Fiction by Jamie
***
All sexual situations depicted in this story involve adults at least 18 years of age.
***
In an effort to continue paying for both the Great Society and the Vietnam War on credit the US Government repeatedly devalued the dollar in the early seventies while simultaneously making it impossible for US citizens to exchange script for gold, effectively unliking the two. Government price controls created artificial shortages, and the 1973 OPEC oil embargo plunged the nation into a deep recession.
The oil embargo also caused Congress to lift the moratorium on oil field development in Alaska. From January of 1974 to September of 1977 an estimated 45,000 different individuals traveled to Alaska to work building the Aleyseka Pipeline and supporting infrastructure, including the fictional ones in this story.
***
"I'd build for my Jenny a honeymoon home.
Below that old white mountain,
Just a little southeast of Nome.
Where the river is windin' big nuggets they're findin,'
North to Alaska, go north the rush is on."
-Johnny Horton (North to Alaska)
***
71123
Taking my journal and a pen, I jotted down the fact that the truck's odometer read 71123 as we were to embark on our epic journey that Sunday morning in early August 1974. We had climbed into the back of the camper and changed out of our finery. It took a little bit longer than it should to hang our nice clothes in the tiny wardrobe.
Mainly it took longer because Chuck was kissing my neck and my back and my breasts through my bra. I grabbed his penis through his BVDs and said that I would love to reciprocate his affection. But being in the gas station parking lot with Todd just outside wondering why we were taking so long just wasn't the right time. I offered a rain-check, he kissed me deeply in accepting.
As Chuck drove north across the Colorado River, I snuggled up tight to my man and looked out the open driver side window of the light blue and white Ford carrying a white and silver camper. As we entered Colorado City, and the arid expanse beyond, I thought about what a weird feeling it was to leave the Edwards plateau. I had never actually been anywhere else. Chuck had been to Houston once.
Thinking back in time to earlier this morning, I knew that what I was doing was wrong. In doing so I had stepped into and then out of Chuck's former love, a Palomino Gold Cutlass, for the last time. Well, actually what I was doing was right. How... How I was doing it was the wrong part. I should have 'womaned-up' and faced my parents. But I just couldn't. So I created a deceitful plan. I hoped it would be my last.
We had taken the State road north from Jumano just outside of San Angelo. Chuck drove while I snuggled with him on the sky blue vinyl bench seat and was our navigator. I kept busy folding and unfolding and becoming frustrated with the half-dozen maps we had obtained from AAA. We would turn onto the US Highway and ride it between Snyder and Slaton and then take a different State Route north to Plainview thus avoiding Lubbock.
Chuck's beautiful Cutlass had been traded straight up to Todd, his friend and now former employer, for the six year old F-100 and camper we were taking on a four-thousand or so mile journey to our future together. Lenny had been one of the first to travel to Alaska right after Christmas, he had told Chuck everything. We talked and we planned, and here we were following in Lenny's tire tracks on the road to Fairbanks by way of Canada.
At Post the gas was down to a quarter-tank so we stopped at what appeared to be the only station in town to get the truck filled-up. That was good, I had to pee. It was almost one o'clock, and we had been on the road for three hours. After I peed in the camper's toilet, I wasn't about to go into that place's bathroom. I got some of the sandwiches that Juanita, Chuck's mom, had made for us out of the ice box under the tiny closet that contained a generous supply of canned food.
Having traded places with Chuck and sitting behind the wheel, I turned off of the US Highway at Slaton, and drove north through Plainview, Tulia, and Canyon, stopping for gas just outside of Amarillo six hours from home. Our day had been one of watching endless fields of prairie grass or cotton. The sorghum fields ended just north of home. We saw some sagebrush north of the Colorado and lots of cattle farms.
Chuck's cousin Hector had given him three boxes of dried chillies to drop off at a restaurant just north of Amarillo so we had lunch there. I asked the waitress what she recommended, and after she did a double-take of the grino speaking flawless Tejican she recommended something off-menu, migas. The mixture of fried tortilla, scrambled eggs, pico de gallo, onion, chili peppers and chihuahua cheese was delicious.
I thought about how fortunate I was to have found Chuck. How easy it would have been for him just to have left and gone to Alaska alone. He was fourteen months older, but two years ahead of me in school. He and Lenny were class of seventy-three. But Chuck had waited, I had offered to leave with him back in February after Lenny wrote him. Chuck loved me and he waited for me.