As Wind in Dry Grass Read online

  "You can't be in here," he told her. "Got to have a paper saying it's okay."

  She laughed like hell when he said that. He watched her laugh, her eyes crinkled up and her throat warbling like a bird. Her eyes.

  "I don't need no paper," she said. "Come on, I'll show you something."

  He followed her to her tent and she went inside and the flap closed.

  "Are you comin?" she called.

  He parted the nylon and saw her lying on her sleeping bag.

  He thought it would smell bad, but it was nothing special, no worse than the sleeper in his truck. She was smiling at him.

  "Come on in," she said. He crawled into the tiny, two-man tent and sat down opposite her. She was smiling, almost angelic, he thought. He didn't know if she was pretty or beautiful or plain. Her eyes were very light.

  "It's all right," she said.

  Her name was Rosemary and she was a very dark-skinned woman with the strange anomaly of extremely bright, light eyes, green or grey and it made him think she was an alien.

  He sat, looking at her for a full minute. They weren't really in danger of being discovered because it was three o'clock in the morning and she had set up her tent at the farthest corner of the lot, out of the penumbra of the lights and against a fence that separated the store from an empty field. A cop might have come by, but she had been living there for three months and had become an accepted artifact of the neighborhood.

  She opened her blouse and invited him to come closer. He had not been with a black woman before, even down in Mexico where he occasionally took his time off. As he settled close against her, she clasped him tightly.

  He visited her in the Home Depot parking lot for the entire summer. She waited for him now and he brought her various items, including a diamond bracelet he bought from a thief in a truck stop near St. Louis. She tried it on and took it right off and put it in a plastic shopping bag. She refused to take money but she accepted anything else he offered. She told him nothing. He asked her nothing. They didn't always conjugate. Sometimes she sat in his truck and listened to the radio. She liked to listen to the CB chatter among the drivers.

  Then, of course, in a totally predictable manner, she vanished. He arrived to unload and she was gone. And that was that.

  Albert, who had not mourned the death of his father, the estrangement of his mother and sisters, who watched indifferently news programs of famines and earthquakes and who had never sent anyone a card or a letter of any kind, finally discovered loss.

  He asked the depot shipper what happened to the woman in the tent but the shipper had no idea.

  "She just up and left."

  Albert sat in his truck all night watching the space where she used to live, not quite believing that she was gone. He took the cans of fruit and olives she liked and put them on the pavement and then drove into the sun on the I-15 through Utah and then picked up the I-70 to Denver, about a thousand miles without stopping except for fuel. He blew his hours and got shut down for the first time in his career. They made him wait a full thirty four before he was allowed to pick up a Denver consignment headed for the New Jersey docks. He ran the seventeen hundred miles in twenty nine hours with no sleep and no food. When he arrived at the docks a company safety official greeted him, grounded him and told him he was on leave for two weeks.

  He booked into a cheap motel near the company yard and watched television for fourteen days straight. When his sentence was up, he walked back to the yard, retrieved his Classic and picked up a load of pallets for North Carolina, a pogue load he wouldn't normally have pulled, but he knew they were testing him. He dumped the pallets and picked up a van full of ladders for Mississippi and pretty soon he was back in shape.

  He never watched television again.

  Rosemary had changed Albert. She had tweaked something in him that had been asleep for most of his life. He wondered why. Then he quit wondering because it didn't make any difference. He discovered women could cast spells on you and he wanted to be voodooed again.

  But after that it never worked out quite the same.

  Marianne Kolczyki was a runaway when he met her. She was running away from her boyfriend, she said.

  He was parked at the Gateway Truck Stop in East St. Louis, Illinois where months before he had purchased Rosemary's stolen diamond bracelet. The yard was packed and he'd tucked himself into a hole for a twelve-hour shut-down. He bought a couple of cans of beer and secreted them back to the rig under his shirt, carefully keeping them below the windshield as he sipped his way through. Beer in a truck, whether on duty or not meant instant dismissal, no questions asked. It was also a federal offence and DOT goon squads could demand a piss test or a breath analysis at any time of the day or night without any cause whatsoever: Unless you were Mexican or a Raghead, of course. The rules did not apply to them as any driver stuck in a chicken coop while tractors with six Pakistanis inside all eating, sleeping and shitting in a room the size of a refrigerator crate got waved through. One company truck came into the garage and the mechanic nearly croaked when he opened it up. Four Pakis had cut a hole in the floor of the sleeper and used it as a shitter, dropping their curried quanta onto the drive shaft. They didn't want to shit where other people shit, they explained. The company fired them and then lost a discrimination suit in federal court. Ah, diversity.

  So when he heard the scrabbling at his driver door and saw the face looking in at him through the window, he panicked and spilled beer on his pants.

  A woman was standing on the step, holding onto the grip railing and staring at him. He relaxed and dropped the window a few inches, allowing her to get her hands over the top edge so she could hang on.

  "What are you doing?" she said.

  "What are you doing?" he said back to her. He dropped the window all the way down so she could hang on.

  Her right eye was black all around the circumference and her cheekbone was swollen. The bruising washed down her throat and chest to the top of her breasts.

  "I'm just trying to get some money to get out of town," she said.

  He gave her twenty dollars but she hung onto the window and looked around the cab.

  The next day he got her a ride pass and she rolled with him from Illinois down through New Mexico and up to L.A. Then she emptied his wallet of cash and took off while he was taking a shower at a truck stop in Nevada.

  Then there was Jenny, a blonde who was sane, solvent and self-confident. She had very straight, white teeth. She liked his truck. She liked to have relations in small, cramped places. He had never seen a woman of this caliber up close and naked before. After the first few times, she got bored with him and his "vanilla regularity," which made him feel like a puce slurry of ex-lax and Imodium. She went back to Denver to her boyfriend who was in the drywall business and wanted to live in Italy and Albert roamed the country for two more years, stopping occasionally in Mexico or Nevada for an overhaul until he finally quit the truck in Indianapolis on a cold Thursday in November about five in the afternoon. He climbed into his pickup with everything he owned in the back in a duffel bag and about two hundred thousand dollars in cash in a couple of suitcases behind the seat and drove south to the property he had purchased the year before.

  Now here it was, five years later and just in time for Christmas, the world appeared to be coming to an end.

  He closed the generator shed and stood back and watched the plume of smoke climbing from the chimney. It was whipped away almost immediately. A sharp yelp drew his attention and he walked around back through a narrow corridor of bare grape vines gripping tightly to a wire trellis as if hanging on against the wind. Ludwig was standing chest deep in the snow and barking to come inside.

  "Come," Albert said and started walking out to the barn. The dog followed, it's previous anxiety gone now that Albert was back. Ludwig followed him happily, his nose shoveling at the snow occasionally.

  When he opened the barn door the old nanny goat alerted and started to rise but then she recogniz
ed him and lay back down. Bolivia bellowed at him. He was late and her udder was full. She moved eagerly into the stall and he scooped a few pounds of corn into her trough. He tied her tail up with a rope hanging from the ceiling and sat down on the stool. He saw a drop of milk on one of the teats.

  "Sorry," he said. "There's a hell of a storm out there if you haven't noticed." He pressed her fat, full udder and she tried to turn her head.

  "Shhh," he said. "It's alright...shhh." He pulled a couple of sani-cloths from the plastic drum and carefully wiped her udder, drawing down against the teats and up behind her leg. Then he pulled the steel pail under her and gently punched her bag, just as a calf would do, only not nearly as hard. The first few squirts he aimed at Ludwig who snapped them out of the air and grinned at him. Then he settled into milking her, two hands drawing down against the bag, filling the teats, then closing off the avenue with thumb and forefinger, forcing the frothing, heavy, yellowish creamy fluid into the pail in two strong, steady, alternating streams. The sound was soothing to them both and for the next half an hour while he milked her and cleaned her again and listened to the wind safely locked outside and out of reach, the peace and stillness made it seem that there was no other world.

  A tabby barn cat leapt up from some dark corner and landed on the top of a stall. Albert nodded a greeting and the cat stretched out and dug claws into the old wood. The goat watched him intently, chewing, ears straight out like wings. Her jeweled eyes watched him without fear or love; but with curiosity. They seemed to notice the slightest change. He put a heavy rubber mat down on her milking stall last year and she hesitated and wouldn't climb up for five minutes. She looked at the new mat and tasted it and sniffed at it and chewed the edge and stared at it and then finally looked at him and hopped up to be milked.

  He sealed the bucket and stepped out into the storm. The wind carried particles of ice and snow and blasted the surface of his face. Ludwig didn't seem to mind.

  He opened the back door and stepped into the kitchen, the dog following and shaking till he looked like a black bottle brush.

  The milk was still warm. Albert placed it in the unheated mudroom on a concrete block and let it sit.

  He turned a few lights on as he walked through the house and the generator gasped a little with each surge.

  He turned on the radio and found himself once again in the middle of some sort of news conference in Washington.

  "...not to be seen as a full declaration of Martial Law. We are not invoking Martial Law at this time. I really want to stress that, Dan."

  "Mr. Secretary, do you think this has come to an end? Is that it or do we have more to fear?"

  "Well, I don't think fear is helpful. We do not want to appear to be afraid and we do not want to be afraid. Fear is not of much use to us. Now that isn't to say that people shouldn't be cautious. Stay in your homes. Don't go anywhere unless it's an emergency...that sort of thing."

  "Thank you Mister Secretary. We have this report from our correspondent on the scene, Mandy Singh-McCarthy. Mandy, are you there...?"

  "Yes Dan...I hear you. We've just heard from Homeland Security that the number of trucks exploding has risen to sixty three. The almost unbelievable sight of a semi blowing up in traffic has been caught on video by our news crew in Manhattan. We really don't-"

  The radio went dead and the reporter's voice was replaced a few seconds later by the heavy weather warning klaxon.

  "Do not adjust your set. Do not-"

  Then static.

  Albert waited quietly, knowing it would come back on. They were testing their ability to commandeer the public airways. Within seconds, the reporter's voice was back.

  "...and he says there is no way to determine which trucks may have been sabotaged without actually stopping every vehicle..."

  Her voice broke off again and someone else began speaking.

  "As you all know a number of commercial vehicles, semi-trucks have been sabotaged with bombs and have exploded across the eastern states since early this morning and we have been using every means to determine who is behind this. At this point nothing is being ruled out-

  "Has anyone claimed responsibility?"

  "I'll get to that in a minute...if you'll allow me to finish my statement-"

  "How many dead?"

  "Does the bureau think there are more trucks set to explode?"

  "As I said, if I could just finish-"

  "Is it true that the president has been relocated to the underground bunker?"

  Albert sat down and removed his boots and hung his jacket over a chair. Ludwig lay down on the kitchen floor and exhaled loudly.

  Albert poured himself coffee and dialed the radio across the FM band. It was the same on every channel. For the first time in years he thought about having a television. There wouldn't be any advantage in seeing the idiots as they jabbered incoherently in panic but there probably would be footage of the damage. He listened until they began repeating themselves for the third time and then he turned down the volume and busied himself with filtering the milk and pouring it into half gallon jars.

  The telephone rang and he let the answering machine have it. The android voice that came with the device went through the usual routine and then the machine beeped. He had never wanted a telephone but the only Internet service he could get was through a local land line distributor and the two came as a package. He was planning to get rid of them both.

  "Pick it up, Albert. I know you're there. I saw you jump the sidewalk this morning. Come on, man-"

  "Hi," Albert said, punching the speaker phone. He continued to pour the cool milk through a series of filters while Harlan chattered like a squirrel.

  "You want to watch this, man...you really do. It's just like we always said."

  Albert looked at the telephone for a moment as if Harlan was in the room with him.

  "They started going off in California about fifteen minutes ago. It's now over a hundred trucks. They're blowing up in loading docks, on highways. Man you should see this. Guys are just parking their rigs wherever, you know and walking away. Are you listening to me?"

  Albert continued to pour milk through a cheese cloth filter.

  "Arabs?" Albert asked.

  "Nobody knows...at least ain't nobody sayin. Man, they got a shot of a gasoline tanker going off while it was filling a station in L.A. Jesus Christ, man, you got to see this."

  Harlan was a former truck driver as well, a younger man than Albert who had given it up a few years before Albert to keep his marriage together. Now she was long gone of course and he hauled gravel locally for McGuire's quarry.

  Harlan and Albert shared a fondness for whisky and an appreciation of baseball. Sometimes he would go to Harlan's trailer and watch a game and they would eat venison that one or the other had shot.

  "I'm not going anywhere in this shit," Albert said, as he placed the last jug in the fridge.

  The telephone went dead and Albert suspected the fierce winds coming down the valley had ripped into some cabling. Though it was only just after nine thirty, the day was almost dark from the cloud cover and the blowing snow. He knew Harlan had a small generator and could probably keep his furnace going and a few lights for a while, but if the situation lasted more than a day or two, he'd run out of fuel.

  "You think we should go get him?" Albert asked Ludwig.

  The dog never moved, but turned its eyes on him from its prone position. Albert was constantly reminded of Ludwig's intelligence but it never failed to surprise him. The damn dog was telepathic. In the summer he would follow Albert around all day and simply lie in the grass and watch intently as he hammered away on some project.

  Then Albert remembered he couldn't go anywhere until he had cleaned out the fuel tanks of the truck and replaced all the fluid in the lines with regular diesel. Harlan would have to wait.

  He picked up the telephone and the line was working fine for the moment. He dialed a number and waited while it rang, not expecting to get through. He
was surprised when Animal's voice came on the line.

  "What happened? You make a mistake dialing you motherfucker?"

  Albert allowed a short laugh. He could hear Animal sucking on a cigarette.

  "What's going on?"

  "What the fuck d'ya think? Just like we always said. Motherfuckers have sabotaged the trucks and nobody's movin."

  "What about you?"

  "I'm alright. I take my rig home every night, remember? Shit man, you wouldn't believe what's happening. I mean I was on the five going into L.A. and this fucking cattle truck just fucking blew all to hell right in front of me. Fuckin pieces of meat hitting my windshield. I just got around the shit, you know, or I'd still be there. Fuckin driver was burned alive in his fuckin cab. Man I hope they get these fuckers. I don't fuckin know, man. I don't know. I just beat it the hell back to the Arizona border and I'm sitting here in a fuckin traffic jam going on for fifty fuckin miles...I can't get ahold of nobody. Course Vivian's probl'y too fuckin drunk to even know what the fuck is happnin...Ain't nobody getting in or out of L.A. Fuckin reefers are exploding in the loading docks...Shit, I'm not going to get killed for no forty cents a mile, I'll tell ya that..."

  He stopped speaking and Albert could hear screaming in the background.

  "D'you hear that? I got the window down. You hear that?"

  Animal must have stuck the phone out the window because Albert could hear people screaming, horns blasting, the thuddering of a helicopter overhead...then sirens, but they were far away.

  "Jesus!" Animal shouted and the telephone went dead.

  Albert tried dialing back but the signal told him there was some kind of trouble on the line. Then the recording came on, telling him to try again later.

  He replaced the receiver and looked into his empty coffee cup as if the grounds might reveal something. Animal got his nick name at a food buffet when he loaded two plates at a time and stuck a drumstick in his mouth before heading back to the table. He stood over six foot three in stocking feet and weighed about three hundred pounds. Yet, in spite of his intimidating appearance, he was incapable of violence, even self defense.