25. One Honest Job
One Honest Job
The trucker who picked up Elias outside Tulsa was a whirlwind of opinions with the lung capacity to share them.
“Country’s goin’ to hell. You got your inflation, your TikTok, your avocado toast. Don’t get me started on avocado toast. You know what I mean?
Course you do. Everyone knows it. Nobody wants to say it, but I’ll say it.
That’s what’s wrong with this country—nobody says what needs sayin’ anymore.
Woke gone wild, that’s what it is. Back in my day—”
Rain streaked across the windshield. Elias watched in silence, wondering if jumping from a moving vehicle at sixty miles per hour would be worse than enduring this for another three hours.
“—and don’t even get me started on electric cars. Total catastrophe if you ask me, which nobody does, but anyway—”
“Could you—” Elias started.
“—because that’s the problem, see, nobody asks the workin’ man anymore.
Just the elites in their fancy offices decidin’ what’s good for us regular folks.
My cousin Jimmy, he bought one. One of them electric sedans.
You know what happened? Battery died in the Walmart parkin’ lot.
Up and died! And you can’t jump-start it like a real car, oh no, you gotta call a special tow truck that—”
“Sir,” Elias pressed.
“—costs three hundred dollars just to show up! Three hundred! For what? To plug it into a wall like a toaster? That’s not a car, friend, that’s an appliance with delusions of—hey, you mind reachin’ in the glove box there?
Get me those No-Doze pills. Long night ahead and I need to stay sharp, you know what I mean? ”
Elias reached for the glove box, grateful for any excuse to stop pretending to listen. It popped open with a click. Inside were pills, registration papers, a collection of gas station napkins, and—
A stack of cash in a white envelope. Twenties.
Elias’s fingers moved immediately, without consultation with his brain. Muscle memory from a different century. He palmed two bills with the practiced ease of someone who’d spent years making things disappear, tucked them into his jacket pocket, and grabbed the pill bottle.
“Here.” He handed it over.
“Much obliged.” The trucker dry-swallowed two pills and immediately launched into a monologue about the decline of American manufacturing. “Now, back in the Seventies—”
Elias tuned him out, focusing on the cash warming his ribs. Forty dollars. Back in his day, that wasn’t a bad take. Enough for a nice meal, maybe a bus ticket to somewhere that wasn’t here. He wondered idly how far forty bucks would get him now.
Then an idle thought skittered through his brain.
No, not a thought . . . more of an idle feeling.
Something uncomfortably close to shame. This mook was nice enough to pick you up, get you out of the rain a while, and this is how you repay him?
This idle feeling was new to Elias and highly unwelcome.
Suddenly, Luna’s voice in his head. You should be better than him.
Christ, he thought in his own voice at last. I need a drink.
The truck pulled off the interstate into a rest stop, somewhere south of St. Louis.
Elias had been half dozing, lulled by the highway’s rhythm and the trucker’s unending monologue, but as the truck slowed, his eyes snapped open.
And immediately regretted it.
The rest stop glowed. Not the warm yellow of gas lamps or even the harsh white of electric bulbs he remembered from Chicago speakeasies.
This was something else—a riot of unnatural colors.
Neon signs screamed in electric blue, hot pink, and acidic green: GAS.
FOOD. LOTTERY. RESTROOMS. Each letter burned into his retinas like an accusation.
The whole place looked like someone had bottled lightning in a dozen flavors and smeared it across every surface.
Elias squinted against the brightness.
“Here we are,” the trucker crowed. “Best coffee in three counties, or at least that’s what the sign says. I think they’re lyin’ but I keep comin’ back anyway.”
Elias looked down at the ground, a long way below.
The truck—and he was using that term loosely, because this thing was the size of a small building—sat so high off the pavement that getting out required an actual descent.
He opened the door and climbed down carefully, boots finding the step, then the running board, then finally blessed asphalt.
When did trucks get so tall?
In his day, you just . . . stepped out. Your feet hit the ground. Simple. This thing required mountaineering equipment.
The parking lot sprawled before him like an alien landscape.
Vehicles stretched in every direction, and not one looked right.
Too smooth, too rounded, like they’d been carved from soap.
And the colors! Red, gold, a truck the color of stomach medicine.
Henry Ford was famous for saying customers could have any color car they wanted, as long as it was black.
The twenty-first century had clearly taken the first half of the promise to heart and abandoned the second.
And there, parked near the entrance like a monument to humanity’s poor decisions, sat something that couldn’t possibly be a vehicle.
It looked like someone had taken a toddler’s drawing of a truck, covered it in aluminum foil, and called it a day.
Elias stared at it for a long moment, a complicated mix of disbelief, irritation, and growing alienation pressing down on him. “What in the hell is that?!”
But the trucker had already gone inside, and Elias was left in the neon-soaked parking lot, surrounded by impossible vehicles and light that hurt to look at. A wave of loneliness and displacement washed over him, making him feel every one of his 125 years.
* * *
The rest stop had that particular vibe of being constantly just past midnight.
This at least was something Elias could understand.
It was too late for the good people, too early for the bad.
The hour of insomniacs and the professionally displaced.
Elias stood in the parking lot, staring at the building as if it might contain answers.
It clearly didn’t. But he went inside anyway.
The diner was quite the feast for 125-year-old senses.
Red vinyl booths held together with duct tape, a pie case displaying towering slices, and wan overhead lights that made everyone look like they were already dead.
A waitress materialized at his elbow. She looked to be fifty-something, with the expression of someone who’d seen it all and found most of it wanting. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
“Cream? Sugar? Flavor shot? We got vanilla, hazelnut, caramel, pumpkin spice—”
Elias stared at her. “What?”
“Yep, pumpkin spice is year-round now. Also got cold brew, nitro cold brew, iced coffee, frozen coffee—”
“Just. Coffee. Hot. Black.”
Elias slid into a booth and studied the small metal box bolted to the wall. It had buttons. Numbers. Song titles in a tiny illuminated display: “Ring of Fire,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Friends in Low Places.”
He stared at it. Poked one of the buttons experimentally. Nothing happened.
“Jukebox is broken.” The waitress shrugged, appearing with his coffee.
“Ah,” Elias said, like he’d known what a jukebox was all along.
She left. He sat with his coffee, which was burnt but was at least comprehensible, and watched the parking lot through the window.
Everything was wrong. The lights: too white, too much like a morgue.
The people: most stared at those goddamn glowing rectangles as if hypnotized.
The whole century felt wrong. But Elias was stuck in it.
Alone and forever. Because he’d betrayed the only person who’d tried to help him.
He took a sip of terrible coffee and tried not to think about Luna’s face when she’d left him alone with the sharks.
A burst of laughter pulled his attention to the back corner. Four men sat around a scarred table, playing cards with the commitment of people who’d rather lose money than go home.
Elias observed their bad poker faces and worse strategy. They telegraphed every hand, looked at their cards too much, at each other too little. But it was poker. And poker, at least, still made sense.
He stood, coffee in hand, and drifted over. “You boys got room for one more?”
The man in the camo cap had nicotine-stained fingers and the air of someone who’d spent his life outdoors and resented every minute. He looked Shaw up and down. “Buy-in’s twenty. You some kind of actor or somethin’?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re dressed funny. Like you’re in a play.”
“I’m from Chicago.” That wasn’t really an answer, but no one around the table pursued it.
“Huh.” Camo Cap grunted. “Well, twenty bucks gets you in. You got twenty bucks?”
Elias pulled out the stolen bills. Peeled off one. “I’ve got twenty bucks.”
They made room. The cards came around, and for the first time since Luna had portaled him to that godforsaken aquarium, something in Elias’s chest unclenched.
Cards. He understood cards.
As he luxuriated in being in a situation with rules he understood, he let the table chit-chat wash over him.
Something about a cousin’s truck, the price of eggs, a college quarterback who was either the second coming or a waste of scholarship money.
Elias played and listened and tried not to get too hung up on details.
“—so I told her, I said, if you’re gonna subtweet me, at least have the guts to—”
“What’s a subtweet?” Elias blurted before he could stop himself.
The youngest player—baby-faced, cocky, wearing a security badge on a lanyard—looked at him like he’d just asked what air was. “You serious?”
“I’m from Chicago,” Elias said again, like that explained everything.
“It’s when you tweet about someone without taggin’ them.”
“Ah.” He nodded as if this made perfect sense. “Of course.” Why did I even ask?!