Lullaby road, p.1
Lullaby Road, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by James Anderson
Excerpt from The Never-Open Desert Diner copyright © 2015 by James Anderson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Gary Miranda for permission to reprint an excerpt of “First Elegy” from Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Gary Miranda and published by Tavern Books in Portland, Oregon. Translation copyright © 1981, 1996, 2013 by Gary Miranda.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN 9781101906545
Ebook ISBN 9781101906569
Cover design by Michael Morris
Cover images: (snow) Christy Chaloux/Aurora/Getty Images; (road) RJW/Stone/Getty Images
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Excerpt from The Never-Open Desert Diner
Dedicated to my enduring role models, warriors and heroines all: Louisa Michaela Cabezut, grandmother; Helen Zuur, mother; Eileen Bernard, aunt; Louise Anderson, sister; Cheryl Zuur, cousin
In my life there are many silences.
—JUAN RULFO
What angel, if I called out, would hear me?
And even if one of them impulsively embraced me,
I’d be crushed by its strength. For beauty
Is just the beginning of a terror we can barely stand:
We admire it because it calmly refuses to crush us.
Every angel terrifies. And so I control myself,
Choking back the dark impulse to cry.
—Duino Elegies, RAINER MARIA RILKE, TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY GARY MIRANDA
1
A momentary silence was all that marked the passing of summer into winter. After living most of my almost forty years in the high desert of Utah, twenty driving a truck, I had come to the conclusion there were really only two seasons: hot and windy and cold and windy. Everything else was just a variation on those two.
Late in the evening I lay half-awake in my single bed and knew the silence meant the season had changed. I like to think maybe I know a thing or two about silence. Real silence is more than the absence of sound: it is something you feel. A few heartbeats earlier a steady wind scattered the leftover sounds from evening—a car passing, neighbors talking from behind closed doors, somewhere a dog barking—all the usual muffled racket of nearby lives. Then there was nothing, nothing at all, as if the desert and everyone in it had vanished and left nothing behind but an indifferent starless light.
By four a.m., when I begin my workday, winter was on its hind legs and waiting. It took longer than usual to get to the transfer station and load my truck. The time was well after five o’clock when I finally got under way, driving cautiously through the light snow and ice in the predawn darkness. My heater was blowing full blast and the bitter, dry cold hijacked the warmth from my body and cracked my skin into something akin to a hardpan lakebed. My last routine stop was to take on diesel. I had missed the morning fueling rush, if there had been one, by being either a few minutes early or a few minutes late. All of the pump islands were empty.
Cecil Boone was the manager of the Stop ‘n’ Gone Truck Stop on US 191 just outside of Price, Utah. The Stop ‘n’ Gone was a cheapo independent, stuck out alone in a patch of sand and broken rock, with the rundown look of a place that must have low prices because it didn’t have much of anything else. Cecil was a stubby, sour man in his fifties. We were inside the small convenience store and Cecil was behind the register. In the eight or so years I had been buying my diesel there, nearly every weekday, I had never seen the man smile before that snowy October morning.
There are probably lots of reasons to smile. Most folks do it every day. In my line of work I don’t see many smiles and I probably don’t give many, not even to myself. That was the way it should be. No one wants to glance up and see a truck driver grinning. My sense is that such a sight is bound to have an unsettling effect on the ordinary driver. I was quickly sorting through the reasons people smile—humor, warmth, trivial annoyance—and coming up short. It was just Cecil and me—and Cecil’s smile.
I paid for my diesel.
“Someone left something for you on Island 8,” he said.
I asked him what.
“None of my business. Just make sure you take it with you when you leave.”
Cecil walked back toward the door of his cluttered office. “Eight,” he said over his shoulder. I thought I heard a small laugh before he closed the door. It might have been gas.
My tractor-trailer rig was parked at Island 2. Eight was on the far west side of the truck stop. I stood for a minute and looked out the window at the blowing snow. Not much accumulation. Ice beneath a thin dusting of white. The fine flakes eddied around the high arc lights of the truck stop like a scene from a low-rent snow globe. Outside I paused and glanced in the direction of Island 8. Nothing I could see.
The inside of my cab was warming up. I was in favor of getting on the road and starting my day. Who would leave something for me at a truck stop? It couldn’t be that important or valuable or it wouldn’t have been left outside. Maybe this was a joke. I could take a joke. Anytime. Later. Cecil’s smile floated in and out of the restless snow beyond my windshield. That smile, if that’s what you wanted to call it, seemed to dare me to swing by Island 8 and take a peek. No matter what Cecil said, I felt no obligation to take it with me.
I jockeyed my twenty-eight-foot tractor-trailer rig in a wide turn and slowly approached Island 8. What looked like a short pile of clothes was stacked against a battered trash can—nothing that couldn’t wait, or be ignored entirely. I began to pull through the cluster of canopied fuel pumps and kept an eye on my side mirror to be sure I cleared the concrete stanchions that protected the pumps from idiots in motorhomes and U-Hauls and once, years ago, when I was hungover, me. The clothes stirred and launched a small wisp of snow into the wind.
I set the brakes and jogged back toward the island, slipping on the ice a couple times and barely managing to stay upright. A large white dog was tightly curled into itself and raised its long nose up an inch or two as I approached. Its pink eyes followed me and then settled intently between my shoulders and head—my neck. No growl or bared teeth. This was a dog that meant business—and it knew its business well. I stopped several feet away and the two of us discussed the situation in silence.
Our conversation ended when the dog uncurled and stood, stretched, and shook the powdery snow off its fur. Its thick coat was still white. Not just white, an impossible luminous white that made the animal almost a blurred white shadow floating inside the blowing snow. The dog was also larger than I first thought, an indeterminate mix of husky and German shepherd, with maybe a little timber wolf thrown in for good measure.
A pair of black, almond-shaped eyes rose like timid fish to the surface of the furry white lake. They stared at me from behind the dog’s back. A small child.
I fell twice in my hurried march back to the building. The soles of my old Ariat roper boots were as thin as paper and just as smooth. Leaving a little kid out in a snowstorm was just the sort of thing that would draw a smile from Cecil. This was his idea of a joke. A five-car pile-up on the interstate or a grisly hit-and-run might give him laughing fits. I was limping badly when I reached the door. It was locked.
A hastily written sign was taped at eye-level, my eye-level, about six foot four in boots. BACK IN TEN MINUTES. Somehow I doubted Cecil would be back until I was well down the road. I had a schedule to keep. He knew I wouldn
After pounding on the door and yelling Cecil’s name, I kicked at the bottom of the heavy glass. My reward was another fall. If Cecil was inside he was determined not to show himself. I walked carefully back to Island 8. The dog hadn’t moved; the kid still huddled behind it. The dog moved aside and fully revealed the child, a young boy. This was permission to move closer.
I guessed the boy’s age at five or six, brown complexion and straight, black hair cut in the shape of a bowl. He was dressed only in jeans and a short-sleeved white collared shirt. His tennis shoes looked new, the kind with blinking red lights in the heels. A piece of paper was pinned to his shirt.
I took a step closer without taking my eyes off either the dog or the boy. Neither seemed afraid, though they keenly gauged my progress. The boy never took his dark eyes from mine, not even when I reached down and gently unpinned what I assumed was a note.
PLEASE, BEN. BAD TROUBLE. MY SON. TAKE HIM TODAY. HIS NAME IS JUAN. TRUST YOU ONLY. TELL NO ONE. PEDRO
The note was printed in block letters with a black marker that had bled through the flimsy paper. It was a cash register receipt. There was no mention of the dog, without which the boy might well have frozen to death. I read through it several times.
Pedro was the tire man at the truck stop. The tire shop was in an old metal building hunched behind the truck stop where the crumbling concrete turned to gravel. We were friendly in the way strangers who infrequently came in contact with each other were friendly: I knew his name and he knew mine. Not much else.
The month before I had bought new tires. They gave me a hell of a deal on brand-name rubber. Pedro and I engaged in the usual bullshit banter. He had never mentioned he had a son. I hadn’t felt shortchanged by not knowing much about him. Why he would turn to me when he was in trouble, any kind of trouble, especially entrusting me with his son, didn’t make any sense. I did not feel particularly honored by his trust.
My options were limited. Call the local cops or take him with me. If I called the police I’d have to wait for them to arrive. When they arrived there would be questions, most of which I wouldn’t be able to answer and Cecil wouldn’t be much help, if he showed up at all. When you tell cops “I don’t know,” all they ever hear is “I won’t tell you,” which in my experience always made for long and frustrating conversations.
Leaving the boy with Cecil was not an option. My guess was that Pedro had left him inside and Cecil, the sick asshole, put the kid and his dog outside in a snowstorm just for giggles. The second option had only a single downside, and it was a big one—I just didn’t want to babysit a damned little kid in my truck all day—or his dog, which I wasn’t going to take under any circumstances.
I jerked a long-handled squeegee out of its canister and flung it through the snow in the general direction of the office. It was a pathetic gesture. The squeegee fell way short of hitting the side of the building. The icy apron of Island 6 took it without a sound.
I cautiously picked up the boy and carried him to my cab and opened the door. The dog scampered past me and quickly made itself comfortable on the warm floorboard. I sat the boy on my passenger seat and grabbed two big handfuls of white fur and readied myself to yank the animal out of my cab. I would have done just that if not for those pink eyes. Those eyes asked me one simple question: How badly do you want to keep your hands? I answered by letting loose of the fur and slamming the door.
2
It took some fiddling to get Juan’s tiny frame secured in a seat belt made for adults. He stared ahead and made no effort to resist or speak. At his age I suspected I was the same way—a half-breed orphan always being shuttled from one place to another. There were always different faces, different rooms, and different vehicles. You learned to go with life and always keep yourself inside, protected—untouchable. Juan’s steady, unemotional attitude toward me—toward the ice and snow and wind—made me wonder about his brief life, and about a father who would leave his child alone at a truck stop.
The dog’s ears perked. He lifted his big head.
A few seconds later Ginny’s old Nissan skidded to a stop in front of my truck. She and her three-month-old infant, Belle, occupied the other side of my shabby duplex. Just barely eighteen, unmarried and alone, Ginny worked two jobs and took business classes part-time at the local community college, and still found time to help me with my bookkeeping. A few months earlier she had saved my tiny trucking company, and me. As usual, she was on a mission, always late and moving fast.
She hopped out of her car while I wondered what in the hell could be so important she would race across town to intercept me. Her spiked red-and-purple hair was even more spiked than usual. I rolled down my window and asked her what was up. She ignored me and pulled the infant seat out of the passenger side. I’m rarely the smartest guy in the room unless I’m alone, which fortunately for me was usually the case. No one needed to draw a diagram for me to guess what her intentions were.
I flung my door open. “No!”
Ginny ignored me. She approached with the infant carrier dangling from one hand and a large pink bag in the other. She was still dressed in her black flannel pajamas decorated with Day-Glo white skulls. Under the lights of the truck stop the skulls danced on her arms and legs. Random flashes glinted off the silver rings in her nose, lower lip, and eyebrow.
I climbed down from the cab and put my arms up to wave her away. “I can’t.”
Ginny made quick use of my arms. She hung the pink baby bag on my left arm and threaded the handle of the infant seat over my right.
“You have to,” she said.
For the first time in our friendship I swore at her. “Goddammit, Ginny. I can’t take a baby out on 117! I won’t. Not in this weather.” I nodded toward the open door of the cab.
I started to object again and thought better of it, at least for the moment, as every man does or should before arguing with a woman, especially someone as important to him as Ginny was to me. We were friends, and only friends, and that meant something special to me, as perhaps it does to any orphan. But friends didn’t begin to cover it.
In a few short months Ginny had become my family, though there were always dirty little minds that worked overtime suggesting a different kind of relationship. When I heard such talk, usually punctuated with a sly wink or worse, my fuse got lit, though more for her than for me.
In her own way, Ginny was an orphan herself. You had to know her mother, Nadine, to know why. I’d dated Nadine for a brief time maybe ten years earlier. Ginny was only a little girl then. My time with Nadine was not brief enough and I was half-relieved early one morning to catch her and a UPS driver in the cab of my truck. Considering the cramped quarters, what they were managing to do belonged in a pornographic circus or Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
Then, by accident, my path crossed with Ginny’s in the dead of night where she was working the nightshift at the twenty-four-hour Walmart in Price. That had been May. She was seventeen, seven months pregnant, and living in her car. She asked me to help her find a second job so she could have a place to live when the baby came. She’d been abandoned by her mother and kicked out of high school and had promptly gotten her GED and was already taking a class at the University of Utah extension.
I’d never met anyone with Ginny’s kind of sand. In the middle of all that she put herself and her body piercing and unborn child in harm’s way for me. If that wasn’t family, I didn’t know what was. I was more than grateful. I admired her and in my own way I was protective, though neither one of us was comfortable thinking about just what we meant to each other, or what we felt.
