The Color of Darkness

After forty-five minutes of struggling against the rain, I gave up when a blue rest area sign advised me of a safe pulloff to wait out the storm. I was in no hurry, so why end up in a bar ditch on a rainy afternoon? I pulled in behind an eighteen wheeler and settled into an afternoon nap which was a skill I perfected in Galveston. I thought about leaving the radio on, but West Texas is a heck of a place to wake up with a dead battery. The pelting rain turned into small crystals of hail pinging off every metal surface. The temperature dropped and condensation fogged the windows until the steady tapping lulled me to sleep.

When I awoke, the weather was clear again. My cell phone reported quarter to seven in the evening. Outside my windshield a large double tractor trailer hogged the left side of the driveway at the far end of the rest area with a small red foreign four door parked not too far behind it. I was apparently the only one awake in spite of the rumbling drone of the big diesel big rig.

I discovered that the outside temperature had dropped about forty degrees with the storm when I yanked back the inside door handle causing the driver’s door to settle ajar. There was a moment of indecision as to whether I should dig out a sweatshirt or be macho and brave the cold. Macho won. I was instantly alert as I trudged up the empty sidewalk to wash up. Oftentimes being macho was not what it was cracked up to be.

I didn’t mind the approaching darkness, but I was not a fan of the cold. West Texas can easily chill a man to the bone when a biting wind joined forces with falling temperatures. The water I splashed on my face and hands was cold enough to leave my skin red and raw, especially as I walked briskly back toward the truck.

A man in a green and yellow ski jacket and jeans was walking away from the back of my pickup toward a covered picnic table pavilion when I came out. He parked on the bench about thirty feet from the truck smoking a cigarette, huddling under his jacket and hood. I was unnerved because the only other vehicles were the small foreign car and the eighteen wheeler at the other end of the driveway. I had just been burglarized in Galveston and wasn’t looking forward to the expense of fixing another broken window. I was lucky in Galveston that the thieves overlooked my laptop computer, but this time it was only covered with a jacket on the back seat. I walked down to the driver’s side of the pickup, around the tail and back up the passenger side without finding any damage. I had apparently scared him off in time.

The biting wind was freezing the edges of my ears and numbing the skin on my forearms. It was time to hang up the pretense of being macho and to succumb to the need to be warm. I pulled open the passenger door and rummaged around in the back seat for my jacket under the tangled mass of clothes. Suddenly I had one of those moments when the hair on the back of one’s neck came to attention. The pain of a sharp tip poking into the center of the back of my thin t-shirt let me know that a threat had materialized out of the darkness.