“Was it?”
“Well let’s see. It took me a half an hour to get the motor running
without stalling. Another half an hour to figure out how to back up
without stalling.”
“How much training did you get?”
“Training? That was the training. We left next morning.”
Shirley enjoyed Vi’s face for a moment, then put out her wet-lipped
cigarette in the dregs of her coffee. “Listen,” she said. “Long as we’re
headed for the same place, why don’t you ride along with me?”
Vi, who’d told herself to be ready for anything, wasn’t ready for
this, didn’t have a name for the feeling the offer wakened in her.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 83
“I paid for a bus ticket all the way,” she said.
“So what?” Shirley said laughing. “I’m not going to charge you. And
I’ll get you there faster.” She bent toward Vi. “I’d like the company,” she
said. “Gets lonely in the dark. You can keep me from falling asleep too.”
So Vi went and woke the bus driver asleep in his seat and told him
she wasn’t going any farther; he looked at her like he’d not heard, then
nodded slowly without speaking. She got her bag from the overhead
rack and dragged it away down the bus steps and only then heard the
driver call after her, but not what he said. Shirley was waiting for her
and they went together out to where the trucks were starting their
engines, turning on their great lights.
“So this isn’t against the rules?” Vi asked. “What if they kick me
off?”
“There’s no they,” Shirley said. “There’s just us.”
It was hard to get into, no running board, only a sort of rung, you
stood on that and pulled the door open, then took a jump to another
step and in.
And it was hard to get the big thing going. Shirley pulled the choke,
feathered the clutch, worked the long gearshifter into the wrong then
the right slots, all the while letting out what in an old book Vi’d read
was called “a string of oaths” and then doing better after she calmed
herself, and crossed herself.
The trucks moved out into the empty night highway. Vi could see the
vehicles far ahead pulling one by one into line like a great glittering snake
whipping sidewise very slowly. Then Shirley’s, with a judder and a roar. Vi
was on the move now for sure: later she would remember it as the moment
when she was put into motion not away but for the first time toward,
toward whatever the world was bringing into being, everything ahead.
They picked up speed. High up off the road Vi bounced in her hard
seat as though she might lose it and end up on the floor—she thought
of the miles ahead and wondered if she would regret her impulse to
climb in with Shirley, who was gripping the steering wheel hard but at
least no longer bent forward as though impelling the 10-ton all by her-
self. Vi’s job was to help keep an eye on the truck ahead, watch for its
dim brake lights. If something happened far up the line, if the lead
truck had to stop, then the following trucks would have to stop in turn,
but the gap between a braking truck and the still-moving truck behind
84 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
it would shorten as the stop went down the line, till the trucks far back
would have to stop fast, so you needed all the time you could get.
“It’s why we’re driving through the night,” Shirley said. “We got a
truck this afternoon had to go off the road to keep from hitting the one
ahead. Just like a train derailing. The one truck turned out so’s not to
hit the one ahead, and the one behind that one had to turn out not to
hit her and got bent and went into the slough there, and altogether it
took some hours to get us all out and going again.”
Night went on. Vi tried to watch the truck in front, hypnotized by
its swaying. She only realized she’d fallen asleep when she felt a sharp
smack on her arm.
“Hey,” Shirley said. “You’re supposed to be keeping me awake.”
“Oh,” Vi said. “Oh sorry.”
“So talk to me,” Shirley said, turning back to the road. “Tell me
your story. What do you love, what do you want, what makes you
laugh, who’d you leave behind. All like that. Make it exciting.”
Vi laughed and suddenly wished she could do that, but the story she
could tell—all that she was willing to tell—was more likely to put a
hearer to sleep than keep one awake. She told Shirley about how her
mother had died when Vi was eighteen, a cancer, and her father had
moved his kids out to the ranch where his own mother still lived alone.
Vi’d just graduated from high school in the town they lived in then—not
a big town, not a real city, but it had had a picture show and a couple of
restaurants and a normal school that Vi had enrolled in, hoping she could
figure a way to get to the state college—she was smart and knew it, and
had done well in school, her favorite teacher was working to help her. She
spent a year attending the normal school, but in the end she’d gone out to
the ranch with her father and brothers. “The boys were young,” she said.
“I couldn’t let Daddy go it alone. Grandma wasn’t well either.”
“Sure,” said Shirley.
“Anyway,” Vi said, and then no more.
“So this was what, four, five years ago?”
“Yes.”
“Great time to go ranching. Or farming. Around there where you
were.”
“Yeah well. We didn’t do so hot.”
There came a pause then in the cab, a brief mournful or memorial
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 85
moment: everybody remembered, times on the farm that had been so
bad you didn’t need to say anything, only a fool would feel the need to
say something, and the worst was all over now—but you didn’t say
that either, it wasn’t good luck or good sense to say so. But Vi had to at
least finish the story, which in her own case or her family’s didn’t get
better. Bad earth, failure, war and her brothers enlisting, things stay-
ing so bad it was almost laughable, like some pileup of disasters in a
comedy picture.
“So no regrets about leaving,” Shirley said, reaching for the pack of
smokes on the truck’s dash. “That’s good.”
Vi wouldn’t say yes or no.
“A fella you left behind? Not even that?”
“No,” Vi said, looking ahead. “No fella.”
“No cowboy serenading you with a git-tar?”
Vi laughed. Another reason to leave town and school and go out to
the empty places: that’s what her father thought, and Vi for her own
reasons, but concerning the same matters, had guessed it was advis-
able: what she went away from, which didn’t count now, not right now
anyway, beside Shirley in the truck. “I got a nice smile from Gene
Autry once when he came to the opera house in the next town,” she
said. “But he didn’t follow up.”
They laughed together, and went on into the night, which was at
last beginning to pass, the ragged edge of the mountains that they were
to cross now distinguishable from the greening sky; they sang some of
Gene’s hit songs, everybody knew them.
“Sometimes I live in the country
And sometimes I live in the town
Sometimes I take a great notion
To jump in the river and drown.”
Somehow, all the next day after she climbed at last down from the
10-ton in the port district where the trucks lined up to be loaded onto