Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 15

by Kelly Link Gavin J. Grant

  Two hours later, on the way home, sun deep in the afternoon sky and his mind pumping and clicking along again with the gears and pedals, it occurred to Parker that his afternoon had been research after all, but mind yielded up to body. The rush had been purely physical, but it had been a platonic sort of physicality, disembodied somehow, and somehow absolute. Like orgasm, he thought, without sex.

  For a day or two this notion intrigued him. Wasn't there a case to be made for somatic understanding, the role of the body in knowledge? Weren't there things that could be lived, but not spoken? That seemed pivotal. He found his unread copy of a book on somatics, put his feet up like Camilla, and read. When he'd finished thirty pages, he rubbed his eyes and read one more. Then he put his feet down and threw the book against the wall. “So what?” he demanded, his voice rising as if helium driven, and he pointed instructionally across the table, “There's an eighteen-wheel truck in my living room, goddamn it. A goddamn eighteen-wheel truck!"

  By the weekend Parker was so distracted he was itching for confrontation. He had begun to suspect that something devious was going on, something in his family, something shifty and disloyal, perhaps even cruel. He had been watching the traffic patterns between the bedrooms and the kitchen, and though his wife and daughter maintained a canny silence, their behavior, which is to say their navigational habits and certain shrewd avoidance maneuvers, betrayed an awareness of and, as he was becoming increasingly convinced, probable complicity in the outrage taking place in his living room.

  Nightly, surrounded by her statements and printouts, Camilla stretched her long legs and bare feet across the coffee table to within inches, centimeters, barest millimeters of the knuckled steps, the gleaming aluminum fuel tank. She came so repeatedly, breath-stoppingly close that after a while it was impossible for Gary, spying from the kitchen, to accept her invariable failure finally to make contact as a matter of chance. She was teasing him, baiting him, intentionally making him crazy. His daughter, at fourteen not yet so cunning as her mother, was flagrant. More than once he had watched Emily bounce out of her bedroom and head straight toward the chrome-toothed grill of the Kenworth only to stop short at the very last possible moment, stoop down to pick up some scrap of paper from the floor—when in all of her fourteen years had she ever voluntarily stooped down to pick up anything?—and then veer off at right angles toward the waste basket. Just how gullible did they think he was?

  He felt insulted. Ridiculed. And when on Saturday, Emily repeated this same transparent stunt, dropping to her knees in front of the Kenworth for what surely must have been the fourth or fifth time, Gary Parker, tracking her from the hallway, exploded.

  "Just what do you think you are doing down there?"

  Emily, spread on all fours, gathering school books and papers, froze. Slowly she twisted around in place to look up at her father, eyes a careful study in perplexity. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  "I'm.... “Her eyes widened, but she couldn't hold his gaze. She glanced quickly over at Camilla, who was looking up with an equally quizzical expression. “I'm picking up, Daddy.” She said this ostensibly to him, but her statement seemed not so much an answer to his question as a postulate submitted for approval to her mother.

  "Gary,” Camilla interceded, “are you all right?"

  "Oh, I'm fine, Camilla. I'm just fine. And for your information, I'm also on to all of this. How dumb do you two think I am?” The silence was enormous. Exactly what he'd expected. But he'd made his point. They knew now that he knew. And so he walked out on the two conspirators, left them staring dumbly after him through the kitchen door.

  That was on Saturday. By Monday, however, he despaired of actually forcing the intrigue into the open. The shrewd interrogations he invented out riding his bicycle seemed frankly demented when it came time actually to put them into words. He kept silent, a counter-conspiracy of one.

  The college term resumed and he had to work. But after Camilla and Emily left each morning, he slipped down the hall to the Kenworth. While work piled unattended on his desk, he climbed the steps to the cab and settled into the seat. He shifted experimentally through the gears, then reached for the ignition switch as though this were reflex. He turned the ignition key many times, watched the gauges spring to life, waited for something to happen, but nothing ever did. He tried again and again, but he was also nervous, afraid he might do something wrong and irreparable. And why did he even care? This was hallucination. Yet always, as now, he would come back, heave himself into the custom leather, take hold of the wheel, and guide the Kenworth mentally off through the furniture, beginning to envision, however darkly, just where he and this truck were headed.

  On Wednesday he had no class. The sky was clear, the air humid, hot. When Parker reached Taylor's Truck World, he was sweating. His T-shirt was stained in a dark wet bib down the middle. He dismounted and pushed his bike up the long gravel entrance ramp. There was a ramshackle disreputability to this sprawling aggregation of store fronts, service sheds, squat fuel pumps and soaring pavilions.

  Parker started down the nearest rank of trucks. There were Freightliners, a Marmon, a massive Peterbilt not unlike the truck he was looking for, but too pumped up, too horizontal. He passed a White/GMC, another Peterbilt and was halfway down the row when he stopped short. Forty yards away across the packed dust and gravel rose the gothic features of a truck he'd never seen before. The bright red logo was unmistakably Kenworth, but the truck itself was a verdant brown, glazed darker, almost green by the sun, the color of nightmare. The gaunt, nostriled hood and tinted windshield arched high above the lot like some terrible mantis. Even the mirrors rose on either side like strange, horned mandibles, and above each of these a single quivering antenna.

  Parker approached it slowly. When he was directly in front of the monster, he leaned his bike against what should have been the bumper.

  "Somethin’ I can help you with?” The voice, which did not sound remotely helpful, came from behind him. “You lookin’ for someone?"

  "No!” Parker jumped. “No, not really. I was just looking at the truck.” He turned around to see a wiry man with flame hair and matching face, standing with arms folded across his chest. “I mean,” he struggled to sound casual, “It's an impressive rig, isn't it? It's different."

  "That your bike?"

  "Yes, yes it is."

  "You got it leaning up against my truck."

  "I do. Sorry about that.” Parker stepped quickly back toward the Kenworth, grabbed the bike and pulled it away.

  "This is your truck?"

  "That's what I said."

  "Right. You did.” Parker was stammering like a freshman. He tried to pull himself together, “Look, would you mind if I asked you some questions? Actually, the thing is, I'm out here doing research."

  The trucker eyed him with disdain. “Mister, I don't know who you are or what you want, but I'm going to explain something.” He waited and then began as if this were an old irritation. “First,” he raised an instructional finger above his wrist, “I like girls. Women. You understand?"

  "Sure,” said Gary, who didn't. And then he did. “I mean, yeh ... I mean, ah ... of course..."

  "And second,” the trucker raised a second finger, “a lot of people got a lot a money invested in these rigs. You could real easy get yourself hurt. You understand?"

  "Oh, I understand completely. I do, but maybe I could explain.” Parker was intimidated, but undeterred. “The thing is ... I was wondering if maybe you'd, you know, let me buy you a beer or something."

  He could tell as they slid into the turquoise vinyl bench seats in Taylor's Truck World Country Grill that his new tutor could not believe he had let himself be talked into this.

  "Let's get this straight,” he sounded angry. “You're paying?"

  "Right. Absolutely."

  When the waitress came, the trucker, who had not disclosed his name and, apparently, did not intend to, ordered a Molson's and pointed at Parker's forehead. “His
tab,” he said.

  The waitress nodded and turned to Parker, her green order pad bobbing suggestively.

  "Uh...” He hadn't thought about this. “I'll have a Diet Coke, please."

  "Don't have Coke,” her reply was weary reflex, “We have Pepsi."

  "Fine. Diet Pepsi then.” When he looked up, the trucker was staring at him.

  "I don't drink,” he felt obliged to explain. “It's not a moral thing. It's just nutritional, I guess.” He shrugged. The trucker said nothing.

  "There's really no one around here I can talk to. I...” Parker laughed a small self-conscious laugh, “I tried the library."

  "You got a job?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Well?"

  The trucker's impatience made Parker less than anxious to reveal who he was. “I'm a ... well a teacher."

  "You're a what?"

  "I ... I teach at the college here."

  There was a long silence.

  "You like teaching?"

  "Sure. Sort of."

  "So why are you prowling around trucks?"

  "It's a kind of a mid-life crisis, I guess. I think I may need to change careers?"

  The man looked at him strangely, then away out the window. “No, you don't,” he said.

  "What?"

  "You don't need to drive a truck."

  "What makes you so sure?” Parker regrouped.

  "For a professor, you could use some education. Look, a rig like that ain't for running down to the grocery. You drive it off the lot, you're eyeball to eyeball with guaranteed fifteen to eighteen hundred a month just for the tractor. That's if you got maybe $12,000 down. Then there's two-hundred fifty in insurance and maybe five hundred, maybe more for maintenance. God damn tire costs three hundred dollars. Tolls on a bad run'll eat you alive and then you got fuel. Have to turn twenty-two, twenty-three hundred a week minimum just to keep the son of a bitch on the road. Now that ain't impossible if you're smart and lucky and know what the hell you're doing and if you don't mind working fourteen-fifteen hours a day, seven days most weeks with maybe three nights home a month, maybe, n’ just lucky you made enough to keep yourself on the road because you sure as hell can't get off the road, not and pay the mortgage, not and make expenses. You got a family, cowboy?"

  Parker, transfixed by the trucker's litany, was ill-prepared for questions. “Huh?"

  "Well, do you or don't you?"

  "Do I?"

  "Do you have a family?"

  "I have a wife and a daughter."

  "If you're trying to get away from ‘em, if gettin’ out is what you're after, then sure, okay, you could drive a rig. But you want advice? Good advice? Forget it."

  "The thing is,” he said, knowing he sounded like a screwball, “I already have one."

  His mentor seemed stunned, “You got a rig?"

  "Pretty much like yours. It's a Kenworth anyway. Actually, I never saw a truck like yours before. It's almost, I don't know ... menacing. What is it?"

  At this change in topic, the driver looked suddenly away, out the window. “It's new,” he said. “A fleet truck. It's aerodynamic.” There was high, nasal disdain in his voice. “Get's maybe one, maybe two miles a gallon mor'n a real truck, but it's ugly as hell. That's the price. I didn't buy it. I just drive it.” He shook his head. “Looks like a goddamn anteater coming down the road."

  "It looks different, that's for sure."

  The driver was clearly irritated. He changed the subject. “You was telling me, you already bought yourself a Kenworth truck."

  "Oh no, that's just it. I didn't buy it, I inherited it, sort of, but I don't know about it. I don't know anything about running it."

  "And where is this rig?"

  "At my place."

  "A hood?"

  Parker squinted incomprehension.

  "Does it have a hood?"

  "A huge hood."

  "And chrome?"

  "Everywhere."

  "And saddle tanks?"

  "You mean fuel tanks? They're under the sleeper."

  The trucker gave him a strange look. “Is there a nameplate behind the fender?"

  Parker thought about this. He closed his eyes and paced mentally around the truck. “A logo? Yes, by the steps."

  "Shit, cowboy, you got yourself a 900. We're talking a classic here. A goddamn Kenworth 900.” He shook his head again in slow incredulous arcs.

  Parker sensed his stock rising. “Yes,” he said, “it's quite a machine."

  "There's drivers out there would kill family for a rig like that. And you want me to sit here'n tell you in one beer how to drive it?"

  "Right, I mean, just some general information. Basic stuff."

  "Look Mr., they got schools for that."

  "Right. I know. I've seen ads on television. But it's not that I want to get out on the highway. Not yet. I just want to move it. I've got a small place, and it's sitting right there in the middle of everything. I mean, it's practically in the living room."

  "You could sell it. Rig like that's worth some money. You want to sell it, I know people. I could give you a phone number."

  "I'm not interested in selling."

  "It'd be a fair price. You could buy yourself a pick-up maybe, big-ass Dodge Ram with a stretch cab and gun rack. That's half a rig all by itself. Help get this truck thing off your mind. You could blow the rest on Diet Pepsi."

  Parker stared at the remnant of crushed ice in his glass. “I don't think I can do that.” he said. “I appreciate what you're telling me. But it's not really possible."

  Deep skepticism returned to the trucker's eyes.

  Parker shrugged, “It's complicated. I mean, I understand what you're saying, and you're right, of course, it makes sense, but I'm afraid I just can't."

  The trucker finished his beer and stared back across the table as composed as a case worker. “What's the name of that college you say you teach at?"

  "My college?"

  "That's right. Your college. I got friends with kids graduating high school. They're gonna want to know exactly where you're at, Mister. And I'm gonna tell ‘em."

  "Yeh,” Parker nodded, “you probably ought to do that, but first,” he waved at the waitress and pointed at the trucker, signaling for another beer, “tell me this one thing, would you? When you turn the ignition key, the dashboard lights up, but it doesn't start the engine. What exactly do you have to do to get the engine started?"

  * * * *

  The following morning, before she left for work, Camilla came and stood in the bedroom door.

  "Gary."

  He opened one eye.

  "On the way home could you stop at Lesher's and buy something for tonight?"

  "Buy what?” he grumbled, half asleep, half irritated.

  "Scones or those oatmeal things you like. The Felderbergs are coming over. Remember?"

  Parker sat up. “No! What are you talking about?"

  "It's Thursday. Darin and Elaine are back from the Keys. She says they took some great pictures."

  Parker's irritation became distress. He was trying to imagine himself in the living room with Camilla and the Felderbergs, passing photos and tea biscuits around the Kenworth. What was she thinking?

  "I know,” Camilla was saying, “Darin's photos again. But we'll play Scrabble, and Elaine will have all the college gossip. You'll find out what's going on down there. You never know anything."

  Parker stammered and looked at the floor, “I can't. I...” He threw up his hands. “I have to work."

  "Gary,” Camilla cocked her head, “are you sure you're all right? All last week you were ... I don't know.... You hardly talk to me. Do I need to worry? Is something wrong?"

  "Well, yes there's something wrong. I'm buried in work. I am way, way behind, and I just can't deal with the Felderbergs right now. Is that some sort of crime?"

  "No.” Camilla looked resignedly away. “Of course not. I'll call Elaine. We'll call it off."

  "I'm sorry!” His apology was pitched
too high for contrition. He didn't look at Camilla.

  "It's all right, Gary,” she said and turned to go. “I'm sorry, too.” But then she stopped and turned back again: “Oh, and Gary."

  "What?” He didn't look up.

  "Do you ever shave anymore?"

  Late that night, after the Felderbergs had not come and not gone, Gary stood barefoot in the living room in his T-shirt and shorts. The trucker was right. There was something classic about this rig, something solid and broad-shouldered and—here in the narrow impound of the living room—sad, a life force yielded up to cafe curtains and books, but meant, surely, to break free.

  He was romanticizing wildly, he knew, but consoled himself, there were less rational people in the world. He'd met a man with over 26,000 baseball cards, each individually sealed in custom plastic. The guy spent every waking hour at this, and his eyes were as glazed as his dirty pants. You could smell him from a distance like a spoiled melon. But that was not Parker. He held down a job. He bathed. He would remember to shave. Still, he knew this wasn't moderate craziness either.

  It could have been a movie: some guy careening from his dean to his wife to the sheriff, crying “truck,” but nobody's listening. By the end his own family sends for the county van and the county keepers to take him away. He escapes, of course, in the nick of time at the wheel of the Kenworth. The wail of an air horn is all that remains.

  Parker climbed up into the cab. He looked out over the living room and turned the ignition key. To his left a red light lit up. The glow plugs, he had learned, were now heating the cylinders, and the light would blink off again when they were ready. When it did, he pushed the button directly beneath it. The immediate drone of the diesel filled the cab. He had expected more drama, thunder rolls, Niagara, but the cab vibrated docilely to the pulsing baritone of the diesel.