The A/C died with the automotive equivalent of a death rattle, a couple of clanky coughs and then breeze-free silence. I lowered the windows, and thick heat filled the cab at eighty miles an hour. I reached for the thermos I filled at Double D’s in Asheville after leaving Winston-Salem at four that morning. Double D’s is a red double-decker bus whimsically converted into a café that sells overpriced caffeinated drinks and muffins and such. I came across Double D’s mapping my route and thought it looked like a fun break three hours into my ride. Double D’s was pulsing with young folks on their way to work. I liked that; it gave me a bump. And I liked my triple espresso latte, all twenty-four ounces, which cost as much as a full truck stop dinner back when I drove these roads for a living.
The barista, a young woman with three gold rings, each as thin as a light bulb filament, looped through the flesh behind her left eyebrow, commented that my purchase would keep her awake for a week. I said twenty hours would be enough for me. That was my estimate: eight hours of driving to Tuscaloosa, two to buy and load the lumber, eight hours back, and two one-hour rest stops along the way—Double D’s the first. Back behind the wheel, my latte spun its magic. I was sharp and strong in my bones. And then, just north of Chattanooga, Tennessee in August emptied the will out of me, as easily as water poured from a glass. I was two hundred miles shy of my destination and could barely keep the truck between the white lines.
“Lodging near me,” I told the phone, adding a pathetic “please.”
I obeyed the gruff-voiced travel assistant, drove raggedly for five miles, turned left one mile off the ramp, then right, then a sharp right. The directions took me through stretches of wild scrub brush and flourishing hardwoods and then, appearing like palaces, grand clapboard homes with ornamental trees posing like Las Vegas show dancers on the blue-green grass of front lawns bigger than supermarket parking lots. It was exactly the kind of high-end residential area I wouldn’t expect to find a cheap motel. Then, on the last stretch down a steep backroad of cracked blacktop, the woodland divided, and the windshield filled with a placid reach of the Tennessee River.
I pulled off the road, down a gravel boat launch, and parked near a small doc—a wooden plank deck supported by sludge-blackened piles. On the opposite bank was a longer dock and clusters of flipped aluminum canoes, kayaks, and candy-colored rafting tubes. The breeze off the river was cooler. I stretched out as much as the seat allowed and closed my eyes. It didn’t help. My body felt like it was devouring itself, taking what it needed to survive and expelling the waste in streams of stinking sweat rolling down my chest and rib cage. I yanked a T-shirt from my travel satchel, wiped my face, and reversed back to the road. After a couple more directions, my phone delivered me to the Blue Run Inn. I hooked my hand to the roof of the truck and got myself upright. By the time I made it into the office to ask for a room, the act of speech itself felt like a wire brush scraping the skin off the back of my tongue.
“Check in at three,” said the young man behind the desk. He was sunburned and honor guard straight and had an Eastern European accent that reminded me of Brandon’s high school swimming coach, a member of Hungary’s medal-winning relay team in the Athens Olympics.
“Could you make an exception?” I croaked. “I’m not feeling well.”
“Covid?” he said, leaning back.
“No. Something I ate.”
“Sausage?”
“I think it was a coffee I bought.”
“Strange. Maybe better go to emergency.”
“I just need to rest. I’ll pay for yesterday and today. The room doesn’t have to be made up.”
He lifted his broad shoulders in feigned hopelessness, but his fingers started hammering his computer keyboard, the sound like brads being driven into window molding. After a time, it was clear that the solution to our dilemma was not appearing on the screen. I placed my forearms on the counter, bending my head over them. It wasn’t an act—well, maybe a little—but it seemed to help.
“Better I call manager,” he said, pointing to a chair under the bellowing rust-stained A/C at the top of a window. “Sit. You need water?”
“I need a room.”
“Okay, sir. Be still, yes?”
He went through the doorway behind the desk and returned with a blue rubber bucket he placed near my feet.
“If you need.” He raised his palm from stomach to mouth.
“Thank you.”
The roar of the A/C drowned out most of his phone conversation. From the few words I picked up, it did seem he was advocating for me. The call ended and he handed me a key with a bronze fob stamped with 18 and gave me directions. I asked if he wanted me to register.
“Later,” he said. “Now rest. Take bucket.”
The Blue Run Inn wasn’t an inn at all; it was more of a camp—standalone cabins of varying sizes spaced out over a gently sloping river plain, all networked by unpaved paths that eventually reached a narrow sandy beach on a cove of the river. My cabin had unpainted wood shingles, an eco-friendly thatched roof, and a single, tall wooden step anchored into pounded earth. The room itself belied the rough exterior. There was an iron-framed king bed covered by a velvet bedspread with a stitched diamond design, several thick area rugs of similar design, and an antique writing desk of polished oak. On the walls hung striking black and white photos of a plunging diamond waterfall and, strange for the region, a bearded mountain goat on an icy cliff. A sliding glass double door offered a crystal-clear view of the river, silver flashes under the noonday sun. The room was more than clean and comfy; it was meticulously thought out and furnished with pride and affection. I pulled the drapes shut and eased back onto the bed. After the kick-ass heat of the day, the room felt cold, and I dragged the bedspread over me.
“I’m a fucking fool,” I confessed to the room. I said it again, louder. With that off my chest, I drifted into semi-dreams and then sleep itself.
I awoke with the sense I hadn’t slept at all, but the room was darker and my shoulders stiff from the chill and not moving. Sounds had roused me, voices and car doors slamming. I reached through the bed covers and found my phone. I promised Brandon I’d text progress reports and hadn’t, not since Double-D’s.
I typed, “Break at the lovely Tennessee River. Slowing me down a bit. More when I’m back on the road.” It was too close to a lie, and I didn’t send it. The truth was that I was four hundred miles from home, flat on my back and inclined to stay that way. I didn’t want to write that either. I thought back to Brandon in his first competitive race when he was nine, insisting he could finish the 200 meters and then almost sinking from exhaustion in the middle of the pool. But I wasn’t nine; I was seventy-five and should have known better.
I put my feet to the floor, shuffled outside in my socks, and sat on the front step. The Blue Run Inn was rocking. Vehicles had pulled up beside almost every cabin and there was a wave of families in bathing suits, carrying plastic picnic baskets and towels, taking the paths to the beach. The nap had restored me. After the cool, shadowy room, the river breeze and lemony scent of magnolia reminded me that I quite enjoyed Southern summers. Happy screams from the beach stirred more nostalgia, enhancing the serenity. Down the path, the darkly clothed clerk appeared from behind a cabin, approaching through the streaks of sunlight filtered by the tree canopy.
“May I?” he nodded at the step.
I shifted to the side and he sat.
“Feel better?”
“Yes, thanks to you.”
“Bah. What do I do? Call the boss?”
He had a tablet on his lap. I pulled out my wallet and we went through the registration business.
“Far from Winston-Salem in truck,” he said, nodding at Brandon’s long-bed Ram parked beside the cabin.
“I’m on an errand,” I said. Then, remembering what he did for me and that I owed him more. “For my grandson. To pick up a log.”
“A log. Of course. We get that all the time.”
I laughed and turned toward him. The sun had been hard on him, splaying mismatched patches of pink and purplish red across his cheeks and forehead and down his neck. He was lean and big-boned with brawny forearms and a confident ease in his body.
“The log’s for my grandson. He builds mantels for fireplaces. He was always good with wood, but mostly just fences and barn doors. Then, somebody asked him if he could build a mantel. He tried and loved it. He turned the garage into a shop and started advertising. He was growing a business—hired a part-time assistant and started shipping out his work. Then he severed a tendon in his arm replacing the bushings in that truck there.”
I gestured at the long bed and shook my head.
“Sorry,” I said. “Not your problem.”
“Of course, but I must know more about this log.”
“Not a log, not now. It was a log, from an old hickory tree. A farmer in Tuscaloosa milled it into planks—quarter-sawn, which is good for woodwork. But he couldn’t sell it and kept lowering the price. Brandon saw the offer. When he called, the farmer said it had to be sold soon or he was taking it to a landfill. Everything is slow for Brandon now because of the injury, and he couldn’t take the time. So I told him I’d do it, and I’d get it back in a day.”
“My American geography needs work,” he said, scratching his cheek. “Maybe you help me with arithmetic.”
“Eleven hundred miles roundtrip. Back home late tonight with the log.”
It occurred to me that he might be former military. Or maybe law enforcement, though he seemed too young to be an ex-cop. There was an influx of them back home, young, imposing expats from Poland and Hungary and Ukraine, who took the work they could find and, once established, called over family members one at a time.
“You can do this?” he said.
“In the past, without thinking twice. I drove tankers for Sunoco—saved up and bought my own rig. I could drive for two days straight without getting sleepy. The government said long-haul truckers had to rest for ten hours after eleven hours of driving. The hauling companies complied sometimes, but most contractors like me would go broke. So, I just did what I always did.”
“Ever get caught?”
“Never.”
“So this thing with hickory log no big deal?”
“That’s what I thought. After I sold my rig, I missed it. Every time I got behind the wheel, I wanted to drive under the new moon, see the sunrise, go down the mountains to the Gulf. Getting the lumber, it’s more than helping my grandson. It’s doing what I love.”
“Bad food could happen to anyone.”
“It wasn’t that. It was me. I’m not what I used to be.”
He asked if my appetite was back and said there was a bar and grill a mile upriver that made good barbeque on Fridays. He walked easily back to the office, the sunbeams fluttering like small wings across his back.
I took a ginger ale from my cooler, returned to my room, and sat at the desk, staring at my phone. The farmer had refused to accept an electronic deposit to hold the lumber. Show up, he said, pay in cash and have an awesome day. For all I knew, someone else had already bought the hickory. I dialed his number, then stopped the call. I wasn’t in the mood for bad news.
Outside, the wind had picked up and a few visitors were drifting back to their cabins. Sipping my soda, I headed up the road on foot. It was too early for barbeque, but the bartender went into the kitchen and brought out a hamburger bun stuffed with a couple of slices of fried chicken. He put it in a paper bag and refused my payment.
On the walk back, I ate it all in small, satisfying bites. I thought about turning around and getting another, but didn’t want the bartender to think I expected a second freebie. My body retained nothing of the physical collapse that brought me here. It was happening again, the illusion that I wasn’t a creaky retiree foolishly acting like the ten years since I’d done real trucking were an irrelevant burp in time.
The desk clerk was leaning against the tailgate of Brandon’s truck, chatting with a pretty young woman in shorts, a tank top, and running shoes. Beside her, at the end of a leash, a compact, black-and-white wirehair with a brown head sat in the grass, closely watching the clerk gesticulating toward one end of the camp as the woman nodded in response. I returned to my cabin step. The woman kept nodding and then took off in a run, her companion jogging easily alongside. The clerk watched her departure, lingering a couple beats longer than needed to be sure she was headed where he directed her.
Again, he joined me on the step. “How was barbeque?”
“Too early, but the bartender gave me a sandwich and wouldn’t take my money.”
“Ah. Freddy, good man.”
“I’m hitting the road. You’ve been very kind.”
“I think this. We go together.”
“Hmm?”
“I drive with you to get log.”
I smiled and put my hand on his hard-packed shoulder.
“Thanks, but I can’t let you do that.”
“Why not? I’m off weekend. No plans.”
“This is my job.”
“Listen, I think I need new career. On way, you tell me about trucking.”
“The air conditioning in the truck is broken.”
“Is cooler. I just check weather.”
We volleyed back and forth this way a bit more until it seemed to me his reasoning outweighed mine. I told him I was leaving soon, before I had the time to change my mind. Inside, I snapped a couple of pictures, told the room it was beautiful, apologized for not staying longer, and promised to be back. It’s a loopy thing I did when on the road, chatted with the rooms I stayed in.
Outside, he was waiting beside the long bed, a small backpack hanging from one shoulder and a Braves cap on his head. He was a good driver, silent and careful as he got the feel of the truck, staying at the speed limit on I-59. I told him about the fraternity of truckers and how couples drove together, many with their dogs.
“Perfect,” he said. “I marry girl with dog back at Blue Run and we deliver toilet bowl floats around America.”
“Toilet bowl floats?”
“Crazy big demand. I replace every week at inn.”
We reached the farmer before dark. The clerk told him I’d left Winston-Salem early that morning and planned to drive back straight through the night with the wood. The farmer, who was about my age, looked me over. Then he, like the bartender, refused to take my money.
On the way back, as night darkened the road, the clerk asked me what he needed to do, what he needed to know to drive trucks for a living. That’s what we talked about most on our way back to the Blue Run Inn. In front of the office, we shook hands, and I told him he could call me anytime to talk about trucking. As I slowly steered Brandon’s truck past the trees and darkened cabins, he waited, watching me as I was watching him in the rearview, until we were each no more to be seen.
I kept my promise to Cabin 18 and returned in early autumn, this time with my wife. The desk clerk was still there, still charred by the sun and still, he laughed, changing out toilet floats.
Bill Schillaci
Bill Schillaci was born in the Bronx and attended New York University. He worked on the East and West coasts as an engineering writer and then as a freelancer specializing in environmental law and regulation. His stories have appeared in paper and online journals. He enjoys woodworking and has built most of the furniture in the New Jersey home he shares with his partner.
