NIGHT CRUISING

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  "Never had a black man, I guess," the man said and smiled. "Honey, all the stories are true. We all got bigger cocks than these white boys." He laughed out loud, throwing back his head.

  When so engaged Cruise dropped his death grip on Molly and went for the knife. He had backed the black against the side of the truck before he had finished laughing. "What you doing, hey now..."

  "What I'm doing is taking your truck. You're driving us across the state line. I'll let you out somewhere down the way if you're real good."

  "Hijacking my fucking truck? Why, you son of a bitch. I heard of you guys..."

  "You've never heard of me. Now follow me back to my car to get my gear."

  Cruise had him carry the luggage. He kept his hand on Molly's neck. Back at the truck door he said, "Get up in the cab."

  "But, hey, everything I got goes into this truck. It cost me..."

  "I'm not interested in your finances. Now move." Cruise took a tiny slice of the black's neck, enough to get the blood flowing, and the fear instilled.

  The trucker yelled, reached up quick to feel the cut, came away with sticky fingers. "Okay. All right," he said. "Don't get nervous, okay? You can have the fucking truck. I don't want it that bad."

  Cruise knew some of these truck jockeys stashed an arsenal. They were the National Rifle Association's hardcore supporters. Some even had Uzis, they were so nuts about preventing a hijacking. He climbed right behind the black to make sure his hands didn't go for a weapon. Once he was up on the step and facing the driver, Cruise said, "Now get in the sleeper for a minute. Stow my gear. If you make a move, motherfucker, you're a dead man, won't bother me a bit."

  "Take it easy, take it easy." The driver crawled over into the sleeper. Cruise motioned for Molly to climb up behind him. He had her follow as he moved onto the engine cover, gestured her into the sleeper with the driver, before he took the passenger seat. "Okay, come on out and drive this bastard."

  The black made his way into the driver's seat. He shut the door. "This is a rotten thing to do to a working man. I've been paying on this rig for two years already," he said.

  "Shut up and drive."

  They crossed the state line into Arizona without notice. Cruise saw state patrol cars every few miles. Real ones, not phantoms. He slumped in the high seat so they wouldn't see his hair. It wouldn't be long before they found the Chrysler at the California pickle park and figure he'd hopped a ride with someone, or stolen a car.

  Cruise studied how the driver put the truck through the gears. Outside of Tucson he said, "Pull over at some place we can get some food."

  "Whatever you say, Jack. You the boss."

  "I also want you to drop this load."

  "Now wait a minute..."

  Cruise moved across the engine cover and had the knife out all in one motion. The thermos next to the gearshift fell over onto the floorboard with a bang. The driver jerked upright in his seat. The truck began to weave. "Whoa!"

  "You don't want to argue with me."

  "No, no, I don't wanna do that, don't get carried away with that knife, okay? I'll find a place. We'll drop the load, don't worry. No skin off my ass, ain't my stuff."

  "That's right. It isn't yours." Cruise slowly relaxed into the passenger seat after looking at where Molly was curled into a corner of the sleeper as far as she could get from him.

  A billboard announced Guthrie's Truck Stop at the next exit. The black drove to it, Cruise watching as he changed gears and worked the clutch. He thought of something.

  "You got mud flaps on this rig?"

  "Sure."

  "Good. I want it legal on the road." He knew from hearing the truckers talk over the years that trucks couldn't go into cities without mud flaps. They were ticketed without them. That's all he needed, a cop pulling him over.

  First he'd get rid of the load. They ever found out he had taken a truck, they'd be looking for one with a trailer. Next he'd get rid of the driver. He thought he could drive the rig without instruction now.

  Turning into Guthrie's, Cruise leaned forward and looked through the wide windshield for a quiet place to park the truck and drop the load. He pointed to the rear of the building. "Back there, back row."

  "Whatever you say."

  The driver circled the big truck and began backing it into one of the last slots near the rear fence that bounded on open pastureland. When he had it parked and out of gear, Cruise watched how he pulled out one of the knobs on the control panel and a second knob popped out all on its own. He heard the gushing hiss of air brakes. He had to remember that.

  Cruise told him to get out and unlock the trailer from the cab. He descended from the passenger side after giving Molly a hard glance. He watched while the man pulled the big rod that unhooked the trailer from the truck. He watched closely while he cranked the landing gear to the cement. There were big red and blue air hose cables to unlatch, an electrical connector to disconnect.

  Inside the cab again the driver put the truck into first, gave it a little goose of gas. There was a thump and the cab rocked. He goosed it again and there was a clang as the rig came loose of its load.

  "Good. Now let it sit while we get something to eat." The driver relaxed in the seat, breathing noisily.

  "They're gonna hate losing this fucking load," he said.

  "I'm hauling a reefer full of California avocados. It was a damn good payload too."

  "You make me want to cry. Now climb out of the cab. Molly, you stay put."

  Cruise hurried around the front of the rig. He confronted the black man as he hit the pavement. "Let's go check the reefer first."

  "What's to check? We're leaving it, right?"

  "Just go." Cruise had the knife in his hand. The driver saw it, began walking to the rear of the trailer. There weren't any trucks parked in the back row with them. There was nothing beyond the hurricane fencing but yucca plants and prickly pear.

  Just as the black driver reached the back doors and began his turn to face Cruise, the knife did its business. The victim held his throat closed with one hand, but blood pumped between and over his fingers. He looked like he was gagging, as if had a chicken bone caught in his gullet. What he had was too much blood and no way to swallow it all. He stood on his feet for what seemed like a long time staring straight into Cruise's eyes. He didn't make any sounds. He didn't move his hand from his fatal wound. He stood there while blood covered the front of his white undershirt and soaked the top of his jeans. Then suddenly he fell to his knees, the sound like walnuts cracking under the force of a hammer blow. He fell forward, Cruise backing out of the way just in time. The victim's hands, both of them now, were still around his own throat.

  "That's what you get," Cruise whispered as the blood ran onto the lip of the pavement and over into the dry dirt.

  No time to wash. Had to get the hell out of Arizona. Needed to make New Mexico before morning.

  In the cab he took the driver's seat. Molly hadn't moved from her frozen position in the sleeper's corner.

  "You're driving?" Her voice was shrill as if she knew what he had done, but didn't want to admit she knew it.

  "Go to sleep or something. Leave me alone'" He turned on the rig's lights, pushed in the buttons that released the air brakes, stomped the clutch, and got the transmission into first gear. As he drove from the parking lot, the rig too powerful without its load to haul so that it bucked and tried to get out of control, he wished he could have gotten something to eat.

  He could smell some blood on him somewhere. He felt his shirt, but it was dry. He felt his arm that itched and there it was, that sticky wetness that drove him mad. He didn't know if it was his blood from the cuts he'd made on his arm or the driver's blood, not that it mattered. It was going to drive him out of his mind.

  #

  A Mayflower rig driver parked next to the avocado-carrying reefer one hour after it had been dumped. In his rear lights as he backed into the slot he thought he saw something lying on the pavement near the fence. He went
to investigate. He stepped in a puddle of blood before he reached the corpse. He didn't bother to check for a pulse. He knew the man was dead.

  A news crew from Tucson picked up the story on the police scanner and were at Guthrie's Truck Stop with a mini-cam minutes after the first patrol car squealed into the lot.

  Mark heard the report of the slashing near midnight. He slammed the brakes and edged over into the emergency lane.

  "Tucson," he muttered between gritted teeth. "He's backtracking. I know that's him."

  Mark waited for a break in the traffic, then bounded across the wide sandy space between the east and west bound lanes. He stomped the accelerator. He had slept all day and part of the evening hours before waking when the van next to him revved its motor to leave. He wasn't far west of Yuma in the state of California. If he drove like a son of a bitch he could get to Tucson and be behind the killer once again. All these changes of direction were mind-boggling. First the killer was going west on I-l0, then north on 666, then south again to Yuma, then instead of west, he had turned back east.

  Mark decided it was because he was trying to throw off the highway patrols. He was leading them on unpredictable paths.

  The latest death happened at a truck stop. The identity of the man was not yet being released pending family notification, but the announcer did say he was a truck driver, carried his D.O.T. certification in his wallet.

  What if the killer stashed the blue car and had stolen the dead driver's truck? They wouldn't say that on the newscast. Mark had to decide if it made any sense. It sounded right.

  The killer probably didn't expect his victim to be discovered so quickly. He thought the truck would make good cover. If he heard the same reports Mark had heard on the radio, what would he do?

  He'd ditch the truck or he'd get off the freeway system. Either way Mark would find him eventually. He would never give up now. Not since on the last report there was a cafe busboy as a witness. He worked at the truck stop, was going off-duty, and claimed he saw a girl in the cab of a truck in the back lot where the body was found. She was waving her arms, the truck-stop employee said. Just like she was in bad trouble, but for some reason couldn't lean out the window to yell at him for help. When asked why he didn't go see what she wanted, the boy replied, "She just went back into the sleeper, I guess. I started over to the truck and she disappeared. I didn't think nothing of it. I had to get home. How'd I know she might have been with a killer?"

  That was Molly. She was alive. Now he knew for sure.

  When he reached Tucson and saw the billboard for Guthrie's Truck Stop, he took the off ramp. He didn't expect to glean any new information from the personnel, and he was certain the police had already come and gone.

  What he did want to do was make a purchase.

  He needed a CB.

  #

  He told her to climb into the passenger seat. She didn't want to. It felt safer in the sleeper, behind him where he couldn't see her.

  There were smells in the sleeper, comforting homey scents of bedclothes and sheets that had been slept on, the pillowcase that held the aroma of hair oil. She hoped the man who created these distinct, very human scents was not dead, but she knew. She knew Cruise. She didn't want to think about it much, sitting in the dark of the sleeper, sharing the same space the driver had used for his rest. It seemed strange that his personal scent could linger once his life was over. Possessions, yes, the person's clothes, shoes, his toothbrush, his shaving articles, this was to be expected and could be dealt with; they could be put away. But how would his family feel when they crawled into the coffin darkness of the sleeper and recognized their loved one's smell?

  It was enough to break the heart.

  Cruise insisted she take the passenger seat. She finally complied, too tired and depressed to give him misery.

  She had tried to stop the murder. They couldn't say she hadn't tried. She saw the teenage boy walk out the back exit of the truck-stop restaurant and she fairly flew from the corner of the sleeper onto the center section between the front seats. She was afraid to roll down the window to wave, but she pressed up against the windshield and she tried to get the boy's attention. He glanced at the truck. He saw her! He stood holding a black garbage bag in his arms. He cocked his head as if in question. She waved wildly, shook her hands, pointed to the rear of the truck trying to signal that something awful, something permanent and deadly was taking place there.

  Suddenly she heard the ring of footsteps on the rungs leading to the driver's door and she fell back, scooting fast as she could away from the windshield, burrowing into the sheets in the corner of the sleeper as Cruise climbed into the cab. She saw the boy dump the garbage bag, look her way once, shrug, and cross the parking lot to a battered black Camaro. He had not understood her pleas. He might have thought she was playing a joke on him. Or he might have decided she was a Lot Lizard and didn't deserve his attention.

  As Cruise put the rig into gear and let out the clutch too quickly, humping the big growling machine across the parking lot to the feeder road, she despaired of ever finding someone to help her. She slumped against the buttoned and rolled brown vinyl walls of the sleeper, letting her chin fall onto her chest. She sat with her legs beneath her, the raw places on her ankles burning from her weight, and she wondered when she was going to die.

  "Let's turn on the CB, see what the world's up to," Cruise said.

  She would have rather he turned on the radio so that she'd know when they found the trucker's body, but it was long past the time she could suggest anything to her captor. He was fast losing it if his actions dictated his state of mind. There was something wrong, terribly wrong, with his arms. Not only did they look misshapen--too large and puffy--but she couldn't stand the way he massaged them, the way he held one, then the other, out from his body as if they were alien appendages he had just discovered.

  And of course, the killings. It was as if a dam had broken and his thirst for blood rushed over to flood his senses. He wasn't cautious. Imagine overlooking the little boy in the back seat of the car at the lakeside when he murdered the child's father! How could Cruise have done something like that? If he had been killing people without getting caught for so many years you'd think he'd have looked in the back seat first. But he hadn't, thank God, or there would have been a dead boy alongside his parents on that dark rainy road.

  He hadn't made much effort to hide the truck driver's body either. There it was. She thought of him as dead. She knew it was the truth.

  He might have put him into the trailer, but Molly didn't think so. She hadn't heard the doors open or close. She expected he left the driver where he died, somewhere on the truck-stop property near the trailer. Maybe he'd be discovered soon and they'd know Cruise had stolen the cab. Wouldn't it be an easier vehicle to find than the Chrysler?

  Molly felt herself perspiring despite the cab's air conditioner. She could smell her own scent mingling with those of the driver's. She had not had a bath in...two...three days. She couldn't remember the sequence of events, they were all becoming scrambled in her memory. She thought it might be a side effect of sleep deprivation. She didn't think she had slept more than an hour or two total in a couple of days. But then she didn't know for sure. She couldn't remember. The nights were fluid, running one into the other, time bent out of joint.

  She wished now she'd not been frightened into submission at the border crossing. She had meant to make a break for it. She never should have looked into Cruise's eyes. He saw her resolve and took hold of her wrist. Had she said anything to the border guard, Cruise would have killed her first.

  She didn't want to die. She guessed she would keep her mouth closed during any atrocity as long as she was assured of another hour of life. She was selfish. That thought should have made her feel ashamed, but that's the way it was. In order to keep breathing, she did as she was told, she didn't speak up, she didn't even get a chance to warn the black man that he was doomed if he got out of the truck with Cruise.

/>   It seemed a squalid way to die. In a truck stop. In the dark at the back of the lot.

  She shivered, sweat drying beneath her shirt so that it stuck to her skin.

  She thought she ought to talk to Cruise, find a route into his madness where she might influence him, but she couldn't find her tongue and couldn't make words form in her mouth. What could she say? What had she been able to say so far that changed anything he had wanted to do?

  Nothing.

  It was all beyond her ken, beyond her control. She mentally flinched over the word "ken." It was another word from vocabulary lessons like the word "chattel" that she didn't know she knew or would ever use. Ken. Range of knowledge. Beyond her range of knowledge and control. Way out there in the ozone layer floating into the hole over Alaska, drifting into space. Beyond her ken.

  Ever since she got into the car with Cruise in Mobile she realized all choice had been out of her hands. She was out of her element. Lost in the depths.

  She listened to the periodic static and sudden influx of voices talking on the CB about late loads and missing home and dispatchers who made them wait over weekends to deliver and clocking the miles and doctoring the logbooks before they hit the weigh stations and staying on the lookout for Smokeys. Cops is what they meant, of course.

  It might as well have been a foreign language because they didn't teach her about loads and logbooks in school.

  Besides which, the voices weren't talking to her.

  #

  He wanted to talk to her. He filtered the many voices coming from the CB, but didn't give them his direct attention. He wanted to tell Molly something about the cuts on his arms, but he didn't know how. Maybe just that they tortured him, that he felt impelled to do it again, to cut into the tightening flesh to let out the galloping fear. He wanted to tell her that ghosts kept following them. Indians on ponies keeping pace with the truck, their reflections glimmering off the side window as he drove. Edward sat on the engine cover between them, dripping sewage water from the gap in his throat. And in the sleeper lay the ghost of the black truck driver, whistling wind and gulping for air.