Furnace. Muriel Gray
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scrubwood, still expertly hidden from anyone who wasn’t looking for it. Josh’s smile couldn’t get much wider, but he tried.
The timing was close to perfect. The Honda swerved a little as two fat white buttocks poked out of the Freightliner’s window, a finger sticking grotesquely into its own rectum, precisely as the three vehicles glided past the parked patrol vehicle. To the two cops sitting glumly in their car, wishing that dawn would break and bring the end of their shift closer, it looked like a circus act that had taken a lifetime to perfect. They exchanged no more than a brief and weary glance before snapping on the siren and pulling out.
Now it was Josh’s turn to slap the wheel in glee as the Freightliner edged back and pulled over, falling prey to the police car like an antelope brought down by hyenas. Josh was alone with his good Christian lady again, and part of him wished she had CB so he could share the joke, and more important so that she could thank him for his betrayal of colleagues in the name of chivalry. But the exit ahead seemed to be the one she wanted, maybe from choice, or maybe just to get off the highway and away from her persecutors. She started to brake and signal. Josh braked in response and was surprised when she slowed to a crawl. There was nothing for it but to pass, so he swung the rig out and changed down accordingly. As the bulk of the Peterbilt moved past the woman’s tiny car, now peeling away at a snail’s pace towards the exit ramp, Josh Spiller threw a look across at her.
From her open window an elegant arm emerged in farewell, and on the end of that arm, stabbing the air repeatedly like it was trying to puncture an invisible skin, was a deeply un-Christian middle finger.
He’d fumbled in the plastic ledge above the dash for a good thirty seconds, initially finding only an evil knot of Jelly Bellies that had fused together in the heat of the cab, before his fingers closed on the cassette he wanted. The sun was almost visible now, and Josh urgently wanted to get his chosen track lined up before it was too late.
He flipped the tape out of the plastic junk-filled canyon and slotted it quickly into the stereo. It came on halfway through some terrible and elderly Doors number. Wrong. So wrong he wished he’d never included the track on this jumbled and hastily assembled compilation. He pressed fast forward, waited and then let it play again.
Aerosmith. He cursed silently. That meant that it was rewinding, not going forward.
The sky to his right was now growing light so fast that a ridiculous mixture of anxiety and frustration tightened his chest. He took out the tape and reinserted it. The machine didn’t like the way he did it and slid it back out at him again. The sky had now gone way past pink, turning into the luminous aquamarine that heralds the first glorious golden shards of sunlight, as he slammed the troublesome cassette back in and pressed fast forward again. Two pauses and he was there.
Josh couldn’t say why he fancied this track most to greet the dawn, but he did. It was old but it was tranquil. A song off some weird album by a British band called The Blue Nile that Elizabeth’s kid brother had loaned him.
It started with a slow drum then this really sad guy came on and sang like he would break your heart. You had to be in the mood or you couldn’t take it. Josh was in exactly the right mood. It was just what he wanted for the big event, the arrival of the sun after this nine-hour non-stop homeward haul from Tennessee. And it was going to work this time. It was going to be a peach. The track was lined up, the sun was maybe only seconds from view, and he was northbound in the right lane with nothing obstructing his view across the dew-soaked fields to the dark rolling back of the Appalachians.
That was important to the full enjoyment of the moment, the absence of anything man-made in between him and the sunrise. No buildings. No human junk. Nothing that would spoil his view with another reminder, particularly after his disappointment in the reluctant maiden he’d rescued, that sometimes people didn’t deserve another day graced by anything as beautiful and indiscriminately benevolent as the sun. He waited, his hand ready to press play, glancing every three or four seconds out of the passenger window to catch the first sight.
Up ahead, the highway stretched empty before him, an artery of stone that fed America its life-blood. Or was it a vein that circulated the disease of man and his junk around the once untouched and healthy body of this delicate continent?
Josh gazed out front, contemplating it for a second, knowing that whatever the answer, he was a part of it. The rare sight of clear road made him suddenly feel exposed, an alien object moving without permission upon an ancient and secretive landscape.
And in those few moments of inattention as Josh dreamily regarded the road ahead, the sun betrayed him and sneaked up over the rim of the hills. He whipped his head to the east as the first orange beam hit the side of his face, shifted in his seat and stabbed the play button on the stereo.
The tape hissed and then the song began.
How could he have known? Even with the benefit of the height that he enjoyed from the truck Josh couldn’t see the entire landscape ahead, couldn’t see the mark of man that was waiting for him, nestling smugly between mountains and highway. So at that religious and significant moment when the sun rose, it rose not over unsullied meadows and hills, but from behind a forest of four tall masts, one tipped by golden horns, another by the Cracker Barrel sign, the other two proclaiming Taco Bell and Burger King.
Josh blinked for a second, his mouth slightly open until an excited voice on the CB crackled over the gentle song playing on the tape and brought him back.
‘Man, oh man! Any of you northbounds see that?’
Josh glanced across at the source of the enthusiastic message; a lone R-Model Mack pulling a covered wagon on the southbound highway.
Gratefully, Josh picked up the handset. ‘Sure as hell did, big truck. Glad there’s someone else out there with a soul.’ He flicked off the tape, ready to receive the reply, and it came right back at him with its enthusiasm intact.
‘Yeah? Man, I can’t believe they’s only askin’ two dollars ninety for a chargrill, family bucket of fries, soup and a free soda. That’s a whole dollar less than the joint at exit 19. Sure gonna work for me!’
Josh Spiller stared ahead for a second or two, then gently replaced the handset, let out the remains of his breath and started to chuckle. He shook his head and carried on laughing until a tiny rogue tear rolled down one cheek and he wiped it away with the back of a greasy hand.
‘Shit. Know what, America? You are one fucked-up country.’
She’d been awake for at least two hours. Now that the dawn was bleeding through the drapes, she shifted under the covers and ran a hand over her warm belly. She had to get up. No choice. But here, in the dark that was gradually being corrupted by light, it was safe and warm to think, and everything outside that cocoon seemed impossibly cold.
Josh’s face. She closed her eyes and thought about it. Sometimes, if it had been a long time, she had trouble remembering the exact contours. But even if it was difficult to visualize she could always recall how it felt beneath her lips. She held on to that now, breathed in through her nose as she thought about the smooth soft skin over his cheekbones, the thick curl of eyelashes and the rough texture of bristle around mouth and chin.
With her eyes still shut, she swung her legs out of the bed and sat up.
The bedroom mirror greeted her with her own reflection when she raised her head and looked towards it. Despite her hunched posture, even she would admit that her breasts looked enticing. They were fuller and firmer than she’d realized, and her hands came up in an unconscious gesture to cup them gently.
Elizabeth Murray let her hands move up to her face and then spoke in a whisper to the mirror, the delicate planes of her cheeks and forehead sculpted by the grey dawn light.
‘What now?’
Josh waited impatienly outside the phone booth. There were only three private booths at this Flying J truck stop, all occupied