A Day's Wait, Por Que?

This story is for those who've ever had to spend a few more hours in a place than they really counted on. Maybe because the flight got bumped, or the weather moved in. Ever spent too many hours in a crew boat in the middle of an unexpected tropical storm? Slept in the office because the ice and snow came in while you went for that last meeting of the day?

Javier makes the corn run often enough. Run up to Brownsville and unload the corn, then haul empty over to Harlingen to get a trailer full of grain for the run back to Monterrey. An easy day's work, it keeps the miles paid. Sure, every now and then you're pulled over for a few hours in the sleeper. But that's just the trucker's life, ain't it?

In this week's story, dear reader, we, and Javier, discover the difference between "Oh well" and those times when you really do end up having to sweat out...

A Day's Wait, Por Que? by M. K. Dreysen

Javier scuffed through the dust, the old steel toes dragging in the caliche, as much from the weight of the heat as that of the bad news.

A summer day in Harlingen. Damn. He climbed into the cab and picked up the phone. "Rita, yes... no. Yes... hey mama, listen. I'm stuck here for another day... maybe tonight... if they get a train in tonight... yes... no... maybe, mama listen. It depends on whether they load me out first or not."

He looked at the other trucks, their drivers making similar phone calls. Some of them, the ones who'd gotten there later, had already fired up and started the big turns for the highway. "Yes... looks like Pete and Sonnier and them... no. Mama listen... ok yes. I love you too. Bye."

Javier thumbed the phone's connection shut and threw it on the dash. Then he parked the old steel toes up next to the phone, picked up a book, some weird western by a one-eyed poker player from Las Vegas, and started on the next chapter. There was time yet, and daylight, and hours that didn't go in the log.

A horn jarred Javier out of the book. He jerked, then rolled down the window. "Yeah?"

Marcus Jones had pulled up; he'd been the only truck in front of Javier. Marcus had pulled his rig loose of the trailer, bobtailed now and probably headed into town. "Get you anything?" Marcus asked, peering past the yellow lab that had been his constant road companion for a few years now.

Javier thought about it. "Where you thinking of going, my friend?" Marcus was good people, always a happy sight where their runs that overlapped. He'd be headed for Corpus whenever he got the trailer loaded.

"What do you think? I'm thinking of a sitdown, you wanna come along?"

The rigs would be good here, the folks who ran the grain silos kept a clean yard. And it was daylight. Javier thumbed the book.

A few more chapters, finish whatever Marcus brought back, climb in the back and sleep until they had enough grain to fill the trailer... it sounded more immediate than climbing into Marcus's cab. "No, but thank you. Whatever looks good, Marcus, maybe a good salad with chicken if they have it?"

"Caesar?"

"Yep."

"Got it, see you." Marcus pulled away. When Javier checked his mirrors, he saw another bobtail rig pull out behind Marcus.

Almost twenty rigs had been in the yard when they'd gotten the message. Now, they were down to... eleven, about half of them trailers only now. Javier nodded and turned back to the book. No sense climbing into the back now, he told himself, not and have to climb back out again. Too easy to fall into deep sleep that way, and let the coming lunch get nasty in the heat.

Half the trucks would have gone to find another load, he mused between paragraphs. Gravel if they had to. Javier snorted; he had a trailer for that, instead of this one for grains and other food-grade loads.

But his gravel trailer was parked in Laredo. No sense hauling the hours up the road for that nonsense. The silos would start filling as soon as he got over the horizon, the way Javier's luck ran.

Javier started running out of patience with his book just a few minutes before Marcus showed back up with lunch. "Thanks man, I appreciate it."

"No problem. Anything happen?"

"I'd have called." And Javier would have. He didn't recognize everyone who'd parked to wait, but those he did know he would have called. You didn't want to be the asshole, not when there'd be a time and place where the positions were reversed.

Besides, the jerks... well they all too often ended up on the side of the road, cussing the maintenance they'd let slide and the other drivers who'd warned them about it. Some roads Javier didn't want to steer down, not even a little.

Rita called when he'd put fork to his second bite. "Yes mama... a salad, Marcus picked it up for me... no it's not as good as... of course. Yes. Yes. I love you too, I'll call you... yes I'll keep it next to me."

He thumbed back into the book; maybe he'd just been frustrated and bored, the pace picked back up again as his stomach started happily into its work on the salad.

When he'd finished and relieved himself, Javier climbed into the sleeper and allowed the summer sun to go about bleaching everything to that blended gray tone without his supervision.

He slept through Rita's calls. Both of them, and the beeps from the annoyed voicemails she left. The knockout curtain blocked the long change from daylight to yard lights.

Something scratched at the door of the cab. Javier would have had to have the curtain pulled, and he'd have had to sit up in the bunk to see the mirrors. Instead, he slept through the inquisitive testing.

Marcus's horn did wake him. Just a bit before midnight. Javier splashed a little bottled water on his face, used the chemical toilet again, then climbed down out of the cab.

The yard had lost three more rigs, just him and Marcus and another half dozen now.

But the train had come in. The engine's light, and now a horn, greeted Javier as his feet found the caliche dust. "Good," he muttered before walking up to join Marcus. "You get any sleep?"

"Yeah. Benny woke me up to take a walk about half an hour ago, otherwise we'd both still be out."

Javier let the grinning lab sniff and lick his hand. "Yep, you're on the job, right Ben?"

The dog shook his collar, then bounded up and into Marcus's rig. "He knows the drill better than we do."

Marcus nodded, then they went in to get their tickets punched.

****

The yard was rigged up for loading a couple trucks at a time. They only needed two of the rail cars to fill up the trucks who'd stayed. Marcus got the first scale, Javier pulled into the second, and they started the wait for the next stage.

Technically, they were back on the clock as soon as they geared up. The electronic logs didn't let anyone get away with anything. Yeah, even though they weren't moving. Javier called Rita while the yard got the railcars going. "Getting loaded soon, mama, I'm on the scales now... yes... no... Marcus too... no. Mama listen, I might have to pull over at Reynosa... it's my hours, love."

He held the phone away; the logs didn't care about the couple hours, going and coming, that the border crossing added to his time. All the computer knew was that he'd put in six hours on the road here, through Brownsville and the load of corn he'd dropped there, up to Harlingen and the wait. And he'd gotten some sleep, but it didn't count to ten hours off the road on the computer.

Javier was the only one Rita could yell at about the idiot computer. "Mama, don't worry, I'll be home tomorrow." Well, once he dropped the load off at the mill in Monterrey. But he wasn't going to bring that up.

"Can I talk to the kids? Oh." They were asleep, and Rita didn't want to wake them. "Listen mama, I love you."

She grudgingly accepted that, and returned his love. "Now go to sleep, ok?"

The grain started its count on the scale just as Javier cut the connection.

The scale had been re-calibrated just a couple weeks back. The Harlingen silos kept them in good repair; their drivers needed, more than most, to know that the scales didn't lie. Not when they had to deal with border patrol any way they went.

Point was, the scales were capable of measuring the weight difference between Javier and his truck.

And Javier and his truck, and the shadowy passenger they'd added, the one that had slid its way into the trailer's undercarriage. Only, because the shadow had already made its way into a safe spot in the belly dump mechanisms, the scale didn't see anything but trailer and driver plus one.

So Javier and the silo crew went about their business, unaware. And when Javier did pull out into the yard, where he stopped to rig up his covers, check tires and axles and brake lines and the belly dump's locks, he didn't notice the shadow either.

The yard lights couldn't quite penetrate that far, and the shadowy form, the one that had scratched at Javier's door to check whether the driver was truly asleep or not, knew well enough how to hide from Javier's inspection in those favorable conditions.

****

It built itself from bad ideas and trouble. It fed from the forklift driver's "Eh, I'll chance it," and the scaffold builder's urge to "Just get it done with."

When the silos had gone up, even before that when the grade crew had shown up with a backhoe and a bulldozer to level the ground, it had coalesced from the survey team's last day on the site. The last run, the one where the surveyor had taken his last sight, scratched out his numbers on the pad and transcribed a three for a two.

Shrugged and gotten on with his life. Somehow, it worked out. Maybe because the dark little collection of "Ah, it'll be alright" had phased into existence, and absorbed the little mistakes and easy decisions before they could get far enough to hurt anyone. Dirt work. Tracks laid down. Scaffolding and steel. Then the hundreds of hours while the folks who worked the yard learned how the place had been put together, and what they had to do to make it all work.

The beast had fed well, grown strong within a constant inflow of all those little things.

Only now, the yard crews had their practice. The owners had burnt through their stock of "Hey, maybe you can" and "Can't you do just a little more" and "Wouldn't you be able to, if you tried" suggestions. Even the truckers and the train crews had ground down to the steady and the patient. Mostly.

There were always a few other bad ideas around. They waft in, don't they, from just about everywhere?

Not enough though to keep one living on the diet to which one had become accustomed. The beast hungered for the old days. For something more than the thin gruel of an occasional "I'm good, I can drive" blowing in off the highway. Even Jose Stone the maintenance hand had cleaned up, quit keeping a six pack in the ice chest in his truck for quitting time.

"You know, I should have done this a long time ago, I can't tell you how much better I feel" tasted like lye soap instead of ice cream and cake. Or like it was time to hit the road and find new pastures, the beast had finally decided.

It didn't know for sure what lay over the horizon. All the shadowy thing knew, really, was that the trucks went somewhere. That the yellow dog in the first truck meant trouble.

And that there were no animal companions keeping rig number two occupied while the driver slept. And so it climbed aboard, hid itself as well as it always had, and set itself to watching, and waiting, for the opportunity it needed to climb down and feast anew.

****

They met in a truck stop in Reynoso.

Javier had driven as far north as Fairbanks, as far south as San Salvador. The truck stops didn't change much, except for the menu. Especially early in the morning, you just pulled through an almost settled dust haze lit by the neon of the gas pump lights and rumbling from the engines.

His passenger hadn't been anywhere but a grain yard. But that had the same look, it thought. When the trucks pulled in to wait for their loads, the pre-dawn light had a look to it that the creature recognized.

But here was that same quiet professionalism; here, the drivers got down to check tire pressures, miles and oil and hydraulic fluids. Whether the load had shifted. Sure, the creature tasted remnants of that which it sought.

But only remnants. Echoes of a different hour and a different time for misbehaving. This hour tasted of drivers who only wanted to get down the road, or sleep off the last few hours of the last one.

The creature watched, listened. Javier pulled in, got down to use the shower and someone else's pisser, and the passenger stayed.

It was unsure.

Javier came back to the trailer and did a walkaround. Nothing too much, not here in the dark, he'd walk it again with a bump stick and a pressure gauge and a more critical eye, but he liked to at least make sure the belly locks held. That the grain wasn't leaking out onto the parking lot. That he still had all the tires and the tractor and the trailer where they should have been.

He didn't feel his passenger's impatience. Its mounting frustration. Hunger, packed into a seam where light and humble driver's vision couldn't reach. When Javier nodded his agreement with himself that the rig would do for another few hours, then left the trailer to walk around and climb into the cab and its waiting sleeper...

the passenger slid down to the parking lot. It didn't stand there and wait, it didn't pause.

It flowed beneath the trailer and around to meet Javier at the bottom step of his cab.

Javier felt it come on as a rush of bad feeling.

As a lack of surety.

As though he had picked up his trust in his rig, examined it, checked it out. Put it down for a bit.

And turned back to discover that the trust had never been there at all. Weight rushed onto his back, pushing, demanding that he realize he wasn't going anywhere, and if he did make the decision to get on the road he'd be traveling with the damned and the dead instead of getting back home to Rita this night.

The claws the creature sank into him bled Javier of the little moments, the simple accomplishments. The passenger wanted to drive now, and it needed doubt and uncertainty to take the wheel. It needed fuel.

Javier climbed into his cab. He reached for the grab bar, kicked his toes against the steel tank step. Fumbled the door closed, banged his knees on the seat and came this close to kicking the shifter loose of the floor.

He made it to the bed and tried not to think about the thirst that flooded his mouth. For what, he didn't know.

And even that strange thirst, hunger, desire, drained away until the only thing left was the doubt. The "What am I going to do?"

Then focus narrowed down to the roof overhead, closed down to just a little bit of light from the parking lot, and a whole lot of darkness from the passenger that now rode Javier's mind.

****

The computer recorded ten hours of rest in Javier's logs that night.

Looking back, even a month later, Javier couldn't quite remember which trip it had been.

Which haul and overnight in Reynosa turned into ten hours of sweats. Three hours before the sun tried to fight its way into the cab and drag him out, but seven hours yet more of Javier staring at the back of the sleeper bunk wall. He fought it.

For every lost shred of confidence, Javier remembered a moment when somehow the truck stayed on the road. Or the brakes caught just in time, even with the squeal of tires on the pavement.

He fought it. He pushed the doubts into a bundle, one mistrust at a time. Then, when the gorge of the passenger couldn't be contained any more, Javier stumbled and fell to the parking lot and vomitted the creature up.

It lay there in a pool of attempted poison and summer sun and evaporated.

But even in dying the creature left a residue there, a little bit of memory that occasionally caused one of the Reynosa truckers to misjudge their timing, or to ignore the pressure on that one tire in the back.

Javier avoided that little patch of bad attitude, as much by luck as intention. Just like he would forever after wake, most nights, for a minute or two of wondering whether he'd checked everything but no...

From then on, when he pulled into that Reynosa truck stop, once he'd filled up and pulled back around, instead of turning left and getting lined up halfway between the easy out and the quick walk to the dinner counter, Javier just pulled straight out of the pumps and took the first available. Or turned right and shrugged at the walk and the additional trouble he'd have getting out.

And tried, between bites of egg and potato and the green salsa please, or the moments of sleep, or the walkaround to make sure he and his rig were all in good sync, not to remember why the lefthand, the eastern side of the parking lot just didn't feel like the best place to park his rig anymore.