“ 03 Captain Dave goes to Kansas”
Musical Theme; Here to Midland by Kansas
Dave pulled onto the highway, and began going up through the gears without the clutch.
“How are you doing that?”
“You match the throttle to the wheels. When you are not on compression or accelerating, either, you can slip the shift into neutral, just as if you had used the clutch. Then you let the engine slow down until it matches the speed of the wheels and you don’t need a clutch because the gears are moving at the same speed. So you just drop it into the next gear.” He checked his mirrors. “Take the shift lever, and wait for me. OK, slip out of 6th.” He let the engine down. “Now straight back into 7th.”
She pulled it into 7th. He put the power on again. “Now we get up the speed to do the same thing again. We’re going to get out of gear at about 3600, and let the engine slow to 1800, and drop into 8th. Ready?”
“I am.”
They shifted again. “That’s all there is to that. Downshifting is usually a little tougher, because you are usually going to have to double clutch it. You clutch to get out of gear, and into neutral, then you rev the engine to the speed the wheels are at, and then clutch again and into that gear. You can do it without the clutch, but if you are slowing down, you don’t want to put the throttle to it to equalize the gears, because you are wanting to lose speed.”
“It doesn’t even sound easy when you explain it.”
“It’s not that bad. We’ll do it somewhere with the trailer off. Maybe at some receiver’s place. Backing the trailer is the hardest. And you have to constantly think of how much the trailer will cut in when you turn. And that the four wheelers won’t understand what you’re doing. So they might get in the way by accident. And it would be a bad accident, because you are so much bigger. 18 wheelers are almost like they were designed to kill people. Which they do.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“You should be scared. I am. You take an eighty thousand pound rig and run it up to 70 miles an hour, and you have enough kinetic energy to smash a lot of cars, and the people inside. You’re responsible for that KE, to use the brakes to get rid of it when that is needed.”
“You drive around in the Clarissa Marlene, and she is ever so much bigger and powerful. How can you do it?”
“Clarissa Marlene only operates near people at the dock. Ships and boats do tremendous damage if they do collide. But you normally stay ¼ mile or more away from each other because everyone is cautious. Also, they are mariners. Professionals who operate dangerous instrumentalities in a dangerous environment. Clarissa Marlene has all kinds of hazards of her own, like lines that could cut you in half. If you had someone careless, you would get rid of him. The transportation industry has no use for people who don’t understand that safety really does come first.”
“You don’t seem too keyed up right now.”
‘Oh, I’m not. But I’m watching my mirrors and all that. Do you think a car can come up alongside my tandems, and I don’t know it?”
“No.”
“I have to watch the highway ahead, and on both sides and to the rear. For every second I am on the road. That’s why, if you go to a truck stop you will see the drivers telling each other ‘be safe’, ‘have a safe trip’, and things like that. Nobody worries that you won’t arrive on time. You want to be a trucker, that is how you should think. And if I am back there sleeping, then you have both our lives in your hands; which you do anyway, because if you go off and die on the highway, there won’t be much left of my life anyway.”
She laid over, and put her head in Dave’s lap. She put her hands around him. “Nothing can happen to you, Dave. I need you.”
He stroked her hair. “I know, Honey.”
Someone on the CB said “brake check” and as they crested a rise, they did need to brake down. Dave looked at the mirrors, and then at Jillian, who was still laying in his lap. He wondered what right he had to teach her to drive a truck when she could be so unaware. He had a thought that everything he was doing was wrong. Rescue a damsel in distress from the highway, and then agree to marry her and train her in one of the most dangerous professions existing, 41 times as likely to kill her as being a police officer in a big city. He would take her out on the Clarissa Marlene, to have a look at an even more dangerous profession. His old shipmates would happily let her wander around a deck covered with lines that could drag her into the sea, and cables that could cut her into a bloody mess. It was all on Dave; nobody else to blame. If this darling little girl died on some truck or commercial fishing boat, it would be Dave’s misguided attempt to help a stranded motorist that would be the cause. That, and his understandable but still somehow wrongful lust for a young woman who had no idea what she was getting into, and was even wanting to share her considerable inheritance with him. He was too old for her. It was wrong. He should not do it. He pulled into a rest stop, and slid out from under her without waking her. He approached an old guy with a confederate flag on his radio antenna, and was promised a ride a few exits north.
He got out of the old guy’s truck, and offered him $10. The guy refused. Dave looked down the road, and saw a gas station. He would call someone and get a ride to Louisiana. Or maybe he would get some owner operator to run him down there. He had walked about ¼ mile down the road when a road horn sounded, and the Princess Baby Doll pulled in behind him. He walked toward the passenger side of the truck, but she pointed her thumb at the driver’s side, so he checked the traffic and got in that door as she leapt into the passenger’s seat.
“I can’t believe you would do this to me, Dave. Can’t understand it. How could you? Why would you?” She was wiping smeared makeup and tears from her face with a blue windshield towel.
“I’m too old for you. All I am doing, teaching you to drive a truck so you can get killed on the highway. Taking you on a midwater trawler so you can get killed at sea. Everything I am doing is wrong.”
“The only thing you have done wrong is running away like a weasel with a chicken in his mouth. Almost the first thing I found out about you from the investigators was your date of birth, and I don’t mind. I want this truck to commute from Wyoming to Louisiana, and I thought I could haul some cattle when I went south. It’s a lot safer than a car. If some idiot comes over the centerline at me, I’d like him to hit the Princess Baby Doll and not my little car.”
“That makes sense.”
“What you were doing doesn’t. You didn’t even talk to me. You just left. Dave, if you are going to leave me, leave me dead. Get that big fillet knife out of your sea bag, and put it right through my heart. That way, I won’t suffer so much.”
“I think you know I would never do any such thing.”
“I thought I knew a lot of things about you, Dave, and then I get this total blind side.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, so am I. You love me, and you hurt me. Put this thing in gear and take us to Kansas. If you’re going to pull the PTO on me, you can do it in Louisiana easier than here in nowhere, USA.”
He flicked the shift into second, and made a quick and illegal U turn, heading back to the Interstate. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I thought, uh.”
“You told me what you thought. What you have said, you need not say again. You’re the smartest man I have ever known, and you do something so stupid. You’re the nicest man I have ever known, and you do something so awful. You’ve cut the ground out from under me. I don’t know anything now.”
“I didn’t…”
“Forget that. I know what you were thinking, and why you did what you did. I accept that you would not lie to me. I don’t ever want to hear you say you’re sorry, or you didn’t mean to hurt me. I know those things. What I want to know is where we go from here. I wish we could just go back, but that will never happen. I still want to marry you, but I suppose that is also off.”
“I was wrong.”
“Don’t say that again, either. Do you want to be my husband? Do you want to have and hold me until death do us part?”
“Yes.”
“So you won’t do something like this again?”
“No.”
“Then I propose we pretend to forget this ever happened, and go on. Dave, you can’t do something like this again. You can’t imagine how much it hurt.”
“Maybe I can.”
“I suppose that’s right.”
He took the left lane to get around a slow car. “I don’t believe in following close, ever. Sometimes I get stuck behind a slow car, but I won’t tailgate them with an 80,000 truck.”
“Are you teaching me to drive an 18 wheeler?”
“Yes.”
“I ground the gears pretty bad looking for you.”
“We will change out the transmission oil. New gears leave a lot of micro metal shavings in the oil anyway.”
“When can we do that?”
“After we unload in Emporia, Kansas, I would think.”
“I’m not afraid of dying.”
“Most people are.”
“Dave, I don’t want you to die first. I’m just being selfish, but I don’t want to be without you.”
“Odds are you will be some day. I am older, and men don’t live as long, although our odds get better when we get too old to be bungee jumping and riding motorcycles and all those guy things.”
“I want to be the first to go.”
“Don’t think like that, honey. You will probably find yourself a nice guy when I am gone. You’ll probably still be pretty.”
“Well, I’m going to get some new machines and stuff for the place in Wyoming. The boys like to lift weights, anyway. And I go to a gym in New Orleans with my cousins.”
“I should probably start going with you.”
“If you can keep off Marcie.’
“So far I have.”
“Did she wear that black body stocking with the lace and all?”
“Yeah. I asked her to change into something less comfortable.”
“She did?”
“Well, kind of. A jogging suit with gold things all over. She looked great in it, but she looks great in lots of things. It’s her profession.”
“I thought about letting you bang her.”
“That’s probably not a good idea.”
“I know that. I was thinking that she would lay off if she got what she wants…”
“Except that what she wants is to break us up.”
“And you would be happy because you got to bang the hottest chick in New Orleans.”
“And I would get tired of her because she is one of those super hot babes who think a guy should be satisfied because they let him do her. Whereas you kiss and cuddle and caress, and even seem to be happy when you get it done by hand when I don’t have a round in the chamber?”
“Your hands are amazing, Dave. That’s the way I think this idea could go wrong. You start on Marcie with your hands, and she might really want you.”
“Marcie, the way I have it, wants to make men want her. She doesn’t actually have a strategy for what she will do if she gets a good one. She may not have even conceptualized a good man.”
“Take this next exit.”
He went down through the gears, double clutching each shift. His hand on the shift lever was gripping gently. He flicked the transmission into each gear with a turn of his wrist.
“How long will it take me to learn to shift like that?”
“Maybe six days, maybe sixty days, maybe sixty years.”
“I want to master this machine.”
“I tell you the deep dark secret of these things. Women learn to shoot better than men, and the same with driving trucks. There is a lady from Colorado who can knock a golf ball off a tee with the right inside rear tandem without touching the tee.”
“Is she hot?”
“Margie Leonne? Not hardly. Her great grandson is a trucker.”
He pulled into the fuel pumps. “You want to do the fuel or go in to the desk?”
“Us tough chicks pump the fuel.”
“When you pick up the nozzle, hit “pay inside” and start the one on the right, the ‘satellite’ when the main one comes on.”
“OK”
He went inside, and came back out. The diesel was running. When it shut off, he went back inside and paid. He got a pumpkin spice cappuccino for Jainie. He went back outside, and handed her the coffee. “Pumpkin spice.”
“It’s good. You should try it.”
He got in the truck. “Pumpkin spice. Well, as you like it, Shakespeare said.”
He pulled out of the fuel island and got back onto the Interstate. He jammed it on, and went rapidly up through the gears.
“I wonder if I can ever learn to do that.”
“Oh, I think you can. It’s just timing and throttle control. Each shift is at the same engine speed, so it’s the same thing over and over.”
“People don’t understand the skills and knowledge of blue collar workers.”
“If they did, we would make as much as the drones in offices.”
She slipped her left arm around behind him, and laid her head in his lap. “If I fall asleep, you won’t be gone when I wake up.”
“No.”
She burrowed in, and sighed. “I need you. I have a problem in topographic calculus. I’m solving for the tangent of the slope of the linear solution. I just need the integral of the topograph, and then I can solve for the cosecant.”
“Set it up in sines and cosines, and then solve it for the cotangent. Take the inverse, and it drops right out.”
“Does that make any sense?”
“No.”
“Could you really teach me that stuff?”
“Sure.”
“My algebra is not so good.”
“I’m not teaching you any calculus until your algebra is perfect. Then you learn analytic geometry, and after that we do calculus.”
“What will I do with calculus?”
“Nothing. Admire Isaac Newton’s genius. You’d have much more use for an expert knowledge of algebra.”
“I didn’t understand algebra.”
“Maybe your teacher was no good, or maybe you just don’t think like a mathematician.”
“Well, if I want to?”
“Think like a mathematician? You would have to be one. I imagine you could do it, but I have no idea why you would want to.”
“Is it hard?”
“Oh, yes. Very hard. Much harder than any of the social ‘sciences’. In general, the hard work is in the hard sciences: physics, chemistry, and the stuff that comes out of them.”
“What do the real hard core guys study?”
“Quantum mechanics, physical chemistry, those kind of base line sciences that everything comes out of.”
“Kevin Lake is a physical chemist.”
“Right. They study things like why does one atom bond with another to form a compound. Everything is inferred from something else, and it is enormously difficult. It requires lots of math, like any real science does. So they have to know that, too. Kevin could solve almost any problem in your calculus text in his head.”
“Wow. So who is the smartest person you know, Dave?”
“Marcinella Delavigne. She’s a French astrophysicist. Most of her work is on the radiation from Quasars. Marcinella will hold one phone in each hand, and talk to the person in the left hand in Spanish, and the one in the right hand in Mandarin. She consults for corporate clients on optics, and she works for the French government on cryptology, although they always say she doesn’t. She writes for the 80xxx microprocessors in assembler, and she is also a mainframe systems programmer. “
“This is her?” she showed her laptop, with a picture of Dave with Marcinella. His hand was on her shoulder.
He checked the mirrors, and then looked at the laptop. “Yeah. That’s her. That’s at some conference or other in France. I wasn’t much interested in the conference, but there were some good places to eat around there.”
“Did you, well, do it with Marcinella?”
“Would I ask that about anyone?”
“That means you did. She has about a cubic yard of black curly hair. It’s pretty.”
“Everyone notices her hair. And she is so little. She says she is 5-1, but she isn’t 5-anything. She’s about 4-9 and weighs probably 75 pounds. In that pic, she was standing on a chair.”
“She’s really pretty.”
‘She is. Not as pretty as you, but she’s cute.”
“So there is my competition.”
He looked in the mirrors and checked the gauges and all. “Your competition? Marcinella married Evion, the novelist, before that picture was taken.”
“Nevertheless.”
“You don’t have any competition. I’m already yours.”
She looked out the window, as the landscape went by. “I did stake my claim.”
“We’re getting married on the 22nd. I don’t know of any plans.”
“There aren’t any. My cousins are going to be the bridesmaids. Kevin Lake is going to be your best man, and he is, too.”
“You like Kevin?” He asked.
“He is a very nice guy.”
“This will be in Louisiana?”
“A Catholic ceremony in Baton Rouge, but the priest is cool with you not being baptized.”
“I need to get something to wear?”
“No. You can do it in Carhartt. I will be, well, you know me. Danielle will wear something cute and tasteful, and Marcie will dress like a high priced whore. It will be fun for the whole family. You could invite some people if you like.”
“If I know anyone who is coming for something but the beer?”
“That’s the reception. I was going to get Waylon Jennings to play, but he was too dead.”
“At some point, that won’t be funny.”
“Tell me when we reach that point.”
“Tell me when we reach the point where we turn.”
“On I-70.”
“To Kansas.”
“That is on our list of sights to see, yeah.”
“I have not been seeing a lot of sights.”
“You’re imperceptive. These are the sights of the lovely Midwest all around you.”
“We need to water the cattle pretty soon.”
“Done while you were taking that nap in Whatchicallit, Colorado.”
“It would be good if you had a CDL so we could run right into IBP.”
“Someone had that idea, but it led to some very harsh misunderstandings.”
“I was the one who was wrong.”
“While I died of a broken heart, I would have liked to know that.”
“Right. We were going to just sort of close the page on that, though?”
“What I thought, but it sort of got brought up.”
“OK, but I guess you should have a CDL.”
“You’re really tired, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t we trade seats at an off ramp, and I’ll take us into Kansas? This thing is just a car, only bigger. I’ll be fine on the Interstate for a few hours.”
He pulled onto an off ramp, took off his shoes, and laid down in the sleeper. “If I die before I wake…”
“Shut up. Say something constructive or say nothing.”
He heard the truck going up through the gears, but he forgot what he was listening to. He had a dream where he was trying to say which was Marcie, and which was Marcinella, but he couldn’t figure out the answer.
“Wake up, Dave. They want us on the radio.”
“Dave?” the voice asked as he was putting his shoes on.
“Yeah.”
“Bay 89. Do you know where it is?”
He put the truck in gear. “I’m at Bay 11 now.”
“Keep going, up the hill.”
“I am passing Bay 14 now.”
“You’re fine. Just keep going, and it will be on your right.”
“Thanks.”
He came up to the bay, turned the truck around, and backed up to the gate. Two cowboys came out as he was setting the brakes, and they opened the gate of the trailer. Dave sat at the wheel as they chased the cows out. When the receiver came with his receipt, he asked where he could park. “Right over there, driver. Wherever you like.”
Dave drove over to the open area, set the brakes, and went back to the sleeper. He took his shoes off again, and laid down. “You must have driven 400 miles.”
“Something like that.”
“Did you know about the scales?”
“There were none.”
“So your trainer let you drive 400 miles while he was asleep. If you don’t speed, you don’t get stopped much. But we could have been. You did all right on the shifting?”
“I’ll be right back.”
She came back into the truck. “I had to see a man about a dog.”
Dave got up, stepped outside, and took care of the same need. He came back in and laid down again. Jainie was pulling the curtains over the windows. She got into the bed alongside him, wearing satin pyjamas.
“I can’t imagine how you did that change.”
“Do you like them?”
“I sure do.” He ran his hand up her side.
“Take off your overalls, my Mathematician.’
He did.
“We’re both worn out, so I just want to cuddle, but I very much want to cuddle.”
He caressed her, and then fell asleep.
* * *
He looked out at the morning light coming through the gaps in the curtains.
“I didn’t get much cuddling before you fell asleep last night. Now I am going to get it all.” He felt her over him, and then he was inside her somehow. There was some confused activity, and then she was laying on him, sighing with satisfaction. He woke up a few hours later. She was sitting in the passenger seat with a cup of coffee. She handed him one. She was wearing a pair of designer jeans and a soft pink sweater with a matching headband. Her jeans were tucked into high heeled boots.
“I dreamed you were in a satin pantsuit.”
“I had the same dream.”
He drank some of his coffee. Then she took the cup from him, and she was all over him. There was some vague image of her trembling and gasping in pleasure, and he was back in the bed, with her handing him the coffee.
“I’m not even awake yet.”
‘I ambushed you again, Dave. I can’t resist the chance to do it.”
“I guess that’s why I feel so good.”
“So long as you do. It’s the bayou or the barrio, home boy.”
“I’ll have to take the bayou. I wouldn’t know my way around the barrio.”
“You think you’re a coonass?”
“I know people born on the bayou who call me ‘coon.’”
“Well, do you suck the fat on crawfish?”
“I like it better than the tails.”
“How do you eat oysters?”
“There is no wrong way, but raw with Tabasco sauce is great.”
“You may actually be a coonass, although you don’t have a Louisiana accent.”
“You can’t imitate that, and you can’t acquire it either.”
“All right, Coonass Carhartt mathematician guy, take us to the bayou.”
“I thought someone here wanted to be a big truck driver.”
He handed her a battered Rand McNalley trucker’s atlas. “A real trucker kind of girl, who would have her picture painted on the side of the truck, she could drive it all the way home, maybe her trainer tells her a hint or two.”
She jumped into the driver’s seat and buckled her seat belt. “Get up here, coon.”
Dave got into the passenger seat and put his feet on the dash.
“You’re not going to buckle up?”
“You have a GOAL you have not yet reached.”
She got out of the truck, and walked to the back of the trailer, then returned. “I got out and looked.”
He buckled his seat belt, and she backed the rig up and then pulled out onto the access road. “Are trainers always like this?”
“Yes.”