All stories › Science Fiction › Nine Minutes on the Ramp › Episode 3
The Paddle
Episode 3 of 3 of Nine Minutes on the Ramp by Travis Underwood · free to read
Only one person could have taught my truck to put Hector Cutler to bed, and on Wednesday I found her sitting on the step of my cab.
“You have the only key to the head, Lou,” I said. “Lights down, fan down, radio down, a doorbell at eight thirty. Nine minutes, because ten pings Joyce. Nobody else could write that.”
She held her laptop closed on her knees and didn’t argue.
“Four years ago,” she said. “He came to me with his hands shaking. Said he’d jerked awake twice that week with no idea how long he’d been gone.”
“Gone where?”
“He stops breathing in his sleep. Forty times an hour, the doctor said. The plan covers the machine that fixes it, after a twelve hundred dollar deductible. His wife’s treatments eat that every January.” She pressed her lips together. “His wife drives him home every morning. He won’t trust himself in a car.”
“So you gave him a ramp.”
“I gave him a nap. I didn’t know what else to give him.” She shrugged. “I wrote it as a service hold, the kind we use for scales. Holds don’t log.”
“And when they moved him?”
“New trucks have locked heads. I tried the first night. I can’t get in.” She rubbed her eyes under her glasses. “I forgot to take it out of yours. Then I didn’t want to.”
“He’s got two flags, Lou.”
“I know what he’s got.” She stood. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whatever you do, keep it out of the log. Nobody reads a log with nothing in it.”
Thursday.
My daughter had run a fever the night before, and I’d sat up with her until it broke at four. By 2:38 I wanted those nine minutes the way you want water.
The truck signaled for Exit 212. The lights went amber. The fan dropped. The radio turned itself down.
I kept my eyes open and watched the dark corn past the guardrail.
At 2:44 Joyce came through, small and far away. “Northbound six, check call.”
Nothing.
“Northbound six. Hector, check call.”
Nothing. I turned the radio up by hand.
“Gordon,” Joyce said. “If he doesn’t answer in sixty seconds, I log it. That’s three.”
“Can you do anything?”
“I can call him. That’s all I’ve got.”
Across the median, headlights were coming up the northbound side. Our colors on the trailer. No cab light.
I switched to channel four, the truck to truck channel we weren’t supposed to use for talking. “Hector. Southbound four. Hector, wake up.”
Static.
“Thirty seconds,” Joyce said.
I looked at the paddle. Forty-five dollars. A stop on a ramp, in a log that had always been empty, with a reason a person would have to read. Lou’s four years. Maybe my job, for sitting on her secret for two weeks of runs.
And a man asleep at the front of eighty thousand pounds, with ten months to go.
Every company cab inside a mile. Both directions.
I pulled the paddle.
The chime went off like a smoke alarm in a closet. Across the median, Hector’s truck was a quarter mile out and closing. Its cab light snapped on.
“Northbound six, awake,” Hector said. His voice was thick. “Northbound six. I’m here, Joyce.”
“Fifty-two seconds,” Joyce said. “I’ve got you, Hector. You’re green.”
His truck went under the overpass. The cab light flashed twice.
Channel four clicked. “Southbound four. That you up on my ramp?”
“It’s mine now,” I said. “Sorry about the noise.”
He was quiet a long time. “Six years I told myself what Joyce tells you. I’m not paid to drive. I’m paid to be awake.” I heard him breathe. “I keep losing the second half.”
The tablet lit up with the review form. Reason for intervention. A list of choices, none of them right, and under them the note field.
I typed for a long time.
“You’re writing a note,” Joyce said.
“Yes.”
“Somebody’s going to read it.”
“That’s the point.”
I wrote what the truck did at Exit 212 every night, and that I had let it. I wrote what the eye counted and what it didn’t.
I wrote that the man on northbound six stopped breathing forty times an hour. I wrote that his deductible was twelve hundred dollars, which was about twenty-seven of my paddles. I wrote that he needed a machine, not a ramp.
I did not write Lou’s name. They would find it if they looked, and I wanted them to look.
At 2:47 the hold ran out. I cleared the paddle by hand, and the truck rolled up to the stop sign and back down to the highway.
Pay statement, period ending October 17. Line 7: Intervention, Exit 212, 2:44 a.m. Deduction, $45. Review status: Read. Hold at Exit 212: removed.
Under it, Joyce had written in the note field, which nobody uses. Hector off the board with pay till he is on the machine. Company is covering the deductible.
I stayed awake for all nine.