Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (2 page)

“Yes. South.”

She had on music he hated, something full of twang. “I have a load to drop outside of Sacramento. Then I’m headed to a little town thirty miles north of the border.”

“Great.” He smiled. “I’m going to Mexico.”

“Mexico.”

“Yes. I was having a little trouble getting a ride. It’s hard.”

“Getting a ride’s not hard. Just stick out your thumb and wait.”

He’d never in his life ridden this high. Black asphalt and white lines streaked below them. A pair of boots, black, tooled, and shiny, sat on the immaculate dash. He’d imagined that a semi’s cab might contain fuzzy dice, graduation tassels, dashboard Madonnas. Those toxic air-freshener trees. Not a nice pair of small boots. Maybe the boots were a trucker thing. She’d tucked home-rolled cigarettes and wooden kitchen matches in her hatband. He wondered if that were a trucker thing, as well.

“I’m Isaac.” He waited.

Those cold eyes flickered over him like a snake on a dusty road. “You from Portland or Eugene?”

“Portland. Where are you from? You don’t exactly sound like California.”

She took a drag from her smoke. “You sound exactly like Portland. But I picked you up east of there.”

“That’s where I turned around. So, can I ask your name?”

She replied with a question. “You take pictures?” She said it like “pitchers.”

“Yes, I do.” His hand trailed protectively on the camera case.

“You take’em for a living, or just for school?”

“Just for school, right now.” Though he hadn’t, this year, he’d just slacked off and worked in the photo lab, stinging eyes and toxic chemicals, and he had nearly started it on fire by sneaking cigarettes. He went to an expensive private school with a student body doomed to careers as Greenpeace canvassers. That all led to thinking about the senior thesis he hadn’t even started, tuition like a wad of shredded money flushed down the toilet. His father’s eternally disappointed face. “How did you know I was in school?” Maybe she was some kind of scary psychic woman who could read him like tea leaves. He moved the camera closer to his leg. “Lots of people don’t even know what this case is for. They think it’s my lunch.”

“I bet you eat lots.” She glanced at his big boots. “And you hike, I wager.”

“I do.” He looked at her hard thighs in those soft jeans. “Do you?”

“If I get a flat and I’m sick of waiting, I’ll hike. But usually I just go in the back and take a nap until my tow gets there.” She extinguished her cigarette by briefly inserting it in her mouth, then flicking it out the window.

That was different.

She seemed to drive without thinking, shifting, steering, listening without speaking to the babble on her CB. He thought of the chopped hair, the cotton skirts, the pierced noses and navels, the hairy legs and shaved privates of all those young women back at school. Spoiled, pampered, prone to giggles or yawns during sex. Most of his female classmates went through a period of bisexual experimentation for political reasons. He resented being rousted from a girlfriend’s bed for another woman, especially since no one would ever let him watch. Yes. This was a woman unlike any he’d ever met.

They passed through the lunar landscape of the Shasta reservoir.

HE WOKE ALONE
in the cab to the sound of a man’s voice. Another trucker. “They’re out thick. Like flies.”

“They always are this time of year.”

Cops. Isaac winced, thinking of his warrant for some stupid college boy errand that made him feel worldly, taking too much pot from point A to point B. The routine traffic stop turned nightmare, watching them tow his parents’ car as a cop cuffed him, knowing 24 hours later when they released him that he couldn’t go home, ever.

He thought he might throw up, but that would definitely make this woman angry.

The other trucker said, “Gimme one of them home-rolled.” She reached up and plucked one from her hatband. He accepted a light, too. “When you gonna quit this dirty habit? It’s bad for your voice.”

“What do I need a voice for?”

“It was real pretty when you used to sang on the radio.” He looked at her and narrowed his eyes. “You still got that guitar you won from the Devil in a card game?”

She laughed. “The Devil ain’t ever come back to get it.”

The trucker laughed too. Isaac leaned to get a better view of the ghostly man with a soft beard, some missing teeth, and gentle eyes. He wore a baseball cap that said ‘Anarchy!’ over the bill. Isaac hadn’t wanted to take a picture in months, but he quietly freed his camera and found his shot just as the other man doffed it in an oddly courtly gesture.

It was going to be a beautiful shot.

“Have fun with that load. It’s a shifter. I’ve stopped three times to tighten it down.”

“You headed home for the talent show?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

“I guess I’ll see you when you hit the road again. Take care, now.” He peered into her face and spoke with importance. “You know I partied with Bukowski one night.”

“I know, Frank, and I never quite figured out why I’m supposed to be impressed.”

Isaac put his camera away before she swung into the cab, carrying with her a faint tang of axle grease and body odor. She sat for a moment, her hands on the wheel, her eyes on nothing. She looked tired. “We’ll make good time now. No load.”

He watched the polished steel of the trailer they’d been pulling roll out of the parking lot and onto the freeway behind Frank. “Where’s it going? The load?”

“L.A.”

“Why didn’t you take it there?”

She shrugged. “Let somebody else fight the traffic.”

“Oh.” He tried to think of something to say. “I bet it’s a relief not to haul a load.”

She looked at him sideways. “You don’t know a whole lot about trucking, do you.” That was a statement, not a question.

Well, so he’d said something else stupid. He would try again. “I hate Bukowski.”

“Bukowski? Never met the man.”

“He’s a writer.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t read.” She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “You hungry?”

“I brought food.” He opened his backpack and showed her. Baggies of trail mix and dried fruit. Salmon jerky. Mineral water.

She raised one eyebrow. “Looks like you forgot your gerbil. You want some people food? I’ll buy you a steak.”

His belly flopped like a dying fish.

THEY ENTERED A
truckers’ oasis of smoke, laughter, light, and grease. She didn’t talk in the diner, and she didn’t take off her hat. It shaded the scar from his view, just the lowest tracks visible beneath her cheekbone, nothing at all of the knot at her temple he’d seen from below. She methodically cleared her plate without a trace of self-consciousness, then stood up and hit herself in the stomach with the side of her right fist to knock loose a belch.

He guessed it was time to go.

At the counter, she slowed to banter with other truckers. Easy, laughing. He stood behind her while they talked loads, cops, weather and roadwork. He felt effete, despite his large size. He followed her back to the idling truck, climbed in the passenger side, waited. “I suppose you know all those guys.”

She looked at him from under the brim of that pale yellow hat. “Of course. It’s the Trucker Club. There’s a secret handshake, and we’ve all got names like Skeeter and Hitch. Since I’m a girl, I write the newsletter.”

Every time he opened his mouth, she let him know that he’d said something stupid. He didn’t know one thing about trucking, and basically he didn’t care, either. He was just trying to make conversation with this tight-mouthed woman with the disfigured face. He was lost, frightened, on the run and ashamed of the mess he’d left behind in Portland. If he thought about his parents and how disappointed they’d be, he’d cry. The thought of crying in front of this woman was more than he could take.

The safest thing to do was remain mute.

The sky slowly darkened. He’d been relieved when he first got in the truck, because that branching scar was on the far side of her face and he didn’t have to look at it. But sitting there waiting, knowing that scar was lurking on the other side of her face, he had an almost unbearable need to see it again.

After a few more minutes on the radio speaking a jargon he didn’t understand, she rubbed her belly. “I’m shot. All that food. You could probably head south tonight with Harlan, that’s who I was talking to back there at the café. Or you can wait and go with me in the morning after I get some sleep.”

At the mention of sleep, his eyelids drooped. He shouldn’t have been tired. The nap between the Shasta reservoir and Sacramento should have revived him. His fear at running away, that should have made him alert. But the meal sat heavy in his gut. She hadn’t had a beer, but he’d downed three. “Can I sleep in here?”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself. But it’s a lot more fun in back with me.”

ON THE ROAD,
even when a big rig is still, it can be oh-so-full of movement.

Somewhere in those hours of arched backs and straining bodies and twisted blankets, amid the deep sighs and animal cries, feet thumping against fiberglass walls, somewhere in that night, he took a break.

He sat before her, naked, cross-legged, a home-rolled cigarette hanging on his lip. He played his guitar and sang a Simon and Garfunkel song. She listened, really listened. “Not bad. You sing like Gordon Lightfoot. Or Bruce Cockburn, maybe. Okay, my turn. I need to see if I can still play.” Her exposed neck was as long, as graceful as the fretted neck of the instrument she held. She coaxed the guitar into a minor chord, her personal tuning. She ran a scale and called it good. Her voice was honey and whiskey, sorrow and soul. It hung in the night, lifting and turning and hurting like something caught and twisting in the dark.

It made him cry.

“Oh, you great big pussy.” She climbed on him again.

THEY LAY ON
their backs.

“You know, you’re really good. You could be a professional.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.” Her smoke rings wafted over their heads. “It might ruin sex for me if I did it for a living.”

“Noooo, God. I meant being a professional musician.”

“I did that. I worked the gospel circuit from the time I was four until I was eighteen.”