“This one’s ours,” she says. The truck goes by with so much force it almost knocks us over. A long time passes before a green Dodge Ram stops, brand-new, one of those big ten-cylinder diesels that short guys like to drive. We throw our stuff in the back. He’s a feed salesman from Indio, California, driving to a five-day convention in Kansas. It takes me an hour of failed attempts at conversation to get that much out of him. By Mono Lake, I’m completely drained. Hours and hours of sagebrush later, punctuated by billboards advertising slot machines at the next exit, he stops for a bathroom break at Boomtown, Nevada, a casino on Interstate 80.
“You girls wait right here,” the feed salesman says. He locks up the truck, hikes up his pants, and heads into Boomtown. As soon as he’s out of sight, I grab Grimshaw’s suitcase out of the back and throw my backpack at her.
“We have to get away from him,” I hiss.
“Why? He says he’s driving to Kansas. That’s, like, halfway home.”
“But he was so boring,” I groan.
“You find something better, fine,” she says. “I’m not standing out there on that highway again.”
“Okay,” I say, backing away from her. “Take our stuff, go in there, and gamble or something. Just don’t get back in that pickup.” She rolls her eyes, picks up our stuff, and walks away.
A warm wind blows cigarette butts and dead leaves across the parking lot. Tractor-trailer trucks are lined up, snoring like a herd of sleeping buffalo. I head into the thick of them. I find a short, potbellied man standing next to a tank truck, tamping tobacco into a pipe. The name embroidered on the patch on his shirt in red thread is Bob.
“And what can I do for you, missy?” he says when he sees me. He’s completely bald, with bushy brown eyebrows, mustache, and tufts on his earlobes.
“Bob, I’m headed east,” I say breathlessly. “With my friend. And we need a ride. But the thing is, we want to, you know, be able to have a decent conversation.”
“You want a talker.”
“Yes.”
Bob squints at me, nods sagely, lights a match, squints at the horizon, and takes the first pull on his pipe. “I think I got a candidate. Can you wait?”
“Sure. I can wait.” Bob climbs the ladder up into his truck. Soon, a voice comes through the speakerphone, and an exchange of code words gives way to an uninterrupted monologue, punctuated by Bob’s laughter. Whoever Bob is talking to goes on and on and has a twang in his voice like I’ve never heard. He sounds more enthusiastic about life than you would expect a trucker to be, then they sign off.
“Yup,” Bob says after a while, looking down at me through his open window. “Bo’s a talker.”
“He says he should be here in forty minutes or so,” he informs me. “An older black Kenworth with a new flame job comes in, that’ll be him. He’ll wake me up when he gets here.” Bob disappears into the recesses of his cab. I lean against the front bumper of Bob’s truck and watch the girders of a high-tension line turn pink in the sunset, count the pigeons on the wires, and listen to the blues come crackling out of Bob’s open windows. Night falls, trucks pull in and out of Boomtown, the evening star appears, fat and yellow, next to a fingernail of a moon, and then more stars come out, until the parking lot lights blink on and wash them out. Old people get off tour buses and file slowly into Boomtown, pushing walkers. Old people come out of Boomtown and get back on the buses.
I think about the guy whose voice I heard and wonder what he looks like. It seems like a lot more than forty minutes ago since I heard his voice. It occurs to me that Bo the Talker might not get here at all, and if he doesn’t, I’m going to have to look for another ride. I feel a stab of disappointment about that, more than you would expect I would feel about someone I’ve never met before. I don’t even know what direction he was coming from. I look as far as I can see to the west, where the daylight lingers in a purple glow in the sky. For a long minute, the highway is empty and silent. A pair of headlights comes over the horizon. I follow them with my eyes until they turn into a truck, which slows down and pulls into the Boomtown parking lot. It’s a black Kenworth with an extensive orange and yellow flame job licking out from the wheel wells. It squeals around the entire perimeter of the parking lot at Boomtown before slowing down and then coming to a full stop in front of Bob’s tank truck. The door opens, and a young guy swings down. He has long hair that goes past his shoulders. His green ball cap has a patch that reads IF IT AIN’T A CAT IT’S A DOG. He takes it off. He wears a flowered shirt, like the pattern of old-fashioned wallpaper. It’s untucked on one side and unbuttoned enough to reveal a medallion against his chest, a little carving that looks like a cow horn. He’s vain about his hair and scrunches it back up where the ball cap flattened it. If I had his hair, I’d be vain about it, too. I think it might be Bo the Talker.
We stare at each other for a minute. He shifts his weight to the other foot and hooks a thumb over his belt.
“This Bob’s truck?” he asks me.
I recognize the banjo twang, but it’s slower than when I first heard it on Bob’s radio. It is Bo the Talker. It has to be. “Yes. He wants you to wake him up.”
“You the one going—east, was it? ’Cause I’m going as far as Iowa.”
“Sort of. But I have to go get my friend.” I back away. “We’ll be right back.”
Boomtown smells like a nursing home. It has that thickness in the air that comes from trying to hide what a place really smells like. I walk by acres of slot machines, almost deserted except for a couple of old people feeding in quarters. I find Grimshaw by the card tables, standing with her arms crossed, staring intently at a game of blackjack.
“I could work in a place like this,” she says when I come up to her. “I’d consider a career change.”
I tug on her sleeve. “Come on.”
“Not that I regret, you know, what I did. Experience is always a good thing.”
“I got us a ride, a good one. Quick.” I shoulder my pack, grab her suitcase with one hand and her with the other, and drag her through Boomtown again and out to the parking lot. When I see the Kenworth, I stop. Bo is standing in the headlights of his truck, next to the tank truck, talking to Bob.
“That’s him,” I whisper. I study her face for her reaction to him. “The tall one. Bo. What do you think?”
She whistles softly through her teeth. “Nice work, Serena. You found a young one. Very impressive. Any teeth?”
“Teeth?”
She shrugs. “Sometimes they go.”
“He’s says he’s going to Iowa.”
She keeps nodding and assessing. “I can see that I taught you well,” she says.
“I got him on my first try.”
“Don’t tell him how far we’re going, though,” she whispers. “In case he’s a psycho.”
I take her arm, but she stays put. She’s studying Bo. “He looks like a nice guy,” she says. “I like the way he stands. You can tell a lot about a guy from the way he stands. Do you like him?”
“I just met him. Come on.”
She still doesn’t move. “Do you think he’s smart enough for you?”
“Grimshaw! He’s just a trucker. But I think he’s smarter than he looks.” I remember the long monologue I heard on the radio. “He has a lot of interests.”
She nods. “Iowa’s not that far away.”
“It isn’t?”
“Tell him—” She speaks slowly. “Tell him if he brings us all the way home, you’ll give him the best kiss he’s ever gotten in his life.”
“Oh, come on. Do you even think that’ll work?”
She just smiles that Mona Lisa smile of hers, picks up her suitcase, and walks toward them.
“Grimshaw!” I hurry after her. “Don’t you try it, okay? Let me.”
Once we get going, Grimshaw takes the passenger seat, gets nail polish remover and cotton balls out of her suitcase, and starts doing her nails. Boomtown has cheered her up. Maybe I’ll never have to tell her about Mike. Maybe
she’ll just forget him. I sit on the hump in the middle. As advertised, Bo’s a talker. When he first got out of the Marine Corps, oh, about a year and a half ago now, he worked for a big company and had a regular route, and he couldn’t stand that, going the same place over and over again. He’s an independent owner-operator now and can go where he wants, more or less. He’s hauling rolls of synthetic rubber to a gasket factory in Iowa. He talks about gaskets for a long time, that same kind of flood-burst of words I first heard on Bob’s radio, as he stares straight ahead of him at the white dotted line in his headlights. Gaskets are everywhere, it turns out, places you’d never expect—engines, tanks of all kinds—and made out of just about every kind of material you can imagine. Without gaskets, life would be a leaky, god-awful mess.
Maybe the feed salesman wouldn’t have been so bad, I think. I’m not sure this guy notices that anyone else is in the truck with him. I steal a glance at Grimshaw, to see what she thinks of our gasket lesson. Her feet are braced against the dashboard, and by the light of the open glove box she is painting her fingernails blue. When she’s done, she cracks the window and holds her hand up in the breeze. We watch a billboard go by, advertising slot machines.
“I’ve never gambled,” she announces. “I have a feeling I’d be good at it.”
“There’s nothing to it,” Bo says. “You put your money on the table, and they take it off. It’s a very simple process.”
Up ahead, a gas station sign floats in the darkness. Bo gears down, and the truck shudders to a stop. Inside are two one-armed bandits and a blackjack table. Except for a blonde girl in a tank top playing solitaire on the counter, the place is deserted. We stand next to the blackjack table and wait for her to notice us, which she appears to have decided not to do. She’s chewing the biggest wad of green bubble gum I’ve ever seen. I notice a sign that says we have to be twenty-one to gamble.
“Hey!” Bo snaps his fingers at her. She looks up at him with flat blue eyes and blows a bubble half as big as her head. She snaps it back into her mouth and pushes herself away from her cards. She slaps across the floor in shower slippers.
“Three dollar chips,” says Bo.
When Grimshaw and I take stools at the blackjack table, two men I hadn’t noticed before materialize out of the magazine rack and join us. It takes me three cards to lose my chip, but Grimshaw wins and keeps on winning. She gives Bo his chip back, he slides it over to me, and I lose that one, too. Grimshaw’s time in Boomtown obviously stood her in good stead. She has all the moves down—scratching the table with a card when she wants another one, holding her finger up when she’s down. She never takes her eyes off the dealer. The girl wears press-on nails with rhinestones, which flash under the lights as the cards fly through her fingers. She keeps blowing those insolent green bubbles, though, until I can’t stand it anymore. I go outside and watch the traffic, a line of diamonds and rubies strung across the dark country, under a sky that’s twenty times more huge than any sky I’ve ever seen, with twenty times as many stars. Bo comes up and stands next to me.
“I don’t blame you for wanting to leave Nevada,” he says. “It’s a rotten state.”
“It feels like we’ve been in Nevada for a week.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Nevada’s like that.”
“I’ve never seen so many stars.”
“When I was in Hawaii,” he says, “you could see stars like anything.” He points out the constellations, the dippers, the North Star, Orion going down, Hercules coming up.
“Where I come from,” I tell him, “you have to look up to see the sky. The sky is like a river of stars between the trees.”
“East? That’s where I figured you were from. Where I grew up, you couldn’t see ’em at all. Too many refineries.”
“Oil refineries?”
“Oil. Petrochemicals.”
“What’s a refinery look like?”
“It’s like you take all the lights in a city and compress them into one factory.” He demonstrates the compressing motion with his hands. “But you can’t really explain it. You just gotta see it.”
“Where are you from again?”
“Texas. Not one of your garden spots. You never seen a refinery?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Christ. Where you been?”
“Nowhere. I hardly know where I am right now.”
“You better look at a map,” Bo says. “I got a map for you to look at. Stay right there.”
I watch him walk to his truck. He wears cowboy boots, and the denim on his back pocket is faded from where he sits on his wallet. I think about what Grimshaw said about how a man stands. He comes back with something rolled up under his arm. On the pavement under a streetlight, he spreads out an atlas of the United States, and we crouch over it.
“Here we go,” Bo says, turning the pages. “Nevada. And there’s Winnemucca. That’s us. That little dot right there.” As he talks, I watch his hands move across Nevada. It looks like all the grease of the world is under his fingernails and worked into the nicks on his knuckles. The pages of his atlas are soft with use and covered with arrows and circles in black and red ink. He tells me he has a thing for old iron bridges and he likes to visit them when he can. As he turns the pages of the atlas, I watch the world open up. All roads lead to all other roads, and I start to feel this intense curiosity about following them the way he does.
Grimshaw pokes her head out of the door. “They’re closing,” she calls to us. “If you want anything.”
“Your friend must be winning,” Bo says. “Otherwise they’d stay open.” We go inside. Grimshaw is at the counter, counting out her chips.
“How much did you win?” I ask her.
“Enough,” she says airily. “I’m definitely going to work in a casino. I wonder how much they pay.”
“I think they hire dancers in casinos, too,” I suggest.
“No. I’m going to be a real dancer from now on. I just have to figure out how to live.” We walk across the parking lot to Bo’s truck. An hour of winning at blackjack has put Grimshaw in a good mood. She chatters about her upcoming career, how she needs more training before she moves to New York. She looked into it some in LA and realized how far away she was from the precision and training of real dance, but when she’s ready, she thinks she’ll have something of her own to bring to it, her own perspective on it. While she talks, I study Bo’s hands, wondering what they’d feel like on my skin and what my chances are of finding out. Grimshaw would know, if I could find the right moment to ask. By the Utah state line, though, she’s asleep.
Across the Bonneville Salt Flats, Bo entertains me with his favorite moments from the call-in radio shows he listens to while he’s driving across the country at night, psychic shows and religious shows. He says he gets ideas for songs from them. I tell Bo the plot of a play I started about a guy who murders his best friend and gets away with it by making it look like a motorcycle accident. But it turns out the murdered guy was an organ donor, so the murderer gets driven crazy by the thought of his frenemy living on in the bodies of all these grateful people, and he has to kill them all.
“I’m going to be a playwright,” I tell him. “Or a speechwriter. I can’t decide which.”
“Either way,” he says. “You got a future.”
* * *
At a truck stop near Salt Lake City at midnight, the parking lot is full of VW campers and we buy veggie burritos from some cave hippies with dreadlocks and bones through their noses who offer to read our auras for twenty dollars apiece. From Salt Lake to the Wyoming border, the highway is dark, and the trucks are lit up like circus wagons. Bo tells me more stories, and I tell him more of my plots.
At sunrise, Bo can’t drive anymore, and we check into a motel. We drag Grimshaw out of the truck and get a room with two double beds and all sleep past noon.
When I wake up, Grimshaw’s in the shower and Bo is sitting on the edge of his bed arguing on t
he phone with his dispatcher.
“California!” he shouts. “I can’t go to California! All right, I won’t go, then. Either way. Tennessee. That’s better. Give me Tennessee.”
After breakfast, we get back in the truck and head east across Nebraska. The earth has just been plowed, and it’s black and kind of heaving with fertility. Nothing’s green yet, but you can feel it coming in the air. It pours through the open windows of the truck. We drop the rolls of synthetic rubber at the edge of a city in Iowa. We go into Missouri to pick up a trailer from a truck that broke down hauling potatoes to the Pringles potato chip factory in Jackson, Tennessee. Bo’s been to the Pringles factory before, and he describes the Pringle-making process to me in detail, what they do to mountains of potatoes to make them stack in a can.
“God, that sounds really cool,” I tell him.
“The place looks like a nuclear power plant,” Bo says. I eye Grimshaw, wondering if she’d go for a scenic detour through Jackson, Tennessee, and decide to wait to bring it up until she’s in a better mood, but the farther east we go, the gloomier she gets. Her every-twenty-minute sighs are back. At sunset, we drive into a truck stop next to a tank farm. Grimshaw crawls into the sleeper cab. She hasn’t said a word all day.
“Come on.” Bo holds out his hand to me as soon as we jump down from the truck. “I got something to show you.” He tows me across the parking lot toward the trees. We head into the bushes, which are dripping wet from a recent rain. It’s getting dark, and I stumble over rocks and almost trip a couple times, but he keeps pulling me forward. We break through the trees onto an asphalt path and turn right.
“Where are we going?” I pant.
“This way.”
Around the next bend, we stop before a padlocked chain-link fence with thick iron bars that curve up over our heads. Bo grabs the bars of the gate.
“What is it?”
“Chain of Rocks,” he says. “Nineteen twenty-nine.” I peer through the gate, but all I see is what seems to be a bridge, a long iron bridge. I can’t see the other side. “Here we go.” Bo jumps, chins himself up on the bars, hooks a boot heel over, and then reaches down for me.
The Spaces Between Us Page 17