by David Rhodes
Another kick and the room again exploded in sound.
“Hey, you insubordinate asshole, you better answer me when I ask you a question.”
“I’m awake,” said Blake.
“I thought so, because, see, I’m concerned maybe you don’t have the right sleeping habits. So every hour tonight I’m going to check to make sure you’re sleeping. Is that okay with you, Bookfucker?”
“Leave him alone,” said Jones across the hall.
“What was that?”
“Leave him alone.”
Following a long silence, Jenks spoke. “Did you just swear at me, Jones?”
“No.”
“I think you goddamn did, Jones. You swore at me, and that’s a violation. And look here, what’s this piece of crud on the floor? You threw this at me through the vents in your door.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Too bad, Jones. You’ve been over here on Level Two for quite a while now, haven’t you? Nice place. It’s quiet here most of the time. A couple of you guys got televisions over here and you get to see all those nice visitors from time to time. You get to make phone calls once a week, and for some reason the food here doesn’t get all mixed together and taste like someone pissed in it. Too bad, Jones.”
“What are you talking about?”
“See, there just happens to be a cell open over on Range C. You know where Range C is, Jones? I’ve got an uncle who delivers the food over there. You know where Range C is, Jones?”
“Yes sir.”
“Of course you do. Range C is way over on the other side of the building. And guess what cell just happens to be empty right now? I’ll tell you. It’s the one just across from Raymond Cawl. You know Old Ray, don’t you, Jones? He’s the great big guy missing most of his teeth, the gentleman who never showers and screams all night and throws his feces into the hall. I’m sure you remember him. Well, tomorrow your door is going to be right across from his, and you’re going to be behind it for a long, long time. Oh yes, I forgot to tell you, Jones—and you’ll love this part—just beside that empty cell is Bernie Hortell. I’m sure you remember him. As you probably already know, Mr. Hortel sings while he beats on his walls. And the food over there, well, you remember what it’s like. You were over there once, remember?”
“No call for you to do this, sir. I never swore at you or threw anything.”
“Rules are rules. I don’t make ’em, you know. I just enforce ’em. It’s my job and you wouldn’t want me to not do my job, would you, Jones?”
Silence.
“Of course, you got the right to file a complaint. That’s also the rule, Jones. You can do that. Once you’re over on Range C you can file a grievance report. You can tell them how you came to the aid of this punk here, who beat up a police officer and later assaulted a guard. You can tell them. First thing tomorrow morning you’ll be moved.”
Shuffle, shuffle. Silence. Then another boot against the door of Blake’s cell.
“Sleep tight, Bookfucker. I’ll be back.”
Shuffle, shuffle, rattle.
Blake lay on his bed staring at the dim light above him, his anger mounting. He knotted his hands into fists, closed his eyes, and fought with himself. It was Jones’s own fault. He’d brought it on himself, broke the cardinal rule: don’t get involved in any injustices other than your own. Mind your own business.
It didn’t work. The anger was still there. Shaking with impotent rage, Blake rolled out of the bunk and onto his knees again, praying for help, for strength, for mercy, for anything. How could so much wrong be allowed to continue? God save me. I can’t do this any longer.
Without getting up, he crawled over to the door and whispered through the grate. “Jones, hey, Jones. Are you all right? Jones?”
Silence.
“Jones? Hey, man, I’ll make the complaint tomorrow to the review committee. We’ll tell them the truth . . . Jones? . . . I know this time they’ll listen. They will . . . Jones?”
Silence.
Suddenly Blake felt something inside him split open and spill out, a rupture deeper than he could reach. He lay flat on the concrete floor, looked at the ceiling, and did something he’d done only two other times in his life—once, at four, when he understood his mother was never coming back, and once when he’d first entered prison. He found the part of him that was not.
It was very small, hard to find, impossible to understand. It did not think, feel, imagine, or remember. It did not know Jones or anything about prison, had never heard of Spinoza, did not know Bud Jenks or Winifred Helm, or his father or Danielle Workhouse. It was the part of him neither attracted to nor repelled by anything else, the space-within-space and time-within-time that did not recognize the survival of Blake Bookchester as a valid concept. It was the part of him that was not. It contained only a cold flickering awareness of nothing in particular. And to that dark flickering he wholly committed himself.
Standing in the Middle
Heading into Chicago on Interstate 94, transparent waves of heat rose from the pavement and curled off the long hood of the Kenworth. The air trembled and glowed, luminous with baked humidity. Nate turned to merge onto I-294 and the taillights in front of him lit up in a stream of angry red. The traffic stopped, started, slowed, and then came to a standstill. Nate thought he could remember when—if you avoided certain times of the day—you could stay out of this. But Chicago traffic could snarl at any time now.
The station wagon directly in front of him moved ahead eight feet and he took up the slack. Over the next forty-five minutes he repeated this stop-gap movement three times, but he was still on the merging ramp.
He brought his logbook up to date, filled in several additional columns, and thought about nothing in particular. The temperature outside continued to climb, and he noticed with some concern that the heat gauge on the dashboard had inched up as well. He successfully assured himself this was only natural, given the situation. When it rose higher he turned off the air conditioner to take a little stress off the diesel and rolled down the window.
Then the engine began to idle unevenly and the color of the exhaust turned a shade darker. Again, he refused to worry. The injectors needed cleaning—he already knew that. The engine had over six hundred thousand miles on it. Still, there was maybe a cushion of fifty thousand or so before things really started going south.
The air seeping through the opened window felt like breath from a large mouth.
Taking a drink of water, he drew his spiral-bound notebook from the dash compartment and read over a letter he’d started to his son. Unable to think of anything to add, he put the notebook back.
The heat gauge climbed higher, accompanied by a barely audible whine. Then the whine grew more persistent, and the fan belt broke, snapping against the inside hood with a crack. Warning lights lit up on the dash, matching the color of the brake lights outside.
Nate pulled onto the shoulder, crowded close to the embankment wall, turned off the engine, and phoned the dispatch operator in Wisconsin.
“Water pump seized up—I’m broke down.”
“Where are you?”
“Outside Chicago, just off I-94, on the entrance ramp to 294.”
“Full or empty?”
“Full.”
“There’s a Mack shop not far from you. I’ll give you the number.”
Nate called and the service person said they could bring the tractor in and fix it tomorrow, but they couldn’t tow a loaded trailer. “You’ve got to lose the trailer. Call me back. I can have someone there in forty-five minutes.”
“Not in this traffic,” said Nate, and called dispatch again.
“Okay, Nate. Hold on, let me check.” Click. Silence. Click. “Here’s one. Bob Miller is about an hour from you and he’s got a load he can put up for a while.”
Nate turned on his warning lights and climbed out. Blistering heat and blinding light gave him the impression of stepping onto the surface of the sun. He placed warning markers along the shoulder and t
hought about calling highway patrol. The metal was hot. He lowered the jacks on the front of the trailer and broke open the hitch. Then he moved the tractor forward enough for someone else to hook up.
In the hot shade of the embankment wall, Nate watched the traffic slowly lurch forward again, gaining speed. Most of the other truck drivers waved as they went by, or at least smiled. The others glanced at him with a mixture of anxiety and disapproval—a premonition of their own breakdown.
Two hours later, a Peterbilt pulled onto the off-strip and backed into the waiting trailer hitch, the traffic speeding by only several feet away.
The driver climbed down onto the pavement—mid-forties, unshaven, open white shirt, sleeves torn off, jeans, and untied shoes.
“It’s a hot one.” He spoke rapidly and without looking up. “Where do these electric motors have to go?”
“South Side.” Nate gave him the paperwork.
“Been here long?”
“Long enough. Thanks for coming.”
“Wrecker on the way?”
Nate nodded.
Above him a small face appeared fleetingly in the window of the Peterbilt—a girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen, disheveled, dirty hair, pretending to look indifferent.
“You got someone with you,” Nate observed.
“Not for long,” he said, glancing briefly up at the cab. “Look, you need anything?”
“I’m good to go.”
“We’re done here, then,” the man said, opening the door and climbing up. Nate made quick eye contact again with the teenager inside, then looked away.
It wasn’t that long ago, it seemed, when truck stops and public lots did not have as many people selling themselves to drivers. There had always been some of that, of course, but with the crippled economy it was now so bad that some parts of the country put security fences around parking areas and charged fees for the privilege of avoiding the prostitutes, dealers, pornography vendors, and other lot lizards.
I must be getting old, Nate thought. These things didn’t used to bother me.
The shadow running along the embankment wall was thicker now, more luxuriously dark. He returned to sitting in it, and a small breeze found him.
All things considered, trucking was a good way to make a living, though there was no doubt that it had contributed to his wife running off. He’d left her alone with the baby too much. He should have known that, or rather, what he did know should have meant more to him than it had.
Afterward, he told everyone—especially those in his family, his aunts, uncles, cousins—that he hadn’t seen it coming. Her leaving had no warning, out of the blue. Here one day, gone the next.
But it wasn’t true. Her escape had been building for years. She’d carried it in her hands, worn it on her face. Her eyes couldn’t stop planning it. He knew, or should have known, from the way she moved, sitting on the bed in the middle of the night, holding the baby, slumped over and staring out the window.
Ignorance was the problem, he knew. Some people were just too damn stupid to see what was going on right in front of them. And ignorance wasn’t simply a failure to register facts and understand them. No, Nate’s kind of ignorance had been more like a force. It persisted vigorously in knowing that all women were natural mothers. He’d known that with absolute certainty. Having children fulfilled women, all of them. They needed babies to take care of as surely as plants needed water. Difficulties might arise, sure, but those were to be expected. And even if they weren’t expected, a mother would never reconsider motherhood. Such an idea was beyond possibility’s outer wall. And as for a mother leaving her child, well, that was unthinkable. Did apple trees produce oranges? It would never happen.
Nate often wondered where his false confidence had come from, how the notion became planted in him that no matter how difficult caregiving seemed, all women actually enjoyed it. Did someone teach it to him? If so, he didn’t remember the instruction. Somehow he’d swallowed the corrupted seed on his own.
Nate could still see her frantically signaling to him with a thousand silent pleas. He could feel her broken hope, failing courage, and frightened despair. I can’t do this any longer, Nate.
He should have known the truth, and the truth should have changed him. Instead, he ignored her, left her alone, month after month after month.
Oh Christ, he thought, looking into the heat rising from the concrete. His kinship to himself sometimes felt unbearable.
He saw a tractor coming toward him with a piggyback fifth wheel. It pulled out of the traffic and backed up behind the Kenworth.
“I’ll take you into the shop,” said the driver.
After he locked down Nate’s truck, they climbed onto the seat together, then drove up the ramp and onto 294.
“How long you been out here?”
“Couple hours.”
“Hot day.”
“Yep.”
“You got a place to stay?”
“Not yet.”
“There’s a little motel not far from the shop—pretty cheap. I can drop you off.”
“Thanks.”
They hit a chuck hole and it moved through them.
“These roads are getting bad,” said the driver.
“My boy’s in prison.”
“Sorry to hear that. Nothing serious, I hope.”
“Drugs.”
“What kind?
“The kind you go to prison for.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“You said that already.”
“I know. I couldn’t think of anything else.”
“He doesn’t want me to visit, says it’s humiliating.”
The driver said nothing.
That night at the motel, Nate lay on the bed and hurried through television channels. He found a western, but he had already seen it. Then he took a shower and fell into a fitful sleep.
The following afternoon he called the Mack shop and talked to one of the mechanics.
“We’ve got the pump out and will have a new one in by four o’clock.”
“I’ll be over.”
“Your engine needs an overhaul. Bearings are loose, pistons slapping in the cylinders.”
“I know it.”
Then he reported in to the dispatch operator.
“Nate, are you running?”
“I’ll be up tomorrow.”
“There’s a load of plastic wrap and freezer paper in North Chicago. It needs to go out tomorrow to Wormwood, Iowa, to arrive before nightfall.”
A small town in southeastern Iowa, Wormwood was Nate’s least favorite place to go. On the edge of town was a slaughterhouse bigger than the rest of Wormwood. The packing plant there butchered hogs and cattle. You could smell it for miles. There was a security fence surrounding the plant, separating it from a rambling slum of trailers, rusting motor homes, and tin and tar-paper shacks, where mostly Spanish-speaking people lived.
The Wormwood workers were nervous, and the security guards and management were surly. The loading station was around behind the hog pens, chutes, and offal rendering. There were about a dozen docks, and all the good slots were always taken. To maneuver into position you had to turn so sharply that the end of your trailer disappeared in the mirror. Some of the younger drivers would try for hours to get lined up. It was a nightmare. No one wanted to try it after dark. When you finally got in, there often wasn’t anyone around to open the doors or who understood English. They sometimes wanted the drivers to unload the trailers themselves, because most of the workers couldn’t, or wouldn’t, operate the forklift.
“Can’t make that one,” said Nate. “The repairs won’t be done in time. Do you have a later one?”
A long pause reminded Nate of the management’s grudging acceptance of drivers who owned their own trucks. “Maybe I can make it,” he added. “I’ll push them at the shop.”
“We’ll get someone else. Wormwood Packing locks up early and we’ve had trucks stuck in there overnight. Can’t find anyone to sign off on
the papers or even open the damned front gates. They don’t speak English. I don’t know what goes on there, but . . . forget it. I don’t give a rip what they do there.”
Nate didn’t want to imagine what went on there either. It was an ugly place. One time he’d delivered a load of refrigeration units and another truck backed into the dock next to him—a rusted out cab-over Freightliner. Everyone seemed in a hurry to open the trailer, and inside it smelled like something he didn’t want to identify. It was filled with packing crates and corrugated boxes on pallets, each about four feet square—big enough for washers and dryers, maybe.
“What are those?” he asked the man he’d just handed his invoice papers to.
“I don’t know,” the man answered, and walked away.
While they were unloading, one of the boxes fell over and two people rolled out—a man and a boy, frightened, dirty, and emaciated. Several large men told Nate to leave.
“Like I said, I can try to get the shop to—”
“Forget it. I’ve got a load for you in North Chicago. Take it to the shipping plant in Mason City, Iowa. There’s another load waiting for you there.”
“Where’s that one headed?”
“New York.”
“Thanks,” said Nate, and the dispatcher hung up.
At the machine shop, the bill came to over eight hundred dollars.
“Is that a problem?” asked the woman who had just passed the slip of paper to him through the little window in the glass booth.
“No,” he answered, and wrote out a check. When he got back to the motel he called his bank to see if his account would cover it.
In the middle of the next afternoon, somewhere in northern Iowa, Nate’s mood began to darken again. The recently cultivated cornfields around the moving truck spread out flat in all directions—horizon to horizon in uniform lines of sprouting green on a black-earth background. Planted along a grid, each corn plant currently stood at a uniform height of about twelve inches. Nate could feel his mind growing numb. All these plants in perfect rows, maturing at exactly the same rate, racing toward the grain harvest and into the mouth end of livestock digestive tracts, creating more civilization, more government, more laws, more prisons. On and on, as far as the eye could see, the raw material of man. Agribusiness was the ultimate expression of the times, making skyscrapers, universities, computers, and particle colliders irrelevant by comparison. Mile after mile inched by and the surrounding green rows never changed.