No Doors, No Windows

Fifteen: The Man on the Juice Wagon

He took the hairpin curve at sixty-five, and the big truck-and-cab reeled drunkenly toward the edge of the road, toward the dark lip that pouted above nothingness. He pumped the air brakes and the rig squealed like a whale with a harpoon in its blowhole. Two baby-fat tires left the road and pawed air for a moment, then fell back, and the dynamite truck was around the bend. On the left, the rock wall of a nameless North Carolina hill rose up to an invisible peak, lost in darkness. To the right, unfenced, unprotected, the road fell off in a sheer drop, three hundred and eighty feet to the valley below; to tarpaper shacks huddled in cold and poverty. And on that thin strip of tarmac, room for two cars to pass ever so carefully (and one truck to pray no one was coming up, while it was coming down), Harry Fischer hunched over the big steering wheel, eyes squinting into the night, half-smoked butt wedged in a corner of his mouth, sweat chilling his neck and back …

Behind him in the truck section, the cases of nitro were murmuring in their gelatin straitjackets, and a harsh word would convince them they should forget their manners.

Beside him in the cab, the half-naked girl huddled against the other door, her gold-flecked eyes wide with terror, the whip scars still welling blood across her back, and her mouth open, dragging in air raggedly.

Back of him, and closing fast on the treacherous, twisting mountain road, was a caravan of four cars, holding a small army of pistoleros stinking of hate who didn’t give a damn how he went down the hole: in flames, over the edge of the road, like a shooting star … or from a shotgun blast that would turn him into one hundred and eighty pounds of dogmeat. It was all the same to them.

“Look out!” the girl shrieked, and Harry realized his eyes had been locked in road hypnosis, that the tarmac was twirling off to the left again. He walked the wheel between his hands, fast, and the truck careened around the bend, punched holes in the darkness with the beams of its two big heads, and roared away down a short slope. He flicked his eyes up without moving his head, and caught sight of the four pairs of lights behind him, in the rear-view; two single sets, and two sets of doubles, brights; bounding around the bend and down the slope in charge pursuit; they were gaining on him.

“Oh, yeahhh …” He drew the words out in whispered undertones, ruefully. “Are you ready for them!” He stomped the accelerator and the big rig cleared its throat, dug in at the tarmac and pulled away. He felt pain at his lips, and ripped the roach of the cigarette out of his mouth. He dropped it and ground it against the rubber floormat.

“We’ll die! We’re never going to make it!” The girl was babbling. Harry didn’t even look over. If he’d been where she was, with some crazy asshole driving the way he was, he’d have been puking already.

There had to be a pull-off along the way … there had to be, or he wasn’t going to be hauling much freight in the future. His mouth was dry, now that the cigarette was gone, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it; he couldn’t spare the effort or thought to light a fresh one; nor was there anything he could do about the four carloads of clowns behind him. The rear-view mirror sparkled and he tossed a glance into it. They were still back there, and coming in faster, it seemed. Harry’s foot refused to go any farther to the floor; more speed would be like taking an enema with a thermite bomb. Like spreading himself out across half a mile of scenic North Carolina like peanut butter; like an uncomplicated suicide. And Harry was convinced he still had a couple of good hours left in him.

“Reach into my shirt pocket,” he said to the girl. “Light me a cigarette.”

His tone frightened her, on an entirely different level than the gut-wrenching fear of the men behind them, the road over which they hurtled, the death all around them. He was an ominous, cruel figure, beside her in the cab, his craggy features limned by the dash lights. She reached across his barrel chest and fingered the crumpled pack of cigarettes out of the pocket. “Matches on the seat somewhere,” he said, in a matter-of-fact way, screaming around a curve, missing the rock wall by inches.

She found them, lit the cigarette, coughed twice at their acrid brittle taste, and put it between his lips. “The pack,” he said. “Put it back where you got it, please.” She was amazed at his surface calm, but reached across once more, put the crumpled pack into his shirt pocket.

He drew deeply, threw smoke against the windshield, and made his decision. “When I stop, I want you out that door and down the road as fast as you can go. Do you understand?”

She looked at him with renewed fear. “I don’t have any shoes.”

His tone became softer, coping with the crazily appropriate remark as if it made sense, rather than as an indication of her nervousness. “That’s all right, the road is smooth, and it won’t be too far. Just try to get around a bend or under cover if you can. There might be an explosion.” Her eyes grew wide.

“But —”

“Do you understand?” he asked again, tightly. His patience was running thin. “Yes or no?” She nodded yes, but he was watching the road; he asked her again, and she answered with the one syllable, softly, timorously.

“Okay then,” he said, “open your door now. Don’t let it fly open, just slip the latch. Hold it ready to jump when I tell you.” He caught sight of the four cars pulling in like hunting falcons, above him in the rear view, behind him in the all-too-real world.

He took an S-curve right, then left, then right again, and for several beats was out of sight of the pursuers. The wheel seemed to flow like licorice in his hands as he slewed the rig sidewise, and amid the banshee-shriek of air brakes and peeling rubber, he jackknifed the cab left, right, left again, and wedged it between the rock-wall and the end-on bulk of the truck that lay across the road, its right rear wheels on the lip of the precipice. He had effectively blocked the road by turning the rig into an L-shaped barricade. “ Now jump! ” he howled at her, shoving her against the open door as hard as he could.

The girl tumbled out of the cab, hit the ground, rolled like a jellybean, and came up with slim legs pistoning, flashing white as her torn dress flapped about her thighs. She was running running and down the road … the sound of heavy boots running behind her, and she tossed a quick glance around; it was Harry Fischer, broken-field sprinting as though time was running out. They gained the safety of a bend, and Harry caught up with her.

“Here, take my hand!” He started climbing the raggedy face of the rock-wall. They were more than fifty feet up, moving like mountain goats, quickly, effortlessly on the ledged rock-wall, when they saw the lights of the first car slithering around the bend. They could not see what happened, but there was a squeal of brakes, a sound of something tearing, and then the car smashed full into the rig. There was an electric moment of waiting, and then the second car hit, the third, the fourth, and then came the explosion. It caught the night and tore it up the middle viciously. The sound was incredible, like a thousand rifles going off inside the semicircular canal of the ear. A whanging, metallic report that ratcheted back and forth through the mountains, building, building, phasing itself up like a dynamo gaining momentum. Harry threw himself across the girl as they hung there on the rock wall and the girl clapped her hands against her ears, a scream tearing from her mouth. The explosion seemed to go on forever, and then bits of metal and rock and dirt and foliage and — other things, cascaded down on them.

Harry started to move, flattening himself protectively against the girl, when something huge and black and heavy came down out of the night sky and clipped him solidly across the top of his skull. He sagged without a sound, and started to slip away. The girl grabbed for him, they lost their footing and tumbled in a welter of rock and dirt down the rock wall. He hit first and lay crumpled, and an instant later she crashed down on top of him. She tried to rise, the debris continued to pelt them, and she was caught by a bit of tree stump that took her high above the right eye; and with a tiny murmur of pain she sagged across Harry Fischer’s body.

They lay there, unmoving, while the faraway hills echoed the dying gasps of the explosion, farther and farther away, till only the stars shied back and hid from the sound.

When he swam up through the ebony pain. Harry knew he was where he was, but superimposed over the watery image of the returning scene around him was another scene, not too far back in the past. He had been coming through the mountains, had stopped in the little town for a cup of joe, a couple of sinkers and a goofball to keep him awake the rest of the run to the excavations. There had been a carnival in the town. One of those balk-line jobs with a freak tent and half a dozen rube games rigged to pay once in ten thousand tries, a couple of animals, maybe a geek, a cotton candy bowl, and a nautch tent with half a dozen worn-over hags.

Harry had wandered down the midway and bought a suety hot dog, and a twist-cup of pink lemonade that tasted as though a boar had urinated in it. As he had come to the darker end of the midway he had heard the scream, and the girl pleading not to be hit again. Then the crack of a whip — that sound unlike any other sound in the world, when thong leather strikes flesh and draws blood — and another scream.

He had dropped the wienie and the pee-juice, and plunged into the darkness at the end of the midway. Behind the road trucks used to haul canvas and booths, there had been a dozen men in white sheet hoods, and one of them was beating the crap out of a blonde, her dress ripped in half a dozen places, and the whip lash-marks already thick and dark across her back and breasts. The man with the whip yelled “Whore!” and pulled his arm back to let her have it again.

Harry had barely realized what he was doing. A sharp remembered image of his mother being struck across the face by his father when he had been a child — it came and went — and he was on his way already. He hadn’t even thought of the ridiculous odds. A dozen big men who could tear his arms from their sockets and shillelagh him to death with the bloody ends.

He had caught the leader low in the back, like a pile-driver, and the man shot forward into the crowd like a cannonball. The whip had flown from his hand, and Harry quickly retrieved it. “Back, you buncha bastards!” he screamed shrilly, and cracked the whip around his head like a cowboy. They had fallen back, the circle of pain he created with the whip keeping them at bay. He grabbed the girl under one arm and started dragging her away.

They were moving in and he flicked the whip toward their faces with vicious determination. They had fallen back, and in one quick movement he picked the slight girl up in his arms and ran like a madman. He gained the cab of the truck just as they burst out from between the carny tents, and in a second he was inside, the doors locked, and the motor kicking.

The mob had grown by two or three men, unmasked, and one of them had a shotgun. He leveled it, ready to blow a hole through the cab, but one of the others had pointed in panic to the legend on the door of Harry’s cab: DANGER DYNAMITE EXPLOSIVES DANGER and the shotgun had gone down off point fast. Then Harry had kicked the heap, and gunned it forward. The big hulk had jumped as though goosed, and the hooded men had leaped out of the way.

A turn out into the town, a short run to the highway, and then out, climbing. And then the headlights behind him. The death-chase, the jackknifed rig, climbing the rock wall with the girl, the explosion and he had Had It. . . .

The scene flashed in an instant, re-told everything, and he came back to consciousness lying at the side of the road with the girl on top of him. His head ached as though someone had steam-driven a tenpenny spike in behind each eye, with a third shard of steel into his medulla oblongata, just for a fail-safe. He groaned, and the girl squirmed on his body. It was a disconcerting combination of feelings. The pain, and the pleasure.

Harry slid out from under her.

He staggered around the roadway for a few moments, trying to convince his synaptic relays they weren’t sending out orders for spaghetti. When he had mastered the trick of walking without falling down, he went back to the girl, and lifted her by the waist. She sat up, groaned in a fine alto, and opened her eyes blearily.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Some of them may have made it through little Hiroshima down the road.”

He helped her to her feet, and supported her as they stumbled down the road. They did not talk for quite a while, until she seemed able to carry her own weight, and then they moved at a regular pace, casting weary, threadbare smiles at each other from time to time. Harry was impressed with the girl’s recovery, and the uncomplaining way she jogged along beside him.

When they reached the bottom of the steep incline, they found a fire-gutted shack, and part of a barn. There was hay in the barn, and they climbed into it, burrowing deeply inside, at the back of the mow, and Harry kept an eye out for travelers down the road.

“Who the hell were those men?”

“The local enforcers. They were kicked out of the Klan ten years ago for unnecessary brutality, or something, and they’ve been surly ever since.”

Harry grinned. She was all right. “That’s a very funny line. How true is it?”

“Every word.”

“So who was the big stud with the whip? He didn’t seem to like you very much.”

She tried to adjust the ripped bodice of her dress, but it only exposed more flesh, and Harry caught a brief flash of dark aureole and pink nipple before she covered herself with a dirt-smeared hand. “That was my father. He has a tendency toward crankiness.”

“What does he do for entertainment, let babies play with plastic clothing bags?”

She grinned youthfully. “He was angry at me.”

“For what?”

“For wanting to run away. I hired on at the carnival, in the girl tent; to try and get out of town. I was desperate; I’d have tried anything.”

“What’s wrong with the bus?”

“Daddy runs the town. He has a fellow, Routener; he does dirty things for him. Routener would have stopped me, sent me back into town. I tried everything: bus, train, even hitching a ride on the highway. They always brought me back. I figured if I could slip out of town with the carnival, I might make it.”

Harry scratched at his stubbled jaw. “You must be a pretty popular girl, them wanting to keep you handy like that.”

She snapped out a sweet, deadly laugh. “Popular! Ha, that’s a good one. They’d like me dead, but Daddy won’t let them do it; he says I look too much like my mother to put me in cement and sink me in the lake.” She paused, and a cloud passed across her expression. “I don’t know why my looking like mother should keep the dirty bastard from killing me … he drove mother to her grave.”

She pulled her full mouth tight, and Harry noted that she had dimples. “And besides, I know too much,” she said. “He knows all I have to do is get out of town, and I’ll tell everyone about why the new hospital collapsed. He stole close to eighty thousand dollars from that job!”

“Your father’s a big man in construction, I gather.” A horrible realization was dawning on him.

She nodded. “Everything from the new school library to the mine excavations about ten miles from here.”

“Bingo,” he said, and lay back in the hay, wishing he had taken a nice quiet job tending cobras. “I was hauling that juice to the excavations for him.”

“Oh,” she said softly, looking at Harry with fear.

“Bonded driver,” Harry reassured her. “No connection with your old man’s outfit.” He lay back for a long time in silence.

“I’ll fuck you if you’ll get me out of town,” she said, and removed her hand from her breast. Harry closed his eyes very slowly, then opened them, and what he had seen was still there, breathing heavily at him. Oh boy , he thought.

“Well, that’s very nice,” he said, “but what makes you think we can get out of town without your Daddy’s group stopping us … hey!” She had her hand on his leg, and was moving it in slow circles.

“Maybe Daddy was killed in the explosion,” she said gently, moving nearer to him. “I think so, you know?”

“When that juice wagon went up,” Harry said, moving closer to her , “almost anything could have happened. I heard all four cars hit, but whether they were just piled up and the first car caught most of it, I don’t know. Or even if your old man was in the damned car, it’s simply a shuck, baby, we could be in real trubb —”

She came at him mouth first, and he caught her on the fly.

It was a long, twisting time before he got his mouth free enough to say, “You must want out of here pretty bad …”

“Very bad,” she answered, pulling up her skirt. “Daddy was whipping me because I was working the girl show after the regular show ended. That’s how bad I wanted out.”

“You mean the ‘blow-off,’ in the raw?”

She nodded, and did something interesting with her underpants. “What’s your name?” she asked him, just before their bodies ran together like lava.

After the third time, they lay in the hay, and she lit a cigarette for him. Her name was Angela; she told him to call her Angie.

“You’re going to be a problem if your old man didn’t buy it in the crash back there,” Harry said. She grinned and took a deep drag from his cigarette. He grinned in mock ferocity and yelped, “ Wowch! ” as she handed the cigarette back, and it burned his fingers.

He dropped the butt, and it disappeared in the hay, and she started giggling at him. “I think good fucking really shakes you up, doesn’t it, Harry?”

“Stop clowning!” he yelled. “This hay’s drier than hell, and that cigarette’s in there.” He started scrabbling through the debris, trying to hitch up his pants at the same time. He began throwing hay like a dog burying a bone.

“Oh Harry, don’t be such a jerk! It’ll put itself out.” She tried to drag him back down to her, just as the first wisp of smoke floated up out of the mass. An instant later a thin tongue of flame leaped past their faces.

“Run!” Harry yelled, and dragged her to her feet. They struggled hip-deep out of the hay, and by the time they had reached the open door of the ruined barn, there was a wall of thick, acrid smoke and yellow-crimson flame behind them.

They stumbled out into the weed-overgrown yard between the stump of the tarpaper shack and the furiously blazing barn. They stood there choking, trying to rub the smoke from their eyes, trying to empty their lungs of smoke.

“Good show,” Harry said resignedly, just as the first bullet cracked across the hillside, and whanged past his head, losing itself somewhere in the woods behind the burning barn. The second and third shots were wilder, far wide of the mark, but Harry got the message. His head came up and he saw the bunch clambering down the roadside toward them.

“Shoot by the light of the barn!” one of the men was shouting, and even across that great a distance, Harry could recognize the voice of the girl’s hooded Daddy. “But watch Angela! Don’t hit Angela!”

Angie’s hands went to her face in terror, as though on puppet strings, and Harry spun around in confusion. “I don’t know how they came out of it alive, but we’ve got trouble, little lady.”

He grabbed her by the wrist and turned, looking for an avenue of escape. “C’mon, the woods!” He plunged forward, dragging her along behind.

They hit the woods at a gallop, and lost themselves in the twisted shadow mass among the trees. They ran on through the twisting stands of short-leaf pines, oak, poplar and hickory trees that seemed to converge on them, mass against them, send them deeper into the murky undergrowth, blot out the sky overhead, trip them, send them sprawling.

They were on their feet again, plunging through a clump of dogwood, and suddenly, they were out on the other side. Against the night sky, now just lightening into dawn with a gray, zombie-flesh paleness, they could see the huge grotesque bulk of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

They were in a field of ripe tobacco.

“Run, for chrissakes!” Harry gasped. They ran, hurling themselves forward through the great leafy plants, the flat green fronds slapping their faces. They did not hear the chopper till it was almost overhead, and spinning down on them. “Harry!” Angie shrieked, looking up into the whirling rotors.

“Jeezus, Christ, Awmiddy!” Harry bellowed, and tried to run in another direction. The eggbeater followed his progress. They tried hiding in the tobacco, but the backwash of the rotors cleared them out like maggots from under a piece of fetid meat.

“A chopper! Where the hell did that come from?”

Harry was running as hard as he could. Angie dragged hard on the end of his hand, and her words came as gasps: “He has a … radiophone in his … car … he uses the heli, heli … cop … ter for surveying construction sites … he must … must have called it from the c-car …”

The chopper swooped at them, and they fled before it.

They were trapped.

The ’copter drove them forward, coming at them field-level high and hovering, sending them out of the tobacco, toward the road: the road that curved around the forest, that now carried the group of men in white hoods and sheets. The sheets were dirty and torn and some of the men were without cover, but when they saw Harry and the girl they yelled like rebel troops at Missionary Ridge and pounded down the road toward them.

The first one to reach Harry caught a fist high in the face. It spun him like a dervish and his legs twisted like vines. He went down in an untidy heap; and then the rest of them were on Harry. He kicked out, and swung his locked hands like a mace, but there were too many, and when they grabbed him from behind he kicked off with both feet and jacked his heavy boots into someone’s crotch. There was a scream, and a moan, and Angie yelled something obscene, and then they hit Harry very hard with something very very hard, and he sagged in their grasp. Suddenly, the dawn (that had been coming up like thunder) went out like the light when you close the refrigerator door.

And Harry was in cold storage.

Angie’s Daddy was a cartoon impression of Little Orphan Annie’s Daddy. He was a huge phallus of a man, bald and glistening, with a pair of slitted eyes that looked as though they’d been cut in the yellow papyrus of his thick face with a serrated-edge bread knife. His mouth was almost entirely lipless; and aside from the resemblances to Daddy Warbucks, Mr. Clean and Disraeli, there was a salamander air about him. Harry expected Daddy to hiss, rather than shout.

But Daddy shouted. For a long time!

“If it hadn’t of been for that goddamned fire we never woulda seen your goddamned bodies standin’ out against the light. Thought you had old Daddy, din’tcha, you goddamned snotty punk! Thought you put old goddamned Daddy down for the long count, din’tcha? Well, old Daddy got nineteen lives an’ then some, like a mass ’a cats!”

“Daddy’s got a dirty mouth,” Harry said. And received a gloveful of nickels across the back of the head for his trouble. He slumped forward in the chair, arms tied behind him to the slats. His eyes fluttered closed, open, closed again. The man with the five-fingered blackjack was a short, extremely surly, box-shaped individual named Routener. His face was oily and his hair was very curly.

Harry came up from the pit again, and stared unfocused at Daddy.

“Boy, you know what old Daddy’s gonna goddam well do for you? He’s gonna introduce you to some of the finest goddam concrete that you ever saw. He’s gonna make your acquaintance all the way from your goddam feet to your gaah dam head. And then he’s gonna have a li’l heart-to-heart and mouth-to-hand talktalk with his goddam daughter. In’t that right, Angela girl?” Angie shivered. There was such loathing in her eyes as she stood against the wall of the construction shed, that it burned from her face like the inferno the barn had become.

“Is that the sandy concrete you used on the hospital?” Harry asked. “I hear tell it’s groovy goods; how many people got buried when the building collapsed and fell into the valley?”

“Shut your goddamned mouth!”

“Better use somebody else’s concrete, Daddy. I might be able to chew my way out of your product.” The gloveful of nickels again. Wham! Across the temple. He went away for a while. When his eyes opened again, he was lying on the ground outside the shed, and Routener was standing over him, a big .45 packed in his mitt, and that oily face saying something. After a few minutes and several kicks in the ribs, he understood that Routener wanted him to get up.

“Where’s the rest of the group?” It was a toss-off question; Harry was merely glad the other hooded men were nowhere in sight. There was always a better chance of getting away without holes in untidy places if there were less cooks ready to stir the pot.

“Rggll,” said Routener.

“Thanks,” Harry answered, and moved forward as Routener shoved the .45 into his ribs, hard.

They walked toward the excavations and Harry found himself looking down into what must have been set-pits for three big buildings. The drop was easily a hundred feet, and at the bottom of all three was quagmire. It was suckmud of the worst sort. Harry had been around enough to know what Daddy was going to have to do, if he was going to build there: fill in that muck till it settled. And it looked as though they had started the fill already. With garbage. Soft sand. Rubbish.

The buildings would get erected, and then, slowly, begin to sink. If the residents were lucky they would find out in time and third-floor occupants could step out of their windows onto the surrounding ground. First- and second-floor tenants would have to take the elevators upstairs to free themselves. Harry wondered how much graft was attached to this little goodie. He didn’t wonder for very long; at that point Routener indicated the mixing trough of wet cement standing by the edge of the pit.

“Fszl,” Routener commanded Harry. He pressed the .45 even harder into Harry’s ribs.

And Harry was about to say screw it and take a chance on diving headfirst down the slope, trying to get away from the Neanderthal with the blocky .45 — when he heard the click. It was right down alongside his ribs. It was the locking mechanism in the barrel of the .45 — a mechanism that kept the pistol from firing as long as pressure was exerted against it. Harry stepped closer to Routener, swung heavily, keeping the .45 imbedded in his side, and stuck his thumb into the pistolero’s eye, as hard as he could. Routener screamed. The thumb went in. Harry dropped his shoulder, hauled back and grabbed the pistol. Then he swung hard. Holding the .45 by the barrel he caught Routener flush on the tip of his prognathous jaw. The squat bully-boy’s head flipped back like the top on a pack of cigarettes, and he did a gainer and a half off the edge of the excavation. Harry watched him go.

When Daddy turned around and saw the big mouth of the .45, his style was fine, just fine:

“How’d you like to drive for me, boy. How’d you like to make ten times what that bonding outfit paid you? You could make a goddamned fortune workin’ for me, boy, a goddamned fortune. Whaddaya say?”

“No thanks, big Daddy,” Harry said, untying Angie as he kept the .45 trained unwaveringly on the bald contractor. “You’ve got a foul mouth, and my family always brought me up to be genteel. Move!” He ushered Daddy ahead of him, with Angie bringing up the rear, rubbing her chafed wrists.

They went back around the construction shed, and Harry saw another nitro truck, a previous shipment from his company. “Get in; see if the keys are there,” he said to Angie. She climbed up, looked inside, said the ignition was empty. “Come here and hold this howitzer on your poppa.” She came to him, took the .45 and stood with legs wide apart staring down the blue-metal length of it.

“Move?” She dared him.

Daddy froze.

Harry went to the cab, opened the hood and proceeded to jump the ignition wires. He crawled behind the wheel, kicked it over, and the engine roared into life.

He was checking just how much juice had been left in the wagon when he heard the first two shots. He was out of the truck and around the side when the next three explosions ripped the air.

Daddy was bleeding profusely. It wasn’t that she was a bad shot, just sadistic. She’d shot him in the neck, both arms, both legs, and seemed ready to put one into his stomach when Harry grabbed the weapon away from her. “Give me that! What the fuck is it with you! You some kind of goddam nut-case? Jeeezus!” She started crying then. She folded against him. He helped her up into the cab of the nitro wagon.

“We’ll call a doctor for you, Daddy, first house we hit down the road,” Harry said. “Stay healthy, Daddy. See you around sometime.” He sprinted around the truck, popped behind the wheel and threw the monster into gear. He drove fast, but carefully, and the image of Daddy lying there, bleeding from every pore, was a heartwarming thought.

“Where are we going?”

“Raleigh. The capitol. I think the highway commission would like to know about Daddy’s dealings.”

“They’ll come after us. If you stop to call, they’ll come after us.”

“We’ll call.”

“Let him die, Harry. He let my mother die; let him die!”

“We’ll call.”

“They’ll come after us. They’ll catch us, there are plenty of them, all over the state. We’ll never get to Raleigh.”

“We’ll call, and we’ll get there. They’ll stay away from us in this truck. I’ve got enough juice in this wagon to turn a lot of hair prematurely gray. And they’ve had experience with my lousy driving already. Nobody’s going to make me too nervous.”

She smiled wanly and after they stopped at a roadhouse to call, the smile strengthened. They were on the highway, heading out, and Angie seemed pleased to be in the warm cab.

“Where will we go after Raleigh?” she said.

“You can go where you want, I suppose, it’s a big world.”

She was staring at him. There was a long moment of silence, then she said, “No, I asked where we would go after Raleigh?”

He stared straight ahead. Kept driving. There were no other cars on the road. “Wrong word. There’s no we . There’s you, and there’s me, and that’s two separate units.”

“Why, you sonofabitch!”

Then she started trying to slap him. Harry let her work at it for a few seconds, then punched her in the mouth. Not hard enough to put her away, but hard enough to convince her he wasn’t there for target practice.

“You’re like all the rest of them,” she said, with the nastiest tone Harry could remember having heard in years.

“How’s that, Angie? Like all the rest of the knights on white chargers who’ve saved you from Daddy and the Klan? Get off it. What the hell’s that supposed to mean: you’re like all the rest? ”

“You took what you could get back there in that barn.”

“I took what was offered. And why not? Does fucking you mean I inherit you? This isn’t the Orient, we’re not locked together forever by a bond of debt. Don’t be cute, kiddo: it didn’t mean any more to you than it did to me. You’re a big girl, and I’m a converted chauvinist pig, and this is the middle of the Seventies and we don’t owe each other anything.”

Then she tried to be sweet. “But, Harry … I want to go with you. You got me out of there, you saved my skin …”

“Call it even for the wonderful sex. But that’s it. When we get to Raleigh you go your way, and I go mine.”

“You’re too wild for that. Harry. You like the excitement.”

Harry hit the brakes. Air blew out, the rig fought the road, slowed, and Harry tooled it onto the shoulder. He let it idle in neutral as he turned to her.

“Okay, now here is what it’s really all about. Not the bullshit that’s swamping your brain, but what it’s really all about.

“My name is Harry Fischer. That’s Fischer with a ‘c’ in it; I figured I’d tell you that because you were too busy getting it on in that haystack to really catch the name; I mean, you were already trying to maneuver me into fucking you before you gave a shit who I was, except that I was a guy who could get you out of town. So the sex is about as big a debt as a hot roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and salad on the side.

“So pay attention: it’s Harry Fischer, and I’m forty years old, and I’ve got a terrific wife and three kids and I like them and they like me and the only reason I’m on this fucking suicide run lugging nitro is because it pays high-hazard and nobody else wanted the goddam job and I took it because the biopsy report came back three months ago and it says with treatment I’ve got maybe another year. Now can you piece all that together and understand that I’m not the fucking Lone Ranger, that I jumped in to ‘save’ your ass because of, hell, I’m not even sure, something I remembered from when I was a kid, and any body can be a hero once, but I’m not John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or any damn body else, I’m just a forty-year-old truck driver who’s dying of cancer and I didn’t have as much to lose as some guys so I did it! But that don’t make me Sir Lancelot, and it sure don’t make me a gay, mad adventurer ready to go streaking off across the countryside with a lady who shoots her old man as many times as she can before I grabbed the gun. Does all of that penetrate, kiddo?”

She sat staring at him for a long time.

And after that long time she said, simply, “You prick.”

Harry nodded with resignation. “Right. I’m a prick. A tired old prick, little miss. And there’s an awful lot of your Daddy in you. But at least now we’ve been properly introduced.”

And he put it in gear, moved it off the shoulder, got it up to cruising speed, and went to Raleigh.

And after he let her out on a street corner in downtown Raleigh, and after she gave him the finger as the rig moved away from the curb, Harry Fischer with a c returned the truck to the company that had bonded him, picked up his paycheck, and went home to his wife and kids.