For All Nails #237: Truckers
by Carlos Yu
Kane was not a happy man, even in the best of circumstances. He was not expecting sleep, not this night, but the bunk of the cab was too short for a big man to lay down to his full length. Knees up, knees to the side, a roll to the left and then to the right in a demented hula of discomfort, Kane cursed, sat up, and slid on a pair of flip-flops, stepping out into the warm Balinese air.
He looked up. The Milky Way cut the night sky in two. Kane shrugged and started a slow walk around the rig, flashlight in hand, working his way through the final checklist. Dance music thumped over the hum of the trailer's compressor as customers entered and left the brothel across the parking lot. A popular place.
A knock on the cab door. "Señor, señor?" It was a little kid, not more than ten years old, with a bad bowl cut, just like the rest of Asia. Kane ignored him.
Knock knock. "Señor, señor!" Kane sat impassively.
Knock knock. "Señor, señor!" Kane shut his eyes.
Knock knock knock. "Señor, señor!"
Kane rolled down the window. "Not interested."
"You wanna girl, señor? She come right out to the truck."
"Not interested." Kane closed his eyes again.
Knock knock. "Señor, señor? She do whatever you wan. Mexican, Merican, Greek."
"Not interested. Go away." Kane rolled up the window, put in a tape of The Well-Tempered Clavier, and waited.
Knock knock. "Señor, mister, you wan two girls? Ver nice, verdad. Lossa fun!"
"Not interested."
"You can watch!"
"Not interested. Go away."
"Blanco inside say he pay."
That Haggard. Probably drunk off his ass. "No. Go inside and tell Señor Blanco I'm not interested. Got that? Not interested. Make sure he knows."
The boy nodded and ran off. A ten minute respite, Kane figured, wondering once again what the hell Klugman was muttering under his breath as he played. Prayers? Time counts? Cricket scores? One last mystery.
A half hour later, "Señor, señor?"
"Go away."
"You wanna boy, mister?"
Kane turned and saw the kid had brought another boy with him, maybe an older brother, thirteen, fourteen at most, standing hand on hip and fluttering his fake eyelashes at him.
"Jesucristo, NO! Goddammit. Here, kid. Here's a tenner. Get me a cup of coffee and a chicken sandwich, and a newspaper if you can scrounge one up. English, Spanish, ching-chong, doesn't matter. Got it? I take it black."
"You got it mister. Number one chicken sammich, comin right up!" The boys ran off into the night. Kane never saw them again.
He didn't bother to try to go back to sleep. Instead, Kane lit up a cigarette and took a long drag. Then he laughed.
Haggard stumbled out of the brothel an hour later. He looked like a happy man. He didn't look particularly drunk, even though his breath had alcohol on it. Probably his exertions burned it all off.
"Que onda," said Haggard. He sounded like a teenager. He was forty-seven.
"What do you think?" responded Kane. He took another puff on his sixth cigarette of the night. "You look like shit."
Haggard shrugged. "I got me four chicas in there who say different."
"Lo que sea," grunted Kane. "Get some sleep, Haggard."
Haggard actually laughed, a grating high-pitched Jefferson rooster's cackle. "I don't think I cain sleep. But I sure cain't fuck no more either."
"That's not need to know information."
Haggard's grin never left his face. "Jes' wanted to get the lead out of the old pencil . . . and we got to mosey in a couple hours."
"Lo que sea." It was Kane's favorite expression when he talked to Haggard. He tossed the cigarette on the ground, not bothering to stamp it out. Somehow the remote chance of the dirt catching fire seemed even more remote than usual. Kane coughed, and grimaced at the taste of his own blood.
"Move it on over, Big Dog. This old dog's getting in." Kane hadn't actually been blocking the door to the cab. Haggard climbed into the top bunk, turned on the reading light, and pulled a battered copy of Azul out from under the pillow. Within minutes, he was snoring loud enough to wake the dead. Kane switched the reading light off.
Kane remembered the war.
Alienists said that jovenes thought they were immortal, that they would never die. They never smelled the piss and shit of the bombing runs over Japan, where only the Devil and Bernhard Kramer knew what the Japs would come up with next.
It was the Yokohama run, tonne after tonne of Fat Bastard dropped onto the port city, the recon man shooting footage from the bomb bay as the black eggs blossomed into white flowers down below.
You could feel the anti-airmobile fire burst above you, catch the shadow of it through the clear ball turret beneath you, glimpse some through the cockpit window in the corner of your eye. Meanwhile the ground, the city below you starts to glow hibiscus red.
And then the smell of roasted pork as you climbed away through the smoke. Briefings said the Japs lived in paper houses.
No one ever thought about bailing out over the Home Islands.
Once again, the Japs have something new. First the radiodetector sweep, which puts out enough RF to make our own bomber's tubes glow and hum in sync. We release the chaff, it's almost automatic at this point. This time, we have a decoy glider as well. Then the Japs try a cross-channel jam. Gomez throws off his headphones and starts swearing. You can hear the feedback whine over the engines before the circuit cuts out. He puts on his dark glasses and switches to the xenon lamp, flash flash. We're all grinning at each other like idiots.
Then the bullets stitch through the top of the fuselage. It's a complete surprise, the scope said only angels and the Almighty above us. Williams is hit, pithed through the skull and out his lower back. His arms flop and he is still. Every tenth round is fosforo blanco, they hiss and spatter like ice on a skillet. Blue flames, yellow sparks, the night sky. There's a terrible light followed by an explosion, and we know another crew won't be landing with us.
Our guns won't point up enough, and the Jap airmobiles are dancing on our ceiling. They bounce like fleas, you can see flames shoot out their ass, what the fuck are they? Fuck, here comes another, in a long graceful arc.
At the last possible second Olazaran rolls us thirty, forty-five degrees. We're gonna broadside them, conquistador style. And it works! Twelve point seven will shoot through anything, but these fleas must be made from plywood. The chemical smell from the explosions stings our noses. "Bug juice," someone calls it. We all know what he means.
The fleas have legs and angels on us but no range. We pass over the spine of Japan in the moonless night. Williams we wrap in blankets. Curtis, the Acapulco cameraman, looks like he has been slashed by whips. No one is sure what happened to him. He's babbling about the film, is it safe? We tell him it is.
Gunner O'Connell dies during the night. Joking one minute, shock the next. No obvious wounds, he must have bled out internally.
We land at Dezhnevsk. Already we can tell attrition has taken its toll. The Siberian flight crews are there with the ceremonial bottle of vodka. Olazaran gets a big bear abrazo from the commandant. The bottle runs out. They have another, and another. Soon the night seems like a bad dream.
And then off to the steam baths, where they beat the burnt pig smell off of you with birch twigs.
Kane rolled down the window and lit another cigarette. The night was cool and silent now, except for the incessant creaking of the frogs. Kane blew out a cloud of smoke into the air, tossed the half-gone cigarette into the lot. Smoke 'em if you got 'em, boys.
Kane remembered the peace.
The goons use crowbars while the bulls use the hoses, but the scabs fight with the same clubs as the strikers, heavy batons of koa wood that can shatter bone with a single blow.
Keep the line firm, that's the thing. Stay strong, never let them see you doubt, never let them smell your fear, never let them see the rifts between you, sons of Chiapas and the Azores, Isleno and Japanese, Neiderhoffero and Jeffersonian and big Joe Kane, who one day said enough was enough.
"Hawaii! Unido! Jamas sera vencido! HAWAII! UNIDO! JAMAS SERA VENCIDO!"
The blows rain down hard, the sound like meat thrown onto a butcher's block. One man shrieks and chokes it back down, his arm hanging uselessly at his side, the jagged edge of bone sticking through bare flesh. A lot of veterans do like Kane does, wear their flight or drop jackets on the line, ripe in the heat, grateful for the padding.
Another thrust, and this must be what it was like in the old days, before Kramer or Cook or Cortez, before any haole set foot in the New World, shouts and bludgeons until one side breaks. Kane wonders which side will shoot first.
And out of the sun he comes, like a Jap in a dogfight. We hear the hummingbird chop of his gyropter first, then the wind whipping trash around our feet and dust into our eyes. We all back up, striker and scab and company man, making a ring of human flesh, making room. We know who this must be.
The blades wind down and he steps out. His suit is creased and rumpled but somehow he is immaculate. He speaks, smiles ruefully as he waits for the drone of the rotors to ebb, and speaks again, pitched perfectly to the crowd. We hang on every word.
"My friends! My friends. There is no need for violence here today. What we have here is merely a failure to communicate."
Later, much later, at the ceremony, we line up to shake his hand, management and labor alike. "Of course I remember you, Joseph Kane." He pronounces it right, with two syllables. "I never forget a face. Mexico has need of men like you, you know. I have need of men like you."
The sky was graying in the east. Supposedly the Arabs reckoned dawn to be the time when you could tell a white hair from a black one. Probably turista folklore. Kane checked his chronometer. Gray and black hairs peppered the back of his hand. He laughed, coughed and spat out the window.
More blood. Time to go.
Kane reached inside the bunk and shook Haggard's foot. "Haggard. Wake up. We have to go."
"Huh?" mumbled Haggard.
"It's almost dawn. We have to go."
Haggard grunted something profane. He slid out of the bunk and out of the back of the cab in one motion. His eyes were still bloodshot, Kane noticed. They were always bloodshot now.
"Got to shake the dew off the lily."
"All right."
Kane got in the driver's side of the cab. It was on the right. Kane was used to that. Haggard got in the passenger side of the bench, hangover quiet.
"Big Dog."
"Haggard."
"I ever tell you why I joined up?"
Yes. "No."
"Why, to kill Japs, a course. And Cangas and Tories too, and their niggers. But mainly it was to kill Japs. You got a cigarette?"
Kane handed him the pack.
"Muchas." The orange tip of the cigarette was the same shade as the eastern sky. "Just another goddam day in paradise." Haggard must have noticed too. "And I killed me a lot of Japs. Well, after a while, you start to lose track. Like one more don't signify. And that set me to thinking."
"Say on." Kane checked the tell-tales on the dashboard.
"If you cain't remember something, it cain't be right or wrong. It stands to reason. You don't know it, it as well never happened."
"Makes sense."
"Momma Haggard didn't raise no Wayne Lee estupido, no sir. But if it ain't never happened, well. Someone done snipped out part of your life." Haggard ground out his cigarette on the door, let the butt fall to the floor. "I sure couldn't live like that, all vidado in the haid."
"Don't suppose you could."
Tritium count in the zone, all systems go.
"Big Dog."
"Haggard."
"I ever tell you why I joined up?"
Kane felt chilled to the bone. "No?"
Haggard looked at him like a mournful hound dog, lower lip quivering. Then he cackled, slapping his thighs. "Hee hee hee! Gotcha! Oh, hombre, you should a seen the look on your face."
Kane snorted. Then he guffawed. "You sad sorry son of a bitch."
"Oh, I'm a card, I am. We ready to go?"
"Ready." Kane shifted the rig into gear. "Let's roll."
Forward to FAN #238: These Are the Journeys.
Forward to 25 December 1974: Puputan.
Return to For All Nails.