by Muriel Gray
If there was mystery, it was in why that which was waiting to be born could remember where it had been, where it had come from, only while it waited to meet the light. Afterwards, there would be no memory. Only the urge to live, the cry as it came through, the knowledge of the suffering its carrier would endure in its passage.
But for now, as it grew and changed, it could remember everything, and it floated in its dark hot place, thinking of the deeper darkness it was leaving.
Eddie Shanklin was singing. It was toneless and horrible, but it made him feel good.
“… maybeeee I didn’t hold yoooo…”
He sang in a high, whining voice, a grin remaining constant as he contorted the muscles of his pale, bearded face to reach the high notes. For the first half hour after it was free of a load, the rig felt like a formula-one racing car, and even though running empty meant he was burning a hole in his wallet. Eddie had sat back and enjoyed the feeling. But that was hours ago, and even though the truck had lost that first sensation of being loosed from its shackles, Eddie was still high.
They were going to have themselves some fun, he and Josh. In under an hour they’d be stepping out of their rigs and into the parking lot of a motel just outside Chattanooga, checking in and letting loose.
He could hardly wait. Even hearing the surprise in Josh’s voice over the radio when Eddie had ambushed him outside Martintown had left him grinning for about five miles. Yeah, Eddie was pleased with himself.
After they’d parted last time, he’d guessed the four possible dispatchers that Josh could have used in the area near his drop-off, and had got lucky on call number two. Sandy at Groves’s told him that Josh had left for the smelter about two hours ago. That meant, given time loading, weighing and general shitting about. Eddie figured he’d be able to intercept him on the one and only route back to the interstate. And he had.
Now he and his buddy needed some serious rest and recreation, and the unconvincing fight Josh had put up, whining about not being able to take the time out, had taken Eddie about ten minutes on the CB to break down.
He missed Josh. He tried to figure why he hadn’t called him, hadn’t even sent a postcard. Nothing. Not since they spent a weekend getting wrecked at the truck show in Louisville a whole two years ago.
It just seemed like he didn’t need to. He knew that the next time he saw Josh it would be just like it always was. You didn’t have to call each other like teenage girls planning a pyjama party to stay friends. He’d figured the next time they’d meet would be at the wedding—whenever Mabel made her frigging mind up about when that was going to be—and he’d never questioned that his friendship was intact hundreds of miles away, secure in its silence.
Now he knew he was right. There was no embarrassment in rekindling its fire. Only comfort. And he sensed after that grim conversation they’d had through the night that it was well-timed comfort.
As he stepped on the gas, he screwed up his eyes and threw his head back again, trying hard to reach an impossible falsetto. And if Elvis was really dead, even though Eddie knew he wasn’t, he would have shifted uncomfortably in his grave.
If Eddie hadn’t gotten there first, maybe Josh would have just turned around and kept driving. But there was no escape. There he was, leaning smoking against a Kenworth that walked a thin line between attracting the disbelieving stares of children and making decent folks shoo those children away while they called the authorities.
It was more sculpture than truck. Everything that could be chrome was, and that included a lot of things that shouldn’t be. A double row of orange lights framed the radiator grille and topped the windshield like eyebrows, and, clinging to the exhaust pipe with one arm while it beat its chest in silent rage, was a two-and-a-half-foot plastic gorilla. Mounted over the sleeper roof on a long board in front of the model ape were light-refracting rainbow letters that unnecessarily picked out the words “King Kong.”
Eddie grinned as he watched Jezebel roll into the parking lot, flicked away the cigarette and stood to attention.
When he’d parked and climbed down, Josh waited by the open door, his hands on his hips, and smiled at the man walking towards him. Eddie was a big guy, but he looked like he was made of butter, filling his denim jacket and overalls the way a steamed pudding fills muslin. The only purpose served by the shoulder-length sandy hair pulled in a ponytail behind his grimy baseball cap was to foil a long, darker beard and moustache by failing to match it. Eddie stopped in front of Josh, and echoed his stance by placing his hands on his own hips.
“Toss for it?”
Josh nodded.
“Heads.”
Eddie took a coin from the pockets of his overalls, looked his friend in the eye and flicked it in the air. He caught it deftly in his palm and showed it to Josh.
“Shit, Eddie. That coin weighted?”
“Nope. Lady fate just ain’t kind to you, Spiller.”
“That’s for sure.”
“You’ll check in?”
“I’ll check in.”
“I need your credit card and I need to see trucker’s ID for your driver’s rate.”
The girl behind reception barely looked at Josh as he complied. He could feel Eddie hovering behind him, waiting. The girl crossed her arms and scratched at her upper arm with long pink plastic fingernails as Josh slid his card and licence across the desk. She took them with a small clacking noise of nails on wood, like a raccoon foraging on a tiled floor behind an icebox.
Josh cleared his throat. “Ma’am? Eh, my colleague and I here were wondering… well, eh, we were wondering if you’re someone who could help us get hard…”
The woman looked up, her expression darkening and her mouth slightly open in indignation as she looked from Josh’s innocent face to Eddie’s impassive one. Josh took a breath. Timing was everything now. He had kept his own mouth open after the last word. That was always important. He left her for a few beats more and cut in as though he’d been taking time to think, just as he saw her lips about to form a word.
“… copies of our overnight accounts. You know? Not just the credit card total. Need more than one itemized copy, you see. Accountants never do believe we only eat, sleep and drive…”
Still unsure, she closed her mouth and searched Josh’s face very hard for even the ghost of a smile. There was none. There couldn’t be. Ten dollars and the first round of drinks always rested on it.
She made a pursuing movement with her glossed lips and looked him straight in the eye, although there was something in her own that suggested she was finding that uncomfortable. “Sure. You just ask here tomorrow when you check out.”
Josh nodded politely. “Thank you, ma’am. ‘Preciate it.”
Their business was concluded in silence and Josh took the plastic room keycards from her taloned hand, listening sagely to her monotone directions to the elevator. She followed them with a sullen gaze as they walked casually back out the glass doors to the parking lot, wanting to glare at them with female menace but finding herself curiously uncomfortable and unable to look directly at the handsomer of the two. But if they imagined she didn’t witness them double up and punch at each other in glee as soon as they hit the fresh air, then they were wrong.
“Hey, Cherie,” drawled the receptionist to a bored-looking companion as she tapped her computer keyboard with the tips of her nails. “I’m shutting off the adult pay channel in Beavis and Butthead’s rooms. If they want to watch some porn they’re gonna have to call down here and beg.”
“They’re actors.”
“They ain’t actors. They’re just regular people that got asked to do it.”
“I need to know what makes you think that, Eddie. I mean, how can you think that?”
Josh took a deep swig from his beer bottle and shook his head in exaggerated disbelief. “I’ll tell you how, right? You say to an actor, look, buddy, we need you to look like a regular Joe that stacks shelves in a store, and then when I say ‘action,’ you tuck your arms
in and wave your elbows about, makin’ like you’re a fuckin’ chicken and then sing ‘I feel like chicken tonight.’ It ain’t gonna happen with a genuine smile, is it?”
“ ‘Course it is. That’s what actors do.”
“Yeah, but they never look like real folks. They’d look like actors. These are real people. Morons, maybe. But real morons. You can tell.”
“Look, Eddie. You give an actor money and you tell him to stick his own dick in his mouth, he’s gonna do it with a smile and make it look as natural as you want. These are not real people in that commercial.”
“How d’you know?”
“Jesus, man, they look too good. You stack shelves you probably don’t have health insurance. You got bad teeth and zits. Sure, you might feel like chicken tonight, but you ain’t goin’ to get any.”
He paused thoughtfully.
“That’s what real people look like.”
Josh indicated the ugly mass of flesh and patterned nylon on the dance floor. “Look kinda like you, Eddie.”
“Yeah, yeah. Eat my meat, Spiller.”
Josh lifted his beer to his mouth and as he tried to drink from it Eddie nudged his elbow, sending a stream of liquid down his chin and over his shirt.
As Josh spluttered through a wet laugh, a pantsuit-clad family at the next table eyed them both with naked disdain. Eddie noted the mother avoiding his gaze by urging her youngest son to finish up his soda, while the small, ferretlike father attempted to look protective and manly with only a mixer drink as an unlikely prop.
Josh and Eddie were neither out of place nor at home in this cavernous motel lounge bar, a room that smelled of sour carpets and the chlorine that had drifted in from the indoor swimming pool down the corridor.
Like most of the motels that welcomed drivers, someone had given the huge carpeted, mirrored split-level barn a name, trying to pretend, but fooling no one, that it had character and a local clientele. This time it was called Poppers. Crude stick-on pictures of champagne bottles popping their corks were glued at angles on the mirrors around the room, and a three-man band played some dismal soft-rock covers backed by a mural depicting two giant champagne glasses clinking together. When Josh and Eddie had first come in around six-thirty, it had been practically empty. But now, hours later, their fellow motel guests had showered, eaten and changed, and it was filling up.
The collection of fat people in shiny clothes that Josh had cited in evidence were stepping their way through the alley cat on the dance floor, and while the singer was smiling at them, the bass guitarist was watching them the way a child might watch his parent burn his collection of baseball cards.
Eddie and Josh sat in silence for a while, gazing vacantly at the dancers, until Eddie looked down at the table and toyed with the paper drip-mat that ringed the stem of his redundant glass.
“How you feel?”
“Bad.”
Eddie nodded, still not looking at his friend. “I ain’t got much to say that’ll help that.”
Josh continued to gaze at the dance floor, and Eddie leant back into the cushioned booth, resting his beer bottle on one knee.
“I figure some things, though.”
Josh turned to look at him and Eddie lifted his bottle to his lips and met Josh’s eyes over its glass neck. He emptied the bottle’s contents and wiped his mouth.
“I reckon you can’t change what happened to that kid. You can’t change the fact you humped a basket case of a hitcher. But you still got a chance to put things right between you and Elizabeth.”
“Maybe.”
“You gonna try?”
“Maybe.”
Eddie sighed and leaned forward on his knees. “Man, this ain’t like you. You been through shit before. Always came out the end stinkin’ of it but smilin’.”
“I don’t reckon I’ll get out the end of this one.”
“Why? What’s the fuckin’ deal? You had an accident that weren’t your doin’. Live with it and forget it.”
Josh touched the hoop in his ear. “Want another beer?”
Eddie softened his voice as much as his pride would allow. “Come on, man. Talk to me.”
It was Josh’s turn to sigh. He remained silent for a long time, aware that Eddie was looking at him, then bit at a knuckle as he spoke. “Am I actin’ weird, Eddie?”
“Yeah. You’re actin’ like a fuckin’ fruit.”
“I mean it. Like actin’ in a way that would make people I don’t know want to cross the street?”
“How you mean?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m askin’ you, dick brain.”
Eddie shook his head. “You’re leavin’ me behind here, man.”
Josh was finding it hard to meet Eddie’s gaze. In fact, he was finding it hard to say this at all. “I’m startin’ to imagine bad things, Eddie.”
“Like what? Roseanne naked?”
Josh continued without catching the smile Eddie threw him.
“All sorts of stuff. Worst one is I feel like I’m being watched.” He lowered his voice, his turn to feel an unmanly shame. “In fact, I’m feeling it right now.”
Eddie blinked at him, then slowly turned his head and scanned the room. He wiped his mouth again, then turned back to face Josh. “Well, maybe one of them lardballs in the Kmart party frocks got the hots for you. Any of ‘em might be eyeballin’ you right now. Don’t mean much.”
Josh looked around. There was no one taking any notice of them at all in their dark booth. But what he’d told Eddie was true. He could feel that inexplicable sensation of an unseen watcher, heightened by the sensation that whoever or whatever possessed those eyes was not looking kindly on him.
“Yeah? Well, how about this, then. You need another beer, right?”
“Right.”
“How many we had so far?”
“Shit. I don’t know. Six. Maybe seven?”
“Seven. Want to know how many times out of those seven orders I managed to get the waitress to come over?”
“You got me.”
“None. Zero. You grabbed her every time. She won’t even look at me.”
Eddie looked at Josh for a moment with a hint of panic in his eye, then he poked a finger in Josh’s shoulder and laughed. “Is that what this is about? You runnin’ scared that you don’t make them get wet no more?”
Josh didn’t return the laughter. He turned around and regarded him with a mixture of desperation and anger that immediately cancelled the grin on Eddie’s face.
“Watch.”
Josh searched for the waitress who’d been serving their booth all night and spotted her wiping a table. He glanced once at Eddie, making sure he had his full attention, then sat forward, adopting the universal body language of straightened back and stillness of head that means someone wants a drink.
Eddie turned from his friend to watch the waitress. She finished wiping the table, balanced three glasses on her tray, then straightened up. As she turned, she saw Josh as he raised his hand and waved at her. Her eyes met his, and he used the moment to yell, “ ‘Scuse me. Miss?” across the room.
As Eddie watched, the girl’s eyes registered a fleeting hint of confusion before she turned away, pretending she hadn’t seen him. Josh slumped back in his seat.
“Now you try. Just like you been doin’ all night.”
Eddie licked his lips. She had moved back to the bar, a mile away from their table. But she would be back. They waited in silence, a tension between them that Eddie found hard to interpret. When she returned to serve someone four tables away, Eddie caught her eye as she waited to be paid and raised his finger.
She raised a hand back and, as she pocketed the money, wandered over to them and scooped up their empties.
“Same again?”
“Yeah. Don’t need glasses.”
Josh was right. She didn’t look at him at all. Eddie watched her as she made the long journey back to the bar, then leaned back heavily and stared ahead as Josh spoke quietly, almost to himself.<
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“You see, the weird thing is, she don’t even know she’s doin’ that. Know what I mean? It’s like she hasn’t figured why she don’t want to look at me.”
They sat quietly for a moment, then Eddie nudged his shoulders playfully up against Josh.
“Come on. Don’t mean nothin’ if one waitress don’t get off on you.”
Josh turned to look at him. “You feel it too. Don’t you, Eddie?”
Eddie Shanklin felt his heart alter its rhythm by half a beat. He moistened his lips beneath their thatch of rough hair and tried to buy himself time to think. He’d been dreading that question. Ever since Josh had raised the issue, it had opened up a dark crack he’d been trying to seal ever since he greeted him in the parking lot.
Yes. He did feel something was wrong with Josh, from the moment they faced each other and touched. And it was something badly wrong. Something that made Eddie instinctively not want to be around him, just in case…
In case of what?
He had no fucking idea what. All he knew was that it had been troubling him for hours, a curious sensation of apprehension and, at its most extreme, a tiny trace of fear. And he knew long before Josh had raised it that the waitress was feeling it too. But it was nothing he could define or understand. This was a friend, if he were man enough to be honest with himself, he loved. So quite simply, he’d ignored it.
Until now.
Eddie moved a few inches away, giving himself room to turn and meet Josh’s gaze. “I feel how strung out you are. You act like someone clipped jump leads on your balls. But I ain’t blamin’ you none. Not after what you been through.”
“Nothin’ more?”
Eddie looked away. That way, Josh wouldn’t see his eyes. “You know what the real problem is?”
Josh waited.
“Man, you said it yourself a minute ago.”
Josh made a questioning grunt.
Eddie slapped the edge of the table with one finger. “Seven beers. That’s the fuckin’ problem. I can’t believe we only drank seven lousy beers each in three hours.”
He could feel, rather than see, Josh smiling at his elbow.