Running with the Night
By: Edd Jennings
Tags: Drama, Short Story, Fiction, Writing, Adventure

Exhausted from long hours of driving, Hardin pulled into the diner. He didn’t like it that it was also a rundown bar, but in this part of Montana outside of one of the larger towns they all were.

The almost young if hard-used woman behind the bar looked dead on her feet, which caused him to take a stool at the near empty bar, forgoing his usual practice of finding the darkest booth in the farthest corner of the back. In seconds, he wished he hadn’t when he found himself noticing the way her long blond ponytail swayed almost to the beat of Reba McIntyre’s I’m a New Fool at an Old Game on a radio somewhere behind the bar. Had he some distance from the bar, he could have watched those toned legs peeking out from bright white shorts to strain against the too high heels she wore when she approached and receded from his booth.

Sometimes women who worked aged fast. She might go anywhere from late twenties to early forties. Only the absence of visible tattoos made him guess her true age as closer to forty. The swaying ponytail mesmerized him. He didn’t want to know why his efforts to think about something else failed.

He meant to be as forgettable as possible, wearing the same clothes he wore on the Mackenzie and the Gravel Rivers, which gave him the look and dress of another working man past his best years.

“What’ll it be?” she asked.

Her faced cracked into a smile for another road-weary stranger.

Maybe it was the romance of the thing. Imagining who or what the next person stepping into the door might be, when it was almost always impossible to know. Anything or anybody could drift in off these high plains. For most, it was traveling ground, a place to pass through, a destination for few.

Or maybe her thoughts were nothing like that.

He liked to imagine what other people thought, knowing in advance he only wanted to make them interesting. Realism, he could leave. Realism would bite you in the butt.

“Black coffee.”

And when he said it, lines from Lacy J. Dalton’s Black Coffee came to him. “I don’t know if I can live without you/I don’t know if I can understand.” Her nasal Tennessee twang thick in the fetid air of his mind.

He was coming back, driving across this wide country. Once he recovered his energy he was going to do something that meant something. He had to make his life into something more than a compendium of regrets, do more than wish he could know a woman he had no business knowing, whose life he should leave strictly untouched.

As he ate his hamburgers, and drank his coffee, he basked in this young woman’s warmth. Background speakers played country music, Ronnie Milsaps’ Smoky Mountain Rain, “She’s somewhere in the Smokey Mountain rain.”

It’d be days before he saw the mountains of his home country, not so far north of the Smokies. The woman he wanted to return to, never — he knew that now — but this had happened to him before, and he had long come to accept it.

“Passing through?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“The good ones always are. Passing back and forth to the mountains. They don’t come for this. Eastern Montana is like another state, more like the Dakotas, except wilder, emptier. People want the mountains. But for me I can take only so much of the trees. It makes me feel closed in.”

And that’s when he looked at her for the first time beyond the casual appraising of an attractive woman’s sexuality, a thing a lonely man did instinctively. She knew things he didn’t. Felt things he couldn’t. He didn’t say that the trees were everything to him, gave him everything, a place to hide, food, warmth, the closest he knew to serenity. This openness, these horizons, did the same for her. And that difference should have told him everything he needed to know about her. That he had no right to intercede his life into hers. The differences were just too vast. And yet the night pulsed.

Instead he said, “The high plains, the far-seeing land, the country of Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter. It’s a place where a man can stretch. It has horizons. And in the old days, this was the country the strongest tribes chose.”

For the right man the ponytail would open and all that hair would cascade into forever. He heard or thought he heard the sadness in her voice. “Not many know that, but you probably know as well the reason the strongest tribes wanted to live in this country was to be near the buffalo and the elk. They’re long gone. Yet, you still see it.”

“Yes, the weird rock structures. The pronghorns. The folds in the land that could and did hide an army. A magic remains, and ghosts of old magic gone as well.”

“Sometimes I just want out. I tried LA for a while, but I always come back.” She filled his cup again.

He could see it in her, the hold of the land, strong enough that she couldn’t shake it. It told in the lines beginning to form in her young face. She’d stay, even if it meant nights tied to waitress work in this rundown bar.

“The men who live with the land, who grow the wheat, who bale the hay, and run cattle on her must be a different breed,” he said.

“A dying breed,” she answered. “Fewer every year. My parents did it as long as they could. I grew up in it. They lost most of it when my brother got in trouble with the law and had to sell land to pay court costs and lawyers. I have the house and a little grazing left, not enough to make a living. He went to jail anyway.”

The loss of her heritage didn’t seem to make her bitter, just tired. She recited the information more as historical fact than anything that had anything to do with her life now. She had adjusted.

That was the difference between a woman like her and himself. She could adjust. He couldn’t. He was fragile, bitter, weak.

She paused, almost visibly debating what she wanted to say, and he saw the beginnings of her smile when she finally did, “I haven’t heard anybody say it quite like that in a long time, but you’re like my father. When he spoke of the land, he always referred to it as she or her.”

“The land in its many moods. It’s always a woman. It has to be a woman. In the right mood, warm, embracing, calling you. In another mood, cold, cruel, indifferent.” He had to pull back, stop talking like this. Memory was not his friend.

“Indifferent, yes. In the end the land takes them all. Watching the hardest go is always the saddest. My parents looked to my brother to carry on, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. He wasn’t cut out for it.”

This flatly stunned him. He hadn’t come into this place expecting this. One day — if she lived — she’d be one of the crones, the old ones, the kind of woman who knew things, who felt the land in a way no man could or ever would, the pain, the joy, the love, the hate. What would become that lined face still retained a beauty, reminiscent of the best of the prairie wildflowers of that brief high plains summer.

“And you were, but they didn’t see it because you were a girl?”

“That’s right. It was the times.” She paused. “You see that? What do you do?”

“I grew up in cattle as well. Virginia. Softer country, richer country. A quarter acre of its best handled right could and did feed a family, but its very richness is its curse. It’s fought over, bled over ground, too many ghosts. A man tries to live with the ghosts, but maybe it’s no use. In the end they’ll call for him. Now? I’m nothing. Mostly a drifter. Itinerant work when I can find it. Just coming out of Saskatchewan. Heading east to another job.” He looked down into the flat blackness of his coffee, as if this time he’d find an answer. He didn’t.

“I thought. I could see it in you. That you were one of the hard ones, of the land.”

“Best is when I have a stake and I can disappear into Alaska or Canada for a season. It’s easier to move than to stay in one place.” The smell of wood smoke rising from his clothes comforted him, anchored him.

“Not many like you left, like my parents. The winters killed them.” She poured more coffee, rich and fresh, this woman of the far horizons. She smiled that weary smile of the hard used, the left behind, who had lost at life, and expected no better.

In minutes the moonlight would claim him and his headlights would bore down the empty road, forever pushing east into the blackness. And she, another bleak night of pouring coffee or staring at the walls of a dying business.

Her expression darkened at the young man standing in the open door, letting in the chill air. As a reflex, Hardin swiveled on his stool for a look. He might have been younger than her, and he didn’t look happy. The frown, the aggressive stance, everything about him screamed trouble.

“Excuse me. I need to talk to him,” she said as she lightly brushed her fingertips against Hardin’s forearm.