The Mexican girl at the west
Texas rest stop faced New Mexico as if New Mexico was all of tomorrow’s
problems stretching before her in rust and fire. She was en route to nowhere,
standing by the vending
machines, her beat-to-hell Tercel
parked where the state troopers would not see her expired plates. My Peterbuilt
rig idled in the painted light. We were on the westbound side of I–40, close to
the ghost town of Glenrio. Texas was where the night’s long-haulers would roll
in from. She was short and round-cheeked, hair tied up in a bouquet of auburn
corkscrews, eye shadow lavender. In her line of work, it was early. In mine,
the middle of a long day.
Her youth was bent from a
scarcity of comfort. Or maybe that’s what I projected. I had this bad habit of
seeing the girls working the truck stops as victims, especially the young ones.
But I knew that if you let your guard down, you’d be left pondering how it all
went wrong so fast. She tracked me the whole time without meeting my eyes. She
had watched me step down from my cab and walk up with the missing flyer in my
hand.
“Mira, por favor.” I held up
Sarah’s picture. “Conoces? Mira aqui.” “No,” she said with a scant
glance.
I stapled the paper four cornered
to the inside of the lean-to sheltering the vending machines.
“Maybe you rest?”
She lifted her eyes the direction
of my rig.
“No rest,” I said.
I walked back to the rig and
looked up the grade to where the girl was little more than another signpost
along the road. I refrained from lecturing them, but I thought a few good
thoughts for her, for at least
enough mercy to keep her leg from
turning up in a coyote’s mouth one morning. I couldn’t remember if her toenails
were painted, or if she had any visible tattoos. Those things were important,
as they would connect her to this world again if my well-wishing didn’t hold. I
was out of flyers. Five hundred down, another five hundred to be printed. In my
cab I emailed a new master copy to an Office Depot in Albuquerque, where a
stranger would prepare Sarah again for me.
She was always ahead of me and
behind me and yet nowhere. From this rest stop and a hundred others, two pairs
of Sarah’s eyes, fourteen and eighteen, gazed unblinking onto the rivers of
interstate
traffic and the insides of
doorless bathrooms.
She rode along with the
sympathetic long-haulers and territorial state cops, lay taped down to
convenience store counters between the herbal methamphetamines and headache
powders. She crumpled
under the backseats of family
SUVs, tucked politely away on others’ vacations, then promptly forgotten,
mashed with the clay, candy, and dog-shit shoe soles of other people’s
children. The ink and toner of Sarah as she was and Sarah as she might be ran
in the sleet, baked in the sun, and withered in the rain. When the staples holding her fast gave up,
she stared into the empty sky from littered ditches, among the cellophane
discards and chucked lug nuts. I replicated and distributed, shared and asked,
scanned her
and posted her, and as always, in
the end, it was the same. I left her behind.
One of the lucky
breaks amid the compound fractures of my divorce from Miranda was the fact that
we sold the house at the height of the real estate boom. We were gifted in our
quitting. We sold,
divided, and quickly relinquished
the painful sight of one another. In less than a year, everything else
collapsed. I went through trucking school just as the safest real estate you
could own was portable.
My rig was the only six-figure
loan I carried. I went from a priest in the church of home and hearth to a
full-time nomad on eighteen wheels in under a year. If Sarah swam out
willingly, or against her
will on the back of one of these
big alligators, I would swim with them, too.
I made the
Office Depot in Albuquerque a half hour before close. I locked the rig with its
engine idling and trotted across the soft blacktop to work the stiffness out of
my legs. I was forty-two and beginning to feel it. It was easier to freeze up
as I got older. I tried to keep off the weight I’d lost. I ate a lot of canned
tuna and did pushups in parking lots and playgrounds.
A few kids slouched on ruined
Hondas. I counted three guys and two girls. I never stopped looking at boys of
that age without imagining what I’d have thought if Sarah had brought them
home.
Maybe I stuck on it because I
last saw her on the cusp of full-blown high school adolescence and never had to
get acclimated to the boys coming to the house, never had to divine their true
natures beneath
junior varsity jackets and
drugstore, body spray deodorants. It was much the same way when I went to
truck-driving school. Scrawny redneck kids without the granddaddy that owned a
fernery, poorer than the migrant workers because they didn’t even have family,
buying a case of Budweiser and shoplifting a jar of peanut butter every week to
stay alive. I knew those kids personally after so many weeks in the driving
classes, and I still couldn’t keep from looking at their axle grease nails and
thinking If Sarah had brought
one home, I
would have choked him at the door.
I smelled sage and
lavender on the desert wind before disappearing into the shrink-wrapped air of
the Office Depot. The clerk behind the print counter wouldn’t even have been a
contender. He was a smeary white stoner with dyed blond hair and tribal
tattoos, the sort who went vegan in the desert and filled up on drum circle,
his vacant head drifting with tumbleweed stories of an older cousin who went
to Burning Man.
“Picking up. Name’s Robbie.”
He scanned the shelves below the
counter.
“Flyers?” he asked. His eyes
flicked over my face. Having done this in a dozen copy centers across as many
states, I developed a story to cover for the fact that the girl on the flyer
was my stepdaughter.
“Part of the program,” I said. “Truckers
for the Lost? Ever heard of it?”
“Nah,” he said. He scanned a bar
code taped down to the counter and entered in the number of flyers.
“It’s a good organization. They
send the flyer, I post it along the way. Back and forth,” I waved my hand in
the air. His eyes tried to track it. He was anxious to close, high already.
“Mind if I post one near the
door? That okay with your manager?”
“I am the night manager. Go wild.”
I peeled a fresh color copy of my
Sarahs from the cardboard box and rubber-banded the box closed again. The kid
looked at her and made a show of scratching the black soul patch under his lip,
a kind of burner’s bad acting for careful consideration.
“You ever find one like her?” he
asked.
“What do you mean, ‘one like her’?”
“A runaway.”
“I never said she was a runaway.”
Maybe he put it together, maybe
not. I didn’t think Sarah looked at all like me.
“Well, yeah, I guess she coulda
been kidnapped. But she looks like a runner.”
“What makes you say that?” I
looked at the young version of her for something I’d missed over years, but it
was the same photo, a yearbook shot with the false blue sky-and-cloud
background.
“Takes one to know one, maybe? I
was a runner. She’s almost jumping out of that picture. Like she was thinking
about it when they took it.”
Outside, the night was not any
cooler, but had come alive with a wind. I held the box of flyers under my arm.
One of the boys I’d counted on my way in was looking at my rig. He had his back
turned to me. They looked like high school dropouts. I scanned their hands for
spray paint cans, in case they planned on tagging my trailer. The two girls and
two remaining boys idled near their cars, a few bottles poorly hidden in white
McDonald’s bags by the tires.
“Evening,” I said outside of the
kid’s striking distance. It was a well-lit lot. Not empty, but you could never
tell.
I expected him to return to his
friends, but he stood unperturbed by my presence, hanging around as though he’d
been waiting for the guided tour to start. I unlocked the cab and stepped up.
The kid craned his neck to see inside. He was wearing a no-known-color hoodie,
hands stuffed in the kangaroo pocket. His jeans slouched far below his waist.
His mouth was open enough for me to see the drunken clutch of teeth forming his
overbite.
“You can sleep in there, right?”
he asked.
“Yep.”
“I knew it,” he said, like he’d
nailed a game show question. “Hella tight.”
“Mind taking a look at something
for me?” I asked him. I wanted to see his hands.
“You one of those Jesus freaks?
Highway holy roller?”
I unbanded the box, pulled out a
flyer at arm’s length, and put the box on the stairs of the cab. He looked back
to the car where his friends watched with the girls. He leaned forward to look
at Sarah.
“Here, take it.” He took it and
bit the quick of one thumbnail.
“Hey, Tanya!” he shouted over to
the cars.
“What?”
“Come here!”
“A.J., leave that guy alone.”
“Get your skank ass over here.”
“Best watch how you talk to me,”
she shot back. “I’m not your bitch.”
She sulked over with her bagged
bottle. She was the youngest in the group, on fire to burn the brightest, the
one with the most fear of being left out. She was short, a little splay-footed
and skinny-hipped, built like a Little League t-ball player with tits.
Out-flourished orange blond hair in a midlength Japanese helmet, two different
drugstore hues. She’d taken on the boys’ mouth to cover up the fact she was
about fifteen and wearing tough
around like it was the one nice pair of jeans she owned.
“You seen this girl?” he asked
her. She drank from the bottle openly.
“No.”
One of the boys, his black hair
parted in the center and smoothed to his knobby head, loped over to where we
stood. They were all by the rig now, including the third boy, a stumpy,
muscled, pimply kid who looked like he had a religious devotion to steroids and
Big Macs. The girl with him looked Navajo. She had an unlit cigarette between her
fingers. She stood behind him and picked at the filter with her nail. The
muscle kid stepped up, and by the way he parted them, I could tell he was their
alpha dog. He had a moon face, a shiny black ponytail, and a dust-brush
mustache as fine as baby’s hair. His biceps must have seventeen inches around.
“All you truckers like crystal,
yeah?”
The kids seemed to draw together
then, an unspoken change in the flock, a less significant me standing
before a unified them. The first one, A.J., turned his back to me and
put his hand on the musclehead’s
shoulder. “This dude ain’t no
tweaker, Ali.”
“They all tweakers. Wheels ain’t
turning, he ain’t earning.” He folded his hands in front of his waist. “What do
you say, Dad?”
No one ever called me Dad. Not
even Sarah.
“You ought to be more careful,” I
said.
“Why’s that? You a cop?”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Don’t matter. I didn’t make you
no offer. Just asking if you got a substance abuse problem.”
“You’re a drug counselor, then.”
“That’s right. You gonna hate on
that, I show you how I handle my business.” He lifted the edge of his shirt,
revealing an inch of pistol stock and gothic lettering above his elastic
waistband. The Navajo
girl moved in closer to the Ali
kid and draped her arms around his shoulders. She was a little taller than he
was, no longer a young girl but not the ground-out woman she would become. Her
beauty was cutting her to pieces and she couldn’t feel a thing.
“How much?” I asked.
“How far you wanna go? Forty get
you through tonight. Sixty, you have a little extra just in case.”
I took out my wallet. Ali slit
his eyes at A.J. and fired a shaming laugh. “What I tell you. You gotta listen
to me, homes. They all tweakers. Go get his shit.”
“Skip the shit.” I picked up a stack of flyers
from the box and held the two twenties on top of the stack with my thumb. “Take
the forty, keep your shit, and hand these flyers out.”
Ali took the stack of flyers and
stuffed the twenties into his front pocket. He frowned. “Give them to your
customers, the guy who’s cooking the shit for you, anyone who might know where
girls go when they can’t be found.”
He showed Sarah’s face to the
Navajo girl on his shoulder. She looked at Sarah’s face, then to me, and unwrapped
herself from Ali. Ali considered Sarah, then threw the stack of flyers straight
up into
the air. “Fuck your flyers.”
They fluttered and caught in the
breeze of the diesel. He rested his hand on the gun stock under his shirt and
slinked off a few steps before turning back to the cars. The Navajo girl stuck
the unlit cigarette into her mouth and followed him.
“Let’s ride,” Ali shouted at A.J.
and the mouthy girl. A.J.’s jaw tensed as his only apology. He followed, but
the mouthy one didn’t. I picked up the flyers that hadn’t escaped yet. I could
hear the girl take another drink. She dropped the bottle in the bag on the
asphalt and it rolled away. I pulled a flyer from under her dirty white Keds.
“Tanya!” A.J. shouted from the
open door of his Civic. “Now!”
I looked up at Tanya, her face
smoldering where the booze had doused her fire. A.J.’s patience expired. He
slammed the door and started the engine. Bass and a razzing electronic music
Dopplered past as he sped out of the lot, chassis sparking on the asphalt.
Tanya watched him go, unperturbed
by abandonment. The truck rattled its sweet rattle and a downdraft brought the
warm exhaust across my neck.
“You think you know what you’re
doing, hanging around guys like that.”
“You don’t know me.”
“No. But I recognize you. You
think you’re invincible.”
She scoffed. “No I don’t.”
“You want to end up on one of
these flyers?”
“Depends.” She was so full of
herself.
“It depends?”
“Depends on what got her on the flyer.”
“It’s a missing flyer,” I shook
it at her. “What do you think got her on the flyer? She disappeared. No one can
find her.”
She took the smeared flyer from
my hand and looked at Sarah’s face.
“Alls I’m saying is, how do you
know where she is now ain’t better than where she’s from?”
The lights in Office Depot
darkened.
“Is that really what you think
when you see a girl’s face on a missing flyer? It’s a sign of her good luck?”
“Maybe she got something better
and kept it to herself.”
I could see the shadow of the
Office Depot stoner behind the big windows. He pushed the automatic doors open
with his bony arms, stepped outside, then closed them and locked up.
“You don’t think that hanging out
with drug dealer assholes and talking to strangers in parking lots at night is
a more likely reason to end up on a flyer?”
She returned a look of
impenetrable indifference.
“Sweetie, if it’s such a good
idea, why don’t you climb up in that cab and hit the road with me?”
She looked at the twilight
interior of the cab and smirked. “You don’t seem like you’re going somewhere
better.”
I stepped closer to her, into the
radius of her candy perfume and Kool-Aid booze. She stood her ground, may have
even leaned in a little. I lowered my words on her head.
“You know who the biggest serial
killers in this country are? Longhaul truckers.”
She raised Sarah’s flyer between
us and pulled it tight against her face like a mask, her features distorting
the twin photos. She twitched her head left and right with each mocking word.
“You’re. So. Scary.”
I surprised her when I ripped the
paper from her hands. But she was fast, and she decked me with a closed fist
before I could step back. She threw a right cross like she learned from older
brothers.
The blow caught me across the
cheekbone, glancing over the bridge of my nose. My eyes stung. I caught myself
before slapping her back, which was a good thing for a lot of reasons, the
first of which was the
night manager, jogging toward us
across the empty lot.
“Hey!” he shouted.
“You like that, you fucking
psycho?” she spit.
“Go home!” I shouted at her. “Go!”
She reached down and picked up
her bottle from the ground. I backed away and she pitched it into the side of
the rig, where it shattered in the bag and rained on the ground. I scooped the
box of flyers into the cab. They sloshed onto the floor.
“Think I can’t protect myself?
Fuck you!”
I slammed the door to the cab,
but I could hear her outside.
“You go home! Run! You ain’t
never going to find that girl! That’s a curse on you, motherfucker! Never in
your fuckin’ life!”
I ground the gears bad, my eyes
watering, my heart unused to the adrenaline. I heard something solid hit the
side mirror of the rig and the glass fell out in a funhouse spider web. I
gripped the suicide knob and hammered the gas, the cab bucking over its air
shocks. The rig heaved away in a large arc, tilting from the girl still
screaming profanities and the jabberwocky night manager by her side. The big diesel
roared. I felt the load shift and the trailer start to get light on me. Horns
lit up. I bounced across two lanes, let off, and tucked it in just before
pulling head-on into oncoming traffic. Four hundred copies of Sarah sloshed
around me.
At 4 a.m., I parked in a rest area
near Barstow. Getting socked in the face by a teenage girl was about as good as
crystal for keeping you up all night. I replayed the image of her with Sarah’s
flyer pulled to her face. There was no sleep in the air, just the absence of
any image in the busted side mirror, which was doubly disorienting when you expected
to see your own exhausted face.
I watched a lot lizard climb out
of a sleeper cab down the line of rigs, a midriff jean jacket flung fast over
her shoulders. Her red hair was perm-fried and cab-tussled. She scanned the lot
self-consciously, looking for the twilight cockpit of a state trooper, gentlest
of her natural predators. The rig she climbed out of kicked on the low beams and
lurched into gear. The guy got his rocks off and had to start turning those
wheels.
I blipped through the dead
channels on the CB radio until I heard a guy singing a spiritual in a strong,
low voice. The last note carried and died. There was a long emptiness, and then
someone squawked back “Amen, brother,” and then it was silent again and stayed
that way. Nobody looking for conversation in the holy predawn hour.
It was about this time of night
Sarah disappeared. No more talking. That’s what the abandoned phone had meant.
She was like a satellite that had just broken orbit, momentum carrying her
deeper into the void with each passing minute.
Six years on and I often woke at
this hour, unable to sleep. The stars would be over soon. Idleness was no good
when you were solving for peace in the long division of estrangement. I squared
up Sarah’s flyers and peeled one off the top of the stack. With my staple gun hooked
in my belt loop, I stepped down from the cab.
In the men’s room, the tireless
war between vandals and the manufacturers of automatic hand dryers continued.
On the women’s side of the building, I could hear the hooker gargling, brushing
her teeth.
Time passed in the click and
running intervals of the water conservation faucets. My cheek was swollen. I
had a scrape on my nose where the girl’s ragged, bitten fingernail grazed me.
On the narrow grass island by the
bathrooms was a hutch protecting a faded
map behind a scratched up Plexiglas panel. On the map, the roads and landmarks
were redacted by hieroglyphics of paint pen.
It was the legend for the
underworld beneath the trucker’s atlas. I found a clear spot on the side of the
hutch, facing east. The sky was lighter by degrees, dawn coming. I stapled
Sarah’s flyer looking at the
miles I’d covered. The sun would
fade her fast, but it would be a good view while it lasted.
The hooker bought a Coke and a
pack of peanut butter crackers from the vending machines. She perched on top of
a picnic table with a passing glance my way. I flattened out a rumpled dollar
bill and fed it to the machine. The machine rejected it. I fed it again; again rejected.
I worked the bill on the side of the machine in two hands, ironing out the
wrinkles, but the bill ended up wet from the dew. The machine scorned it a
third time.
The hooker walked over and
reached around me to feed four quarters into the change slot. She pulled the
tongue of my damp dollar from the machine and pocketed it. She returned to her
breakfast.
“Thanks,” I called after her.
She raised her hand in my
direction. A gesture between you’re welcome and be quiet.
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any suggestion on my side