DAVID HOLDRIDGE

How We Went to Chicago --
The Avant Garde in 1962

(an excerpt from the memoir Rutherford Travels)

The next morning, Clem let me off in the town center from which I walked, not paying attention to where I had been, nor to where I was going. I was part of the crowd outside Saint Anthony's church as the timid bride and her proud groom nestled for the first and last time into the back seat of a rented limousine. Later that morning, I was a witness to a lightning evacuation of men and engines from the bays of the Vine Street Hook and Ladder Company. A right turn, a left turn, a Byzantine cross on the dome of a church. Down the street, the noise of a kennel, a foreign automobile parked near the funeral home, catty corner from some kids playing hopscotch, a left turn toward a theater where for fifteen minutes I filled my eyes with coming attractions.

And so, I meandered, mile after mile, with long strides, dallying where my attention was arrested. An hour on the mezzanine of a department store looking at what people drank from, ate off, how much time they spent on their feet, what the women slept in. A half hour alone watching a fast-talking hawker demonstrate an all-purpose kitchen utensil, twenty minutes in a park following a checkers contest, more time watching the arm and hand signals of a traffic cop – always close enough to see but always distant enough not to be drawn in.

By mid-afternoon, my stomach demanded some filling, so I spent a dollar on a good-looking submarine, a couple of Hostess Twinkies and a carton of chocolate flavored milk. Then I brought my lunch over to a nearby railroad station where I sat down on a bench along the track, consumed my meal, and became a spectator to many greetings and farewells. After lunch, a crew of men spiked litter with their poles, a two-headed turtle in a pet shop, an accident and a fist fight, a crippled dog, a flock of starlings, and finally the stranger before whom I opened my mouth to ask the way back.

I watched some black boys play basketball then headed toward the house. I was thinking of how long I should stay. How it would read. Another day had disappeared and nobody knew where I was. Maybe there was a zoo I could visit tomorrow. Still it wasn't much of a life for an aspiring warrior, no prospect of breakneck charges nor wanton women at farmhouse doors. I knocked on the door. I heard some hushed commands within. Then a minute later, through the side panes, I saw Clem advancing down the hall, zipping up the front of his nylon windbreaker.  He opened the door, stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind him. He looked past me in the direction of the couch I had slept on, his lower lip quite disturbed. "Get your bag, boy. I'm taking you back to the thruway." 

I followed him out to the station wagon, unsure of what had gone wrong, but wary enough to know I shouldn't argue with a man in that condition. Not a word was uttered. Night had fallen and I was afraid for myself – being dumped out on the thruway, after dark, hundreds of miles from home. With only a few dollars in my pocket. As we approached the entrance ramp, I asked Clem what the matter was. Whereupon he immediately yanked the car off onto the shoulder, reached across me, and pushed open my door. "OK, if that's the way you feel," I said and reached for my pillow case. Before I knew it, Clem had snatched my arm and was sticking his face in mine. He was frightening to look at, all mixed up with hateful emotions. 

"You want to know what the matter is, do you?" He tightened his grip on my arm. "Well, I'll tell you what the matter is. The matter is my eight-year-old boy who found your knife on the couch and went to put it back in that there bag." A car suddenly passed sweeping the station wagon with its lights and giving me a clear view of Clem's distorted face. I was scared. Just about ready to wrench my arm free and run for it. "You listening, boy?" Clem demanded, jerking my arm back toward the seat. 

"Take it easy," I exclaimed.

Clem held his grip and twisted his lips into something close to a smile. "Believe me, boy, you'd be hurting a damned sight more if I had gone to the police, the way I should have." He had brought his face closer to mine, the end of his nose only an inch or two away. Slow and deliberate, he working to control his emotion. "And what do you think my wife found when she went out on the porch to see what was keeping her boy?" I tried to look away. "I said look at me. Damn it, look at me when I'm talking to you."  I tightened, on the verge of ramming my free fist into the man's side and bolting. "I'll tell ya what she found," Clem spluttered. "She found our eight year old boy..." For a second his voice faltered, as if he were trying to recollect exactly what she had found. "She...she found him," and now his voice regained its passion, "in a mess of disgusting, filthy smut pages. All of it...disgusting smut-filth." And then he grew silent and looked away. A minute passed without a word, his grip still tight around my arm. "Now get out," he ordered "and if I ever see you around here again, you can bet your bottom dollar I'll call the police."  With that, he shoved me toward the door.     
 
I stood on the side of the road, dumbstruck, staring at the station wagon until it had turned out of sight.  Then I slumped down in the roadside gravel and began fumbling with the contents of my sack. By the light of the sky, I could see that the several pages had been reduced to confetti, my army jacket covered with the glossy flakes of the Scranton nudes. I gathered up a handful and by the moon, sadly, I saw that the destruction had been complete.  Everything was now in tatters. I noticed my hands were shaking.
    
I feared that Clem might yet change his mind and sic the  police on me. Quickly, I closed the sack, slid down the embankment, and emptied the contents on a bare patch of ground. Then I shook my stuff free of the confetti, double checking – fearing now that even one piece of filth-smut could land me in an Ohio jail. I was getting ready to scamper back up the hill when I noticed that most of one breast had fluttered down onto the toe of my boot. I picked it up. I judged it just too perfect to abandon, so I opened the locket on my wrist and slipped it behind the photo of Anne.
    
Back up on the ramp, lonely, and anxious to make myself scarce, I began to solicit cars. But for a half an hour, no one took an interest. I suspected the night was lowering my chances and as the time dragged on I became more and more afraid that at any moment a cruiser would turn up the ramp with Clem sitting in the front seat. Then I remembered from the day before, there was a truck stop about a half mile east from where I was standing. Without thinking twice, I threw on my jacket and headed toward it. I told myself not to appear fugitive. Button my jacket. Without it, I would look all black. A cat burglar, I feared, slinking down the highway with a green pillowcase of valuables.
    
Ahead was the station, shimmering in the evening gloom. It struck me like Bethlehem did in the children's illustrated bible – bathed in a holy apparition. Hooded arc lights; in the firmament, thick infusions of dust and swirling exhausts. Heat lightning crackling in the distance. On the ground, heavy machinery was being shifted about the lot. Preparations for war, I imagined. Eighteen wheelers leaving their berths to charge out into the dark. Snub-nosed diesels with pistons that fired like jackhammers.
    
I felt odd in this place – too slight amidst all the upheaval – but, nonetheless, uplifted.  "What now?" I asked myself. Men in places like this should make their plans over coffee. So I entered the diner, slipping through the crowd, and put myself at the counter, elbow to elbow, thinking I might be a skinny teamster with my two hands around a mug of coffee, staring at the steam curling from the surface. Between sips, I peeked about. I was looking for the massive guts, the tattooed arms – for those famous beefy truckers wolfing down mountains of food while their waitresses rattled off the cakes and pies. I found one. He had belched and was pushing off from the booth, rambling back, I supposed, to the parking lot to sleep off his supper in the back of his cab. The man next to me was slowly pushing a piece of bread around his plate, sopping up the last of his chicken gravy. Then he had reached into his breast pocket, removed a small bottle of pills, pinched the sweetener between his thumb and finger, and dropped it in his coffee.
    
I, reluctantly, wandered outside to begin what I had come there for. Now I would really be sticking my face in this shameless business. The thumb had been bad enough. Now I would be reduced to asking strangers for a ride outside a diner.

I held back. I looked for the kind face. Once again, I was wavering with Dickie over the brook in March, to jump or not to jump through the ice. I held my breath: "Excuse me, sir, are you going west? I wonder if you could give me a lift?" 

The man paid no attention. But I had done it, and now I did it less meekly and did it and did it again. "No" after "no" continued. But so did I – with one eye out for management and the other for the cops. It became a parade of casual rejections and soon enough my faith in myself began to wane – eventually followed by a flagging will to continue at all. I turned away from my begging post. Bastards, I thought. The smart ones hadn't even answered. But many had lied. Why the hell, I thought, would anyone stop at a diner when they were only going up the road a mile or two? And what about the jerk who said "not tonight son"? As if it would have made a bloody difference which night it was. I flung my sack over my shoulder and moved off toward the lot; amidst the rows of idle trucks, perhaps I would bump into a ride west.
    
I walked in and out of the shadows, down the hollows between the huge vans. Nothing was stirring. Disconsolate, I sat down on a guard rail, dismayed once again with my predicament. What the hell was I doing roaming about the backlot of some truck stop when at that very moment I could have been home watching the pennant race – digging into a box of pretzels and washing them down with my mother's lemonade? My stomach twinged with the memory. Yet I knew I daren't spend my last few bucks on food when I might need it for a fare out of Ohio. I felt alone and scared. I was going in circles and getting nowhere. I remembered the joy with which I had run up that ramp in Pennsylvania. And now less than two days later, I was feeling the sharp edge of the rail through my pants and the grime on my face and thinking how best I could mete out punishment for the last man who had picked me up. Sticking him for eternity into what my seventeen-year-old mind imagined as the real "smut-filth." I imagined shoving a shotgun to the back of his throat and pulling both triggers. Blowing the back of Clem's head off and the folksinger's too, for that matter.  Had they purposely betrayed me with their bullshit about riding the rails, strumming along, divining the land? After everything that summer and now it seemed worse. Like I had felt that night locked in the back of the Scranton Y. Like the echoes, I pondered, of some nightmare I often had – alone, lost, falling through the ice of that northern lake, helplessly clawing, knowing the cold was taking me with nothing there except perhaps the impassive stare of some winter birds.
    
A door was opening. A trucker was climbing down from a nearby cab. Interrupting my despair and setting me to hope. The man hesitated for a moment, squinting up at the arc lights, apparently rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Then he stepped around to the front of his truck and looked over at me. "If you haven't got a ride by the time I've had my coffee, ya can come along as far as Chicago."
    
I snapped up to my feet. "You bet.  I'll be here." 

The man continued toward the diner without looking back. I made a fist and threw a great big haymaker at the sky. Chicago. Hot damn. I was going. I immediately ran back to the guard rail and transferred my pillowcase over to the bumper of what was now my truck. It had been there all the time – one of those sleeping giants that had served as a backdrop for my revenge on Clem and the other traitors. But now that I'd be coming aboard I walked its length and marveled at it. Nothing that huge had ever been through Suffield. I was sure of that. It made the farm trucks in Pennsylvania look like toys. Sure enough, there's the bull-dog. Eighteen wheels. I counted them, kicked each and every one as I had seen another trucker do. Save him the time, when he gets back, I thought.  "A real beaut," I could hear my mother say, and I laughed out loud.  "Chicago," I said, releasing the syllables one by one, then I plopped down on the bumper next to my bag. "This rig ain't budging without me. No sir." I patted the grill. "I reckon that's the way they talk. Chicago. Just imagine.  Busting in at dawn, churning down Cicero."
    
A burly sort, I thought. He reminded me of the old time sluggers I had seen on the Sunday afternoon baseball retrospectives – panting around the base paths, some mischief twinkling in their eyes, enough heft left to occasionally carom the ball off the left center wall. I put my elbows on my knees and dropped my chin into my hands. I was speculating on my savior. I was informed that most of them now lived in split level ranches with a flagpole in front and a patio in back where they drank beer while their children water skied down at the lake and that during the winter they bowled duckpins and that they habitually smothered their Caesar’s salad with too much Thousand Island dressing and according to the gossip in Suffield they also huddled around fire barrels outside company gates with paper cups of coffee and crowbars ready for the first poor joe who crossed the picket and most recently had cooked up something criminal with the mayor of Chicago to put Kennedy over the top.
    
I was hot and sticky. The station's streamers had stopped fluttering and now hung limply from the light poles. Once again, I cursed my clothes. It would be great to get moving – out of these fumes and stagnant airs and onto the road west.  "That all ya got?"  The man had surprised me. 

I stood up. I was hoping to spot that bit of mischief in his eyes. "I'm travelling light," I answered. There was no reaction. I felt I was being sized up. The man was large. His head blocked the light, and I couldn't see whether he was being stern or sympathetic. Regardless, he was capable of handling the truck behind us and that caused me to tread softly. My instincts told me to play the ardent boy for the large man and to skip the smart replies.

"You a runaway?" he asked.

"My parents know what I'm doing," I responded.
    
The truck driver pointed to the pillow case. "Pretty fancy luggage they've sent you off with." I looked at my sack, now streaked with dirt, and was at a loss for words. "So what do you expect to do in Chicago?"
    
"I'll be visiting friends of the family," I answered.
    
"What's their name?"
    
"Cobb," I retorted, proud to remember a ready answer.
    
The man looked down, slowly raising the toe of his shoe. Then abruptly in one motion his shoe had slapped the asphalt, and he was once again staring at me. "I'm gonna hold ya to that."  Nothing was said. I wasn't yet sure I had been accepted. "Is that a deal, kid? You call your people as soon as we hit Chicago, or I turn you over to the cops. Fair enough?"
    
I wasn't leaving that truck no matter what I had to promise. "Fair enough," I said, beaming, as I took the man's signal to mount the passenger side. I was wildly happy. Safe. Elevated above everything that moved in the lot and perched eagerly behind the most intimidating horsepower allowed on the road. Settled in the cockpit, a bed behind me and an array of precision gauges just then lit up as the driver started the ignition and made the diesel hum. Strands of straight brown hair had fallen across the man's forehead. Then as he checked the mirror on my side a red scar emerged – smeared from his nose to his mouth. It was the first harelip I had seen outside of books, and it helped seal an attachment I was already feeling. He had put the truck in gear, and now we were inching out of our berth, gathering speed down the exit ramp before we swung out onto the highway, intruding on the traffic, quickly preeminent among the stream of headlights already coursing over the blacktop.
    
The man moved through the speeds methodically, lodging and dislodging the gears until we were cruising. A stream of night air began to blow through the side window, cooling my neck and brow, taking off the day's sweat. It was dark in the cab, and it was only by the luminous dials on the dash and the dull glow of the clouded moon that I could make out the man next to me. Several miles had passed in silence before the driver asked me where I was from and what my parents thought of my travelling like this. I volunteered that they probably hoped I would get it out of my system before college started in September.  "I mean," I began, in a voice much too soprano for my liking.  "I mean," I began again, lowering my voice a notch,  "I've had my fill of facts and figures." The man laughed. I had been caught. I knew I was blushing. I wished he'd stop, so I could explain. "I mean I wanted to see the country." There was no response from the other side of the cab, so I pressed on. "Did you ever read ‘In Dubious Battle’ by John Steinbeck?" The man was checking the mirror and said nothing.  "Also," I quickly added, "I got involved with an older woman and had to leave."
    
"Ah-ha, so that's it," the man declared. "Had a woman problem did you?"
    
I was delighted to have finally evoked a response from the trucker, especially since the man had also turned and smiled at me. Naturally, it was too bad that a drama as complicated as mine had been reduced to just a few simple words, thrown into the bin, so to speak, with the problems of every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Yet what counted was the smile – seen by the lightning that was continuing to crackle on the horizon. Thunder was rolling louder toward us. I was charging toward the wars, snug, in a mighty truck in the company of a powerful friend. I felt impelled to chatter. I asked him how long he had been a truck driver and in the asking found that the job stuck for an instant in my throat, like something disreputable. But the man didn't seemed to notice. "Eighteen years," he answered. "I came home in '44, married the girl next door, and have been driving ever since."
    
"This your truck?" I asked, thinking that folks like him often left their verbs out.
    
"It is now," he answered. "Took ten years to get the bank off my back, but my pact with the devil is done."
    
I didn't know exactly what to make of that, so I let it lie. More than anything what I wanted to find out was whether the man next to me was really a card-carrying teamster. So far the man seemed amiable, not to mind my questions. In fact, from the brief glimpses the lightning afforded, I thought the man happy with my company. "You in Jimmy Hoffa's union," I asked, emboldened to bring up another dirty name.
    
"You bet," the driver answered.
    
"He's in jail now, isn't he?" I asked.
    
"Not yet. Maybe not ever."
    
I hesitated to go further. The last answer had been sharper than the others, so a lull arrived in our conversation. Closer now, the black was being ripped through by lightning, its thunder less muffled.
    
"Let me tell you something, kid," the man began. "In the first place, no matter what you've heard, change comes hard. Second, remember the word justice. It means knowing your place. We used to get crumbs for our work. Guys like Hoffa showed us how we could shut down the country. Since then, the fair-haired boys behind the expensive desks have had to start dealing with us. Sure, Hoffa's hard nosed, maybe even a pig. But that's just who you want to deal with businessmen and politicians. Someone with the same manners."
    
I was speechless. The economics of the message was strange to comprehend, but the intent of this harelip trucker was to strike hard at the establishment, and it had not been said by some whining professor, but by a two-fisted, long-ball hitter who could drive eighteen wheelers through thunderstorms. I was awestruck.
    
"That's what he did, kid. He taught us our place." Then he laughed softly. "Yes sir, the wives got their washing machines, and Hoffa got Kennedy. Serves them both right."
    
This last information left me a little puzzled, but it hadn't interfered with my general impression.  The man was a red-knuckled enemy of the sanctimonious old order and its legions of hypocrites.  And to boot he was as old as my father.
    
The first bits of drizzle hit the windshield. The moon was gone. Branches were beginning to bow under the wind. Leaves danced in the headlights, dove and slapped against the hood. I felt the first drops of rain against my face. I shivered, put my hands between my knees, and felt both cozy and tingling with goosebumps. I hoped the man wouldn't tell me to roll up the window. I couldn't remember being happier.
    
"What happens when you get to Chicago?" I asked.
    
"With any luck at all I should be empty by noon and then I'm due in Cleveland."  There was a pause. I knew that wasn't the right way west. "You're looking," the driver continued, "at a brand new grandpa and as soon as they're done with me in Chicago, I'm off to see what my little girl has delivered."
    
I meekly offered my congratulations.
    
"Why thank you," he said cheerfully.
    
"Any other children?" I asked absentmindedly, still wondering if things could be worked out so that we could travel further west together.
    
"Had a boy," the driver replied. The rain had begun to pelt, and he had reached down to switch on the wipers.  "But he died.  A long time ago."
    
The confidence, said so matter of factly, stunned me. I felt embarrassed by the silence. The man was rolling up his window.  "I'm sorry," I said, half whispering. 

The driver acted surprised by my response. "Don't be. I shouldn't have mentioned it. The thought only just passed when I was thinking about my daughter's kid. If ya look hard, ya can see it in their eyes, right when they're born. They're moving toward death and from what I've seen for most of them the destination usually turns out a hell of a lot more pleasant than the effort getting there." He looked over toward the passenger side. "Better roll up your window. It'll be on us in a minute."
    
His words seemed scary to me. I could picture him hurting someone who crossed the picket line. With those big hands and that lip. I backed off for a second. Then the rain broke, driving down on the hood, the windshield awash with it. The trees along the road tossed furiously. The man leaned forward combing the hair back off his forehead with his hand, maintaining speed while he searched the dark for trouble. But the storm did not last. Within minutes of its greatest wrath, the heart of it had passed over. The gusts of driving rain had given way to a steadier, more soothing downfall.
    
Now, for the first time since I had mounted the truck, I began to feel the late hour. I leaned back into the seat and nudged the window open a crack with my elbow. Once again drops of water blew through onto my face making me feel shivery and snug. The water made the night glossy and sleek. I squinted. White light from the cars across the divider refracted with reds from tail lights through liquid prisms into violet and indigo and all the spectral colors, staining the glass and making the dark splendid with jewels, streaked monotonously by the long blade of the wiper swishing back and forth under the steady rain.
    
It was not yet light when I awoke. I hoped the teamster had not seen me with my knees up and my hands tucked between them, my mouth agape. It wasn't what a trucker should want as a sidekick. As quietly as I could, I straightened up, trying to give the impression that I was just shaking off a few moments of unwanted sleep. We were still charging forward through the last of the glossy black; inside, the luminous dials were soft and reassuring. I could not contain myself. I had accomplished one of youth's favorite moments: waking up on the move. I bubbled over into words I thought would be right, "The rain'll take some of the brown off the fields."
    
"It'll take the brown off here just as fast," the trucker said, pointing to his hair.  "That and cars are the worst part of this work. Three weeks of exhaust on the roads, and no washing makes them greasy as hell. Then ya get a downpour like that, and your tires'll slide through it like it was butter."
    
The air now crisp, I wrapped my jacket closer to my body. Chicago was seventy-three miles.  "How long do you think you'll stay with it – driving, I mean?" I asked.
    
"I've got two more years for the minimum pension."
    
"And then what?"
    
The man laughed.  "And then another ten years for full benefits."
    
"You don't seem too excited about it."
    
"Sometimes, I think there ought to be more to it. You know, I've been on the same roads now for almost twenty years – almost since the day I left the Army. I've come to know most of the highways and stops by heart."
    
The Army, I thought. For the second time, war as a reference point. I recalled assignments, five hundred word papers on The Red Badge of Courage and The Guns of August. Ideas already articulated but yet to penetrate – thoughts tossed about on the surface of a bed of sentiment; of "it's hi hi he in the field of artillery, as the caissons go rolling along"; of garlanded tank turrets beneath cheering women hanging from the balconies on the Champs-Elysées; of stark heaps of Jews as thin as Hansel's chicken bone, in quicklime pits. Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie; achoo, achoo, we all fall down.
    
One of those European sports cars – the type made in limited numbers – blew by us. I wondered what the man felt. The absence of the finer things – my mother's talk of sterling silver, china from Limoge, Bruge lace. Unions or not, their fingers never touched it. But when I broached the inequities of inheritance, the man only smiled.  "I don't knock the aristocracy," he said. "In fact I enjoy reading about them in the weeklies. As long as they don't screw with me or my family they can have their fun."
    
"But you fight their wars, don't you?"
    
"In the first place, I only fought one war. And in the second, I didn't go kicking. I got carried away. I figured it was worth it." He laughed. "Didn't your teachers tell ya that Roosevelt was a better choice than Hitler?"
    
And so we talked. On the road to Chicago. The man amused, the boy respectful – treating the strange driver as a mythical father, trying to keep him interested with my questions, proud to be in his shadow when we stopped for coffee. On toward daybreak, bleary eyed, the truck driver and his sidekick.
    
Then – as I was trying to imagine other fair-haired leaders, the Duke of Wellington or Queen Elizabeth as a pig or a sow, hearing my mother's shock, "Heavens no, wash your mouth with soap" – it appeared before us. The first intimations of the city’s halo. "Attack at first light," the captain would order. Not rosy-fingered at all, I was hoping. Rather, a tart in Piccadilly. And then, later, employing Prof Sanderson’s favorite word. Inexorably, it became the midwest rolling out of the night. This was the way to go. Snatching sleep on the run. A God-Almighty balloon lifting off the horizon behind us. An infernal hole to be regarded with circumspection or by shading the eyes.  "Awn, dawn, fawn, lawn, pawn, yawn," I whispered. Not so violent. Mom pulling the blankets down in the morning, the boogeymen in flight. Farms coming to life, the pigweed opening up toward the sun. Damn. On the road to revelation. The seventeen-year-old was recording.
    
We were highballing through the outskirts, I looking for Irish cops and racketeers and blacks from down South. Wheeling into the warehouse district. Coming out of the night and riding high into a strange population. Forklifts like mighty yellow midgets dodged around us with crates twice their size on their prongs. Vast depots lined their way. Inside everything now in units, stacked in piles or hung in rows.
    
So in we pulled, the two of us, with hissing and gasps issuing from the works, the hood and the great frame streaked with the soot and rain of the journey. The gears, finally, hot, lodged in reverse. The beginning of the berthing process. The geometries of edging the giant truck up to the ramp. The slow wide revolutions of the driver's wheel, the great forearms making me feel the bones that I had. The frowns and the constant consultations with the mirrors till the momentum, the charge, the rolling through storms was halted and reversed by inches, till the metal was snug and rubbed against the rubber cushion of the pier. Then he turned the key and shut it down. He had his pay day.
    
The smiles, the insults, the slaps on the working backs. I was the light fly on the wall, wide-eyed at the vulgar greetings. Shoved off to the side as the grandchild's photo was presented amidst the tough talk and a thumb went toward the boy that had hitched a ride. Working stiffs. They backed into the depot's front office, where a nude calendar hung, and where there were blacks with T-shirts rolled up to show the muscles, black muscles, with meat hooks on their belts to splinter the pine crates and dig deep into the animal bone.
    
Flyspecked and tacky that office was, save the hearty laughs. I was anxious to have my boss banter and lean back with the last true proletariat while I, the kid, for free, no pay, struggled with my heart to keep up with the unloading of goods. And still I hoped that I would be the sidekick and travel through lots of nights and fight back to back. And so I worked, looking often toward the office, till my turtleneck turned from dusty black to wet black. God knew, I was an athlete. I only lacked finesse. We, I and the great men with the hooks, unloaded the truck in short order. Only once I stopped. When I saw the beef coming off a neighboring truck and drawn along the rails into storage.
    
I waited for the pat on the back.  The driver came toward me smiling, and flipping the thin silver-colored dime.  "How about that call, my friend?"
    
"I was thinking I could wait for you while you visited your daughter and the baby in Cleveland," I answered.
    
But the man only said: "There's a phonebook in the office."
    
So, I went in. Startled once again by the calendar and thinking of the breast in my own locket that lay behind my Anne whom I was forgetting, it seemed. I felt confused because I thought I had won the man's esteem and should have been given some more time to negotiate. But his thumb had sent the dime flying, and I had snatched it to show him a good catch. Now the man had gone off somewhere so there was nothing left to do but call Cobb. He was supposed to be rich. He'd drive me away. I got Marion.
    
"Where are you? Your dad called...Russ'll be over...what warehouse? Now, stay put. It may be awhile."
    
I brooded. I wanted to remain with them, with the muscle and the hooks and my harelipped partner.
    
Then the Corvette came. Say it for Russ. They bowed to him. Not like in King Arthur. But they bowed, and he was so clean and bespectacled and jut-jawed and finely dressed that they grew silent and bowed. The warehouse men that is. Not the driver. He had just smiled when I shook his hand before quickening my step toward this friend of the family. Russ's executive hand now on the door of the sports car – taking charge of Henry's boy – who looked back for the trucker and saw he had already disappeared into the office.

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