West Bound and Down
“Breaker, breaker, 1-9, this is Wild Bill. You there in the rockin’ chair, you got your ears on?”
The metallic voice comes across the CB radio attached beneath the dash of the Shiny red 1974 Peterbilt with the chrome grill and duel chrome stacks, and it sounds like the voice of frying bacon.
“10-4, there good buddy,” comes the reply from the Peterbilt. “Mighty Mouse in the house and on the air.”
“Mighty good! Mighty good,” answers Wild Bill, who leads a three-truck convoy racing west on Interstate 40, along a lonely, desolate stretch of New Mexico. Wild Bill’s 1972 seafoam blue Kenworth is trimmed in white. The residue of a half-dozen states dulls it. He hauls a trailer filled with massive rolls of carpet from a Georgia mill. He is lugging it to a wholesaler in Los Angeles.
“10-4,” Wild Bill says. “How ‘bout you, Back Door?”
“Ol’ Possum at the back douh,” comes the answer from a voice dipped in the sap of a Georgia Longleaf Pine. “All cleah back heah.”
“We flyin’!” answers Wild Bill, “Nothing ahead but blue skies and cactus, and a cloud the size of your fist over Albuquerque. Oh, and that little sky-blue diner called Rainbow Cafe outside Santa Rosa 20 mile ahead. I need a bite o’ breakfast. Y’all in?”
Time is tight but Wild Bill is hungry, and it is already half past 7 AM, New Mexico time.
“Roger that!” answers Mighty Mouse.
“Negatory,” says Ol’ Possum. “I’m westbound and down, lookin’ fuh that magic mile. See you all on the flipside.”
(The “magic mile” is trucker slang indicating the final mile of a long haul.)
“Roger that, Ol’ Possum. Keep ‘er sunny-side up and between the lines.”
“10-4.”
Tilly Rae Dunn, born in 1943 to Reverend Wade Dunn and his wife Phyllis, is known to some around Santa Rosa as “The Desert Rose” because of her unique blend of vulnerability, often prickly banter, and natural beauty.
“She’s a rose, pure and simple,” says Jimbo Olmstead, a regular at the Rainbow Café, which Tilly Rae owns and serves as cashier, head waitress, and chef. “But them roses,” he adds, “They got thorns. Now, don’t forget that.”
By June 1980, which it happens to be at the time of our story, Jimbo has been courting Tilly Rae for going on two decades to no effect. He asks her every day if she will marry him. She usually ignores the invitation or quips, “Ask me tomorrow.”
He will, too. He is not one to easily give up on an idea.
Jimbo was also born in 1943 but a month before Tilly Rae. This puts them each on the edge of 40, single, and stranded in Santa Rosa.
Well, Tilly Rae is stranded there. Jimbo was more or less planted there. The Olmsteads go nearly as far back in Santa Rosa as the town itself. This burg of 2800 or so souls is stuck between Albuquerque and Amarillo. It was christened Santa Rosa in 1890.
Ten years later, in 1900, James Olmstead and his wife Maria settled there. James was born in London. Maria was from the state of Chihuahua in Mexico. They met at the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas, and married in that same church three months later. They decided to go west to California to seek their fortune in land and crops, but they got off the train in Santa Rosa.
They never left.
Jimbo (James III) is the oldest grandson of James and Maria Olmstead and a third-generation Santa Rosa citizen.
Grandmother Maria was an excellent seamstress. Jobs were scarce in Santa Rosa in 1900 (and remain so in 1980), but Maria found work darning socks and mending jackets. Soon, she was commissioned to make custom dresses for local women and pants and shirts for men. She taught James to sew. He was a fast learner. James opened an upholstery shop while Maria continued her work as a seamstress. James worked in leather, canvas, and cloth, mending furniture, automobile upholstery, and making canvas tents.
Jimbo now owns and operates Olmstead Upholstery, which is a Santa Rosa staple but still a business with tight margins and low profits, not unlike the Rainbow Café, where he takes his breakfast and dinner almost every day of the year.
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