18 Wheels of Horror

by Eric Miller

  While he nibbled burnt toast and watched pigeons out the window, Clay forgot his gut problems and his war against King Shits. Then voices rose behind him.

  “Yo cunt, I’m talkin’ to you.”

  “Shhh, T, she’ll hear you.”

  He had barely noticed them when he came in. The restaurant’s only other patrons, two booths behind him. Talking about the waitress, the Kim Kardashian look-alike arranging silverware by the bar. The man was black and the blonde white woman wore short-shorts. A second woman at the table muttered something inaudible.

  Then: WHAAAP cracked a fist on the tabletop. “I said, hey, BITCH, I’m TALKIN’ to you.”

  The first woman said: “For God’s sake, T, I’ll get us some napkins. Just leave her alone, will you?”

  “Fuck off, Iris. ‘Sitcher ass down ‘fore I smack you into next week.”

  Iris sighed.

  Clay laid his butter knife next to the toast. He pitied Iris and the other woman. And he pitied the waitress. No wage was worth dealing with venomous shitheels like T. She deserved Employee of the Month for the way she was enduring his goading. Clay admired her swelling backside as she bent over utensils, moving so minutely she looked like her celebrity twin’s wax double. Maybe she’d found the best way to handle men like T was to freeze like a squirrel before a large dog.

  “The ho hears me,” T said. “Right, ho? You hear me. Been hearin’ me for the last five minutes and actin’ like you Helen Mirren.”

  “I think you mean Helen Keller,” Iris said.

  “Whatever. Bitch better serve us.”

  “I think I’ve got some toilet paper in my purse,” the second woman said.

  “The hell for? Jesus, Betsy. Aiight. If that bitch don’t come in ten seconds I’m goin’ over dere and give her some a’ big T.”

  Betsy said, “Actually, I’ve got tissues too.”

  “Ten—”

  “T,” Iris said.

  “Nine—”

  “Who wants some tissues?”

  “Eight—”

  “I promise they’re not used.”

  “Seven—”

  “T, please…”

  “That was a joke. Come on, T, just take my—”

  WHAAAP! cracked the fist again, this time on bone.

  “Damn it, T!” Iris.

  “Not a peep from you tricks. You wanted to use them tissues, girl, use ‘em.”

  Betsy sobbed.

  “Oh, NOW I got your attention,” T shouted at the waitress. “Don’t look at me like that, you deaf-actin’ bitch. You stay right where you are. You just keep playin’ with that silverware while I tear dat fat ass up.”

  Clay got up and marched toward the table. T, on his feet, wiped his knuckles on his jeans leg and scowled. “The fuck you want, you Jim Carrey-looking motherfucker?”

  He was Clay’s height, but beefier. Wearing a sleeveless T-shirt. A lifetime of urban desolation and rage exuded through his pores. Clay had read about pimps: Confused, desperate young girls fell for their promises of protection and prosperity and wound up drug-addicted, sexually battered, and often pregnant from their coercions.

  Iris, the blonde, turned in her seat and gaped up at Clay as if he’d punched in the code for a nuclear missile launch.

  T was out of the booth and swinging when Clay stepped inside and drove his fist into T’s sternum. T’s legs meant to wheel him back ten feet but the wall absorbed the impact and he slid to a sitting position on the floor. Iris yelped when Clay pushed her gently back to her seat. “But he can’t breathe,” she said. Guppy-eyed, T sucked at air as if fellating an under-endowed John.

  The waitress said, “Holy shit,” as Clay bent T over the table. He twisted the pimp’s arm back and nodded at the puffy-eyed Latina between Iris and the wall. “Cover your eyes.” From the plate of chicken fried steak under T’s belly, he extracted a steak knife slathered in sausage gravy. He drove it into the base of T’s neck, paralyzing him.

  Iris shrieked. The waitress shrieked. Betsy shrieked, peeking through her fingers at T’s blood leaking onto her French fries. Without use of his legs, the pimp was like a 200-pound dead fish.

  “Napkins,” Clay snapped. The waitress quieted down and did as told. Clay tore a hole in the napkins pushing them down the knife in T’s neck.

  “Here’s your damn napkins. Have a nice day.”

  Iris gaped. Betsy shrieked again.

  Clay left a hefty tip.

  ***

  The town was called Wanting. Population 94, a gas station, a general store. Nearest post office was twenty miles north, in Dayton. The Hallers and family dog lived in the old Wanting fire station. Mr. Haller, fresh from the military, worked in Dayton and dropped Clay at Dayton Elementary each morning.

  This was Clay’s first year there. Seventh grade. One day at recess, Chris Kezzlewick, an eighth-grader and the biggest kid in school, challenged Clay to a fight. When he refused, Chris made to tackle him and slipped. The nimble new kid dodged him all around the playground until a teacher stepped in. How he finally caught Clay came a week later, after school.

  It happened on the forest road that led to the bus stop. Backed by buddies David and Quinton, Chris jumped Clay and dragged him into the forest. David and Quinton braced him against a tree in crucifix position while Chris pummeled him. A low blow dropped Clay to his knees. The sight of him kneeling, wet with tears, inspired the bully to relieve himself. Clay gagged on blood and Chris’s copious piss, still in his captors’ clutches, in Christ pose.

  Dusk in those woods, pencil beams of sunlight stabbing through the murk of old growth. Next they turned Clay toward the tree and laid him face down. Dirt and pine needles sandpapered his cheek. “I said hold him!” Chris barked, behind him. Quinton’s hand clamped down on Clay’s wrist. The other boy, David, grabbed the other. “Don’t move, Clay,” he whispered, and it sounded like advice, like how Clay’s father advised him where to place his thumb when he drove a hammer. “Hic,” Quinton said, Quinton who always had hiccups because he ate like a famished dog, “hic.”

  Clay heard Chris unbuckle his overall suspenders. He was like some fat snake crawling over Clay now, breathing hotly. His hands found Clay’s fly, pulled his pants down, underwear next, cold earth kissing his shriveled penis and indrawn testicles. Time stretched Clay on a rack of pain and humiliation. Then finally the nerve ends in his broken boyhood granted him mercy and he passed out.

  He didn’t tell his parents what had been done to him. Only that three classmates had beat him. His torment snowballed over the next few weeks when Chris Kezzlewick spread a rumor in school that Clay was a “homo.” Even teachers looked at Clay like some sort of pervert.

  How hatefully some of the boys called him names, Clay wondered if they, too, had been taken to those woods.

  He grew so despondent that finally his parents moved from Wanting, population 94, to Los Angeles, population two-million-something. The Hallers took an apartment in a neighborhood where white, undersized, timid boys were singled out on the street. After so many Band-Aids and ice packs, Clay’s dad enrolled him in a Kung Fu school in the building where he worked.

  The instructor warned Clay that the training was monotonous and repetitive. Children want action, he said, big movement. Clay followed instructions and, a year later, not even three of his enemies together could beat him. He stopped coming home bruised and bloodied.

  From then on, Clay avoided conflict. He made it a practice to treat others with kindness, compassion, and restraint. As his skills developed, so did his ability to find peaceable solutions. Trucking seemed a natural entry into the real world, a life of solitude and purpose. Sealed in the bubble of his semi, he reduced his chance of running into Chris Kezzlewicks and street toughs. Of course, he could never completely avoid bullies.

  He was between shifts at a bar in Butte, Montana. Rowdy place. Friday night. A big man, like Chrome Dome but more fat than muscle, bumped Clay in passing. He turned on Clay and shoved him off his barstool. Clay reseated hi
mself. Felt Big Man watch him. Didn’t see Big Man’s friend come up from behind and crack a glass stein on his noggin. Next thing he knew, two Big Men had him on the floor, working him over with steel-toed boots.

  Visions of Chris Kezzlewick and his buddies flashed through his nerves. Chris pushing inside him, becoming part of him. Hic. Hic. Something in the brutal touch of his attackers awakened memories buried in his cells. Flipped a switch. Pain sloughed off Clay like old skin, and the kicks to his skull and rib cage, the commotion around him, passed through him like light through water.

  Training took over. He rolled to his feet. Jabbed his fingers in each man’s throat. Slipped outside them, gave one a liver shot and the other a knee breaker. Dragged them by the wrists out the front door. Training turned into something other than self-defense. Clay pierced eyeballs. Broke fingers. Stomped scrotums. As the men screamed, he no longer saw pain as an end to conflict but as the beginning of a conversation. A lesson in how much can be broken if he plowed the body deeply enough.

  Brutalizing those men, Clay felt nothing. No rage or hate. He followed a script in his muscles, the way a predator takes down its prey. Witnesses gaped when, with an air of punctuality, he urinated on his victims. Even then he felt no pleasure, no satisfaction beyond a job well done, like delivering a load to his next receiver. Pain and humiliation, right on time.

  He drove his rig the hell out of Butte, Montana. Next night, walking another town’s streets, he followed his shadow. And he realized he felt no rage or hate because he was those things, a negative incarnation of the principles he had lived by. Clay Haller died under a rain of steel-toed boots. His body now was like the shadow at his feet. A resurrection, a Rebirth of opposites. Like the men he had beaten, shadows of power driven by fear and weakness. The world, nothing but shadows.

  Time to stop running from them.

  Realizing that, Clay shed biological imperatives like food and sleep. One night he watched a TV show about a golem. A magical entity formed from clay, like his name, unstoppably pursuing the mission it was made for. He’d never heard of such a thing, but here he was, like that golem, a monster created from pain and humiliation to give the self-crowned kings of the earth—King Shits—a taste of their own medicine.

  But how would he find them?

  How could he reach so many?

  Then he realized the answer was parked right outside his motel room.

  ***

  Surfing the Internet on his laptop, Clay came across an item on cop killer Clint “Herc” Walker. Herc was well over six feet and resembled his granite-jawed, movie-actor namesake, at least in the mug shot. He was a hard drinker with a vicious temper. One night a deputy called on him, responding to a disturbance call. Heated by drink and bad poker hands, Herc bludgeoned the lawman with a bronze sculpture.

  Paroled after 25 years in prison, Herc was back in his hometown, the article said. Grimsbo, population 1,100, on the way to Clay’s next pickup.

  A temper like that, Herc might need talking to.

  The temperature was in the nineties when Clay rolled into Grimsbo the next day. He checked into a motel. After weeks of napping in his truck, a private bed called to him. Curtains closed, A/C whirring, crisp sheets beneath him. Normally he didn’t need but an hour of rest, but the bodybuilders and T had drained him. Drifting off, last thing he saw was Chrome Dome’s gold Elvis sunglasses and gap teeth. Come on, Jim Carrey.

  Next thing he knew he was sitting up straight throwing punches in the dark. He kept on going till he realized he was hitting air. Shadow boxing.

  “Clay!” The voice so close, like Chris Kezzlewick at his neck, while he ran the shower. Dripping wet, Clay shot into the bedroom, found no one.

  He peered through a gap in the curtain: Dusk out. He got dressed. Stared at himself in the bathroom’s cracked mirror. He threw back the toilet seat, puked mud and conscience.

  “Clay!” Calling him from the door of the town watering hole.

  Where he thought he might find Herc, or get a lead on him. The sort of place where peanut shells littered the floor and deer heads lined the walls. Business was good. Clay sat near some old-timers and scanned the bar’s patrons. Was someone stalking him, or was he getting twitchy after so long at war?

  “Smashed a bottle on a guy’s throat, Herc did,” an old-timer said, wiping beer froth off his mustache.

  Minutes later the legend himself walked in. He reminded Clay of rock stars who hadn’t seen the limelight in decades, a jarring contrast to yesterday’s portrait. Herc looked old, stooped, and milk-pale, with wispy white hair and pinkish eyes. “Kidney cancer,” a Stetsoned old-timer said. Only his height and granite jaw identified him as the hard-drinking juggernaut who beat a peace officer to death twenty-five years ago.

  Grimsbo’s drinkers, they patted him on the back and made way for him. Herc smiled through the welcome reception, eyes downcast, edging through the crowd. He nodded at Clay, the small-town courtesy, as he brushed past and joined a frumpy redhead sitting in back. A waitress served him ice water.

  While this went on the old-timers talked about how Herc had become an ordained minister in prison. Clay was about to leave when Herc’s spitting image—from the mug shot—lumbered through the door.

  “Even worse than his old man, back when,” the mustached old-timer said.

  Herc Jr., it seemed. Slightly shorter, but beefier. A few more steroid injections and he could be with Chrome Dome’s crew. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, wearing a baseball cap turned backward and a skintight T-shirt that said “Dick Diesel.” Grimsbo’s drinkers, they greeted him and his entourage with a scant nod.

  “Them dogfights up at Sin Mountain,” the Stetsoned old-timer said.

  “What up, Meat!” The shouter had fewer pounds on him than the gold chains he wore over his Yankees baseball jersey. Meat gave Pencil-Neck a fist bump and led his entourage to the bar.

  Clay guessed none of them could fight. Not Meat, who measured toughness in biceps’ peaks. Not the tousle-haired Frankenstein’s monster showing Pencil-Neck some karate block. Not the mutton-chopped beach ball rolling his head around like a boxer and shrugging to a twenty-year-old rap song he picked on the jukebox.

  A row of shots was set before them which they raised toward Herc. “Welcome home, dad!” Meat downed the shot and slammed the glass on the bar top. His father, at the rear of the bar, nodded gloomily.

  The buxom waitress drifted over to Clay, smelling of gum and perfume. “Sorry to keep you waiting, hon. Can I get you anything?”

  “You can get me something, Maria,” Meat shouted before Clay could speak. “Name of that fake casting agent who cream-pied up your slit. Nice video on Jizzhub!”

  Maria made a face like she was counting to ten, then stormed off, crunching peanut shells underfoot.

  Clay had seen enough. He nodded to the old-timers and went back to his truck. He parked in a lot across the street facing the bar. An hour later Meat and his boys climbed into a black Escalade. Clay tailed them through side streets and turned off when they entered a cul-de-sac. He cruised the area a few minutes, then parked on the street facing the cul-de-sac. The turnaround was packed with SUVs, pickup trucks, vans, motorcycles, and hoopties.

  Rap music boomed from the biggest house on the dead-end street.

  Somewhere behind the house, dogs were crying.

  ***

  The party raged into the early dawn. All night people went in and out of the house, drinking and smoking. No one seemed to notice the black 18-wheeler parked down the street. Clay saw nothing of interest until just before noon, when a van cruised past his truck and stopped on the lawn.

  Meat came out to greet it. Through his binoculars Clay watched the van’s side door open and a Mr. Universe wobble out with two leashed pit bulls. The driver, a gorilla in a cutoff army jacket, went to the back of the van, grabbed a bucket of 5/8-inch steel chain and followed Meat and the dog walker into the house.

  Clay wiped his binocular eyecups on his shirt and mopped his b
row. Hot as hell out.

  Hotter in his chest, where an old memory caught fire.

  Old Man Gardner. He was why Jimmy, Clay’s dog, his twenty-pound Boston terrier, never made it to Los Angeles. Clay wanted to blame his father for not mending the fence where Jimmy escaped, but in the end it was Old Man Gardner who pulled the trigger, who blew the back out of Jimmy for crapping in his yard. Jimmy and his butter-soft coat, how he leaned on Clay’s chest and rolled his eyes up for attention. Old Man Gardner left the dead dog on the road outside his gate. This he declared on the Hallers’ front steps, reeking of cheap whiskey and self-satisfaction—Chrome Dome’s granddaddy with a shotgun.

  Clay sweated in the cab, thinking about Jimmy.

  About the pit bulls.

  What the old-timer had said: “Them dog fights up at Sin Mountain.”

  He’d read about dog fighting. How so-called “dog men” beat and starved the dogs to make them more aggressive. Set them loose on “bait” animals, like cats or smaller dogs, to sharpen their taste for blood. Chained them in cages or steel drums. Drowned, strangled, shot, or beat against the ground the dogs who lost or were severely injured. He’d seen pictures of dead dogs in trash bags, blood-spattered walls. One image, the combatants locked like Kama Sutra lovers, bleeding all over each other, the bottom dog staring at the camera, infinitely rueful.

  The pit bulls from the van, they looked like they’d survived such a contest—barely. Faces like meat tossed under a lawn mower.

  Clay’s dad didn’t let him see the body when he picked it up, but that didn’t help. For weeks he kept picturing Jimmy raped by Old Man Gardner’s shotgun. Post-traumatic stress disorder, he didn’t know the term back then, he only knew that what happened to him in the forest transformed how he would see life forever. Every show of strength, every flaunting of power, extended the rapist’s will, thrust a knife through the core of him.