by Muriel Gray
Quarter of an hour down the highway, Josh saw a five-mile service sign and realized he was hungry. More important, he was approaching his thirty-sixth hour without sleep and unless he grabbed a coffee soon, bad things were going to start happening. In fact, they already had. A dull grey slowness had settled on him, making his peripheral vision busy with the hazy shifting shapes that severe fatigue specialized in manufacturing, and his limbs were beginning to feel twice their weight. But hungry as he was, he still hadn’t forgotten the affront of yesterday’s dawn. McDonald’s might have sold ten billion, but he wasn’t going to make it ten billion and one.
He thumbed the radio.
“Any you northbounds know a good place to eat off the interstate?”
The voice first to respond just laughed. “Surely, driver. There’s a little Italian place right up ahead. Violins playin’ and candles on every table.”
Josh smiled.
Another driver butted in. “No shit? Where’s that at again?”
“I’m kiddin’, dipshit. Burgers ain’t good enough for you?”
Josh pressed his radio again, then thought better of it. What did these guys know? Channel 19 would be busy now for the next hour with bored truckers arguing about the merits of the great American burger. He was sorry he started it.
There was an exit coming up on the right, and although the sign declared this was the exit for a bunch of ridiculously named nowhere towns, he braked and downshifted. It was twenty before seven and if he didn’t get that coffee soon he’d have to pull over.
The reefer tailing him came on the radio.
“Hey, Jezebel. See you signalling for exit 23.”
Josh responded. “Ten-four, driver. That a problem?”
“Got a mighty long trailer there to get up and down them mountain roads. They’re tight as a schoolmarm’s ass cheeks.”
“Copy, driver. Not plannin’ on goin’ far. Just grab a bite and get myself back on the interstate.”
Josh was already in the exit lane as he spoke the last words, the reefer peeling away from him up the highway.
“Okay, buddy. Just hope you can turn that thing on a dollar.”
“Ten four to that.”
“How comes she got the handle Jezebel?”
Josh grinned as he slowed down to around twenty-five, on what was indeed, and quite alarmingly so, a very narrow road. When he felt the load was secure behind him, he took his hand off the wheel to reply.
“Aw, this is my second rig, and I figure she tempted me but she’ll probably turn out to be no good like the last one.”
He swallowed at that, hoping the ugly thought that it had stirred back into life would go away. The other driver saved him.
“Yeah? What you drive before?”
Irritatingly, the signal was already starting to break up. Strange, since the guy was probably only two miles away, with Josh now heading southeast on this garden path of a road.
“Freightliner conventional. Everything could go wrong did go wrong. Might be mean naming this baby like that. Hasn’t let me down yet. But she’s pretty, huh?”
The radio crackled in response, but Josh didn’t pick up the driver’s comment. It was the least of his worries. He saw what the guy meant. The road was almost a single track. If he met another truck on this route they’d both have to get out, scratch their heads and talk about how they were going to pass. Josh slowed the truck down to twenty and rolled along, squinting straight into the low, morning sun, which had only now emerged from the dissipating grey clouds, looking for one of the towns the sign had promised.
The interstate was well out of sight, and he was starting to regret the impulsive and irrational decision to boycott the convenience of a burger and coffee. The road was climbing now, and since the exit he hadn’t seen one farm gate or cabin driveway where he could turn the Peterbilt.
He pressed on the radio again.
“Hey, any locals out there? When do you hit the first town after exit 23?”
He waited, the handset to his mouth. There was silence. It was a profound silence that rarely occurred on CB. There was always something going on. Morons yelling, or guys bitching. Drivers telling other drivers the exact whereabouts on the highway of luckless females. There was debate, there was comedy, there were confidences shared and tales told. All twenty-four hours a day. Anything you wanted to hear and anything you wanted to say were all there waiting at the press of a button.
But here, there was nothing. Josh looked up at the long spine of the hills and reckoned they must have something to do with the sudden stillness of the radio. It unnerved him. The cab of a truck was never quiet. Usually Josh had three things going at once: the CB, the local radio station, and a tape. Elizabeth had ridden with him a few times and could barely believe how through the nightmarish cacophony he not only noted the local traffic report, hummed along to a favourite song, heard everything that was said on the CB and was able to make a pretty good guess at which truck was saying it.
“How in hell do you do that?” she’d breathed admiringly after he’d jumped in with the sequel to some old joke someone was telling, only seconds after he’d been shouting abuse at a talk radio host who’d used the word Negro.
“What’d you say, honey?” he’d replied innocently, not understanding the irony when she laughed at him. She said after that, if she had anything important to tell him, she’d do it over a badly tuned radio with a heavy metal band thrashing in the background.
Except she hadn’t. Had she?
It had been important, and she’d told it to him straight, her words surrounded by a proscenium arch of silence. Josh flicked his eyes to the fabric above the windshield, where Elizabeth’s cheap brooch was pinned. He’d stabbed it in there as a reminder that it had been bought with love but used as a spiteful missile, hoping it would harden him to the thought of her every time the pain of their argument germinated again. But it wasn’t working. It just made him think of her long brown fingers fingering it with delight. Josh wished the trivial memory of her riding with him hadn’t occurred to him, hadn’t made him feel like his heart needed a sling to support its weight.
He leant forward and retuned the CB as though the action could relegate his dark thoughts to another channel.
Still nothing.
Josh sat back and resigned himself to the blind drive. The next town could be two or twenty miles away, and he was just going to have to live with that. It could be worse. The road was still climbing, but at least it was a pretty ride.
Dogwood bloomed on both sides of the road, and on the east verge the rising sun backlit the impossibly large and delicate white flowers, shining through the thin petals as though the dark branches were the wires of divine lamps. Ahead, a huge billboard cut rudely into the elegance of the small trees. The sign was old and worn, with the silvery grey of weathered wood starting to show through what had once been bright green paint.
SEE THE WORLD-FAMOUS SULPHUR CAVES AT CARRIS ARM.
ONLY 16 MILES.
RESTAURANT AND TOURS.
In the absence of anyone to talk to on the CB, Josh spoke to himself.
“World-famous. Yeah, sure. The Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon and the fuckin’ sulphur caves at Carris Arm.”
As if he needed it, the sign confirmed that Josh Spiller was driving around in the ass-end of nowhere, and he was far from happy. If that was the next town, then sixteen miles was way too far. He started to weigh his options. Surely there would soon be a farm gate or a clearing he could turn in. But as the truck climbed it seemed less and less likely. The mountains were a serpentine dark wall, clothed here in undisturbed forest only just starting to leaf, and neither farmland nor building broke the trees’ unchallenged hold on the land. Josh had already driven at least four or five miles from the interstate and the thought of another sixteen was making him consider the possibility of backing up and turning on a soft verge, when without any warning or apparent reason, the road started to widen.
A house, set back in the tre
es, neat and spacious with the Stars and Stripes flapping listlessly on a flagpole by the porch, appeared on his right, followed by another three in a row almost identical a few hundred yards farther on. No backwoods cabin these, but substantial suburban houses with trimmed gardens and decent wheels parked out front. Josh raised an eyebrow. This was what truckers called car-farmer country. The backwoods of the Appalachians were home to a thousand run-down trailers and cabins, sporting a statutory dozen cars and pickups half buried in their field, like the hicks who’d left them there to rot were hoping their ‘69 Buick would sprout seeds and grow a new one.
Even on the main routes, Josh had been glared at by enough one-eyed crazy lab specimens lounging on porches to know that this wasn’t exactly stockbroker belt. The kind of tidy affluence quietly stated by these houses was a surprise. But it was a welcome surprise to a man who needed his breakfast and wouldn’t have to buy it from a drooling Jed Clampett with a shotgun raised at his chest.
So half a mile and a dozen or more smart houses later, it was with relief that Josh hit the limits of the town to which these uncharacteristic, middle-class dwellings were satellites. He drove past the brief and concise metal sign with a smile.
FURNACE.
The wide street was now lined on either side by houses only slightly smaller than those on the edge of town. Standard roses bobbed in the breeze and hardy azaleas and forsythia were beginning to form islands of colour in a sea of smooth lawns.
It was five before seven and although it was early, people were about and Josh was heartened by the town’s potential for hot food to go. A kid rode past on a BMX, a sack of papers on his shoulder; two guys sweeping the sidewalk stood jawing against a tree, brushes in hand; a woman walking a dachshund on a ludicrously long leash stopped and waved to someone out picking up their paper from the front step. It was cosy, affluent, peaceful and ordinary. But it certainly was not what he had expected high up in this backwater of Virginia. Here, Jezebel felt ridiculously out of place, rumbling self-consciously through the street at little more than running pace, as though lack of speed could hide the bulk and noise of the Leviathan. The quiet street waking to its new day was like any other, but the affluence and suburban smugness was starting to jog a memory in Josh he didn’t like.
The Tanner ice cream sign.
A dumb, irrelevant memory, and one he tried to sideswipe. But it was there.
That ice cream sign.
For Josh as a child it stood at the corner of Hove and Carnegie like a religious icon: a circular piece of tin with the advertisement painted on it, supported at two points by a bigger circle of wire on a stand that let it spin in the wind. Judging by the arthritic squeaking of its rotations, it had stood at the end of his street like that for years, that dismal street his mother had brought them up on, a strange juxtaposition of the classes that Pittsburgh boasted, where the unwashed poor lived only a block away from their bosses, separated by no more than just a strip of trees or a row of stores.
Or an ice cream sign.
The Tanner girl and boy had big rosy cheeks and were licking the same cone of ice cream, vanilla topped with chocolate sauce. But when the wind blew the sign would spin and the picture, identical on both surfaces except for the children’s mouths, which were closed on one side and open on the other, would animate into a frenzy of darting, licking tongues. Dean thought the sign was kind of spooky, especially when the wind was strong and the tongues went crazy. But Josh liked it. He liked it because it marked the beginning of Carnegie Lane and, more important, the end of Hove Avenue, an end to the crowded street that contained their tattered house. In Carnegie the houses were elegant and tall, keeping watch over their own spacious gardens with the demeanour of large, wealthy women sitting on rugs at a race meeting. And unlike the regiment of dreary wooden houses that included the Spillers’, every one was different. Some were brick with wide, white-columned porches tangled with wisteria and honeysuckle. Others had stone facades and glass conservatories, or European affectations of mock battlements and balustrades. And in addition to the neat front lawns that were uniformly green all the way to the sidewalk, each, Josh knew for sure, had generous and private backyards.
School, the stores and everything that Josh needed to service his uneventful life were at the eastern end of Hove. In other words there was no call to go west into Carnegie at all. It merely led to wealthier parts of town, parts that were decidedly not for the Spillers. But he’d lost count of the times he’d found himself strolling past the squeaking Tanner ice cream sign, stepping into Carnegie with a roll to his prepubescent gait that tried to say he lived there.
At least he had until one searingly hot August. Josh was eleven and the day had been long and empty. His mother’s return from her job at a drug factory, moving piles of little blue and white capsules along a conveyor belt all day with a gloved hand, had been a cranky and irritable one. Particularly since she discovered that neither Dean nor Josh had made any attempt to prepare supper, but had instead been throwing stones up at the remains of an old weathervane that clung to a neighbour’s roof, in a contest to free it finally from its rusting bracket.
Joyce Spiller had sat down heavily on the three car tyres piled by the back door they used as a seat, and glared at the boys, but particularly Josh, with tired, rheumy eyes. Her voice was full of sarcastic venom.
“Sure do appreciate you workin’ all day long, Mom. So to thank you for that act of kindness, please accept this cool glass of lemonade and a big juicy sandwich that me and my shit-for-manners brother have had all friggin’ day to prepare.”
Dean had blinked at his boots in shame, but for some reason, looking at this woman in her short nylon workcoat, her thin brown hair tied back with a plain elastic band, and her face that looked ten years older than her numerical age, Josh had suddenly despised her. Why should he look after her, when other kids got to come home from school and be met by a mom who’d fetch them lemonade and a sandwich? What kind of a raw deal was this, having a mother who worked all day, sometimes nights too, who was always in a foul mood and looked like shit? The absence of a father, a taboo subject in the Spiller house, was bad enough, but the fact they lived in this shambolic house and never went on vacation was all this failure of a woman’s fault.
Josh had stared back at her with contempt and then ran from the yard out into the street.
He thanked God that until her dying day, his mother had taken that action for a show of shame and remorse. It was anything but. He’d seen the Tanner’s ice cream sign slowly rotating in the breeze and had headed straight for the leafy calm of Carnegie, where the people lived who knew how to treat their children. Maybe if he stopped and spoke to a kid up there, they might get friendly and he’d be asked in. He’d often thought of it. That day he decided he would make it a reality. Then she’d see. She’d come home and he’d be in one of those yards drinking Coke with new friends, who had stuff like basketball nets stuck to their walls and blue plastic-walled swimming pools you climbed into from a ladder. There’d be no more kicking around in a dusty yard with nothing to do except scrap with Dean and wait for a worn-out mother to come home and cuss at them.
He ran as far as the sign, then slowed up and turned into the shimmering street with a casual step. The sign had been making a wailing, forlorn sound, a kind of whea eee, whea eee, like some forest animal’s young looking for its parent. Josh strolled into the splendour of the street and walked slowly, gazing up at the grand houses, smelling the blooms from their gardens. There had been nobody about except for one man, who was rooting around in the trunk of a car parked out front.
Josh got ready to say hello as he approached, but on catching sight of him the man straightened up with legs apart, putting his hands on his hips in the manner of a Marine drill sergeant expecting trouble.
He stood like that, staring directly and aggressively at Josh, never taking his eyes from the small boy until he walked by. Josh had felt his cheeks burn.
It was then that he had noticed the
sounds. Just background noises at first, but with the blood already beating in his ears, they grew louder and louder until they were roaring in his head.
Lawnmowers buzzing, children shouting and laughing, garden shears snapping, an adult voice calling out, the echoing, plastic sound of a ball bouncing on a hard surface. All these sounds were being made by a ghostly and invisible army of people cruelly hidden from view. And ever present, weaving in and out of these taunting, nightmarish sounds, was the whea eee, whea eee of the Tanner ice cream sign. Josh had been paralysed by a sense of desolation that made his bones cold in the thick heat.
The wall of expensive stone that was separating him from these invisible, comfortable, happy people was suddenly grotesque instead of glamorous, an obstacle that could never be negotiated if you were Josh Spiller from Hove Avenue. He had slapped his hands uselessly to his ears, turned and run back the way he had come, fuelling, no doubt, the fears that the man by his car had that this was a Hove boy up to no good. Every hot step of the way home the ice cream sign’s wail followed him like a lost spirit, as though it were an alarm he had tripped when he stepped from his world into the forbidden one of his betters.
His mother had welcomed him back with a silent supper of fries and ham, but he could tell by the softness in her eyes she was relieved to see him. Josh knew then how much he loved her. He also knew that no matter how agreeable a house he might eventually buy as an adult, how comfortable an existence he might make for himself, he would always butt up against the corner of a forbidden street, the edge of something better to which he had no access. Maybe that was why he had turned trucker. No one can judge what a man does or doesn’t have if he’s always on the move. The eighteen wheels you lived on were the ultimate democracy. An owner-operator might be up to his neck in debt with his one rig, or it might be one rig out of a fleet of twenty. No one knows if the guy’s rich or poor and no one cares. The questions one trucker asks another are: where you going, where you from, what you hauling, how many cents per mile you get on that load?
