Sneaky peek!

Culpeper VA.

Dallas hummed, Big Joe whistled, while Greasy Mike from Sperryville drummed his oil tarnished fingers on the diner counter like he’d missed his calling. Mae-Lou rocked a dainty hip as she fed the repro-Wurlitzer another handful of quarters from the tips jar, her jaw long from chewing gum. 

         “What y’all be wannin next?” she teased, over her tattooed shoulder, her petite chin poised above the fluttering hummingbird.

         “Springsteen!” the diner hollered back… like she didn’t know.

          The place was a hive of noise, pleasant noise, happy-go-lucky ‘Whoa oh, Livin’ on a Prayer’ kind of noise, and if it wasn’t for that homely air of grilled bacon, French Toast and a wafting of corn from the grits, he could be forgiven for thinking he’d stumbled into some late-night bar out west, the music loud, the chatter louder.  

         “Mae-Lou, when y’all just bout finished…mind doin what a pay ye for?” 

         “You got it boss,” she sang, too merrily mannered to take him seriously. She spun on the balls of her flats and skipped to the service counter like Dorothy in Oz–her ‘too short for Pops’ pink, checked pinny swirling with a twist of her hips. “Whatcha got for me?” 

         Dan dropped a plate under the lamp of the hot pass.  “House omelette, fries, table seven." He smoothed the back of his hand over his sweat drenched brow, wiped it on his apron. “That girl…” he uttered, shaking his head, “I swear she gonna put me in the ground.”

         Mae-Lou graced the chess board floor like she was playing hopscotch on the lino squares; the dish of fried cholesterol precariously balanced on her fingertips above her swinging ponytail and smiling face. Dallas winked at her younger assistant as the two waitresses sailed past each other, synchronised, like line dancers in a Country bar.

          Dallas, pulled up at table nine. “Refill, hun?” she said, holding out the steaming carafe.

          Johnny Ash slid the quarter full mug to the table edge, “need to ask?” he smiled.

         “Never know, babyface, you could surprise me one day and say no.”

          Babyface, a fine name for a man in his early fifties. It was far from personal, nor was it a real compliment. Anyone who’d blown fewer candles out than Hugh Hefner was ‘babyface’ according to Dallas.  It didn’t stop him casting a sideways glance at his reflection in the large window though. He fingered the crow’s feet around his temple, stretched the skin back for youth, smiled, then allowed a finger to run across the light creases under his eye, stopped when he reached the small scar. A nick, the size of a thumb nail clipping, like a crescent moon, loitering among the other lines that his half-century old face was starting to show. His smile dropped, the memory of its incarnation carried more pain than the knuckle that had inflicted it, he shuddered, an anxious hot flush threatening to rise. Why was it that every time he washed, shaved, plucked a hair from an ear, or…checked his reflection in a diner window, did the tiny blemish force him to delve twenty years into the past? Like the past was something he could ever forget anyway.  

          “Ok there hun? You kinda drifted off on me…get to anyplace nice?” 

           Johnny Ash wasn’t aware she was still hovering at the end of the booth; he shook the memory to the back…again. “No, not really.”

           “Where d’ya get it?”

           “Get what?”

           “The ring cut you been pokin at.”

           “Oh, it’s nothing, Dallas, long story, long ago.” He picked up the laminated menu. “So what’s today’s dessert?” 

           Dallas pursed, shook her short, sandy bob side to side.  “Ah’ll figure you out one of these days…John-Boy,” she said, snatching the card from his fingers. “It’s pecan pie n cream, same as it is every Sunday…and you’ll take a slice, extra cream…juss as you do every Sunday.” 

           He didn’t know what was worse, babyface, John-Boy, or her half-hearted efforts to pry into a private life he wasn’t up for sharing. 

          She’d never succeeded, and she wasn’t ever likely to, despite her steely Southern tenacity.

          Ten years hiding out from the mob taught you better than that. He wouldn’t mind, but Dallas wasn’t all that interested anyway; she’d just turned his shelled and protected past into a personal nut she hoped to crack. But, like a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of a green horse in a field, she’d eventually get worn down or bored of it, or both. Just as she had with Dan.

          Poor Dan, smitten like a teenager, even with his back to the floor, tossing eggs in the open plan, furnace of a kitchen, you could feel his eyes following her every move around the diner.

         They had a history, and he wasn’t for giving up on her. He believed it was an age thing, having a decade between them, Johnny Ash knew it was just boredom and the monotony of a six-day week together that had lessened her lust for the middle-aged grill chef, a fact that couldn’t have been made any clearer if it was daubed in chalk on the specials board. Mae-Lou would tease him about it, kept calling him pops in front of the customers, he’d begged her not to, allowed her to wear her skirt as short as she did, so long as she refrained from acknowledging that he was her old man. 

          As much as he believed his own ruse, Dan he was, and everybody knew his story. Firefighter Dan, the single father who couldn’t keep his wife from running off to Florida with the duty sergeant from his own engine house. He’d taken early retirement shortly after, partly over shame, partly to look after his daughter. He still volunteered though, not at the same station, down at Salem, out on five-twenty-two. It was Mae-Lou that had convinced him to take over Mo’s in town after the former owner died in a freak microlite accident. He’d reluctantly pilfered his pension pot and done as she’d asked on the one condition: that she’d study hard and make the grades at Culpeper County High to get her into Virginia Tech. Despite Dan’s initial kickback to the idea, it was a win-win for the novice cook. He got to keep an eye on his growing girl while making a pretty penny from the favourable eatery.

         There wasn’t much he hadn’t picked up on over time. He’d been coming to Dan’s Diner on the corner of Davies and Main St since the day he stepped off the Amtrak at the quaint old station four years back. Every Sunday, like 10am mass, he’d be here, watching, listening, absorbing that wonderful, mild Virginian drawl; not quite deep south, but southern none the least. He knew them all, he could recite the life stories of all the regulars. 

Johnny Ash wagered himself. ‘Strawberry shake if you get em all right’. Fair bet, he toyed, as he started with the big guy.

         Greasy Mike, the lawnmower mechanic from Sperryville, sitting on his usual bar stool at the counter, three from left, with his large ass hanging out of his Wranglers and his John Deere cap on back to front. Said to be able to strip a zero-turn in less than three minutes…and single because of it. Next. The odd, old couple in the corner, Ivy, the English teacher at Culpeper High and her husband, Wilf, ex-marine, two tours of Korea ’51-’53, saw action at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir– but he doesn’t like to talk about that, apparently. Both Lutherans and both extremely grumpy. Ted and Buck, sat in the booth nearest the door, middle aged teenagers who still rode on their ‘Hokies’ college ball fame, class of ’87, and never hung up their VT jackets and still drive the same F150 trucks they bought after graduation. 

         Two booths down from them sat Big Joe, who– ‘Hello, who’s this guy?’ A lone figure ended his round-up like a Mexican wave hitting a wall of sitting killjoys at a ball game.

         He hadn’t noticed the man enter the diner, let alone slide into the booth opposite. Johnny Ash watched him order a coffee from Mae-Lou, the man’s head dipped below an all-black Under-Armor baseball cap, his outfit of the same brand, training shorts and a tight workout T that exposed broad, bar-belled arms. He was no regular and Johnny Ash had to force himself to stop ogling the guy with a face splattered in suspicion; old habits die hard, he thought. He set about returning his attention to the regulars again, but Dallas showed up with the pie n cream, slid the plate over. Johnny Ash thumbed under the table towards the newcomer. “Who’s that?” he mouthed.

         Dallas glanced at the man, shrugged, “Dunno, hun.”

         The hum and the roll of the diner would continue unperturbed by the first timer sat across from him, and why wouldn’t it? What did the rest of Dan’s Diner have to be concerned about? A Sunday jogger who happened to fancy a coffee and a break from the mid-morning’s September sun? He cast it off, another false alarm like countless times before no doubt, it wouldn’t be the first time the rolling in his gut had been the eggs instead of a sixth sense hunch. Holland, Portugal, Greece, London or when he was island hopping around the Canaries for three years, there wasn’t a place he’d hunkered down that hadn’t offered up its fair share of viable looking hitmen. But caution was always the side to be erred on, not chance, and he still had to run them through his own due diligence before he’d let them slide back into the film set around him as mere extras, and not the assumed assassin about to put two in his chest and one in his head.

         He decided on it being no threat to him finishing off the best pecan pie this side of the Rappahannock, but he would skip the milkshake nonetheless. Enough jitters for one day. 

        Time to get back to the farm.