by Richard Peck
We got out on the road about sundown. It was Interstate 57, that cuts straight down the state to the bridge at Cairo. Pete Langbecker was relief driver, and he started out in the bunk. I guess he went to sleep right away; he’s even quieter than Dad so you can’t always tell when he’s awake. Technically, Dad’s his boss, but they’re buddies and play pinochle at the Elks whenever they’re both home. It’s a close friendship, I guess, even if they don’t talk much to each other. Maybe because they don’t talk much.
I started out sitting by Dad, and you’re way up above the other traffic. Perched up that high you can see straight ahead over every car on the road. And you can spot trouble a mile off. It was hot even after sundown, but there was a wind. Hot and steady, coming out of the south to meet us. “I’ll be in ninth the whole way if that wind holds,” Dad said. He was talking about gears.
“What are we carrying?” I asked him.
He couldn’t remember. Truckers don’t do the loading anymore. So he told me to look at the manifest. It said we were carrying a load of knocked-down insulated fiberboard cartons for large kitchen appliances.
“Is that a good load to haul?”
“Everything’s about the same,” he said, “except heavy machinery than can shift on you.”
It’s funny about driving along at night. There’s all that time to talk, and you can’t think of too much to say. It’d always been so easy to think of things to talk about with Flip. But I was beginning to want something else.
South of Centralia, you start seeing the oil wells pumping out in the fields. They look like squatty, little dinosaurs with their heads moving up and down in a steady motion. We were rolling along at seventy, but, once in awhile, a car would pass us. If it dimmed its lights as it came around us, Dad would dim his. Then after they’d get past, some of them would hit their dimmers again as kind of a salute.
We had the windows down, and there was a strong smell of diesel fuel. But over it, you could smell open country. Ragweed, and dust, and an occasional whiff of barnyard. I was trying hard to stay awake and wondering when we’d switch off so I’d get the bunk. I thought maybe if I closed my eyes but stayed sitting straight up, Dad wouldn’t notice I was napping.
He didn’t, I guess, because after awhile he cleared his throat like he was about to say something. Since he doesn’t talk all the time, you can usually tell when he’s getting ready. So I popped my eyes open. He eased forward from the seat and worked his shoulders around to loosen them up. I was still waiting.
“Your mother ever talk to you about things?” he said after awhile, never taking his eyes off the road.
“What things?”
“Oh—you know—about how you ought to act.”
“Manners?”
“No, not manners. I know she talks a lot of manners. She talks them to me.”
“Well, what then?” (I knew what then.)
“About how you ought to act to keep out of trouble. With girls.”
I sat there awhile without saying anything, but I knew I had to say something because I couldn’t let it pass. I wondered, too, if Pete was awake behind us, but decided it didn’t matter.
“I don’t think she thinks I’m old enough yet to be fooling around with girls.”
“You’re getting there,” Dad said. Then after another mile or so, “Anything you don’t know you want to know?”
“I guess not.”
“You sure?”
Actually, I couldn’t be a hundred per cent sure. But I started to say I was. Instead, I said, “If there ever is anything I don’t hear on my own, I’ll ask you.”
“I hope I’ll know,” Dad said.
South of Marion, he geared down and eased over toward the pull-off road. We were coming up on a cluster of lights and a giant electric sign—of a smiling chef swinging a big arm—with neon tubing on it. Underneath, it said:
SWEET SINGER OF THE SOUTHLAND
EAT ALL NIGHT
SHOWERS AND BUNKS
RATES FOR TRUCKERS
DIXIE BEGINS HERE
We pulled up in a long line of semis and livestock trucks full of cattle. When Dad cut the motor, the silence was deafening, even with the cows bawling all around us. They say the steady whine of a big diesel motor can rob you of your hearing permanently. I wondered if it could happen to Dad. He poked Pete, who rolled right down out of the bunk as we were climbing out of the cab.
It was after midnight, but, inside SWEET SINGER OF THE SOUTHLAND, it was like high noon on a busy day. There was a long counter lined with truckers eating full meals. And maybe a hundred tables, mostly crowded. And flypaper hanging down from the ceiling. A loudspeaker system was blaring country music. And the whole place smelled like deep-fried everything. We found three stools together, and I had what Dad and Pete had: chicken-fried steak and cottage fries, tossed salad with blue cheese dressing, two cloverleaf rolls, apple pie with cheese, and coffee. And I could have eaten that much again.
Our waitress was named Rosalee. It said so on her name tag. She came right over as soon as we sat down and said, “Here’s the Dunthorpe boys!” Then she gave me a look, and turned to Dad, and back at me again. “Now I know who this is,” she said, right at me. “Don’t tell me now. I’ve got it—Brian. Right?” This came as a big surprise to me. How this Rosalee, who was young and medium pretty, knew who I was. “Oh your daddy talks about you,” she said. “I knew you quick as you walked in. They going to make a trucker out of you, honey?”
“What’s good tonight, Rosalee?” Dad said. I think he was a little embarrassed.
“Everything,” she said. “But some of it’s better than the rest of it, and we’re out on the catfish.”
“I wouldn’t eat catfish if you tore up the check,” Dad said. And Pete snorted.
“I know it,” Rosalee said. “You don’t eat nothing but steak, so why ask?” But she gave him a big smile and winked at Pete, who ducked his head down.
After that, it was my turn in the bunk, but Dad stayed at the wheel. He’d rather do all the night driving and let Pete drive back in daylight. And the minute I stretched out in the bunk, I was wide-awake. Probably because I was swelled up with all that food. So I poked at the pillow and watched the road over Dad’s shoulder and all the little pinpoint lights on the dash.
That late, the traffic was thinned out, mostly trucks. But suddenly a minibus, with a home-done, bright purple paint job, rocked around us. Dad must have seen it coming up on us in the rear view mirror. It went by so close it nearly sliced the mirror off us and zoomed past like we were standing still. “Sonofabitch,” Pete said. It lost a little speed ahead of us because we were on a grade. It was weaving and straddling the line between our lane and the pass lane.
“Bunch of idiots,” Dad said, and gave them a blast on the air horn. But over the crest of the hill, they pulled away from us and out of the range of our lights. They had to be doing ninety.
Then we were alone on the road for maybe half an hour. And I must have started to doze off because I jumped when Dad started pumping on the brakes and the truck began to pull back. Way up ahead, we could see something off on the shoulder of the road. Dad saw it first. It was the square back of the minibus, but it looked different. Then we could see why. It was the rear end of it, but it was upside down. Flipped. Dad kept working the brakes, and we were pulling up to it, off on the shoulder, which was flat gravel. When he stopped, our lights flooded the whole scene—the overturned bus and the broken glass glittering like rock salt all around it. And the upended wheels still turning. But not a sign of life.
Pete was fishing around in the box under the scat for flares. I started to follow Dad when he ran up toward the wreck, but he told me to cut on back and help Pete plant a flare behind us. It didn’t dawn on me at the time that Pete wouldn’t need any help with that. And when I got way up the road behind with him, I thought maybe I didn’t want to go back to see what had happened. Pete did, though. And we loped back.
Dad had the door on the driver’s si
de open. “Go on back and get the big flashlight,” he said to me instead of to Pete, who’d know where it was.
“God, that’s awful,” I heard Pete say when I came back with the flashlight.
“You go on back in the cab,” Dad said to me. He must have known I wouldn’t do it. When I handed him the flashlight, I tried not to look in the minibus, but I couldn’t keep from it.
The driver was wedged in between the steering column and the front window, which was cracked into a big star and bulging out. There’s no hood on a minibus, so his body was almost pushed out onto the gravel. Dad went around the door and started kicking at the big wedges of glass. The driver finally fell out onto the ground. Dad stopped down over him, and Pete held the flashlight low to the ground. They were in a tight huddle, and as long as I was pretty sure I couldn’t see much, I tried to see a little. “He’s gone,” I heard Pete say. And they stood up at the same time.
We could hear another truck coming upon us from behind, gearing down as he saw the flare. It pulled up next to us, and the relief driver on our side stuck his head out. “You want us here or shall we go on and send back the troopers from Shawnee Villa?”
“Hold it a minute,” Dad said and turned back to the bus. It takes awhile to tell it, but this all happened fast. Dad moved like he was only a step away from everything. He played the light across the upside-down front seat, and there was a girl there. She had on a shoulder strap safety belt, and she was hanging with her head down. “Hold it a minute,” Dad yelled again. He and Pete ran around the front, skirting the body of the driver.
They had a job to get the door on the far side wrenched open. They both reached in and had to work without seeing. Trying to get her safety belt off her and lift her out.
They carried her back behind the bus, full into the beam from our headlights. She had long, smooth, blond hair that swung under her. Dad had her under the arms, and Pete had hold of her under her knees. They laid her down gently, away from the broken glass of the rear window.
She was wearing stretch slacks and a yellow blouse tied in a knot in front so her bare midriff and belly-button showed. There was a line of red on her forehead, but nothing else. She looked asleep. Dad took her wrist. It flopped like a doll’s. There was a long moment then. We all waited and the relief driver on the other truck held his door open, but didn’t get out.
“She’s gone too,” Dad said. But he was looking down at her like he couldn’t believe it. She still just looked asleep. I walked right over to her. Her eyes weren’t quite closed. And she had on dark lipstick that made her mouth look purple. She just looked—relaxed. Like she might stir in her sleep. Dad put her arm down on the ground. Then he turned away from me and walked over to the rig that was idling in the right lane. “There’s two of them. Send the troopers back and the ambulance, but you can tell them it’s too late.”
When we were alone, Pete planted another flare at the edge of the road. He and Dad went through the back of the minibus, looking for something to cover up the bodies with. There was a tangle of stuff back there. I could see some of it from the red light of the flare. A big guitar, for one thing, and some books. It was stuff that had just been thrown in the back end, so it was all in a mess. They found a couple of sleeping bags, but no blankets. So they pulled them out and put one over the driver and the other one over the girl.
The wind had died down, and it was hotter than ever. But the stars were out—bright like they are in the country. They seemed cold.
It wasn’t too long before we saw the revolving red lights coming up ahead of us. A regular state police sedan and an International Harvester ambulance behind it. They U-ed in across the center strip and pulled off in front of the minibus.
Right away, they radioed back for a wrecker and checked the bodies, moving like Dad—quick, but easy. And they discovered that the right front tire was blown out. All four tires were about bald.
It wasn’t too long before we were on the road again. Away from the red flares, it was dark—almost like none of it had ever happened. Pete was dozing in his seat, but I was wide-awake again in the bunk.
I couldn’t get the picture of the dead girl out of my mind—the red line on her forehead and the peaceful look on her face. Dad was thinking too.
“They were asking for it, driving at all on slick rubber.
“I’ve seen my share of pileups. You don’t get hardened to them.”
I figured he was thinking specifically about the girl too.
I remembered what Mrs. Garrison said that time she gave Flip and me the Kennedy half dollars. That we’d be better men for having seen death. Then, we thought she might be cracked. But maybe she was talking about men like Dad.
I wondered, for a minute, if this girl would come back in my dreams like old Gold Tooth had. I didn’t worry about it much, though. For one thing, I felt like maybe I’d never go sound asleep again. But even if I did dream about her, it would be different. If she ever came back to me, she’d come back alive.
But something else in my mind was trying to connect up those two deaths. Like maybe how frustrated Flip would be if he’d been along to see this accident—with no mystery about it. No clues to follow up. Just a quick crunch on an open highway. No loose ends, except maybe insurance.
And it was funny how the girl who didn’t even look dead seemed more dead than the man in the woods, who’d been long gone. Maybe that’s the way it is in Asia and places like that—death all around you and as natural as living. I read one time how, in Calcutta, there’s a patrol that goes around every morning collecting the bodies of people who starved to death in the streets overnight. Like garbage.
It dawned on me then about just how much Flip and I had really enjoyed the whole thing. It made me feel like we’d been a couple of creeps. As creepy as Elvan.
Fall
Fourteen
On warm days in September the high school band
Is up with the birds and marches along our street,
Boom boom,
To a field where it goes boom boom until eight forty-five
When it marches, as in the old rhyme, back, boom boom,
To its study halls, leaving our street
Empty except for the leaves that descend, to no drum,
And lie still.
In September
A great many high school bands beat a great many drums,
And the silences after their partings are very deep.
That’s the poem I’d recited for Miss Klimer’s benefit back in the spring of seventh grade. She went for it because it was about real life and had sound effects. But it’s more of an autumn-type poem. And even though we were only starting the eighth grade and not high school, I always connect it with that fall. When I think about that fall.
The town was warm and empty, and it was like having to go back to school in the middle of the summer. It always starts too soon.
Eighth grade didn’t show much promise of being any different from seventh. Not like starting in the high school, which was still a year off. Coolidge Middle School—what was once called Coolidge Junior High—tries hard to keep up with the times. They call English class “Language Arts” and the Library’s officially known as “The Resource Materials Center.” They have a lot of progressive ideas, but the place is full of old-time relics. Half the rooms still have lift-top desks bolted to the floor. And inkwells.
Everybody with last names starting with A through C was in the same homeroom—from Loretta Armbruster to Clarence Cochran. I was right there in the middle. And, of course, Flip, being a T, was in another homeroom. So we didn’t get together until the real classes started for the day.
What you didn’t want to keep locked up safe in your locker, you kept in your homeroom desk. Nonessentials. It was one morning about the third week of school when I reached in my desk for my notebook and pulled out a little package instead. All neatly wrapped up in brown paper and twine. No name on it or anything. There was just time to get it open—with Mary Beth Borde
n snooping over my shoulder to see what it was all about.
Inside the wrappings was a little box, jewelry store sized. I could feel Mary Beth’s hot breath on my neck as I opened it up. First, there was a layer of cotton. Then a folded-up note, which I transferred to my shirt pocket as it was—to Mary Beth’s disappointment. Then another layer of cotton. And in the bottom was a medal. I pulled it out. It was a ribbon-covered bar. Hanging down from it was a gray part like a coin. Very familiar. Like the knife at the bridge. The same laurel leaf wreath circled around a very authentic swastika. “Here we go again,” I said, but not to Mary Beth.
The first class was Social Problems. We sat in a friendly circle in there, but with assigned seats. Flip’s was directly across from me. There wasn’t time for any real communication, but he looked right at me, nodded, and tapped his chest. I got the message. He’d received a medal too, which was no surprise. Then I remembered the note, and as I pulled it out of my pocket, I saw that Flip kept staring at me, waiting for me to read it if I hadn’t already.
Elvan had decided to disguise his handwriting, which was pretty pointless, but I guess he thought it helped build up the mystery a little. The only thing it did was make it hard to read. But Elvan didn’t want too much mystery:
FOR SOMEONE WHO FOUND THE DEAD MAN IN THE WOODS LAST SPRING ATTENTION
You will find out some more interesting evidence if you come to THE PLACE in the woods where it happened. Be there this evening at 5:30 don’t be late bring this medal to identify yourselfs with
I crumpled it up and gave out a big disgusted sigh for Flip’s benefit. He just shook his head.
At lunch, we compared notes and medals. They were pretty much the same. I was all for marching right back to Elvan’s table and dumping them in front of him. “I told you it’d be like this,” I said to Flip. “We’ll have him on our backs for years if we don’t stop him right now.”
