Elizabeth was right. There was no way he could park Jezebel anywhere near the store. In fact, there weren’t many places in downtown Pittsburgh you could take an electric-blue Peterbilt Conventional with a sixty-inch sleeper and forty-eight-foot trailer. Not unless you wanted to end up trapped like a beached whale, snared in some narrow street by four-wheelers who park like the whole world is their front drive.
Instead, Josh drove straight to Jezebel’s parking lot ten miles out of town, did his paperwork, zipped up a week’s worth of stinking laundry and headed home in the pick-up. He figured Elizabeth wouldn’t really want to see him in the store anyhow. Not if she was busy measuring someone up as a giant tomato. Right now, he needed some sleep. He’d be more use to her wide awake, showered and ready for action.
The duplex that Josh and Elizabeth shared was nothing special, but it was on a quiet block with tiny neatly-trimmed gardens tended by peaceful neighbours. Josh owned the whole house but rented the lower half to an elderly Korean bachelor called Sim, a tiny man in his seventies who constantly complained that he was at the rim of death’s abyss, usually while in the yard tending patio pots full of unpleasantly pungent spices and herbs.
Today was no different. Sim was sitting on a canvas stool against the wall of the house in the chill morning sun. A cigarette hung from his tight mouth, and he held The National Enquirer at a distance from his face as though he were a doctor examining an important X-ray.
Sim looked up as Josh’s pick-up pulled into the yard, and by the time Josh had climbed out the old man’s face had changed from a lively interest in his paper to one of silent suffering.
‘How it been this time, Josh?’
Josh knew the routine. He liked Sim.
‘Good. Seven days, four loads. Pays the rent. How you been?’
This was how it always went.
‘Oh I not got long now, you know. I had pains. Real bad. Right here.’ He indicated his chest with the flat of a palm.
‘Maybe you ought to give up those smokes, Sim.’
‘They not problem, Josh. Living the problem. Too hard for me sometimes. Know how that is?’
Josh nodded. ‘Sure do.’
He continued to nod his head gravely as though Sim had pronounced a universal truth, but by the time he was through the door and the old man had returned to reading about the secrets of Hollywood’s bald stars, Josh was grinning. Life didn’t look too hard for Sim. But then life wasn’t too hard for him, either. Josh was thirty-two years old, and for ten of those he’d been hauling everything you could name, and some things you couldn’t, from one corner of his country to another.
Now, in particular, things were pretty good. His wild years had passed when he’d driven team, swallowing anything and everything illegal to keep awake for forty or more straight hours on the road, just like all the other guys who were trying to make a living. Four years ago he’d joined the world of grown-ups, got a bank loan and bought his own rig. Josh was up to his neck in debt, with the bank’s shadow looming over his house and his truck. But running his own tractor unit and trailer, even just having his name painted on the door in curly purple fairground writing, made him feel like a man who had done something useful every time he stepped up into Jezebel. It wasn’t just driving any more. He worked like a dog, he had a business, and it felt okay.
The house reflected that small triumph. The kitchen he walked through from the yard door was Elizabeth’s domain, full of silly calendars and photos stuck to the ice-box, dried flowers in baskets on top of the cupboards and plaid drapes swagged to the side of the windows that would never meet if anyone were bold enough to undo the huge bows that restrained them and try to draw them shut.
But in the spare bedroom that Josh had made his office, his life in the rig came back with him into the house. It was this room he headed for first, ostensibly to check if there were any faxes or messages on the answering machine, and flick through the mail that Elizabeth left in tidy piles on his desk. The truth was that the room was an airlock, a halfway stage to reacclimatize himself into a life that wasn’t really his; that of wandering round shopping malls, going out for dinner, drinking beer with friends in their yard or his, or just watching TV while Elizabeth fixed their meals.
All the ordinary stuff that most people did and thought nothing of, Josh had to relearn every time he pulled on the brakes and came home. At least in this room, with its giant map of the states pinned unevenly to a cork wall, piles of correspondence, trade magazines and bits of scrap paper that related only to his driving life, he could come down gently, ease into Elizabeth’s normality and try to make it his own. For a few days at a time, at least.
The fax stared back at him, insolently exposing the emptiness of its horizontal slot, and the mail was equally unrewarding. Just bills and a few late cheques from companies that paid slowly. He flicked through them with mild disappointment, the constant hope when returning home to a pile of mail that something in it would be surprising and life-altering, dashed again. Josh left the room, took a shower and crawled into their flowery linen nest for the first sleep of home. The difficult sleep. After six nights stretched out in a sleeping bag on Jezebel’s sagging foam mattress behind the cab with dozens of truck engines thudding outside, finding oblivion in this big, fresh, soft and silent bed took time.
This morning it couldn’t be found at all. Josh was weary, but closing his eyes brought nothing but the road rolling by on the inside of his lids. He lay in the bed, his hands behind his head, resigned to sleeplessness, content with merely resting in a state of semi-reverie until Elizabeth came home, when he hoped she would slide into the warmth and join him.
Josh remained motionless but wakeful for several hours, sufficiently relaxed to be unaware of the day as it played out its variations of light behind the closed bedroom drapes, but then he was a master of rest without sleep. Driving created a new gear for the mind, a neutral that demanded little of the body except breathing. It was almost trance-like and he’d driven in such a state plenty of times, despite the plain reckless danger of it. His enjoyment of the escape it afforded was broken by the sound of Elizabeth’s key in the lock, and the slam of the screen door. He opened his eyes, surprised to have dreamed what seemed like the entire day away, then stretched and lay back with his eyes closed, waiting in delicious anticipation for her to come to him, knowing that she’d see his pick-up parked outside and realize he was in bed.
It was comforting, hearing her sounds, the clatter of domesticity, as she moved about in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards, putting away things she must have bought on the way home, and the scrape of a chair as it was pulled out from the kitchen table. Josh waited.
There was silence.
He slid his legs reluctantly out of the warm bed, pulled on a voluminous sweatshirt and yawned. As he made for the door he remembered her gift, fished in his jeans pocket and transferred the small box into the pocket of the sweatshirt. Then he made his way through to the kitchen, scratching at his skull like a bear.
She was sitting at the table motionless, her back to him, her head turned towards the small window. Elizabeth had hair that was only marginally longer than his own, but the cut was feminine and accentuated the graceful sweep of her neck. He leaned against the door-frame and drank in the slender architecture of her shoulders.
She turned and looked up at him. Brown eyes in a pale and almost masculinely handsome face looked as if they wanted to return his heat, but they were clouded with a film of defeat.
Josh put out his arms and she stood up and moved into them. With an almost imperceptible sigh of pleasure he allowed his fingers to part the dark hair and caress her head.
‘Bad?’
She nodded against him with a tiny movement.
Josh put his mouth to the top of her head and spoke into her hair.
‘Hell, they just don’t know what lucky is, Pittsburgh folk. The chance to zip themselves into a chicken suit, right here on their doorstep, and where are they all?’
‘Fuck off.’
She mumbled it into his chest but he could tell it was said through a smile. He lifted her head and made to kiss her, but her smile died as she looked into his eyes. Then she pulled free.
Josh put his now-empty arms up in a gesture of surrender.
‘Joke.’
‘I know.’
She sat back at the table, where he joined her and took her hand.
‘It’ll pick up. Just one guy who gets his rocks off at a party dressed as a pirate and tells his friends, believe me, you’ll be beating them off with shit-covered sticks.’
‘You’ve been gone a long time.’
An accusing tone she never used. It threw him, and he withdrew the hand that had been covering hers.
‘Got an extra load from Louisville. Couldn’t turn it down. I told you.’
‘We need the money that bad?’
‘Yes.’
She looked down at the table.
‘Sorry.’
His hand was still on the table top. Avoiding his eyes she slid her hand over and laid it on his. Josh reached into the sweatshirt pocket with his free hand, took out the small box and slid it towards her.
‘For you. It’s dumb but it’s for luck.’
She looked up and met his eyes, a smile beginning to ghost in them again.
‘You been screwing someone?’
‘I wish.’
She opened the box, rustled the piece of tissue paper and revealed the dull metal brooch. Her name was etched clearly but unevenly on it, with the E too far from the L and the final T and H crammed so tightly together they were practically one letter, but Elizabeth took the cheap gift from the box as if it were a Fabergé egg.
‘This is beautiful.’
‘It’s just junk. I thought you’d like it.’
‘You thought I’d like junk? That’s what I call romantic.’
She was smiling full on again. For Josh, the brooch had already proved hundreds of times its worth.
‘You like it?’
‘I love it.’
‘Well wear it and things’ll look better tomorrow.’
Her face clouded again and she toyed with the brooch, making a scraping sound on the table as she shifted it around.
‘Maybe.’
Josh held the bridge of his nose between a finger and thumb.
‘What’s the deal here? I’ve been gone longer and you’ve said less.’
‘I had things to talk to you about, that’s all.’
‘Well talk to me now.’
‘It’s too late.’
Josh sighed and bent his head. ‘Shit, Elizabeth. You’re acting like a teenager whose prom date hasn’t shown. I’m kinda tired here.’
She looked at him coldly, stood up, still clutching the brooch in her hand, and walked to the sink to stare out the window.
Josh watched her face as she turned back to him, and saw some kind of battle being fought behind those brown eyes. One of the emotions eventually won and she spoke softly, as if ashamed of its victory.
‘I’m pregnant.’
Josh blinked. He was aware that his heart had picked up its pace, but if that meant more blood was suddenly required and being provided, its rapid distribution seemed to be having little effect on him. It was as though his system had stalled like a smoky engine, leaving him temporarily unable to speak or move. He searched for the kick-start, and when he found it and spoke merely for the sake of speaking, realized that he should have waited.
‘Is it mine?’
Elizabeth’s face, already harder than he had ever seen it, darkened into the suburbs of fury.
‘I’ll give you one chance to take that back.’
He swallowed. ‘Shit, I’m sorry … I mean … Fuck.’
She regarded him with a mixture of contempt and grief. The same eyes that only minutes ago had looked up at him like a lover were now scouring him with acid accusation.
Josh tried again. As he got up to move towards her she made him jump with a sudden violent movement, lifting her arms and waving them in front of her as if to protect herself. He backed off, hands held out in an imploring gesture, and his voice, when it came, was higher than he would have liked.
‘I didn’t mean that. I don’t know why I said it. I’m glad. God, Elizabeth, I’m so glad.’
With those words something happened to Josh Spiller. A happiness that was beyond any he had ever experienced flooded into him and he realized that ‘glad’ was a weak and sickly word to describe the power of his sudden ecstasy.
Elizabeth watched the face of the father of her child as it exploded into rapture, watched his tense muscles melt into a slack, serpentine tangle of joy. Her lip trembled like a child’s as she braced herself. Then she spoke quickly to interrupt the acceleration of his emotion: ‘I’m not keeping it, Josh.’
His imploring arms fell.
‘What?’
‘I don’t have a choice.’
Josh looked at her for a very long time, then turned back to the table and sat down heavily on his chair. He leaned forward and cradled his head in his hands, his hot forehead pointing straight down to the table top.
‘Now hold up. This is going too fast. Talk to me.’
Elizabeth looked down at a hand which had become a fist, and when she opened it to reveal the brooch she had been clutching she could see two clear indentations that the scissors had made in her flesh. She closed her hand.
‘You weren’t here to talk to. I decided on my own. It’s impossible, Josh.’
He looked up from the cradle of his hands.
‘Why? For Christ’s sake we’re doing okay. Aren’t we?’
She swallowed back a sob, barely able to speak.
‘Nope.’
‘What do you mean?’
Elizabeth moved stiffly and rejoined him at the table. She stared into the yellow pine as though the words she was speaking were printed on it.
‘Commitment, Josh. That’s what a baby needs. It’s what I need too and I’ve never had it from you in any shape.’
He opened his mouth to protest but she silenced him with a sorrowful look.
‘I’m not complaining. This is an accident in a relationship that’s doing just fine. But it’s a relationship that can’t handle children.’
She was sounding rehearsed, but seven days to perfect a speech hadn’t been enough to stop it sounding phoney.
‘Welcome to daytime TV, folks.’
The bitterness in Josh’s voice was as alien to him as it sounded to Elizabeth. Any plan she might have had evaporated, and she looked at him like a frightened child.
‘Look at us, Josh. We live together but we’re not married. I see you for two, maybe three days out of every ten. I’ve just started a new business that needs all my time and energy. There’s nothing in this dumb life of ours that’s stable enough to make a good job of growing another human being.’
‘We love each other.’
‘Then why aren’t we married? Why aren’t you at home?’
‘Why aren’t you? Is sewing fucking Batman suits better than staying home and looking after our baby?’
She looked at him coldly. ‘Jesus Christ. You can take the man out of the truck but you can’t take the trucker out of the man. What next, Josh? The chorus of a Red Sovine song?’
He lowered his eyes.
‘I didn’t know you wanted to get married.’
‘You never asked.’
‘What if I asked now?’ His voice had an edge of desperation.
‘It would mean nothing. You wouldn’t be asking for the right reasons.’
There was a pause. A heavy silence that made Josh’s response startling.
‘FUCK!’
He slammed his fist down on the table so hard that Elizabeth leapt in her chair and caught her breath with the fright. Josh was breathing heavily, staring down at his hands, and she spoke softly when her heart had stopped pounding.
‘Next week. Wednesday at three o’clock. It’ll be over.’
He looked up slowly and her grief was almost uncontainable when she saw the film of tears that coated his eyes.
‘Then why even tell me? Does it feel good to give me a few moments of joy and then steal them back again? Huh? Make you feel big? Feel in charge? That what you call love?’
Elizabeth started to cry. Her chest heaved and she bent her head to her chest. Josh watched, wanting instinctively to comfort her but cancelling the order from his brain before it reached his arms.
She sobbed for a few minutes in silence, wiped her arm across her eyes and nose and then faced him again.
‘I told you because I was scared and lost. I always tell you everything.’
He looked at her tragic, puffy face and tried to feel the love for her he knew was there. But the imminent death of his baby, that terrifying appointment, the time already ticking away towards its execution as the baby’s cells split and multiplied inside her, was blocking it like a wall. He spoke quietly and with a malice he never knew he possessed.
‘You didn’t tell me you were a selfish bitch.’
Elizabeth stared at him for a moment, stunned.
‘Damn you to hell.’ She opened her hand and with all the force a close sitting position could afford, threw the brooch at Josh’s face and ran from the house.
As he sat still, listening to her car start and screech hysterically from the drive, Josh fingered the tiny scratch that his gift had inflicted above his eye. He bent to pick up the fallen weapon and closed his hand on the brooch’s innocent form.
There was no question of what action to take. He would do what he always did in a crisis. Josh Spiller got up and went to call his dispatcher.
Time. It was at the core of everything. To buy it. To control it. To comprehend it. And yet still, this night, this eve that had been so long coming, so long anticipated, had now crept up on her like a thief.
As always, she tapped three keys on the keyboard and watched the figures scroll up the screen. She knew what she would see, but it was important to remind herself why.
This was why. The golden, glimmering, shining reason for it all. The dollars, the deutschmarks, the pounds, yen and lire, all flickering before her, lighting her face up with their green glow.
More. The knowledge and power.
But no. She closed her eyes and clenched a fist against it. That thought was forbidden. Vanity was destruction. The power was in the humble and respectful use of the knowledge. And that was why tomorrow was no more and no less than the necessary function that it had always been. The others depended on it. Their world turned on it, because God made it possible. She moved the mouse and closed the file with one diagonal sweep and click, as the sound of soft spring rain tapping at the window won the battle for her attention over the buzzing computer.
And she smiled as she looked up, imagining it soaking new buds on the blanket of trees that separated her from the dull uncomprehending mass of humanity.
It had taken the surly teenagers in the loading bay over an hour to load his trailer. And that was after a two-and-a-half-hour wait in the damp Victorian warehouse. Josh had sat in the drivers’ waiting area, cradling a styrofoam cup of stewed coffee, watching the three bozos wandering around his truck like pimps on a Bronx street. One drove the fork-lift into Josh’s trailer and the others hung around the doors making flipping gestures with their hands and adjusting their baseball caps as they laughed about something secret.
Normally, Josh would have gone out and kicked their butts, but this time he sat immobile behind the glass partition, watching them waste his time. It was a shitty load, some metal packing cases for an industrial ceramics manufacturer in Alabama. No weight in them, so not much pay. But it was all he could get, and Josh would have delivered the Klan’s laundry to South Central LA if he’d been asked. He would have taken anything at all just to turn off and buy his ticket away from home.
There had been two other drivers in the warehouse and, hold the front page, they had been bitching:
‘So I grabs this little jerk by the collar and I says okay man, you want me to load it myself then you gonna have to tell your boss why his lifting gear got all bust up, ’cos I ain’t never used it afore. ’Course I have, but he don’t know that.’
The guy who’d been telling the story was about as big as his truck and the other driver listened without much interest, waiting for his chance to tell a similar triumphant story of how he showed them, and showed them good.
‘Well he calls me everythin’ but a white boy and then I just grabs hold of the controls and lets the whole bunch drop twenty feet onto the deck. Hee hee, did that boy load up like his dick depended on it.’
Josh had let the stream of familiar bullshit wash over him. He was numb. So numb, he’d uncharacteristically ignored both men, walked to the trailer when a nod from one of the rubber-boned kids indicated it was done, barely checked the load or how it was stacked, taken the paperwork and driven off. And now he was sitting upright, staring out of the darkened cab of Jezebel, whose bulk was untidily taking up most of the space in a southbound tourist parking lot on this Virginian interstate. He’d driven for only a couple of hours, but a lapse of concentration that nearly let him trash a guy on a Harley Davidson had made him catch his heart in his mouth and pull over.
It was two a.m. and he could hardly account for the last eight hours since Elizabeth had driven away with her, and his, precious cargo on board. He stared ahead into the dark, sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands resting in his lap like a trauma patient waiting to be seen in an emergency room. Josh wasn’t thinking about what to do. He wasn’t even thinking about Elizabeth and where she might be right now. All that was running through his mind were the words, repeating themselves like a looped tape, ‘How do I feel?’
Soft spring rain started to fall, gradually muting the intermittent roar of the traffic on the adjacent highway. He wound down his window and breathed in a mixture of mown grass, diesel fumes, and the dust raised by the rain from the parking lot’s asphalt. As he tried to take a deeper breath he felt a vice tighten around his chest, a crippling tension which prevented that satisfying lungful of oxygen. The pain came not from the emptiness that was left by that brief and grotesque argument, but from the dual seed of joy and dread that was still germinating in his heart.
Wednesday the seventh of May, three o’clock.
What was it? A boy or a girl? He hadn’t even asked Elizabeth how many weeks old her secret was. A bizarre omission, but more confusing was why he wanted this child so badly. Some of the things Elizabeth had said were true, he knew that. Their life wasn’t exactly an episode of The Waltons, but until last night he’d thought it was safe and stable. It was an adult life, where two self-contained people did what they pleased and came together when they wanted. He’d never even considered how or why that might change. Never considered a third person entering the frame.
The fresh air stirred him from his miserable torpor and Josh got up, absently pulling the drapes around the inside of the windshield. He climbed back into the sleeper and lay down on the mattress with his hands behind his head.
As he lay there, staring up at the quilted velour ceiling, he allowed himself to think of her, of Elizabeth; that funny, sometimes brittle person who even in her hardest moments could be melted like butter over a stove with a kind word or gentle touch.
It was like her to carry the burden of her news silently, but it was unlike her to taunt him by telling him it was over before it began. Perhaps he didn’t know Elizabeth at all. Who was that terrible mixture of defiant accusation and self-pitying grief? And who had he been, to call her what he did and withdraw the support he’d always given unthinkingly and unconditionally?
Josh screwed his eyes tight, trying fruitlessly to squeeze the scene into oblivion with the puny muscles of his eyelids.
Which coupling had done it, he wondered? Last week? The week before?
When?
Outside, a car pulled up in the lot and Josh opened his eyes to listen to the familiar human noises of a man and a woman as they left their vehicle to go and use the rest-rooms.
They chatted in low voices, in that comfortable intimate way that meant they were saying nothing in particular to each other, but were enjoying saying it. An occasional short laugh broke the flow of their small talk as they slammed their car door shut and their footsteps receded towards the rest-rooms. Josh realized he was listening to this most mundane collection of sounds with his teeth clenched and his eyes narrowed, the invisible couple’s easy happiness an unbearable affront.
He lay there for a very long time, and as time ticked away, bringing neither sleep nor solution, he was aware of its swift relentless passing for probably the first time in his life.
Dawn on the first of May was less beautiful than the one Josh had tried to savour yesterday. Low clouds masked the sun’s coming and a thin grey light was all that announced the day. He had lain sleeplessly in the same position all night, eyes staring up into the dark as he alternated between thinking and hurting, and now he wanted to move. The load was already late. The paperwork promised the packing cases would be in Alabama sometime tonight, but they wouldn’t be.
Josh crawled from his bunk into the cab, opened the door on the new day and went to wet the wheels. As he stood, legs apart, urinating on his truck in some unconsciously atavistic ritual, he reconfirmed with himself that the best cure for any form of unhappiness was perpetual motion. Driving let him escape. It allowed him time completely on his own and freedom from responsibility. It had certainly saved his sanity when his mother died, that hellish two weeks after her funeral, when Josh knew he would never again have the chance to say the things to her he’d rehearsed so many times alone in his cab. He’d left his morose brother Dean at their empty home to go through their mother’s pathetically few things, accepted a load to Seattle, and pushed the thought of his loss out with the opening of his log book.
He recalled seeing his brother’s grief-torn face accusing him through the dirty upstairs window as he drove off, and it had chipped at something hard inside that Josh thought had been impermeable. Five hours later he’d put the whole thing out of his mind. Dean had never really forgiven him for that act of abandonment. But he didn’t understand. No one but another trucker would.
Josh finished his task, did up his pants, then leaned forward to rest his forehead against the side of his trailer and punch its aluminium flank with the side of a fist.
‘Fuck ’em all, Jez. Fuck every last one.’