“Truck Driver” by Drew Patton

I’ve been driving a long time, hauling this and that. I know the country well, and I like the feeling of drifting over vast distances. I’m an aimless listless sort, the kind of man who might just as well be found anywhere in the world as at home. My brother and I bought the truck when I dropped out of school. He’s the dispatch and I’m the driver, and I’ve been all over with his voice in my ear.

            I’m bringing Cleveland lumber to Odessa, then I’m bringing Odessa steel to Nogales. After that, I don’t know where I’m going but I hope it’s on the north-track heading homebound. Home is a small town in Michigan. A woman that loves me lives there. I met her on the road in the back corner of a restaurant that closed a long time ago. I told her I loved her and I married her, and marriage is a tricky thing for us. Back then, she told me I was too handsome to be doing what I do, and I told her she was too beautiful to work in a place like that. We don’t say things like that anymore, but we have a kid named Susie and the love is still there for the sake of her.

            I ate lunch an hour ago but I’ll be passing through St. Louis before too long. There’s a smokehouse on the border of country and city that serves good ribs and corn on the cob seared by fire. The ribs are smoked for half a day in a row of smokers that you can see working from two blocks down the road. They’re the kind of ribs you eat even when you’ve already had your lunch. They’re thicker than a regular cut, and the smell of the house-sauce hits my nose when I’m crossing the parking lot. To pass them up seems like a missed life experience of great importance, so I never pass them up.

I never gave much thought to my relationship with food until someone told me I have a relationship with food and it’s not so good. The person that said it was a skinny guy eating a burrito outside of Tucson. I was hauling steel coils, and he was sweating from a run he just went on. He was the sort to talk to anyone within earshot because every thought he had was important and he needed someone else to know about it.

            “You’ve got to earn the burrito,” he said, nodding at me and my meal. “And you’ve got to have a plan for every calorie you take in. Otherwise, you’re just stuffing your skin with layers of fat that’ll never burn off.”

            I told him to leave me alone and went back to my truck. But I felt the burrito like a brick in my gut for the whole day after.

            So I started thinking about my fat layers and the food I stuff into them, but what’s the harm in an extra burger every now and then? Or an occasional stop for St. Louis ribs between lunch and dinner? Still, I’m fatter than what I used to be. My skin is stretched on the sides and I feel silly and ashamed when I wrangle my belt around my gut and can’t find the buckle beneath my stomach. My brother’s thinner but he’s a smoker. Sometimes he has coughing fits through the dispatch radio that last so long I tell him to call back when he’s finished and cut the transmission. He gave an earnest go at quitting some years ago, when we were younger men that still talked about the business like it was a blank canvas waiting for our paint to fill in. He made it a couple months and I thought he’d done it. Then he started up again, and he quit four more times since but meant it less each time.

            When the ribs are through, I’m back in the driver’s seat. I’ll eat dinner and sleep outside of Tulsa. Oklahoma’s a strange part of the country to drive through. The trees get shorter and the grass gets higher, like a state of suspension hung between desert and forest, the transformative crossroads between where one’s from and where one’s going. I’ve been to the Tulsa stop plenty of times. There’s a diner within walking distance that has big bowls of chili and beer by the pitcher. A couple of women like to hang out there and talk. I don’t talk back until there’s a whole pitcher in me. Then I say too much. This time, one of the women is just a girl, but she’s sitting real close to me and talking about pills.

            “You’ve got uppers, right?” she asks. She’s taking sips from my beer and her eyes are big and pretty. “I heard all you guys have uppers. We can hang out for a while, if you’ve got some.”

            “You eighteen?” I ask. I’m drunk and she’s beautiful in a way that makes it feel wrong to look at her.

            “Sure I am,” she replies. She has a hand on my hand and is leaning in close enough for me to smell her breath. It smells like strawberry candy.

            Susie’s halfway through high school and well old enough to know to be embarrassed by my profession. When she was little, she and my wife would call me every night on the road, and we’d make pretend that I was some adventurer exploring far off places. She learned the word ‘nomad’ when she was seven, and she told everybody she met that her dad was just that. She still loves me, sure, but they don’t call so much and she never calls me a nomad anymore. And long days do bring a bite of loneliness. I drink another pitcher and stumble back to my truck with the girl. We climb into the front seat and she runs a hand up my leg. Next to her, my drunk body feels massive and misshapen, like we’re of a different species and I’m some animalistic monster threatening to consume her. A girl like her would never touch a thing like me for free, and she holds out a hand for the pills. I reach into the back of the cab and grab the DVD case that acts as a hiding spot. There’s three separate bags of white pills–I give her one.

            “Speed,” I say. “All I have.”

            My wife was years older than this girl when we met, but she was much the same way. I’d never been with someone who treated the act like a business, and I didn’t know what to do when she pulled me into a bedroom-furnished shed a block from the restaurant and told me to get naked. So I told her I loved her. She laughed at me, but I came back that way four more times in a month, sometimes diverting the route by a couple hundred miles to see her. We started talking more than doing the other thing, and soon I really was in love with her. And she was in love with me. The girl with me now has a tattoo of a cartoon character I don’t recognize on her shoulder, and she’s trying to kiss my neck. She’s small and wiry and I think the wrong move would break her.

            “Get off,” I say, pushing her away. “We don’t have to. You can keep the pills.”

            She’s heard it before, I can tell by her face–other men that ran into a crisis of conscience when faced with her willing youth. She holds up a phone screen open to a social media page.

            “Follow me at least?” she asks. “I’m building a business.”

            “Best not,” I reply. “My wife would see it. What’s the business?”

            She lifts her shirt and flashes me.

            “You’re looking at it!” she says before climbing out of the truck to skip back in the direction of the diner.

            Early the next morning I’m hurtling towards Odessa. A breakfast of eggs and country fried steak from the diner sits in my stomach, building on the fat layers. I wake myself up with black coffee and uppers. Oklahoma becomes Texas and the lands are big and empty around me. A woman in Boston once told me I was depressed and I didn’t put too much stock in it because people like to say that sort of thing to all sorts of people. And she didn’t know me except for seeing how I drank my pop and ate my lobster roll. It was a cloudy day.

            “You look like you’ve got a rain cloud following you,” she said, taking a seat next to me.

            “It’s a rainy day,” I replied. “Clouds are following all of us. I’m just tired is all.”

            “Maybe you’re depressed,” she said. “You know, eating like that can be a sign of it. Eating your emotions and all that.”

            “I’m just eating a lobster roll,” I said.

            “But you look so sad doing it,” she said. “Lobster rolls should make you happy. If not, if you’re sad while eating one, you’re probably depressed.”

            I told her I preferred to eat alone and hurried out of the restaurant to finish delivering the concrete I was hauling. She made me think about my fat layers more and what might be going into them. Like depression. But I never gave much thought to my own dying, nor have I ever felt the inclination to bring it about sooner than nature’s intent. The Llano Estacado has so much sky to drift under. And it looks heavy, like the gravity that holds me to the earth might fail anytime and I’ll find myself sinking into an upside-down, perfectly blue ocean. I stop for lunch at a steakhouse that sells $9.99 ribeyes and take a to-go basket of fries and buttered rolls. When the day is hottest, I reach Odessa and drop off the lumber and pick up the steel.

My wife likes to talk about the ‘what if’s’ of winning the lottery. She says we’d be able to do this or that, and we’d live somewhere nice that I’ve never driven through. She says she’s got an image in her head of some perfect day when we forget about trouble or work, and Susie’s there sitting between us talking about a perfect future and everything the girl dreams up feels possible. A few months back, my brother brought up the prospect of retiring. He said we needed a game plan and the will to execute.

“Seventeen more years,” he said. “We do that and sock away 10 percent, we’ll be in good shape. Hell, we’ll be in great shape.”

“I could go longer,” I replied. “If we needed to. I haven’t given too much consideration towards anything else.”

“Seventeen years is plenty long enough,” he said. “Especially when sitting on twenty-four. Why would you want to keep going? You can do whatever you want when we retire.”

“There’s an old cafe in Las Cruces,” I said. “Another driver told me it was the best Mexican this side up. I want to go there.”

I reach Las Cruces as the sun is setting and park for the night. I make my way to the old cafe and order a plate of chile rellenos and beef tacos with a bowl of menudo. Then I drink cerveza by the bottle until I’m drunk. When the cafe closes, I walk back to the truck stop. I feel every step bounce through my full belly, and my back hurts like I’m in a constant state of dragging a weight I can hardly bear. I strip to shower and my flesh rolls out of my shirt and pants in waves. I don’t like what I see in the mirror, the man so ill-fitting to any perfect image of a perfect day and a perfect future. I’ve never been one for modeling, but I used to be handsome enough. Now I think I look like a trucker.

Early the next morning I fly the desert to Nogales. I can’t see the sun coming up over the east except for quick glimpses in my mirrors, but the shadows in the west flee before me as if I’m hauling the dawn on top of racks of steel. It’s a short drive and my brother calls when I’m an hour out.

“Got one for you,” he says. “Homebound, headed to Detroit from Nogales. Car parts. I’ll send over the addresses.”

Arizona is hot and dusty, and Nogales is clogged with northbound and southbound nomads. There’s plenty of good eats around the city, but I choose fast food and eat two breakfast burgers and a basket of tater tots while waiting in line to drop off the steel. It’s a construction site and there’s a hundred other trucks and drivers waiting with me. So many of them look so much like me. When I was a young man on my first route, an old driver sat next to me at a stop near Cleveland and offered some advice. He was hauling the big blades of a wind turbine.

“You’ve got to keep moving,” he said. “Or you’ve got to quit now. Folks like us, when we build up that momentum with so many thousands of pounds behind us, there’s no stopping. Otherwise, the weight of it’ll crush you.”

“We put in a bulkhead,” I replied. “Nothing’s crushing me.”

“I’ll buy you a beer,” the old driver said. “You’ll get it when you’re drunk.”

We drank until we were drunk. The old driver was fat and tattooed to completion. I looked nothing like him. We passed out beside each other and when I woke up the next morning, he was gone, and I was hungover. My head hurt and my vision tilted, and I had a thousand miles to drive. I started to get it. Two hours pass in Nogales and I drop the steel off before picking up the car parts from a factory down the road just before noon. I drive back up the same highway I came down and aim to make it to Texas before nightfall. Now it’s the setting sun on my back, and I drive towards the abyssal horizon that blends the earth with the night sky. The evening has me tired so I take uppers to keep going.

I stop in Amarillo to eat at a famous steakhouse. I order a pound slab of New York strip with a side of chili con carne and a pitcher of beer. The night is black outside and I consider staying in Amarillo until morning. Susie calls halfway through my meal. She says hello and that her uncle said I’d be back soon.

“Will you be here for dinner tomorrow?” she asks. “Mom’s teaching me how to make a Mississippi pot roast.”

There’s nineteen hours of driving between me and them, and I still have to drop off the parts in Detroit.

“I’m not sure I’ll make it this time,” I reply. “I’m a ways out, but I’ll be there Thursday if you have leftovers.”

She says she understands and we say our goodbyes and I love yous. I get back in the truck and decide to keep driving. It’s too dark to make out any of the landscape and I feel like I’ve been set adrift on some endless, formless sea. I drive until it’s late and my eyes are heavy and the dirt lining the road gives way to grass and trees. I pass Tulsa and I see the truck stop and the diner and the women waiting and I keep driving. I feel a momentum urging me onward, like there’s a strong current beneath my tires dragging me over the land. I stop for coffee in Springfield and take three more pills to push it to morning and I keep driving. I drive through St. Louis at dawn and I see the smokehouse and the cooks loading up the ribs into their rows of smokers and I keep driving. The morning sun is orange and big and lights up my face as I travel eastward, leaving the night behind. There’s a hollow feeling that sometimes shows up at the earliest parts of the day, when I’m too tired to differentiate between myself and the truck. It’s like the fat layers are gone and I’m weightless, flying across the long land without a body or even a mind. I don’t think about food or drink or sleep, just the road passing under me. I cut clear across Illinois and into Indiana and pass Indianapolis and I keep driving. In the early afternoon I come into Michigan and drop off the parts in Detroit and I keep driving. There’s a hot dog place nearby that I’ve loved for a long time, longer than I’ve owned the truck. They spice their chili sauce with a secret blend and make their own mustard, and they only charge a buck a dog. Susie will get out of school soon and come home expecting one parent. But I keep driving, and I skip lunch to make it back in time for dinner.

---