I apologize for the mix up in chronology; the stream of memory carried me further down the river than you and I should be. A week or so ago, I posted the folktale about John Gaskins, the bear hunter of Eureka Springs, and that story reminded me of the time I played the part of Gaskins with Ellie in the early 80s. My beautiful Ellie. I guess I could let that memory stream carry me right on into our home today where Ellie is knitting a onesie for our latest grandbaby, and I'm writing stories that may never be read. Ellie saved me from myself, and she says I did the same for her, which is a nice thing for her to say. I wrote Pursuing Daisy Garfield for Ellie. She is my Beatrice, but better than Dante's Beatrice because I got to marry Ellie. Maybe Dante wouldn't have burned so many people in hell if he could have married his Beatrice. Dante's Beatrice married a banker named Simone dei Bardi about whom no one gives a shit anymore. Bardi wouldn't even be a footnote if it weren't for Dante. It just goes to show you, but what, I don't know.
Anyhow, I met the ghost of the "Mountain Maid" in 1967, and she told me my destiny lay in Onyx, Arkansas, and then neglected to tell me where Onyx was. All I had to go on was the Arkansas Ozarks, and as far as clues go, I can't think of a better one. That's why I was hitchhiking south out of Roaring River on a June morning, when the world was as fresh and exciting as a college girl in Playboy magazine. The morning smelled of cut grass wet with dew and bacon frying over campfires and river mist. People were already standing along the river and tossing their lines into the water. Everyone was quiet as a whisper, so the only noise was the tractor mowers down by the pavilions.
The sun lay on the trees different in those days, mellower and not so hot, and the shadows beneath the trees were more a mystery than a menace. I was damn hungry—I remember that—but I was free, too, and who having been free but once will ever forget the feeling? That takes me back to when Mrs. Cox, my sophomore English teacher, asked the class if we would rather be a hungry dog that was free or a well fed dog that was penned up? That's a question not easily answered if you take it seriously. Maybe it was the main question of the 1960s. My question was, why did some people get to tell other people what to do? Now I see they were the same question.
What happened when I hitchhiked out of Roaring River was this: A girl in a green army jeep with the top down picked me up and asked me where I was going.
I said, "Onyx, Arkansas," and she asked, "Where's that?"
I told her I didn't know, and she said, "Then how are you going to get there?"
I said, "That's a good question. A ghost told me to go there, but she didn't tell me where it is."
"You talked to a ghost?"
"Yeah."
"Cool."
For some reason talking to a ghost seemed to raise me in her estimation. The 60s were like that. Some people were praising Jesus in tongues and other people were meditating on crystals; some people were reading de Tocqueville and others Karl Marx. And everybody was doing something sexual, even if they were only doing it to themselves. Sex was the open sea, and culturally speaking, everything else was an oil slick.
We drove out of the park on Highway F and took a right on Highway 86. Somewhere around Eagle Rock, she told me her name was Candy and asked me my name, so we prattled on about who was better, the Beatles or the Grateful Dead, and she said she liked the Stones. We were two meaningless kids like everybody else in our generation.
To speak truly, she wasn't much to look at. I know that's a mean thing to say, but it's true. She was kind of squatty with a head of brown curly hair, and her sunglasses rested on her cheeks. She didn't wear lipstick or eyeshadow, not because she was trying to be natural but because she didn't know any better. She told me she waited tables at the Golden Cafe, and I remember thinking she looked like a waitress. Then again, I wasn't much to look at either. Remember? Skinny, bad skin, bad haircut?
Candy and I were made for each other.
She pulled off down a gravel road, and we had a tete-a-tete with the top down and the morning sun pouring down around us, two meaningless kids swimming around in a rainbow oil slick. I'm 75 years of age as I write this, and you would think I could describe sex more salaciously. But I can't. For the same reason I can't look at pornography. The dopamine hit is too strong. If I start writing about sex in the specifics—tongues and crevices and turgid throbbings—I get so distracted by memory and desire and my own ruined reflection in the mirror, that I have to put down my pen and take a nap. I can still look at a Victoria's Secret circular with some pleasure, though the girls look more and more like AI flesh cartoons with preternatural legs and cheek bones that could slice ham, but I can't look at a photo of naked boobies without being wrecked by the dopamine.
After some vigorous and pleasant activity in the jeep, we drove to the cafe, and Candy served me biscuits with sausage gravy and eggs over easy. (Actually, I don't remember how my eggs were cooked, but I can visualize eggs-over-easy more easily with the broken yellow running into the gravy, so I'll remember that.) She said breakfast was on the house. Kind of like Candy herself was, I guess. Then she said her shift had begun, and she had to put on her waitress uniform, so I thanked her for the ride and the breakfast and shouldered my duffle bag to get back on the road. Outside, the parking lot smelled like biscuits, the gravel crunched pleasantly under my feet, and the morning sun was rising toward mid-day. I noticed that Candy's jeep had one of those fake license plates that said, "Not all who wander are lost." I thought that was a profound insight and succinctly put, but I didn't know it was from The Lord of the Rings until a couple years later when I was living in Eureka Springs, and I read the trilogy. Seems like everybody was reading Tolkien at the time. Hobbits were into pipe weed and mushrooms, and so were most of the people I knew. When I read The Fellowship of the Ring, I learned that the bumper sticker really referred to Aragorn, but I guess it's like Scripture because the saying could apply to anybody.
Years later, I went by the Golden Cafe to see if Candy still worked there, but she didn't. The girl behind the counter said she had moved to Dallas.
I hope Candy did okay in Dallas. I really do.