FURNACE

by Muriel Gray

  “This is beautiful.”

  “It’s just junk. I thought you’d like it.”

  “You thought I’d like junk? That’s what I call romantic.”

  She was smiling full on again. For Josh, the brooch had already proved hundreds of times its worth.

  “You like it?”

  “I love it.”

  “Well, wear it and things’ll look better tomorrow.”

  Her face clouded again and she toyed with the brooch, making a scraping sound on the table as she shifted it around.

  “Maybe.”

  Josh held the bridge of his nose between a finger and thumb.

  “What’s the deal here? I’ve been gone longer and you’ve said less.”

  “I had things to talk to you about, that’s all.”

  “Well, talk to me now.”

  “It’s too late.”

  Josh sighed and bent his head. “Shit, Elizabeth. You’re acting like a teenager whose prom date hasn’t shown. I’m kinda tired here.”

  She looked at him coldly, stood up, still clutching the brooch in her hand, and walked to the sink to stare out the window.

  Josh watched her face as she turned back to him, and saw some kind of battle being fought behind those brown eyes. One of the emotions eventually won and she spoke softly, as if ashamed of its victory.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Josh blinked. He was aware that his heart had picked up its pace, but if that meant more blood was suddenly required and being provided, its rapid distribution seemed to be having little effect on him. It was as though his system had stalled like a smoky engine, leaving him temporarily unable to speak or move. He searched for the kick start, and when he found it and spoke merely for the sake of speaking, realized that he should have waited.

  “Is it mine?”

  Elizabeth’s face, already harder than he had ever seen it, darkened into the suburbs of fury.

  “I’ll give you one chance to take that back.”

  He swallowed. “Shit, I’m sorry… I mean… Fuck.”

  She regarded him with a mixture of contempt and grief. The same eyes that only minutes ago had looked up at him like a lover’s were now scouring him with acid accusation.

  Josh tried again. As he got up to move towards her she made him jump with a sudden violent movement, lifting her arms and waving them in front of her as if to protect herself. He backed off, hands held out in an imploring gesture, and his voice, when it came, was higher than he would have liked.

  “I didn’t mean that. I don’t know why I said it. I’m glad. God, Elizabeth, I’m so glad.”

  With those words something happened to Josh Spiller. A happiness that was beyond any he had ever experienced flooded into him and he realized that glad was a weak and sickly word to describe the power of his sudden ecstasy.

  Elizabeth watched the face of the father of her child as it exploded into rapture, watched his tense muscles melt into a slack, serpentine tangle of joy. Her lip trembled like a child’s as she braced herself. Then she spoke quickly to interrupt the acceleration of his emotion: “I’m not keeping it, Josh.”

  His imploring arms fell.

  “What?”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  Josh looked at her for a very long time, then turned back to the table and sat down heavily on his chair. He leant forward and cradled his head in his hands, his hot forehead pointing straight down to the tabletop.

  “Now, hold up. This is going too fast. Talk to me.”

  Elizabeth looked down at a hand that had become a fist, and when she opened it to reveal the brooch she had been clutching she could see two clear indentations that the scissors had made in her flesh. She closed her hand.

  “You weren’t here to talk to. I decided on my own. It’s impossible, Josh.”

  He looked up from the cradle of his hands.

  “Why? For Christ’s sake, we’re doing okay. Aren’t we?”

  She swallowed back a sob, barely able to speak.

  “Nope.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Elizabeth moved stiffly and rejoined him at the table. She stared into the yellow pine as though the words she was speaking were printed on it.

  “Commitment. Josh. That’s what a baby needs. It’s what I need too and I’ve never had it from you in any shape.”

  He opened his mouth to protest but she silenced him with a sorrowful look.

  “I’m not complaining. This is an accident in a relationship that’s doing just fine. But it’s a relationship that can’t handle children.”

  She was sounding rehearsed; seven days to perfect a speech hadn’t been enough to stop it sounding phoney.

  “Welcome to daytime TV, folks.”

  The bitterness in Josh’s voice was as alien to him as it sounded to Elizabeth. Any plan she may have had evaporated, and she looked at him like a frightened child.

  “Look at us, Josh. We live together but we’re not married. I see you for two, maybe three days out of every ten. I’ve just started a new business that needs all my time and energy. There’s nothing in this dumb life of ours that’s stable enough to make a good job of growing another human being.”

  “We love each other.”

  “Then why aren’t we married? Why aren’t you at home?”

  “Why aren’t you? Is sewing fucking Batman suits better than staying home and looking after our baby?”

  She looked at him coldly. “Jesus Christ. You can take the man out of the truck but you can’t take the trucker out of the man. What next, Josh? The chorus of a Red Sovine song?”

  He lowered his eyes.

  “I didn’t know you wanted to get married.”

  “You never asked.”

  “What if I asked now?” His voice had an edge of desperation.

  “It would mean nothing. You wouldn’t be asking for the right reasons.”

  There was a pause. A heavy silence that made Josh’s response startling.

  “Fuck!”

  He slammed his fist down on the table so hard that Elizabeth leapt in her chair and caught her breath with the fright. Josh was breathing heavily, staring down at his hands, and she spoke softly when her heart had stopped pounding.

  “Next week. Wednesday at three o’clock. It’ll be over.”

  He looked up slowly and her grief was almost uncontainable when she saw the film of tears that coated his eyes.

  “Then why even tell me? Does it feel good to give me a few moments of joy and then steal them back again? Huh? Make you feel big? Feel in charge? That what you call love?”

  Elizabeth started to cry. Her chest heaved and she bent her head to her chest. Josh watched, wanting instinctively to comfort her but cancelling the order from his brain before it reached his arms.

  She sobbed for a few minutes in silence, wiped her arm across her eyes and nose and then faced him again.

  “I told you because I was scared and lost. I always tell you everything.”

  He looked at her tragic, puffy face and tried to feel the love for her he knew was there. But the imminent death of his baby, that terrifying appointment, the time already ticking away towards its execution as the baby’s cells split and multiplied inside her, was blocking it like a wall. He spoke quietly and with a malice he never knew he possessed.

  “You didn’t tell me you were a selfish bitch.”

  Elizabeth stared at him for a moment, stunned.

  “Damn you to hell.” She opened her hand and with all the force a close sitting position could afford, threw the brooch at Josh’s face and ran from the house.

  As he sat still, listening to her car start and screech hysterically from the drive, Josh fingered the tiny scratch that his gift had inflicted above his eye. He bent to pick up the fallen weapon and closed his hand on the brooch’s innocent form.

  There was no question of what action to take. He would do what he always did in a crisis. Josh Spiller got up and went to call his dispatcher.

  4


  Time. It was at the core of everything. To buy it. To control it. To comprehend it. And yet still, this night, this eve that had been so long coming, so long anticipated, had now crept up on her like a thief.

  As always, she tapped three keys on the keyboard and watched the figures scroll up the screen. She knew what she would see, but it was important to remind herself why.

  This was why. The golden, glimmering, shining reason for it all. The dollars, the deutsche marks, the pounds, yen and lira all flickering before her, lighting her face up with their green glow.

  More. The knowledge and power.

  But no. She closed her eyes and clenched a fist against it. That thought was forbidden. Vanity was destruction. The power was in the humble and respectful use of the knowledge. And that was why tomorrow was no more and no less than the necessary function that it had always been. The others depended on it. Their world turned on it, because God made it possible. She moved the mouse and closed the file with one diagonal sweep and click, as the sound of soft spring rain tapping at the window won the battle for her attention over the buzzing computer.

  And she smiled as she looked up, imagining it soaking new buds on the blanket of trees that separated her from the dull, uncomprehending mass of humanity.

  It had taken the surly teenagers in the loading bay over an hour to load his trailer. And that was after a two-and-a-half-hour wait in the damp Victorian warehouse. Josh had sat in the drivers’ waiting area, cradling a Styrofoam cup of stewed coffee, watching the three bozos wandering around his truck like pimps on a Bronx street. One drove the forklift into Josh’s trailer and the others hung around the doors making flipping gestures with their hands and adjusting their baseball caps as they laughed about something secretive.

  Normally, Josh would have gone out and kicked their butts, but this time he sat immobile behind the glass partition, watching them waste his time. It was a shitty load, some metal packing cases for an industrial ceramics manufacturer in Alabama. No weight in them, so not much pay. But it was all he could get, and Josh would have delivered the Klan’s laundry to South Central L.A. if he’d been asked. He would have taken anything at all just to turn off and buy his ticket away from home.

  There had been two other drivers in the warehouse and, hold the front page, they had been bitching:

  “So I grabs this little jerk by the collar and I says okay man, you want me to load it myself then you gonna have to tell your boss why his lifting gear got all bust up, ‘cos I ain’t never used it afore. ‘Course I have, but he don’t know that.”

  The guy who’d been telling the story was about as big as his truck and the other driver listened without much interest, waiting for his chance to tell a similar triumphant story of how he showed them, and showed them good.

  “Well, he calls me everythin’ but a white boy and then I just grabs hold of the controls and lets the whole bunch drop twenty feet onto the deck. Hee hee, did that boy load up like his dick depended on it.”

  Josh had let the stream of familiar bullshit wash over him. He was numb. So numb, he’d uncharacteristically ignored both men, walked to the trailer when a nod from one of the rubber-boned kids indicated it was done, barely checked the load or how it was stacked, taken the paperwork and driven off. And now he was sitting upright, staring out of the darkened cab of Jezebel, whose bulk was untidily taking up most of the space in a southbound tourist parking lot on this Virginia interstate. He’d driven for only a couple of hours, but a lapse of concentration that nearly let him trash a guy on a Harley Davidson had made him catch his heart in his mouth and pull over.

  It was 2 A.M. and he could hardly account for the last eight hours since Elizabeth had driven away with her, and his, precious cargo on board. He stared ahead into the dark, sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands resting in his lap like a trauma patient waiting to be seen in an emergency room. Josh wasn’t thinking about what to do. He wasn’t even thinking about Elizabeth and where she might be right now. All that was running through his mind were the words, repeating themselves like a looped tape, “How do I feel?”

  Soft spring rain started to fall, gradually muting the intermittent roar of the traffic on the adjacent highway. He wound down his window and breathed in a mixture of mown grass, diesel fumes, and the dust raised by the rain from the parking lot’s asphalt. As he tried to take a deeper breath he felt a vise tighten around his chest, a crippling tension which prevented that satisfying lungful of oxygen. The pain came not from the emptiness that was left by that brief and grotesque argument, but by the dual seed of joy and dread that was still germinating in his heart.

  Wednesday the seventh of May, three o’clock.

  What was it? A boy or a girl? He hadn’t even asked Elizabeth how many weeks old her secret was. A bizarre omission, but more confusing was why he wanted this child so badly. Some of the things Elizabeth had said were true; he knew that. Their life wasn’t exactly an episode of The Waltons, but until last night he’d thought it was safe and stable. It was an adult life, where two self-contained people did what they pleased and came together when they wanted. He’d never even considered how or why that might change. Never considered a third person entering the frame.

  The fresh air stirred him from his miserable torpor and Josh got up, absently pulling the drapes around the inside of the windshield. He climbed back into the sleeper and lay down on the mattress with his hands behind his head.

  As he lay there, staring up at the quilted velour ceiling, he allowed himself to think of her, of Elizabeth: that funny, sometimes brittle person who even in her hardest moments could be melted like butter over a stove with a kind word or gentle touch.

  It was like her to carry the burden of her news silently, but it was unlike her to taunt him by telling him it was over before it began. Perhaps he didn’t know Elizabeth at all. Who was that terrible mixture of defiant accusation and self-pitying grief? And who had he been, to call her what he did and withdraw the support he’d always given unthinkingly and unconditionally?

  Josh screwed his eyes tight, trying fruitlessly to squeeze the scene into oblivion with the puny muscles of his eyelids.

  Which coupling had done it, he wondered? Last week? The week before?

  When?

  Outside, a car pulled up in the lot and Josh opened his eyes to listen to the familiar human noises of a man and a woman as they left their vehicle to go use the rest rooms.

  They chatted in low voices, in that comfortable, intimate way which meant they were saying nothing in particular to each other but were enjoying saying it. An occasional short laugh broke the flow of their small talk as they slammed their car doors shut and their footsteps receded towards the rest rooms. Josh realized he was listening to this most mundane collection of sounds with his teeth clenched and his eyes narrowed, the invisible couple’s easy happiness an unbearable affront.

  He lay there for a very long time, and as time ticked away, bringing neither sleep nor solution, he was aware of its swift, relentless passing for probably the first time in his life.

  Dawn on the first of May was less beautiful than the one Josh had tried to savour yesterday. Low clouds masked the sun’s coming and a thin grey light was all that announced the day. He had lain sleeplessly in the same position all night, eyes staring up into the dark as he alternated between thinking and hurting, and now he wanted to move. The load was already late. The paperwork promised the packing cases would be in Alabama sometime tonight, but they wouldn’t be.

  Josh crawled from his bunk into the cab, opened the door on the new day and went to wet the wheels. As he stood, legs apart, urinating on his truck in some unconsciously atavistic ritual, he reconfirmed with himself that the best cure for any form of unhappiness was perpetual motion. Driving let him escape. It allowed him time completely on his own and freedom from responsibility. It had certainly saved his sanity when his mother died, that hellish two weeks after her funeral, when Josh knew he would never again have the chance to say the things to her
he’d rehearsed so many times alone in his cab. He’d left his morose brother, Dean, at their empty home to go through their mother’s pathetically few things, accepted a load to Seattle and pushed the thought of his loss out with the opening of his logbook.

  He recalled seeing his brother’s grief-torn face accusing him through the dirty upstairs window as he drove off, and it had chipped at something hard inside that Josh thought had been impermeable. Five hours later he’d put the whole thing out of his mind. Dean had never really forgiven him for that act of abandonment. But he didn’t understand. No one but another trucker would.

  Josh finished his task, did up his pants, then leant forward to rest his forehead against the side of his trailer and punch its aluminium flank with the side of a fist.

  “Fuck ‘em all, Jez. Fuck every last one.”

  5

  The cloud had lifted as she stood rigid and still on the grass. That was good. She watched the thin sunlight play amongst the bare branches of the ancient tree that stood solemnly in the wide street, and as her gaze moved down to the base of its massive bole, she frowned with irritation. There were suckered branches starting to form in clumps at the base. That meant only one thing. The tree was dying.

  It must have been the men laying the cables last year. They had been told to make sure the trench came nowhere near the roots, to cut a path for the thick mass of plastic tubing and wire in between those delicate arteries of soft wood rather than through them. But they were like all workmen. Lazy. And this was the result.

  She ground her teeth and concentrated on fighting the irritation.

  Absence of malice, absence of compassion, absence of all petty human emotion. It was essential.

  In a few hours she would let her thoughts return to the vandalized tree, but not now. The workmen would never be employed by her again. And that, she decided, would be the least of their worries.

  But not now. Push the thought away and leave nothing. Nothing at all.