Tom Sheehan

The Big Runner

 

 

Nothing was incidental. He put his hand down on the suitcase at his side, the case she had left behind. The details of the meeting came rushing back. All of them came back. They teased him again. They had not let go. If he listened…

 

...For a pure moment trucker Rene Destot had felt above it all, above dawn at its tatters, above the voice coming at him from day’s edge. King of the throne he was, king of the hill, the road having slammed under him all night long.

 

The 475 horses loose in his truck’s Caterpillar engine sounded their endless music, hummed under his seat bottom, talked lightly to his wrists.  (Controlled rampage, the voice had said a number of times long before he used to think about owning a Kenworth, Earth-mover, star-hauler.) House-big, highly modified for cruising, a Caddy in a sense, the Kenworth T2000 he was driving came over the jaunty crown of the hill and he froze at the front of his seat.

 

Was this what the voice had been talking about? Night has justice. Day has none. What curve in the road?

 

The gray skies to the north were releasing massive shapes, taking on lesser ones and night was crawling away on hands and knees. Rene, not yet bleary-eyed, knew the thievery of it, the moment, the uncertain reigns of clarity that can fall into one’s hands as night departs.  

 

In obstinate pieces the pre-dawn had been talking to him in the scary way it manifests intonations. Some days pass easily. This one will not. Hearken. Night is a beginning and an end. Even knowing it was his voice did not make it any more reflective. He had heard it before, sometimes operatic, then in whispers, but not on the road.

 

Never before on the road. Not behind the wheel. The road, with a justice all its own, has demands all its own.

 

Now, in that clarity at hand, sudden sunlight scattered ammunition out there on the road in front of him, tracer’s quick as lightning, sudden flares of chrome flashing in every direction. About an older day he immediately thought, of odd and rampant shrapnel loose at another dawn, detonation and combustion everywhere, decisions at hand, Sgt. Rumney down at his feet and crying, metal from their own high angle devils still burning its way through his body, the last shards of both.

 

A scant 50 or 60 yards ahead of him a car was broadside in the road, the sun in its own purpose of explosion almost breaking down the catalogue of the vehicle’s parts. And though there was enough room on either side for safe passage of the rig, he thought his tires would take an unnecessary beating.

 

Even as he identified a ’98 Crown Victoria, he slammed the gears in a downshift, feeling the weight pushing at his back, popping the rig towards a slow-down, the gears abruptly humming their mesh of music, just like the back row of the orchestra at a Copland night at Symphony Hall. Forces, as always, were all around him. He thought it was like stopping the world to get off, some kind of carousel, centrifugal. Remembering a French horn destroying a note one night deep in his past made him think about the way the crew packed the load back at Swanton’s Ridge, certainly not at perfection, thinking it might start shifting and daring to stand on its feet, threatening to jackknife.

 

Just then he saw the woman step from behind the car and dart to the side of the road. In his mind was the converse turmoil of a lady in distress and the $200 cost of each new truck tire. There was feeble juxtaposition to contend with.

 

The house of a vehicle slid by on the left side of the Crown Victoria. Gravel and shoulder waste and perimeter-loose asphalt and rock pebbles sang under his wheels and pinged away as if from a hundred slingshots and he could feel the rig momentarily hang in the air.

 

The woman, young, trim, hair proud-red and like a ball of fire, was waving at him as he veered by. For scant seconds the trailer, potentially a deserter, AWOL in promise, tugged at his backside like a child at a mother’s skirt and then let go that demand. From his lungs a pocket of air came loose with a bang. The gears shutting down into lowest low, the cargo somehow still threatening movement, morning suddenly full of other energies, the huge Kenworth and its attachment came to a stop.

 

In the side mirror the woman was waving at him. The voice, talking again, was unheard.

 

Dropping down from the cab, calling on the serenity that was part of his make-up, having been in tougher spots before, and able to measure them, he immediately checked the tires on his side. They looked fine and he walked back to the young woman and the car. She was not in panicsville either, though her cheeks were flared red.

 

Instantly, with a quiet daring, her eyes measured his eyes, the depth in them, the span of his shoulders, his hipline, the bleached impact of his worn but neat jeans. Rene, at 37, slim and rugged from a decent regimen and a usual tussle with weights, even out on the road, was aware he had certain attractions. Ease, supposedly, was one of them.

 

“Will the engine start?” he said, looking up at the crown of the hill he had just come over. She was trimmer than thought at first.

 

“No, it just died on me,” she said. One shoulder shrugged. “There’s been some trouble with it the last few days.” The shoulder shrug was the universal one, her head tipping to meet it, eyes shifting color. Her legs were marvelous. She looked clean as a new napkin, but her eyes at the moment darker.

 

“You watch for traffic,” Rene Destot said, “and I’ll try to get it out of the road.” Noting her slimness again, how her red hair glossed against her neck, he advised, “Wave something. A sweater, a pocketbook, anything. But wave something if you have to.”

 

He dropped into the seat, kept the door open, and keyed the starter. The engine coughed and jerked and he did it a second time. Then he tried it again and popped the gear quickly into neutral after catching a minor thrust from the starter, and with one foot pushing got the Crown Victoria rolling on a slight grade and coasted it off the road.

 

“I can give you a lift down to Crawford. It’s about twenty miles. There’s a garage there. Probably help you out.”

 

“That’s great. Let me get my bags. Only a couple. I don’t want to leave them out here.” Her eyes, like a chameleon at work, were as green as a lagoon ought to be. She spun away with a youthful twist, energy riding off her frame. Other forces, the voice said, are about.

 

Back on the road, the Caterpillar touching him in the wrists again, in the seat of his pants, Rene caught her out of the side of his eye. He knew she was identifying the music on the radio, low, quiet, as if out of sight. Her legs were remarkably elegant, even, he thought, for the cab seat of a Kenworth. He’d saved for eight years for the rig, elegance itself, and here was more elegance sitting in his cab than he had ever dreamed of.

 

“That’s lovely,” she said. “That’s Nessum Dorma and I’m Lila Endwell.” Musically she said it. “I was heading home to Ossipee, to see my family. From college. I teach, a half professor. Do you always play that kind of music when you’re driving?” Lila Endwell had turned to face him. Her eyes he caught first, now of another hue, not lagoon green, not as dark as earlier, and then her mouth. He could taste her mouth, the serious red lips. It was in his eyes.

 

“You’re blushing. I like that kind of honesty in a man. Like you’re not afraid to admit anything. If you screw up, you screw up. That’s really charming, courageous, and extremely sexy. Oh, my brother Tim says I’m too damned direct but life is too short to be otherwise. There are things that need doing. My father is godawful overprotective, now, but he’s the one should watch out for himself. Thinks he owns half the world and wants the other half. It’s going to kill him. I tell him he’ll be sorely missed, but that’s only a mere caution.”

 

“What’s he do?”

 

“He owns.”

 

“That simple?”

 

“That much and that simple.”  If you’re going on to Boston, we’ll be going right by his place. A long ride by. It’s like a border, like you need a passport.”

 

“Your mother?”

 

“The owning killed her. I got out. I still love him, in some way, but I got out. She worked forever for him, at anything, and when she wasn’t there any more, neither was I. She used to slip into my room at night, barefoot, smelling nice, and tell me stories. Sometimes she kept me up looking at the stars, the moon, telling me stories her mother had told her. About witches and sadness and losing the moon when you wanted it most. And he was downstairs doing the books. We knew the difference, and the parting. We all parted before we knew it. As a kid it was all done. Before she died it was all done. Can you reach something like that?”

 

“Yes. If you’re looking for something besides the trucker response, I’ll find it for you.” He could have harrumped, but let it go. “I guess it’s like notes in music that come up in one place but you know they belong someplace else. Only if you really listen, nothing else in your mind, absolutely no taste in your mouth, no beauty in your eye, nothing to touch. Even the composer never knew it. All things aren’t what they always seem. My pal Eddie drives a Diamond-T and he knows every damn word of Gilbert and Sullivan. Every damn word.”

 

“That’s wild! I’m sorry for the unintended aspersion. Are you a composer? A musician? A music buff? Love Country and Western? Blues besides the longhair? Where does jazz fit itself, on an edge?” Each of them realized that she could go on much longer, but was being temperate, allowing her eyes to change again.

 

“You keep talking like that and I’ll remember you a long way down the road.”

 

“Oh, you’ll remember my good legs and thinking about the oral stuff, the way you guys do. What do they say, every five or six seconds? My God, how can you drive? I think it comes with the equipment, doesn’t it? Part of the spec sheet? Au naturel. My God, I’d be running all the red lights!” He realized there was not an edge to her voice. It was the way she talked, so utterly natural. And for kicks the air caught a small grasp of a new aroma, an essence of personal identification, more than newly cut grass or a vast salty marsh or a whole mountain cleansed just after rain. It said, for that moment and forever, Lila Endwell. He didn’t know if he had said her name or the voice had said her name. He pretended ignorance.

 

“Head on and no red lights?” His thumb hit a switch on the wheel and Eddie Arnold, somewhere in a corner of the huge sleeper cab, was about as sad as one can get, the kind of song Sgt. Rumney had played and leaned on all the time.

 

“I like Country. I like him. It’s what the traffic bears, but no adjusting of personality. I like myself sometimes. I love my father, I guess, but I don’t like him. I liked my mother and loved her, barefoot, smelling nice, the moon in the window like colored glass. I think already I like you. You come this way often? Where from? Where to?”

 

“I’ll go by three more times in the next week and a half.” He looked at a small calendar on the visor. “Then maybe not again for three or four months.”

 

“Will you blow that crazy horn, if you have one, when you go by?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“I’d rather you stopped and knocked at the door, if you could manage it.”

 

“What would your father say with this rig at his door?”

 

“All he has to dictate is his will, and I think he’s done that by now. I’m on my own, up to my own. The critters in my puddle are the ones I float with.” She popped fully sideways in the seat. “You’re coming back this way, right?”

 

Her knees shone at the back of his eyes, a field of white, expansive, compelling. If he saw much more of her, he’d explode. “Tomorrow, back over the same route.”

 

Then he thought he heard her say, “Let’s drop in, say hello, get the car squared away, and then I’ll go to Boston with you. I’ll treat you to dinner. I’m on vacation.”

 

He would understand the aegis of her argument. “I won’t leave the truck for very long. And never in the city if I can help it. The investment is enormous.” If he ever needed the voice, now was the time.

 

It came at him from more than one source.

 

“Then we’ll party here. After, you can bring me back home, and when you leave you can blow that crazy horn.” Standing up beside the seat, she slipped into the back of the cab. In half a yodel she said, “Hell--o.”

 

There should have been an echo. “It’s like a damn gymnasium back here. I saw you looking,” she said. It was not coy. Did not come across that way. “There’s nothing but silk under there. Nothing but silk.”

 

……. “Nothing but silk.” She was into him, of course, with that. No doubt about it, the voice and the words making their way. “Nothing but silk.” From another place he heard passage and permit. And earlier she had said, “passport.” They gathered and called him to attention. “Nothing but silk.” They took him on a quick side trip, a lovely detour, him and his Kenworth and the girl with the red hair. “Nothing but silk.”

 

In a cluster he saw it all, heard it all. They would stop and meet her father in his great house. She’d kiss her father after showering, steering Rene out the door, leaving her father on the huge porch in the exhaust of the Kenworth, in its shade, his shoulders slumped as his daughter went off with a trucker, with a rig runner. Rene would carry away with him the sounds of her mother telling a story in three rooms, in the huge hallway, in the dining room, in the den where they had a glass of wine. It was another voice in the gathering, more of the music that was supposed to bring him ease. If it were night he’d see the colored glass of the moon.

 

His cargo would be delivered, phantom and quick hands unloading and putting on a new load for a return trip. It never paid to go anyplace empty. Part of it then would be dinner outside the city. A few glasses of wine. Later, a bottle of Madeira she’d take from a small case she brought with her. On the lower bunk of the Kenworth cab, parked in a rest area with a dozen other trucks holed up for the night, someplace on a wide curve on I-89, northbound, they’d make love. After they made love he’d fall in love, after she showed him there was nothing but silk under there. “It’s the wave of the future,” she’d say. “It’s our call,” as she explained how she’d shave herself. He would shiver with the thought of the razor.

 

“Nothing but silk under there.”

 

But then Sgt. Rumney and all the noise got into the act. He’d be in Vergennes, outbound, when he’d find a suitcase on the lower bunk under a pillow and blanket. Neat blocks of currency piled like Leggos in the case. He’d count to a million and fifty thousand, the Kenworth paid off, a couple more in the barn, whole new routes staked out all over the country. There’d be no note, but he’d smell her, like he could hear a high note left on the air, like he could hear Rumney crying and sad songs coming back at him.

 

He’d drive back to the mansion, the police would be there, noise and static, alarms. One trooper would tell him a young woman had killed her rich father, and then herself. “There was no note,” he’d say. “Strange, you have to admit. Had everything going for them. Or so it seemed.” His voice would be dark and distant, like it was coming down a long tunnel, night behind it, pushing for all it was worth.

 

When she climbed down from the cab at the garage in Crawford, she knew it would be the last she’d see of him.

 

But Rene Destot had reservations.