Frazier drove on through the night. Some time later Charlie clambered over into the front seat, grumbled and muttered and settled himself down to sleep. Frazier kept the needle steady on the speed limit. The warm night swirled by the big car. They headed steadily north.
Now he felt the ache of twelve hours and more of steady driving.
“Can I climb over in front and sit between you?” the blonde asked.
“No.”
He wondered if he should pull over, give her some cash and let her out. Charlie might be glad to wake up sober and find her gone. But he might not. Frazier wished he’d demanded the split earlier. Then he’d have only himself to worry about. His half was back there in the luggage compartment, packed inside the extra spare. Round and firm and fully packed. And time for his draw.
In spite of the dim blondes and the current item, Charlie was as good as you could find. All timed down to the last piece of a second. No pain, no strain. Walk in and walk out and drive away.
“When are you going to stop?”
“Pretty soon now. Then you and Charlie can sit up front here and I can get some sleep in the back.”
He knew he needed sleep. His face felt granular. Every once in a while his eyes would swim and he’d have to shake his head. Twelve hours’ steady driving was about as much as a man could take.
“You boys should have brought Jean along too. She wanted to come. Then there’d be more company.”
“I didn’t like Jean.”
“Everybody likes her. She’s an awful lot of fun when you get her going. We went there to Red’s together last night. I think she was kind of sore when I left with you two. She’s almost my best girl friend. I’d feel better about all this if Jean was along.”
“We can’t go back and get her.”
“You don’t have to be nasty. I was just saying that.”
“You say a hell of a lot. Shut up for a while.”
“I didn’t know it was going to be like this,” she said distantly.
After she lapsed into silence her words kept echoing in his mind. I didn’t know it was going to be like this. Well, neither did I, lady. I didn’t know anything was going to be like this. Neither did proud parents beaming down into the crib of one James Hallowell Frazier thirty years ago.
He wished he could have Charlie’s eternal confidence. But even confidence wasn’t enough when you knew that the files were being collected. Random bits of description, carefully gathered. One fine day the boom would be lowered again. They’d welcome you back into the Big Yard.
And they’d sing the same sad song. “Frazier, I fail to see why a man of your education and background and war record turns to crime.”
Explain it to me, Doc. I’d like to know too. How can I be so stupid? Just think, I could work for forty years and if I saved ten dollars a week, I’d end up with over twenty thousand bucks all my own. That’s a lot better way than picking it up in one afternoon.
“You don’t spend money lavishly, Frazier, when you have it. The mere act of acquiring it seems to answer some need in you.”
Could that be, Doc? Do you think a fellow would get so he’d look forward to those minutes just before it happens, to the sweat and tension, and everything honed keen and fine and close? Right up on the thin, hot tip of one minute of being alive? Could that get to be a thing with him?
“You were not a disciplinary problem before. I assume you will react in the same way.”
Work all day and dream all night, Doc. Remembering all the scores and thinking of the big one to come, the big, fat, ultimate, incredible score where they have to write it in seven figures.
“In one sense I suppose you could be considered a psychopath, Frazier.”
Me, Doc? Psycho? Unless you say Willie S. is one too. They asked him why he robbed banks and he looked at them rather blankly and said because that’s where the money is. My friend Charlie might be a psycho, Doc. He hasn’t killed anybody yet, but he thinks about it. He wonders how it would feel. I know how it feels, Doc. But I did it legally, in full accordance with the table of organization and equipment, with my name inscribed on the morning report, squeezing them off like I learned on the range down at Fort Bragg, N.C.
We’re just chasing the big score, Doc. But if we caught it, it wouldn’t be quite big enough. Now you take any little managerial cuss living in Levittown. Isn’t he chasing a score too, along with the eventual ulcer? He probably has his hot flashes when there’s an opening upstairs.
“Are you going to buy me something to drink?” the girl asked.
“Honey, you like to punish yourself.”
“Won’t this thing go any faster?”
“Lots faster, but we obey all the little signs.”
“Is it a hot car?”
“Hot, Lou? I’m comfortable. How are you?”
“You know what I mean. Why don’t you wake Charlie up now?”
“Lou, dearest, up ahead someplace is a wide place in the road called Blanchard. It has a bean wagon made of shiny aluminum. We shall stop there and eat and from then on old Charlie will drive.”
“He isn’t as old as you are!”
“He is a lot younger in one sense and much older in another.”
“You talk funny. You talk sometimes like the television.”
“Get your paw off the back of my neck, child. Charlie is your boy.”
“You’re both cute.”
“Extremely.”
“Do you think Charlie will let me stay for a while? Last night he said we’d have a lot of fun.”
“You’ll have to discuss that with him.”
“I never did anything like this before, going off with a boy I hardly know at all. You shouldn’t think I go around doing stuff like this. I was bored. You know how it gets. Same old stuff. Same old people at Red’s. Then you two came in.”
“We walked right out of a dream.”
“Huh? Well, you say it funny. I mean we had fun after you boys got there. I wisht we’d brought Jeanie. She’d knock you out, honest. She’d do anything for a laugh. She was even with the circus one year. Honest. There was this guy and she had to wear practically nothing and hand him clubs and balls and chairs. He juggled. He beat hell out of her once too many times, though, and she quit right there and got a job in Red’s. That’s how I met her. Is there another bottle maybe in the glove thing?”
“No.”
“How’d you get that scar on the back of your hand anyhow? You know, you’ve got strong-looking hands. I like a man with strong hands.”
“Don’t forget Charlie.”
“All he does is sleep. Jim, I want you should take me shopping when we get there. I got to have other clothes. And I like to know what a man likes. That’s the best way to buy your stuff, with a man telling you what looks yum.”
“Yum?”
“Sure. You know. Like you wanted to look twice. Where is this Blanchard anyhow? I got to go something terrible, excuse the expression.”
“Just up the road.”
“I bet you wouldn’t guess it, but I damn near got to be Miss Tennessee the year before last.”
“No!”
“You don’t have to say it like that, mister. I’m not kidding you. I got a good build. Thirty-four, twenty-four, thirty-four, and I can do talent things like sing and dance and do monologues. Anyway, the girl that got it, you could tell it was all political.”
“Did you get a consolation prize?”
“You know you ask stuff with a nasty sound in your voice. You needn’t think I’m some kind of tramp or something. Just because I came along with you boys when Charlie was being fun and asking me, and it was all kind of a joke. It was just one of those drunk things. I even wish I hadn’t come.”
“You are not alone, dear.”
She was sitting on the edge of the back seat, her arms on the edge of the front seat, chin on her wrist, left elbow pressed warmly against his shoulder. She smelled a bit stale. He felt oddly sorry for her, sorry for this fiasco of what ha
d seemed to her like a bright gay trip.
“Where did you come from originally, Lou?”
“Me? Oh, I was born in a place called Parrel. That’s near Sharon, Pennsylvania. But we left there when I was real little.” She sighed dramatically. “I guess I’ve lived a lot of places since then. I guess you could say I’ve had a tragical life. I had a little girl once. She died after two weeks. She had water on the brain. I was married then. I still am, because he just took off, but I make like I’m not. Gee, why am I telling you all this stuff.”
A brown Chrysler sped by him, passing the black Ford directly ahead of him in the middle lane. The Ford was going less than the legal sixty. Frazier moved out to pass it. Ahead of him the brown Chrysler jammed on its brakes. It swerved inward, banged the black Ford and spun it out.
He heard the girl scream in his ear. The road was blocked. He could see one place to take the Olds—up over the curbing and down the center strip. He had committed himself when he saw how bad a mistake in judgment that had been. The girl’s thin long scream was still piercing the air when he made his second decision and flung himself sideways toward the floor of the car, falling between the dashboard and Charlie’s knees, arms clasping his head.
chapter 6
TEN minutes before the sleek fast traffic of Route 56, six miles west of Blanchard, was transformed into shrieking, spinning, grinding chaos, Stanley Cherrik measured the mileage against the implacable clock in his mind. He had a comfortable margin over his schedule. Westbound on the Cleveland-Wilmington run, Blanchard was a check point for time. He should go through it no later than one-thirty. Today it would be a little after one-fifteen.
The big rig was rolling smoothly, fourteen good treads against the pavement. The air lines were holding good pressure. The new picture of Buddy, the youngest, was Scotch-taped to the dash. He took a quick glance at it for luck. A very quick glance. Cherrik never took his eyes from the road for more than the smallest part of a second.
It made him feel proud of himself and amused at himself to think of Buddy. There had been three kids, the youngest fourteen, the oldest in the Army, and then Buddy had come along. Pretty damn good for an old man. Not so old, though. Forty-two. Ruth was forty-one. It was harder for her, having a baby. She’d been gloomy about it at first. But now that Buddy had come she felt a lot better about it. And the other two kids helped a lot taking care of Buddy.
Cherrik was a small wiry man with a round hard belly, powerful clever hands, a lined cheerful face and hair like steel wool. He was popular with the dispatchers and the other drivers. He’d gone with Quin-State back when it was called Harbor Transit Lines and ran only ten trucks. That was twenty-one years ago. Now they had over five hundred trucks and Cherrik was senior driver, holder of two company gold medals each for ten-year stretches of accident-free driving, plus of course the National Safety Council awards.
Each year Marsh would say, “Time you came inside, old man. Time you got off those wheels before somebody gets killed.”
“One more year, I think. One more year. I hate it so bad I can’t stop.”
“You’ve pounded your brains out on the road, old man.”
Now, he thought, this is the last year. Too many years of riding them when they all had square wheels. Not like now with the springs and cushions and everything.
For the last two years he had worn a webbed support like a girdle. It had eased the pain in his kidneys. Ruth had kidded him about his girdle. It had bothered him a little to be kidded. He’d never known exactly how to take kidding. He guessed he took too many things too seriously.
Like driving a truck, for instance. Take the smart kids. They make out like it’s a job for morons, maybe. Sit and turn a wheel. Wear the company monkey suit. He hadn’t liked wearing a uniform at first. Then he learned how it began to mean something. You had a job. You dressed for it. Other lines could have drivers who looked like bums. But on Quin-State you knew you were good. You had to be or you wouldn’t stay there.
The old man, Marsh’s father, had said it once before he died. “Cherrik, I am not going to put twenty thousand dollars’ worth of vehicle and forty thousand dollars’ worth of cargo into the hands of some wild man and then trust in God and the insurance company to take care of me. We can bid low rates and pay top salaries because we hire and we keep men like you who want to do things right. Have to do them right. Mine is a public responsibility. I can’t afford to put killers on the road. Killers are men who take chances. Some of the drivers get sore because I hire men to spy on them on the road. You watch the ones who complain. They’re the tailgaters. They’re the boys who let the terminals do all the checking on maintenance. Anybody asks you what you do for a living, Cherrik, stick your chin out and say you drive a truck.”
Even after all these years, he still got a boot out of it. Hammering the hills in the first light of day, shifting at the precise moment, racking up the miles, pulling in for coffee where dawn paled the waiting Christmas trees of the flanked trucks.
What ya know, crazy Cherrik! Haven’t seen you since around Omaha. I guess you heard what happened to Scotty later. Yeah, right on a hilltop in Texas, driving a pipe truck north of San Antone. The pipes shifted forward when he hit. How’s it making, Cherrik? Me, I’m with Keeshin. I’d like to stay around, but I got to make like a train. Something the Air Force wants yesterday. We got it out of Cincinnati last night. Some kind of testing stuff. How’s all the kids, Cherrik? Me? Oh, Midge called it off. No home life, she says. I get to see the kids every once in a while, whenever I get down to St. Louis.
Then the dawn slap of the screen door and the big Diesel warming up. Crunch of gravel under the duals and the old friend goes down the highway, climbing up through the gears until he is a far drone against the morning.
Twenty-one years and a lot of them had gone quietly and a lot of them had gone violently, but the violent separations were small in number, very small, compared to the ones killed in the cars, the small fragile, bug-quick cars that sped by his big rig, taking insane chances. It made him nervous to drive or ride in a car. It was too close to the road, and the skin of it was too thin, the horses too eager.
In the big rigs ice could kill you. Ice and hills. Fire could kill you. If one of the bright leaping crazy cars hit you head on it could kill you. But most times, in bad trouble, if you rode the rig you’d come through it.
But there had to be an end to it. Reflexes slowed down. Traffic moved at faster tempo. Yes, the rigs were bigger and quicker and more powerful, but that didn’t help when the quickness needed was that of the strong wrist on the wheel. It would be time to go inside. Normal working hours. Regular food. Not so much fried stuff. He wondered if he’d be any good at all off a truck. They kept telling him they could use him.
He wondered if Quin-State would install the new gimmick on all the rigs this year. There was a lot of talk about it. A sealed meter that would give a complete history of each trip. Maximum speed, average speed, number of stops. Then the statistician in the chief dispatcher’s office would analyze it and from that they would determine the best routes, the ablest drivers. Cherrik hoped he would be off the rigs before those things were installed. Even with your helper asleep in the bunk in back of your head you still felt alone on the high cold mornings droning through the sleeping towns. The dashboard bug would kill that feeling.
“Cherrik, the trip record shows that you decelerated sharply four miles south of Vernon, came to a dead stop and then continued.”
“Did I come in on schedule?”
“Yes, but I want an answer to that question.”
“What difference does it make?”
“Why, Cherrik, did you come to a dead stop on the open highway at six-seventeen on Tuesday morning?”
“Well, it was on account of a quail. She had a mess of little quail, about seven of them. They were crossing the road in single file and you see, I just happened to notice them ahead and…”
“Cherrik, you removed eleven dollars and three cents�
�� worth of rubber, put unnecessary wear on the brakes and drove above maximum recommended speed in order to regain your schedule. The next time, Cherrik, I suggest you…”
No, you would not be completely alone again in the cab, not with the bug watching you with bland dial and moving scriber.
He slowed for the town of Blanchard, touching the brakes skillfully, watching to be certain no one was following too close. He shifted down through the gears, gauging the timing of the light ahead, alert for any kind of trouble on any side of him. He loafed and when the first light changed he mentally begged the car ahead of him to roll quickly, saving two more gear changes. It pulled away fast and a bulging orange wildcatter shouldered around him and into the lane in front of him. Cherrik looked at the weary rig with mild interest and no annoyance. He could not afford annoyance. He saw the collection of battered license plates and saw how deep and heavy the truck was on its suspension.
Scared to death of running into a check point, he guessed. Owner-driver, sweating out a mortgage on the rig, driving twenty hours a day, fighting for every salvageable second, becoming a bully of the road through pure desperation and weariness. He’d dope himself with no-sleep pills, and then spend a few hours twitching and moaning when he did get a chance to sleep. He’d grab off contracts at dawn markets, bidding starvation prices, and then hit the road, cursing the big outfits with their rotation of drivers, maintenance terminals, safety rules and slogans. He’d drive himself haggard, and drive his truck to breakdown or worse. And then they would close him out.
His only hope was to land a good regular contract. Then on the basis of that he would go in hock for a second rig and hire a driver and keep driving the old one himself. If he was one man in fifty thousand he might make it. Then he could sit in an office and his trucks would carry his name around the country. Then he would become virulent about rules and safety and programs. But now he was a menace, a man fighting for life and justification.
Cherrik sighed. Life was too short to get mixed up in that sort of thing. The orange truck pulled away, punishing the gears. It barely got through the second light on the caution signal. Cherrik had planned on making that light and would have made it had not the truck passed him when it did. But he could not afford irritation and annoyance. Anger killed lots of people. The sun was shining. He was ahead of schedule. Traffic was heavy, but the new road clicked the miles off effortlessly.
Cry Hard, Cry Fast Page 6
