It starts a year before the hurricanes with me driving twelve-hundred 5-gallon cans of Chinese paint from the Port of Los Angeles to New Orleans, which also being a port makes me suspect that something about the deal is off, that maybe there was somebody who could be fixed in L.A. and nobody convenient in New Orleans. I am partial to conspiracy thinking and probably too paranoid to be driving a highway rig, not that I can sell the rig and pick up another job that pays this well; times are hard for the working woman.
So what's in the cans? Am I going to blow somewhere East of Barstow? Or am I just hauling a load of innocent drugs to the Big Easy? I feel like I'm in the first line at someone's
funeral and I have to go to the graveside with the body and not get to cut away with his spirit in the second line to go with the music and the partying.
I'm driving an ancient Kenworth cab-over whose big virtues are I own it, I operate it, it's paid for and you can still buy parts. The road is clean and hard. Bad weather is asleep on the other side of the mountains and I've got Maggie Lee Cochrane riding shotgun, eating chocolate bars and talking like a radio.
She's up to where she worked for a big store in Dallas taking on the toughest complainers and utterly insane customers.
"Damn hard," I say.
She laughs. "Honey, I hooked for ten long years. I tell you, you do learn to handle the hardest."
Her laugh is like road noise, low and rumbling. It's a mellow lady laugh, made deeper by cigarettes and beer. She's adequately pretty, no makeup, skin more sun-wrinkled than aged; there's nothing of the successful hooker about her except long red nails and store-bought teeth.
We're running on the desert now, trying to get to Phoenix before it gets too hot. I've done this run before, though not with Chinese paint; when you're an owner-operator you take your rig anyplace there's a haul to be made. My license says I live in the Big Easy, but I may sleep that bed a month a year. Mostly I'm in the bunk behind me, crosswise in the cab.
Maggie Lee worked the truck stops and no place else. "Plain good folks, mostly," she said. "And they bring their own beds."
The trouble with the interstates is that they're so damn dull to drive, the straight ones where the surveyor used a rifle to lay them out. Road builders and river channelers just love everything to be straight. They've been kicking the Mississippi straight through concrete banks lonqer than I remember, but New Orleans is built on a swamp and the river has a memory too.
What Maggie Lee got out of ten years of trucker hooking was her own rig and being able to drive it. Not that she actually bought the rig; she more or less inherited it.
"Bobby drank his kidneys down to the size of peas -and then he couldn't." Maggie Lee laughs the road laugh. "He was a good old boy. Didn't treat me bad. Took me with him the last six months and taught me to drive."
"You miss him?"
"Don't. Did. He could be a stubborn sonovabitch. "
"You grieve him long?"
"The full year."
That surprises me. "When my mother died, they told me six weeks, then get over it."
Maggie Lee shakes her head. "That's plain stupid. You live one year cycles so you gotta go through every time and day you shared once before you're done."
