Out in Maryland

Colt Rasper walked into the M’s Pancake Shack, like he’d done a thousand times, and sat down at one of the big booths near the window. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and M’s was desolate. Puddin and Cher, the two waitresses on duty, were marrying bottles of Heinz ketchup and windexing the menus. M’s was the only restaurant in the whole the area (unless you want to count the Dairy King and the Mack in the Box), and its proximity to a motel and a truck stop/gas station kept it astir with customers. This was all way out in the part of Maryland that doesn’t really have any allegiance to the rest of the state—the part of Maryland where they play the Steelers and Pirates on TV instead of the Ravens and Orioles.

“You rollin’ solo, handsome?” said Cher, cruising over with a huge iced water with an upside-down bendy straw poking out of it.

“Got someone joinin’ me here in a bit,” said Colt. “At least I hope I do. We shall see.”

“Ain’t seen you in a minute,” said Cher, reaching over him and straightening the little flotilla of diner condiments/accessories.

“I was here last night but you was off.”

“Yeah, I don’t do Fridays,” she said, fidgeting with the triple-knot on her apron. “Date night.”

“You still with that knucklehead?”

“Who, Slim Jim? You know it. Goin’ on six months.”

“That is the most cuckoo thing on the planet,” said Colt, leisurely sprawled out in the booth.

“I’m gonna tell him you said that.”

“I hope you do.”

“You want coffee?”

“Pretty please.”

Cher whizzed back into the kitchen. Colt looked out the window. A gun-metal grey Audi TT was now moored in the dirty parking lot right there next to his Jeep Guzzler. That’s gotta be her, he thought, right as the door opened and out of it stepped a slender Caribbean-lookin’ girl in pink acid-washed jeans and a turquoise tank-top. Krissy, a girl Colt had recently met online and finally coaxed into coming out and meeting him in person. He wondered if Krissy was her real name.

He watched her thumb something into her smart phone. Two seconds later his phone lit up: Here. He texted back, telling her to come into the restaurant.

“Colt?” she said, right upon entry.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, standing up to sort of give her a half-hug and a handshake. “Great to finally meet you. Officially, I mean.”

“Likewise.”

“Pop a squat. Let’s do this thing.”

Krissy sat down across from Colt and rubbernecked at all the bric-a-brac around her. M’s was basically decked out with the whole Beyond section of a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Lots of cheap prints of what algorithms probably reckoned wildlife to look like, plus a few aphoristic exclamations here and there. The only thing left from previous ownership was a huge taxidermied largemouth bass that the rats had nibbled on here and there throughout the years. (The original M was Miriam Schnellegeister, an entrepreneur from Morgantown, West Virginia, who specialized in designing fishing lures. Miriam owned M’s Pancake Shack from its genesis in 1954 until very recently, when she sold it to another M—a retired stockcar racer by the name of Mehdi Nabil. M’s new owner did what most new owners usually do not do and enhanced the overall quality of the place without compromising any of its vital essence. He retained his staff but thickened it up a bit so they didn’t get overworked and jaded, and he did a little adding and subtracting on the menu (adios, pork platter; hello, meatloaf sandwich), as well as lower the prices a smidge. The only change he made that the locals mostly snubbed was getting rid of the haggard jukebox that had wheezed its way through nearly seventy years of existence, playing old 45s of Bobby Vinton and Lesley Gore and other Boomer fodder/promacana a la David Lynch flick [though with a little Saturday night ruckus-on-the-bayou jingles mixed as well—Hank William Jr., Toby Keith, Alan Jackson]. Mehdi had replaced the jukebox with a playlist that was basically a simulacrum of the jukebox but peppered with a few breezy cabana crooners like Sade and Astrud Gilberto).

There in the big booth by the window of M’s Pancake Shack, after a few more introductory quips about nothing, Colt Rasper twisted in his seat so he could face Krissy and said, “With all due respect, but you are truly gorgeous. I mean, your pictures were pretty, but man-oh-man . . . Dig your style, too. You look like how soft candy tastes.”

“That’s very sweet. Thank you,” Krissy said, stretching that final syllable out until it turned into ambiguous irony.

Cher came over, did her thing at the table, and then Colt and Krissy sat there for a while, drinking coffee, and basically verbally confirming stuff that they had chatted about online. Krissy had recently moved from outside Philadelphia to western Maryland to spend some time with her father, who had recently been diagnosed with three different types of cancer. The doc had recently told him to don’t bother buying any green bananas.

“You hungry at all?” Colt asked her.

“Kind of, yeah.”

“You wanna split some chicken wings?”

“Are they super spicy?”

“I wouldn’t say they’re super spicy, but to me nothing’s super spicy. I’m an inveterate eater of spicy stuff, so nothing really musses my mane unless it’s just like out-of-this-world spicy. I did get a hold of something one time—little Cambodian joint down over in Frostburg—made my whole damn face explode. My pee smelled like two percent milk for a week.”

“Yikes,” Krissy said, holding up the menu and squinting at it. “I’m okay with spicy. Let’s get the wings and some onion rings.”

Colt looked around for Cher but he didn’t see her, so he waved Puddin over. “How you doin’, babe . . . May we please have a basket of onion rings and half-a-dozen chicken wings? Extra spicy.”

Puddin nodded and scampered off. You could hear her relay the order to either Cher or the cook in the back.

“This is where it gets interesting,” said Colt.

“How’s that?”

“I will bet you everything in my momma’s wallet that they send out somewhere between seven to ten wings even though we ordered half-a-dozen.”

Krissy just looked at him, waiting for further explanation.

“This cook they got, some ol’ boy named Terry who’s been around for years, cannot count to save his life. He got in this four-wheeler accident when he was a teenager and it just kinda screwed him up a little bit,” Colt said, tapping his head.

“Aww, that’s sad.”

“Them four-wheelers will mess you up big time if you ain’t careful,” Colt said, “which, I guess, Terry was not.”

“Poor thing.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t call him that. He’s fine in most other regards, but everything to him is a baker’s half-dozen, if you know what I mean. You ask him to hold up four fingers and you can go ahead and expect to get a nice big close-up of his thumb, too. Something about numbers. His brain just ain’t havin’ it.”

Cher came out with their food and a big roll of paper napkins. She set everything down and grabbed the coffee kettle off a nearby ledge.

Colt counted the wings. Six.

“Terry ain’t back there today?” he said to Cher and she refilled their coffee.  

“Oh my God, you didn’t hear?”

“Guess not,” Colt said, looking up at Cher. “Hear what?”

“Terry got hit by a bus up in Pittsburgh two nights ago.”

“Holy shit. He okay?”

“If you call being dead okay.”

Colt winced and said, “That’s awful. I’m sorry, Cher.”

“We wasn’t that close or anything, but still, it’s weird when somebody you know dies, no matter who it is,” Cher said, standing there in waitress limbo.

Krissy sat there nodding her head in solemn accord.

Colt poured a lagoon of ketchup on a little side plate and dipped an onion ring into it and said, “What happened exactly?”

“All I know is Terry was crossing the street, and Pittsburgh has them little electronic signs at crosswalks that count down, you know, letting you know how much time you got left to get across, and my guess is . . .”

Krissy exploded into laughter—a cinematic cascade of laughter, in every shade of octave on the planet. The outburst startled Colt and Cher. They both got bug-eyed and stared at her in perplexment. She could not seem to stop laughing.

“Well, I’m glad you think this is funny,” Cher said to her.

“I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry,” Krissy said, still unable to reel in her laughter, which had turned into a crazy person’s laugh, all squeaky and squawky and very loud.

Colt started laughing too. Cher skulked off, befuddled, probably wanting to be mad at them but not really caring enough to do so.

The cook came out to Colt and Krissy’s booth and filled them in with the details. The bus that had crunched Terry had been done up like a big Snickers bar as part of this citywide advertising campaign. This knowledge amplified their laughter to where Cher and Puddin had to come out and scold them. They went full-blown manic when the cook told them that the street Terry had been killed on was called Harms Way, named after a nineteenth century Dutch settler named Luuk Haarm, who had been just impressionable enough for prosperity to name a street in Pittsburgh after him (though anglicizing his surname a la Haarlem-cum-Harlem by lopping off the second A). Eventually Colt and Krissy’s laughter fizzled and Colt paid the tab and they went out into the parking lot and did some rated-G smooching and made plans to do something tomorrow night.

Colt had Krissy meet him at this popular bar with a big deck that was over in a neighboring county. He got there early and she showed up early as well and they picked up right where they left off yesterday, smooching, holding hands, rubbing up on each other. They got a pitcher of Coors Light and sat down at a picnic table on the deck and slowly drank the pitcher down while yapping endlessly, getting increasingly comfortable with each other as the night went on. A dozen or so locals around them, all decked out in denim and flannel, were socializing and playing on their phones.

Something was going on on the other side of the deck. A meaty guy in desert storm camouflage seemed to be getting a lot of attention from the locals, and it only took Colt a couple of seconds to recognize him to be Terry’s older brother, a truck driver named Dustin, who was always sort of in and out of town. Colt never knew Dustin particularly well, but he always thought he was a decent dude.

“I’ll be right back,” Colt told Krissy and then went immediately over to Dustin.

“Hey, brother, good to see you,” Colt said to Dustin, as they embraced.

“Good to see you too, man. You look good,” said Dustin.

“You do too,” said Colt. “Cher told me yesterday about what happened and, well, it’s just goddamn awful. My sincere condolences. If you need anything at all, just let me know, okay? Seriously, anything.”

“I appreciate that, man,” said Dustin, looking Colt in the eyes and nodding his head slightly. “I really do.”

They hugged again and patted each other on the back and Colt went and sat back down.

Krissy went up to the bar and came back with a couple of huge frozen drinks in plastic cups. Bushwhackers, Colt recognized the drinks to be, mentally saluting Krissy’s leftfield choice of beverage, especially considering they just drank a small aquarium’s worth of beer. The place was really packed out with people now and it wasn’t even ten o’clock. The music was loud, which made the people even louder.

Colt got up and went to the men’s room. On the way back, he bumped into Dustin again. They went through their lubby dubby routine, both of them now substantially buzzed, and started doing a little shallow-end reminiscing about Terry.

“The thing about ol’ Terry,” Colt said, now flanked by Krissy, who had come to find Colt, who had been gone from the table for longer than he realized. A bunch of drunkies annexed their table as soon as she had gotten up. “The thing about ol’ Terry,” Colt said, repeating himself, “is that he just wasn’t never the same after he wrecked his four-wheeler.”

Dustin grimaced and mouthed a harsh unpleasantry. Colt detected his change in demeanor and said, “I’m sorry, man. I don’t mean nothing by that.”

“Who told you that?” Dustin said, getting a little up in Colt’s face.

“Easy, Dustin,” Colt said, backing up. “Who told me what?”

“Who told you Terry wrecked his four-wheeler?”

This confused the hell out of Colt. He finished his Bushwhacker and set the empty cup on a nearby wooden rail. “Well, Terry did. He told me years and years ago.”

Dustin put his hands on his head and rocked back and forth a little bit. He was now steeped into the advanced level of drunkenness that only massive amounts of sleep can tidy up.

“Number one, Terry didn’t wreck no four-wheeler and, number two, it sure as hell wasn’t his vehicle to begin with!” Dustin said, almost yelling now. A few dudes around them noticed the commotion and were gauging the prospect of getting into a fist fight. “And number three, that wreck didn’t have shit to do with how Terry was or how he wasn’t!”

“Oh, okay, brother. I didn’t know all that. Again, I’m sorry,” Colt said to Dustin, trying to settle him down. Krissy whispered let’s go! into Colt’s ear. “We gotta jet, brother. I’ll see you around.”

Colt and Krissy started to walk away. Dustin made this horrible sound, like he was trying to squeeze out a huge turd. They stopped and turned around and looked at him.

“You see, that was my vehicle my dead brother Terry crashed all them years ago!” Dustin hollered at them. “And I know for a fact the only reason he crashed it in the first place is because it wasn’t no four-wheeler, it was a three-wheeler!”