Memories of a Female Trucker

By Penny K. Johnson

Memories of a Female Trucker is written from the cab of an eighteen-wheeler where Johnson lived for five years. The gist of the book takes place within the schism of the lush life of the 1950s and the rebellion of the 1960s. It uses the grid of interstate driving to deftly weave a collage of time and place. It is nightmare, visitation and new meanings where the past is squarely placed in the rearview mirror while the highway is always moving forward. This is a story of a woman and a man as well as of a mother and daughter in which the intellectual brutality is always offset with the juxtaposition of nature. It is a journey of healing and success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penny K. Johnson
• Release date: Feb 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301381975

Penny K. Johnson

Bicycle rider. Horse rider. Harley rider. Truck driver and back again. MFA & Winner UCLA Extension Short Fiction Psychiatric Nurse. English as a second language teacher: Brazil and Poland. Family: two truck drivers off-the-road, 2 horses, 12 goats, 3 dogs, 1 cat.

Book preview

Memories of a Female Trucker

By Penny K. Johnson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Penny K. Johnson

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Acknowledgments

About the Author

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CHAPTER ONE

DELORES: Dying. Will it happen in an exhale or framed between hell and the inquisition? It’s a strange thing for a mother to ask a daughter, but my daughter should know since she is a nurse. She tells me, dying is a kind of manual labor. When people die, they are taken up in a kind of work that leaves all others out. Dying is a lot of work. She says she’s seen the work done in a few days or if it’s a car accident, done in a blink of an eye. When you are dying, time has no borders, it fills horizon to horizon. That’s it, that’s all, it just seems to me like some hard work is being done, she says. Life is funny. When my daughter was young she swallowed a whole bottle of pills. When I was young I couldn’t wait to die. I think all the way back to when I was born in 1921. I wonder about my own mother. Now, I am old, only a few breaths from dying but I feel like I am just learning to have fun.

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I’m going to tell you this story of my Mom dying just once but the chances are you won’t even listen to me. Either you won’t understand, won’t be able to follow, or you won’t believe me. Same thing maybe. But I’m old enough now that there’s no time for repeating the same words over and over. If you don’t remember anything else, remember this: when someone close to you dies, time gets turned inside out. A portal opens where time is all the same. All of a sudden, what comes second comes first, and the fourth is now the third and what was fifth becomes two hundred. Sometimes, like now, while I’m driving the eighteen wheeler and Emil’s taking a nap in the bunk, curled with his knees to the back wall, time comes shooting at me all in one ball. Right now, I’m really tired but I don’t fall asleep at the wheel. More than once I’ve watched the black of Emil’s eyelashes glide down to match the bottoms. Emil sleeps more than me. He’s older than me in the first place and he has the Portuguese disease that keeps his balance off. He has to concentrate twice as hard, at least, when he’s walking. So I am tired and irritable and I have gel ear plugs in. I have gel ear plugs in to cut down on the racket. And I’m sitting here with both hands on the steering wheel going sixty five across the rest of Indiana. Corn is coming up all over the place. I am already missing the West, the sharp beamed western barns which have now lost out to the red gambrels. My coffee is close to my right hand and my good dog Tip is rolled into a donut on the passenger seat. If I think too loud Tip will raise his head and stare at me with eyes as round as sable buttons. This is the way it should be.

With people, you say the same words out loud, over and over, louder and louder, and they still won’t get it. With ear plugs in, words get stuck on the inside like a gum machine filled with peanuts, raisins and candy then all and jumbled together. Every once in awhile someone puts in a nickel and stirs the whole thing up; a few pieces fall out. I am going to tell this out loud so my head doesn’t split in two. I am going to say it only once: Trees are nocturnal animals.

I started camping when I was eight months old. It took me forever to understand that Mom didn’t even like camping but she’d do anything Dad said. Dad found some farmer who didn’t mind a few campers at the edge of his pasture among the slim dogwoods, four white petals to the flower, thick oaks, sometimes a paper bark birch. Mom and Dad went camping in the big army tent that exhaled damp canvas, a sprinkle of mildew. Mom put me in a bark basket strapped to her back or hung it from a sturdy branch of a tree. There are old photos with scalloped edges, turning mostly gray, photos of my chubby baby body in the basket or swaddled in the thick pillow of a life vest. My head is bald and my face is scrunched tight. They sat me down in an ice cold, spring creek. My mouth is a compressed baby line. Mom wanted me clean.

Mom worked to make both of us clean. Her life depended on it. She scrubbed at me, she scrubbed at herself. At home, every night she’d laugh and point to the bathtub water line. Look how dirty you are. Look how wonderful it is to be clean. She took the time to sew the cotton pajamas she buttoned me into each night. Each morning she’d throw the spotless pajamas in the wash. Just smell these, she’d laugh. My mother took at least two showers every day.

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: Knuckle bones. Tree bones. Toed twigs. Heaved ground. Burrow roots. Whose grave? Every leaf whispering. Watch out: the neighbor.

~~

What about the trees? First, to understand the trees you need to understand the water. There’s hardly any difference, only in shape. The shape of water can be more intrusive. The shape of water can take you over. Trees, on the other hand, it’s hard to even get them to notice you.

I push the gel earplugs farther in and hear the pressure pop in my ears.

Salt water isn’t clean and it smells bad, Mom says. It is always part of the story that Mom grew up as Delores, on Lake Michigan, where there was no salt in the water. No salt in the water. The part of the story that would have been her parents is a shiver and creases the skin between her eyes. But even in the salt water, you need to put your face in. I can’t stand a girl who can’t put her face in the water, Mom says. When we get out of the water we stand under the lukewarm, weak sprinkle of a shower that hangs off a wooden pole up the beach. When I look up there are always rainbows.

There is so much water in my life, the entire Atlantic, lakes, storms and puddles, I barely remember sitting in the white enamel kitchen sink. Water buoys. Water you can lie on top of. Don’t forget, when you are sinking, water will support you.

When we get home we plunge our bathing suits into metal pails of fresh water over and over. We take showers with soap and put on clean clothes and are safe until bath time before bed. When we get up we will drive to the grandparents, at least the grandparents I know, brown shingled house with the wrap around porch.

Right this minute I am steering the Freightliner around the lip of Lake Michigan. The light over the water is so bright I put my sunglasses back on. The truck is tracking north into the dazzle. The truck will carry us right through Muskegon where the grandfather I never knew was raised by an Irish mother and a father who made violins and died on a race track. By the time we pass Traverse City, Emil will be awake.

Traverse City, they used to buy candied sugar, I’ll say to Emil. You know, the spun stuff. Pink.

Who’s pink? Emil shouts back over the engine noise. I have earplugs in and the cotton candy is already melting pink against the heat of my brain. I ignore Emil. I cannot say the same thing twice or the raisins in my gum machine will be flat against the glass. The insides will squish out. I look north toward Mackinaw City. I look north across the caterpillar of a bridge inching between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The truck climbs over the back of the bridge toward Saint Ignace. This is the Penninsula. We stop at a rest area. And I bow my head under the weight of trees.

Besides the thick, gray barked trees and the brushed green trees, this is a place where the peeling, silver barked birches crowd together. Birches are burrowers, they will burrow down in winter the same as any ground squirrel. These trees will bend underneath two hundred inches of snow. They raise up their children close to their hearts before the frost has quite left the moss. They are close family to the trees in Maine. In the Big House, outside Philadelphia, where I was locked up for two years, the other kids and I were packed up to Maine for the summers. They named it camp. I learned a lot from the paper bark birches in Maine.

I leave Emil with the electric frying pan in the truck. I need me an electric fry pan, he said last month at the discount store in Alabama.

Count me out, I said. In this store there are no surprises. It is all cola, chicken, and white flour. The lights are bright enough to crowd out any secrets.

What’s wrong with a fry pan? He rolls his eyes toward his white eyebrows. They are bushy. He spreads his feet apart in the aisle. Man, I hate it when he spreads his feet. An old bull spreads his feet and lowers his head. Old bulls have thick necks and balls that hang by a ribbon down to their knees. You learn to just step aside. Look the other way.

The truck’s so crowded I can’t breathe.

You’re crazy, he lowers his head.

No. My voice is level as my head slowly turns to look at him straight on. I am not crazy.

Fine, he says. I’ll be the only one using the fry pan. It’s a green electric skillet tight in his hand. I am already walking past, toward the coolers with the milk and cheese.

That day I lean right in like I’m studying the different choices of margarine and invite the cold air to bathe my face almost like water.

Today, at the rest area just over the bridge, Emil is just starting to come alive at dinner time. I leave him to figure out supper. It’s his frying pan anyway.

The dogs are with me scattering down this path. There are rocks. I go slow. The Border collie, Jenna, always pushes out in front. Tip stays just far enough ahead that if I fall he will be there in the same breath. If I fall Jenna will not think to even glance back. The path goes down and skirts around. I am aiming for the water and this is just one of those times that we actually make it. There are no fences, no private yards, no obstacles. Lake Huron skips and jiggles itself against a rose pink dusk.

~~

: Lake rise. Lake reach. Gnaw calcium. Whose bones? Rocks and bones. Fish bones. Minerals mine. Restless knuckles.

~~

My Border collie jumps back but Tip leads me on. He stops chest deep and turns his head back to me. His eyes are sparkling. My outside clothes pull off, shed like leaves from trees. My mother already stands in the water. I am not surprised to see her. She is younger in a green plaid bathing suit with a skirt. Her hair is soft brown, bubbled against her head.

There is hardly any crease between her eyebrows.

I am so glad to see her. It’s been a long time, maybe six months. Even with all her terror and worry, I can’t tell you how much I miss her. Recently a woman asked if I ever got over being angry at my mother. I just looked at that woman, my lips compressed in a line. My mother lived in a black pit of terror. The worst thing was always around every corner. Every day. Every minute. She knew my father would not survive the war. When he did, she was even more confused. When she put me to bed my mother would tell a story, would say, as if a story: Some women do so well and I fall apart. I am not proud of it and let me tell you, during the war, it was not the rationing. I was never cut out to be on my own, she’d say. The crease between her eyes cut a little deeper. She goes on, I saw the way those men came back from Europe. Our neighbor screaming in the night, the middle of his own tennis court. My Mom’s crease gets so deep I shut my eyes, pretend I am asleep so my mother can rest from the movie playing behind her eyes. I was never angry at my mother.

Right now the lake is over my mother’s knees. She turns her head toward the east, toward the night, as she waits for me. Her profile is my profile. Since she has been dead, she is so much happier.

The water eases my skin. Water hisses cold against knees shelled soft as acorns. I kiss the water against my face, soaking my graying black hair. The water cuts breath off from my lungs as I am supported. The water is ice and I turn back but my mother, her stroke is always in perfect rhythm. One arm crosses over her head, her mouth turns up to breathe while her legs kick, feet just breaking the surface. My mother never has to turn back anymore. She never has to spend another Sunday with my father’s parents, the only grandparents I know and the only ones we call grandparents.

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My grandparents have a dark table that sits on claws. Nana’s covered it with white draped linen. It almost hangs to the floor. The clock is ticking on the sideboard. The smell of lamb is thick as a thunderhead. I cringe at the scrape of forks on teeth. My head fills with the scrape of forks on teeth. My mother can’t stop staring at the drop of gravy that splats like a spider between the pitcher and plate as I slide from my chair under the table and into the quiet gloom.

Where is your daughter? Aunt Florence’s hair is crimped in rows not at all like my mother’s soft bubbles.

Well, I believe she is under the table, my mother answers with a lift to her voice.

What on earth? Richie, do you know your daughter is under the table? Aunt Florence demands. Aunt Florence is a school teacher and knows how to be pushy, my mother tells me at night.

Come out from under the table, my father says. But with the next breath my father has forgotten and is talking to my grandfather in Swedish. They are talking in a foreign language I will never learn but always recognize the cadence of.

Slowly I untie the laces of my mother’s oxfords. When my mother lifts her foot I slide the shoe off and then I slide the other one off. My mother wiggles her toes. For just a little bit, for a moment, her life is bearable.

There is one gray photo of my slim mother in a dark bathing suit high to her neck. She is standing waist deep in Lake Michigan; she is smiling at the camera. My father is skinny. His suit covers his whole chest and as the cold water hits his groin he is bent concave with his mouth open. The grandmother I will never meet is thick with age. Her suit is dark and sags like extra skin but she is walking out. This grandmother is looking far away. On the back of the photo, in my mother’s sloping script, it says, Delores, Ernie, Mother. Mom only refers to her mother as Mother, capital M. I wonder who is taking this picture?

~~~~~

I leave the water. It runs off my bare skin making its own highways. My clothes stick as I pull them on, they are stained with lake. There is the opposite of hurry as dark grows up out of the ground. Night rises as I find my way deeper and deeper into the woods.

Entering trees in the dark is the same as entering a foreign country late at night. Before my first step hits the ground, I sense a different smell. There is a scent I can’t name because it comes from something I have no recognition of. And then there is