Earl was sitting in Teller’s Oldsmobile, and it really was the most beautiful car he had ever seen. But several minutes had gone by, and Earl was starting to feel conspicuous. It was a good ten minutes before Teller came out the front door, locked it, and then strolled down the driveway, grinning. He opened the door, handed Earl a road atlas, and then got in. With his short legs and ample middle, he had to wedge himself behind the steering wheel, but then he looked over at Earl and said, “Earl, my man, our joyride starts now. You’re about to have the best time of your life.”
Earl grinned. It was hard not to feel some of Teller’s enthusiasm. “Which way are we going?” he asked.
“Well, that’s a good question. Do you have a preference for the route we take? Through Wyoming or Colorado?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that.”
“Well, let’s head out of I-80 through Wyoming and get some miles behind us before anyone knows we’re gone.”
Earl gave a couple of head bobs—his idea of looking cool. “Let’s do it.”
So Teller drove east to I-15, turned north to catch I-80, then ascended Parley’s Canyon. He drove faster than seemed necessary, but what concerned Earl more was Teller’s habit of taking his eyes off the road when he turned to talk.
Teller finally said, “What are you so stiff about? I thought you were ready to let the good times roll. You’re clinging to that door handle like you’re scared to death.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You don’t have to. I can see the muscles in your neck all tight, like you’re about to scream.”
“Well, then, don’t look at me. Just look at the road.”
Teller did look at Earl, maybe longer than usual, and laughed. “Oh, my friend, you’ve never done anything like this before, have you?”
“Like what?”
“Headed out without a plan, not sure where you’re going or how long you’ll be gone. My guess is, you’ve carefully planned every trip you’ve ever taken, right down to the hour.”
Earl tried to think. Teller was basically right, but he didn’t like to admit it. “Not to the hour,” he said. “But I like to have a daily schedule. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“Yes, there’s something very wrong with it. It means you’ve had no adventures. Excitement scares you. You want to know what’s around every corner before you make a turn.”
“I guess you’re right,” Earl said. “But that’s how I was raised. My father had a farm and a job, and he had to use every minute of his day to get all his work done. And that’s how I’ve lived my life. I went to work every day, fit in my family life and my church work, and I built my own house in the hours I could squeeze out of each day. That’s one reason retirement has been hard for me.”
“Earl, that explains more about you than I’ve ever understood before. And there’s not one thing wrong with any of that. It’s just different from the way I’ve done things.”
Teller had passed the summit and was now descending toward Park City. There was road construction going on, and that slowed the traffic, but the slowdown was actually comforting to Earl. “I guess I should have let myself have a little more fun,” he admitted. “I missed a lot of dances and things like that because Weber High was so far down the canyon from Huntsville, but mostly because I didn’t know how to dance very well or how to talk to a girl.”
“So how did you meet your wife?”
“She was the daughter of the man who ran the grocery store where I worked. We were friends during high school, and then I went to college and on a mission, and she went to nursing school and worked down at the Dee Hospital in Ogden. At that point neither one of us had gotten married, and we were both twenty-five—old for getting married in those days. We saw each other at church one Sunday when we were both home for the weekend. We started to talk—and it wasn’t long before we got engaged.”
“Was it just the practical thing to do—both of you older and ready to get married, or—”
“Oh, no. I’d been in love with Muriel for about ten years. But she was really pretty, and I hadn’t dared to ask her to a church dance or anything like that. She told me later that she had always liked me and wondered why I didn’t ask her on a date.” Earl hesitated for a moment, and then he added, “But I’ll tell you something, Teller. I was way too sensible for her. She was a musician, taught piano lessons and was a wonderful singer, and she liked to go to symphonies and things like that. But I usually fell asleep at concerts, and it was hard for me to break loose with a few bucks to buy a nicer house or better furniture. I just never learned to spend money. Then Muriel died, and now I wonder what I was saving my money for. I wish I’d done a few more things for her. I should have taken her on a cruise or something like that.”
“So here’s my advice,” Teller said. “Let go a little right now. Don’t keep telling yourself you’re scared. Relax, and just see what happens when you don’t draw out everything on paper before you build it.”
Earl did think that was what he needed to do, though he still wished Teller would watch the cars in front of him. But Earl didn’t say anything; he simply sat back and told himself that he was ready for a good time.
“My life has been exactly the opposite of yours,” Teller said. “I hated sitting in school, and I never liked a job enough to stay with it very long. When I lived in Hawaii, I used to see all those ships pass by, and I wanted to be on one someday—and go see how people in other parts of the world lived.”
“It sounds like you did that.”
“Well, yeah. But the truth is, out at sea, excitement comes along only once in a while. Most days are just long and tedious.”
“How did you end up in Hawaii?”
“My dad was in the navy over there, and he stayed in for a while after the war. He brought me and my mom over, and we lived there for a couple of years.”
“Where did you live when you were little?”
“A couple of places. Tacoma, Washington, mainly. And that’s where we went when we came back to the mainland.”
“When you were at the bank, the guy kept calling you Mr. Godfrey. How come you go by Teller?”
Teller laughed. “Well, it’s the name I like. When we moved back to Tacoma, I was Markham Godfrey. I went to a high school where I didn’t know anybody, but I found some guys I could eat lunch with, and I started telling them stories about surfing and spearfishing and dating hula girls. That caught their interest.”
“Was any of that true?”
“Sure it was, Earl. I wouldn’t lie. I tried some surfing. And a lot of girls danced the hula over there. I knew girls like that.”
That didn’t seem quite the same thing he’d told his friends, but Earl didn’t say anything.
“But those guys liked hearing that stuff, and pretty soon they started calling me ‘the old storyteller.’ After a while they just shortened it to ‘Teller,’ and that settled in as my nickname. I’ve just been Teller ever since. It’s sort of my name and also my trademark. I know you like my stories.” He looked over and grinned.
“Yes, I do. I also think they’re about ten or twenty percent true.”
“Well, that’s enough truth for a story. Don’t you go to those movies where the words ‘Based on a true story’ come up on the screen? Those are some of the best movies around.”
Earl nodded, but he decided he should always listen to Teller with healthy skepticism.
Teller and Earl drove the rest of the afternoon, and they arrived in Rock Springs, Wyoming, before dark. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” Teller said. “Some of the nicer motels don’t like to take cash—just so they don’t have to keep money on hand. Let’s look for something that’s not very fancy so we can pay cash in advance and not have to use a credit card.”
“That’s fine with me,” Earl said. “The fancy places cost way too much just for a place to sleep. Our money will be gone pretty fast if we’re not careful.”
Teller laughed. But then he said, “Yeah. You’re probably right.”
They were driving down Main Street in Rock Springs, watching for a place to stay. When they spotted an old-fashioned row of motel rooms, Earl said, “That doesn’t look too bad.”
“All right. If you say so. I’m pretty sure a dump like that will take cash.”
Teller was right. The guy at the desk did take cash. Teller told him that his name was Max Garfield and that Earl was Ernest Evers.
When they opened the door to their room, it looked tidy, seemed pretty clean, but it certainly wasn’t fancy. It had twin beds with bumpy chenille bedspreads, one chair, and a TV that looked like it had been brought across the plains by the early pioneers. That was fine with Earl; what he wanted more than anything was to take a couple of Tylenol and lie down for a while. His knees were still killing him.
Teller seemed to have the same idea. He lay down on one of the beds and stretched out. “The mattress is kind of hard, but it’ll be all right. I sure hope you don’t snore. I never thought to ask you about that.”
“I don’t think I snore. But Muriel used to shake me now and then and tell me to roll over. I’m not sure what that was all about.”
Teller laughed. “Well, I’ll see if I can find a long stick to reach over and poke you with, but I gotta admit, I can get snoring pretty hard too—at least from reports I’ve received—so maybe we can saw logs in harmony.”
Earl sat down on the other bed and began to search through one of his totes for his pain meds. But he was thinking about something else. “Hey, how come you gave the guy those fake names? Do we have to lie about who we are?”
Teller let out a little groan. “I don’t know why you care about that. We’re on the lam, Earl. By now, your daughter probably has search parties out looking for us. So we can’t leave a trail. I’ve had some experience with that. I had to stay a step ahead of the police a whole year one time.”
Earl didn’t like hearing that. He wondered what kind of a guy Teller had been in his life. “What did you do?” he asked. He reached down to unlace his shoes but then thought better of it. He wasn’t sure how clean the carpet might be. The old shag had been green at one time and still was around the edges, but a worn gray-brown path ran from the door and around the beds.
“I didn’t rob a bank or anything like that, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ll tell you the whole story one of these days, but it was just a matter of getting too many parking tickets in and around Montclair, New Jersey. I didn’t know police took such things so seriously. But haven’t you ever been in trouble with the law? Or in any kind of trouble?”
“Sure I have.”
“I don’t believe it. Give me one example.”
“Okay. Once, when I was a student at the U, I drove home to Huntsville for the weekend and a cop stopped me in Bountiful and gave me a ticket. I didn’t want my dad to know I was speeding, so I tried to raise the money to pay it myself. But I couldn’t get my hands on that much money, so after a while I had to go to Dad after all. He lent me the money, but he wasn’t happy about it.”
“That’s it? He wasn’t ‘happy about it’?”
“Well, no. He was upset. He made me pay the money back, and he gave me quite a talking to about obeying the law.”
“Wow. ‘Quite a talking to.’ I don’t know how you ever recovered from something like that.”
Earl smiled. “I’ll tell you how. I’ve been a safe driver all my life. I’ve received maybe two or three other tickets, but that’s about all, and I’ve never had a serious wreck.”
“Oh, Earl, I could tell you about tickets all day. Once I rolled a car over about six times, and another time I ran a red light and T-boned a brand-new Pontiac. I totaled both cars, and I was in the hospital for two weeks. That’s just the trouble I’ve had with driving cars. I could tell you—”
“You sound proud of yourself.”
Teller laughed. “Well, not really. Or maybe a little. But you’re the cocky one, telling me what a safe driver you are. Don’t you have any regrets?”
“Of course I do.”
“What, for instance?” Teller sat up on the side of the bed so that he was facing Earl.
Earl wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about this. But Teller didn’t know much of anything about his life. So he said something that didn’t cut too deep. “Muriel always wanted to travel, so after she had an operation for cancer and got feeling better, I took her on a trip to Europe. We traveled around on a bus with a bunch of people. I liked the people and got along with everyone, but the museums and castles got to be a little much for me. So after that trip, I kind of stalled her when she talked about going somewhere else. But then her cancer came back, and we never got the chance to take another trip.”
“How long after the trip was it before she died?”
“Over two years. But she was on chemo and radiation and everything, and it wore her down. We missed our chance to travel again.” He thought about that for a time before he said, “We did have a good marriage in most ways, and I tried hard to be a good dad, but it was Muriel the kids all felt close to. I wish I could have figured out how to be more like her. That’s my regret.”
“Now you’ve come to my great regret.” Earl heard something new in Teller’s voice, saw it in his face. This was not the beginning of a story. “I missed all that. I was such a lousy husband that Sharon divorced me. It was partly that I was gone so much, out to sea and everything. But I always thought about myself first and my wife and kids after that. I know that now, but it’s too late to do anything about it.”
“How many kids do you have?”
“Two. A son and a daughter. But I haven’t had contact with them for a long time. I’ve collected a lot of memories over the years, and I feel good about that, but I don’t know anything about family life. I respect you for being a good dad.”
“All I said was that I tried to be a good dad. My kids have done okay, but I messed up with my third son. He started to drink a little, and I thought the answer was to get tough with him, so I took his car privileges away and I sent him to our bishop to confess. After that, I just figured the matter was finished. But I found out later that he was not only drinking but also taking drugs. I tried to correct him again, but I didn’t understand what was going on inside the kid. He wasn’t as good at sports as his brothers, probably not as good looking, and he was only average in school. I think that poor kid hated himself, and I never even recognized it. What he needed was love and understanding. The boy—Alan is his name—is divorced now, doesn’t have much education, and he’s unhappy with the jobs he ends up doing. He reverts to drugs over and over.”
“That’s what happens with drug addicts.”
“I know, Teller, but it’s not that simple. He needed me at a certain time, and I didn’t understand that. I didn’t know that addiction was an illness. He’s done better this last year, and he’s holding down a job for now. But I always worry that it won’t last very long.”
“At least you were there, Earl. You did the best you could with what you understood. I checked out.”
“Well . . . I guess everyone has some regrets by the time they reach our age.”
“Sure. But I have more than most.”
Earl knew better than to try to talk Teller out of such feelings. Still, he was glad to know that such a brash guy actually realized that he had made mistakes.
But it was time for that Tylenol. And maybe just a short nap.