by Muriel Gray
Why?
Maybe after the unluckiest day of his life, Josh Spiller had just spent the luckiest night of his life. If he really had slept with a major, Al psycho, then he could thank his guardian angel that all that had come of it were two memorable orgasms and a logbook that looked like rabid polecats had fought over it. But it didn’t make sense, and more important, it just didn’t feel right.
She’d seemed in no way disturbed, and at no point even remotely pissed off at him. Quite the contrary. In fact, for a one-night stand with a total stranger, Josh had experienced a surprising quantity of tenderness in their sex. He was no shrink, but he had encountered enough mad people on the road to spot the signs. You had to in his game. This was a big crazy country, and from coast to coast there were barking lunatics just waiting for some luckless truck driver to pick them up.
He’d seen plenty. There was that time that he and Eddie had given a ride to a guy up in Oregon who’d flagged them down by a busted car. He’d told them gratefully that he was a professor of languages, on his way back home after teaching some disadvantaged kids in Portland how to speak Spanish. Sounded so weird it should have been true, but both of them knew straight off in the first five minutes, by the way he was talking too fast and the way his hands kept touching his face, that he was out of it.
Eddie had the gun he carried under the seat pointed in that guy’s side before they’d even made ten miles, which was just as well since the screwball pulled his own piece out at fifteen.
They’d left him standing at the roadside, nose slightly bloodied and his gun thrown out of the cab three miles back but otherwise intact, hollering about the fact that he was the rightful Spanish king and would reclaim his throne without their help.
As far as Josh knew, Eddie, like a lot of truckers, still carried a gun illegally in the cab, and sometimes he wished he had the balls to do the same.
But Griffin hadn’t given any hints, however subtle, of being the kind of basket case to pull a stunt like this. Why would she do it? Why, for Christ’s sake?
He stared ahead and concentrated on that question as he drove. He concentrated very hard indeed. For at the back of his mind, somewhere so scary he didn’t care to look, was the ghost of another possibility. But it was a possibility too dark and dangerous to consider.
No. There was nothing wrong with his mind whatsoever. Things had been going wrong, true. Things had been going very wrong. But he was sane and together and everything was going to be just fine.
All that was really wrong was that he had a load of packing cases behind him, that someone fifty miles south of here was pulling out their hair to receive. He focused on that thought and just drove.
“I’ll bet you got some real good reason. Yeah?”
Josh narrowed his eyes at the obese man who was holding the documents he needed in order to get paid for this shitty job. His bald head had a smear of dirt on it that ran comically from the crown all the way down behind his left ear, and in order to keep him from losing his temper at the lardball, Josh concentrated hard on how he might have acquired such a mark.
“Yeah. Real good.”
“Let’s have it.”
Josh shifted his weight and looked at the mark more closely. Grease from the forklift, he decided. Smeared when the guy had scratched at an itch with a mucky finger.
“You got the cases.”
“Yeah. An’ I got the delivery receipt right here. Guess I might just make a note on it that you was late so they hold your pay-off. Unless I get to know what made you a whole friggin’ day late.”
Behind them, Jezebel was being unloaded by a small wiry man in a forklift who whistled tunelessly as he drove at a leisurely pace back and forth on the dock, watched sullenly by two factory hands and another driver waiting to unload his covered wagon. Josh ran a hand over his hair.
“Same old story. Abducted by aliens. Hate it when that happens.”
The man waved the thin paper. “Yeah? Well, whistle for it, boy. You be lucky to see a cent a mile for this one. You be payin’ me after I talk to your people.”
He officiously snapped shut his pen and rammed it in the top pocket of his overalls, a pocket stitched with the name Leonard, where Josh noticed a small dark patch indicated the pen had been leaking. Unconsciously echoing Josh’s gesture, the man ran the hand that had pocketed the pen over the top of his head and left another mark.
Josh smiled as the man waddled away to deal with the other driver, but his smile faded quickly, and he sat down heavily on the edge of a pallet and watched the rest of the cases coming out of Jezebel’s tail. Across the loading bay, on the walls beside a picture of a beaver with a hard hat on telling you ten ways to stay safe at work, was a pay phone. He’d been trying not to look at it since he got here, but now his gaze drifted back. Jesus, he was blowing hot and cold about her. One minute she was the cause of everything bad in his life right now. The next, he wanted Elizabeth so much he ached.
He rubbed at his stomach and tried to deal with the hot worm of guilt that was starting to writhe in his guts again. Killer. Adulterer. Where did failure to phone home come in that roll call? He glanced across again. The beaver was still lecturing him about safety, and the phone was still free. He stood up and walked across, followed by the small eyes of the fat man, who watched him with contempt as Josh stood beside the phone and contemplated it. Josh took out his Driveline card, flicked it over in his fingers like a card sharp and bit his top lip. Twenty dollars’ worth of talk time. But would she talk? He leaned forward against the wall on outstretched straight arms, his head down looking at his boots while he tried to sort it out.
Someone was looking at him.
He could feel their eyes, their intense gaze burning into his back. Josh stayed in the same position while he wrestled with how he might know that, then slowly straightened up and turned around. Across the loading bay the men he’d just left were still there. The fat guy was standing with one hand on his hip, watching a new truck roll slowly up to the dock, and the rest of them stood in an angular work-shy huddle around the pallets. But no one was looking his way. He scanned the factory floor for the eyes that he felt even more keenly now had been watching his back, and saw nothing.
The only view offered was one of stacked and tightly wrapped aluminium, forming corridors which boasted their length and height by displaying perspectives that nearly came to a point in the distance.
He remained motionless for a moment, barely breathing as he tried to rationalize why he still felt observed, and then equally, as his eyes roamed across those long dark avenues, why he just as suddenly felt the watcher had gone. Josh rubbed a hand over the back of his neck as if those unseen eyes had scalded his skin, then slipped his phone card back into his wallet.
The fat man looked across and raised an eyebrow as Josh walked slowly away from the wall, waiting for him to come closer, when he would hit him with a remark that would make that fresh driver think again about smart-mouthing him. But when Josh turned and looked straight through him, the man saw something in his eyes and thought again. Shrugging brusquely towards the guy’s truck to indicate it was finished unloading, he kept his silence.
Leonard liked to have the last word in any situation and he’d been looking forward to this one. But the truth was… well, he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. Whatever it was, it was giving him a bad feeling between his shoulder blades. Hell, it was crazy.
Not only did that trucker look like he kept real bad company, but somehow Leonard felt he’d only just avoided meeting it.
He shivered once and, against his better judgment, turned his back on Josh and walked away.
A series of minor roads snaked through ramshackle towns that led to the dispatch office, and Josh gazed out at the untidy buildings occasionally brightened by Alabama’s taste for ostentatious signs. He watched them catch the light—red and blue glitter-discs strung together to advertise a hair salon or a gun store twinkling as they moved in the warm southern spring breeze.
That breeze was becoming more than warm. It was making the inside of the cab uncomfortably hot, but then, the southern states were a meteorological mystery at this time of year. He’d shivered out here in a quilted parka in April, and just as sure been sweltering in eighty degrees in March. Today had obviously decided it was going to be a hot one, even though, oddly, it hadn’t given any indication of it earlier. For the first time in months he reached for the air conditioner and flicked it on. Josh didn’t like using the AC. He preferred to ride with the window down, an arm resting on the sill, feeling the breath of whatever part of the country he was in blow on his cheeks with its own special mixture of telltale odours. Mown hay in Virginia, ripe apples in PA, diesel mixed with cooking in the small pull-off to nowhere towns along almost any interstate you could name. It helped him know he was travelling, reminded him he was the one who was moving through the landscape, instead of sitting in a stationary box where pictures moved silently in front of him like the windshield was a movie screen. But he was too hot and he wanted to get cool. He moved forward to unstick his clammy back from the seat as he waited for the AC to do its work.
He waited a long time. The cab, if anything, was growing hotter. And worse. There was a smell, faint at first, but growing with the increasing heat, and it was stomach-turning.
At the first wrinkle of his nose, Josh’s senses registered something that approximated sewage, and his brain automatically apportioned the blame to the shabby town that Jezebel was rumbling through in line behind a motley procession of beat-up Alabama traffic.
But if the odour was genuinely emanating from the waste dropped from the collective backsides of this town’s residents, then Josh thought they should get some medical help.
The stench was revolting. It was more than just a broth of fermenting faeces. It had an undertone of rotting flesh, a sweet, cloying, almost solid quality that was starting to make Josh gag. He coughed dryly, his throat threatening to rise with bile, and reached for the controls. His fingers found the air-recycle switch and snapped it on, and as the atmosphere shifted around his face he held his breath for a moment, allowing time for the hot, foetid air to depart.
It wasn’t enough time. When he next inhaled, the odour now being recirculated was so strong he felt it bite at his chest. With streaming eyes and a retching cough he clutched at the window handle and jerked it open.
Gradually something approximating oxygen started to replenish his bursting lungs, and Josh gulped at the fresh air like a goldfish tipped out on the carpet.
As he wiped at his eyes and shook his head, he made a strong mental note never to organize a cookout in Alabama.
Groves’s Dispatch and Haulage was housed twenty miles south of Scottsboro, in a temporary building in the centre of an enormous clearing of scrub oak and alder. There were already two rigs abandoned seemingly at random on a huge gravel area outside the building that could happily serve as a parking lot for a battleship when Josh pulled Jezebel in and tucked her alongside one of the trucks.
He kept her running and climbed down out of the cab. As Josh walked towards the office, stretching his stiff limbs as he went, the noise of his boots on gravel and the drone of Jezebel’s engine were undercut by a thin, scrabbling, metallic sound. He stopped and looked back to the truck, then smiled as his eyes quickly identified the source of the sound. Hopping across the front of his radiator grille was a large black bird. A very large bird indeed. As he watched, Josh’s relief that Jezebel’s radiator was back in favour for snacking gave way to a nervous curiosity as to the species of creature that was moving across the chrome grille with disturbingly humanoid movements.
He put his hands on his hips and peered at it, and although he was some distance away from the truck, and too far to be able to examine it closely, he narrowed his eyes and put a hand to his forehead to shield them from the sun.
Almost as though the creature realized it was being observed, it turned a misshapen head and with alarming speed flipped upside down and scrambled over the radiator to the darkness beneath the truck.
Josh let his hand fall from his face and stared stupidly at the empty grille. It had only been a glimpse, and a glimpse from a distance, but the impressions it left were disquieting.
It couldn’t have been a bird. It had seemed more like a cross between a small animal and an oversized bat. Its wings were leathery and stunted and attached to long scrawny arms.
But worse. When it had turned, Josh could have sworn that two almost human red eyes glared back at him from a deformed face.
He wiped his hand across his tired eyes, then crouched down to see if he could spot the animal beneath the truck. The familiar darkened underbelly of an eighteen-wheeler was all that Josh could make out. Of course there were a hundred nooks and crannies for something that size to squeeze itself into, but somehow Josh didn’t think a wild animal would be too happy to nestle in between growling, vibrating machinery.
Standing up, he ran his hand over the back of his head. He was tired and he was in the south. It could have been anything. They had all kinds of crazy animals down here, and if Josh had to look up the birds he saw, he was even worse with animals. He could barely tell a racoon from a rabbit. He looked towards the truck for a beat, still unsure of what he’d seen, then dismissed it, turned and walked towards Groves’s.
Behind the window of the main office, Sandy Englehart lifted her head from a telephone conversation and looked out at Jezebel. She recognized the rig and waved a hand in greeting as she bent her head again. It was only Josh Spiller, and he dropped by only when he needed a quick load back home. Groves’s didn’t pay as much as the company Josh was leased to in Pittsburgh, but they always had something going north and she guessed that’s why he was here. Good. She could use him today. She drilled a pencil into the desktop and carried on talking as Josh crossed the vast acres between his truck and the office.
“You’re darn right we mean it, darlin’. We need you to pick it up in the next two hours or the job’s gone.”
She smiled as the person on the other end protested, then looked up again as Josh entered the office and stood waiting by a large and unhappy potted plant by the door.
“Well, now, Thomas, if I wasn’t a lady I guess I’d know what that meant, but since I am I can only take a stab at it and figure it’s a no?” She laughed and tapped her pencil some more. “Yeah? Okay, you got it. Sure. I got all the paperwork you’ll ever need right here, darlin’.”
She hung up and looked up at Josh with the grin she always gave drivers. Josh returned it and walked towards the desk, but his grin subsided as he saw the smile fade on Sandy’s face.
Burning. That was the only way Sandy could rationalize the sudden panic she was feeling. But it was more than that. It was the smell when something is singeing, just before it bursts into flame. That was it. Josh Spiller smelled like he was going to burn.
“What?”
Josh put his hands out, searching her face for whatever was causing her concern.
She crushed it and pulled back half a smile. “You been drivin’ through a forest fire or somethin’?”
“What you talkin’ about, Sandy?”
“You smell, kinda… I don’t know… smoky.”
Josh looked puzzled and sniffed unconvincingly at his shoulder. “Yeah? Last town I came through smelled like every goddamn man, woman and child had shit themselves and hung their assholes out to dry in the wind.” He grinned down at her, and tried to coax her full smile back with his own. “But I guess that smells like Chanel No. 5 to a southerner, huh?”
Sandy’s smile remained incomplete and she wagged a finger. “Boy, you northern drivers sure know a lot about assholes, huh? Guess that’s ‘cos you talk out of ‘em most of the time.”
Josh made a face that winced in mock pain, and she licked a finger to mark one on an imaginary scoreboard in the air.
But her unease was sneaking back. There was something more than a weird odour about Josh that made her not want him in the offic
e. Then Bob Taylor walked through, the usual handful of paper clutched in his fist. He looked up and nodded at Josh before disappearing into his portion of the long prefab. Sandy couldn’t help noticing through the glass partition that separated them that Bob’s head was up, instead of bent over the crap he kept his nose in all day long, and he was continuing to look at Josh from behind his desk.
Josh watched Sandy’s face. “I still smell?”
She shrugged and shuffled some papers of her own. This was dumb.
“Aw, shoot, honey. I have no idea what I’m talkin’ about this afternoon. I know you want a load goin’ north, though. How’s about that for mind readin’?”
Josh rubbed at an arm. “Yeah.”
“Don’t even need to tap into my Mac, sweetheart. There’s a whole stake of aluminium needs pickin’ up from Scottsboro right now, goin’ all the way to your front door.”
“Piss money?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay.”
She smiled at him and motioned to the seats by the potted plant.
“You must want home awful bad, Mr. Joshua Spiller. Never had you not argue the price with me before.”
“Yeah. I do want home bad. Real bad.”
As Sandy Englehart picked up the phone to call and book the load, she thought that she and Josh were a lot alike right then.
She wanted him home real bad too. In fact, just out of the office and as far from her as he could manage would do just fine.
17
Why was this state of growing, of being born, so mysterious to man? To that which was becoming ready to be born, it was a natural state of grace. That it could sample the outside world through its carrier was part of that simplicity.