FURNACE Read online

  Choose any truck stop, any row of phones and mostly all you’d hear was a chorus of deeply discontented men. Some of it was just plain moaning, but enough of it was from the heart to make hearing it uncomfortable. Why drive if you hated it so much? Josh liked it fine. Just fine. And he loved Elizabeth. If the seat was clammy with his sweat after he’d talked to her, it wouldn’t be from stress.

  The vacant, computerized woman on the phone thanked him in a monotone for calling Driveline and informed him in a voice that suggested she was painting her nails that he had seven dollars and fifteen cents left to make his call. He punched in their number.

  It rang eleven times and just as he was about to hang up Elizabeth came on, out of breath, and sounding angry.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hey. You should get into telephone sales, honey.”

  She tried to change the tone, but there was still something there. Something at the back of her throat.

  “Hey yourself! Where are you?”

  “On the pike. Near enough home to smell next door’s mutt.”

  “Well, get back here. I missed you.”

  It was familiar small talk. But she said the last bit as though she really meant it.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Big day, huh?”

  “Yeah. Big.”

  A melancholy tone reaffirmed that something was wrong. Now, in this tiny booth with two guys already waiting outside, wasn’t the time to find out what it was.

  “Want me to come straight by the store?”

  “How you going to park Jezebel?”

  “Normally I just pull on the brakes and shut her big ass down.”

  “And screw the Pittsburgh morning traffic?”

  “For you I’d leave her standin’ in the middle of the Liberty Tunnel at five-thirty Friday night.”

  She laughed, and hearing her was like he’d swallowed something warm and sweet.

  Elizabeth sounded more like herself when she spoke next. “Then come on by and make a traffic cop’s day.”

  “See how it goes.”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  He hung up and left the booth. Had he imagined it or had she really sounded uneasy? Understandable. Today, she and Nesta started their new career. A sackload of tasty severance pay blown on their crazy business.

  Josh would have spent it buying something a man could use, like a decent flatbed to switch with the trailer he was pulling so he could haul bigger sections of steel when he needed to. But it was Elizabeth’s choice, her money. She didn’t spend much of his, and he certainly didn’t spend any of hers.

  Fifteen years as a machinist hadn’t made her rich but facing a new day, every day, sewing nylon umbrella sleeves, cheap bags for storing shoes and suit covers, had given her plenty of time to think about her life. She and her buddy were about the only girls not weeping when the scrawny, acne-covered floor supervisor told them they were out. With a little shame, Josh admitted to himself that he didn’t really know if the costume ball hire shop was Nesta’s idea or Elizabeth’s. But he sincerely hoped the name “All Dressed Up” was Nesta’s. It was seriously crap.

  Of course Elizabeth would be scared today. The door would be opening in a couple of hours for the first time, and she’d be praying, fruitlessly, Josh thought, that there’d be a line of customers around the block, ready to part with cash to dress up in the ridiculous costumes she and Nesta had been sewing for the last three months.

  Costume balls baffled him. To Josh, the idea of standing around at a party with a beer in your hand talking to someone about real estate or kit cars seemed pretty attractive. But not if you were dressed like Pinocchio and the guy you were talking to was trying to make an earnest point in a fun-fur kangaroo suit. But if it made money, then so what?

  What bugged him was that Elizabeth’s tone had sounded more than just anxious. Sounded like she was sad.

  He wandered out of the phone lobby and through the shop towards the restaurant. Maybe he should buy her something.

  Truck stops nearly always boasted carousels full of junk that skulked near the cash register like muggers, offering a variety of garbage for the guilty driver to take home and pacify his sweetheart. But until now Josh had never really looked at it.

  The days when he’d done things he’d have to say sorry for were the days he hadn’t had someone steady like Elizabeth waiting at home. Now he had her, he didn’t do much on the road except drive, eat, sleep and shit.

  Pausing for the first time at the cylindrical stand like it was a confession box, Josh let an embarrassed gaze drift over the assortment of tacky merchandise. He found himself looking quizzically at some round balls of fluff with eyes and feet made of felt, sporting cloth ribbons that said everything from “I Love You” and “You’re Cute” to statements of coma-inducing inanity like “I’ve Been to West Virginia.” A gentle push of his forefinger sent the display turning slowly around to reveal badly made plastic boxes covered in lace hearts that had been hastily glued to the lids, and some dusty-looking dolls dressed as cowgirls.

  Josh glanced around, anxious in case anyone had seen him looking at this stuff, only to discover the woman behind the counter already had. She smiled when he caught her eye. Maybe someone had given her one of those fluffy balls once, with a message on the ribbon that she wanted to hear. He lowered his eyes, and wandered casually over to the display of Rand McNally road atlases, flicked through a couple like he’d never seen a map of America before.

  Men like Josh Spiller didn’t look right poking at dolls and lacy boxes. Six feet and 168 pounds of fit, pale body was topped by a head of light brown hair cut so short it was near enough shaved. There was a tiny silver ball of an earring in his right ear and it combined with the hair to make sure he didn’t get stopped in the street often by nuns collecting for orphanages. What little hair that had survived the cut sat above a face with kind blue eyes, a straight, elegant nose and a wide, mischievous mouth. That open face meant that although he was adopting the demeanour of a mean guy, no one was going to mistake Josh for a member of an underground militia group. He looked kind. He couldn’t help it. Nevertheless, the spirit in him that made him look the way he did was not prepared to let him stand at the counter and buy some piece of girlie shit. He shut the atlas and walked towards the restaurant.

  “We got something new over here she might like.”

  The woman behind the counter was smiling, her eyes lowered, looking at what she was doing and not at him. Josh cleared his throat.

  “Yeah?”

  Her fat fingers counted out shower vouchers in front of her like they were cards in a game.

  “We got these real pretty pins. All sorts. And a machine that does her name on it while you grab a bite. Takes about ten minutes.” She indicated the contraption behind her with a small movement of her shoulder. “You just turn that there dial to the letters you want and it gets right on doin’ it. Seventeen dollars including the name. Plus tax.”

  Josh was trapped. He walked slowly over and she looked up.

  From behind the glass under the counter she took out a tray of cheap pewter-coloured metal brooches shaped in a bewildering variety of little objects, each with a space beneath the object for the name like the scroll on a tattoo. With his hands in his pockets Josh looked them over, grateful the store was empty.

  There were tiny metal bows, a rabbit, some bees around a hive, all in a mock-antique style, and all waiting to have a woman’s name scratched beneath their immobile forms. Despite his discomfort he decided they were cute, and when his eyes wandered over to one made from a tiny pair of scissors cutting out a perfect metal heart, Josh knew Elizabeth would like it. The scissors were neatly appropriate.

  “So you do their name on the blank bit with that machine?”

  “Well, I ain’t doin’ it. Got enough to do keepin’ you guys from rippin’ me off to sit here and carve your wives’ names on a pin.”

  Josh smiled, pointed
at the one he wanted and reached for the wallet in his back pocket. “Okay. It’s Elizabeth.” He spelled it for her, watched her write it so she wouldn’t make a mistake, then went to get that coffee.

  “Takes ten minutes,” she reminded him to his back as she clicked the letters into something that looked like a sewing machine and, with her tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth, placed the brooch on a tiny vise.

  3

  Elizabeth was right. There was no way he could park Jezebel anywhere near the store. In fact, there weren’t many places in downtown Pittsburgh you could take an electric-blue Peterbilt conventional with a sixty-inch sleeper and forty-eight-foot trailer. Not unless you wanted to end up trapped like a beached whale, snared in some narrow street by four-wheelers who park like the whole world is their front drive.

  Instead, Josh drove straight to Jezebel’s parking lot ten miles out of town, did his paperwork, zipped up a week’s worth of stinking laundry and headed home in the pickup. He figured Elizabeth wouldn’t really want to see him in the store anyhow. Not if she was busy measuring someone up as a giant tomato. Right now, he needed some sleep. He’d be more use to her wide awake, showered and ready for action.

  The duplex that Josh and Elizabeth shared was nothing special, but it was on a quiet block with tiny neatly-trimmed gardens tended by peaceful neighbours. Josh owned the whole house but rented the lower half to an elderly Korean bachelor called Sim, a tiny man in his seventies who constantly complained that he was at the rim of death’s abyss, usually while in the yard tending patio pots full of unpleasantly pungent spices and herbs.

  Today was no different. Sim was sitting on a canvas stool against the wall of the house in the chill morning sun. A cigarette hung from his tight mouth, and he held The National Enquirer at a distance from his face as though he were a doctor examining an important X ray.

  Sim looked up as Josh’s pickup pulled into the yard, and by the time Josh had climbed out the old man’s face had changed from a lively interest in his paper to one of silent suffering.

  “How it been this time, Josh?”

  Josh knew the routine. He liked Sim.

  “Good. Seven days, four loads. Pays the rent. How you been?”

  This was how it always went.

  “Oh, I not got long now, you know. I had pains. Real bad. Right here.” He indicated his chest with the flat of a palm.

  “Maybe you ought to give up those smokes, Sim.”

  “They not problem, Josh. Living the problem. Too hard for me sometimes. Know how that is?”

  Josh nodded. “Sure do.”

  He continued to nod his head gravely as though Sim had pronounced a universal truth, but by the time he was through the door and the old man had returned to reading about the secrets of Hollywood’s bald stars. Josh was grinning. Life didn’t look too hard for Sim. But then, life wasn’t too hard for him, either. Josh was thirty-two years old, and for ten of those he’d been hauling everything you could name, and some things you couldn’t, from one corner of his country to another.

  Now, in particular, things were pretty good. His wild years had passed, when he’d driven team, swallowing anything and everything illegal to keep awake for forty or more straight hours on the road, just like all the other guys who were trying to make a living. Four years ago he’d joined the world of grown-ups, got a bank loan and bought his own rig. Josh was up to his neck in debt, with the bank’s shadow looming over his house and his truck. But running his own tractor unit and trailer, even just having his name painted on the door in curly purple fairground writing, made him feel like a man who had done something useful every time he stepped up into Jezebel. It wasn’t just driving anymore. He worked like a dog, he had a business, and it felt okay.

  The house reflected that small triumph. The kitchen he walked through from the yard door was Elizabeth’s domain, full of silly calendars and photos stuck to the refrigerator, dried flowers in baskets on top of the cabinets and plaid drapes swagged to the side of the windows that would never meet if anyone were bold enough to undo the huge bows that restrained them and tried to draw them shut.

  But in the spare bedroom that Josh had made his office, his life in the rig came back with him into the house. It was this room he headed for first, ostensibly to check if there were any faxes or messages on the answering machine, and flick through the mail that Elizabeth left in tidy piles on his desk. The truth was that the room was an airlock, a halfway stage to reacclimatising himself into a life that wasn’t really his: that of wandering around shopping malls, going out for dinner, drinking beer with friends in their yard or his or just watching TV while Elizabeth fixed their meals.

  All the ordinary stuff that most people did and thought nothing of, Josh had to relearn every time he pulled on the brakes and came home. At least in this room, with its giant map of the states pinned unevenly to a cork wall, piles of correspondence, trade magazines and bits of scrap paper that related only to his driving life, he could come down gently, ease into Elizabeth’s normality and try to make it his own. For a few days at a time, at least.

  The fax stared back at him, insolently exposing the emptiness of its horizontal slot, and the mail was equally unrewarding. Just bills and a few late cheques from companies that paid slowly. He flicked through them with mild disappointment, the constant hope when returning home to a pile of mail that something in it would be surprising and life-altering dashed again. Josh left the room, took a shower and crawled into their flowery linen nest for the first sleep of home. The difficult sleep. After six nights stretched out in a sleeping bag on Jezebel’s sagging foam mattress behind the cab with dozens of truck engines thudding outside, finding oblivion in this big, fresh, soft and silent bed took time.

  This morning it couldn’t be found at all. Josh was weary, but closing his eyes brought nothing but the road rolling by on the inside of his lids. He lay in the bed, his hands behind his head, resigned to sleeplessness, content with merely resting in a state of semi-reverie until Elizabeth came home, when he hoped she would slide into the warmth and join him.

  Josh remained motionless but wakeful for several hours, sufficiently relaxed to be unaware of the day as it played out its variations of light behind the closed bedroom drapes, but then he was a master of rest without sleep. Driving created a new gear for the mind, a neutral that demanded little of the body except breathing. It was almost trancelike and he’d driven in such a state plenty of times, despite the plain reckless danger of it. His enjoyment of the escape it afforded was broken by the sound of Elizabeth’s key in the lock and the slam of the screen door. He opened his eyes, surprised to have dreamed what seemed like the entire day away, then stretched and lay back with his eyes closed, waiting in delicious anticipation for her to come to him, knowing that she’d see his pickup parked outside and realize he was in bed.

  It was comforting, hearing her sounds, the clatter of domesticity as she moved about in the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets, putting away things she must have bought on the way home, and the scrape of a chair as it was pulled out from the kitchen table. Josh waited.

  There was silence.

  He slid his legs reluctantly out of the warm bed, pulled on a voluminous sweatshirt and his jeans and yawned. As he made for the door he remembered her gift, fished in his jeans pocket and transferred the small box into the pocket of the sweatshirt. Then he made his way through to the kitchen, scratching at his skull like a bear.

  She was sitting at the table motionless, her back to him, her head turned towards the small window. Elizabeth had hair that was only marginally longer than his own, but the cut was feminine and accentuated the graceful sweep of her neck. He leant against the door frame and drank in the slender architecture of her shoulders.

  She turned and looked up at him. Brown eyes in a pale and almost masculinely handsome face looked as if they wanted to return his heat, but they were clouded with a film of defeat.

  Josh put out his arms and she stood up and moved into them. With
an almost imperceptible sigh of pleasure he allowed his fingers to part the dark hair and caress her head.

  “Bad?”

  She nodded against him with a tiny movement.

  Josh put his mouth to the top of her head and spoke into her hair.

  “Hell, they just don’t know what lucky is, Pittsburgh folk. The chance to zip themselves into a chicken suit, right here on their doorstep, and where are they all?”

  “Fuck off.”

  She mumbled it into his chest but he could tell it was said through a smile. He lifted her head and made to kiss her, but her smile died as she looked into his eyes. Then she pulled free.

  Josh put his now-empty arms up in a gesture of surrender.

  “Joke.”

  “I know.”

  She sat back at the table, where he joined her and took her hand.

  “It’ll pick up. Just one guy who gets his rocks off at a party dressed as a pirate and tells his friends, believe me, you’ll be beating them off with shit-covered sticks.”

  “You’ve been gone a long time.”

  An accusing tone she never used. It threw him, and he withdrew the hand that had been covering hers.

  “Got an extra load from Louisville. Couldn’t turn it down. I told you.”

  “We need the money that bad?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked down at the table.

  “Sorry.”

  His hand was still on the tabletop. Avoiding his eyes she slid her hand over and laid it on his. Josh reached into the sweatshirt pocket with his free hand, took out the small box and slid it towards her.

  “For you. It’s dumb but it’s for luck.”

  She looked up and met his eyes, a smile beginning to ghost in them again.

  “You been screwing someone?”

  “I wish.”

  She opened the box, rustled the piece of tissue paper and revealed the dull metal brooch. Her name was etched clearly but unevenly on it, with the E too far from the L and the final T and H crammed so tightly together they were practically one letter, but Elizabeth took the cheap gift from the box as if it were a Fabergé egg.