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Arrived
Episode 3 of 3 of The Twelfth Stop by Lorna Keough · free to read
The phone rang eleven times. I let it.
She came up the steps in work boots with a canvas bag against her hip. Gray coat buttoned to the throat. Forty, maybe. Hair pinned back off her face. Wet to the knees, and it had not rained in a week.
“Ticket?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Sit anywhere.”
“Fourteen’s fine.”
“Fourteen’s fine.”
She took 14. Put the bag on her lap. Faced front.
I let the air off and we rolled. Sixty two, same as always.
My five riders slept through all of it. Nobody looked up. Nobody asked why we had stopped at a fence in the dark.
My hands were fine on the wheel, which surprised me. Nine years of nights teaches your hands to go on without you.
Mile 148. Mile 147.
“Come up front,” I said. “I can’t hear you back there.”
She moved to the seat behind the stanchion, where the older ladies ride.
“What’s your name.”
“Osborn.”
“First name.”
“That’s the part you’d write.”
I kept my eyes on the road.
“Dwight,” I said. “Ball cap. Riding to Houston.”
“Yes.”
“Sheila. Seat 12. Grocery sack.”
“Yes.”
“Where are they.”
“Ahead of us,” she said. “Or behind. I don’t keep them.”
I let a mile go by under us.
“Eddie Whitlow stopped for you once.”
“He did.”
“And he wouldn’t sign.”
“No.”
“So you took one off his sheet.”
“I take what the sheet allows.”
“And if I sign.”
“Then I am finished with this road.”
“Say the rest of it.”
“There isn’t any rest of it,” she said.
That was the closest thing to an explanation I got, then or after.
Houston at 4:00. Two off.
I stood at the bottom of the steps and watched them get into the same car. She did not move. The reading lamp over her stayed dark, and I had thumbed it on at Licking.
Back in the seat I called it in.
“Dispatch.”
“Count for you, Curtis. Five on at Kirksville. Two off Houston.”
“Copy, five and two.”
“I’m closing it tonight.”
He was quiet a second.
“Call me from the lot,” he said.
“I will.”
“Sharon. Call me.”
Cabool at 4:28. Two off. I counted them down with my hand on the rail and both of them said good night and I said it back.
One rider left in 6, a kid with headphones, out cold.
And 14.
She talked a little over the last thirty eight miles. Nothing about herself. She asked when they took the sign down at 149.
“Before my time,” I said. “Ninety something.”
“It was a stop.”
“Not on anything I ever carried.”
“It was a stop,” she said, and let it go.
She asked how long the run takes in the winter.
Then she asked me one more.
“Do you ever run any other road?”
“Nine years on this one.”
“That is a long while to know one road.”
“It is.”
“You’ll know it a good while yet.”
Mile 40. Mile 30. The grain elevator. The county line sign.
I ran the sheet in my head the way you do at the end. Five boarded, four off, one riding through, and a line at the bottom with nothing on it.
“It’s one word,” she said, out of nothing.
“I know how many words it is.”
West Plains at 5:10. I came in past the feed store and swung wide into the lot, the way you have to with a forty five footer.
The kid in 6 woke on his own and was gone before I had the brake set.
Then it was the two of us and the engine ticking.
She stood up.
“Sign me arrived.”
“I know.”
“You’ve had three hundred miles to change your mind.”
“I didn’t.”
I thought about Whitlow saying it ends for the road and not for me. I thought about a man in a ball cap answering to his name at a curb in Kirksville.
“What happens to me,” I said.
“Ask the one who wouldn’t sign.”
“He’s alive.”
“He is,” she said.
“You could sit back down.”
“I could.”
“You won’t.”
“No.”
I put the clipboard on my knee. The clip still had my blood dried in the corner.
I wrote the run out. Five boarded Kirksville. Two off Houston. Two off Cabool. One off West Plains.
Then the line at the bottom.
1 BOARDED MM 149. ARRIVED WEST PLAINS 5:10.
“Name,” I said.
“Osborn.”
I printed OSBORN and signed under it. Sharon Gentry. Coach 412.
She picked up the bag and went down the steps. The air took the door. Gravel, and then nothing.
I did not look.
I called Bramlett from the lot.
“It’s done,” I said.
“Is it.”
“Pull tomorrow’s header.”
I heard a drawer.
“Eleven,” he said.
Eleven more nights on Route 9. Every header eleven. Every count closed.
Whitlow stopped picking up.
On the twelfth night Bramlett handed me a sheet that was not Route 9.
“You’re on 14 Monday,” he said. “Overnight west. Your bid came through.”
“I never bid on 14.”
“Says here you did.”
I turned it over under the yard light.
The header on Route 14 said twelve.