Dusty

Dusty

1990 Words

(Note from the author - this story is being entered into the brown paper box contest and contains the contest criteria to include a suspicious package wrapped in brown paper)

Listen. It's all you can do while you're here. The keys of my belt, jingle. The darkgreen cornfields crinkle across the only road through Loveland. Because some of us never leave the small towns we were born in, and when our parents die, we inherit the world, and we might wish we never were. Through the sprinklers, szz szz szz, and the footsteps, scrunch srunch ca-runch every katydid screech, every lovesick birdcaw out in the wild fardark breach, we stay up to make sure it'll all still brighten; a Dominos delivery car pulls into the hotel. The wind, just enough, shimmies the moondrunk shrubs and branchy, frazzled trees, and sweeps in sweet sultry smells of summer. And the thought of it all ending any second exhilarates me.

“So, what’d your boss say,” I ask.

He looks up at me, eyebrows big and bushy, face square and neanderthal. He takes a long draw from his cigarette.

“Couple things. He was pissed. Oh, and I get that. I’m pissed right through. He says we should have been notified in the change of height restrictions when crossing borders.”

“What do you mean?”

He looks unconcerned how he is in a poolchair.

“Well, um, I was coming over the Missouri river, from Nebraska, been driving all day. Pulled a 48-er since two nights ago, caught me runnin on no sleep, and so when I was looking up hotels that could accommodate parking for a rig, which I admit, I admit I shouldn’t been doing that while I was driving the wheeler, I—”

“I mean about height restrictions, specifically,” I say, sitting down at a table 25-feet from him.

“Oh, sure. Sorry bout it. I, let’s see. What’s a good way to put it. In Nebraska, you can have a 14.6-footer. And in Iowa, come by I’m finding out, you can only have a 13.6-footer.”

“Uh-huh, so you were pulling an oversized trailer against state regulation and failed to read the clearance posted on our building overhang,” I say.

“Now don’t go writing that, woman. I didn’t say that.”

“I just filled out the preliminary questions of the incident report. You’ll see when you sign. You said you were tired, up all night?”

“Yes m’am. Two nights that is.”

“Is that typical?”

“That’s typical, yes.”

He takes a good squinty puff of smoke.

“Okay,” I say. “It’s really time for you to fill this out, Dusty. I’ve waited long enough, and it’s supposed to be filled out first thing.”

He smiles at the moon like a harmonica player might. The pool cover scraping against the concrete. All the rooms looking in on the courtyard dark but one where a person stands in silhouette against a yellow room.

“Do you mind putting that out?”

“My cigarette?”

“Yes, you’ve been smoking since you . . . crashed.”

“A free country.”

“Yes, it is, but I’d like to be able to breathe while we go through this.”

“Okay, miss, you don’t gotta ask me twice. Yeesh.”

We go through a series of questions together, basics I’ve already filled out including his legal name, Dusty Dale, the location of the incident and time, all things I confirm with him. Other questions I clarify include if police were notified, which they were not, and if he had been under the effects of alcohol, which to my best judgement, he hadn’t. I read him my witness report and he nods.

“That all sounds fairly agreeable,” he says.

“Okay, then if you can write your statement here, you can sign here and we’ll be all through.”

He squints, looking at the words.

“What about damages,” he says.

“What about them?”

“My rigs dented, scraped. Looks like a seal might be busted on the reefer.”

“Reefer?”

“Refrigerator trailer.”

“Well, Mr. Dale. That’s a conversation for the owners of the property involved, that being my company, the hotel, and your company, or the trailers, whomever needs money from whom, to have.”

“CVMC. That’s the trailer. The cargo is a private shipper. Truck’s my own. You ain’t a manager or nothing?”

“Hmm? No.”

“How come you know so much then?”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I nod.

“You’s a married woman?”

“Was. I’m widowed.”

“I’m sorry to hear that m’am. Might I ask how long it’s been?”

“Seven years.”

“Lord, that is terrible.”

“Thank you.”

“Say,” he says, leaning in with interest, sincerity, “how long’s it take a person to go before they become unwidowed, d’ya say?”

“I’d say that’s probably a case-by-case sort of thing, Dusty.”

He peels his trucker hat back, reaches up to scratch his forehead. Fat flakes of dander fall to the table. He burps.

“Will you be needing a room while we figure out the next steps?” I ask.

“You read my mind. Dispatch told me I’m responsible for my load, and being as it’s a reefer, I’m dealing with the possibility of all that product going bad.”

“All our rooms have air conditioner units. I could offer you a corporate rate.”

“Well, an air co-ditioner won’t do much for what I usually haul. I mostly carry carcasses. Beef, pig, that sort of thing. Sometimes I get pharmaceuticals. But we’re talking I’m at risk of losing my job. It’s a huge financial burden on the company if that chiller lorry’s busted. I’ve been stressed to go open her up.”

And when he puts his hat back on his head, I picture what the inside of an Adult Shop might look like, and every rest stop I’ve been to where he’s ever masturbated at, next to a row of trucks full of masturbating men, and every lonely town like Loveland he’s come through and not spoken to so much as the person who’s been there to watch him buy gas, or to sell him cigarettes, or to slide a plate onto a linoleum counter where he might stay for two hours, three, four to drink coffee and eat syrupy, gone-cold eggs, and leave to another town which isn’t but all the same.

“Are you married, Dusty?”

He turns and looks at me.

He laughs. He pulls out a cigarette.

* * *

Listen. He opens the doors to the reefer, carefully. I’m standing beside the scene like a detective, usually with a fire extinguisher or a defibrillator or a condom.

Cold air comes out of the unit, like a scene in the Alien movie.

“Brrr,” I say, involuntarily. “Still seems cold to me.”

“It’s cold, but cold enough, we’ll see. Gotta check the gauge. This was a special order, why I been driving all damn day and night for a week from California to New York. This isn’t just your typical reefer. She’s sealed for subzero.”

“I can see that,” I say, still shivering, cold air coming in blue tendrilling clouds from the open trailer. He hops down, shutting the doors temporarily.

“Hang tight a sec,” he says.

He heads to the front cab. I see him through the giant, rectangular mirrors changing. When he returns, Dusty has undergone a full wardrobe change, and the sci-fi motif has doubled down, as he looks like an astronaut or one of those hazmat guys from ET. He reopens the back hatch and starts waddling, carefully, into the back of the truck, disappearing in the fog, while I nervously stand guard outside as if I could do anything in case the whole roof caved in on us, or worse.

“Huh,” he says.

“What?”

“There’s nothing in here.” His voice is muffled in the suit.

“No?”

“No.”

“Huh.”

I peek my head up a bit, standing on my toes. I can’t even see Dusty anymore from all the freezing fog. I get an ominous feeling. I look back at the hotel, into the lobby, to make sure there’s no one who needs me. Two cars pass each other on the road in front of the hotel.

“Wait a minute. Wait, a, minute!”

“Is there something there?”

“Ha ha. Whoa! Whoa! Ho boy.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, shit. Holy shit! Jesus H. Christ. I can’t. I just, I just can’t. I just. Phew. Ha. I just, just remembered. I have to. I have to call my boss once I’ve checked on the cargo, so I, I. I got it from here! Won’t be needin a room after all! Thanks for all your help, lady. Appreciate it. But you can go on now. Haha! Ho boy. Go on now.”

Curious, I linger a moment. I wonder what has got him so excited, so out of breath. The deskbell sounds from inside the lobby. I can hear it, even through the closed doors. As far back into the truck’s trailer as I can see, there’s nothing. Nothing but fluffy white fog billowing out of the trailer, out along the pavement in icy blue whisps. I walk away, turning my head behind me again and again and again, hoping to see something. I walk through the sliding glass doors back into the lobby.

“Hello?” I say.

There’s no one.

Bland classic rock plays in the lobby. An ice machine gurgles down a hall. I disappear behind the front desk. I’m late setting up breakfast. I start gathering plastic cutlery. The copy machine turns on and scares me. A page prints in loud increments. It’s Jonny faxing over instructions on how to fill out an incident report, with a forward from corporate. I sit down, breathing deep in my chest. I feel panic all at once. I need a moment for myself. It’s started to rain, I can hear it. I can almost smell it it’s been so long. It feels like it’s been exactly seven years, it rained the day after the funeral, the day I realized I left the death certificate at the funeral home and had to go back and there was already another funeral underway. The day I gave up smoking. I can see the rain pass over the security camera’s lenses, I don’t remember ever seeing that. I don’t remember ever seeing that, how peaceful it looks. Then someone standing behind the truck. It’s Dusty holding something. In his spacesuit, holding something in a large, brown paper bag he’s ripping open. Bright, green, unworldly liquid drips out the sides as paper lands in the debris covered entryway. An object wrapped tight in vacuumed plastic, factory sealed, is reveal. A naked woman to be sure. He sets her down with indiscretion, like how you might set down a bag of groceries or a bag of discgolfs, to close the trailer doors and latch them shut. He unhitches the trailer. Then he picks up the bagged lady once more, the subject in the bag that looks like a cat for dissection, the lady in the clear plastic bag dripping green substance, and drapes her over his shoulder like he’s found the girl in every trucker’s mudflaps.

And before I even know what to do with my body, before I even know what to do with my mind, the truck starts up, loud and irreverent, lit up like an airstrip, and I hear the sound of the trailer-hitch screech loose like cicadas in a late June night, and the truck engine grumble for all its 80,000 gross carrying capacity worth, and the building overhang collapse completely. The chandelier on the inside of the porte-cochère flickers. Then the chandelier detaches and breaks and shatters like a thousand glass windchimes, but only just after Dusty drives off in the truck, unscathed, leaving the trailer behind to decimation under falling, crumbling cement and pillars, and just as I come outside to see the rain falling on the aftermath, a response surveyor arrives in his non-emergency vehicle from Dealing with Debris and Damaged Buildings, smoking a cigarette before a bloodorange moon—prolific and ancient, like a coin of forgotten currency, or like a UFO coming directly at the world how you never think one will or might.