When they stopped for the night outside Toledo, he went for a run down a corn road that led away from the truck stop. He ran with his shirt off to save on laundry later. The damp cold air chilled him badly. He ran away from the sun, and by the time he circled back it had set, and having no towel he let the wind dry him while he shivered. The driver already lay sleeping across the seat under a military-issue wool blanket. Vollie shut himself in the trailer and wrapped a tarp around his body for bedding and lay down with his bunched shirt for a pillow on the floor among the cargo crates of grapefruit. The piney smell hung thick in the dark like a blessing given in excess that had become a curse.
For two days on the road the driver didn’t volunteer his name. Neither did Vollie, who didn’t have one yet. They stopped at a wholesaler in Akron and unloaded fruit. They swung north to Rochester and unloaded more. Vollie declined a share of the driver’s meatloaf supper at a tavern and drank only coffee that failed to revive him. After sundown, the night before he was to meet his superiors in Bridgeport, slouching and limp with hunger and fatigue, he was falling toward a dream when the driver took three gasps off a Benzedrine inhaler and said, “All right, Staff Sergeant, I’m sure you want to ask how it went for me over there.”
“Not now,” Vollie muttered.
“Don’t you want to know what all I saw and what I did?” the driver asked.
“Maybe another time. I need to sleep.”
The driver’s nerve-jangled eyes speed-read the vacant road. He activated the left signal, checked the mirrors, drew the rig halfway into the passing lane, rechecked the mirrors, completed the lane change. There were no signs of cars or lights save the rig’s own anywhere. Then he activated the right signal and performed the whole operation the other way. The rig accelerated. It slowed. It accelerated again for no evident reason. The driver started to talk inaudibly, then stopped and swallowed. The marks on his pallid face were a matrix of uncertainties. He watched the road as if he feared it. His mouth distorted vividly to squelch a rising sob. His eyes welled. But he did not fully cry.
They commenced a sudden incline, yet the driver shifted into higher gear. The engine shuttered and bucked. When he hit the inhaler twice more, Vollie sat up and said, “Pull over the rig.”
“What for?”
“Pull to the wayside. I’ll drive.”
“You ain’t got no hauling paper, have you?”
“I’ve driven eighteen wheels before.”
The driver said, “I’m having a rough time, Staff Sergeant.”
“That’s all right.”
“I thought it would be different stateside.”
“You’re all right, citizen.”
“I thought it would be like a wet sponge on the blackboard. But everything keeps getting louder, and I can’t make it stop. I don’t got anyone to tell. If I go home I’ll fuck everybody up.”
“There’s a pull-off right there.”
In fact it was a crawler lane for trucks on the steep grade of the mountain. The rig merged into it equivocally then swerved again into the through lane.
“Aim back toward that solid white line,” Vollie said.
The rig slowed, then darted toward the roadside and came to a shuddering halt straddling the lane and shoulder. They were on an escarpment above a canoe-shaped valley. The driver popped his door.
“Check your mirror now,” Vollie said.
The moment the driver poked his foot out the door, another rig, festooned with lights like a refinery at night, shot past them near enough to touch. It shed a tremor in its wake that shook the cab. The driver sucked his breath. Then he checked the mirror and climbed down to the road. He crept in front of the headlights.
Suddenly he was sprinting up the highway.
At first he ran in the crawler lane. Vollie saw him spasmodically check either shoulder as though mirrors were mounted there. He veered to the edge of the road and continued to run. The slope of the escarpment leveled, then quickly tilted up again, but he showed no signs of slowing.
While Vollie slid over the bench and oriented his feet to the pedals, the driver, evanescing in the upward-angling headlights, ran like a tireless dog.
Vollie put the rig in gear and overtook the runner by a half mile before he brought the rig to a stop again on the roadside and got out and lit a flare. He sat behind the trailer on its bumper and smoked while the hazards flashed.
A figure emerged through the intermittent shadows. It seemed to move too slowly to be a person. Creeping closer amid the red- and amber-pulsing dark, it became the revenant driver, hands in pockets, face streaked with tears and snot.
“What fool place did you think you were running to?” Vollie asked.
The driver dragged his sleeve across his nose.
Vollie picked a tobacco shred from his tongue and spat and looked at the tired boy. He was a boy now, his tears unmasked him.
“There’s a house back there in the trees,” the driver said with timid hope.
Vollie studied him.
“I just saw it a second ago. Maybe they’d let us in.”
“Get your crazy ass in the cab.”
He stood there cowering.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Vollie said.
“You say that now.”
“If I miss this meeting tomorrow I got no number to call, no place to bunk, no way back on the train the other direction. Do you follow? So get back in the cab, and I’ll drive us to Connecticut. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Once Vollie got the rig going again, the boy, having nothing to drive, sat on his hands and quailed like a child who had been beaten a second time for crying out during his first beating.
The road materialized endlessly at the horizon of the headlights.
In the middle of the night, Vollie said, “You weren’t really at Hue, were you.”
The boy struggled to reimpose the air of authority he had possessed when Vollie had first climbed into the cab two days before but shortly gave up and admitted he had not been there for the battle at Tet, no. He had gone through—well, he had flown over it later on. It was a stretcher he had got used to telling. Now Vollie would never believe him about anything he said. He felt so fucked up. He really had been in those other places.
“I know it,” Vollie said.
“How?”
“I believe you, that’s all.”
“You don’t mind being lied to?”
“Not if I know it.”
“The president said we were winning, and the secretary of defense said we were winning, but in private they said we were losing and we’d never win. It was in the papers black and white.”
“I heard,” Vollie said.
“It doesn’t bother you?”
Vollie exhaled slowly through his nose, extending the many aromas in the tobacco smoke.
“I wish I could be that way,” the boy said. “I mind a lot. You don’t seem to mind anything. You’re like the mountain under the trees.”
Vollie’s father had once told him that if you let someone go on believing you had a talent you didn’t really have, you were worse than a braggart, you were a liar too. He said, “I mind being broke.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Anymore if you’re broke, what good are you?”
“Folks didn’t need money before?”
“They didn’t always need money for everything,” Vollie said. “I hate money.”
As they crossed into Connecticut, the sun jumped a low fence of gauzy cloud, and Vollie snapped the window visor down. He hadn’t eaten or slept in thirty hours, but his impatient hungry mind was keen amid the rush-hour bedlam of the interstate in Hartford. From there he found his way to an AME church in Bridgeport where somebody was to meet him.
Vollie threw his bag down to the pavement. He offered the driver his hand, and they shook. The driv
er’s face was covered in the still-pink acne scars of a body until lately flush with the hormones of growth. Only now did Vollie really look at him. He asked his name. “Clayton,” the driver said. Whether it was the true name, Vollie never knew.
Then the rig was gone, and in its place lay a city street stabbed with phone poles and NO PARKING signs and NO LOITERING ANYTIME.
He sat on his bag on the sidewalk, stretching his back before the iron fence that encircled the untended churchyard, the cracked, toppled headstones lying every which way. One after another pedestrian, catching a glance at him, zagged across the three-lane avenue where the loading docks of a factory loomed in windy rust-flaked sleep.
Midday, the factory awoke. A hundred men streamed out the doors into its acres of parking lot and sat on open tailgates eating wax-papered sandwiches from Styrofoam coolers. They napped in truck beds. Cigarettes jounced in the mouths of four men playing cribbage across the hood of an LTD. From among this assembly two white men emerged, waited as a flight of traffic clamored past, and jogged across the lanes to where Vollie sat at the cemetery fence. One of them said, “Staff Sergeant, that you?”
“Yessir,” Vollie said. It took a few more seconds before he recognized Lorch amid the mustache, sideburns, plaid shirt.
“You’re a sight,” Lorch said. “Are you hungry?”
“Naw.” He could have eaten a house.
“You look like Opie the Gimp. He used to stake out Mamma’s beauty parlor pleading for alms.”
“I was to stay at the churchyard and wait,” Vollie said.
“Good man, but you look like, Brother can you spare a dime? I wonder why.”
“Sir, I never panhandled in my life.”
“It’s the shirt—where’s your iron? Or it’s the whole getup.”
“Sir, in my bag,” he said, hoisting it.
Lorch didn’t introduce the associate, who stood watching Vollie with minute, unswerving, impassive eyes.
“At ease,” Lorch said. “You’re out now. Nobody cares how you keep your clothes.”
“Sir, I never begged, sir.”
“At ease, I said. It’s lunch hour. Off we go.”
Vollie had only ever encountered Lorch at Bien Hoa and at the base hospital in Saigon. To meet him now in America was vertiginous and world scrambling. He briefly suspected he was dreaming this whole encounter: soon he would meet with other such misplaced figures—squirts he had killed in combat would pass on the street; his mother would approach, not recognizing him, asking the way to the train station.
Bridgeport was strafed with sunshine, but clouds impended from the west. The sky was a brain chopped in half. Lorch’s associate walked point, Vollie and Lorch following. When a bum on a corner dropped a bottle that shattered a few yards away on the sidewalk, Vollie and Lorch jumped, every bone at once, as though they were marionettes and the invisible puppeteer had sneezed. Lorch’s associate reacted not at all and went on walking. He held open the door of a strangely built diner with small stools and banquettes and narrow tables on each of four cramped floors, and narrow iron staircases leading between them, steep as ship ladders. Vollie stowed his bag in the coat closet, and they all climbed to the top floor. The associate sat with his back to the wall facing the landing as the waitress climbed down below decks.
Lorch said, “Home cooking filled you out, some anyhow. I wouldn’t have known you from Adam’s off ox if it weren’t for that bag.”
Vollie read the menu.
“I have a sister used to make us all a vinegar pie every time I come home on leave,” Lorch said. “It took every ounce of my self-restraint not to eat the whole thing before anybody else got to the table— Hold on. I forgot. You didn’t go home, did you?”
“What were you guys doing in that plant?” Vollie said.
Lorch extracted his cutlery from the paper napkin in which it was raveled. He said, “Ask me later.”
When Vollie spoke, the associate watched him intently, yet with eyes cast strangely down. Then it became evident he was following Vollie’s lips, to read them.
His name was Arthur Van Aken, United States Army, retired. He had lost his hearing from an aerial attack he had called in on a ravine in Laos where he and a group of Hmong guerrillas he was working with had got pinned down. All this came out later. He was fifty-eight, with broad shoulders, but he had lost the upper body strength of youth. His movements were few and smooth, as if unguided by consciousness and untroubled by its interference. His jaw had been broken, so that he frowned—the lined, uneven frown of an old person working a seed from a molar with his tongue. His bloodshot eyes were dim and small. He had never married. He spoke, distinctly but at a whisper, when the waitress came. “Fried chicken, coleslaw, greens, water, lemonade, cobbler.”
Lorch pronounced, “For the table,” and offered a hand to take Vollie’s menu. The waitress went away. The light changed. Their table abutted the louvered windows, but it was queerly dark in their perch under the rafters. The windows gave on the dark street below and dark torquing trees; two hunched people sprinted past with jackets on their heads: it was raining. But nowhere could you see the rain.
“We need you to get comfortable awhile,” Lorch said. “Do you think you can do that? Settle down and get recognized. Bore in like a tick does. I’m aware it isn’t your training to subcontract personal chores, but we need you to lay up some of your independence. Use the dry cleaner. Firstly on that shirt—what am I saying? The shirt has to go. All them stripes ain’t accurate anymore. Pay the girl upstairs to simonize your car.”
“I don’t have a car.”
“Actually, you do, and it’s paid for. So’s the spinet piano we found for your apartment. Play it with the window open. Let the neighbors hear.”
“I forgot to ask you, bread or biscuits,” the waitress announced, stopping to address Van Aken from the side.
Van Aken didn’t see her.
Lorch said, “Get your teeth cleaned and make a follow-up appointment—biscuits, thank you, honey.” He waited as the girl went away. “With the car comes a loan to buy the car, ergo a credit history. When you get yourself a speeding ticket, your name goes on the rolls of the local sinners. That might serve you later. ‘For all have sinned and come short.’ Romans three, verse twenty-three. I’m saying don’t hide. If our subject is anywhere down there, he’s probably under a bridge or a park bench. You’ll never hear a word about him if you make yourself a homebody.”
Van Aken continued with his statuary stare. He had picked up lipreading in a year. You couldn’t tell whether the eyes had their graven stillness from disposition or from training. They were like the eyes of a lieutenant commander from Naval Intelligence to whom Vollie had once made a report, an old-timer trained before the era of subminiature cameras to memorize whole documents at a sitting. An indifferent, acquisitive stare. It didn’t say, I see or understand you. It said, You will never escape the consequences of what you are doing right now; I will have the evidence, and I will not forget.
The waitress labored up the ship ladder carrying the chicken, legs and thighs only, the crust thick as barnacles. The men fell to, dabbing with paper napkins at the grease in their whiskers.
Shortly, Vollie had cleaned his plate. He took two more thighs and ate.
“I hope you’re happy with your assignment,” Lorch said. “We can’t afford you to be disappointed, dissatisfied, disabused.”
“I’m well-enough appointed,” Vollie said.
The rain had stopped. Women and men went bareheaded below the window. From here you saw not their faces but their hats and swinging arms and foreshortened legs.
The cobbler arrived. Lorch asked the waitress to bring them some ice cream. He remembered aloud the greater and lesser ice creams of his youth in the town of Alpharetta, now an Atlanta suburb. “I like that you’re not even going to ask what they want with our subject, are you?” Lorch said.
Vollie ate his cobbler.
“You don’t think to ask why?”
“It doesn’t interest me, sir.”
Lorch seemed disappointed Vollie would not ask for what he would not have disclosed even if he knew it. “It’s only natural to have some curiosity with respect to why or wherefore.”
“Maybe I’m not natural.”
“Everybody’s natural is the whole notion of natural. And you out there for months or a year following orders without even a question, that’s a little—you really don’t care?”
“Why should I ask? You’d have to lie.”
“Among ourselves,” Lorch said, “we tell the truth. Leviticus nineteen, eleven. Colossians three, nine. Revelation twenty-two, fifteen. ‘For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.’ That’s without. You’re within a family now.”
“I don’t hold it against you, sir. It’s your job to lie.”
“A job—what are the ideals in a job? Listen, there’s an immediate customer for this intelligence. Do I know the immediate customer is the ultimate customer? Of course not. That doesn’t mean I’m lying. If I don’t tell you something, I’m just not telling it to you. But if I do tell you, it’s the truth. You do likewise and we’ll make great product. Arthur has some background on our subject to give you now.”
Van Aken sipped his coffee. He was older than Lorch. He didn’t care whether Vollie believed any of this. He put the cup on the table. He said, “We don’t write any of this down.”
“I understand,” Vollie said.
“We pay attention the first time.”
“Yessir.”
“I’m not your superior,” Van Aken said. “I’m retired.”
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