by Steve Vernon
“Don’t climb into nothing that ain’t got a back door out.”
Well, the truck did have a back door even though I couldn’t get to it unless I wanted to climb into the trailer, which I didn’t. So I climbed on into the cab. My feet were sore and up until now the only other hope I had was that maybe that drunken Texas plowboy might stick his tractor in reverse.
* * *
The driver was a big fellow, even sitting down, with a big red beard, tight and curly as a fistful of copper wool.
“Where you heading?” He asked.
“Memphis.”
“Tennessee, Texas, or Egypt?”
I laughed, thinking it was a joke.
“Can’t get to Egypt on a truck.”
The big man grinned like a burning neon sign.
“You’d be surprised how far a fellow can get, if he really wishes.”
Holy Moses. I was sitting next to an Oprah slinger. Worse than bible thumpers, Oprah slingers spread good cheer and hope in the form of meaningless proverbs and all knowing grins. If they aren’t working as truckers they’re often found in bus terminals and airports pressing grimy tracts of unfathomable wisdom into hands that would rather hang onto their luggage.
To hell with it. A ride was a ride and I needed one.
“Texas,” I said. “I’m going to Memphis, Texas.”
“Long way from here.”
“Not as far as Egypt.”
He nodded like he was listening to Solomon.
“Got a name?” He asked.
“Everybody does,” I said, letting it lie right there.
He laughed at that, a long steady huh-huh-huh, like the sound of empty boxcars rolling over a rusty switch.
His laughter got to irritating me and I wished he’d shut the hell up.
Just as slick as a turnpike he let the laughter ticker out and we drove the next hour through a desert of silence. There was nothing but the wind whiskering past the windshield. I got to regretting my last wish. The whole world seemed lonesome with no words to hear.
Only thing to look at besides the road was a big old pocket watch swinging from the sun visor like a gallow medal. It wasn’t ticking. I don’t know if it was broke or just not wound.
Near as I could figure we were rolling just north of Bigfoot, about a hundred miles west of Corpus Christi which was fine with me. I was headed for Memphis, about as far as I could get from Corpus Christi without actually leaving Texas.
I fell asleep, thinking about detours and goat paths winding in slow dusty circles.
That’s the trouble with history. You just can’t get far enough away from it to ever truly say goodbye.
* * *
Corpus Christi may have been where it all started but it was Misty Abilene who set the fuse to burning. Misty Abilene was the prettiest one hundred eighteen pounds of temptation God ever poured into a pair of sun-faded Levi low-rise leg hugging jeans. I met her in a Corpus Christi pool hall, name of The Lucky Scratch.
We’ve all heard stories about fellows tempted by heartless sirens. Heard how some guys were lead by their zipper to the unhitching bedpost. Well that was some other guy. I didn’t need tempting and I sure wasn’t lead anywhere that I didn’t want to go. Yes sir, you can lay the blame right here. I knew what I was up to from the ready-set-go.
Give me credit. I stopped long enough to look once at the gold ring on my left hand. Dinged in on one side where I’d caught it on a gear at the nail factory. I thought about Amy, waiting at home with my boy, waiting to share a couple cups of cold coffee and a tired kiss goodnight. Then I stuck that finger in my mouth, worked up a good half swallow of spit, and wiggled the ring off with my teeth.
Looking back from where I’m at now, I wish somebody had snuck up behind me and dropped a pool table on my head before I got much further than that.
* * *
“Hang on for a moment. I got to pull in here,” The trucker said.
I opened my eyes as the big rig eased to a halt.
“Where’s here?” I asked.
“Just east of Rock Springs,” He said.
We were in the back streets of a one dead horse town. The rig was cosied down a back alley. I must have been sleeping sound to doze through the bent fish hooks the trucker must have turned to squeeze into a snug-hole like this.
He got out in a hurry.
Making a delivery? Or maybe just taking a leak.
It seemed kind of strange, wasting time working this rig into the tiny alley just to make a pint of dirty lemonade but maybe he was shy.
Then I saw her standing in the halo of an unshaded sodium lamp. Just a couple steps from a door that had last seen paint somewhere around the time Moses got the green light at the Red Sea. A tiny gray haired Mexican doll. She was a beauty, even though she was staring at the wrong end of eighty years. She was all dusky and petal hued, like a wild rose gulping at the rain. Aside from Amy, the old Mexican lady was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen.
The big trucker walked up to her and I thought I had things figured out. Then I heard him speak to her, in Mexican so fluid and graceful it sounded like a slow country waltz molassesing out of the big man’s mouth.
I didn’t savvy half what they said, yet I could feel what they were talking about. Kind of like a slow growing hunch, I felt a certainty in their language. I felt the shape of the words, slow round rolling words like moon and dream and wind; and above all of that I heard the deafening silence of the stopped pocket watch, echoing like the sound of a stone dropped down a bottomless wishing well.
First he lead her on back to the trailer. I heard the big doors swing wide open. I wondered if he had a truckload of queen sized mattresses for the use of this beautiful old senora. He was gone just long enough for me to wonder if maybe he wasn’t kidnapping her, or smuggling her across the border. Then he lead her right back out from the darkness. In the side mirror I saw she had a smile on her face like the big man had given her a thousand years of hope.
“Gracias,” She whispered. “Muchos gracias.”
Then she leaned over and kissed his left cheek like a dove pecking at bit of spilled grain. I heard her whisper something too soft to hear. The pocket watch clicked loudly, like a camera shutter. I was watching it when it happened. The second hand geared backwards, one distinct notch.
Then the watch was still again.
“Well Judas,” I swore.
Then the trucker was up beside me like he’d been called. He swung the big door shut. He was in a hurry like he had to be somewhere else by yesterday. We headed out fast, so fast I didn’t see how the rig made the close tight turns.
I looked back and saw a figure framed in moon and tail light. It looked like the old woman’s daughter, a young senorita as beautiful as a sigh torn from an angel’s gullet. In her arms she cradled a tiny baby, wrapped tightly in a homespun blanket.
“What the hell was that about?”
He smiled, a soft kind of forget about it smile.
“Just a little life. A woman. A son she’d wished she’d had.”
I didn’t understand.
“You gave her the son?”
He grinned.
“I guess I did. Sort of.”
And that’s all he said.
He revved it up and geared it down and we headed for the open road.
* * *
I knew about babies.
Amy and me made the boy in our second year of marriage. We hadn’t really planned on it. He just sort of happened along. We loved him as best we could. We called him Jimmy after my dad. He grew like a running weed, all forward with no reverse. He kind of aggravated me, nights when I tried to read the paper. He kind of amused me, the way he reminded me so much of myself. All go and no stop. I laughed out loud every time I thought about how badly my own father had wanted to murder me, when he wasn’t too busy loving me with all his heart.
It was a good life. It was kind of quiet like a sleep beneath a shady tree. Maybe sometimes I wished I hadn’t been so qu
ick to say “I do”. Maybe sometimes I wished I hadn’t chosen that road of lace and duty. Maybe sometimes, but mostly I couldn’t complain.
Then I met Misty Abilene, and everything fell apart.
* * *
Like well oiled clockwork, we came to another stop.
We were somewhere in the open desert. It looked to me like New Mexico.
Don’t ask me how I knew this. It was like some voice told me. It didn’t make sense though. We weren’t following any road map I knew of. I couldn’t even remember leaving Texas.
The truck pulled over. I saw an old man sitting by a wooden dock in the middle of the desert, fishing in a dry arroyo. He grinned as we approached. A big moonlike caul hung like a penance mark directly over the old man’s left eye. He saw me staring at it, and winked himself blind with his right.
The scene from the alley repeated itself. First the trucker took the old man behind the truck. I heard the doors swing open. I told myself to go take a look but I couldn’t force myself to move. It was like my legs had gone to sleep and hadn’t bothered waking my feet.
When it was over the old man hugged the trucker like he was a long lost brother. He kissed him on the cheek and graveled out a phrase my ears couldn’t catch. Then he returned to his dry gully fishing.
The rod bent double like he’d caught the mother of whales. The last I saw he was reeling in a fish something the size of a deep water salmon.
The pocket watch clicked back.
It began to rain.
In the side mirror I caught a glimpse of the old man dancing in the downpour.
The truck moved on and everything became a blur.
* * *
It was raining the night I met Misty Abilene at The Lucky Scratch.
The thing I remember most was the big neon sign with a big neon rack of pool balls. Then there was this big cue stick and the balls clicked out one by one. Then there was nothing but the cue stick. Then the balls, blinking back again, one by one.
A do-over, we used to call that. If you screwed up something particularly well, like a bad bat swing or a missed target, then you blamed it on the sun or a random bumblebee and you got to do it over.
That’s what I wanted now. A do-over. A chance to make it right, to make my life back to what it was before I met Misty Abilene. I should have known better. If I had the chance again I would make things right with Amy and Jimmy. I know I could.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda. The three stooges of destiny, lined up and laughing at me.
I’d tell you a lot about what happened with Misty but there wasn’t much to say.
I got stupid. I fucked up.
No sun, no bumblebee, no do-over, just a long detour down a dead end road.
Misty and I wound up in a hotel room with a couple of lazy rats and a half thousand insomniac cockroaches. Our bed sheets stank of wasted sweat and mispent seed. The whole thing was about as memorable as the thirteenth firework on a thousand candle fourth of July picnic.
Three days later Amy found out and then I ran out.
* * *
The truck pulled over a third time.
There was a boy waiting on a large rock in a field that reminded me of Oklahoma. You could hear the wind singing through the grass. The boy looked a little like Jimmy in the way all boys look alike. That constant yearning bounce for the sky. That wide eyed, never seen it, never done it before expression.
When I saw the trucker invite the boy back into the shadows I knew I had to do something. I’m ashamed to say a part of me imagined the worst was going on between that big old trucker and that poor little boy. My mother’s echo again, I suppose. The dangers of stepping into vehicles with strangers.
I felt the same sluggishness overtake me. The same feeling of why bother moving. Nothing could be done about anything. I fought clear of it. I would not yield, not this time. I had to find out what was happening back in that trailer. It was a combination of worry for the boy and tomcat curiosity.
I climbed out and ran back just in time to hear the boy say, “I wish old Duker had never run out in front of that hay truck.”
Then the boy came out of the cave of the trailer, grinning like he’d been handed the keys to the cotton candy dream factory. He stared up at the big trucker who grinned back like a hundred piano keys. Then the boy threw his arms around the big man and kissed him squarely on the chin about as high as he could reach.
Then he said it. Those three words. Like the old man and the woman before him. Those three words , singing as clear as the ringing of a midsummer bell.
“I forgive you,” The boy said.
Then he ran into the night. He ran the way young boys ought to, all forward and no reverse. Somewhere out in the darkness I heard the baying of a bluetick hound, heard a young voice yelling “Hey Duker”, and I knew without looking that the pocket watch hanging on the sun visor had clicked back one more notch.
The big trucker grinned like he knew I was there.
“Caught me at it, didn’t you?”
“Guess I did,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I have any idea what you’re up to.”
He shrugged and I felt the sky move above his shoulder blades.
“Wishes,” He said. “I’m collecting wishes. From one end of the country to the other. A whole truckload of wishes.”
“What for?”
He shrugged.
“Payback, I guess. Same as you. Sometime back I screwed up a dream so sweet and real it seemed a forever kind of mistake. Didn’t matter that it was what I was supposed to do. Didn’t matter what he told me afterwards. I’d screwed up and I needed to make things better. You know what I mean?”
I thought about Jimmy. Thought about Amy. Hell, I even thought about Misty Abilene.
“Yeah,” I said. “I got a notion what you’re talking about.”
“Figured you did,” He said. “That’s why I stopped. I felt your wishing halfway down the highway. What the hell were you doing on that goat path any way?”
Now it was my turn to shrug.
“Took a wrong turn, I guess.”
He chuckled and his big red face glowed like a freshly stoked coal stove.
“Why don’t you give it a whirl? Go on. You know you want to. Try it. Just climb on in. It don’t hurt much.”
So I climbed on 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. 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.
“Wish I’d never...,”
“Wish he hadn’t...,”
“Wish, I wish, I wish...,”
In the darkness I saw a woman holding a baby she’d let go a lifetime before. I saw an old man catching a fish out of a gully run dry from sunshine and neglect. I saw a young boy running through an endless field with a big lolling wet tongued hound baying happily at his heels.
And then there was me. Standing alone in the back of an empty trailer full of wishes and dreams and over two thousand years of accumulated regret.
I made my wish.
I heard it fall amongst all those hopes and dreams like a feather drifting into a pillow of sponge cake and soft blown snow.
Then I made my way from out of the truck.
The old trucker stood waiting on the roadside, like he had all the time in forever.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked.
“Just a fellow with a long row he’s chosen to hoe.”
I wasn’t buying his song and dance. I wanted an answer.
“You can’t kid your way out of this one. I need to know.”
“You need to know? Is that what you really wish?”
I shook my head.
“I want to know,” I corrected.
He nodded and pulled aside his black plaid collar.
“I’m the fellow who spoiled the party. I’m the one who gave the world away with a single stupid kiss.”
I saw the rope burns, hidden like a smoldering snake beneath his folded collar.
“Well Judas,” I said, meaning it for the very first time.
He smiled, like he figured I’d known all along.
Maybe I did.
“So what do you want?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“I reckon you know.”
I hugged him. I kissed his cheek like he was some kind of saint. In the dusty folds of cheek wrinkles I tasted the far off sands of distant Jerusalem, the dropping silvered thankless stains, the rope of regret burning at my throat. I knew what mistakes could taste like. I knew how to take a wrong road, a detour that looked to last forever.
I knew what it was like to need to find your way back home.
“I forgive you,” I said.
He smiled as softly as a summer rain.
“Hell,” I added. “We all forgive you.”
The big man’s smile got real wistful.
“Someday,” He said. “Someday all.”
Then he was gone, like a puff of yesterday’s smoke.
All I saw were the chain of bright red goodbye lights, rolling down the road.
Then even that was gone.
I looked around. I recognized where I stood.
I was standing inside The Lucky Scratch.
The place where it all began.
I saw myself, standing there in front of me like a twisted funhouse mirror, my ring finger poked deep into my mouth like I was making a wish.
I picked up a cue stick. I aimed for the goodnight spot right behind the left ear, and clocked myself out. Then everything went black.
I awoke in the county hospital. Nobody could quite tell me how I’d got there. Seemed some drifter had cracked my skull with a cue stick.
First thing I saw was Amy, standing by my bed.
Next I was hugging her like a drowning man hanging onto a life ring.
Jimmy was there too and I hugged him twice as hard.
* * *
It’s been three years now and I haven’t stopped hugging either of them. I hug them everyday, hanging on just so they know how much I need them.
