Muriel Gray - Furnace

Dawn on the first of May was less beautiful than the one Josh had tried to savour yesterday. Low clouds masked the sun’s coming and a thin grey light was all that announced the day. He had lain sleeplessly in the same position all night, eyes staring up into the dark as he alternated between thinking and hurting, and now he wanted to move. The load was already late. The paperwork promised the packing cases would be in Alabama sometime tonight, but they wouldn’t be.

Josh crawled from his bunk into the cab, opened the door on the new day and went to wet the wheels. As he stood, legs apart, urinating on his truck in some unconsciously atavistic ritual, he reconfirmed with himself that the best cure for any form of unhappiness was perpetual motion. Driving let him escape. It allowed him time completely on his own and freedom from responsibility. It had certainly saved his sanity when his mother died, that hellish two weeks after her funeral, when Josh knew he would never again have the chance to say the things to her he’d rehearsed so many times alone in his cab. He’d left his morose brother Dean at their empty home to go through their mother’s pathetically few things, accepted a load to Seattle, and pushed the thought of his loss out with the opening of his log book.

He recalled seeing his brother’s grief-torn face accusing him through the dirty upstairs window as he drove off, and it had chipped at something hard inside that Josh thought had been impermeable. Five hours later he’d put the whole thing out of his mind. Dean had never really forgiven him for that act of abandonment. But he didn’t understand. No one but another trucker would.

Josh finished his task, did up his pants, then leaned forward to rest his forehead against the side of his trailer and punch its aluminium flank with the side of a fist.

‘Fuck ’em all, Jez. Fuck every last one.’

The cloud had lifted as she stood rigid and still on the grass. That was good. She watched the thin sunlight play amongst the bare branches of the ancient tree that stood solemnly in the wide street, and as her gaze moved down to the base of its massive bole, she frowned with irritation. There were suckered branches starting to form in clumps at the base. That meant only one thing. The tree was dying.

It must have been the men laying the cables last year. They had been told to make sure the trench came nowhere near the roots, to cut a path for the thick mass of plastic tubing and wire in between those delicate arteries of soft wood rather than through them. But they were like all workmen. Lazy. And this was the result.

She ground her teeth and concentrated on fighting the irritation.

Absence of malice, absence of compassion, absence of all petty human emotion. It was essential.

In a few hours she would let her thoughts return to the vandalized tree, but not now. The workmen would never be employed by her again. And that, she decided, would be the least of their worries.

But not now. Push the thought away and leave nothing. Nothing at all.

Quarter of an hour down the highway, Josh saw a five-mile service sign and realized he was hungry. More importantly, he was approaching his thirty-sixth hour without sleep and unless he grabbed a coffee soon, bad things were going to start happening. In fact, they already had. A dull grey slowness had settled on him, making his peripheral vision busy with the hazy shifting shapes that severe fatigue specialized in manufacturing, and his limbs were beginning to feel twice their weight. But hungry as he was, he still hadn’t forgotten the affront of yesterday’s dawn. McDonald’s might have sold ten billion, but he wasn’t going to make it ten billion and one.

He thumbed the radio.

‘Any you northbounds know a good place to eat off the interstate?’

The voice first to respond just laughed. ‘Surely, driver. There’s a little Italian place right up ahead. Violins playin’ and candles on every table.’

Josh smiled.

Another driver butted in. ‘No shit? Where’s that at again?’

‘I’m kiddin’, dipshit. Burgers ain’t good enough for you?’

Josh pressed his radio again, then thought better of it. What did these guys know? Channel 19 would be busy now for the next hour with bored truckers arguing about the merits of the great American burger. He was sorry he had started it.

There was an exit coming up on the right, and although the sign declared this was the exit for a bunch of ridiculously named nowhere towns, he braked and changed down. It was twenty before seven and if he didn’t get that coffee soon he’d have to pull over.

The reefer tailing him came on the radio.

‘Hey, Jezebel. See you signalling for exit 23.’

Josh responded. ‘Ten-four, driver. That a problem?’

‘Got a mighty long trailer there to get up and down them mountain roads. They’re tight as a schoolmarm’s ass cheeks.’

‘Copy, driver. Not plannin’ on goin’ far. Just grab a bite and get myself back on the interstate.’

Josh was already in the exit lane as he spoke the last words, the reefer peeling away from him up the highway.

‘Okay, buddy. Just hope you can turn that thing on a dollar.’

‘Ten-four to that.’

‘How comes she got the handle Jezebel?’

Josh grinned as he slowed down to around twenty-five, on what was indeed, and quite alarmingly so, a very narrow road. When he felt the load was secure behind him, he took his hand off the wheel to reply.

‘Aw this is my second rig, and I figure she tempted me but she’ll probably turn out to be no good like the last one.’

He swallowed at that, hoping the ugly thought that it had stirred back into life would go away. The other driver saved him.

‘Yeah? What you drive before?’

Irritatingly, the signal was already starting to break up. Strange, since the guy was probably only two miles away, with Josh now heading south-east on this garden path of a road.

‘Freightliner Conventional. Everything could go wrong did go wrong. Might be mean naming this baby like that. Hasn’t let me down yet. But she’s pretty, huh?’

The radio crackled in response, but Josh didn’t pick up the driver’s comment. It was the least of his worries. He saw what the guy meant. The road was almost a single track. If he met another truck on this route they’d both have to get out, scratch their heads and talk about how they were going to pass. Josh slowed the truck down to twenty and rolled along, squinting straight into the low morning sun that had only now emerged from the dissipating grey clouds, to look for one of the towns the sign had promised.

The interstate was well out of sight, and he was starting to regret the impulsive and irrational decision to boycott the convenience of a burger and coffee. The road was climbing now, and since the exit he hadn’t seen one farm gate or cabin driveway where he could turn the Peterbilt.

He pressed on the radio again.

‘Hey, any locals out there? When do you hit the first town after exit 23?’

He waited, the handset in his hand. There was silence. It was a profound silence that rarely occurred on CB. There was always something going on. Morons yelling, or guys bitching. Drivers telling other drivers the exact whereabouts on the highway of luckless females. There was debate, there was comedy, there were confidences shared and tales told. All twenty-four hours a day. Anything you wanted to hear and anything you wanted to say, was all there waiting at the press of a button.

But here, there was nothing. Josh looked up at the long spine of the hills and reckoned they must have something to do with the sudden stillness of the radio. It unnerved him. The cab of a truck was never quiet. Usually Josh had three things going at once: the CB, the local radio station, and a tape. Elizabeth had ridden with him a few times and could barely believe how through the nightmarish cacophony he not only noted the local traffic report, but also hummed along to a favourite song, heard everything that was said on the CB, and was able to make a pretty good guess at which truck was saying it.