Of course, the teacher could have dreamed the part about the eighteen-wheeler. Could have gone to sleep at the wheel and made up a story to keep him from seeing he’d driven off the road and killed his own family. Pin it on the Phantom Trucker and keep the blame off your own self.
Probably how it happened.
Still, from that morning on, Waldron kept an eye on the papers.
“Hey, boy,” Lundy said. “Where you been?”
It was a cold December afternoon, overcast, with a raw wind blowing out of the northwest. The daylight ran out early this time of year but there were hours of it left. Waldron had broken his trip early just to stop at the Rodeway.
“Been up and down the Seaboard,” he said. “Mostly. Hauling a lot of loads in and out of Baltimore.” Of course there’d been some cross-country trips, too, but he’d managed to miss Indianapolis each time, once or twice distorting his schedule as much to avoid Indy as he’d fooled with it today to get here.
“Been a while,” Lundy said.
“Six months.”
“That long?”
“July, last I was here.”
“Makes five months, don’t it?”
“Well, early July. Say five and a half.”
“Say a year and a half if you want. Your wife asks, I’ll swear you was never here at all. Get some coffee, boy.”
There was another trucker sitting with a cup of coffee, a bearded longhair with a fringed buckskin jacket, and he’d laughed at Lundy’s remark. Waldron poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down with it, sitting quietly, listening to the radio and the two men’s light banter. When the fellow in buckskin left, Waldron leaned forward.
“The last time I was here,” he said.
“July, if we take your word for it.”
“I was wired that night, I’d had a clown playing tag with me on the road.”
“If you say so.”
“There were three truckers in here plus yourself. One was drinking beer and the other two were drinking coffee.”
Lundy looked at him.
“What I need to know,” Waldron said, “is their names.”
“You must be kidding.”
“It wouldn’t be hard to find out. You’d have the registrations. I checked the date, it was the ninth of July.”
“Wait a minute.” Lundy rocked his chair back and put both feet on the metal desk. Waldron glanced at the built-up shoe. “A night in July,” Lundy said. “What in hell happened?”
“You must remember. I almost had an accident with a wise-ass, cut me off, played tag, made a game of it. I was saying how angry I was, how I wanted to kill him.”
“So?”
“I wanted to kill him with the truck.”
“So?”
“Don’t you remember? Something I said, you made a song out of it. I said I could have killed him like a bug on the windshield.”
“Now I remember,” Lundy said, showing interest. “Just a bug on the windshield of life, that’s the song that came to me, I couldn’t get it out of my head for the next ten or twelve days. Now I’ll be stuck with it for the next ten or twelve days, like as not. Don’t tell me you want to haul my ass down to Nashville and make me a star.”
“What I want,” Waldron said evenly, “is for you to check the registrations and figure out who was in the room that night.”
“Why?”
“Because somebody’s doing it.”
Lundy looked at him.
“Killing people. With trucks.”
“Killing people with trucks? Killing drivers or owners or what?”
“Using trucks as murder weapons,” Waldron said. On the radio, David Allen Coe insisted he was an outlaw like Waylon and Willie. “Running people off the road. Flyswatting ’em.”
“How d’you know all this?”
“Look,” Waldron said. He took an envelope from his pocket, unfolded it, and spread newspaper clippings on the top of Lundy’s desk. Without removing his feet from the desk, Lundy leaned forward to scan the clips. “These are from all over,” he said after a moment.
“I know.”
“Any of these here could be an accident.”
“Then somebody’s leaving the scene of a lot of accidents. Last I heard, there was a law against it.”
“Could be a whole lot of different accidents.”
“It could,” Waldron admitted. “But I don’t believe it. It’s murder and it’s one man doing it and I know who he is.”
“Who?”
“At least I think I know.”
“You gonna tell me or is it a secret?”
“Not the beer drinker,” Waldron said. “One of the two fellows who were drinking coffee.”
“Narrows it down. Not too many old boys drive trucks and drink coffee.”
“I can almost picture him. Deep-set eyes, dark hair, sort of a dark complexion. He had a way of speaking. I can about hear his voice.”
“What makes you think he’s the one?”
“I don’t know. You want to get those registrations?”
He didn’t, and Waldron had to talk him into it. Then there were three check-ins, one right after the other, and two of the men lingered with their coffee. When they left, Lundy heaved a sigh and told Waldron to mind the store. He limped off and came back ten minutes later with a stack of index cards.
“July the ninth,” he announced, sinking into his chair and slapping the cards onto the desk. “You want to deal those, we can play some Five Hundred Rummy. You got enough cards for it.”
Not quite. There were forty-three registrations that had come through the truckers’ check-in room for that date. Just over half were names that one of the two men recognized and could rule out as the possible identity of the dark-eyed coffee drinker. But there were still twenty possibles, names that meant nothing to either man—and Lundy explained that their man might not have filled in a card.
“He could of shared a room and the other man registered,” he said, “or he could have just come by for the coffee and the company. There’s old boys every night that pull in for half an hour and the free coffee, or maybe they’re taking a meal break and they come around back to say hello. So what you got, you got it narrowed down to twenty, but he might not be one of the twenty anyway. You get tired of driving a truck, boy, you can get a job with Sherlock Holmes. Get you the cap and the pipe, nobody’ll know the difference.”
Waldron was going through the cards, reading the names and addresses.
“Looking through a stack of cards for a man who maybe isn’t there in the first place and who probably didn’t do anything anyway. And what are you gonna do if you find him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s it your business, come to that?”
Waldron didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “I gave him the idea.”
“With what you said? Bug on the windshield?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, that’s crazy,” Lundy said. “Where you been, boy? I hear that same kind of talk four days out of seven. Guy walks in, hot about some fool who almost made him lose it, next thing you know he’s saying how instead of driving off the road, next time he’ll drive right through the mother. Even if somebody’s doin’ this”—he tapped Waldron’s clippings—“which I don’t think they are, there’s no way it’s you gave him the idea. My old man, he’d wash his car and then it’d rain and he’d swear it was him brought the rain on. You’re startin’ to remind me of him, you know that?”
“I can picture him,” Waldron said. “Sitting up behind the wheel, a light rain coming down, the windshield wipers working at the low speed. And he’s smiling.”
“And about to run some sucker off the road.”
“I can just see it so clear. This one time”—he sorted through the newspaper clippings—“downstate Illinois, this sportscar. Witness said a truck just ran right over it.”
“Like steppin’ on it,” Lundy said thoughtfully.
“And when I think ab
out it—”
“You don’t know it’s on purpose,” Lundy said. “All the pills some of you old boys take. And you don’t know it’s one man doing it, and you don’t know it’s him, and you don’t know who he is anyway. And you don’t know you gave him the idea, and if there’s a God or not you ain’t It, so why are you makin’ yourself crazy over it?”
“Well, you got a point,” Waldron said.
He went to his room, showered, put on swim trunks, and picked up a towel. He went back and forth from the sauna to the pool and into the Jacuzzi and back into the pool again. He swam some laps, then stretched out on a chaise next to the pool. He listened, eyes closed, while a man with a soft hill-country accent was trying to teach his young son to swim. Then he must have dozed off, and when he opened his eyes he was alone in the pool area. He returned to his room, showered, shaved, put on fresh clothes, and went to the bar.
It was a nice room—low lighting, comfortable chairs, and bar stools. Some decorator had tricked it out with a library motif, and there were bookshelves here and there with real books in them. At least Waldron supposed they were real books. He’d never seen anyone reading one of them.
He settled in at the bar with bourbon and dry-roast peanuts from the dish on the bartop. An hour later he was in a conversation, and thirty minutes after that he was back in his room, bedded down with an old girl named Claire who said she was assistant manager of the gift shop at the airport. She was partial to truckers, she told him. She’d even married one, and although it hadn’t worked out they remained good friends. “Man drives for a living, chances are he’s thoughtful and considerate and sure of himself, you know what I mean?”
Waldron saw those deep-set brown eyes looking over the steering wheel. And that slow smile.
After that he seemed to catch a lot of cross-country hauling and he stopped pretty regularly at the Rodeway. It was convenient enough, and the Jacuzzi was a big attraction during the winter months. It really took the road tension out of you.
Claire was an attraction, too. He didn’t see her every visit, but if the hour was right he sometimes gave her a call and they sometimes got together. She’d come by for a drink or a swim, and one night he put on a jacket and took her to dinner in town at the King Cole.
She knew he was married and felt neither jealousy nor guilt about it. “Me and my ex,” she said, “it wasn’t what he did on the road that broke us up. It was what he didn’t do when he was home.”
It was mid-March when he finally found the man. And it was nowhere near Indianapolis.
It was a truck stop just east of Tucumcari, New Mexico, and he’d had no intention of stopping there. He’d had breakfast a while back in a Tex-Mex diner midway between Gallup and Albuquerque, and by the time he hit Tucumcari his gut was rumbling and he was ready for an unscheduled pit stop. He picked a place he’d never stopped at. If it had a name he didn’t know what it was. The signs said nothing but diesel fuel and truckers welcome. He clambered down from the cab and used the john, then went in for a cup of coffee he didn’t particularly want.
And saw the man right away.
He’d been able to picture the eyes and the smile, and a pair of hands on a wheel. Now the image enlarged to include a round, close-cropped head with a receding hairline, a bulldog jaw, a massive pair of shoulders. The man sat on a stool at the counter, drinking coffee and reading a magazine, and Waldron just stood for a moment, looking at him.
There was a point where he almost turned and walked out. It passed, and instead he took the adjoining stool and ordered coffee. When the girl brought it, he let it sit there. Beside him, the man with the deep-set eyes was reading an article about bonefishing in the Florida Keys.
“Nice day out there,” Waldron said.
The man raised his eyes, nodded.
“I think I met you sometime last summer. Indianapolis, the Rodeway Inn.”
“I’ve been there.”
“I met you in Lundy’s room in the back. There were three men there besides Lundy. One of them was drinking a can of Hudepohl.”
“You got a memory,” the man said.
“Well, the night stuck in my mind. I had a close one out on the highway, I came in jawing about it. A jerk in a car playing tag with me and I came in mad enough to talk about running him off the road, killing him.”
“I remember that night,” the man said, and he smiled the way Waldron remembered. “Now I remember you.”
Waldron sipped his coffee.
“ ‘Like a bug on a windshield,’ “ the man said. “I remember you saying that. Next little while, every time some insect went and gummed up the glass, it came to me, you saying that. You ever find them?”
“Find who?”
“Whoever was playing tag with you.”
“I never looked for them.”
“You were mad enough to,” the man said. “That night you were.”
“I got over it.”
“Well, people get over things.”
There was a whole unspoken conversation going on and Waldron wanted to cut through and get to it. “Who I been looking for,” he said, “is I been looking for you.”
“Oh?”
“I get things in my mind I can’t get rid of,” Waldron said. “I’ll get a thought working and I won’t be able to let go of it for a hundred miles. And my stomach’s been turning on me.”
“You lost me on a curve there.”
“What we talked about. What I said that night, just running my mouth, and you picked up on it.” Waldron’s hands worked, forming into fists, opening again. “I read the papers,” he said. “I find stories, I clip them out of the papers.” He met the man’s eyes. “I know what you’re doing,” he said.
“Oh?”
“And I gave you the idea,” he said.
“You think so, huh?”
“The thought keeps coming to me,” Waldron said. “I can’t shake it off. I drop it and it comes back.”
“You want the rest of that coffee?” Waldron looked at his cup, put it down unfinished. “C’mon then,” the man said, and put money on the counter to cover both their checks.
Waldron kept his newspaper clippings in a manila envelope in the zippered side pocket of his bag. The bag rode on the floor of the cab in front of the passenger seat. They were standing beside the cab now, facing away from the sun. The man was going through some of the clippings and Waldron was holding the rest of them.
“You must read a lot of papers,” the man said.
Waldron didn’t say anything.
“You think I been killing people. With my truck.”
“I thought so, all these months.”
“And now?”
“I still think so.”
“You think I did all these here. And you think you started it all by getting mad at some fool driver in Indiana.”
Waldron felt the sun on the back of his neck. The world had gone silent and all he could hear was his own breathing.
Then the man said, “This here one was mine. Little panel truck, electrical contractor or some damn thing. Rode him right off a mountain. I didn’t figure he’d walk away from it, but then I didn’t stay around to find out, you know, and I don’t get around to reading the papers much.” He put the clipping on the pile. “A few of these are mine,” he said.
Waldron felt a pressure in his chest, as if his heart had turned to iron and was being drawn by a magnet.
“But most of these,” the man went on, “the hell, I’d have to work night and day doing nothing else. I mean, figure it out, huh? Some of these are accidents, just like they’re written up.”
“And the rest?”
“The rest are a whole lot of guys like you and me taking a whack at somebody once in a while. You think it’s one man doing all of it and you said something to get him started, hell, put your mind to rest. I did it a couple of times before you ever said a word. And I wasn’t the first trucker ever thought of it, or the first ever did it.”
“Why?”
“Why do it?”
Waldron nodded.
“Sometimes to teach some son of a bitch a lesson. Sometimes to get the anger out. And sometimes—look, you ever go hunting?”
“Years ago, with my old man.”
“You remember what it felt like?”
“Just that I was scared all the time,” Waldron said, remembering. “That I’d do something wrong, miss a shot or make noise or something, and my dad would get mad at me.”
“So you never got to like it.”
“No.”
“Well, it’s like hunting,” the man said. “Seeing if you can do it. And there’s you and him, and it’s like you’re dancing, and then he’s gone and you’re all that’s left. It’s like a bullfight, it’s like shooting a bird on the wing. There’s something about it that’s beautiful.”
Waldron couldn’t speak.
“It’s just a once-in-a-while thing,” the man said. “It’s a way to have fun, that’s all. It’s no big deal.”
He drove all day, eastbound on 66, his mind churning and his stomach a wreck. He stopped often for coffee, sitting by himself, avoiding conversations with other drivers. Any of them could be a murderer, he thought, and once he fancied that they were all murderers, unpunished killers racing back and forth across the country, running down anyone who got in their way.
He knew he ought to eat, and twice he ordered food only to leave it untouched on his plate. He drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and just kept going.
At a diner somewhere he reached for a newspaper someone else had left behind. Then he changed his mind and drew away from it. When he returned to his truck he took the manila envelope of newspaper clippings from his bag and dropped it into a trash can. He wouldn’t clip any more stories, he knew, and for the next little while he wouldn’t even read the papers. Because he’d only be looking for stories he didn’t want to find.
He kept driving. He thought about stopping when the sky darkened but he decided against it. Sleep just seemed out of the question. Being off the highway for longer than it took to gulp a cup of coffee seemed impossible. He played the radio once or twice but turned it off almost immediately; the country music he normally liked just didn’t sound right to him. At one point he switched on the CB—he hardly ever listened to it these days, and now the chatter that came over it sounded like a mockery. They were out there killing people for sport, he thought, and they were chatting away in that hokey slang and he couldn’t stand it . . .
Enough Rope Page 29
