Me by Anonymous

Author:Anonymous
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1976-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

The Girl

It was pure accident that I came to New Orleans. Or maybe it was meant to happen that way. Take a look back, don’t nothing that happens in your life seem like an accident, because you can’t figure how it could ever have been any way different. Which makes you to wonder.

How it come about was this. For a week, now, I had been traveling with this one fellow. It was against my rules, but we got along good together. All day long I’d ride shotgun in his big truck—he was driving one of them Peterbilts, with chrome stacks and all, which made him mighty high class amongst the other truck drivers. They all want to drive a “Pete.”

Or else I’d get up in the bunk, especially if I’d been entertaining fellows till all hours last night, and doze off, knowing even while I was sleeping that he was rolling me safely down the highway. Just the best long-haul trade driver I ever traveled with. A real gypsy, too, that traveled all over the place. Give him a choice between a milk run and someplace he’d never been before, and there wasn’t no doubt about where he’d go.

When we’d pull into a track stop, he’d go inside first and get me all fixed up—I want to tell you, I was well-known by this time, and the fellows liked hearing that I was on the premises—and then he’d take his dollar turn first of all. After he had got satisfied, he’d go out and sleep in his truck, to save the money for another room, you see, and leave me to my business. First thing in the morning, he’d come in and wash up whilst I was having my breakfast somebody had brought from the restaurant, and then he’d look at me with his pretty black eyes, which had long lashes just like a girl’s, though there was certainly frothing girlish about him, and he’d say, “Going my way?”

I don’t understand to this day why it was, but every time he asked, I’d say, “Well, I reckon I am.” I don’t know why it was. Maybe it was that he was such a strange fellow, in a nice sort of way. He had this funny way of talking which I just liked to hear, no matter what he happened to be saying, because he was what they call a Cajun. His voice just lilted and sang like a bird. He was dark-complected, with black hair and black eyes, and though not a big man, was built as strong and pretty as that Peterbilt ;track he drove so proudly.

One day, just as the sun was going down, we had come into this place called Algiers. He stopped his truck in front of a bus station.

“I will say good-bye to you, Cherie, because tonight I go home.”

He always called me Cherie for some reason, though it wasn’t anywhere close to my name.

It had come up so sudden, I hadn’t been expecting it. “I wish I could go with you,” I said.

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