The Heart is Deceitful above All Things (11 page)

I hear Kenny's train whistle for the last time while eating alone in a truck stop diner outside Orlando, Florida. I look up and around me, but it all continues, the haggard waitresses in dirty white sneakers, glittering
gold hairnets, and short pink skirts, tending to the big men and their bigger wives packed into the orange plastic booths with their dull-eyed children.

Nobody notices the train horn. A train horn on a truck, and no one looks up to wonder who was in the way and if they moved fast enough.

I bury my spoon under the milk in my Cheerios mix. Sarah showed me how to make Cheerios. ‘Just Cheerios, no milk . . . Milk's on the table, don't need to pay for what they're givin'away.' She dumps the silver container into her cereal and points to me to grab the container off the empty table behind us and do the same. ‘Jelly's free . . .' She spoons half the jar of sugary strawberry jam in, then does the same on my Cheerios. ‘Butter's free, too.' She opens five little plastic packages and pushes out the bright yellow blobs into the bowl and motions for me to do the same. ‘The classier places leave out the maple syrup . . .' She pours half the slow amber liquid into her bowl, then mine, pouring it on the table while traveling between her bowl and mine. ‘Now this rounds it out . . .' She reaches for the red plastic ketchup bottle and squirts a big mound of red squiggly lines in our bowls, and again she doesn't stop squeezing the bottle in the space between our bowls. ‘Now, if ya got a extra fifty cents, you order yourself a cottage cheese ball.' She grabs a fork and begins to stir the mixture. ‘Then you're really stylin'. More cream,' she tells the waitress when the waitress asks her too loudly if that'll be all. ‘White trash, cunt,' Sarah mutters as the waitress walks away.
‘Here . . .' She reaches out, gripping the glass sugar container like a machine gun, and dumps half of it into our bowls and on the table.

The truck's train horn sounds again, farther away, three quick fuck-you-I'm-out-of-here blasts. ‘Gotta let the hearts know when to start a-breakin',' Kenny would say every time he would pull the horn chain when we left a truck stop. ‘More like their wallets to start a-achin',' Sarah would say, laughing.

The train horn echoes through the diner, but nobody even looks toward the big mirrored plate-glass window. If you stare for a while, you can make out the huge black box outline of trucks in the night, like some hidden underworld nobody wants to remember exists. I hear Kenny's horn long after it must have stopped, long after he must be on the interstate and finally getting to play his country tapes, the ones Sarah didn't toss out the window.

A teenage girl with frizzy red hair she keeps combing and holding down with her hand as if it were a hood in a windstorm has watched me prepare my Cheerios from a table across from mine. She picks at her fries, then frowns at me when I pour something free into my bowl. When I pick up the ketchup her face goes sour. I pretend to only be examining the container, and I put it back down. I wait till she turns to her mother, and I squirt my ketchup in fast. We do this dance for a while, her even faking me out, not really going for her fries, making me panic and squirt a red slash line across
my chest. I expect her to laugh. She only looks more lemonish. I feel disappointed and ashamed. I don't start to eat until she and her mother leave.

The horn sound is still ringing inside my head. It's not a surprise; I thought it would happen sooner, I thought I'd feel relieved, relieved that I wouldn't keep waiting to hear the hollow bellow of it every time I left the truck.

‘I hate punk rock,' Kenny had said, and pulled her tape out of the cassette player.

‘Only faggots call it punk rock, Kenny. How many times I have to tell you, you ignorant, country-listening, white trash, cocksucking, hillbilly, motherfucking . . .'

He grabs a handful of her tapes and tosses them out the window. She screams and attacks him, whaling at him with her fists so violently, he almost hits another truck. He pulls over and runs along the interstate like a jackrabbit, returns an hour later, holding up three tapes, his face cut from her fingernails. He cradles one tape, its guts roped and glittering around his fingers. ‘Maybe we can rewind it, baby,' he says, looking down as he enters the cab.

She grabs the broken tape. ‘The Subhumans, you fucker!'

They don't speak until they get to the truck stop. She dresses in her wig and shiny dress. He says he'll listen out. She leaves, telling him he'd damn well better. He doesn't get dressed up like usual. He asks me if I want
another comic book. He gives me $5 and tells me not to spend it all in one place. ‘Go on now, before the gift shop closes up.'

I don't go to the gift shop. I go to the diner. I don't buy a burger like I could, I don't even get a cottage cheese scoop.

And I feel the bill in my jeans pocket, the jeans Milkshake gave me and I keep up with Kenny's belt, doubled around me. I run my palm along the smooth leather of the belt and reach my hand in my pocket past the five-dollar bill, like I do at night sleeping on the foam bed in the front of the cab when I snake my belt out from my jeans loops and guide it gently under the fuzzy polyester blanket. It's Kenny, holding me from behind, breathing out in my ear, pressing into me, draping the belt over me, like I wish he would but never does, my grandfather preaching, his minty breath stinging and his face set like a stone carving so solid, so absolute, you know there's something between you and the bottomless pit. Every package of candy and comic book I've stolen from truck stop gift shops is laid out, and I whisper, ‘Please punish me, please,' and I rub, so hard it'll hurt when I piss the next day. I rub with the belt, wrapping it and squeezing. I dig my nails deep into the tender skin of my thing until I cry, until I feel that point of breaking, but there's no one to fall into. I hold the belt close until I finally sleep.

‘Daydreaming at night's bad for your health,' the blue-haired waitress says above me. My eyes jerk open,
and I pull my hand out of my pocket. ‘Waitin' for your momma?' I shake my head. Children are always eating alone at all times of night at truck stop diners. Some kids get dropped off before their parents go honky-tonkin'. There'd usually be a few kids sleeping in a booth in the back. Some truck drivers ride with their whole family. I'd seen seven or eight kids tumble out of one cab. Some waitresses smile at you for being alone and bring you free milkshakes and burgers. Some tell you they ain't no goddamn baby-sitter, and tell you kid or not, she'd better get a goddamn tip. Most just treat me like a non-truck-driving customer, relaxed and with indifferent friendliness. I eat another spoonful of Cheerios and imagine Kenny laughing and pulling on the chain, the brass chain he polished every day. I can't be sure Sarah isn't with him; to think about that makes it impossible to swallow. Her hand on his, pulling the brass lever together. I pay for my Cheerios and run to where the truck was parked.

It's empty, like I knew it would be. There's a black garbage bag sitting on the black tar between oil spots. Our stuff is inside, mostly Sarah's. I find my comic books next to her red spiked heels. I dig around and find the markers I'd stolen from a truck stop goods shop in Georgia.

I tear out a piece of paper from a small notebook I stole. I write on it with a red marker and fold it up. In my notebook I have written five words on each page. As we drove, I wrote stories but only put one word of
it down here and there, so when Sarah grabs it to see what's so damned interesting she won't know the code, won't know the story, and can't take it from me. But I see the words fit snugly between the printed ones and could read the story the same way fifty times. I sit on the plastic bag and wait for her return.

I hear her heels clicking, echoing down the rows of sleeping trucks. I peel my cheek, glued with drool, away from the garbage bag. She says nothing, only moves her eyes over the empty space like it must be a reverse mirage, seeing nothing when something is really there. Her makeup is smeared, and her wig is crooked. I reach up and hand her the folded notebook paper. She holds it close, reads it, laughs, and drops it. ‘That orange truck . . . there . . .' She points down the line. ‘I'll be in there.' Her voice slides around the edges of her words, not quite pronouncing them, but I understand her. ‘Come by tomorrow and you're my sister.' I nod. She steps on the note, the words melting into the oil. ‘Somebody stabbed you,' she says, and points to the ketchup stains across my chest. She turns and wobbly walks toward the orange truck. ‘Bring the bag,' she says over her shoulder. As she walks she reaches up and yanks down on an invisible chain three times.

I stare at the note, almost drowned in oil. ‘I love you' is covered, the red ‘Goodbye' slowly slips into black.

In the morning I find the Schneider National truck, not shiny and covered in lights like Kenny's, but ugly and bright orange, like construction site cones, which
is why truckers call the cones Schneider eggs. ‘What's your name, darlin'?' He makes a tight-lipped smile, but because of his droopy eyes it looks more like a frown.

‘Chrissy, that's Chrissy,' Sarah says, taking the garbage bag from me and pulling out her red heels. I nod hello and watch him dance his fingertips along his leather belt and then through his crew cut.

‘Pretty sister you got, Stacy,' he says to Sarah.

‘Uh-huh,' Sarah says, stuffing balled-up tissues into her bra.

‘Sure is pretty.'

I smile back and blink my eyes like the bleach blond waitresses do on the trucker side.

I don't like the smell of Schneider Truck. His moldy flannel mixed with women's flowery deodorant nauseates me. His hands are pale, and his fingers are long and floppy like daisy stems, not cracked and heavy like Kenny's, not the kind that can crush you quickly if they wanted to, and for some reason that makes me feel cold and hot at the same time they just don't. Schneider Truck pinches my ass when I move past him. He rubs my cheek with fingers that feel slippery and wet like spaghetti. He tells me I'm a pretty girl like my sister. I like that, and I smile while looking away from his filmy gray eyes. Sarah hates him. He doesn't understand her medicine. He won't help her tie her arm for it, so I do while he paces in front of the cab and whines for her to hurry up. She gives him the finger behind his back; sometimes he turns, catching her, and she pretends to be picking her
nose. He doesn't like punk, either. He only listens to boring radio talk shows. He shakes his head when they talk about the perverts teaching in our schools. ‘They should be castigated,' he says.

He gets a room for us, paid for one month while he's away. Sarah wants it far from the truck stop but still in Orlando, on Orange Blossom Trail. He likes her away from the stop, but, ‘Orange Blossom Trail ain't no place for my future wife . . .'

‘It's cheap, ain't it,' she yells as we drive down the wide dark street, passing gated deserted warehouse lots and neon ‘GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS' signs every two blocks. She heard from someone that it's the place to stay. Schneider Truck doesn't like it being situated right behind the sleaziest striphouse he ever saw. ‘It's cheap, ain't it?' Sarah says again, and they go to check in.

I sleep in the cab that night. They sleep in the efficiency motel room. She insists they get the room with the gas stove so she can cook for me. The next day Sarah gets a job stripping at the club in front of the motel. ‘Fuckin' Mickey Mouse tips again.' She pulls the fake Disney dollars mixed with real dollars out of her bra. ‘They think they're so original . . .'

Schneider Truck calls every day for a month. Since there's no phone in the room, he rings on the pay phone at the end of the line of chipped-wood motel doors. Sarah either isn't around or won't answer when someone bangs on our door for the phone. I go instead.

‘How's your sister, sweetie?' His voice has a raspy, lung-cancerous tone to it.

‘Fine, sir.' I run my dirty nails over the silver metal armadillo back phone cord.

‘What's she up to . . . no good, honey?' He coughs and laughs nervously.

I look at the flashing blue neon outline of a naked girl on the club about a stone's throw away. ‘It's all fine, sir,' I say.

‘You can tell, baby . . . I'm gonna be almost like your daddy, buy you lots of pretty little dresses . . .'

I dig my nail in the black rubber under a chink in the phone cord's armor. The idea of going shopping for dresses makes me happy. ‘I've seen a real nice Sunday dress at T. J. Maxx,' I tell him.

‘What color is it, sweetie?' he asks.

I wrap the cord around me and pull the phone in tighter. I turn away from the club. ‘Kinda pink,' I say quietly.

‘You got––' he coughs–– ‘got panties to match, sweetie? Little pretty pink panties to match?' His voice is high, like he's talking to a puppy.

‘No'––I dig my nail in deeper to the sticky rubber–– ‘sir.'

‘I'll get ya some, for you, sweet-pie.'

‘OK . . .' I push dirt with my sneaker over a busy anthole.

‘Tell your sister I love her . . .'

‘OK . . .'

‘I love you, too, sweetie . . .' I nod. ‘Now say you love your daddy.'

The ants are scurrying, searching for the entrance to their home. ‘Say you love your daddy,' he repeats louder, but he sounds like he's cupping the phone.

Some of the ants have found another way in, a back door five inches away from the main one.

‘Don'tcha love your daddy?' He coughs.

I'm mad at myself for not covering them both.

‘Sweetie? Chrissy baby?'

I lean over and kick dirt over their back hole.

‘You still there?'

Now they're panicking again. I smile.

‘Chrissy!' he shouts.

‘Yes, sir . . .'

‘I got to go . . . kiss your sister for me.'