CHAPTER SIXTEEN Memories of a Female Trucker
Delores: Mother leaves Father five times. This time when Mother leaves Father, she takes a train; we three girls and, of course, the maid Always Liza, are on the train with her. The train stops outside Phoenix. I have never seen windmills until Arizona. Windmills circle and circle. Pull the water right out of earth, send it splashing in a silver tub and cows lie on the ground around them. There is so much sun. You can never get away from the sun. Sun is a tidal wave. Mother buys a Model T. I know why she does it. I know she does it because Father only has Cadillacs. For a few weeks in Arizona, Mother does not drink. Mother and Always Liza put a cot out for my younger sister, Clarese, to lie on between the laundry lines. There is some shade between the laundry lines especially next to the sheets. The sheets ruffle in the breeze but when the wind picks up, they snap. Always Liza and Mother say that Clarese is breathing better but I have never seen Clarese have trouble breathing. Within the first two weeks Mother has stopped cooking, tossing salads and layering scalloped potatoes. She is drinking again. Always Liza cooks now. Mother’s new friend, Captain Jack, picks Mother up at our house that has linoleum floors and I watch in the window for her to come home. Her hat is crooked like Charlie Chaplin. Tonight she has forgotten about the ditch that runs water to the cows. She gets out of Captain Jack’s car, hat tilted. She starts walking like she knows what she is doing, like she is a normal mother, and just like that, there she is, down, and there is water splashing high into the air. Captain Jack is rushing out of the car. He is reaching out his hand. He pulls her out of the ditch. I cannot believe it but there she is, up again, as if she knows what she is doing, except now she is dripping water. There is water running down her arms and streaming off her skirt. Maybe I will never stop laughing. Right now, I do not miss Father.
Emil is talking on the CB while we are driving east on I-80 in Wyoming. The only people crazy enough to be out in a blizzard this late at night are other truck drivers like us. I am looking out the side window at the night where the hunched figures of witches gather in clouds of snow.
: Blizzard. Filings fly. Magnet. Bend bony, flourish up, breath of gale. Suck a straw. Draw them in, cough them out. Scatter sky.
The big trucks are the casualties. We pass one that must have made a jump for it, landed clean on the other side of the ditch, then went ahead and rolled. Look at it dying on its back, all eighteen wheels in the air, broken at the neck. Soon all that’s left, nothing but colossal ribs. Big trucks and dinosaurs, vanishing breeds.
Emil and I are bosom buddies in winter whether we like it or not. Truck driving through winter, it splits you off from the main stream. You’re a backwater tributary. Winter seals you over. Winter, you don’t look far ahead, just hope to stay upright into the next hour. You stop hoping. In the morning you try to stay asleep. You try not to move. You start thinking you like the dark. Maybe you’re invisible.
Even after the frost leaves the ground it takes more time for truck drivers to thaw. You try to look somebody in the eye, open your mouth for something nice, but you already forgot what to say and it’s too much work anyway. Some drivers stay freeze dried forever. And who knows? It could just as soon start snowing again.
February, you hoist your chains on then power them off simply to heave them back on for the next hill.
Emil only talks on the CB in bad weather. Voices are hushed. Drivers sit by themselves staring out the black windshield with nothing but the dash lights and their CB radio to keep them company. It’s the only time they carry on long conversations within semi-trucks, just as long as it keeps snowing. Men. They use the kind of voice they use to seduce women, hushed, focused, with a reverb of electricity. With a spark of danger, grown men put down all the bullshit, weeks on end, and there’s the need to stretch head to toe with the heat of a woman’s body or at least a full-on radiator. Even now, I’ll stay up to listen to these male voices over the radio. They curl around the heart of the matter while trying to keep all eighteen wheels on top of a winter road crowded with snow witches in the middle of the mountains of Wyoming.
The green light above Emil’s head blinks on and off as he clicks his microphone talking to the kid. I can only hear the kid coming through the speaker above Emil’s head. Emil’s deep voice is silenced by the engine. I can tell the kid is young but his voice is filled with the deadly seriousness of winter driving seduction. The kid’s voice hesitates then picks up speed, rushes across static then fizzles out again. The kid keeps talking about taking control of life. He just needs to get control of his life. In these pauses, winter scratching the window glass on the other side of my door, I tune in to the other voices that still haunt me. They’re nothing like the CB voices. There is no static. They are always pin-prick sharp. Oddly it is not the voices inside my head that I will always carry with me. The voices that never leave are those thrust in childhood, from the inside out and the outside in. They come out of my past. The voices are from the Big House. The danger of winter rising is flimsy compared to out-foxing psychiatrists buttoned into suits and ties, banded by thick framed glasses. It is the powerlessness that pulls me under.
Are there voices inside your head? The psychiatrist at the Big House has horn-rim glasses. His hair is cut closer than a short haired, orange cat. His suit is charcoal. And I do not know enough yet to realize this is a centennial question and to step aside. And really, where does he hear his own voices? Aren’t they inside his head? Voices synchronize inside your skull. Skulls are exquisite echo chambers. They resonate. There are questions I do not ask, and at fourteen I never force more words than necessary outside of my head. I want to ask him to tell me about the voices inside his head. He picks up his wooden pipe from the side table. Looking over the top of his glasses he pokes the bowl with his finger. He thinks he is so smart.
He wants me to tell him about Soprano. Everyone wants me to tell them about Soprano who is not a voice because he never talks. I have never heard Soprano say one word. Soprano comes whole. He moves within my mind at his own bidding. He sits on a box and peels off artichoke leaves, just drops them one after the other. Soprano doesn’t eat. He is opaque and sits on a crate. He only watches. He watches everything and he knows what to do but he never talks. I have a feeling that he is the conductor, Soprano orchestrates but there’s no way to ask him anything. This psychiatrist has been trying to catch Soprano for five months now. When I turn my head, at first the office window glass reflects just me.
My hair has waves. I hate waves. The ends of my hair do not hang straight. I reach up, pull an end in front of my face and search for the bubble in the brown shaft. When I find it I pull from both sides and it pops apart. I throw the piece on the floor and look out the window.
Outside the window are dark skinned tree branches. In the morning they were coated in ice, branches clink together. Now, they are simple brown skin with a deeper hue of red.
I hear the trees, I say to the psychiatrist.
Before I was caught in this Big House made of stone, filled with crazy kids like me, I’d sneak out in the middle of the night to be with trees. At home, I crept, each footfall on top of the notes of my father’s snore, stepping forward on the growled exhalations.
My mother sleeps on her back right up against my father. She sleeps there all relaxed because she thinks my father wakes up at every little sound. I know she is sleeping on her back and wearing a thin cotton nightgown, almost sleeveless except for a tiny ruffle. You don’t need to be scared, she presses her lips together. My mother tells me she stopped being scared because my father hears everything. My mother frowns at me and the skin between her eyebrows creases.
My mother is a warren of make-believe. If you try to tell her something different you might as well put a dagger in her hand. If you threaten her, my mother will turn on you. To stay safe she will jettison anybody. Don’t think she won’t. My mother is brilliant, her words are honed.
My mother has it in her to drop me off at the front door of the Big House for what will end up being the next three years. Starting in 1965, my parents sign a yearly contract. They give up authority. My mother wears a pink shift and white tennis shoes for this occasion. I understand that my mother is afraid. She doesn’t know what to do, what the right thing is. What my mother says is, This is the laziest you’ll ever get to be. I never got to be so lazy as you will be now. You better appreciate it. That night they start giving me the pills. I spend a lot of time sitting, drugged, wondering how I got to this place and if I’ll ever get to leave.
But before this, while I’m still thirteen living in my parents house, almost every night I sneak out. The most my father ever does is snuffle. Before I know it, I am out the glass slider and the night rises up and spreads itself across the dew on the grass. My bare feet wriggle like worms in the humidity. At first I just sit on the driveway wall and pull a cigarette from the front pocket of my shirt, light it from cupped hands. Winston. Soprano walks forward, white as cotton, sheer as silk, sits on his crate and looks out from my eyes.
This is the summer I am thirteen.
And already I have learned not to smoke from the middle of my mouth. Harry told me that was wrong. Smoke off-center. Be careful not to wet the filter with your saliva. When you flick ashes, flick the ashes up, not down, with your finger. Harry tells me a lot at night but during the day he pretends he doesn’t know me.
This night my dad is asleep upstairs, snoring through the open window. I smoke deep until I am more dizzy than nauseous. This night is so silent, no car doors slam. No laughter flows out of a screen door. I walk across the road and into the edge of the woods. I pass between the trunks of two trees and am no longer visible. These trunks are gnarled and thicker than I am. The trees flow their branches out sideways and wish them up skyward.
Trees don’t notice me more than they would a box turtle. The trees breathe for each other. They are endless, whispering to each other. Do I understand the words?
Are you hearing voices now? The psychiatrist asks.
I thickly turn my head, the strain of effort clutters my peripheral vision. There sits that psychiatrist with his cold pipe. To be with him here, in this room, the effort hurts. Does he think I’m in the woods, that the trees are speaking? No, I am in this awful place. There’s a different color pill for morning, noon and night. The pills suck my mouth dry. My mouth does not want to talk to him. If I did, I would say, Look where I am. There’s no one ever saying anything here. My eyes are on his and his are no more alive than the buttons covered by his navy blue tie. The buttons and the psychiatrist, they are both camouflaged and they are dead. I am in an office where even in the middle of the day, electric lights are burning.
What are you hearing, he holds a match again to the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe and sucks the flame.
I could tell him that the trees speak another language, that it enters my skin like the distillation of jasmine wrapped against skin or what raises hair on the back of your neck when you step too close to a growling dog. But right now my words are far off, they have been swallowed while I stared through the glass at the veins of the dark branches.
He says, what you’re hearing is all inside your head. You know that don’t you? It isn’t real. The psychiatrist seeps the smoke from his mouth. It is another sign of your sickness. You are the sickest girl here he says. You may never get out. He says this twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays before the weekend. There is nothing for me to say. But if it were night, me standing between the trunks with my bare feet planted in last year’s leaves and the leaves of all the years that came before that, where the worms tuck away at the past dead, I would say inside my own mind, I know what the trees are saying.
I do not shift my head because it is too heavy, too much work and I am getting so tired. I only shift my eyes so the psychiatrist does not jam my peripheral vision. I stare at the blank wall and fill my head with piano notes. Yes, I finally say. Yes, of course I know that.
There is still a chance you may get better, his voice comes from out of sight. We are starting to work together now.
I do not say that outside my parents’ home in the night, in the shallow parts of the woods, I walk with bare feet. I hear the whine of a car as it shifts uphill, climbs Turkey Mountain. I hear the pitch of the engine when it makes the last bend and now is in line with me. When the first beam of headlights soar over a crest, I turn and dash like a deer through the trees. Surrounded by trunks I hold still, knowing I am now another trunk. I am invisible. Eyes shut, the whispers are so loud in this circle, I cannot hear my own breathing and I cannot move. For how long? Who knows.
What startles me is the sound of sports cars. They are beneath, down by the lake, just passing the country club. They are fast, winding up, shifting down. One follows the other as I follow them both in my mind along the lake road. I hear the dullness in pitch as they turn at the far end but they do not stop and the road at that part of the lake is not long. I hear them slow for the unpaved lane, where the clearance is narrow, and then they stop. I hear the car doors slam. Harry is home.
I head downhill on the road. The woods are on my right willing to take me back. The tar is warm under the soles of my feet. I tie the white shirttails of my button-down shirt around my waist, just above my bone-colored cut-offs. The threaded fringe tickles my white legs that never see the daylight. Two miles along I finally reach the gravel lane. It pricks my feet so I walk closer to the edge. Pine trees grow on this knob and leave a soft path. I hear the stream that is in Harry’s yard. The house is dark. The Austin Healy, the MG, their engines warm, still ping. The house is dead but Harry’s window is open. When I get to the window, I call out and he hears me. His face appears then disappears. The TV is on in the room.
Johnny Carson and Jacqueline Susann talk about virgins. Can you ever really respect a woman who is not a virgin? Johnny asks. Can you ever really trust her? He looks pointedly at the camera and keeps asking. At the end of five minutes he’s still asking. His face sucks itself down when Harry turns the dial and the TV sucks itself into a dot and shuts off.
Harry bends his long frame through the open window. With a hop he is on the ground. He stands up straight and I love him. I mean, I wish his skin was better. He’s always got at least two giant pimples but his eyes are so blue and he must have the thinnest nose, a bump, a hint of danger. He has two beers in one hand and pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his navy blue peacoat pocket. I watch him shake two cigarettes free and put both tips in his mouth. He does a thing with the book of matches, bends it to his fingers, and one of the matches lights. I know I will never be this sophisticated. Handing me a cigarette we start back on the gravel lane.
We don’t talk until we get past the neighbor’s house. I was at a party, he says.
I heard you come home, I say.
Where were you?
I was outside my house, I answer.
You can’t have heard me from there. Sometimes little shivers pass from his head down his back and his teeth click together.
I guess I heard something.
Anyway. Hunter got really drunk. He was yelling. Harry’s teeth click together. I am wondering if he’s thinking I’m not a virgin. Hunter was yelling and Rex and Roy and some other guys kept saying: Punch him Harry, you have to shut him up. Go ahead and punch him one.
If I never have sex with anyone else but Harry, then can Harry respect me?
So I did, Harry says. The hand that flicks the cigarette from underneath is shaking. I punched my brother, he says.
I can see all those boys. I can see tall Harry, with dirty blond hair, blue eyes. His brother, Hunter, has black hair that falls forward, eyes as big as coal. There’s a ring of boys, bright eyes in the background. There are empty beer cans lying on the grass. The house behind, where the parents are gone, rises with lit windows like rows of yellow teeth. Harry swings his arm back and then it rushes forward of its own accord toward Hunter. Hunter is yelling out, staggering around in a little circle. His voice is hoarse from shouting. He doesn’t expect Harry’s fist to come rushing through the dark at him. When it slams into the soft pink of his lips, he stumbles. His lip is bleeding.
There is a place in my stomach that tingles and tightens. I wouldn’t have minded being there. I wish I had seen the expression on Hunter’s face and on Harry’s. This is something that I will never get a chance to see now.
Why did I do that? Harry asks. I never should have done it. Harry’s voice is always deep but now it is deeper. Harry really isn’t talking to me but he says, you should have seen Hunter’s face. Hunter looked right at me, Harry says.
I should have been there. I want to scream at Harry but how can I see these things when I am never invited to parties? I want to hit him with my own fists but Harry is my only friend. Sometimes kids drive by my house just to stare at me. Two weeks ago Vic stopped his car to talk to me where I was standing by the rock circle. He locked his car doors before he spoke. I don’t say anything mean to Harry.
We turn onto the path into the woods, mostly evergreens that sigh in the breeze. The stream is loud in the dark. Up above is the flat place where I come alone to build a fire and roast hot dogs on a stick. Harry stops short, just far enough not to see the road.
He spreads his peacoat on the dirt and sits shivering. I sit next to him and we each drink out of the Colt 45 cans. When we’re finished he leans over and kisses me. I come here for the kisses too. They fill my mouth. These kisses are better than cupcakes. They are better than cream filled éclairs. I press into them. I come for the hands on my back but that’s not where the hands stay. The buttons, the bra hook, the button at the top of my levis. My clothes pile up. When Harry gets his clothes off I watch him rip the foil, rubber-wrapper between his crooked teeth. I watch him do something with his fingers and his one hand like a magician. This is another trick I will never know. He rolls on top of me and there is a burning in my crotch so I look at the trees, the branches and even at night the sky, which is lighter than the ground. It is like swimming deep under water and as you rise everything gets lighter, then you are out, on top.
Harry lies still for a minute.
You have a misplaced sense of superiority, the psychiatrist adjusts his dark rimmed glasses. It’s called paranoia. It’s an odd thing; even though you think the whole world is against you, you have this misplaced feeling of superiority.
I can hear the psychiatrist’s voice but I will not directly look at him. It is better if he is disembodied.
Emil and I are also disembodied in the Big Truck, our speed has dropped down to forty but the green light is blinking and the kid’s voice comes through above Emil’s head. I know the kid is traveling in the same direction or we would have lost his voice miles back.
“And I’m not there for my kids. I got two kids,” the kid is saying. “I got a dog. Sometimes I think I’m just traveling on a one-way street.”
This kid and Emil, men who felt they never had options. Maybe even Harry didn’t feel like he had choices. The word option is one Emil learned from me since we moved into the truck together. It’s a funny word and he does not mouth it himself. For Emil, options don’t spring to mind. He thinks they only come as part of some kind of argument.
I make sure to have options, always.
“I know I’m kind of old. I’m not a kid anymore,” the kid says. “Well, I’ll just say I’m twenty-seven. I’m missing so much, there’s already too much I’ve missed.”
I think how long it is stringing a whole life together.
“When I was a kid,” the kid says, “I thought things would be different. I never pictured being out here in Wyoming the middle of winter.” His sigh echoes the wind and then the wind picks up. “Man this is the shits. I’m gonna find me a place to pull over before I get myself killed out here.”
The wind has turned into a wall. There are long pauses on the CB. Either no one is left or they’ve all fallen silent. The wind barrels off the mountains, scours the flat land, jumps the snow fence without even an indrawn breath and double fists itself into the truck. A curtain of snow rips between the windshield and the interstate. The truck crawls itself back into a straight line between punches.
Emil’s not talking at all. Maybe inside his mind he is mapping every truck stop, rest area, abandoned weigh station. But it’s not that kind of night and we’re not going to make it to some big parking lot with hot showers and flush toilets. Somehow Emil picks out a widening in the shoulder of the road. We ease our way, waiting for the fall, tires dipping, the truck leaning into what looked like hard surface or just another apparition. But the ground holds even as the wind slams into us like a bucking animal. Witches rise up around us. They lengthen and twist themselves until we are completely circled.
“I wonder if we’ll get rear ended. Nobody can see us over here,” I say.
“My guess is they’ll shut down the interstate any minute.” Emil stands to pee in his bottle, one hand holds the rail and even then he is swaying with the truck. He struggles to take the dogs out, using the side of the truck as a wind block. I flick the lights down to park and then I reach up and turn off the CB. Night brushes up against me as I pull my shirt off. Night whispers tighten my nipples. Both Emil and the night will sleep next to me, side by side.
