Page 26 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

14 Jack Fritscher

*

Cameron grinned as he sped north off the Bridge. Sausalito lay
below him to the right, and that crazy Sunday in Tiburon lay even
farther off in time and space. Ada should have written her thesis
on Millay, he thought. With her little petulant hand an annotation
of her greatly petulant life. He took the off-ramp from 101 and
headed up the canyon roads, past the Muir Woods turnoff, shifting
gears and climbing the snaking asphalt up the mountain, above the
Pantoll Ranger Station, roaring beyond the natural Mountain Home
Theater, to the top of Mount Tamalpais, the highest point in the
Bay area, a forest and crest sacred to the old Miwok Indian gods.
Cameron loved the mountain.
It was worn and smoothed, twisted with trails as ancient as the
fog that rolled through its pines. Hikers puffed up and down its
paths, rediscovering traces of the old gravity-pulled Mt. Tamalpais
Railway that before the San Francisco quake had pulled fashionable
ladies and gentlemen up the steep grade for picnics of chicken and
lemonade in the sun.
Cameron kicked up his bike in the asphalt parking lot below
the peak. The ladies with the lemonade had vanished. A tie-dyed
hippie replaced them, lounging in the mountain heat against the
stainless-steel sides of a pickup truck fitted out to serve cellophaned
sandwiches and coffee.
“Black or white?” the hippie asked.
“Black.” Cameron took the styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand
and flipped the kid a half-dollar.
“It’s sixty cents, man.” The boy hooked his long hair back be-
hind his ears and dropped his hands to his hips. “Overhead,” he said,
looking up at the clear blue sky. “The cost of doing business, man.”
“Yeah.” Cameron flipped him the dime.
The kid caught it. “Have a nice day,” he said.
Cameron headed back to his bike. “Whatever,” he said over
his shoulder. He set the coffee on the asphalt, zipped off his leather
jacket, pulled off his flannel shirt, picked up the coffee, and lay

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK