Marisi
Ornstein
Will snakes the International through the Travel Center’s parking lot and backs into a tight slot beside a Freightliner fully chromed with gold flake trim and turquoise under-lights glistening in the falling snow.
He settles the engine, marveling at the colors of the individual cabs, the lights, the personal expression, the bling, the fact that every cab is unique in personality.
The drivers, too, all unique, from all walks of life, all ethnicities and belief systems, all ages and genders, all sexualities, cultures and nationalities, speaking all kinds of languages, traveling alone or with their families and their pets, raising their children on the road.
He bundles up his Five-O-Ones, fresh tee, Veera’s new socks, takes a twenty-two from the compartment, pats the dash and steps out into the storm, feeling refreshed and filling his lungs with ice cold air.
Walking down the line of trucks, he‘s taken by the multi-colored lights glowing through the waves of snow.
A few seasoned drivers passing Will on their way from the diner to the lot nod to him in a recognition he always reacts to by rendering himself invisible and moving on.
He makes his way to a row of brand new electric semis feeding from a row of newly installed unsanctioned chargers.
Finding the sticker on a charger, he scans and registers all the information he can find; the country of origin, manufacturer, date of manufacture, date of installation, contact information, serial numbers, technical specs and emergency contacts, and walks to the diner uploading all the info he’s gathered into a folder in his mind labeled Unsanctioned Chargers.
He’s so involved with the circus of facts dancing through his psyche that he nearly slips on the ice.
A passing Mermaid in a hot pink puffer and purple sequined heels catches Will’s arm, steadies him, and surprises him with a smile that swerves him off balance again, “Careful, sailor.”
Her smile lingers as she disappears into the sea of trucks.
Will walks past a family in a Subaru with the parents fast asleep in their seats, saving money on a motel.
The little girl in the back seat knocks on the window and waves to Will and he waves back, just as her brother slams her in the face with a ragged stuffed bunny.
In the Travel Center’s store, Will takes a ticket for the showers and grabs some inserts for his JK’s, while waiting for his number to be called. He walks to the knife counter, where a clerk is standing at the ready, “Welcome.”
“Hey, Alvin. Let me get a strawberry chew. Check the date, it’s for Scratch.”
He hands Alvin the keys to the International, “Ask Jon to tune her up. She’s exhausted and hungry and Veera drove her through a river.”
“Ouch.”
The loudspeaker cracks, “Shower customer one-forty-four. Your shower is now ready. Please proceed to shower nine. Shower customer one-forty-four.”
Will holds up his ticket, “Hold the chew, I’ll be back.”
“Copy that.”
Will walks towards the showers, passing the movie room where a Kung fu film blares. He grabs a towel, a bar of soap and a small bottle of shampoo and enters his stall where he settles into a wicked hot shower.
Afterwards, he gets into his new Five-O-Ones and white tee, pulls on Veera’s new socks and his JK’s, climbs into his jacket, and is sitting in a window booth and drinking piping hot coffee before his Pompadour dries.
The Mermaid from outside appears at the doorway. Their eyes meet and Will turns his face to the window, but she walks over anyway, dumping her bag and puffer in the booth and sliding in across from Will.
She searches through her massive bag, “Saw you in the lot.”
“Saw you, too.”
She flashes a smile, “Not every day a Mermaid saves your life.”
“True.”
She folds her hands on the table, “My name is Diana and I have an issue.”
“Okay.”
A server appears and Diana orders immediately, “I’d like to thank you in advance. Please. May I have a cup of beef barley soup, meat loaf, mashed with gravy, and a Coke. Coffee and cherry pie to top that off. No à la mode.”
The server takes off.
“À la mode means ‘ice cream’ in French. I’m lactose intolerant, so I always got to say, ‘No à la mode’ when I order pie.”
Will glances out the window.
Diana rummages through her bag, “This bag is a bottomless pit of lost items and it’s ruining my life.”
They sit in silence.
“So.” Diana sits up straight, “Where you headed?”
Will looks around, “How do you know I don’t live here?”
“Nobody lives here anymore. It’s the same where I live.”
“Where’s that?”
“You know Minetta?”
“Sure.”
“My farm is about four hours outside Minetta. Can you get me there tonight?”
“Minetta is three and a half hours from here. You’re talking seven, eight hours.”
She sips her coffee, “Ain’t far.”
“I got no rig.” Will leans in, “I’m a Tap.”
She leans in, “What’s a Tap?”
“I drive for drivers while they sleep.”
“Like Saint Christopher?”
“No. Christopher rides. I drive.”
“You do this for a job?”
“I do it because it helps me to do my job.”
“What’s your job?”
Will ignores this and scans the room for drivers looking tired enough to need a Tap.
Diana’s soup arrives and she offers a spoon, “Want some?”
“Thanks, no.” He spots a giant of a driver nodding out in a booth, “Be right back.”
Will walks to the driver and slides into the booth opposite him, gently knocking on the table with his ring.
The driver stirs awake, “Was I snoring?”
“You bound east?”
“I am.”
“Need a Tap?”
“Fuck off, I don’t use Taps.”
He yawns, “Okay, yeah, sure. I’m wiped. How much?”
“Two hundred.”
“Why so cheap?”
“I’m that good.”
The driver laughs, “You like comedy?”
Will stares, “Yes or no?”
“Sure.”
“We got to make a stop outside Minetta.”
“I can do that.”
“You got room for two?”
“Who’s two?”
Will points to Diana and the Driver’s eyes widen.
Will leans in, “She’s off the job.”
The Driver scratches his chin, “Okay.”
“In the lot in twenty.”
“Twenty.”
Will knocks on the table and returns to the store. He takes the chew from Alvin, “Fresh?”
“Yep.”
Will points to the air fresheners, “Gonna need an air freshener. The strongest scent you got, and I mean powerful.”
Alvin thinks, “Banana. It’s horrible.”
“Perfect.”
He hands Alvin a fifty and heads back to the diner, sliding into the booth where Diana is finishing her meatloaf, “Got us a ride.”
Diana’s pie arrives and she attacks it, “Thank you. It’s very important I get home.”
“Somebody sick back home?”
“Nah, they’re all dead and buried. I’m the last of our line.”
She watches as Will twirls his skull ring, “You’re an outlaw, I can tell.”
He moves the salt shaker to a new location for no reason.
She whispers, “What’s it like being a Tap?”
“In the best of circumstances it’s like not existing at all.”
He glances at her, “What’s it like being a Mermaid?”
“It’s like existing too much.”
She moves the salt shaker back where it was. “It’s cold. Everything is too loud and there’s no rest.”
Diana wraps her puffer around her and searches through her bag.
They sit in silence a while.
Will stands and slips a hundred under a cup, “We gotta go. Driver’s waiting.”
Diana grabs her stuff and they fight their way through the snow and heavy winds towards the driver, who extends his hand, “Name’s Carter.”
Will blows right past him, “Get in. Lady’s cold.”
He opens the door for Diana and helps her into the cab.
Over an hour later, Will is driving through the blizzard whiting out his view less than two feet from the windshield.
He’s grinding slow but making time with a snoring giant in the passenger seat and a Mermaid fast asleep in the bunk, gliding smooth over the black ice below.
Carter wakes up and snaps his fingers, “Being that you love comedy, here’s a classic for you.”
He laughs so hard that he is barely able to tell the joke, “I wrote a girl’s name on my arm and got it tattooed, only to realize later that I wrote her name while I was looking in the mirror.”
He waits for the laugh while Will stares straight ahead.
“Don’t you understand? The inked version was backwards.”
Will stares and drives.
“You don’t think that’s funny?”
Will is silent.
“Fuck.” Carter punches himself in the head, “Name one thing about that story that ain’t funny.”
Will shrugs, “Ink ain’t meant to be funny.”
They ride in silence as Carter pouts.
He snaps out of it and slaps his knee, “I rant while I drive. Rant and rant. I got a few thousand hours of material and it ain’t nothin but pure humor. If folks don’t think it’s funny, it ain’t my problem. I’m a funny motherfucker and I know it.”
Carter grabs a chocolate bar from the console and devours it in three bites, “Get some humor in your life, why don’t you. Bring a little sunshine to the world, why don’t you. Be happy for once in your life, why don’t you, and laugh, you miserable fuck.”
Will turns to him, “You talking to me, man?”
“No. I’m talking to my critics.”
“You got critics?”
“Of course I do.”
“How do you know?”
“Social media.”
He slaps his knee again, “Mean people who don’t think I’m funny. They’re out there. I got sixteen open mics I hit regular on my routes, weather permitting, of course. My critics show up at the venues and try to sabotage me live and in person by saying mean things to me while I’m on stage.”
“Fall asleep, man, let me work.”
“I’m gonna do a podcast.”
Will grips the wheel a bit too hard, “Quiet. Fall asleep.”
Carter sulks for a moment, then violently rolls up the sleeve of his coat to exhibit a crooked and splotched tattoo with a backward ARLENE in three inch high letters, “Comedy’s real, man.”
He roughly rolls his sleeve back down, “Fuck.”
Carter’s face melts into a distant stare. Moments later, he perks up, “How do you like my ride?”
“The Christmas lights are illegal, but it’s a damn nice ride.”
“We can’t enjoy Christmas now?”
Will takes a breath to calm the rising energy in his bloodstream, “You need to fall asleep right now, driver. I got something on my mind that I got to work through.”
Carter laughs, “What can you have on your mind, you’re just a Tap.”
Will turns and meets Carter’s eye, “Sleep. Now.”
Carter closes his eyes and tries to sleep.
A few seconds later, he bursts out, “I lease the cab, but I tricked it out anyhow, made it mine. Ain’t bothering anybody.”
He takes a handful of M&M’s from his coat pocket and chews, “Christmas lights make folks happy. I’m trying to spread a little cheer out here on the road, that’s all.”
“Okay, got it.”
“Now that I ate all that chocolate, I’m liable to be up all night, ranting my lips off. You’re about to get a live show.”
He goes silent and stares out the side window, then speaks in a low voice, “I used to rodeo.”
Will grips the wheel.
“Earned big. Had a collection of prize buckles, trophies. Had to sell them all. I got no home, wife’s gone with the kids, don’t know where. I’m always catching glimpses of her, but it ain’t never her.”
He pulls another bar of chocolate from the console and holds onto it, looking out the side window, his voice rising, “All I wanna do, I wanna go home, but home ain’t home no more, she drove it away.”
Carter shoves the entire chocolate bar into his mouth, “I got nobody to love and nobody to love me.”
He slams himself in the forehead, “All I want is a few minutes in anybody’s home, don’t matter who, as long as it’s a home for somebody.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Diana pokes her head through the bunk curtain, “Will you please shut the fuck up! Please! Shut the fuck up!”
Carter is in shock.
“Silence!” She swipes the curtains closed, “Some people!”
Carter sits terrified in the passenger seat of his own cab looking like a five year old who accidentally knocked over a fish tank onto a stone floor.
He is fighting to stay awake, “How long you been driving?”
“If I were you, Carter, I’d shut the fuck up.”
“How come you driving Tap?”
Will cracks his window, “It’s where I got to be.”
“Must be a good feeling, being where you’re supposed to be.”
He looks to Carter, “You’re safe with me. Sleep.”
Carter finally relaxes. His head lulls back and his eyes close.
Will moves onwards through the high velocity snow and checks to see that Carter is actually asleep. He takes the black haired girl’s photograph from his jacket pocket and finds a place on the dash to mount it.
Just as Will slides into his groove, he’s blasted by super bright headlights shining into his side-view, illuminating the cab with white light.
What is approaching on the left is more like a bullet train than a semi, moving in complete silence at a speed no driver in their right mind would travel in this kind of weather.
Will glimpses the sleek beak of the ferocious electric semi.
As the rig passes, he searches for an emblem on the hood, but there is no branding whatsoever.
He notices men in matching blue polo shirts busily working inside the cab, and a man in Carhartt coveralls in the driver’s seat, but the driver doesn’t have his hands on the wheel. He is feverishly writing into a Composition notebook with what looks like a pencil.
Will sees spinning electronics and blinking sensors all over the rig and realizes it’s a tester, and most likely, loaded with bleeding edge technology.
The electric Dragon of a ghost ship pulls a wind wake like a hurricane, swerving Carter’s rig.
Carter stirs, “What the hell is that?”
“The future.”
Will watches the rig rolling on like a Dragon, “Fall asleep.”
Carter falls asleep.
Will checks his speed at ninety-five to calibrate, and figures the Dragon must be traveling upwards of a hundred and twenty.
He cracks the window and lets his mind go to work, beginning with forcing himself to stop avoiding the fact that it was Leo who installed the unsanctioned charging stations.
Also, Leo most likely already owns a piece of every electric autonomous semi that sets wheel to road for commerce on his roads.
Will grips the wheel so tight it nearly bends with a clear realization that it’s time to finally destroy Leo and take full control of his family business, own it all, beginning with that Dragon of a fuckin tester.
He watches the taillights of the future sail off into the night, leading him further in to or out of the darkness.
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