“Not any more,” she answered.
Richie sent some air derisively through his lips and kicked his feet in the assertive running shoes. “Don’t tell us your troubles. So your old man found a boy who was better-looking.”
John admonished him. “Will you stop being so insulting?” He addressed Sharon again. “You just go ahead, say anything you want.”
He saw her silently shake her head and wondered what kind of medication she was on, if that could explain the state into which she had fallen. But then he was distracted again. The street had become a three-lane county highway, on which it was possible for him to increase speed, the traffic ahead having suddenly melted away. But though he went to the posted limit, forty-five, and then to fifty, the tractor trailer
stayed virtually against his rear bumper, an ominous situation to be in, for the middle lane at the moment was monopolized by a series of cars traveling in the opposite direction, and he was as far to the right as he could be, almost onto the narrow shoulder, beyond which was a drainage ditch.
Again Richie was quickly aware. “Don’t speed up. Gradually slow down, drive him nuts. He won’t hit you unless you stop without warning.”
This took a lot of nerve, for as soon as John began subtly to decelerate, the truckdriver sounded shattering blasts of his horn. The only way to persist in the tactic was to avoid looking in the mirror, grit your teeth, and put your being on automatic pilot. He had once successfully employed the technique as a passenger on a light aircraft in stormy skies. Whether it would have worked again he was not to determine now, for after another mile, by which point he was still going better than forty, the highway became positively spacious, with two full lanes separated by a grassy median strip from the two that went the other way.
His sigh of relief, however, proved premature: the truck stayed directly behind him even when both vehicles had gained the wider road. Furthermore, the deafening sound of the horn had become constant.
When he quickly changed lanes, so did the truck.
“Okay,” Richie cried in elation. “We got him now!”
What scared John about this sort of dueling was the irrationality of it. He put the accelerator to the floor. The car responded more vigorously than he had anticipated and sprang out to a substantial lead on the truck. But the driver of the larger vehicle was quick to answer what he took as a challenge. It was unfortunate that, as John could see only now that the highway began an ascent, the powerful tractor had no trailer in tow, which undoubtedly meant that Sharon’s
little car would be no match for its brute power even when going uphill.
“Christ, why doesn’t a cop come along
now?
” He regretted the need to express fear in Richie’s presence. Though he was going flat out, the truck was overtaking him, its windshield reflecting the sun in an impenetrable glare. He still could not see the driver.
“We’re in luck,” Richie shouted, over the noise of an engine at maximum power. “A cop would only take the bastard’s side. Don’t worry. We’ve got him now!”
An empty boast if there ever was one! John had reached the crest of the rise and looked down a long slope of highway on which its weight would give the truck an even greater advantage in speed. Furthermore, several cars were in sight ahead, in each lane, so that he might be trapped behind them in either. To be sure, were they driven by good citizens, perhaps by some effort of them all in concert the truck would be the one so confined or captured. Then, too, car phones and emergency CB sets were commonplace. An observant and law-loving driver might well alert the state police to such conspicuous and illegal slipstreaming.
Yet while entertaining such fantasies, John was aware that no help would be forthcoming. Though accompanied by, and in fact responsible for the well-being of, two other souls (both of them strangers, so that while providing little effective company, they denied him privacy), he stood alone.
But Richie suddenly helped. “Let him get right up against you in the right lane, then suddenly switch to the left. You can maneuver a lot quicker than him. He can’t turn that fast at speed without being in danger of losing it. Soon as you get over, slow down some. He’ll have to go on by. Once we get behind him, we’ll own his ass.”
But who wanted it? John looked forward only to seeing
the last of the menace. To him the driver was a potential homicide, without a motive: he yearned for no revenge on such a depraved human being. Naturally, if he saw a cop he would report the incident, but that was another thing entirely. As to “letting” the truck ride his back bumper, it had arrived there once more without his permission and would stay there. What Richie had suggested was better than that.
He gave a warning to his passengers, and Richie heeded it, seizing the handhold above the upper left corner of his door, but Sharon apparently did not, and when he made his abrupt lane-switch, he heard the sound of her body being flung across the backseat by centrifugal force.
Richie’s tactic worked! The truck thundered by in the right lane, its rushing bulk and giant brutal wheels even more frightening than its seemingly static and one-dimensional image had been in the mirror. By such a simple device, the thing that could have flattened them was now rendered harmless. Perhaps the madman behind its wheel would roar on to threaten other defenseless motorists. If so, who cared? Quite a natural feeling at this instant. In the next, he would continue to look for a policeman.
Now he was able to ask Sharon, “Are you okay back there?”
She mumbled an affirmative. At such a time there was surely an advantage in being tranquilized.
“Okay,” Richie said eagerly. “Now let’s nail him.”
The truck was already fifty yards ahead, John having diminished his speed so as to fall far behind and thus recede from the immediate memory of the driver, who might just be crazy enough to retain a grudge. Nowadays you were always hearing about people who on the occasion of traffic squabbles produced the guns they carried in their cars for just such
a purpose, and shot adversary motorists or even others who were faultless.
“Forget about the bastard,” John said. “Good riddance.” He was relieved to see Richie accept this with a stoical shrug and fall back into the seat, slumping so low that he could barely see over the dashboard. John had feared that a need for revenge might be the man’s dominant emotion. What was his own? He was conscious of a lifetime urge to do right. This put him at a frequent disadvantage, as in the case of the tailgating truck. It was true that he had now escaped from the situation, but it was unfair that he had been in it in the first place. He had given no rational offense. How could one do so by driving in an orderly manner at the speed limit? To behave otherwise would endanger the lives of human beings: that was what had been at issue, not the narrow concerns of traffic law.
Richie grumbled, down in his slump, kicking the firewall. “Those kind of people make me mad: they don’t have any respect.”
All John wanted to do was get to Hillsdale, and back, without further incident. What Richie said might be true, but nothing could be done about it beyond complaining, and John hated to waste his time in negative lament.
“How big a town is Hillsdale?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you lived there long?” John glanced at him. “Do you live there at all?”
Richie grinned. “I said I did, didn’t I?”
“Well, that’s where I’m taking you.”
“Then that’s where I’m going.” Without emerging from his slump, Richie made a long reach for the knobs of the radio.
“Do you mind?” John asked. “I don’t want to hear any music now.” He did not quite understand why he had said that. Had he been alone he would have switched on the radio and listened to almost anything but elevator music, though what he preferred were the records popular when he was in the latter years of high school, which to younger people were already far out of date.
“Do you ever enjoy yourself?” It was Richie’s sudden question and bore an implication John did not care for.
“I’ve done some things in my day. I wasn’t always married, with little kids. I’ve been around.”
“I’m talking of right now,” Richie said. “You interested in some partying? We’ll pick up a couple bottles.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “She’s got everything else. Maybe go to a motel, do it right.”
“Oh, come on,” John complained. “Just let that—”
“Think I’m kidding? Should of seen what she had in her purse. That’s why she was so worried about the cop back there. Junkie bitch.”
John was hit hard by this information. He lacked the spirit to ask Sharon to confirm or deny, but assumed she would have protested had the charge been baseless. He did not even wish to know what sort of drugs were at issue.
“I’m dropping you off in Hillsdale and then going straight home. Since this is the only form of transportation available to me, I’m driving myself home in this car.” He had made the latter statement for Sharon’s benefit, should she herself be (despite her professed fear of Richie) inclined to acquiesce in the proposal, and looked for her in the mirror, but she was presumably lying on the seat and could not be seen.
“Just an idea,” Richie said.
John saw something that brought him back to the moment. A quarter mile ahead, the truck that had tailgated him
was parked on the shoulder, which had widened with the broadening of the highway. Instantly chilled, he would have turned and run if he could, but the road was one-way and at this point on the median the simple grass had given way to bushes, so it was not physically possible to perform an illegal U-turn and head back where they had come from—for such he might well have done, in a sudden and unprecedented access of mortal fear.
In another moment, however, he again was in command of himself. The truckdriver was surely not waiting for
him
but rather immobilized by mechanical trouble. John was in fact instantly ashamed of himself and grateful that he had said or done nothing that could have revealed his fright to Richie, whom he glanced at now.
Richie, too, had already seen the truck. “Hey, look!”
“I guess he’s broken down,” John said hopefully.
Richie eyed him. “Maybe we just ought to stop and ask. Maybe he’s in real trouble.”
John took refuge in a sardonic tone. “I doubt it’s life or death.” They were not far from the truck now, but he had yet to see the driver.
“Pull in,” Richie said abruptly. “You can stay in the car if you want. I’ll see what’s what.”
Insulted by the implied slur on his courage, John accelerated onto the shoulder and then had to brake hard, skidding on the loose dirt and gravel, to stop the car before it collided with the rear of the truck.
He jumped out, in a certain disorder. He disliked hearing the sound his old sneakers, normally quiet, made on the gritty shoulder. Before he reached the truck, the driver’s door was hurled open. A burly figure emerged and did not jump but rather descended to the ground with the deliberation of the overweight.
So that his intentions could not be misinterpreted, John quickly said, “Hi. Anything we can help you out with?”
The driver wore a dirty plaid shirt but was clean-shaven and pinkly scrubbed of skin. He spoke in some kind of hick accent. “You mess around with me, and I’ll make you cry.” He was taller than John and wider, but much of his poundage consisted, visibly, of lard, and he looked to be about forty. He held a metal bar.
John had not been in a fight since childhood, and in fact had not been offered one since then. But now that he was out of the car and actually in this situation, he was not unduly apprehensive. He was a salesman, and knew how to talk to people.
“Hey, I just stopped to see if I could help out.” He smiled. “Really. We thought you just might be in some trouble.”
“I ain’t,” said the truckdriver.”
You
are.” He lowered his heavy head, on which the thick hair looked freshly combed.
“Now take it easy,” John said, suppressing his annoyance. “I mean it. If your radio’s out, I’ll be glad to make a call for you at the next phone. How about it?”
“I could of squashed you like a stinkbug,” the trucker said, “in your little gook automobile.” He tapped the iron bar against the palm of his left hand.
John decided it would be cowardly to disclaim ownership of the car at this point, though he had begun to take the weapon seriously. “I didn’t do anything to you,” he said firmly. “You tailgated me and wouldn’t pass when you had the chance.”
The truckdriver said, “And now I’m going to take you apart, smartmouth.”
John did not give ground. “I’ll say it again: I don’t have anything against you. But if you threaten me with
that
, you’re breaking the law.”
The fat man laughed sourly, showing lots of pink mouth. His stomach hung over the waist of his pants, obscuring most of the oversized belt buckle, but that also could be said of the world’s strongest men, the weightlifters of the superheavyweight class.
“This here’s the law of the road, you skunk.” The trucker continued to slap the bar against his other palm as he advanced. “Should of wrote your will before comin’ out today.”
Hands in the air, John began to backstep. “What have I done to you? Take it easy.” He despised himself for the beseeching note that had entered his voice.
“You just think what I’m going to do to
you
,” the man cried with a rage so venomous that John could not stand against it: he broke and ran to the car.
Richie was at the wheel, and the engine was running. “He’s got a tire iron!”
“Look out,” Richie said, leering ahead. The door handle was torn from John’s grasp as the car shot forward, striking the truckdriver, lifting his heavy body as though it were stuffed with straw. It struck the hood and bounced away.
Richie braked. For an instant John tried to believe it was a mishap of the sort that was common enough, though usually with older drivers: the car is accidentally in gear, the foot by chance comes down on the gas and stays there in momentary panic. But when the vehicle reached him in its reverse travel and he saw Richie’s triumphant face, John recognized that the trucker had been intentionally run down.