Trucking with the Sky Thing

Thirty-one years I been driving freight. Started when I was twenty, in a rig older than I was, hauling produce up and down the coast. Now I'm fifty-one and I train the new hires for Renner Hauling, which mostly means I sit in the passenger seat, drink bad coffee, and say "you're gonna want to downshift there" about forty times a day.

I like it. Don't tell anybody.

* * *

Jasper Fox was the quietest trainee I ever had. And I've trained guys who didn't talk for the first two hundred miles and guys who didn't shut up for a second, so I know the range.

He didn't talk at all, really. Twenty-nine years old, maybe, per his file, though something about his face made me want to double-check the math. He was skinny, pale, dark hair he kept pushed back. Handsome in a way that made you look twice, like a photo of somebody you almost knew.

Here's what bugged me. We left Salt Lake City at six in the morning. By noon I'd had two coffees, a breakfast burrito, and a bag of gas station almonds. He never ate. Not in the whole trip, and believe me, I watched, because I'm nosy and I own that.

"You not hungry?" I asked him outside of Elko, somewhere in the middle of Nevada where there's nothing but sagebrush and roadkill.

"I ate before we left," he said.

Nobody ate before we left. I was in the parking lot. I saw him walk to the truck with nothing.

I let it go. Not my first weird trainee. One guy in 2019 carried a machete everywhere and cried at country music. Jasper at least kept his weirdness tidy.

He was good, though. That was the other thing. He didn't need the GPS. Didn't need the atlas. He'd look out the windshield and just know where the next weigh station was, where the construction was, where the trooper sat under the overpass outside Fernley. I checked his guesses against the map three times before I stopped checking.

"Where'd you drive before this?" I asked him once.

"Places without interstates," he said, and that was the complete answer, and he looked out at the desert like it had personally insulted him.

* * *

The plan was to stop at the truck stop outside Battle Mountain for dinner. Twenty-four hour diner, decent chicken fried steak, coffee that tasted like it had been filtered through a sock but was hot. I was starving.

"I'll stay with the truck," Jasper said. We were pulling in, and he was already gathering his jacket as a man planning an escape.

"You gotta eat something, kid."

"I'm fine, Marianne."

"Marianne now, is it? It's been 'ma'am' since Salt Lake."

He almost smiled. Almost. "Marianne."

Fine. I went in alone, ate my steak, read the paper, listened to two old boys argue about DEF fluid for forty minutes. Classic night out for a woman my age. I even had pie.

When I came back out, the lot lights were on and the cab was dark and I stopped dead in the parking lot for a second, because something felt off about the truck and it took me a beat to figure out what.

The window.

Jasper was sitting in the driver's seat, waiting, plain as anything. But the window was dark glass, and in dark glass you expect a reflection. Mine was there, floating over the asphalt, holding a to-go box. His wasn't. Just the seat. Just the headrest. Like the window had decided he wasn't there and was being real polite about it.

I blinked. He moved his hand and the reflection did nothing.

Old eyes, Marianne. That's what I told myself. Fifty-one years old, tired, pie for dinner, seeing things. I climbed in and didn't say a word, because what's the word? "Hey Jasper, you got no reflection, also you never eat, also you know where every cop in Nevada lives, what gives?"

Instead I said, "There's pie in the box if you want it."

"Thank you," he said, and didn't touch it.

* * *

Two hours later, outside Lovelock, the truck started running hot.

I felt it before the gauge showed it. That little shudder in the wheel, the engine note going up a hair. I pulled us off onto a gravel pullout and killed the lights.

"Coolant," I said, grabbing the flashlight. "Probably a hose. Happens."

"Can I help?"

"Sure. Hold the flashlight."

I popped the hood and the heat rolled out at me like a slap. I found the problem fast enough. A hose clamp had let go and coolant was weeping down the block in a thin shiny line, dripping onto the gravel. Not fatal. Not fun at eleven at night in the middle of nowhere.

"Hand me that rag out of the cab," I said, and leaned in to look closer, and that's when I saw it.

Jasper's arm was inside the engine bay. He'd reached past me to reseat the loose hose, and his sleeve had ridden up, and his forearm was open.

I don't mean cut. I mean split. Like a seam that had always been there, running neat along the inside of his wrist up past where I could see. And inside wasn't blood and meat. Inside was light. Soft, blue-white, steady light, and under it a structure like cut crystal, faceted, turning slowly, the way a prism turns when you're not touching it. Segments. Rows of them, clicking into place as he worked, small precise sounds like a watch being assembled.

I did not scream. I want credit for that. I'm fifty-one years old and I've changed a tire on the shoulder of I-80 at two in the morning with a bull snake crawling over my boot, and I did not scream.

I backed up one step. The flashlight shook in my hand, so the beam jumped all over the engine. Jasper finished what he was doing first, which I will always think was the strangest part. He pressed the hose back onto the nipple, seated the clamp, and then, and only then, he turned and looked at me.

His forearm slid closed. Quiet as a zipper. The light went out. Skin, smooth, no seam, like it had never been anything else.

"Marianne," he said.

"That's," I said.

"Yes."

"That's not an arm."

"No."

We stood there. The engine ticked as it cooled. Somewhere off in the dark a coyote yipped twice and gave up.

"Okay," I said, because what else was there. "Okay. You wanna tell me what's going on? And don't tell me a defect at birth, because I saw what's under the birth."

He looked at the truck, then at the road, then at me. Long enough that I counted my own heartbeats. Twelve of them.

"If I tell you," he said slowly, "you can't un-know it. And I've got one more leg of this run, and one delivery, and then I'm done. I need everything quiet until then."

"Quiet about what? Jasper. There is a light where your arm goes."

"There's a crate in the trailer," he said.

"I know there's a crate. It's a sealed crate, it's the whole reason Renner wanted a bonded run, I signed paperwork for it."

"It's mine," he said. "Sort of. I'm delivering it for someone else. And it has to get to Sacramento by Thursday, and I can't do that if you're standing there with a flashlight and a face full of questions."

I set the flashlight down on the bumper. Crossed my arms. Here's the deal I cut in my head, fast, the way you cut deals at two in the morning: I'd spent a whole day feeding a man who didn't eat, riding with a man who didn't reflect, and I was not getting back in that cab with a mystery the size of a mattress between us. Curiosity is my worst trait. My sister Jan would back me up on that, and she's been backing me up on it since 1983.

"Here's my offer," I said. "You tell me what you are. What you actually are. And what's in that crate. And I keep my mouth shut till Sacramento."

"You'd help me?"

"I'd keep driving, is what I'd do. Same as I was gonna do anyway. But I'm not doing it blind."

He rubbed his thumb along his knuckle, on the arm that wasn't an arm an hour ago. "You won't believe me."

"Kid. I watched your arm turn into a lamp. My bar for belief is real low right now."

That got the almost-smile again, the real one this time, and it changed his whole face, and I thought, well, there you go, that's why you don't trust the file photo.

He looked at the sky. Not up at the stars the way a person does. At the sky itself, like you'd look at a wall of a room you were standing in.

"Get back in the truck," he said. "It's cold, and this takes a minute."

I got in the truck.

He didn't start right away. He sat with his hands on his knees, looking at the windshield like the answer was written on the glass somewhere past the dark.

"I'm air," he said finally. "Not a man who controls air. Not a spirit that lives in it. Air. A piece of it. A fragment of something that used to be a lot bigger."

"A piece of air."

"An elemental. That's the word your books would use. I've been... distributed, I guess, is the honest word. Most of me is scattered. What's sitting in this seat is what's left that can hold a shape."

I looked at his hands. Regular hands. Knuckles, fingernails, a little scar on the left thumb I'd noticed that morning and never asked about.

"And the scar?"

"Details I keep because I've worn this shape a long time. The body remembers itself."

"Okay." I rubbed my face. "Why are you delivering a crate for Renner Hauling? You could be, I don't know. Blowing around the sky."

"Because of a debt." He said it flat, no drama. "When I was young, in your terms, I made an agreement with a man. Aldous Renner's grandfather, as it happens. He held a piece of me. Not a piece of my power. A piece of me. He kept it safe when I couldn't, and I owed him for that, and the debt passed down the family like furniture. The current contract is this: one delivery, cross-country, crate sealed, handed over in Sacramento by Thursday. Then I'm free."

"Free to do what?"

"To go back to being weather." He almost laughed. "I don't know. I've never been free. I've been working this job