“New Emergence”
Wendy Balconi
Collage
It was beautiful, the way his hands worked the meat, turning it over like a memory. At first Thurlene was annoyed when the cook said he’d make her patty melt fresh. Tired from the road, she just wanted to eat. But now, hearing the sizzle of fat on the grill, smelling the savory richness, she was glad.
“You just relax,” the cook said, topping up her coffee. His nametag said “Rudy.”
“Guess you can tell I need a breather,” she said. Life in an eighteen-wheeler was often dull, but never relaxing. It required taut vigilance. Her body was barraged by pothole bumps and engine rattles, the squawk of the CB radio, the stinging scent of diesel, winter mornings when her gloved hands were almost too numb to hold the wheel, and summer afternoons when the heat stuck to her like honey.
“Long day at the office? Or with the kids?”
“On the road. Got my rig from Topeka to—what’s this town?”
“Scipio, Indiana. But most people don’t stop long enough to learn the name.” He put down her plate. The bread of the sandwich had been crisped in butter, and little crystals of salt speckled the French fries.
“I’m glad I did, Rudy,” she said.
He smiled. “What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Thurlene.” She didn’t usually give her name. Everyone on the road called her Miss T, so long now she almost forgot what the initial stood for. But somehow she wanted to hear her real name in this man’s mouth. He was a middle-aged man with a paper cap atop his hair. His voice was deep and steady, like the narrator on the black-and-white Christmas specials she watched as a kid. She could imagine him shaping the word “Bethlehem,” like each syllable was a pearl on a string.
They chatted while she ate and he cooked, cleaned, and rang up orders for the few other customers. Thurlene could feel her muscles uncoiling, the worn padding of the stool gently giving beneath her. The diner was lit by the glow of milk glass pendant lights, and pale pink neon from behind the chrome flanking the hood of the counter area. Warmth wafted to her from the grill. She let the sounds slip over her: the stream of Rudy’s voice; the murmur of a new episode of Dynasty playing in the background; the low buzz of the light in the chilled bakery case, where pastel-frosted cakes rotated slowly, like showroom models; and the soft drumming of rain on the windows.
Rudy told her how he’d started here washing dishes when he was twenty-one and had taken over for the old owner six years ago. She had a slice of cherry pie after dinner, with a scoop of luscious vanilla ice cream that melted into the crust. Rudy said he hoped to sell this place and move out to San Diego and get a condo by the beach, with a view of the aquamarine water, one day soon.
“I’ve got a question for you, Thurlene,” he said as he took the empty plate, and she touched up her frosted pink lipstick.
“What’s that?” But she already knew. He was going to ask how a woman got to be a trucker, or why she wasn’t in a house somewhere with a husband and kids.
“With all the places you’ve traveled, what’s one place you always wish you could go?” he asked.
She put the cap back on her lipstick with a little plink and thought. “Home.”
As Thurlene made her way to the door, she walked slowly. She didn’t quite want to leave. Something caught her attention. There was an arcade game. A red-haired boy, maybe eight, sat on the stool, engrossed, twiddling a joystick with one hand and mashing a button with the other.
She nodded back to Rudy. “Feel like I’m seeing these things everywhere now. Like Pac-Man, right?”
“Yeah, but this one’s different. Gives the kiddos something to do.”
She walked closer behind the boy to watch. Help Howie! was emblazoned across the top of the cubicle, with a picture of a round-eyed little ghost, his body shaped like a fat spring raindrop, a single ghostly curlicue atop his head, like he was a perfect dollop of soft serve. His chubby arms were clasped in front of his chest, beseeching. Something swelled inside her. He was so sweet, so cute, so helpless.
On the screen, the digitized version of the baby ghost was trapped in an old Victorian haunted house, represented by a pale green outline on the black screen. Long-toothed monsters lunged out at him as the boy beat them back with green dots of flame. There was one coming up behind Howie—so close—
“Shoot to the left!” she cried. The boy spun toward her on the stool, scared, his eyes as wide as Howie’s. He must not have known she was watching. She could picture the exact way his eye sockets must sit in his skull. She had just wanted to help.
“Come on, you can still get him!” Thurlene said. But the boy scampered off, back to his parents, who were putting on their windbreakers. The monster reached Howie and the ghost vanished in a puff. The machine gave a downward chime and flashed “Game over,” with an image of a sad-faced Howie, then went dark.
Thurlene spotted a dish of cellophane-wrapped butter mints and took a few on her way out. They were her favorite.
She avoided saying the man’s name during sex because she wasn’t sure she knew what it was. Mason, she thought. Cooing his name into his ear felt too intimate anyway. Though when they finished, he did ask what Miss T stood for.
“Tiffany,” she said.
They were in the sleeping berth of her truck, right behind the driver’s seat, barely four feet wide: a meager bunk at head height, a plastic fold-out table, a bench that doubled as a storage cubby for her shoes and Good Housekeepings. He tossed the condom onto the floor, where its translucent folds shone off-yellow, like a shed snakeskin, in the fluorescent light from the parking lot. As he gathered his jeans and hopped down to dress, Thurlene lay naked, propped on her elbows, watching. She never saw the point in turning her head away.
“I’ll admit, Tiffany, I did ask around about you, but all the other fellas kept locked lips.”
“Let’s keep it that way.”
“Guess you got a lot of respect out there in the community.”
“Guess I do.”
A pale scar tracked up his hipbone, catching the light right before he tugged his briefs up. She wondered how many people in his life had ever seen that scar—possibly not many, and now she was one of them. But she would never learn its story.
“You do this sort of thing often?” he asked.
“As often as I want.” That was the truth. When she’d first started on the road, about fifteen years ago now, the other truckers expected her to be afraid of them. It was the early ’70s; things were different. There was an assumption they would all try to use these truck stop nights to sleep with her, and that she wouldn’t want that. It was as if they felt obligated, too, to make remarks. “Clear the road—woman driver,” “Come sit on my lap and I’ll help you reach the wheel,” that sort of thing.
One evening a bunch of them were gathered for a few beers, and one man had been making relentless comments, and sliding a finger into the curls of her hair. He got so drunk he passed out, splayed on a folding chair in the parking lot.
In full view of the others, Thurlene got a length of cord from her truck, tied one end to her tow hitch, and knotted the other tight around the man’s belt. When she revved her engine, his eyes jumped open in her side mirror. She started inching her truck forward, slowly, but fast enough to drag the man, the legs of his chair screeching against the asphalt before he toppled out. “Hey! Hey!” he yelled, but she kept going. In the rearview she could see him grappling with the rope, trying to untie it while he slid along the ground, the other guys laughing, clapping hands on their knees. She bore down a little harder on the accelerator. Finally the man undid his belt and scrambled out of his pants, then lay there gasping in his tighty-whities while the others roared.
After that, no one gave her shit.
She was one of the guys now, and if she didn’t want to sleep with any of them, they wouldn’t pressure her. But she wanted to, and did often. It was the only thing that made her feel more in control than maneuvering that big machine.
Mason was dressed, and leaning against the divider in the truck, arms crossed, kneading his elbows. “So what’s your story, Tiffany? You got a high school sweetheart you left to come out on the road?”
“You got a wife you want to gas about?”
He held up his hands with a chuckle. “Fair enough. You have yourself a fine night.”
He slid over the driver’s seat and let himself out. Thurlene watched him weave away through the trucks, their giant shapes outlined in the fluorescent lights, like sleeping bison on a moonlit plain. She couldn’t see the tall pines beyond the edge of the lot but knew they were there. A couple trucks down she saw a door open and a lot lizard step out, still pulling her tank top back on, her thin clavicle cutting across her chest. The woman, or girl, maybe, looked both ways, then blotted into the shadows.
Thurlene almost always had the women’s restroom to herself at truck stops. In a canvas bag she brought in her bar of green soap, her toothbrush, and a shower cap for her hair, which every few days she washed and blow dried, teasing and spraying it into a frail dome. She showered at night because being in the truck all day, it felt like the grime of the road somehow got on her, and she didn’t want to carry that into bed. The cab of her truck was a mess, but she kept the back, where she lived, neat.
While the lukewarm water ran off her, she looked at the cracked white shower tiles. On the toilet, she read phone numbers and Bible verses markered onto the stall.
Thurlene did have a cheap apartment in West Virginia but she was almost never there. Every time she came back, bills and Publishers Clearing House brochures overflowed the mailbox. She only wished she were there more so she could have a rabbit.
In bed, listening to the radio host Delilah’s supple corn-silk voice, trying to drift off, she let certain thoughts slip in. Thoughts about her ex-husband (technically her husband, if he wasn’t dead, since she’d never filed for divorce): the feel of his rough-skinned hands when they’d caressed her back, and when they’d tightened around her wrists so hard her fingers had turned purple. And the memory of the warm pocket of scent right behind the perfect shell of her baby’s ear. She tried to tune it all out, just float between Delilah and the lull of low voices across the lot, and the susurrus of the pines, bringing the sadness in.
A couple days later, driving between Arkansas and Kentucky, she was glad for the views of undulating fields and gray barns buckling into kudzu, and she was glad the day was almost done. She liked her job sometimes: the romance novels she listened to on tape, stories about schoolteachers on the prairie with ankle-brushing petticoats and naturally blooming cheeks. The collection of stuffed animals and plastic bobbleheads across her dash, each smiling at her in his own particular way. The sunrises. A curve of road revealing a drive-in theater in a field, with flickers of light from the screen bringing out the colors of the cars in flashes: olive green, creamy white, cherry red. The feeling, high in the cab, of gliding over everything, like a crane she saw once veering across a lake in Michigan.
But she got tired of these days too. The cab got filthy, with cigarette butts and cellophane butter mint wrappers skipping around on the floor, and a sticky residue of hairspray from her touch-ups outlining her head on the seat, like the soft light haloing a saint. She had to keep the CB radio up high, since her ex had put a cigarette butt out in her ear once, and the bark and static got to her, even the friendly jibes the other truckers would trade over the line. The constant motion drew her to this job, but she hadn’t thought about the fact that she would be constantly sedentary too.
She often distracted herself by musing about where she might stop for dinner that night. She tried to never visit the same place twice. But for the past couple days, she kept thinking about Rudy, and Howie the ghost. She decided to stop off in Scipio.
That evening, after devouring the Reuben Rudy had made her, she asked him to break a one so she had quarters for the machine. As she got deep into the game, slapping the button faster and harder, he came out from behind the counter to watch, cheering her on.
“Oh, right there—you’ve almost got him—” Rudy said.
“Come on, you big old—” Thurlene torqued her whole body to the right as she mashed the button, killing the last and meanest monster. “Hallelu!”
Onscreen, Howie whooshed forward, growing from a little icon into his full, round-eyed self. He whirled and flung out his arms as if for a hug. “You saved me! I love you!” He blew a kiss. Thurlene laughed aloud.
“You’re a wiz!” Rudy said.
“Couldn’t have done it without you cheering, gassing me up.”
“I mean it, no one ever wins this thing.”
“Ah, bet it’s just kids who play.”
Rudy leaned against the top of a booth. “You have any kids back home, Thurlene?”
“I had a baby but I left him behind with my ex fifteen years ago.” Thurlene pressed the button to play again, but the screen demanded another quarter. She swiveled on the stool to face Rudy and noticed that he looked startled. But he politely put the expression away, like snapping a book shut.
“You heading back to the truck for the night?” he asked.
“Naw, I’m going one more time! Break another for me?” She held out a dollar.
“Of course.”
“Keep the change, hon.”
Thurlene made it a point to go back to Scipio, and Rudy and Howie, as often as she could over the next couple months, going farther and farther off-route, even doubling back sometimes after a drop-off and driving an extra two hours each way to visit the diner in time for dinner.
Rudy did fix her delicious dinners: a tuna melt with pimiento, or a sweet, peppery sloppy joe, even pancakes and grits if she was in the mood. They talked about the billboards she had seen that day, or how his mom was doing when he stopped by to give her insulin, or their favorite Christmases when they were kids. But as the weeks passed, she spent less time chatting with Rudy and more playing the game.
At first Rudy would cheer her on; he even put up a paper scoreboard on the wall, where the top five scores were always Thurlene’s. But when she got so hooked into the game that she didn’t talk to him, he’d leave her to it and go clean the cooktop with a sprinkle of baking soda.
One night she finished a round—her highest score yet, but she was frustrated because she still hadn’t breached the top level. Who knew what Howie would do there? “Hey Rudy, you got any more quarters?” she yelled back.
“Just these couple, and you told me to keep the change.”
“Yeah, but can I have them? I’ve got to go again.”
Rudy fished some quarters from the cash register, walked over, and dumped them into her palm. They felt heavy and cold, like rocks in a drowning man’s pockets. “This is all I got. You know that machine gets awful loud when it’s going all the time.”
“Just turn up the TV, then,” Thurlene said, and faced the game.
Rudy sighed and went back to cleaning.
That night Thurlene almost nodded off as she drove the two hours and fifteen minutes to her stop for the morning. This was something she never did: she was a solid driver, she was safe. But it was late, and it wasn’t until a blur of white in the road caught her eye that she snapped out of her doze. She whipped the wheel to the right. The whole truck bounced as she steered it onto the shoulder, braking as fast as she could without jackknifing.
As soon as she was at a halt, she turned and squinted back for the object, or animal, or person. A white plastic bag danced over the road, glowing in the last reaches of her taillights.
She exhaled, and it came out jagged and shaky. Tears started at the corner of her eyes, and it felt like her chest couldn’t expand enough to get air.
This was the first time Thurlene had almost fallen asleep while driving, but not the first time she had found herself on the side of the road, gasping. It happened sometimes, always at night, always when she saw something small and pale in the street.
Thurlene hadn’t known she had wanted a child until she was six months pregnant with her son. His conception was a decision her husband had made, but she was used to that. She spent the first two trimesters in pain, with cramps and bleeding gums and sore feet, feeling as if a tumor was growing inside her that any day now could stretch up and squeeze her heart still.
Then one morning, she woke up, and it was a child. It was her child. She somehow felt, in a way she hadn’t before, that this was a human with a heart of its own, so close to her chest cavity that her heart was no longer alone.
The birth took only four hours, and the first month of her son’s life was heaven. Even with the stinging in her stitches, and the sleeplessness, and her husband pinching the flesh of her inner elbow to wake her from a moment’s sleep when the dishes needed doing, she had this person who had appeared to her, with ten miraculous fingers and ten miraculous toes.
But then something shifted. She felt sad often, so sad that it slowed her, till she moved like an old tree in the wind. She began to lose snatches of time. She hacked the microwave out of the wall and put it in the street because she became convinced the rays were controlling her brain. Her husband smacked her so hard for that it left a welt, purple-red, like the underside of a tongue. There was a moment when her baby wouldn’t stop crying, and she wondered if she could just put him in a pillowcase and tie off the end.
Then one night she found herself standing at the side of the road and seeing her baby sitting there in the center, naked, white in the headlights of an oncoming car. It was like coming to in the middle of a dream, unsure if the dream was so real because you were so deeply asleep, or because you had actually awoken to real life. Somehow, impossibly fast—she still didn’t know how she’d done it—she dove into the street, and as the car whizzed by, she was already rolling in the crisp cold mud on the other side, panting while her son wailed into her chest.
That night, she put her child in his crib, grabbed her purse, got in her car, and started driving.
She had been driving ever since.
It was late, and the other customers had cleared out, but Rudy didn’t seem in a hurry to get rid of Thurlene. He wiped the counters with a rag, then sat at the edge of the booth nearest her game, his legs out stick-straight and his feet pointing to the ceiling.
“I talked to my mom today,” he said. “Told her I’d been thinking of putting out feelers to put the diner up for sale.”
“Oh yeah? What’d she say?” Thurlene asked, eyes on the blinking ghost icon, jerking the joystick.
“She doesn’t want me to move away yet.”
“Been saying that for years, hasn’t she?”
“She just needs a little more time. I’ll always be her baby.”
“Hmm.” Thurlene twitched forward on the stool as if pouncing onto the monster herself. The machine zinged as she killed the monster, then the electronic music chirped along, another assailant already advancing.
“Don’t you ever get tired of that music, Thurlene?”
“Hold on—I’ve got him, Howie, here I come—whoo-ee!” Thurlene yipped and clapped her hands, laughing, after she finished the final enemy.
Onscreen, Howie swooped around, his little tail flipping. “You saved me! I love you!” he cried.
Thurlene imitated him, delighted. “‘You saved me! I love you!’ Ain’t that cute?”
“You saved me! I love you!” Rudy muttered back. He watched Thurlene dancing in her seat, just like the ghost. “You ever hear from your boy, Thurlene?”
She turned and glanced at him, face blank like a baby deer’s. “My boy?”
“Your son. You said you had a kid, years back.”
“No. Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him since I left.”
“Well, gosh. Haven’t you gone back? Tried to talk to him?”
“My ex took him and left town right after I did. Of course, that’s according to my mom. And I haven’t talked to her since then neither.” She picked up a coin from her stack and dropped it in the machine. The music revved back up.
“Aw, come on, now, I’ve got to close,” Rudy said.
“I’m not stopping you.”
But Rudy didn’t get up and finish cleaning. He watched Thurlene, the glow of the machine turning her eyes electric. “Haven’t you ever tried to find your son?”
“How am I supposed to do that, if my ex don’t want him found?” she said, still playing.
“The police could help. Or I could. We could print flyers.”
“I’m trying to concentrate here.”
“You go all over the country anyway; you could put them up every place you go. Might as well get something out of all that moving around. Get your family back.”
Her hand slipped, and the jet of flame she was firing missed. The monster skittered forward and swallowed little Howie. Thurlene rattled the joystick, then released it with a huff. “What do you know about all that moving around? You’re never going to go anywhere.”
She turned to face Rudy, and he just looked at her. One end of his trim mustache trembled.
“Guess I’ll be out of your way,” she mumbled, grabbed her white pleather purse, and left.
Thurlene was on a Maine lumber loop and couldn’t make it to the diner for three nights. When she walked in, there was a boy behind the counter, with a thin mullet and shoulders that slanted like a collapsing tent. She had seen him here and there handling the fryer and running orders.
“Rudy in the back?” she asked, settling onto a stool.
“No’m,” he said.
“Where’s he at? He knows just how I like my fries. Hope he’s not sick?”
“Rudy’s out for good.” The boy scraped a spatula under a burger. He didn’t get the whole thing and left little bits of meat behind when he flipped it, and Thurlene could see the scrapings starting to burn.
“What do you mean, out for good?”
“He left. Said he’s moving, didn’t say where. He put me in charge just until he sells the place.”
Thurlene dug her elbows into the counter and leaned forward, shoulders tight. “Why on Earth? Well, if he hasn’t sold it, he could come back. He didn’t say where he’s going?”
“No’m.”
“Did he leave a message for me? For Thurlene?”
“No’m. He just told me he’ll take care of me till the place sells. Are you eating? I can make you a cheeseburger. Or I can make you a hamburger.” The boy stared at her with wet gray eyes.
“I’m not hungry.” Thurlene dragged herself off the stool and went to the game, but stopped. There was a slack strip of paper tape reaching from one side of the cubicle to the other, and tape over the coin slot.
“Is Howie down?” she called back to the boy.
“No’m, that’s the first thing Rudy sold off. They’re coming to collect it in the morning. He said the noise was a nuisance anyway.”
Thurlene hovered before the machine, staring very hard at it, like she was peering into a frozen lake, trying to see the fish below the surface. Then she left without a look back at the boy.
Thurlene didn’t spend long planning because she didn’t have time for options. There was just a slip of a window tonight. She parked on the edge of the truck stop lot, where she sat in the driver’s seat for hours, listening to a book on tape, hands folded across her turquoise sweatshirt, body twisted so she could prop her bare feet on the dash and poke her Bugs Bunny bobblehead with her toe. Then at three AM, she put on her Keds and chugged out of the lot, growling to full speed on the highway.
She pulled up as close to the diner as she could, angling her rig into the parking lot. Moving quickly and steadily, she got a dolly, a length of rope, and a wrench from the back of the truck, and went to the front door. She broke the glass immediately with the wrench; she’d known she’d have to. She cleared some shards with her sleeved arm and reached in and turned the lock.
She rolled the dolly in and set to work easing the machine from the wall. The only light in the diner was the alien white glow of the pastry case, where wedges of half-gone cakes and pies revolved silently. Rudy’s paper scoreboard was still tacked up, with her name written five neat times, like a chant.
Thurlene was strong, but the machine was heavy. She grunted as she pushed her shoulder into one side of the cubicle at a time, nudging it onto the dolly. She stopped and yanked the cord from the wall, panting. The edges of the cubicle bit into her hands as she gripped them, urging the whole box forward with her chest. Howie’s pure face watched her from the side of the machine.
Finally the whole base was secure. Thurlene’s armpits were hot and prickly, her upper lip wet. She tied everything down with the rope, pinning the power cord inside. The game had been pretty wedged in there, and she had to tip it up carefully on its edge and navigate the dolly toward the door. There was still a stink of burned meat in the air, and it made her think of cigarette ends on flesh.
A powerful crack—the rope gave and the whole contraption lurched, crashing into a booth—and just as quickly, Thurlene dove and shoved it back onto the dolly.
She whirled around to check the damage. The metal on that side of the cubicle had a long deep dent now, and there was a crack across the gaming screen, right where Howie’s green-limned face would glow out at her. She was shaking, she realized, and her arms felt like they were floating from her body. How did she ever push that whole machine up? It was like some instinctive strength had welled out of her, something bedded deep in her blood.
Once Thurlene tied the rope more tightly, collecting her breath, she carefully wheeled the game out, brushing the shattered glass on the floor aside with her shoe before propping the door and guiding Howie into the night. Then she thrust him up the ramp into her truck and tied him down with more ropes, all while the black night air whistled over the open road beyond. She slammed the door down, ran to the driver’s side, jumped in, and laughed out loud as she took off, tires screeching as she forced the turn.
She had him. No one was going to take Howie. He was here and hers and she had wheels and a full tank of gas and they could go anywhere, anywhere.
About maybe five, when the sunrise hadn’t started yet but was threatening, washing the whole sky a deep gray, she wondered where she was going. She couldn’t hide her cargo, couldn’t keep it in the truck where it would eat up space for the next haul of lumber or color TVs, couldn’t stash it anywhere easily. And she worried more and more about the gash across the screen. She ought to stop somewhere with power and wheel the whole thing out and plug it in, see if it would start.
But then maybe it wouldn’t.
She kept going, the silence underneath the road rumble getting heavier and heavier in the cab. She would just drive for a while. She’d never reached the end of a highway yet. As long as she didn’t stop and plug the game in, the ghost was still alive.
Sarah Archer: “I’m a Charlotte-area resident and North Carolina native. While I also write longer fiction, screenplays, and poetry, short fiction excites me as a place to experiment with characters, voices, and topics I might be intimidated to explore in a novel. The main character in this story is a female long-haul trucker in the 1980s. I am not that. But I think everyone has some experience of running from pain. This story was a finalist for this year’s Doris Betts Fiction Prize.” Online: saraharcherwrites.com, Facebook @archersarahp, Instagram: @saraharcherwrites.