Lullaby Road, page 2
I thought maybe if I calmly reasoned with her. “Look around you, Ginny,” I said. “I’m headed out into the desert in this shit. Not exactly a safe place for a baby.”
“I’ve got two tests this morning and the sitter just called. She’s sick. My shift at Walmart starts at two. You can and you will. Belle is safer with you on 117 than in her crib.”
I was between a rock and a hard place, and it was obvious that between the two, Ginny was the rock.
“I have no choice. You have no choice,” she said, and walked back to her car.
Few things pissed me off more than hearing the phrase “You have no choice.” I’d heard it in one form or another all my life, sometimes from someone explaining a self-inflicted tragedy after making a bad choice. Usually it had been served up to me as a last resort in someone’s effort to convince me a crap sandwich was better than no sandwich at all.
“Please don’t do this, Ginny,” I shouted. “There is always another choice.”
“Then you make it. I don’t have time to argue.”
Pure Ginny. Nothing I could say was going to change her mind. It was up to me to stand up or stand down to the occasion. Ginny was in a bind and she needed me. Knowing her, just coming to me for a favor, to anyone, was an act of courage. How she managed school and work and the baby, plus the bookkeeping for me, and all of it at eighteen and alone, was both a mystery and a miracle. She had never asked for help. And despite the sharpness of her manner, she was asking. I’d never heard a complaint from her. One way or the other, I would deliver. I owed her, and more. She was a friend. She was family, or as close to one as I was ever likely to have. I was her first, best, and only choice and any man with a brain and worth his salt should welcome the privilege.
Ginny revved the old Nissan’s tired engine and the pistons knocked loudly in protest and puked blue smoke into the air. The car didn’t move. I watched as she sat behind the wheel. When she opened the door she sat a long moment and stared at me before getting out. She left her car idling and walked slowly back to me and gave me a tired smile.
“I don’t know what to do, Ben.” She rested her chin on my chest. “I’m so exhausted I can’t think.”
This was a side of her I knew had to exist, though I’d just never seen it before. She didn’t let me see it. She didn’t let anyone see it, even herself. That was her way. The way she did it all. Eyes straight ahead. No prisoners. No quarter given and none asked for.
“Are you asking for advice?”
Her head didn’t move from my chest and she let out a deep sigh into my flannel shirt. “I fell asleep at work the other night. Facedown and snoring like a pig on a clearance counter I was supposed to be stocking. When I woke up some of the older women were standing around me so the manager couldn’t see me. I would have been fired. They had just been letting me sleep for as long as they could. I was so embarrassed.”
“Do what you have to do,” I said. I might have tried to hug her, but I didn’t.
She pulled her head back from my chest and stared up at me. “Okay, then,” she said. “Suck it up, cowboy.”
She sped away and left me draped in a baby and pink diaper bag like a daycare scarecrow in a concrete field.
I was reviewing my very short list of alternate choices when a gas tanker made the left-hand turn off US 191 into the truck stop. Davey Owens drove between Salt Lake City and Moab. He was a decent-enough, hardworking man with a wife and three kids at home. Davey inched his big rig to a stop near the spot where Ginny had been and rolled down his window. He leaned on his bare left arm and studied me for a few seconds.
“I sense there has been a change for Price’s most eligible bachelor.”
I was busy choosing the right words for my response. Davey was a straight arrow, a recovering alcoholic and born-again Christian. All the words that came to mind consisted of four letters and graphic instructions.
“You okay?” he asked.
I said I was.
“Then you best get your new family out of this cold.”
His rig began to move forward again. As he rolled up his window I could see him shaking his head. I know I was shaking mine, in frustration or disbelief I couldn’t have said—probably a bit of both, followed quickly by resignation.
From where I stood the empty highway stretched a couple hundred feet in the general direction of Moab before disappearing into a wall of shifting white embraced by darkness, like a tunnel probably leading to more than a hundred miles of the same. Maybe not. Probably not.
There was a small jump seat behind the passenger seat and the boy and the dog watched patiently as I wrestled with the car seat in back of them until I got it anchored as best I could with its one lap belt. For her part, Annabelle stared up at me with her round white face and blue eyes and, or so it seemed to me, a wry smile of both comfort and victory. Somewhere I’d read an observation by a writer and it came to mind as I tucked a blanket around the baby: It is rare to see the promise of a man in a young boy but you’ll always see the spirit of a woman in a little girl. Annabelle was damn sure her mother’s daughter.
Once again I thought of the road ahead, and the weather. A smarter man with less experience might have checked the weather conditions on the road ahead. I knew better. In all likelihood I knew I would need at least a hundred different weather reports, one for every mile of two-lane blacktop, and a hundred more for the return. I’d probably see a little of everything the road and sky had to offer—snow, ice, rain, freezing rain interspersed with sunlight and clouds, low and high, dark and bright, and sometimes everything all at once. Hell, somewhere along the way it might even turn nice—for a minute or two.
My route along State Highway 117 took me through the heart of a hundred miles of nowhere before dead-ending at the dying former coal-mining town of Rockmuse, population 2,344. I climbed up on the driver’s side running board and tried to bore a hole through the blowing snow to guess what the day might bring, which was as futile an exercise as trying to tell the future. I was stalling and I knew it, hoping a solution to my predicament might present itself. It didn’t. Go to work or turn around and call it a day? The soft vibration of the diesel engine rose through my feet and the nearby air was tinged with oddly sweet exhaust fumes trapped by the snow and cold air.
I did a quick inventory of cargo and the schedule of deliveries to determine if any of them were absolutely necessary. A couple ranchers and a desert rat needed the fifty-gallon plastic drums of water I was hauling. Those fifty-gallon containers of water might be life or death. I didn’t know. Then there was the mail. The mail was the least important cargo.
A couple months earlier I had been fortunate to secure the contract to take the US Mail to the Rockmuse Post Office—not that there was ever very much of it or anyone particularly cared. The postmaster, Calvin Harper, was a short, affable guy in his late fifties or more. He was locally famous for the model airplanes he built and which were dangled on wire from every spare inch of ceiling space of the tiny post office. He had that kind of time on his hands. Water. Mail. Ten cases of bulk oil. Parts to repair an old windmill. Fresh vegetables for the Rockmuse Mercantile Grocery. There were other miscellaneous odds and ends. It came down to the water, as it often did.
Do my job or turn around and go home? Ginny knew damn well I’d head out into the desert, no matter the weather, with or without Annabelle. She didn’t even ask me to cancel my workday. I doubted it even crossed her mind. As for the boy’s father, who knew what in the hell he’d been thinking? Call it work ethic or habit, or necessity, or just a nasty stubborn streak. I would go out to do what I had done five days a week for half my life—drive the desert.
I got inside the warm cab and turned to my passengers. “Weather,” I said, “is my only prediction.”
Belle gurgled and the boy Juan stared ahead through the windshield and into the rhythmic swing and flap of the wipers. The dog angled his big head in my direction and briefly cast his pink eyes on my throat again before burying his nose back into his fur. Maybe he was either too cozy or too lazy to act? Or going after me just wasn’t worth the effort. Maybe he was curious about what would happen if he let me live. So was I—and I surrendered the four of us to the road and announced our departure with a whispered shit as I dropped into first gear and cautiously pulled out onto an ice-varnished US 191. At best it would be a long day, and at worst, a long dangerous day that wouldn’t have us back in Price until late evening, if we made it back at all.
3
Being primarily a day driver and not a long-haul operator my truck didn’t carry a sleeper; I couldn’t afford the cost, space, or the weight and, as a general rule, I didn’t need one. There were exceptions. During winters I always spent a handful of uncomfortable nights, sometimes a day or two, with my boots on the dashboard waiting for the weather to break. Ginny and Pedro might spend a long night full of anxiety waiting for me to return their damn kids. There was no happiness in that thought for me.
My truck pulled the steep grade out of town at a steady and safe thirty miles per hour and then tiptoed down the ice rink on the other side in low gear before dropping onto the desert floor and a straight stretch of five miles, not that I could see it. Visibility was less than a quarter mile. One touch of the brakes could mean trouble. The wind began to gust and buffeted the sides of my trailer like they were sheet-metal sails. A couple times the truck and trailer scooted sideways all of a piece as if pushed by unseen hands.
Up ahead I could just make out the red taillights of another truck and I kept pace with his lights a safe distance behind. Every few minutes I took my eyes off the road and checked on my crew, all of whom seemed serenely unconcerned, which was good, since I was concerned enough for all of us.
There were no headlights behind me. Not one vehicle approached from the opposite direction. A tardy dawn began to send slanted needles of soft red light down through the snowy canopy of darkness. Instead of helping visibility the broken and shifting light made the distance even trickier to penetrate.
The junction of US 191 and State Highway 117 came at about the halfway mark of the five-mile straightaway with no flashing yellow warning light and only a small, unlighted sign—and not so much as an extra foot of a turn lane. It was usually a dangerous left-hand dodge considering traffic behind picking up speed off the hill and a string of oncoming trucks getting a run at the coming 7 percent grade.
The fact that the road seemed empty did nothing to make me feel easier. Some of the worst accidents happened at that junction, at least one a year, and though none of them had ever involved me, a few times I’d come upon the fresh wreckage minutes ahead of the Utah Highway Patrol. Someone, often more than one, was always dead or dying and there was never a damn thing I could do about it except comfort the injured and dying and string flares up and down the highway in both directions.
Juan turned and stared at me as if he might be reading my mind, maybe seeing the collage of horrors I had witnessed over the years. I hoped not. Those were memories even I didn’t want. I slowed to barely a crawl and checked my side mirrors again and again. Nothing. For a long, quiet minute the only sound was the crunch of hard ice beneath the tires. Nothing up ahead. Satisfied we were alone on the highway, I committed the truck to the turn and began to cross the oncoming lane.
I couldn’t see the low headlights of the semi. The red running lights strung across the roof of its cab jumped into my peripheral vision and sliced through the scattered pink palisades of dawn and shadow. In that terrible second of realization Juan smiled up at me. The inside of my cab filled with the rushing bright glow of the truck’s dual headlamps as the distance between us rapidly closed.
Assuming the driver saw us in front of him it was still too late to avoid a collision by swerving around us into the southbound lane. One touch of his brakes would send his trailer sideways making it and his tractor into a twenty-ton, hundred-foot-wide snowplow sweeping away everything in its path.
My fear-pounding impulse was to accelerate. I wanted to push the pedal to the floor. It would have only made the inevitable worse. I couldn’t speed up without spinning my drive wheels. Doing that would only slow us down and make the odds even better that he’d hit us dead square on the passenger side. Annabelle’s side. Juan’s side. There was only one thing either of us could do—come ahead and try to reduce the point of impact to just the rear of my trailer. I white-knuckled the few seconds as we crept ahead and the semi bore down on us.
One second. Two seconds.
Our cab filled with blinding white light. The impact was deafening. Shudders of stressed aluminum screamed the length of my rig as the trailer lurched sideways and tipped upward. For a few seconds we hung in the air, balanced on one side of tires. The tractor and trailer righted itself with a jarring bounce. We were rubber-side-down and still moving slowly ahead onto Highway 117, though at an odd angle. Our headlights pointed not at the road but north, into the swirling snow and silence of the jagged darkness of the desert shoulder of 117. I slipped the transmission into neutral and let the tractor ease itself to a complete stop.
I relaxed and let my body slump forward, resting my forehead against the steering wheel. All the breath I had been holding escaped at once. From beneath my right arm I cast a one-eyed glance at the boy. Juan was rigid in his seat with a wide, snaggletoothed grin that suggested anything but joy or amusement, like a silent scream sucked inward and held. The dog was sitting up looking at the boy. I am no authority on dogs, or children. My guess was that the dog was expressing concern—a concern for the boy alone.
I straightened up in my seat and forced what I hoped was a reassuring laugh. In the dim light of the cab I checked Belle. She was still secure in her car cradle, awake and quiet and appearing vaguely entertained, as if she had experienced nothing more than a gentle rocking.
“How about we all check our diapers?” I said. The expressions on the faces of the dog and the boy did not change. Opening my door, I added, “Okay, then, you’ll excuse me while I check mine.” Almost as an afterthought I set the brakes and flipped on the emergency flashers before stepping down onto the running board.
The sun had finally made up its mind to rise in earnest. Well out of view of the boy, I leaned in against the side of the trailer with my palms against the cold metal. Then I spent a well-earned minute swearing, mostly at myself. I did have choices at the truck stop and just like some of the people who pissed me off in the past, I made the easier one, the wrong one, because I refused to make the choice between hard and harder. The harder choice would have been to call it a day and go home. Sure, I’d thought about it. Like a good many people, when faced with a hard decision, most of my thinking involved trying to come up with a good excuse not to do what I knew I should do. The refrain of woulda-shoulda-coulda repeated itself over and over in my head.
I walked around to the rear of the trailer as another northbound semi split the creeping dawn. An inspection of my hydraulic lift gate and trailer door indicated no damage—none at all. But I knew we had been hit, and hit hard. Then I saw it, up high on the right rear corner of the trailer—a souvenir of our near-death misadventure. Half-buried in the aluminum skin of the trailer, like a chromed artillery round, was the side mirror from the semi. My legs quivered with the inescapable proof of just how close we had come to an ugly end. The difference between life and death had come down to weight and speed, and less than an inch. Experience will help you make the right decision. And when you make the wrong decision anyway, it might save your sorry, stupid ass.
The other driver hadn’t stopped after our trucks made contact. It would have been dangerous to even try. Maybe he was speeding. Maybe not. I doubted he was going all that fast. The visibility and road conditions only made his speed seem fast. He’d lost a mirror and that was all. Down the road, probably at the Stop ‘n’ Gone, he’d pull over and assess the damage. And think. And maybe change his underwear. At some point I’d have to get a ladder and surgically remove the mirror. For the time being, it would have to stay where it was.
I walked out to the front of the truck and paused to watch the sun come up over the desert. In less than a minute the snow stopped and the wind dropped to barely a whisper as wide patches of blue opened up between the clouds overhead. Even as I watched, the white expanse of snow-covered ground began to stretch out before me farther and farther until the sheer cliff face of the red, mica-flaked mesa a hundred miles distant was revealed, its flat top still obscured by clouds and behind them the first piercing rays of sunlight. As forbidding as the desert might be in summer, it was nothing compared to the silent and cold emptiness of winter.
Even as I stood there surveying the vastness of it all I was drawn toward it, into it, like it was some crazy lover forever promising passion and never love. Yet it was always there, beckoning, and sometimes I thought it was that constancy that drew me, that simple need to know what I could never know in a place, from a landscape, that didn’t care either way. And Utah 117 ran straight through its bloodless heart. Driving it was my job. In rare, charitable moments I thought what I did might be important. I’d been doing the job for so long I didn’t know anything else. And maybe I didn’t want to.
I turned and looked up at the windshield of the truck and thought of my passengers. Maybe Ginny had a point. Belle was safer with me on 117 than in her crib, or just as safe. For all I knew the same was true of the boy. I knew it was true for me. I felt safer in a natural world no matter how treacherous and unforgiving, without promises or illusions, than at home in my crib.
4
Except for random patches of ice, the ten miles to The Well-Known Desert Diner were trouble-free. The locals had long ago nicknamed the place The Never-Open Desert Diner. The diner was always my first stop, and sometimes my last, even when I had nothing to deliver to Walt Butterfield, its owner. As usual, I parked my rig on the gravel apron. The Closed sign hung from the front door and the place, while never open, seemed more closed these days than in times past. The two antique glass bubble pumps were just homeless old men who had run out of conversation. A frozen lace of spiderweb reached across one corner of the door. It was a beautiful and lonely addition, caught as it was in the early sunlight.
