Friends in tow places
- Mar 2
- 7 min read
“Could I offer you 50 bucks to drive us to Yreka?” he asked. “Ap-parently they don’t stock Prius tires at the garages around here.”
“How many of you are there?” Mom asked.
“Me, my husband, and his mother,” the man said, pointing his big sunglasses at a man escorting an old lady across the car kennel.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could help,” Mom said. “I don’t actually have seats in my van. I don’t think it would be a pleasant ride for your mother-in-law.”
“Can you believe that they don’t have Uber in this town?” he said, like it was a crime no one would get away with if he were in charge. “They don’t even have any hotels. There’s a motel but…” he shuddered like he was imagining a long fall off an icy ridge. “I don’t know how people live like this!”
Mom breathed a sigh of relief that he wouldn’t see the inside of the Wagon after all. Guessing he might be less upset if she changed the subject to something familiar, she asked, “Where are you from?”
“The Bay Area.”
“You don’t say…” Mom caught herself right before the bite made it into her voice. This man wasn’t bad, just very lost.
“We’re supposed to be visiting friends in Portland this weekend, but we’ll never make it now.” He seemed to see Mom for the first time behind all the screens and wires. “How about you, where are you from?”
“I’m from the Bay Area, too.” What she really meant was, You seem like you need an interpreter. “Have you thought about calling an old-fashioned taxi company?”
“I looked on Yelp, but I couldn’t find one. They’re all in Yreka.”
“You could check the phone book. They might have one inside…” She trailed off when she saw the look on his muzzle. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“Where are you headed?” the man asked. A map of all the places on the far side of Yreka formed in his thought bubble.
“The southern Cascades to van-camp and hike for a week.”
The wayfarer’s thought bubble flashed like he’d just won the jackpot.
Maybe to show that she wasn’t a hobo, and maybe just to let him know that we’d be here a while, she added, “I’m just here charging my electronics. You never know when you’re going to find an outdoor outlet.”
He tilted his head as if it’d never occurred to him that trees didn’t have charging stations. He looked at Mom suspiciously, like maybe she was really there to break the window of his Prius and steal the coins in his cup holder. His fingers found the loose loop on his muzzle and lifted it toward his ear.
“What do you do?” Mom asked, hoping that the next line in the script would keep him from thinking too hard.
“I work in tech,” he sighed, like such a glamorous lifestyle was tiresome.
“Yeah, me too.”
He relaxed and let go of the muzzle strap. Just then, a jumbo tow truck pulled into the dirt patch beside the gas station.
“Oh thank god,” the man said, rehooking his muzzle and running to introduce himself.
The couple and the old lady talked to the truck driver through their muzzles. They chopped their arms toward the Prius and then toward Yreka.
The truck driver’s face crinkled into a well-used smile that showed where some of his teeth had worn out. He flapped his hand in a bah! motion, then flapped it back in a c’mon motion. All three of the city slickers went slack with relief and danced around the truck driver in a sort of floppy play bow, yipping, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”
“Look, Mom. They’re Friends!” I said.
“Mmmm?” Mom said, pretending that she’d been absorbed in her laptop and hadn’t been watching the whole time.
Everyone watched the Prius climb piggyback onto the truck before the two men helped the lady into the truck’s cockpit. While his husband climbed in behind her, our Friend looked over his shoulder and noticed Mom watching him. He held up a finger to the truck and came back.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what? I didn’t do anything.” Mom flapped her hand in the same bah motion the driver had made. “I’m glad it worked out. Have a good trip!”
He thanked us again over his shoulder as he ran back to his family and new Friend.
“He was nice,” I said once the cloud of dust from the truck cleared.
“Know what’s funny? That guy and the kid saw the same scene, but the kid thought we were the ones that needed help, and the man thought we were the best ones to help him.”
“He did need help,” I pointed out.
“He sure did.” Mom shook her head. “I guess that’s the problem with this country right there.”
“What, that there aren’t enough Ubers to bring all the lost cityfolk to the nearest Best Western?”
“I was thinking that the city and country are different worlds. It’s selfish to accept free help in a city, because whatever you need is someone else’s livelihood. Paying someone to help you out of a fix is a win-win. But country folks pitch in like a deposit, knowing that they may need to ask their neighbors to repay the favor someday. What goes around comes around faster in a small circle.”
“Isn’t that nice? There’s more than one way to care for people. What’s wrong with that?”
“Because each way of thinking is rude in the other’s world. I was annoyed when that kid offered me a sandwich. I thought he was suggesting I couldn’t pay for my own damn sandwich. It took me a second to realize that it was really a very kind thing to do.”
“I’m glad you didn’t tell him that you’re a vegetarian. Are you going to eat the other half?”
“Go ahead.” She ripped it into bite-sized chunks as she carried on with her thought. “On the other hand, that guy sure did come off as an insufferable git whining about Ubers and not roughing it at anything grimier than a Holiday Inn.”
“He didn’t want to bother anyone is all,” I reminded her. “And they did find help, so it all worked out in the end.”
“Yeah, but he’s gonna go home with a story about his close call in this god-forsaken inbred backwater, and how rude the tow truck driver was for not wearing a mask around his elderly mother-in-law. And the driver’s gonna go home talking about the helpless fop—except that’s probably not the word he’ll choose—who made him drive 50 miles with the window rolled down in 100-degree heat, then offered him a $50 tip but didn’t tip anything because the driver didn’t take Venmo.”
“Of course the driver wouldn’t use an ugly word like fop,” I said. “He was a nice man. You could smell it from all the way over here. I bet he’ll call them poor gentlemen who needed my help. Or maybe he won’t say anything at all, because it’s not polite to brag about good deeds.”
“I hope you’re right.” Mom pulled the plug out of the wall and wrapped the cord around its anchor. “I hope they both walked away with that nice feeling you get when two cultures make a connection, but no one can make those connections when we’re just peeking at each other through the internet and judging others’ lives out of context.” She slipped the laptop back into the packpack. “I have a feeling that the version that’s going to live in those guys’ memories is the internet version, not the version you and I just saw.”
When the Witch bleated that it was time to wake up, I jumped to attention. “Guess what! We’re back in Oregon!” I cheered when Mom gave up on pretending to be asleep. “I thought maybe I smelled green last night, but now that the sun is up, I can smell that it’s definitely green out there!”
“Grumblegrumblegrumble.” Mom used a hat to crush the fur standing straight out from her head.
“Why so grouchy?” I asked. “It’s a lovely day.”
Mom wiped the sleepies out of her eyes. “It is now, but I can’t believe you slept through that thunderstorm last night.”
“The what?”
“All that flashing and booming. I was afraid a tree would come down on our heads or something.”
“Oh. I thought they were just picking up the trash in the middle of the night.”
“They don’t have trash day in the forest, you numbskull.”
“They could. It was dark when we pulled over, and anything can happen in the dark.”
“They don’t,” Mom said like she was setting a rule. “Places big enough to have trash day don’t usually let you sleep in your car. I wish they did, or else I could have gotten an extra 45 minutes of sleep.”
Mom made a cup of poop juice and guided the Wagon onto the freeway. When the cup was almost empty, the Witch directed us into a town with more than one gas station and more traffic lights than a dog can count. We rolled through a neighborhood, searching for a stretch of curb long enough to hold the Wagon. There would’ve been plenty of room to park if it weren’t for the overstuffed trash bins waiting beside every driveway like people puppies waiting for a bus. I know adventure is ahead when the Wagon stops in nature, but when we stop in a town and Mom checks for the poop bags before dismounting, I know a Friend is coming to see me. I could hardly wait for Mom to leash up to see who it was.
Poop bags packed, Mom opened the door and I leaped over her lap in a flying dismount before the Wagon had even finished sucking in the seat leash. That did the trick.
“Oscar! Dammit!” Mom ejected herself from the driving chair and grabbed my collar. “What’s gotten into you? Get out of the road.” She dragged me onto the sidewalk by the collar. While Mom double checked her pockets for wallet and Witch, I perked my ears like two antennae and sniffed the air for the scent of Oscar fans.
“Where are they? Where are they?” I squealed. Without waiting for an answer, I launched in the direction that smelled most like breakfast, dragging a whining Mom behind me.
Suddenly, bandit a popped out from behind a bush. It stood in a star shape, blocking the sidewalk. “Oscar!” it growled.
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
