Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (i am reading a book TXT) 📕

have had some influence over his emotions. After an hour he took it up again and the same ineffable feeling descended upon him, this time more intensely. I won’t be bullied in this manner, he told himself, and forced page after page into his memory. Before the end of the second book of Moses he was filled with such an inexorable dread that he had to put it down and flee to his room beneath City Hall. It was as though something else was trying to speak through the broken language, and it was something he couldn’t fathom. Later heput the book into his bookshelf and pushed the experience behind him.

He took the equivalency examination and passed.

He got a chauffeur’s license so he could pilot Carroll about the city, on occasion into New York, and run errands to the bank. He was responsible for keeping delivery records and handling all written correspondence.

Late one night Carroll came upstairs and rapped anxiously on his door. July was reading and stood up with a start, wondering why there should be so much excitement.

Franklin came in with a rush. “Quick, quick,” he exclaimed. “You must do me a favor, just this once. Hurry, get your coat. Think you can handle a truck? Hurry up, hurry—of course you can, you’re an excellent driver.”

On the way down the stairs to the basement Carroll shoved a piece of paper into July’s pocket, explaining that there was an address on it, somewhere in Chelsea, Mass. He opened the door for him and escorted him onto the loading ramp in the basement. A cold blast of air met them. The doors were open and an enormous trailer truck stretched out into the back lot, alley lights reflecting through the windshield and side wings of the cab, looking like a gray twenty-ton silverfish.

“I can’t drive that,” July complained. As he spoke he noticed they were not alone. Two men were crouching on the ground alongside the truck, one of them leaning against a black tire. All the lights were out. The back end of the trailer was locked with a padlock, the motor was idling and diesel fumes filled the air. From what he could make out, the two men were young, early twenties, dressed in heavy, dark pea jackets. One of them—the one on the ground against the tire—looked as though something might be wrong with him. His chest heaved as if he were breathing hard. The other walked about nervously, up to the door, back to his companion, talking in low, unintelligible words.

“Sure you can,” said Carroll. “There can’t be anything to it. Drivers don’t know anything. Don’t you see, you have to.” Therewas a frantic note in Carroll’s voice—a sound July had never heard there before.

“What’s this all about? Why aren’t the lights on? What’s in this truck?”

“Don’t ask questions. Quick, you have to get this thing out of here. Hey, you—you, Sonny!” he shouted to the pacing man, who came back to them. “There’s nothing to driving this, is there?”

“We got to get Murf out of here,” he complained.

“Shut up. Murf can freeze in hell for all I care now. We’ve got to get this truck out of here. Is there anything to it?”

“Naw, anybody can drive one.”

“There, you see, now get going.”

“Those things have a thousand gears,” protested July.

“Hurry, please get out of here. Take this.” Carroll shoved some bills into his coat pocket and practically dragged him up past the heaving young man to the cab. “Come back as quick as you can. Don’t talk to anyone. You’ve got to! Christ, get this thing out of here. Hey, you idiot”—to Sonny—“get him out, take ’im to a hospital if you want.” The man turned to help his companion up. “Wait! What about these gears?”

“There’s a plate on the dashboard shows where they are. Careful going through the city. Be easy on the brakes till you get the feel. Be careful going through New York.”

“OK, that’s enough, now get him out of here.”

It wasn’t difficult for July to tell that at the present moment Carroll and the young man had no high regard for each other. And as a testimony to the kind of loyalty he had, he climbed into the truck and closed the door, eager to help out in the best way he could.

“If you’re stopped,” said Carroll through the window, “say nothing and we’ll get you out—but don’t call here.” That was all.

July depressed the clutch, put the shift lever in the first position, as nearly as he could figure, and rolled out of the loading dock and into the lot. The motor screamed and the tires inched ahead. Boy, is that a low gear, he thought and shiftedinto second, double-clutching in neutral as he’d once heard you should do. He got onto the Schuylkill Expressway and headed toward New York City.

Once on the open road, his anxiety over handling the big, roaring monster settled back, and bits of conversation, like phantoms, formed dream pictures in his imagination, moved about by his own fearful expectations: If they stop you—If they get you—Don’t call . . . Be careful going through the city. How could one be careful in a semi? Careful of what? Every car he saw, he was suspicious of. He prayed there would be enough gasoline in the tank to last the whole way, because he was afraid of any encounters. His headlights on the road seemed miles underneath him.

Because it was so late at night a certain comradeship seemed to exist between him and the other truck drivers on the facing lanes, and they winked their overhead lights at him. He imagined them making long hauls across the country against a strict deadline, and driving long into the morning because of stopping off in some wayside town and being taken for a ride by a long-legged hooker from a crosstown bar, their money gone but left with pictures to turn in their heads through New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana,