by Muriel Gray
“AT&T operator. How may I help you?”
This woman was real, but her voice was as flat and miserable as the recorded one on Driveline.
“Yeah. Collect call. Pittsburgh.”
“Number?”
He ran through them.
“Calling who?”
“Elizabeth.”
The name. It was making his eyes film over with tears.
“Your name?”
“Josh.”
“Tosh?”
“Josh.”
“I can’t hear you. Jaws?”
“JOSH! Fucking Josh!”
The line went quiet and he thought his temper had blown it, meaning he’d have to call again. But then… ringing, and a distant pick-up, sounding as far away as the moon.
“This is the AT&T operator. I have Josh?”—she paused and then went on—“for Elizabeth calling from McNab County, Virginia. Will you collect?”
There was a pause, a muffled conference, then Nesta spoke.
“No. Sorry.”
She hung up.
Josh stared at the wall, his fingers clenched around the phone.
“I’m sorry, caller. I’m unable to connect you.”
He put the phone gently back on its hook and stood looking at it for a moment. Then the door to the restaurant opened and his only fellow diner pushed past on the way to the washroom, letting loose a belch like an old bear. Josh glared at him, and the man glared back.
“Got a problem?”
Still looking at him, Josh folded his laminated calling card in two, in four, then let it drop on the floor.
“War, incurable disease, and the national debt of Ecuador. How ‘bout you?”
The man looked back at him like Josh was a simpleton, belched again deliberately and open-mouthed, then, catching the look in Josh’s eye, quickly entered the washroom. Josh, after all, still looked like Josh.
This time when Josh pushed open the restaurant door there was a new diner. A girl was sitting sullenly in the corner booth finishing off an orange juice and a sandwich, her only companion a giant, overstuffed knapsack propped against the window. As Josh looked at her, wondering about the speed with which she must have been seated and served by the sullen waitress, a movement outside caught his eye. Pulling out of the parking lot, almost obscured by his truck and the young trees, but visible for this one brief moment as it turned, was a police car.
It glided and bounced silently out of his vision, leaving Josh staring out the window. The girl lifted her head to him like a meerkat, misinterpreting the direction of his gaze and offering a challenge. His eyes slid a fraction to the side, refocused and met with hers. They were the intense, silly eyes of the young, the innocence of childhood gone and not yet replaced with the wisdom of adulthood. But green irises, heavy dark lashes and eyebrows made them beautiful.
He looked away quickly, turned and sat down in a booth near the door. The waitress was absent from her post, and three puppet dogs blared out a Brechtian atonal song about the letter D at the two people in the empty room. Josh clasped his hands in front of him and gazed out the long window.
He could have talked to her, made her understand why he was hurting as well as convincing her he was truly sorry. He knew it. Could hear it in her voice. Fuck that delay. It had made her change her mind, strengthened her resolve. But a lot had happened to Josh too. He knew Elizabeth wanted him to orbit around her pain like some healing satellite, apologizing and gesturing until she let him land, but he’d needed her too, today more than ever in his life, and she’d let him down. Badly.
Of course she was going through it, but how about him? Josh could feel his need for her, his remorse, starting to sour back into resentment.
A white ceramic mug was slammed down in front of him, spilling some of its cooked black contents on the Formica tabletop.
“Creamer?”
Josh didn’t even look up.
“Cream. Yeah.”
“It’s creamer. We ain’t got cream.”
He raised his head to look at her. She was holding a fan of brown rectangular packets of powdered creamer between her thumb and forefinger as though they were the prize money on a game show, and her bored eyes were already starting to swivel towards the dogs and their song.
“I’ll take milk, then.”
Her head was now completely turned in the direction of the television screen as she answered him in a drawl, “You only get creamer with coffee.”
Josh looked at the side of her pasty face, noting with distaste a tide mark of grey grime that ran the circumference of her collar.
“What if I ordered a glass of milk?”
Something in his tone this time made her turn back to him. She looked at him to assess whether this was the beginning of an argument. There was a glint in her eye that suggested she might look forward to that.
“You’d get milk.”
Something was building in Josh. A release of tension, guilt, fear, resentment and loneliness. And it was being released without his permission. He could feel the confrontation in his low voice, could feel himself seething where he would normally shrug and laugh. He couldn’t stop it. It was too late.
“Then why don’t you pour some of that available milk into a container and bring it here so I can put it in my coffee?”
“You want a glass of milk, mister, I can bring you one, but I have to charge you for it. You get creamer with coffee.”
The girl at the other end of the room was looking at Josh from behind her knapsack, her head cocked and her eyebrows slightly raised as though she too thought he looked like a troublemaker. Josh’s gaze was steady.
“You don’t get off on being a waitress much, do you?”
Her eyes hardened. “I like it fine.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m not getting off on being your customer.”
“That’s your problem, mister.”
Still looking at her, Josh slowly reached out his hand and knocked over the mug of coffee. It spilled over the table in a great dark wave, and splashed its way to the floor via the cushions of the bench opposite him.
“Looks like that’s your problem.” He smiled at her without mirth, then let the smile die abruptly. The girl held her ground, never taking her eyes from him. Her drawl, when she spoke, was soft with an undercurrent of menace.
“Now I’m goin’ over back there to get a cloth. And when I come back, you’re goin’ to clean that up. You hear?”
Josh stared back, unmoved.
She turned, walked with a measured pace to the counter and disappeared through a doorway. Josh closed his eyes in shame. A slow hand clap started from the other side of the room. The girl with the knapsack was glaring at him as she performed the ironic act of appreciation.
“Big tough guy, huh?”
He ignored her, but her scorn merely highlighted what he already felt about his behaviour. He’d lost his temper with a dumb little waitress, and he felt like a shit.
For something to do, he turned his attention to the TV and then to the man returning from the washroom, whom he followed with his gaze as he left the restaurant and climbed into his pickup. The man leaving reminded Josh that he didn’t need to stay and wait for further confrontation. Still watching him through the window Josh started to slide his legs from under the table, but before he could stand, the girl was at the end of his table, knapsack on shoulders, ready to leave. Her voice was pitched high with indignation.
“All you need to know, Mr. Dick Brain, is that she probably gets the kind of weekly wage you spend daily on deodorant to keep you from stinking like the sexist pig you are. That might be why she’s not too anxious about treating you like you’re the master of the fucking universe.”
“She was rude,” Josh said unconvincingly.
“No. She’s just bored and exploited. This is what being rude’s like: go fuck yourself, you sad old cocksucker.”
Josh nodded, and for the first time on this dark and terrible first day of May, he fought to keep a smile at
bay.
“Thanks. I’ll know it now when I hear it.”
She frowned, tried to look threatening and failed.
“I’m wasting my time, and missing a ride.”
She tossed her head, although there was not much hair to respond, walked defiantly to the door and exited. The man in the pickup was starting the engine and she broke into a run to reach him before he pulled away.
As Josh watched, bemused but nevertheless shamed by the girl’s attack, the waitress reappeared, predictably, with a large-bellied man in a dirty apron. Josh held both hands up to them in surrender before they reached him.
“I’m sorry. I really am. Forgive me.” He was saying it a lot today. There was a lot to be sorry about.
The pasty-faced girl looked disappointed. Despite the admirable feminist defence from her sister of the cervix, the waitress still looked to him like a poisonous vixen who was looking forward to a fight.
“I don’t care to be treated like that. There weren’t no call for it neither.”
The man said nothing, but crossed his arms menacingly. Josh nodded once.
“I know.”
“You’ll wipe it up good and pay for that coffee.”
“Sure.”
She dropped a stinking cloth onto the table and made an ugly and satisfied smirk, which faded when she looked across to where the girl had been. “Shit, Jim. That girl ain’t paid me.”
They both twitched like pointer dogs and lunged in readiness to pursue the hitchhiker, but Josh stood and held out his hands.
“Whoa. I’m picking up her tab.”
They looked at him suspiciously, but the waitress stood back and nodded, a sly grin playing at the corner of her mouth again.
“Fifteen dollars. Includin’ yours.”
He was about to protest at the obvious extortion, then decided that fifteen dollars wasn’t that much in the scheme of things if it got him the hell out of here. He fished out his wallet, took out a twenty and handed it to her. “Keep it.”
The waitress took the bill and folded it into her pocket. Mister Jim decided it was safe to speak.
“Get the fuck outta here, you stinkin’ low-life truckin’ shit-hole.”
A day ago, perhaps, in what felt like another century, his temper at such an unprovoked insult might have left Mister Jim with a physical souvenir of Josh’s visit, something facial for the big ugly man to bathe in Dettol. But not today. Today Josh had already done damage that would last him a lifetime and beyond. He met their gaze with steady eyes, then left quietly, making sure the door didn’t bang behind him, climbed into Jezebel and roared out of the empty parking lot.
The trees that lined the road arched and thrashed in the wind of the truck’s wake, as Josh accelerated down the mountain towards the interstate.
What to do? He had fully intended, regardless of his load, to drive home to Elizabeth. But now he was stinging with her rejection, stirring a bitter broth in his heart that had transformed guilt into a sense of betrayal and abandonment. He wasn’t going home. Not yet.
The CB crackled for the first time since he’d left the interstate that morning, and as the truck slowed approaching a crossroads, Josh leant forward and tried channel 19 again.
“… aw, shit, I said you can pay the niggers that, but I ain’t haulin’ for that kind of money. Know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah? That so, driver? Think you’re the fuckin’ master race? Huh? I bet you’re the big fat piece of scum I passed playin’ with himself ‘bout a mile back. Sure was impressed.”
“There ain’t no call for profanity. You guys are so damn smart you can’t even talk your garbage without profanity.”
“Smarter than you, you old asshole.”
“That why you’re drivin’ truck, you dumb fucker, instead of runnin’ the country?”
“Whooooeee! Now if that ain’t profane? What’s got up your butthole?”
Josh turned the volume down, his initial delight at being back in radio contact diminishing with the reminder that the highway was still teeming with bored jerks. He brought the truck to a stop at the junction and checked the side roads. There was a community billboard at the corner, a rustic affair with vines creeping up the wooden supports and a small wooden tiled roof tacked along the top, keeping the rain off the assortment of fluttering notices for yard sales and barn dances. As he looked left, checking the road, Josh’s eye roamed over its tattered display.
His heart lurched.
It was bigger, pasted inexpertly onto the wood at a slight angle, but it was the same photograph, the same slogan. And it was in colour.
He stared at Nelly McFarlane’s smiling face, beaming out at him from above her lurid pink suit, and his head began to swim. The lead weight that pulled his heart to his boots was back, and this time the weight had a name written on it.
Elizabeth. It was all her fault. She had made him so crazy that his sense had gone.
There it was in full colour. The proof that Josh’s mind was on some Looney Tunes vacation when the accident happened, transposing an innocent photograph of an equally innocent woman he’d seen and not registered into an empty picture of a baby being blown by a fatal wind.
Without warning a bulbous tear formed, rolled down his cheek and dissipated into the forest of rough stubble on his chin. The bottled grief for the dead child, the horror of his own temporary, sleep-deprived madness released itself and left him empty.
He was utterly defeated. If he could hallucinate so clearly and convincingly at that point, at a moment when all his wits and sanity had been required, when might it happen again? Would he be sleepless and confused from now on? What had Elizabeth done to him, with the selfish, blind countdown to her abortion?
He wiped his nose on his sleeve, shifted into first and drove on, away from that crookedly hung picture that told the world Josh Spiller was going crazy. As the dust from the wheels spiralled up in the disturbed air and Jezebel disappeared into the Appalachian late afternoon, the corner of Nelly McFarlane’s poster lifted and curled, and from under the paper a small trickle of new and runny paste slithered down the wood and dripped onto the dirt.
11
“I think you shoulda talked to him that time.”
Elizabeth looked up at Nesta. It was dark back here in amongst the rails of costumes, and she was crouching beneath the comforting heavy cloth curtain made by long Jacobean skirts, her arms circling her knees.
Nesta crossed her arms and took her weight on one foot. “You hearing me, Liz? You can’t go on avoiding each other.”
“He ran out on me.”
A customer called from the front of the shop. “Hey! Anyone back there?”
Nesta hollered back: “Sure. Be right with you.”
She looked at her friend and partner. Liz was pretending to sort through costume jewellery but Nesta could see she was huddled on the floor like a traumatized child. She bent down to be level with her face.
“Look, I don’t know what this is about but it must be real bad. If you don’t want to tell me, then fine. But if you do, you know I’m here.”
Elizabeth nodded.
Nesta returned the nod solemnly, stood up and went to deal with what might be their only customer of the day.
“Nesta… Did he sound… you know… sorry?”
Nesta leant against a shelf holding pantomime horse heads for a moment, her expression full of sympathy. “Yeah. He sounded totally broke up.”
Elizabeth looked at the floor again.
As Nesta left, to flatter and joke with the man out front who wanted to look like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, but never would in this life, Elizabeth ran her hand through her hair and sniffed.
She slid her hand into the deep pocket of her fleece top and slowly pulled out the square of thin paper. Just a black blob. A tiny photo of a black blob inside her, growing and living. Elizabeth stared at it for a long time, then gently replaced it in her pocket.
She would take his next call. She wished now she had taken the las
t one. But next time. Next time they would talk.
Josh saw her standing by her knapsack on the left of the narrow road. She’d seen him first, of course. It was hard to miss a truck. By her body language it was clear she wasn’t sure whether it was worth sticking out a thumb. As rides went, the one with the pickup driver must have been the shortest in hitchhiking history. She’d been dropped a good five miles away from the interstate junction and it didn’t look like she was pleased. Before he knew why, Josh was slowing up.
The girl glared up at him as he stopped level with her, watching him wrestling with similar indecision. Josh looked back at her for a moment through his closed window, then slowly wound it down.
“You make him apologize once too often for being born a man?”
She tried to set her mouth into a hard thin line, but Josh saw a movement play at the edges that suggested a seed of mirth.
“He was only going this far.” She indicated a rough track between the trees behind her with a slim shoulder, never taking her eyes from his.
“Where you heading?”
She looked back steadily. “Anywhere. Away from here.”
Josh turned and looked out the windshield for a moment, his fingers drumming the wheel thoughtfully. If the girl imagined his musing was merely a decision about carrying her, she was wrong. Josh was deciding about a whole lot more. He turned back to her and his voice was low, almost sad.
“I’m going south.”
She looked at him and then her face ignited with a smile that gave her a new identity. It was a young and lovely face and it lit up unexpected parts of the darkness that wrapped Josh.
“Neat. I’ve never been in a truck.”
With a twitch of the head he motioned to her to get in. She picked up the knapsack, skipping around to the passenger door as though her sizeable luggage weighed nothing. Josh stretched over and opened the door for her as she struggled to climb up. She tossed the knapsack onto the seat and then as Josh reached out with the intention of moving the large pack, she took his hand and pulled herself into the cab.