Hot Food
In Swinburn, time is not measured by minutes, hours or weeks, but by the number of eighteen wheelers that rumble past my house. If there’s construction on the I-4, time goes by fast, and more customers than I usually see in a month pack themselves into the space of a week, maybe less. But if the weather’s fair and the accidents are mopped up, and all the lanes are open and traffic’s going three lanes north and three lanes south, it could be days at a time before I see even one trucker.
Still, I put on my bead-spangled top and my flouncey skirt, did my makeup with two thick lines of black around each eye and a flowered silk scarf knotting my long hair back, because they’ve heard of me, them truckers, and that’s what they’ve come to expect.
“Mornin’ Sadie,” said Bertram. He runs the truck stop diner during the day, switching off with his cousin Stanley at six p.m. sharp every night. I never quite got the story straight on which of them owned it. Them two look more like twins than cousins, except that Bertram’s glasses are held together with masking tape, and he always says hello. I expect that Stanley thinks he’s too good for me. And that’s saying a lot, since all of us live in the same sorry place.
“Good morning, Bert.” I see him heading for the coffee pot and stop him. We’ve got a deal that I drink for free, coffee, soda, whatever I want, if I give him five bucks whenever I land a customer. It works out well for the both of us. Bert’s coffee is a cut or two above most roadside diners’ coffee, expecially considering that he’d never even taken the time to figure out what to call his joint, and people had to start calling it by the two-foot-high blocky letters on the plate glass window that said, “HOT FOOD.”
“Just water for me today.”
Bert pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows, pretending to give me flak as he scooped ice into a tall plastic tumbler. “I never see you turn down coffee less you had a load on.”
“Might’ve have a drink or two,” I said.
Bert grinned and poured me some water. He came to work bleary and stinking of whiskey once in a while himself. What else was there to do in Swinburn but drink--at least when the I-4 was clear?
I sat down at the counter and crossed my arms over the dog-eared paperback I’d brought with me. I really needed to find some books that I hadn’t read two or three times before. “Anyone come through today?”
Bert lined up his extra salt shakers with expert precision. “Nope.”
“Construction?”
“Nope.”
“Accidents?”
“Not that I heard.”
I looked up at the clock. Not even ten, the day looming ahead of the two of us, tedious and empty. “Lemme give you a freebie,” I said. If Bert and me were both stuck in Swinburn, we might as well get something out of it.
“Y’all know I’m a good Christian man,” said Bert. He thought it was funny. Maybe I did, too.
“Then tell me about the next song you’re gonna write,” I said. Bert wrote songs, and he played them on his warped acoustic guitar and taped them on a boombox held together with silver duct tape. But he was good; he had a lot of heart. He needed to move to Nashville so he could get paid for his music. But Bert lived in Swinburn, and he showed no signs of budging.
“I done told you...” he started, but the chirp and wheeze of airbrakes cut short whatever he was going to say. A rig had pulled up somewhere on the east end of the lot where we couldn’t see it through the plate glass window and the backwards letters that read “HOT FOOD.”
“Got your grill fired up?”
“Girl, it always on. But he comin’ here for you, not me.”
“You never know,” I said. “Maybe he’s just hungry.”
“Hungry all right. Hungry for--” the creak of the front door swinging open cut us off. It was a lanky kid in a hunter’s dayglo orange jacket. He twisted a set of keys between a pair of callused hands. Not a bad-looking kid, maybe ten years younger than me. But spooked about being there in Swinburn that day, judging by the way he hung back by the door.
“Coffee?” said Bert, and the kid jumped a little, then nodded. He crept up to the counter, still twisting his keys. Bert poured him a cup, set it on the counter, and then tucked a pair of small plastic creamers onto the saucer. The kid picked up the sugar dispenser and poured about a quarter cup of sugar into it, sneaking small glances at me the entire time.
“You gon’ order?” said Bert.
“Are you Sadie?” he blurted out, ignoring Bert.
I nodded.
“I heard that you....”
“You got money on you?” I learned the hard way to get the money up front. People get queer about money sometimes. “Show it to me.”
The kid fumbled his keys into his pocket and pulled out a few folded bills. “This g-guy, calls himself Wild Bill. He said you charge fifty.”
I nodded again. “I remember Wild Bill. Give the money to Bert and follow me.” I turned and walked to the farthest booth, the one tucked back behind the coat rack that nobody but Bert could see, and only if he came all the way to the end of the counter and craned his neck.
There were no sugar dispensers, bright red and yellow plastic ketchup and mustard sets, or chrome napkin holders in this far booth. Just a small white candle in a simple glass holder. I pulled out a book of matches from Lonnie’s, a gin mill off the I-4, and I sat down and lit it.
The kid slid into the other seat and stared at me, wild-eyed with first time jitters. “D’you need to, uh, know my birthdate or anything like that?”
“No,” I said. I held my hands out. “Just show me your palms. That’s all.”
He looked at his own hands as if he’d never seen them before. “Shit,” he said, laughing nervously. “They’re dirty.”
“That’s okay, kid,” I said. “We’re at a truck stop, not the Taj Mahal. And besides, they look just fine.” And they were fine--good hands, honest hands.. A little yellowed between index and ring finger where he held his cigarettes, some old grease rubbed into the knuckles and under the nails, but so what? I’d seen worse.
Bert started humming to himself as he put on a new pot of coffee, the sound of his music swelling around me as I lost myself in the map of the trucker’s life, his heart line, straight and steady, his life line, branched with illness, maybe injury, but not now, not so young. I thought about how to tell him what I saw, a typical life full of ordinary home runs and hard knocks, in a way that would make him feel a little bigger in the scheme of things than a dime-a-dozen trucker just passing through a skidmark of a town called Swinburn.
end