Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  He says he did laundry. He watched a fishing show. He listened to Clint Black.

  “Do you know what the life expectancy is of a roughneck after they retire? Did I tell you about that?”

  I tell him no, we didn’t cover that.

  “They give up,” he says. “Two old guys I worked with didn’t get their first retirement checks. Both just up and died before the first check came.”

  We sit in that thought for a moment.

  “I’m thinking: broken heart,” he says.

  He shrugs, continues thumping his fingers. I cut him off before he can say it doesn’t matter, that it’s all workable.

  “That’s not workable,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “That’s the whole deal. It’s not.”

  We say good-bye. He calls to make sure I get home safely, apologizing for worrying: “That’s just the way I roll.” Days go by, weeks, a few more hitches. He gets a Father’s Day present from his kids, who all put together to buy him a tepee for the backyard, eighteen foot around. Kind of a man cave, but not. As touched as he is by the gesture, he can’t help but wonder if they want him to move out there for real.

  He gets a big job offer, a chance to be a company man, just like Rod, except off on rigs all over the world. He’d be gone months at a time again. He tells Andy about it, wonders how, if he took the job, he would tell the rest of the guys. He tells Andy he feels like he’d be abandoning his children if he left the island. He tries to explain that kind of sorrow to his wife. “You said you wanted to improve yourself,” she says. “This is improving.” He calls Jason, invites him to shoot archery at a shooting range. From twenty yards away, Jason hits a fake moving bear. From the same distance, Jason then hits an arrow into the arrow on the still-fake moving bear. TooDogs tells him he’s sorry he hasn’t been more of a friend during all the divorce stuff. Jason says, “Quit it.” TooDogs tells Jason about the job offer and, like everybody else, Jason says, “Take it.”

  On the last day of his very last hitch on Oooguruk, TooDogs pulls Turtle aside. “I didn’t think much of you when you started,” he says to Turtle. “But you’re turning into a real good floor hand.” Turtle recoils, nearly weeps, then leans in for a hug. TooDogs hesitates, takes an exhausted breath, but finally opens his arms and cradles Turtle’s head. “This is a rig,” TooDogs says. “My God, this is just supposed to be a rig.”

  He does well as a company man, so well he gets quickly promoted, and promoted again, until finally the offer comes to go all the way to the top, to become a corporate superintendent, one of the smart guys on the other end of the phone, yelling at the idiot roughnecks to get their drill unstuck, move faster, stop wasting the company’s money. On his first day of work in management, July 13, 2010, TooDogs is fifty-two. He walks into his office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his heart abruptly stops beating, and he is gone.

  SPUTTER

  I-80, Exit 284

  Walcott, Iowa

  She had 44,000 pounds of warm beer in the trailer, and when she hit the brakes, she could feel the beer slosh forward. Wake up, girl. Wake up! (She had been dreaming, or pre-dreaming, imagining herself kidnapped, dead and famous and featured on Nancy Grace.) She slapped her cheek, shook her head. She turned to channel 19 on the CB, opened the window, smacked her other cheek.

  That was when she got the idea to go topless. Who knows where a fool notion like that even comes from? I have to do something to wake up. Manning the eighteen-wheeler with one arm, she wiggled out of her shirt. That’s what I’m talking about. She unhooked her bra. Whoo! Flung that bra into the back of the cab. Whoo, girl! Whoo! she said to herself, the hot air blowing on her breasts and the thrill of adventure refueling her. This was just north of Columbus, Ohio, on I-71 at around 3:00 a.m. on a blistering summer night, and Shannon Smith, aka Sputter, was back in business.

  She got another idea. She flicked a switch on the dash and, bang, on came the cab lights, exposing her soft brown body to the night. Hello, fellas! (Hey, they probably needed to wake up too.) She didn’t wave, didn’t even look in the direction of the passing trucks, but instead grinned smugly, a pose that definitely enhanced the overall effect. “Northbound naked chick!” they said to each other on channel 19. Stuff like that. “Nice rack, Air Ride!” one guy said as he passed. Oh, please. She did not think she had anything even approximating a nice rack. (So that was sweet.) She righted her posture, thrust her chest forward like a confident old hen, and she drove clear on up to Cleveland like that, two and a half hours away.

  “But I still listen to channel 19 even though I have the satellite now,” Sputter says to me after she gets finished telling the topless story, as if the point of the whole thing is to explain the radios on her dashboard, and not to take my imagination to all the places it has just taken me.

  “Well, I can’t believe you did that,” I say.

  “Oh, we help each other out all the time,” she says, as if keeping the guys awake were the other point. It is the middle of July, solidly hot, and she has her shiny black hair in ribbon curls on top of her head. “Girl, I can’t even express how happy I am you’re here,” she says. “Aren’t we having an adventure? I feel like we’re sisters already! Do you? Do you?” She has buttery-smooth skin, round, sturdy features, and the steering wheel is so large, she uses it like a shelf to rest her elbows on. She’s put a half million miles on this rig—an International 9400 Eagle, royal blue, with a 500-horsepower Cummins ISX engine, ten speeds on the floor, and an air-ride suspension system.

  She’s at home here, her body gently jiggling with the rhythm of the road. She tells me she started long-hauling at twenty-three, just as soon as she was old enough to get insured; it was her dream ever since she was a little girl watching her daddy, a heavy-machinery mechanic, who spent all his days under the hood. She would make a noise with her lips, a sputtering sound, and he would sing to the tunes she made up, and somewhere in that transaction Sputter, now thirty-five, got her nickname.

  “Well, I bet he’s proud of you now,” I say.

  She looks at me. “He didn’t want me driving a big old truck,” she says. “What kind of father wants his baby girl out driving a truck?”

  “Okay, but—”

  “Girl, just sit back and enjoy the scenery.”

  We are somewhere west of Chicago, coming off some exit, merging onto some highway; everything about the expansive Midwest thoroughfares—the diesel stops and fast-food joints and weigh stations—has collapsed into a collage and I have given up trying to keep track. We started our zigzaggy journey about five hours ago at an abandoned Kmart parking lot where Sputter keeps her truck near her home in west Cleveland, and we’re bound for Walcott, Iowa, and the Iowa 80, the world’s largest truck stop, where the thirty-first annual Walcott Truckers Jamboree starts in a few days. Along the way, we’ll drop off a load of factory-new farm tractor rims, pick up a box trailer full of feeding troughs, and another of beer—and haul whatever else Rob decides, based on the bid offerings on his computer back at the Landstar dispatch station in Kalida, Ohio.

  Sputter is excited about the jamboree. She wants to show me the very best of her world. She has told me legends of glamorous lights and tricked-out trucks too ornate to believe. “You will see some chrome!” She has a magnanimous way that invites the whole world into her inner circle, and like most people, I have tumbled easily in.

  To say that I’m glad I did would be a vast understatement. I almost didn’t make it. I almost canceled this trip. My mother has just died. She was eighty-six. She was ill. It was expected. “A beautiful death,” my mother would have said of it. My father held her. He was eighty-eight, ill, his heart literally breaking. My sisters and brother and I had been at this for months, and now it was my father’s turn to die. People said: “Oh, how beautiful, your parents dying in each other’s arms.” We said: “Not really.” He lasted ten days. Exhausted, spent,
we postponed his funeral a week while the extended family reassembled. I cut out of there, went to Cleveland. I knocked on the door at Sputter’s house, leaving all that behind.

  “Thank God for Wonder Hangers,” Sputter said, greeting me. We had been planning this meeting and this trip for months, and she was excited. “Do you want to see what these things have done for my closets?” she said, holding the hangers. She lives in a second-floor duplex that might have been spacious but it was too jammed with stuff to really tell. She seemed nervous, unsure of what to say. I have no other explanation for the tour of the closets. “The problem is Michael, my boyfriend,” she said. “He shops more than a woman. . . . Wait a minute, step over that. Wait a minute! See, all that’s his. All that’s his, and all this. Michael, he just loves to buy clothes. Look at this! Look at this. What is this? A hundred forty-two dollars’ worth of stuff in this bag. I bet he won’t even remember he has it. He wears a police uniform every day, so I really don’t see the need. He’s an officer in the housing authority, like the projects? Cuyahoga. He’s not scared there. I’m scared for him. But I love to hear the stories. Because you wouldn’t believe what people call the police for. But I’m nosy that way.

  “Now we’ll move on to the other bedroom. Close that door. Again, most of this is his stuff. Girl, please. All this! This is his stuff. That’s his stuff. Clothes baskets. I bought him those storage things for more room.”

  It was a turbulent tour of her apartment, her life, all of it coming at me tsunami-style. “Michael wants a wedding at the beach,” she said. “Can you believe that? I want it at a haunted house. Because I love Halloween. We’re at a standoff. I’m, like, the beach? I’m not this beach girl dressed in white, all the people dressed in white. I think I’m more tomboyish than this girly girl he thought he met. I don’t know where he got that. Beats me. Beats me.” The apartment was hot, and she carried a hanky and continually dabbed her forehead and her neck.

  “Look at this,” she said, sorting through her dresser. “I get cards from him. ‘For the one I love.’ I’ll send him to the drugstore to buy me some medicine, like some Alka-Seltzer or something, and he comes back with stuff like this. Stuff like this. It’s a rose, a singing rose. Singing cards. You know. He just sees stuff and buys it. I asked him before, ‘Why do you do that?’ He said because growing up he couldn’t afford it. Yeah, but be a little bit more sensible now, I mean, come on.

  “Now you have to meet my cats,” she said, leading me to the living room, where a woman was sitting watching Wheel of Fortune on TV. “This is Elaine,” Sputter said. “My sister.”

  “Hi,” Elaine said.

  “Okay, here’s Hurt,” Sputter said, picking up the tabby from the couch. “He was a stray. He was in a cat fight. When he would try to walk forward, his hind would raise up and he would go backwards. I took him to the vet, they amputated his tail. He had a big hole in his side. But he healed!

  “My other friend, a Siamese cat, lives in the attic. His name is Ghost. Him and Hurt don’t get along, so I have to keep them separate.”

  Elaine sat watching. She was backlit. She held the remote up and softened the volume on the TV. “So you’re going to ride with Sputter?” she said, and I smiled and nodded.

  “Have you ever done it?” I asked her.

  “Ride in her truck?” Elaine said, waving the very notion away from her face. “My favorite truck is a Peterbilt.”

  “Oh, so you’re a truck driver too?” I asked.

  “No, no, not me,” Elaine said. “I just love Peterbilts. I collect them. And even my e-mail address is Peterbiltforyou.”

  “Peterbilts are classy,” Sputter said, sitting down with her cat on the couch and pulling my hand to take a seat next to her. “But not even in my top three. They’re real heavy-duty trucks, don’t get me wrong. They pull real good.”

  “Best truck on the road,” Elaine said. “I just always loved Peterbilts, even as a little kid.”

  I felt I should offer something, but I never knew people even had favorite trucks.

  “Elaine works with the elderly,” Sputter said, and then she put her face up to Hurt and began her good-byes in hushed tones.

  “The elderly?” I asked.

  “Alzheimer’s, wheelchairs, you know, the elderly,” Elaine said. “Sometimes eight hours, sometimes sixteen.” She was taller than Sputter, I could tell that, and she had a calm demeanor. “It makes for a long day, especially when the moon is full,” she said. My impulse was to say, “Hey, we have a lot in common!” but then I thought no, we don’t; my parents were dead, so I was no longer in that line of work. Elaine told me about a dying old lady whose hair she washed, and she told me about a crazy old man she danced with every day, and when I asked her if she liked her job, she said she did.

  “Girl, you’re covered in cat hair,” Sputter said to me, and she came at me with a lint roller. She rolled my arms and my legs and my back until she was satisfied that all signs of Hurt and Ghost were off me, which I did pause to think was funny, if not disturbingly convenient, and then we all went outside and got in Elaine’s big Ford. Elaine drove us to the Kmart lot and she told Sputter she owed her one for the favor, and that was how our day began.

  —

  THE HORIZON PULLS us farther west, and we listen to country music, and Sputter alternates between singing along and telling me stories and complaining about Michael.

  The sky is without clouds, flat cerulean blue, and the Toyota passing in the left lane has four bikes attached to a rack, one with pink streamers flapping helplessly. When you are in a long-haul truck, you are in a zone above, a shared space high above the rhythms of vacation, commuting, visiting. When you are in a long-haul truck, you are in a moving neighborhood above all that, and having nothing to do with it.

  There are precious few women truckers out here, a fact Sputter finds surprisingly little to say about. She thinks of her fellow truckers as brothers. Good guys. Ornery. Brothers to tease, but also to protect—everybody united in the massive, complex call to haul America’s stuff. Cookies, soup, juice, carpet, umbrellas. She tells me about some of the stuff she’s hauled, a list as random as it is thought-provoking. A trailer full of Clorox bleach, ketchup and mustard packets, mail, oxygen tanks, caskets, fireworks, plastic eating utensils (“that come in the pack with the napkin, salt, and pepper”), tissue, paper towels, cardboard, huge rolls of paper, books, sales inserts for newspapers, bundles of shredded paper and aluminum cans, paint, cat litter, dog food, toys, GARBAGE (“Yes, actual stinky trash”), brand-new garbage cans, TVs, DVDs, camcorders, Whirlpool products, plant pots, military equipment (“ammunition, tank parts, and wooden crates”), glass freezer coolers, oil, batteries, hydrochloric acid, white powder calcium, liquid chemical solvents and solutions, aluminum ingots, powder coating, fifty-gallon drums (“empty and full of car-wash liquid”), totes (also empty and full), cleaning products, plastic beads that are melted down to make bottles, all kinds of auto parts (crankshafts, bumpers, rims, engines for big trucks and the motor for the Ford Mustang, doors, gas tanks, windows). “In 2009, I had the pleasure of hauling the body for the 2012 Ford Explorer to be crash-tested. So I got a sneak peek.”

  It’s rare to sit and contemplate cargo, to say nothing of the people hauling it. Stupid trucks. Why are there always so many trucks? Can’t somebody do something about all the goddamn trucks? We travel on turnpikes in sedans and minivans, trying to ignore the monstrous rigs with which we are forced to share the road. That there are people up inside those rigs, big and little lives moving about, rarely occurs to most of us, or if it does, we’d just as soon they all go away. Never mind that we are dependent on these people, 3.5 million truckers delivering 69 percent of the stuff we buy—$670 billion worth of stuff. We know the stench of diesel fumes, the splash on our windshields that only an eighteen-wheeler can throw at us, and somewhere in the periphery we see shadows of dudes at truck stops hunc
hed over coffee and pancakes and eggs. We know, but we don’t know at all. Our grocery stores are stocked fresh every day, Home Depot has all the latest colors of paint, and Amazon ships two-day, or one. How all this stuff moves about the landscape, gets from here to there to us, is not our concern any more than how the furnace in the basement blows heat into our bedrooms. Except that furnaces don’t have lives. There is no befriending a furnace.

  “Now don’t laugh,” Sputter turns to me and says. “But I’m kind of proud of the way I’m taking care of these stupid tractor rims we’re hauling.” She says it’s hard to explain. She says responsibility has always scared her, seriously, almost like a phobia. “Other than that part of it, I think I would make a great mom.”

  We chew on that one a while.

  “I wish Michael was more like my father,” she says, then. “My father, like me, is a laborer. Change the oil? I do it myself. Not Michael.”

  “I suppose everybody has different skills,” I say. I have no idea why I’m defending Michael.

  “How does laziness even form in a person?” she says. “How? That’s what I can’t get a grasp on.”

  We think on that one too, flip our visors down almost in unison when the sun shoots us blind. We pass a billboard for McDonald’s apple pie and discuss its merits.

  “One time I hauled a whole truckload of cherry pie filling to New Jersey,” she says. “Oh, man, I smelled cherry the whole way there. That was a treat. Then I got stuck in New Jersey. That was the worst.” With so much of the manufacturing happening in the Midwest, there’s way more stuff going toward the coasts than coming out of them. If Sputter had it her way, and usually she does, she’d just stay in the Midwest, going from plant to plant to plant. “Like now I’m taking these tractor rims, and then another day I’ll be picking up huge tires, and then maybe a whole trailerload of front grilles. Same thing with car parts. One day steering wheels and then the next fenders. It’s like everything is in bits and pieces all over the country and I’m hauling it so people can put it together. It makes me feel like I’m part of something.”