I got my crutches under me again and got out of my car.
Road salt gritted under the crutches’ rubber tips, but the going felt safe. Standing in front of Johnny Pomberton’s woodpile was one of the strangest-looking vehicles I’ve ever seen in my life. A faint, pungent odour, not exactly pleasant, drifted over from it to where we stood.
At one time, far back in its career, it had been a GM product—or so the logo on its gigantic snout advertised. Now it was a little bit of everything. One thing it surely was, and that was big. The top of its grille would have been head-high on a tall man. Behind and over it, the cab loomed like a big square helmet. Behind that, supported by two sets of double wheels on each side, was a long, tubular body, like the body of a gasoline tanker truck.
Except that I never saw a tanker truck before this one that was painted bright pink. The word PETUNIA was written across the side in Roman gothic letters two feet high.
“I don’t know what to think of her,” I said. “What is she?”
Pomberton poked a Camel cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a quick flick of his horny thumbnail on the tip of a wooden match. “Kaka sucker,” he said.
“What?”
He grinned. “Twenty-thousand-gallon capacity,” he said. “She’s a corker, is Petunia.”
“I don’t get you.” But I was starting to. There was an absurd, grisly irony to it that Arnie—the old Arnie would have appreciated.
I had asked Pomberton over the phone if he had a big, heavy truck to rent, and this was the biggest one currently in his yard. All four of his dump trucks were working, two in Libertyville and two others in Philly Hill. He’d had a grader, he explained to me, but it had had a nervous bustdown just after Christmas. He said he was having a devilish job keeping his trucks rolling since Darnell’s Garage shut down.
Petunia was essentially a tanker, no more and no less. Her job was pumping out septic systems.
“How much does she weigh?” I asked Pomberton.
He flicked away his cigarette. “Dry, or loaded with shit?”
I gulped. “Which is it now?”
He threw his head back and laughed. “Do you think I’d rentcher a loaded truck?” He pronounced it ludded truck. “Naw, naw—she’s dry, dry as a bone and all hosed out. Sure she is. Still a little fragrant, though, ain’t she?”
I sniffed. She was fragrant, all right.
“It could be a lot worse,” I said. “I guess.”
“Sure,” Pomberton said. “You bet, Old Petunia’s original pedigree was lost long ago, but what’s on her current registration is eighteen thousand pounds, GVW.”
“What’s that?”
“Gross vehicle weight,” he said. “If they pull you over on the Interstate and you weigh more than eighteen thousand the ICC gets upset. Dry, she prob’ly goes around, I dunno, eight-nine thousand Pounds. She’s got a five-speed tranny with a two-speed differential, giving you ten forward speeds all told… if you can run a clutch.”
He cast a dubious eye up and down my crutches and lit another cigarette.
“Can you run a clutch?”
“Sure,” I said with a straight face. “If it isn’t really stiff.” But for how long? That was the question.
“Well, that’s your business and I won’t mess into it.” He looked at me brightly. “I’ll give you a ten per cent discount for cash, on account of I don’t usually report cash transactions to my favourite uncle.”
I checked my wallet and found three twenties and three tens. “How much did you say for one day?”
“How does ninety bucks sound?”
I gave it to him. I had been prepared to pay a hundred and twenty.
“What are you going to do with your Duster there?”
It hadn’t even crossed my mind until just now. “Could I leave it here? Just for today?”
“Sure,” Pomberton said, “you can leave it here all week, I don’t give a shit. Just put it around the back and leave the keys in it in case I have to move it.”
I drove around back where there was a wilderness of cannibalized truck parts poking out of the deep snow like bones from white sand. It took me nearly ten minutes to work my way back around on my crutches. I could have done it faster if I’d used my left leg a bit, but I wouldn’t do that. I was saving it for Petunia’s clutch.
I approached Petunia, feeling dread gather in my stomach like a small black cloud. I had no doubt it would stop Christine… if she really showed up at Darnell’s Garage tonight and if I could drive the damned truck. I had never driven anything that big in my life, although the summer before I’d gotten some hours in on a bulldozer and Brad Jeffries had let me try the payloader a couple of times after knocking off for the day.
Pomberton stood there in his checked jacket, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his workpants, watching me with wise eyes. I got over to the driver’s side, grabbed the doorhandle, and slipped a little. He took a step or two toward me.
“I can make it.”
“Sure,” he said.
I jammed the crutch into my armpit again, my breath frosting out in quick little gasps, and pulled the door open. Holding onto the door’s inside handle with my left hand and balancing on my right leg like a stork, I threw my crutches into the cab and then followed them. The keys were in the ignition, the shift pattern printed on the stick. I slammed the door, pushed the clutch down with my left leg—not much pain, so far so good—and started Petunia up. Her engine sounded like a full field of stockers at Philly Plains.
Pomberton strolled over. “Little noisy, ain’t she?” he yelled.
“Sure!” I screamed back.
“You know,” he bellowed, “I doubt like hell if you got an I on your licence, boy.” An I on your licence meant that the state had tested you on the big trucks. I had an A for motorcycles (much to my mother’s horror) but no I.
I grinned down at him. “You never checked because I looked trustworthy.”
He smiled back. “Sure.”
I revved the engine a little. Petunia blew off two brisk backfires that were almost as loud as mortar blasts.
“You mind if I ask what-you-want that truck for? None of my business, I know.”
“Just what it was meant for,” I said.
“Beggin your pardon?”
“I want to get rid of some shit,” I said.
I had something of a scare going downhill from Pomberton’s place; even dry and empty, that baby really got rolling. I seemed incredibly high up—able to look down on the roofs of the cars I passed. Driving through downtown Libertyville, I felt as conspicuous as a baby whale in a goldfish pond. It didn’t help any that Pomberton’s septic pumper was painted that bright pink colour. I got some amused glances.
My left leg had begun to ache a little, but running through Petunia’s unfamiliar gear pattern in the stop-and-go downtown traffic kept my mind off it. A more surprising ache was developing in my shoulders and across my chest; it came from simply piloting Petunia through traffic. The truck was not equipped with power steering, and that wheel really turned hard.
I turned off Main, onto Walnut, and then into the parking lot behind the Western Auto. I got carefully down from Petunia’s cab, slammed her door (my nose had already become used to the faint odour she gave off), set my crutches under me, and went in the back entrance.
I got the three garage keys off Jimmy’s ring and took them over to the key-making department. For one-eighty, I got two copies of each. I put the new keys in one pocket, Jimmy’s ring, with his original keys reattached, in the other. I went out the front door, onto Main Street, and down to the Libertyville Lunch, where there was a pay telephone. Overhead, the sky was greyer and more lowering than ever. Pomberton was right. There would be snow.
Inside, I ordered a coffee and Danish and got change for the telephone booth. I went inside, closed the door clumsily behind me, and called Leigh. She answered on the first ring.