Whiskey in the Rig

The cargo terminal at the regional airport was the kind of place nobody built on purpose, a big steel barn with a loading dock on one end and a counter nobody manned after eleven, and at two in the morning it smelled like jet fuel and cardboard and the cold coffee Tracy had spilled in her cab three weeks ago and never fully wiped up. She was twenty-three years old, she'd been driving long-haul for two years now, and she had thought she'd seen every way a night could go sideways, but the girl behind the freight desk (well, woman, she'd guess mid-thirties, in a fleece vest with the airline logo half peeled off) had just told her the cargo flight out was cancelled and the next one wasn't until tomorrow night, maybe.

"Maybe," Tracy said. "What does maybe mean, in your book."

"It means the weather's coming in from the west and the scheduler hasn't called back," the woman said, and she had the tired, apologetic tone of somebody who'd said the same sentence eleven times tonight and would say it eleven more. "You can leave the load in bonded storage and pick it up tomorrow, or you can take it wherever you want, it's your manifest."

Tracy looked at the four pallets sitting on her flatbed, shrink-wrapped and tagged for a distribution center three hundred miles east, and she did the math she was always doing, which was money math, because every hour that load sat still was an hour she wasn't getting paid and a day later her next run would start and her next check would shrink. Her rig was already backed up to the dock, her flatbed loaded and strapped, and she'd planned to hand the pallets to the cargo flight and deadhead home like she always did on this route, and now the airport had gone and cancelled the whole idea out from under her.

"Fine," she said. "Bring the paperwork out. I'll drive it."

"That's a long drive at two in the morning."

"That's the job," Tracy said, and signed what the woman put in front of her, and went out into the cold to start her pre-trip check, muttering the whole way about schedulers and weathermen and the general flavor of her luck lately.

That was when she noticed the man standing by the terminal doors with a laptop bag and a carry-on and the particular expression of somebody whose evening had also just died on the tarmac. He was older, mid-forties maybe, tall, in a suit that had been nice that morning and was now showing the wear of a long day, and he was on his phone saying yes, I understand, no, I understand, in the flat voice people use when they understand perfectly well and don't care. He hung up and looked at the dark parking lot like it had personally betrayed him.

Tracy finished cinching a strap and walked back toward the doors, mostly out of curiosity. "Rental counter closed on you?"

"Closed an hour ago. Car won't be available till tomorrow, and there's nothing bookable online until the morning flights." He said it like a report, like someone who summarized things for a living. "There's a regional hub a couple hours east. If a car shows up there tomorrow, I make my nine o'clock. If not, I don't."

"You got a ride lined up to this hub?"

"Not yet."

"Well," Tracy said, and it was at this point that the idea arrived, the kind of idea that shows up at two in the morning wearing work boots, "here's your not yet. I'm driving east with a full load, and the interstate goes right past that hub of yours. No charge, I'm going that way anyway. You ride in the cab and keep your opinions about my driving to a minimum."

He looked at her, and she could see him doing his own math. "You're a freight driver."

"Best one in this county, and modest about it. Tracy." She stuck out her hand. "And you'd be?"

"Roger. Roger Horton." His grip was firm and his palm was dry. "Logistics."

"Well, Roger Horton, logistics, you are literally looking at logistics. You need to be at that hub by when, to make your morning?"

"Seven would be safe."

"That's doable at my pace, with a stop or two."

He actually laughed at that, a short dry laugh like it surprised him coming out. "Fair enough." He reached for his wallet anyway, and she shook her head. "Put it away. The ride's free, and it stays free, whatever else does or doesn't happen between here and that hub. Deal?"

"Deal," he said, and put the wallet back, and Tracy figured this night had just improved by exactly one passenger who didn't seem like a pain.

The cab of her rig was her second home and she kept it that way, clean-ish, a futon mattress folded up behind the seats, a cooler, a duffel of clothes, a plastic crate of odds and ends, a phone mount, and a photograph taped to the dash of a dog that wasn't even hers but that she'd met at a truck stop in Ohio and thought about more than she'd admit. She climbed up into the driver's seat and Roger hauled himself into the passenger side with the grace of a man who hadn't climbed into a truck since a college buddy talked him into it once, and got his laptop bag wedged down by his feet.

"This is cozier than it looks," he said, looking around.

"That's the sales pitch, anyway." Tracy pulled out of the lot, the load shifting faintly behind them, and the diesel settled into its long idle hum as the empty two-lane gave way to the interstate, black and empty in both directions. "House rules. I pick the music and the stops. You can nap, the seat does that recline thing if you fiddle with the lever. And if you want to talk, fine, but I'm driving, so don't take it personal if I zone out on you."

"Understood." He dug into his coat and came out with a steel flask, unscrewed the cap, and held it out. "It's two in the morning and my flight got cancelled. I'm going to have a drink. Would you care to join me?"

She glanced over, keeping most of her eye on the road. "What is it?"

"Bourbon. Decent bourbon, before you make that face. I'm not offering you anything from a plastic bottle."

"Well, since you put it fancy, I'll take the smell and skip the swallow. I'm driving, and I don't drink behind the wheel, ever." She sniffed it and handed it back, and he took a small pull of his own and capped it, and the cab went quiet for a while with just the engine and the tires, and Tracy found she didn't mind it, which was not always the case with a stranger riding shotgun.

"Long-haul," Roger said after a few miles. "How'd you get into that?"

"My old man drove for twenty years, and I swore up and down I'd never, and then at twenty-one I got the chance to take my CDL test for free through a company that was hurting for drivers, and I figured free beats proud." She shrugged. "Turns out I like it. You're out here with a job to do, nobody standing over your shoulder, and the radio and the road and that's it. What about you, what does a logistics man do at two in the morning that can't wait?"

"Buy things," he said. "Plants, mostly. Factories, contracts, the occasional warehouse network. I fly around, shake hands, sign papers, and fly home, and lately I've been noticing that I can do the whole thing asleep, which I take as a bad sign."

"That sounds like the kind of job where they pay you a lot to be miserable."

He huffed, half a laugh. "That's about the size of it, yeah."

Roger left the flask capped after that, one small pull being his limit, and the talk went easier anyway. He asked about the routes she ran and she told him about the haul she liked best, the overnight down through the mountain pass in fair weather, and she asked about the deals he ran and he told her about a plant in the Carolinas that had nearly fallen through over a clause about water rights, and she said that sounded like the most boring thing she'd ever heard, and he said, "It was, honestly, and I told the story anyway, which tells you something about my life," and that made her laugh, a real one, and he looked over at her when she did it, longer than he needed to.

"Take a picture," she said. "It lasts longer."

"Sorry." He didn't sound very sorry. "You laugh like somebody who means it. I don't hear that a lot at work."

"Well, work's got you spoiled, then." She took a drink from her water bottle, and the interstate ran on black and empty ahead of them, and two hundred miles of night sat between them and the hub, and Tracy was thinking, in the back part of her brain where the thinking happened under the driving, that the seat beside her was warmer than it had been in a long while, and that the night, which had started out ruined, was starting to look like a different kind of night altogether.

The first stop came forty minutes up the road, a truck stop with a diesel canopy and a diner that was open even at this hour, and Tracy needed fuel anyway, so she pulled in and topped off the tanks while Roger stood there under the lights with his suit jacket buttoned like he was at a funeral. Then, because the only open spot along the front was between a reefer unit that had its engine howling and a horse trailer parked crooked as a drunken fence, she decided to back into the long lane along the side instead, and that was when Roger got his little show.

She climbed up into the cab, checked both mirrors, and rolled backward into the lane with one arm slung over the top of her seat and the other hand working the wheel in loose half-turns, and the flatbed, forty-eight feet of steel and shrink-wrapped pallets, swung around behind her like it was on a string. She straightened it, pulled forward half a truck length, backed again, and tucked the whole rig along the curb with maybe a foot to spare on the trailer side, then set the brake and hopped down without a word.

Roger was still standing there. "That was," he started, and stopped, and started again. "How long did that take you to learn?"

"Learn it? Hell, the test took ten minutes. The learning was the two years of denting fenders before that." She was walking to the pay-at-the-pump, working her jaw around a yawn, and she caught him watching her do it in the window reflection and didn't say anything about that either.

"I mean it, though. I've watched men do that at loading docks and it looks like surgery. You did it like parallel parking."

"Well." She dug her wallet out, thumbed through bills, and shot him a look over her shoulder. "You buy warehouses for a living. You want to watch something better, stick around, because backing a flatbed into a dock with a forklift driver standing there judging you is the actual Olympics."

"I believe you." But he was still watching her, and it wasn't the rig he was watching, and she knew it, and he knew she knew it, and neither of them made a thing out of it, which was somehow its own kind of conversation.

She got snacks she didn't need and coffee that had been on the burner since the previous administration of the pot, and they got back on the road, and the miles rolled under them the way they do out here, one identical to the next, so that time went soft and strange, and the dark worked on both of them in the quiet way night driving does, loosening the joints of the conversation until it was swinging free.

"So this dog," Roger said, nodding at the photo she had tucked up by the visor, a mutt with one ear up and one down, sitting proud on a truck step. "Friend of yours?"

"Met him at a truck stop in Ohio last summer. He belonged to a driver who was laid up in the hospital, and this other driver, this woman, was keeping him until the guy got out, and I babysat him for a weekend and got attached and took about forty pictures like some kind of lunatic." She adjusted the photo so it sat straight. "His name was Juniper. Dog like that, you don't forget him."

"Was? He didn't make it?"

"No, he made it fine, his owner got out and took him home. I just never saw him again, which is its own kind of was, I guess." She shrugged. "That's trucking. You meet everything once and nothing twice."

Roger was quiet a moment, looking out at the dark. "That's been my whole career, more or less. Airports and conference rooms, and every city looks like every other city from inside a Marriott. I used to tell myself I was seeing the world." He took the flask out, looked at it, and put it back without drinking, and she passed him a bottle of water from the cooler instead, and he took it. "You've seen more actual world than I have, I'd wager. Just from the window of a truck."

"The window of a truck is still a window," she said. "But it's a window with bugs on it, so at least it's honest."