Ridge Road, Chapter 7 · The First Winter

Hank left at four-thirty on Thursday morning, in the dark, with his thermos and logbook and a load that Walt had booked for him.

He had explained it twice in the kitchen. A chemical shipper in Houston wanted a driver with two years of hazmat on the insurance rider, and Sam had a CDL only weeks old and a hazmat test he hadn’t taken. So it was Laredo and back by way of Albuquerque, ten days on the dispatch sheet, solo, the way he had run before Walt and in the nine years since.

“Walt gave me ten days,” Hank said, frowning at the sheet. “He usually gives me six and a lecture.”

On the porch he stopped with his glasses pushed up on his forehead and his beard damp from the cold, and put one hand flat on Sam’s chest, over the borrowed flannel, as if checking that it was solid. “Back Sunday night. Late. Don’t wait up.”

“I’ll wait up.”

“I know you will. Sweetheart. Study your hazmat. Eat something that doesn’t come in a box. Sleep in the back room.”

“I slept in it last night.”

“Sleep in it again.”

He kissed him once, hard, with the yellow bulb making a circle on the boards around their feet. Then Sam drove him to the yard in the Camry, and Hank climbed up into the Pete without looking back, and Sam sat at the gate with the engine running until the taillights had gone out of sight down the frontage road. The depot window was dark. He found he’d lifted two fingers anyway.

---

The ten days were stranger than he expected.

He passed the hazmat test on Monday, forty questions about placards and spill distances, and celebrated with eggs. At night he lay in the back bedroom and listened to the house tick and settle, and every night at nine Hank called from a different truck stop and said about five sentences. Sam talked for the rest.

By the seventh night he understood that the mattress had a shape. There was a long soft dip on the left side where one man had slept for eleven years, and he had been sleeping on the right without ever deciding to.

He didn’t tell Hank about Sunday. Walt had asked him not to, and it felt like a small lie, and he told it every night.

On Saturday he stopped at the Walgreens on Harvard and bought a new tube of the water-based stuff, because the one from Limon was down to a flat curl of foil.

On Sunday at a quarter to three, Mrs. Pruitt was on her porch before he had the Camry’s door shut.

“You’re going somewhere in a clean shirt,” she called across the street.

“Visiting a friend, Mrs. Pruitt.”

“Which friend?”

He thought about lying and couldn’t do it to a woman in a quilted robe. “Walt Brennick.”

Her whole face changed. She came to the top of her steps with her hand on the rail. “Well, tell him I said hello. And tell him he still has a casserole dish of mine that he never returned, and I’ll have it back when he comes to get it himself.”

“Go on,” she said, with great dignity. “Don’t be late for supper.”

---

Walt lived in the lower half of a brick duplex off Fifteenth, with two steps up to the door and a rail somebody had bolted on badly. He opened the door before Sam knocked. He was in a cardigan the color of oatmeal, leaning on his cane, with a dish towel over his shoulder and the smell of cumin and onions coming out around him.

“Ortega. You came.”

“You asked.”

“People ask me for all sorts of things and then they don’t.” He stood aside. “Come in and sit. Not the green chair. The green chair is for people I don’t like.”

The front room was small and tidy and crowded with paperback westerns, and a small TV on the bookcase showed a ball game with the sound off. Beside it stood a photograph of two men in their thirties squinting on a truck bumper, the big one with the dark beard plainly Hank, the lean one with the wild hair plainly Walt. Sam didn’t pick it up. He sat in a chair that was not the green chair.

Walt brought two bowls and two beers and lowered himself onto the couch in stages.

“Hank’s on the road till tonight,” he said. “In case you were wondering how I picked the day.”

“You picked the day.”

“I’m a dispatcher, Ortega. It’s the only power I have, and I use it with great restraint.” He lifted his beer. “Eat. I’m going to talk for a long time.”

Sam ate. It was good chili, heavy on the cumin. Walt watched him finish half the bowl and set his spoon down.

“The first winter,” he said. “That’s what you want.”

“If you want to tell it.”

“I do. There was never anybody to tell who didn’t already know.” He looked at the muted ballgame. “So. Twenty years ago, in November, I answered an ad on a board at a truck stop in Amarillo. ‘Co-driver wanted, owner-operator, no talkers.’ I was thirty-five. I talked the whole way to Tulsa, to see what he’d do.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing. He drove. Three hundred and seventy miles, and at the end of it he said, ‘You can have the back bedroom for two hundred a month.’ I said, ‘What back bedroom?’ He said, ‘The house.'” Walt shook his head. “He was thirty-one years old and he’d bought a house in Tulsa from his aunt the year before, and he’d never once slept in it for more than three nights running. I think he wanted somebody to keep the pipes from freezing.”

“Did you?”

“Not the way he meant.” Walt smiled at his beer. “That first winter we had an ice storm. January. The ice came down for two days and took the lines with it. No power for four days, and nobody could get a truck through. That house had one wall heater, a little blue-flame thing in the back bedroom, and it was the only warm room on the street. So Hank moved in with me.”

“Moved in with you.”

“He carried his mattress down the hall on his back, like he was evacuating a flood. He put it on the floor next to my cot, and he said, ‘For the heat.’ And I said, ‘Doyle, you don’t have to explain.’ And he said, ‘I’m not explaining. It’s cold.'” Walt’s eyes had gone soft and far away. “Four nights I lay on that cot with a man six inches away breathing like a bellows. I’d wanted him since Amarillo. I had enough sense to know that if I made one move he’d go out and sleep in the truck, in the ice, out of pure manners. So I lay there. The second night, he said in the dark, ‘Brennick. You awake.’ And I said yes. And he said, ‘I want to ask you something and I’d like you to not laugh.'”

Sam found he’d stopped eating. “What did he ask?”

“He said, ‘How do you know when it’s all right?'”

Walt let that sit.

“I told him,” he said. “Eventually.”

“Do you want me to skip the next part?” he added, in a drier voice. “I’m a gentleman, I can. But if I dress it up, you’ll know I’m lying.”

Sam’s face had gone warm. He put his bowl down. “Don’t skip it.”

“Good.” Walt nodded slowly, as if a clerk had stamped something. “I’ll tell it plain. That’s the only way I can. Interrupt me if you’d like it stopped.”

---

“The fourth night,” Walt said, “the wind took out the big pecan in the front yard. We heard it go, a sound like a rifle and then a long tearing. Hank sat straight up and said, ‘That’s the tree.’ And I said, ‘It is.’ And then neither of us said anything for a good while, and the heater ticked, and I could see his shape against the blue of it. And he said, ‘Brennick, I’d like to put my hand on you. If it’s all right.'”

“And you said.”

“I said, ‘Doyle, I’ve been lying here since Monday hoping you’d ask.'”

He drank some beer.

“He came across that floor on his knees. He was a big man even then, broader than now and no gut yet, and the heater lit one side of him up like a coal. He put his hand on my chest, and he was shaking. I took it and moved it down. He said, ‘Is this all right,’ and I said yes, and he said, ‘Is this,’ and I said yes, and every time I said yes he took a breath like he’d surfaced. By the time he got his hand on my cock I was making a noise I wasn’t proud of.”

Sam’s pulse had settled somewhere low and loud.

“I got his shirt off him. I got my mouth on him. You’ve met that part of him, so I won’t describe it, except to say that I was thirty-five and I nearly choked to death out of enthusiasm, and he held on to the frame of that cot with both hands and said, ‘Oh, hell. Oh, hell, Brennick.’ Over and over. As if I were reading him his rights.” Walt’s mustache twitched. “He called me Brennick the whole night. Even with his hand around me. I finally said, ‘Doyle, if you say my last name one more time I’m going to sit up and shake your hand.'”

Sam laughed, and it came out unsteady.

“So he said my name. Walt. Just once, very quietly, like he was trying it on.” Walt rubbed his thumb along the cane’s curved handle. “Then I told him what I wanted, and I’ll say it exactly, because it’s the only time in my life I’ve been that brave. I said, ‘I want you to put that in me and not be polite about it.’ He said, ‘I don’t know how to not be polite.’ I said, ‘Then be loud.'”

“Was he?”

“Ortega.” Walt looked at him over the top of his glasses. “That cot was an army surplus cot with a canvas bed and a frame older than both of us. I got on it on my hands and knees, and he got up behind me, and I told him where the K-Y was, which I’d bought in Amarillo the first week like a fool with a plan. He was slow. God, he was slow. He kept saying, ‘Am I hurting you,’ and I kept saying no, I’d say if it was, and finally I said, ‘Doyle, push.’ And he pushed.”

Walt’s voice had dropped. He had stopped performing and was looking at something a long way off.

“I can still feel it. The way he stopped, halfway, and said my name properly, and then the rest of the way. A man that size, going in like he was scared of breaking me. And I told him to move, and he moved, and by about the fourth stroke he’d found his rhythm, because he was a driver, he knew how to hold a speed. He said, ‘You’re so hot inside,’ in a wondering voice, as if he had found something in his coat pocket. And I said, ‘Harder,’ and he gave me harder. I said some things he’d never heard from a living man. He said a few back. The cot complained the whole time.”

“The cot,” Sam said faintly.

“Gave out on the ninth or tenth stroke. The canvas ripped right across the middle and we went down together onto the floor, and the heater was right there, hot as a stove lid on my left side. He started to apologize. I said, ‘Do not stop.’ So he rolled me over on his mattress, in front of the heater, with my knees up around his ribs, and he looked down at me with the blue light all over his face, and he said, ‘Walt.’ Plain as day. And he went back into me, and he didn’t say Brennick once more for the rest of the night. He fucked me on that mattress until I couldn’t have told you what day it was, and I shouted. I shouted so loud that the ice came off the roof, or that’s how I remember it. He came with his forehead on my collarbone, saying my first name into my skin.”

Sam realized his hand was pressed hard against his thigh. Walt had the grace to look at the ballgame.

“I came when he did,” Walt said, “from nothing but that. Untouched. I was thirty-five years old and I’d been with a few men and I had never done that. In the morning the pecan was across the driveway, the power was still out, and he made me coffee on a camp stove and said, ‘Is it all right if I do that again.'” He smiled. “That was the first winter. Eleven of them, all told.”

“The yellow bulb,” Sam said finally.

“That was the next week.” Walt’s mouth moved. “I told him the white bulb on the porch made me feel like a suspect when we got in at two in the morning. He bought a yellow one the next day and never took it down. I don’t think he ever realized I was complaining about the white one in order to see if he’d change it.”

“He didn’t take it down in nine years.”

“I know. I drove past.” He put his spoon back in the bowl. “I wanted you to hear this, Ortega, for one reason. You’re not competing with any of it. You’ve got the other side of that bed, and that side’s all yours.” He raised his cane an inch and put it down. “I’m not asking you for anything. I want that said clearly, since Hank’s a stubborn fool and so am I. I’m telling you what that house remembers, so you know what you’re living in. That’s all.”

“Thank you,” Sam said, and meant it more than he could say.

“One more thing, and then I’ll stop and you can have seconds.” Walt looked suddenly tired, and years older. “There’s a cedar box on the closet shelf in that back room. A cigar box, about so big. Don’t open it. Ask him what’s in it. He’ll say it’s nothing. Ask him anyway.”

---

Hank’s headlights swung across the front of the house at eleven-forty.

Sam was sitting up in the back bedroom with the lamp on and a hazmat manual he hadn’t read a page of. He heard the Pete pull up out front, bobtail, the trailer already dropped at the yard, and then boots on the porch, slow and heavy, and the front door and the kitchen tap, and then Hank filled the doorway of the back room with his Carhartt hanging open and ten days of road in his face.

“You waited up.”

“I said I would.”

Hank came in and sat on the edge of the bed to take off his boots. He was grey with fatigue and smelled like diesel and truck-stop soap. Sam got down on the floor and unlaced the left boot for him without being asked, and Hank let him. Neither spoke till the second boot hit the boards.

“Walt called me at the Texas line,” Hank said.

Sam’s hands stopped. “He said not to tell you.”

“He told me he’d told you.” Hank leaned down and put one hand under Sam’s jaw. “That man never kept a secret off me longer than he could stand it. What did he give you?”

“The ice storm.” Sam’s voice came out rough. “The cot.”

Hank closed his eyes. A long breath went out of him, and then he started laughing, a deep helpless laugh that shook the whole bed. “That damn cot,” he said. “He told you about the cot.”

“He said you called him Brennick the whole time.”

“I did.”

“Until it broke.”

“Until it broke.” Hank wiped his eyes with a thumb and looked at him, the laugh still in his face and something softer under it. “He tell you what I said first? Before anything?”

“He said you asked how you knew when it was all right.”

“I did.” Hank’s hand slid into Sam’s hair. “I’ve been thinking about that for ten days on the road. I think I finally know.”

“How?”

“You ask,” Hank said. “Then you shut up and listen to what they say.” He bent his head, so that their foreheads almost touched. “So I’m asking. Tell me what you want, Sam.”

Hank had said his name a hundred times, but never in that voice. Sam felt it go down his spine and settle between his legs.

“I want you to take your clothes off and get in that bed,” he said. “On the right side. I’ll take the dip.”

“Why the dip?”

“Walt says it’s the best bed he ever bought. I’d like to find out.”

Hank looked at him a long moment. Then he stood, unbuttoned his flannel, shed it, pulled the white tee over his head, and stepped out of his jeans. The lamp lit the grey on his chest and his heavy belly, and his cock was already half up and thickening under Sam’s gaze. Sam stripped faster than he’d ever done anything, got into the left side of the bed, and felt the mattress cradle his hip exactly where it had been cradling someone else’s for eleven years. Hank lay down facing him on the right.

They kissed for a long time, slow and deep, mouths open, with Hank’s beard rough on his chin. Hank’s hand moved over his ribs and down, and Sam hooked a leg over Hank’s hip and pulled him in until their bellies met and their cocks pressed together, hot and slippery between them.

“Missed you,” Hank said into his mouth.

“Say it again.”

“I missed you. Every night.” His hand closed around both of them. “Tell me you’re not sore.”

“I’m not sore. I bought a new tube. Water-based, same as before.”

“I saw. It’s on the nightstand.” Hank’s mouth twitched. “You put it where I’d find it.”

“I wanted you to know I’d been planning.”

Hank reached over, found the tube, and thumbed the cap. “Open for me, sweetheart.”

Sam shifted, one knee drawn up and his top leg resting on Hank’s hip, and felt the cool gel and then Hank’s big blunt finger working into him, slow, patient, one knuckle at a time. He breathed out slowly. Hank watched his face the whole time, and kept watching as the second finger went in and began to press, gentle, then not gentle at all.

“There,” Sam gasped.

“Here?”

“Yes. Christ, yes. Right there. Don’t stop.”

“I’m not stopping.” Hank leaned in and bit his lip, then his jaw. “You grip my fingers like you’ve been waiting. So have I. At Las Cruces I took myself in hand in the sleeper and said your name out loud, and I have never felt so stupid.” His voice was hoarse. “Now I’m going to put my cock in you, and I want to hear everything.”

“Do it.”

“Say yes or say wait,” Hank said.

“Yes. Go on.”

Hank took a rubber from the Walmart box on the nightstand, rolled it on, slicked it from the new tube, and eased Sam’s top leg higher over his hip. Then he pushed in. Sam felt the whole length of it. The thick head opened him, and then the long wide stroke of it, until Hank’s belly pressed against his and they lay joined from chest to thigh with their faces an inch apart.

“All of it,” Hank said. “That’s all of me.”

“I feel it. Fuck, Hank, I feel you everywhere.”

He moved slowly, long and unhurried, with his eyes open and locked on Sam’s face. The old springs sang under them. The dip in the mattress tipped them toward each other, so that each thrust carried Sam forward onto Hank’s chest, into the scratch of the grey hair.

“You fit me,” Hank said, wondering. “I keep wanting to say that.”

“Say it while you do that.”

“You fit me.” Hank’s hand slid down to Sam’s ass and gripped, pulling him closer, deeper. His thrusts grew longer and harder, the bed knocking softly against the wall. “Tell me how it is.”

“So good. You’re so deep.” Sam clutched at his shoulders. “Harder. I waited ten days for this, so fuck me properly.”

Hank gave a low growl and shoved in hard enough to rock Sam up the bed. After that he didn’t hold back. He drove into him in long, heavy strokes, wet and loud in the quiet house, with Sam’s leg locked tight over his hip and Sam’s fingers clawing at his back. The wall took every thump of the headboard. Sam heard himself shouting, nonsense and Hank’s name, and Hank answering in a ragged voice, “That’s it, sweetheart. Let me hear you. Nobody on this street will mind.”

“Mrs. Pruitt,” Sam gasped.

“Mrs. Pruitt can take it up with the management.”

Sam laughed and cried out in the same breath, because Hank had found the place and was hitting it again, and again, short thrusts that grew ragged. “I’m going to come,” Sam warned. “Hank, I’m—”

“Not yet.” Hank pulled out with a shudder, tore the rubber off, and rolled him onto his back in the dip. “Let me?”

“Please.”

He went down between Sam’s thighs in one move, put his beard against the inside of his leg, and took him whole into his mouth.

Sam’s back came off the bed. “Oh, God. Oh, fuck. Hank, I’m going to—”

Hank pulled off just long enough to growl, “Give it to me,” and took him back down.

His mouth was hot and relentless, with his hand fisted at the base. He sucked him slow, then fast, moaning around him until Sam’s heels dug into the mattress. With his other hand he reached up and laced their fingers together on Sam’s belly. Sam held on. His hips bucked up into that mouth and he came with a cry that tore out of him, spilling over Hank’s tongue in long pulses, while Hank swallowed and swallowed and didn’t pull away until the last of it was gone.

Then Hank climbed up the bed, his face wet and his eyes bright, and knelt over his chest. “Now me,” he said, hoarse. “See what you do to me.”

Sam took him in both hands. “Come on me,” he said. “I want to see it.” And Hank, who had been on the road ten days, was gone almost at once. He came with a groan that shook him from his knees up, thick and hot across Sam’s chest, and he stayed there with his head down and his chest heaving, until Sam pulled him into the dip and he collapsed beside him, laughing without any sound.

---

Hank was asleep in under five minutes, on his back with one arm flung out, snoring softly.

Sam lay in the left half of the bed with the heat of him against his shoulder and the lamp turned down to a thread. Every part of him was loose and heavy, and nothing was keeping him awake.

He turned his head. The closet door stood open a hand’s width, as it had every night, because the latch had never held. On the top shelf, above the folded sheets, in the corner where a lamp’s light barely reached, he could see the flat pale corner of a small cedar box.

He had dusted around it for ten days without asking himself why.

Out in the hall a pipe knocked once. Hank shifted in his sleep and said a word that might have been “Walt,” and might have been nothing, and went quiet again. Sam stayed where he was, with his hand an inch from the covers and his eyes on that small shape in the dark, and tried to work out how to ask a question when he had already been told the first answer would be nothing.