by William Lobb
The guy with the pills walked in and he told Frankie the price. Frankie asked for Seconal; he said he had Quaaludes. Frankie said he’d take them. The deal was done and Frankie was on his way south again, finally. He rolled into Atlanta late; he’d pick up the load when the terminal opened at 6:00 a.m. Frankie took a couple of the Quaaludes, sat back in his sleeper with his vodka and the demon and drank, hoping to pass out. He hated Quaaludes. They made him constantly horny; no fun sitting in the sleeper of the tractor alone. He thought about finding a strip club and taking care of this problem, but he had not been feeling quite right lately, sexually. He actually realized he’d rather be fucked up, than fuck. Much less complex and a lot less work, but a part of him knew a change was happening in him, a change he didn’t like.
There was a time when his legendary appetite for booze and pills was a source of amazement and pride, and he could always get it done with the girls, always able to get up the next morning and take on the day. That seemed to be fading now; the need to be numb on pills and drunk seemed to be taking over. He looked at the passenger seat. The demon smiled back, telling him to drink, relax. It’s all good. Drink.
Frankie got angry. “I’m sick of you. I’m sick of you always sitting there with that ugly, stupid smile. Always telling me what to do, always fucking me up; get the fuck away from me. Ten years you’ve been on my ass.” With that, Frankie lunged at the empty passenger seat, slamming himself into the door. Head down by the floor, feet up on the seat back. The demon was on top of him, pummeling him, pounding him with hard, fast body shots. Frankie felt every blow. He tried to pull himself back up, but the demon pushed him back down.
“Stay down, bitch,” he growled and hissed through his gray teeth. Frankie could smell and feel the stench of his breath on his face. “You are my bitch; I own your pathetic ass. You’ll do as I say, when I say, bitch.” Frankie felt the demon’s pounding blows over his entire body; it felt like bones were breaking. He went into a fetal curl down there in the wheel well.
Once again, he submitted. Once again, a lesson was learned. Once again, he knew who the boss was. He passed out, an upside-down mess in the wheel well, his face on floor board.
Chapter Twenty-eight:
The Road To
New Orleans
He heard a banging on the door on the other side of the truck. It was morning, not sure of the time. Frankie tried to extract his twisted body from that impossible position. He popped open the passenger side door and almost fell out of the truck, caught himself, managed to get into a semi-standing position inside the cab, crawled across the “doghouse” that covered the engine, slid himself down into the driver’s seat, pushed the button to lower the window, stuck his head out, and said, “What’s up?”
A very unattractive woman, most of her teeth missing or blackening, said, “Sweetie, do you want to come out for a blowjob?”
Frankie actually started to laugh. He tried to calculate, at that moment, exactly where he was in his life. Getting beaten down by some demon he used to think imaginary, now not sure of that at all, and toothless, terrifying hookers waking him up for sex. This is not at all the life that he had planned. Those days skipping school with Sammy and hiding out in the cemetery, smoking weed, scheming how they’d change this world. None of this at all came to mind in those plans they made.
He had to start the tractor to build up air pressure to roll the windows back up. As he sat there somewhat humiliated, the reality just started to sink into him hard and fast. How did he get from the guy who lived at Turf’s, who could party like a rock star with anyone and drink anyone under the table, and always had the pretty girls, become this guy sitting in a truck terminal somewhere in the Deep South hallucinating about demons and pondering whether he would or would not take that hooker her up on her offer?
It seemed to Frankie that in a very short time, his fortunes had seriously changed and his options had diminished. He found himself on a downhill slide without having any idea how to stop it or how to save himself. Earlier this summer, his biggest concern was keeping himself out of jail. Now, as the summer segued into autumn, he felt that sanity was slowly slipping away and he had absolutely no idea how he could salvage what little he seemed to have left.
He sat there, elbows on the steering wheel, palms on his temples, and pondered for a few more moments. Was it the drugs? Was it the booze? Was it the guilt? Was it the stones and the memories of those he’s killed and the ghosts he’s taking responsibility for? Was all this weight just now slowly starting to cause Frankie’s structure to crumble? He remembered back to the summer when they were running too much, too long, too hard; no sleep, living on whites. He remembered those moments of fleeting sanity, but he always could seem to get it back. It didn’t take that much—lay off the booze for a couple of days and get some sleep. This was different, this was much more deeply concerning and different, a lot different. For the first time, as he sat in his tractor in a warehouse terminal somewhere in Atlanta, Georgia, Frankie faced the reality that he may be losing his sanity.
He thought back to the summer, or summers, past and he realized now how precious and evanescent sanity is. It wasn’t that long ago that thoughts like this would not even cross his mind, and now they were there all of the time. He saw it slowly, or maybe not-so-slowly, running from him like a stream. It started as a small trickle, but as the days passed, it became a rushing torrent. What? He wondered, was this the end game? What happened once our sanity was gone? Would he become one with the demon, or would he hop down and go with the toothless hag? Fall away into that other world, where the lines and the rules were blurred into nonexistence, and where caring at all finally ceases and our numbness is complete. There, we fall forever, until the moment our crushed and bloodied spirit leaves and we become the ghost we were always destined to be.
He thought of his friend Joe, who took too much acid, way too much acid. One day, the radio in his head wouldn’t shut off and he tried to carve it out of his skull with a table fork. Frankie went to visit him once in the home. Some sort of vegetable, Joe looked peaceful, but Frankie looked deep into his eyes and he knew that radio was still playing. Frankie wanted to kill his friend, just to help him make the music stop.
Frankie could feel the end now. He could feel it with every drink, with every violent wrenching and vomiting morning. He could hear it and see it through the terrors of the night, where the demon, now dominant and fully in control, beat him down a little further, slowly beating him down until his collapse is complete. Frankie reached into the sleeper, grabbed the bottle of white crosses and the vodka bottle, shoved the pills in his mouth, and took a long shot off the bottle. It was time to get the day under way, try to silence the voices and the demon long enough to get all of them, the entire traveling circus, to Mobile and then onto New Orleans.
He went into the men’s room at the terminal and took a sponge bath in the sink, brushed his teeth, and used a lot of mouthwash. He looked pretty sick, ashen, skinnier than the last time he looked. There was a constant burning pain in his right side. Frankie told himself it was probably a cartilage tear from one of his many broken ribs. He looked in the mirror and his eyes looked like the whites were yellowing. Nothing that a pair of sunglasses wouldn’t cure.
He cleaned up the best he could, then walked out and sat down at a small table just outside the men’s room and drank some coffee, black, hoping he could make his breath and sweat smell a little less like alcohol. He had been told recently he was starting to really stink of alcohol. Frankie had an uncle die of cirrhosis. It was not a pretty death. Thoughts and memories of that were starting to creep into his mind daily. Just more stones, is all he would tell himself. It was a Sunday morning, and on the radio by the coffee pot a church service played. He sat there listening to old school southern Baptist radio. Frankie actually sat there in silence, trying to grasp what was happening, sincerely trying to connect to the Gawd and Jeeeeesusss that the preacher talk
ed about. He thought about the drug dealer from the other day, at the truck stop. He thought about John Quarry. He thought about the toothless hooker. Everybody is selling something. For today, for right now, at this moment, Frankie wasn’t buying any of it, not today anyway.
He walked into the office and explained who he was. He had a load scheduled for Montgomery and Mobile. A pretty young girl was there to help him. He kept himself intentionally as far from her as he could, trying to make sure she didn’t smell him. He was becoming very sensitive to the way he seemed to smell constantly like alcohol. She took about fifteen minutes to verify who he was and that the load was ready. She handed him the paperwork, pointed into the yard the direction to go to find the trailer and its number and said, “Have a nice trip.” Frankie thought it would be a much nicer trip if she was in the sleeper, but that was not to be.
He walked out into the yard and up into his still-idling tractor and drove over to the trailer, hooked up and pulled out of the yard, and headed westbound and southbound.
Chapter Twenty-nine:
The Truth
Frankie was having a difficult time driving. He’d find himself moving down the road and suddenly he’d feel a panic, an attack out of nowhere. He would break out in a sweat and feel like he was about to pass out. He would start to hear voices again. He’d look over and see the demon smiling at him and he would start shaking, almost uncontrollably. It was a battle to just stay conscious, all this while pulling 80,000 pounds of equipment and freight down the road. He was trying hard to just take white crosses and not drink too much. He only wanted to get to New Orleans. That was all he was concerned with.
He had to drop the partial load in Montgomery and a couple of hours later drop the trailer in Mobile and then deadhead into Louisiana and finally New Orleans. I think somewhere in his mind he began to imagine that getting to New Orleans was going to be some panacea. Getting there would be someplace where he can relax and rest and heal. As he drove through Alabama, he just tried to keep himself medicated with beer and white crosses, just to stay awake and not be drunk or drugged and somehow get through the next six or eight hours.
The day remained uneventful, except for the three or four incidences of terrifying panic attacks. In the midst of an attack, he felt like he was dying. Darkness seemed to surround him, coming from the corners of his eyes until he was nearly blind. It was not unlike falling off a cliff into darkness. He would grip the steering wheel so hard and tight he’d feel it could break in his hands, just trying to hang on. Sometimes an attack would pass without shaking. Other times, he felt he was about to have a seizure. Each time, he tightly held on and did not pass out. Possibly, passing out would be the best thing for him—just pass out and lose control of the truck, die in a fiery crash and call it a day. He started to think of everything he missed, how badly he wanted to get back to his life.
The truck rolled into Montgomery; he backed up to the dock and was unloaded in about half an hour. Frankie sat in the cab, smoked a few cigarettes and a joint, and drank a beer. A knock on the door to sign a few papers, and then he was off and headed south.
He’d been running now for months. Each day, Frankie seemed to get a little sicker and farther from home. He thought about Eddie’s death and the murder of John Quarry. What he did frightened him, not because it wasn’t justified; it was. It frightened him because it had been quite easy and he felt no remorse. No remorse, just this drowning weight. The haunting voices did not come from guilt, not at all. They came from another place, deep in his weak and broken spirit that called to him and said, “Now you own this man’s sins. Now you own his crimes. You robbed him of his life. Now take the crimes and lies and broken promises and make them your own.”
The demon smiled, “You have no soul. You are an empty vessel that collects pain and manufactured sin and sadness. That’s your only purpose and all I have to do is watch and wait, eventually it will kill you. All I have to do is wait.”
Strangely, for a reason he could not understand either, Frankie smiled with the demon, as if this promise of death, from the one whose promises are always tainted and twisted lies, was a comfort. A light at the end of this black and now hopeless tunnel, a promise of an ending, that was the only comfort these days for Frankie, an ending. It could be cold, or dirty, or bloody, or in flames; any ending would do. Somehow, all this had to end and end soon.
He missed the truth of his friends, of home. He missed the freedom of the truth, of never having to remember who he claimed to be, or where he’d been, or why. The truth of his friends was born in a war to be free, to live just outside the law, to live and function just below the horizon. That’s where the truth lives, down in the grit and grime, down under the light of day, down where the gears are turned. Not the pristine and jaded and always smiling and twisted truth of the preachers or the old ladies with arthritic knuckles banging on old pianos; that was someone else’s truth. For the truth to survive, it has to get dirty. It needs some grease under its fingernails. We have to take it out and work it. Frankie was always looking for the working truth, the honor of a handshake, the retribution of the broken promise.
There was no truth in Eddie’s death or in Sammy’s or in all the deaths by Katrina’s hands. Those deaths were lies. There was a truth in the death of John Quarry. It was settling a score with the universe, of making something wrong right again. Jones saw this. Jones knew the truth. Frankie missed his friends like Jones who understood the truth and how it worked.
Now he rode alone with the ultimate liar. One day, he asked himself how he could doubt God but accept the demon. The answer was easy to Frankie: he could see the demon. It did not require faith or a preacher or some complex belief system, based on old stories told over and over by old men. The demon was real. Frankie had never had any sense of God. That was Frankie’s ultimate truth; this was the truth he lived and worked. His God was his demon. That was all he’d ever known. When the old lady said he’d been broken as a boy, she was talking about the day he met the demon.
Frankie had no faith in anything he could not see. He could see the demon. He could smell the demon. One day, soon after his father died, he stood in an empty field and screamed at the sky in anger and then he waited for an answer. He heard nothing but the breeze and the distant noises of the city. If there was a God, he was silent and uncaring and cold, kind of fitting for the world as Frankie knew it. He only knew the truth as he saw it and all he could see was the demon.
Now, it seemed that with each passing hour, he and the demon were coming closer to becoming one and the same. That was the truth he’d always known. Deep in his heart, in the cold, lifeless vacuum of his spirit, Frankie could only connect to the wicked and darkness.
He dropped the trailer in Mobile, got his paperwork in order, promptly lost it in the mess of the tractor, and turning down Route 10, finally headed to New Orleans.
Chapter Thirty:
New Orleans
As he drove on, he thought about the boss and the Mechanic and the Engineer. He never did say goodbye to Earl—brave guy, a true badass. Frankie had the envelope for the boss’s friend in New Orleans and an address; that was all he knew. He’d never been to the Big Easy. He had no idea what to expect.
Rolling into New Orleans was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He expected this small city he’d seen in pictures during Mardi Gras. What he was presented with instead was a big city, full of tall buildings and parks. It looked like any other big American city. Frankie pulled up to a hotel and found a place to park the tractor, then he went inside to get a room and find out about a rental car. The desk clerk was a beautiful Cajun girl. She explained to him that the address he was looking for and the city he expected to find were located in the French Quarter. That he’d have no need for a car. A bus or trolley was all he needed. He’d understand when he got down there. He signed for his room and headed to the bar.
Frankie wanted to get severely drunk and pass o
ut for a while. It had been many months since he’d been in a bar. He looked like Hell and smelled worse. He’d grab a couple of maintenance drinks and then go get cleaned up. That was the plan, anyway. It was a nice hotel and had about six floors, clean, new and modern. The bar was clean and white and pretty and filled with clean, white, pretty people. Frankie knew he was not in his element. He liked dark, smoky, dangerous bars. Guys planning crimes, girls doing business, cheap booze served quickly. He needed to get to the real New Orleans and out of this whitewashed nightmare.
Frankie went to his room and took a shower and put some clean denim on. He realized he might need to change his style. It was hot in New Orleans. He walked out of the front door, got a ride to the French Quarter and never went back to the hotel. When he hopped off the last step of the streetcar, Frankie felt for a moment that he had found his new home. There was a vibe to New Orleans like no other city he’d ever seen. Everything was alive and bright. For a moment, he forgot he was tortured and sick. He had the envelope for the woman, the boss’s friend, tucked deep inside his pants pocket. He wanted to go there first, but there was so much to see and do.