by Steve Vernon
The big trucker grinned at me.
“You caught me at it, didn’t you?”
“I guess that I did,” I admitted. “But that don’t mean I got any idea what you’re up to.”
The trucker looked at me and grinned that goddamned grin of his.
“Did you ever collect stamps, when you were a kid?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“How about bugs?”
“That was my brother,” I said. “He was always nuts for bugs. I had a shoebox full of matchbooks though. My daddy picked them up when he was out on his runs, and he brought them home to me.”
“Well then you know just what I’m up to. The truth is - I am collecting wishes. From one end of the country to the other, a whole truckload of wishes and hopes and might-have-beens.”
“What for?”
He shrugged.
“Payback, you could call it,” he said. “You see, some time ago I screwed up, big time. One damned kiss was all it took and I messed up a dream so sweet and real it seemed like a forever kind of mistake. Do you know what I mean?”
I thought about Jimmy. I thought about my wife Amy, about the way her eyes looked when she cried me goodbye.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I got a notion what you’re talking about.”
“I figured you did,” the trucker said. “That’s why I stopped. I only stop for them that need me. I felt the power of your wishing halfway down the highway.”
He motioned to the back of the truck.
“Why don’t give it a whirl? Go on, you know you want to.”
I wasn’t so sure.
“Try it,” the trucker coaxed. “It don’t hurt much.”
So I climbed in.
At first the trailer seemed like any other trailer. Big and hollow, a little dustier than most.
Only the dust had a strange kind of scent to it, a tang, like the incense they burn in some churches I been in. Then I heard the voices, low and far off and lulling, like waves in a seashell, soft like the kind of whispers a woman makes when she’s telling you how much she never wants to lose you.
“I wish I’d never….”
“I wish he hadn’t….”
“I wish she’d remember how….”
In the darkness I saw a woman holding a baby she’d let go a lifetime ago. I saw an old man catching a fish out of a rain filled arroyo. I saw a young boy running in an endless field with a big lolling wet tongued hound baying happily at his heels.
And then there was me.
Me, standing alone in the back of an empty trailer truck full of wishes and dreams and over two thousand accumulated years of regret.
I made my wish.
I heard it fall amongst all those hopes and dreams, like a feather drifting into a bed of sponge cake.
Then I made my way from the truck.
The old trucker stood out there on the roadside, like he had all the time in forever.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked. “Really?”
The trucker pulled aside his black plaid collar.
Underneath I saw the rope burns.
“I am just a fellow with a hell of a long row to hoe. Another fellow hung for me once, and then even after I hung myself it just wasn’t enough to pay for all the good he’d done.”
“Well Judas,” I said, meaning it for the very first time.
“You sure got the name right,” he said.
“So what do you want?”
“You know.”
I hugged him. I kissed his cheek softly as summer rain, and in the dusty folds of his cheek wrinkles I could taste the far off sands of distant Jerusalem. I knew how it was to make a mistake, to take a wrong road, and to need to know how to find your way back home.
“I forgive you,” I said. “Hell, we all forgive you.”
“Someday,” he said. “Someday all.”
Then he was gone, just like a puff of cigarette smoke.
All I saw were the bright red goodbye lights rolling down the road.
I was standing outside of the bar where it had all begun.
The Lucky Scratch.
I walked in.
I saw myself, standing there, with my ring finger poked deep into my mouth.
I did not think about it for a single minute.
I picked up a cue stick and I clocked myself out.
*
I woke up in the county hospital.
Nobody could quite tell me how I got there. Seemed some drunk had up and cracked my skull half open with a gentle cue stick.
The first thing I saw was my wife, and while I was hugging on to her like a drowning man might hug a life preserver I saw my boy Jimmy and I hugged him twice as hard.
It’s been three years now, and I haven’t stopped hugging them.
Some folks have to tie a string around their finger, if they want to remember something important.
Not me.
I have got a sweet gold ring that I put on in a church and swore I would never take off. And underneath that gold ring, I have got another that I can’t take off. A ring of teeth marks dug like a tiny coral necklace, right round my ring finger. A row of red marks, like the goodbye lights of that distant trucker and his trailer load of wishes.
Jumping Chollo Will Never Die
I am telling this story from a mouth that cannot speak.
I don’t rightly know why I’m even bothering to try to tell it. The only audience that pretends to be listening is the highway gravel under this hyper-thalidomized butt that I have inherited, a couple of lazy saw flies helicoptering by, and the ant chewed skull of a road killed armadillo.
Even the buzzards are afraid to come near me.
Anyways, I am telling it.
Like all of the stories I have ever heard, this one is and isn’t true in almost all the right places, depending on how you hold your mouth.
If I only had a mouth to hold.
*
Well listen up, old skull, and I will tell you how it all went down.
It started with my mouth and the words that fell out of it.
My grandpa Jake told me I could talk my way into and out of anything I wanted, and a whole lot more of what I didn’t want, if I wasn’t particularly careful.
“Sonny Jones,” he’d say. “Your lips aren’t no prayer book but when it comes to silver tongues, God gave you the whole damned mother lode. It’s just too damn bad the good Lord didn’t give you any stick-to-itiveness.”
Well rubber and glue grandpa, rubber and glue. Everything you say bounces off of me and sticks back on you. Grandpa always called me Sonny because I get up every morning and could burn you if you weren’t too careful; and I guess the name just stuck, because even now folks call me Sonny
Grandpa and I don’t see much of each other these days, on account of he won’t see me, on account of the time I talked him in to buying a half a thousand shares in a Mexican gold mine with a name you couldn’t pronounce the same way twice. That mine went belly up two weeks before its stock even hit the market. Grandpa didn’t take it too badly, seeing it was only a penny issue, but he took it kind of personal when I refused to give him his money back.
That’s just the kind of fellow I am.
See, I’m the kind of guy that fishes all the beef out of the beef stew before anybody else has a chance to. “If you’ve got it, I want it,” is the motto I try to live by. I figure it serves you right if you let yourself get sucked in by me. Some folks would call me entrepreneurial; others would call me a lowdown eggsucking spongehanded grifter.
You can call me Sonny.
*
Excuse me folks, but here comes an El Dorado, and I got to take me a stab at hooking a ride, only I guess these god damned thumbs that I’ve acquired are too damn small to be seen, because that big old road boat just rolled right on by, clouds of dust rolling out behind it damn near rolling me over in the suck of its god almighty wind stream.
That’s just my luck, I guess.
“Sonny,” my gra
ndpa Jake would always say to me. “You are so damned unlucky that if you died and were reincarnated, you’d probably come back as yourself.”
Well he was right as Texas rain about that. Every one of my end of the rainbow schemes always ended out blowing up in my face like those exploding cigars you used to be able to order out of the back of comic books. This particular stroke of bad luck that I’m labouring under started back on a Greyhound bus out of New Mexico; headed for Garden City, Texas or bust.
Now I don’t much like buses. They take too damn long to get anywhere. I talked to a bus driver once about this, and he told me that buses always go straight where they’re going, and didn’t I know that the shortest distance between two points was always a straight line, and then I asked him if he’d ever had to walk a nineteen year old, weak bladdered, gimpy legged blood hound straight through a forest of unpeed upon tree stumps before?
I guess you see my point. Straight can be as crooked as you allow it. It is a God given truth that the shortest distance between two points is always a short cut, and like as not it’s apt to be a crooked one. Which brings me right back to where I’m at, a crooked short cut on my way to getting rich quick, here on this bus, headed for Garden City, Texas or bust.
Garden City, Texas. That has got to be some kind of joke. As far as I could see the only thing that Texas could grow was miles and miles of get in your grin kind of dust; and the only kind of garden I would call that would be the garden of getting even.
Like my grandpa used to say - the only two things certain in life is death and Texas.
See, Texas’s largest crop is the jumping chollo. That is a sneaky little cactus, twice as persistent as kudzu, twice as nasty as a rattlesnake with haemorrhoids of the belly.
The chollo looks just like any other cactus until you walk past it. It’s got a mechanism so damned sensitive that the shadow of a cat will set it off. The vibration of a footstep will cause the jumping chollo to snap off in your direction. Like a big old thistle, it’ll hook into your boot or your butt, ride with you for a half a mile or so, and then drop off.
Where it drops, it roots, and another chollo begins to grow.
Some folks claim that if you burn the skin off the chollo is good for cattle feed, if your cattle ain’t fussy. But if you ask me, they aren’t good for anything but making more chollo, and hitch hiking where they aren’t wanted.
Which brings me back to buses.
Like I said, I don’t much care for buses and like you figured I definitely don’t care for buses going to Texas, except when I’m not on them.
The only reason I’m on this one is on account of Brenda Storm and her daughter, little seven year old Jenny.
*
Let me tell you about Brenda.
Sheis your original Texas school marm. A little worn around the edges but pretty enough to look at, if you squint. I wouldn’t outright call her ugly, but she’s got a face that’d make a freight train think about taking a long walk down a dirt road. Anyway, I think Brenda’s stuck on me and I guess I can’t blame her, but for somebody who’s supposed to be hopelessly in love she’s being awful cagy about it.
You see, Brenda has been burnt once and she has stayed away from the campfire ever since. She was married once. It seems that the fellow she got hooked up with, Harry was his name, was one of those kinds of guys who will never stick around long enough to leave town. He was always close enough to wave his copy of their wedding certificate under her nose just in case she forgot who she was supposed to belong to, yet when ever she needed something done he was off with his buddies in a bar, or shacked up with some hot tamale he’d met down the road.
Even after she up and left him, he kept turning up like the second fiddle in a country waltz. He wouldn’t give her a moment to draw a good sized breath. I suppose you could give old Harry an `A’ for perseverance, but then again you could say the same thing about that chunk of dried manure that insists on hanging up in that shady notch where a cowboy’s boot heel meets his sole.
Or for that matter, a chunk of jumping chollo.
There came a day when Brenda finally had enough. She set out to leave Texas. I guess she figured if she put enough miles between her and Harry he’d leave her be once and for all; on account of he’d lost his driver’s license, once and twice. He lost it once in a poker game and twice to a judge.
I guess Brenda figured wrong.
The next thing old Harry is standing in front of her station wagon, waving their wedding certificate and telling her that he wasn’t about to let her go. So Brenda hit the gas.
She swears to this day that one of her high heels got wedged beneath the accelerator. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. Whatever the case that big Detroit iron went from zero to forty in the time it took to slam into old Harry’s where-with-alls.
I hear it was quite a sight. I am talking pure Technicolor multiple trauma. You ever see what one of those big blue assed house flies looks like right after you nail it with your latest copy of Popular Mechanics? The paramedics had to use a garden hose to get what Harry called his guts out of Brenda’s bumper. Brenda herself used the wedding certificate to wipe the grill dry.
“Waste not, want not,” that was Brenda’s motto; only I think she had another definition of waste in mind.
*
So Brenda was finally free, but she wasn’t exactly what you’d call flush. If high on the hog is rich, Brenda was hanging out somewhere south of the big pig’s hind trotters. It seems the only kind of life insurance old Harry had kept had been a second pair of shoes and a change of boxer shorts.
About the only worth while thing he left Brenda was her seven year old daughter Jenny. Since then, Brenda and Jenny stuck together tighter than bubble gum on silk.
I didn’t come into the picture until a year and a half later.
When I met Brenda, she and Jenny lived in a trailer park up in New Mexico where they’d moved to from Texas, which is sort of like moving from a pimple on Satan’s left butt cheek, to a festering boil on his right but cheek.
Now right away I was touched by Brenda’s plight. You have got to believe me that the thought of her trying to raise a daughter on the little bit of come-by-chance cash she managed to scrape up and the dole she drew from the government really melted my butter.
So I moved in on Brenda.
I was just trying to help, you understand.
Still, she was harder to nail down than a loose shingle in a Kansas wind storm. All the same, I started dropping in on her unexpected and all the time offering to help out with a few round the house kind of handyman jobs. You know, the sort of things women can’t rightly do without a man. Complicated things like mowing the lawn or painting the fence.
Yet no matter what I did she kept giving me the cold shoulder.
Yes sir, getting to know Brenda was about as hard as hunting for a whisper in the middle of a thunder storm. I am not saying the lady was hard to please, but if she ever gets to heaven I bet she asks for a look at the upstairs first.
*
It took me two weeks, but I finally figured what was my best foot in the door opportunity.
It was little Jenny.
Like the good book says - a little child shall lead them.
The way I figured it was, deep down in her heart of hearts, dear sweet Brenda must have known her little tyke needed some kind of father figure to give her true wisdom. I figured I qualified for sure. All I had to do was to pay a little attention to little Jenny, and Brenda would be bound to up and say howdy to good old Sonny Jones.
Now from what you know about good old Sonny Jones, you’re probably asking yourself why the hell am I bothering so hard at buttering up Brenda’s fritters.
Well old skull, I will tell you.
What Brenda did not know was that her dotty Texan grandmother, two and one half shuffles away from the bone orchard, had rewritten her will. Old granny was hard core Baptist indignant over the notion that her other grandchild was living in sin with a one eyed
Tennessee truck stop waitress.
Me, I think it was mostly the part about Tennessee that burnt granny’s grits. But whatever the reason, Brenda’s respectable widowhood made her old granny’s sole heir. Brenda was due to haul in a stash of government bonds worth somewhere in the neighbourhood of seven or eight kinds of zeroes. That was big pickings for a small time chicken picker like me.
I found out about this whole deal because right about the time Brenda’s dear sweet granny rewrote her will I just happened to be plowing the lower forty of that lawyer’s legal secretary. Now you know what they say about pillow talk making good acquaintances. That legal secretary couldn’t wait to ask me if I’d ever heard anything so crazy as the idea of this crazy loaded old lady leaving all her worldlies to her no account trailer trash daughter.
Once I’d got the low down on Brenda’s whereabouts I told that lady legal secretary I’d call her later. Then I sort of lost her phone number and skipped town, heading for Brenda’s neck of the woods. I wanted to get there before some eggsucking weasel bastard got there before me. I imagine right about now that legal secretary is sitting and waiting by the pay phone in the nearest two bit honkytonk saloon, weeping in her whisky over me.
Ordinarily I would say it served her right, but the fact is if she caught a look at the way I look right now I don’t figure she’d wait much longer. She’d start looking for some other cowboy’s whisky to sip, only she wouldn’t be doing no sipping, no sir old skull. One look at the way I look right now and she’d be needing a bottle or two of nasty Jack Daniel’s to wash the sight of me from out of her eyes.
*
Wait a minute.
Here comes a pick-up.
It’s only a Dodge, but beggars can’t be choosers.
I am determined this time. I jump up and down as best as I can, waving what’s left of my arms and wiggling my thumbs, and for a minute that fellow in the Dodge slows down to pick me up.
I start singing hallelujah inside my head.
Then that pick-up driver sticks his head out the side window, takes one good look at me and his eyes start bugging out and his mouth makes open and close kind of motions like he was trying to bag first place in a fly catching contest and then that oilslicking cowlicked bastard pulled away fast.
