by Muriel Gray
“Yeah, go on.”
She poured the hot liquid into his mug and as Griffin touched her own mug in anticipation, the waitress smiled and walked off.
“Shit. How come I don’t get any?”
Josh smiled and emptied some cream theatrically into his mug. “They do that. They don’t like women in here. Pisses off the women truckers something fierce.”
Griffin raised her dark, prettily arched eyebrows. “You get women truckers?”
“Sure. Plenty husband and wife teams too.”
Josh swallowed after he said it, a wave of something sad breaking at his shore again. Husband and wife. Sounded nice.
“What do they look like?”
“They look like truckers.”
“What? Like those guys over there?”
“Well, some don’t have beards.”
“Do I look like a trucker?”
Josh put his paper down and sighed. “No. You don’t.”
“Why don’t I?” She sounded mildly offended.
“You just don’t look like one. Okay? You can tell.”
“Shit. Then they probably do think I’m a hooker.”
Josh smiled. “I doubt it.”
“Well, of course they must.”
“I don’t think you’d do much business if you were.”
“And what exactly is that supposed to mean?”
She was genuinely annoyed now. Josh’s smile was widening.
“You’re not dressed for it.”
She stared at him for a moment, then her face broke into a smile of unparalleled loveliness. Josh felt his pulse quicken and he looked back down at the lurid map of America on the paper.
“What do they wear, then?”
Josh found himself reddening slightly. He picked up the coffee and obscured his face with it for a moment until the sensation subsided. “What do you think? Shitty cheap things. Short tight skirts. Sparkly stuff. High shoes.”
“Where do they do it? In the cabs?”
“Naw. They lean up against the pumps while you fuel up and try and get you to come before the tank’s full.”
It was Griffin’s turn to redden. The mischief had been replaced by genuine adolescent horror.
“What? Out in the open there? With everyone watching?”
“Don’t be dumb. Of course they do it in the cabs.”
She looked hurt, and Josh relented. “We call ‘em lot-lizards, and if you don’t want to get bugged by them, some guys put a sticker on their sleeper door with a lizard and a line going through it. You know, like a no-smoking sign?”
“Do you have one?”
Josh shook his head and smiled. “Nope.”
“Then you get bugged by them.”
“Haven’t so far.”
“Does that mean you’re waiting to be?”
Josh sighed and pulled at the skin on his throat. “Finish up. I want some sleep.”
He stood up and fished in his pocket for money. His hand found the five dollars that Griffin had given him nestling beside his wallet. He looked down at her, hurriedly gulping at the remains of her coffee in case she got left behind, and he felt that tenderness come over him again. He took the bill and pushed it back into his wallet as he took out a twenty and dropped it on the table. Then they were out of the restaurant and into the lot, Josh once again pursued by the trotting of a companion who tried to match his stride through the gloomy corridors of throbbing metal as though her life depended on it.
14
“Jesus. What a mess.”
Elizabeth gave a half smile across the table and shrugged at her friend. “Could be worse, Nesta.”
“How?”
“I dunno. Lots of ways. I’ll think of some.”
Nesta took a greedy gulp from her wineglass and pushed out an arm as the waiter passed by. “Hey, Tony. Two more here, huh?”
The young man looked to Elizabeth for confirmation as he gathered the two glasses.
“Hey, not for me. Thanks.”
Nesta raised an eyebrow. “What does it matter? You know, if—”
Elizabeth shot her a warning look that had thunder in it. “Yeah, okay. One more white wine and…?”
“A Coke.”
“Yeah. A Coke.”
Tony put his hand on a hip. “Diet or Classic?”
Elizabeth sighed. “Shit, Tony. Do I look like I’m on a diet?”
“Jeez. You crabby women. Who needs ya?”
He minced off to fetch their drinks.
“No one,” answered Elizabeth softly to his back.
Nesta put her hand across the table and touched her friend’s. “That ain’t true. He’ll be back. Christ, you just freaked me out with this baby stuff. How’d you think he must have felt?”
“I know how he felt. Betrayed.”
“What about you?”
“Confused.”
Nesta put her other hand over Elizabeth’s and lowered both her head and her voice. “You want it. Don’t you?”
Elizabeth stared back into her friend’s face, and as her eyes filled with tears Nesta nodded and sat back.
“Thought so.”
There wasn’t much room in the Peterbilt’s sleeper. Josh had seen the rig advertised in a trade magazine and wanted it straight off. But although the guy who sold it to him moved around in the sleeper as he told Josh what a golden baby she was, holding his short chubby arms out like a man trying to fly, there was no getting away from the fact that it was fine for one, but tight for two.
Elizabeth had been on only a handful of trips in Jezebel, and on every single one she’d banged her head on something. The inevitability of the accidents made Josh laugh, even when one injury had drawn blood after she’d caught her temple on the edge of the shelf that held the microwave. She’d hit him in a temper then, and after that they’d fallen onto the skinny mattress, and that had been that for an hour or more while they’d made amends.
Now, with Griffin crouching and fussing around over her knapsack, Josh realized that this was the first time he’d had a stranger sleep in his cab. It made him feel peculiar. He sensed strongly somewhere deep and almost unreachable that there was someone in his cab that most definitely shouldn’t be there. And it was made all the more strange by the fact that his conscious mind was thinking exactly the opposite.
He sat in his driver’s seat and watched Griffin in the rearview mirror as she moved around delicately, like a small animal preparing a nest, and admired the fact that as yet she hadn’t bumped her head once. When she spoke as she dug around in the bottom of her pack, it was with the intimate tone a wife might use to a husband on a camping trip.
“I don’t know if you need to go to sleep right now, but I’ve got something in here you might like.”
“Yeah? You got the paycheck from the dispatcher in Georgia who paid me?”
She smiled into the pack as he watched and then pulled out a pear-shaped bottle. She held it up as he swung around to look at her.
“Ta-da!”
“What is it?”
Griffin clambered forward and sat in the passenger seat, the bottle held around the neck by her slim brown hand. “Appalachian brandy. A bottle of the finest.”
Josh shook his head. “I don’t drink when I’m on the road.”
“But you’re not on the road now. You’ve stopped over.”
“Not for long. I got to drop this load in Alabama today. That means gettin’ movin’ in around six or seven hours.”
Griffin held the bottle up and looked lovingly at the label.
“It’s ten years old.”
“No shit? Older than you?”
Griffin rolled her eyes and slapped the bottle down in her lap. “Jesus. If you absolutely have to know, I’m twenty-one years old. Okay? Just turned it on April twenty-fourth.” She counted on pretty fingers. “I got a pair of binoculars, two computer games, a mountain bike and heaps of cards. The only nonlegit thing about me is that I swiped this from my dad’s cabinet before I left. Now, is that such a cr
ime?”
Josh was interested. “They know you’re gone?”
She looked at the bottle to avoid his eyes. “They’ll know by now.”
“So why’d you leave?”
“Wrong colour mountain bike.”
“I’m serious.”
She sighed and looked out through the windshield, running with water as the rain streamed down it unimpeded by the immobile wipers.
“Furnace is a bad place.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Bad full stop, or bad for you?”
“Both.”
“It sure wasn’t great for me. But as towns go it looked a pretty decent place to grow up.”
Griffin turned to Josh and regarded him with an intense stare. In the dim light cast by the single lamp above the rearview mirror she suddenly looked a lot older than twenty-one. The shadows were harsh. She stared at him for a few moments before speaking, and when she did it was in a low voice, like that of a psychiatrist to a patient. “Pretty decent place? You telling me you don’t regret the day, the hour, the very second when you decided to turn off that interstate and crossed into McNab County? And that you won’t live with that regret of having ever set foot in Furnace until the very last breath of your dying day?”
Josh’s heart started to beat a little faster. Her tone was unsettling, and his head swam with the memory of it all. He ran a hand over his hot forehead, trying to push that terry-cloth sleep suit and its contents to the blackest, deepest well in his head he could find.
“Ten years old?”
Griffin registered surprise, as if pulled from a daydream.
“What?”
“The brandy.”
She smiled like a shy child, looking awkward at having shared her feelings with him, and lifted the bottle again. Her cheerfulness was forced, but Josh was grateful for it.
“Yeah. People laugh at Appalachian wine and brandy. But speaking as a woman whose entire bitching family are of Scottish descent and never shut the fuck up about it, I reckon it beats even the finest Scotch single malt.”
Josh reached behind him and fished about in a velour pocket stitched onto the wall. He retrieved two cups, one a white china mug with the logo of the Owner Operators Association on it, the other an opaque red plastic tumbler covered in fragmented cracks from being mistakenly loaded in a hot dishwasher.
Josh put them down in the cup holders between them, then leant forward and pulled the drapes around the windshield. Griffin smiled wickedly at him as she uncorked the bottle.
“Cute. Drapes in a truck.”
“You keen on seein’ the hairs on some fat trucker’s ass?”
She laughed and poured the brandy carefully into the containers, passed him the mug, then held the tumbler up and touched it to his drink.
“Slange.”
Josh raised a quizzical eyebrow as he froze the mug a little distance from his lips.
“It’s Gaelic. For good health. You know, cheers.”
He inclined his head in acknowledgement, touched her tumbler with his own mug again, and took a large mouthful. It burned his cheeks momentarily, then slipped over his throat. He let it warm him for a second, with his lips tightly pressed together, then let out a satisfied exhalation. Griffin had a point. It was top-notch liquor. Its anaesthetic qualities were almost instantaneous and he was grateful for the subtle physical suggestion that the sharp part of him still slicing away inside was beginning to go numb.
She threw hers back like a labourer and placed the tumbler back in its plastic hole. “Any music? Can I look at your tapes?”
Josh pointed at the shelf above the dash. “Sure.”
She clattered around, fishing out tapes and discarding them until she found one she liked.
“Hey, this’ll work. Del Amitri. Scottish, so of course they must be good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You like British bands?”
“Yeah. Kind of. Not especially. It’s Elizabeth’s brother. He’s into that kind of stuff.”
As soon as he’d said it, Josh regretted it. Why did he have to speak her name? Of all the things in the world, she was the last subject he wanted to discuss. He flicked his eyes at Griffin.
She was fishing the cassette out of its box, spending a long time looking at the photograph of the band on the cover. He waited for the inevitable question. It never came.
“Can you put this on?”
Josh took the cassette and slid it into the player. As always he hadn’t rewound the tape, and it came on in the middle of a track. The guy was singing a line about driving with the brakes on. Another sad one, about breaking up with someone, about not being able to say you loved a person. Or something like that anyway. He never could work it out. But although he liked this track a lot, he was still anxious, waiting to be grilled about Elizabeth by this keen-eyed, curious passenger. Griffin said nothing, but sang along in a high-pitched, whiny voice as she opened the brandy and poured them both another large measure. Josh was going to put his hand out and stop her, but the numbing effect that the alcohol was having on his pain was too good to ignore. He let her pour, and they sat drinking in silence, staring at the grey velour drapes as the melancholy music competed for their attention with the drumming of the rain on the cab, and the thrumming of the reefer that was parked hard up against them.
It must have been three or four minutes before Griffin nodded towards the padded strip above Josh’s head.
“That hers?”
Josh looked at what had caught her attention. It was the scissors brooch, still pinned to the fabric, boldly declaring her name with its uneven etching. So she hadn’t missed a thing. She’d been weighing it all.
“Nope. It’s mine.”
She nodded as if it was all she wanted to hear. “It’s pretty. Elizabeth’s my grandmother’s name.”
Josh looked at her for a moment and then a madness came over him. “Do you want it?”
She turned to him with a half smile as though he might be joking, and when she saw no humour, but a very deep solemnity, she took another sip of brandy and wiped her mouth.
“For real?”
“I’m not plannin’ on wearin’ it.”
She examined him closely again, and then lit up into one of her gorgeous smiles. “Thanks.”
He stretched up and unpinned it. “It’s just cheap tin junk. Probable make whatever you pin it to go black.”
He handed it to her, and his heart sunk when he watched her turn it over in her hands in almost exactly the same way that Elizabeth had. He looked away. She sensed his discomfort and neatly pocketed the brooch.
There was an awkward pause, then she jumped in her seat. “Aw, shit. This is my favourite. Listen to this guy’s voice. Oh, man. Turn it up. Turn it up, will you?”
He leant forward and turned up the music, and continued to look away as she swayed in the seat next to him as though at a gig, reminding him again of the difference in their years.
Josh swallowed his brandy and willed it to do what only 80 percent proof could.
The worst thing was that it took so little. Josh was by no means drunk, only mildly loosened by the brandy when he first touched her. He hadn’t meant to, but when he’d leant across to her window to pull the drape the full way around and his hand had brushed the back of her neck, he knew it had been on the agenda since he’d picked her up.
He knew, too, that the decision to be unfaithful for the first and only time in his relationship with Elizabeth had been made in retributive anger at that roadside, looking down at Griffin’s young, sullen but willing face, not here in the gloom of the warm cab, with the rain beating a rhythm on the roof. The deed had already been done in his mind; now it was time for his body to catch up.
Her shoulders had tightened at his touch and instead of pulling his hand away, he’d let it linger, the backs of his fingers gently brushing soft warm skin. She’d turned to him, his face now so close he could smell her sweet brandy breath from slightly open l
ips, then she’d closed her eyes.
It hadn’t been clumsy or difficult getting from there into the back. It had just happened. Only once as she kissed his neck and he lay staring into the ceiling had he thought of Elizabeth. He conjured up a picture of her at the shop, imagined her standing behind Nesta as he phoned, smug that she hadn’t taken his call, and for that moment he made the effort to hate her. He tried to hold fast to that emotion, but even as he struggled to do so, he wondered momentarily, in the hazy, dreamlike state of arousal, why he was committing this unprecedented act of betrayal. Then he’d felt Griffin’s hand sliding beneath his shirt, running over his nipples like syrup, and his own hands had found her large, firm breasts. Josh put Elizabeth from his mind completely and gave himself up to the explosive relief that the joining of their bodies was affording almost every part of him.
Afterwards, they lay like lovers rather than spent and embarrassed strangers, Griffin’s head in the hollow beneath Josh’s shoulder, his hand toying with the short strands of her hair.
When she spoke, Josh mused dreamily on the fact that they had both used the pleasure not merely to escape from something, but perhaps also to hurt someone. He could hear it in her voice.
“I want you to promise me you’ll never go back there.”
“Hmm?”
“Furnace, Josh. Don’t ever go back.”
He tried to look at her, pressing his chin into his neck, but her face was buried in his chest.
“Why would I go back?”
“I don’t know. If you have to for an inquest or something. I don’t know.”
He thought about it. “Well, I would only go back, I reckon, if they dug up evidence about…” He paused. He hadn’t told Griffin about the woman. About the murderer. He certainly didn’t want to now.
“Evidence about what?”
She sat up a little, pushing herself up on one elbow.
“I don’t know. I’m talkin’ garbage.”
She looked at him, searching his face, then kissed him softly and resumed her place beneath his shoulder. She spoke into his skin, her words muffled and slow. “I thought I could fit in, you know. Be like everybody always wants you to be? But I guess I want more.”
“Sure. We all want more.”
