Southbound 63
by Richard R. Barron
Weary from eight hours on the road but excited to see her, I followed her up the stairs of her non-air-conditioned dorm room at the University of Missouri. Once in her third-floor room, baking in the lingering warmth of campus concrete, I looked out over campus.
For a moment this distracted me. Then Melissa turned around. Suddenly, abruptly, she was my focus once again. And why not? Wasn’t she the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen?
She smiled. No, not exactly smiled. She tried to smile, then winced from the pain in her neck and back.
I smiled back and remembered the letter from her I received two weeks before. In it she told me of a tipsy night at a bar, and the blurry drive home. Well, not all the way home. She made it as far as that big truck, which crushed her car into a two-ton accordion.
The letter also said sure, Richard, you’re welcome to come see me anytime.
I assumed that two weeks later was included in “any time,” so there I stood in her room, looking the prettiest girl I’d ever known.
And I’d known her for a long time. We met in seventh grade. We were twelve. No. She was still 11. Wow, 11. She was cute and quiet and ten times more popular than I was. Watching her turn in her math homework in math class, and play her flute in third hour was… I had such a crush on Melissa. In those dark days of junior high, her freckles and pixie haircut held promise, and now, as I stared at her across the room, all that promise was in its prime.
I know. That all sounds hopelessly naive and romantic.
With the meaningless hellos out of the way, I felt like being with her, talking or walking or eating or something. She, however, wasn’t really that kind of person.
As we sat chatting, a friend of hers, who she introduced as “Steve,” arrived to return something he had borrowed. Unlike me in my t-shirt and cutoffs, Steve was dressed in crisp blue jeans and a Western-style plaid shirt, and wore that I could only guess were $700 cowboy boots.
I looked at Melissa as she looked at him.
As many of you know, when someone sees something they like, their pupils dilate. Melissa’s hazel eyes were the size of dinner plates, and were as black as coal.
After Steve left, Melissa announced, “I’m going to The Granary,” telling me what a great bar it was, and how much fun she’d always had there. “You’re welcome to come along, if you want.”
I guess she either didn’t care or didn’t understand that I had no choice in the matter. I either went with her to The Granary, or sat in silence in her dorm room waiting for her.
With the drive in awkward silence behind us, we entered the smoke-filled, dimly-lit night club. Finding a table, we sat, and were pounced upon immediately by a darkly-tanned sorority-type college girl anxious to sell us overpriced, watered-down drinks. She seemed aggravated when I asked for an iced tea.
Five or ten minutes passed as we silently sipped our drinks. My tea must have seemed a bit pious next to her tall whiskey sour. And my clean smile must have paled in the clouds of her cigarette smoke.
Wait a minute. Melissa doesn’t smoke. My perfect little Melissa doesn’t smoke!
She caught the eye of a friend or two, then another, and soon I was surrounded by people I didn’t know. They were loud, drunk, vulgar, and I couldn’t understand exactly why Melissa wanted to be around them.
The dance floor had been empty, except for one very trashy-looking couple who persisted in amusing the entire patronage of the tavern, including us. Their dance was sleazy.
It turned out to set the tone of the evening. Melissa drank and smoked and danced with her friends, and with the sleazy couple, for what seemed like hours and hours.
One in the morning rolled around, and she asked, much to my relief, if I wanted to go. I drove, since I was the only one close to sober.
Back at her dorm, she led me across her hall to a friend’s room, where they offered us an amyl nitrite “popper.” Melissa took it, put it to her nose and inhaled deeply. She stumbled backward a bit, instantly high as kite.
I was stunned.
The next morning, we decided to have an early lunch.
“I couldn’t believe you just sat there all night,” she said as we tried to eat, frowning. “Didn’t you even want to be there?”
No, I didn’t.
“Sure I did,” I said.
It was as if she had ordered me to have fun, and I disobeyed.
“I just don’t appreciate the way you acted, that’s all,” she said. “I can’t believe you wanted to leave so early.”
Ah, yes, the way I acted. Sitting quietly, minding my own business. No wonder she’s so angry.
“Melissa, maybe I should just go.”
“Maybe you should,” she said, not even looking at me.
* * *
My windshield collected bugs rapidly, thick splotches of bug guts and bodies clinging to the glass. The windshield belonged, I thought for a moment, to my own Bug, my VW.
“A bug killing bugs,” I mused and smiled weakly to myself.
If I didn’t clean them off at every fuel stop, they quickly became so thick and messy I could hardly see. And as the sun started to set off to my right, the brilliant yellow summer light began to highlight them.
The bugs were a sideshow. I watched them and considered their presence a major issue, because I didn’t want to think about the weekend I was escaping.
The green Missouri farmland rushed past my open window. Trees swayed in the waning heat of the wonderfully, oppressively painful day.
Music from my headphones covered the drone in my ears as the last rays of the sun touched the tall windbreak trees, southbound on U. S. 63.
I listened to my music trying to get Melissa out of my head, but it didn’t work. I reached up and yanked off the headset. The broken muffler of my Volkswagen droned louder. The night dragged on longer.
I remembered something a friend told me one time. If you start to get sleepy while driving, put your hand in a bucket of ice water. The pain will keep you awake. I was certain that tonight, however, no ice water was necessary. There was already enough pain.
My Volkswagon and I rumbled south towards Jefferson City on one of the sturdy four lanes of U.S. 63. It was almost dark, so before it became too dark to see, pulled her last letter from its envelope. Awkwardly, with one hand driving and the other unfolding the typed page, I read.
“… and I’d love it if you would come up. Just name the weekend and I’ll work around whatever I have going on.”
She’d love it. And she did love it, for about the first three minutes I was there.
Since I was driving alone with another six hours ahead of me, I had plenty of time to think about what had transpired, if anything, between us. And honestly, I didn’t go to see her with any kind of plan. I didn’t plan to try to fuck her, or talk her into marrying me, or anything in between. I just wanted to be with her.
Fully dark now, my headlights shone on the sign for West U.S. 54. I turned, and was on my way home. My car and I rushed through the night. I relaxed as we got further from Melissa. I wasn’t going to see her again anytime soon.
And the next time I wanted to feel this kind of pain, I could just put my hand in a bucket of ice water.