The picture on the right is from the Rocky Stone notebooks, notes taken in between the April 18th and April 19th entries.
From April 19th, 1949:
It was already dark when I crossed the New Mexico border in my Buick and at times I wasn't sure that Route 66 was still underneath me. No one traveled this stretch of highway at night and no one had a reason to. The road was straight and flat. Headlights from cars going west could be seen coming for miles. A few towns were scattered here and there, spread about seven or eight miles apart, each with a gas station and a motel for the weary traveler, and each more forgettable than the last.
The authorities gave me all the information I needed to know. The name of the town was Gehenna, an outpost like so many others along the road, 15 miles from the hustle and bustle of Albuquerque, and the date was June 30, 1940, when Marjorie Gomer was arrested by an officer named Mike Godatz. There were charges, suspicions, but nothing stuck and the whole matter was dropped after a few days. She would have been all of seventeen years old.
I could see a light in the distance, a fixed point on the horizon. It became brighter and brighter as I glided along the road until my headlights flashed on a strip of wood by the side of the road, painted red with white lettering. “Welcome to Gehenna,” it read, “population 26.”
There were only three houses on the left side of the road and two of them had their windows boarded up. On the other side, a few more houses and a side street, the only side street in the town. At the corner there was an old hotel. Eight cars had pulled over in front of it and along the side. The bright light I had seen from far off was shining on a white flag of a sign reading “The Gehenna Tavern.” I slowed down and turned at the side street, parked the Buick in a patch of dust across the way so I could get a better look. A man in a Stetson and dungarees stumbled out through the open door and into the night and landed on one knee in the dirt. He picked himself up and gently stepped across the road to the other side, landing just short of the porch of the only house whose windows were still intact.
I pushed myself out of the car. It was the kind of joint you see in the Western pictures where swinging doors and an old man beating out tunes on a clinky piano wouldn't be out of place. The tavern's owners must not have gone in for all that Old West jazz, because the door was solid and there was no music to speak of inside. Just a low rumble of voices coming from tired old men hunched over the bar, drinking whatever the bartender dropped into their glasses. Nobody under the age of fifty and nobody female. The room was deliberately dark, with three tables no one was using lying at the fringes and an opening in the back covered by beaded curtains. I wedged my way in and sat on a stool and all the weary eyes turned to look at the stranger. The bartender stepped in my direction and looked like I amused him.
“You're not from these parts,” he commented.
“Don't worry, I don't bite. Ginger ale.”
He leaned in and grabbed a glass from underneath the counter and dropped it in front of me. “On your way somewhere?” he asked, then turned away to take the bottle off the shelf behind him.
“You might say that. Any women in this town or did you all just spring from the dust one day?”
He filled up the glass and the corners of his mouth twitched and formed a grin. I saw his hand reach under the bar and he pressed against something. His left eye winked at me, and at that moment the beaded curtains rustled. The men at the bar didn't bother to look. They had seen it all before.
She was standing in front of the curtains in a plain black dress and a dynamite hat with sparkles that they don't see much of in these parts. She looked out of place in a dusty old bar on the edge of civilization. Her hands were on her hips and she was looking right at me. She didn't know why I was just sitting there looking at her. She had black hair and a chin that stuck out like a sore thumb. Unless I was goofy, this wasn't Marjorie Gomer.
“The evening's still young, pardner,” she said in a fake accent. “What say we make it one to remember?”
I couldn't let her know I was looking for somebody else, not yet. The cops would've been wise to a place like this and any false move on my part would make the folks in charge smell a rat. I held out my arm and she took it, patted my hand. When we slipped in through the beaded curtains and into the darkness, her head landed peacefully against my arm. “We don't get a lot of men like you in these parts.”
I bet, I thought, as I looked around the back corners for the woman I had been sent to find.
Will Rocky find her? Tune in next week along this very same inter-net for The Lost Love, Part 7!
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