Furnace
Furnace
Muriel Gray
From the author of The Trickster, an unnerving tale of latterday alchemy and the horrors brooding beneath the placid surface of life in one small town in America.
Something is being born.
The darkness is its delight, deep and black and hot.
Its growth is unstoppable.
It knows who has summoned it.
It knows that its carrier is aware and afraid.
Its time is drawing near…
When long-distance truck driver Josh Spiller pulls into the small backwater town of Furnace, Virginia, he has a lot on his mind. He’s been driving for thirty-six hours straight after busting up with his pregnant girlfriend; he’s tired and hungry, and all he wants is to get some breakfast and rest up.
But Furnace has something special in store for Josh. Amongst the surprisingly affluent houses, the neat streets and smartly-dressed townsfolk lurks the stuff of living nightmare. A sequence of events is about to be unleashed that will test Josh to the edge of his endurance. A world of sorcery and malice is waiting to gather him in. For behind the prosperity of Furnace lie terrible secrets; and a terrifying fate in store for those who take an unwarranted interest.
Even now, as Josh searches for a place to stop, his electric-blue Peterbilt roaring through the gears, the eyes of the town are upon him.
The nightmare is beginning…
MURIEL GRAY
Furnace
HarperVoyager an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Muriel Gray 1997, 2015
Cover photograph © Wiskerke/Alamy
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Muriel Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008158255
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780007582051
Version: 2015-10-29
For Hamish, Hector and
Rowan Marsaili Barbour, with love
Contents
Cover (#u2c46d54c-f9af-5218-8a7e-3003c1fa00ac)
Title Page (#u5aa950f8-a0c6-546e-af31-5ece3d18e9df)
Copyright (#u7a3d0667-bfd7-5794-9da9-eb098de753fc)
Dedication (#u3f060ad1-ea7c-5052-83e0-3e0afa616bfe)
Chapter 1 (#u3bdb8439-6d0f-553a-8f44-05584847ba94)
Chapter 2 (#u32a7167f-9f91-5bc6-9a59-0a5d6488c14f)
Chapter 3 (#u6f333517-7072-5beb-ac16-c38933ee8130)
Chapter 4 (#udb1de8a8-0fa4-5587-9c5a-5417c0cc17c2)
Chapter 5 (#u1d88ae5d-9818-59f9-acd3-66a61f9537d3)
Chapter 6 (#u988caf08-34af-5c7e-a197-c9989173d989)
Chapter 7 (#u1b21a10c-bd19-5f4e-89e4-18c3bef22606)
Chapter 8 (#u8a4a81e1-42bc-5ea5-969e-a001ca46b448)
Chapter 9 (#ucd2c97b9-aa24-5964-b250-18a644b81f77)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
The Ancient: Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also By Muriel Gray (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
There was no need for her nakedness. Not yet. But as she stood on the rock and looked at the pale hands stretched out before her, she was glad that she had shed her clothes. The dawn light would break over the mountain behind her at any moment, and although the cold was fierce, her shivering was of anticipation rather than physical discomfort. The chill breeze on her skin felt good and the heavy scent of dogwood blossom and wet grass filled her nostrils.
Far below in the dark sweep of the Shenandoah valley, the lights of isolated trucks and cars moved along the highway as though pulled by an invisible link. She opened the fingers of her right hand and moved them across the blackness until they cupped one of those moving lights like a firefly. Perspective. It was incredible to her that it had taken the human beings until the Renaissance to interpret size and the distortion of distance correctly. What did ancient man think when he held up his hand as she was doing now, perhaps to balance a herd of animals on his palm? Did he think that by the visual evidence of their diminished size he became their master? And what made that thought more obtuse than the beliefs of modern man? To his eye, this would be no more than a naked woman standing alone on a hillside, playing an optical conjuring trick that allowed a truck to drive across her opened hand. How long before the next Renaissance-like awakening of intelligence? The awakening that would confirm his mistake in this respect.
As she became aware of the first rays of the new sun back-lighting her hair, she closed her hand slowly and obliterated the lights of the far-distant vehicle from her view.
‘Hey, Peterbilt. You got the four-wheeler leg shot ahead of you?’
Josh Spiller smiled before thumbing the CB in response.
‘Might do. Might not. How you gonna get that crawling piece of junk past my rig an’ find out?’
There was a cowboy whoop from the radio speakers, and as Josh had guessed, the source of the message was the reefer coming up on his left, increasing its speed and pulling level with him. He glanced with measured amusement at the cab of the Freightliner Conventional. It was like he thought. A company truck. Company drivers. A name ‘Kentucky Meat and Foul’ was painted on the door in fat blue letters, and the leering bearded face of the team driver hovered above them at the window, like he was a painting and the letters below spelled his title. The guy gave Josh a triumphant surfer’s thumb and little finger, accompanied by a shit-eating grin as his partner at the wheel came on the radio again.
‘Come on there, big truck. Bet you snatched a look at the snatch. Am I right, or am I right?’
Josh rolled his eyes skyward, trying hard to suppress a smile, then looked forward again.
To his right, the great rolling back of the Appalachians was a graceful black cut-out against the lightening sky, and in only a few minutes the first orange arc of a new sun would break across that heavenly silhouette. But to the guys on his left, the sun could come up accompanied by a cloud of naked golden angels sounding trumpets, and all they’d do would be to slap their thighs and guffaw at the fact that they could see some flying bare ass.
He felt a sudden wave of sympathy for the girl in front, still oblivious to the harassment she was about to endure. Channel 19 had been discussing her for the best part of an hour. Sure her legs were long and her skirt short, though if she hadn’t left her interior map light on no one would have known. But the bumper sticker on the back of her tiny Honda, that line-drawn fish that declared the driver was a Christian, suggested that light being left on was an innocent error. In Josh’s experience Christian ladies didn’t flash truckers.
His sympathy was mixed with a strange nostalgic melancholy brought about by the imminent appearance of the sun. He’d been feeling pretty mellow for miles, looking forward to slotting a cassette into the stereo and watching the dawn break over the mountains to the sound of something good. Something carefully chosen to heighten the privileged experience of welcoming the daybreak over gentle but beautiful open country. Now these pencil-dicks had ruined it, and there was nothing he could do. They would get level with her, probably sound their horn and embark on a series of gestures among which a zoologist could find subject matter for a dissertation.
As they inched forward, the reefer struggling to get ahead of Josh’s more powerful rig, he sighed and resigned himself to the spectacle, running a hand over the back of his neck to massage away fatigue from the muscles there.
And then the red light winked.
Josh glanced up at the radar detector on his dash and as quickly across at the cab of the reefer.
Company trucks didn’t carry radar detectors. Other owner-operators like Josh might just. The damned things were illegal in big trucks but nobody could get you for just riding with one, and Josh knew where to switch it on and where not to. Here, on this stretch of the northbound interstate through Virginia, he was glad it was on. If nothing had changed in the highway patrol’s routine since his journey down, then he knew exactly where those bears with the radar were. There was a rest area just ahead on the right before the next exit, and that’s exactly where he’d spied a state bear sitting hunting on the way southbound only three days ago. How could the apes in the Freightliner know that? They couldn’t. Not without a detector, or that other essential lifeline every trucker relies on. Information from a fellow driver. A driver like Josh. And if Josh chose not to say anything, there weren’t a whole lot of trucks packing out this road right now who’d blow those bears’ cover instead. The highway was so quiet it could have doubled as a runway. On the dash the red light was going crazy, and Josh pressed simultaneously on his brakes and the talk button of the CB mike, a smile nearly cutting his face in two.
‘Yeah, you’re on it, guys. I looked for sure. And let me tell you, she’s askin’ for it. Since she been showin’ us so much leg there, why don’t you fellas give her a look at some of them Kentucky chicken pieces of your own.’
He looked across as the cab of the Freightliner started to pull away by virtue of his own subtle braking, and watched the bearded guy slap the dash and give a thumbs up in appreciation of the joke.
‘Come on, asswipes,’ Josh whispered as he saw the rest area up ahead.
The truck drew level with the Honda, and as the window of the Freightliner started to wind down he could just make out the nose of the patrol car, peeking out from behind a clump of scrubwood, still expertly hidden from anyone who wasn’t looking for it. Josh’s smile couldn’t get much wider, but he tried.
The timing was close to perfect. The Honda swerved a little as two fat white buttocks poked out of the Freightliner’s window, a finger sticking grotesquely into its own rectum, precisely as the three vehicles glided past the parked patrol vehicle. To the two cops sitting glumly in their car, wishing that dawn would break and bring the end of their shift closer, it looked like a circus act that had taken a lifetime to perfect. They exchanged no more than a brief and weary glance before snapping on the siren and pulling out.
Now it was Josh’s turn to slap the wheel in glee as the Freightliner edged back and pulled over, falling prey to the police car like an antelope brought down by hyenas. Josh was alone with his good Christian lady again, and part of him wished she had CB so he could share the joke, and more important so that she could thank him for his betrayal of colleagues in the name of chivalry. But the exit ahead seemed to be the one she wanted, maybe from choice, or maybe just to get off the highway and away from her persecutors. She started to brake and signal. Josh braked in response and was surprised when she slowed to a crawl. There was nothing for it but to pass, so he swung the rig out and changed down accordingly. As the bulk of the Peterbilt moved past the woman’s tiny car, now peeling away at a snail’s pace towards the exit ramp, Josh Spiller threw a look across at her.
From her open window an elegant arm emerged in farewell, and on the end of that arm, stabbing the air repeatedly like it was trying to puncture an invisible skin, was a deeply un-Christian middle finger.
He’d fumbled in the plastic ledge above the dash for a good thirty seconds, initially finding only an evil knot of Jelly Bellies that had fused together in the heat of the cab, before his fingers closed on the cassette he wanted. The sun was almost visible now, and Josh urgently wanted to get his chosen track lined up before it was too late.
He flipped the tape out of the plastic junk-filled canyon and slotted it quickly into the stereo. It came on halfway through some terrible and elderly Doors number. Wrong. So wrong he wished he’d never included the track on this jumbled and hastily assembled compilation. He pressed fast forward, waited and then let it play again.
Aerosmith. He cursed silently. That meant that it was rewinding, not going forward.
The sky to his right was now growing light so fast that a ridiculous mixture of anxiety and frustration tightened his chest. He took out the tape and reinserted it. The machine didn’t like the way he did it and slid it back out at him again. The sky had now gone way past pink, turning into the luminous aquamarine that heralds the first glorious golden shards of sunlight, as he slammed the troublesome cassette back in and pressed fast forward again. Two pauses and he was there.
Josh couldn’t say why he fancied this track most to greet the dawn, but he did. It was old but it was tranquil. A song off some weird album by a British band called The Blue Nile that Elizabeth’s kid brother had loaned him.
It started with a slow drum then this really sad guy came on and sang like he would break your heart. You had to be in the mood or you couldn’t take it. Josh was in exactly the right mood. It was just what he wanted for the big event, the arrival of the sun after this nine-hour non-stop homeward haul from Tennessee. And it was going to work this time. It was going to be a peach. The track was lined up, the sun was maybe only seconds from view, and he was northbound in the right lane with nothing obstructing his view across the dew-soaked fields to the dark rolling back of the Appalachians.
That was important to the full enjoyment of the moment, the absence of anything man-made in between him and the sunrise. No buildings. No human junk. Nothing that would spoil his view with another reminder, particularly after his disappointment in the reluctant maiden he’d rescued, that sometimes people didn’t deserve another day graced by anything as beautiful and indiscriminately benevolent as the sun. He waited, his hand ready to press play, glancing every three or four seconds out of the passenger window to catch the first sight.
Up ahead, the highway stretched empty before him, an artery of stone that fed America its life-blood. Or was it a vein that circulated the disease of man and his junk around the once untouched and healthy body of this delicate continent?
Josh gazed out front, contemplating it for a second, knowing that whatever the answer, he was a part of it. The rare sight of clear road made him suddenly feel exposed, an alien object moving without permission upon an ancient and secretive landscape.
And in those few moments of inattention as Josh dreamily regarded the road ahead, the sun betrayed him and sneaked up over the rim of the hills. He whipped his head to the east as the first orange beam hit the side of his face, shifted in his seat and stabbed the play button on the stereo.
The tape hissed and then the song began.
How could he have known? Even with the benefit of the height that he enjoyed from the truck Josh couldn’t see the entire landscape ahead, couldn’t see the mark of man that was waiting for him, nestling smugly between mountains and highway. So at that religious and significant moment when the sun rose, it rose not over unsullied meadows and hills, but from behind a forest of four tall masts, one tipped by golden horns, another by the Cracker Barrel sign, the other two proclaiming Taco Bell and Burger King.
Josh blinked for a second, his mouth slightly open until an excited voice on the CB crackled over the gentle song playing on the tape and brought him back.
‘Man, oh man! Any of you northbounds see that?’
Josh glanced across at the source of the enthusiastic message; a lone R-Model Mack pulling a covered wagon on the southbound highway.
Gratefully, Josh picked up the handset. ‘Sure as hell did, big truck. Glad there’s someone else out there with a soul.’ He flicked off the tape, ready to receive the reply, and it came right back at him with its enthusiasm intact.
‘Yeah? Man, I can’t believe they’s only askin’ two dollars ninety for a chargrill, family bucket of fries, soup and a free soda. That’s a whole dollar less than the joint at exit 19. Sure gonna work for me!’
Josh Spiller stared ahead for a second or two, then gently replaced the handset, let out the remains of his breath and started to chuckle. He shook his head and carried on laughing until a tiny rogue tear rolled down one cheek and he wiped it away with the back of a greasy hand.
‘Shit. Know what, America? You are one fucked-up country.’
2 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
She’d been awake for at least two hours. Now that the dawn was bleeding through the drapes, she shifted under the covers and ran a hand over her warm belly. She had to get up. No choice. But here, in the dark that was gradually being corrupted by light, it was safe and warm to think, and everything outside that cocoon seemed impossibly cold.
Josh’s face. She closed her eyes and thought about it. Sometimes, if it had been a long time, she had trouble remembering the exact contours. But even if it was difficult to visualize she could always recall how it felt beneath her lips. She held on to that now, breathed in through her nose as she thought about the smooth soft skin over his cheekbones, the thick curl of eyelashes and the rough texture of bristle around mouth and chin.
With her eyes still shut, she swung her legs out of the bed and sat up.
The bedroom mirror greeted her with her own reflection when she raised her head and looked towards it. Despite her hunched posture, even she would admit that her breasts looked enticing. They were fuller and firmer than she’d realized, and her hands came up in an unconscious gesture to cup them gently.
Elizabeth Murray let her hands move up to her face and then spoke in a whisper to the mirror, the delicate planes of her cheeks and forehead sculpted by the grey dawn light.
‘What now?’
Josh waited impatienly outside the phone booth. There were only three private booths at this Flying J truck stop, all occupied by frowning men who looked like they were making talking an Olympic event. He sighed and leaned heavily against the wall, toying with his Driveline calling card.
The big black guy next to him was holding the phone against his ear with his shoulder, passing a rubber ball restlessly from hand to hand as he listened, his eyes glazed like he was hearing bad news.
Josh guessed what he might be hearing. The guy’s dispatcher would have put him on hold, and the profound expression of misery was most likely induced by an age of listening to the theme from Love Story reproduced electronically by a sadistic phone company. He looked at his boots. All he wanted to do was to call Elizabeth and tell her he was less than an hour from home. No filthy talk like you sometimes heard and wished you hadn’t, but he wanted privacy when they spoke, and if he didn’t get a free phone soon he’d miss her. He’d already gone past that delicious time when she would pick up the phone beside the bed and answer in a sexy, sleepy way. Right now she’d have a mouth full of Cheerios and be pulling on a jacket ready to go to the store, pleased to hear from him, but with a tone of urgency in her voice that meant he was making her late. Five more minutes and she’d be gone.
The door of the centre booth opened but infuriatingly the guy hadn’t stopped yakking.
Josh made a move towards him and the guy held up a hand without looking at him.
‘Uh huh? Well it ain’t okay with me.’
A listening pause.
‘No, it ain’t my last word. This is my last word. Okay, two words. Fuck you.’
He slammed the phone down, got up off the small plastic seat and pushed past Josh.
Josh grinned at him, and gesticulated at the phone. ‘It’s a drag always havin’ to call your grandmother, ain’t it?’
The man looked for a moment like he might throw a punch, but something in Josh’s eyes held his clenched fist by his side, and he satisfied himself with a ‘Yeah, funny guy’ muttered beneath his breath.
Josh smiled at the man’s back and entered the booth, his grin deforming into a grimace at the blush of sweat those substantial buttocks had left on the plastic. But he needed to make that call. He decided to stand, and as he punched in the code for the card he shook his head. Seemed like all truck drivers did was drive and then get mad with someone for no other reason than they didn’t like driving.
Choose any truck stop, any row of phones and mostly all you’d hear was a chorus of deeply discontented men. Some of it was just plain moaning, but enough of it was from the heart to make hearing it uncomfortable. Why drive if you hated it so much? Josh liked it fine. Just fine. And he loved Elizabeth. If the seat was clammy with his sweat after he’d talked to her, it wouldn’t be from stress.
The vacant computerized woman on the phone thanked him in a monotone for calling Driveline and informed him in a voice that suggested she was painting her nails that he had seven dollars and fifteen cents left to make his call. He punched in their number.
It rang eleven times and just as he was about to hang up Elizabeth came on, out of breath, and sounding angry.
‘Yeah?’
‘Hey. You should get into telephone sales, honey.’
She tried to change the tone, but there was still something there. Something at the back of her throat.
‘Hey yourself! Where are you?’
‘On the pike. Near enough home to smell next door’s mutt.’
‘Well get back here. I missed you.’
It was familiar small talk. But she said the last bit as though she really meant it.
‘You okay?’
‘Sure.’
‘Big day, huh?’
‘Yeah. Big.’
A melancholy tone reaffirmed that something was wrong. Now, in this tiny booth with two guys already waiting outside, wasn’t the time to find out what it was.
‘Want me to come straight by the store?’
‘How you going to park Jezebel?’
‘Normally I just pull on the brakes and shut her big ass down.’
‘And screw the Pittsburgh morning traffic?’
‘For you I’d leave her standin’ in the middle of the Liberty Tunnel at five-thirty Friday night.’
She laughed, and hearing her was like he’d swallowed something warm and sweet.
Elizabeth sounded more like herself when she spoke next. ‘Then come on by and make a traffic cop’s day.’
‘See how it goes.’
‘Love you.’
‘Love you too.’
He hung up and left the booth. Had he imagined it or had she really sounded uneasy? Understandable. Today, she and Nesta started their new career. A sackload of tasty redundancy pay blown on their crazy business.
Josh would have spent it buying something a man could use, like a decent flat-bed to switch with the trailer he was pulling so he could haul bigger sections of steel when he needed to. But it was Elizabeth’s choice, her money. She didn’t spend much of his, and he certainly didn’t spend any of hers.
Fifteen years as a machinist hadn’t made her rich but facing a new day, every day, sewing nylon umbrella sleeves, cheap bags for storing shoes and suit covers, had given her plenty time to think about her life. She and her buddy were about the only girls not weeping when the scrawny, acne-covered floor supervisor told them they were out. With a little shame, Josh admitted to himself that he didn’t really know if the costume ball hire shop was Nesta’s idea or Elizabeth’s. But he sincerely hoped the name ‘All Dressed Up’ was Nesta’s. It was seriously crap.
Of course Elizabeth would be scared today. The door would be opening in a couple of hours for the first time, and she’d be praying, fruitlessly Josh thought, that there’d be a queue of customers round the block, ready to part with cash to dress up in the ridiculous costumes she and Nesta had been sewing for the last three months.
Costume balls baffled him. To Josh, the idea of standing around at a party with a beer in your hand talking to someone about real estate or kit cars seemed pretty attractive. But not if you were dressed like Pinocchio and the guy you were talking to was trying to make an earnest point in a fun-fur kangaroo suit. But if it made money, then so what?
What bugged him was that Elizabeth’s tone had sounded more than just anxious. Sounded like she was sad.
He wandered out of the phone lobby and through the shop towards the restaurant. Maybe he should buy her something.
Truck stops nearly always boasted carousels full of junk that skulked near the cash desk like muggers, offering a variety of garbage for the guilty driver to take home and pacify his sweetheart. But until now Josh had never really looked at it.
The days when he’d done things he’d have to say sorry for were the days he hadn’t had someone steady like Elizabeth waiting at home. Now he had her, he didn’t do much on the road except drive, eat, sleep and shit.
Pausing for the first time at the cylindrical stand like it was a confession box, Josh let an embarrassed gaze drift over the assortment of tacky merchandise. He found himself looking quizzically at some round balls of fluff with eyes and feet made of felt, sporting cloth ribbons that said everything from ‘I Love You’ and ‘You’re Cute’ to statements of coma-inducing inanity like ‘I’ve been to West Virginia’. A gentle push of his forefinger sent the display turning slowly round to reveal badly-made plastic boxes covered in lace hearts that had been hastily glued to the lids, and some dusty-looking dolls dressed as cowgirls.
Josh glanced around, anxious in case anyone had seen him looking at this stuff, only to discover the woman behind the counter already had. She smiled when he caught her eye. Maybe someone had given her one of those fluffy balls once, with a message on the ribbon that she wanted to hear. He lowered his eyes, and wandered casually over to the display of Rand McNally road atlases, flicked through a couple like he’d never seen a map of America before.
Men like Josh Spiller didn’t look right poking at dolls and lacy boxes. Six feet and one hundred and sixty-eight pounds of fit, pale body were topped by a head of light brown hair cut so short it was near enough shaved. There was a tiny silver ball of an earring in his right ear and it combined with the hair to make sure he didn’t get stopped in the street often by nuns collecting for orphanages. What little hair that had survived the cut sat above a face with kind blue eyes, a straight, elegant nose and a wide, mischievous mouth. That open face meant that although he was adopting the demeanour of a mean guy, no one was going to mistake Josh for a member of an underground militia group. He looked kind. He couldn’t help it. Nevertheless, the spirit in him that made him look the way he did was not prepared to let him stand at the counter and buy some piece of girlie shit. He shut the atlas and walked towards the restaurant.
‘We got something new over here she might like.’
The woman behind the counter was smiling, her eyes lowered, looking at what she was doing and not at him. Josh cleared his throat.
‘Yeah?’
Her fat fingers counted out shower vouchers in front of her like they were cards in a game.
‘We got these real pretty pins. All sorts. And a machine that does her name on it while you grab a bite. Takes about ten minutes.’ She indicated the contraption behind her with a small movement of her shoulder. ‘You just turn that there dial to the letters you want and it gets right on doin’ it. Seventeen dollars including the name. Plus tax.’
Josh was trapped. He walked slowly over and she looked up.
From behind the glass under the counter she took out a tray of cheap pewter-coloured metal brooches shaped in a bewildering variety of little objects, each with a space beneath the object for the name like the scroll on a tattoo. With his hands in his pockets Josh looked them over, grateful the store was empty.
There were tiny metal bows, a rabbit, some bees round a hive, all in a mock-antique style, and all waiting to have a woman’s name scratched beneath their immobile forms. Despite his discomfort he decided they were cute and when his eyes wandered over to one made from a tiny pair of scissors cutting out a perfect metal heart, Josh knew Elizabeth would like it. The scissors were neatly appropriate.
‘So you do their name on the blank bit with that machine?’
‘Well I ain’t doin’ it. Got enough to do keepin’ you guys from rippin’ me off to sit here and carve your wives’ names on a pin.’
Josh smiled, pointed at the one he wanted and reached for the wallet in his back pocket. ‘Okay. It’s Elizabeth.’ He spelled it for her, watched her write it so she wouldn’t make a mistake, then went to get that coffee.
‘Takes ten minutes,’ she reminded him to his back as she clicked the letters into something that looked like a sewing machine and with her tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth placed the brooch on a tiny vice.
3 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
Elizabeth was right. There was no way he could park Jezebel anywhere near the store. In fact, there weren’t many places in downtown Pittsburgh you could take an electric-blue Peterbilt Conventional with a sixty-inch sleeper and forty-eight-foot trailer. Not unless you wanted to end up trapped like a beached whale, snared in some narrow street by four-wheelers who park like the whole world is their front drive.
Instead, Josh drove straight to Jezebel’s parking lot ten miles out of town, did his paperwork, zipped up a week’s worth of stinking laundry and headed home in the pick-up. He figured Elizabeth wouldn’t really want to see him in the store anyhow. Not if she was busy measuring someone up as a giant tomato. Right now, he needed some sleep. He’d be more use to her wide awake, showered and ready for action.
The duplex that Josh and Elizabeth shared was nothing special, but it was on a quiet block with tiny neatly-trimmed gardens tended by peaceful neighbours. Josh owned the whole house but rented the lower half to an elderly Korean bachelor called Sim, a tiny man in his seventies who constantly complained that he was at the rim of death’s abyss, usually while in the yard tending patio pots full of unpleasantly pungent spices and herbs.
Today was no different. Sim was sitting on a canvas stool against the wall of the house in the chill morning sun. A cigarette hung from his tight mouth, and he held The National Enquirer at a distance from his face as though he were a doctor examining an important X-ray.
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.
‘For you. It’s dumb but it’s for luck.’
She looked up and met his eyes, a smile beginning to ghost in them again.
‘You been screwing someone?’
‘I wish.’
She opened the box, rustled the piece of tissue paper and revealed the dull metal brooch. Her name was etched clearly but unevenly on it, with the E too far from the L and the final T and H crammed so tightly together they were practically one letter, but Elizabeth took the cheap gift from the box as if it were a Fabergé egg.
‘This is beautiful.’
‘It’s just junk. I thought you’d like it.’
‘You thought I’d like junk? That’s what I call romantic.’
She was smiling full on again. For Josh, the brooch had already proved hundreds of times its worth.
‘You like it?’
‘I love it.’
‘Well wear it and things’ll look better tomorrow.’
Her face clouded again and she toyed with the brooch, making a scraping sound on the table as she shifted it around.
‘Maybe.’
Josh held the bridge of his nose between a finger and thumb.
‘What’s the deal here? I’ve been gone longer and you’ve said less.’
‘I had things to talk to you about, that’s all.’
‘Well talk to me now.’
‘It’s too late.’
Josh sighed and bent his head. ‘Shit, Elizabeth. You’re acting like a teenager whose prom date hasn’t shown. I’m kinda tired here.’
She looked at him coldly, stood up, still clutching the brooch in her hand, and walked to the sink to stare out the window.
Josh watched her face as she turned back to him, and saw some kind of battle being fought behind those brown eyes. One of the emotions eventually won and she spoke softly, as if ashamed of its victory.
‘I’m pregnant.’
Josh blinked. He was aware that his heart had picked up its pace, but if that meant more blood was suddenly required and being provided, its rapid distribution seemed to be having little effect on him. It was as though his system had stalled like a smoky engine, leaving him temporarily unable to speak or move. He searched for the kick-start, and when he found it and spoke merely for the sake of speaking, realized that he should have waited.
‘Is it mine?’
Elizabeth’s face, already harder than he had ever seen it, darkened into the suburbs of fury.
‘I’ll give you one chance to take that back.’
He swallowed. ‘Shit, I’m sorry … I mean … Fuck.’
She regarded him with a mixture of contempt and grief. The same eyes that only minutes ago had looked up at him like a lover were now scouring him with acid accusation.
Josh tried again. As he got up to move towards her she made him jump with a sudden violent movement, lifting her arms and waving them in front of her as if to protect herself. He backed off, hands held out in an imploring gesture, and his voice, when it came, was higher than he would have liked.
‘I didn’t mean that. I don’t know why I said it. I’m glad. God, Elizabeth, I’m so glad.’
With those words something happened to Josh Spiller. A happiness that was beyond any he had ever experienced flooded into him and he realized that ‘glad’ was a weak and sickly word to describe the power of his sudden ecstasy.
Elizabeth watched the face of the father of her child as it exploded into rapture, watched his tense muscles melt into a slack, serpentine tangle of joy. Her lip trembled like a child’s as she braced herself. Then she spoke quickly to interrupt the acceleration of his emotion: ‘I’m not keeping it, Josh.’
His imploring arms fell.
‘What?’
‘I don’t have a choice.’
Josh looked at her for a very long time, then turned back to the table and sat down heavily on his chair. He leaned forward and cradled his head in his hands, his hot forehead pointing straight down to the table top.
‘Now hold up. This is going too fast. Talk to me.’
Elizabeth looked down at a hand which had become a fist, and when she opened it to reveal the brooch she had been clutching she could see two clear indentations that the scissors had made in her flesh. She closed her hand.
‘You weren’t here to talk to. I decided on my own. It’s impossible, Josh.’
He looked up from the cradle of his hands.
‘Why? For Christ’s sake we’re doing okay. Aren’t we?’
She swallowed back a sob, barely able to speak.
‘Nope.’
‘What do you mean?’
Elizabeth moved stiffly and rejoined him at the table. She stared into the yellow pine as though the words she was speaking were printed on it.
‘Commitment, Josh. That’s what a baby needs. It’s what I need too and I’ve never had it from you in any shape.’
He opened his mouth to protest but she silenced him with a sorrowful look.
‘I’m not complaining. This is an accident in a relationship that’s doing just fine. But it’s a relationship that can’t handle children.’
She was sounding rehearsed, but seven days to perfect a speech hadn’t been enough to stop it sounding phoney.
‘Welcome to daytime TV, folks.’
The bitterness in Josh’s voice was as alien to him as it sounded to Elizabeth. Any plan she might have had evaporated, and she looked at him like a frightened child.
‘Look at us, Josh. We live together but we’re not married. I see you for two, maybe three days out of every ten. I’ve just started a new business that needs all my time and energy. There’s nothing in this dumb life of ours that’s stable enough to make a good job of growing another human being.’
‘We love each other.’
‘Then why aren’t we married? Why aren’t you at home?’
‘Why aren’t you? Is sewing fucking Batman suits better than staying home and looking after our baby?’
She looked at him coldly. ‘Jesus Christ. You can take the man out of the truck but you can’t take the trucker out of the man. What next, Josh? The chorus of a Red Sovine song?’
He lowered his eyes.
‘I didn’t know you wanted to get married.’
‘You never asked.’
‘What if I asked now?’ His voice had an edge of desperation.
‘It would mean nothing. You wouldn’t be asking for the right reasons.’
There was a pause. A heavy silence that made Josh’s response startling.
‘FUCK!’
He slammed his fist down on the table so hard that Elizabeth leapt in her chair and caught her breath with the fright. Josh was breathing heavily, staring down at his hands, and she spoke softly when her heart had stopped pounding.
‘Next week. Wednesday at three o’clock. It’ll be over.’
He looked up slowly and her grief was almost uncontainable when she saw the film of tears that coated his eyes.
‘Then why even tell me? Does it feel good to give me a few moments of joy and then steal them back again? Huh? Make you feel big? Feel in charge? That what you call love?’
Elizabeth started to cry. Her chest heaved and she bent her head to her chest. Josh watched, wanting instinctively to comfort her but cancelling the order from his brain before it reached his arms.
She sobbed for a few minutes in silence, wiped her arm across her eyes and nose and then faced him again.
‘I told you because I was scared and lost. I always tell you everything.’
He looked at her tragic, puffy face and tried to feel the love for her he knew was there. But the imminent death of his baby, that terrifying appointment, the time already ticking away towards its execution as the baby’s cells split and multiplied inside her, was blocking it like a wall. He spoke quietly and with a malice he never knew he possessed.
‘You didn’t tell me you were a selfish bitch.’
Elizabeth stared at him for a moment, stunned.
‘Damn you to hell.’ She opened her hand and with all the force a close sitting position could afford, threw the brooch at Josh’s face and ran from the house.
As he sat still, listening to her car start and screech hysterically from the drive, Josh fingered the tiny scratch that his gift had inflicted above his eye. He bent to pick up the fallen weapon and closed his hand on the brooch’s innocent form.
There was no question of what action to take. He would do what he always did in a crisis. Josh Spiller got up and went to call his dispatcher.
4 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
Time. It was at the core of everything. To buy it. To control it. To comprehend it. And yet still, this night, this eve that had been so long coming, so long anticipated, had now crept up on her like a thief.
As always, she tapped three keys on the keyboard and watched the figures scroll up the screen. She knew what she would see, but it was important to remind herself why.
This was why. The golden, glimmering, shining reason for it all. The dollars, the deutschmarks, the pounds, yen and lire, all flickering before her, lighting her face up with their green glow.
More. The knowledge and power.
But no. She closed her eyes and clenched a fist against it. That thought was forbidden. Vanity was destruction. The power was in the humble and respectful use of the knowledge. And that was why tomorrow was no more and no less than the necessary function that it had always been. The others depended on it. Their world turned on it, because God made it possible. She moved the mouse and closed the file with one diagonal sweep and click, as the sound of soft spring rain tapping at the window won the battle for her attention over the buzzing computer.
And she smiled as she looked up, imagining it soaking new buds on the blanket of trees that separated her from the dull uncomprehending mass of humanity.
It had taken the surly teenagers in the loading bay over an hour to load his trailer. And that was after a two-and-a-half-hour wait in the damp Victorian warehouse. Josh had sat in the drivers’ waiting area, cradling a styrofoam cup of stewed coffee, watching the three bozos wandering around his truck like pimps on a Bronx street. One drove the fork-lift into Josh’s trailer and the others hung around the doors making flipping gestures with their hands and adjusting their baseball caps as they laughed about something secret.
Normally, Josh would have gone out and kicked their butts, but this time he sat immobile behind the glass partition, watching them waste his time. It was a shitty load, some metal packing cases for an industrial ceramics manufacturer in Alabama. No weight in them, so not much pay. But it was all he could get, and Josh would have delivered the Klan’s laundry to South Central LA if he’d been asked. He would have taken anything at all just to turn off and buy his ticket away from home.
There had been two other drivers in the warehouse and, hold the front page, they had been bitching:
‘So I grabs this little jerk by the collar and I says okay man, you want me to load it myself then you gonna have to tell your boss why his lifting gear got all bust up, ’cos I ain’t never used it afore. ’Course I have, but he don’t know that.’
The guy who’d been telling the story was about as big as his truck and the other driver listened without much interest, waiting for his chance to tell a similar triumphant story of how he showed them, and showed them good.
‘Well he calls me everythin’ but a white boy and then I just grabs hold of the controls and lets the whole bunch drop twenty feet onto the deck. Hee hee, did that boy load up like his dick depended on it.’
Josh had let the stream of familiar bullshit wash over him. He was numb. So numb, he’d uncharacteristically ignored both men, walked to the trailer when a nod from one of the rubber-boned kids indicated it was done, barely checked the load or how it was stacked, taken the paperwork and driven off. And now he was sitting upright, staring out of the darkened cab of Jezebel, whose bulk was untidily taking up most of the space in a southbound tourist parking lot on this Virginian interstate. He’d driven for only a couple of hours, but a lapse of concentration that nearly let him trash a guy on a Harley Davidson had made him catch his heart in his mouth and pull over.
It was two a.m. and he could hardly account for the last eight hours since Elizabeth had driven away with her, and his, precious cargo on board. He stared ahead into the dark, sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands resting in his lap like a trauma patient waiting to be seen in an emergency room. Josh wasn’t thinking about what to do. He wasn’t even thinking about Elizabeth and where she might be right now. All that was running through his mind were the words, repeating themselves like a looped tape, ‘How do I feel?’
Soft spring rain started to fall, gradually muting the intermittent roar of the traffic on the adjacent highway. He wound down his window and breathed in a mixture of mown grass, diesel fumes, and the dust raised by the rain from the parking lot’s asphalt. As he tried to take a deeper breath he felt a vice tighten around his chest, a crippling tension which prevented that satisfying lungful of oxygen. The pain came not from the emptiness that was left by that brief and grotesque argument, but from the dual seed of joy and dread that was still germinating in his heart.
Wednesday the seventh of May, three o’clock.
What was it? A boy or a girl? He hadn’t even asked Elizabeth how many weeks old her secret was. A bizarre omission, but more confusing was why he wanted this child so badly. Some of the things Elizabeth had said were true, he knew that. Their life wasn’t exactly an episode of The Waltons, but until last night he’d thought it was safe and stable. It was an adult life, where two self-contained people did what they pleased and came together when they wanted. He’d never even considered how or why that might change. Never considered a third person entering the frame.
The fresh air stirred him from his miserable torpor and Josh got up, absently pulling the drapes around the inside of the windshield. He climbed back into the sleeper and lay down on the mattress with his hands behind his head.
As he lay there, staring up at the quilted velour ceiling, he allowed himself to think of her, of Elizabeth; that funny, sometimes brittle person who even in her hardest moments could be melted like butter over a stove with a kind word or gentle touch.
It was like her to carry the burden of her news silently, but it was unlike her to taunt him by telling him it was over before it began. Perhaps he didn’t know Elizabeth at all. Who was that terrible mixture of defiant accusation and self-pitying grief? And who had he been, to call her what he did and withdraw the support he’d always given unthinkingly and unconditionally?
Josh screwed his eyes tight, trying fruitlessly to squeeze the scene into oblivion with the puny muscles of his eyelids.
Which coupling had done it, he wondered? Last week? The week before?
When?
Outside, a car pulled up in the lot and Josh opened his eyes to listen to the familiar human noises of a man and a woman as they left their vehicle to go and use the rest-rooms.
They chatted in low voices, in that comfortable intimate way that meant they were saying nothing in particular to each other, but were enjoying saying it. An occasional short laugh broke the flow of their small talk as they slammed their car door shut and their footsteps receded towards the rest-rooms. Josh realized he was listening to this most mundane collection of sounds with his teeth clenched and his eyes narrowed, the invisible couple’s easy happiness an unbearable affront.
He lay there for a very long time, and as time ticked away, bringing neither sleep nor solution, he was aware of its swift relentless passing for probably the first time in his life.
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.’
5 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
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.
‘How in hell do you do that?’ she’d breathed admiringly after he’d jumped in with the sequel to some old joke someone was telling, only seconds after he’d been shouting abuse at a talk radio host who’d used the word ‘negro’.
‘What’d you say, honey?’ he’d replied innocently, not understanding the irony when she laughed at him. She said after that, if she had anything important to tell him, she’d do it over a badly tuned radio with a heavy metal band thrashing in the background.
Except she hadn’t. Had she?
It had been important, and she’d told it to him straight, her words surrounded by a proscenium arch of silence. Josh flicked his eyes to the fabric above the windshield where Elizabeth’s cheap brooch was pinned. He’d stabbed it in there as a reminder that it had been bought with love but used as a spiteful missile, hoping it would harden him to the thought of her every time the pain of their argument germinated again. But it wasn’t working. It just made him think of her long brown fingers fingering it with delight. Josh wished the trivial memory of her riding with him hadn’t occurred to him, hadn’t made him feel like his heart needed a sling to support its weight.
He leaned forward and retuned the CB as though the action could relegate his dark thoughts to another channel.
Still nothing.
Josh sat back and resigned himself to the blind drive. The next town could be two or twenty miles away, and he was just going to have to live with that. It could be worse. The road was still climbing, but at least it was a pretty ride.
Dogwood bloomed on both sides of the road and on the east verge the rising sun back-lit the impossibly large and delicate white flowers, shining through the thin petals as though the dark branches were the wires of divine lamps. Ahead, a huge billboard cut rudely into the elegance of the small trees. The sign was old and worn, with the silvery grey of weathered wood starting to show through what had once been bright green paint.
‘See the world-famous sulphur caves at Carris Arm. Only 16 miles. Restaurant and tours.’
In the absence of anyone to talk to on the CB, Josh spoke to himself.
‘World-famous. Yeah, sure. The Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon and the fuckin’ sulphur caves at Carris Arm.’
As if he needed it, the sign confirmed that Josh Spiller was driving around in the ass-end of nowhere, and he was far from happy. If that was the next town, then sixteen miles was way too far. He started to weigh his options. Surely there would soon be a farm gate or a clearing he could turn in. But as the truck climbed it seemed less and less likely. The mountains were a serpentine dark wall, clothed here in undisturbed forest only just starting to leaf, and neither farmland nor building broke the trees’ unchallenged hold on the land. Josh had already driven at least four or five miles from the interstate and the thought of another sixteen was making him consider the possibility of backing up and turning on a soft verge, when without any warning or apparent reason, the road started to widen.
A house, set back in the trees, neat and spacious with the stars and stripes flapping listlessly on a flagpole by the porch, appeared on his right, followed by another three in a row almost identical a few hundred yards further on. No backwoods cabin these, but substantial suburban houses with trimmed gardens and decent wheels parked out front. Josh raised an eyebrow. This was what truckers called car-farmer country. The backwoods of the Appalachians were home to a thousand run-down trailers and cabins, sporting a statutory dozen cars and pick-ups half buried in their field, like the hicks who’d left them there to rot were hoping their ’69 Buick would sprout seeds and grow a new one.
Even on the main routes, Josh had been glared at by enough one-eyed crazy lab-specimens lounging on porches to know that this wasn’t exactly stockbroker belt. The kind of tidy affluence quietly stated by these houses was a surprise. But it was a welcome surprise to a man who needed his breakfast and wouldn’t have to buy it from a drooling Jed Clampit with a shotgun raised at his chest.
So half a mile and a dozen or more smart houses later, it was with relief that Josh hit the limits of the town to which these uncharacteristic middle-class dwellings were satellites. He drove past the brief and concise metal sign with a smile.
Furnace.
The wide street was now lined on either side by houses only slightly smaller than those on the edge of town. Standard roses bobbed in the breeze and hardy azaleas and forsythia were beginning to form islands of colour in a sea of smooth lawns.
It was five before seven and although it was early, people were about and Josh was heartened by the town’s potential for hot food to go. A kid rode past on a BMX, a sack of papers on his shoulder; two guys sweeping the road stood jawing against a tree, brushes in hand; a woman walking a dachshund on a ludicrously long leash stopped and waved to someone out picking up their paper from the front step. It was cosy, affluent, peaceful and ordinary. But it certainly was not what he had expected high up in this backwater of Virginia. Here, Jezebel felt ridiculously out of place, rumbling self-consciously through the street at little more than running pace, as though lack of speed could hide the bulk and noise of the Leviathan. The quiet street waking to its new day was like any other, but the affluence and suburban smugness was starting to jog a memory in Josh he didn’t like.
The Tanner ice cream sign.
A dumb, irrelevant memory, and one he tried to sideswipe. But it was there.
That ice cream sign.
For Josh as a child it stood at the corner of Hove and Carnegie like a religious icon; a circular piece of tin with the advertisement painted on it, supported at two points by a bigger circle of wire on a stand that let it spin in the wind. Judging by the arthritic squeaking of its rotations, it had stood at the end of his street like that for years, that dismal street his mother had brought them up on, a strange juxtaposition of the classes that Pittsburgh boasted, where the unwashed poor lived only a block away from their bosses, separated by no more than just a strip of trees or a row of stores.
Or an ice cream sign.
The Tanner girl and boy had big rosy cheeks and were licking the same cone of ice cream, vanilla topped with chocolate sauce. But when the wind blew the sign would spin and the picture, identical on both surfaces except for the children’s mouths which were closed on one side and open on the other, would animate into a frenzy of darting, licking tongues. Dean thought the sign was kind of spooky, especially when the wind was strong and the tongues went crazy. But Josh liked it. He liked it because it marked the beginning of Carnegie Lane, and more importantly, the end of Hove Avenue, an end to the crowded street that contained their tattered house. In Carnegie the houses were elegant and tall, keeping watch over their own spacious gardens with the demeanour of large wealthy women sitting on rugs at a race meeting. And unlike the regiment of dreary wooden houses that included the Spillers’, every one was different. Some were brick with wide white columned porches tangled with wisteria and honeysuckle. Others had stone facades and glass conservatories, or European affectations of mock battlements and balustrades. And in addition to the neat front lawns that were uniformly green all the way to the sidewalk, each, Josh knew for sure, had generous and private back yards.
School, the stores and everything that Josh needed to service his uneventful life was at the eastern end of Hove. In other words there was no call to go west into Carnegie at all. It merely led to wealthier parts of town, parts that were decidedly not for the Spillers. But he’d lost count of the times he’d found himself strolling past the squeaking Tanner ice cream sign, stepping into Carnegie with a roll to his pre-pubescent gait that tried to say he lived there.
At least he had until one searingly hot August. Josh was eleven and the day had been long and empty. His mother’s return from her job at a drug factory, moving piles of little blue and white capsules along a conveyor belt all day with a gloved hand, had been a cranky and irritable one. Particularly since she discovered that neither Dean nor Josh had made any attempt to prepare supper, but had instead been throwing stones up at the remains of an old weathervane that clung to a neighbour’s roof, in a contest to free it finally from its rusting bracket.
Joyce Spiller had sat down heavily on the three car tyres piled by the back door they used as a seat, and glared at the boys, but particularly Josh, with tired, rheumy eyes. Her voice was full of sarcastic venom.
‘Sure do appreciate you workin’ all day long, Mom. So to thank you for that act of kindness, please accept this cool glass of lemonade and a big juicy sandwich that me an’ my shit-for-manners brother have had all friggin’ day to prepare.’
Dean had blinked at his boots in shame, but for some reason, looking at this woman in her short nylon workcoat, her thin brown hair tied back with a plain elastic band, and her face that looked ten years older than her numerical age, Josh had suddenly despised her. Why should he look after her, when other kids got to come home from school and be met by a Mom who’d fetch them lemonade and a sandwich? What kind of a raw deal was this, having a mother who worked all day, sometimes nights too, who was always in a foul mood and looked like shit? The absence of a father, a taboo subject in the Spiller house, was bad enough, but the fact that they lived in this shambolic house and never went on vacation was all this failure of a woman’s fault.
Josh had stared back at her with contempt and then run from the yard out into the street.
He thanked God that until her dying day, his mother had taken that action for a show of shame and remorse. It was anything but. He’d seen the Tanner’s ice cream sign slowly rotating in the searing hot breeze and had headed straight for the leafy calm of Carnegie, where the people lived who knew how to treat their children. Maybe if he stopped and spoke to a kid up there, they might get friendly and he’d be asked in. He’d often thought of it. That day he decided he would make it a reality. Then she’d see. She’d come home and he’d be in one of those yards drinking Coke with new friends, who had stuff like basketball nets stuck to their walls and blue plastic-walled swimming pools you climbed into from a ladder. There’d be no more kicking around in a dusty yard with nothing to do except scrap with Dean and wait for a worn-out mother to come home and cuss at them.
He ran as far as the sign, then slowed up and turned into the shimmering street with a casual step. The sign had been making a wailing forlorn sound, a kind of whea eee, whea eee like some forest animal’s young looking for its parent. Josh strolled into the splendour of the street and walked slowly, gazing up at the grand houses, smelling the blooms from their gardens. There had been nobody about except for one man who was rooting around in the trunk of a car parked out front.
Josh got ready to say hello as he approached, but on catching sight of him the man straightened up with legs apart, putting his hands on his hips in the manner of a Marine drill sergeant expecting trouble.
He stood like that, staring directly and aggressively at Josh, never taking his eyes from the small boy until he walked by. Josh had felt his cheeks burn.
It was then that he had noticed the sounds. Just background noises at first, but with the blood already beating in his ears, they grew louder and louder until they were roaring in his head.
Lawnmowers buzzing, children shouting and laughing, garden shears snapping, an adult voice calling out, the echoing, plastic sound of a ball bouncing on a hard surface. All these sounds were being made by a ghostly and invisible army of people cruelly hidden from view. And ever present, weaving in and out of these taunting, nightmarish sounds was the whea eee, whea eee of the Tanner ice cream sign. Josh had been paralysed by a sense of desolation that made his bones cold in the thick heat.
The wall of expensive stone that was separating him from these invisible, comfortable, happy people was suddenly grotesque instead of glamorous, an obstacle that could never be negotiated if you were Josh Spiller from Hove Avenue. He had slapped his hands uselessly to his ears, turned and run back the way he had come, fuelling, no doubt, the fears of the man by his car that this was a Hove boy up to no good. Every hot step of the way home the ice cream sign’s wail followed him like a lost spirit, as though it were an alarm he had tripped when he stepped from his world into the forbidden one of his betters.
His mother had welcomed him back with a silent supper of fries and ham, but he could tell by the softness in her eyes she was relieved to see him. Josh knew then how much he loved her. He also knew that no matter how agreeable a house he might eventually buy as an adult, how comfortable an existence he might make for himself, he would always butt up against the corner of a forbidden street, the edge of something better to which he had no access. Maybe that was why he had turned trucker. No one can judge what a man does or doesn’t have if he’s always on the move. The eighteen wheels you lived on were the ultimate democracy. An owner-operator might be up to his neck in debt with his one rig, or it might be one rig out of a fleet of twenty. No one knows if the guy’s rich or poor and no one cares. The questions one trucker asks another are: where you going, where you from, what you hauling, how many cents per mile you get on that load?
No one would ever ask what street you lived on and give you a sidelong glance if it happened to be the wrong one. Josh hadn’t thought about that dumb incident for years, but here, faced with these attractive houses in this small mountain town, he could almost hear the ice cream sign howling forlornly again. It was crazy. He’d grown into a man to whom material possessions meant little or nothing, and yet here he was being infected by that old feeling of desire and denial that he thought he’d shaken off before he’d even grown a pubic hair. And all because a town looked a little neater, a little smugger, a little more affluent than he’d expected. Okay. A lot more affluent.
Josh shook his shoulders, suppressed his discomfort at the memory as he approached the town’s first set of lights, and scanned the side streets for a sign of something that might suggest food. The truck’s brakes hissed, he leaned forward on the wheel and looked around.
If Furnace had a commercial centre then this was probably it. The wide street that cut across this one was lined on both sides with small shops and offices, buildings that were as well presented as those belonging to their potential customers. There was a cheerful bar on one corner, featuring long, plant-filled windows onto the street, far removed from the darkly terrifying drinking-holes a man could expect in the mountains, and an antique shop on the other that suggested Furnace did a fair piece of business from tourism. A complex metal tree of signs told him where the best Appalachian wine could be bought, provided directions to a children’s farm where the animals could be petted, and reminded you that the world-famous sulphur caves were now a mere fourteen miles away. Josh conceded that bored families in camper vans might tip a few dimes into the town’s economy every summer, but even if they loaded up with Appalachian wine till it broke their axles and petted the farm animals bald, it still wouldn’t account for the prosperity of the town. He mused on the mystery of it, and settled with reckoning there must be a whole heap of prime farmland groaning with fat cattle hiding way back here that was keeping these people in new cars and white colonnaded porches. But if that was the case, they were keeping it well hidden. And although the mountain forest came so close to the edge of the town it made Furnace look little more than a fire-break, what the hell: it was a theory. It made Josh more comfortable to invent a logical and soil-based reason, stalling that tiny and rare niggle of envy he was feeling. He never envied farmers. Being tied to the land was just about the worst thing you could be.
Far down the road to his right, Josh could make out the entrance to a mini-mall, fronted by an open foodstore. That’s where he would head and take his chance, since the parking in front of the store looked sufficiently generous to accommodate the truck.
As he gazed along the long wide road, waiting for the lights to change, the vibration of the idling engine combined with the pale early morning sun shining into his face suddenly made Josh ache to close his heavy eyes. He fought it, but his eyes won.
It must have been only seconds, but when he awoke with a neck-wrenching upward jerk of the head, the fact he’d fallen asleep made Josh pant with momentary panic. He ran a hand over his face. This wasn’t like him. It had been years since he’d allowed himself to become so tired while driving that he could lose it like that. In the past, sure, he’d pushed it. But not now. Once, back in those days when he’d try anything once, he’d driven so long he’d done what every trucker dreads. He’d fallen asleep with his eyes open. After a split-second dream, something crazy about shining golden dogs, Josh had woken suddenly to find the truck already bouncing over the grass verge. He vowed then he’d never do it again. Yet here he was, thirty-six hours since sleep, still driving. He had to stop and get some rest. No question. But first he wanted to eat.
Above him, the bobbing lights had been giving their green permission for several seconds, and he shook his head vigorously to rid himself of fatigue while he turned Jezebel into the street at a stately ten miles an hour. As he straightened up and moved down the road, a car trying unsuccessfully to park pushed its backside out into the road at a crazy angle and forced him to stop. He sighed and leaned forward on the wheel again while the jerk took his time shifting back and forward as if the space was a ball-hair’s width instead of being at least a car-and-a-half-length long. The old fool behind the wheel stuck an appreciative liver-spotted hand out the window to thank Josh for his patience, and continued to manoeuvre his car in and out at such ridiculously tortuous angles it was as though he was attempting to draw some complex, imaginary picture on the asphalt. Josh raised a weary hand in response and muttered through a phoney smile, ‘Come on, you donkey’s tit.’
He sighed and let his eye wander ahead to the foodstore, allowing himself to visualize a hot blueberry muffin and steaming coffee.
Across the street, a woman was walking towards the mall, struggling with a toddler and pushing a stroller in front of her that contained a tiny baby. It must have been only days old. Josh swallowed. He could see the little creature’s bald head propped forward in the stroller, a striped canvas affair, presumably the property of its sibling and way too large for its new occupant. The baby was held level in this unsuitable vehicle with a piece of sheepskin which framed its tiny round face like some outlandish wig.
With the sight of that impossibly small creature, it was back; the longing, the hurt, the confusion that Elizabeth had detonated in him.
He found himself watching like some hungry lion from long grass as the woman kicked on the brakes of the stroller, abandoned the baby on the sunny sidewalk and dragged her toddler into the store. The tiny bundle moved like an inexpertly handled puppet in its upright canvas seat, its little arms flailing and thrashing as two stick-thin legs paddled in an invisible current. Josh ran a hand over his unshaved chin, and covered his mouth with his hand.
Would his baby be kicking like that little thing, right now, inside Elizabeth? When did all that stuff happen? A month? Two months? Six? He knew nothing about it.
Elizabeth. His mouth dried. Elizabeth, his love. Where the hell was she?
He closed his gritty eyes for a moment and the shame of what he had done overwhelmed him, making him light-headed with the sudden panic of regret. Opening his eyes again, he looked towards the infant. There was now a different woman standing behind it, both hands on the plastic grips of the stroller.
Older than the mother, possibly in her fifties, she was dressed in a garish pink linen suit that, although formal and angular in its cut, seemed designed for a far younger woman.
Her hair was red, obviously dyed, and even from this distance Josh decided she was wearing too much make-up; a red gash for a mouth, arching eyebrows drawn in above deeply-set eyes.
He had seen plenty of women like that at the big Midwest truck shows, hanging on the arm of their company-owning husbands; women who spent money tastelessly as though the spending of it was inconvenient and tiresome but part of a dutiful bargain that had been struck.
Josh would barely have glanced at such a woman had he seen one sipping sparkling wine in a hospitality marquee, while her husband ignored her to do business with grim-faced truckers.
But here, standing outside a foodstore in this rural nowhere at seven o’clock on a spring morning, she looked remarkably out of place.
More than that. The most extraordinary thing about her was that she was staring directly and with alarming intensity at Josh. It wasn’t the annoyed and studied glare of a concerned citizen, the look a middle-aged woman with nothing better to do than protect small civil liberties might throw a noisy truck.
It wasn’t aimed at the truck. It was aimed at him.
In front of him, the master class in lunatic parking had ceased, the man at the wheel waving a gnarled and arthritic hand from his window again in mute thanks, and still the woman’s eyes continued to bore into Josh as she stood erect and unmoving, her body unnaturally still, on guard behind the writhing baby. For one fleeting, crazy moment Josh thought he might be inventing her, that a part of his guilty and fevered mind had conjured up this stern female figure to reprimand him for his paternal inattention.
‘That’s right, you useless dick,’ those eyes seemed to be saying. ‘This is what a baby looks like. You can look but you certainly can’t have. Only real men get these. Real men who stay home.’
He blinked at her, hoping that her head would turn from him and survey some other banal part of this quiet street scene, proving that her stare had been simply that of someone in a daydream, but her face never moved and the invisible rod that joined their eyes was becoming a hot solid thing.
There was no question of him stopping at that store now. Josh wanted out of there, away from that face, away from that tiny baby.
He fumbled for the shifter, starting the rig rolling clumsily by crunching his way around the gear-box as he picked up speed. A row of shiny shop windows to his left across the street bounced back a moving picture of Jezebel as she roared up through the gears. It was the clarity of that reflection as it distorted across undulating and different-sized glass that gave her driver an excuse to admire the mirror-image of himself sitting at the head of his gleaming electric-blue Peterbilt, and take his eyes momentarily from the face of the woman who was still standing like a lawyer for the prosecution on the sidewalk ahead.
Had she been waiting for that irresistible weakness that is every trucker’s vanity, to catch a brief glimpse of themselves on the move, and see themselves as others do? Josh would never be sure. How could he ever be sure of anything that happened that morning?
His eyes flicked back from the moving reflection down to the speedometer which showed around twenty, and then looked forward again. Back to the road and those eyes glaring at him from across the street.
She pushed the stroller like an Olympic skater, propelling it forward with a theatrically benevolent outward motion of the arms which culminated in a triumphant crucifix, palms open, shoulders high, as if waiting for a panel of judges to hold up their score cards. The timing and positioning was spectacularly accurate. She hadn’t pushed until Josh had been exactly level with her, so that the front wheels of the stroller rolled at an oblique angle beneath the double back tyres of the tractor unit.
That expertly judged speed and angle let the outer tyre snag the frame and flip it on its side under the rig, giving all eight wheels the opportunity to travel directly over the stroller and its contents.
It was almost as if Josh’s hysterical intake of breath was the force which pulled his right leg up and slammed his foot down on the brake. But there was little point in the action. His chair had already bounced in response to that small shuddering bump, the slight motion the truck’s suspension registered as it negotiated a minor obstacle, the same motion that would indicate Jezebel had run over a pothole or a piece of lumber on the highway. Only this time it wasn’t a piece of lumber. It was eight pounds of brand-new flesh, bones and blood, strapped into its flimsy shell of plastic, aluminium and canvas.
The force of the braking threw Josh forward into the steering wheel, and after he whiplashed back with a winded grunt he snapped his head round, eyes and mouth as wide open as the muscles were designed to allow, wildly scanning the view from his open window as he panted for breath. In those few seconds that felt like minutes, he noticed three things. The first was that the woman in the pink suit was gone. The second was that the reflection in the store window showed him quite clearly that there was a small mangled mass beneath the trailer, caught untidily between the back wheels of the cab. The third was that the mother was emerging slowly, as if in a dream, from the door of the store, her mouth making a dark down-turned shape that was impossibly ugly. It took a few more seconds before her screams started. First her arms twitched at her sides and her body appeared to quiver with some internal electric current, and then it was as if that current had been suddenly cut. She collapsed to her knees like a prisoner about to be executed, and her dark open mouth shaped the cry that savaged the morning air with the naked brutality of its pain.
Behind her, in the open doorway, her toddler stood howling until adult arms swept it inside.
Josh was out of his cab and scrambling desperately beneath the trailer before he had time to consider what he might find there. Had he stopped to think he would never have approached that soup of flesh, but his body was working to some private agenda that had little to do with logic or thought. It moved and acted on instinct, as if unthinking swiftness of action could somehow undo what had most certainly and irreversibly been done.
The towelling one-piece babysuit had held most of its contents together, but it had expanded when the body inside changed shape, so that now it was not so much a garment as a large, sticky, flat sack. The blood seemed so thick and black, but the worst of it was the way the main aluminium support of the stroller had embedded itself in the middle of the baby’s skull, splitting the head in two in a diagonal line from one eyebrow to a tiny shoulder. It had forced both eyes from their sockets before they, too, were mashed into the glistening corpse.
Perhaps he thought the child would be unrecognizable. He was disappointed. The mess was still so obviously a baby that Josh put out a trembling hand and fingered one tiny foot that had somehow remained intact, regretting it instantly when his gentle touch made it shift slightly with a sickening slick sound. For a crazy moment, lying on his stomach beneath the trailer, he thought about those cartoons where the victim is run over by a road roller and peeled off the road in a long flat strip, and he wanted to laugh.
He wanted to shake with laughter, wanted to feel tears of mirth pour down his cheeks, and hold his sides as they ached with the effort of hilarity. But the sound he was already making, accompanying the stream of salty tears dripping from his chin, was a thin, reedy wail that came from the back of his throat. It was a sound very far away from laughter.
He lay there for a long time, then there were hands on his legs, pulling him out from under the truck. Gentle hands, squeezing him reassuringly as they tugged him back. And voices. Calm voices that sounded miles away, saying things like ‘come on now, fella’, ‘leave it now’, ‘come on there’.
Josh went limp. He was pulled free of Jezebel by three pairs of hands and manhandled into a sitting position. A man wearing thick spectacles and a blue cotton coat with ‘Campbell’s Food Mart’ stitched on the pocket, was kneeling in front of him, looking concerned.
Behind him were two lanky teenagers, one with the same coat and one in a T-shirt and low-slung jeans. The man was talking softly, as if to a wounded animal.
‘S’okay. S’okay now. Weren’t nothin’ you could’ve done there, fella. Sheriff’s on his way. You just sit tight.’
Josh looked at him dumbly and then turned to the sidewalk in front of the store where he had seen the mother collapse. She was sitting as he was, although being attended to by more people, but her head was thrown back and one arm reached up above her head as though trying to grab a rope. The woman, the woman in pink, that staring, crazy murderer, was nowhere to be seen. Josh realized with an accelerating panic she was not being pursued, that her absence was not an issue here. She had to be found, had to be stopped. He struggled to get to his feet.
‘It wasn’t no accident … listen … we have to find that woman … she …’
The bespectacled shopkeeper held him down.
‘Hey, hey. Come on there. You had a mighty bad shake-up. Hang on in there.’
A station-wagon ambulance was drawing up, and suddenly the hands that were pressing his shoulders down now went to his armpits and helped him to his feet.
He went meekly and sat down heavily on the edge of the sidewalk where his assistants abandoned him in favour of a split interest between the hysterical mother and the two paramedics crouching under the trailer. To Josh, the people making up this macabre tableau were moving slowly and dreamily as though they were under water. He blinked as a fat, dusty police car rolled to a halt behind the truck and watched impassively as a sheriff’s deputy climbed into Jezebel and moved her to the side of the street with a shudder of badly-changed gears.
He said nothing as a square man who claimed to be the sheriff led him to the police car and gently guided him into the back seat. But as they drove off, his armour of numbness was shattered by the sight of the bereaved mother, still sitting on the sidewalk, now embraced clumsily around her thin shoulders by a rough-hewn man in paramedic’s coveralls. She lifted her head as he sat in the police car, raised a trembling hand towards him and opened her mouth to speak. He waited, steeling himself for the abuse, the unimaginable but inevitable verbal wounding.
With the window shut he couldn’t hear her words, but her face was so close, and she spoke so slowly he could lip-read as clearly as if she had shouted.
Josh’s heart lurched as he watched her mouth say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then she bowed her head and gave in to her weeping once more.
6 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
‘No. I don’t understand.’
Dr McCardie tapped his pen on the desk and looked at her without sympathy.
‘It’s like I said, Miss Murray.’
‘Elizabeth.’
‘Elizabeth.’ He nodded politely but coolly, taking her point before continuing. ‘I realize that a scan may be the last thing you want when you obviously have your mind set on the termination, but in order to carry that termination out without complication, we need to know how the land lies.’
‘Why today? Why couldn’t you do this on Wednesday when I’m anaesthetized?’
The young man looked at her with an eyebrow raised and barely suppressed a sigh. ‘A scan is neither painful nor traumatic. What’s worrying me here is that you seem to believe that we’re just going to put everything right while you’re asleep. The termination is done under a local anaesthetic. You’ll be awake. But more important than your comfort, Elizabeth, you’re making a decision here. You’ll have to live with that decision when you get up and walk away. Do you understand what that means?’
She blinked at him.
‘Yes.’
He waited a few moments until the film of tears that was forming over her eyes was re-absorbed under his professionally dispassionate glare. ‘Then may we proceed?’
She looked across at the screen of the scanning machine, still showing the result of its last client, a tiny crescent blob adrift in a black universe.
Elizabeth stood up and slipped off her coat.
They tested him for alcohol, taking his blood and breath, gave him scrappy bits of food and a warm can of soda as they wrote down the fragments of his fevered statement. Then, with the comic solemnity of a man who believes himself to be of great importance, a thickset policeman led him into a small brick-lined cell. He waited until Josh sat down on the narrow bed by the wall, then nodded to him as though his prisoner had performed some act of kindness.
‘Shouldn’t be overlong till the test results get back. This don’t mean nothin’, bein’ in here for now. Just procedure.’
Josh looked up at him and returned the nod. The policeman closed the door gently and locked it.
The sleep that immediately overwhelmed Josh was so deep he had no recollection of even lying down on the hard mattress. His next sentient moment after the locking of the door was the unlocking of it, and that, he discovered with a bleary glance at his watch, was at least five hours later. A different policeman was regarding him coolly, waiting for him to come round.
‘It’s this way,’ he said, as though answering a question.
Josh stood up unsteadily and followed him out of the cell, along a corridor and into the room where the sheriff and his colleague had interviewed him hours before. He entered, sat down on one of the unsteady wooden chairs arranged around the metal table, and waited with his hands folded in front of him. The deputy pulled out a chair opposite Josh, sat down and cleared his throat.
Outside the closed door, phones were ringing in the distant office and men were talking in low voices. Not the voices of conspiracy or suppressed anger, but rather the voices of visitors to a desperately sick hospital patient. The deputy scratched at an armpit.
‘Got some more stuff to ask you if that’s amenable to yourself.’
Josh blinked and sat back, marginally opening his palms in acquiescence.
‘While you been sleepin’ we got most of the information we need ’bout what went on back there.’
Josh sat up. ‘The woman? You found her?’
The man looked back at Josh with a mixture of embarrassment and impatience. ‘I’m goin’ to stick to what we know here right now. You with me?’
Josh said nothing, and his silence was taken as permission to continue.
‘You ain’t been drinkin’ or poppin’ pills, an’ the marks from your tyres out on the road, along with them witnesses that saw it, say you weren’t speedin’ unduly neither. But I guess you know you’re in violation with your log book.’
Josh’s mouth twitched.
‘I told you where I pulled over, and for how long. I was going to fill it in when I stopped here.’
‘Trucker with all them years behind a wheel knows that’s against the law.’
‘Sure. I know it.’
The man’s demeanour was changing. Beneath his officious politeness, Josh could read a glint of malice.
‘Log books ain’t there for your recreation, mister. We got to know where and when you stop. In case you been doin’ somethin’ you shouldn’t.’
The policeman waited a beat, as if hoping for some display of emotion from his interviewee, then continued. ‘Like drivin’ illegal hours without sleepin’.’
Josh stared back at him, his closed mouth failing to conceal a jaw that was clenching, making the tiny muscles beneath his ears protrude.
‘You have a good sleep in the cell?’
‘Sure. Thanks.’
‘Mighty tired, huh?’
‘Yeah. Been working hard lately.’
The deputy sighed, long and deeply, as though growing weary of this. ‘Your stopover. It checked out. Highway patrol saw your truck there three times in the time you said you parked.’
Josh stared at him, watching him closely as he continued to see if there were a trap being set.
‘Guess it was lucky you pulled over in a tourist bay instead of a truck stop, huh, Mr Spiller? Attracted attention.’
‘Never thought about it.’
The deputy leaned forward, his voice menacingly conspiratorial. ‘Yeah, it’s real lucky. ’Cos if we thought that you’d been drivin’ for more than the legal ten hours when you killed that little baby, I guess I don’t know what the sheriff might do.’
Josh stared back, trying to look unmoved. The deputy hissed, ‘You’re gonna get a fine that’ll make that shaven head of yours curl the goddamn hair it got left. You’re goin’ to think about how poor you are every time you open your log book.’
‘It was a mistake.’
The deputy looked back at him with naked contempt. ‘Sheriff needs a final statement.’
He got up and left the room. Clearly, the impromptu interview had been nothing more than a device to work out his anger at an obvious injustice. If things had been different, Josh wondered how many teeth he might be missing right now, how many broken ribs he might be nursing after having ‘fallen’ in his cell. There was no doubt. They had been trying their damnedest as he slept to nail him with something, and they had failed.
Josh screwed shut his eyes and clenched his teeth. Ten hours? Try thirty-six. The lie was more intolerable for being a lie that could never be uncovered. Only Josh Spiller knew he hadn’t slept. Did it really matter? He hadn’t killed the baby. That woman, that nightmare of a creature, had killed it. How would a night’s sleep have altered that?
Unless …
The tiny seed of doubt that he might have fallen asleep for a split second, for that crucial life-changing, life-ending second, wormed its way back into his mind. He slammed it down. No. He knew what he’d seen. A woman, a mad evil woman, had deliberately murdered a child.
He composed himself and forced himself to concentrate on waiting. For what, he was unsure, but the process of sitting still and expectantly was surprisingly calming. It was out of his hands. Someone, some unseen witness, would have told the police about the woman in the suit and they would be out there looking for her, if indeed they hadn’t already got her locked up. If they could trace Jezebel’s whereabouts to the parking lot last night, surely they would already have her behind bars. Maybe she was in the next cell. He would just wait and see.
He didn’t have to wait long.
The door opened and the square sheriff entered with two deputies, each carrying a cup of coffee. The sheriff carried two, one of which he put down in front of Josh.
‘Coffee. Take cream?’
Josh nodded his head dumbly and cupped his hands around the warm styrofoam as the man serviced his coffee with some mini-cream cartons from his pocket.
The sheriff sat down on the chair opposite and the two other men leaned against the wall, but their presence was casual rather than threatening.
‘I introduced myself earlier, Mr Spiller, but I guess you were pretty spaced out by the whole thing so let me do it again. I’m Sheriff John Pace.’
Josh looked at him expectantly, hoping by the tone of his voice that he brought not a further reprimand, but some news.
John Pace, however, looked back as though the reminder of his name was all that mattered here. When he realized that the man was going to say no more, Josh spoke:
‘Did you get her?’
Pace looked down at his cup and then glanced quickly out the corner of his eye at one of the deputies. The look, unlike that of his deputy before him, was one of disappointment, of someone letting him down. He sighed before he replied.
‘Who might that be, Mr Spiller?’
Josh’s hands, still cupped round the coffee, changed to fists.
‘The woman. The one who pushed the baby under the truck.’
The sheriff cleared his throat. ‘Mr Spiller,’ he hesitated, then said, ‘Can I call you …?’ he fished Josh’s licence from his top pocket and peered at it. ‘Josh? That’s it?’
Josh stared at him as if he were mad.
‘Josh,’ the sheriff continued with renewed confidence. ‘I know how shook up you are, but we need to pull ourselves together here a piece. We already got statements from the witnesses. We just need yours. You know we’ll have to fine you for your log book violation. There’s an eight-hour shut-down goes with that. Guess you know. But since you’ve been out of action damn near that, I reckon once you’ve paid up you’ll be free to go. We know you stopped where you said.’ He hesitated. ‘But ’fore I let you leave I need to know you’re goin’ to be okay. Shock makes you tired. Confused. Whole bunch of stuff. You feel better after your sleep?’
Josh searched the sheriff’s face for irony and oddly found none. He fought back his guilt.
‘What did they say?’
‘Who?’
‘The witnesses.’
John Pace leaned forward and his hand lifted slightly as if he wanted to put it on Josh’s arm. He stopped himself when the look in Josh’s eye warned him that he didn’t want to be touched.
‘No one’s blaming you, son. It was an accident. You weren’t speeding, you weren’t drinking. Just an accident.’
Josh swallowed. He spoke quickly with panic in his voice.
‘A woman pushed the baby under the truck. Deliberately.’
The sheriff was shaking his head.
‘The mother left the brakes off the stroller and the wind caught it. She told us so. Saw the whole thing herself. You think she’d lie about a thing like this?’
It was Josh’s turn to shake his head. Pace looked perplexed.
‘Why you doin’ this to yourself, fella?’
‘I can describe her. In detail. I want it on my statement.’
‘I’m goin’ to say this again. Shock plays tricks on you.’
‘I know what I saw.’
The sheriff sighed deeply and turned to one of the men leaning against the wall behind him.
‘Archie?’
The man opened a notepad, pulled out another chair and joined the two men at the table. John Pace ran a hand over his short sandy hair and sat back in his chair.
‘So?’
Pace gestured at him like a sultan allowing a feast to commence.
Josh took a sip of the bitter coffee in front of him, nervously coughed his throat clear and told them it all again.
He spoke slowly and deliberately, and when once more it came to describing the woman he paused, making sure that the man with the notepad had caught up with his tale. The deputy looked up expectantly, holding his pen like a high-school student paying attention to a dull but insistent lecturer. Josh concentrated on his description of the woman, making it more detailed than when he’d first blurted out his hysterical, ragged tale hours ago, and as he spoke he noticed a change come about the men. The one writing glanced across at John Pace who in turn narrowed his eyes. When Josh had finished Pace sat back in his chair and looked thoughtfully across the table. He nodded to himself for a second or two, then rose slowly to his feet and made for the door. He pointed at Josh as he left the room.
‘Hang on there. Got somethin’ for you.’
Josh blinked at the man’s back then looked quizzically at the two men left in the room. They returned his stare with the dull gazes of small-town policemen and Josh looked elsewhere to avoid those vacant eyes. They waited several minutes until Pace re-entered the room clutching a piece of paper. It had ragged fragments of Scotch tape adhering to three comers, with the fourth corner missing, and looked like it had just been ripped clumsily from a wall.
Pace sat at the table, looked down at his prize for a second, moved Josh’s cup to one side then slid the paper in front of him. Josh looked down and the breath left his body.
It was her.
The photo was monochrome, but she was wearing the same suit. She was in a room that looked like a court or schoolroom, with a large flag propped in the corner behind her, and she was smiling up at Josh with even white teeth. She looked good in the picture, younger than Josh had initially guessed, and her make-up was more gentle and sophisticated. But it was her. The murderer. No doubt.
Below the picture a large caption read, ‘Vote for Councillor McFarlane. You talk. She listens.’
Underneath in smaller print the handbill informed Josh that Councillor Nelly McFarlane would be holding a question and answer session at Furnace junior school on May nineteenth.
When Josh looked back up at the sheriff’s face, John Pace was registering a peculiar mixture of triumph and sympathy. But if the man was feeling smug, he concealed it well.
‘This her?’
Josh nodded once, almost imperceptibly. Pace did the same.
‘Like I say, shock’s a crazy thing.’
‘Where was this?’
‘All over town.’
‘You think I saw it somewhere.’
‘I know you did. Hard to miss.’
One of the deputies sniggered and Pace threw him a look.
Josh slumped forward, the core of determined revenge dissolving in him, leaving his body slack and empty with misery. He let his hot head touch the back of his hand. This time, Pace allowed himself to put a hand on Josh’s arm and found that it was not resisted.
‘But I saw her.’
Josh’s words were muffled, spoken into his own skin. Pace replied to the top of his head. ‘You just had the worst day of your life, Josh. But you have to realize it weren’t your fault. The mind makes up all kind of mixed-up shit to help us deal with guilt and grief. Once ran over a neighbour’s dog. Couldn’t sleep for weeks. God alone knows what it must be like to have killed a child. You ain’t goin’ mad, Josh. It happens.’
Josh raised his head and squinted at the man whose big hand was still resting on his arm. ‘You’re wrong. I know I saw her.’
Pace shook his head, and tightened his grip. ‘Then the mother of that poor little baby girl? She gone mad?’
Josh lowered his eyes, aware of how he must seem to these solid, unimaginative men. ‘Maybe.’
Pace withdrew his hand, rubbed his chin roughly and thought for a moment.
He stood up.
‘I’m goin’ to do somethin’ outside police procedure here, Josh. But I reckon it’s goin’ to help things along. You want some air?’
Josh unconsciously rubbed at his arm where Pace’s hand had been.
‘I guess.’
Pace nodded, and opened the door for him. They left the room, re-entered the small, neat office that smelled of new carpet, and walked outside towards the car. The sheriff waved a dismissive hand above his head to the calls from his staff as he left the building.
‘Shit, they’ll live without me for ten minutes,’ he said to no one in particular.
7 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
Thank God it was over. They’d made the delivery and everything was in order. Bernard Epstein didn’t like his job any more than his companion did, but as he got back into the car, Harry gave him a long look.
He returned the stare and shifted the driver’s seat back so that he could unzip his overalls.
‘She say anythin’?’
Harry’s tone was accusing.
‘Like what?’
‘I dunno. Like what we do next, I reckon.’
Bernard wriggled out of the top half of his suit and lifted his buttocks to slip the legs off.
‘You know what we do next. Nothin’. That’s what we do.’
Harry looked forward out of the windshield to the gracious sweep of the street. ‘You done it before, ain’t you?’
‘Yeah. The once.’
‘So that’s all I’m askin’. Like what next?’
‘It’s different each time. Has to be.’
Harry looked at his hands. ‘Delivery’s the same.’
Bernard pulled the last of the overall from his foot and turned to look at his companion with a sigh. ‘She doin’ well, huh?’
Harry blinked at him.
‘Huh?’
‘That daughter of yours. The one you got in that fancy twenty-thousand-dollar-a-term college up in New Hampshire.’
‘Yeah. She’s doin’ fine.’
Bernard waited a beat, his eyes never leaving Harry’s, then nodded. ‘Mighty glad to hear that. Can we get back to the sawmill now? Them backs ain’t gonna stack themselves.’
While Harry looked at the floor and cleared his throat, Bernard crumpled up the overall and threw it in the back seat beside the other one. The blood would come off in the wash. It had stained the green cross and half the word ‘paramedic’, but it would be fine with some rub-on detergent before the rinse cycle.
And anyway, they wouldn’t need them again for a long time. They were woodsmen. They had their own work-wear.
Pace helped Josh into the passenger seat as though he were an elderly female relative visiting for Thanksgiving, then climbed breathily into the driver’s seat and drove off slowly at policeman’s speed. Josh looked across at him, waiting for an explanation. Pace kept his eyes forward.
‘How were you feeling before the accident? Just when you thought you saw the woman.’
Josh’s temples throbbed. He put a hand to his head. How had he been feeling? He had been feeling guilty, sad, screwed up and crazy without sleep. That’s how. So crazy he even thought he might have invented the woman to chastise himself for driving away from his problems. Remember, Josh? Remember? Oh, he remembered all right, and he wrestled with the truth of it before answering.
‘I felt fine. Hungry. That’s all. I needed something to eat.’
What else could he have told this man? That he had fallen asleep at the traffic lights, then woken thinking about how his girlfriend was going to kill his baby? Just seconds before he killed someone else’s?
Pace nodded as though that was what he wanted to hear, and steered the car carefully into a wide tree-lined avenue. Josh looked away in shame and turned his attention to their destination. If Furnace’s suburbs had been impressive then this was even more so. They had arrived in the land of the seriously rich. The houses here were set far back from the road, and the maturity of the gardens, ringed with ancient oaks and high rhododendrons, told the story that they’d been here a long time. The same uncomfortable alienation that had introduced him to this town was returning. He turned back to Pace.
‘What’s the deal with this town? Where’s the money coming from?’
Pace raised an eyebrow as if the question was not only irrelevant but also impertinent. He shrugged. ‘Same as anywhere. Rich folks here got old money, poorer folks do what poor folks do. Work.’
Josh shook his head, undeterred by this oblique answer. ‘No, I mean what’s the bottom line? Farming? Mining? What?’
Pace looked like he was thinking hard. ‘Well, I guess that’s a good question. I reckon mostly it’s land and timber, but we got a few people here deal mostly in money, know what I mean? Like they don’t make nothing, they just sit on the phone or the fax and move money around the world. Seems to make more.’
‘Up here? In the mountains?’
‘You got a phone and a fax it don’t matter if you’re on the moon. I guess they like the mountain air.’
Josh nodded, disappointed at the mundane explanation. The easy resolution of the mystery did little to make him feel better. But then he was far from feeling good. He was feeling worse than he’d ever felt in his life. The image of that tiny foot, that thick black blood, bobbed to the surface of his consciousness like a plastic ball held under bath water and released. He swallowed hard, fighting back his horror, as Pace brought the car to a stop outside a sprawling white house. The sheriff cut the engine and sighed deeply. He tapped the wheel thoughtfully for a moment, then turned to Josh.
‘This is out of order and I ain’t no psychiatrist but I reckon if you meet this lady you’re goin’ to realize that you made a mistake.’
Josh felt cold. My God. This was her house. John Pace was going to make him talk to her, make him look again into those eyes that had drilled him just before she …
‘But I don’t want you tellin’ her why we’re here, you understand? That’s important. No way am I goin’ to treat Councillor McFarlane like a suspect. This here visit is just so you can straighten things out in your mind and get on your way again. Can you handle that?’
Josh looked up to the dark windows of the great house and knew he had to see her. He nodded. Pace studied his face for a moment returned the nod, then got out of the car. Josh followed him, a few steps behind.
The arrival of the police car had already made one of the drapes twitch. A child’s face looked out from behind pale flowery material, and opened its mouth in naked delight that the sheriff was coming up their driveway. The drapes fell and swung as the child dived away.
Pace rang a doorbell that buzzed deep inside the house. There were voices, children’s and an adult cheerfully telling them to be quiet, and then the mock-period door swung open.
She opened it. The murderer.
Councillor Nelly McFarlane was wiping her hands on an apron that hung loosely around the waist of a plain denim knee-length dress. Her red hair was tied back in a knot and her open friendly face was without make-up. Clinging to her skirt was a girl of about nine or ten, and in the background a younger boy and a slightly older girl hopped around with open curiosity.
Nelly McFarlane looked at them both and smiled, showing those fine white teeth that graced her campaign handbill.
‘John! Hi! Come in.’
She motioned to the men to enter, but looking questioningly at Josh. He was aware that he looked like a criminal. Take a trucker from his truck and he always does. He was well used to being followed round factory outlet malls by store detectives who fixed on his clothes and haircut like pointer dogs on a duck. But right now, he was more aware that he was looking at a criminal. A first-degree murderer. Pace put a hand behind Josh to push him gently forward, speaking to the woman as he did so.
‘I want you to meet Josh Spiller. He’s a trucker from Pittsburgh.’
She widened her smile and raised her eyebrows. Josh was grateful that she didn’t offer a hand to shake. He was barely in control, but to have been forced to touch the flesh that had launched the baby into oblivion …
The children scuttled away inside and vanished, satisfied that the police visit was to be a dull social one.
Josh hesitated, his heart racing in his chest. The space between his shoulderblades told him that he was about to be clubbed from behind with a baseball bat, but his eyes, his logic, his head told him he was the unannounced guest of a bewildered and respectable Furnace citizen. He stepped into the large, cool hall. In the spacious living room to which she led them, a television was blaring cartoons to a room now vacated by children. Nelly McFarlane moved to a low mahogany coffee table, picked up the channel changer and silenced the noise.
Josh flicked his eyes to it just in time to see a coyote being pursued on a dusty road by a huge rolling rock before the picture fizzled away to black. He looked away quickly, a hot, sick feeling returning to his head. She sat down on a long sofa and motioned for the men to do the same on an identical one on the opposite side of the coffee table. They sat, and Pace clasped his hands on his knee.
‘Sorry to trouble you, Nelly, but there’s been a real bad accident.’
Josh watched her face carefully as a line of fear and confusion passed over its undoubtedly handsome structure. She was much younger than he’d thought. In her late forties maybe. It was hard to tell. But she looked good. He held his breath. He was confused and light-headed. Pace saw what she was thinking and hurried along to halt it.
‘Alice Nevin’s baby was killed this morning.’
Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Oh sweet Lord. Alice? Berry Nevin’s girl?’
Pace nodded.
‘How?’
Her voice was croaky.
‘It was out the front of the mall. Maybe you saw some of the commotion if you were in town early?’
He looked at her carefully, but if there was to be any flicker of guilt or duplicity it was not going to register on this woman’s sympathetically open face.
She shook her head slowly, her hand now at her neck.
‘We haven’t been out yet, John. What happened?’
‘Stroller rolled right out into the street. I’m here to tell you ’cos I know that’s a big piece of your campaign, Nelly. To get them metal barriers up in front of the store.’
She was shaking her head in disbelief now, and Josh watched her, seeing only a woman in genuine distress at an appalling tragedy. Pace was continuing.
‘Mr Spiller here, well, he was the real unfortunate one who just happened to be passing by slowly in his truck. Just shows you, you were right about an accident waitin’ to happen. He was way under the speed limit, braked an’ everythin’, but there was nothin’ he could do. Little Amy rolled right under there. Didn’t stand a chance.’
She silently mouthed the words ‘little Amy’ to herself, then turned her eyes on Josh. There was a fleeting second, no, less than that; a fraction of a second, in which a cold wind blew across his heart and he imagined he saw the same cold reptilian eyes that had stared him down at seven o’clock this morning, light years away.
And then his bruised mind allowed him to see what was really in front of him. Two eyes that were already glazing with tears and regarding him with an expression of horror that the killer, albeit an unwitting one, was here in her house, which was being replaced with some obvious effort by a sympathy that seemed so warm and genuine he felt tears prick his own eyes again.
John Pace looked concerned. ‘You okay, Nelly?’
She swallowed and waved a hand at him. When she spoke, she was still visibly wrestling with revulsion and compassion. ‘I don’t know what to say. You poor man.’
Pace looked at his feet.
‘Like I say, Nelly, if those barriers had been up like you’ve been shoutin’ for, this’d never have happened. I just wanted Mr Spiller here to know that it ain’t never goin’ to happen again. Kind of put a bit of his mind at ease.’
Josh stared at her, his mind spinning. How did he get here? A few hours ago he was on the interstate trying to find his breakfast, and now he was in a living nightmare that he was never going to wake from. Nothing would ever be the same again. He had killed a child. Not her. Not this middle-class, bland and ordinary woman who spent her life campaigning for tiny small-town victories. Him. He had been sleepless and crazy. Seeing things. He had seen some dumb poster on a wall and his mixed-up, fucked-up brain had concocted that stuff. It was no one else but him. He was the killer.
She got to her feet. Her face told the story that she was still unsure of him, almost as though she were reading his guilty mind, and as she spoke her next hospitable words, her eyes suggested she was thinking of running to get a gun.
‘Can I fetch you something, Mr Spiller? A coffee? A cold drink?’
Josh shook his head. ‘No. Thank you.’
She paused, staring at him with an expression that was difficult to read, then spoke gently. ‘Well let me give you this. Please.’
She went to a drawer in an elegant sideboard, took out a small yellow pamphlet, crossed the room and handed it to him.
Josh took it and looked down at its cover. It showed a poor drawing of a family, a mother and father straight out of the Brady Bunch, all big collars and bad seventies haircuts, and two apple-cheeked children encircled by their parents’ arms. At the back of the family, the figure of Christ was holding his shepherd’s crook out and beaming great rays of light over them. Large-seriphed type declared, ‘Jesus, the head of the family of man. His love heals all.’
He looked up at Nelly McFarlane in dismay. She had almost lost all trace of uncertainty and dismay, but now adopted the brain-damaged expression of the born-again Christian, beaming at him as though she had given him some delightful gift.
‘Are you a believer, Mr Spiller?’
He looked at the pamphlet again to avoid her eyes. ‘No. I’m afraid not.’
‘Please read it anyway. It might help you. Jesus wants to help the unbeliever not only to be at peace, to be healed, but also to come to Him and embrace the word of God.’
Pace was looking at the table, his hands still clasped, and it was impossible for Josh to see if it was out of embarrassment or piety. The woman turned her attention back to the silent sheriff.
‘Should I go round there, do you think, John?’
‘She’s been taken to the clinic, Nelly. She’s pretty shook up. I reckon you should wait a piece.’
She nodded, then turned back to Josh.
‘May I pray for you, Mr Spiller?’
Josh felt awkward and silly. ‘Sure. Thank you.’
‘Then I will. I’ll pray very hard. You must be in terrible pain.’
He nodded and then looked to Pace, telegraphing that he was desperate to leave. The sheriff read the face of his companion and stood up. Josh did likewise.
‘Anyhows, Nelly, I’m real sorry to intrude, but like I say I thought you should know. Hope it’s helped Mr Spiller here, too, knowing that it’s something that’s goin’ to get fixed.’
Nelly McFarlane stood up, moved quickly round the table and grasped Josh’s arm. He recoiled, but her touch was not the horror he had dreaded. Her hand was warm and soft.
‘You can be sure of that, Mr Spiller. Barriers are going up on that sidewalk if I have to build them myself. But for the moment, while the pain of this is still crippling you, try and let Christ into your life. He can help too.’
Josh nodded dumbly and shifted his feet. She scanned his face for a few more moments then led them into the hall. At the door Josh unzipped his jacket pocket to put away the pamphlet, and as he did so the handbill that Pace had given him poked out of the corner. She saw it, smiled and pointed with a slender finger, clipped clean nails without varnish. The finger of a neat, God-fearing mother. Not the painted nails of a terrifying harpy.
‘Guess you hoped I’d be a slice more glamorous if you saw that picture before we met, Mr Spiller. Sorry you caught me in Grandma mode.’
Josh managed a weak smile.
‘You look just fine.’
She responded with the coquettish grin of a woman flattered. ‘Well I just throw that old pink suit on when I need to look like I mean business. This is me really.’ She lifted the sides of her denim skirt like a little girl.
Josh gave an embarrassed upward nod of acknowledgement. The sheriff shook her hand, asked to be remembered to Jim, and they walked back to the car. She watched them go then quietly pushed the door shut.
Josh was silent for the first few minutes of the return journey, gazing out at the passing houses and their uniform blankets of velvet gardens. Pace broke the silence.
‘Well?’
Josh remained quiet, thinking. Agonizing.
Pace looked sideways at him.
‘That your murderer?’
Josh hesitated. It was still so real. But of course it couldn’t be. That woman, that ordinary woman wasn’t capable of anything more than boring the nuts off you at a church social. There was no other explanation. He was ill. He hadn’t slept. He’d made it up.
‘I guess not.’ Josh continued to stare out of the car, then turned to his driver. ‘Why are you being so kind?’
‘You think I’m being kind?’
‘Yeah. I do. I reckon some of your deputies would be mighty pleased to see me strung up.’
Pace drummed the wheel with a finger, his eyes still forward.
‘You made a mistake forgettin’ to log, Josh, but we both know the accident weren’t your fault. Now there’s already one person dead. We can’t change that. But I’m damned if I want you freakin’ out on the highway out there and have me come and scrape up some more mess. I seen men confused and lost about a lot less than you been through.’
Pace sighed through his nose and then spoke again wearily as though this kind of bizarre incident happened on a daily basis.
‘Now. Want to change your statement?’
Josh chewed at a fingernail. ‘That necessary?’
When Pace replied, his tone was one of irritation. The concerned policeman was disappearing: he sounded like a man who had proved a point and needed to get about his business.
‘Sure it’s necessary. You change your mind about what happened, you have to change your statement.’
Josh said nothing, but they drove back to the sheriff’s office in the silent understanding that the favour was over and it was time to clean up. The problem was he had no idea what he would say in a new statement. How could he say the stroller rolled with the wind, when he didn’t see that? He’d seen it being pushed. He had. He closed his eyes and the picture was still there.
Suddenly Josh wanted Elizabeth very badly. He wanted to be held in her arms, have her run her hands over the shaved nape of his neck the way she did, and smell the clean, sweet smell of her body. He needed her to tell him it was going to be okay. Only it wasn’t okay. A baby was dead and he was losing his mind. Panic rose in his throat again, and he turned his attention to the sanitized landscape of Furnace’s tidy houses to help battle it back.
Moments later he was back in the small room they had left less than half an hour ago, walking with his eyes fixed firmly on the man’s back to avoid even the tiny task of thinking about where to take his next step.
He was lost and dazed and the emotions were so alien to him that he reeled from them. Once, lounging on the sofa at home, he and Elizabeth had been watching that dumb TV game-show where the glazed-eyed contestants begin by describing their own characters. She’d laughed and made him do the same. He recalled pulling a serious face and adopting a joke manly voice to say,
‘Hi. I’m Josh Spiller and I get things done. I take control.’ Would he say that today and still expect her to laugh? The truth wouldn’t make either of them laugh. Try ‘Hi. I’m Josh Spiller. Things happen. I run away.’ Right now he was seriously out of control and there was nowhere to run. He sat back in the shaky wooden chair and let his arms flop heavily onto the table.
The deputy who’d taken the statement returned, bringing with him a pile of paperwork, arranged himself at the table and looked to the sheriff for instruction. Pace nodded and the man smoothed a new piece of paper with his hand, held his pen expectantly and looked to Josh.
‘You want me to read you back your first statement and amend it, or just start from new?’
Josh looked at him with dull eyes, still unsure what he could say that would replace the one he’d given. He stalled for time.
‘Can I hear it back?’
The man straightened his shoulders and started to read haltingly like a shy child standing up in class.
Josh listened, his mind playing the movie that went with the words, fighting to make himself believe that his clear and accurate account was the product of a temporarily fevered brain. As the deputy reached the description of the woman, Josh slid the crumpled handbill picture of Nelly McFarlane out of his pocket and onto the table in front of him. He gazed down at the woman’s open, friendly face as the man’s voice droned in the air like some monotonous tour guide in a national monument.
‘… hard to tell her age, but older than the mother, wearing a little too much make-up, and a tailored pink suit. Her hair …’
Josh looked up.
‘Wait.’
Pace, who had been picking at his thumbnail, apparently bored and barely seeming to listen, looked up at Josh.
Josh was excited, his eyes flashing with impatience. He spoke quickly, turning to Pace to make his point.
‘Pink. You hear? I said it was a pink suit.’
Pace put his wide hands out palms up, and raised his eyebrows in a silent question. Josh stabbed at the handbill with a finger.
‘You heard her as we left, sheriff. She mentioned this pink suit, the one in this picture.’
Pace was still looking quizzical, but Josh could detect falsehood in that expression, could see the conclusion to his observation being born behind the sheriff’s narrowed eyes before Josh spoke it.
‘If this is what I saw, how could I have known the suit was pink? This picture is black and white.’
John Pace looked across at his deputy and then back at Josh, who was breathing more quickly now. The deputy’s mouth remained slightly open, as though he wished to continue his reading aloud. Pace spoke slowly.
‘Well now, that’s a fair point. A fair point.’
He turned to the deputy, his voice casual and light.
‘Archie. Any of these posters around town in colour?’
The man with his mouth still open closed it, and scanned Pace’s face carefully before speaking.
‘Eh, I can’t rightly say.’
Pace rubbed his chin. ‘I guess the only explanation is that there must be.’
Josh’s heart raced. ‘But it’s something you can find out.’
‘For sure.’
‘And if there aren’t any in colour then where does that leave our theory about how I’d seen her before?’
There was a pause. A long pause, and then Sheriff John Pace clasped his hands together in front of him and looked Josh straight in the eye.
‘Up shit creek, Josh.’
Josh sat back in the chair and almost smiled. But there was very little to smile about.
‘Then I stick by my statement. Until you find out about the poster.’
Pace paused again for an awkward length of time, then unclasped his hands and wagged a finger like he was scolding an invisible dog.
‘Okay. We’re gonna get right on that. But after you’ve paid your fine for that dumb stunt with your log book, there ain’t no reason to keep you here any more. You feel up to drivin’?’
Josh nodded, unsure how the atmosphere in the room had changed, but certain it had.
‘Sure. I kinda feel better already knowing I might not be crazy.’
This time, Pace snorted. ‘Yeah? You saw Nelly. Even if a decent woman like that could have slipped in and out of town in broad daylight to do the deed unseen by anyone but you, what motive would she have for doin’ somethin’ as wicked as happened?’
‘How should I know? Jesus freaks are always missin’ a few floorboards upstairs.’
As soon as he’d said it, Josh knew he shouldn’t have. Archie made a blowing motion with his mouth and Pace’s voice dropped an octave and darkened to the same degree as his face.
‘Now I reckon you ought to keep that smartass truckin’ talk to yourself. Specially when you’re referrin’ to good folks who choose to follow the Lord’s path.’
Archie said a quiet ‘Amen’ and they both looked at Josh with matching contempt. Josh ran his hand over the stubble of his hair and looked from one man’s face to the other.
‘Sorry. No offence.’
Pace’s face told him that offence had indeed been taken. He stood, pulled Josh’s licence from his pocket, dropped it on the table and waved a hand at the paper in front of Archie.
‘Sign your original statement, take a copy. When you’ve paid your fine, Deputy’ll give you back the truck keys.’
Josh opened his mouth to speak and was silenced by a fat finger held up and pointed rather too directly at his face.
‘We’ll be in touch if we got anythin’ to tell you.’
Pace turned to leave the room, speaking as he went with his back to Josh.
‘Drive careful.’
The two men were left in the room, facing each other over the table. Archie Cameron turned the statement towards Josh. It had been neatly typed, presumably when they were out on their less than social visit. He read it through then held out his hand for Archie’s pen. It was given with bad grace, and retrieved with the same.
‘You wait here. I’ll have this photocopied and you get to keep one.’
The deputy left the room. Josh rocked back on the legs of his chair and exhaled deeply. His mind was racing with more than his embarrassing error. The sheriff had almost convinced him he’d seen McFarlane’s poster and subconsciously dropped her into his mad and confused recollection. Now he didn’t know whether to be pleased or dismayed that the theory wouldn’t wash. His mind was working like an abacus, clicking possibilities, fantasy and realities together like wooden balls on a wire. Except nothing was adding up.
The baby’s mother slid uncomfortably back into those thoughts. Why would she, the most important and relevant witness of all, say it was an accident? He let the chair bump forward again and ended up with his head in his hands, elbows on the table. Josh looked miserably through his wrists at the papers in front of him, a pile of official-looking forms, mostly handwritten. He glanced up at the door, then put a hesitant hand out and rotated the papers towards him. The top sheet was a scrawl of notes and observations on the position of the truck and the time of the incident, but the next two pages had a hastily-written list of witnesses’ names and addresses. He scanned it quickly, found Alice Nevin, and before understanding why he was doing it memorized the address and turned the papers back to face the empty chair in front of him.
The deputy’s return was abrupt, but he was formal to the point of a lawyer serving a summons in making sure Josh took his copy of the statement. ‘This here is yours. You take that now.’ He held out a brown business envelope with the neatly folded paper protruding slightly from the open end.
Josh took it from the deputy’s hand and was observed carefully as he pressed it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
‘And you get these back.’
From another larger brown envelope the man brought out a plastic bag of Josh’s personal belongings that had been removed from his pockets when they put him in the cell.
He watched Josh as he removed the items and started putting them back in his jacket. When it came to the wallet the deputy smiled unkindly.
‘Guess you’re gonna need that all right. I’ll get Deputy Busby to bring in the paperwork for your ticket.’
He walked to the door, opened it and called down the corridor. As Josh suspected, the man who answered the call was the angry policeman who had led him from the cell. He was holding a pad of tickets, a credit card swipe machine, and he was grinning.
Archie Cameron left the room with a long look at Josh and Deputy Busby took a chair.
‘You take a copy of your statement to keep?’
Josh nodded numbly, trying hard not to think of the horror contained in the words that were tucked so neatly inside his jacket.
‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah? Well here’s another souvenir from Furnace, Virginia.’ He slid the square of paper towards Josh.
‘One thousand bucks.’
Josh stared at him, his eyes narrowing. ‘The maximum? Even though my stopover checked out?’
‘Mister, if I were you I’d be pretty thankful for walkin’ outta here at all after what you done. Looked in your wallet and I guess those hundred and forty-five dollars ain’t goin’ to cover it. Pleased to tell you we take Master Card.’
Josh was about to protest further, but the policeman’s face told him it was useless. Part of Josh wanted to pay a fine. A huge fine. But no amount of money would undo his deed.
The transaction was performed in an uncomfortable silence until the deputy folded up the credit card receipt and a copy of the ticket into an envelope and handed it to Josh. He watched Josh’s face as he took it.
‘You keep hold of that now.’
Josh looked at him suspiciously, since the man’s tone was of a dishonest merchant who has successfully swindled a fool. The deputy read his face and added with a glare of indignation, ‘In case anyone needs to check up on you. Believe me. I’m goin’ to make damned sure they do.’
Only when the envelope was safely away, did Deputy Busby hand Josh the keys to Jezebel and the licence that he’d scooped up from the table.
‘You need a ride back to the truck? I’m supposed to ask.’
Josh shook his head. ‘It’s only a few blocks. I need the walk.’
‘Good. Cause you ain’t gettin’ a ride.’
Josh stood up and pocketed his keys. He looked long and hard at the man’s face, but any aggression he might have been able to muster before today was dissipated by the knowledge of his own inner guilt. He broke the stare first, turned and left the room.
John Pace was gone from the main office and Josh was oddly disappointed he hadn’t stayed to say goodbye. He’d heard enough horror stories from other drivers about the consequences of committing a violation in backwater towns, to know that by the sheriff, at least, he’d been treated fairly and with respect. But even though the law had decided he’d done nothing wrong, as he walked down the concrete steps to the clean sidewalk, he felt like a man being released from prison.
The air smelled sweetly of catkins and sap, and a gentle breeze moved the young chestnuts that lined the street. Josh walked slowly at first, then picked up speed as the fresh air revived and invigorated him.
Alice Nevin. The woman who started today with two children and ended up with one. Thanks to him. He knew she wouldn’t be home. He could almost see her now, lying on a hospital bed somewhere, her pupils dilated with tranquillizers and her thin arms lying immobile by her sides. But maybe something … anything …
Josh had no idea what he was going to do. He just wanted to go to her house. There was a drugstore at the end of the block. He pushed open its glass door and walked to the empty counter. A pretty but dull-eyed girl stopped stacking packets of sanitary towels, walked slowly over and filled the space behind the cash register.
‘Yeah?’
‘You know where Strachan Boulevard is from here?’
She looked at him. He knew she’d be weighing up the hair, the clothes, the earring. But he moulded his face into contours of friendly expectation and she broke into a half smile as she decided to co-operate.
‘Okay. You want to make a right here, then take a left into Frobisher Place and then two blocks down you’re there.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
As he turned to go Josh’s gaze swept past a telephone on the wall. His heart lurched. Elizabeth. He should phone Elizabeth. He felt in his pocket for his wallet and found his phone card. He could feel the girl’s eyes burning into his back and knew that although this call, of all the calls in the history of time, should be made in private, he couldn’t wait any more.
He punched in the complex code, waited for that monotonous and irritating voice to tell him how much time he had and then at last heard the long ring of his own phone. There was a click then the heart-sinking hiss that meant the answering machine had kicked in. His own voice.
‘Hi. You’ve guessed. We’re out. Try the numbers that follow, call back or leave a message. Here we go, the shop number is …’
He hung up. He hadn’t left the answering machine on, so at least that meant she’d come home and been there to switch it on. So she was safe. Cold comfort. She wasn’t answering.
He stood for a moment and let his heart slow down. What would he have said if she’d picked up the phone? This was new territory. Josh Spiller was a man, and a man who drove forty tons of truck around America. Yet right now, he wanted to put his forehead against this wall and weep. For a moment he saw himself reflected in the shiny chrome of the telephone, saw himself as he knew the girl behind the counter was seeing him; a haggard, haunted face that belonged to someone he barely recognized.
He dug his fingernails into his palm, took a breath and walked quickly out of the store. Movement. As always, it was the only cure.
8 (#ulink_5c8174a9-c8a9-55aa-8236-f028a47644df)
Sim was worried about his lemon balm. The leaves were turning brown around the edges and there were aphid casts on the new shoots. He bent over the big terracotta pot and poked pointlessly at the sick plant with a gnarled finger. Herbs were tricky. You had to know when they came indoors to avoid the frost and when they should go out again to harden off. He reckoned this time he’d got it wrong, underestimating once again the bitter spring winds that chilled Pittsburgh, and he tutted as one of the leaves fell off with his touch.
Inside the house, Josh and Elizabeth’s phone rang. The old man straightened up and shuffled towards the open window. Sim liked it when they had their answering machine on. He could hear all their messages clearly through the window, whether open or shut, and it made him feel part of their lives that he knew what was going on, often before they did. Sometimes it was just messages from Josh’s work, and sometimes it was Elizabeth’s family. But he always listened in the hope of hearing something secret and exciting. And there was something else.
Sim had a pointless but amusing little gift. Mostly, although occasionally he got it wrong, he could tell who was phoning while it was still ringing.
He had no idea how he knew, but he did. He liked to play the game with himself as the phone rang its four short peals before the answering machine intercepted.
‘Dispatcher,’ he would say out loud on the second ring, and then slap his thigh when the familiar voice came on, droning, ‘Josh? Got a pretty high-paying load with your name on it. Call me, would you?’
Or he would mouth, ‘Oh oh, Elizabeth’s brother,’ and then look delighted when the sulky sibling’s voice left its disgruntled message. If he were ever forced to explain the process, and he knew he never would, Sim would have to say that he could see not so much the person, but the essence of the person as the phone rang, and the times he got it wrong he believed were simply the times when he just wasn’t concentrating hard enough.
Of course he never mentioned any of this to Josh or Elizabeth. Sim thought they probably knew he listened to their messages but said nothing. They were so kind. They knew no one ever phoned Sim, and he guessed Elizabeth left the window of the office open purposely so he could hear. Maybe one day he would show her what he could do. He would like that, to see her pretty face light up in delight as he performed the trick for her. Only it wasn’t strictly speaking a trick. It was real. He just knew who was on the line.
Today, however, it was habit rather than design that made him move to the window. Sim wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the message after the fight he’d heard yesterday. He’d heard Elizabeth’s car screech away after Josh had come home, and last night her crying had kept him awake, wondering whether he should go upstairs and comfort her or just leave her alone. He’d opted for the latter, so hysterical and forlorn were her wails. How could anything an old man would say heal that kind of wound? Things must be bad, he thought, for such good people to hurt each other so badly. He waited by the window as the four short phone rings completed and the answering machine clicked in.
‘Josh,’ Sim said to himself, supporting himself against the wall with an outstretched hand.
An eavesdropper couldn’t hear the outgoing message, only wait patiently for the caller to start speaking. Sim waited to hear Josh’s voice, but the caller hung up.
‘Josh,’ he confirmed with himself, nodding as he shuffled back to his herbs.
A cold wind eddied around the edge of the house and stirred the lemon balm. Two more leaves dropped from the stem and Sim cursed in Korean. He bent down again and resumed fussing with the plant.
‘Josh,’ he repeated to the herb. It ignored him, and dropped another leaf.
* * *
By Furnace standards, Alice Nevin’s house was pretty ordinary. By anywhere else’s yardstick, it was an expensive and desirable property. But unlike a Bostonian or Beverly Hills house where the lawn is God, here the front garden was littered with toys. Two plastic pedal cars lay on their sides as if there had been a collision. A ragged fun-fur horse was splayed over the porch steps and an odd assortment of tiny plastic figures were distributed so evenly around the property it was as though they had been placed there to serve some kind of gardening function. Josh stood across the street and stared up at its long white wooden porch and colonial dormer windows, wondering what he was going to do next.
She wasn’t here. Why was he?
A figure came to the downstairs window. A man. He had a crying child in his arms that looked about a year old and small heads moved about at his hips betraying the presence of more children. The man was trying to make the baby look out into the garden, pointing at things and jogging it up and down in his arms in a vain effort to comfort it. It was only a matter of seconds until he saw Josh, and when he did, he stopped moving. He stared at him for a moment, then moved away from the window.
Thinking was getting in the way. So Josh stopped thinking and walked swiftly across the street, picking his way through the toys to mount the steps and ring the doorbell. A distant dog barked, as though shut in a room, accompanied by a variety of screams and shouts that reinforced his belief that he’d seen several children. The door opened wide and aggressively fast. The man, wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt, cheap stone-washed jeans, and holding his tearful burden, stared at Josh. At this close range Josh could see that the man had eyes almost as red and puffy as his baby’s. He had been crying.
‘Need somethin’?’
It was a challenge rather than a question, a voice and demeanour Josh might have expected in a pool hall if he’d knocked a guy’s pile of dimes off the table. It was way out of place in the doorway of an elegant house. Josh felt colour come to his neck and cheeks. This was all wrong, but there was no going back.
‘Mr Nevin?’
The man’s face crinkled from aggression to suspicious aggression. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
A child screamed from the core of the house. Josh looked past the man at the sound, but it screamed on ignored.
‘I just need to know if you’re Mr Nevin.’
‘There ain’t no Mr fuckin’ Nevin. And I asked you a question.’
Josh remembered. Berry Nevin’s girl. That’s what McFarlane had said. That would mean either that Alice Nevin had kept her maiden name in an unlikely modern fashion for this small mountain town, or quite simply that she wasn’t married. The baby in the man’s arms started a high-pitched whine again and was swayed from side to side by the man in an unconscious act of comforting. It was the action of someone used to holding kids.
Josh lowered his voice and spoke quietly, never taking his eyes off those of the man opposite him. He was glad he was burdened with the child. It would be harder for him to hit Josh when he heard what was coming.
‘My name is Josh Spiller.’ He paused, and when he spoke again Josh’s shame was apparent in his voice. At least to him. ‘Are you Amy’s father?’
Some things happened to his face. Strange things, as if a dial had been implanted that could be turned to a variety of different emotions, and someone was spinning it. His eyes were a mixed carousel of grief, confusion, anger, and most perplexingly, fear.
‘Yeah.’
There was no rise in the intonation of the word that would have made it a question. Inexplicably, Josh wanted to touch the man, wanted to reach out his hand and hold his arm, to tell him it was okay and he understood. Instead he savaged him with his words.
‘I was driving the truck.’
The eyes that had registered that abnormal mix of emotions now became cold, opaque and unreadable.
‘What you want?’
Josh looked at the baby and then back up at that hard face.
‘To say sorry.’
The man took a step back into his house, shaking his head like Josh had drawn a gun.
‘You git off. You fuckin’ git off now. Right now.’
Josh lowered his eyes and stood still almost as though he were going to pray. In truth he was wondering feverishly why he was here. What lunacy was gripping him, making him behave so irrationally?
He could hear the man panting as he turned and made to leave. A babble burst from the figure in the doorway and Josh turned back towards him.
‘It was her fault for fuck’s sakes. The kid was seven days old. You hear that? Seven fuckin’ days old. I says to her to watch it, I says to her, but shit, she never listen to nothin’, that dumb bitch. Never listen. And it ain’t goin’ to be okay. I knows it ain’t.’
He started to cry. A horrible sound, all high and whining like his child.
‘She was so beautiful, my little darlin’. I sees her bein’ born. I ain’t done that with the other six. But I sees Amy come right here into the world and I tells her that everythin’s goin’ to be okay. But it ain’t. I couldn’t do what I had to do. Couldn’t do it. Maybe I’m not man enough, maybe I’m too much of a man. I just couldn’t. She was so little, know how I mean? I don’t know what she was thinkin’. She knows it ain’t goin’ to be safe. I don’t know nothin’ no more.’
He let his whining develop naturally into full-scale weeping, while Josh watched, horrified and baffled. The man was senseless, and the babbling insanity of his outburst was far more terrifying than the violent retribution that Josh had anticipated, and perhaps secretly desired. Still facing him, Josh breathed that he was sorry again, although this time it was more an expression of sympathy with the man’s hysterical condition than remorse for his actions. He backed off down the steps and walked crab-like over the lawn. The sideways walk became a canter, and as he turned his head away from the crying, ranting man at the door Josh broke into a loping run.
He kept running until he was three blocks away, where he stopped, bent over and put his hands on his thighs to regain his breath. The purpose of the visit had been unclear to Josh, an order that was impossible to disobey from some despotic part of his subconscious. But if its secret agenda was to free his head from the maze of craziness, then it had failed spectacularly.
What had he learned? Nothing. At least nothing except a heap more stuff that didn’t make sense. The baby was from a big family. The parents weren’t married. They looked poor and undereducated but they lived in a house a surgeon or a lawyer might be proud of. And the father. The father didn’t blame Josh the way any redneck mountain-bred man would, regardless of circumstance. He blamed the mother of his children.
Josh was sweating from his ludicrous, panicking run and he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Reality. Familiarity. Normality. There was only one place where those precious things resided. He had to get back to Jezebel.
9 (#ulink_ba328a74-80f0-5bee-89e0-40f0ca73fd16)
She’d taken the call calmly, although there was a suppressed fury in her voice that seldom surfaced, a fury the man on the other end of the line recognized and silently prayed would be contained. But there was no time for displays of personal anger. There was work to be done.
A 10A scalpel blade had always been her favourite. Straight edge and not too short. She turned it over in her hand for a moment, feeling its weight, the coolness of the handle, and then positioned it delicately between thumb and forefinger ready to cut. As the blade pierced the skin, the subtle drag on the metal parting those tiny cells told her how sharp this instrument was. She sighed.
The waste. The infernal waste. The potency was not inexhaustible, and to remove a part now for such an unnecessary task was shambolic in the extreme. She used her left hand to steady the rest of the tiny corpse as she made the second incision. Too much. The blade had gone too far. She put the scalpel down carefully and picked up the engraved copper rule. It confirmed her mistake. The second incision was a fraction over seven inches. No matter. The two short cuts that would complete the skinny rectangle would redress the inaccuracy.
Seven inches by seven sixteenths exactly. It would dry smaller, but it had to be cut precisely. She picked up the scalpel and held it alongside the rule, running the blade down the straight edge, and with a steady hand made the final two cuts. This was where the 10A held its own.
A curved blade was useless at prising the skin from the flesh, but with the accuracy of such a straight point she could easily slice away the precious shell from its red fruit without tearing.
At last she allowed herself a smile. It was perfect. It would need washing and drying of course, but she had already prepared the solution. In only a few hours it would be completely ready.
The thud of a ball hitting the back yard wall near her window made her look up and stay still like a thing hunted. She waited on her side of the closed Venetian blinds, senses keen and on standby for action. The children’s voices were full of laughter and sunshine.
‘Oh my God. The window. You nearly hit the window.’
‘Get the ball, you jerk.’
‘Get it yourself.’
She waited. They were laughing, those young high-pitched yelps, growing faint as they receded to some distant part of the yard where their game was in progress, and mentally she ticked off the faces she knew matched the voices, counting how many there were, listening for the tiny dangers of playful curiosity or insubordination.
Then, certain it was safe, she put down her tools and lifted the strip of skin to the light. The light shone through its pinkness and she smoothed it between her fingers, assessing how much time it would take to dry. They didn’t have long. Maybe these few hours were not enough.
She took a deep breath at that alarming thought, then walked to the high table and began the ritual. She pulled the skin over the stone, pinning it at either end with the copper pins, and lit the candles. It was a time to concentrate, not to concern herself about the tasks of others, and so she closed her eyes and pressed a thumb to her forehead.
As she practised the words inside her head before they were spoken and could never be corrected or retracted, a fly circled the room clumsily and came to rest on its target.
Once there, with the only person in the room who would shoo it away deep in meditation, it crawled freely over the remains of a terry towelling babysuit stiffened with blood, and made ready to feast on the shining new rectangular strip of exposed flesh.
It took only five minutes to walk back to the truck, during which time he worked hard to get that sad mixed-up man’s face out of his mind.
She was still there, parked at a tortuous angle outside the store and his heart leapt at the thought of the simple pleasure of climbing into his own private space, the place that smelled of him, that housed the detritus of his driving life, and starting her up. But as he came closer, Josh remembered the consistency of what had been under those wheels, and his pace slowed to a crawl. Would they have cleaned it up? Would anyone have been under there since they slid beneath the trailer and scooped out what was left of Amy Nevin? The saliva dried in his mouth. He approached the trailer from the back and walked slowly along its flank towards the cab.
There was nothing to see. The wheels were just wheels.
A darker patch of asphalt under the whole cab was the only sinister suggestion that maybe someone had taken a hose to it, and it made him look towards the store. There were people in the window of Campbell’s Food Mart peering out at him.
He could see their heads and shoulders turned towards him, watching silently over a display of cans and giant bags of nachos as if waiting for something to happen, and for a moment he thought of going in, asking them what they saw. But the face of Amy Nevin’s father came back. That twisted, weeping, mad face. He wanted no more of this. Either everyone here was blind and insane or he was, and right now he didn’t care to work out which.
Driving would help him think. It always did. With eyes boring into him, he unlocked the cab, climbed in and sat down heavily in his seat, which bounced in happy response. There was a brief moment of paralysis as Josh started the engine and waited for it to warm up. He listened to the familiar throaty throbbing, feeling it vibrate up his spine, and for a fraction of a second he thought he might never drive again. There had been plenty of fur and feathers beneath those wheels, but never soft white skin and tiny bones. He’d never even clipped anyone, despite cretins stepping out of car doors into his path and kids playing chicken on city streets. He stared at the gas pedal as though it had grown teeth, then took a breath, dug deep into what was left of his tattered resolve, and won.
Josh Spiller wanted out of Furnace.
The street was not sufficiently wide to turn in, so Josh drove ahead looking for a side street that would take him back the way he’d come. The opportunity came at the end of the block where a sign told him that the interstate was seventeen miles away down the route to his right. It was a different route from the one he’d come in by, and longer, but it was heading south so he would make up the mileage when he rejoined the interstate. And from here it looked like a better road.
There was little pleasure in driving, but as he increased his speed past the last of those heavenly suburban houses, and a small sign said Leaving Furnace, the vice around his heart loosened a notch.
The road was heading back down the mountains again, but this time it did so in a more generous and less winding fashion. Lacy budding forest still formed an impenetrable cloak on either side, but only a few miles out of the town normal Appalachian life started to appear. Here and there the odd tatty cabin poked a roof or porch from the trees, and an unpleasant-looking general store even boasted a roadside location with the comforting sight of abandoned rusty cars growing from the sumachs in the rough field behind.
Josh was numb now. He was back on automatic and he drove without thinking, letting the moving landscape roll in front of him. Five miles on and a huge clearing to his left revealed a long low restaurant called Mister Jim’s. It looked modern and clean, but more importantly the parking lot was big enough to take Jezebel. Josh started to brake and pull in.
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Muriel Gray
From the author of The Trickster, an unnerving tale of latterday alchemy and the horrors brooding beneath the placid surface of life in one small town in America.
Something is being born.
The darkness is its delight, deep and black and hot.
Its growth is unstoppable.
It knows who has summoned it.
It knows that its carrier is aware and afraid.
Its time is drawing near…
When long-distance truck driver Josh Spiller pulls into the small backwater town of Furnace, Virginia, he has a lot on his mind. He’s been driving for thirty-six hours straight after busting up with his pregnant girlfriend; he’s tired and hungry, and all he wants is to get some breakfast and rest up.
But Furnace has something special in store for Josh. Amongst the surprisingly affluent houses, the neat streets and smartly-dressed townsfolk lurks the stuff of living nightmare. A sequence of events is about to be unleashed that will test Josh to the edge of his endurance. A world of sorcery and malice is waiting to gather him in. For behind the prosperity of Furnace lie terrible secrets; and a terrifying fate in store for those who take an unwarranted interest.
Even now, as Josh searches for a place to stop, his electric-blue Peterbilt roaring through the gears, the eyes of the town are upon him.
The nightmare is beginning…
MURIEL GRAY
Furnace
HarperVoyager an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Muriel Gray 1997, 2015
Cover photograph © Wiskerke/Alamy
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Muriel Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008158255
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780007582051
Version: 2015-10-29
For Hamish, Hector and
Rowan Marsaili Barbour, with love
Contents
Cover (#u2c46d54c-f9af-5218-8a7e-3003c1fa00ac)
Title Page (#u5aa950f8-a0c6-546e-af31-5ece3d18e9df)
Copyright (#u7a3d0667-bfd7-5794-9da9-eb098de753fc)
Dedication (#u3f060ad1-ea7c-5052-83e0-3e0afa616bfe)
Chapter 1 (#u3bdb8439-6d0f-553a-8f44-05584847ba94)
Chapter 2 (#u32a7167f-9f91-5bc6-9a59-0a5d6488c14f)
Chapter 3 (#u6f333517-7072-5beb-ac16-c38933ee8130)
Chapter 4 (#udb1de8a8-0fa4-5587-9c5a-5417c0cc17c2)
Chapter 5 (#u1d88ae5d-9818-59f9-acd3-66a61f9537d3)
Chapter 6 (#u988caf08-34af-5c7e-a197-c9989173d989)
Chapter 7 (#u1b21a10c-bd19-5f4e-89e4-18c3bef22606)
Chapter 8 (#u8a4a81e1-42bc-5ea5-969e-a001ca46b448)
Chapter 9 (#ucd2c97b9-aa24-5964-b250-18a644b81f77)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
The Ancient: Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also By Muriel Gray (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
There was no need for her nakedness. Not yet. But as she stood on the rock and looked at the pale hands stretched out before her, she was glad that she had shed her clothes. The dawn light would break over the mountain behind her at any moment, and although the cold was fierce, her shivering was of anticipation rather than physical discomfort. The chill breeze on her skin felt good and the heavy scent of dogwood blossom and wet grass filled her nostrils.
Far below in the dark sweep of the Shenandoah valley, the lights of isolated trucks and cars moved along the highway as though pulled by an invisible link. She opened the fingers of her right hand and moved them across the blackness until they cupped one of those moving lights like a firefly. Perspective. It was incredible to her that it had taken the human beings until the Renaissance to interpret size and the distortion of distance correctly. What did ancient man think when he held up his hand as she was doing now, perhaps to balance a herd of animals on his palm? Did he think that by the visual evidence of their diminished size he became their master? And what made that thought more obtuse than the beliefs of modern man? To his eye, this would be no more than a naked woman standing alone on a hillside, playing an optical conjuring trick that allowed a truck to drive across her opened hand. How long before the next Renaissance-like awakening of intelligence? The awakening that would confirm his mistake in this respect.
As she became aware of the first rays of the new sun back-lighting her hair, she closed her hand slowly and obliterated the lights of the far-distant vehicle from her view.
‘Hey, Peterbilt. You got the four-wheeler leg shot ahead of you?’
Josh Spiller smiled before thumbing the CB in response.
‘Might do. Might not. How you gonna get that crawling piece of junk past my rig an’ find out?’
There was a cowboy whoop from the radio speakers, and as Josh had guessed, the source of the message was the reefer coming up on his left, increasing its speed and pulling level with him. He glanced with measured amusement at the cab of the Freightliner Conventional. It was like he thought. A company truck. Company drivers. A name ‘Kentucky Meat and Foul’ was painted on the door in fat blue letters, and the leering bearded face of the team driver hovered above them at the window, like he was a painting and the letters below spelled his title. The guy gave Josh a triumphant surfer’s thumb and little finger, accompanied by a shit-eating grin as his partner at the wheel came on the radio again.
‘Come on there, big truck. Bet you snatched a look at the snatch. Am I right, or am I right?’
Josh rolled his eyes skyward, trying hard to suppress a smile, then looked forward again.
To his right, the great rolling back of the Appalachians was a graceful black cut-out against the lightening sky, and in only a few minutes the first orange arc of a new sun would break across that heavenly silhouette. But to the guys on his left, the sun could come up accompanied by a cloud of naked golden angels sounding trumpets, and all they’d do would be to slap their thighs and guffaw at the fact that they could see some flying bare ass.
He felt a sudden wave of sympathy for the girl in front, still oblivious to the harassment she was about to endure. Channel 19 had been discussing her for the best part of an hour. Sure her legs were long and her skirt short, though if she hadn’t left her interior map light on no one would have known. But the bumper sticker on the back of her tiny Honda, that line-drawn fish that declared the driver was a Christian, suggested that light being left on was an innocent error. In Josh’s experience Christian ladies didn’t flash truckers.
His sympathy was mixed with a strange nostalgic melancholy brought about by the imminent appearance of the sun. He’d been feeling pretty mellow for miles, looking forward to slotting a cassette into the stereo and watching the dawn break over the mountains to the sound of something good. Something carefully chosen to heighten the privileged experience of welcoming the daybreak over gentle but beautiful open country. Now these pencil-dicks had ruined it, and there was nothing he could do. They would get level with her, probably sound their horn and embark on a series of gestures among which a zoologist could find subject matter for a dissertation.
As they inched forward, the reefer struggling to get ahead of Josh’s more powerful rig, he sighed and resigned himself to the spectacle, running a hand over the back of his neck to massage away fatigue from the muscles there.
And then the red light winked.
Josh glanced up at the radar detector on his dash and as quickly across at the cab of the reefer.
Company trucks didn’t carry radar detectors. Other owner-operators like Josh might just. The damned things were illegal in big trucks but nobody could get you for just riding with one, and Josh knew where to switch it on and where not to. Here, on this stretch of the northbound interstate through Virginia, he was glad it was on. If nothing had changed in the highway patrol’s routine since his journey down, then he knew exactly where those bears with the radar were. There was a rest area just ahead on the right before the next exit, and that’s exactly where he’d spied a state bear sitting hunting on the way southbound only three days ago. How could the apes in the Freightliner know that? They couldn’t. Not without a detector, or that other essential lifeline every trucker relies on. Information from a fellow driver. A driver like Josh. And if Josh chose not to say anything, there weren’t a whole lot of trucks packing out this road right now who’d blow those bears’ cover instead. The highway was so quiet it could have doubled as a runway. On the dash the red light was going crazy, and Josh pressed simultaneously on his brakes and the talk button of the CB mike, a smile nearly cutting his face in two.
‘Yeah, you’re on it, guys. I looked for sure. And let me tell you, she’s askin’ for it. Since she been showin’ us so much leg there, why don’t you fellas give her a look at some of them Kentucky chicken pieces of your own.’
He looked across as the cab of the Freightliner started to pull away by virtue of his own subtle braking, and watched the bearded guy slap the dash and give a thumbs up in appreciation of the joke.
‘Come on, asswipes,’ Josh whispered as he saw the rest area up ahead.
The truck drew level with the Honda, and as the window of the Freightliner started to wind down he could just make out the nose of the patrol car, peeking out from behind a clump of scrubwood, still expertly hidden from anyone who wasn’t looking for it. Josh’s smile couldn’t get much wider, but he tried.
The timing was close to perfect. The Honda swerved a little as two fat white buttocks poked out of the Freightliner’s window, a finger sticking grotesquely into its own rectum, precisely as the three vehicles glided past the parked patrol vehicle. To the two cops sitting glumly in their car, wishing that dawn would break and bring the end of their shift closer, it looked like a circus act that had taken a lifetime to perfect. They exchanged no more than a brief and weary glance before snapping on the siren and pulling out.
Now it was Josh’s turn to slap the wheel in glee as the Freightliner edged back and pulled over, falling prey to the police car like an antelope brought down by hyenas. Josh was alone with his good Christian lady again, and part of him wished she had CB so he could share the joke, and more important so that she could thank him for his betrayal of colleagues in the name of chivalry. But the exit ahead seemed to be the one she wanted, maybe from choice, or maybe just to get off the highway and away from her persecutors. She started to brake and signal. Josh braked in response and was surprised when she slowed to a crawl. There was nothing for it but to pass, so he swung the rig out and changed down accordingly. As the bulk of the Peterbilt moved past the woman’s tiny car, now peeling away at a snail’s pace towards the exit ramp, Josh Spiller threw a look across at her.
From her open window an elegant arm emerged in farewell, and on the end of that arm, stabbing the air repeatedly like it was trying to puncture an invisible skin, was a deeply un-Christian middle finger.
He’d fumbled in the plastic ledge above the dash for a good thirty seconds, initially finding only an evil knot of Jelly Bellies that had fused together in the heat of the cab, before his fingers closed on the cassette he wanted. The sun was almost visible now, and Josh urgently wanted to get his chosen track lined up before it was too late.
He flipped the tape out of the plastic junk-filled canyon and slotted it quickly into the stereo. It came on halfway through some terrible and elderly Doors number. Wrong. So wrong he wished he’d never included the track on this jumbled and hastily assembled compilation. He pressed fast forward, waited and then let it play again.
Aerosmith. He cursed silently. That meant that it was rewinding, not going forward.
The sky to his right was now growing light so fast that a ridiculous mixture of anxiety and frustration tightened his chest. He took out the tape and reinserted it. The machine didn’t like the way he did it and slid it back out at him again. The sky had now gone way past pink, turning into the luminous aquamarine that heralds the first glorious golden shards of sunlight, as he slammed the troublesome cassette back in and pressed fast forward again. Two pauses and he was there.
Josh couldn’t say why he fancied this track most to greet the dawn, but he did. It was old but it was tranquil. A song off some weird album by a British band called The Blue Nile that Elizabeth’s kid brother had loaned him.
It started with a slow drum then this really sad guy came on and sang like he would break your heart. You had to be in the mood or you couldn’t take it. Josh was in exactly the right mood. It was just what he wanted for the big event, the arrival of the sun after this nine-hour non-stop homeward haul from Tennessee. And it was going to work this time. It was going to be a peach. The track was lined up, the sun was maybe only seconds from view, and he was northbound in the right lane with nothing obstructing his view across the dew-soaked fields to the dark rolling back of the Appalachians.
That was important to the full enjoyment of the moment, the absence of anything man-made in between him and the sunrise. No buildings. No human junk. Nothing that would spoil his view with another reminder, particularly after his disappointment in the reluctant maiden he’d rescued, that sometimes people didn’t deserve another day graced by anything as beautiful and indiscriminately benevolent as the sun. He waited, his hand ready to press play, glancing every three or four seconds out of the passenger window to catch the first sight.
Up ahead, the highway stretched empty before him, an artery of stone that fed America its life-blood. Or was it a vein that circulated the disease of man and his junk around the once untouched and healthy body of this delicate continent?
Josh gazed out front, contemplating it for a second, knowing that whatever the answer, he was a part of it. The rare sight of clear road made him suddenly feel exposed, an alien object moving without permission upon an ancient and secretive landscape.
And in those few moments of inattention as Josh dreamily regarded the road ahead, the sun betrayed him and sneaked up over the rim of the hills. He whipped his head to the east as the first orange beam hit the side of his face, shifted in his seat and stabbed the play button on the stereo.
The tape hissed and then the song began.
How could he have known? Even with the benefit of the height that he enjoyed from the truck Josh couldn’t see the entire landscape ahead, couldn’t see the mark of man that was waiting for him, nestling smugly between mountains and highway. So at that religious and significant moment when the sun rose, it rose not over unsullied meadows and hills, but from behind a forest of four tall masts, one tipped by golden horns, another by the Cracker Barrel sign, the other two proclaiming Taco Bell and Burger King.
Josh blinked for a second, his mouth slightly open until an excited voice on the CB crackled over the gentle song playing on the tape and brought him back.
‘Man, oh man! Any of you northbounds see that?’
Josh glanced across at the source of the enthusiastic message; a lone R-Model Mack pulling a covered wagon on the southbound highway.
Gratefully, Josh picked up the handset. ‘Sure as hell did, big truck. Glad there’s someone else out there with a soul.’ He flicked off the tape, ready to receive the reply, and it came right back at him with its enthusiasm intact.
‘Yeah? Man, I can’t believe they’s only askin’ two dollars ninety for a chargrill, family bucket of fries, soup and a free soda. That’s a whole dollar less than the joint at exit 19. Sure gonna work for me!’
Josh Spiller stared ahead for a second or two, then gently replaced the handset, let out the remains of his breath and started to chuckle. He shook his head and carried on laughing until a tiny rogue tear rolled down one cheek and he wiped it away with the back of a greasy hand.
‘Shit. Know what, America? You are one fucked-up country.’
2 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
She’d been awake for at least two hours. Now that the dawn was bleeding through the drapes, she shifted under the covers and ran a hand over her warm belly. She had to get up. No choice. But here, in the dark that was gradually being corrupted by light, it was safe and warm to think, and everything outside that cocoon seemed impossibly cold.
Josh’s face. She closed her eyes and thought about it. Sometimes, if it had been a long time, she had trouble remembering the exact contours. But even if it was difficult to visualize she could always recall how it felt beneath her lips. She held on to that now, breathed in through her nose as she thought about the smooth soft skin over his cheekbones, the thick curl of eyelashes and the rough texture of bristle around mouth and chin.
With her eyes still shut, she swung her legs out of the bed and sat up.
The bedroom mirror greeted her with her own reflection when she raised her head and looked towards it. Despite her hunched posture, even she would admit that her breasts looked enticing. They were fuller and firmer than she’d realized, and her hands came up in an unconscious gesture to cup them gently.
Elizabeth Murray let her hands move up to her face and then spoke in a whisper to the mirror, the delicate planes of her cheeks and forehead sculpted by the grey dawn light.
‘What now?’
Josh waited impatienly outside the phone booth. There were only three private booths at this Flying J truck stop, all occupied by frowning men who looked like they were making talking an Olympic event. He sighed and leaned heavily against the wall, toying with his Driveline calling card.
The big black guy next to him was holding the phone against his ear with his shoulder, passing a rubber ball restlessly from hand to hand as he listened, his eyes glazed like he was hearing bad news.
Josh guessed what he might be hearing. The guy’s dispatcher would have put him on hold, and the profound expression of misery was most likely induced by an age of listening to the theme from Love Story reproduced electronically by a sadistic phone company. He looked at his boots. All he wanted to do was to call Elizabeth and tell her he was less than an hour from home. No filthy talk like you sometimes heard and wished you hadn’t, but he wanted privacy when they spoke, and if he didn’t get a free phone soon he’d miss her. He’d already gone past that delicious time when she would pick up the phone beside the bed and answer in a sexy, sleepy way. Right now she’d have a mouth full of Cheerios and be pulling on a jacket ready to go to the store, pleased to hear from him, but with a tone of urgency in her voice that meant he was making her late. Five more minutes and she’d be gone.
The door of the centre booth opened but infuriatingly the guy hadn’t stopped yakking.
Josh made a move towards him and the guy held up a hand without looking at him.
‘Uh huh? Well it ain’t okay with me.’
A listening pause.
‘No, it ain’t my last word. This is my last word. Okay, two words. Fuck you.’
He slammed the phone down, got up off the small plastic seat and pushed past Josh.
Josh grinned at him, and gesticulated at the phone. ‘It’s a drag always havin’ to call your grandmother, ain’t it?’
The man looked for a moment like he might throw a punch, but something in Josh’s eyes held his clenched fist by his side, and he satisfied himself with a ‘Yeah, funny guy’ muttered beneath his breath.
Josh smiled at the man’s back and entered the booth, his grin deforming into a grimace at the blush of sweat those substantial buttocks had left on the plastic. But he needed to make that call. He decided to stand, and as he punched in the code for the card he shook his head. Seemed like all truck drivers did was drive and then get mad with someone for no other reason than they didn’t like driving.
Choose any truck stop, any row of phones and mostly all you’d hear was a chorus of deeply discontented men. Some of it was just plain moaning, but enough of it was from the heart to make hearing it uncomfortable. Why drive if you hated it so much? Josh liked it fine. Just fine. And he loved Elizabeth. If the seat was clammy with his sweat after he’d talked to her, it wouldn’t be from stress.
The vacant computerized woman on the phone thanked him in a monotone for calling Driveline and informed him in a voice that suggested she was painting her nails that he had seven dollars and fifteen cents left to make his call. He punched in their number.
It rang eleven times and just as he was about to hang up Elizabeth came on, out of breath, and sounding angry.
‘Yeah?’
‘Hey. You should get into telephone sales, honey.’
She tried to change the tone, but there was still something there. Something at the back of her throat.
‘Hey yourself! Where are you?’
‘On the pike. Near enough home to smell next door’s mutt.’
‘Well get back here. I missed you.’
It was familiar small talk. But she said the last bit as though she really meant it.
‘You okay?’
‘Sure.’
‘Big day, huh?’
‘Yeah. Big.’
A melancholy tone reaffirmed that something was wrong. Now, in this tiny booth with two guys already waiting outside, wasn’t the time to find out what it was.
‘Want me to come straight by the store?’
‘How you going to park Jezebel?’
‘Normally I just pull on the brakes and shut her big ass down.’
‘And screw the Pittsburgh morning traffic?’
‘For you I’d leave her standin’ in the middle of the Liberty Tunnel at five-thirty Friday night.’
She laughed, and hearing her was like he’d swallowed something warm and sweet.
Elizabeth sounded more like herself when she spoke next. ‘Then come on by and make a traffic cop’s day.’
‘See how it goes.’
‘Love you.’
‘Love you too.’
He hung up and left the booth. Had he imagined it or had she really sounded uneasy? Understandable. Today, she and Nesta started their new career. A sackload of tasty redundancy pay blown on their crazy business.
Josh would have spent it buying something a man could use, like a decent flat-bed to switch with the trailer he was pulling so he could haul bigger sections of steel when he needed to. But it was Elizabeth’s choice, her money. She didn’t spend much of his, and he certainly didn’t spend any of hers.
Fifteen years as a machinist hadn’t made her rich but facing a new day, every day, sewing nylon umbrella sleeves, cheap bags for storing shoes and suit covers, had given her plenty time to think about her life. She and her buddy were about the only girls not weeping when the scrawny, acne-covered floor supervisor told them they were out. With a little shame, Josh admitted to himself that he didn’t really know if the costume ball hire shop was Nesta’s idea or Elizabeth’s. But he sincerely hoped the name ‘All Dressed Up’ was Nesta’s. It was seriously crap.
Of course Elizabeth would be scared today. The door would be opening in a couple of hours for the first time, and she’d be praying, fruitlessly Josh thought, that there’d be a queue of customers round the block, ready to part with cash to dress up in the ridiculous costumes she and Nesta had been sewing for the last three months.
Costume balls baffled him. To Josh, the idea of standing around at a party with a beer in your hand talking to someone about real estate or kit cars seemed pretty attractive. But not if you were dressed like Pinocchio and the guy you were talking to was trying to make an earnest point in a fun-fur kangaroo suit. But if it made money, then so what?
What bugged him was that Elizabeth’s tone had sounded more than just anxious. Sounded like she was sad.
He wandered out of the phone lobby and through the shop towards the restaurant. Maybe he should buy her something.
Truck stops nearly always boasted carousels full of junk that skulked near the cash desk like muggers, offering a variety of garbage for the guilty driver to take home and pacify his sweetheart. But until now Josh had never really looked at it.
The days when he’d done things he’d have to say sorry for were the days he hadn’t had someone steady like Elizabeth waiting at home. Now he had her, he didn’t do much on the road except drive, eat, sleep and shit.
Pausing for the first time at the cylindrical stand like it was a confession box, Josh let an embarrassed gaze drift over the assortment of tacky merchandise. He found himself looking quizzically at some round balls of fluff with eyes and feet made of felt, sporting cloth ribbons that said everything from ‘I Love You’ and ‘You’re Cute’ to statements of coma-inducing inanity like ‘I’ve been to West Virginia’. A gentle push of his forefinger sent the display turning slowly round to reveal badly-made plastic boxes covered in lace hearts that had been hastily glued to the lids, and some dusty-looking dolls dressed as cowgirls.
Josh glanced around, anxious in case anyone had seen him looking at this stuff, only to discover the woman behind the counter already had. She smiled when he caught her eye. Maybe someone had given her one of those fluffy balls once, with a message on the ribbon that she wanted to hear. He lowered his eyes, and wandered casually over to the display of Rand McNally road atlases, flicked through a couple like he’d never seen a map of America before.
Men like Josh Spiller didn’t look right poking at dolls and lacy boxes. Six feet and one hundred and sixty-eight pounds of fit, pale body were topped by a head of light brown hair cut so short it was near enough shaved. There was a tiny silver ball of an earring in his right ear and it combined with the hair to make sure he didn’t get stopped in the street often by nuns collecting for orphanages. What little hair that had survived the cut sat above a face with kind blue eyes, a straight, elegant nose and a wide, mischievous mouth. That open face meant that although he was adopting the demeanour of a mean guy, no one was going to mistake Josh for a member of an underground militia group. He looked kind. He couldn’t help it. Nevertheless, the spirit in him that made him look the way he did was not prepared to let him stand at the counter and buy some piece of girlie shit. He shut the atlas and walked towards the restaurant.
‘We got something new over here she might like.’
The woman behind the counter was smiling, her eyes lowered, looking at what she was doing and not at him. Josh cleared his throat.
‘Yeah?’
Her fat fingers counted out shower vouchers in front of her like they were cards in a game.
‘We got these real pretty pins. All sorts. And a machine that does her name on it while you grab a bite. Takes about ten minutes.’ She indicated the contraption behind her with a small movement of her shoulder. ‘You just turn that there dial to the letters you want and it gets right on doin’ it. Seventeen dollars including the name. Plus tax.’
Josh was trapped. He walked slowly over and she looked up.
From behind the glass under the counter she took out a tray of cheap pewter-coloured metal brooches shaped in a bewildering variety of little objects, each with a space beneath the object for the name like the scroll on a tattoo. With his hands in his pockets Josh looked them over, grateful the store was empty.
There were tiny metal bows, a rabbit, some bees round a hive, all in a mock-antique style, and all waiting to have a woman’s name scratched beneath their immobile forms. Despite his discomfort he decided they were cute and when his eyes wandered over to one made from a tiny pair of scissors cutting out a perfect metal heart, Josh knew Elizabeth would like it. The scissors were neatly appropriate.
‘So you do their name on the blank bit with that machine?’
‘Well I ain’t doin’ it. Got enough to do keepin’ you guys from rippin’ me off to sit here and carve your wives’ names on a pin.’
Josh smiled, pointed at the one he wanted and reached for the wallet in his back pocket. ‘Okay. It’s Elizabeth.’ He spelled it for her, watched her write it so she wouldn’t make a mistake, then went to get that coffee.
‘Takes ten minutes,’ she reminded him to his back as she clicked the letters into something that looked like a sewing machine and with her tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth placed the brooch on a tiny vice.
3 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
Elizabeth was right. There was no way he could park Jezebel anywhere near the store. In fact, there weren’t many places in downtown Pittsburgh you could take an electric-blue Peterbilt Conventional with a sixty-inch sleeper and forty-eight-foot trailer. Not unless you wanted to end up trapped like a beached whale, snared in some narrow street by four-wheelers who park like the whole world is their front drive.
Instead, Josh drove straight to Jezebel’s parking lot ten miles out of town, did his paperwork, zipped up a week’s worth of stinking laundry and headed home in the pick-up. He figured Elizabeth wouldn’t really want to see him in the store anyhow. Not if she was busy measuring someone up as a giant tomato. Right now, he needed some sleep. He’d be more use to her wide awake, showered and ready for action.
The duplex that Josh and Elizabeth shared was nothing special, but it was on a quiet block with tiny neatly-trimmed gardens tended by peaceful neighbours. Josh owned the whole house but rented the lower half to an elderly Korean bachelor called Sim, a tiny man in his seventies who constantly complained that he was at the rim of death’s abyss, usually while in the yard tending patio pots full of unpleasantly pungent spices and herbs.
Today was no different. Sim was sitting on a canvas stool against the wall of the house in the chill morning sun. A cigarette hung from his tight mouth, and he held The National Enquirer at a distance from his face as though he were a doctor examining an important X-ray.
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.
‘For you. It’s dumb but it’s for luck.’
She looked up and met his eyes, a smile beginning to ghost in them again.
‘You been screwing someone?’
‘I wish.’
She opened the box, rustled the piece of tissue paper and revealed the dull metal brooch. Her name was etched clearly but unevenly on it, with the E too far from the L and the final T and H crammed so tightly together they were practically one letter, but Elizabeth took the cheap gift from the box as if it were a Fabergé egg.
‘This is beautiful.’
‘It’s just junk. I thought you’d like it.’
‘You thought I’d like junk? That’s what I call romantic.’
She was smiling full on again. For Josh, the brooch had already proved hundreds of times its worth.
‘You like it?’
‘I love it.’
‘Well wear it and things’ll look better tomorrow.’
Her face clouded again and she toyed with the brooch, making a scraping sound on the table as she shifted it around.
‘Maybe.’
Josh held the bridge of his nose between a finger and thumb.
‘What’s the deal here? I’ve been gone longer and you’ve said less.’
‘I had things to talk to you about, that’s all.’
‘Well talk to me now.’
‘It’s too late.’
Josh sighed and bent his head. ‘Shit, Elizabeth. You’re acting like a teenager whose prom date hasn’t shown. I’m kinda tired here.’
She looked at him coldly, stood up, still clutching the brooch in her hand, and walked to the sink to stare out the window.
Josh watched her face as she turned back to him, and saw some kind of battle being fought behind those brown eyes. One of the emotions eventually won and she spoke softly, as if ashamed of its victory.
‘I’m pregnant.’
Josh blinked. He was aware that his heart had picked up its pace, but if that meant more blood was suddenly required and being provided, its rapid distribution seemed to be having little effect on him. It was as though his system had stalled like a smoky engine, leaving him temporarily unable to speak or move. He searched for the kick-start, and when he found it and spoke merely for the sake of speaking, realized that he should have waited.
‘Is it mine?’
Elizabeth’s face, already harder than he had ever seen it, darkened into the suburbs of fury.
‘I’ll give you one chance to take that back.’
He swallowed. ‘Shit, I’m sorry … I mean … Fuck.’
She regarded him with a mixture of contempt and grief. The same eyes that only minutes ago had looked up at him like a lover were now scouring him with acid accusation.
Josh tried again. As he got up to move towards her she made him jump with a sudden violent movement, lifting her arms and waving them in front of her as if to protect herself. He backed off, hands held out in an imploring gesture, and his voice, when it came, was higher than he would have liked.
‘I didn’t mean that. I don’t know why I said it. I’m glad. God, Elizabeth, I’m so glad.’
With those words something happened to Josh Spiller. A happiness that was beyond any he had ever experienced flooded into him and he realized that ‘glad’ was a weak and sickly word to describe the power of his sudden ecstasy.
Elizabeth watched the face of the father of her child as it exploded into rapture, watched his tense muscles melt into a slack, serpentine tangle of joy. Her lip trembled like a child’s as she braced herself. Then she spoke quickly to interrupt the acceleration of his emotion: ‘I’m not keeping it, Josh.’
His imploring arms fell.
‘What?’
‘I don’t have a choice.’
Josh looked at her for a very long time, then turned back to the table and sat down heavily on his chair. He leaned forward and cradled his head in his hands, his hot forehead pointing straight down to the table top.
‘Now hold up. This is going too fast. Talk to me.’
Elizabeth looked down at a hand which had become a fist, and when she opened it to reveal the brooch she had been clutching she could see two clear indentations that the scissors had made in her flesh. She closed her hand.
‘You weren’t here to talk to. I decided on my own. It’s impossible, Josh.’
He looked up from the cradle of his hands.
‘Why? For Christ’s sake we’re doing okay. Aren’t we?’
She swallowed back a sob, barely able to speak.
‘Nope.’
‘What do you mean?’
Elizabeth moved stiffly and rejoined him at the table. She stared into the yellow pine as though the words she was speaking were printed on it.
‘Commitment, Josh. That’s what a baby needs. It’s what I need too and I’ve never had it from you in any shape.’
He opened his mouth to protest but she silenced him with a sorrowful look.
‘I’m not complaining. This is an accident in a relationship that’s doing just fine. But it’s a relationship that can’t handle children.’
She was sounding rehearsed, but seven days to perfect a speech hadn’t been enough to stop it sounding phoney.
‘Welcome to daytime TV, folks.’
The bitterness in Josh’s voice was as alien to him as it sounded to Elizabeth. Any plan she might have had evaporated, and she looked at him like a frightened child.
‘Look at us, Josh. We live together but we’re not married. I see you for two, maybe three days out of every ten. I’ve just started a new business that needs all my time and energy. There’s nothing in this dumb life of ours that’s stable enough to make a good job of growing another human being.’
‘We love each other.’
‘Then why aren’t we married? Why aren’t you at home?’
‘Why aren’t you? Is sewing fucking Batman suits better than staying home and looking after our baby?’
She looked at him coldly. ‘Jesus Christ. You can take the man out of the truck but you can’t take the trucker out of the man. What next, Josh? The chorus of a Red Sovine song?’
He lowered his eyes.
‘I didn’t know you wanted to get married.’
‘You never asked.’
‘What if I asked now?’ His voice had an edge of desperation.
‘It would mean nothing. You wouldn’t be asking for the right reasons.’
There was a pause. A heavy silence that made Josh’s response startling.
‘FUCK!’
He slammed his fist down on the table so hard that Elizabeth leapt in her chair and caught her breath with the fright. Josh was breathing heavily, staring down at his hands, and she spoke softly when her heart had stopped pounding.
‘Next week. Wednesday at three o’clock. It’ll be over.’
He looked up slowly and her grief was almost uncontainable when she saw the film of tears that coated his eyes.
‘Then why even tell me? Does it feel good to give me a few moments of joy and then steal them back again? Huh? Make you feel big? Feel in charge? That what you call love?’
Elizabeth started to cry. Her chest heaved and she bent her head to her chest. Josh watched, wanting instinctively to comfort her but cancelling the order from his brain before it reached his arms.
She sobbed for a few minutes in silence, wiped her arm across her eyes and nose and then faced him again.
‘I told you because I was scared and lost. I always tell you everything.’
He looked at her tragic, puffy face and tried to feel the love for her he knew was there. But the imminent death of his baby, that terrifying appointment, the time already ticking away towards its execution as the baby’s cells split and multiplied inside her, was blocking it like a wall. He spoke quietly and with a malice he never knew he possessed.
‘You didn’t tell me you were a selfish bitch.’
Elizabeth stared at him for a moment, stunned.
‘Damn you to hell.’ She opened her hand and with all the force a close sitting position could afford, threw the brooch at Josh’s face and ran from the house.
As he sat still, listening to her car start and screech hysterically from the drive, Josh fingered the tiny scratch that his gift had inflicted above his eye. He bent to pick up the fallen weapon and closed his hand on the brooch’s innocent form.
There was no question of what action to take. He would do what he always did in a crisis. Josh Spiller got up and went to call his dispatcher.
4 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
Time. It was at the core of everything. To buy it. To control it. To comprehend it. And yet still, this night, this eve that had been so long coming, so long anticipated, had now crept up on her like a thief.
As always, she tapped three keys on the keyboard and watched the figures scroll up the screen. She knew what she would see, but it was important to remind herself why.
This was why. The golden, glimmering, shining reason for it all. The dollars, the deutschmarks, the pounds, yen and lire, all flickering before her, lighting her face up with their green glow.
More. The knowledge and power.
But no. She closed her eyes and clenched a fist against it. That thought was forbidden. Vanity was destruction. The power was in the humble and respectful use of the knowledge. And that was why tomorrow was no more and no less than the necessary function that it had always been. The others depended on it. Their world turned on it, because God made it possible. She moved the mouse and closed the file with one diagonal sweep and click, as the sound of soft spring rain tapping at the window won the battle for her attention over the buzzing computer.
And she smiled as she looked up, imagining it soaking new buds on the blanket of trees that separated her from the dull uncomprehending mass of humanity.
It had taken the surly teenagers in the loading bay over an hour to load his trailer. And that was after a two-and-a-half-hour wait in the damp Victorian warehouse. Josh had sat in the drivers’ waiting area, cradling a styrofoam cup of stewed coffee, watching the three bozos wandering around his truck like pimps on a Bronx street. One drove the fork-lift into Josh’s trailer and the others hung around the doors making flipping gestures with their hands and adjusting their baseball caps as they laughed about something secret.
Normally, Josh would have gone out and kicked their butts, but this time he sat immobile behind the glass partition, watching them waste his time. It was a shitty load, some metal packing cases for an industrial ceramics manufacturer in Alabama. No weight in them, so not much pay. But it was all he could get, and Josh would have delivered the Klan’s laundry to South Central LA if he’d been asked. He would have taken anything at all just to turn off and buy his ticket away from home.
There had been two other drivers in the warehouse and, hold the front page, they had been bitching:
‘So I grabs this little jerk by the collar and I says okay man, you want me to load it myself then you gonna have to tell your boss why his lifting gear got all bust up, ’cos I ain’t never used it afore. ’Course I have, but he don’t know that.’
The guy who’d been telling the story was about as big as his truck and the other driver listened without much interest, waiting for his chance to tell a similar triumphant story of how he showed them, and showed them good.
‘Well he calls me everythin’ but a white boy and then I just grabs hold of the controls and lets the whole bunch drop twenty feet onto the deck. Hee hee, did that boy load up like his dick depended on it.’
Josh had let the stream of familiar bullshit wash over him. He was numb. So numb, he’d uncharacteristically ignored both men, walked to the trailer when a nod from one of the rubber-boned kids indicated it was done, barely checked the load or how it was stacked, taken the paperwork and driven off. And now he was sitting upright, staring out of the darkened cab of Jezebel, whose bulk was untidily taking up most of the space in a southbound tourist parking lot on this Virginian interstate. He’d driven for only a couple of hours, but a lapse of concentration that nearly let him trash a guy on a Harley Davidson had made him catch his heart in his mouth and pull over.
It was two a.m. and he could hardly account for the last eight hours since Elizabeth had driven away with her, and his, precious cargo on board. He stared ahead into the dark, sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands resting in his lap like a trauma patient waiting to be seen in an emergency room. Josh wasn’t thinking about what to do. He wasn’t even thinking about Elizabeth and where she might be right now. All that was running through his mind were the words, repeating themselves like a looped tape, ‘How do I feel?’
Soft spring rain started to fall, gradually muting the intermittent roar of the traffic on the adjacent highway. He wound down his window and breathed in a mixture of mown grass, diesel fumes, and the dust raised by the rain from the parking lot’s asphalt. As he tried to take a deeper breath he felt a vice tighten around his chest, a crippling tension which prevented that satisfying lungful of oxygen. The pain came not from the emptiness that was left by that brief and grotesque argument, but from the dual seed of joy and dread that was still germinating in his heart.
Wednesday the seventh of May, three o’clock.
What was it? A boy or a girl? He hadn’t even asked Elizabeth how many weeks old her secret was. A bizarre omission, but more confusing was why he wanted this child so badly. Some of the things Elizabeth had said were true, he knew that. Their life wasn’t exactly an episode of The Waltons, but until last night he’d thought it was safe and stable. It was an adult life, where two self-contained people did what they pleased and came together when they wanted. He’d never even considered how or why that might change. Never considered a third person entering the frame.
The fresh air stirred him from his miserable torpor and Josh got up, absently pulling the drapes around the inside of the windshield. He climbed back into the sleeper and lay down on the mattress with his hands behind his head.
As he lay there, staring up at the quilted velour ceiling, he allowed himself to think of her, of Elizabeth; that funny, sometimes brittle person who even in her hardest moments could be melted like butter over a stove with a kind word or gentle touch.
It was like her to carry the burden of her news silently, but it was unlike her to taunt him by telling him it was over before it began. Perhaps he didn’t know Elizabeth at all. Who was that terrible mixture of defiant accusation and self-pitying grief? And who had he been, to call her what he did and withdraw the support he’d always given unthinkingly and unconditionally?
Josh screwed his eyes tight, trying fruitlessly to squeeze the scene into oblivion with the puny muscles of his eyelids.
Which coupling had done it, he wondered? Last week? The week before?
When?
Outside, a car pulled up in the lot and Josh opened his eyes to listen to the familiar human noises of a man and a woman as they left their vehicle to go and use the rest-rooms.
They chatted in low voices, in that comfortable intimate way that meant they were saying nothing in particular to each other, but were enjoying saying it. An occasional short laugh broke the flow of their small talk as they slammed their car door shut and their footsteps receded towards the rest-rooms. Josh realized he was listening to this most mundane collection of sounds with his teeth clenched and his eyes narrowed, the invisible couple’s easy happiness an unbearable affront.
He lay there for a very long time, and as time ticked away, bringing neither sleep nor solution, he was aware of its swift relentless passing for probably the first time in his life.
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.’
5 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
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.
‘How in hell do you do that?’ she’d breathed admiringly after he’d jumped in with the sequel to some old joke someone was telling, only seconds after he’d been shouting abuse at a talk radio host who’d used the word ‘negro’.
‘What’d you say, honey?’ he’d replied innocently, not understanding the irony when she laughed at him. She said after that, if she had anything important to tell him, she’d do it over a badly tuned radio with a heavy metal band thrashing in the background.
Except she hadn’t. Had she?
It had been important, and she’d told it to him straight, her words surrounded by a proscenium arch of silence. Josh flicked his eyes to the fabric above the windshield where Elizabeth’s cheap brooch was pinned. He’d stabbed it in there as a reminder that it had been bought with love but used as a spiteful missile, hoping it would harden him to the thought of her every time the pain of their argument germinated again. But it wasn’t working. It just made him think of her long brown fingers fingering it with delight. Josh wished the trivial memory of her riding with him hadn’t occurred to him, hadn’t made him feel like his heart needed a sling to support its weight.
He leaned forward and retuned the CB as though the action could relegate his dark thoughts to another channel.
Still nothing.
Josh sat back and resigned himself to the blind drive. The next town could be two or twenty miles away, and he was just going to have to live with that. It could be worse. The road was still climbing, but at least it was a pretty ride.
Dogwood bloomed on both sides of the road and on the east verge the rising sun back-lit the impossibly large and delicate white flowers, shining through the thin petals as though the dark branches were the wires of divine lamps. Ahead, a huge billboard cut rudely into the elegance of the small trees. The sign was old and worn, with the silvery grey of weathered wood starting to show through what had once been bright green paint.
‘See the world-famous sulphur caves at Carris Arm. Only 16 miles. Restaurant and tours.’
In the absence of anyone to talk to on the CB, Josh spoke to himself.
‘World-famous. Yeah, sure. The Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon and the fuckin’ sulphur caves at Carris Arm.’
As if he needed it, the sign confirmed that Josh Spiller was driving around in the ass-end of nowhere, and he was far from happy. If that was the next town, then sixteen miles was way too far. He started to weigh his options. Surely there would soon be a farm gate or a clearing he could turn in. But as the truck climbed it seemed less and less likely. The mountains were a serpentine dark wall, clothed here in undisturbed forest only just starting to leaf, and neither farmland nor building broke the trees’ unchallenged hold on the land. Josh had already driven at least four or five miles from the interstate and the thought of another sixteen was making him consider the possibility of backing up and turning on a soft verge, when without any warning or apparent reason, the road started to widen.
A house, set back in the trees, neat and spacious with the stars and stripes flapping listlessly on a flagpole by the porch, appeared on his right, followed by another three in a row almost identical a few hundred yards further on. No backwoods cabin these, but substantial suburban houses with trimmed gardens and decent wheels parked out front. Josh raised an eyebrow. This was what truckers called car-farmer country. The backwoods of the Appalachians were home to a thousand run-down trailers and cabins, sporting a statutory dozen cars and pick-ups half buried in their field, like the hicks who’d left them there to rot were hoping their ’69 Buick would sprout seeds and grow a new one.
Even on the main routes, Josh had been glared at by enough one-eyed crazy lab-specimens lounging on porches to know that this wasn’t exactly stockbroker belt. The kind of tidy affluence quietly stated by these houses was a surprise. But it was a welcome surprise to a man who needed his breakfast and wouldn’t have to buy it from a drooling Jed Clampit with a shotgun raised at his chest.
So half a mile and a dozen or more smart houses later, it was with relief that Josh hit the limits of the town to which these uncharacteristic middle-class dwellings were satellites. He drove past the brief and concise metal sign with a smile.
Furnace.
The wide street was now lined on either side by houses only slightly smaller than those on the edge of town. Standard roses bobbed in the breeze and hardy azaleas and forsythia were beginning to form islands of colour in a sea of smooth lawns.
It was five before seven and although it was early, people were about and Josh was heartened by the town’s potential for hot food to go. A kid rode past on a BMX, a sack of papers on his shoulder; two guys sweeping the road stood jawing against a tree, brushes in hand; a woman walking a dachshund on a ludicrously long leash stopped and waved to someone out picking up their paper from the front step. It was cosy, affluent, peaceful and ordinary. But it certainly was not what he had expected high up in this backwater of Virginia. Here, Jezebel felt ridiculously out of place, rumbling self-consciously through the street at little more than running pace, as though lack of speed could hide the bulk and noise of the Leviathan. The quiet street waking to its new day was like any other, but the affluence and suburban smugness was starting to jog a memory in Josh he didn’t like.
The Tanner ice cream sign.
A dumb, irrelevant memory, and one he tried to sideswipe. But it was there.
That ice cream sign.
For Josh as a child it stood at the corner of Hove and Carnegie like a religious icon; a circular piece of tin with the advertisement painted on it, supported at two points by a bigger circle of wire on a stand that let it spin in the wind. Judging by the arthritic squeaking of its rotations, it had stood at the end of his street like that for years, that dismal street his mother had brought them up on, a strange juxtaposition of the classes that Pittsburgh boasted, where the unwashed poor lived only a block away from their bosses, separated by no more than just a strip of trees or a row of stores.
Or an ice cream sign.
The Tanner girl and boy had big rosy cheeks and were licking the same cone of ice cream, vanilla topped with chocolate sauce. But when the wind blew the sign would spin and the picture, identical on both surfaces except for the children’s mouths which were closed on one side and open on the other, would animate into a frenzy of darting, licking tongues. Dean thought the sign was kind of spooky, especially when the wind was strong and the tongues went crazy. But Josh liked it. He liked it because it marked the beginning of Carnegie Lane, and more importantly, the end of Hove Avenue, an end to the crowded street that contained their tattered house. In Carnegie the houses were elegant and tall, keeping watch over their own spacious gardens with the demeanour of large wealthy women sitting on rugs at a race meeting. And unlike the regiment of dreary wooden houses that included the Spillers’, every one was different. Some were brick with wide white columned porches tangled with wisteria and honeysuckle. Others had stone facades and glass conservatories, or European affectations of mock battlements and balustrades. And in addition to the neat front lawns that were uniformly green all the way to the sidewalk, each, Josh knew for sure, had generous and private back yards.
School, the stores and everything that Josh needed to service his uneventful life was at the eastern end of Hove. In other words there was no call to go west into Carnegie at all. It merely led to wealthier parts of town, parts that were decidedly not for the Spillers. But he’d lost count of the times he’d found himself strolling past the squeaking Tanner ice cream sign, stepping into Carnegie with a roll to his pre-pubescent gait that tried to say he lived there.
At least he had until one searingly hot August. Josh was eleven and the day had been long and empty. His mother’s return from her job at a drug factory, moving piles of little blue and white capsules along a conveyor belt all day with a gloved hand, had been a cranky and irritable one. Particularly since she discovered that neither Dean nor Josh had made any attempt to prepare supper, but had instead been throwing stones up at the remains of an old weathervane that clung to a neighbour’s roof, in a contest to free it finally from its rusting bracket.
Joyce Spiller had sat down heavily on the three car tyres piled by the back door they used as a seat, and glared at the boys, but particularly Josh, with tired, rheumy eyes. Her voice was full of sarcastic venom.
‘Sure do appreciate you workin’ all day long, Mom. So to thank you for that act of kindness, please accept this cool glass of lemonade and a big juicy sandwich that me an’ my shit-for-manners brother have had all friggin’ day to prepare.’
Dean had blinked at his boots in shame, but for some reason, looking at this woman in her short nylon workcoat, her thin brown hair tied back with a plain elastic band, and her face that looked ten years older than her numerical age, Josh had suddenly despised her. Why should he look after her, when other kids got to come home from school and be met by a Mom who’d fetch them lemonade and a sandwich? What kind of a raw deal was this, having a mother who worked all day, sometimes nights too, who was always in a foul mood and looked like shit? The absence of a father, a taboo subject in the Spiller house, was bad enough, but the fact that they lived in this shambolic house and never went on vacation was all this failure of a woman’s fault.
Josh had stared back at her with contempt and then run from the yard out into the street.
He thanked God that until her dying day, his mother had taken that action for a show of shame and remorse. It was anything but. He’d seen the Tanner’s ice cream sign slowly rotating in the searing hot breeze and had headed straight for the leafy calm of Carnegie, where the people lived who knew how to treat their children. Maybe if he stopped and spoke to a kid up there, they might get friendly and he’d be asked in. He’d often thought of it. That day he decided he would make it a reality. Then she’d see. She’d come home and he’d be in one of those yards drinking Coke with new friends, who had stuff like basketball nets stuck to their walls and blue plastic-walled swimming pools you climbed into from a ladder. There’d be no more kicking around in a dusty yard with nothing to do except scrap with Dean and wait for a worn-out mother to come home and cuss at them.
He ran as far as the sign, then slowed up and turned into the shimmering street with a casual step. The sign had been making a wailing forlorn sound, a kind of whea eee, whea eee like some forest animal’s young looking for its parent. Josh strolled into the splendour of the street and walked slowly, gazing up at the grand houses, smelling the blooms from their gardens. There had been nobody about except for one man who was rooting around in the trunk of a car parked out front.
Josh got ready to say hello as he approached, but on catching sight of him the man straightened up with legs apart, putting his hands on his hips in the manner of a Marine drill sergeant expecting trouble.
He stood like that, staring directly and aggressively at Josh, never taking his eyes from the small boy until he walked by. Josh had felt his cheeks burn.
It was then that he had noticed the sounds. Just background noises at first, but with the blood already beating in his ears, they grew louder and louder until they were roaring in his head.
Lawnmowers buzzing, children shouting and laughing, garden shears snapping, an adult voice calling out, the echoing, plastic sound of a ball bouncing on a hard surface. All these sounds were being made by a ghostly and invisible army of people cruelly hidden from view. And ever present, weaving in and out of these taunting, nightmarish sounds was the whea eee, whea eee of the Tanner ice cream sign. Josh had been paralysed by a sense of desolation that made his bones cold in the thick heat.
The wall of expensive stone that was separating him from these invisible, comfortable, happy people was suddenly grotesque instead of glamorous, an obstacle that could never be negotiated if you were Josh Spiller from Hove Avenue. He had slapped his hands uselessly to his ears, turned and run back the way he had come, fuelling, no doubt, the fears of the man by his car that this was a Hove boy up to no good. Every hot step of the way home the ice cream sign’s wail followed him like a lost spirit, as though it were an alarm he had tripped when he stepped from his world into the forbidden one of his betters.
His mother had welcomed him back with a silent supper of fries and ham, but he could tell by the softness in her eyes she was relieved to see him. Josh knew then how much he loved her. He also knew that no matter how agreeable a house he might eventually buy as an adult, how comfortable an existence he might make for himself, he would always butt up against the corner of a forbidden street, the edge of something better to which he had no access. Maybe that was why he had turned trucker. No one can judge what a man does or doesn’t have if he’s always on the move. The eighteen wheels you lived on were the ultimate democracy. An owner-operator might be up to his neck in debt with his one rig, or it might be one rig out of a fleet of twenty. No one knows if the guy’s rich or poor and no one cares. The questions one trucker asks another are: where you going, where you from, what you hauling, how many cents per mile you get on that load?
No one would ever ask what street you lived on and give you a sidelong glance if it happened to be the wrong one. Josh hadn’t thought about that dumb incident for years, but here, faced with these attractive houses in this small mountain town, he could almost hear the ice cream sign howling forlornly again. It was crazy. He’d grown into a man to whom material possessions meant little or nothing, and yet here he was being infected by that old feeling of desire and denial that he thought he’d shaken off before he’d even grown a pubic hair. And all because a town looked a little neater, a little smugger, a little more affluent than he’d expected. Okay. A lot more affluent.
Josh shook his shoulders, suppressed his discomfort at the memory as he approached the town’s first set of lights, and scanned the side streets for a sign of something that might suggest food. The truck’s brakes hissed, he leaned forward on the wheel and looked around.
If Furnace had a commercial centre then this was probably it. The wide street that cut across this one was lined on both sides with small shops and offices, buildings that were as well presented as those belonging to their potential customers. There was a cheerful bar on one corner, featuring long, plant-filled windows onto the street, far removed from the darkly terrifying drinking-holes a man could expect in the mountains, and an antique shop on the other that suggested Furnace did a fair piece of business from tourism. A complex metal tree of signs told him where the best Appalachian wine could be bought, provided directions to a children’s farm where the animals could be petted, and reminded you that the world-famous sulphur caves were now a mere fourteen miles away. Josh conceded that bored families in camper vans might tip a few dimes into the town’s economy every summer, but even if they loaded up with Appalachian wine till it broke their axles and petted the farm animals bald, it still wouldn’t account for the prosperity of the town. He mused on the mystery of it, and settled with reckoning there must be a whole heap of prime farmland groaning with fat cattle hiding way back here that was keeping these people in new cars and white colonnaded porches. But if that was the case, they were keeping it well hidden. And although the mountain forest came so close to the edge of the town it made Furnace look little more than a fire-break, what the hell: it was a theory. It made Josh more comfortable to invent a logical and soil-based reason, stalling that tiny and rare niggle of envy he was feeling. He never envied farmers. Being tied to the land was just about the worst thing you could be.
Far down the road to his right, Josh could make out the entrance to a mini-mall, fronted by an open foodstore. That’s where he would head and take his chance, since the parking in front of the store looked sufficiently generous to accommodate the truck.
As he gazed along the long wide road, waiting for the lights to change, the vibration of the idling engine combined with the pale early morning sun shining into his face suddenly made Josh ache to close his heavy eyes. He fought it, but his eyes won.
It must have been only seconds, but when he awoke with a neck-wrenching upward jerk of the head, the fact he’d fallen asleep made Josh pant with momentary panic. He ran a hand over his face. This wasn’t like him. It had been years since he’d allowed himself to become so tired while driving that he could lose it like that. In the past, sure, he’d pushed it. But not now. Once, back in those days when he’d try anything once, he’d driven so long he’d done what every trucker dreads. He’d fallen asleep with his eyes open. After a split-second dream, something crazy about shining golden dogs, Josh had woken suddenly to find the truck already bouncing over the grass verge. He vowed then he’d never do it again. Yet here he was, thirty-six hours since sleep, still driving. He had to stop and get some rest. No question. But first he wanted to eat.
Above him, the bobbing lights had been giving their green permission for several seconds, and he shook his head vigorously to rid himself of fatigue while he turned Jezebel into the street at a stately ten miles an hour. As he straightened up and moved down the road, a car trying unsuccessfully to park pushed its backside out into the road at a crazy angle and forced him to stop. He sighed and leaned forward on the wheel again while the jerk took his time shifting back and forward as if the space was a ball-hair’s width instead of being at least a car-and-a-half-length long. The old fool behind the wheel stuck an appreciative liver-spotted hand out the window to thank Josh for his patience, and continued to manoeuvre his car in and out at such ridiculously tortuous angles it was as though he was attempting to draw some complex, imaginary picture on the asphalt. Josh raised a weary hand in response and muttered through a phoney smile, ‘Come on, you donkey’s tit.’
He sighed and let his eye wander ahead to the foodstore, allowing himself to visualize a hot blueberry muffin and steaming coffee.
Across the street, a woman was walking towards the mall, struggling with a toddler and pushing a stroller in front of her that contained a tiny baby. It must have been only days old. Josh swallowed. He could see the little creature’s bald head propped forward in the stroller, a striped canvas affair, presumably the property of its sibling and way too large for its new occupant. The baby was held level in this unsuitable vehicle with a piece of sheepskin which framed its tiny round face like some outlandish wig.
With the sight of that impossibly small creature, it was back; the longing, the hurt, the confusion that Elizabeth had detonated in him.
He found himself watching like some hungry lion from long grass as the woman kicked on the brakes of the stroller, abandoned the baby on the sunny sidewalk and dragged her toddler into the store. The tiny bundle moved like an inexpertly handled puppet in its upright canvas seat, its little arms flailing and thrashing as two stick-thin legs paddled in an invisible current. Josh ran a hand over his unshaved chin, and covered his mouth with his hand.
Would his baby be kicking like that little thing, right now, inside Elizabeth? When did all that stuff happen? A month? Two months? Six? He knew nothing about it.
Elizabeth. His mouth dried. Elizabeth, his love. Where the hell was she?
He closed his gritty eyes for a moment and the shame of what he had done overwhelmed him, making him light-headed with the sudden panic of regret. Opening his eyes again, he looked towards the infant. There was now a different woman standing behind it, both hands on the plastic grips of the stroller.
Older than the mother, possibly in her fifties, she was dressed in a garish pink linen suit that, although formal and angular in its cut, seemed designed for a far younger woman.
Her hair was red, obviously dyed, and even from this distance Josh decided she was wearing too much make-up; a red gash for a mouth, arching eyebrows drawn in above deeply-set eyes.
He had seen plenty of women like that at the big Midwest truck shows, hanging on the arm of their company-owning husbands; women who spent money tastelessly as though the spending of it was inconvenient and tiresome but part of a dutiful bargain that had been struck.
Josh would barely have glanced at such a woman had he seen one sipping sparkling wine in a hospitality marquee, while her husband ignored her to do business with grim-faced truckers.
But here, standing outside a foodstore in this rural nowhere at seven o’clock on a spring morning, she looked remarkably out of place.
More than that. The most extraordinary thing about her was that she was staring directly and with alarming intensity at Josh. It wasn’t the annoyed and studied glare of a concerned citizen, the look a middle-aged woman with nothing better to do than protect small civil liberties might throw a noisy truck.
It wasn’t aimed at the truck. It was aimed at him.
In front of him, the master class in lunatic parking had ceased, the man at the wheel waving a gnarled and arthritic hand from his window again in mute thanks, and still the woman’s eyes continued to bore into Josh as she stood erect and unmoving, her body unnaturally still, on guard behind the writhing baby. For one fleeting, crazy moment Josh thought he might be inventing her, that a part of his guilty and fevered mind had conjured up this stern female figure to reprimand him for his paternal inattention.
‘That’s right, you useless dick,’ those eyes seemed to be saying. ‘This is what a baby looks like. You can look but you certainly can’t have. Only real men get these. Real men who stay home.’
He blinked at her, hoping that her head would turn from him and survey some other banal part of this quiet street scene, proving that her stare had been simply that of someone in a daydream, but her face never moved and the invisible rod that joined their eyes was becoming a hot solid thing.
There was no question of him stopping at that store now. Josh wanted out of there, away from that face, away from that tiny baby.
He fumbled for the shifter, starting the rig rolling clumsily by crunching his way around the gear-box as he picked up speed. A row of shiny shop windows to his left across the street bounced back a moving picture of Jezebel as she roared up through the gears. It was the clarity of that reflection as it distorted across undulating and different-sized glass that gave her driver an excuse to admire the mirror-image of himself sitting at the head of his gleaming electric-blue Peterbilt, and take his eyes momentarily from the face of the woman who was still standing like a lawyer for the prosecution on the sidewalk ahead.
Had she been waiting for that irresistible weakness that is every trucker’s vanity, to catch a brief glimpse of themselves on the move, and see themselves as others do? Josh would never be sure. How could he ever be sure of anything that happened that morning?
His eyes flicked back from the moving reflection down to the speedometer which showed around twenty, and then looked forward again. Back to the road and those eyes glaring at him from across the street.
She pushed the stroller like an Olympic skater, propelling it forward with a theatrically benevolent outward motion of the arms which culminated in a triumphant crucifix, palms open, shoulders high, as if waiting for a panel of judges to hold up their score cards. The timing and positioning was spectacularly accurate. She hadn’t pushed until Josh had been exactly level with her, so that the front wheels of the stroller rolled at an oblique angle beneath the double back tyres of the tractor unit.
That expertly judged speed and angle let the outer tyre snag the frame and flip it on its side under the rig, giving all eight wheels the opportunity to travel directly over the stroller and its contents.
It was almost as if Josh’s hysterical intake of breath was the force which pulled his right leg up and slammed his foot down on the brake. But there was little point in the action. His chair had already bounced in response to that small shuddering bump, the slight motion the truck’s suspension registered as it negotiated a minor obstacle, the same motion that would indicate Jezebel had run over a pothole or a piece of lumber on the highway. Only this time it wasn’t a piece of lumber. It was eight pounds of brand-new flesh, bones and blood, strapped into its flimsy shell of plastic, aluminium and canvas.
The force of the braking threw Josh forward into the steering wheel, and after he whiplashed back with a winded grunt he snapped his head round, eyes and mouth as wide open as the muscles were designed to allow, wildly scanning the view from his open window as he panted for breath. In those few seconds that felt like minutes, he noticed three things. The first was that the woman in the pink suit was gone. The second was that the reflection in the store window showed him quite clearly that there was a small mangled mass beneath the trailer, caught untidily between the back wheels of the cab. The third was that the mother was emerging slowly, as if in a dream, from the door of the store, her mouth making a dark down-turned shape that was impossibly ugly. It took a few more seconds before her screams started. First her arms twitched at her sides and her body appeared to quiver with some internal electric current, and then it was as if that current had been suddenly cut. She collapsed to her knees like a prisoner about to be executed, and her dark open mouth shaped the cry that savaged the morning air with the naked brutality of its pain.
Behind her, in the open doorway, her toddler stood howling until adult arms swept it inside.
Josh was out of his cab and scrambling desperately beneath the trailer before he had time to consider what he might find there. Had he stopped to think he would never have approached that soup of flesh, but his body was working to some private agenda that had little to do with logic or thought. It moved and acted on instinct, as if unthinking swiftness of action could somehow undo what had most certainly and irreversibly been done.
The towelling one-piece babysuit had held most of its contents together, but it had expanded when the body inside changed shape, so that now it was not so much a garment as a large, sticky, flat sack. The blood seemed so thick and black, but the worst of it was the way the main aluminium support of the stroller had embedded itself in the middle of the baby’s skull, splitting the head in two in a diagonal line from one eyebrow to a tiny shoulder. It had forced both eyes from their sockets before they, too, were mashed into the glistening corpse.
Perhaps he thought the child would be unrecognizable. He was disappointed. The mess was still so obviously a baby that Josh put out a trembling hand and fingered one tiny foot that had somehow remained intact, regretting it instantly when his gentle touch made it shift slightly with a sickening slick sound. For a crazy moment, lying on his stomach beneath the trailer, he thought about those cartoons where the victim is run over by a road roller and peeled off the road in a long flat strip, and he wanted to laugh.
He wanted to shake with laughter, wanted to feel tears of mirth pour down his cheeks, and hold his sides as they ached with the effort of hilarity. But the sound he was already making, accompanying the stream of salty tears dripping from his chin, was a thin, reedy wail that came from the back of his throat. It was a sound very far away from laughter.
He lay there for a long time, then there were hands on his legs, pulling him out from under the truck. Gentle hands, squeezing him reassuringly as they tugged him back. And voices. Calm voices that sounded miles away, saying things like ‘come on now, fella’, ‘leave it now’, ‘come on there’.
Josh went limp. He was pulled free of Jezebel by three pairs of hands and manhandled into a sitting position. A man wearing thick spectacles and a blue cotton coat with ‘Campbell’s Food Mart’ stitched on the pocket, was kneeling in front of him, looking concerned.
Behind him were two lanky teenagers, one with the same coat and one in a T-shirt and low-slung jeans. The man was talking softly, as if to a wounded animal.
‘S’okay. S’okay now. Weren’t nothin’ you could’ve done there, fella. Sheriff’s on his way. You just sit tight.’
Josh looked at him dumbly and then turned to the sidewalk in front of the store where he had seen the mother collapse. She was sitting as he was, although being attended to by more people, but her head was thrown back and one arm reached up above her head as though trying to grab a rope. The woman, the woman in pink, that staring, crazy murderer, was nowhere to be seen. Josh realized with an accelerating panic she was not being pursued, that her absence was not an issue here. She had to be found, had to be stopped. He struggled to get to his feet.
‘It wasn’t no accident … listen … we have to find that woman … she …’
The bespectacled shopkeeper held him down.
‘Hey, hey. Come on there. You had a mighty bad shake-up. Hang on in there.’
A station-wagon ambulance was drawing up, and suddenly the hands that were pressing his shoulders down now went to his armpits and helped him to his feet.
He went meekly and sat down heavily on the edge of the sidewalk where his assistants abandoned him in favour of a split interest between the hysterical mother and the two paramedics crouching under the trailer. To Josh, the people making up this macabre tableau were moving slowly and dreamily as though they were under water. He blinked as a fat, dusty police car rolled to a halt behind the truck and watched impassively as a sheriff’s deputy climbed into Jezebel and moved her to the side of the street with a shudder of badly-changed gears.
He said nothing as a square man who claimed to be the sheriff led him to the police car and gently guided him into the back seat. But as they drove off, his armour of numbness was shattered by the sight of the bereaved mother, still sitting on the sidewalk, now embraced clumsily around her thin shoulders by a rough-hewn man in paramedic’s coveralls. She lifted her head as he sat in the police car, raised a trembling hand towards him and opened her mouth to speak. He waited, steeling himself for the abuse, the unimaginable but inevitable verbal wounding.
With the window shut he couldn’t hear her words, but her face was so close, and she spoke so slowly he could lip-read as clearly as if she had shouted.
Josh’s heart lurched as he watched her mouth say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then she bowed her head and gave in to her weeping once more.
6 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
‘No. I don’t understand.’
Dr McCardie tapped his pen on the desk and looked at her without sympathy.
‘It’s like I said, Miss Murray.’
‘Elizabeth.’
‘Elizabeth.’ He nodded politely but coolly, taking her point before continuing. ‘I realize that a scan may be the last thing you want when you obviously have your mind set on the termination, but in order to carry that termination out without complication, we need to know how the land lies.’
‘Why today? Why couldn’t you do this on Wednesday when I’m anaesthetized?’
The young man looked at her with an eyebrow raised and barely suppressed a sigh. ‘A scan is neither painful nor traumatic. What’s worrying me here is that you seem to believe that we’re just going to put everything right while you’re asleep. The termination is done under a local anaesthetic. You’ll be awake. But more important than your comfort, Elizabeth, you’re making a decision here. You’ll have to live with that decision when you get up and walk away. Do you understand what that means?’
She blinked at him.
‘Yes.’
He waited a few moments until the film of tears that was forming over her eyes was re-absorbed under his professionally dispassionate glare. ‘Then may we proceed?’
She looked across at the screen of the scanning machine, still showing the result of its last client, a tiny crescent blob adrift in a black universe.
Elizabeth stood up and slipped off her coat.
They tested him for alcohol, taking his blood and breath, gave him scrappy bits of food and a warm can of soda as they wrote down the fragments of his fevered statement. Then, with the comic solemnity of a man who believes himself to be of great importance, a thickset policeman led him into a small brick-lined cell. He waited until Josh sat down on the narrow bed by the wall, then nodded to him as though his prisoner had performed some act of kindness.
‘Shouldn’t be overlong till the test results get back. This don’t mean nothin’, bein’ in here for now. Just procedure.’
Josh looked up at him and returned the nod. The policeman closed the door gently and locked it.
The sleep that immediately overwhelmed Josh was so deep he had no recollection of even lying down on the hard mattress. His next sentient moment after the locking of the door was the unlocking of it, and that, he discovered with a bleary glance at his watch, was at least five hours later. A different policeman was regarding him coolly, waiting for him to come round.
‘It’s this way,’ he said, as though answering a question.
Josh stood up unsteadily and followed him out of the cell, along a corridor and into the room where the sheriff and his colleague had interviewed him hours before. He entered, sat down on one of the unsteady wooden chairs arranged around the metal table, and waited with his hands folded in front of him. The deputy pulled out a chair opposite Josh, sat down and cleared his throat.
Outside the closed door, phones were ringing in the distant office and men were talking in low voices. Not the voices of conspiracy or suppressed anger, but rather the voices of visitors to a desperately sick hospital patient. The deputy scratched at an armpit.
‘Got some more stuff to ask you if that’s amenable to yourself.’
Josh blinked and sat back, marginally opening his palms in acquiescence.
‘While you been sleepin’ we got most of the information we need ’bout what went on back there.’
Josh sat up. ‘The woman? You found her?’
The man looked back at Josh with a mixture of embarrassment and impatience. ‘I’m goin’ to stick to what we know here right now. You with me?’
Josh said nothing, and his silence was taken as permission to continue.
‘You ain’t been drinkin’ or poppin’ pills, an’ the marks from your tyres out on the road, along with them witnesses that saw it, say you weren’t speedin’ unduly neither. But I guess you know you’re in violation with your log book.’
Josh’s mouth twitched.
‘I told you where I pulled over, and for how long. I was going to fill it in when I stopped here.’
‘Trucker with all them years behind a wheel knows that’s against the law.’
‘Sure. I know it.’
The man’s demeanour was changing. Beneath his officious politeness, Josh could read a glint of malice.
‘Log books ain’t there for your recreation, mister. We got to know where and when you stop. In case you been doin’ somethin’ you shouldn’t.’
The policeman waited a beat, as if hoping for some display of emotion from his interviewee, then continued. ‘Like drivin’ illegal hours without sleepin’.’
Josh stared back at him, his closed mouth failing to conceal a jaw that was clenching, making the tiny muscles beneath his ears protrude.
‘You have a good sleep in the cell?’
‘Sure. Thanks.’
‘Mighty tired, huh?’
‘Yeah. Been working hard lately.’
The deputy sighed, long and deeply, as though growing weary of this. ‘Your stopover. It checked out. Highway patrol saw your truck there three times in the time you said you parked.’
Josh stared at him, watching him closely as he continued to see if there were a trap being set.
‘Guess it was lucky you pulled over in a tourist bay instead of a truck stop, huh, Mr Spiller? Attracted attention.’
‘Never thought about it.’
The deputy leaned forward, his voice menacingly conspiratorial. ‘Yeah, it’s real lucky. ’Cos if we thought that you’d been drivin’ for more than the legal ten hours when you killed that little baby, I guess I don’t know what the sheriff might do.’
Josh stared back, trying to look unmoved. The deputy hissed, ‘You’re gonna get a fine that’ll make that shaven head of yours curl the goddamn hair it got left. You’re goin’ to think about how poor you are every time you open your log book.’
‘It was a mistake.’
The deputy looked back at him with naked contempt. ‘Sheriff needs a final statement.’
He got up and left the room. Clearly, the impromptu interview had been nothing more than a device to work out his anger at an obvious injustice. If things had been different, Josh wondered how many teeth he might be missing right now, how many broken ribs he might be nursing after having ‘fallen’ in his cell. There was no doubt. They had been trying their damnedest as he slept to nail him with something, and they had failed.
Josh screwed shut his eyes and clenched his teeth. Ten hours? Try thirty-six. The lie was more intolerable for being a lie that could never be uncovered. Only Josh Spiller knew he hadn’t slept. Did it really matter? He hadn’t killed the baby. That woman, that nightmare of a creature, had killed it. How would a night’s sleep have altered that?
Unless …
The tiny seed of doubt that he might have fallen asleep for a split second, for that crucial life-changing, life-ending second, wormed its way back into his mind. He slammed it down. No. He knew what he’d seen. A woman, a mad evil woman, had deliberately murdered a child.
He composed himself and forced himself to concentrate on waiting. For what, he was unsure, but the process of sitting still and expectantly was surprisingly calming. It was out of his hands. Someone, some unseen witness, would have told the police about the woman in the suit and they would be out there looking for her, if indeed they hadn’t already got her locked up. If they could trace Jezebel’s whereabouts to the parking lot last night, surely they would already have her behind bars. Maybe she was in the next cell. He would just wait and see.
He didn’t have to wait long.
The door opened and the square sheriff entered with two deputies, each carrying a cup of coffee. The sheriff carried two, one of which he put down in front of Josh.
‘Coffee. Take cream?’
Josh nodded his head dumbly and cupped his hands around the warm styrofoam as the man serviced his coffee with some mini-cream cartons from his pocket.
The sheriff sat down on the chair opposite and the two other men leaned against the wall, but their presence was casual rather than threatening.
‘I introduced myself earlier, Mr Spiller, but I guess you were pretty spaced out by the whole thing so let me do it again. I’m Sheriff John Pace.’
Josh looked at him expectantly, hoping by the tone of his voice that he brought not a further reprimand, but some news.
John Pace, however, looked back as though the reminder of his name was all that mattered here. When he realized that the man was going to say no more, Josh spoke:
‘Did you get her?’
Pace looked down at his cup and then glanced quickly out the corner of his eye at one of the deputies. The look, unlike that of his deputy before him, was one of disappointment, of someone letting him down. He sighed before he replied.
‘Who might that be, Mr Spiller?’
Josh’s hands, still cupped round the coffee, changed to fists.
‘The woman. The one who pushed the baby under the truck.’
The sheriff cleared his throat. ‘Mr Spiller,’ he hesitated, then said, ‘Can I call you …?’ he fished Josh’s licence from his top pocket and peered at it. ‘Josh? That’s it?’
Josh stared at him as if he were mad.
‘Josh,’ the sheriff continued with renewed confidence. ‘I know how shook up you are, but we need to pull ourselves together here a piece. We already got statements from the witnesses. We just need yours. You know we’ll have to fine you for your log book violation. There’s an eight-hour shut-down goes with that. Guess you know. But since you’ve been out of action damn near that, I reckon once you’ve paid up you’ll be free to go. We know you stopped where you said.’ He hesitated. ‘But ’fore I let you leave I need to know you’re goin’ to be okay. Shock makes you tired. Confused. Whole bunch of stuff. You feel better after your sleep?’
Josh searched the sheriff’s face for irony and oddly found none. He fought back his guilt.
‘What did they say?’
‘Who?’
‘The witnesses.’
John Pace leaned forward and his hand lifted slightly as if he wanted to put it on Josh’s arm. He stopped himself when the look in Josh’s eye warned him that he didn’t want to be touched.
‘No one’s blaming you, son. It was an accident. You weren’t speeding, you weren’t drinking. Just an accident.’
Josh swallowed. He spoke quickly with panic in his voice.
‘A woman pushed the baby under the truck. Deliberately.’
The sheriff was shaking his head.
‘The mother left the brakes off the stroller and the wind caught it. She told us so. Saw the whole thing herself. You think she’d lie about a thing like this?’
It was Josh’s turn to shake his head. Pace looked perplexed.
‘Why you doin’ this to yourself, fella?’
‘I can describe her. In detail. I want it on my statement.’
‘I’m goin’ to say this again. Shock plays tricks on you.’
‘I know what I saw.’
The sheriff sighed deeply and turned to one of the men leaning against the wall behind him.
‘Archie?’
The man opened a notepad, pulled out another chair and joined the two men at the table. John Pace ran a hand over his short sandy hair and sat back in his chair.
‘So?’
Pace gestured at him like a sultan allowing a feast to commence.
Josh took a sip of the bitter coffee in front of him, nervously coughed his throat clear and told them it all again.
He spoke slowly and deliberately, and when once more it came to describing the woman he paused, making sure that the man with the notepad had caught up with his tale. The deputy looked up expectantly, holding his pen like a high-school student paying attention to a dull but insistent lecturer. Josh concentrated on his description of the woman, making it more detailed than when he’d first blurted out his hysterical, ragged tale hours ago, and as he spoke he noticed a change come about the men. The one writing glanced across at John Pace who in turn narrowed his eyes. When Josh had finished Pace sat back in his chair and looked thoughtfully across the table. He nodded to himself for a second or two, then rose slowly to his feet and made for the door. He pointed at Josh as he left the room.
‘Hang on there. Got somethin’ for you.’
Josh blinked at the man’s back then looked quizzically at the two men left in the room. They returned his stare with the dull gazes of small-town policemen and Josh looked elsewhere to avoid those vacant eyes. They waited several minutes until Pace re-entered the room clutching a piece of paper. It had ragged fragments of Scotch tape adhering to three comers, with the fourth corner missing, and looked like it had just been ripped clumsily from a wall.
Pace sat at the table, looked down at his prize for a second, moved Josh’s cup to one side then slid the paper in front of him. Josh looked down and the breath left his body.
It was her.
The photo was monochrome, but she was wearing the same suit. She was in a room that looked like a court or schoolroom, with a large flag propped in the corner behind her, and she was smiling up at Josh with even white teeth. She looked good in the picture, younger than Josh had initially guessed, and her make-up was more gentle and sophisticated. But it was her. The murderer. No doubt.
Below the picture a large caption read, ‘Vote for Councillor McFarlane. You talk. She listens.’
Underneath in smaller print the handbill informed Josh that Councillor Nelly McFarlane would be holding a question and answer session at Furnace junior school on May nineteenth.
When Josh looked back up at the sheriff’s face, John Pace was registering a peculiar mixture of triumph and sympathy. But if the man was feeling smug, he concealed it well.
‘This her?’
Josh nodded once, almost imperceptibly. Pace did the same.
‘Like I say, shock’s a crazy thing.’
‘Where was this?’
‘All over town.’
‘You think I saw it somewhere.’
‘I know you did. Hard to miss.’
One of the deputies sniggered and Pace threw him a look.
Josh slumped forward, the core of determined revenge dissolving in him, leaving his body slack and empty with misery. He let his hot head touch the back of his hand. This time, Pace allowed himself to put a hand on Josh’s arm and found that it was not resisted.
‘But I saw her.’
Josh’s words were muffled, spoken into his own skin. Pace replied to the top of his head. ‘You just had the worst day of your life, Josh. But you have to realize it weren’t your fault. The mind makes up all kind of mixed-up shit to help us deal with guilt and grief. Once ran over a neighbour’s dog. Couldn’t sleep for weeks. God alone knows what it must be like to have killed a child. You ain’t goin’ mad, Josh. It happens.’
Josh raised his head and squinted at the man whose big hand was still resting on his arm. ‘You’re wrong. I know I saw her.’
Pace shook his head, and tightened his grip. ‘Then the mother of that poor little baby girl? She gone mad?’
Josh lowered his eyes, aware of how he must seem to these solid, unimaginative men. ‘Maybe.’
Pace withdrew his hand, rubbed his chin roughly and thought for a moment.
He stood up.
‘I’m goin’ to do somethin’ outside police procedure here, Josh. But I reckon it’s goin’ to help things along. You want some air?’
Josh unconsciously rubbed at his arm where Pace’s hand had been.
‘I guess.’
Pace nodded, and opened the door for him. They left the room, re-entered the small, neat office that smelled of new carpet, and walked outside towards the car. The sheriff waved a dismissive hand above his head to the calls from his staff as he left the building.
‘Shit, they’ll live without me for ten minutes,’ he said to no one in particular.
7 (#u71bff44d-69f8-523b-ac8d-f80f0d79299a)
Thank God it was over. They’d made the delivery and everything was in order. Bernard Epstein didn’t like his job any more than his companion did, but as he got back into the car, Harry gave him a long look.
He returned the stare and shifted the driver’s seat back so that he could unzip his overalls.
‘She say anythin’?’
Harry’s tone was accusing.
‘Like what?’
‘I dunno. Like what we do next, I reckon.’
Bernard wriggled out of the top half of his suit and lifted his buttocks to slip the legs off.
‘You know what we do next. Nothin’. That’s what we do.’
Harry looked forward out of the windshield to the gracious sweep of the street. ‘You done it before, ain’t you?’
‘Yeah. The once.’
‘So that’s all I’m askin’. Like what next?’
‘It’s different each time. Has to be.’
Harry looked at his hands. ‘Delivery’s the same.’
Bernard pulled the last of the overall from his foot and turned to look at his companion with a sigh. ‘She doin’ well, huh?’
Harry blinked at him.
‘Huh?’
‘That daughter of yours. The one you got in that fancy twenty-thousand-dollar-a-term college up in New Hampshire.’
‘Yeah. She’s doin’ fine.’
Bernard waited a beat, his eyes never leaving Harry’s, then nodded. ‘Mighty glad to hear that. Can we get back to the sawmill now? Them backs ain’t gonna stack themselves.’
While Harry looked at the floor and cleared his throat, Bernard crumpled up the overall and threw it in the back seat beside the other one. The blood would come off in the wash. It had stained the green cross and half the word ‘paramedic’, but it would be fine with some rub-on detergent before the rinse cycle.
And anyway, they wouldn’t need them again for a long time. They were woodsmen. They had their own work-wear.
Pace helped Josh into the passenger seat as though he were an elderly female relative visiting for Thanksgiving, then climbed breathily into the driver’s seat and drove off slowly at policeman’s speed. Josh looked across at him, waiting for an explanation. Pace kept his eyes forward.
‘How were you feeling before the accident? Just when you thought you saw the woman.’
Josh’s temples throbbed. He put a hand to his head. How had he been feeling? He had been feeling guilty, sad, screwed up and crazy without sleep. That’s how. So crazy he even thought he might have invented the woman to chastise himself for driving away from his problems. Remember, Josh? Remember? Oh, he remembered all right, and he wrestled with the truth of it before answering.
‘I felt fine. Hungry. That’s all. I needed something to eat.’
What else could he have told this man? That he had fallen asleep at the traffic lights, then woken thinking about how his girlfriend was going to kill his baby? Just seconds before he killed someone else’s?
Pace nodded as though that was what he wanted to hear, and steered the car carefully into a wide tree-lined avenue. Josh looked away in shame and turned his attention to their destination. If Furnace’s suburbs had been impressive then this was even more so. They had arrived in the land of the seriously rich. The houses here were set far back from the road, and the maturity of the gardens, ringed with ancient oaks and high rhododendrons, told the story that they’d been here a long time. The same uncomfortable alienation that had introduced him to this town was returning. He turned back to Pace.
‘What’s the deal with this town? Where’s the money coming from?’
Pace raised an eyebrow as if the question was not only irrelevant but also impertinent. He shrugged. ‘Same as anywhere. Rich folks here got old money, poorer folks do what poor folks do. Work.’
Josh shook his head, undeterred by this oblique answer. ‘No, I mean what’s the bottom line? Farming? Mining? What?’
Pace looked like he was thinking hard. ‘Well, I guess that’s a good question. I reckon mostly it’s land and timber, but we got a few people here deal mostly in money, know what I mean? Like they don’t make nothing, they just sit on the phone or the fax and move money around the world. Seems to make more.’
‘Up here? In the mountains?’
‘You got a phone and a fax it don’t matter if you’re on the moon. I guess they like the mountain air.’
Josh nodded, disappointed at the mundane explanation. The easy resolution of the mystery did little to make him feel better. But then he was far from feeling good. He was feeling worse than he’d ever felt in his life. The image of that tiny foot, that thick black blood, bobbed to the surface of his consciousness like a plastic ball held under bath water and released. He swallowed hard, fighting back his horror, as Pace brought the car to a stop outside a sprawling white house. The sheriff cut the engine and sighed deeply. He tapped the wheel thoughtfully for a moment, then turned to Josh.
‘This is out of order and I ain’t no psychiatrist but I reckon if you meet this lady you’re goin’ to realize that you made a mistake.’
Josh felt cold. My God. This was her house. John Pace was going to make him talk to her, make him look again into those eyes that had drilled him just before she …
‘But I don’t want you tellin’ her why we’re here, you understand? That’s important. No way am I goin’ to treat Councillor McFarlane like a suspect. This here visit is just so you can straighten things out in your mind and get on your way again. Can you handle that?’
Josh looked up to the dark windows of the great house and knew he had to see her. He nodded. Pace studied his face for a moment returned the nod, then got out of the car. Josh followed him, a few steps behind.
The arrival of the police car had already made one of the drapes twitch. A child’s face looked out from behind pale flowery material, and opened its mouth in naked delight that the sheriff was coming up their driveway. The drapes fell and swung as the child dived away.
Pace rang a doorbell that buzzed deep inside the house. There were voices, children’s and an adult cheerfully telling them to be quiet, and then the mock-period door swung open.
She opened it. The murderer.
Councillor Nelly McFarlane was wiping her hands on an apron that hung loosely around the waist of a plain denim knee-length dress. Her red hair was tied back in a knot and her open friendly face was without make-up. Clinging to her skirt was a girl of about nine or ten, and in the background a younger boy and a slightly older girl hopped around with open curiosity.
Nelly McFarlane looked at them both and smiled, showing those fine white teeth that graced her campaign handbill.
‘John! Hi! Come in.’
She motioned to the men to enter, but looking questioningly at Josh. He was aware that he looked like a criminal. Take a trucker from his truck and he always does. He was well used to being followed round factory outlet malls by store detectives who fixed on his clothes and haircut like pointer dogs on a duck. But right now, he was more aware that he was looking at a criminal. A first-degree murderer. Pace put a hand behind Josh to push him gently forward, speaking to the woman as he did so.
‘I want you to meet Josh Spiller. He’s a trucker from Pittsburgh.’
She widened her smile and raised her eyebrows. Josh was grateful that she didn’t offer a hand to shake. He was barely in control, but to have been forced to touch the flesh that had launched the baby into oblivion …
The children scuttled away inside and vanished, satisfied that the police visit was to be a dull social one.
Josh hesitated, his heart racing in his chest. The space between his shoulderblades told him that he was about to be clubbed from behind with a baseball bat, but his eyes, his logic, his head told him he was the unannounced guest of a bewildered and respectable Furnace citizen. He stepped into the large, cool hall. In the spacious living room to which she led them, a television was blaring cartoons to a room now vacated by children. Nelly McFarlane moved to a low mahogany coffee table, picked up the channel changer and silenced the noise.
Josh flicked his eyes to it just in time to see a coyote being pursued on a dusty road by a huge rolling rock before the picture fizzled away to black. He looked away quickly, a hot, sick feeling returning to his head. She sat down on a long sofa and motioned for the men to do the same on an identical one on the opposite side of the coffee table. They sat, and Pace clasped his hands on his knee.
‘Sorry to trouble you, Nelly, but there’s been a real bad accident.’
Josh watched her face carefully as a line of fear and confusion passed over its undoubtedly handsome structure. She was much younger than he’d thought. In her late forties maybe. It was hard to tell. But she looked good. He held his breath. He was confused and light-headed. Pace saw what she was thinking and hurried along to halt it.
‘Alice Nevin’s baby was killed this morning.’
Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Oh sweet Lord. Alice? Berry Nevin’s girl?’
Pace nodded.
‘How?’
Her voice was croaky.
‘It was out the front of the mall. Maybe you saw some of the commotion if you were in town early?’
He looked at her carefully, but if there was to be any flicker of guilt or duplicity it was not going to register on this woman’s sympathetically open face.
She shook her head slowly, her hand now at her neck.
‘We haven’t been out yet, John. What happened?’
‘Stroller rolled right out into the street. I’m here to tell you ’cos I know that’s a big piece of your campaign, Nelly. To get them metal barriers up in front of the store.’
She was shaking her head in disbelief now, and Josh watched her, seeing only a woman in genuine distress at an appalling tragedy. Pace was continuing.
‘Mr Spiller here, well, he was the real unfortunate one who just happened to be passing by slowly in his truck. Just shows you, you were right about an accident waitin’ to happen. He was way under the speed limit, braked an’ everythin’, but there was nothin’ he could do. Little Amy rolled right under there. Didn’t stand a chance.’
She silently mouthed the words ‘little Amy’ to herself, then turned her eyes on Josh. There was a fleeting second, no, less than that; a fraction of a second, in which a cold wind blew across his heart and he imagined he saw the same cold reptilian eyes that had stared him down at seven o’clock this morning, light years away.
And then his bruised mind allowed him to see what was really in front of him. Two eyes that were already glazing with tears and regarding him with an expression of horror that the killer, albeit an unwitting one, was here in her house, which was being replaced with some obvious effort by a sympathy that seemed so warm and genuine he felt tears prick his own eyes again.
John Pace looked concerned. ‘You okay, Nelly?’
She swallowed and waved a hand at him. When she spoke, she was still visibly wrestling with revulsion and compassion. ‘I don’t know what to say. You poor man.’
Pace looked at his feet.
‘Like I say, Nelly, if those barriers had been up like you’ve been shoutin’ for, this’d never have happened. I just wanted Mr Spiller here to know that it ain’t never goin’ to happen again. Kind of put a bit of his mind at ease.’
Josh stared at her, his mind spinning. How did he get here? A few hours ago he was on the interstate trying to find his breakfast, and now he was in a living nightmare that he was never going to wake from. Nothing would ever be the same again. He had killed a child. Not her. Not this middle-class, bland and ordinary woman who spent her life campaigning for tiny small-town victories. Him. He had been sleepless and crazy. Seeing things. He had seen some dumb poster on a wall and his mixed-up, fucked-up brain had concocted that stuff. It was no one else but him. He was the killer.
She got to her feet. Her face told the story that she was still unsure of him, almost as though she were reading his guilty mind, and as she spoke her next hospitable words, her eyes suggested she was thinking of running to get a gun.
‘Can I fetch you something, Mr Spiller? A coffee? A cold drink?’
Josh shook his head. ‘No. Thank you.’
She paused, staring at him with an expression that was difficult to read, then spoke gently. ‘Well let me give you this. Please.’
She went to a drawer in an elegant sideboard, took out a small yellow pamphlet, crossed the room and handed it to him.
Josh took it and looked down at its cover. It showed a poor drawing of a family, a mother and father straight out of the Brady Bunch, all big collars and bad seventies haircuts, and two apple-cheeked children encircled by their parents’ arms. At the back of the family, the figure of Christ was holding his shepherd’s crook out and beaming great rays of light over them. Large-seriphed type declared, ‘Jesus, the head of the family of man. His love heals all.’
He looked up at Nelly McFarlane in dismay. She had almost lost all trace of uncertainty and dismay, but now adopted the brain-damaged expression of the born-again Christian, beaming at him as though she had given him some delightful gift.
‘Are you a believer, Mr Spiller?’
He looked at the pamphlet again to avoid her eyes. ‘No. I’m afraid not.’
‘Please read it anyway. It might help you. Jesus wants to help the unbeliever not only to be at peace, to be healed, but also to come to Him and embrace the word of God.’
Pace was looking at the table, his hands still clasped, and it was impossible for Josh to see if it was out of embarrassment or piety. The woman turned her attention back to the silent sheriff.
‘Should I go round there, do you think, John?’
‘She’s been taken to the clinic, Nelly. She’s pretty shook up. I reckon you should wait a piece.’
She nodded, then turned back to Josh.
‘May I pray for you, Mr Spiller?’
Josh felt awkward and silly. ‘Sure. Thank you.’
‘Then I will. I’ll pray very hard. You must be in terrible pain.’
He nodded and then looked to Pace, telegraphing that he was desperate to leave. The sheriff read the face of his companion and stood up. Josh did likewise.
‘Anyhows, Nelly, I’m real sorry to intrude, but like I say I thought you should know. Hope it’s helped Mr Spiller here, too, knowing that it’s something that’s goin’ to get fixed.’
Nelly McFarlane stood up, moved quickly round the table and grasped Josh’s arm. He recoiled, but her touch was not the horror he had dreaded. Her hand was warm and soft.
‘You can be sure of that, Mr Spiller. Barriers are going up on that sidewalk if I have to build them myself. But for the moment, while the pain of this is still crippling you, try and let Christ into your life. He can help too.’
Josh nodded dumbly and shifted his feet. She scanned his face for a few more moments then led them into the hall. At the door Josh unzipped his jacket pocket to put away the pamphlet, and as he did so the handbill that Pace had given him poked out of the corner. She saw it, smiled and pointed with a slender finger, clipped clean nails without varnish. The finger of a neat, God-fearing mother. Not the painted nails of a terrifying harpy.
‘Guess you hoped I’d be a slice more glamorous if you saw that picture before we met, Mr Spiller. Sorry you caught me in Grandma mode.’
Josh managed a weak smile.
‘You look just fine.’
She responded with the coquettish grin of a woman flattered. ‘Well I just throw that old pink suit on when I need to look like I mean business. This is me really.’ She lifted the sides of her denim skirt like a little girl.
Josh gave an embarrassed upward nod of acknowledgement. The sheriff shook her hand, asked to be remembered to Jim, and they walked back to the car. She watched them go then quietly pushed the door shut.
Josh was silent for the first few minutes of the return journey, gazing out at the passing houses and their uniform blankets of velvet gardens. Pace broke the silence.
‘Well?’
Josh remained quiet, thinking. Agonizing.
Pace looked sideways at him.
‘That your murderer?’
Josh hesitated. It was still so real. But of course it couldn’t be. That woman, that ordinary woman wasn’t capable of anything more than boring the nuts off you at a church social. There was no other explanation. He was ill. He hadn’t slept. He’d made it up.
‘I guess not.’ Josh continued to stare out of the car, then turned to his driver. ‘Why are you being so kind?’
‘You think I’m being kind?’
‘Yeah. I do. I reckon some of your deputies would be mighty pleased to see me strung up.’
Pace drummed the wheel with a finger, his eyes still forward.
‘You made a mistake forgettin’ to log, Josh, but we both know the accident weren’t your fault. Now there’s already one person dead. We can’t change that. But I’m damned if I want you freakin’ out on the highway out there and have me come and scrape up some more mess. I seen men confused and lost about a lot less than you been through.’
Pace sighed through his nose and then spoke again wearily as though this kind of bizarre incident happened on a daily basis.
‘Now. Want to change your statement?’
Josh chewed at a fingernail. ‘That necessary?’
When Pace replied, his tone was one of irritation. The concerned policeman was disappearing: he sounded like a man who had proved a point and needed to get about his business.
‘Sure it’s necessary. You change your mind about what happened, you have to change your statement.’
Josh said nothing, but they drove back to the sheriff’s office in the silent understanding that the favour was over and it was time to clean up. The problem was he had no idea what he would say in a new statement. How could he say the stroller rolled with the wind, when he didn’t see that? He’d seen it being pushed. He had. He closed his eyes and the picture was still there.
Suddenly Josh wanted Elizabeth very badly. He wanted to be held in her arms, have her run her hands over the shaved nape of his neck the way she did, and smell the clean, sweet smell of her body. He needed her to tell him it was going to be okay. Only it wasn’t okay. A baby was dead and he was losing his mind. Panic rose in his throat again, and he turned his attention to the sanitized landscape of Furnace’s tidy houses to help battle it back.
Moments later he was back in the small room they had left less than half an hour ago, walking with his eyes fixed firmly on the man’s back to avoid even the tiny task of thinking about where to take his next step.
He was lost and dazed and the emotions were so alien to him that he reeled from them. Once, lounging on the sofa at home, he and Elizabeth had been watching that dumb TV game-show where the glazed-eyed contestants begin by describing their own characters. She’d laughed and made him do the same. He recalled pulling a serious face and adopting a joke manly voice to say,
‘Hi. I’m Josh Spiller and I get things done. I take control.’ Would he say that today and still expect her to laugh? The truth wouldn’t make either of them laugh. Try ‘Hi. I’m Josh Spiller. Things happen. I run away.’ Right now he was seriously out of control and there was nowhere to run. He sat back in the shaky wooden chair and let his arms flop heavily onto the table.
The deputy who’d taken the statement returned, bringing with him a pile of paperwork, arranged himself at the table and looked to the sheriff for instruction. Pace nodded and the man smoothed a new piece of paper with his hand, held his pen expectantly and looked to Josh.
‘You want me to read you back your first statement and amend it, or just start from new?’
Josh looked at him with dull eyes, still unsure what he could say that would replace the one he’d given. He stalled for time.
‘Can I hear it back?’
The man straightened his shoulders and started to read haltingly like a shy child standing up in class.
Josh listened, his mind playing the movie that went with the words, fighting to make himself believe that his clear and accurate account was the product of a temporarily fevered brain. As the deputy reached the description of the woman, Josh slid the crumpled handbill picture of Nelly McFarlane out of his pocket and onto the table in front of him. He gazed down at the woman’s open, friendly face as the man’s voice droned in the air like some monotonous tour guide in a national monument.
‘… hard to tell her age, but older than the mother, wearing a little too much make-up, and a tailored pink suit. Her hair …’
Josh looked up.
‘Wait.’
Pace, who had been picking at his thumbnail, apparently bored and barely seeming to listen, looked up at Josh.
Josh was excited, his eyes flashing with impatience. He spoke quickly, turning to Pace to make his point.
‘Pink. You hear? I said it was a pink suit.’
Pace put his wide hands out palms up, and raised his eyebrows in a silent question. Josh stabbed at the handbill with a finger.
‘You heard her as we left, sheriff. She mentioned this pink suit, the one in this picture.’
Pace was still looking quizzical, but Josh could detect falsehood in that expression, could see the conclusion to his observation being born behind the sheriff’s narrowed eyes before Josh spoke it.
‘If this is what I saw, how could I have known the suit was pink? This picture is black and white.’
John Pace looked across at his deputy and then back at Josh, who was breathing more quickly now. The deputy’s mouth remained slightly open, as though he wished to continue his reading aloud. Pace spoke slowly.
‘Well now, that’s a fair point. A fair point.’
He turned to the deputy, his voice casual and light.
‘Archie. Any of these posters around town in colour?’
The man with his mouth still open closed it, and scanned Pace’s face carefully before speaking.
‘Eh, I can’t rightly say.’
Pace rubbed his chin. ‘I guess the only explanation is that there must be.’
Josh’s heart raced. ‘But it’s something you can find out.’
‘For sure.’
‘And if there aren’t any in colour then where does that leave our theory about how I’d seen her before?’
There was a pause. A long pause, and then Sheriff John Pace clasped his hands together in front of him and looked Josh straight in the eye.
‘Up shit creek, Josh.’
Josh sat back in the chair and almost smiled. But there was very little to smile about.
‘Then I stick by my statement. Until you find out about the poster.’
Pace paused again for an awkward length of time, then unclasped his hands and wagged a finger like he was scolding an invisible dog.
‘Okay. We’re gonna get right on that. But after you’ve paid your fine for that dumb stunt with your log book, there ain’t no reason to keep you here any more. You feel up to drivin’?’
Josh nodded, unsure how the atmosphere in the room had changed, but certain it had.
‘Sure. I kinda feel better already knowing I might not be crazy.’
This time, Pace snorted. ‘Yeah? You saw Nelly. Even if a decent woman like that could have slipped in and out of town in broad daylight to do the deed unseen by anyone but you, what motive would she have for doin’ somethin’ as wicked as happened?’
‘How should I know? Jesus freaks are always missin’ a few floorboards upstairs.’
As soon as he’d said it, Josh knew he shouldn’t have. Archie made a blowing motion with his mouth and Pace’s voice dropped an octave and darkened to the same degree as his face.
‘Now I reckon you ought to keep that smartass truckin’ talk to yourself. Specially when you’re referrin’ to good folks who choose to follow the Lord’s path.’
Archie said a quiet ‘Amen’ and they both looked at Josh with matching contempt. Josh ran his hand over the stubble of his hair and looked from one man’s face to the other.
‘Sorry. No offence.’
Pace’s face told him that offence had indeed been taken. He stood, pulled Josh’s licence from his pocket, dropped it on the table and waved a hand at the paper in front of Archie.
‘Sign your original statement, take a copy. When you’ve paid your fine, Deputy’ll give you back the truck keys.’
Josh opened his mouth to speak and was silenced by a fat finger held up and pointed rather too directly at his face.
‘We’ll be in touch if we got anythin’ to tell you.’
Pace turned to leave the room, speaking as he went with his back to Josh.
‘Drive careful.’
The two men were left in the room, facing each other over the table. Archie Cameron turned the statement towards Josh. It had been neatly typed, presumably when they were out on their less than social visit. He read it through then held out his hand for Archie’s pen. It was given with bad grace, and retrieved with the same.
‘You wait here. I’ll have this photocopied and you get to keep one.’
The deputy left the room. Josh rocked back on the legs of his chair and exhaled deeply. His mind was racing with more than his embarrassing error. The sheriff had almost convinced him he’d seen McFarlane’s poster and subconsciously dropped her into his mad and confused recollection. Now he didn’t know whether to be pleased or dismayed that the theory wouldn’t wash. His mind was working like an abacus, clicking possibilities, fantasy and realities together like wooden balls on a wire. Except nothing was adding up.
The baby’s mother slid uncomfortably back into those thoughts. Why would she, the most important and relevant witness of all, say it was an accident? He let the chair bump forward again and ended up with his head in his hands, elbows on the table. Josh looked miserably through his wrists at the papers in front of him, a pile of official-looking forms, mostly handwritten. He glanced up at the door, then put a hesitant hand out and rotated the papers towards him. The top sheet was a scrawl of notes and observations on the position of the truck and the time of the incident, but the next two pages had a hastily-written list of witnesses’ names and addresses. He scanned it quickly, found Alice Nevin, and before understanding why he was doing it memorized the address and turned the papers back to face the empty chair in front of him.
The deputy’s return was abrupt, but he was formal to the point of a lawyer serving a summons in making sure Josh took his copy of the statement. ‘This here is yours. You take that now.’ He held out a brown business envelope with the neatly folded paper protruding slightly from the open end.
Josh took it from the deputy’s hand and was observed carefully as he pressed it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
‘And you get these back.’
From another larger brown envelope the man brought out a plastic bag of Josh’s personal belongings that had been removed from his pockets when they put him in the cell.
He watched Josh as he removed the items and started putting them back in his jacket. When it came to the wallet the deputy smiled unkindly.
‘Guess you’re gonna need that all right. I’ll get Deputy Busby to bring in the paperwork for your ticket.’
He walked to the door, opened it and called down the corridor. As Josh suspected, the man who answered the call was the angry policeman who had led him from the cell. He was holding a pad of tickets, a credit card swipe machine, and he was grinning.
Archie Cameron left the room with a long look at Josh and Deputy Busby took a chair.
‘You take a copy of your statement to keep?’
Josh nodded numbly, trying hard not to think of the horror contained in the words that were tucked so neatly inside his jacket.
‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah? Well here’s another souvenir from Furnace, Virginia.’ He slid the square of paper towards Josh.
‘One thousand bucks.’
Josh stared at him, his eyes narrowing. ‘The maximum? Even though my stopover checked out?’
‘Mister, if I were you I’d be pretty thankful for walkin’ outta here at all after what you done. Looked in your wallet and I guess those hundred and forty-five dollars ain’t goin’ to cover it. Pleased to tell you we take Master Card.’
Josh was about to protest further, but the policeman’s face told him it was useless. Part of Josh wanted to pay a fine. A huge fine. But no amount of money would undo his deed.
The transaction was performed in an uncomfortable silence until the deputy folded up the credit card receipt and a copy of the ticket into an envelope and handed it to Josh. He watched Josh’s face as he took it.
‘You keep hold of that now.’
Josh looked at him suspiciously, since the man’s tone was of a dishonest merchant who has successfully swindled a fool. The deputy read his face and added with a glare of indignation, ‘In case anyone needs to check up on you. Believe me. I’m goin’ to make damned sure they do.’
Only when the envelope was safely away, did Deputy Busby hand Josh the keys to Jezebel and the licence that he’d scooped up from the table.
‘You need a ride back to the truck? I’m supposed to ask.’
Josh shook his head. ‘It’s only a few blocks. I need the walk.’
‘Good. Cause you ain’t gettin’ a ride.’
Josh stood up and pocketed his keys. He looked long and hard at the man’s face, but any aggression he might have been able to muster before today was dissipated by the knowledge of his own inner guilt. He broke the stare first, turned and left the room.
John Pace was gone from the main office and Josh was oddly disappointed he hadn’t stayed to say goodbye. He’d heard enough horror stories from other drivers about the consequences of committing a violation in backwater towns, to know that by the sheriff, at least, he’d been treated fairly and with respect. But even though the law had decided he’d done nothing wrong, as he walked down the concrete steps to the clean sidewalk, he felt like a man being released from prison.
The air smelled sweetly of catkins and sap, and a gentle breeze moved the young chestnuts that lined the street. Josh walked slowly at first, then picked up speed as the fresh air revived and invigorated him.
Alice Nevin. The woman who started today with two children and ended up with one. Thanks to him. He knew she wouldn’t be home. He could almost see her now, lying on a hospital bed somewhere, her pupils dilated with tranquillizers and her thin arms lying immobile by her sides. But maybe something … anything …
Josh had no idea what he was going to do. He just wanted to go to her house. There was a drugstore at the end of the block. He pushed open its glass door and walked to the empty counter. A pretty but dull-eyed girl stopped stacking packets of sanitary towels, walked slowly over and filled the space behind the cash register.
‘Yeah?’
‘You know where Strachan Boulevard is from here?’
She looked at him. He knew she’d be weighing up the hair, the clothes, the earring. But he moulded his face into contours of friendly expectation and she broke into a half smile as she decided to co-operate.
‘Okay. You want to make a right here, then take a left into Frobisher Place and then two blocks down you’re there.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
As he turned to go Josh’s gaze swept past a telephone on the wall. His heart lurched. Elizabeth. He should phone Elizabeth. He felt in his pocket for his wallet and found his phone card. He could feel the girl’s eyes burning into his back and knew that although this call, of all the calls in the history of time, should be made in private, he couldn’t wait any more.
He punched in the complex code, waited for that monotonous and irritating voice to tell him how much time he had and then at last heard the long ring of his own phone. There was a click then the heart-sinking hiss that meant the answering machine had kicked in. His own voice.
‘Hi. You’ve guessed. We’re out. Try the numbers that follow, call back or leave a message. Here we go, the shop number is …’
He hung up. He hadn’t left the answering machine on, so at least that meant she’d come home and been there to switch it on. So she was safe. Cold comfort. She wasn’t answering.
He stood for a moment and let his heart slow down. What would he have said if she’d picked up the phone? This was new territory. Josh Spiller was a man, and a man who drove forty tons of truck around America. Yet right now, he wanted to put his forehead against this wall and weep. For a moment he saw himself reflected in the shiny chrome of the telephone, saw himself as he knew the girl behind the counter was seeing him; a haggard, haunted face that belonged to someone he barely recognized.
He dug his fingernails into his palm, took a breath and walked quickly out of the store. Movement. As always, it was the only cure.
8 (#ulink_5c8174a9-c8a9-55aa-8236-f028a47644df)
Sim was worried about his lemon balm. The leaves were turning brown around the edges and there were aphid casts on the new shoots. He bent over the big terracotta pot and poked pointlessly at the sick plant with a gnarled finger. Herbs were tricky. You had to know when they came indoors to avoid the frost and when they should go out again to harden off. He reckoned this time he’d got it wrong, underestimating once again the bitter spring winds that chilled Pittsburgh, and he tutted as one of the leaves fell off with his touch.
Inside the house, Josh and Elizabeth’s phone rang. The old man straightened up and shuffled towards the open window. Sim liked it when they had their answering machine on. He could hear all their messages clearly through the window, whether open or shut, and it made him feel part of their lives that he knew what was going on, often before they did. Sometimes it was just messages from Josh’s work, and sometimes it was Elizabeth’s family. But he always listened in the hope of hearing something secret and exciting. And there was something else.
Sim had a pointless but amusing little gift. Mostly, although occasionally he got it wrong, he could tell who was phoning while it was still ringing.
He had no idea how he knew, but he did. He liked to play the game with himself as the phone rang its four short peals before the answering machine intercepted.
‘Dispatcher,’ he would say out loud on the second ring, and then slap his thigh when the familiar voice came on, droning, ‘Josh? Got a pretty high-paying load with your name on it. Call me, would you?’
Or he would mouth, ‘Oh oh, Elizabeth’s brother,’ and then look delighted when the sulky sibling’s voice left its disgruntled message. If he were ever forced to explain the process, and he knew he never would, Sim would have to say that he could see not so much the person, but the essence of the person as the phone rang, and the times he got it wrong he believed were simply the times when he just wasn’t concentrating hard enough.
Of course he never mentioned any of this to Josh or Elizabeth. Sim thought they probably knew he listened to their messages but said nothing. They were so kind. They knew no one ever phoned Sim, and he guessed Elizabeth left the window of the office open purposely so he could hear. Maybe one day he would show her what he could do. He would like that, to see her pretty face light up in delight as he performed the trick for her. Only it wasn’t strictly speaking a trick. It was real. He just knew who was on the line.
Today, however, it was habit rather than design that made him move to the window. Sim wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the message after the fight he’d heard yesterday. He’d heard Elizabeth’s car screech away after Josh had come home, and last night her crying had kept him awake, wondering whether he should go upstairs and comfort her or just leave her alone. He’d opted for the latter, so hysterical and forlorn were her wails. How could anything an old man would say heal that kind of wound? Things must be bad, he thought, for such good people to hurt each other so badly. He waited by the window as the four short phone rings completed and the answering machine clicked in.
‘Josh,’ Sim said to himself, supporting himself against the wall with an outstretched hand.
An eavesdropper couldn’t hear the outgoing message, only wait patiently for the caller to start speaking. Sim waited to hear Josh’s voice, but the caller hung up.
‘Josh,’ he confirmed with himself, nodding as he shuffled back to his herbs.
A cold wind eddied around the edge of the house and stirred the lemon balm. Two more leaves dropped from the stem and Sim cursed in Korean. He bent down again and resumed fussing with the plant.
‘Josh,’ he repeated to the herb. It ignored him, and dropped another leaf.
* * *
By Furnace standards, Alice Nevin’s house was pretty ordinary. By anywhere else’s yardstick, it was an expensive and desirable property. But unlike a Bostonian or Beverly Hills house where the lawn is God, here the front garden was littered with toys. Two plastic pedal cars lay on their sides as if there had been a collision. A ragged fun-fur horse was splayed over the porch steps and an odd assortment of tiny plastic figures were distributed so evenly around the property it was as though they had been placed there to serve some kind of gardening function. Josh stood across the street and stared up at its long white wooden porch and colonial dormer windows, wondering what he was going to do next.
She wasn’t here. Why was he?
A figure came to the downstairs window. A man. He had a crying child in his arms that looked about a year old and small heads moved about at his hips betraying the presence of more children. The man was trying to make the baby look out into the garden, pointing at things and jogging it up and down in his arms in a vain effort to comfort it. It was only a matter of seconds until he saw Josh, and when he did, he stopped moving. He stared at him for a moment, then moved away from the window.
Thinking was getting in the way. So Josh stopped thinking and walked swiftly across the street, picking his way through the toys to mount the steps and ring the doorbell. A distant dog barked, as though shut in a room, accompanied by a variety of screams and shouts that reinforced his belief that he’d seen several children. The door opened wide and aggressively fast. The man, wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt, cheap stone-washed jeans, and holding his tearful burden, stared at Josh. At this close range Josh could see that the man had eyes almost as red and puffy as his baby’s. He had been crying.
‘Need somethin’?’
It was a challenge rather than a question, a voice and demeanour Josh might have expected in a pool hall if he’d knocked a guy’s pile of dimes off the table. It was way out of place in the doorway of an elegant house. Josh felt colour come to his neck and cheeks. This was all wrong, but there was no going back.
‘Mr Nevin?’
The man’s face crinkled from aggression to suspicious aggression. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
A child screamed from the core of the house. Josh looked past the man at the sound, but it screamed on ignored.
‘I just need to know if you’re Mr Nevin.’
‘There ain’t no Mr fuckin’ Nevin. And I asked you a question.’
Josh remembered. Berry Nevin’s girl. That’s what McFarlane had said. That would mean either that Alice Nevin had kept her maiden name in an unlikely modern fashion for this small mountain town, or quite simply that she wasn’t married. The baby in the man’s arms started a high-pitched whine again and was swayed from side to side by the man in an unconscious act of comforting. It was the action of someone used to holding kids.
Josh lowered his voice and spoke quietly, never taking his eyes off those of the man opposite him. He was glad he was burdened with the child. It would be harder for him to hit Josh when he heard what was coming.
‘My name is Josh Spiller.’ He paused, and when he spoke again Josh’s shame was apparent in his voice. At least to him. ‘Are you Amy’s father?’
Some things happened to his face. Strange things, as if a dial had been implanted that could be turned to a variety of different emotions, and someone was spinning it. His eyes were a mixed carousel of grief, confusion, anger, and most perplexingly, fear.
‘Yeah.’
There was no rise in the intonation of the word that would have made it a question. Inexplicably, Josh wanted to touch the man, wanted to reach out his hand and hold his arm, to tell him it was okay and he understood. Instead he savaged him with his words.
‘I was driving the truck.’
The eyes that had registered that abnormal mix of emotions now became cold, opaque and unreadable.
‘What you want?’
Josh looked at the baby and then back up at that hard face.
‘To say sorry.’
The man took a step back into his house, shaking his head like Josh had drawn a gun.
‘You git off. You fuckin’ git off now. Right now.’
Josh lowered his eyes and stood still almost as though he were going to pray. In truth he was wondering feverishly why he was here. What lunacy was gripping him, making him behave so irrationally?
He could hear the man panting as he turned and made to leave. A babble burst from the figure in the doorway and Josh turned back towards him.
‘It was her fault for fuck’s sakes. The kid was seven days old. You hear that? Seven fuckin’ days old. I says to her to watch it, I says to her, but shit, she never listen to nothin’, that dumb bitch. Never listen. And it ain’t goin’ to be okay. I knows it ain’t.’
He started to cry. A horrible sound, all high and whining like his child.
‘She was so beautiful, my little darlin’. I sees her bein’ born. I ain’t done that with the other six. But I sees Amy come right here into the world and I tells her that everythin’s goin’ to be okay. But it ain’t. I couldn’t do what I had to do. Couldn’t do it. Maybe I’m not man enough, maybe I’m too much of a man. I just couldn’t. She was so little, know how I mean? I don’t know what she was thinkin’. She knows it ain’t goin’ to be safe. I don’t know nothin’ no more.’
He let his whining develop naturally into full-scale weeping, while Josh watched, horrified and baffled. The man was senseless, and the babbling insanity of his outburst was far more terrifying than the violent retribution that Josh had anticipated, and perhaps secretly desired. Still facing him, Josh breathed that he was sorry again, although this time it was more an expression of sympathy with the man’s hysterical condition than remorse for his actions. He backed off down the steps and walked crab-like over the lawn. The sideways walk became a canter, and as he turned his head away from the crying, ranting man at the door Josh broke into a loping run.
He kept running until he was three blocks away, where he stopped, bent over and put his hands on his thighs to regain his breath. The purpose of the visit had been unclear to Josh, an order that was impossible to disobey from some despotic part of his subconscious. But if its secret agenda was to free his head from the maze of craziness, then it had failed spectacularly.
What had he learned? Nothing. At least nothing except a heap more stuff that didn’t make sense. The baby was from a big family. The parents weren’t married. They looked poor and undereducated but they lived in a house a surgeon or a lawyer might be proud of. And the father. The father didn’t blame Josh the way any redneck mountain-bred man would, regardless of circumstance. He blamed the mother of his children.
Josh was sweating from his ludicrous, panicking run and he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Reality. Familiarity. Normality. There was only one place where those precious things resided. He had to get back to Jezebel.
9 (#ulink_ba328a74-80f0-5bee-89e0-40f0ca73fd16)
She’d taken the call calmly, although there was a suppressed fury in her voice that seldom surfaced, a fury the man on the other end of the line recognized and silently prayed would be contained. But there was no time for displays of personal anger. There was work to be done.
A 10A scalpel blade had always been her favourite. Straight edge and not too short. She turned it over in her hand for a moment, feeling its weight, the coolness of the handle, and then positioned it delicately between thumb and forefinger ready to cut. As the blade pierced the skin, the subtle drag on the metal parting those tiny cells told her how sharp this instrument was. She sighed.
The waste. The infernal waste. The potency was not inexhaustible, and to remove a part now for such an unnecessary task was shambolic in the extreme. She used her left hand to steady the rest of the tiny corpse as she made the second incision. Too much. The blade had gone too far. She put the scalpel down carefully and picked up the engraved copper rule. It confirmed her mistake. The second incision was a fraction over seven inches. No matter. The two short cuts that would complete the skinny rectangle would redress the inaccuracy.
Seven inches by seven sixteenths exactly. It would dry smaller, but it had to be cut precisely. She picked up the scalpel and held it alongside the rule, running the blade down the straight edge, and with a steady hand made the final two cuts. This was where the 10A held its own.
A curved blade was useless at prising the skin from the flesh, but with the accuracy of such a straight point she could easily slice away the precious shell from its red fruit without tearing.
At last she allowed herself a smile. It was perfect. It would need washing and drying of course, but she had already prepared the solution. In only a few hours it would be completely ready.
The thud of a ball hitting the back yard wall near her window made her look up and stay still like a thing hunted. She waited on her side of the closed Venetian blinds, senses keen and on standby for action. The children’s voices were full of laughter and sunshine.
‘Oh my God. The window. You nearly hit the window.’
‘Get the ball, you jerk.’
‘Get it yourself.’
She waited. They were laughing, those young high-pitched yelps, growing faint as they receded to some distant part of the yard where their game was in progress, and mentally she ticked off the faces she knew matched the voices, counting how many there were, listening for the tiny dangers of playful curiosity or insubordination.
Then, certain it was safe, she put down her tools and lifted the strip of skin to the light. The light shone through its pinkness and she smoothed it between her fingers, assessing how much time it would take to dry. They didn’t have long. Maybe these few hours were not enough.
She took a deep breath at that alarming thought, then walked to the high table and began the ritual. She pulled the skin over the stone, pinning it at either end with the copper pins, and lit the candles. It was a time to concentrate, not to concern herself about the tasks of others, and so she closed her eyes and pressed a thumb to her forehead.
As she practised the words inside her head before they were spoken and could never be corrected or retracted, a fly circled the room clumsily and came to rest on its target.
Once there, with the only person in the room who would shoo it away deep in meditation, it crawled freely over the remains of a terry towelling babysuit stiffened with blood, and made ready to feast on the shining new rectangular strip of exposed flesh.
It took only five minutes to walk back to the truck, during which time he worked hard to get that sad mixed-up man’s face out of his mind.
She was still there, parked at a tortuous angle outside the store and his heart leapt at the thought of the simple pleasure of climbing into his own private space, the place that smelled of him, that housed the detritus of his driving life, and starting her up. But as he came closer, Josh remembered the consistency of what had been under those wheels, and his pace slowed to a crawl. Would they have cleaned it up? Would anyone have been under there since they slid beneath the trailer and scooped out what was left of Amy Nevin? The saliva dried in his mouth. He approached the trailer from the back and walked slowly along its flank towards the cab.
There was nothing to see. The wheels were just wheels.
A darker patch of asphalt under the whole cab was the only sinister suggestion that maybe someone had taken a hose to it, and it made him look towards the store. There were people in the window of Campbell’s Food Mart peering out at him.
He could see their heads and shoulders turned towards him, watching silently over a display of cans and giant bags of nachos as if waiting for something to happen, and for a moment he thought of going in, asking them what they saw. But the face of Amy Nevin’s father came back. That twisted, weeping, mad face. He wanted no more of this. Either everyone here was blind and insane or he was, and right now he didn’t care to work out which.
Driving would help him think. It always did. With eyes boring into him, he unlocked the cab, climbed in and sat down heavily in his seat, which bounced in happy response. There was a brief moment of paralysis as Josh started the engine and waited for it to warm up. He listened to the familiar throaty throbbing, feeling it vibrate up his spine, and for a fraction of a second he thought he might never drive again. There had been plenty of fur and feathers beneath those wheels, but never soft white skin and tiny bones. He’d never even clipped anyone, despite cretins stepping out of car doors into his path and kids playing chicken on city streets. He stared at the gas pedal as though it had grown teeth, then took a breath, dug deep into what was left of his tattered resolve, and won.
Josh Spiller wanted out of Furnace.
The street was not sufficiently wide to turn in, so Josh drove ahead looking for a side street that would take him back the way he’d come. The opportunity came at the end of the block where a sign told him that the interstate was seventeen miles away down the route to his right. It was a different route from the one he’d come in by, and longer, but it was heading south so he would make up the mileage when he rejoined the interstate. And from here it looked like a better road.
There was little pleasure in driving, but as he increased his speed past the last of those heavenly suburban houses, and a small sign said Leaving Furnace, the vice around his heart loosened a notch.
The road was heading back down the mountains again, but this time it did so in a more generous and less winding fashion. Lacy budding forest still formed an impenetrable cloak on either side, but only a few miles out of the town normal Appalachian life started to appear. Here and there the odd tatty cabin poked a roof or porch from the trees, and an unpleasant-looking general store even boasted a roadside location with the comforting sight of abandoned rusty cars growing from the sumachs in the rough field behind.
Josh was numb now. He was back on automatic and he drove without thinking, letting the moving landscape roll in front of him. Five miles on and a huge clearing to his left revealed a long low restaurant called Mister Jim’s. It looked modern and clean, but more importantly the parking lot was big enough to take Jezebel. Josh started to brake and pull in.
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Muriel Gray
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Фэнтези про драконов
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 28.04.2024
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О книге: From the author of The Trickster, an unnerving tale of latterday alchemy and the horrors brooding beneath the placid surface of life in one small town in America.