Three

Reggie Turner slept through the first twelve hours of the end of the world.

He’d been in Houston, taking it easy after a sixteen hour haul from Tucson, Arizona when the job offer came: deliver a load of industrial chillers to Sacramento within forty hours. It was a thirty-hour run with no trouble and no sleep. He slept for five hours and got to Sacramento in a little over twenty-eight hours, popping Black Mollies all the way.

Reggie didn’t like the way speed made him feel—like a big rodent or a small monkey was trapped behind his ribs and was panicking, trying to tear its way out—but he did what he had to, and he got to Sacramento not long after sundown. This was a good thing, too—he hated walking around in the daylight after a long haul. Too damned bright.

He dumped his load and picked up another for a short run down to Fresno that didn’t need to be there for twenty-four hours. Still flying from the Mollies, he tried to cool his heels in Frank’s, a small, smoky bar and grill not far from the rest stop where he’d get the last good night’s sleep of his life.

Frank, whoever he was, was nowhere to be seen, but the blinds and the smoke made the waitress—her name was Maxine—look at least thirty-five. He smiled and she smiled. He ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and a beer, and he decided he needed to fuck. First things first, though.

Sliding away from the bar and letting his eyes linger over Maxine’s ass (nice for a white woman who’d already given forty a healthy push), he went to the pay phone, which was located between the bathroom doors (the combined smell of piss and urinal cakes and crap lingered here, as it did outside the bathrooms in every truck-stop bar and grill in America). No one looked at him as if he should get his black ass the fuck out the door and on the road. If they felt that way, and he was sure some of them did, then they did a better job of hiding it than the assholes in Houston.

He fed the payphone and dialed home. His mother answered on the third ring. They talked small for a few minutes and then he asked to talk to Nef. Nefertiti’s mother had been on an Africa kick when she’d gotten pregnant and she’d insisted on giving their child a name that evoked the majesty of Ancient Egypt. When he’d asked her why they couldn’t give their kid a normal name that wouldn’t get its ass kicked at school, she’d called him an Uncle Tom and then tried to gouge out his eyes. Her Africa kick came around the same time as her cheap hard liquor kick, and she was a mean ass drunk.

He didn’t miss her.

“Hey, daddy,” Nef said.

“Hey, baby. You have a good birthday?” She’d just turned seven.

“Yeah,” she said, and it was such a short word, he didn’t have time to decide whether he could hear sadness in her voice.

“You coming home soon?”

“Soon, honey.”

“When?”

“I got one more job to do tomorrow, a little one, and then I’m on my way home. How’s day after tomorrow sound?”

“Great!”

They talked and laughed. He asked her how school was, and if she’d gotten the present he’d mailed from Texas, and then she asked him how long he was going to stay home. As long as he could afford to, he told her. They wrapped it up and then he said a few more words to his mother. Yes, she’d picked up the check he’d wired her; yes, Nef was going to bed early and doing her homework and eating good. He said goodnight and when he returned to the bar his food was waiting for him.

He downed the food along with three more beers, eyeing Maxine and talking to her whenever she came by. Both of them knew the game well enough to tell that the other was playing it. He asked her what time she was getting off, and she spun it into a joke.

“I clock out at eight.” It was fifteen after seven. “So I’m thinking maybe twenty minutes after eight?”

“And again at eight thirty.”

She smiled, and they walked out to his truck a few minutes after eight. In the cramped sleeping quarters behind the seats, they undressed separately and got to work. She hadn’t been off in her estimation, nor had he. They went at it with something like tired desperation, and when they were done no one said anything. The smell of cigarette smoke and charred meat clung to her hair; the smell of their bodies filled the small space in which they lay, side by side, like relations.

She sat up to light a cigarette and spied his dog-tags, and he readied himself.

“You were over there?”

“Yes I was.”

“What was it like?”

“Like you heard it is.”

“Something you don’t like to talk about?” She’d never come right out and ask, not without an opening (they never did), but it was pretty damned obvious: she wanted to know if he’d killed anyone, and if so, how many; and what did it look like, smell like, feel like? He saw her eyes crawl over his body, scavenging for overlooked scars. Everyone was a ghoul, eager to wrench the bones from the dirt and see if there was anything wet left to suck out. Everyone wanted to hear about the bad stuff, about the brains popping and the blood flying. This had once surprised and disappointed him.

“No,” he said. “Bad dreams.” This was bullshit, the kind she wanted to hear and enough to make her uncomfortable. He didn’t dream of Vietnam. He never dreamed of Vietnam, not of the good moments, the quiet moments in which it was possible to believe that you were not a second away from eating a bullet or being obliterated by a landmine; nor did he dream of the screams of the dying or of the asshole reckless superior he and a few of his fellows had gotten away with fragging. He hadn’t had nightmares before combat, and he did not have them now. Combat, he believed, did not change a man: it magnified him. He came out a bigger, truer version of himself, for better or worse.

No nightmares, but sometimes the images from 1965 would come to him when he was awake, and with total clarity: the sight of a cluster of VC coming apart in spurts and chunks as his M14 spat fire and tried to shake itself from his grip; the heaps of bodies, the crying children; the old man laughing and telling unintelligible yet obviously raunchy jokes on a Monday and lying waxen and still the following Wednesday, a mangy wild dog lapping clean the hollowed-out ruin of his skull.

Reggie yawned. The Mollies were out of his system, the animal that was his heart had calmed, and the long haul was catching up with him. He sat up.

“You heading out?”

“I’m exhausted,” he said, his eyelids heavy. “I need sleep.”

“You can stay parked right here,” she said. He could see the hope in her eyes, or thought he could. Maybe she wanted more dick; maybe she wanted to press him for more about the war. Maybe she just wanted to be held, but he wanted her out of his truck.

“I know, but I need real sleep, and I bet this parking lot gets noisy.”

“Yeah.” She gazed at his chest, and the look of hope in her eyes had turned to a look of disappointment. “You going to the rest stop?” She nodded in its general direction.

“Yeah. Nice and quiet.”

“Coming through town again?”

“Probably one day.” He shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Okay,” she touched his chest and leaned in for a kiss. They dressed, and it was as awkward as it ever was.

“See you around,” she said as she walked away from his truck and toward her car. A Mac tractor rumbled through the parking lot. Good old boys with too little sense in their heads and too much beer in their bellies leaned against a pick-up truck and hooted at Maxine as she got into her car.

Reggie got behind the wheel of his Kenworth, locked the doors, and fired her up. He drove to the rest stop, left the air running, and crawled into the back. He fell asleep to the sound of the truck’s idling diesel engine.