Getting Out of College, #2

TWO

I wondered, were you where my

mind’s eye saw you?

Did you do the things we

spoke of when you got there?

         Mike tried to pay attention to where they were going. He scanned the buildings and cross streets looking for someplace that looked like a college office building.  Most of them looked like brick cubes with sidewalks around them.  The lawns looked like most of the desert plants they driven by to get here.  Short and brown. “Do you know where you are going?” He decided that Shane was just as lost as he was.

         “I lived here all last winter! Pull your head out…” he hissed between his teeth.

         “OK…OK, just askin’, Jeez, it just looked like you was as lost as I am.” Mike pretended to be hurt. “When you finish are you gonna buy supper? Where we staying tonight?” he was worried about supper.

         “Just hang tight, I’ll be right back.” Shane parked the car and went into a brick cube that looked like all of the other brick cubes on the block.  Mike rolled the window down so that the breeze might cool him down. A sudden gust of wind caught his attention and he suddenly realized that the sky was darkening with clouds.  “It is gonna rain.” he thought. “Just what we need.” Men and women walked past him on the sidewalk, most were carrying books or bags.  He knew it was the end of summer school, and a few weeks until Fall semester started, so he wondered to himself why there were so many students hanging here.  He wasn’t complaining, after all the scenery (pretty girls) was almost as striking as hanging out at BYU. He decided that he would count blondes and brunettes and calculate the ratio of blondes to brunettes.  He was up to 5 blondes and 10 brunettes when the driver’s door whipped open and Shane dropped into the seat.  “Back already?” Mike asked him.

         Shane smiled, “I don’t let the grass grow under my feet. We’re heading out of here. What do ya say to Der Wiener? For supper.”

         “Sounds like a plan, did you know that I took a survey of blondes while you were in getting out of college?” Mike kept watching the girls go by.

         “Yeah, so”?

         “There are 2 brunettes to every blonde that walked by me. Now, the challenge is to figure out how many of the blonde girls were natural blondes.  What do you think?” Mike was digging for a pencil in his backpack. He found what he was looking for and opened the glove box for a piece of paper.  Finding a crumpled envelope, he smoothed it out and wrote the numbers that he had collected on it. “So, if I counted 10 girls and 5 of them were blonde, that gives us a ratio of 2 to 1.  If we ask ourselves, how many were naturally blonde, given that at least 1 of them is truthful about their hair color; that gives us a 20% chance that any blonde women we see are natural blondes. That isn’t very encouraging, but how can we determine that 80% of blonde women aren’t lying through their teeth about their hair color. After all, if they lie about that, what won’t they lie about? “

         “And the point of this is…” Shane maneuvered the car into the parking lot at the hotdog stand.

         “The point is….wait, I’m starving, let’s eat. “

         Ten dollars and ten hotdogs later, Mike reached into his pocket to hunt for another dollar or so. He was looking at the menu board above the take out window and was listing the choices they had already tried. “Let’s see, Kraut Dog-check, Chili Cheese Dog-check, Polish Dog-yep had that one, I don’t think we had the Hawaiian yet…you game?” Shane put his fist against his diaphragm and pushed a couple of times bringing forth a loud healthy belch. “Geez, I don’t know…Oh hell, why not?” he agreed.

         Mike dug the money out of his pocket and unfolded the wrinkled cash.  He placed their order and stood back to wait.  Shane said, “Are you ready to hit the road, we can flop on my sister’s floor if we get to Cedar City tonight.”  Mike nodded in agreement and the hotdog girl called for him to pick up the order. Shane got into the car and started it up and as Mike closed the door, he put it into gear and headed out of town.  

         The guys are driving to Cedar City.  It is dark and a hard rain begins to fall, lightning flashes almost continuously. The road is nearly invisible in the dark with the rain falling on it. Shane leans forward closer to the windshield,he asks if Mike could help them stay on the road, “I wish I could see this road, it’s getting worse, the headlights shining on the water are blinding me, can you see the lines on that side?”

         Mike strains to see the right side of the road through the cascading rain on the window, he replies, “No, it’s even worser over here, the wiper isn’t workin’ so good.  Maybe we should pull over ‘til it lets up.”

         “It ain’t lettin’ up.  There isn’t anywhere to pull over, the shoulder is too narrow.  We’ll just have to keep goin’, there’s some taillights ahead of us, I’ll just follow them. You never said if you had any dates in Arizona.” Shane tried to ease the tension of driving in the storm. Mike was glad to talk about anything but the driving rain, “Well, there was this girl who checked groceries at the store, she was a looker.”

         “So, what was her name?”

         “Ethel.”

         Shane laughed and repeated an old ditty that they had joked about when they worked at the service station, “You washed the windshield, and I pumped Ethyl!  Hahahaha.  Really, Ethel?

         Mike grinned to himself on his side of the car, “Yea, she was stacked. Look out, a deer!” Shane jerked the wheel and narrowly missed it, “Whoosh, that was close!” he said, his voice shaking with adrenaline.

         “You better watch the road closer and not worry about my love life. I didn’t ever take her out.”

         Shane turned to glance at him, “What? How come?”

         Mike pointed forward out of the windshield, “Watch the road. Well, I almost did.  I wanted too.”

         “Whatdya mean, almost.” He turned back.

         “I talked to her.”

         “Wow, what a ladies man.  So them other stories you told about Wanda, and Cyndi, they were BS then?” Shane accused him of embellishment.

         Mike didn’t let that stand. “No! No way!  I can prove that to you, we’ll stop at BYU on the way back and call Wanda, you’ll see.  Hey, that sign said a rest stop is coming up.  Pull in there.”

         “Watch for the turnoff.  Why didn’t you take Ethel out?  She have a boyfriend?”  Shane wanted to know the details. Mike’s adventure in Arizona had been a topic they discussed all of the time. He thought that Mike was full of bullshit most of the time, but his stories were pretty good. And he did tell a lot of them.

         “I don’t know, I never asked.  I also liked my landlady’s daughter, but she was pregnant.  Good lookin’ though.  Her old man would’ve took a dim view of me talkin’ to her.” Mike replied, distracted by the heavy rain.

         Shane must have been too, because he was confused by the answer, “Ethel? Are we talking about Ethel? Was she married?”

         “No, the landlady’s daughter.  I could’ve beat him up, he was just a skinny lookin’ nerdy guy.  I just was too nervous, I guess.” Mike cleared up the confusion.

         “I’ll bet, you layin’ there naked under the cooler and all, nervous as hell.  Hold on, here we go!” Shane wrestled the car off of the road into the rest stop.            

Michael D. LeFevre         (Adapted from a Short Play of the same title)        Copyright 5 June 2001