Remember Oochie? She’s slim, 25, with wavy red hair flowing down below her waist. Mood-sensitive eyes — hazel when smiling, dark when angry. She’s agile, a good dancer, wears tight-fitting bellbottoms, eats fried potato sandwiches and listens to Joni Mitchell (did you guess it’s 1974?). Peelio’s 29, a little thick around the waist, a passionate but flawed lover, likes to wear worn-out blue denim shirts and take his knobby-tired chair into the woods. He eats anything that comes within reach and listens to jazz and regional accents.
Peelio and Oochie’s relationship is built around escape. Oochie has escaped a bad marriage and Peelio has escaped death, but that’s another story. Now they spend time together escaping Bakersfield. At night they escape into music and ice cream. When people stare at them, they do their best to escape stereotypical assumptions.
One day, hearts set on escape, they drive north in Peelio’s ’69 Chevy Malibu, snaking up the Kern River Canyon, flanked by whitewater and granite walls. They stop for lunch at a secluded restaurant overlooking the river. The waitress smiles as if to say, “How special — the young man in the wheelchair has found a lovely companion.” Peelio, attuned to such condescension, stifles an impulse to run over her toe.
They continue driving with no destination in mind. Peelio turns west and they start climbing. Patches of snow appear on the roadside. Soon they have reached the snow-covered summit of Greenhorn Mountain. They start down the other side — snow patches dwindling — and Peelio remembers the cabin that friends of his parents own. Yes — the perfect getaway. No one will be there this time of year.
He turns into the red-earth drive and parks next to the cabin.
“You sure this is a good idea?” asks Oochie, eyes darkening.
“No problem,” says Peelio. “The Three Bears won’t mind. There’s a key hanging above the woodpile next to the window.”
Oochie helps Peelio in his wheelchair up the steps into the musty cabin. In the sleeping porch a huge pine grows through the floor and out through the roof. Peelio starts a fire in the old woodstove.
The old phonograph cabinet stocked with vintage 78s is still there — Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra with his young crooner’s voice. For the next few hours the old music takes them far away, far from Watergate, the tired tale of Vietnam, the energy crisis, discrimination. Nothing matters but pine aroma, crackling fire and timeless lover’s music. For a moment, asleep in each other’s arms on a blanket in front of the woodstove, Peelio and Oochie disappear.
“Oh my,” says Peelio, waking. “Time to go.” Oochie blinks, her eyes the color of bright acorns.
Back in Peelio’s Malibu, retracing their path through the canyon, they approach the secluded restaurant again. “Dinner?” asks Peelio.
“Sure.”
They sit at the same table. The same waitress comes to take their order, smiling the same smile, the one that bothered Peelio earlier. But something has changed.
The waitress waits, still smiling. What seemed like condescension now seems generous. Oochie beams from across the table. Their journey to a timeless getaway has tweaked Peelio’s heart. “How special,” he thinks. “The young man in the wheelchair has found a lovely companion.”
Comments