The Magic Chair A Tale from Tales From the Front Copyright reserved 1998 by Dave Laird Copyright 1993 by Dave Laird Even today, if you talk about travels long ago, his toes begin to itch, and Harry gets that fevered appearance that friends know so well; in short, he becomes totally absent-minded and not worth a damn the rest of the day. Whisper a few well-chosen words about lifes on the road and he becomes obsessed, even now in middle-age he quivers, becoming totally self-absorbed. To some, freedom is a cup filled with the proud inelegant rumble of the highway; to others, it is but the cup of memories full to the brim, and Harry apparently has both. He once sat in a blue funk staring off into space, as if by the mere act of will, he could foresee the years to come, so he could well in advance uncast the spells and start over with life. It was one of Harry's worst nightmares that someday he might wake up, having suddenly acquired, through no fault or involvement of his own, two cars, two kids, a motor home and a mortgage that, despite his best efforts has yet to be paid off. He might as well have stepped over the threshold into another dimension and while he was gone, somebody made him responsible for all that. He always awoke from that nightmare cold and clammy, his face dripping with sweat and fearful. First he had to solve what might seem to some a liveable problem of sorts, such as the time, one morning in his youth, he was hitchhiking beside the highway leading to Amarillo, Texas. He was going to go see a friend about some money owed him, but then the fates walked up behind him and WHAM! A half-drunk blonde in a Buick convertible pulls over to give him a ride, just as the sun is beginning to set, and the next thing he knows, he's in a motel room halfway across the state with her and her two pet guinea pigs. Harry didn t ask for her to make love, much less to get him drunk while driving 800 miles the opposite direction from Amarillo. He didn t ask for her and the guinea pigs to take turns seeing who could squeal the loudest the rest of the damned night. He was dealt a rough hand, and tried as he might, he couldn t avoid playing it out. He ended up at four in the morning standing in his underwear staring out the window of the motel room into the gray half-light of a Texas dawn asking himself how the hell he ever got into such a mess to begin with. After a few more similarly wild adventures, thinking perhaps that he possessed some kind of undeniable sex appeal, for a time he swore off women in general, but that, too, never seemed to last. One morning he woke up after a hard night drinking, only to discover he was in bed with the neighbor's brunette wife, but couldn t remember how he had gotten there. Thinking once more that he had to curtail his drinking if he ever stood a chance of getting his life in order, he entered into a four year state of sobriety that would have done the temperance ladies proud, had they but known. It wasn't that he never worked hard at whatever work came his way. "Never be a shirker, son," his father had taught him. "God may hate the Catholics, but he reserves his best hatred for shirkers." Harry just wasn't ready to settle down. In fact after holding nearly one hundred jobs in over ten states, there wasn't hardly one of his former employers that wouldn't have been tickled to death to have him back, were he to ever wander their way again. Impeccably clean, cheerful, always on time to work and willing to help wherever help was needed, Harry was unquestionably one of the finest short-order cooks and overall hot shot restaurant employees that any of his former bosses had ever had the good fortune to hire. "But the sumbitch won t stay in one place more than a month," Bill Tawgland muttered angrily, to a friend who ran another restaurant forty miles away. Only that morning, Harry had given him fair notice he was leaving, then disappeared entirely. It was the second time Harry had worked for him. "While he s here, he s the best damned man for the job. No sooner than you relax, think maybe this time he s gonna stick around, maybe set up roots, hell there he goes down the road a couple hundred miles." Tawgland grumbled some more. In fact, Harry was well-known to most of the restaurant owners in the Tri-State area. Here today, damned good worker, gone tomorrow. So much so, it was rumored for awhile that Harry was the person responsible for bringing the various owners together, eventually to form the highly-contentious but nonetheless functional Tri-State Restaurant Association, an organization whose purpose it officially was to encourage the highest possible standards in the restaurant industry, and unofficially, to help business owners find and KEEP decent help. At their monthly meetings, if one were to judge which of the two principles really mattered to anyone, of course the second, finding decent restaurant help, was most often the topic of discussion. The bywords to any of these meetings were, 'Anybody seen or heard of Harry, lately?' followed by the sounds of amused laughter. Then the afternoon that forever changed Harry's life came along. While Harry was preparing an order of fries, fate, in the form of Tuila Tulips, came sashaying in the door of the restaurant, fresh off the road in her VW Microbus. In the first ten seconds, while she removed her sunglasses and peered around the room, she ended forever any last hopes that anyone might have harbored that Harry would settle down, accept his position as a restaurant cook for life, and adopt the program that destiny seemed to be handing him. Tuila simmered, she seethed, she walked like she had ball bearings in her hip sockets. She had naturally long eyelashes that, like her waist-length braided hair, were the color of fire and brimstone. Most important of all, when she saw Harry standing at the counter, ostensibly to take her order, it seemed like he was smiling like sin itself. Of all the great lotharios in the world, and she had seen more than her fair share, she WANTED this skinny, half-breed short order cook in the worst way. She had to have him. After her heart-stopping entrance, she pondered her next move for less time than it takes for a mouse to fart, then throwing out her already-considerable chest for good effect, and batting her red eyelashes for even better measure, she leaned forward, as if to beckon him to explore the front of her low-cut dress, and whispered seductively, "Hi, whatcha got I can eat? You got anything really delicious you'd like to share?" The forks and knives of approximately half a dozen men within hearing simultaneously hit the Formica counter so hard it probably was heard outside outside on the street simmering in its own heat. Two old men sitting at the far end of the counter fumbled frantically with their hearing aids, while the rest of the men simply turned beet red, whispered beneath their breath to their friends, or just giggled to themselves. The women, for the most part, kept a sharp eye on their men or simply stared with that peculiar flinty look that sometimes women get when they feel threatened, intimidated or just aggravated by another sexually-overt woman. Harry, every bit the professional, didn't blush, laugh or show any emotion standing at the counter because he knew, inside his heart, that at least for another three hours, he was first and foremost a short-order cook, and that even under such trying circumstances, he was bound to never shirk his duties. However, that didn t stop him, while he was patiently waiting for Tuila to place her order, from taking a long, appreciative glance down the front of her dress, mentally pumping her ample breasts and gauging her legs that were sleekly shaped like dual chromium pistons. He would have had to be dead not to notice the fervid scent of unlimited sexual possibility Tuilia was exuding all over his freshly-washed counter top. In their first thirty seconds spent face-to-face, they tangled and untangled their bodily parts, wrapped their arms and legs around one another and got breathless all without so much as touching one another or saying a word. They did hideously wonderful things with their hands and lips, and four minutes later, they did them all over again when Harry set down an order of freshly-made french fries and coke where Tuila sat at the front counter. They spent their first real night together in the back of her VW Microbus because fifty feet to the Starlight Star Bright Motel next door was too damned far, as was the tiny room Harry had out in back of the restaurant. The next morning, unlike his traditional departures of the past, Harry simply walked up to his boss and said, "I'm leaving. Can I have my check please?" That was that. Fifty miles down the road, they had to stop at one of Harry s previous employers to catch a bite to eat, and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon in the Microbus parked beside a suitably-named body of water, Naughty Creek, that ran close by. Two states, thousands of miles later, after the passion had lessened to where they could travel more than one hundred miles per day without spontaneously grappling, groping and screeching to the heavens in the back of the well-worn Microbus with the pale blue trim and seats, they admitted to one another that they were hopelessly in love with each other, and the road in that order, and thus they spent the rest of the summer feverishly enjoying both, working when they had to, but never losing sight of one another or the highway. By the time the leaves began to turn with autumn, after they had amassed what was, for them, a considerable fortune from working at various jobs and being thrifty, they promptly hit the road once more, this time traveling into the Deep South, then west to Amarillo, Texas and finally to Los Angeles, California. Somewhere during the next two years, in a whirlwind of passion and propriety, they were married by a blind justice of the peace somewhere in Oregon. For their honeymoon, they bought a newer model VW Microbus, and proceeded without so much as a fair-thee-well, to travel through the rest of the states they might have missed in their lives. The doorbell tinkled, and Harry arose from his reverie, suddenly all business. "Hi, how can I help you?" he asked the middle-aged woman with a smile. "My husband and I are thinking of traveling across country to Texas, perhaps to the Amarillo area where we have some family, but would like to make reservations in advance. Do you provide that kind of service?" Why we certainly do, mam," Harry said, smiling brightly at her. "In fact, I can even help you with planning the trip, as I know all of the highways between here and Texas quite intimately, having done some considerable traveling down that way a few years back." "You went to Amarillo?" the matron asked, her eyes watching Harry alertly for any sign of dishonesty. "Oh yes, Harry uttered reassuringly, expertly whipping out a pre-marked western states road map. "There are several ways to get to Amarillo from here. It all depends upon what you want to do, what you want to see. I ve marked this map with a Magic Marker so you can see the best routes to travel, and depending upon how far each day you want to drive, we will set up room reservations to meet your needs before you leave." Tuila, who had just entered at the back of the shop, came up quietly behind Harry at the front counter, and slipping her arm around him, added, "That is a particularly beautiful drive if you know the right routes to take. Harry and I have been there several times in our lives together, and on our vacation each year, we always make it a point to see Amarillo and the Ozarks." On an otherwise quiet corner in a rustic professional building just around the corner from their home, Harry and Tuila still continue to travel the roads, to listen for the sounds of the highway beckoning them onward. That night, sitting in their home of nearly twenty years, with the children in bed asleep and Tuila at a Rotary meeting, Harry sat in his favorite chair, an heirloom of sorts, and began dreaming of the past. Unlike the rest of the conventional furniture in the house, his favorite chair was the pale blue front seat from the VW Microbus he and Tuila had spent their first summer in love. Reverently, once more he caressed the keys hanging down from the ignition switch, and then he was gone once more, traveling the roads and remembering how crazy he once was.