You hear a lot of stories when you work in a truck shop. Sometimes it's your fellow mechanics. They talk about that idiot driver who rolled in with half his brake chambers just dangling from their airlines, or the time they started a truck that had been sitting for a while and a whole family of possums flew out from under the hood, or maybe the old guy they used to work with who could turn a four hundred horse motor up to six with nothing but fifteen minutes and a screwdriver. You also hear from the drivers themselves, usually boasts or just silly stuff they've seen on the road. Occasionally they tell spook stories: Glowing eyes on the shoulder that didn't look like they belonged to any animal, hitchhikers that disappeared from the passenger seat, weird lights in the sky. Silly stuff for the most part, tall tales told with a wink and a chuckle. With, of course, the one exception that I'm here writing about, and that exception was told to me by a trucker we'll call Jim.
Jim brought his truck into the shop on a Tuesday morning in the middle of November. I'd never met him before, but he'd been coming to our shop for a while since before I was hired. Some other guys at work said he was a good man, though he always seemed to be down. They figured he'd lost a wife or child, and didn't press him about it. His truck was a red and white International Eagle, CAT-powered, and he brought it in because it was starting hard and losing power. A couple new air and fuel filters later, and the rig was back in shape.
Jim'd shown up pretty early, and since it hadn't taken me that long to get everything squared away, it was about time for my break. Jim didn't seem to be leaving right that second, so I stayed out in the shop to make conversation. You don't see too many of those 9300 Eagles, so I asked him if he liked his truck.
"Oh, it's a nice rig," he said. "'S'got a real nice cab, engine pulls hard, and it doesn't spend an unreasonable amount of time in the shop. Not my favorite truck I've ever driven, but not the worst by a long shot."
"Which one was your favorite?" I replied.
Jim thought a moment and said, "That was my old Superliner, the truck I had before I picked up this Eagle. Now that was a rig. I ordered it brand-new from the Mack dealer, with the 450-horse V8, the Maxitorque 12-speed, and Mack bogie rears. The old style, back when they still made them. Man, I loved that truck, from the first time I drove it, until..." A pained, almost haggard look clouded his face as he cut off. "...until I, ah, didn't have it anymore."
I assumed he'd been in a wreck bad enough to destroy the truck, and stayed quiet, not wanting to bring up any more bad memories than I already had. Jim, however, continued talking. He stared at the floor, talking so quietly I think he was only half speaking to me. "I always think about how I lost that truck this time of year. No matter what I do to forget, it's always with me, you know, the knowledge that that thing is still out there. It's too strong to die. I could tell that even only seeing it for a second." His head snapped up, all of a sudden, and he looked at me. The look on his face was like nothing I've seen. It was almost the same expression a sick or hurt animal has, a look of painful bewilderment that says, "Why me?" He didn't say anything, but there was a silent question on that face. Filled with anxious curiosity, I tentatively nodded for him to continue. At that, he began to tell his story, and I'll relate it here, as clearly as I can.
None of it would have happened if it hadn't been for my cousin wrecking his Harley. He drove truck too, and the job was supposed to have been his. I didn't hear about it until he called me from his room at the hospital, where he was staying after skidding his Electra-Glide off the side of a mountain road and down a 200-foot rocky slope. He'd broke an arm, his foot, and a couple of ribs, and he called me from his bed. "Jim," he said as soon as I picked up the phone, "have I ever got some news for you." He told me he'd been contacted by a firm out of Yonkers, New York to haul a single load cross-country to the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. They'd only wanted owner-operators, and they hadn't even bother to post ads, simply calling those whom they thought suited them. They called themselves Fordham-North Organized Research and Development, and my cousin's questions about why he'd never heard of them were quickly silenced when they told him what they'd be paying him, and then sent a full third of that impressive sum to him up front. Fordham told him that they were providing everything but the truck and driver, and all he'd need to do was show up at their loading dock, hook up to their trailer, and drive it out to their "New Mexico office," a location so remote its address was a mile marker on some barely-used state route.
My cousin'd managed to get this much out of the tight-lipped people at Fordham when he crashed his bike. It was only a week before he was scheduled to show up at their office, and (he said to me over the phone) he'd called them not only to report his inability to run their load, but also that he knew someone who could, that "someone" being me. And, to top it all off, he said that Fordham had agreed to hire me in his place, and that I'd be getting a call very soon.
Indeed, I only had to wait until the next day to get the call. "I am calling from Fordham-North Research and Development," the voice on the other end of the phone said after I'd identified myself. "We have a trucking job to offer you." The voice was deep and garbled such that I could barely understand it through the scratchy connection.
"Is this the same one you offered to my cousin"- Here I said his name- "a few weeks ago?"
