Katie Buckley

‘The Truck Driver’

The truck is so large that it does not fit into the normal-sized parking space outside the normal-sized grocery store. One of its front wheels has actually mounted the curb and is prodding the sand swept board walk of this open plan mall. It is July.  The boardwalk runs, river like, around a collection of shops that suggest a drunken blend of change and permanence. The grocery store. An art gallery that sells only seaglass reworked into unusual objects, including, this season, a life sized mermaid. It is 4,000 dollars. The library, where the truck driver’s mother used to work. It has posters in the window advertising the summer reading competition. The truck driver’s sister brought it up the last time they spoke. How mom had always made them do it and how the truck driver had read the most books of anyone on the island that one summer when Dad was sick. A hardware store. LENNY’S: SCREWING SINCE 1983. The pharmacy. The liquor store. And a real estate agent. Holiday makers pause to look at the ads pasted on the inside of the window. ESCAPE CITY LIFE. SECOND HOME POTENTIAL. Land is for sale too, reams of it, rolling on down to the laughing belly of the pacific. 

Down the road from the mall there is a house. You go past the beaches, past the soccer fields, yellow and scratchy on the small knees that thud into it, and up the hill. Hang right, into cool puddles of shade thrown by arbutus trees. At the end of this road, where the pavement peters out into gravel, the small house sits. Pine needles in the gutter. A screen door. A black swimsuit hangs and sways from a low hanging branch. 

Inside the small house, the phone is ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing. 

The bell above the grocery store door chirps. A woman walks out and heads straight for the truck. She is wearing denim cut-offs with a cropped Canucks t-shirt and her hair is held up by a pen, twisted through the stack of gold on top of her head. She hauls the crate of beer she is carrying into the bed of the truck, opens the passenger seat door and places the paper bag of groceries in the well of the seat. As she walks round the hood, she taps it with her nails, painted red. 

Sea air roars into the truck. A few strands of blonde hair roar out, ripped away by the wind. Some will end up woven into a blue jay’s nest. 

The truck driver’s aunt owns the house. She lives in another, on the same plot of land, divided by a row of surprisingly even pines. The truck driver wakes often at night. She sees a solitary light in the top window of her aunt’s house and falls back to sleep quickly. 

The highest concentration of cougars in the world is on an island a crow’s flight from this one. Cougars kill you by tearing your stomach open with their back claws. They disembowel you. It is, naturally, impossible to run away from a big cat when your insides are at your feet in the dirt. 

If you ever see a cougar, her father had said back when she was so small that his sweaters reached her toes, it has already been following you for hours. It has been watching you from the woods. 

If you ever see a cougar, it’s over. 

Cougars are the same cat as panthers, she had explained to her husband years before, lying in bed, listening to his heart purr.

I don’t believe you, he said. 

That, she thinks, looking out at the pines, was when their troubles started.

No one is sure if there are cougars here, on this smaller, wilder, island, in comparable density. The island is so small that it seems impossible that anyone, living or dead, would’ve missed them. Sometimes, the truck driver walks all the way round the island. She has cut her hands before, scrambling up rocks bedecked in barnacles. But it is something to do. And she has layers of scars on her hands from other things. One is from a pizza oven, her first job, 15 years ago. Another from cutting melon recklessly, distracted by her husband. Laughing at something she can’t remember anymore.

There are cougars here. Tracks, outside the cabin door. Yowling, disquieting in its similarity to a house cat in heat. A lazy trick. It makes the hair on her neck stand up. Not the sound. The impulse to check if the cat is okay. The way she almost falls for it, every time. 

She cannot bear to sleep with the windows open. She thinks she hears the clack of claws on the thin screen. The screen is there to prevent mosquitos. She imagines it crumpling like cellophane at the first curious paw. 

The phone rings in the night. She thinks about unplugging it and she asks her aunt one day, in the garden, if she can. 

Disconnect the phone? The aunt asks. Ice hurls itself from one side of the highball glass to the other. The surface of the ice tea has a film on it, like an oil slick. 

Yes, the truck driver says. She uses her finger to stir her glass of ice tea. The slick becomes a whirlpool. The second she stops stirring it, it goes back to disaster. As if she’d never tried to fix it at all. 

Why? The aunt asks. She wears all white. There is a tiny grass stain on each knee. A keen gardener, like the truck driver’s mother. 

The truck driver doesn’t say anything. In the driveway, behind them and through the old driftwood fence, a cougar hops into the bed of the truck. She settles. Sighs, as if she misses someone. Licks a monstrous paw. 

He will still try to call, you know, the aunt says, shifting in her chair. 

The truck driver nods. She knows. She has been told. Look, how the waves can’t help coming back. 

He misses you, the aunt says.

And I him, the truck driver thinks. She says,

I’ll get us more tea. 

In the kitchen, her mother and father stare down at her from the fridge. Sitting on the hood of the truck. Her mother is mid sentence. Her father, mid laugh and there is no rust anywhere. She used to fall asleep in the truck, sandwiched between her family. Her head on her father’s lap. Her feet on her mother’s. Drifting off listening to everyone singing along to Jerry Lee Lewis’s Great Balls of Fire. The feeling of knowing you would all make it home.

They wouldn’t like it, her aunt says, when she brings back the ice tea. All this misery-making. 

The truck driver used to seek out danger. She walked by herself in the woods for hours. She went home with strange, wide mouthed men. Once, she danced on the lonely edge of a pier. Balancing on the splintered wood. Slivers biting into the soft skin of her instep. The water was shallow around the base of the pier and there were rocks, sneering up at her and impossible to miss. The ocean so wet and wanting her so badly and her almost losing her footing over and over again. 

Why did you do it? Her husband asked her. They had just met and she was lying between his legs, her face pressed into the bready domestic smell of his cock. She laughed. When she tilted her face up to look at him, he didn’t smile. He wiped her hair off her sticky face and tucked it behind her ear. 

The next time the phone rings she is sitting right next to it. It is 4 am. The sun is stretching her tired limbs over the horizon. The truck driver has not slept. She heard crunching. When the yowling starts she is almost relieved that she was right to be scared, right to keep the windows closed. She answers the phone before she remembers not to. Her husband says, 

Hello?

She doesn’t say anything. She can hear the wind chime on their balcony singing to itself through the phone. She imagines the click of the dog’s claws on the hardwood floors. 

He can hear her breathing. 

She sits with her face pressed so hard to the phone, that when she hangs up and walks away, her cheek is honeycombed with the hollows of the speaker. 

Before she hangs up, he says, 

I’m still here.

She receives a postcard, unsigned, in the mail. Snuggled up in the dove-grey metal post box between a Telus bill for her aunt and a 4 month old copy of Country Living her sister has sent her. Some of the pages have been turned down. Things to look at again, later. Her mother has written inside it, next to things she likes. On a page about building your own birdhouses, her mother has written, 

How lovely!

The postcard says ‘I love you’ in cramped, masculine handwriting. Why, she wonders, do men never stop writing like middle schoolers. Her own handwriting is scattered all over the apartment. On the message pad, next to the phone. The top Post It just says,

no.

The journal, which lies face down and splayed out on the bed. Her favourite is the shopping list, written on the back of last week’s grocery store receipt and tacked up on the fridge. 

Eggs

Milk 

Sleepytime tea 

Beer 

Bacon 

Cheese 

And, added in a reckless post script, 

Nice bread from the market (Saturday) 

In her wallet, tucked behind a picture of her father in the 70s, there is a shopping list written by her husband. At the top,

Anniversary Dinner! 

And underneath, a jewel box of things. She particularly likes the way the humble things look in his adolescent script. 

Salt. Butter. 

She used to call him just after he’d left the house and stay on the phone while he shopped. She’d say 

What are you looking at? Which aisle are you in? 

So she could see him, even when they were apart. 

On nights when he came late she would pace the floor of their apartment. Press her palms to the window, waiting for his headlights to light up the trees. The light-headed rush of relief that came with them, so much like ecstasy that even now the sight of lone headlights on an empty road makes her feel like screaming with joy. Shaky hands, scooping her insides back into her body. 

The truck driver walks out to the edge of the rocks. Barefoot, barnacles sinking their white teeth into the soles of her feet. The waves are crashing over her calves and when she falls in, she doesn’t make a single sound. Just slips into the water like a hammock-wrapped corpse thrown over the edge of a ship. The ocean so wild and wanting her so badly. Her body is covered in tiny little cuts when she walks back out of the water. Her flesh ribboned by coral. She leaves her blood behind in the water with the recklessness of a swimmer who has already been scented by sharks. 

Flowers are still arriving, a couple of times a week. Allegedly for her, but for her mother really. She takes the bouquets apart and throws the stems into the sea. Where her mother is. She sits on the rocks that rise out of the foam like the ridged back of a dragon and watches the lilies drown themselves in the grey-green water. She finds them days later, washed up on the shoreline. The currents of the island are too strong, the baker at the market explains. Things always get brought back. Then the baker asks,

How’s your dad’s truck? 

She has started washing the truck by hand every other day. She finds dusty paw prints on the hood, in the bed. Scuff marks where the cougar has rubbed its sooty pelt against the metal. She wipes them away before anyone sees. She does not tell her aunt, or her mother’s friends, that a cougar is following her. She opens the windows at night. Come and get me, she thinks.

When she was 16, a few years after the death of her father, she realised that her mother too would eventually die. She lay on the couch and cried and cried and cried and her mother laughed and said,

By the time I go, you’ll be so busy with your own life that you won’t even notice. You won’t miss me, she said. 

The truck driver would crawl into bed with her mother in the middle of the night to make sure she was still breathing. She did the same thing with her husband. She’d lie there and watch him in the very early morning. Just in case, she thought. I’ll stay awake just in case. 

And if we have a boy? She had asked him only weeks ago, how obscene the way happiness had looked at the scythe that hung above the truck driver’s head and decided that no, this was not a place where she would unpack her things. The truck driver smelt too much like rot. 

If we have a boy, he said, looking at the ceiling. Long long lashes, like a little child’s. Freckles on his ears. 

If we have a boy, we’ll name him after your dad, he said. So he’s always with us. 

The ring of the phone is so constant now that she can tune it out. It rings as she leaves the house in rhinestone flip flops, handed down from her aunt, and an old linen dress of her mothers, speckled with sprays of blackberry juice from lost days of jam making. It rings when she comes back, her fingers ringed with the pink welts from heavy plastic grocery bags. It rings when she unpacks the food and puts a beer in the freezer straight away. It rings and rings when she takes a shower and then puts the same dress back on. She smells of sweat and jasmine oil, bought from the health food store. It rings when she reads old paperbacks, left behind from holidays with her mother and sister. Her mother has underlined passages in some of them. In others are her own fingerprints, red and purple blotches left behind from berry-stained fingers. 

At her mother’s funeral, her husband held her hand. He handed around small plates of crackers and cheese. Squatted down to talk to old people. His black suit was ancient, he’d had it since they were at college together. She looked at the back of his neck. He needed a haircut, his hair curled over the collar of his pale blue shirt. A cherub, on a long-ago ceiling in Rome. She had held his hand and looked up for so long that she felt dizzy. When he pulled her away to kiss her she had been surprised to find her feet still on the ground. She looked at her fingers, latticed with his. Tethered, she thought. Safe. 

It takes a whole day for her to notice that the phone has stopped ringing.