by Jack Cady
"It’s all right now," he said. "There’s nothing left on that road. Right outside of Harrodsburg, down that little grade and then take a hook left up the hill, and right after you top it . . ."
"I’ve driven it."
"Then you begin to meet the start of the hill country. Down around the creek I found him. Fifty feet of truck laid over in the creek and not an ounce of metal showing to the road. Water washing through the cab. Load tipped but a lot of it still tied down. All dead of course."
"A mess."
"Poultry rots quick," was all he said.
"How did it happen?"
"Big animal," he told me. "Big like a cow or a bull or a bear . . . There wasn’t any animal around. You know what a front end looks like. Metal to metal doesn’t make that kind of dent. Flesh."
"The stream washed it away."
"I doubt. It eddies further down. There hasn’t been that much rain. But he hit something . . ."
I was feeling funny. "Listen, I’ll tell you the truth. On that road I hit everything. If a cow had shown up I’d have run through it, I guess. Afraid to stop. There wouldn’t have been a bump."
"I know," he told me. "But Joe bumped. That’s the truth. Hard enough to take him off the road. I’ve been scared. Wondering. Because what he could not believe I can’t believe either. It does not make sense, it does not . . ."
He looked at me. His hands were trembling hard.
"I waded to the cab," he said. "Waded out there. Careful of sinks. The smell of the load was terrible. Waded out to the cab hoping it was empty and knowing damned well that it wasn’t. And I found him."
"How?"
"Sitting up in the cab sideways with the water swirling around about shoulder height and . . . Listen, maybe you’d better not hear. Maybe you don’t want to."
"I didn’t wait this long not to hear," I told him.
"Sitting there with the bone handle of the knife tacked to his front where he had found his heart . . . or something, and put it in. Not in time though. Not in time."
"You mean he was hurt and afraid of drowning?"
"Not a mark on his body except for the knife. Not a break where, but his face . . . sitting there, leaning into that knife and hair all gone, chewed away. Face mostly gone, lips, ears, eyelids all gone. Chewed away, scratched away. I looked, and in the opening that had been his mouth something moved like disappearing down a hole . . . but, in the part of the cab that wasn’t submerged there was a thousand footprints, maybe a thousand different animals . . . ."
His voice broke. I reached over and steadied him by the shoulder. "What was he stabbing?" the man asked. "I can’t figure. Himself, or . . ."
I went to get more coffee for us and tried to make up something that would help him out. One thing I agreed with that he had said. I agreed that I wished he had not told me.
The Ghost of Dive Bomber Hill
Dead men at the bottom,
A roller-coaster ride,
Smoke ’em if you got ’em,
then hang a right and glide,
with fifty thousand gross . . .
and slide . . .
Headed north from Knoxville, trucks crossed into Kentucky just above Jellico and below Corbin. The road ran two-lane and thin. That was "back then." Today I-75 carries the load out of Tennessee to Louisville.
Bessie has passed into the mists of time, although she lies buried on a rise above Dive Bomber Hill. Her house used to stand where now lies her grave. Her girls have moved away.
But the ghost still wanders the Hill. These days tired farmers see him, or he’s seen by highschool kids who get the kind of drunk that mostly happens in places where, each election, bootleggers and preachers get together and vote the county dry. The ghost now seems a little lost, and still beholden to the living. No matter how successful he was in life, he made some big mistakes as a ghost. These days he’s got no visible use except to waken tired drivers, or sober up a bunch of fool kids who think they’ll live forever, and end up dying in droves.
Dive Bomber Hill hasn’t changed. It still runs two-lane and thin. An occasional tractor-trailer still moves along Highway 25 between Corbin and Mount Vernon. The rig rolls beside narrow shoulders, deep ditches and sharp hillsides. Northbound, it labors like a red or yellow smudge through foresty hill country, green in summer, gold in fall, and stark in wet winters. The truck’s stacks generally smoke from fouling injectors, and it puffs gray or black on upshifts. When the grade drops hard, the jake causes cracks like rifle shots. Hardwood trees are bright in autumn and creeks still run. The land is alive with deer, varmints and birds.
At the crest of Dive Bomber Hill the driver hangs a right and, whoops, over she goes.
It’s a two-lane, mile-long drop with a two hundred-yard flat space in the middle. That long flat space once held Bessie’s place, fair-sized restaurant whitewashed, bunkhouse, and a graveled parking lot filled with tractor-trailers. Young trees grow there now.
Coming off the flat space, the road plummets to a short steel bridge that rattles like chattering teeth beneath the tandem. Through the windshield what appears is the shear side of a mountain, a rock face. The road hangs a 90° to the left and points up the next set of hills. What used to happen . . . don’t try this at home . . . don’t try it on Dive Bomber Hill, either.
Dry freight haulers, and only them because no other type of rig had the right suspension, would hold back a handful of rpms as they crossed that bridge heading at the rock face. Speed, 50 to 60. As they came to the hard left they jerked their wheel left, then right, then left, and goosed out the last thin line of power. The trailer picked up and actually walked across the road, dancing like a truck practicing ballet.
That meant the driver could find himself starting to climb the next hill at 45 or 50. If the curve was driven according to all rules of sanity, he would find himself hitting that grade at only 20. How fast you can approach a grade makes a big difference on a hilly run, especially when you’ve got a dispatcher who thinks of the world as flat lines on a road map.
A man had to be on his game. Drivers not on their game produced some of the most godawful wrecks and bloody corpses the road has ever seen. Unless, of course, the rig burned. Either way, the guy and truck were pancaked . . . the grim joke being, "Anyone want to buy a tall, thin Kenworth?"
Then, one night, the ghost showed up and there were no more wrecks. Drunks still ran off the road and tumbled down the mountain. Trucks still sometimes ended up in ditches, but that rock face never again took another truck. Could be, it just could be, that the ghost knew he was going to have to pay off a debt.
The ghost knew drivers and their feelings. He seemed to know us better than we knew ourselves. For instance, sometimes a man didn’t know whether he was on his game or not. When that happened, and he rolled away from Bessie’s, the driver looked for the ghost to appear, lanky, sad-looking and gray as mist. Gray but luminous. The ghost dressed country-style but knew trucking. Under mist or moonlight, he always looked the same; thin face below white hair, the face stern as a ticked-off preacher.
The ghost would do one of two things: he would roll his hand in circles, the old road signal for "road clear ahead so roll ’em." Or he would pat the air, palm downward, like he petted an invisible dog, the old road sign for "slow it down." When he did that we would take his warning and drive like pussycats.
We: Jimbo, Mick and Luke-the-Apostle. I’m Mick, Jimbo is a wop . . . a skinny little ginny with ravioli eyes . . . and Luke, a Christian, but couldn’t seem to help it. He didn’t drink, smoke, chase loose women (although some chased him), cuss, gamble or do anything interesting except be a lay preacher on Sundays. He was sort of off in his own cathedral-type world. Me? As the saying goes, kiss me, I’m Irish.
Our trucks were ’47 White Mustangs, six years old, engine rebuild at half-a-million, but lean and beautiful. They packed five-over transmissions that would keep a guy working in the hills. Men swore that the seat was nothing but a board and seat covers. They were a tou
gh truck, in tough territory, what with hills and hijackings; both of which happened. And, it was a sure bet that unless the schedule was totally shot, on every run those trucks would, soon or late, be found parked at Bessie’s . . .
She was in her early fifties and just beautiful. Even the youngest cowboy who ever strutted slowed down and looked. Bessie was a little plumpish, with little-bitty face wrinkles, and always wearing a spiffy housedress. Mostly her dresses were flowery, sometimes plain and decorated with flower-pins. Her three daughters took turns "doing" Bessie’s silvery hair. What made her beautiful, though, was how she made a man feel. The minute you walked into her place you just naturally felt peaceful. For one thing, you had to hand your gun to one of the girls. She hid it behind punchboards over the sink.
Get seated at the counter and knots in the shoulders relaxed, the back didn’t ache so much because the kidneys weren’t bouncing, and it was like sitting around a country kitchen with country people. Guys talked civilized with no cussing. I’ve actually seen guys sit and help snap green beans. It’s hard to say, even now, if we showed up because of Bessie’s daughters or because Bessie’s place felt like the home we wished we had.
The girls, so help me God, were named Molly and May and Mary, with Molly being dark-haired, blue-eyed, and cute, May also dark-haired and cutting a fine figure, but more-or-less modest. Mary was quietly pretty. She had the brains in the family; bright, strawberry blonde, and sometimes a smarty mouth. The girls also dressed in clean and pressed housedresses, flower prints, and with their hair fixed like ready-for-church. Without meaning to, they were more attractive, and a lot more sexy, than any of the hookers on each end of the Knoxville/Louisville run.
In the days before CB radios news along the road traveled by truck. If there was a race riot in Detroit, people in Alabama knew about it before radio reporters had time to digest the news. Plus, it wasn’t only news. Truckers, some of them, are awful gossips. If a man didn’t know better he’d swear that b.s. never existed before the invention of trucks.
We heard about trouble at Bessie’s while pulled over in the truck stop just south of Indianapolis. August heat lay flat across cornfields. Asphalt in the parking lot bubbled. Steam rose from ditches.
We’d been rerouted to pick up loads. Rigs ranged along the ready-line; Mayflower Fords, Roadway (roadhog) Express kicking Internationals (known as Binders), a few bright Reos here and there, Jimmys, Diamond T’s, an occasional Marmon-Harrington; all in road colors of red, orange, yellow.
"You’re an honest man," Jimbo-the-Wop told another driver. "You wouldn’t be flippin’ bullshit?" Jimbo took it serious. He sat small, muscular, sniffin’ suspicious with an Italian beak that had already been busted one time in a fight. His hands were callused and scarred like everybody else.
"I was there," the driver said. "I saw it happen." The guy was short, built like a fireplug, and capable.
We sat before cups of coffee. The place in no way resembled Bessie’s. Like most truck stops the counter was three-sided, with kitchen at back. Guys looked across at each other. The design allowed management to overwork its waitress while keeping the boys happy, more or less. It all depended on, was the coffee fresh? Did the waitress look like someone you might have dreamed of, once?
"Turned out there was this old guy at Bessie’s, must-a been sitting off to himself. Seemed familiar when we finally saw him. Seemed kind of gray and quiet." The driver paused, like he just knew he was about to be accused of bullshit. "You guys ever see anything on that road? Night stuff?"
"Who doesn’t?" Luke said. He talked soft in the hubbub of the restaurant. The jukebox sobbed away on Truck Gypsy Blues, ". . . chasin’ that lonesome road . . ."
Everybody sees night stuff. Luke calls them visions, I call them hallucinations, and Jimbo calls them hangovers. Different stuff appears on the road, and not just ghosts. Luke sees angels, I see animals that aren’t there, Jimbo sees barns in the middle of the road with doors opening to let him through.
"So," the driver said, "some guys claim they see a gray ghost tellin’ them what to do."
"We’ve heard about it," I said, admitting nothing.
"Suppose there is a ghost," the driver said, "and suppose one night he walked up to Bessie’s like any normal man. Does that sound right? That don’t sound right."
From what the guy said, we learned that three plowboys from London, Kentucky had showed up mid-week, the week before. They’d been drunk, passing out crap, busted a chair and propositioned the girls, treating them like whores. They left the minute Bessie phoned the sheriff.
"So everybody’s sitting there," the driver said. "Minding our manners, mindin’ our own business. This gray guy ain’t at the counter. He’s maybe off in one corner at a table. Then these three sodbusters who didn’t learn nothin’ show up again. They’re drunk and drivin’ a crapcrate ’41 Buick.
"The very minute they come through the door, Bessie starts moving. She takes a broom like she’s gonna sweep those boys right into an outhouse . . . one of the damn fools makes a mistake. Instead of running he raises his arm against the broom. Bessie gets kind of bumped, falls back against a wall."
"Who’s in jail?" Jimbo was believing the story. He no longer had doubts.
"I assume that one or more is dead." Luke didn’t look like an apostle, really. He looked like somebody who ought to be running a hardware store. Just a quiet, smart guy with thinning hair.
The south has a few things to answer for, but it also has good things going. Nobody hits a woman, or if they do they get dealt with. Sometimes, some sorry fool is stupid enough to hit a woman in the presence of real men. It was damn near a death sentence in older days, and maybe it’s changed, but I wish it was the same way now.
"Nine, maybe ten guys on their feet right away," the driver said. "We chased those bastards to their junk car. Just as the driver got the engine started this gray guy shows up. I admit to bein’ scared, somewhat." The driver’s hand actually shook when he raised his coffee mug. The coffee slopped a little.
"This gray guy, outta nowhere, stands beside the car and there’s this spic driver steps up beside him; Spaniard or Mex, or some such-a damn thing. The spic reaches through the open window. He grabs the driver’s hair and jerks the head down against the doorframe. Then he lays a knife, honest to god, longer than your wanger, across this hayseed’s throat."
"Okay, so far." Jimbo liked it.
"And then," the driver claimed, "the damn Spaniard starts out preaching woe about killin’ bulls and visitations and general horseshit."
"It wasn’t," Luke said real quiet-like. "What you’re saying sounds like Jeremiah. Jeremiah 50:27."
It always seemed strange, talking about the Kentucky hills while surrounded by civilized Indiana, which is as flat as a political promise. In the busy truckstop rigs roared off the ready-line, and there were rattles of air tools from the shops. Guys in the restaurant slugged five-cent coffee from thick mugs while they told stories about themselves being heroes.
". . . sounded like horseshit to me," the driver said. "And the spic kept it up. The other guys stood, the whole bunch of us, watching and listening for maybe ten minutes and not able to do squat. Ever’ time the spic made a point in his sermon he’d bang the hayseed’s head agin’ the doorframe, ’til the bastard wasn’t just scared but sober. Ended with talking about evil and upright and bloodthirsty . . ."
"Proverbs 29:10," Luke murmured. "Most likely."
"And then," the driver said, "he drew that knife light across that throat, just enough to bleed. And then he gave the guy’s head one more bounce, and let go the hair. And that Buick got out of there, throwin’ gravel all the way to Miss-i-friggin’-ssippi."
"And nobody dead." Jimbo sounded indignant.
"Not unless the hayseed bled to death, which I gotta doubt." The driver gulped his coffee. "Then the Spaniard says, ‘Mother-of-God, what happened? Did that shit come out of my mouth? I don’t talk that way.’ The Spaniard wiped the knife on his pants leg and loo
ked toward the gray guy, and the gray guy wasn’t there. And the spic says, ‘Damn farmer wasn’t worth goin’ to jail over. How come you guys didn’t stop it?’"
The driver tossed a tip on the counter and stood. "Turnin’ St. Looie." Then he paused. "The thing is, there was a bunch of guys there, and that meant a bunch of guns behind the punch boards. Nary a one of us thought to go get one." He shook his head like he couldn’t believe the memory. "And we watched the Buick leave, and then looked around and the gray guy still wasn’t there, and the spic was still sore at us." He started toward the doorway.
"Keep it between the fence posts," I told him as he left.
The outfit we drove for tried to keep its trucks running in groups of three. Driving the hills of Kentucky and West Virginia was no joke back then. Trucks that got hijacked were generally whiskey or tobacco haulers, but dry freight or swinging beef was fair game. Our outfit figured that a lone truck was a target, but three together were safe. Nice idea on paper, but hard to make work on the road. On the turn-around headed south, we generally held pretty close together until Frankfort, Kentucky, where a long, long grade leads out of town. The truck stop on top of that hill not only had walls of the can painted gleamy white, it supplied crayons so guys could write graffiti; most of which was on the order of, "Goddamn my truck."
Jimbo always led, Luke second, me at the rear pretending to supervise. When we got into the hills our little convoy fell apart. The only way anybody ever caught up to Jimbo was if some farmer in a ’41 Chevrolet got ahead of him, 40 downhill and 30 up. Lots of times, though, another trucker, well ahead of that slow farmer, could see a clear road. He would give a road sign. Jimbo would catch the farmer on a curve. Even some country boys would give you a road sign when they could see clear road and you couldn’t.
I trusted the judgment of truckers, didn’t trust the country boys. Jimbo took chances with the country boys. He figured if they misjudged, and he got caught looking at oncoming traffic, he could always whip his trailer to the right. He would run the screw-up off the road.
