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THE FOURTH IN A SERIES OF SEVEN STORIES.

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As the plane began its final descent into Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport, Corey Channing looked out the window at the bleak landscape below and remembered why he’d left the panhandle of Texas two decades earlier.  At the age of 19 he shook the Texas dust off his boots, got in his old black 1961 Dodge Dart D-500 hardtop coupe and left his hometown of Shamrock, population less than 3,000, in the rearview mirror mounted atop the dash.

Life in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he’d received a scholarship to the school of journalism, was as different from life in Shamrock as it could be.  Lincoln’s population was a thousand times that of Shamrock.  As such there were a thousand more opportunities.  A thousand times more girls his age.  A thousand times more mistakes to make, a thousand times as many lessons to learn making them.

Channing had been back to Shamrock a handful of times over the two decades that followed, each trip “home” becoming shorter than the last.  It had been eight years since the last one.  His folks, Vic and Vera, never asked him about his life.  Sure, they asked about his kids and the wife he’d married.  But they didn’t even feign interest when he got promotions or took different, better jobs in other locations.  To his knowledge they never read any of the articles he’d written that had been featured in The New Yorker, TIME, or Business Week.  He’d sent them a copy of his first book.  It was met with little comment by Vera, disinterest by Vic.

There was no question he’d return home when he got the call that Vic had passed.  He and his three living sisters would be there for their mother and to help any way they could.  The oldest sister and her husband had taken over the farm when Vic had his stroke. The sister in between him and the oldest sibling had passed away a few years earlier.  Folks never really talked about what had killed her.  Channing thought it was Shamrock, just eating their young.  His two younger sisters got out of town as soon as they could, one to Houston, the other to California.  Vic’s death brought them all together again, something his life was never able to do.

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“Your loyalty points have earned you an upgrade, Mr. Channing.”  The clerk behind the counter at the Hertz Rental Agency must have expected Channing’s response to that announcement to be more exuberant.  He noted that based on her appearance, name tag, and location in the Texas panhandle there was a good chance she’d never actually rented a car before.  She probably found the thought of an upgrade to be a lot more titillating than he did.  He attempted to muster a smile.  She took it as a smirk and chalked up to people from New York being arrogant.

Channing found the 1992 Chrysler LeBaron convertible in the parking spot that coordinated with the number on the key fob and paperwork he’d been given.  “If this is the upgrade,” he thought to himself, “what the hell is the regular offering?”  The car looked like a Light Champagne Metallic turd with red and black pinstripes. Inside, the seats were covered in fabric that was somewhere between corduroy and mouse fur. Everything that wasn’t cord-o-mouse was cheap tan plastic.  Unless it was cheap black plastic.

His bag thrown in the backseat, Channing fell into the driver’s seat and looked around with disdain.  The car had less than 2,000 miles on it, but bits seemed to be loose or ill-fitting.  “Probably left the factory that way,” he muttered to himself.  Thoughts of his 1961 Dodge Dart D-500 came back to him.  The bulges and angels of the body made it easily identifiable.  The 318 under the hood made it fast.  The three speed transmission made it engaging.  The back seat made it memorable.  That car was a beast.  The Chrysler he’d been “upgraded” to was a wart on the ass of that 1961 Dodge.

Cranking the 3.0 liter V6, Channing thought the 141 horses under the hood sounded as bored with the car as he was.  He thought about putting the top down, just so the wind would help keep him awake on the hour and a half drive to Shamrock.  Then he remembered the dust.  It would be everywhere if the top was down.  On every surface of the interior, all over his clothes, in his hair and nose, and god knows where else.  He pulled into the drive thru of a Dairy Queen down the road from the airport for a large coffee to do for him what the top remaining up could not.  The air conditioner wheezed, fighting for attention with the wind that blew in between the windows and the tan canvas top.

The viewing, funeral, and two day aftermath was a lesson in the adage, “You can never go home.”  Everyone looked shell shocked and old.  The Light Champagne Metallic Chrysler LeBaron Convertible with red and black pinstripes looked more like an escape pod than a rental car by the time Channing left Shamrock to head back to Amarillo for his flight home.  “This place might not be Hell, but you can see it from here,” he told his secretary before he lost the spotty cell service on Interstate 40 headed west.  He tossed the brick-like Motorola mobile phone over his shoulder into the backseat.

In his exuberance to flee the scene, Channing floored the wheezing 3.0 liter V6 and pushed it to what he perceived to be its limit.  As a result, he still had an hour and a half before his flight took off from Amarillo International. Against his better judgement, he drove into town rather than taking the exit for the airport and found himself driving past the True Rest Motel.  Like his relatives at the funeral, the True Rest had not aged as well as he’d hoped.  But his memories of the place still endured..

He pulled into the parking lot, into the same spot where Jenny Gidding’s Imperial had parked on the countless nights they’d met there 20 years earlier.  Later, he’d drive down the block to see if the Whataburger was still in the same place, a block away. That’s where he’d parked the Dodge Dart D-500 and then walk to the True Rest Motel, where Jenny would be waiting.  They both thought they were fooling everyone.  And, they were fooling all the people that mattered.

Jenny told the friend whose house she stayed at that she was returning to Fort Stockton on the weekends she met Corey Channing at the True Rest Motel.  Corey explained to his aunt and uncle that he was staying with a friend he’d met in class in Amarillo in order to be closer to the library, or get some relaxation in the form of a movie.  He never told his aunt he was going home to Shamrock because his aunt and his mother talked too often and that lie would have been quickly discovered.  But the manager of the motel knew full well that the woman who checked into the same room every weekend at the back of the motel, away from traffic and probing eyes, would have a young man join her shortly after she picked up her key from the front desk. The Whataburger parking lot can hide a black Dodge Dart a lot easier than it can hide illicit sin.

As Channing sat in the cheap front seat of the LeBaron and looked at the cheap drapes hanging in the window of the cheap motel, he thought back to what had taken place there 20 years earlier, and laughed that nothing about any of it seemed cheap at the time.

The very first time he’d gone to the room had been in mid June of 1972.  Classes had only been going on for a few weeks at Amarillo Community College.  He’d written a paper on The Five Elements of Romanticism that he felt sure would either get him kicked out of the college or get him laid.  He’d bet on the getting laid part and won.  At the instruction of his profesor, he’d shown up at the motel at the assigned time, parked down the street, and made sure there was no one else in the parking lot when he knocked lightly on the door.

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Mrs. Giddings opened the door standing behind it, only her face visible from behind the door.  When he stepped inside she quickly closed the door behind him and slid the chain from the door jamb where it was anchored, to the plate on the door to keep it from being opened more than an inch or two.  Jenny Giddings was as naked as a jaybird.

Her tongue was in his mouth and her fingers running through the hair on the back of his head before he was even fully able to look at her standing naked in front of him.  Of course, that had been her intention.  Not overly confident of her 31-year-old body, she knew if she didn’t begin the act as soon as Channing got there she might lack the courage to do it at all.  She pressed herself into him and against the back of the door he’d just come through.  Her student’s reaction was immediate and gratifying.  His hands fumbled to grope as much of her flesh as he could find, like a man overboard struggling to grab a life preserver someone had tossed him.

The two did not speak.  He smelled lavender, vanilla, and arousal and didn’t know what he should do next.  He needn’t have worried.  With a skill that was indicative of her raw desire rather than any level of actual experience, Jenny found the buttons on his jeans and had them in a pile on the floor around his ankles before he realized what had taken place.  His white cotton boxer shorts quickly followed.  Jenny’s hand was quickly wrapped around his manhood, half of it still outside her grasp.

And that was the first experience in the study of Romanticism that would last through the summer before Corey Channing went off to attend The University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  In the weeks that followed Corey would learn the intricacies of how to please a woman. Jenny Giddings used her ability to teach Romanticism to levels she’d never expected to attain.  The two of them would experience physical pleasure that would lived on in their memories for the rest of their lives. The only challenge for either of them was keeping the feelings they had for one another private during the rest of the week, so as not to arouse suspicions.

The two of them would perform acts on one another that neither had ever experienced before and then fall back and discuss the works of Chaucer, Wordsworth, or Austen.  When she revealed that George Eliot was actually a woman using a man’s name, he rolled over and said, “A writer’s manhood should never be questioned,” and then exemplified the point in ways that George Eliot could never have been able to, much less have written about.

As Channing sat in the cheap Chrysler LeBaron convertible rental car and thought back to what had happened inside the room ten feet in front of him, but twenty years behind him, he blushed.  And he was not a man normally given to modesty.  He remembered admitting to Jenny that he’d only ever had one girlfriend back in Shamrock.  “And we never got past third base,” he’d told her, which made her laugh.

It was weeks into their tawdry relationship that she admitted that she and her older husband didn’t have sex and it made her question her own attractiveness.  He quickly did a number of things to assuage her concern. The ones she enjoyed the most he did twice that night. More often after that in the days that followed. Being 19 he was at his peak of physical performance, an attribute Jenny came to appreciate.

Turning the key in the ignition of the LeBaron, Channing found the button on the plastic console in between the two front seats and pushed the inverted one labeled DOWN.  The tan canvas ill-fitting top folded down and nestled into the gap between the backseat and the trunk.  He drove through the parking lot of the True Rest Motel out to Amarillo Boulevard.  But rather than heading out to the airport north of town, Channing kept driving and then he headed south on US 27. That would take him to Lubbock.  From there 385 would take him to Highway 67, Highway 67 to Interstate 10.  And Interstate 10 would take him west, right into Fort Stockton.

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