On Route 66 — Fat Cat Meilleur

On Route 66

Fat Cat Meilleur

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

Fat Cat Meilleur came from Lafayette, Louisiana. He lived in the back of a 1961 white Lincoln Continental convertible, its top always down and its rear suicide doors open to anyone who pulled through the Rio Pecos Truck Terminal just outside Santa Rosa, New Mexico. That’s where he met Nell O, who had drifted out of Harvard with a PhD in economics and into the real world with nothing to call her own. She hitched her way out of Boston, wandered west, and ended up as a truck stop prostitute, working for twenty a pop.

The story goes that Fat Cat Meilleur shot and killed a man who was beating Nell senseless outside a Peterbilt 18-wheeler on a dry, hot summer’s night. Some say it was Nell who provoked the whole incident, but sometimes those stories are just a part of some folklore that gets a little twisted over the years. One thing is for sure though. Fat Cat Meilleur made Nell his exclusive companion, and before long, most everyone knew to stay away from her unless your intentions were decent and honourable. Everyone, that is, except Gionny Romero, a slick Italian long-hauler out of Chicago’s west side.

Most days, Fat Cat Meilleur and Nell were inseparable, but every Saturday morning, she would take off in the Lincoln and run solo along Route 66 to buy California fruit from makeshift produce stands along the highway. Before she’d leave, the Cat would lean into the car, give her short auburn hair a soft ruffle, and say, “Don't run too far, you’ll just have to come the same distance back.” Then, he’d sit outside in the hot sun and wait on a wooden bench until she reappeared out of the desert dust, usually right before day’s end.

Every Saturday night, Fat Cat Meilleur would play a tenor sax out back of the diner where the lackeys would sit and smoke rollies and drink illegal corn liquor on the sly. The sound had magic to it, but when Nell would ricochet her jazzy voice over top of the melody, that magic multiplied, and you thought you were gone, long gone, transported off to a world that wasn’t so cruel to everyone living outside of money America. Most of us agreed that we needed the Cat and Nell more than they needed us. Some folks are like that. They bring you some kind of escape route. You take the ride because you really have no other choice.

No one expected any of that would change so quickly. Then, Gionny Romero showed up on a Sunday afternoon for a short stop and a Thermos of coffee. His rig spoke of flash and cash, and everyone around that day sauntered out just to stare at it, like we were all witnessing a float that was looking for the Rose Bowl parade. Romero was as dazzling as his rig. He was tall and muscular, with thick, black hair that was combed straight back. He wore a deep blue, silk cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons that ran down the front and high up along his cuffs. His complexion was the colour of burnt umber but wasn’t stretched tight like the Navajo, and he wore a wide smile that exploded into white when you met him. Everyone liked him from the first handshake, and he joked with the old-timers about all the young women that he said they must have destroyed over the years with their hard loving.

I’ll admit this just once and never again. At first, I liked him too.

Fat Cat Meilleur watched him from a distance, never walked out to inspect that flashy rig, and never shook that Italian leather hand. Something about Romero didn’t sit easy with the Cat. It was like he was seeing beneath the glaze of Romero’s shiny truck and even shinier personality. Maybe he sensed what was coming.

Nell’s eyes lit up the moment that Romero geared down and pulled into the lot. Maybe it was the deep shine of that black and gold rig that got her attention at first, but before long, she was never more than two short steps behind his cognac alligator boots as he walked among us and parted the waves of our dull, grey world. When he pulled out just before the sun flooded the dry landscape with a chokeberry red light, Nell O was sitting beside him and learning her first Italian verbs.

Fat Cat Meilleur might well have killed a man to scrape Nell O off the asphalt of the life she lived before the two met, but he did nothing as he watched her leave. He sat fingering his sax, and every couple of minutes, he’d play a few soft, blue notes, but from that day on, the Cat’s world fell mostly silent. He never said much to anyone and no longer sat out back on Saturday nights. Most of his time was spent waiting and watching every transport that came in from the east to see if Nell would step down from the cab and reappear in his life.

She never did.

She’d run too far, and there was no coming back.

The Back Story:

This was the fifth 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.

When I started this story, I was intent on it becoming the definitive "love" story in the collection. For some reason, all the romance fell like feathers from the nest, and I turned to what I knew to be real. The characters were simply not fanciful enough to pull off a fairy-tale "happily ever after" ending. So I followed my instincts and wrote it out as best as I could.

Love is like a impressionist's landscapes, like a Monet painting, but like any place of beauty, it has its borders. As long as you're in that world, everything seems perfect, but in my heart, I knew that people do wander and sometimes cross those borders, sometimes step out of the painting no matter how beautiful. So, to be true to what I believed, I took Nell O out of the fairy tale, maybe just to see if I could somehow get her back into it. I couldn't.