Turn Signal

by Howard Owen

  Turn Signal

  Howard Owen

  New York

  Many thanks to Martin Shepard, Judy Shepard, Elise D’Haene and, most of all, Karen Van Neste Owen for their help and patience.

  This book is dedicated to Janice Owen Faircloth

  (1955–2003)

  CHAPTER ONE

  His shirt and his pants legs were just kind of flapping in the breeze as he scrambled up into the cab, a body hidden in there somewhere. He looked to be about 60 years old.

  I needed somebody to keep me awake, but part of the reason I stopped was I felt sorry for anyone that age out there trying to thumb the interstates in the absolute damn middle of nowhere, and it almost pitch dark.

  I didn’t think he was from around here. Didn’t seem to have much of an accent at all. What he also didn’t have was that smell the road bums have, part body stink, part booze, part vomit. If he’d smelled like that, I’d have kicked his butt right back out again. He was a good half a head shorter than me. I do remember that. His hair was long and stringy, in a gray ponytail.

  “I thank you,” was all he said at first. Most of the ones who hitch a ride with you, they want to kind of carry the conversation, like they think they have to entertain you for picking them up. Usually, I’m OK with that.

  But this guy, he said not one damn word for the better part of an hour, just sat there looking as contented as a millionaire.

  Finally, I broke the silence. I was starting to get a little drowsy.

  “What you got there?” I asked him, nodding toward this plastic bag he’d dragged in with him. He had it wedged between his legs. I figured whatever was inside was more or less his net worth.

  He didn’t answer for about three beats, and I was about to ask him again.

  “Oh,” he said at last, in a voice too deep for a fella that scrawny, “change of underwear. Toothbrush. Soap. Some of my work.”

  “What kind of work?” I could tell I was going to have to pump this guy for any conversation at all.

  “Oh, I write.”

  I smiled in the darkness.

  “What? Like books and things?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, and he laughed very quietly, the way he spoke. I could hardly hear him over the general roar as we rolled on past Charlottesville. “Nothing like that. I just like to write.”

  That was all for another 20 minutes. Then, I tried to prime Mr. Chatty again.

  “Yeah, I wanted to be a writer. You hear a lot of good stories between here and California.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” was all he said. He said it encouragingly, not like he was humoring me or something.

  Well, it was true, even if I hadn’t said it to anybody since a freshman English class about two lifetimes ago. Why I told this character, I don’t know. Sometimes, when the other person doesn’t say anything, you fill in the gaps, and first thing you know, you’re just laying your life story out there like a burnt offering.

  “Well,” he said, taking the initiative for once, “it isn’t all that hard to do, if you really want to do it.”

  Here, he stopped and looked right at me. When I looked back, I saw somehow that he knew things about me he shouldn’t have known.

  “It might cost you some things you think you can’t do without,” he went on. “You’ll find you can do with less than you think.”

  “I guess you’ve got it pretty much down to the bare essentials.”

  He laughed again, a deep, pleasant chuckle. His eyes shone when I glanced over and the light of an oncoming truck reflected off them.

  “Oh, I’ve got my ways. I get along.”

  I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything else to him, or him to me.

  The next thing I remember is the sound of those rumble strips.

  I had done something I never do—fallen asleep at the wheel. I got control of the rig quick enough and eased to a stop on the right-hand shoulder. There wasn’t another vehicle in sight.

  I turned to apologize to the old man. There was nobody there. I thought maybe he’d somehow gotten back in the sleeping compartment, but he wasn’t there, either.

  You can have some strange experiences driving across the country in an 18-wheeler. You can zone out and not remember how you got from Bristol to Nashville. You’re not really asleep. Hell, somebody was driving. But you just put your mind on cruise control.

  Still, I had no—have no—recollection of letting that old man out, and I know he was there, sitting beside me in the cab. I know it.

  I checked the mile marker and tried to figure how long I was asleep. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes, probably a lot less than that.

  At the next exit, I turned around, then spent 30 minutes driving east and retracing my steps, all the way back to where I picked him up. Nothing.

  At some point, with the hairs on the back of my neck not quite standing up, I convinced myself that I shouldn’t start cross-country trips without at least eight hours’ sleep.

  I just kept driving until I got to the truck stop just outside Knoxville where I usually sleep first night out. When I opened the door, getting ready to go in for a cup of coffee and something to clog my arteries, I saw a glimpse of white on the floor. When I reached underneath the seat, I pulled out my former passenger’s traveling bag, manufactured by Hefty. Inside, there was no sign of underwear or toothpaste or toothbrush—just a bright green folder. And inside that were 68 pages—I know because he’d numbered them—written in the tiniest, finest handwriting I’d ever seen from a grown man.

  I put it back under the seat. By this time, I was really getting spooked. In the diner, I asked a couple of fellas I know, and they asked some more, and nobody had seen anything of anybody like my hitchhiker. If it hadn’t been for the bag and the folder, I could have written him off as a dream. I couldn’t even describe him that well, just knew I’d recognize him if I saw him again.

  I could drive from Speakeasy to Los Angeles and back in seven days, hauling a load of rug nylon out there and bringing lettuce or tomatoes or broccoli back east. Back then, I wasn’t likely to be in the same time zone two days in a row. But I did keep checking on Channel 19, asking about my little old man.

  Nobody ever owned up to seeing anybody fitting my very general description.

  Back when Gina traveled with me, we’d try to see some of the towns and cities I was driving past. We stayed entertained. But by June of 1998, Gina was back home with Shannon, whose birthdays usually caught me in Arkansas or Arizona or someplace equally fascinating.

  So I had a lot of time to read, and probably too much time to think.

  The second day out, at a truck stop just west of Texarkana, I couldn’t resist any longer and finally turned my attention to the white plastic bag. I took the green folder out and carefully picked up the first sheet of paper inside. It was amazingly clean and uncrumpled, considering. I still felt that somehow, somewhere I’d see the old man again and wanted to keep his stuff in good order.

  At the top of the first page was written, in all capital letters: LOVELADY.

  It started out:

  “Lovelady had been traveling for three days solid. He hadn’t slept the last two, since he woke up next to the girl whose throat he’d slit in that cinder-block motel back in Dothan, the one that made you pay extra for ice. Her eyes had been shiny with fear, her arms outspread toward her bound wrists and her fists clenched tight, but she probably was nearly dead before she knew she was going to die. He’d rushed it.

  “Lovelady didn’t feel sleepy at all.”

  I read about two-thirds of it that night in my bed in the back of the cab, no mean accomplishment for a man practically asleep in the seat, trying to read the world’s tiniest, most precise handwriting. Lovelady, it developed, was a hitchhiker, traveling the co
untry. The girl was the first one he would kill, but there were two more by page 40, as he got better, or worse, with practice. That’s where I had to shut my eyes, after making sure everything was locked up tight.

  Lovelady, I learned as the story went on, had decided to adopt the interstate highway system, the way some people adopt a mile of a county road. Except Lovelady was not interested in combating litter. He was more into combating human life.

  That night, I dreamed about the old man, except he was Lovelady. I was sitting in my cab and he was in the parking lot of the truck stop I always use at Fairfield, talking to one of the girls. She didn’t look like she was much older than Shannon. And then he’s got his arm around her and they’re walking off. I start to get out, to try to save her, but he turns toward me and grins, and his teeth glitter like diamonds, and I’m paralyzed. I see him like I never saw him in real life, but when I woke up, I still couldn’t really remember exactly what he looked like.

  I got up earlier than I meant to and read the rest of it the next morning, and was introduced to an Arkansas sheriff named Pettigrew, who obviously was going to be Lovelady’s nemesis. I read a lot of suspense thrillers crossing the United States, and I could kind of see where I thought this was going. At the end of 68 pages, things were just starting to heat up. That’s where it ended, with this paragraph:

  “Pettigrew was familiar with crime. He understood that all criminals did not want to be rehabilitated, that there was a chromosome or a gene or some damned miswired switch that made some yearn to defy good. But here was pure evil. He hadn’t seen that before.”

  I was three hours late getting to Los Angeles.

  That was two-and-a-half years ago, and it’s certainly an overstatement to say the old man just vanished into thin air. Maybe I’d have been better off if he had.

  And I suppose you’d have to say he’s got something to do with the snubnose .38 special in my overnight bag.

  But don’t give Mr. Lovelady all the credit.

  I know what I’m doing.

  Really.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Facing away from the plate-glass front, he hears Milo before he sees him. Three booths from the back, he halfway hopes he’ll somehow be undetected. He’d like to eat and run, and Milo loves to talk.

  No such luck.

  “Well,” says the voice just to his rear, “that looks nutritious and delicious. A truly well-balanced meal. Barbecue, hush puppies and everybody’s favorite health vegetables, french fries and macaroni and cheese.”

  “Milo. How’s it going?”

  “Hey, Pauline,” Milo yells over to the Speakeasy Diner’s only waitress, “this just occurred to me the other day: How do you all get away with calling macaroni and cheese a vegetable? How can that be?”

  The waitress tells him he’s eaten enough of it, from the looks of his gut, and she hasn’t previously heard any complaints. He says he wants a refund for every time he’s been deceived into ordering macaroni and cheese as one of his two vegetables.

  “I’ve been tricked. Swindled.”

  He’s warming up now, basking in the attention he’s getting from the farmers and the other office workers.

  “And it took you how long to figure this out?” Pauline asks.

  Milo raises his arms in a silent “You see?” He slides into the booth facing Jack Stone.

  “So,” he says, “you going to the reunion or not?”

  Jack finishes chewing and washes some barbecue down with sweet iced tea.

  “Probably. My social calendar isn’t too full these days.”

  “Gina coming?”

  “Dunno. That’s up to her.”

  “So you think you can leave off the great American novel for a day, then?”

  Jack shrugs and looks out the window.

  Pauline comes up to take Milo’s order. He grabs a menu, although he knows it by heart.

  “Let’s see, I’ll have the Salisbury steak, with mashed potatoes and………macaroni and cheese.”

  Pauline walks away shaking her head. Jack smiles down into the remnants of his lunch. Milo has been making him laugh for most of his life, and he generally appreciates that. They played high school ball together, Jack as a running back and linebacker, Milo as a skinny, motor-mouth wide receiver.

  “Can’t believe it’s been 30 years,” Milo says.

  “Because we still look so young, right?”

  “Well, at least some of us do.” Milo brushes back imaginary hair, having lost almost all of it while he was gaining about a pound a year. “You know what Cully Dane told me?”

  “What?”

  “He said Jerry Prince was gonna come back for this one. That’d be a hoot, wouldn’t it. I wonder what ol’ Jerry Prince would look like now. Remember the time he tried out for the JV football team? The chin protector?”

  “Hard to forget.”

  Jerry Prince, weighing perhaps 110 pounds, had somehow gotten his mother to let him try out for junior varsity football when they were all in the ninth grade. But he’d neglected to bring a jockstrap, didn’t even seem to know what one was when Milo produced his and asked him to identify it.

  So, Milo Wainwright and Mack McLamb showed Jerry Prince how to wear his “chin protector.”

  “If you don’t wear this, and somebody hits you under the helmet, they’ll knock you out like a light,” Milo told him. “This’ll hold everything in place.”

  When the coach came into the locker room that first day, Jerry Prince was wearing a jockstrap over his head, with the elastic waistband encircling it from crown to chin, the cup dangling behind him.

  “Mack laughed so hard he wet his pants,” Milo says. It is obviously a fond memory.

  It was not the kind of story that would be worn to forgetfulness by four years of Buster Gladden High School, or even 30 more years of adulthood.

  It was Jack Stone who offered to loan Jerry Prince a jockstrap after he left practice that day in tears before it even started. But that was it for Jerry Prince and football.

  “God, I wonder if he ever got married.” Milo, retelling the story for the benefit of the two or three people in the diner who didn’t know it already, has been laughing so hard he has to wipe a tear from his cheek.

  “I heard he’s still in New York,” Jack says. “Some kind of big editor or something.”

  “Well, good for him. Good for ol’ Jerry Prince.”

  Jack stands and leaves six dollars with his check on the table.

  “Gotta go,” he says. “No work, no pay.”

  Milo tries to get him to stay, even blow off the afternoon. He runs the insurance agency one block from the diner, and he seems to have all the time in the world.

  “We could shoot some pool.”

  Jack waves him off, gives a general goodbye to the rest of the room, and heads for his truck.

  The hardest part, he supposes, is the uniform, a shade of brown seldom worn voluntarily. But the pay is good for a guy like him, strong and energetic enough to outhustle kids half his age. He tried once to get Brady to go to work for UPS, but the way his son turned him down made him realize that even Brady, whose most prestigious job to date was a six-month stint managing the QuikStop in Riverdale, thought Jack’s present station was beneath him.

  He looks at his watch. One o’clock. Even with Milo for entertainment, he’s only wasted 30 minutes over lunch. He makes three more deliveries in town, the last one over at Judge Edmonds’ house on Second Street, the nice, shady part that overlooks Sycamore Creek. The judge, who’s retired now, sees him coming up the street, and Jack feels obliged to stop and talk to the old man, father of one of his old classmates.

  “Susan’s inside, gettin’ her beauty sleep,” the judge says with a grin as he walks down the flagstone steps to the sidewalk. “She’s wearing herself out, getting everything ready for the reunion. Thirty years. Damn. It seems like it was yesterday you were out there scorin’ touchdowns.”

  The judge rambles a little about the weather and politics, and
it takes Jack 10 hard-to-regain minutes to get away from him.

  “Tell Susan I said hi,” he yells as he drives off. She lives in the judge’s house now, the one she grew up in. Gina says she’s resting up between marriages. She’s been arrested for two DUIs in the past year, but she’s still driving.

  He guns it, hurrying back to Main Street. “You slow down, Jack Stone!” he hears a voice yell behind him. He thinks it’s Mrs. Guarnieri, who used to work at the dry cleaner’s, but he isn’t sure, and he doesn’t have time for a lecture. He’s happy when he gets out of Speakeasy, where at least the people offended by his driving don’t seem to know his name. Before his mother passed away in March, they would call her up and complain.

  “Maybe you could get a job driving one of those race cars,” she said once. “Then people would like it when you went fast.”

  He crosses the flat bridge over the creek. Down below, a boy and girl are sitting in tubes in the middle of the water. It’s over 90 degrees, headed for 95, and in the truck it feels every bit of 100.

  Jack turns left on Humpback Road. He has five deliveries to make in a 20-mile loop that will take him to Holden Springs, where he has enough work to carry him through to quitting time.

  The road parallels the creek for a couple of miles, with hardwoods and swampland to the left, houses and farms to the right. One of the first homes he comes to has a cardinal-and-bluebird festooned mailbox out front, nearly surrounded by clematis. He can barely read the name on it: PRINCE.

  Everywhere Jack Stone turns, his history confronts him. Sometimes these days, it’s hard to delineate between past and present. The girl he got to third base with in 10th grade is an assistant principal at the high school now, but the last time he saw her, he had this lapse, only a few seconds, when he saw her as she was, and damn near grabbed her ass, right there in the Food Lion parking lot. The boy who was second-string tailback in 1969 is a bank vice resident, but Jack can’t see anything except the little doofus who used to tell him, as they went back out after halftime, leading by three touchdowns, “Don’t kick all their butts, Hoss. Save some for me.”