Terry, Montana

He parked his beat-up pick-up truck in the stall directly in front of room 102. The sun was setting down on the prairie. A McDonald’s hamburger wrapper blew past his front window. Two teenage boys with ripped up Eminem T-shirts and khaki shorts were skating on the emptied disused swimming pool. He cut the engine off and got out into the parking lot. He stretched his back by holding his hands tightly together way over his head. He couldn’t believe he had been driving almost non-stop since early morning. He unloaded the bags off his black Ford and walked to the door of the motel room and opened it with the keycard. He stepped in and stood in silence in the doorframe without moving for a few moments. His eyes scanning the length of the room. Another bland middle of nowhere motel room. He started to hear her voice again. That kind of pinched upper-nasal sound. The high tension in her angry voice. He tried to put the last painful memory of them behind by bringing to mind her soft brown fuzzy hair and her icy-blue eyes. He remembered how it felt to be lost in those eyes. It shocked him that he could still feel that way about her, but now he couldn’t act on it. He felt wiped out, dizzy. He questioned his motives for driving half way across the country to get as far away from her as possible if the memories followed wherever he went. He decided he needed a drink. He threw his bags recklessly inside the room, closed the door behind him and got back in his pick-up. Her voice was still going on inside his head. The kind of breathless tone she uses to get her point across without being interrupted. The thought occurred to him that he was never able to get a word in edgewise when she got like this. It drained him emotionally to the point where he just forfeit these battles and let her have her way. He drove into a gravel parking lot full of rusty old pick-ups in front of a place called “Standing Rock Saloon & Casino” and turned off his engine. He just sat there and watched the approaching storm lights. Sitting behind the wheel. Trying to get her high-pitched angry voice out off his head. Looking past the dark horizon. He got out of his Ford, and went inside the bar as it threatened to start raining. The bar was nearly full with an assortment of cowboys and farmhands trying to bring some kind of excitement to the end of another workday. He kept one ear tuned to the news on TV as he hunted up and down for a place to sit. A video poker machine was blinking in one corner of the bar near the bathroom. An old cowboy kept trying his luck until the money ran out. He stepped up to the far end of the bar and found an empty seat. The news had switched to the weather. He ordered a Jim Beam and looked around trying to adjust himself with the group of strangers that filled the bar in order to feel like he belonged. The two cowboys who sat next to him turned from their conversation about steers and cattle weaning to acknowledge his presence with a tip of their cowboy hats and then returned to their drinks. He sipped on his drink and starred over the rim of his glass at the many autographed framed pictures hanging on the walls. And there she was. Holding a Martin guitar, all dressed up in her best Patsy Montana outfit. Maybe eighteen-years old. It all came back to him and he realized he was in her hometown. In the exact same spot where she started singing. The small prairie town she had left behind for good more than twenty years ago and that she promised to never return to again. The irony didn’t escape him. He had driven this far away, from her memory, to be standing consciously or unconsciously where her discarded memories of what she used to be were. He paused and swirled the melting ice in his bourbon.  Without warning the thought that he had been reduced to nothing as far as she was concerned, a flicker of her imagination, just another sad song on her repertoire, flooded his mind. He smiled briefly. He paid for his bourbon and stumbled out the door. Outside, in the parking lot, he looked at the dark fields under a patchy drizzle. There wasn't a sound to be heard except the wind in the prairie. A freight train in the distance. The definite silence of her voice echoing loudly in all directions.