Muriel Gray - Furnace

His sympathy was mixed with a strange nostalgic melancholy brought about by the imminent appearance of the sun. He’d been feeling pretty mellow for miles, looking forward to slotting a cassette into the stereo and watching the dawn break over the mountains to the sound of something good. Something carefully chosen to heighten the privileged experience of welcoming the daybreak over gentle but beautiful open country. Now these pencil-dicks had ruined it, and there was nothing he could do. They would get level with her, probably sound their horn and embark on a series of gestures among which a zoologist could find subject matter for a dissertation.

As they inched forward, the reefer struggling to get ahead of Josh’s more powerful rig, he sighed and resigned himself to the spectacle, running a hand over the back of his neck to massage away fatigue from the muscles there.

And then the red light winked.

Josh glanced up at the radar detector on his dash and as quickly across at the cab of the reefer.

Company trucks didn’t carry radar detectors. Other owner-operators like Josh might just. The damned things were illegal in big trucks but nobody could get you for just riding with one, and Josh knew where to switch it on and where not to. Here, on this stretch of the northbound interstate through Virginia, he was glad it was on. If nothing had changed in the highway patrol’s routine since his journey down, then he knew exactly where those bears with the radar were. There was a rest area just ahead on the right before the next exit, and that’s exactly where he’d spied a state bear sitting hunting on the way southbound only three days ago. How could the apes in the Freightliner know that? They couldn’t. Not without a detector, or that other essential lifeline every trucker relies on. Information from a fellow driver. A driver like Josh. And if Josh chose not to say anything, there weren’t a whole lot of trucks packing out this road right now who’d blow those bears’ cover instead. The highway was so quiet it could have doubled as a runway. On the dash the red light was going crazy, and Josh pressed simultaneously on his brakes and the talk button of the CB mike, a smile nearly cutting his face in two.

‘Yeah, you’re on it, guys. I looked for sure. And let me tell you, she’s askin’ for it. Since she been showin’ us so much leg there, why don’t you fellas give her a look at some of them Kentucky chicken pieces of your own.’

He looked across as the cab of the Freightliner started to pull away by virtue of his own subtle braking, and watched the bearded guy slap the dash and give a thumbs up in appreciation of the joke.

‘Come on, asswipes,’ Josh whispered as he saw the rest area up ahead.

The truck drew level with the Honda, and as the window of the Freightliner started to wind down he could just make out the nose of the patrol car, peeking out from behind a clump of scrubwood, still expertly hidden from anyone who wasn’t looking for it. Josh’s smile couldn’t get much wider, but he tried.

The timing was close to perfect. The Honda swerved a little as two fat white buttocks poked out of the Freightliner’s window, a finger sticking grotesquely into its own rectum, precisely as the three vehicles glided past the parked patrol vehicle. To the two cops sitting glumly in their car, wishing that dawn would break and bring the end of their shift closer, it looked like a circus act that had taken a lifetime to perfect. They exchanged no more than a brief and weary glance before snapping on the siren and pulling out.

Now it was Josh’s turn to slap the wheel in glee as the Freightliner edged back and pulled over, falling prey to the police car like an antelope brought down by hyenas. Josh was alone with his good Christian lady again, and part of him wished she had CB so he could share the joke, and more important so that she could thank him for his betrayal of colleagues in the name of chivalry. But the exit ahead seemed to be the one she wanted, maybe from choice, or maybe just to get off the highway and away from her persecutors. She started to brake and signal. Josh braked in response and was surprised when she slowed to a crawl. There was nothing for it but to pass, so he swung the rig out and changed down accordingly. As the bulk of the Peterbilt moved past the woman’s tiny car, now peeling away at a snail’s pace towards the exit ramp, Josh Spiller threw a look across at her.

From her open window an elegant arm emerged in farewell, and on the end of that arm, stabbing the air repeatedly like it was trying to puncture an invisible skin, was a deeply un-Christian middle finger.

He’d fumbled in the plastic ledge above the dash for a good thirty seconds, initially finding only an evil knot of Jelly Bellies that had fused together in the heat of the cab, before his fingers closed on the cassette he wanted. The sun was almost visible now, and Josh urgently wanted to get his chosen track lined up before it was too late.

He flipped the tape out of the plastic junk-filled canyon and slotted it quickly into the stereo. It came on halfway through some terrible and elderly Doors number. Wrong. So wrong he wished he’d never included the track on this jumbled and hastily assembled compilation. He pressed fast forward, waited and then let it play again.

Aerosmith. He cursed silently. That meant that it was rewinding, not going forward.

The sky to his right was now growing light so fast that a ridiculous mixture of anxiety and frustration tightened his chest. He took out the tape and reinserted it. The machine didn’t like the way he did it and slid it back out at him again. The sky had now gone way past pink, turning into the luminous aquamarine that heralds the first glorious golden shards of sunlight, as he slammed the troublesome cassette back in and pressed fast forward again. Two pauses and he was there.

Josh couldn’t say why he fancied this track most to greet the dawn, but he did. It was old but it was tranquil. A song off some weird album by a British band called The Blue Nile that Elizabeth’s kid brother had loaned him.

It started with a slow drum then this really sad guy came on and sang like he would break your heart. You had to be in the mood or you couldn’t take it. Josh was in exactly the right mood. It was just what he wanted for the big event, the arrival of the sun after this nine-hour non-stop homeward haul from Tennessee. And it was going to work this time. It was going to be a peach. The track was lined up, the sun was maybe only seconds from view, and he was northbound in the right lane with nothing obstructing his view across the dew-soaked fields to the dark rolling back of the Appalachians.

That was important to the full enjoyment of the moment, the absence of anything man-made in between him and the sunrise. No buildings. No human junk. Nothing that would spoil his view with another reminder, particularly after his disappointment in the reluctant maiden he’d rescued, that sometimes people didn’t deserve another day graced by anything as beautiful and indiscriminately benevolent as the sun. He waited, his hand ready to press play, glancing every three or four seconds out of the passenger window to catch the first sight.

Up ahead, the highway stretched empty before him, an artery of stone that fed America its life-blood. Or was it a vein that circulated the disease of man and his junk around the once untouched and healthy body of this delicate continent?

Josh gazed out front, contemplating it for a second, knowing that whatever the answer, he was a part of it. The rare sight of clear road made him suddenly feel exposed, an alien object moving without permission upon an ancient and secretive landscape.

And in those few moments of inattention as Josh dreamily regarded the road ahead, the sun betrayed him and sneaked up over the rim of the hills. He whipped his head to the east as the first orange beam hit the side of his face, shifted in his seat and stabbed the play button on the stereo.