by Jim McKenna
And now six years were behind him. His mandatory downtime was spent at terminals or truck stops, and most everything he owned was in the cabinets, cubbyholes, and top bunk of the Peterbilt. He shopped at Walmart because they let semi trucks park in their lots. Always a big reader, Brad bought paperbacks and left them for someone else when he was done. He bought an iPad and discovered audiobooks and Netflix. He had a simple rule he followed that kept everything in the order he liked: never get something new without taking something old away.
Don’t add where you can replace.
At Oklahoma City Danny and Brad switched places. Danny stayed up in the passenger seat for awhile and Brad was happy for the company. Danny was bright and funny with a good personality. He was a lifelong truck driver and proud of his wife and grown children who were now serving up grandkids. That just goes to show that a man can have a life and a real good one and still drive.
“I rarely get out of Arizona anymore,” Danny said. “I done did my time on the road.”
“You a day driver?”
“Mostly. I do one, maybe two overnights a week, but no more than that.”
Brad nodded. “Why did you take this trip?”
“The money, man!” Danny shouted and laughed. Shouting was Danny’s normal voice, Brad discovered. Semi trucks are hard on the ears, and a lot of guys shout by accident. “That and I think this makes for a good vacation.”
The were silent for a time. Danny tried to call someone on his smartphone but got voicemail. “You see that lizard last night?” he asked.
“Yep.”
Danny laughed. “It was dark, but she didn’t look half bad. That’s rare.”
“Mmm.”
“Most lot lizards are all tweakers, you know? Goddamn, that shit just rots you into a skeleton.”
“Ever see a fat meth-head?” Brad said.
“Oh, yeah,” Danny said. “There was this guy worked out of Phoenix terminal where I am. They did a random drug test on him and he was full of meth. Turns out he’s been smoking that shit the whole time we was driving. And you’d not know it from looking at him. He’s not fat like me, I mean no one is, but he’s a big dude. Bigger than you by a long shot.”
Brad smiled. “I’m starting to get a gut. Give me time.”
“Well what do you expect, you know? Driving, sitting, eating, repeat. This job plays hell on you.”
He was right. Trucking broke a body down over time. There were the weight issues, but also slowly building damage to the back, hips and legs from thousands of hours behind the wheel. It was an insidious kind of debilitation, too. A person never sees it coming until they start aching all over all the time. Wheatley trucking put a patchwork fitness program in place to combat this. They provided classes in getting exercise on the road and at each terminal was a room with fitness machines. Brad did his part with long walks at the end of every shift, weather and location permitting.
“Don’t see lot lizards like you used to,” Danny said. “Drivers don’t like being bothered all the time and so the truck stops keep ‘em the hell outta there. But there are some places, Jesus Christ. They’re all over the place. Still. You know?”
“Memphis, Brad said. “New Orleans. Atlanta. There’s spots in Indianapolis that are bad.”
“I bet.”
Danny had enough for one day and made his hefty way into the back, leaving Brad alone to the road. He could hear Danny talking on the phone for the next hour or so, then things went quiet. Brad listened to a podcasts as the miles went by.
Truck stop prostitutes did not make Brad angry. They made him sad. There was a lot of loneliness on the road. And there were women with nothing left going for them but to exploit that loneliness. Mostly it was pimps making the women do what they did, he guessed, but Brad didn’t know much about that. The truck stop women were rare as hen’s teeth, and always a bummer.
Everyone had a lot lizard story, it seemed. Some guys have even made videos of them stalking from truck to truck and posted them on YouTube. But if you ask you’ll never find a man who’s actually paid for one. Brad knew they had to be out there. But that’s something you keep to yourself, and Brad knew that for sure. After all, that what he’d done.
Brad had been driving for abut a year, and pulled into an east Texas truck stop late at night. The regular spaces where all full at that hour but Brad bumped the semi through a vacant lot and found a space in the far back between two heavy equipment haulers. He was not even parked before he saw her coming towards him in the dim light.
The way she was trying to flag him before he was even stopped made him think she was not a hooker at all, but a lady in need of some help. And sure enough when he rolled down the window she said something about being out drinking with her friends, but they all left and she had no gas money to get home. She asked if she could come inside and Brad opened the passenger door for her.
She was plain. She was ordinary. She was someone’s dull girlfriend. She wore glasses, had good skin and teeth. She seemed… normal. She talked about needing some money but didn’t ask so much as offer. And finally Brad said he’d give her $25.00 for a blowjob. She seemed relieved, really.
They went into the sleeper berth and she knelt down. Brad asked her to raise her shirt and she did, and he fondled her small tits before dropping his pants and lying back. It was a good blowjob. She hung in there and did it right, pumping him hand and mouth not too fast or too hard. As she blew him in the dim light of the berth Brad started seeing things about her. He saw how her eyeglasses that looked new were repaired with dirty cellophane tape. She reeked of beer, and some time in the past earrings had been ripped out of her ears, leaving two v-shaped notches in each lobe. When he came she pulled away to as not to get cum in her mouth and Brad watched his white seed spill over her her fingers still pumping his shaft. And he he saw her other hand clenched in a tight fist, with car keys jutting out between the knuckles for if things went dangerously wrong.
The memory of her stayed with Brad, and the lingering sadness of the life she led depressed him and prevented him from making the same choice again. But mostly it was the fear expressed in that fist full of keys. He didn’t like the idea that a woman would think he might hurt her. He didn’t like to think that way about himself.
3.
Brad pulled the Peterbilt off the interstate at St. Louis and routed to the drop yard. He pulled up to the gate and checked in with a bored security guard. After being told where to go Brad pulled into the lot, dropped his trailer in the assigned space then found the new one parked in the slot he’d been told.
He nearly missed it at first. The trailer was not the same white trailer with red and blue letters that H. P. Wheatley used for their livery. This one was black, with the lettering in contrasting white. After checking the numbers again to make sure, Brad swung the tractor into place and slowly backed under the trailer, feeling the familiar lifting of the weight and hearing the sharp click as the fifth wheel found the kingpin and locked onto.
Brad climbed out, hooked up the airlines and power cord and cranked the trailer’s landing gear to the up position. Then he walked around the rig inspecting it. All the lights worked, the tires were in good shape. He came around to the back and saw the metal seal on the door that he expected to find, but on the other door handle was a padlock. This was not expected.
Frowning, Brad made his way back to the front of the trailer and opened the little flat aluminum box he found there. Inside were papers wrapped in a ziplock bag. He took the papers out of the bag, returned the bag to the box and got in the truck. Danny was awake now and in the passenger seat.
Brad examined the bills. They were strange. The bill of lading was of an old style. The yellow paper was like they used to use in the old days, and the form was typed with what appeared to be an old school manual typewriter. There was a small scrap of paper with a hastily penned note: Receiver will have padlock key . Brad shrugged and handed the bills over to Danny, who scanned them.
“Twent
y-four thousand pounds,” he said. “Not bad. Don’t have to weigh it.”
“Yep,” Brad said. “There’s a padlock on the back. Note says the receiver has it. Weird.”
“That is weird,” Danny agreed, and with that Brad entered the pickup information into the onboard computer and they started again. Getting back on the road, Brad felt the change to the truck from the added weight. It felt more snug on the road, more secure. He pulled onto the freeway and they made for the Mississippi and Illinois.
Brad played a game of chess that early morning when he handed the wheel back to Danny. He had a chess app on his iPad, but he also had a portable chess machine he bought years ago he liked to play on. This one had little peg pieces and all the functions he liked. Over the years Brad tracked his progress on the machine in a little notebook he kept for that purpose. The notebook he’d purchased as a diary, but soon realized he had nothing to write about. He didn’t know what to think about that.
When he laid back in his bed he dropped off to sleep quickly, the bouncing of the truck and Danny’s seemingly endless phone calls slipping into the back of his mind.
His dreams came dark and strange.
He dreamed of a young woman he knew in Port Huron, Michigan. Her name was Audrey. She was short and pleasingly plump, with a round pretty face and bright blue eyes. For months Brad made regular runs into Canada and the truck stop where Audrey worked was the place where his border crossing permits were faxed. So he got to expecting to see her and she knew him by sight now. They talked only briefly at the service desk while he got his materials, but that was as much as he talked to anyone, so he thought to himself that he was building a kind of relationship with her. Once he came in and she was finishing her shift and they talked for a long time, and that made him happy. Maybe he was not imagining things and she did like him, despite being much younger than him. Routes had changed and Brad’s life had not, and it was long gone months since he’d been to Port Huron. Not that it mattered, but maybe it did.
In his dream he lay with Audrey on warm bed, and she snuggled up next to him. Her skin was soft and cool and he touched her all over. Then she was on top of him, riding him and whipping his face with her long hair. Her breasts were big and full and hung low on her chest, and she leaned forward and he took her fat nipple into his mouth and sucked.
She moaned and rocked her hips on his. Her hot breath was in his face, in his hair. He sucked hard and hot milk flooded into his mouth and he drank, and his mouth filled again. The milk streamed from her and filled his mouth to overflowing, and thin streams of white milk escaped the corners of his mouth and filled his ears, and the sensation tickled him awake. Brad came to with the truck still rocking down the highway. He had a huge erection and he took care of it before falling back to a fitful sleep.
4.
“I’ve been having bad dreams,” Danny said. “Strange dreams.”
Brad thought of his own dreams. Yes they were strange. Then he thought of how much he didn’t want Danny to tell him about his dreams.
On the Pennsylvania Turnpike in a driving rain, Danny lit a cigarette, downshifted, and cracked the window just enough let smoke out. “I saw a real pretty Amish girl once,” he said.
“No shit.”
“No shit. I was over in Indiana, I think. She was in the front yard of her house and she went across the street to check the mail.” The truck gained the rise and Danny upshifted again. “She had a reddish dress on and one of those little hats. Her legs were tan. I didn’t think Amish chicks got tan legs. And she had bare feet.”
“Amish women are fiercely plain,” Brad said. “It was probably her bare feet that made her pretty.”
“Really?”
There was a long pause in the conversation. Danny tossed his smoke. “I read there’s supposed to be a trucker serial killer, you hear that?”
“I’ve heard that,” Brad said. “But tell me, don’t you think it’d be kind of hard to steal up on someone in a sixty-five foot long, thirteen foot high, loud as hell truck?” Danny laughed. “I mean, the last word that comes to mind with semis is stealth.”
“I think he’s supposed to kill drifters, or something.”
“Makes sense.”
“I bet there’s not like one killer, but a bunch. Think about it.”
Brad had thought about it. The thing about trucks is people see them all the time, but no one ever really thinks of who is driving them, where they are from or what they are seeing as they drive day in and day out through everyone’s towns and cities. It was like a separate world really. To Brad, the trucking world was like a big map of the entire country overlaid with a sheet of clear acetate. And written on that sheet are things that you can only see from the cab of a big rig.
“Bad things happen, Danny Boy,” Brad said. “And I know for a fact that if some bad person once to do a bad thing, they are going to find a place and a way to do it. And our world is as good a place as any.”
“Our world?”
“Yeah. Truck driving. We have our own kind of world out here. Hidden in plain sight.”
Danny frowned and nodded, taking all this in. “Yeah, you’re right. You must see it a lot what with living out here.”
“I guess so. Or maybe it’s just another place and another day and I don’t really see anything at all.”
They were quiet for a time. Then Danny said, “You know, it probably was her bare feet.”
5.
Brad wished he could draw better, because if he could he would draw a picture of the Dark Lady who came to his dreams. There was a sensation of nothingness in the dream, no connection to time or place. There was only distance. There was only far off distance where things moved and made sounds. And from that faraway distance she emerged, coming closer and closer and it took forever to reach him. When he was awake he compared it to that one scene in Lawrence of Arabia, when Omar Sharif is riding towards Peter O’Toole on a camel, and it takes forever for him to get there.
Her skin was red and hot. Her hair long, to her knees even. She had the body of a goddess with wide hips and big breasts on a firm, muscled body. He couldn’t see her face but he wanted to, and he needed to, but when he awoke it was a mix of wonder and terror that assailed him, and there was no face in his memory save beetle black eyes with sparkles of emerald green.
Brad had several relationships come and go over the years. It took a certain kind of woman to be with a man who was gone all the time. She had to have the right temperament, meaning she had to want a man who was not going to be there much even at the beginning of the relationship, and that was a lot to ask for.
Vicky was a fine woman who worked at a trucking company. So she probably knew what she was getting into. They had been an item for about year before she started wanting him around more and he could not make a change. So bye, Vicky.
Sarah was another driver, and that was cool. She was tall and strong and no nonsense. They talked of teaming and driving together. Then once they got into one hell of an argument and Brad could not recall what it was about. He had an idea now that he became too needy somehow and that killed it. So long, Sarah.
Alice was a quiet woman who waited tables at a Waffle House. She was pretty. She was so very pretty, with her black hair, sad eyes and pale skin. Her nose has been broken and reset crooked on her squarish face. They were together over Thanksgiving and he spent the holiday with her. They were alone in her little apartment and she made a small turkey. They ate. They made love. Throughout the day Brad heard little things here and there. She came from a big family but the phone didn’t ring all Thanksgiving day. She had two kids and the oldest was seven, and they were in foster care. The woman who came for them that day was a cunt. Brad got up to pee in the night and looked out into the living room. Alice was sitting naked in a battered chair, a glass of wine in her hand. It was snowing outside, and she sat there at the window watching it fall, and silent tears ran down her cheeks like rain.
Alice hurt too much, and Brad felt so gui
lty when he let her go. He never forgot her and often wanted to call her, but before he knew it to much time had gone by.
And Brad came to know how alone he really was, inside and out.
6.
“Hey bro, I’m coming off the interstate. I think we're almost there.”
Brad finished getting dressed and slipped into the passenger seat. “How far?”
Danny handed him his iPhone. “I got the spot marked on the map. I think like three miles.” Brad found the pin marking their destination and the blinking dot that was them, and matching the two worked out a route. There was nothing to see off the road. There were no lights. The headlights showed a light mist in the air. The truck rolled to a four way stop. Buildings were on all four corners but nothing was open.
“Turn right here,” Brad said and Danny brought the Pete into a wide right and went on. The road ran straight but they dipped up and down over small hills. Eventually they spied lights in the distance when they got to a rise. “Okay, now I think there's a fork up ahead. you need to stay right. You’ll go about quarter mile and then we should see it on the right.”
Danny followed the directions. There was no other traffic on the road. Brad looked at the time. 11:40 PM. He’d slept longer than he expected. He could still feel the sensation of those dreams. There was an immediacy to them, like they were pressing against the inside of his skull to become part of his waking world. He’d almost expected to find little Audrey cuddled up next to him when he awoke, one of her soft breasts cupped in his hand. Or sense the presence of the Dark Lady, commanding him from afar with a voice of distant thunder. Stranger still that Danny, someone he hardly knew, shared with him that he'd been having bad dreams, too. Bad? Well strange anyway.
Danny slowed as the blip on the screen drew alongside the pin, and both men peered out into the night. Out Brad’s window the dark silhouette of a building appeared across a flat open space. “Slow down,” he said and Danny dropped a gear. “It's an old truck stop I think.”