Twist

by John Lutz

  She walked out of the shade of the vending machine kiosk and crossed the grass to where Dred was sitting patiently at one of the wooden tables. There was a small charcoal grill there on an iron post. Mildred wondered who the hell would grill anything on it. Who wanted to eat at a rest stop?

  She gave the soda can she’d been sipping from to Dred, then sat down next to him on the bench seat, hoping she wouldn’t get a splinter in her ass. It had happened to her once before at this stop.

  From where Mildred and Dred sat they could see the truckers’ side of the rest stop. Three eighteen-wheelers were parked over there. The round metal lids capping their vertical exhaust pipes were dancing, and diesel fumes from their idling engines wavered in the humid air.

  One of the trucks growled and moved forward, rolling slowly away from where it had been parked. The engine changed tones as the driver worked through the gears. When the truck reached the long ramp back up to the highway, it picked up speed. Mildred watched it merge with traffic, off in the distance.

  “You know what you’re gonna do?” Mildred asked.

  “Sure.”

  Neither of them spoke as a tractor-trailer with a dusty blue cab rolled into the truck stop. It slowed, and with much hissing of air brakes it parked in the space vacated by the truck that had just left. This rig (as Mildred had come to think of them) looked as big as the law allowed, with a sleeper behind the cab. It was pulling a long trailer with a blue stripe painted on it front to rear. The trailer was lettered HOGAN GASS CARTAGE. Mildred had researched it and learned it was a small outfit based in Memphis.

  The driver-side door opened, and a husky man in coveralls and no shirt swung himself down from the cab. He was bald and wearing sunglasses. Even from this distance he looked big. He stood for a moment looking around, then swaggered toward Mildred and Dred.

  When the man got closer, Dred saw that both of his huge arms were covered with tattoos. So many tattoos that it was impossible to single out any one of them and know what it represented without staring hard. And Dred didn’t want to stare at the man at all.

  “I’m Rudy,” he said in a smoker’s harsh voice. “If you’re Mildred, we talked on the phone.”

  “I’m Mildred,” Mildred said. “And this is Dred.”

  Rudy looked at Dred appraisingly. “Named after your mother?”

  “I s’pose.” Dred had never considered that. Now that he had, he didn’t like it.

  “To some folks he goes by the name Squeaky. ’Cause he bitches and whines too much.”

  The driver looked him up and down. “I’ll call him something other’n that.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “I expected somebody older and bigger,” the driver said.

  “He’s big enough. Don’t matter how old he is.”

  “Guess not,” Rudy said. He trained narrow dark eyes again on Dred. “You strong, kid?”

  “Strong enough.”

  Rudy grinned. “He a smart-ass?” he asked Mildred.

  “If he is,” Mildred said, “let me know.”

  “I’ll behave,” Dred said.

  “You bet your ass you will,” the driver said. He glanced around, then took a roll of bills out of a coverall pocket. He peeled five of the bills off the roll and handed them to Mildred.

  She counted them deftly and slipped them into a fold of her dress.

  “You got a money belt in there?” the driver asked.

  “Or a knife or a gun,” Mildred said, grinning to show she was kidding, they were just joking around. Maybe. “Either way, you’ll get your money’s worth.” She nodded toward Dred. “He’ll go with you and unload your truck while you sit on your ass. Then he’ll load your trailer for your return run. Just drop him off here and we’re done. If you like the service, you can use it again.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  “Is fair.”

  “To everybody but the kid.”

  “Like you give a shit.”

  Rudy nodded. “Let’s go, kid.”

  Dred wriggled his way along the bench to where he could swivel and stand up without getting his legs tangled up under the table.

  “How much of that hundred is he gonna get?” the driver asked Mildred.

  She smiled. “He likes to work.”

  “Lives for it, I’ll bet,” the driver said, signaling with a sideways motion of his head that it was time to walk.

  Mildred watched the two of them cross the grassy rise toward where the truck with the blue cab was parked. The driver absently rested a hand on Dred’s shoulder.

  They could have passed for father and son.

  Five miles west of the rest stop was a restaurant and gas station popular with travelers as well as truckers. The lot was crowded with cars and eighteen-wheelers. Mildred steered the van over to the pumps and filled the tank with some of the money she’d been paid for hiring out Dred.

  When the tank was full, she went inside and paid cash, then returned to the van and moved it onto the restaurant side of the parking lot. She felt pretty good, with a full tank of gas and a pocketful of money.

  She got out of the van and locked it carefully out of habit, from hauling antiques she bought and sold at auctions. There was an old tiger oak dresser back there now. She should have used Dred’s help unloading it before driving to the rest stop. They could have moved it into the storage shed, where it wouldn’t be rained on, so the van would be available for whatever they might buy at an auction scheduled in two days where a farm was being foreclosed on.

  They could move the dresser as soon as Dred returned, she decided. He shouldn’t be too tired. Better to wrench his young back than her older one.

  She went into the restaurant and had a large piece of coconut pie and a glass of milk. After wiping a milk mustache from above her upper lip, she scooped up the check and made her way to the cashier to pay. She didn’t leave a tip.

  On the way out, she bought a lottery ticket.

  23

  New York City, the present

  “What if something had gotten in the paper or on TV news?” Carlie asked Jesse Trummel the next morning at work.

  They were alone in the Bold Designs employees’ lounge, a pale green room lined with vending machines that dispensed soup, sandwiches, tasteless cinnamon rolls, and coffee. There was a table with half a dozen gray metal folding chairs around it. Hardly anyone actually ate any of the food here. They drank the coffee only because they had no choice.

  “I’m sorry,” Jesse said for the tenth time. “I screwed up,” He was dressed in a brown suit, blue shirt, and plain red tie. Decades ago he might have been a faceless advertising executive over on Madison Avenue. Now he was a faceless draftsman with delusions of gossip and grandeur, and the executive’s unisex restroom that required a key.

  The key, Carlie mused, was what Jesse would always be searching for.

  “We can be colleagues and friends,” Carlie said. “That’s all.”

  “I think that was pretty much drilled home to me last night.”

  As he spoke she noticed a curious thing. One of his ears was noticeably larger than the other. Oddly, that took away some of his boring sameness, his averageness , even made him remotely attractive.

  Carlie cautioned herself not to dwell on the mismatched ears.

  “Can I at least buy you a coffee?” Jesse was asking.

  Not giving up. Something else she had to admire, despite herself.

  “No,” she snapped. “Nothing. It isn’t real coffee, anyway. It’s piss.”

  She turned and went out the door.

  “I know it is,” she heard him saying, as the door swung closed behind her. “But it’s all we’ve got.”

  His words echoed in her mind. All we’ve got . . .

  No, no, no!

  “A paycheck for your thoughts,” a male voice said.

  She stopped, startled.

  Floyd Higgins, one of her many bosses at Bold Designs, was smiling at her. “You looked so preoccupied,” he said, “it made
me wonder.”

  “I was thinking we need to move the changing rooms closer to the middle of the store in that Cuddled Cougar account.”

  “The closer the customers are to the changing rooms, the closer they are to trying it on,” Higgins said.

  “And to parading around and showing it off to whoever else is in the store, gauging other people’s reactions before they commit to buying it.”

  “Strangers’ reactions?”

  “Especially strangers’ reactions.”

  “Ah, the female insight.”

  “Like you guys with hats.”

  Higgins grinned. “Okay, you get your paycheck.”

  Carlie couldn’t help noticing that both of his ears were exactly the same size. Boring.

  Dora Lane had watched another condo deal come unraveled. The prospective new owners had ordered a home inspection—not a bad idea, or unexpected—and found plenty to bitch about. The seller offered to adjust the price downward, but not enough. Another commission lost.

  Dora was a sales agent for The Walker Group. Old Herman Walker, the owner and manager of the firm, had already laid off half the sales force, and those left were now working on a commission-only basis.

  No sales, no commissions, no paycheck. Dora’s savings were shrinking fast, and her credit cards were almost maxed out.

  She stood now on the subway platform, waiting for the uptown train—any train. It would be painful but simple and fast to die beneath the wheels of a roaring, shrieking subway train that would still be traveling near top speed when it got to where Dora was standing.

  She had moved as far down as she could get on the platform. So far, in fact, that there were no other passengers around. That was fine with Dora. She didn’t want to upset anyone. She simply wanted out.

  Out of sight now on the platform was a crusty-looking guy playing the sax, with the case laid out open before him. As she’d walked past him, Dora had noticed that there were two lonely dollar bills in the worn velvet lined case, probably put there by the sax player himself as an ice breaker.

  He was playing something sad that Dora had heard before, but whose title she couldn’t recall. Something about Sunday-morning love. His worn clothes, battered instrument, and mournful tune reminded Dora that there were people worse off than herself. But so what? Wasn’t there always someone in a worse situation? Maybe this guy with the sax should follow Dora’s lead and end his ceaseless desperation.

  An incomprehensible voice blared from the public address system, speaking with an accent Dora couldn’t place.

  The air began to stir as a train approached, pushing a breeze ahead of it through the narrow tunnel. Dora moved to the edge of the platform, where it was painted yellow, leaned forward, and peered into the black tunnel.

  Still she couldn’t hear the train, but she could see its distant twin lights piercing the darkness.

  She gathered her final thoughts as she began to hear the muted roar, watching the twin lights become brighter and farther apart.

  And there the train was, bursting out of the darkness, drowning out the sad song of the saxophone.

  Or had the plaintive tune ceased earlier?

  Just her luck, not even being able to die with musical accompaniment.

  The great steel front car was gigantic now, closing fast.

  Dora shifted her weight forward. She had the balls to do this. She did!

  As she leaned forward, a grip like steel closed on her arm just above the elbow and pulled her back.

  The train screamed and squealed to a stop, to disgorge and take in passengers. Dora heard a voice in her ear.

  “A pretty girl like you doesn’t have to do that.”

  She moved half a step away and turned. And was looking at the sax player. Same tattered jeans, duct-taped sneakers, stained black Phantom of the Opera T-shirt.

  Otherwise she wouldn’t have recognized him. He was such an average-looking guy.

  She glared hard at him, told him to mind his own business, then walked to the stairwell and stomped toward the world above.

  Half an hour of hard walking later, Dora said, “What the goddamn hell are you doing?”

  She’d found herself at the farmer’s market and had reached for the last apple pie, and another, larger hand closed on the pie just as she touched it. Neither she nor the man who had reached for the pie withdrew. It had been something of a tie.

  Their fingers remained in contact. He had strong-looking hands with prominent veins. They were warm, and the hair on the backs of his knuckles was dark and slightly curly. Dora looked up from the pie display, into his face, and there was the interfering bastard from the subway. Mr. Sax Man.

  He was smiling. It didn’t light up his face. “Apple pie happens to be my favorite,” he said, “and considering what you have in mind, why not let me have it? Don’t try to tell me you weren’t going to do a swan dive in front of that train.”

  “I don’t have to tell you or not tell you anything. You were probably gonna steal the pie anyway.” She moved her hand slightly so it wasn’t touching his, but she could still feel a slight tingling on the backs of her fingers. As if electricity played there.

  He was still smiling. He was getting some kind of charge out of this. As if he sensed a mutual attraction. Dora kept a poker face. Dream on, asshole.

  His smile stayed. “I’m not as down and out as you might think,” he said.

  “Or as I might care.” Dora wrenched her arm away from him.

  “Let me buy the pie and we’ll go someplace and share it. We can talk this thing over.”

  “The pie thing?”

  “The other thing. You know what I mean. What were you going to do, gorge on the pie because calories no longer mattered?”

  That was precisely what she’d had in mind. The lesser sins hardly concerned her at this point.

  “There is no other thing,” she said. “And I don’t want to share your apple pie with you.”

  He shrugged. “So you pay for the pie. What’s it matter to you, if it’s gonna be your last meal?”

  He showed infallible logic there. And another train wasn’t due for more than twenty minutes.

  And there would be one after that.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ve got enough left on one of my credit cards for a hamburger.”

  “You should use a debit card. You can run through your money much faster that way.” He did a graceful little dip and picked up his saxophone case, which Dora had forgotten even though it was close enough to trip over.

  “You aren’t going to change my mind,” Dora said.

  “About the debit card?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t want to change your mind,” he said. “I only want to enjoy your company, what’s left of it. And my pie.”

  He stayed beside her as they walked toward the register, paying for the pie with a twenty-dollar bill and waving away the change as if he were Rockefeller. Out on the sidewalk beyond the stalls, he stayed close to her, as if he didn’t want her to get away from him.

  They settled into a diner on Sixth Avenue. It had blue vinyl booths, gray Formica tables, and oak-paneled walls displaying autographed photographs of famous but older Olympic athletes. Dora had heard of Wilma Rudolph and Mark Spitz, but that was about it. Who the hell was Cassius Clay?

  She’d placed the pie, shrink wrapped and in a paper bag, on the seat beside her.

  “We can’t very well eat this in here,” she said.

  “We’ll have it for dessert somewhere later.”

  There aren’t going to be very many laters, she almost told him.

  When a waiter came over from behind the counter, Mr. Saxophone ordered for both of them a cheeseburger, fries, and coffee. Dora wasn’t crazy about the cheese but let it go. Mr. Sax removed his Mets cap when the waiter walked away, and placed it next to him on the booth’s blue vinyl seat cushion, where his saxophone case was leaning.

  Dora continued to assess the man. Couldn’t help
it. Brown hair, parted on the left, no gray in it yet, not a bad haircut. Even features. Some might say a reasonably handsome man. Others not. It would average out to about fifty-fifty. She wasn’t sure which side she came down on. If he acted in the movies, it would be in forgettable everyman roles. The star’s best friend who gets the homely girl as a consolation prize.

  “You should take advantage of this opportunity,” Dora said. “Get some good, nourishing food in you.”

  “You’re concerned about my health?”

  “Not really.”

  He placed his elbows on the table and laced his fingers. Dora noticed that his nails were clean and trimmed. “Meat and potatoes,” he said. “Not to mention a bun. That should help me somewhat.”

  It took Dora a few seconds to realize he was talking about the meals he’d ordered for them. He made them sound like part of a health regimen.

  Dora played with her napkin-wrapped knife and fork until the waiter returned with their coffees, each with a spoon balanced on the saucer.

  She added cream. “Is playing sax in the subway more lucrative than I think?”

  He gave her his average smile. “Probably.”

  “Are you one of those talented musicians licensed to play there?”

  “No, no, I’m strictly illegal.”

  “What would the cops do if they caught you?”

  “The first time, they’d just give me a warning and chase me away.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know. There’s never been a first time.”

  “You’re actually pretty good on that saxophone. You teach yourself?”

  “Nope. A truck driver taught me, long time ago.” She laughed, surprising herself. “You are so full of bullshit.”

  “That would be true.”

  The waiter came with their food.

  Dora realized she was hungry and wolfed down her hamburger. She noticed her companion took his time eating and had reasonably good table manners. Better than hers, in fact.