by Pete Dexter
Mickey saw that Bird was scared to death of the man in the front seat. “The meat business is like that,” Bird said. “I mean, lookit. Here we go, drivin’ to Jersey to take a truck, right? Someplace in Kansas, a young calf is just learnin’ the ropes. You know—eat, shit; eat, shit …”
The man in the front seat gave him a look, which Bird took for interest. “The guy drivin’ the truck knows what we’re going to do. In fact, right now he’s wonderin’ where the fuck we are. Am I right or wrong?
“The guy shippin’ the load knows we’re going to take it. He sends us a set of keys. The guy s’posed to be waitin’ for the load knows somebody’s going to take it. He’s got a receipt for State Farm says he paid eight thousand more than he’s got in it.”
He stopped beside the tollbooth and threw in three quarters. “Now what happens,” he said, “if we don’t show up? We got all this business dependin’ on us to take the truck, and there’s cows comin’ up right now in Kansas, and without us there’s no place to put them. Without us, nobody’s got nothin’ to do.”
Bird took Admiral Wilson Boulevard to 70, then 70 to the Turnpike. He said, “Sometimes, you wish you didn’t have so many people dependin’ on you,” and then he shut up. Mickey settled back into his seat and looked at New Jersey. It was pretty. He’d never say that out loud, but this part, shit, it could be Iowa.
They drove north about twenty minutes, to Exit 7. The truck stop was a twenty-booth restaurant with showers and bunks in back, a couple of Pac-Man games and a parking lot a quarter-mile square, which was full. The man in the front seat turned to Bird and said, “Which one?”
Not, “Holy shit, look at all of them trucks” or, “What the fuck?” but, “Which one?” So it was all in Bird’s lap, any problem they had. Mickey watched it work on him.
“It’s a silver truck,” Bird said. “Here, I got a plate.…” He went into his shirt pocket and came out with a piece of paper.
“They’re all silver,” the man said, “and it’s going to take half a fuckin’ hour to read all the plates just on that one.” He pointed at the first truck in the first row. Fourteen plates, half of them covered with mud. Then he said, “Hey, it’s runnin’….”
Mickey saw Bird looking for him in the rearview mirror. “That ain’t it,” Mickey said. “We’re lookin’ for a reefer.” The man in the front seat turned around to look at him. “A refrigerated truck,” Mickey said, “you know? So the meat don’t cook on the way to Vermont?”
The man turned back in his seat without saying anything else, but he was looking at the truck again. “They don’t turn them off,” Mickey said, “they’re diesels. They leave them goin’ a week at a time.”
The man in the front seat said, “That’s very interesting, the history of the trucking industry.” So Mickey shut up and Bird drove the Cadillac up and down the rows of trucks, stopping when he came to a reefer to check the plate numbers. Then he almost ran over a whore, coming out from between trucks. Bird hit the brakes, then gave her a little wave and a smile. She gave him the finger.
“Truck whores won’t have nothin’ to do with nobody but truckers,” Mickey said.
Bird looked concerned. “Is that so?”
“That’s a fact,” Mickey said. The man in the front seat looked straight ahead. Mickey wondered what kind of trouble Bird was in that they’d pick a hard dick who wouldn’t know the difference if they stole a load of live chickens to keep an eye on the job. Before, it was always just him and Bird.
“Pull up here,” the man said. “I got to piss.” Bird stopped the Cadillac and the man walked between two trucks.
“Who is that?” Mickey said. Bird shrugged. “He don’t seem to know a hell of a lot.”
Bird said, “He knows what he knows, and he don’t give a shit about the rest.”
“I can see that,” Mickey said. “But what’s he doin’ here with us? I don’t like none of this.”
“It’s nothin’ to do with you,” Bird said.
“A guy like that, I seen them do things,” Mickey said. “I mean, he don’t know somethin’, that’s fine until you know he don’t know. Like right now, he’s standin’ there pissin’ on his shoes. The wind’s comin’ from under the trailer, but he don’t notice it because of all the noise, which he ain’t used to. But if you were to go out there and tell him he’s pissin’ on his feet, he might shoot you, just to show you he knows what he’s doin’.”
Bird said, “That’s why God gave you and me brains, not to go out there and tell him he’s pissin’ on his feet.”
They found the truck in the last row, a new Peterbilt. The driver was a skinny kid with a beard and a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. Bird stopped the car in front of him, and the kid watched the three men get out. He was sitting sideways in the cab with his feet up on the other side, listening to some shit wasn’t even music. You could hear it even with the windows closed and the engine on. He was a dirty kind of kid, you could see that. If the truck was his, Mickey wouldn’t let somebody like that put air in the tires. The kid looked down at the three of them awhile, then he turned around slowly in his seat and rolled down the window. He said, “Yeah?”
The man with piss on his shoes turned to Bird. “You notice,” he said, “the fuckin’ world’s got an attitude anymore.” He glanced at Mickey, to include him, and then he stared up into the cab. The kid shrugged, turned off the tape and climbed down.
Bird handed him an envelope and said, “Go on in there and have some breakfast, pal. Take an hour, unnerstand? An hour before you come out here lookin’ for your outfit.”
The kid smiled. “Who’s driving?” he said. He looked them over one at a time, still smiling. Some private joke. The man with piss on his shoes was left-handed. He turned halfway around, like he was walking away, and then he came back. The fist drove up under the ribs, toward the liver. The kid’s face all came together in the middle, and he dropped.
He lay where he fell, afraid to move anything that might make it worse. The man watched him, nodding as the kid improved. “All of a sudden,” he said, “the world don’t have no attitude no more.” He sat down on the hood of the Cadillac and waited.
Bird bent over the kid and started talking. “Lookit,” he said, “it’s none of your business who’s drivin’, am I right?” The kid held himself, waiting for things to come back together. “Lookit, you all right, pal? You run your business, we run ours. We give you the trump, your business is over. Now go on into the restaurant like I said, eat a nice breakfast, all right? Nothin’ happens. I mean, it was lucky you wasn’t hurt, pally.…”
Bird was sweating. Mickey saw things were getting away from him. He didn’t like the job at all. He didn’t like what had happened to the kid, but more than that he didn’t like it that nobody was under control. The next you knew, the kid would be crying.
The man was looking at him now. “Business is business,” he said. The kid sat up in the dirt, still holding his side.
“An hour,” Bird said, “all right? You go have a nice breakfast, you feel a lot better, then you come out lookin’ for the truck.”
The kid stood up, Bird holding his arm. “Take a couple deep breaths,” he said. The kid took a couple of deep breaths, so his ribs weren’t broke. Bird picked up the Cleveland Indians hat and dusted it off, then put it on the kid’s head. “Am I right or wrong?” he said.
The cab of the truck smelled like a Chestnut Street double feature. There were a couple dozen roaches in the ashtray, smoked down to raggedy little squares. The kid had left orange peels and banana peels and empty cartons of Wendy’s chili all over the floor. Mickey wondered how people could live like that. You did live in a truck.
He pulled the rig out of the lot, getting used to the throw of the gears, fixing the mirrors. The Cadillac came out behind him, Bird was alone with the man again. Mickey looked over the tapes. Plasmatics, AC/DC, the Sex Pistols. Sex Pistols? He remembered the look on the kid’s face before the man with Bird hit him. Queers always thought they wer
e smarter than anybody wasn’t in their club.
He drove away from the Turnpike, up over a little hill, and pulled onto 295 South. The truck was new and tight and strong, ten forward gears, and his hands and eyes fell into old patterns, and there was something simple and comfortable about it that he didn’t have anymore.
He’d driven trucks since he was fourteen years old. He’d made the run from Miami to Atlanta with the old man a hundred times before that. The old man didn’t care if he went to school, as a matter of fact he felt better if Mickey was with him because there wasn’t nobody to watch him at home, and when he’d died Mickey had taken the truck and made the runs for him. He was sixteen, and that’s what it felt like he was doing.
Daniel had taught him the driving end and he’d taught him the business end. He didn’t talk about much else. Once, coming down old 441 through Georgia, Mickey had said the sunset was pretty behind the pines. The old man had said, “If it is, you can’t make it no better, sayin’ it.”
And when he’d died—the old man thought he had hemorrhoids for two years, truck drivers always had hemorrhoids, and by the time the doctors went in there it was in everything—when he’d died, Mickey had taken the rig and made the runs and kept his feelings in order, and to himself.
He looked in the mirror and caught the yellow Cadillac a quarter mile behind him.
The old man had never taught him anything about women, of course, or drinking or the ponies. When Mickey got older, he sometimes wondered if it was because the old man didn’t know anything about it.
He found the ponies for himself. First at Hialeah, then Gulfstream and Sunshine. He’d lost the rig to the ponies when he was eighteen. He kept coming back. He didn’t cry the blues when he lost, he didn’t kiss strangers when he won. And there’d been days when he won as much as the old man had made in half a year.
Mickey knew he didn’t have hold of it, it had hold of him. It made him feel weak, and a couple of times he quit. And he kept coming back.
He’d took a job with Peabody Movers and went all over the South. His favorite track was the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. It was a dignified old track, you walked in there and you could see it was built with that in mind. He always did all right at the Fair Grounds.
Peabody had died—he heard that at the garage and it surprised him to hear there was actually somebody named that—and the company folded in four months. He’d gone back to Florida for a while, pulling double-size mobile homes, but with the winds and the narrow roads then, it was about as peaceful as hauling leaky dynamite. And by then he didn’t like the way the mobile home business was doing Florida anyway. There was nothing safe from them but the ocean.
He’d gone to Chicago then, and hauled cattle in from Iowa and Nebraska. In the winter, you’d have to stop every hundred miles to see that none of them were down. The driver was responsible for that. They gave you a hollow metal pole, and when one of the cattle went down you slid the pole in through the slats and poked it in the eye.
A cow didn’t lie down back there for nothing, and when it was cold that’s all you could do to get them up. When it was cold enough, they didn’t care what you did.
Sportsman Park and Arlington didn’t fit him at all. In Chicago, it was like nobody gave a shit who they were when they got around money, and he went east and got a job with Dow Chemical, hauling poison. Mostly to Florida. They needed a lot of poison in Florida.
He’d met Bird at Garden State, sitting in the reserved seats in the clubhouse. Bird had been to every track in the East, and he was interested in Mickey’s work. “Listen,” he’d said once, “they give you a mask or somethin’, handlin’ all that shit?” Mickey hadn’t thought of that. It was always something.
Garden State was a good track, old and comfortable, and he and Bird were there the day it burned down. They stood in the parking lot and watched it go. Four hours later, in a bar across the highway from the track, Bird told him about the meat business. They had the place to themselves because it was full of smoke.
The Cadillac had moved up and was sitting on his ass now, close enough so he could see the faces in the front seat. Bird was still talking, the other man looked straight ahead.
They went by the state trooper at sixty-two miles an hour, which should of been safe. He came out behind them though, and Mickey felt himself go weak. His hands were shaking and the cop was coming. So the kid had gone inside and made a call. Well, he was a kid. The man with Bird had hit him, and he’d called the cops. He was a kid. The Cadillac pulled into the passing lane and went around him. Mickey touched his brakes and looked over into the car, but the man with Bird didn’t look back.
Seven hundred dollars, that was his end. Half a day’s work, and some fuck who pissed on his own feet had decided the world had an attitude. He was probably up there now, getting his story together with Bird, how nothing had happened at the truck stop.
Mickey eased the truck down to fifty-five. The cop was two hundred yards and coming. Mickey thought about the kid. Whatever kind of shit this was, the kid was in worse. The man in the car with Bird turned around to watch, and at that moment the cop pulled into the passing lane, went around the truck, and stopped the Cadillac.
It turned out they got a ticket for following too close.
He got off 295 and headed over to 130, the old truck route. There were lights and some traffic, but on 130 he wasn’t as worried about what the kid back at the truck stop might do. He still got back to the flower shop twenty minutes ahead of Bird. He pulled the truck around to the back, opened one side of the garage and drove in, and left it there next to his own truck.
The sun was working, and the place was warmer than it had been that morning. Mickey walked around the outside of the building, and then went into the flower shop and talked with Mrs. Capezio. She was worried that Bird was working too hard. “Arthur’s nerves ain’t what they was,” she said. “He went to the doctor, they said his pressure’s too high. I don’t know, I tell him to have faith in God but he don’t seem to think things is going to work out.” The old woman shook her head. “This is bad business, started with poor Mr. Bruno. Arthur’s thinkin’ all the time, and you know that ain’t good for him, Mickey.…”
Fifteen minutes later Bird parked the car on the sidewalk in front of the shop. The man with piss on his shoes was gone. Bird came in and kissed his aunt on the cheek. “They didn’t get the electric back on, Sophie?”
“They say very soon, Arthur,” she said. “They say not to worry, have confidence in your electric company.”
Mickey followed Bird through the flower cooler and the meat cooler, all the way back to the truck. There were windows back there, covered with shades, about twelve feet up the walls, so you could see without a flashlight. Bird wasn’t talking, which wasn’t like him. “You got a problem with somebody?” Mickey asked.
“Sally? No, he’s out of it. He was only along, you know. To see it all went down.” He ran his hands through his hair. “We got a little business to talk over, Mick.”
Mickey did not like the way that sounded.
“See, I got a problem. I didn’t especially even want to do the job today, even before the fuckin’ electric went out, and I got a cooler full of meat that’s been in there a week already. Even before that, I didn’t want it because of a problem I’m havin’.”
Mickey noticed again that Bird was scared. “You don’t have the seven hundred?” he said. Bird held out his arms. Embarrassed and scared, trying to hold it together.
“Somethin’ is goin’ on,” he said. “They hit Angelo, all right. He was a nice old man, but they want A.C. Then they hit Chicken Man. He gives them A.C., brings in shit the old man wouldn’t allow, I mean he’s bringin’ it in in suitcases, and they hit him too. And Frank and Chickie and fourteen other guys, some of them don’t even make sense. Nobodies. And it’s changin’ things all over. Business …”
Mickey said, “Forget it. I’m doin’ all right.” His lies always sounded like lies. “When you got it,
you can give it to me then.”
“Take some of the meat,” Bird said. He took a set of keys out of his shirt pocket and opened the locks on the reefer. He opened one of the doors. The meat had been loaded in a hurry, 150-pound sides thrown in there any way they landed. Each side had been put into a gauze envelope for shipping. With arrows, it could of been a hundred-year-old massacre.
“I can’t do nothin’ with that,” Mickey said. “It ain’t even cut.” Bird was staring into the reefer.
“What the fuck, Mick? What the fuck are they tryin’ to tell me here?”
“I don’t know these people, Bird,” he said. “I never dealt with them, so I don’t know.” Bird was still staring into the truck. “Lemme help you get it in the cooler.”
Mickey took off his shirt, and he and Bird picked up one of the sides of beef. It kept slipping out of Bird’s hands, but they got it into the cooler, stumbling in the dark, and put it on a hook.
They went back and looked into the truck again. Bird couldn’t stand it. “Fuck it,” he said, “we’ll leave it in the truck.”
“We ain’t going to take the truck to Delaware?” Mickey said. They always took the empties to a shopping center in Delaware. “These people are going to want their truck back, Bird.”
“Fuck them,” he said. He seemed healthier, now he was pissed. “Let’s get some of this shit in your truck, Mick.”
Mickey said, “I can’t use it like this. I got nowhere to cut it up.” He saw Bird wasn’t listening. “Bird?”
Bird jerked a side of beef down and Mickey helped him get it out and carry it to his truck, and helped him put it in. They stacked eight sides of beef, four on the left, four on the right, putting most of the weight over the axle. Bird was out of breath when they finished. “You sure you don’t want a couple more?” he said.
“This is enough,” Mickey said. “It only keeps a week in there anyway.” Bird went back over to the truck and closed the door on the meat. It seemed to make him feel better, not to be looking at it.