Viaticum

by Lancelot Schaubert

This is one of the Five Winners of the Waffle House Contest in Volume 7 of SumFlux. Come find the menu here: carte du jour.

Three A.M. struck dark and clear starred during my virgin burglary of Waffle House. Down at one of those crank, prank, and magic joints in Eureka Springs, I purchased a fake All-Star Special with six extra waffles. After that I came to the Waffle House on Range Line in Joplin and asked for the breakfast nutritional menu. The waitress was modest of bearing, perhaps the most modest waitress in Route 66’s storied history, broken up now by I-44. I shopped over ten or twelve breakfast menus. Those started at four bucks and climbed to twenty. The thirteen dollar All-Star Special exactly like the one in my reusable plastic tote. I eyed it, ordered it. They brought it until a four-hundred-pound trucker came in and the modest waitress rushed to them. Regular. I swapped out my meal for my rubber meal and shouted, “Where’s the restroom?” Half the place pointed. I went, left my rubber meal for long enough that it became background noise, then walked out to the store. Easy cheesy, syrup squeezing out all over the bag. I walked over to one of the truckers climbing into their rig and offered an All-Star Special for fifteen, saying they overcharged me for twenty. The old weathered woman laughed and gave me thirteen in cash, sight unseen. I gave her the bag and ran off towards another truck headed to Anchorage at five. I told them that wasn’t fast enough. They pointed back to the weathered woman and said she was heading the same way in an hour. So I went back to the woman I’d sent stolen goods to. “Have room in your cabin?” It was one of these 180” Volvo legacy big rig sleepers. 2020. They’d cashed in their home during the pandemic for it.

She thumbed over her shoulder as if she were the one hitching a ride, not me, and I saw in the passenger seat a snoring man her junior, but not by much, fatter than supersized ramen pork belly, snoring. He had a thousand and one nights of cigarettes in an ash tray. She proffered no martini. She barely proffered a homemade bulldog.

Mrs. Losepeace. Apparently her big Mr. got motion sickness often, he took a mix of black market Zyprexa, worse than the hormone suppressants mom and dad gave me in the fourth grade to keep me from growing a beard too soon and getting mocked, and some other sleeping pill to basically drift through the rides. So we started the confusing priggery of asexual romance that she insisted was becoming horny. I’ve not been attracted to people since early puberty, but were I, I doubt it would be to the corrugated sunburnt flesh of a reanimated mummy truckeress.

Still, we flirted over texts while he slept. We hopped on walkie talkies at trucker stops. We acted disinterested in each other when Mr. Losepeace woke: “This is a stowaway.”

“Mmm. Another?” he asked and crashed. How he’d gone so long on such a fast, I would not normally understand, but I suppose grizzlies do the same every winter, so the thermodynamics checked out.

It was only when we stopped for diesel in Omaha where the Missouri splits the Iowa and Nebraska borders that I found myself alone by the pump while Mrs. Losepeace’s unironed skin strode tall and unafraid into the department store gas station that I heard a knock at the door. Not the cab door. Not the back door where you got in and out quickly from the RV part of the 180” Volvo. No, a little compartment. I jumped back as it opened and reached for a knife I haven’t carried since Boy Scouts. A faint little battleful wisp of a girl — like a tiny cumulonimbus thunderhead — crawled out. Germania. Not Germany: Germania. The feminine of Aleman. Yes, she told me her name was Germania and said if I ever needed anything, she would be more than happy to service my room.

I panicked when Mrs. Losepeace returned and said, “Oh, did you earn yourself diamond studs? Have you seen my diamond studs? We match.”

This will-o-wisp girl named after the land of Germany said, “Go away to Satan.”

“Why argue truth? Good King Losepeace bought me and himself diamond studs. He wears them in his belly button.” She had broken eye contact and had hooked onto the next highest handhold on the climb into the cab.

“I shit on you, mamagüevo.”

“My unending gratitude. My blessing. Praise you, jewel of my crown, pearl of great price,” said my mummy love interest.

“Stemlick! Low to crow!”

“I praise you, I praise you, I—”

Went to bed.

I got ten minutes of consciousness out of Mr. Losepeace while the two women went at it. We’d stopped to diesel up just south of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate territory in Lake Traverse and I hadn’t seen a decent Waffle House I could pilfer for miles. Mr. Losepeace said she came from German nobility and they’d kicked her out when she’d hooked up with him and so they took to the “gypsy life,” his words, not mine. They’d brought on Germania from DR as her Dienstmädchen, which amounted to hiding, arguing, and occasionally pumping gas. Most of Mrs. Losepeace’s most prized possessions were now in the hidden under compartment of the truck. I called bullshit when he’d told me this, but then he lumbered out of his spring loaded navigator’s chair, opened it up and pointed out there was the Fabergé, there the Tiffany glass, there the quartz backup of The Internet.

“You’re fucking her?” he asked me bluntly.

“What?”

He shrugged and said, “Enjoy.”

“No it’s not like that.”

“Uh huh,” he said.

That was worse than what we had hidden. Why was that worse? He was already back in the cab and asleep when the women came out shouting. Germania asked, “Why? Why Anchorage?”

“To fix my diamond studs.” Mrs. Losepeace said.

“What studs?!”

“Right,” Mrs. Losepeace said. “Well I remember what they felt like.”

“Why go to Anchorage to fix diamond studs you no longer own?”

“Right you are, pearl of great price.”

They tell you about the woodchipper, but not the incredible air museum of Fargo. They tell you about tar sands and not the Taube Museum of Art. There’s an incredible Western Development Museum in Saskatchewan (the whole damn time she insisted on listening to repeat this song Saskatchewan and on and on and on…)

At the Meewasin Valley Trail, two young college Canadian things asked me to hold — physically — their binkinis as they jumped into the cold waters of the South Saskatchewan River. I was still holding them, waiting for them to return, when Mrs. Losepeace came up behind me and said, “Flirting with someone else?”

“What?”

“Enjoy.”

“No, it’s not like that.”

“Uh huh,” she said.

I said, “No really, my… forget it. It’s not like that.”

We didn’t make it to Anchorage by the time everything went down, but were left adrift around Fort Nelson Heritage Museum. It was the high water mark of the trip for me before everything went down because it had all of these cars that had tried to road trip to Alaska and failed. We were, it seemed, the first 180” Volvo rig on the lot. I wondered with the gas spiking if we had the funds.

I was in there enjoying myself in the morning when I heard the two of them coming. “Old leather! Daughter of the Seed!”

And from behind her, my dear old mummy said, “Pearl! Jewel in my crown! Richness of life itself!”

“Sweet tooth! Glutton!”

“Sugar of my heart!”

“Sometimes eater!”

“Good reason for my fasting!”

Back and forth like this and they were shouting and I turned to see them pulling back and forth on the gas pump. It was one of those old ones. It got squeezed. Mr. Losepeace was awake and had been smoking in hopes to add to his thousand and one night ashtray. Some of the gas caught the cigarette on the ground. Diesel doesn’t go up like gasoline, but it does go and it burned the old woman. She screamed, “Oooh! Ohhh my!” Did any real witch at any real burning who ever really deserved it ever sound so pure? So kind? Probably. But this is the one I’m talking about: it’s as if even in her moaning, she intended to compliment her Dienstmädchen, who was screaming, “Not my fault! Not my fault! Not my most grievous fault!”

“Find me a priest,” the woman said to me. It wasn’t a huge fire, you see. But a chemical fire need not be huge.

I lifted her in my arms. It reminded me of the time in Gentry, Arkansas at the hillbilly wildlife preserve when I lifted up a small ringtail monkey. She weighed about like that.

“Not my most grievous fault!” the Dominican named Germany called behind me.

I did the Quasi Modo thing and went straight through the white doors of the cedar paneled Our Lady of Sorrows, passing by its sign that had been made by a whittler and a wood burner. There I found the vicar, wiping down the pews himself with one of those microfiber rags. He dropped it and came to us, me with my little love monkey in my arms, the bear asleep again on his zyprexa, Germania beside me.

“My girl,” said Mrs. Losepeace. “My girl, Germania.”

“Shit speaker!” Germania said.

“My only love. I have doted on you, my child.”

And the girl who lived under the cabin of the big rig’s sleeper cab wept as the priest worked his way towards the Viaticum.

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Dedicated to Mark and Autumn Neuenschwander and Andrew Nash: the biggest Wafflehouse fans I know.