My dad, he's a long-haul truck driver. Why? Well, because his dad was one. And grandpa was one because...well...his dad, my great-grandfather was one. Ah hell, I bet if you were to go back another generation you would find one of us hauling freight with a wagon and horses.
Want to hazard a guess what I've spent the last few months in training for?
Oh my name is Brace, by the way. Brace Pennington.
At first I was at a truck driving school, a standard Class A-CDL training course, paid for with seventeen years of saved-up birthday money. As soon as I had my CDL in hand, I was into the cab with my dad. I went on two month-long trips with him, and he got me started on what he called my "real" training. This included the bare-bones of how to drive a rig into the most insane places imaginable, big cities with streets laid out for horse and buggy traffic, what to do and what not to do, and all-the-more-important, when not to do something. All the while trying to move eighty thousand pounds worth of truck and trailer down a crowded road barely big enough to fit a pair of VW Rabbits.
Of course, this wasn't my first time behind the wheel of Dad's truck. Nope, he had been teaching me how to drive it before I ever drove a car. This was just the first time it was completely legal for me to have that huge wheel in my hands.
I guess every young boy gets the idea of driving a tractor-trailer at some point in his life. Hell, I grew up watching Smokey and the Bandit, Convoy, and BJ and the Bear when other kids were watching cartoons. My Hot Wheels were always trucks. I was talking fluently on a CB before I was ten. I knew every single bit of trucker talk there was before I hit puberty.
Hell, my first crushes were on Stacks and Sally Fields.
There was diesel fuel in my blood, and gear grease under my nails. I grew up playing on Dad's trailer the way other kids did on jungle gyms. Most of my childhood was spent in, on, or near a diesel truck. Lord, even my first sexual experience happened in one!
Oh, my god, if Dad knew that I had lost my virginity to a "lot lizard" in his sleeper at a truck stop in Texas...killing me would be just the beginning of what he would do to me!
When I was younger, my dad was gone a lot, off on a run somewhere, so it would be just Mom and me. We also moved a lot back then. While he was out of town, Dad would get a job offer from another trucking company for much better money. We must have crisscrossed the country twice before I was in my mid-teens. There weren't a lot of longtime friends for any of us. Mom used to joke that we were Gypsies.
I guess the first permanency in my life came around my fourteenth birthday. Mom told Dad she'd had enough and wanted a place where she could put a nail in the wall without having to worry about losing a security deposit. Well, Dad wanted land. He had some half-formed plan to be a farmer when he retired, something about a vineyard, or maybe an apple orchard. Like he wouldn't go stir crazy in a month! Anyway, he and Mom looked around with no luck till he had a chance to chat, with Drake, an old friend of his, over dinner. At a truck stop of course,
Now, I had never seen Drake or his wife, but I had talked to both of them many times over the CB. So when Dad came pulling in and told my mom to start packing up, that he had found the perfect place...across the street from Drake and Marion, a woman I knew only as "The Ice Queen," I was both hopeful and overpoweringly nervous. I mean you talk to someone for years and then you get to see them, it's kinda weird. Nice but weird. And to know that you were about to be living across the street from them made it even stranger.
But Dad was adamant, Mom liked the idea and I was not really consulted about my nervous concerns.
You know one of the awesome things about a truck driver family? Getting a truck to move your stuff is no problem. Having enough stuff to fill that truck so that it doesn't feel echoingly empty, yeah. That can be an issue.
So we moved, and I saw our new neighbors, who were old friends, for the first time. And fell head-over-heels in love with Marion. She had waist-length black-till-it-looked-blue hair. There was a white blaze by her left ear that sent a single lock of white back through that dark mane. It gave her this almost fake-looking Cruella DeVille colored braid that she wore often around her neck, almost like a necklace. But the body on this woman, damn! She was all curves, hills and valleys. And she smelled like honeysuckle and...Oh, I was "crushing" on her bad!
Looking back, I think everyone knew it. Color me embarrassed.
Anyway, we bought the land, and sank a ton of money into a house built just the way Mom and Dad wanted it. Again I was not consulted. Before the place was half-done, Dad had to hit the road to go earn back what had been spent. Leaving my mom and me pretty much alone. With a million things to get done and a half million decisions to still be made.
Drake and Marion were gone almost as much as Dad was. They drove the long, northern runs, working as a driving team. Up through British Columbia, Canada, through Alaska. They drove the Yukon roads where you spend more time seeing moose and buffalo than other cars. Hell, they even did the ice road hauls sometimes, which Dad called "insane in the brain" truck driving.
A couple of years rolled around with all the mercurial slowness for a teenager stuck in high school. Summers were always fun. One of the things Mom insisted on had been a swimming pool, and in the summer, I all but lived in that thing. When everyone was in town, weekends and vacations, that pool and the surrounding patio were the highlight of my life. Why? Barbecues, pool parties what's not to like? Why...?
Because Marion came over in a bikini.
Yeah, I didn't really get over that crush, and seeing her in nothing but three wet pieces of cloth and a few strings did nothing to make it go away. Reinforced it like steel-belting in tires...yeah that would be closer to the truth.
Anyway, I hit eighteen went and got my interstate CDL license. Picked up a part time job at a local furniture store driving their delivery truck, something I thought gave me invaluable driving knowledge, but that my dad told me wasn't worth "a bean fart in a whirlwind" when it came to driving cross-country long-haul. Yeah, my dad and his euphemisms. There were so many times when I wanted to kick him in his...greatest-truck-driver-to-ever-live ego.
Then I would think about going ahead and moving out, getting me my own little apartment, (probably a really good idea), and I would always come back to the fact that Mom would be here all alone. My twenty-first birthday was going to bring that empty house about anyway, so why rush it? I would soon be living out the sleeper of a truck just like dad, and his dad, and so on and so on.
So, a couple of years went by, I hit my twenty first birthday and got my class A. Got dragged across country by my dad for four months, with him telling me stuff I already knew, only to be told by his boss when we got back home that he had changed his mind.
Their company's insurance would not cover a driver under the age of twenty three, no matter how much trucking knowledge he had. Oh, they would hire me on, oh sure...but only for intrastate runs. Drive here, pick up this, take it there, come back, sleep in your own bed every night, but get paid half what they pay their long-haul drivers.
Did I want the job?
I told him to "let me think about it for a bit." I so badly wanted to add "Let's say...for oh, about two years, you know, the amount of time you've been stringing me along that just as soon as I got a Class A CDL and was twenty one, I would be hired on and I would start driving around the country."
He said he "understood."
Then the Christmas season passed, and the furniture company laid me off. Oh, I could still deliver part-time if they had enough orders for a week to justify calling me in, but they just didn't need me on full-time till next November. And there I was, twenty-one years old, going to have to take a job I didn't really want just because I was two years too young to do what I wanted. A job I would be hard-pressed to get back out of two years from now.
Dad, when he was home, put pressure on me to take it. Mom said she understood my hesitation, but that I needed to make a decision. Even if it turned out to be the wrong decision.
That was when Drake got hurt.
I should probably tell you what Drake looks like. Look up "Snow Flake," the only albino male silverback Gorilla. Now, dress him in red flannel, give him tattooed arms and have him chewing on a big, never-lit cigar. That's Drake.
Anyway, Drake got hurt. It was early February, and they were up in the backside of nowhere Canada when their load shifted. Drake had been walking around tightening chains on his flatbed, when he slipped on a patch of icy side-rail. He fell off the trailer, landed wrong, broke his arm in three places and dislocated that same shoulder. The fall also bruised several ribs on that same side.
Marion got him into the sleeper of their truck, and drove through the night, in blizzard-like conditions, to get him to a doctor. Drake, the ornery cuss that he is, didn't stay at the hospital for long before he was getting everyone's blood pressure up. Since his injuries were only broken bones, they cast him up, and stuck him on a plane. When we got the phone call that they were coming in, Mom and I took our van over to the airport to meet them.
It took me and an orderly to help Drake into the van, and then I somehow managed to get him into his house by myself, with him cussing Mother Nature's frozen ass for making him slip on ice the whole way. When the pain-killers took effect, Marion came over to our house and sat in the kitchen sipping coffee, talking to Mom and me.
"I have to fly back up in the morning. After I get the rig home, we'll be okay for a bit till he can get to driving again. Maybe I'll do some short local runs to make ends meet, but we will be okay."
"How long will it take for you to get it back?" asked Mom. She had agreed to watch over Drake till Marion got home.
"Hard to say. I've still got to deliver the load that's on it, unload, and then get my return load. Also I've never driven it without him and me taking it in turns. It's more than three days straight-driving just to get it here, given the weather. I'll be having to stop and sleep, of course. If DOT checks my log book, I would be screwed if I didn't."
"If Tom was here, he could fly up with you and help you drive it back. Can you wait?" Mom asked, as she refilled Marion's cup. I held mine up as well, but she ignored me and carried the pot back to the maker. I sighed and got to my feet to get me some.
"When is he coming back in?" Marion asked, blowing across the top of her cup.
Mom had to shake her head, not knowing. I knew it would be awhile; Dad had just left right before we got the call from Alaska about Drake being hurt.
