Muriel Gray - Furnace

Far down the road to his right, Josh could make out the entrance to a mini-mall, fronted by an open foodstore. That’s where he would head and take his chance, since the parking in front of the store looked sufficiently generous to accommodate the truck.

As he gazed along the long wide road, waiting for the lights to change, the vibration of the idling engine combined with the pale early morning sun shining into his face suddenly made Josh ache to close his heavy eyes. He fought it, but his eyes won.

It must have been only seconds, but when he awoke with a neck-wrenching upward jerk of the head, the fact he’d fallen asleep made Josh pant with momentary panic. He ran a hand over his face. This wasn’t like him. It had been years since he’d allowed himself to become so tired while driving that he could lose it like that. In the past, sure, he’d pushed it. But not now. Once, back in those days when he’d try anything once, he’d driven so long he’d done what every trucker dreads. He’d fallen asleep with his eyes open. After a split-second dream, something crazy about shining golden dogs, Josh had woken suddenly to find the truck already bouncing over the grass verge. He vowed then he’d never do it again. Yet here he was, thirty-six hours since sleep, still driving. He had to stop and get some rest. No question. But first he wanted to eat.

Above him, the bobbing lights had been giving their green permission for several seconds, and he shook his head vigorously to rid himself of fatigue while he turned Jezebel into the street at a stately ten miles an hour. As he straightened up and moved down the road, a car trying unsuccessfully to park pushed its backside out into the road at a crazy angle and forced him to stop. He sighed and leaned forward on the wheel again while the jerk took his time shifting back and forward as if the space was a ball-hair’s width instead of being at least a car-and-a-half-length long. The old fool behind the wheel stuck an appreciative liver-spotted hand out the window to thank Josh for his patience, and continued to manoeuvre his car in and out at such ridiculously tortuous angles it was as though he was attempting to draw some complex, imaginary picture on the asphalt. Josh raised a weary hand in response and muttered through a phoney smile, ‘Come on, you donkey’s tit.’

He sighed and let his eye wander ahead to the foodstore, allowing himself to visualize a hot blueberry muffin and steaming coffee.

Across the street, a woman was walking towards the mall, struggling with a toddler and pushing a stroller in front of her that contained a tiny baby. It must have been only days old. Josh swallowed. He could see the little creature’s bald head propped forward in the stroller, a striped canvas affair, presumably the property of its sibling and way too large for its new occupant. The baby was held level in this unsuitable vehicle with a piece of sheepskin which framed its tiny round face like some outlandish wig.

With the sight of that impossibly small creature, it was back; the longing, the hurt, the confusion that Elizabeth had detonated in him.

He found himself watching like some hungry lion from long grass as the woman kicked on the brakes of the stroller, abandoned the baby on the sunny sidewalk and dragged her toddler into the store. The tiny bundle moved like an inexpertly handled puppet in its upright canvas seat, its little arms flailing and thrashing as two stick-thin legs paddled in an invisible current. Josh ran a hand over his unshaved chin, and covered his mouth with his hand.

Would his baby be kicking like that little thing, right now, inside Elizabeth? When did all that stuff happen? A month? Two months? Six? He knew nothing about it.

Elizabeth. His mouth dried. Elizabeth, his love. Where the hell was she?

He closed his gritty eyes for a moment and the shame of what he had done overwhelmed him, making him light-headed with the sudden panic of regret. Opening his eyes again, he looked towards the infant. There was now a different woman standing behind it, both hands on the plastic grips of the stroller.

Older than the mother, possibly in her fifties, she was dressed in a garish pink linen suit that, although formal and angular in its cut, seemed designed for a far younger woman.

Her hair was red, obviously dyed, and even from this distance Josh decided she was wearing too much make-up; a red gash for a mouth, arching eyebrows drawn in above deeply-set eyes.

He had seen plenty of women like that at the big Midwest truck shows, hanging on the arm of their company-owning husbands; women who spent money tastelessly as though the spending of it was inconvenient and tiresome but part of a dutiful bargain that had been struck.

Josh would barely have glanced at such a woman had he seen one sipping sparkling wine in a hospitality marquee, while her husband ignored her to do business with grim-faced truckers.

But here, standing outside a foodstore in this rural nowhere at seven o’clock on a spring morning, she looked remarkably out of place.

More than that. The most extraordinary thing about her was that she was staring directly and with alarming intensity at Josh. It wasn’t the annoyed and studied glare of a concerned citizen, the look a middle-aged woman with nothing better to do than protect small civil liberties might throw a noisy truck.

It wasn’t aimed at the truck. It was aimed at him.

In front of him, the master class in lunatic parking had ceased, the man at the wheel waving a gnarled and arthritic hand from his window again in mute thanks, and still the woman’s eyes continued to bore into Josh as she stood erect and unmoving, her body unnaturally still, on guard behind the writhing baby. For one fleeting, crazy moment Josh thought he might be inventing her, that a part of his guilty and fevered mind had conjured up this stern female figure to reprimand him for his paternal inattention.

‘That’s right, you useless dick,’ those eyes seemed to be saying. ‘This is what a baby looks like. You can look but you certainly can’t have. Only real men get these. Real men who stay home.’

He blinked at her, hoping that her head would turn from him and survey some other banal part of this quiet street scene, proving that her stare had been simply that of someone in a daydream, but her face never moved and the invisible rod that joined their eyes was becoming a hot solid thing.

There was no question of him stopping at that store now. Josh wanted out of there, away from that face, away from that tiny baby.

He fumbled for the shifter, starting the rig rolling clumsily by crunching his way around the gear-box as he picked up speed. A row of shiny shop windows to his left across the street bounced back a moving picture of Jezebel as she roared up through the gears. It was the clarity of that reflection as it distorted across undulating and different-sized glass that gave her driver an excuse to admire the mirror-image of himself sitting at the head of his gleaming electric-blue Peterbilt, and take his eyes momentarily from the face of the woman who was still standing like a lawyer for the prosecution on the sidewalk ahead.

Had she been waiting for that irresistible weakness that is every trucker’s vanity, to catch a brief glimpse of themselves on the move, and see themselves as others do? Josh would never be sure. How could he ever be sure of anything that happened that morning?

His eyes flicked back from the moving reflection down to the speedometer which showed around twenty, and then looked forward again. Back to the road and those eyes glaring at him from across the street.

She pushed the stroller like an Olympic skater, propelling it forward with a theatrically benevolent outward motion of the arms which culminated in a triumphant crucifix, palms open, shoulders high, as if waiting for a panel of judges to hold up their score cards. The timing and positioning was spectacularly accurate. She hadn’t pushed until Josh had been exactly level with her, so that the front wheels of the stroller rolled at an oblique angle beneath the double back tyres of the tractor unit.