Jewelweed (13 page)

Two hours later, a Peterbilt pulled onto the off-strip and backed into the waiting trailer hitch, the traffic speeding by only several feet away.

The driver climbed down onto the pavement—mid-forties, unshaven, open white shirt, sleeves torn off, jeans, and untied shoes.

“It's a hot one.” He spoke rapidly and without looking up. “Where do these electric motors have to go?”

“South Side.” Nate gave him the paperwork.

“Been here long?”

“Long enough. Thanks for coming.”

“Wrecker on the way?”

Nate nodded.

Above him a small face appeared fleetingly in the window of the Peterbilt—a girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen, disheveled, dirty hair, pretending to look indifferent.

“You got someone with you,” Nate observed.

“Not for long,” he said, glancing briefly up at the cab. “Look, you need anything?”

“I'm good to go.”

“We're done here, then,” the man said, opening the door and climbing up. Nate made quick eye contact again with the teenager inside, then looked away.

It wasn't that long ago, it seemed, when truck stops and public lots did not have as many people selling themselves to drivers. There had always been some of that, of course, but with the crippled economy it was now so bad that some parts of the country put security fences around parking areas and charged fees for the privilege of avoiding the prostitutes, dealers, pornography vendors, and other lot lizards.

I must be getting old, Nate thought. These things didn't used to bother me.

The shadow running along the embankment wall was thicker now, more luxuriously dark. He returned to sitting in it, and a small breeze found him.

All things considered, trucking was a good way to make a living, though there was no doubt that it had contributed to his wife running off. He'd left her alone with the baby too much. He should have known that, or rather, what he did know should have meant more to him than it had.

Afterward, he told everyone—especially those in his family, his aunts, uncles, cousins—that he hadn't seen it coming. Her leaving had no warning, out of the blue. Here one day, gone the next.

But it wasn't true. Her escape had been building for years. She'd carried it in her hands, worn it on her face. Her eyes couldn't stop planning
it. He knew, or should have known, from the way she moved, sitting on the bed in the middle of the night, holding the baby, slumped over and staring out the window.

Ignorance was the problem, he knew. Some people were just too damn stupid to see what was going on right in front of them. And ignorance wasn't simply a failure to register facts and understand them. No, Nate's kind of ignorance had been more like a force. It persisted vigorously in knowing that all women were natural mothers. He'd known that with absolute certainty. Having children fulfilled women, all of them. They needed babies to take care of as surely as plants needed water. Difficulties might arise, sure, but those were to be expected. And even if they weren't expected, a mother would never reconsider motherhood. Such an idea was beyond possibility's outer wall. And as for a mother leaving her child, well, that was unthinkable. Did apple trees produce oranges? It would never happen.

Nate often wondered where his false confidence had come from, how the notion became planted in him that no matter how difficult caregiving seemed, all women actually enjoyed it. Did someone teach it to him? If so, he didn't remember the instruction. Somehow he'd swallowed the corrupted seed on his own.

Nate could still see her frantically signaling to him with a thousand silent pleas. He could feel her broken hope, failing courage, and frightened despair. I can't do this any longer, Nate.

He should have known the truth, and the truth should have changed him. Instead, he ignored her, left her alone, month after month after month.

Oh Christ, he thought, looking into the heat rising from the concrete. His kinship to himself sometimes felt unbearable.

He saw a tractor coming toward him with a piggyback fifth wheel. It pulled out of the traffic and backed up behind the Kenworth.

“I'll take you into the shop,” said the driver.

After he locked down Nate's truck, they climbed onto the seat together, then drove up the ramp and onto 294.

“How long you been out here?”

“Couple hours.”

“Hot day.”

“Yep.”

“You got a place to stay?”

“Not yet.”

“There's a little motel not far from the shop—pretty cheap. I can drop you off.”

“Thanks.”

They hit a chuck hole and it moved through them.

“These roads are getting bad,” said the driver.

“My boy's in prison.”

“Sorry to hear that. Nothing serious, I hope.”

“Drugs.”

“What kind?

“The kind you go to prison for.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“You said that already.”

“I know. I couldn't think of anything else.”

“He doesn't want me to visit, says it's humiliating.”

The driver said nothing.

That night at the motel, Nate lay on the bed and hurried through television channels. He found a western, but he had already seen it. Then he took a shower and fell into a fitful sleep.

The following afternoon he called the Mack shop and talked to one of the mechanics.

“We've got the pump out and will have a new one in by four o'clock.”

“I'll be over.”

“Your engine needs an overhaul. Bearings are loose, pistons slapping in the cylinders.”

“I know it.”

Then he reported in to the dispatch operator.

“Nate, are you running?”

“I'll be up tomorrow.”

“There's a load of plastic wrap and freezer paper in North Chicago. It needs to go out tomorrow to Wormwood, Iowa, to arrive before nightfall.”

A small town in southeastern Iowa, Wormwood was Nate's least favorite place to go. On the edge of town was a slaughterhouse bigger than the rest of Wormwood. The packing plant there butchered hogs and cattle. You could smell it for miles. There was a security fence surrounding the plant,
separating it from a rambling slum of trailers, rusting motor homes, and tin and tar-paper shacks, where mostly Spanish-speaking people lived.

The Wormwood workers were nervous, and the security guards and management were surly. The loading station was around behind the hog pens, chutes, and offal rendering. There were about a dozen docks, and all the good slots were always taken. To maneuver into position you had to turn so sharply that the end of your trailer disappeared in the mirror. Some of the younger drivers would try for hours to get lined up. It was a nightmare. No one wanted to try it after dark. When you finally got in, there often wasn't anyone around to open the doors or who understood English. They sometimes wanted the drivers to unload the trailers themselves, because most of the workers couldn't, or wouldn't, operate the forklift.

“Can't make that one,” said Nate. “The repairs won't be done in time. Do you have a later one?”

A long pause reminded Nate of the management's grudging acceptance of drivers who owned their own trucks. “Maybe I can make it,” he added. “I'll push them at the shop.”

“We'll get someone else. Wormwood Packing locks up early and we've had trucks stuck in there overnight. Can't find anyone to sign off on the papers or even open the damned front gates. They don't speak English. I don't know what goes on there, but . . . forget it. I don't give a rip what they do there.”

Nate didn't want to imagine what went on there either. It was an ugly place. One time he'd delivered a load of refrigeration units and another truck backed into the dock next to him—a rusted out cab-over Freightliner. Everyone seemed in a hurry to open the trailer, and inside it smelled like something he didn't want to identify. It was filled with packing crates and corrugated boxes on pallets, each about four feet square—big enough for washers and dryers, maybe.

“What are those?” he asked the man he'd just handed his invoice papers to.

“I don't know,” the man answered, and walked away.

While they were unloading, one of the boxes fell over and two people rolled out—a man and a boy, frightened, dirty, and emaciated. Several large men told Nate to leave.

“Like I said, I can try to get the shop to—”

“Forget it. I've got a load for you in North Chicago. Take it to the shipping plant in Mason City, Iowa. There's another load waiting for you there.”

“Where's that one headed?”

“New York.”

“Thanks,” said Nate, and the dispatcher hung up.

At the machine shop, the bill came to over eight hundred dollars.

“Is that a problem?” asked the woman who had just passed the slip of paper to him through the little window in the glass booth.

“No,” he answered, and wrote out a check. When he got back to the motel he called his bank to see if his account would cover it.

In the middle of the next afternoon, somewhere in northern Iowa, Nate's mood began to darken again. The recently cultivated cornfields around the moving truck spread out flat in all directions—horizon to horizon in uniform lines of sprouting green on a black-earth background. Planted along a grid, each corn plant currently stood at a uniform height of about twelve inches. Nate could feel his mind growing numb. All these plants in perfect rows, maturing at exactly the same rate, racing toward the grain harvest and into the mouth end of livestock digestive tracts, creating more civilization, more government, more laws, more prisons. On and on, as far as the eye could see, the raw material of man. Agribusiness was the ultimate expression of the times, making skyscrapers, universities, computers, and particle colliders irrelevant by comparison. Mile after mile inched by and the surrounding green rows never changed.

His mood darkened further when he remembered that there was a weigh station about a half hour ahead. Though his truck was well under the eighty thousand-pound maximum, the Department of Transportation sometimes had its inspection agents there as well, and heavy fines were levied for things like out-of-date fire extinguishers, expired transit permits, and the small crack in his windshield that could easily be seen from the inside.

He radioed eastbound drivers. “The station, are they open?”

“You bet. Light's on and they're hauling 'em in.”

“See any DOT?”

“The Suburbans are there and brown uniforms everywhere.”

“Can you get around? Do you know this area?”

“Go twenty miles or more before you cut back. DOT's got another trap set in a wide place in the road about ten miles west.”

“Thanks, friend.”

“Back at you.”

Nate turned onto a country road heading south, deeper into the young cornfields. A cloud of dust rose up behind the trailer, filling his mirrors.

Most country roads in Iowa are laid out in square miles, but for some reason this one continued for miles without intersecting another. When he found one he turned right onto patched macadam, where the shoveled-in and stamped-down repairs were lumpy and darker than the rest of the faded surface.

In the far distance, Nate saw a little rise of land. His attention clamped onto this blip on the horizon. He turned at the next intersection to draw closer, and after several miles he could see it more clearly. On top of the little hill was a tree, and it rose up against the sky like a lone plant growing in the middle of an empty lot. When he imagined sitting beneath it, he felt better.

He turned the Kenworth onto a smaller, narrower road. Later, Nate turned again, this time onto a dirt surface, where he hoped he would not meet another vehicle, because there was barely enough room.

After another mile, the hill and tree came clearly into view, separated from a weathered house and a small garage by a broad section of corn.

A poorly maintained drive connected the house to the road.

Nate did not pull in. Instead, he parked the Kenworth as far into the ditch as he dared go. After turning off the engine, he walked down the lane, with rows of corn on both sides.

A small garden grew between the garage and the house, connected by a worn path. The inside door was open to allow air from the screen door to enter, and faint music could be heard inside, the kind often played on afternoon public radio programs. Nate knocked and waited as the music stopped and other sounds arranged themselves inside, then gathered and came toward him.

“Come in,” said a man who appeared to be ancient. He was wearing a pair of faded gray sweatpants and a paint-speckled blue work shirt with an orange patch sewn onto the right shoulder. An impressive growth of fine white hair grew out of his face, but the top of his head appeared to have retired from growing anything a long time ago. His eyes were gray and surprisingly expressive, beneath two white thickets of brow.