Where I'm Hauling From
How absurd is it to write a 5000 word short story in this time and place, the era of flash fiction, social media attention spans, scary ass clickbait headlines, when you’ve got thousands of classic movies and T.V. shows in your pocket at a whim, and so on? There’s no way around it, it’s pretty fucking absurd, but anyway that’s one thing I did in 2024, and anyway the Malarkey Books folks published it in King Ludd’s Rag. I can’t tell if writing it was an offensive act of pure ego, or if it was an act of passionate love for the long form story, a thing that might be mostly an endangered species at this point. Or maybe doing 20 drafts of a 15 page story is a cry for help. I don’t know, it’s probably all those things. Whatever it is, I wanted to put the story here so that it can have some sort of internet life, where maybe over the next decade one or two people might read it. Five if I’m really lucky. This story is probably my favorite thing I’ve ever written, or at least the thing I’m most emotionally attached to. It’s an homage of course to Raymond Carver, the aesthetic father to all of us raised by drunks who ruined us emotionally, who sipped cans of Coors in the living room and chain smoked Marlboro Reds only twenty or thirty feet away from us while we slept, and we’d wake up through the night to that blue glow of the television out there, and we’d notice the fresh burn marks in the divan the next morning. This story is about those types of people, whom I hate but can’t help loving, and it’s about trying to make a comeback from all the things we try to come back from. Hey, if you read this all the way through, if you’re one of the few people who will ride it out, thank you. We are each other’s people.
Where I’m Hauling From
Hutch is called Hutch because he’s from Hutchison, Kansas, a town where every other person who lives there works at the level 4 prison or the Wal-Mart. Level 4 is a fancy way of saying maximum security. I don’t know Hutch’s real name even though we’ve now teamstered this tractor and trailer from KC to the Meadowlands to Louisville to Wyoming, and now we’re headed back home to KC.
“Hutch did you ever do time in Hutch?” I ask, because I feel like this is a funny thing to say. I expect him to do what he always does when I blurt out a dumb thing — to laugh and shake his head and light a cigarette, to mostly ignore me.
“Yep,” he says, his voice a hiccup. “Spent eleven years of my one fuckin life in that cage.”
“Oh,” I say, “fuck. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. I ain’t ashamed.”
I do the math. Somehow I’ve spent 3000 miles riding with a person who committed a violent enough crime to be in a max. At least it wasn’t a super-max, I think to myself, trying to see the bright side. We have 900 more miles to go. I’m tempted to ask him what he did to get locked up but even I know you’re not supposed to ask that. Then Hutch says, “Aren’t you curious what I went to prison for?”
“No, man,” I say, “no, it’s all good.”
“You could be riding with a god damn serial killer, you don’t want to know?”
“Am I riding with a serial killer?”
Hutch laughs. He says, “Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
He says, “I only ever killed one person and no one knows about it but me.” He laughs again. I laugh too because hopefully he is joking. Then he says, “Nah man, I don’t talk about what I got convicted of. If you’re curious, type it in on Case Net.”
I shake my head and say, “We’ve come this far without me knowing.”
Hutch says, “That’s stupid. I’d want to know.” We go under a bridge and I am tempted to jerk the wheel into one of the columns. Not because I’m suicidal, but because I don’t like him having the last word, being all condescending like that. My ex says I’ll do anything to win an argument. I’m starting to think she’s right.
My ex-wife also says I am terrible at reading people. When we get back to KC I’m tempted to stop by her new place and tell her how right she is about this. To give her that much, let her win this one thing about the kind of person I am. But the problem is I don’t know where she lives. I’ll have to look her up. She put our old house up for sale last month and the closing was supposed to happen while I was out on the road this time. She wouldn’t tell me where she’s moving to or give me any other way to reach her. Fuck, she could be moving out of the state for all I know. I told her it’s not right of her, that we raised two kids together, that we had three good decades and why couldn’t she tolerate one bad one —because three out of four is not such a bad winning percentage, right? — and I said she’s too much a part of my life for me to not even know where the hell she’s laying her head at night. She said no, that that was the whole point of paying the attorneys all that money, so that she didn’t have to tell me these sorts of things ever again. Hutch says she probably has a new man. He’s probably right. And I think it might break me to have to look her up, my own wife — it might be the final thing that finally breaks me.
The mountains eye us as we head toward them, driving through the angry flatland wind, and Hutch points at them and asks me what’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. I tell him the view of the pacific ocean driving up Highway 1 is the most amazing thing I ever laid eyes on. “It’s all an endless dome of a whole other universe under there and we can’t even begin to understand the first thing about it. You can follow those currents all the way to the Mariana Trench — there’s whole worlds there we’ll never know about,” I say, hoping he sees the wonder in my eyes, that this is not a thing inside me that has died yet. Hutch rolls his eyes. He tells me the most amazing thing he ever saw was when the BTK killer cut his prison jumpsuit into a thong singlet, somehow dyed it pink, and then walked around in the yard humming the melody of some 80’s pop song no one knew the words to. He says BTK is one hairy son of a bitch.
After a few more miles I say, “You serious about killing someone?”
He shrugs.
I say, “I could never kill anyone. Probably not even in self-defense. I flat out don’t have it in me.”
“Yes you could,” Hutch says, “anyone could. There’s nothing to it.”
“No, no, I really don’t think so, Hutch, I’m not the type. I could kill myself, I think, I could see myself doing that, but not someone else.” Hutch tells me not to have those thoughts when I’m behind the wheel while we’re hauling 80,000 pounds of steal on our backs. He says killing yourself is for pussies.
When we were younger my wife and I used to joke about a suicide pact. We said we wanted to spend every minute we could together until we were 75 or so. As far as we could tell, everything concerning the human body and mind went downhill after the mid-seventies. We figured that by then we’d have had five good decades together. Fifty years is longer than a lot of people even get to live a whole ass life, I’d say, so we’d find the most painless way to die and pick a day to shuffle off the stage together. We’d escape this life without any real suffering, if we could.
“How romantic,” Hutch says when I tell him about it. The engine grunts as we go up the mountain.
“You ever heard of the law of LD-50?” I say back. He says he knows exactly what it is. I raise my eyebrows as if to say prove it. He recites the definition to me, says that LD-50 is the toxicology unit that measures a lethal dose of any substance. Everything can be lethal, he says, depending on the dosage. “So then would you like to know what the LD-50 of ice cream pints is?” I say. I half expect him to tell me.
“Sure as hell would,” he says.
“It’s 37. You eat 37 pints of ice cream and that’ll do it. Coronary, I guess, maybe. My wife and I were gonna do that instead of a nursing home — go to the store, pick up 37 pints, all different flavors, and enjoy poisoning ourselves. Have fun with it.”
“But what if the store only had, say, 30 pints to sell?” Hutch says to this.
I tell him he is just like my wife, always poking holes in my ideas. “Stick ‘em in the freezer and wait a week. Wait for another truck to come in. There’s always another truck coming in.”
“You’re a weird motherfucker,” Hutch says.
I walked through our old house before Hutch and I went out on this leg. I pretended that I was an interested buyer, called my wife’s real estate agent, and asked her if she could show me the house. She said it was already under contract. I said sure but what if the deal falls through. “It happens,” I said, and she agreed to meet me after her lunch break. My wife used to do this. When we were in our late 20’s she’d pretend to be a homebuyer and she’d get these realtors to show her through houses and she’d steal shit from people, and then the one time she got caught she said she’d blow the realtor if he didn’t tell. He let her blow him but then snitched on her anyway. This was all before she got clean, back when she had her Xanax addiction. She’d do a couple ladders with some red wine and black out, and I was on the road too much to notice.
Hutch says he doesn’t believe I didn’t notice. He says I just didn’t want to deal with it, that I was hoping it’d go away.
“The point is I stuck with her through all that, all the fucked up things she did…why couldn’t she stick with me?” I say. “Give me a chance to make things right?”
“People change,” Hutch says. He also says I sound like every other divorced guy he’s ever talked to, that I wanted to put all the blame on her for not having enough tolerance of my bullshit.
“Fuck you,” I say to him, but all he does is laugh. I pull over and tell him it’s his turn to drive, that I’m taking my siesta in the back.
A little while later I come out of the sleeper bunk as we go down the other side of the mountain. We are tilted forward so much that Hutch is standing up out of his seat. I sit down and light a cigarette, put my feet on the dash and pretend I am skateboarding. “Go back to sleep,” he says.
“Make sure you stay off the brake,” I say. I laugh. I tell him we don’t want a tire fire. I remind him of the guy we both heard about who a few weeks ago had a fire while he was hauling fertilizer. Ultimate bad luck. “We’ll freeze to death out there in five minutes if we have to abandon our unit fleeing some flames, Hutch.”
“Go back to bed, please.” He guides the wheel like we are sailing some ancient vessel out into the mysterious pacific. I tell him if he’s going to roll us down the side of the mountain I want to get in one last cigarette before it happens. I laugh again. I quote Groucho Marx to him. I say the only true laughter comes from despair. He tells me he can see why my wife kicked me out.
The next morning I come out of the back to see that we are parked and Hutch is gone. I’m a little hungover because after I went back to try to sleep I could feel that Hutch had a few trouble spots going down the mountain, and I kept imagining one of the steel beams back there on the flatbed coming through the sleeper cab and impaling me right into the side of the mountain, and then I’d die while vultures peck away at me. So to cope I drank most of my mouthwash. The point is I am not with it enough to realize Hutch has parked us at a truck stop and I have both drank an entire bottle of water and peed into the empty plastic before I realize I can go inside and use the facilities like a proper civilized human. When I walk in to brush my teeth I see Hutch over in the diner. He’s sitting across from some kid who is not really a kid. He’s in his early thirties, this kid, and he looks like he could be Hutch’s twin. I can see what Hutch looked like when he was young and broad in the good way (as opposed to broad in the way we have both become) and his ruddy hair is parted in the same comb over as Hutch’s, though instead of looking like antique twine it is thick as the prairie grass we will be driving by in a few hours. For a moment I imagine that we have travelled through time somehow, that Hutch has found his younger self and is warning him about some things. I wonder how fast I could find my own younger self in this particular dimension, or if I’d even have anything wise to say.
I stop by the payphone as I go back out to the tractor, because this also makes me feel like a time traveller, and I drop in some change and call our old number. My finger itself remembers all ten numbers before my actual brain can even recall it. This number has been disconnected for almost a year now and each time I’ve called it the robot voice has told me I’m sorry but this number is no longer in service…as if anyone uses landlines anymore. We didn’t even use it. We only kept it because we were dinosaurs and liked to hear it ring once in a while, to know that someone out there still remembered us. I’m so surprised to hear a voice on the other end say, “Hello,” that I almost wince. “Hello?” the voice says again. An older woman’s voice. A smoker. She says hello one more time and I don’t say anything and then finally she says, “Mark?” and I’m quiet until just before she seems like she’s about to hang up, and then I say, “Wait…”
“Mark?” she says again.
“I’m sorry,” is all I can think to say.
“For what — what are you talking about? Where even are you?” she says, and I hang up.
I’ve got the tractor nice and warm for when Hutch gets back in. I’ve figured out by now that we are in Colorado Springs, off course a little but not by too much, only maybe an hour or so. If it’s a windy day coming in from the west we should be able to make up the fuel some, but even if we don’t I’m not going to say anything to Hutch. Who knows how long it’s been since he’s seen his kid, which is something I’ve decided I won’t ask him about unless he brings it up.
He glares at me in the windshield reflection after he climbs back up inside. He thinks I can’t see him staring but I can. He lights up a smoke. “Fuck. I don’t know what I expected.”
A few miles down the road Hutch tells me the story. He says one night, years ago, back when he could afford cocaine, his wife found his stash and snorted all of it. “And I mean all of it. A fuck ton of grams,” he says.
“A whole fuck ton?” I say, but he doesn’t laugh. He says he freaked out, not because she’d just put thousands of dollars of his shit up her nose, but because it was plenty enough to OD. He says her heart had to be doing about 800 beats per minute, that it was ready to pop like a balloon. I ask if he took her to a hospital. “No,” he says, “I beat the shit out of her.” He shrugs. He says he was high on coke too and it seemed like the right move at the time. He says he thumped her in the nose hard enough that she wouldn’t be able to snort anything ever again if she survived the night, and he pulled clumps of hair out of her head and ripped her Aerosmith t-shirt clean off her shoulders, and he even chased her down the street as she fled to the neighbor’s house. They let her in before he could get ahold of her, he says, and he was afraid they’d call the police so he went and hid in the woods. Stayed out there all night. Problem is, he says, the neighbor was the landlord. Other problem is, he says, they left their kid — the now fully grown younger version of Hutch — alone in the living room all night, and when the boy got up and saw that Mom and Dad weren’t there, he wandered out into the night, all the way up the street to the 7-11. Hutch says, “You live and you learn,” and I say I’m not sure that’s how that phrase should be used but oh well. “We got our eviction letter the next day and then a few days after that SRS shows up and hauls J.P. away to be ward of the state for a while.”
I ask what does J.P. stand for. He says Jared Patrick. I eye Hutch’s wedding ring. It’s catching some sunlight right now, the diamonds are sort of glimmering as if fate itself is trying to make a point of me noticing. “You two still together?”
I expect him to say hell no are you crazy are you nuts hell fuckin no. I expect him to say this is wife number four or something, that he got married in prison to one of these babes who has a fetish for inmates. But he nods and says, “Yep. We’ll be celebrating 29 years this spring.” Then he says, “I don’t understand how it is she can forgive me but our boy can’t. Especially now that he has kids of his own, how he can’t see how impossible it is know what you’re doing in this life.”
This is something I will say to my wife when we get back to town, when I look her up and call her and beg her to at least think about giving me another chance. She won’t see it but I will be on my knees, pleading. I will say I just rode almost four thousand miles with a guy who was a violent criminal drug addict wife beater and possible murderer, and if his wife can forgive him why can’t you forgive me, why not, what did I ever do that was even one percent as bad as any of that? I will confront her about what she did to our old house, how she erased any trace of me. How she got rid of my work bench in the garage, the one I built by hand the first year we moved in. I wonder, did her boyfriend take the crowbar to it, pry it apart piece by piece, or did she do it herself, did she take it apart the way she’s taking my life apart right now, board by board, nail by nail? I will confront her about the new ugly ass paint color — baby shit yellow — and about changing out the carpet in the front room, which we’d only just changed a few years ago, when we’d picked it out together, when we got down on hands and knees with these swatches and eyed the fabric and really debated what would look best, and did she remember how she laughed when I turned to her and said, “Do you want to wrastle?” even though we didn’t wrastle hardly ever anymore, but she did laugh and that was always my third favorite thing to do with her. That laugh of hers. All those changes to our home, all those decisions we made together that now she made alone, and couldn’t we have made those last decisions as a couple if this was how it was going to be? And she sold my stuff, the things I hadn’t gotten the chance to haul away, she’d had a god damn garage sale and she’d sold it, all of it. How did it feel to haggle over quarters and dimes as she liquidated my things, really, I want to know, how did it feel? Probably good, is the answer, probably it felt damn good. But I was entitled to half the money then, by god, if this was how she wanted it, I was entitled to half, even if it was fifty bucks, I wanted my twenty five, I wanted enough to buy a pizza and some beer after years of accumulating all that stuff on all those credit cards. And did she have to give the rest away to Goodwill? Did she think I hadn’t driven by and seen all my things piled up on the curb, with the sign taped to it — DONATIONS — like I was the dead husband instead of the divorced one?
“You’re a bit of a stalker huh?” Hutch says, and it’s only then that I realize I’m talking aloud, ranting to myself, that I’ve maybe spent too much time alone all these years.
I lean back in my seat, put my hands out like I’m being crucified. Hutch grins at my gesture. I say, “You can’t stalk your own wife, that’s not how it works.”
“Oh, brother, yes you can. Yes you sure as hell damn well can, I know about a hundred guys who did.” I tell him not to compare me to his inmate friends. I watch the road for about a dozen miles, watch the ditch unwind like one long ribbon. Eventually I say, “And don’t call me brother, Hutch.”
A hundred miles before home — “home,” a different word for me now, which used to mean our house south of Holke road across from a fire station and behind a grade school, but is now an extended stay motel on 40 Highway, bookended by cop bars — we stop at our last truck stop. It’s been a warm day which this time of year means a ripping wind up from the south, and our load is heavy and we didn’t have enough diesel to make it the rest of the way after our detour. We need fuel. That’s all this job is, really. One truck stop after another between chasing the white lines, refueling in some way or another.
I pull through the pumps and Hutch jumps out before I can even get stopped, like he is escaping me, as if I’d ever kidnap a stinky smart ass like him. He asks if I want anything but I ignore him. I check my phone, wondering if maybe she’s called or texted, even if it’s to call me a lying bastard or a wet brain. I’d take that right now from her, anything but for her to ignore me for forever, to write me out of her life, like I never existed, like we were never even together.
A hundred and fifty gallons later Hutch comes out and I climb up into the cab. He throws me a candy bar and says, “Here, since you’re being a moody little bitch I thought you could use this —” and then as he’s putting his seatbelt on he sees something across the lot that stops him from moving altogether. His jaw slacks and he goes quiet, even stops breathing, and his eyes go so wide that for a second I wonder if I’m soon going to be giving him mouth to mouth and pumping my hands into his chest.
“You’re not gonna die are ya?”
He points, his finger barely above the dash, and says, “My god holy fuckin shit, it’s them. What a small fuckin world, I can’t hardly believe it.”
“Who?” I say. “Who’s them, them who?”
“Right there,” he says, pointing, and it’s like they can sense themselves being noticed, being singled out, like it’s some kind of super power, and they look right at Hutch. They stop walking and stare. They too have gone in for a snack, a pair of women, one who is a little older, in her early 60’s maybe, and the other is in her late 30’s but it’s hard to tell from this distance. “Look at them. Fucking legends.”
“Legends?”
Hutch turns to me, fully faces me, and he’s so excited that he’s gesturing as he talks. “Back like, I don’t know, almost 20 years ago, there was this mother-daughter prostitute team in Indiana—”
“Oh I don’t like where this is going. Hutch, this story is gonna make me more depressed and I really don’t want to be more depressed than I already am.” But he keeps talking, like he doesn’t hear me at all, and says that they’d roam the truck stops and extended parking lots all over the state, that they’d find the most pervy truckers they could find, the kind who’d be into the idea of a threesome with them, and they’d get these fellas all wound up and ready to go, all excited, get them stripped down and naked in the back, “And then they’d fucking rob a motherfucker at knife point. Take cash, credit cards. Jewelry. Wedding rings. Guns. Whatever they could grab and stuff into their little duffle bag. Old boys in Indy would cry all over the CB radio when they’d have a run-in with these gals. I figured some psycho would’ve killed those two by now, that they’d eventually run out of luck and rob the wrong crazy ass bastard. Ha,” he slaps his thigh, “good for them.” He starts waving at them.
“Stop that, don’t wave them over, what if they’re still robbing people.”
“I actually seen ‘em work a Love’s one night, seen some feller chase ‘em across the lot naked as a hog, all rolls and cock and balls, all danglin and swingin and sweatin.”
Instead of coming over to us they haul ass across the lot and scurry into their car and drive out in a rush, maybe figuring us to be two maniacs from their past who they’d ripped off while they were just trying to survive. “You know what that is?” I say. “That’s two people looking out for each other. That’s true love.”
Hutch stares at me for a while, like he’s really turning my words over in his head. For a second it seems like he might actually agree with me. “Nah,” Hutch finally says, “that’s just what society does to some people.” I laugh and tell Hutch I didn’t figure him for a commie. He says, “Let’s get rollin, comrade, I miss my wife.”
Back in town I drop Hutch off in the Costco parking lot. I watch as he climbs down from the rig and his ass gives all the shoppers an inverted smile and he makes a big dramatic effort to pull the waist of his pants high up on his hips after his feet hit the ground. He’s so glad to be back ashore. For a moment it seems like he might drop to his knees and kiss the earth. Instead he looks at me and shrugs, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t wave goodbye, only turns and ambles over to his wife, waiting for him in an old Crown Vic, the kind detectives drive. Hutch lowers himself inside and to passersby it might look like they’re discussing which crime scene they should head to.
Twenty minutes later I park my rig in the empty parking lot across from the extended stay. Home. Is there any other word designed to fuck you up more? I go in and shower and shave and then sit on the edge of the bed. I get my phone out and start to type my wife’s name in the search engine, to look her up and see if maybe she’d at least be open to hearing my voice on the phone. But I already know the answer. And what does it even mean to look someone up these days? It’s not like it used to be, just open a White Pages and flip to a name. Nowadays it’s all cellphones and social media pages, and people can block you on all of it and I guess that means they don’t want you to exist to them when they do that. For you to be, at best, a ghost. I still love her. That’ll never change, never, even if I make it to my 75th birthday and make a run to the store to buy all 37 pints of ice cream, hold up my end of the bargain. But what the fuck does it mean to love someone who doesn’t love you back? I want to call Hutch and ask him because he of all people is wrestling with this one too, but he and I have talked enough. After sitting with my eyes closed against the headboard for a while I come up with something of an answer. If Hutch and I go on the road again together I’ll tell him what I’ve come up with, even if he chews on it and spits it out at me feet the way he likes to do. I’ll say loving someone who doesn’t love you anymore means you keep that shit to yourself now, I guess. The only way I can show love to my wife the rest of the way — my ex-wife — is to give her what she wants from me. To do the hard thing for once and stay the hell out of her way, to not call her, to not drop in on her, to stop trying to convince her she should feel something other than what she does. To not make it about me. To not look her up, to not even have that knowledge in my brain because that’s how she wants it. Respect her wishes, I guess, probably for the first time in our whole relationship. I can hear what she’d say to this if she could read my thoughts. “You were always a slow learner,” she’d say.
And I’d say, “That’s me, sugar, forever two steps behind and runnin in circles.”
“And always such the martyr,” she’d say.
“Yeah,” I say aloud, to her voice in my head. “But no. Not just now. For once, no.” And I guess no one knows that that’s the truth but me. And I guess that’s how that sort of thing is supposed to work. Maybe that’s something close to true love.
I lay back and call my dispatcher. I tell him to find me my next load out. He asks where I’m hauling from. I tell him. I say, “Home.”