All stories › Science Fiction › Nine Minutes on the Ramp › Episode 2
Hector’s Shirt
Episode 2 of 3 of Nine Minutes on the Ramp by Travis Underwood · free to read
Lou Bellamy could tell a truck to forget anything, so on Tuesday I went looking for her before my run.
Lou did the pre-trip on every truck in our yard. She was about sixty, with reading glasses on a cord and a laptop she plugged into a port under the dash. She called that box the truck’s head, and she had the only key to it.
I found her lying on my cab floor with her cable in.
“What’s at Exit 212, Lou?”
“Corn. A ramp. A stop sign.” She didn’t look up. “Why?”
“My truck parks on that ramp every night for nine minutes. Then the log skips it.”
“Is it hurting anything?”
“That’s what Joyce said.”
“Joyce is smart.” She typed, read, and typed again. “Head’s clean. No faults.”
“I didn’t say fault.”
She sat up and reached behind my seat. She came out with a flannel shirt rolled tight and held with two rubber bands. She turned it over in her hands for a while.
“That’s Hector’s,” she said. “He rolled it for his neck. I’ll get it to him.”
“Joyce says he never had an eye flag in six years.”
“Joyce is right.” She looked at me over her glasses. “You look like him around the eyes. You sleeping?”
“I have my daughter four days. I sleep while she’s at school.”
“That’s not sleep. That’s waiting.”
“I’m not paid to drive,” I said. “I’m paid to be awake.”
“Joyce tell you that?”
“Every night.”
“She told him too.” Lou unplugged her cable and coiled it around her hand. “Drive safe, Gordon.”
“I don’t drive.”
“I know,” she said.
At 2:38 the truck signaled for the exit, and this time I didn’t type anything. I watched.
It took the ramp. It set the brakes. I started the stopwatch. A few seconds later the dash lights dropped from white to a soft amber. The fan slowed to its lowest setting. The cab went quiet enough that I could hear the engine tick.
“Southbound four, you there?” Joyce’s voice came through at half the volume I had left it at.
I hadn’t touched the knob.
“Southbound four, awake,” I said.
“You sound far away.”
“The radio turned itself down.”
“Huh,” Joyce said. “Well, you’re green.”
I leaned my head back against the seat. Hector’s shirt had sat right there for six years, rolled for his neck. The amber light was the color of a nightlight in a kid’s room.
I thought I would close my eyes for ten seconds, just to see what the cab felt like with them shut.
Two soft notes woke me. Not the smoke alarm. Something closer to a doorbell.
I grabbed my phone. The stopwatch said eight minutes, thirty seconds.
I sat up fast. Thirty seconds later the brakes released. The dash went white, the fan came up, and Joyce came back at full volume, reading a weather advisory to somebody else. The truck rolled up to the stop sign and back down to the highway.
The eye blinked its little green light at me. No flag. The wheels hadn’t been turning.
I had slept eight minutes on a ramp and felt better than I had in a week. That scared me more than any chime.
At 3:15 Joyce came back on. “Gordon, did Hector flash you tonight?”
I thought about it. “I didn’t see him.”
“He missed his 2:14 check call. I gave him the full sixty seconds, and then I had to log it.” She was quiet. “That’s his second flag in three weeks.”
“And one more?”
“One more and he’s done. He’s ten months short of his pension.”
I looked at the eye on the dash. Six years in this truck without a single flag. Three weeks in a new truck with two.
The new truck didn’t take Exit 212. It didn’t turn the lights amber or the radio down. It didn’t ring a doorbell at eight and a half minutes, so a man could sit up before the wheels moved.
And mine stopped for nine minutes, because ten would ping Joyce’s board.
“Joyce, does the new northbound run the same software as mine?”
“Newer. Lou says she can’t even get into those.”
I looked at the empty seat back where the shirt had been.
Somebody taught my truck to put Hector to bed.