Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

  She started spending the night—once, then twice, then a few nights a week. They’d just about gotten into a regular routine when Ramsey’s training period ended. It figured that he’d be hitting the road just when he finally had a reason to stay in town. Yet when he factored out the utility company, which had canned him for good the day after his late-night climb, he wasn’t qualified for anything that paid more than minimum. And working for Topaz Trucking was a great deal. The company was paying for his training, and there was a guaranteed job at the end with a salary even better than he had been making not climbing telephone poles. And for the second time in his life, Ramsey had a job he could actually stand—one with a future, too, provided he didn’t do anything stupid again, like slicing up his driving leg.

  As a rookie, he went over-the-road, meaning anywhere and everywhere. But unlike a lot of truckers gone for three, four weeks at a time, he had it pretty easy. Home every two weeks for four days.

  Those were good days.

  He was home for Allie’s college graduation and cooked dinner from a recipe in the Sunday paper. He was leaving the next morning. After the dishes were washed and the two of them were on his sofa with Led Zeppelin IV playing on the stereo, he took Allie’s hand and said—casually, but with his heart pounding—“So if we got married, would you be okay with that?”

  Fifteen days later they landed at McCarran International Airport and were in Vegas fewer than six hours before a grinning minister at the Xanadu Drive-Thru Wedding Chapel declared them man and wife. Flower bouquet, boutonnière, five-by-seven photo, marriage license: eighty-seven dollars, plus tax. Back in their motel room, they propped the photo up on the dresser, and Ramsey couldn’t stop looking at it. He’d never seen that expression on his own face before. One of the words he’d learned recently from the dictionary was effervescence, and that was close, but the more accurate word was a lot simpler. Joy.

  12

  By 1991, six years later, Allie was a senior sales rep whose boss was grooming her for management, and Ramsey was doing damn fine, too. He’d built up enough goodwill at Topaz that they started keeping him east of the Mississippi, usually seven days away rather than fourteen. He and Allie remained man and wife, remained in love, the love having become more nuanced, perhaps—less desperate, but more dependable, a love as essential to each of them as their blood and bone, inseparable from the life they had created together, the child they had created.

  Which was why Ramsey’s phone call with Eric on the morning of June 10 completely blindsided him.

  The argument that morning between Ramsey and Allie had been over Meg’s day care. Meg was two and a half, and her December birthday made her one of the oldest in the Ladybug group. Allie thought she should move up to the Grasshoppers, where she’d be one of the youngest. Let her learn from the older kids, Allie said. Let her be challenged. Ramsey thought: She comes home happy every day. Why rock the boat? Besides, she was challenged enough, navigating a dozen other kids and two teachers every day. She’d be challenged her whole life, same as everyone. Why rush it?

  They didn’t shout at each other, Ramsey and Allie. That was never their way. And this fight that Ramsey and Allie were having, it was about nothing. Meg would be fine in either group. Ramsey knew this. But he also knew that Allie was being short-tempered with him lately, as if any view he held was the wrong one. From time to time she brought work-stress home, especially at the end of the quarter when there were reports to complete, but her stress had always shown itself as an unspecified moodiness, a cloud that settled over the house for a couple of days before lifting again. This was different. Her impatience seemed directed specifically toward him.

  So when she said for the fifth or maybe the thousandth time that she wanted Meg to be challenged, that it was important she be challenged, Ramsey said, “For Christ’s sake, Allie, it’s fucking day care, not NFL training camp.”

  He didn’t intend to sound mean or rude—okay, rude maybe—but people hear what they want to hear. And her dismissive reply—“Oh, fuck you, Ramsey”—felt worse than if she’d hit him. In all their years together, neither of them had ever said that to the other, even kidding around. And because he was hurt and stunned, he left angry later that morning on a weeklong haul without so much as a good-bye. Last time he’d done that was three years earlier, and it had ended with him frightening that poor hitchhiker in his cab and then nearly drinking himself to death.

  Driving the familiar roads that began most of his trips, he felt awful about the fight and how he’d left. She had looked especially attractive this morning. The outfit she had on, and her hair, curled with the iron she used... whatever it was, Ramsey would have preferred to part for the week with a proper good-bye in the bedroom, rather than fighting about day care in the kitchen. And now he was alone in his truck, heading away, and Allie was alone in the house, and although they’d talk on the phone tonight or maybe tomorrow, the hurt wouldn’t fully resolve until he returned, which was too long.

  He didn’t like driving agitated, never had, so he blasted the radio. It helped some—music always chilled him out, kept him from stewing in his juices. Near the Jersey/Pennsylvania border a couple of hours later, a song came on by one of the new Seattle bands. He could take or leave what he’d heard so far from these bands whose music sounded like heavy metal on downers. That was why he had on the classic rock station, songs he knew and loved, but somehow this one track had made it into the rotation. It wasn’t classic, not yet, but something about it grabbed him. The lyrics were half indiscernible, half impenetrable. Nirvana, the DJ said the band was called. The song sounded nothing like any nirvana Ramsey might imagine, but that was okay. The energy and the anguish were real.

  Ramsey took the next exit to find a gas station with a pay phone and call Eric, who was spending his hard-earned, week-long vacation renovating his kitchen—ripping out linoleum, putting in tile, installing new cabinetry. When Eric answered, Ramsey informed him that he’d just heard a new song that they must learn right away, and if he hadn’t heard it yet, then he’d better put down the trowel or tile or grout or whatever and get his ass over to the radio, pronto, and request—

  “Hold it a minute,” Eric said. “I need to tell you something.” But then he didn’t say anything else.

  “You still there?” Ramsey asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here. I hate to...” He paused again. “Ah, shit—but you have a right to know.”

  Ramsey wasn’t sure why all his muscles had suddenly tensed. Then it occurred to him that until that moment, he had never heard Eric utter a single vulgar word.

  “What is it?” Ramsey asked.

  “I went to pick up my amp from your house earlier.” Of course. With his fast exit this morning, Ramsey had forgotten to tell Allie that Eric would be dropping by. “So I was driving down your street. And I saw something.”

  “Well, don’t draw it out, man. What’d you see?”

  “Yeah, okay.” He heard Eric take a breath. “It was Allie, standing in the driveway with a guy. I’m pretty sure it was David Magruder—you know who he is?”

  “The weatherman? Yeah, he lives down the street from us.”

  “He does? Oh. Okay. It was him, then, for sure. Well, the thing is, they were standing in your driveway, by the front door. And... Ramsey, he had his arms around her.”

  “No,” Ramsey said. “You got it wrong. They don’t even know each other.” But did they? How would Ramsey know? With him gone half the time, he couldn’t be sure. Except, Allie would have mentioned Magruder at some point. Unless she didn’t want Ramsey to know.

  “It was him,” Eric said. “I know what he looks like.”

  “Then there’s an explanation.” Ramsey’s mind worked to come up with one. Sprained ankle, one leaning on the other? “Trust me, I’m sure—”

  “And they were kissing,” Eric said quickly.

  The phone receiver became a heavy weight in Ramsey’s hand. He lowered his voice. “Like a real kiss?”

  Er
ic’s silence made everything worse. He could tell that his friend was thinking hard about his words, something that friends shouldn’t have to do. “You don’t want the answer to that,” he said.

  “I fucking do,” Ramsey said.

  Eric cleared his throat. “What can I tell you, man? They were kissing. He had his hand...”

  “Where?”

  “Doesn’t matter. On her rear end, okay?” Another throat-clear. “I didn’t want to tell you. I was praying on it when you called.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “No, I doubt it. I was driving toward the house, and when I saw what I saw, I just kept going. It all happened fast, a couple of seconds. Anyway, they were still kissing when I drove past. They weren’t looking anywhere else.”

  “Man.”

  “Listen, I’m real sorry. I didn’t want to tell you. But I figure that God must have put me in my truck and made me bear witness so I could be the one to break the news. So I had to tell you, you know?”

  All around Ramsey, cars were fueling up. A man in overalls returned to his pickup from the gas-station store carrying a cup of coffee. A hundred yards away, vehicles rushed across the highway overpass in a steady hum. An absolutely ordinary Monday morning on the road in the middle of nowhere, U.S.A.

  “Sure, man,” Ramsey said, barely aware of Eric’s words anymore, or his own. “Sure you did.”

  His call with Eric must have ended, and Ramsey must have climbed back into his truck, shut the door, and started the ignition, but he couldn’t remember doing any of it. Couldn’t remember leaving the gas station or pulling back onto the highway or shutting off the radio, but he must have done those things as well.

  He continued west toward Pittsburgh. Without music, his thoughts drifted and focused, drifted and focused. He replayed the morning—something extra in the way Allie had put herself together, the way (he now remembered) she wouldn’t quite meet his eye—and he replayed all the times lately when she’d been short-tempered with him or exasperated and he couldn’t figure out why, almost as if she wanted to be mad at him. His thoughts drifted further back to times when they would be pushing Meg along in her stroller and Allie would exchange nods or smiles with neighbors who walked or drove past, many of them men. He visualized Magruder’s house—split-level, gray, just a few hundred yards from their own—and how Allie never once mentioned that she knew him. That seemed more damning than anything. Other neighbors, she mentioned: the retired couple who lived across the street, the boy at the end of the block who was bald from chemo, the veterinarian with the Great Dane puppies that Meg played with. But Magruder? Not one fucking word.

  A truth began to emerge like a person walking toward him through thick fog—invisible, invisible, then startlingly clear.

  She’d done this once before, cheated on Ramsey, though she refused to see it that way. When they first started spending time together, she was still seeing some college boy. She never mentioned him until the day she told Ramsey that it was over.

  What’s his name? Ramsey had asked.

  It doesn’t matter what his name is, she said. What matters is that I ended it. I chose you.

  He’d believed her. It hurt, though, knowing she’d continued seeing this college boy while things with Ramsey were heating up. (Not “seeing him,” Ramsey told himself now. No sugarcoating, big guy: “fucking him.”) He’d been alarmed at the time, how she had it in her to lead two lives without him ever having a clue. But by then he was already in love with her. And like she said, what mattered was that she’d ended it with the other guy. Anyway, the two of them were having this conversation in a fairly expensive restaurant, celebrating three months of whatever it was they were. And the fact was, she had chosen him. That was what mattered, he told himself at the time.

  He wondered, now, how long it’d been going on with Magruder, how long the life he thought he was leading wasn’t his life at all. Weeks? Months? Or much longer? And he wondered if over the last few years there had been other other men. He tried to remember all the men on his block, every last leering accountant and dentist, every shithead with a business suit and a neatly mulched yard. But they all blended together. And soon enough, those other men stopped mattering—they were merely interchangeable parts—and he began to see Allie more clearly than he’d ever seen her before.

  He must have been driving, but the universe was collapsing in on itself, obliterating time and distance, and now he was a boy in a tree and now his mother was turning in the air and now his father was bleeding in the kitchen and now he was smelling piss in a drunk tank and now he was lying in bed in one dark apartment and now in another and now, and now, and amid this barrage of memories, all the rage he had worked tirelessly over the years to rid himself of came rushing back as if through a busted levee. He was driving toward Pittsburgh, past farms and over hills and through valleys, but what he saw was Allie as she’d first appeared from inside the hospital elevator, blue skirt, vase of flowers in her hand, and then he saw her standing outside his house kissing David Magruder, and then their hands were all over each other, and she and Magruder were in bed, clothes on the floor, and he was inside of her, thrusting, and she was looking into his eyes.

  Ramsey didn’t touch the truck’s radio dial. He wanted the silence, the thoughts to keep coming, wanted to experience in its fullness the fact that the single truth he had lived by every day since first meeting Allie in that hospital corridor, the truth that made all truths possible, was a lie. And the worst part was, he should have known it. Should have seen that his life these last seven years had been too good to be true—the wife, the kid, the house, the two-car garage, the job, the band, and on and on. But now, alone in his cab with no distractions, he saw the past seven years for what they were: a big sham. That was the only truth. He should have known.

  The land rose as he bypassed Wheeling and crossed the Ohio River. He passed a weigh station without stopping, and then the land flattened again to ten million acres of corn stalks and soybean crop. He saw none of it. As his big rig rolled at a steady seventy-five miles per hour toward Columbus, his anger continued to build and crash down on him in waves—strong, then stronger still—again and again and again, a rage so distilled and devastating, it was almost like bliss.

  He pulled into the Buckeye Travel Center around 5:30 p.m. for diesel and a leak. Got out of his truck and blinked several times in the late-afternoon haze. Once more he became aware of his surroundings. After fueling up, he entered the facility and went through the shop toward the fast food. Ordered a sub and looked around for a place to sit. Half the dining area was roped off for construction. He didn’t want to return to his cab yet, though. The travel center was already doing him some good, forcing him to move in a world of other people. He knew he easily could’ve driven off the road, earlier—from inattentiveness or from a decisive yank on the steering wheel. Jump an overpass and create one of those video-game fireballs.

  When a man left his table near the windows, Ramsey claimed it. At the adjacent table, a man wearing a Pennzoil cap sat hunched over a book spread open on the table. The pages were all marked up. Bible, Ramsey figured. Many truckers passed their time that way—all well and good until they found one another, and suddenly you’re stuck listening to a group of impassioned truckers quoting—probably misquoting—chapter and verse and tossing their discoveries around as if the truck stop were their personal church.

  When the man turned the page, Ramsey saw it wasn’t the Bible, not unless there was a new version with charts and graphs. The young man wore a button-down shirt and brown pants. He was sort of short and thin like Ramsey, but not muscular. Clean-shaven but with terrible acne. His glasses were wire-rim, the lenses round and professorial. The Pennzoil cap might have been a red herring—he was probably a student, not a trucker. Ramsey unwrapped his sub, and as he chewed he kept glancing over. Eventually, he took a sip of soda and said, “So you in school or something?”

  The man looked up from his reading. “Me?” He shook his hea
d. “No, I drive for Safari.”

  “They got a good reputation.”

  “Can’t complain,” the man said.

  “The way your book is marked up,” Ramsey said, “I had you pegged for a Bible thumper. Then I saw the graphs and whatnot.”

  “Student wasn’t a bad guess.” He licked his lips. “I went two semesters at Humboldt County College. Was gonna be an oceanographer. I always had a knack for science.” Although the man looked younger than Ramsey, his smile was already full of nostalgia. “But life gets in the way sometimes.”

  “Brother, I hear you there,” Ramsey said.

  The man shrugged. “What I found, you don’t have to be in school to be a student.” He patted his book twice for evidence.

  “So what’s that, an oceanography book?” Ramsey surprised himself, engaging with this other man, shooting the shit today of all days. But he’d been so deep inside himself, it came as a relief to talk to someone who didn’t know him from Adam.

  “There’s oceanography in here,” the man said, pulling his chair a little closer to Ramsey, “but a lot more than that.” He licked his lips again. “See, there are these two scientists—one’s an astronomer and the other’s a geologist. They’re two of the leading scientists in their fields, and... well, you know how when the moon is full, the tides get extra big?”

  “Of course,” Ramsey said, and went on to tell the man about having grown up at the shore—how on moon tides, boats in Shark Fin Inlet were always getting grounded on sand bars.

  “So you know that the moon affects the earth’s gravitational pull—it’s literally sucking the water up and pushing it back down again.” The man touched the bridge of his glasses. “And when a planet—Jupiter or Mars or any of them—when it lines up with the earth and the moon, the tides get even bigger. That’s called a planetary conjunction. Doesn’t happen too often. But it’s nothing compared to what’s going to happen on September 22 of this year, when they all line up.”