Hush

I drive a semi-truck. It’s a living. The road soars beneath you, and give or take the odd damn fool brake-checking a 40 ton leviathan doing 70 mph, you are the master of your moments, at least until you pull up and the sour warehouse guy, sad god of his pissy little domain, says he was expecting you three hours earlier.

The road has its idiot newbie drivers who think the power of the semi engine equals power in the world, but they learn eventually that they are just small dead leaves blown how and where the wind wants. Power belongs to other people.

All you own is a feeling…that you are not a part of that world, you are a part of this other world. Where the beast you drive splits the air apart and you cruise through that gap into a different place, where you can breathe and be free. Like travelling into another dimension, where ‘they’ can’t get to you. It’s a fantasy, a rolling phantasm. A dream where you can think you have some control of your life, of the shit that roils out there and always wants to crash the dream into the brick wall of reality. Of mortgages, assholes, bosses and constantly rising prices.

So, gas tank full, mechanicals serviced, tyres checked and still with an eighth-inch of wear left, trailer hooked up and air lines jinked in. Start the engine. Roll out the black carpet. Then with that off-we-go-on-the-road-to-nowhere look in the eyes I am propelled into the future, the place where I am free.

Anyway, I’m out on Interstate 70 through Denver, down the gears through the Rockies’ and up through them again to head down the Colorado valley for Vegas. Western Slope dreaming, canyons and arches out there, but here there is just the road, the stretching, luring, chasing, hammering bitch that is the highways of lurid America.

Sometimes your driving mind requires music. Blues, country, rock – depends on the mood, the weather, the news of the day, what life is throwing at you. Sometimes the louder the music the less your brain hunkers down on what you left behind. So this day, this road it’s Led Zeppelin playing Black Dog. Appropriate. It’s what Winston Churchill used to call his bouts of depression.

Hey hey mama, like the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove…

Like way back then when I first met Marian. We used to dance to hell and back. We were thin as whippets from too little food, too much drink and so much goddam dancing. All she ever wanted to do was grind and move. Talking was done on the move, fingers twitching to help get the words out faster, the thrill, the excitement of every thought that just had to get out because it was so important, so new to her mind that it MUST be important. Whoah!...driving was a part of the thrill, the running game of life and living and being enthralled that it could be so good and so exciting, that the sunrises were so wild, the sleeps so long and deep, and waking up was a joy because the day ahead held so much promise – of life, of music, of new people and new ideas that thrilled the mind and led on to the next party, the next book, the next conversation, the next idea, the next L.P.

God knows what happened. Except that time passed and we had two kids and the world started moving slower on its axis.

That’s all right. Time passes. Things change. Driving for a living becomes harder as they push the distances up and the benefits down. Years add small physical decrements one at a time so you hardly even notice until one day it hurts when you get out of bed and you start to look more like those guys in black and white photos on your parents’ mantelpiece.

But there are these kids, my boys, like blossoms in the winter. Bright, cheerful, glad to see you, even when you don’t bring anything home for them because their mother says to stop bringing sweets, they’re bad for their teeth. They smell like happiness, and their laughter is the sound that lightens your dreams on lonely nights on the road. There is no happier sound in the world than your kids laughing. It makes the streams flow and the forests leaf again every spring. It makes my heart glow and swell with love and pride. I helped make those little things, those small hands that hug me and drag me out to show me a snail they found.

She wasn’t a great mother though, and sometimes it seemed like the boys were less happy every time I came home. Then she started complaining that I was never there when she needed me, that other men looked after their families better.

I probably shouldn’t have said that other truckers’ wives manage fine and are happy when their man gets home and the money hits the table. It’s not about money she said. You try living here all the time and those boys yelling and screaming around the house like wounded wolverines. I don’t get a break. You get a break every time you leave.

I probably shouldn’t have said you knew I was a trucker when you married me. Yeah I knew you were something she said and left the house. Her mother came round later and took the boys because I had another run to take industrial salt, I swear, to Salt Lake City.

Then when I got home after dropping off a return load of liquid latex the house was cold and empty and the laughing boys were gone along with the mother who had forgotten how to laugh.

We sorted out access so I got to see them every few weeks, between loads as often as I could. I got to a deeper understanding of the popularity of country and western relationship-breakdown songs as I glided above the long, flat asphalt of Kansas or the gear-sapping grinds of the Rockies and did what I could to not think about what I had lost.

Years passed, and there had been a few passing fancies but no-one who’d put up with me and my preference for British rock bands over American, Delta blues over Chicago, Texan country over Nashville.  

My ex made my life hell as she found some kind of hell for her own stupid existence. Some mad drifter drug-sucker for a boyfriend. Sharing a roof with my sweet boys! I just wanted to get round there and hurl him out a window and talk sense into her and take the boys for walks in Canyonland. Rent that trailer in Moab, make them eggs and bacon and pancakes for breakfast. Make them see they were the most important thing in my life, even as they faded from being the most important thing in hers.

Then two days ago the call from her mother. Marian died. Beaten up and left for dead by the boyfriend from Dregsville.  You better come and look after your boys, she said. I’m too old for this kind of thing. I’m wore out after half a day. You know I love ‘em, but… Yeah, yeah. Hell I’d hate to interrupt your lazy retirement, and the Happy Rest committee probably won’t let them stay anyway.

So, you find your head a bit messed up by how the girl you used to love died at the hands of a human with a hamster in place of a brain, by how your boys found her and called 911 like little men with too much responsibility.

I’m coming boys. My little heroes. We’ll work something out. I’ll find a warehouse job driving forklifts. I ain’t messing this one up.

Hush. Hush. Thought I hear her calling my name now….  Deep Purple riding the highway waves.  

…

A van pulled in front of the semi too quickly. He braked hard, swearing. The load of steel piping on the van roof came loose, tumbling onto the highway. A few slid off the rear, end-first into the road surface, one leapt up as if it was alive and speared through the truck windscreen, entering his chest just above the heart.

Out of control, the semi veered off the roadway onto a grass bank, slewed onto its side and ploughed into the grass.

The van driver pulled over, jumped out and stood still, stared at the wreck, at the thing he had done. There was a noise. Music…

Hush. Hush. Thought I heard her calling my name…..