Caught (2 page)

The driver put
the truck into gear and he waited, his face set toward the side mirror. He just sat there, looking behind them as if he had all the time in the world. Finally, a yellow convertible flared past them and was gone.

Thank you for stopping, Slaney said. The driver reached up to the ceiling and touched a light that snapped on and he looked Slaney over. A few mosquitoes became visible near the white ceiling light, and the two men were reflected in the wide black windshield, the broken white line of the highway shooting up between them. The trucker took in Slaney’s orange coveralls.

The mosquitoes were collecting on the inside of the windshield; the light made them glitter like splinters of glass. Slaney leaned forward and put his thumb against one. He looked at his thumb and there was the tiny squished insect, the wings crushed, and a touch of blood, probably Slaney’s own.

Out for a midnight stroll? the trucker asked. Slaney rubbed his thumb against a seam in his coveralls.

Something like that, Slaney said. The driver looked at his watch. He said he’d been told Slaney would be farther up the road.

I thought I had a ways to go before I run into you, the driver said. You’re lucky I never went on past. You come out in the wrong spot.

It was hard to judge where I was, Slaney said.

You didn’t have directions?

I never had nothing.

You’re lucky, the driver said.

I hope I am, Slaney said.

It comes and goes, the trucker said. Comes and goes.

The driver had a full black beard and moustache and thick greased hair that held the marks of the comb near his temple and hung in wet-looking ringlets over the back of his lumber jacket. He touched the ceiling light and it went off. He pulled the rig out onto the highway. Each wheel hitched itself up onto the asphalt with an arthritic lurch and the quivering machine became smooth and they took off.

Almost at once, three more cop cars with the lights on passed the truck and Slaney hunched down under the dash.

There’s some dry clothes back there, the trucker said. He jerked his head toward a red blanket he’d nailed over the bunk behind them. Slaney saw the blue Samsonite overnight bag that belonged to his mother. Slaney’s sister must have packed the bag for him.

He flicked the chrome locks with his thumbs and the suitcase popped up. There was a brown envelope with three hundred dollars and a slip of paper that had a phone number. It would be the number for Hearn. He memorized the number and crumpled the piece of paper and looked around for how to dispose of it. There was an ashtray in the armrest but it was blocked with butts. He balled up the paper and swallowed it.

The three hundred would have been every cent his sister had.

Three pairs of jeans, underwear, socks, a jean jacket, and a cake tin with a Norman Rockwell illustration of a hobo fleeing with a stolen pie, a hound dog snapping at his trousers. He lifted the lid and there were chocolate chip cookies.

He took out one of the five plaid shirts and it was covered in cellophane and folded around a piece of cardboard, held in place with a number of straight pins. He took the pins out and laid them on the armrest where they shivered and rolled.

Slaney changed on the bunk. Then he felt around in the bottom of the case to see if his sister had packed a joint or two. There was a rent in the blue lining near the seam and something was caught in the threads. Slaney wiggled two fingers into the tear in the lining beneath the zippered pockets.

It was a ring. He pulled it free.

His mother’s old engagement ring. His mother had lost the ring years ago during a hospital stay and they’d thought stolen. But no — it had fallen between the hard casing and the torn fabric. Slaney put the ring in the pocket of his new jeans and sat back down in the passenger seat and he and the trucker watched the empty highway before them.

We’re going to take a little detour, the trucker said. He turned down a dirt road with dusty alder bushes grown so close the branches scraped at the truck. The wheels sank into deep potholes and climbed up over stones and they proceeded at a crawling pace, rocking from side to side, jerking up and down, all eighteen wheels, until the lane seemed so overgrown they might not be able to proceed or reverse. The trucker turned off the lights and killed the engine.

What’s going on? Slaney asked.

I’m going to wait here for a bit, the trucker said. Take a little snooze. Let the cops do their thing.

He stood and hefted his jeans up over his belly and disappeared behind the red blanket. Slaney heard him flap the sheets and he heard the trucker’s boots fall to the floor and his head hit the pillow.

Nothing stirred outside the cab except the twigs and branches scraping against the steel sides of the truck. The trucker’s breathing became deep and steady, a long deep reeling in of air and a phlegmy whistle of exhalation that couldn’t quite be called a snore.

Slaney heard a woodpecker knocking close by, deft and humourless. It was a beautiful noise. The windshield steamed up. He sat still for two hours and ten minutes.

The trucker finally let out a groan and he stumbled out from behind the blanket and seemed surprised to see Slaney, as if he’d forgotten all about him.

Oh, hello, he said. He got back into the driver’s seat and felt around in his pockets for some gum and he offered Slaney a piece and Slaney said, No thanks.

The trucker removed the paper and the silver foil from a stick of gum and tossed them out the window and folded the stick into his mouth. Then he started up the truck. Slaney rolled down his window and tossed out his orange coveralls.

The truck broke out of the alder bushes onto the highway. Slaney reached back behind his chair for the cookie tin that had been in his mother’s suitcase and removed the lid and the trucker took a cookie when it was offered and said it was good.

Slaney ate seven cookies. After a time the trucker reached under his legs and drew out a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and said that Slaney was welcome to all that was left. He handed the bucket over without taking his eyes off the road and Slaney took off the cardboard cover and inside there were several drumsticks and a bunch of paper napkins. Slaney cleaned the meat off the bones of each drumstick.

The whole bucket, the trucker said. Didn’t they feed you in there?

It was a mystery to me, Slaney said, how they could call it food.

A while past dawn Slaney realized he had dozed off but he’d felt the driver suddenly become alert beside him.

There was something in the road.

A dayglo lime green object the size and shape of a tortoise.

It was phosphorescent and insubstantial and poisonous-looking; it had the jellyfish waver of something dreamt.

Slaney slammed his foot as if he had a brake on the passenger side. They hit the object. A crackling little
pock
.

It was a plastic spaghetti strainer. It smashed to bits under the tires and Slaney saw the pieces blow around through his side mirror. Luminous flecks of green plastic. The pieces remained aloft in the backdraft of the truck, spinning in a vortex, then fluttering down all over the asphalt.

Vigilance

Get the key
to the room at the bar, Harold had told him. Say hello to my half-sister Sue Ellen.

The strip bar was on the highway with not much around it except a bungalow set way back from the road. There had been a garage but the gas pumps were removed and the dirty window had been hit by a bullet. A sun-silvered hole the size of a quarter, a web of cracks that spread in concentric rings outward to the peeling window frame.

There were demolished cars in the field near the garage, all missing wheels and doors and the hoods were up, the engines were gone. A crippled school bus up to the axles in grass had a sodden Union Jack hanging out one of the windows. Beyond the garage stretched a field and there was the grandmother’s bungalow with a tethered horse on the lawn. The horse was white and trotted in circles, flicking its head, slapping its tail.

Slaney could see Harold’s grandmother out on her back porch hanging up the laundry. The line squeaked each time she flung it out over the field below.

He thanked the truck driver but they both just sat without moving.

I didn’t expect to get this far, Slaney said. As soon as he said it, Slaney recognized the statement was true. He had believed he would get caught.

Right now four years in prison seems like a long time, the driver said. You’ll lose that feeling. Then he said he hadn’t wanted to get involved.

Aiding and abetting, he said. Slaney looked down at the late-morning fog on the road. The sun had already shrunk the shadows and was pelting down a warm, muggy heat. He wanted to find out if the room was available.

I got a new wife, the driver said.

You try to see what’s coming but it shifts on you, Slaney said.

My wife wouldn’t have condoned this, the trucker answered. She would have put her foot down.

They had been together in the cab through the night and Slaney had listened to the calls over the CB radio and there was a lot of talk about his break. There were bears all over the road, the truckers said. Slaney had heard the broken late-night banter, half lost in bursts of static and jargon about sirens and the cops, about wives with cancer and a little girl named Nancy who had lost her first tooth and what the weather was like and he had learned the trucker went by the handle Woolie because of his beard. But Slaney and the trucker had hardly spoken at all.

Now that they had arrived the trucker wanted to talk. He spoke to Slaney about what he’d heard.

Slaney and his friend Hearn had lost more than a million dollars’ worth of weed when they were busted and there were people in Montreal who had invested and they were looking for their money back.

I’m telling you this because I like your sister, the trucker said. Slaney thanked him and he assured the trucker he’d be careful and he said goodbye but the guy kept talking.

You walk away with a couple of busted kneecaps, consider yourself lucky. I knew a guy, they came at him with a mallet. Another guy lost an eye out of it.

How well do you know my sister? Slaney asked.

What the hell are you talking about, the trucker said. I’m married.

You said you liked her.

Jesus, not like that. I’m telling you this because your sister is a good kid. Doing social work, she helped me out. Nice young woman.

You don’t need to tell me, Slaney said. The trucker scowled out the window. He jiggled the gearshift.

I stop for you in the middle of nowhere and you come up with this about your sister.

You’re right, Slaney said. I’m sorry.

Another guy they put in a wheelchair, the trucker said. Slaney nodded.

The trucker spoke again: Another guy. Never mind about the other guy.

Well, thank you for the ride, Slaney said.

My wife and me only been together two years, the trucker said.

Maybe you don’t need to mention to her, Slaney said. About all this.

The trucker said that not saying what happened was another variation of lying, but it was less damning. He told Slaney that he had learned how easy it was to tell a lie relatively late in his life, and found he’d had an aptitude for it. But as a child he had gravitated toward honesty.

Maybe everybody starts out that way, Slaney said.

It’s just a matter of looking someone in the eye, the trucker said, and speaking as if you could hardly be bothered recounting the facts.

A woman came out of the front door of the bar with a red plastic bucket that slopped as she walked. She had a long skirt that flapped around her sandals with every step she took. She crossed the parking lot to the ditch and flung the water out and walked back with her head down. She seemed to be singing to herself.

Look them in the eye, Slaney said.

You look them in the eye or you look to the middle distance, the trucker said. He put on an expression, the expression he used when he was lying, to illustrate his point. It was a belligerent look, solemn and tinged with equanimity. Slaney saw it was the same expression the trucker used when he wasn’t lying. It might have been the only expression at his disposal.

Nobody doubts me, the trucker said. He shook his head a little as if this were a disappointment.

You’re friendly, Slaney said. Everybody takes a shine.

I can lie as easily as I can butter a piece of bread, he said. But I tell you what. If I were you I’d keep my ears open. Even a lie you can learn something.

The trucker had a drive ahead of him but he still seemed reluctant to get back on the road. He’d been in prison a long time, he told Slaney. A lot longer than four years. He gave Slaney the look again.

I was in for a crime I didn’t commit, he said. He did a drum roll on the steering wheel with two fingers. Slaney didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

If you’re young when you go in, you don’t stay that way, the trucker said. He admitted that he didn’t believe in God, though he’d tried for his wife’s sake. She worked long shifts in an emergency ward as a nurse.

It’s not the other prisoners or even the guards, he said. It’s something else, prison is.

It’s something else again, Slaney said. The trucker’s face took on an open-eyed softness. He seemed to be looking at something that he could not believe. He flicked his hand through the air in Slaney’s direction, batting away everything he’d just said.

Across the field Harold’s grandmother picked up her laundry basket and went through the screen door and it closed behind her with a click that Slaney could hear from the parking lot of the bar. It was an intimate sound, carried on the breeze over the fields to the bone in his jaw.

You won’t get very far, the trucker said. I’ll tell you that.

I’m going to try, Slaney answered. He opened the door of the cab and jumped down and closed it. He stood back on the shoulder with his hands on his hips. The truck crept back onto the road and was gone down the highway.

A Room with a View

Slaney walked up
the wheelchair ramp that led to the side entrance of the bar. From there he had a view of rows of cabbages and fields of hay. The clouds tumbled backwards in folds and billows all the way to the horizon.