Thanks to its oversized engine, the heavily loaded Speed Wagon easily climbed the grade on Echo Summit out of Meyers. The last of the afternoon light stretched east of them toward Lake Tahoe. Both men smiled at the decision to change the route on the way home as they snuck quick glimpses of the majestic view.
Finally, Willie gave up and pulled into the overlook.
As they walked to the thick rock retaining wall, their mouths were at half gape. The gold sparkled across the lake some five miles away. A mist or haze played through the forest to create an ethereal, dreamlike beauty.
Hooker sat on the wall. “This is the kind of view you want to show your girlfriend.”
The older steely eyes never wavered from the view. “Or just someone you care about.”
The air was thick between the two men. Neither needed to say more as they watched the long shadow of the mountain reach out to embrace the valley.
“So, why did you?”
Willie knew exactly what Hooker wanted to know. It was years coming. “Why did I what?”
“Why did you take me in that day?”
Willie spun on Hooker in mock horror. “You vandalized my DeSoto.”
Hooker duck-lipped a raspberry. “Bull pucky!”
“With your little butt in the air, fixing to rip the wires out of the radio.”
“I was trying to hotwire the car.”
The older man offered out his palm. “Well, there you go. There’s your answer.”
“What, stealing cars?”
It was Willie’s turn to duck-lip the raspberry. “You had no idea what you had in your hands. You didn’t even know what to do with a stolen car—even if you could have hotwired it. But you were willing to try. You were willing to reach out and learn.”
“With my tiny butt in the air…”
Willie rolled his eyes. “Oh, let’s not go to any extremes. It may have been smaller than mine, but it was by no means tiny.”
“But a small target of opportunity for your newspaper to smack…”
“Those papers weren’t a newspaper. Those papers were my death sentence.”
Hooker frowned in confusion.
Willie looked down at his hands picking at each other, and then back out at Lake Tahoe where the shadow reached out like a wraith from Hades. In his mind, it was a metaphor for the day over a decade before.
“It was the lowest day of my life. Those papers informed me I was no longer needed. I was flotsam on the sea. The Navy kicked me out. The only option I saw at the moment was to go home and crack open three or four quarts of Maddie’s moonshine or drive the DeSoto off a cliff.”
“Until you saw my butt…”
Willie nodded and looked back to Hooker. “Until your butt…” His lips curled in tight, white against his teeth. “I was mad already, but I got white-hot about someone trying to steal my car. You sat only a second away from me, pulling your ass out of the car and beating you to death right there in front of the post office.
“One minute, I was ready to commit suicide and the next murder. And then I saw what a screw-up you really were. I almost laughed.”
“But you hit me, instead.”
“I smacked your jeans… where your brains seemed to sit. I needed your attention and for you to not pull on those wires. It would have taken me hours under the dashboard to put the wires back so I could have my radio. You do realize the DeSoto is my only vehicle with a radio, don’t you?”
Hooker had never thought about it. He pictured the plain expanse of smooth steel of the Speed Wagon’s dashboard. As he mentally ticked through the many cars that had passed through Willie’s large garage and hands, he realized all had been radio delete. “Yeah, why delete?”
“Because you can’t have a radio on a racetrack, it would be distracting.”
“Okay, but it still doesn’t explain why you took me to lunch, and then gave me a home.”
Willie looked at the hands continuing to pick at each other. He sighed. “As I said, you were trying. You didn’t know what to do next. I didn’t know what to do next. All my life, I wanted to be in the Navy, and then they didn’t want me. I may have been pushing sixty, but I felt like twenty. I’d recently stopped seeing a man who wanted to try being married to his wife instead…”
“Ralph or Randy…”
Willie nodded looking back at the last light on the hills on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. “Randal. I didn’t know what to do. Those papers were the final nail in my coffin. I knew in the moment, I would never put on my dress whites again. My daily khakis would never come out of the closet again. I was adrift, just like you, but you were down under a dashboard digging around for a new career. You were reaching out. You. All alone. You were going to take control of your destiny by your own hand.
“I guess the moment I realized what you were doing—I wanted to be a part of your life. I never thought about showing you the way. It was always about my being a part of your life. I had no idea you would turn out to be such a gearhead.” He looked up and smiled warmly.
“So you adopted the screw-up.”
“Ho, by no means were you a screw-up. I had years of experience of dealing with screw-ups, both below me as well as up the chain of command. Out of the gate, I just needed to show you a path and stand back. Although, I did have my doubts about securing you a bogus driver’s license until you went out and got a job with it. It was a bit of a shocker. Even Maddie raised an eyebrow, and you know how nonplussed she is about doing things.”
Hooker laughed. “I think down deep, even Don knew I wasn’t nineteen. But after I hooked and towed the Opel around the yard and backed it through some holes, he had to admit I drove better than at least two of his other drivers.”
“Yeah, Don called me. If you had just put it in the parking spot, it would have been fine. But you had to show off by backing all the way through three rows of cars, and the holes weren’t lined up.”
“Oh, hell’s bells, Willie, what fun would simple stuff job have been?”
“But where did you learn to tow? I sure as hell didn’t teach you.”
Hooker laughed. “I sat on top of the warehouse next door to the yard for a few days. I watched them hook and unhook, and the backing part… I don’t know… it just seemed as natural as driving forward to me. Scary the first hole but by the third hole I was having fun.”
They laughed softly and watched as the last rosy mountaintop slipped into the shadow of night. The lights of State Line were beginning to glow. As they stood to resume their travels, Willie asked the important question. “Dinner in Placerville or Strawberry?”
Hooker opened the passenger door. “I’ll let you know when we get to Strawberry.”
The roll down the mountain to Placerville had been quiet. Both men seemed to have a lot to think about or remember. Willie had noticed the frost already forming on the large box stuffed at the back end of the truck bed. He guessed it was probably summer hog. Steven didn’t slaughter beef until after the first snow in November, then hang until the New Year. He hoped for some blood sausages, so Hank could try out his new recipe.
Placerville never seemed to change much. It was the same sleepy town it had been in the late forties when Willie first found his way around the lower Sierras. The diner along the highway was the fresh take on the old railroad car with the wheels knocked out. The quilted stainless-steel skin made it look somewhat like an Airstream trailer, a look not lost on many travelers. There had seemed to be no need to get creative with the name of the joint, as they all seemed to be called a diner. It was the food luring them in. The sandwiches were good, but the berry desserts had drawn them past Strawberry and down to the larger city.
The heavy-duty white plates sat stained with hints of black and raspberry cobbler. The ice cream tidemark was homemade French vanilla.
Willie pushed the handle of his coffee mug from finger to thumb as he stared food-struck into the dark brown liquid. He didn’t have to look to know his movements were mirrored the next seat over. Stella had laughed at their unconscious mimicry.
“What prompted this sudden question about my actions?”
Hooker’s finger stopped mid-track. His mind ground through the question and selected the reference. He chuckled softly. “The Squirt.”
Willie looked up at the back bar of milkshake machines, coffeepots, and other food prep all neatly placed along the stainless-steel counter and back wall. He thought about how the Squirt had come into all of their lives during the spring, and ended up saving Hooker’s life. He still lay in the hospital, but soon he would need a home to go home to.
Willie sipped his coffee. Slowly putting the mug down, he looked over at Hooker. “So, where are you going to stick your new child, daddy?” He smiled softly, a tease, but with an honest heart.
Hooker raised his eyebrows as he stared ahead and sipped his coffee. “It seems I have no say in the matter. Stella has all but staked her claim on the kid.”
They both nodded and said in unison, “Heaven help him!” They laughed and sipped their coffee in mirror image.
As the Speed Wagon nosed out of the town limits and across the agricultural prairie of the Central Valley, Willie leaned into the open window mirroring Hooker with his arm out the other side. “So, how do you feel about being a benefactor?”
“I’m happy I have Stella and Manny to back me up, but it feels a bit daunting. I can look after myself, but to look after someone else…” He looked out the window at the rice fields whipping by in the black night. “It’s why I had hoped there was some wisdom coming from you. But I think I’m far past smacking his tiny butt with some paper like a puppy.”
Willie laughed at the image and analogy. “You went way past that mark the second you drove a fork into his hand in front of his sister who you hoped to take to bed. Yessirree Bob, that ship done sailed a long time ago.”
Hooker groaned. “Oh, great, play the nasty memory over and over.”
Willie laughed but took pity on the apple of his eye. “Look, I don’t know if there is anything particularly wise I could ever tell you. When it came to you, I was making it up new every day. It scared the hell out of me. Maddie was of no help. She just kept asking why the hell I was asking her about raising up a kid. She had been the baby, and her dad just threw her in overalls and tossed her under the hood of a car like she was just another one of the boys. But what I can tell you about the Squirt is: you have your hands full. He’s not like you. When he gets his head of steam up, you better give him a wide berth or hold on tight. I think he’s got a whole lot of potential, and he isn’t going to slow down until he fulfills it.”
Hooker rolled his lips into his teeth and scratched at the new scars on his head as the nerves knit. “That’s what I was afraid of. I’m glad he’s going to be out at the hacienda, so Manny can fill his head with cop stuff.” Hooker laughed at the memory of Squirt lying in the hospital reading his letter of acceptance into the police academy while he was petting Box and sipping the moonshine Hooker had snuck into the hospital. “You should have seen his face when he realized one way or another, he was going to get his dream of being a cop.”
Willie glanced over at the man the kid had become. He smiled softly and cherished the filling ache in his chest. Yes, Willie knew a little something about dreams coming true.