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The Truck Driver
The trucker who lives next door is seldom home.
He’s a long-haul trucker, he’s over-the-road. He earns good money and does not spend. There’s something ascetic about him. He’s forty-five. His hair is long. He wears jeans and combat boots. Sallow and haggard, his face is handsome nevertheless. His willowy wife does not ride with him but stays at home. They have no children. The wife is solitary, long-legged and tan. She has a ponytail of sandy-brown. She smokes Marlboros. They do not rent but own. The wife spends hours in her garden, or she reads in her backyard. Her eyes are pensive. She waves to us but rarely speaks.
The trucker who lives next door arrives at unexpected hours, on unexpected days. Emerging from his rig, he has the leanness of a desert prophet about him. I imagine him eating very little while he’s out on the road. He transports the goods from north-to-south. He hauls the freight from coast-to-coast. He kisses his wife in the driveway. They hold hands and enter their tidy cottage together. They shut the door behind.
Sometimes, on holidays, his rig will sit for three or four consecutive nights along this residential side street. It sits gleaming in the dark. The trucker loves his rig. It is his home away from home. Once, in the middle of the night, I heard a gentle noise outside and crept up to the window. The trucker who lives next door was polishing his semi in the moonlight. The semi is midnight blue and chrome.
Here on the ragged edge of this desert town where the ancient railroad tracks lie rusting in the grass, the frontiers begin. These are the frontiers the trucker crosses and recrosses year-round. Our town is like many western towns, with its looping river and cauliflower clouds, its one Masonic lodge and the hard clean skies above, and in the distance, fields of clay where woolly mammoth and dinosaur once knelt down in the soft earth to die, and a billion bison bones fossilize in the ground.
Beyond the backyards, the interstate curves off into the intricate horizon, and the distant cars make very little sound.
Published in Literature
Thank you!
Now that’s a compliment I love (but don’t deserve).
Thank you.
Thank you for saying. Truly.
Now hold my feet to the fire, please.
Very handy.
Thank you. Thank you for reading, and thank you for cloggin’ my noggin.
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Americana!
That was wicked fine. Last night, deep time – all marks on the same page. Buried bison bones from long ago and long-shank tanned Peterbilt widows from last Tuesday.
My father still drives; he hauls fuel up to his business’ customers in small towns an hour or so away. The yard bosses always check his paperwork because he’s hauling hazardous material, and he delights in noting their expression if they check his license; they feel sorry for this fellow who has to work at his age. But he reached this age because he does what he loves, and he loves to drive. He’s one of those men who likes the find the right gear. The man is 92.
That’s a bloody beautiful comment.
Watched a documentary a few years ago about Clarence Thomas and he loves trucks. He and his wife used to love traveling the US in their RV and I think they stayed in WalMart parking lots a few times. He said that getting out and meeting Americans was something he enjoyed because there are a lot of good people in the country.
Brother was a trucker, it isn’t a cushy job, that’s for sure. His kids went with him sometimes and those are great memories.
I like this.
Found myself feeling sad there aren’t any kids in their house.
I love the 5th paragraph.
Wow. Thank you for transporting me back to my youth this morning. My father drove a semi sometime between his stint in the roller derby (after serving as a gunner in WWII) and becoming an Art Director for Overdrive ( a magazine for Truckers). I grew up with a beautiful, crimson Peterbilt sitting in my driveway. And, yes…I even had a CB handle, which I stole from an episode of Charlie’s Angels…
The piece has kind of a Willa Cather sound, I’m thinking. Do you like her work, Ray ?
I was introduced by a very wealthy acquaintance to other very wealthy folks as “salt of the earth”on time. Wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not. lol
It is not a cushy job, that is absolutely true.
Undoubtedly a compliment!
I do like her, @ansonia. Thank you.
Death Comes for the Archbishop was once very important to me.
That 5th paragraph owes a lot to James Salter (RIP), who in my opinion is an inconsistent writer, but at his best, he’s stylistically brilliant.
Wow. Thank you for the lovely comment.
Just incidentally, my father was also a World War II vet — he was not quite 60-years-old when I was born — and part of the D-Day invasion. He, too, drove a truck for a while, but he was mostly a miner.
P.S. What was your handle? Sabrina Duncan?
HA HA No, I was never a Sabrina fan. I stole it from Chris Monroe who was “Angel Eyes”, which is odd because I always wanted to be Kelly (Jaclyn Smith)…
I haven’t met many with older fathers! Mine was 48 when I was born. He was 21 years older than my mother. I love the similarities! I’m curious if there might be more.
My dad led a Bofor gun crew onto Omaha Beach on D-Day – hour 9 .
Angle Eyes(!), I’ve only known one person in real life who fathered at an older age than my dad, and that, as it happens, was my dad’s barber: an extraordinarily likable fellow named Jack, who used to cut my hair as well, when I was just a pup.
Yowza! My dad never talked about it. But he had bad dreams about it all his life. (“Now count your men, Sargent!” he once said in his sleep, when they were blasting dynamite outside my hometown.)
This is an actual photo of the old man, and the post itself, though fictionalized, is largely based upon him
I’m so glad you directed us over to that piece. I’d missed it as evidently had many others. It’s fascinating the way you can limn a character with rough, dark edges and yet manage to make them totally sympathetic. Your observational and descriptive skills are incredible. And in this case – very moving.
Dad did talk about his experience in Normandy. We owe so much to these men.