Necessity

by Brian Garfield

  By the time Doug Hershey returns to the truck with a take-out paper bag of hamburgers she’s back in the seat with the baby. She gives him as bright a smile as she can muster.

  He settles down behind the wheel and hands her the bag. “You really worth twenty-five thousand dollars?”

  “I’m not. She is.” The baby.

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Not now.” She’s found the warm milk. She’s feeding it carefully to Ellen. “Can we go now?”

  He says, “You’re not heading for Baltimore, are you.”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Want to go west?”

  “Salt Lake City? Portland?”

  “Why not. I could use the company.” He’s switching things on, starting the engine. He hooks a thumb over his shoulder toward the bed behind him. “You get done eating, climb back there and get some sleep. Time you wake up we’ll be past Cleveland. Oh—be careful with the shotgun up there. It’s loaded. Once in a while we run into hijackers. You can pass it down to me if you want.”

  As he hauls the rig out across the apron she leans forward against the window to look back at the station and she sees the fat cop come out of the men’s room. She’s isn’t sure whether he sees her in the cab but the brim of his trooper hat turns to indicate at least a casual interest in the departing truck and she pulls back away from the glass with a feeling of numb tired fear.

  67 She wakes in strident alarm.

  The baby is here—safe in the circle of her arm. But the truck isn’t moving. Where’s Doug?

  When she sits up she bangs her head. She swears at the damn truck and ducks down to peer outside.

  Turnpike service area. It’s hot and steamy. The ratty remains of her clothes are sticking to her.

  He’s out there filling the tank, talking to another driver.

  The baby wakes up and starts talking. Nobody else would be able to decipher it but she understands that Ellen is hungry. She finds the battered package and digs out one of the Gerber jars and feeds her.

  She’s just finished changing the baby when Doug climbs into the cab. “Hi.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Near Rochester.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Two-thirty, something like that. Here.” He hands her the Thermos. “Fresh coffee.”

  When they’re back on the road he says, “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”

  “What?”

  “I’m twenty-seven,” he says. “I own a little piece of this rig. The bank owns the rest. I drive a truck because I’m restless and I like to be my own boss and also because I aim to be a country-western song writer and being alone on the road all day gives you plenty of time to write. I use that little cassette recorder there. If I get to know you better I’ll sing two or three of my songs for you. Born in Alabama and I’ve been married six years and we’ve got two boys, five and four, and considering I’m on the road half my life I think we’ve got a pretty good marriage but I guess I’ve been heartbroken enough times in my imagination and my memories to qualify me to write songs. I was a kid, I used to keep falling in love with women but then something’d happen. I’m working on a song now about how love is the bait they put in the trap at the beginning. It’s really a poem, sort of. I’m going to send it to the New Yorker, I get it finished. You sure are a beautiful woman underneath all those bruises and scratches.”

  “Why are you doing all this? Why didn’t you go for the twenty-five thousand dollars?”

  “I don’t know. Impulse? My romantic illusions, maybe.”

  But then he says, “That’s not true. Not altogether. The way you looked standing on the side of the road with the baby in your arm—Madonna and child. But I’m not a teen-ager any more. I don’t operate on sentiment. You know what it was? It was because you trusted me. I couldn’t let you down.”

  “I was too tired not to.”

  “Well I don’t care why you did it.”

  Later at 65 mph on the Interstate she climbs down into the passenger seat and has a long conversation with Ellen after which she puts the baby to sleep in the bed. Then she says to the truck driver: “Last night I was going to outbid the opposition. I was going to offer you thirty thousand dollars to save me and my daughter.”

  “Jesus. Why didn’t you?”

  “I just forgot.”

  “Maybe that’s because you had an instinct that you didn’t need to.”

  “You’re coming on awfully strong as the good Samaritan.”

  A quick glance at her out of the side of his eye. “You really don’t want to trust anybody, do you. It’s very hard for you.”

  “The last man I trusted—”

  There’s no need to finish it. She subsides and peers forward through the windshield: streams of cars on the highway; grey sky. He’s got the air conditioning on and she feels chilled.

  Her mind drifts. They run on into the afternoon. Occasionally she risks a glance toward him. The truck-driving dreamer in daylight; after a while she decides that he seems to have a deep understanding of silences.

  68 “Where are we now?”

  “Out of Chicago, headed for Minneapolis–St. Paul.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Nine, maybe nine-thirty.”

  “What night is this?”

  “Friday. I forget the date. It’s the damn Labor Day weekend. Sunday drivers all over the place.”

  “Thanks for stopping to let me buy these clothes and all.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “You expecting to stop again soon?”

  “We could take a break next service area if you want. I’m already half a day behind—another few stops won’t make much difference. We’re taking a route a little farther north than they’d guess from my manifest. That’s just in case somebody happens to be looking for this truck, I mean. I doubt they are but what the hell.”

  “I don’t know how to begin to—”

  “Don’t. You hungry again or what?”

  “I’ve got to make a phone call.”

  “Okay,” he says. Then after a little while: “Want to talk about it?”

  “It’s something that came on me just a little while ago. You know how a fresh idea sometimes will pop into your mind when you’re half asleep?”

  “I get some of my songs that way.”

  “I’ve been running away for months. The baby and I are still running right now. I’m tired of it. Hell, I’m just tired period.”

  “You can talk about it if you like. I’m a good listener.”

  “You really are. And I probably owe you some truth. It’s the least I can do. Who knows. Maybe you can turn it into a song.”

  “And sell it to Willie Nelson and make my fortune. You go right ahead. We’ve still got a couple thousand miles to go.”

  “How do you keep awake? Do you take pills?”

  “I used to. Went to cocaine for a while too. Lucky I never freebased but once or twice—but even so spent three months in a rehab program getting off everything. Now I settle for coffee, a little No-Doz now and then. I get tired I go to sleep. I’ve got a funny metabolism though—I can go a long time without sleep sometimes.”

  “I tried cocaine once. Made my nose run for three days.”

  “You’re lucky if that’s all the contact you had. Stuff can turn you inside out. You get real paranoid.”

  “I know. I’ve seen it. I’m a prude about it.” She hesitates. Then: “I left my husband when I found out he was dealing coke.”

  “This the guy that’s after you now?”

  “The same. I don’t mean street-corner peddling—I’m talking airplane loads. He’s in the importing business. The wholesale end, you might say.”

  “You married this man?”

  “I married him. Had his child. This feels awkward but I like telling you about it. I’ve never talked to anybody about it.”

  “You just go right ahead. I’m starting to write that song already. Make
up for that twenty-five thousand dollars I didn’t collect.”

  “There’s not so much to tell. I decided to take the baby away from him and raise her myself. I knew he’d try to find us. He’s got a lot of money to spend on detectives and whatever it takes. It seemed obvious we wouldn’t have much of a chance unless we had a lot of money to spend on keeping out of his reach.”

  “You mean it’s not just the baby he’s trying to get back. You took his money too.”

  “It was her money. He owed it to her. Not to me, but the baby.”

  “Well you’ve got her now. That’s what counts.”

  “You’re very trusting. You haven’t even heard my husband’s side of the story. I stole his money and I stole his child. I don’t feel guilty and I have no sympathy for him. What does that make me?”

  “I don’t want to hear his side of it. I believe you.”

  “Why? I’m a total stranger.”

  “Look here: the only way you can find out whether you can trust somebody is to trust him.”

  “You mean trust someone and see what happens.”

  “You trusted me. See what happened? Got yourself a ride fit for a queen in this luxurious Cadillac limousine.”

  She’s thinking of Bert with a smoking rifle in his hand and the flailing body of a deer whirling against a tree. She says, “I know how the drug business operates. It can’t exist without people getting killed. I don’t know if he’s ever pointed a gun and shot someone dead. But he’s capable of it .… I stole from him. I guess that doesn’t make me the good guy. You have such a nice simple belief in things. I trusted someone else recently and it didn’t work out so hot.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve been trying to replay it in my mind. Do you know anything about helicopters?”

  “Happens I do. When I was nineteen I used to work on them in the navy. Engine mechanic. Why?”

  “There’s the service area coming up. Can we stop at a phone?”

  “You bet.”

  She’s looking at the shotgun. He’s wedged it up into the foot-well on the passenger side where it’s out of reach of the baby’s curious proddings. With her eyes focused on the trigger she says, “You know I hate the son of a bitch. I want my revenge. It came to me a little while ago how I can fight back.”

  69 Trusting Doug to look after the baby, she changes five dollars into coins and gets the phone numbers from directory assistance for the New York State Police and the Clinton County sheriff’s office and the appropriate branch of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, which turns out to be in Burlington, Vermont.

  It’s best to call all three, she’s decided, because knowing Bert’s penchant for paying people off he may have bribed one or another of them and it only makes sense to cover all the bases. At least one of them is bound to take action.

  She tells each of them more or less the same thing:

  “Never mind who I am. Take this down. Got your pencil? Ready? There’s an unregistered private landing field on federal land two miles east of Albert LaCasse’s house on the Fort Keene road. An airplane will land there at midnight tomorrow to deliver several million dollars’ worth of narcotics. Albert LaCasse and his men will be there to accept the delivery personally, and you can catch them red-handed. You’re welcome and good night.”

  It’s only when she’s on her way back to the truck that she realizes how it can go wrong: if any of those law enforcement agencies is in Bert’s pocket they’ll warn him off in advance and he’ll simply reschedule the delivery for another time and place. Her effort will have gone for nothing.

  But it’s worth the try.

  70 Sunday night after nearly a full day’s delay caused by the need to find a garage that was open and capable of replacing a bad front wheel bearing she kicks off her shoes and dances with Doug Hershey to the jukebox in a roadside joint in Wyoming. It’s a bluegrass sort of record with a solid three-quarter beat by someone she’s never heard of—John Starling—but she likes the music. The lyric is something about a hobo on a freight train to heaven.

  She feels the steady pressure of his hand in the small of her back. They move unhurriedly to the three-quarter beat and he keeps a little polite distance between them so that she is reminded of the proprieties of the junior prom at the base school in Darmstadt.

  She likes the gentility in him: he wants to be a friend—he doesn’t seem to be on the make.

  Calmed by the music she’s thinking: I deserve a good break just now. I deserve a friend.

  You trusted Charlie too. Remember that.

  The unanticipated thought darkens her mood. She feels vaguely ashamed of it.

  All of a sudden Doug says, “Takes two to tangle.”

  She rears back. “What?”

  “I was just thinking. It takes two to tangle. Cute line for a song.”

  Past his arm she has one eye on the baby who sleeps in her new blanket on the vinyl seat of the booth. Ellen spent the whole day talking incessantly, commenting on everything in the truck and everything that went by outside. The baby has always been singularly curious about the world around her. Maybe she’s going to grow up to be a scientist—or a poet. But first she’s going to have to learn to speak in real words.

  The record ends. Something else starts playing—too fast to dance to unless you’re wired to a high-voltage generator—and they return to the booth and their iced teas. He says, “Tell me about your friend and his airplane again.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Maybe you left out something.”

  She feels petulant. “He bugged out on me.”

  “Yes, but why? Maybe he had to.”

  “There was room. He could have landed.”

  “Where was the helicopter then?”

  “It went climbing up out of the way.”

  “Strange thing to do, don’t you think?”

  She squirts lemon into the tea and fishes for seeds with her spoon. She’s beginning to like the stuff.

  “I thought so at the time. But whatever they had in mind, they left the runway wide open for Charlie. He could have picked us up. He didn’t. That’s the bottom line.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe not. I keep coming back to what you said about afterward. When you kept looking up and you’d see old Charlie up there dancing around the sky with the helicopter.”

  “It looked like some sort of dogfight.”

  “Sure. He was distracting the helicopter. How big’s that helicopter?”

  “You can get four people in it.”

  “That’s pretty small. So it’s not too fast. Your friend Charlie could have just put on the throttle and his airplane could’ve run right away from them. But he hung around and kept playing cat and mouse with the chopper. You think he did that for fun?”

  “I have no idea.” She fixes the baby’s blanket.

  “If I was inclined to give my friend the benefit of the doubt I’d have to guess maybe he was trying to make that chopper mad enough to keep chasing him around the sky—so it couldn’t find you and the baby. You think you’d still been able to get away from those guys on the ground if the helicopter had been right up there keeping watch on you all the way?”

  Her fingers pluck at the blanket. “I didn’t—I never thought of that.” She feels defensive. “It doesn’t change the fact he ran away and left us there.”

  “Maybe he figured you had a better chance on the ground.”

  “But that’s just not true. If you knew what we went through—”

  “If I was that helicopter pilot and I saw this airplane coming in and I wanted to stop him, I’d let him go right ahead and land. I’d figure I had a lot better chance if he’s on the ground than if he’s in the air. In the air he’s a lot faster than I am.”

  “We could have taken off. I’ve seen Charlie deal with obstacles on the runway. It’s part of the students’ emergency training. He could have bounced the plane right over their Bronco if they’d tried to get in the way.”
>
  “All the helicopter had to do was hover directly above Charlie’s airplane. He’d have been pinned—might as well be nailed down. There’s no Cessna in the world could take off against that downdraft.”

  Something in her eyes. She grabs a paper napkin out of the dispenser and presses it against her eyelid.

  She hears him say: “I think Charlie must have seen what they were up to. Maybe he waved himself off and suckered the helicopter into that game of tag because he figured it was the best chance he could give you.”

  “You men stick together, don’t you. How about the way he never came back to look for us.”

  “Sure—and lead them right to you.”

  “Damn it, you’re on his side, you don’t know. You weren’t there. He ran out on me.”

  “You want to be mad at him, don’t you. Makes things easier. Helps you prove you don’t need anybody. You can get along by yourself. The hell with Charlie, he chickened out so you don’t have to think about him any more. You want to look at me a minute?”

  She looks up reluctantly.

  His big eyes sorrow at her. “Look how he betrayed you. You’re here. You’ve got what you came for. You got the baby and you’re on your way home.”

  She wipes her eye again and examines the napkin closely as if to single out the offending particle. After a while she looks up. “You son of a bitch.” Then she laughs.

  They get in the truck. As she hands the sleeping baby to Doug for a moment and prepares to climb into the bunk her foot slips, dislodging the shotgun. It tips over with a bit of a clatter. “Oh dear. Sorry.”

  “Safety catch is on. It’s okay, no danger. I’ll put it back. Go ahead.”

  She gets settled. He puts the baby down beside her and picks up the capsized shotgun, wedging it back in place. “All set? Nighty-night.”

  When they drive out there’s a highway patrol car at the curb and she sees a khaki-uniformed trooper in the phone booth. It isn’t clear whether he’s watching the truck depart.

  She sleeps soundly in the bunk behind the seats, lying on her side with the baby in a gentle one-arm cradle. She’s used to the growl and shudder of the truck now.