Interlude

Interlude

And in another part of the world, in that western part of Texas where a town called Royalty resided, Jim and Lori Ellison were readying their trailer for a camping trip.
The town was one of those places that is often romanticized, written about, with its life stories played out against a set that seemed to have been hastily put into place. The post office stood, letting in the bright day through a broken expanse of glass. The other buildings in the once-bustling boom town lay in broken pieces or were already gone. The stage, against which so many lives had played out, was being dismantled.

On the grand boulevards in Paris, writers and artists and theater people and feelers of a thousand feelings discussed those lives, or lives like them. They congratulated each other, bestowing praise for a particular turn of phrase, how a page captured an entire scene or mood. They read about themselves, or about each other, fretted that a review was maybe not as positive as they’d hoped, or secretly were pleased that some of their creative colleagues received less than glowing acclaim. They devoted so much time, so much imagination to the telling of life, and never quite got it right. They came awfully close, however, but there was always something missing. They knew it, everyone knew it, but it was the one thing they never spoke of.

Jim and Lori’s trailer was ready. The propane tank that would fuel the stove was full, the taillights and turn signals were hooked up for the drive to the lake. Beyond the tall grass that bordered their backyard the coyotes and jackrabbits watched in secret. They saw the goings-on, the car hooked to the trailer, felt instinctively that maybe there would be less food left out for them in the coming days, didn’t know for sure. They were just animals, after all. The old car, left there when the house changed hands thirty years ago, bore witness to everything in that place. The massive chrome bumpers, now pocked with rust, sagged further towards the ground with each passing year. The times that it would drive the Texas highways, all windows open and letting in the hot breeze on a summer day in 1955, were long gone.

Jim put the pickup in gear, checked the mirror for the trailer, made sure that it was following them out onto the highway. He entered the main street, where few buildings lingered, and no cars came through much any more. Pretty soon the tilting post office, ruined and cluttered with debris, was just a speck way back there on the highway. A long-eared jackrabbit jumped out from the burnt grasses, hopped instinctively towards the old Hudson with one door ajar, and a piece of rope holding it to the car still. It lingered in the afternoon shadow created by the car, nibbled at the stuff in Jim and Lori’s yard. The curtain was going down on Royalty.