On Route 66 — Bella Thoranson

On Route 66

Bella Thoranson

[The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.]

Bella Thoranson travelled the road on a motorcycle, a red and black Ducati 650. She had come down originally from Gimli, a small town in Western Canada, and she never went back. In many ways, she reminded me of a modern-day Viking of sorts, with her crystal blue eyes and her long, streaky blonde hair that streamed from under her Davida helmet out into the wind as she drove by you at breakneck speeds.

I met Bella just after the crash. One night she appeared out of nowhere in a roadside diner where the coffee was rich and somehow sweet and the food just bearable. I was sitting in a back booth when she came in, and I guess I looked up more than twice when she pulled off her riding gear and goggles with the smallest hands wrapped up in tight black leather gloves. She was stunning. She brought a kind of diffuse golden light to the grey, dusty air that was thick with cigarette smoke and the grease of ground beef cooking on an open grill. On the back of her riding jacket, you could see where a logo had been unstitched and removed. In its place was a large circular patch of an eerie white moon encircled by the words, “Moon Shadow.”

For years, they say, she rode alone. She ate alone. She slept alone. Then, she met David. That was his full name. Not David Jones, David Smith, David Indigo, or anything like that. Just David, and together, he and Bella travelled long enough for the two of them to fall in love. He was much older than she was, maybe a good twenty years or so, but no one really noticed that kind of stigma in those days. He was everything she wasn’t, quiet, passive, and a serious artist who worked with metal sculpture. He drove a custom Harley like no one had ever seen before. That bike seemed colossal in structure, glimmered with polished chrome, and had thick low-rise handlebars. On its massive, variable-blue, tear-drop gas tank, David had stencilled the word “Goliath” in gold script, just behind the Harley-Davidson logo.

I’ve never fully understood why some people step into your life at a particularly important moment. Some call it coincidence, some fate, I guess. Maybe there’s a master plan somewhere. I’m just not sure. The night that Bella walked into that diner, I knew she was there for a reason. She had the look of an angel. And maybe she was an angel of sorts, come to save me from suffering the same fate as Joe Ferguson.

Stinkin’ Joe Ferguson ran drugs up from Mexico in those days. He sold them out of the trunk of a beat-up ’59 Ford to the hippies that sputtered along Route 66 in new VW vans that were painted over with Peace symbols and slogans. No more than kids really, they wore sandals, sloppy jeans, and pastel Mexican shirts that billowed around their thin bodies. Most of them were from the suburbs of American cities like Chicago and San Francisco, and they seemed out of place among the surly Navajo and the bikers there in the Arizona desert. Still, they talked about starting a new America among the iguanas and Gila monsters. People used to say it was a crazy notion, but before long, they were everywhere, and Stinkin’ Joe would have become a rich man except that he got shot by some truck driver who was hooked on bennies and who snuffed Joe over a drug deal that went sour. That was when I got involved.

Most everyone had a time with drugs back then. I played around with hashish mostly, and never went much further. When Stinkin’ Joe crossed over to paradise, I somehow took up the slack. I was running the border with a tow truck. The gig was simple enough. I’d drive down to Mexico, buy a wreck of some vintage car, stash it full of drugs, and tow it back over the border. The border patrol would never think to look in the car I was towing. My business was clearly classic car restoration. I didn’t come close to looking anything like a drug dealer.

Some say David died in the big crash because of some acid that he’d bought from me. I’m not sure that makes his death my fault. Why he would go out on the road while he was stoned on acid was his business, not mine. But he did. And he smacked Goliath into an eighteen-wheeler making a run north with a load of California grapes. They say his body parts were all over the highway. His bike, on the other hand, was so solid that it remained completely intact. It was sort of a reverse of the biblical story, I guess.

So Bella came looking for me. When she entered the diner that night, I thought she was probably packing and had come to blow me away. She was so beautiful, I think I would have let her too, and maybe have been happy dying in the glow of her gold hair. But she just walked up to me and handed me what was left of David’s leathers. I looked up at her with some curiosity until she said, “You need to know what it’s like to walk around in a dead man’s skin.” Then she simply turned and walked away. A moment later, I could hear the roar of her Ducati speeding off into the night.

I never had anything to do with drugs again.

The Back Story:

This was the third story in a collection of stories that I wrote about people whom I met or imagined I met along Route 66, that famous highway that runs from Chicago to Los Angeles.

I wrote this story as a kind of tribute to a childhood friend, whose life was cut short as a result of his years of involvement with drugs and alcohol. When I moved to Toronto, we had grown apart, and I did not hear of his death until several years after he passed. I was shocked and disappointed, because he was an exceptional musician and he lived life to the fullest, despite the fact that he lived on a razor's edge.

Since people always seem to see the narrator of my stories as a reflection of me, I must add that I have never been involved with the selling of drugs. I actually picked up the method of transporting drugs across the border from a member of the Hell's Angels, whom I met and befriended at one of those open-air rock concerts. Everything else is fiction.

Of all the stories in this series, this one is probably my favourite, despite the fact that I find the ending a bit flat compared to the paragraph preceding it. I remember thinking, when I wrote this piece, that I would have to come back to it and add something more emotive to the last sentence, but I never did.