Chapter 22
ASH
The sky’s dark when the big, noisy rig pulls at last into a truck stop somewhere in Pennsylvania, or at least I think it is.
I’ve kept my eyes practically glued open the entire time, determined not to fall asleep at any point during the fourteen hour drive, and still somehow I’ve missed all the signage. My vision’s bleary. I’m exhausted.
I’ve tried not to think about anything in particular either. Tried to keep my thoughts devoid of anything at all.
Tried not to think of Sam.
Pennsylvania is where my erstwhile companion promised to drop me off.
An older man, grizzled and quiet, with a big red ball cap perched atop his balding head and a short gray beard that looks sort of yellow around his mouth.
He reeks of tobacco; the whole cab does.
He’s gone through a pack and a half since I met him at a gas station near Jacksonville.
He’s silent as he parks the semi with practiced ease. I never actually caught his name but I don’t think he actually offered. He hasn’t spoken much the whole time, which I’m pretty grateful for. There’s nothing I have to say.
“We’re here,” he says curtly. He’s got a nowhere kind of accent and a quiet voice that’s nearly lost in the idling engine of his great big truck. I wonder why he hasn’t turned it off yet, if he plans on sleeping here.
“Where’s this again?” I ask.
“Middletown.”
It doesn’t mean much to me, but it’ll let me get my bearings, if there’s a map inside the store. “Well, so long.” I reach for my backpack where it sits between my legs. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Actually,” he muses, “suppose you could stick around, sleep in the cab.”
“Huh?”
He clears his throat wetly. “I could take you a little further in the morning. New York, maybe.”
“Oh, no. That’s okay. I’ll just find another ride.”
The locks click shut as I grasp the door handle and I freeze. My hair shields me from him, and very slowly and deliberately I hook it behind my ear so I can see him in my periphery. He’s watching me with dull little colorless eyes, slumping in his seat.
“I don’t think so,” he says. The inflection of his voice has changed not at all. We could’ve been talking about something as mundane as the weather beyond the windshield. “I think it’s better if we stick together a little while longer. What d’ya say?”
My heart’s already begun to pound at warp speed. I try to keep my breath and voice steady. “Let me out.”
“Not until I get what I want.”
“What, you want money? I can pay you. A hundred bucks? Two hundred?”
He laughs. “I don’t want your money, boy.” Boy is spat like an epithet. Like I couldn’t be anything more disgusting than a boy.
I feel like I’m seeing things in slow motion, almost. In macrovision, the most minute details magnified.
I note how filthy his yellowed fingernails are as he grasps the zipper of his worn, faded jeans and pulls it down.
The distinct smell of arousal and unwashed skin fills the cab as he pulls out his half-hard dick, grasping it in one meaty palm lined with dirt.
My gorge rises instantly. I have to swallow it back.
“Well?” he says.
My eyes meet his. “No.”
Another laugh. “I’m not asking.”
“Let. Me. Out.”
“Nope.” He wags his stiffening penis at me. “Now c’mere.”
I go for the door again and with his other hand he seizes a handful of my hair and yanks.
As hard as he can, hard enough to make me cry out—I hate myself for it—and then he drags me towards him.
I resist with every ounce of strength I’ve got and I’m pretty sure he rips out a good deal of my hair in the process but I don’t give a shit, I’m hauling back across the cab, kicking and screaming No! No! NO! as he struggles and grunts.
“Stop being so damn difficult!” he snarls at me, and he wrenches my head in such a way that I think he’s about to snap my neck but I’ll take death over this. He can fuck my skull if he wants. No way in hell I’m going down without a fight. I’m not sucking this piece of shit’s cock.
I twist my head and sink teeth into his arm and he starts hollering like a hit dog.
My arm stretches across him, reaching for the unlock button.
My fingertips just graze it before he punches me in the side of the head so hard that my vision goes temporarily black and then, like fucking clockwork, neurons backfire and I lose seconds? how many? before I come to in his lap.
The trucker’s got another fistful of my hair and he’s trying to shove that dirty penis in my mouth. “That’s right,” he growls. “Stop fighting, boy.”
Fight’s all I got in me. Fight’s all I got left.
I fight the dizziness and the pixelating vision, rearing back once more, and my back crashes into the steering wheel.
The horn blips and it’s enough to startle us both; he relinquishes his grasp on my hair at last. Scramble for the lock again, kneeing him in his unprotected groin as I do and he yelps, socking me in the ribs, but I do it.
I unlock the fucking door at last and I pull the handle.
The door flies open and my momentum sends me tumbling across him and to the pavement below. I hit the ground so hard that it knocks the wind out of me. Pain, red hot, flares all along my left side, so intense I think I’m going to puke or pass out or both.
The passenger side door of the nearest truck opens. “What the hell—”
My fucking bag. I don’t have it. It’s still in the truck.
The semi’s engine clunks and roars as the trucker shifts gears and begins to accelerate through the lot. I scramble to my feet and jog alongside it, clambering onto the running board and hanging onto the side mirror for dear life with one arm as I bang on the window with the other.
“Give me back my shit!” I scream.
The trucker doesn’t even look at me as he guns it through the parking lot, picking up speed as he heads for the road.
What he does do, though, is lift an arm, seize a handle by his head and yank.
My ears nearly split as the air horn deafens me and I let go of the mirror, falling to the asphalt once more.
I have to skitter out of the way on hands and knees before he runs me over.
Dusty red taillights recede as he hauls ass out of the lot. Soon enough they’ve disappeared.
Along with my bag.
“Fuck,” I gasp, scrambling to my feet. My ribs scream in protest but they’re nothing compared to the enormity of this revelation. “Oh, fuck.” I stagger a few steps before the adrenaline deserts me, seemingly all at once, washing away like a tide as it’s replaced by a mix of agony and dread.
The money. Holy shit. The money. The prick drove off with all of my fucking money.
It’s gone.
“Are you okay?” The other trucker is approaching. She’s got a smoker’s voice, harsh and scratchy, and her long straight hair is a dark gray. “What the hell was that all about?”
The whole entire reason I did any of this just drove off into the night and there’s no chance I’m going to get it back because it’s in the cab of a man who just assaulted me.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I put a hand on my aching ribs as my breath hitches; it’s so, so painful.
Did he actually break something? Now I can’t even afford to find out. Fuck. Fuck!
“Hey, kiddo? Your ears still work? Or did you get your bell rung?”
I whip around, wince, flinch. As if this woman, heavyset and approaching her fifties, her face creased in kindly concern, is going to hurt me. I don’t know, maybe she will. She wouldn’t be the first and definitely not the last. “Fine,” I manage to choke out. “I’m fine.”
She puts her hands on her generous hips and glances around.
The lot’s silent but for the buzzing neon sign and someone over by the gas pumps filling up.
There are other trucks, all dark, their occupants likely asleep.
“Forgive me for noticing, but that didn’t look fine.
Looks like you got the shit kicked out of you. ”
I bite the inside of my cheek so hard it draws blood. “I’ll be okay. I just—”
“Listen,” she says. “I don’t need to know your story. I’ve got eyes and ears, I can connect the dots well enough.” She lights a cigarette. The smoke curls in the air as she exhales, and she expertly ashes onto the asphalt. “I’m about to go on duty. Heading north. You’re heading…?”
I go to grasp the straps of a backpack that are no longer there. My hands drop uselessly back to my sides. “Rhode Island,” I say. “Providence.”
“Must be serendipity, kiddo. I’m goin’ the same way.” She jerks a thumb at her truck. “You can sleep on the bunk for a bit. You look like you need it.”
Anxiety knots in my throat. “Oh, I don’t…”
“Hey, you ain’t gotta worry about me. You don’t have anything I want.” She winks at me, and I get her meaning. “Come on. I’m on the clock.”
Her tone brooks no argument, and what else am I going to do?
She’s offering to take me right to my doorstep.
I cast one last look after the other truck—the one that’s long gone, the one that’s absolutely not going to come back, like that guy’s really gonna return my things out of the goodness of his heart—and after some additional urging, I dust myself off and climb into the cab.
“Thank you,” I say, settling down on the bunk behind the seats. Within minutes, I’m out like a light.
I sleep almost the entire five hours it takes to get from Middletown to Providence.
The last stretch I get up and move to the passenger seat, and the trucker lady welcomes me back to the world with a smile and a cigarette.
She’s listening to some classic radio station or another.
A Lynyrd Skynyrd song I don’t really know the words to, but I hum a little anyway.
“Sleep okay?” she asks me.
“I guess so.” I feel marginally more alive. Everything hurts, though. “Thank you, for, you know. Back there.”
“That guy,” she says. “The other trucker. He beat the shit out of you? What for? You care if I ask?”