Miss Route 66 Read online

  Praise for Growing Up on Route 66,

  the first novel in this series:

  "Lund presents an entertaining story of small town life - paperboys, the gentle aspects of life in a simpler time and the wonder of the people who make small towns the linchpin of America. Through the eyes of Mark Landon we find that the answers to the myriad questions of life and love aren't always easy to find."

  --Bob Moore, ROUTE 66 MAGAZINE (Volume 9, Number 1; Winter 2001-02)

  "If the trials of Kevin, Paul, and Winnie on the television show The Wonder Years remind you of your childhood, you'll enjoy this coming-of-age book. The author grew up in Rolla, and his characters, Mark Landon and Marcia Terrell, live in a small Missouri town along Route 66. The narrator tells funny stories of adolescence in the 1950s. As an adult, the narrator has a philosophical outlook. 'The road I've traveled has clearer landmarks when I look behind me than when I was moving forward.'"

  --Tricia Mosser, MISSOURI LIFE (Volume 29, Number 6; December 2001)

  Praise for Route 66 Kids, Lund's second novel:

  "Babyboomers coming of age in a small Midwestern town on Route 66. It's a decade later but it reads like the 'Summer of '42.' An extremely heartwarming and nostalgic look at young people's angst during this age of wonder."

  ROUTE 66 FEDERATION NEWS (Volume 9, Number 2; Spring, 2003)

  "Route 66 Kids, follows the fortunes of his earlier hero and heroine of Growing up on Route 66 , Mark Landon and Marcia Terrell, taking them through high school to the eve of Mark's departure for college at Southwest Missouri State College and Marcia's departure for . . . but you'll have to read the book to find out where Marcia is headed. . . . . No matter how often you've heard the phrase/title You Can't Go Home Again, Michael Lund's book convinces us that Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again, and Route 66 Kids takes us home wherever home was."

  --William Frank, FARMVILLE (VA) HERALD, May 31, 2002,

  Praise for A Left-Hander on Route 66 Lund's third Novel:

  "[Lund's] readers are in for a surprise if not a shock, or series of shocks. In conscious and mock imitation of the opening lines of Mark Twain's Huck Finn . . . Lund introduces us to another struggling teen of Fairfield, Hugh Noone--read 'no one.' . . . A Left-hander on Route 66 is an entertaining, interesting, highly readable autobiography of a young boy . . . "

  --William Frank, FARMVILLE (VA) HERALD, Sept. 17, 2003

  "[Left-hander] is a howl with just enough of the serious to add contrast and spice."

  --William Hoffman, award-winning author of Godfires, Tidewater Blood, and many more

  Praise for Michael Lund's Route 66 Novels:

  "I finished your [first] novel . . . and was struck by how perfectly it seemed to encircle (of course) the world of childhood and its heady veering toward adulthood. It's a loving and funny book . . . and made me recall with mingled pleasure and embarrassment all the twinges and itches and passions of adolescence. Well done, and thank you for putting it into my hands."

  --Carrie Brown, author of Lamb In Love and The Hatbox Baby

  "A wonderfully well-wrought [first] novel, set in a place that's still the stuff of myth, about coming of age in a simpler time when sex was giddily mysterious and life was filled with endless possibilities."

  --Bernard Edelman, editor of Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam and Centenarians: The Story of the 20th Century by the Americans Who Lived It

  "In Growing up on Route 66, Michael Lund gives us a loving look through the telescope of memory, resurrecting forgotten feelings in the idiom of adolescence sharpened by the lens of age--and wisdom. He takes us back to a time when the road ahead was a winding one, just right for joyrides, meant to be wandered, with curious roadside attractions and shady stops along the way. Reading [his] book is like returning to a summer night when you were young, when life was full of promise, mystery, and terror, that time at twilight, before your mother called you in to wash up and go to bed, when you were playing a leisurely game of kick-the-can and wished that the game could just go on and on. Fortunately, Lund promises that it will go on, in the second book in his series, Route 66 Kids, and, I hope, many more to come."

  --Eric Kraft, author of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

  Miss Route 66

  By

  Michael Lund

  BeachHouse Books

  Chesterfield, Missouri, USA

  Copyright

  Copyright 2004 by Michael Lund All Rights ReservedThis novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead or actual events is entirely coincidental.

  A slightly altered version of one chapter appeared previously in the Route 66 Federation News under the title of "Slide Rules and Ramblers."

  Graphics Credits:

  Cover by Loren Robertson with the back cover photo of Michael Lund by Kirk W. Johnston.

  Publication date January, 2004

  ISBN 1-888725-96-6 Regular print BeachHouse Books Edition

  First Printing, January, 2004

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lund, Michael, 1945-

  Miss Route 66 / by Michael Lund.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 1-888725-96-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-888725-97-4 (large print pbk. (16pt. macroprintbooks) : alk. paper)

  1. United States Highway 66--Fiction. 2. Beauty contestants--Fiction. 3. Beauty contests--Fiction. 4. Young women--Fiction. 5. Missouri--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3562.U486M57 2004

  813'.54--dc22

  2004000721

  an Imprint of

  Science & Humanities Press

  PO Box 7151

  Chesterfield, MO 63006-7151

  (636) 394-4950

  www.beachhousebooks.com

  Miss Route 66

  Michael Lund

  For Anne

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is time--past time, in fact--to thank all the family, friends, and students who have listened to or read early versions of my stories. Their responses--sometimes praise, sometimes censure--have helped me immeasurably in the subsequent shaping of material into fiction.

  I must once again specifically thank Robin Sedgwick for editorial suggestions in the preparation of this manuscript. And I wish to acknowledge my continuing gratitude to Dr. Bud Banis, my publisher, for his patience, his generosity, and his friendship.

  As always, any errors in fact or inconsistencies of narration in the pages that follow are attributable solely to the author.

  Miss Route 66

  Michael Lund

  Prologue: Belly Dance

  "If I wet it, Susan," Mr. Pierce said, dipping his cigarette-browned index finger into the water of the Coke glass before him, "and then put my finger on the lip of the glass. . . ."

  We were sitting in a booth at Fanny's Dairy Delite one Saturday more than twenty years ago, me a naive twelfth grader and he the worldly high school assistant principal. Me a declared contestant for the coveted crown of Miss Route 66, he a long-time promoter of that Fairfield beauty pageant.

  "Yes?" I asked, wondering then what it was he was going to show me, wondering now at how innocent I must have been not to pick up on his intent from the first.

  "If I circle the glass," he continued, his finger moving slowly around the rim. "If I circle the glass with just the right pressure, at just the right speed--like this--it will make a note."

  And, indeed, a sound did rise up out of the glass, a ringing hollow tone I associated with the wind's moaning on a winter night in some romantic castle: "Ooooo," sang the glass.

&nb
sp; "That's neat!" I agreed brightly, taking the straw out of my glass so I could try the same thing on my side of the booth.

  As I was putting the straw on a paper napkin, Mr. Pierce reached across the booth and stopped my hand. With his fingers wrapped gently around my wrist, he leaned forward and looked intently at me. I noticed an oddly excited look in his eyes and extra saliva gathering at one corner of his mouth.

  "I can put my finger on another place," he said in a husky whisper. "And you'll make the same sound: 'Ooooo.'"

  He leaned closer. "You'll do a belly dance. 'Ooooo.'"

  His voice dropped to a whisper. "And love it. Ooooo."

  At this point I jumped up from the booth and ran out of the store, essentially terrified. I didn't understand exactly what he was talking about, but all my instincts screamed together: "Get out of here now!"

  It was not the last time I had to confront Mr. Pierce and his notion of our making music together. In fact, the next time he looked into my eyes scarred my young psyche so deeply I'm only now able to talk about it. And to seal it into the past forever.

  That's why I'm driving down to Fairfield several decades after the 23rd annual Miss Route 66 Pageant, determined to rectify a wrong done to me and some other girls I knew in those days. It's an anniversary celebration for the town, the sesquicentennial. But no one knows the surprise I'm planning for the mayor, the chamber of commerce, the powers that be.

  I've always been a believer in consummation, you see, in things moving inevitably toward a final appropriate relationship. So if a process was initiated, then broken off, odds are, I believe, it will pick up later and continue to an end. Matters that were tilted out of kilter at one time long ago will come back level at a later date. Today is my time to set things straight in the small town of my birth.

  This belief in an underlying order toward which we move is so old with me I've concluded it must have grown out of my childhood. Even the onomatopoetic sound of my name--my maiden name, that is, "Bell"--asserts, to me at least, the resonance of a perfect note, intention and fulfillment in one sound.

  My family too was a harmonious whole throughout my growing up, as father, mother, older sister, and I shared a sense of destiny, the wholeness of clan. Not that we thought of ourselves as upper class, above others, but we were the Bells of Fairfield, Missouri, nuclear family in a small town at the heart of the country.

  Tricia and I grew up in a close neighborhood too, several dozen parents raising a generation of young people in an area so unified we kids called it the "Circle." It was a new section on the edge of town then, frame and brick two-bedroom homes (later expanded) built to keep pace with growth during World War II and in the boom years afterward. The loop made by its three principal streets--Oak, Hill, and Limestone--gave us the sense that we were living within some benevolent realm, a circle of magic.

  Even into our teenage years, my world remained connected, contained within supportive boundaries. Our high school cruising route even completed a circle: Main Street out to Business Route 66 (also called Kingshighway) past Fanny's Dairy Delite around to Sixth Street, back up to Main. We'd make that circuit ten times in the course of a Friday or Saturday night in those days, seeing the same sights but refreshing ourselves with every trip.

  Life was a lovely song for me until twelfth grade, until I got caught up in the Route 66 Pageant. And something, or someone, broke the spell, ended the age of innocence. Mr. Pierce, yes. But there were also others.

  That's why I'm headed back down the path of fabled Route 66 (today I-44) to Fairfield, ready to complete a set of actions begun over twenty years ago, desires abandoned in the middle of their pursuit, aspirations left to be fulfilled now.

  All of this brings us back to Mr. Pierce, a man whose interest in me was, thankfully, never consummated. I didn't understand his intentions then, of course, for at least two reasons: I didn't know my own power; and I didn't understand his lack of it.

  Let me explain. I hope my chief source of strength is immaterial, my heart and my character. My family and friends say it's so. But I also know a significant portion of what force I can exert in a man's world comes from my body, more specifically my belly.

  You see, I have had since I entered puberty an unusually flat, attractive stomach. My breasts are modest, my rear end appealing enough, I suppose. But the way my hips are hung, my flat tummy--even after three children--moves, rocks, swivels, and bumps in ways that, it turns out, men can't seem to resist.

  This was something I was just beginning to learn at about the time Mr. Pierce made his indecent proposal. It came as my generation learned first the Twist and then other pelvis-oriented dances, all this at the time fashion was lowering the line where we wore our jeans and tightening the tops of our skirts. I could do, you see, a belly dance.

  And Susan Bell with her alluring middle was an unconsciously seductive object of desire for someone like Mr. Pierce.

  I also suspect I know now why the same man made so much of his finger and the note it could sound on a glass of water. Even my sweet husband of twenty-five years has acknowledged that a middle-aged man cannot always, shall we say, rise to the occasion. And that later encounter I had with the Route 66 Pageant official also hinted that leverage was, for him, a recurring problem.

  A virgin sitting across the booth from the assistant principal at Fanny's Dairy Delite, I did not then have sufficient petting experience to know the length or duration of manhood. I remember, in fact, how startled I was when I felt Jack Greer, dancing close at a school function, press himself against my tummy. Could that be his . . . um . . . ?

  I also had no idea about substitutions in the game of love. There were, so far as I knew, one male organ, one female organ, and one position for those involved. What a range of options, equipment, partners, goals my own daughters know about already in their teenage years!

  Old Mr. Pierce's proposal, on the other hand (so to speak), was not for what he truly wanted. But more than digital manipulation was out of his reach (I can't seem to avoid these puns!). I could have done a belly dance for him, that is, but he wouldn't have been able to join in.

  And now I'll be back in town to make a more complete response to Mr. Pierce's offer, as well as to the offers of other men I've encountered in later life. It's a story that will have a happy ending, I think, even if there are some perils and heartaches to endure before then. There are also some laughs to be had along the way, moments where I'll make some happy sounds (though not at Mr. Pierce's direction) and you can, too. So I hope you'll take the journey with me and be pleased with the results. Ooooo!

  Susan Bell Thornton

  St. Louis, Missouri

  Volume One: Instruments. Chapter 1

  I would never have gotten involved in the Miss Route 66 Pageant in the first place, I suppose, if it hadn't been for the flute.

  My best friend Sandy Johnson and I were walking home from school one early spring day when we saw it in the display window of Martin's Jewelry Store.

  "Look!" I exclaimed. A velvet-lined case lay open on a glass shelf, the black and silver instrument itself divided into its three parts, each nestled in the dark recess designed for it.

  "What?" said Sandy. "The rings? Watches? Earrings?" She was looking past the flute to the usual things you see in the display cases of a jewelry store.

  "No, no. The flute. Look at that!"

  I was dazzled. I didn't know how to play the flute, mind you, or even, at that time, how to put the pieces together into a complete musical instrument. But I'd dreamed of playing for a long time. I also saw it, in a moment of inspiration, as an alternative to Randy Alexander, the boy I was dating at the time. I could take up music and drop love.

  Randy and I had gotten pretty serious in our petting, and he had been begging me to play what he called the "mouth organ." I wasn't going to do it, and I'd gotten tired of hearing about it.

  "The flute, Sandy. Isn't it beautiful, even elegant!"

  "Yeah, sure. But you don't play, do you?"
/>
  "Nothing but the tonette in sixth grade music class. Remember that?" It was what they called music education in those days, 75 sixth graders blowing on red bakelite instruments for one hour every other Thursday.

  "Aiii! I remember. Mrs. Jeebers, 'F B-Flat F. F B-flat F.' Oh, it was terrible."

  It was terrible, but even that sad effort to awaken our musical instincts had done something for me. I'd wanted to create a product of my own with that enlarged whistle, an entire song or even just a sweet melodic line. Everyone needs a way of presenting the product of her genius, I'd realized, an outgrowth of the self.

  I had also thought at the time that music might help me connect more with my mother, because she'd had some musical training in her youth. She'd given up such interests when she went to work. And then, once she was married and had children, there was little time for personal pleasures.