Furnace

This was why. The golden, glimmering, shining reason for it all. The dollars, the deutschmarks, the pounds, yen and lire, all flickering before her, lighting her face up with their green glow.

More. The knowledge and power.

But no. She closed her eyes and clenched a fist against it. That thought was forbidden. Vanity was destruction. The power was in the humble and respectful use of the knowledge. And that was why tomorrow was no more and no less than the necessary function that it had always been. The others depended on it. Their world turned on it, because God made it possible. She moved the mouse and closed the file with one diagonal sweep and click, as the sound of soft spring rain tapping at the window won the battle for her attention over the buzzing computer.

And she smiled as she looked up, imagining it soaking new buds on the blanket of trees that separated her from the dull uncomprehending mass of humanity.

It had taken the surly teenagers in the loading bay over an hour to load his trailer. And that was after a two-and-a-half-hour wait in the damp Victorian warehouse. Josh had sat in the drivers’ waiting area, cradling a styrofoam cup of stewed coffee, watching the three bozos wandering around his truck like pimps on a Bronx street. One drove the fork-lift into Josh’s trailer and the others hung around the doors making flipping gestures with their hands and adjusting their baseball caps as they laughed about something secret.

Normally, Josh would have gone out and kicked their butts, but this time he sat immobile behind the glass partition, watching them waste his time. It was a shitty load, some metal packing cases for an industrial ceramics manufacturer in Alabama. No weight in them, so not much pay. But it was all he could get, and Josh would have delivered the Klan’s laundry to South Central LA if he’d been asked. He would have taken anything at all just to turn off and buy his ticket away from home.

There had been two other drivers in the warehouse and, hold the front page, they had been bitching:

‘So I grabs this little jerk by the collar and I says okay man, you want me to load it myself then you gonna have to tell your boss why his lifting gear got all bust up, ’cos I ain’t never used it afore. ’Course I have, but he don’t know that.’

The guy who’d been telling the story was about as big as his truck and the other driver listened without much interest, waiting for his chance to tell a similar triumphant story of how he showed them, and showed them good.

‘Well he calls me everythin’ but a white boy and then I just grabs hold of the controls and lets the whole bunch drop twenty feet onto the deck. Hee hee, did that boy load up like his dick depended on it.’

Josh had let the stream of familiar bullshit wash over him. He was numb. So numb, he’d uncharacte‌ristically ignored both men, walked to the trailer when a nod from one of the rubber-boned kids indicated it was done, barely checked the load or how it was stacked, taken the paperwork and driven off. And now he was sitting upright, staring out of the darkened cab of Jezebel, whose bulk was untidily taking up most of the space in a southbound tourist parking lot on this Virginian interstate. He’d driven for only a couple of hours, but a lapse of concentration that nearly let him trash a guy on a Harley Davidson had made him catch his heart in his mouth and pull over.

It was two a.m. and he could hardly account for the last eight hours since Elizabeth had driven away with her, and his, precious cargo on board. He stared ahead into the dark, sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands resting in his lap like a trauma patient waiting to be seen in an emergency room. Josh wasn’t thinking about what to do. He wasn’t even thinking about Elizabeth and where she might be right now. All that was running through his mind were the words, repeating themselves like a looped tape, ‘How do I feel?’

Soft spring rain started to fall, gradually muting the intermittent roar of the traffic on the adjacent highway. He wound down his window and breathed in a mixture of mown grass, diesel fumes, and the dust raised by the rain from the parking lot’s asphalt. As he tried to take a deeper breath he felt a vice tighten around his chest, a crippling tension which prevented that satisfying lungful of oxygen. The pain came not from the emptiness that was left by that brief and grotesque argument, but from the dual seed of joy and dread that was still germinating in his heart.

Wednesday the seventh of May, three o’clock.

What was it? A boy or a girl? He hadn’t even asked Elizabeth how many weeks old her secret was. A bizarre omission, but more confusing was why he wanted this child so badly. Some of the things Elizabeth had said were true, he knew that. Their life wasn’t exactly an episode of The Waltons, but until last night he’d thought it was safe and stable. It was an adult life, where two self-contained people did what they pleased and came together when they wanted. He’d never even considered how or why that might change. Never considered a third person entering the frame.

The fresh air stirred him from his miserable torpor and Josh got up, absently pulling the drapes around the inside of the windshield. He climbed back into the sleeper and lay down on the mattress with his hands behind his head.

As he lay there, staring up at the quilted velour ceiling, he allowed himself to think of her, of Elizabeth; that funny, sometimes brittle person who even in her hardest moments could be melted like butter over a stove with a kind word or gentle touch.

It was like her to carry the burden of her news silently, but it was unlike her to taunt him by telling him it was over before it began. Perhaps he didn’t know Elizabeth at all. Who was that terrible mixture of defiant accusation and self-pitying grief? And who had he been, to call her what he did and withdraw the support he’d always given unthinkingly and unconditionally?

Josh screwed his eyes tight, trying fruitlessly to squeeze the scene into oblivion with the puny muscles of his eyelids.

Which coupling had done it, he wondered? Last week? The week before?

When?

Outside, a car pulled up in the lot and Josh opened his eyes to listen to the familiar human noises of a man and a woman as they left their vehicle to go and use the rest-rooms.

They chatted in low voices, in that comfortable intimate way that meant they were saying nothing in particular to each other, but were enjoying saying it. An occasional short laugh broke the flow of their small talk as they slammed their car door shut and their footsteps receded towards the rest-rooms. Josh realized he was listening to this most mundane collection of sounds with his teeth clenched and his eyes narrowed, the invisible couple’s easy happiness an unbearable affront.

He lay there for a very long time, and as time ticked away, bringing neither sleep nor solution, he was aware of its swift relentless passing for probably the first time in his life.

Dawn on the first of May was less beautiful than the one Josh had tried to savour yesterday. Low clouds masked the sun’s coming and a thin grey light was all that announced the day. He had lain sleeplessly in the same position all night, eyes staring up into the dark as he alternated between thinking and hurting, and now he wanted to move. The load was already late. The paperwork promised the packing cases would be in Alabama sometime tonight, but they wouldn’t be.

Josh crawled from his bunk into the cab, opened the door on the new day and went to wet the wheels. As he stood, legs apart, urinating on his truck in some unconsciously atavistic ritual, he reconfirmed with himself that the best cure for any form of unhappiness was perpetual motion. Driving let him escape. It allowed him time completely on his own and freedom from responsibility. It had certainly saved his sanity when his mother died, that hellish two weeks after her funeral, when Josh knew he would never again have the chance to say the things to her he’d rehearsed so many times alone in his cab. He’d left his morose brother Dean at their empty home to go through their mother’s pathetically few things, accepted a load to Seattle, and pushed the thought of his loss out with the opening of his log book.

He recalled seeing his brother’s grief-torn face accusing him through the dirty upstairs window as he drove off, and it had chipped at something hard inside that Josh thought had been impermeable. Five hours later he’d put the whole thing out of his mind. Dean had never really forgiven him for that act of abandonment. But he didn’t understand. No one but another trucker would.

Josh finished his task, did up his pants, then leaned forward to rest his forehead against the side of his trailer and punch its aluminium flank with the side of a fist.

‘Fuck ’em all, Jez. Fuck every last one.’

5

The cloud had lifted as she stood rigid and still on the grass. That was good. She watched the thin sunlight play amongst the bare branches of the ancient tree that stood solemnly in the wide street, and as her gaze moved down to the base of its massive bole, she frowned with irritation. There were suckered branches starting to form in clumps at the base. That meant only one thing. The tree was dying.

It must have been the men laying the cables last year. They had been told to make sure the trench came nowhere near the roots, to cut a path for the thick mass of plastic tubing and wire in between those delicate arteries of soft wood rather than through them. But they were like all workmen. Lazy. And this was the result.

She ground her teeth and concentrated on fighting the irritation.

Absence of malice, absence of compassion, absence of all petty human emotion. It was essential.

In a few hours she would let her thoughts return to the vandalized tree, but not now. The workmen would never be employed by her again. And that, she decided, would be the least of their worries.

But not now. Push the thought away and leave nothing. Nothing at all.

Quarter of an hour down the highway, Josh saw a five-mile service sign and realized he was hungry. More importantly, he was approaching his thirty-sixth hour without sleep and unless he grabbed a coffee soon, bad things were going to start happening. In fact, they already had. A dull grey slowness had settled on him, making his peripheral vision busy with the hazy shifting shapes that severe fatigue specialized in manufacturing, and his limbs were beginning to feel twice their weight. But hungry as he was, he still hadn’t forgotten the affront of yesterday’s dawn. McDonald’s might have sold ten billion, but he wasn’t going to make it ten billion and one.

He thumbed the radio.

‘Any you northbounds know a good place to eat off the interstate?’

The voice first to respond just laughed. ‘Surely, driver. There’s a little Italian place right up ahead. Violins playin’ and candles on every table.’

Josh smiled.

Another driver butted in. ‘No shit? Where’s that at again?’

‘I’m kiddin’, dipshit. Burgers ain’t good enough for you?’

Josh pressed his radio again, then thought better of it. What did these guys know? Channel 19 would be busy now for the next hour with bored truckers arguing about the merits of the great American burger. He was sorry he had started it.

There was an exit coming up on the right, and although the sign declared this was the exit for a bunch of ridiculously named nowhere towns, he braked and changed down. It was twenty before seven and if he didn’t get that coffee soon he’d have to pull over.

The reefer tailing him came on the radio.

‘Hey, Jezebel. See you signalling for exit 23.’

Josh responded. ‘Ten-four, driver. That a problem?’

‘Got a mighty long trailer there to get up and down them mountain roads. They’re tight as a schoolmarm’s ass cheeks.’

‘Copy, driver. Not plannin’ on goin’ far. Just grab a bite and get myself back on the interstate.’

Josh was already in the exit lane as he spoke the last words, the reefer peeling away from him up the highway.

‘Okay, buddy. Just hope you can turn that thing on a dollar.’

‘Ten-four to that.’

‘How comes she got the handle Jezebel?’

Josh grinned as he slowed down to around twenty-five, on what was indeed, and quite alarmingly so, a very narrow road. When he felt the load was secure behind him, he took his hand off the wheel to reply.

‘Aw this is my second rig, and I figure she tempted me but she’ll probably turn out to be no good like the last one.’

He swallowed at that, hoping the ugly thought that it had stirred back into life would go away. The other driver saved him.

‘Yeah? What you drive before?’

Irritatingly, the signal was already starting to break up. Strange, since the guy was probably only two miles away, with Josh now heading south-east on this garden path of a road.

‘Freightliner Conventional. Everything could go wrong did go wrong. Might be mean naming this baby like that. Hasn’t let me down yet. But she’s pretty, huh?’

The radio crackled in response, but Josh didn’t pick up the driver’s comment. It was the least of his worries. He saw what the guy meant. The road was almost a single track. If he met another truck on this route they’d both have to get out, scratch their heads and talk about how they were going to pass. Josh slowed the truck down to twenty and rolled along, squinting straight into the low morning sun that had only now emerged from the dissipating grey clouds, to look for one of the towns the sign had promised.

The interstate was well out of sight, and he was starting to regret the impulsive and irrational decision to boycott the convenience of a burger and coffee. The road was climbing now, and since the exit he hadn’t seen one farm gate or cabin driveway where he could turn the Peterbilt.

He pressed on the radio again.

‘Hey, any locals out there? When do you hit the first town after exit 23?’

He waited, the handset in his hand. There was silence. It was a profound silence that rarely occurred on CB. There was always something going on. Morons yelling, or guys bitching. Drivers telling other drivers the exact whereabouts on the highway of luckless females. There was debate, there was comedy, there were confidences shared and tales told. All twenty-four hours a day. Anything you wanted to hear and anything you wanted to say, was all there waiting at the press of a button.

But here, there was nothing. Josh looked up at the long spine of the hills and reckoned they must have something to do with the sudden stillness of the radio. It unnerved him. The cab of a truck was never quiet. Usually Josh had three things going at once: the CB, the local radio station, and a tape. Elizabeth had ridden with him a few times and could barely believe how through the nightmarish cacophony he not only noted the local traffic report, but also hummed along to a favourite song, heard everything that was said on the CB, and was able to make a pretty good guess at which truck was saying it.

‘How in hell do you do that?’ she’d breathed admiringly after he’d jumped in with the sequel to some old joke someone was telling, only seconds after he’d been shouting abuse at a talk radio host who’d used the word ‘negro’.

‘What’d you say, honey?’ he’d replied innocently, not understanding the irony when she laughed at him. She said after that, if she had anything important to tell him, she’d do it over a badly tuned radio with a heavy metal band thrashing in the background.

Except she hadn’t. Had she?

It had been important, and she’d told it to him straight, her words surrounded by a proscenium arch of silence. Josh flicked his eyes to the fabric above the windshield where Elizabeth’s cheap brooch was pinned. He’d stabbed it in there as a reminder that it had been bought with love but used as a spiteful missile, hoping it would harden him to the thought of her every time the pain of their argument germinated again. But it wasn’t working. It just made him think of her long brown fingers fingering it with delight. Josh wished the trivial memory of her riding with him hadn’t occurred to him, hadn’t made him feel like his heart needed a sling to support its weight.

He leaned forward and retuned the CB as though the action could relegate his dark thoughts to another channel.

Still nothing.

Josh sat back and resigned himself to the blind drive. The next town could be two or twenty miles away, and he was just going to have to live with that. It could be worse. The road was still climbing, but at least it was a pretty ride.

Dogwood bloomed on both sides of the road and on the east verge the rising sun back-lit the impossibly large and delicate white flowers, shining through the thin petals as though the dark branches were the wires of divine lamps. Ahead, a huge billboard cut rudely into the elegance of the small trees. The sign was old and worn, with the silvery grey of weathered wood starting to show through what had once been bright green paint.

‘See the world-famous sulphur caves at Carris Arm. Only 16 miles. Restaurant and tours.’

In the absence of anyone to talk to on the CB, Josh spoke to himself.

‘World-famous. Yeah, sure. The Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon and the fuckin’ sulphur caves at Carris Arm.’

As if he needed it, the sign confirmed that Josh Spiller was driving around in the ass-end of nowhere, and he was far from happy. If that was the next town, then sixteen miles was way too far. He started to weigh his options. Surely there would soon be a farm gate or a clearing he could turn in. But as the truck climbed it seemed less and less likely. The mountains were a serpentine dark wall, clothed here in undisturbed forest only just starting to leaf, and neither farmland nor building broke the trees’ unchallenged hold on the land. Josh had already driven at least four or five miles from the interstate and the thought of another sixteen was making him consider the possibility of backing up and turning on a soft verge, when without any warning or apparent reason, the road started to widen.

A house, set back in the trees, neat and spacious with the stars and stripes flapping listlessly on a flagpole by the porch, appeared on his right, followed by another three in a row almost identical a few hundred yards further on. No backwoods cabin these, but substantial suburban houses with trimmed gardens and decent wheels parked out front. Josh raised an eyebrow. This was what truckers called car-farmer country. The backwoods of the Appalachians were home to a thousand run-down trailers and cabins, sporting a statutory dozen cars and pick-ups half buried in their field, like the hicks who’d left them there to rot were hoping their ’69 Buick would sprout seeds and grow a new one.

Even on the main routes, Josh had been glared at by enough one-eyed crazy lab-specimens lounging on porches to know that this wasn’t exactly stockbroker belt. The kind of tidy affluence quietly stated by these houses was a surprise. But it was a welcome surprise to a man who needed his breakfast and wouldn’t have to buy it from a drooling Jed Clampit with a shotgun raised at his chest.

So half a mile and a dozen or more smart houses later, it was with relief that Josh hit the limits of the town to which these uncharacteristic middle-class dwellings were satellites. He drove past the brief and concise metal sign with a smile.

Furnace.

The wide street was now lined on either side by houses only slightly smaller than those on the edge of town. Standard roses bobbed in the breeze and hardy azaleas and forsythia were beginning to form islands of colour in a sea of smooth lawns.

It was five before seven and although it was early, people were about and Josh was heartened by the town’s potential for hot food to go. A kid rode past on a BMX, a sack of papers on his shoulder; two guys sweeping the road stood jawing against a tree, brushes in hand; a woman walking a dachshund on a ludicrously long leash stopped and waved to someone out picking up their paper from the front step. It was cosy, affluent, peaceful and ordinary. But it certainly was not what he had expected high up in this backwater of Virginia. Here, Jezebel felt ridiculously out of place, rumbling self-consciously through the street at little more than running pace, as though lack of speed could hide the bulk and noise of the Leviathan. The quiet street waking to its new day was like any other, but the affluence and suburban smugness was starting to jog a memory in Josh he didn’t like.

The Tanner ice cream sign.

A dumb, irrelevant memory, and one he tried to sideswipe. But it was there.

That ice cream sign.

For Josh as a child it stood at the corner of Hove and Carnegie like a religious icon; a circular piece of tin with the advertisement painted on it, supported at two points by a bigger circle of wire on a stand that let it spin in the wind. Judging by the arthritic squeaking of its rotations, it had stood at the end of his street like that for years, that dismal street his mother had brought them up on, a strange juxtaposition of the classes that Pittsburgh boasted, where the unwashed poor lived only a block away from their bosses, separated by no more than just a strip of trees or a row of stores.

Or an ice cream sign.

The Tanner girl and boy had big rosy cheeks and were licking the same cone of ice cream, vanilla topped with chocolate sauce. But when the wind blew the sign would spin and the picture, identical on both surfaces except for the children’s mouths which were closed on one side and open on the other, would animate into a frenzy of darting, licking tongues. Dean thought the sign was kind of spooky, especially when the wind was strong and the tongues went crazy. But Josh liked it. He liked it because it marked the beginning of Carnegie Lane, and more importantly, the end of Hove Avenue, an end to the crowded street that contained their tattered house. In Carnegie the houses were elegant and tall, keeping watch over their own spacious gardens with the demeanour of large wealthy women sitting on rugs at a race meeting. And unlike the regiment of dreary wooden houses that included the Spillers’, every one was different. Some were brick with wide white columned porches tangled with wisteria and honeysuckle. Others had stone facades and glass conservatories, or European affectations of mock battlements and balustrades. And in addition to the neat front lawns that were uniformly green all the way to the sidewalk, each, Josh knew for sure, had generous and private back yards.

School, the stores and everything that Josh needed to service his uneventful life was at the eastern end of Hove. In other words there was no call to go west into Carnegie at all. It merely led to wealthier parts of town, parts that were decidedly not for the Spillers. But he’d lost count of the times he’d found himself strolling past the squeaking Tanner ice cream sign, stepping into Carnegie with a roll to his pre-pubescent gait that tried to say he lived there.

At least he had until one searingly hot August. Josh was eleven and the day had been long and empty. His mother’s return from her job at a drug factory, moving piles of little blue and white capsules along a conveyor belt all day with a gloved hand, had been a cranky and irritable one. Particularly since she discovered that neither Dean nor Josh had made any attempt to prepare supper, but had instead been throwing stones up at the remains of an old weathervane that clung to a neighbour’s roof, in a contest to free it finally from its rusting bracket.

Joyce Spiller had sat down heavily on the three car tyres piled by the back door they used as a seat, and glared at the boys, but particularly Josh, with tired, rheumy eyes. Her voice was full of sarcastic venom.

‘Sure do appreciate you workin’ all day long, Mom. So to thank you for that act of kindness, please accept this cool glass of lemonade and a big juicy sandwich that me an’ my shit-for-manners brother have had all friggin’ day to prepare.’