joegoda | Nano Day 20 - Trippin the Vortex

For Capi and the readers. I'm out of town till Thursday night.

I stepped out into the morning sun to check on the soda can alarm. It hadn't budged, there were not odd hand prints on the van, nothing to indicate that anyone had been around or inside the van.

I bent down to pick up the soda can and was surprised to find that it was an RC cola can. Images of the dream rushed back into memory. I could still feel the heat and the dust of the desert on my face. I could also feel the incredible power that had raged through me. That was not a good thing. It was a wonderful feeling, granted, but that feeling is an illusion. It's an addiction, and can burn you out faster than a twenty-five cent light bulb.

I felt that sort of power only a few times in my life. It was only with humility and will power that I walked away from it. I remembered the taste. I also remembered the damage that such power could do. I'm not talking about abilities. Hell, anyone of us has abilities, great and small. I'm talking about pure, unbridled power, that thing that drives the engine, the explosion that powers the rockets. It reaches down from above and it reaches up from below and when it merges and combines, there is no limit to what can be done, if the will is strong enough.

I didn't want any part of it, and so the dream scared me of myself. I know my limits, and I know that, regardless of my desire to do good, to be good, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believe that. I also believe that I, as well as anyone else, has the ability to tap into absolute power, mess around enough to screw everything up, and then burn out from the effort. I mean that literally. I mean to burst into flames from the inside out sort of burn out.

I felt that fever, only once, and I walked away from it. And that is a whole other story.

Enough of that. I put the thought away, and concentrated on the dream itself, rather than what it meant for me.

It's possible that those were really Angelina's brothers. It's also possible that I dreamed them up some bodies and had them attack me. It's possible that I didn't have enough information to make any sort of judgment. I believed it was her real brothers. I also believed that they had wanted to kill me, and I also believed that Damien was the monkey with the wrench. Call it a hunch. Call it faith. Call it having a weird bottle cap show up in your pocket when you least expected it to, causing you to go 'Huh.'

I'll take 'Things that make Chester go Huh for a thousand, Alex.'

Winnemucca was a tourist town. And like most tourist towns tended to cater to tourists. That was okay. I didn't want to stand around for ever. I did, however, want to find out why it was calling me, and why it was so damned important to get here, rather than just stop at Elko for the night.

I poked my head back into the door of the hotel, saw that Angelina was starting to rouse, and said, "It's my turn to hunt the bear. I'll be back in a bit with breakfast." I remembered to take pick up my room key, excuse me, card key, and put it in my pocket. I got in the van and drove back down Winnemucca Boulevard to see what I could see.

About seven tenths up the road, I found the Griddle, a hopping breakfast joint that looked like it would have exactly what I wanted. I pushed my way into the crowded place, and it was crowded at seven am, let me tell you. It was a place that was not only popular with the tourists, but with the locals. Apparently, anybody who comes here to gamble, to look at the history, to get away from it all, comes to the Griddle.

I sat at a stool at the counter, not something I like to do, but out of necessity. Every booth was taken, and the only spot I could find was a stool down at the far end of the counter, next to a really, really old guy who was sopping up his eggs with a piece of toast.

When I sat down, he looked up at me with one eye, scootched his plate a bit further from me, and seemed to hunch over his breakfast as if I would dare to try to take it away from him.

I didn't want to look at him, it's impolite to stare, but I found myself catching him, time and time again out of the corner of my eye.

He was old. Old like tanned leather left in the sun and snow and rain for decades upon decades until the cracks appear and then they fade out again from wear. His face was narrow, tanned and lined. When he looked at me, his eyes were the color of a washed out fall sky.

His hands, above skinny and bony wrists were knobby, as if they were dark brown walnuts strung together by tendons. They weren't weak looking hands. In fact, they showed strength in every movement. They were the hands of a worker, of someone that had done manual labor for the entirety of their life.

He wore on his head an old train engineer cap, stained with sweat and his gray hair, longer than mine had ever hoped to be, fell out the back and drooped between his shoulders. His shirt was red plaid, just like mine, but carried with it an air of having been one of the original plaid shirts, first ever made. It fell shapeless over his thin and bowed shoulders, causing him to look like a pillow with all the feathers pull out of it.

He ate quietly, and I could tell he didn't have a tooth in his head. His thin lips delicately sucked the egg from his toast and then he would drop the triangle back down to his plate to scoop up the yolk and then back to his mouth again.

He caught me looking at him, and he looked back, long and hard, like an old dog sizing up a young dog. His head bobbed once, upward, and he said, "She wants your order."

I looked up at the waitress, standing, waiting, pencil in hand and not so patiently. She was a big boned girl, probably in her mid-twenties and wishing that she was anywhere else but Winnemucca, Nevada. Her pink work dress didn't do much to help her figure, but still, it wasn't unattractive in a waitressy sort of way. The tag on her blouse read 'Beth'

I grabbed the menu, looked over it quickly and said, "Beth, I'll have, um... eggs over easy, some hash browns and coffee."

"How would you like your coffee?" she asked. Her voice was tired, even at seven in the morning. Maybe she worked the grave yard shift at the casino.

"Just coffee and water, thanks," I said. Remembering Angelina, I added, "Oh, and another order to go, later."

"Remind me when you're ready," she said. "I'll have your coffee out in a second." She moved down the counter to the next person waiting.

The old man muttered something. I didn't think he was talking to me until he poked me. I jumped in my seat as he asked, "You hard of hearing, son?"

"Uh. No." I was, actually, partially, but so what? My right ear doesn't hear bass tones as well as my left due to a blown eardrum. It does, however, hear higher pitched tones better than my left.

"It's just pretty loud in here," I looked around. The fire marshall probably had this place rated for fifty-five or sixty people. The Griddle appeared to be pushing that limit.

"I said," the old guy repeated, "names are important."

I nodded. "Yes, sir. Yes, they are."

"Names tell what a thing is." I nodded again, wondering if he was going somewhere with this.

"Names also tell what a thing could be." He nodded at the waitress. "Take Bethy there. Her name tells you who she is. She's Beth." He picked up his coffee and took a sip. "Her name, Beth, also tells you that she's a woman, though you don't really need the name to tell you that." He smiled, toothless, a flashing fleshy grin. "Her name tells you that she is someone's daughter. That she has a mother and a father, somewhere. It tells you that someone loves her."

"If you look at her name, it will also tell you what she might be." He went back to his eggs, almost done. "She might be someone's wife. She might be someone's sweety. She might be someone's mother." Eggs all gone, he pushed the plate away, delicately tapped his lips with his napkin and covered his plate with it. "Names tell you almost everything about a person, place or thing."

He lifted his coffee cup and waved it, covering everything. "Take this town, for instance. Winnemucca. What sort of name is that? What does it tell you?" He paused, drank his coffee and eyed me with his pale, pale eyes.

I coughed, gently. "It's a native American town?"

The old man almost spit his coffee. "Boy," he growled, "you ain't got a rat's spit chance of making it in the world if you don't say what's right there in your head. Native American, my ass. Indian!" He looked around, twisting the seat of his stool as he did so. "It's Indian!" he cried, glaring at anyone who dared to stare at him. "Now, boy, tell me more. Tell me all."

Okay. Talk to the crazy man. And so I did. I told him I had no frigging idea what it told me. Only that this town had called to me and I drove almost seven hours just to get here. I told him I figured it was named after some mountain, or some Indian chief or some crap like that. I told him that I came here, carrying a woman whose parents might just be gods and whose brothers tried to kill me in a dream. And then I told him about the dream.

All through my talk, he just sat there, listening. When I finally ran out, he asked to see the bottle cap. I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it him. He turned it over and over and felt of it and smiled at the memory of it and handed it back.

"That's a real RC cap. Not that crap they sell now. RC was great." He lingered far away in his memory for a bit, while the waitress brought me my breakfast. I realized I was hungry and started to chow down.

"You know, I think I know of an old Texaco station like you mentioned." He took off his cap and scratched at his thick gray hair. I only wish I had hair like that. "Up route 95, I think." He scratched some more memory flakes, and then nodded. "Yep, that's where it is, up 95. Some desert rats I know sometime use it when the storms come. I think it's even got that old dodge there, too."

He looked away for a bit, out at the crowd of people, whose faces had changed from the ones that were there when I got there. "You might want to go wandering that way, son. It'll take you to where you need to go faster than going Reno way. 'Specially if you don't want to go to Reno."

He put the cap back on his head, straightened it, dropped a twenty on the counter, and said "Thanks, Bethy. Tell your mom hello for me." The waitress, Beth, nodded back at him, too busy to stop.

He bounce off his stool, and I saw he was just a little guy, not much taller than me. "Things are sometimes what they appear," he said to me. As he went around me, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Look to the North, not the West. Don't go to the hole, but to the nest."

I jerked up, turned my head to him, and he wasn't there. He was gone. Totally no sign of him heading to the door or making his way through the crowd to the bathroom. He just wasn't there.

Dammit, I absolutely hate things like that. It was ridiculous that he should say the very same thing to me that I heard in my dream. It bordered on stupid. It bordered on making me really tired of things happening to me that made no sense that I could see.

I finished my eggs, my mind in a whirl and I found myself growing very, very angry. I felt I was being manipulated, but I didn't know by who. As far as I knew, the old guy was Damien. I had heard of shape shifters, but I didn't believe in them. I still don't. I have no more clue of who the old guy was now than I did back then.

I dropped a twenty on the counter, just like the old guy did. I nodded to Beth, who scooped up the twenty, and asked me if I wanted my change. I told her to keep it, she worked hard enough to earn it. And she smiled at me. And the smile changed her face into the face of a small girl, playing dolls in the dust, dreaming of a world where princes lived and fairy tales came true. I smiled back, waved my hand and started to leave.

"Hey!" I heard Beth call me. "You forgot your to go order!" I turned back and she held it out to me. "I figured you would need it pretty soon, so I went ahead and ordered it. You seemed to be eating in a pretty big hurry." She held out a big Styrofoam clamshell and I took it. It was very warm and a bit heavy for one hand.

I asked what the charge was, and she told me that the twenty more than covered it and my own. I shrugged and said "Okay, long as you're sure." She smiled that smile again, wished me safe travel, and turned away.

Before I let her go, though, I asked her who the old guy was that was sitting next to me.

"Who?" Beth asked, a perplexed look on her face.

"You know," the old man that was eating when I came in.

"Really, there wasn't any old man." I could tell she was getting agitated, and she was too busy to deal with stupid questions.

Chalk up another one to make me go Huh. "Never mind, Beth. Have a good day."

I walked out of the Griddle and got into the van. I placed the Styrofoam container on the seat next to me, turned the key and drove back to the motel.

Opening the door, I heard the shower running. Good. It meant Angelina was up and just about ready. Which mean another hour while she did all those things that a woman does to get ready. I looked at my watch. Seven thirty. I wanted to be on the road by eight, at the very least.

I walked over to the bathroom door, knocked on it and told her to hurry up or I'd leave without her. I was kidding, of course. After the dream, there was no way I was going to not see this through to the end.

The shower stopped running, I heard the door unlock and it opened, just a crack. Her face showed and, wide eyed, she asked, "You would what?" There was real fear in her eyes.

"Oh, come on!" I said. "I was kidding. We're almost there, just another few hours. I wouldn't leave you now."

She searched my face for the truth, and having found it, nodded. "All right. I'll try to hurry." She started to close the door, then stopped herself. "You scared me though. I had a horrible dream last night that I was left alone and someone was trying to kill me."

"It was just a dream, Angel," I said, trying to calm her fears. "That's all. I'm with you all the way."

Again she nodded, turned her eyes down and said, "I'll try to hurry."

"Thank you," I said to her as the door closed.

So Angelina had a dream too. Not just a dream, but a dream where she was left alone, by me, apparently, and someone was trying to kill her. Interesting. I'd ask her about it when we were on the road.

I pulled my map out of my bag and checked for 95. True as true, it ran up from Winnemucca North, then hooked up with 140 west and straight as a palsied snake to Oregon. From what I could tell, there wasn't any big difference in time. It just meant a whole lot of two lane mountain road.

Once she was dressed, her hair pulled back behind her head in a brown waterfall, and dressed in white sweater and jeans, she looked like the spitting image of a young college student. Prepped and ready for anything. She still had a haunted look in her eyes though.

"I have breakfast for you in the van." I told her.

"Thank you, Chester." She said. "What did you get me?"

"Eggs and hash browns. We'll pick up coffee or tea or whatever you want on the way out of town." I dropped the key card on the table, slipped a five under the pillow and carried our bags out the door. "I have to get gas, anyway."

"Do you always do that?" She asked.

"What?" I asked back. "Get gas? Depends on what I eat."

"No, silly." She pointed back at the room. "Do you alway put a five under the pillow? For who? The hotel faeries?"

"Hotel staff are very often underpaid," I told her. "They work hard, and when there is a convention in town, they work double hard. There are things they have to clean up that you, princess, wouldn't even want to think about." I shrugged. "So I leave them a tip. It's better than them stealing our luggage when we're not looking."

"I guess you're right." She climbed into the passenger side as I go into the drivers. She looked at me appraisingly. "I know that I've said this before, but I will say it again." She smiled brightly at me with freshly brushed teeth. "You are a good man, mister Chester."

"Yeah, okay. Whatever." I turned the key and started the engine. "Seat belt," I reminded her.

We drove back the way we came in, and I pointed at the Griddle. "Good breakfast there," I said. "Nice friendly atmosphere, and very crowded."

I found the turn to 95 and took it, moving cautiously across I-80. "We're not going to Reno?" Angelina asked with eyebrow raised.

"Tell me about your dream, and then I'll tell you about mine," I said as we bumped on to two lane state road 95.