Furnace. Muriel Gray
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America before.
Men like Josh Spiller didn’t look right poking at dolls and lacy boxes. Six feet and one hundred and sixty-eight pounds of fit, pale body were topped by a head of light brown hair cut so short it was near enough shaved. There was a tiny silver ball of an earring in his right ear and it combined with the hair to make sure he didn’t get stopped in the street often by nuns collecting for orphanages. What little hair that had survived the cut sat above a face with kind blue eyes, a straight, elegant nose and a wide, mischievous mouth. That open face meant that although he was adopting the demeanour of a mean guy, no one was going to mistake Josh for a member of an underground militia group. He looked kind. He couldn’t help it. Nevertheless, the spirit in him that made him look the way he did was not prepared to let him stand at the counter and buy some piece of girlie shit. He shut the atlas and walked towards the restaurant.
‘We got something new over here she might like.’
The woman behind the counter was smiling, her eyes lowered, looking at what she was doing and not at him. Josh cleared his throat.
‘Yeah?’
Her fat fingers counted out shower vouchers in front of her like they were cards in a game.
‘We got these real pretty pins. All sorts. And a machine that does her name on it while you grab a bite. Takes about ten minutes.’ She indicated the contraption behind her with a small movement of her shoulder. ‘You just turn that there dial to the letters you want and it gets right on doin’ it. Seventeen dollars including the name. Plus tax.’
Josh was trapped. He walked slowly over and she looked up.
From behind the glass under the counter she took out a tray of cheap pewter-coloured metal brooches shaped in a bewildering variety of little objects, each with a space beneath the object for the name like the scroll on a tattoo. With his hands in his pockets Josh looked them over, grateful the store was empty.
There were tiny metal bows, a rabbit, some bees round a hive, all in a mock-antique style, and all waiting to have a woman’s name scratched beneath their immobile forms. Despite his discomfort he decided they were cute and when his eyes wandered over to one made from a tiny pair of scissors cutting out a perfect metal heart, Josh knew Elizabeth would like it. The scissors were neatly appropriate.
‘So you do their name on the blank bit with that machine?’
‘Well I ain’t doin’ it. Got enough to do keepin’ you guys from rippin’ me off to sit here and carve your wives’ names on a pin.’
Josh smiled, pointed at the one he wanted and reached for the wallet in his back pocket. ‘Okay. It’s Elizabeth.’ He spelled it for her, watched her write it so she wouldn’t make a mistake, then went to get that coffee.
‘Takes ten minutes,’ she reminded him to his back as she clicked the letters into something that looked like a sewing machine and with her tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth placed the brooch on a tiny vice.
Elizabeth was right. There was no way he could park Jezebel anywhere near the store. In fact, there weren’t many places in downtown Pittsburgh you could take an electric-blue Peterbilt Conventional with a sixty-inch sleeper and forty-eight-foot trailer. Not unless you wanted to end up trapped like a beached whale, snared in some narrow street by four-wheelers who park like the whole world is their front drive.
Instead, Josh drove straight to Jezebel’s parking lot ten miles out of town, did his paperwork, zipped up a week’s worth of stinking laundry and headed home in the pick-up. He figured Elizabeth wouldn’t really want to see him in the store anyhow. Not if she was busy measuring someone up as a giant tomato. Right now, he needed some sleep. He’d be more use to her wide awake, showered and ready for action.
The duplex that Josh and Elizabeth shared was nothing special, but it was on a quiet block with tiny neatly-trimmed gardens tended by peaceful neighbours. Josh owned the whole house but rented the lower half to an elderly Korean bachelor called Sim, a tiny man in his seventies who constantly complained that he was at the rim of death’s abyss, usually while in the yard tending patio pots full of unpleasantly pungent spices and herbs.
Today was no different. Sim was sitting on a canvas stool against the wall of the house in the chill morning sun. A cigarette hung from his tight mouth, and he held The National Enquirer at a distance from his face as though he were a doctor examining an important X-ray.
Sim looked up as Josh’s pick-up pulled into the yard, and by the time Josh had climbed out the old man’s face had changed from a lively interest in his paper to one of silent suffering.
‘How it been this time, Josh?’
Josh knew the routine. He liked Sim.
‘Good. Seven days, four loads. Pays the rent. How you been?’
This was how it always went.
‘Oh I not got long now, you know. I had pains. Real bad. Right here.’ He indicated his chest with the flat of a palm.
‘Maybe you ought to give up those smokes, Sim.’
‘They not problem, Josh. Living the problem. Too hard for me sometimes. Know how that is?’
Josh nodded. ‘Sure do.’
He continued to nod his head gravely as though Sim had pronounced a universal truth, but by the time he was through the door and the old man had returned to reading about the secrets of Hollywood’s bald stars, Josh was grinning. Life didn’t look too hard for Sim. But then life wasn’t too hard for him, either. Josh was thirty-two years old, and for ten of those he’d been hauling everything you could name, and some things you couldn’t, from one corner of his country to another.
Now, in particular, things were pretty good. His wild years had passed when he’d driven team, swallowing anything and everything illegal to keep awake for forty or more straight hours on the road, just like all the other guys who were trying to make a living. Four years ago he’d joined the world of grown-ups, got a bank loan and bought his own rig. Josh was up to his neck in debt, with the bank’s shadow looming over his house and his truck. But running his own tractor unit and trailer, even just having his name painted on the door in curly purple fairground writing, made him feel like a man who had done something useful every time he stepped up into Jezebel. It wasn’t just driving any more. He worked like a dog, he had a business, and it felt okay.
The house reflected that small triumph. The kitchen he walked through from the yard door was Elizabeth’s domain, full of silly calendars and photos stuck to the ice-box, dried flowers in baskets on top of the cupboards and plaid drapes swagged to the side of the windows that would never meet if anyone were bold enough to undo the huge bows that restrained them and try to draw them shut.
But in the spare bedroom that Josh had made his office, his life in the rig came back with him into the house. It was this room he headed for first, ostensibly to check if there were any faxes or messages on the answering machine, and flick through the mail that Elizabeth left in tidy piles on his desk. The truth was that the room was an airlock, a halfway stage to reacclimatize himself into a life that wasn’t really his; that of wandering round shopping malls, going out for dinner, drinking beer with friends in their yard or his, or just watching TV while Elizabeth fixed their meals.
All the ordinary stuff that most people did and thought nothing of, Josh had to relearn every time he pulled on the brakes and came home. At least in this room, with its giant map of the states pinned unevenly to a cork wall, piles of correspondence, trade magazines and bits of scrap paper that related only to his driving life, he could come down gently, ease into Elizabeth’s normality and try to make it his own. For a few days at a time, at least.
The fax stared back at him, insolently exposing the emptiness of its horizontal slot, and the mail was equally unrewarding. Just bills and a few late cheques from companies that paid slowly. He flicked