The Hollow Man at the Booth

Shanice Bryant was fifty-four years old and she had been driving long haul since she was twenty-one, which meant the cab of her Peterbilt felt more like home than any apartment she had ever paid rent on. Thirty years of routes through the Midwest. Thirty years of truck stop coffee and bad sleep and the kind of quiet that settles into a person after a few hundred miles of nothing.

She was three months out of a relationship. Her partner had sat her down one Sunday and said the word she'd been bracing for. Never around. She hadn't argued, because it was true, and there was nothing to say to a true thing like that except drive.

So she drove. And at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday in October, she pulled into the gravel lot of The Rusty Nail, a neighborhood bar off a state highway in rural Nebraska that she hit every run to Omaha. Cracked vinyl booths. A jukebox that quit playing anything recorded after the nineties. Regulars who nodded at her and left her alone. It was the last good stop on a lonely road and she had been coming here so long the bartender knew to start her usual the second her boots hit the door.

She walked in still wearing her trucker cap, hair pulled through the back of it, jacket smelling faintly of diesel. The place was mostly empty. A couple of old boys at the bar arguing about cattle prices. The jukebox humming through some Garth Brooks song like it had done a thousand times before.

Then she saw him, and she stopped just inside the door with one hand still on her cap.

Milo Freemont was sitting in the back booth. The corner one, the one nobody sat in, the one the regulars avoided after midnight for reasons nobody ever explained to her in thirty years of Tuesdays. He was just sitting there in the dark like he'd grown there.

Milo Freemont, who she hadn't laid eyes on in thirty-two years. Not since she was twenty-two and he was twenty-four and they'd spent one whole summer working the same truck stop, her pumping fuel, him turning wrenches in the garage, and every night they could steal they spent behind the building in the dark with the moths beating against the sodium light.

She didn't sit down right away. She just stood there and looked at him and thought, well, either I'm more tired than I know or that's really him.

It was really him. Older, of course, they both would be, but something else was off about his face that she couldn't name yet. He was thinner than she remembered. Much thinner. His skin had a gray undertone to it, as if he worked nights and never saw the sun, but Milo had always been a daylight person. He used to complain that garage fluorescents gave him headaches.

He looked up and saw her, and something moved across his face that she could only describe as relief. Not surprise. Relief, like he'd been waiting a long time and had started to believe the waiting was for nothing.

"Shanice," he said. Just her name, the way he used to say it, two syllables and a little lift at the end. "Lord. You look exactly the same."

"You look like hell," she said, because it was true and because she didn't know what else to say to a man who'd been gone from her life for three decades and was now sitting in the booth nobody sits in.

He laughed, and the laugh was familiar even if everything else wasn't. "Fair enough. Sit down. Please."

She sat. She told herself it was because her feet hurt from eleven hours of driving, and that was even mostly true.

Before her jacket was off, he raised two fingers toward the bartender, and the bartender, a heavy woman named Dot who had been behind that bar longer than Shanice had been driving, brought over two whiskeys without a word. He'd ordered before Shanice even sat down. Two of them. Like he knew.

"Neat," she said, looking at her glass. "You remembered."

"You drank it neat then too. You used to say anything else was just diluting the point." He pushed her glass across the table toward her, and she saw his hand tremble on it. Not a little tremble either. A real shake, the kind she'd seen in men coming off benders, except Milo didn't look drunk. He looked hollow.

She took the glass and drank and let the burn do its work. "Okay," she said. "Start talking. Because the last I heard, and that's going back years, you were married with a house in Grand Island and a kid in college."

"Divorced a long time back. Kid's grown. I'm not in Grand Island anymore." He turned his own glass a slow half circle on the table but didn't drink. "I've been coming here. Every couple of weeks. For months now."

"Coming here. To the Nail. Why in the world would you drive out here?"

He was quiet a second. "Hoping you'd show."

She felt that land somewhere under her ribs. She took another drink to cover it.

"That's a dumb reason to drive four hours," she said.

"It's the only reason I've got left." He said it plain, no drama in it, which somehow made it worse.

The jukebox wound down and nobody fed it. The cattle argument had moved on to feed prices. It was that deep quiet a country bar gets after eleven, when the day people are home and the night people haven't arrived yet.

"You remember that summer?" Milo asked. He was looking at the table, not at her. "Behind the truck stop. We'd sit on the tailgate after close and you'd tell me about all the places your routes went and I'd pretend I wasn't jealous."

"I remember you smelled like grease and cigarettes," she said. "Every night. You'd come out of that garage and I could smell you from the fence line. Diesel and grease and cigarettes. I can smell it now, thinking about it."

"You never complained."

"I never complained." She smiled a little, and it surprised her that smiling felt easy. "You wanted a house and a porch and a dog and I wanted the road. The fight was nothing more than that, really. Thirty years ago and it wasn't even a big fight. It was just two people wanting different shapes of life."

"I know. I always knew it wasn't anybody's fault." He finally drank, a small sip, like his stomach had to be talked into it. "Doesn't stop a man from wondering, though. What if I'd asked different. What if I'd said come with me instead of stay with me."

"You did say come with me. I said no."

"You did. You did say no." He almost smiled. "Best no I ever got, if that makes any sense."

"It doesn't."

"Give it time."

She studied him then, really studied, because something had been itching at her since she walked in and it finally surfaced. His hands. He'd set both of them flat on the table when he finished talking, palms down, like someone steadying himself, and when he lifted them there were smudges left behind on the tabletop. Dark ones. Faint, like the shadow of a print rather than a print.

Not dirt. She knew dirt. She'd cleaned grease off tables with her sleeve a hundred times in a hundred diners. Grease smears brown and shiny. This was black, flat, no shine to it at all, and it sat on the wood like a stain rather than resting on it.

He saw her looking. He pulled his hands into his lap fast, too fast, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.

"Milo," she said slowly. "What is on your hands?"

"Nothing. It's nothing."

"It's not nothing. You leave marks like that and your skin is gray and you're sitting in the one booth in this state that grown men won't sit in after midnight. I've been coming here longer than you've been alive, practically, and I know that booth." She leaned forward. "So I'm gonna ask you one more time, plain, and I'd take it kindly if you answered plain. What is happening to you?"

He looked up at her then, and his eyes in the low light had a wet shine to them, and behind the shine there was something else, something tired and old and frightened that did not belong on the face of the man who'd once carried her over a puddle laughing the whole way.

"You're not gonna believe me," he said.

"Try me. I drive at night for a living. I've seen things on these roads you wouldn't put in a story."

"Shanice." He swallowed. "I made a deal. A long time back. And the thing I made it with is collecting."

The jukebox picked that moment to act up. It had been sitting quiet since the last record wound down, and then, without anybody touching it, it clicked on. A song Shanice half knew from the eighties came on, and then it skipped. Stuttered. The same half second of music looping over and over, the needle jumping in its groove like a heart skipping beats.

Milo's eyes went to it. And then they went somewhere past it. Past the wall, past the parking lot, somewhere Shanice couldn't follow, and his face went slack in a way that scared her more than the black smudges had. He wasn't seeing the jukebox. He was seeing whatever had made the deal with him.

"Milo." She said it twice before it landed. The song stuttered again, then cut off dead, mid note, the way a radio dies when somebody pulls the plug.

"Sorry," he said, coming back into himself. "It does that. It knows when I talk about it. Or I think it does. Hard to tell what a thing like that knows."

"Talk about what. Plain, Milo. I asked you plain."

He turned his glass another half circle. The smudge his palm left on the wood was wider now than it had been an hour ago, or maybe she was just seeing it better in the dark. "You know how it is out here. Long stretches of nothing. You break down at two in the morning forty miles from anywhere, and there's a light on the horizon that shouldn't be there. A station, a diner, a house with a porch light. Something."

Shanice knew exactly what he meant. She'd stopped at a diner outside Goodland once that wasn't on any map and wasn't there the