You’re Not From Around Here

They all turned and looked when we walked into the diner. It wasn’t unfriendly, I think they just wanted to see who we were.

We weren’t the neighbors or the shopkeeper’s kids or that guy’s wife, the one he brought in from Billings, we weren’t anyone, so the entire place, which stopped, for a blink of a moment when the door clanked shut behind us, went back to their daily special or breakfast all day or whatever it was they were eating.

I was wearing khaki shorts and a zip-front fleece jacket and I can’t remember what K was wearing, but surely it was similar, maybe the black sweater she’d been wearing along the Hi-Line because the wind was cold. We didn’t look like farmers, not one bit. Everyone else was bitten by the wind, dried out by the sun, wiry and tough, stringy. Even the waitress, who was probably no more than twenty, had a tightly compressed look to her, brown and muscled like she’d go off to rope as soon as her shift was done like she was the one who’d crossed 40, not me.

“What’s the matter, didn’t you like the soup?” she asked me, and I felt bad for not eating it, felt like it was wrong to waste it. I did like the soup, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t eat one more bite of the heavy cheddar and cream chowder.

“I really should have ordered a salad,” I said, feeling like a sissy. “I wanted to try the soup, I just didn’t want to eat it once it was in front of me.”

She wasn’t unfriendly, but I got the feeling that the place only had so many words in it that day and she wasn’t wasting hers on some salad eater from god knows where.

At the next table, a tall guy in suspenders and Wranglers and a feed cap silently drank his coffee, slowly, like he was waiting for someone. His lunch companions had taken off ten minutes before but he stayed, procrastinating, maybe, nodding at his cup when the waitress passed by. Just past him, three younger guys, covered in tattoos, rough as fence posts, kept changing the ring tones on their cell phones and laughing. It was a foreign country and I felt foreign, even though it was all my language.

I keep thinking about Montana. I’m two days at home but my mind is still out on the plains, stopped in some little town where the bar is boarded up and the corrugated aluminum on the side of the grain elevator flaps in the wind. There was something about the perfect light, the understated people, the smell of cold underneath the sun and grass… I keep turning east to look back over my shoulder at the long shadows underneath the parked freight cars and at that sky, that endless cliche of a sky, the almost absurd blueness of it broken by gray and white clouds.

There is not enough room in my head for that Montana. I should have eaten my soup, dammit, and I should not write so many words because they need them out there where they have so much space and so few words to describe it.