by Jack Cady
That part was all right. Anyone who has pulled poultry will tell you that you have to ride them. They are packed so tight. You always lose a few. The job is to keep an airstream moving through the cages so they will not suffocate.
But the rest of what Joe Indian did was wrong. He was worse than trash. Men can get used to trash, but Joe bothered guys you would swear could not be bothered by anything in the world. Guys who had seen everything. Twenty years on the road, maybe. Twenty years of seeing people broken by stupidness. Crazy people, torn-up people, drunks. But Joe Indian even bothered guys who had seen all of that. One of the reasons might be that he never drank or did much. He never cared about anything. He just blew heavy black exhaust into load after load of white turkeys.
The rest of what he did was worse. He hated the load. Not the way any man might want to swear over some particular load. No. He hated every one of those turkeys on every load. Hated it personally the way one man might hate another man. He treated the load in a way that showed how much he despised the easy death that was coming to most of those turkeys—the quick needle thrust up the beak into the brain the way poultry is killed commercially. Fast. Painless. The night I saw him close was only a week before the trouble started.
He came into a stop in Harrodsburg. I was out of Tennessee loaded with a special order of upholstered furniture to way and gone up in Michigan and wondering how the factory had ever caught that order. The boss looked sad when I left. That made me feel better. If I had to fight tourists all the way up to the lake instead of my usual Cincinnati run, at least he had to stay behind and build sick furniture. When I came into the stop, I noticed a North Carolina job, one of those straight thirty or thirty-five footers with the attic. He was out of Hickory. Maybe one of the reasons I stopped was because there would be someone there who had about the same kind of trouble. He turned out to be a dark-haired and serious man, one who was very quiet. He had a load of couches on that were made to sell but never, never to use. We compared junk for a while, then looked through the window to see Joe Indian pull in with a truck that looked like a disease.
The Mack sounded bad, but from the appearance of the load it must have found seventy on the downgrades. The load looked terrible at close hand. Joe had cages that were homemade, built from siding of coal company houses when the mines closed down. They had horizontal slats instead of the vertical dowel rod. All you could say of them was that they were sturdy, because you can see the kind of trouble that sort of cage would cause. A bird would shift a little, get a wing tip through the slat and the air stream would do the rest. The Mack came in with between seventy-five and a hundred broken wings fluttering along the sides of the crates. I figured that Joe must own the birds. No one was going to ship like that. When the rig stopped, the wings dropped like dead banners. It was hard to take.
"I know him," the driver who was sitting with me said.
"I know of him," I told the guy, "but nothing good."
"There isn’t any, anymore," he said quietly and turned from the window. His face seemed tense. He shifted his chair so that he could see both the door and the restaurant counter. "My cousin," he told me.
I was surprised. The conversation kind of ran out of gas. We did not say anything because we seemed waiting for something. It did not happen.
All that happened was that Joe came in looking like his name.
"Is he really Indian?" I asked.
"Half," his cousin said. "The best half if there is any." Then he stopped talking and I watched Joe. He was dressed like anybody else and needed a haircut. His nose had been broken at one time. His knuckles were enlarged and beat-up. He was tall and rough looking, but there was nothing that you could pin down as unusual in a tough guy except that he wore a hunting knife sheathed and hung on his belt. The bottom of the sheath rode in his back pocket. The hilt was horn. The knife pushed away from his body when he sat at the counter.
He was quiet. The waitress must have known him from before. She just sat coffee in front of him and moved away. If Joe saw the driver beside me he gave no indication. Instead he sat rigid, tensed like a man being chased by something. He looked all set to hit, or yell, or kill if anyone had been stupid enough to slap him on the back and say hello. The restaurant was too quiet. I put a dime in the juke and pressed something just for the noise. Outside came the sound of another rig pulling in. Joe Indian finished his coffee, gulping it. Then he started out and stopped before us. He stared down at the guy beside me.
"Why?" the man said. Joe said nothing. "Because a man may come with thunder does not mean that he can ride the thunder," the driver told him. It made no sense. "A man is the thunder," Joe said. His voice sounded like the knife looked. He paused for a moment then went out. His rig did not pull away for nearly ten minutes. About the time it was in the roadway another driver came in angry and half-scared. He headed for the counter. We waved him over. He came, glad for some attention.
"Jesus," he said.
"An old trick," the guy beside me told him.
"What?" I asked.
"Who is he?" The driver was shaking his head.
"Not a truck driver. Just a guy who happens to own a truck."
"But how come he did that." The driver’s voice sounded shaky.
"Did what?" I asked. They were talking around me.
The first guy, Joe’s cousin, turned to me. "Didn’t you ever see him trim a load?"
"What!"
"Truck’s messy," the other driver said. "That’s what he was saying. Messy. Messy." The man looked half-sick.
I looked at them still wanting explanation. His cousin told me. "Claims he likes neat cages. Takes that knife and goes around the truck cutting the wings he can reach . . . just enough. Never cuts them off, just enough so they rip off in the air stream."
"Those are live," I said.
"Uh huh."
It made me mad. "One of these days he’ll find somebody with about thirty-eight calibers of questions."
"Be shooting around that knife," his cousin told me. "He probably throws better than you could handle a rifle."
"But why . . ." It made no sense.
"A long story," his cousin said. "And I’ve got to be going." He stood up. "Raised in a coal camp," he told us. "That isn’t his real name, but his mother was full Indian. His daddy shot coal. Good money. So when Joe was a kid he was raised Indian, trees, plants, animals, mountains, flowers, men . . . all brothers. His ma was religious. When he became 16 he was raised coal miner white. Figure it out." He turned to go.
"Drive careful," I told him, but he was already on his way. Before the summer was out Joe Indian was dead. But by then all of the truck traffic was gone from 150. The guys were routing through Lexington. I did not know at first because of trouble on the Michigan run. Wheel bearings in Sault Ste. Marie to help out the worn compressor in Grand Rapids. Furniture manufacturers run their lousy equipment to death. They expect every cube to run on bicycle maintenance. I damned the rig, but the woods up there were nice with stands of birch that jumped up white and luminous in the headlights. The lake and straits were good. Above Traverse City there were not as many tourists. But, enough. In the end I was pushing hard to get back. When I hit 150 it took me about twenty minutes to realize that I was the only truck on the road. There were cars. I learned later that the thing did not seem to work on cars. By then it had worked on me well enough that I could not have cared less.
Because I started hitting animals. Lots of animals. Possum, cat, rabbit, coon, skunk, mice, even birds and snakes . . . at night . . . with the moon tacked up there behind a thin and swirling cloud cover. The animals started marching, looking up off the road into my lights and running right under the wheels.
Not one of them thumped!
I rode into pack after pack and there was no thump, no crunch, no feeling of the soft body being pressed and torn under the drive axle. They marched from the shoulder into the lights, disappeared under the wheels and it was like running through smoke. At the roadside, even cr
owding the shoulder, larger eyes gleamed from nebulous shapes that moved slowly back. Not frightened, just like they were letting you through. And you knew that none of them were real. And you knew that your eyes told you they were there. It was like running through smoke, but the smoke was in dozens of familiar and now horrible forms. I tried not to look. It did not work. Then I tried looking hard. That worked too well, especially when I cut on the spot to cover the shoulder and saw forms that were not men and were not animals but seemed something of both. Alien. Alien. I was afraid to slow. Things flew at the windshields and bounced off without a splat. It lasted for ten miles. Ordinarily it takes about seventeen minutes to do those ten miles. I did it in eleven or twelve. It seemed like a year. The stop was closed in Harrodsburg. I found an all-night diner, played the juke, drank coffee, talked to a waitress who acted like I was trying to pick her up, which would have been a compliment . . . just anything to feel normal. When I went back to the truck I locked the doors and climbed into the sleeper. The truth is I was afraid to go back on that road.
So I tried to sleep instead and lay there seeing that road stretching out like an avenue to nowhere, flanked on each side by trees so that a man thought of a high speed tunnel. Then somewhere between dream and imagination I began to wonder if that road really did end at night. For me. For anybody. I could see in my mind how a man might drive that road and finally come into something like a tunnel, high beams rocketing along walls that first were smooth then changed like the pillared walls of a mine with timber shoring on the sides. But not in the middle. I could see a man driving down, down at sixty or seventy, driving deep towards the center of the earth and knowing that it was a mine. Knowing that there was a rock face at the end of the road but the man unable to get his foot off the pedal. And then the thoughts connected and I knew that Joe Indian was the trouble with the road, but I did not know why or how. I was shaking and cold. In the morning it was not so bad. The movement was still there but it was dimmed out in daylight. You caught it in flashes. I barely made Mount Vernon, where I connected with 25. The trouble stopped there. When I got home I told some lies and took a week off. My place is out beyond Lafollette, where you can live with a little air and woods around you. For a while I was nearly afraid to go into those woods.
When I returned to the road it was the Cincinnati run all over with an occasional turn to Indianapolis. I used the Lexington route and watched the other guys. They were all keeping quiet. The only people who were talking were the police who were trying to figure out the sudden shift in traffic. Everybody who had been the route figured if they talked about it, everyone else would think they were crazy. You would see a driver you knew and say hello. Then the two of you would sit and talk about the weather. When truckers stop talking about trucks and the road something is wrong.
I saw Joe once below Livingston on 25. His rig looked the same as always. He was driving full out like he was asking to be pulled over. You could run at speed on 150. Not on 25. Maybe he was asking for it, kind of hoping it would happen so that he would be pulled off the road for a while. Because a week after that and a month after the trouble started I heard on the grapevine that Joe was dead.
Killed, the word had it, by ramming over a bank on 150 into a stream. Half of his load had drowned. The other half suffocated. Cars had driven past the scene for two or three days, the drivers staring straight down the road like always. No one paid enough attention to see wheel marks that left the road and over the bank.
What else the story said was not good and maybe not true. I tried to dismiss it and kept running 25. The summer was dwindling away into fall, the oak and maple on those hills were beginning to change. I was up from Knoxville one night and saw the North Carolina job sitting in front of a stop. No schedule would have kept me from pulling over. I climbed down and went inside.
For a moment I did not see anyone I recognized, then I looked a second time and saw Joe’s cousin. He was changed. He sat at a booth. Alone. He was slumped like an old man. When I walked up he looked at me with eyes that seemed to see past or through me. He motioned me to the other side of the booth. I saw that his hands were shaking.
"What?" I asked him, figuring that he was sick or had just had a close one.
"Do you remember that night?" he asked me. No lead up. Talking like a man who had only one thing on his mind. Like a man who could only talk about one thing.
"Yes," I told him, "and I’ve heard about Joe." I tried to lie. I could not really say that I was sorry.
"Came With Thunder," his cousin told me. "That was his other name, the one his mother had for him. He was born during an August storm."
I looked at the guy to see if he was kidding. Then I remembered that Joe was killed in August. It made me uneasy.
"I found him," Joe’s cousin told me. "Took my car and went looking after he was three days overdue. Because . . . I knew he was driving that road . . . trying to prove something."
"What? Prove what?"
"Hard to say. I found him hidden half by water, half by trees and the brush that grows up around there. He might have stayed on into the winter if someone hadn’t looked." The man’s hands were shaking. I told him to wait, walked over and brought back two coffees. When I sat back down he continued.
"It’s what I told you. But, it has to be more than that. I’ve been studying and studying. Something like this . . . always is." He paused and drank the coffee, holding the mug in both hands.
"When we were kids," the driver said, "we practically lived at each other’s house. I liked his best. The place was a shack. Hell, my place was a shack. Miners made money then, but it was all scrip. They spent it for everything but what they needed." He paused, thoughtful. Now that he was telling the story he did not seem so nervous.
"Because of his mother," he continued. "She was Indian. Creek maybe, but west of Creek country. Or maybe from a northern tribe that drifted down. Not Cherokee because their clans haven’t any turkeys for totems or names that I know of . . . ."
I was startled. I started to say something.
"Kids don’t think to ask about stuff like that," he said. His voice was an apology as if he were wrong for not knowing the name of a tribe.
"Makes no difference anyway," he said. "She was Indian religious and she brought Joe up that way because his old man was either working or drinking. We all three spent a lot of time in the hills talking to the animals, talking to flowers . . ."
"What?"
"They do that. Indians do. They think that life is round like a flower. They think animals are not just animals. They are brothers. Everything is separate like people."
I still could not believe that he was serious. He saw my look and seemed discouraged, like he had tried to get through to people before and had not had any luck.
"You don’t understand," he said. "I mean that dogs are not people, they are dogs. But each dog is important because he has a dog personality the same as a man has a man personality."
"That makes sense," I told him. "I’ve owned dogs. Some silly. Some serious. Some good. Some bad."
"Yes," he said. "But, most important. When he dies a dog has a dog spirit the same way a man would have a man spirit. That’s what Joe was brought up to believe."
"But they kill animals for food," I told him.
"That’s true. It’s one of the reasons for being an animal . . . or maybe, even a man. When you kill an animal you are supposed to apologize to the animal’s spirit and explain you needed meat."
"Oh."
"You don’t get it," he said. "I’m not sure I do either but there was a time . . . anyway, it’s not such a bad way to think if you look at it close. But the point is Joe believed it all his life. When he got out on his own and saw the world he couldn’t believe it anymore. You know? A guy acting like that. People cause a lot of trouble being stupid and mean."
"I know."
"But he couldn’t quite not believe it either. He had been trained every day since he was born, and I do mean every day."
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"Are they that religious?"
"More than any white man I ever knew. Because they live it instead of just believe it. You can see what could happen to a man?"
"Not quite."
"Sure you can. He couldn’t live in the camp anymore because the camp was dead when the mines died through this whole region. He had to live outside so he had to change, but a part of him couldn’t change . . . then his mother died. Tuberculosis. She tried Indian remedies and died. But I think she would have anyway."
I could see what the guy was driving at.
"He was proving something," the man told me. "Started buying and hauling the birds. Living hand to mouth. But, I guess every time he tore one up it was just a little more hate working out of his system."
"A hell of a way to do it."
"That’s the worst part. He turned his back on the whole thing, getting revenge. But always, down underneath, he was afraid."
"Why be afraid?" I checked the clock. Then I looked at the man. There was a fine tremble returning to his hands.
"Don’t you see," he told me. "He still halfway believed. And if a man could take revenge, animals could take revenge. He was afraid of the animals helping their brothers." The guy was sweating. He looked at me and there was fear in his eyes. "They do, you know. I’m honest-to-God afraid that they do."
"Why?"
"When he checked out missing I called the seller, then called the process outfit where he sold. He was three days out on a one day run. So I went looking and found him." He watched me. "The guys aren’t driving that road."
"Neither am I," I told him. "For that matter, neither are you."