Authors: Brian Hodge
Jason was up on his feet to back off a moment and catch his breath, but a foot sliced across his path and tripped along his ankle. He went flying back to the lot, and Tomahawk was on him again. They tussled and rolled and grunted and punched when they could, and only when they wedged themselves up against the massive tire of a Peterbilt truck did they break.
Jason vaulted unsteadily to his feet, scrambling a couple yards away, and the hooting circle of truckers broke to allow him room. His head thudding with pain and adrenaline, he tried to take stock of them both, who could last longer.
His biggest problem was the patches of skin flayed onto the asphalt, leaving raw and bleeding scrapes behind. He could almost feel the infection setting in and taking root.
Tomahawk’s threadbare shirt was ripped in five or six places, and stained with blood that drizzled from one nostril. His long black hair swung freely in front of his face as he lurched to his feet, favoring his left side, where Jay’s elbow had connected.
The Indian circled warily, putting Jason between himself and the Peterbilt, then charged. Jason grabbed the rearview mirror frame on the cab’s door and, with one foot on the step, launched himself up with every ounce of strength left. Tomahawk rushed beneath him, through suddenly empty space, and hit the truck like a linebacker. Jason swung back down into him, landing gracelessly, and they both staggered.
He heard it then, the truckers cheering in appreciation of what he thought of as a pretty impressive move, even if the landing was rough. Admiration? It did him more good than an injection of adrenaline. He gave a bloody grin and rushed back in.
Tomahawk looked up at him coming, his eyes widening. He reached up to the bottom of the truck’s door, level with his nose, and yanked the handle. The door sprang open and thudded into the side of Jason’s head.
Jason flopped backward like he’d been poleaxed. The sickening crunch still echoed in his skull, and remnants of the white-hot sledgehammer of pain danced before his eyes. He was beyond thought, and felt blood flowing down his cheek from the open cut beside his eye.
He did the best he could to counter, grabbing the edge of the door with one hand and aiming an ineffectual kick that grazed Tomahawk’s shoulder and ripped part of his shirt away, but little else. It killed what remained of his balance, and he went down again.
His head swimming, Jason rolled in the direction of the truck and saw a blur of multiple Tomahawks moving toward him, Tomahawk and his three brothers. They say when you see three of something, aim for the middle one, but they never said what to do when you see four. He blinked away blood as the cluster of Tomahawks came in for the kill, moving in perfect unison and raising four fists.
Jason tried to lift himself off his back, and couldn’t do much more than flounder.
“That’s enough.” A familiar voice out there somewhere…the tall, rangy leader. “He’s done, he’s had it.”
Jason blinked again, spat blood and dirt. This time he only saw three Tomahawks, and they showed signs of converging further.
Aim for the middle one.
“Bullshit,” Jason croaked.
Tomahawk raised one eyebrow.
Jason kicked up into the notch between his legs, and it bought enough time to struggle to his feet once more, vowing to
never
get taken back down. In a few moments everything came back into painful focus, and by this time the Indian had decided he could live with the pain in his balls.
They clashed, slugging it out and body punching, tossing each other back and forth until Jason extended the third knuckle of one hand and rammed his fist into the inverted V of Tomahawk’s ribcage. Breath and spit exploded into his face, and Tomahawk stumbled away gasping to collapse against the dusty, bug-coated front of the Peterbilt.
Jason lurched forward, cocking back one skinned fist. He paused to watch the silent eye contact between Tomahawk and the still-nameless man in the mesh cap and shades. He watched Tomahawk grimace and vainly suck for air and, clutching his sides, shake his head. It was pride alone that held him there, Jason knew. Nothing more. Because when you can’t breathe, you can’t do much of anything else.
Jason didn’t want to end it, for deep inside he knew how utterly stupid this was, beating each other to pulps over…what? A dozen small cans of food? And deep inside he also knew that Tomahawk was probably just as hungry as he himself was. He didn’t want to end it the way it had to end.
But the choice wasn’t his.
Jason moved forward in shuffling steps, regretfully watching the helpless expression grow in the dark eyes of the Indian cramped against the truck. Until the world swam gray and he made an unwanted drop to his knees when his lower legs refused to hold him. So much for his vow of a couple minutes before.
He cursed himself and kept going down.
* *
Daylight was still bright when he awoke, so he knew he hadn’t been out too long. But it was muted somehow.
It took several moments of reorientation and getting newly used to a body that ached all over again, but he finally surmised that he was back inside the truck stop. A thick, metallic taste coated the inside of his mouth. It took another few seconds before he realized he was reclining in one of the cracked vinyl booths, with someone working on his left hand as his arm lay across the table like some grimy entree.
Tomahawk.
Jason watched as the Indian wound gauze back and forth between the fingers, circled it around his palm, taped it into one tight mass. The knuckles underneath, now rendered invisible, still stung, but this time from antiseptic.
“I’m too tired to figure out why
,
”
Jason said.
The Indian smiled, and Jason didn’t think that expression came easily. The left side of his lower lip was swelled up like a weak spot in an inner tube. But at least he was cleaned up, with a new shirt, and appeared less battered than he’d looked outside.
“How’s that feel?” Tomahawk asked.
Jason slowly curled his fingers inward, flexed them. To be honest, it hurt like a bastard. But he’d live. He nodded. Then he reached toward his face, felt another bandage on the side of his head where it had met the truck door.
I
take it we don’t have to fight anymore. I really don’t care who ended up with the food.
And?
And I just want someone to talk to.
“How come?” Jason finally asked.
“Orenda.”
Jason was about to ask him to repeat, but he’d heard it clearly the first time. “Indian word, huh?”
Tomahawk nodded, and placed the roll of white tape back into a blue and white plastic case, the lid bearing a red cross. “Iroquois. The Cayuga Nation.”
A file of long-neglected information gleaned from his American history courses flipped through his head. Iroquois? The word triggered the phrase
Confederacy of the Five Nations,
but the only one he could specifically remember as belonging were the Mohawks. Screw it. That was a long time ago, in a land far, far away.
“Orenda,” Tomahawk repeated, holding a clenched fist to his chest. “It’s your individual spirit, the part of you that fights harm, and evil. Like you thought I was evil. Like I had to pretend you were.”
Jason mused this over. “Orenda. I like that.”
Tomahawk nodded. “And I say it’s worth saving in you
.
”
Jason allowed himself a couple moments of smug satisfaction. Funny. A short while ago he was ready to beat this guy into the pavement or die trying. Now? He wouldn’t yet call him a friend, but he had to admit a grudging respect.
“By itself, one person’s orenda is small,” he went on. Then he looked out the windows, through blinds at the rest of his group milling about outside, laughing and generally farting around. “But combined with the rest of a clan, it can be great.”
“Them,” Jason said, pointing. “They’re your clan?”
“Yeah.” He tucked his hair behind his ears to keep it from falling into his face. “You take off your shirt, I’ll clean up your back and shoulders. They’re a mess.”
It took a good thirty seconds of grunting, swearing, and pained faces, but Jason finally slipped the muscle shirt over his head. He sat on the table and turned his back, waiting for the questions the scars were bound to provoke. But the most he got from Tomahawk was a low whistle.
“No wonder you don’t intimidate easy,” was all he said.
Jason would explain later, maybe, when he felt up to it. For now, he just felt like listening. He asked Tomahawk where he had come from, and as Jason listened to the answer, he became a real person instead of some dusty medicine man spouting spiritual philosophy along with the Bactine.
He’d come from rural New York State, moving to the city in his late teens. Tired of poverty, he came after work as a steel jockey on the skeletons of skyscrapers-in-the-works. There he stayed for seven years, until the day a friend stepped off into air in mid-sentence, into a forty-story journey at thirty-two feet per second.
“You can lose some of your nerve after you see that,” he said.
He traded in his hard hat for a set of keys as a cross-country driver. He garnered the nickname “Tomahawk” from his habit of carrying one, which he used to whap his eighteen tires to mentally gauge their air pressure, and he adopted it as his CB handle while in transit between shippers who didn’t want their loads sent until tomorrow and receivers who wanted them yesterday. The road was as unforgiving a home as a steel girder, but he found it more livable.
Then came the day when it looked as if he would outlive just about everybody else around, and the road became his literal home. The months and the miles united him and the others sooner or later, more often than not a direct result of the one they all seemed to know…a tall, rangy, leather-faced driver whose airwave name was the Highway King. His real name was Donnie Stafford, but in a dusty new world where you had to be hard as nails to make it from one morning to the next, from one town to the another, his handle seemed more fitting. Or for short, just King.
Jason clenched his jaw against the burn spreading across his shoulders. “So what happens when all the diesel and gasoline dry up? When you can’t drive anymore?”
“We’ve talked about that,” Tomahawk said with a shrug. “And I believe it’ll be our destiny talking when that happens. Because when it does, that’s the place where we’ll stop and settle and live out the rest of our lives.”
“No regrets and no questions, huh?”
“Not for me.”
Be nice to have that kind of faith. Me, I feel like I’ve been chasing phantoms for four months.
Tomahawk finished tending to Jason’s scrapes and let him return to his seat in the booth. Both of them sat quietly brooding over their aches and pains in a comfortable silence, until the door opened from outside and royalty strode up in Levi’s and cowboy boots, carrying a bottle and the box that Jason had almost been stupid enough to die for.
“Well, well.” The Highway King appraised them through his shades and took a slug from his bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “You know that old saying about someone looking like forty miles of bad road?”
“Yeah,” Tomahawk said.
“The two of you are about twenty over the limit.”
Tomahawk grinned ruefully at Jason, then reached for the Jack and took his own pull. “Can’t introduce him proper, King. I haven’t caught his name yet.”
“Jason Hart.”
The King nodded, hefted the box. Six cans rolled inside. He plunked it down on the tabletop. “We been talking outside, son. We’ll call the fight a draw.”
Jason peered inside the box. “All the chili’s gone.”
“Hard old world, huh.” King took another slug of Jack and looked at both of them. “Listen up, we got a
pot
of chili cooking outside. That is, if the both of you can make it as far as the parking lot to get some.”
“Strong orenda in
this
room, motherfucker,” Tomahawk said.
The Highway King laughed long and loud. “That’s just what I thought you’d say. Son of a bitch, I won the bet.” He laughed again and moved back outside with a clockwork thud of boot heels.
“You up for it?” Tomahawk asked.
Jason nodded. “Who turns down an invitation to dine at the King’s table?”
They struggled to their feet and moved slowly, slowly outside. Jason saw a large circle of truckers crowded around a fire built from trash and wood scraps. A sizable pot bubbled over the fire. The truckers turned to look at him, a mismatched crew if ever he’d seen one. The trucker nearest him was stereotypical…stubby and bearded, with thick black-framed glasses and a gargantuan stomach. Sitting beside him was a man who would’ve looked more at home on an Ivy League campus; he wore Calvin Kleins and an Izod shirt and was painstakingly clean-cut. On the far side sat the woman who’d come close to blowing him away inside. Wearing a fatigue shirt unbuttoned halfway down and a ponytail that coiled over one shoulder like a pet snake, beads of sweat filmed her chest and face, and she struck a perfect balance between danger and enticement. On and on around the circle, they no longer regarded him with amusement or disdain. Instead, he found, as he had sensed inside, a certain sense of respect. As if he’d passed an initiation ceremony.
But for what? Kicking his ass? Or coming back around so he could keep kicking mine?
The Highway King hunkered down before the pot and ladled chili into a bowl. “You know, son, you’re luckier’n you ever dreamed. Good thing Tomahawk took a liking to you. He comes from people who really know how to hold their grudges.”
Tomahawk groaned and rolled his eyes. “You always figure out a way to work this in, don’t you?”
King stood and took a bite and fanned his mouth. “This man is technically still at war with Germany.”
The truckers laughed, and Jason hoped his face didn’t look as blank as he thought it did.
“I might as well be the one to explain,” Tomahawk said. “He always buggers it up somehow or another.” He was the next to stoop for the ladle. “The Iroquois consider themselves a separate nation from the United States. And when the U.S. declared war on Germany in World War One, we sent a runner in full war dress to Washington to inform the president that we too had declared war. When World War Two came around, we didn’t bother sending a runner because we’d never made peace the first time. We just renewed hostilities.” He moved away from the pot, blowing into his bowl, his eyes alight with pride. “To my knowledge, we still haven’t made peace to this day.”