by Hal Ackerman
The driver they had seen out in the parking lot must have had gone directly into the bar area through a separate outside entrance. He emerged now into the dining room with a drink in hand, a little tipsy—or maybe it was just the contrast to the sudden brightness that startled him and made his first step look unsteady. He located his destination and serpentined his way amongst the bustling waitresses and noisy lunchtime crowd toward the men’s room. “I bet this guy likes country,” Ned said in his wide-open, affable voice. “Am I right, Jimbo?” He read the name stitched above the pocket of the truck driver’s dungaree jacket.
The driver cocked his head to one side and looked down from his six foot two inch natural height, enhanced by the heels of his riding boots. “Do I know you?”
Ned ignored Barb’s warning pressure on his left arm. He knew an invitation to conversation when he heard one. “My name is Ned. I was just telling my family that you probably liked country music.”
“Is that right, Ned?” The driver looked down at each member of Ned’s family. His gaze did not linger long on the side of the banquette where the men sat, but it did on the other, occupied by mother and teenage ice queen, whose acetylene grey eyes were burning hotter.
“What would make you think I like country music, or are you just one observant as hell kind of cowboy?”
“I’m certainly no cowboy,” Ned chuckled, wishing the man had just said yesiree bob and kept moving. But now he had set his drink down on the leatherette bolster behind Skip’s shoulder.
There was a lull in the jukebox music so people at other tables looked around. “What else do you know about me?” Jimbo asked. “That I cheat at cards? That I have a knife in my boot and a hunger for pretty women?”
Ned may have been the last person in the room to feel the undercurrent but he felt it now. “I certainly didn’t intend to be rude,” he said.
“Do you think I like to dance?”
“We really just want to finish our meals and get to Disneyland. I’m sorry if I gave you any offense.”
“You’re absolutely right,” the driver said and clapped Ned’s shoulder with a grip that nearly paralyzed his left side. “I do like to dance. He reached into the tight right hand pocket of his blue jeans and spattered some change across the table in Skip’s direction. “Play E-9,” Jimbo said.
Skip had already memorized the songs. “E-9. If I Said I Liked Your Body Would You Hold It Against Me?”
“That’s the one,” Jimbo said. His eyes were drawn to the heat of the Ice Queen’s young eyes, which were only partially averted as the whine of the steel guitar penetrated the air. But it was not her hand that he took. It was Ned’s wife Barb whom he led from the booth to the center of the floor, held her against him, the rim of his hat so high above her head it looked like a halo, her eyes closed in surrender, her cheek against his beating heart for the whole of that the slow sinuous country song.
The stunned silence in the aftermath of what had happened was as mesmerizing as the event itself. The bourbon poured into the partially eaten banana split left its bitter reek over the entire booth. In the physical sense Ned had not been assaulted. He had not been struck. No ice packs would be needed to bring down any swelling, nor bandages to staunch the flow of blood. It was more that the bandages he had always swathed himself in to conceal his true nature had been stripped away, revealing to the room full of strangers who would soon forget, and to his wife and children who would forever remember, the cowardly man he had always known that he was and wished he were not.
The driver sauntered across the gravel covered parking lot, his hands tucked into the back pockets of his straight-legged jeans. He didn’t have to look back to know if they were watching him through the parted curtains. Sabrina was fixed on his back pockets, imagining how those muscular haunches would feel if they were her hands tucked into his pockets. Skip was more curious about the truck and counted the wheels to verify that there were eighteen. Perhaps his leg had tightened up on him or he was exaggerating for effect, but the driver sauntered around to the back of his rig and opened the canvas tarp to check on his cargo. It was fully loaded, front to back and stacked four high, with two-by-three foot white palates, easily a hundred of them, maybe more, all carefully tied down. He checked that the bindings were taut like a cowboy would check the cinch belt on his palomino before mounting his saddle, then with his left foot first on the bottom step, grasping the roof with his left hand, he vaulted into the cab.
Ned was not looking out the window. His index fingers were on opposite sides of his orange juice glass, intently studying the geometry of the fragments of pulp and wondering if his wife would ever get over the feeling she must harbor for him now. His ears were attuned to the sound of the throaty gargle of the diesel engine starting, the grinding engagement of its gears and the gravel being crunched under the weight of its tires.
Only after the last vestige of sounds had receded did Barb return from the ladies room. Her slender body recomposed, her jacket back in place. Skip greeted her in his oblivious upper register. Sabrina glared with resentment, but it was resentment tempered with some grudging respect, for through the entire incident her mother had never lost her dignity. Her own dignity, Sabrina knew, would have drowned in desire.
“Are you all right?” Ned asked, daring to seek out her eyes.
“Am I all right?” she repeated.
They delayed their departure over the semblance of coffee. The sun had shifted position and the anticipated shade from the eucalyptus trees was gone. The interior of their Rover was a kiln. Sabrina complained that they needed the air conditioner. “Not going uphill,” her mother said, keeping in place their rules of the road even if everything else had been tattered.
“It’s all right,” Ned murmured. He reached for the dial. Their finger and knuckle met briefly at the dashboard, where he waited to measure whether the current in her hand carried solace or repulsion. Reaching the summit of the eastern crest, an ovation of sunlight bathed the expanse of the San Joaquin Valley below them. February meant something entirely different here than in the rest of America. Here, two hundred and fifty miles of almond trees stood poised to set blossom. “The San Joachin valley is named after the father of the Virgin Mary,” Skip informed everyone.
The vista of farms under cultivation was marred only by a mysterious dark, palpitating cloud that gyrated and changed shape below and ahead of them. From their angle and altitude, perspective played tricks with the eye. The phenomenon could have been small and nearby or a distant monumental cataclysm. Skip grasped the back of his mother’s seat for leverage and pulled himself forward for a better look. “What is that?” he asked. Their attentions became riveted upon the swoops of kaleidoscopic motion. The dark cloud hovered in place, then thinned into a long chain, rose up, gained altitude, broadened, flattened, expanded into a long streak of black lightning, then disappeared, as if the entire elaborate display had been a stage effect or hallucination.
Ned took each of the next three hairpin turns with emboldened speed, bearing into the turns like he had a sports car under him rather than a top-heavy vehicle with a propensity for rollovers. “Evel Kneivel,” said Barb.
“We’re behind schedule.” But he braked down to an obedient twenty, causing Sabrina to slump deeper into her seat, sensing that the diminished speed meant more time having to be spent with these people. It was from this angle that she glimpsed down through the tree line to where the road emerged below after its next curve. “Shit!” she exclaimed.
The Rover skidded to a long sliding stop thirty feet from what looked like a felled brontosaurus splayed across the road. Twin geysers of diesel smoke billowed up from the eighteen-wheeler’s engine and exhaust. The four hundred white boxes that had been tied down and packed with such precision now lay strewed and broken across the road. The four doors of the family’s Range Rover opened in cautious unison. The rear guard advanced first—Ned cautioned them about going any closer, but his authority was gone. The children went forward,
outflanking their father’s extended arms.
It was the ice queen who lost her cool. The truck’s cab had separated from the rig and was bent over on its side as though its neck had been twisted off in the jaws of a ferocious beast. Out of the open window, resting on its lower frame looking ready to guillotined, the neck of the driver hung in an impossible angle. The expression on his face, which had been so fiendishly cocky when he had tousled the Ned’s hair and summoned Ned’s wife, was now distended beyond recognition. His cheeks were four times their size. His forehead bulged off its cranium. His eyes were ghastly open but nearly covered with distended flesh.
“Look.” It was Sabrina who saw the orange and black striped body crawl feebly out of the trucker’s open mouth. “It’s a bee,” she said, and drew back.
“Honey bee,” her brother verified. “Apis mellifera.”
It beat its wings twice, toppled in a vain attempt to fly, tried once more and then sat motionless, corpse on corpse. An electronic hum began to fill the air. So transfixed were the foursome that it took several moments of the sound’s approach before they noticed and looked up. At first nothing was visible. It sounded as though police helicopters were approaching from just over the other side of the mountain. And then the sky darkened above them.
Ned rousted them to run like a cowpuncher stampeding a herd. The four open doors were at first a barrier to their safety. Sabrina stumbled and slipped to the hard ground. Her brother did not stop. Her father lifted her to her feet, escorted the others to safety. In an effort to regain what he had lost, he remained a sentry until his family were inside and their doors slammed shut. The shadow descended toward him like a pterodactyl, then partitioned into hundredths, a horrifically beautiful still life of dense, hanging clusters.
The first swarm settled on his back. He felt its vibrating weight like a rear-mounted engine. The next one wound itself slowly around his right leg. He stood without moving. Inside the car, his horrified family watched. His other leg was now covered. Slowly, excruciatingly, he reached out his arm, indicating them to shut the one remaining open door. His outstretched arm was surrounded. Then the other. Sabrina whimpered. “What are they doing to Daddy?”
“They go crazy for bananas,” Skip replied.
The soft scarf of organic life revolved itself upwards now around Ned’s chest, then higher until it covered his throat, his mouth, his eyes. It encased him. Inside the whirling darkness the buzzing filled his senses. It went beyond hearing. His entire body buzzed. He was a tuning fork in sympathetic vibration with the universe. He felt an eerie nostalgic ecstasy as though he were two hundred fathoms beneath the sea. The rest was silence.
HAL ACKERMAN has been on the faculty of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television for the past twenty-four years and is currently co-chair of the screenwriting program. His book, Write Screenplays That Sell... The Ackerman Way, is in its third printing, and is the text of choice in a growing number of screenwriting programs around the country.
He has had numerous short stories published in literary journals over the past two years, including New Millennium Writings, Southeast Review, The Pinch, Storyglossia, and Passages.
His short Story, “Roof Garden” won the Warren Adler 2008 award for fiction and is published by Kindle. “Alfalfa,” was included in the 2006 anthology, I Wanna Be Sedated...30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers. Among the twenty-nine “other writers” were Louise Erdrich, Dave Barry, Anna Quindlen, Roz Chast, and Barbara Kingsolver.
TESTOSTERONE: How Prostate Cancer Made A Man of Me won the William Saroyan Centennial Prize for drama following its theatrical run in Santa Monica, CA and is currently being mounted for a New York production.
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