by Muriel Gray
“I’m saying how can you possibly know whether they are or not?”
“ ‘Cos I got eyes in ma head, that’s how, Brendan. There ain’t no blacks hangin’ round school gates givin’ the stuff away. There ain’t no kind of stuff that you get in the big cities. Like you see on TV, you know?”
Josh shook his head at the radio speakers, signalled and moved out to pass a flatbed hauling a kit house.
“And what’s your point, Pete? Like I care.”
“Well, you should care. ‘Cos my point is just that all the stuff you been talkin’ hogwash about, like it was a real bad problem, only applies to them foreigners in the cities. They’s the ones who’s pushin’ the stuff. There ain’t none of it down here. Us people here still know how to live like Americans.”
“WWPBAL comin’ at you on the Brendan Earl Holler Hour. That’s Pete from Maryville. Pete? Whatever you’re on, buddy, I wouldn’t mind a sniff or a smoke if it made me believe the crap you’re coming out with. Could someone with a brain please call me? Back with more after this.”
Josh stepped on the gas and pulled past the flatbed. As the driver signalled that he had room to pull back in. Josh adjusted the volumes on his two radios, the CB winning the battle over a musical commercial for weed killer.
“Come on back in, Jezebel.”
“I’m there, big truck.”
“Chicken house ‘bout five miles ahead is open, driver. In case you haulin’ somethin’ you shouldn’t.”
“Naw. I’m way below weight. ‘Preciate the information all the same.”
“No problem.”
The irritation that Josh felt, knowing he’d have to pull over, made him realize just how eager he was to get home. There was a fine if you didn’t stop to be weighed when a station was open, and even though it would be a detour costing him only about five minutes, and that was supposing there was a line, it still rankled. He sighed and turned the local radio station back up.
“You can call us crazy, you can call us bananas, you can call us anything you like. But we’re still offering two, yes, two whole years to pay on our best ever selection of pine kitchen and dining room furniture, right here at Sit an’ Eat, Western Avenue, Knoxville. Okay. You’re right. We’ve lost it. We’re insane.”
With six rolls of aluminium sheet in the back, Jezebel was topping out at sixty-eight thousand pounds, a good twelve thousand pounds short of the legal limit. This was a cheapskate job. Since there were at least a dozen rigs all moving the same consignment, he was nowhere near fully loaded and he wasn’t getting the rate even if he had been. But like the lady said, it was going home to Pittsburgh. And being light meant a straight run through the chicken house.
He ticked over in line behind a shiny reefer and avoided looking at his own image in the reflective doors by fumbling around on the dash tidying things up. The light hanging from a wire above the weigh station office turned green and the reefer moved up. Josh pushed the gear stick and followed.
The reefer crawled over the metal plate sunk in the asphalt and as it pulled away the light stayed green. Josh was next. Jezebel inched forward onto the plate and the light went red. The guy in the booth pointed to the holding area and used the loudspeaker.
“Pull over to the right, Peterbilt. To the right, please.”
Josh held his arms out to the guy. “What, for chrissakes?”
The guy pointed again. Josh sighed, and pulled into the big lot behind the booth. He shut her down with an exhalation of breath that almost matched Jezebel’s brake hiss.
This was now more than an irritating delay. It was serious. If you weren’t overweight, then they wanted to look at something else. Through the window of the office, a state trooper was now visible, putting his hat on and gesturing towards the truck with a clipboard. The guy he was talking to was gesturing too, almost with a shrug, but even watching them closely, Josh couldn’t interpret the body language of their conversation.
He pulled out his black folder with a frown, already dreading having to discuss the hell of the last few days, and plucked at the rubber bands in irritation.
The truck shuddered. Josh knew that vibration as well as he knew the beat of his own pulse. It was the movement that every trucker knew and automatically registered even in his sleep. It was the shudder a vehicle’s suspension made when someone was climbing on or off. Josh glanced quickly at the mirrors, saw nothing, then opened the door and stepped down. He walked cautiously down the length of the trailer, scanning the top for any signs of movement, and, moving like a man expecting attack, made a complete circuit of the rig.
There was nothing.
Josh shook his head, exasperated that his nerves were on such fine tuning that a gust of wind could have made him believe Jezebel’s security had been broached. Sighing, he reached up into the cab and pulled out his folder. Josh waited at the door of the truck for a few moments, breathing in the fumes from the long line of trucks, watching jealously as they inched unchallenged over the scales and headed back onto the interstate. It took the men three or four minutes to emerge from the booth, but when they did, the state bear and his sidekick were still deep in conversation. Josh greeted them, a hand on his hip.
“What’s the problem? I weighed at the factory. She’s only hauling sixty-eight thou.”
The bear stood with his legs apart and echoed Josh’s posture. “Want to know what we got?”
“Let’s have it.”
The two men looked at each other, and Josh saw something in the policeman’s eyes. The same something that had been in the waitress’s eyes at the motel. The trooper looked away quickly and nodded for the smaller man to speak, like a proud father urging his son to recite a poem.
“We make it five hundred and fifty thousand pounds.”
Josh stared at him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. Josh laughed mirthlessly, and the man gave another apologetic shrug. The silent discussion witnessed through the glass now made more sense.
“We all know that’s impossible.”
“We sure do. Them scales only measure to a hundred and fifty.”
“So?”
The trooper spoke again, his eyes roaming over Jezebel. Anywhere but Josh’s face. “So while we call for Mulder and Scully, maybe we better take a look anyhow.”
Josh shook his head in disbelief. “How in God’s name you think anythin’ on wheels could carry half a million pounds of weight?”
“I know it can’t. Scales must’ve gone apeshit, but I’d like to see if anything you got in there helped them go that way, before we weigh you again.”
Josh blew out of pursed lips, shook his head a couple more times, put his folder down on the running board and went to open her up. He found the trailer keys on a ring already barnacled with dozens of others and snapped open the padlock.
“What you hauling here?” The trooper talked to Josh’s back while he unbolted the doors.
“Aluminium.”
“Going to?”
“Pittsburgh.”
“I guess if the door ain’t lyin’ you’d be Josh Spiller.”
“Yup.”
“Okay, Mr. Spiller. You want to crack some ID and paperwork for me while I step in here and have a look?”
The doors swung open and the three men looked inside. Six innocent rolls of aluminium sheeting sat in two rows in the airy space of the trailer.
Josh turned, but the trooper continued to stare at the aluminium, making no move to climb up and inside. The weigh station official was looking down at the clipboard that he had retrieved from the policeman, flicking over the top sheet as if deeply interested in what lay beneath. Josh scratched the back of his head.
“You need a hand to get up there?”
The trooper fumbled for a pen in his breast pocket. “Just get the paperwork.”
Josh searched the policeman’s face curiously, trying to decipher his agenda, then walked back to his door and fetched the folder, cursing as he picked it up.
This was bad luck. No one ever got pulled over witho
ut being given the full works. Now they would go over the paperwork, and every nut, bolt and axle of the truck like ants on syrup.
The men were still standing at the open doors when Josh walked back the full length of the trailer. He handed the folder to the policeman and waited to see what their plan was. The trooper flicked the black plastic cover open and fumbled hurriedly through the log sheets and delivery bills. It was obvious he wasn’t looking at them at all.
“Okay. This sure as hell can’t be overweight. We need you to drive over the scales again and then that’s it.”
Josh nodded, astonished, and took back the folder that was being pushed at him without eye contact. “Sure. I’ll just check the load’s still secure.”
“Drive it around the back of the office and rejoin the line.”
Both men walked away quickly, leaving Josh staring after them in astonishment. The moment they’d stopped him, he’d mentally written off a couple of hours, the time it would take to grill him. It had happened plenty in the past. The more eager you were to get back on the road, the slower they would search you.
But not today. Today, it seemed they wanted him gone.
“You see, Eddie? I ain’t imagining it,” he said under his breath to the men’s backs.
He watched them until they reentered the office, then laid the folder on the edge of the trailer floor and climbed up.
He felt it as soon as he stood up.
The heat.
Josh stayed still, balancing on the balls of his feet at the edge of the trailer opening. It felt like wafts of warmth from a radiator, and the cooler air that was coming in the open door was mixing with it, shifting it around his face. Josh swallowed and walked forward. The trailer creaked beneath his weight and he paused. The air was hotter now, and the ticking noises from the metal structure that broke the silence confirmed the fact that it too was registering the abnormal temperature. But there was nothing to see. Each roll of metal was three feet in diameter and stood only five feet high on their pallets, giving Josh a clear view of the acres of space between.
He moved forward again, licking his lips, every sense on alert, until he reached the first load. Slowly, he reached out a hand to touch it. It was warm. Josh withdrew his hand and scanned the rest of the trailer. The rolls of metal remained impassive. With a glance behind him he moved forward between the rolls until he was halfway up the aisle.
There, the heat was more intense, mixing with the diesel and metal to make a smell like the aftermath of a scrapyard fire.
Something dropped on Josh’s shoulder. A tiny shard of metal. Josh looked up at the ceiling and blinked.
Running from the middle of the trailer’s ceiling almost all the way to the back wall in two uneven sets of three were six long, ragged gashes. He stared up at them, his head tipped back on his shoulders, his mouth slightly open, and stepped back a pace. The gouges were each about a half inch wide, cut deep and violently into the thin metal ceiling, and whatever tool had made them must not only have been sharper than an axe, but would have required an inconceivable force to have left their trail so destructively. He took another step back and his heel came up against the corner of a wooden pallet, causing Josh to lose his balance. He put out a steadying hand behind him and touched another aluminium roll, warm as skin. Josh spun around and, putting his other hand up, felt the heat radiating from it.
He stared wildly about him, then stumbled towards the open door, panting, a profound and bubbling fear brewing in his guts.
Jumping from the trailer doors, he kicked his folder to the ground and slammed the doors shut. As he stood, gasping, trying to regain his breath and his sense, he remembered they could see him from the office.
He took a deep breath. In the seconds that followed Josh Spiller asked himself some difficult questions. The first was why he didn’t run to the office for help, to make them come and see his inexplicable find, to make them help him make sense of it. The second was why he somehow felt guilty, responsible for something he could neither identify nor articulate.
But the third and most pressing question was the worst. He shut his eyes against it as he bent down to pick up the folder, aware he was being watched from the booth, and trying to keep his movements casual after the suspicious haste of his exit from the trailer.
Walking back along to the cab, he kept his pace steady and his shaking hands safely at his chest.
But the question was still there.
Oh, there was an answer to a bit of it, but it didn’t help. The answer was that it had only recently departed Jezebel’s trailer.
But the question?
What the fuck was it?
22
“Son of a bitch.”
She leapt back and threw her arms out. The splash from the puddle had completely soaked the front of her sweatshirt, and she looked down with rage at the muddy mess. Then her green eyes flicked back up and followed the retreating Chevy Suburban that had unwittingly done the damage.
“Damned four-wheelers,” she muttered under her breath, letting a smile twitch at the sides of her mouth as she realized she was aping Josh.
Griffin held the base of her sweatshirt in two hands and wrung it out. Muddy brown water dripped onto the asphalt of the parking lot, and she sighed as she let the soggy material fall back against her body and walked across to the knapsack she had left leaning up against a fence.
Hitching wasn’t quite as easy as she’d planned. A ride from a trucker in the TA in Nashville had taken her only thirty miles until he kicked her out, and now she was all but stranded in this out-of-town mall parking lot in the ass end of nowhere. Not that she’d been sorry to get out of the truck. The guy had been nothing like Josh. He’d weighed in at about two hundred and eighty pounds and had smelled like a Salvation Army hostel. But worse: He’d eyeballed her as she climbed into the smelly cab, and only Mother Teresa might have believed his lascivious leer was well intentioned.
Thirty miles was plenty, both for Griffin to endure the smell of the dumb brute’s armpits and for the driver to realize his passenger wasn’t going to put out. They parted without a grunt of farewell.
And so she’d tried car drivers, but thus far without luck. She sat down heavily on her knapsack and rolled up the sleeves of her ruined sweatshirt. The sun was playing tricks, appearing intermittently from behind thick cloud to dry up rain that kept falling in violent sheets. It was steamy and growing hot, and Griffin was getting annoyed.
She looked down at the brooch, pinned at an angle to the thick material, and fingered it, making its dull metal glint in the sunshine. The driver might have been a cretin but he could read, and if he wanted to think she was called Elizabeth, then that was fine by her. It hadn’t occurred to her that it would be useful in that respect, but now it had become a tool of anonymity.
“You should be a whole lot prettier,” she said to the cheap grey metal and ran a well-manicured nail over its uneven surface.
The thought made her smile again, and her smile was still in place as the roar of a truck entering the lot made her look up. Of course she could just give in and make one call and someone would pick her up in a matter of hours. But that wasn’t how it was going to be. Not if she could help it. Another ride from a truck driver wasn’t an attractive prospect, but it was better than no ride at all. She kept her smile fixed, stood up, pulled on her knapsack and walked regally through the puddles towards the vehicle.
“Peterbilt? Unless you’re dead on the road you’d best get your ass out from behind them Schneider eggs, ‘cos there’s a bear sniffin’ around northbound at my tail ‘bout nine miles.”
Josh stared at the back of the passing reefer that had called him and out of habit lifted a hand to pick up the CB handset in response. He stopped midway through the action, unable to move.
Jezebel was sitting on the wrong side of some orange-and-white traffic barrels pulled over at an angle beside the road construction vehicles that, unlike her, had every right to be there. Josh didn’t care. He’d had
to stop. The thought of Griffin tearing at his logbook like an animal had been unsettling and horrible. The thought, after he’d driven away from the weigh station, that maybe she hadn’t, that maybe someone or something else had, was nothing more than the mouth of madness. But was he mad? The traffic roared past him on the left, and he watched it with glazed eyes. Everything looked the same as it always had. The cars hadn’t grown arms and legs, the trucks weren’t made of Jell-O and the highway was still a highway. John Pace’s voice spoke quietly in his head.
“I’m goin’ to say this again. Shock plays tricks on you.”
Neat tricks. Really neat. He played it all back. Bit by bit. Everything from the accident to this. And still Josh Spiller could not accept that he was losing his mind.
He knew what it was like to be crazy. He and Eddie—the stuff they’d done made it miraculous neither had ever done time, marking days with a penknife on the wall of some county jail. He stirred that one around for a second, grasping hopefully at it, until a helpful word surfaced. Acid. Yeah, acid. That might be it.
He’d heard somewhere that even one tab, taken years ago, meant that you could have a trip again at any time in your life. So they said.
But then, they always said crazy shit to try and keep kids off drugs. In his experience it had the opposite effect. You could tow a banner behind a plane saying “Hash makes your balls shrivel up and drop off,” and folks would likely just appreciate the reminder that they hadn’t had a blow for a few days. As for bad trips that recurred decades after the event, he certainly hadn’t ever met anyone it had happened to. But then again…
He leaned forward on the wheel and thought of all the dumb, crazy stuff he’d done in his bad days. Like driving his turn all the way from Denver to Salt Lake City after dropping a tap that Eddie had lovingly laid out on the dash for him with a Rolling Rock to wash it down. But even that hadn’t been particularly crazy. Eddie used to see all kinds of things on acid, shouting at Josh to watch out for bottomless holes in the road and insisting with great solemnity that if Josh tied a rope to the back of the trailer Eddie could fly by holding on. But he remembered being disappointed that all he’d felt was mildly disoriented and more acutely aware of colours and shapes. It was so unremarkable that he’d never tried it again, and stuck to the odd line of coke to help him stay awake when he could raise the cash. Which is why Josh thought the chances of that stupid, pointless little experience coming back ten years later to haunt him with this crazy shit was remote. But if not that, then what?