Muriel Gray - Furnace

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.