Ridge Road, Chapter 16 · Marlene

Hank brought the flashlight. It was a long black Maglite he kept behind the seat of the Pete, the kind that took four D batteries and could knock a man out, and he carried it across the yard on Tuesday morning at ten to nine like he was going to a fight.

The red Kenworth was idling in the back row. Somebody had pulled it out from under the last light and turned it so the long hood pointed at the gate, and the chrome on the bumper was throwing the low sun around the lot. Royce Tibbs stood by the front tire in a brown Carhartt coat zipped to his chin, a short round man with white stubble and a feed cap, a thermos under one arm.

“You’re Doyle,” Royce said.

“I’m Doyle.”

“Walt said you’d bring a flashlight.” Royce looked at it. “He didn’t say it’d be that one.”

“I’m going to crawl under your truck,” Hank said. “I’m going to tell you everything I find. Out loud. In front of him.” He tipped his head at Sam. “If that’s going to hurt your feelings, tell me now.”

Royce laughed. It turned into a cough, and he stood there a minute with his hand flat on his chest, and Sam watched Hank’s face go still.

“I’m fine,” Royce said. “That’s the cold. Go on, crawl. My feelings retired in October.”

Up in the depot window Walt lifted his cup. Hank lifted two fingers without looking, and Sam lifted his whole hand, and felt stupid, and didn’t care.

Hank got a flattened cardboard box off the pile by the wash bay and laid it on the gravel and lay down on it, and his boots stuck out from under the frame rail while the beam of the Maglite moved around under there. Sam crouched by the steps with Royce. Hank talked the whole time, flat and steady, the way he read a weather report off the CB.

“Left rear drive axle, inner seal’s weeping. Not bad. You’ll want it done by spring.” The light moved. “Slack adjuster on the right front drive is out past where I’d run it. Exhaust stack bracket’s cracked at the bottom bolt. Frame’s clean. Somebody kept this frame clean.” A pause. “Air lines are good. Fifth wheel plate’s worn but it’s honest wear.”

He came out from under on his back, grey hair full of gravel dust, and lay there looking up at the underside of the bumper.

“Who washed this frame?” he said.

“Me,” Royce said. “Every Saturday I was home. My wife said I loved it more than her.”

“Did you?”

“Some Saturdays.” Royce held out a hand and Hank took it and let the old man help him up, which Sam had never seen Hank let anybody do. “What’s that list worth to you, Doyle?”

“Ten percent.”

“Walt said you’d say ten.” Royce unscrewed the thermos and poured coffee into the lid and handed it to Hank. “Make it eight and you buy the coffee at the Christmas party.”

“There’s a Christmas party?”

“There is now.” Royce turned to Sam. “Keys are in it. She’s a ten-speed. Second to third, she likes you to wait on her. Don’t fight her. Take her out the gate and down to the turnpike and turn around at Sapulpa. I’ll sit with Walt where it’s warm.” He looked at Hank. “You go with him. He said he wanted you there.”

---

The cab smelled like old coffee and pine air freshener and something powdery, maybe a woman’s hand lotion. There were crossword books in the door pocket on the passenger side, four of them, the pages fat with pencil. A hook by the right window with nothing on it. Sam sat in the driver’s seat and put his hands on the wheel. It was bigger than the Pete’s and the leather was worn pale where Royce’s hands had been for twelve years.

Hank climbed up into the right seat and shut the door. He put the Maglite on the floor between his boots. He didn’t say anything.

“First hour,” Sam said.

“It’s your truck. Your rules.”

“It isn’t my truck.”

“Then it’s Royce’s rules, and Royce didn’t say anything about talking.” Hank folded his arms. “Go on. She’s warm.”

Sam pulled out of the back row slow and swung wide around the wash bay, and he felt the long hood out in front of him like a second body. At the gate he looked up at the depot window. Walt and Royce were both in it now, two men and two cups, watching.

He ground second to third going out onto Mingo. The whole truck shuddered. Sam felt his face go hot.

Hank said nothing.

“She likes you to wait on her,” Sam said. “I know. I heard him.”

“I didn’t say a word.”

“You were thinking it.”

“I was thinking you were in a hurry.” Hank looked out his window. “You’re always in a hurry the first mile. You were in a hurry the first mile in my truck too. You quit it after Limon.”

Sam waited on her at the next light. Second to third went in clean, and he let out a breath he’d been holding since the gate.

They went up the ramp onto the turnpike with the sun behind them. She was loud in a way the Pete wasn’t, a deep steady rumble that came up through the seat and into his spine, and she tracked straight as a ruler. Sam got her up to sixty-five and set the cruise and took his hands off the wheel for one second to see, and she didn’t drift.

“She tracks,” Hank said.

“She does.”

“He kept the front end aligned. Most men his age quit caring about the front end.” Hank was quiet a while. “That’s a good truck, Sam.”

Sam looked over at him. Hank was watching the road.

“You mean that.”

“I’m not going to lie to you about a truck.” Hank shifted in the seat. “That’s a good truck, and the man who owns it is a good man, and I liked him in about four seconds, and I’m sitting in his wife’s seat with her crossword books by my knee, and I’d like to throw that flashlight out the window.”

Sam laughed. He couldn’t help it. After a second Hank’s mouth moved too.

---

At the Sapulpa exit there was a truck stop with a big gravel lot out back, and Sam pulled in and parked her in the far row, away from everybody, and set the brakes and let her idle. The windshield had a crust of frost along the bottom edge that was going clear in the sun.

“I want to see the bunk,” Sam said.

He climbed back between the seats. The sleeper was clean and bare, a mattress with a fitted sheet on it and nothing else, a little shelf with a reading light, a curtain on a rod. Royce had taken everything of his out. Sam lay down on his back on the mattress. His boots didn’t reach the end.

“Hank. Come here.”

“What for.”

“Royce said the bunk’s long enough for a big man to lie straight. He said it twice. I want to see if he’s a liar.”

Hank sat there a minute. Then he climbed back, slow, his right knee cracking on the way, and Sam rolled off and knelt on the floor of the cab and Hank lay down on the mattress in his jacket and his boots. His head touched one wall and his boot heels touched the other.

“Straight,” Hank said to the ceiling. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Sam laughed and leaned over him and kissed him. Hank’s beard was cold from the yard. He kissed Sam back, slow, one big hand coming up flat on Sam’s chest, and then he held Sam off.

“Not in here.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“I know. I’m saying it so I hear myself say it.” Hank looked at him. “It’s a man’s truck and it isn’t sold. I’m not going to do anything in it I wouldn’t do with Royce Tibbs sitting in the right seat.”

“Okay.”

Hank didn’t get up. He lay there on Royce’s mattress with his hands on his belly and looked at Sam kneeling beside him.

“Ask me,” Hank said.

“Ask you what.”

“What you’ve been wanting to ask me since Monday last week. Ask it in here. This is the place for it.”

Sam’s heart went. He sat back on his heels.

“What do you want?” Sam said. “You keep telling me what you’ll do. You’ll crawl under it. You’ll tell Royce ten percent. You’ll be under it with a flashlight either way. What do you want, Hank?”

Hank looked at the ceiling for a long time.

“I want you in my right seat for the next twenty years,” he said. “I want to wake up on the road and hear you singing to the radio you aren’t supposed to touch. That’s one thing.” He swallowed. “And I want you to have this truck. I want you to have something with your name on the door that nobody gave you. I watched you go out that gate and I was so proud of you I couldn’t breathe. That’s the other thing.” He turned his head and looked at Sam. “And they don’t fit. I’ve been lying awake a week trying to make them fit and they don’t. So I keep telling you what I’ll do instead, because I can do that part.”

Sam reached out and took his hand.

“You can say both,” Sam said. “Out loud. When you think them. You don’t have to make them fit for me.”

“That’s not how I was raised.”

“I know. Say it anyway.”

Hank squeezed his hand so hard it hurt.

“I want both,” Hank said. “God help me. I want both.”

They drove her back with Hank at the wheel for ten miles, because Sam asked him to, so Sam could sit in the right seat and watch him drive a truck that wasn’t his. Hank drove her like he’d been born in her. He waited on second to third without thinking about it. Sam picked up one of the crossword books and opened it and found that Marlene Tibbs, or whatever her real name was, had done every puzzle in ink.

Sam took the wheel back at a pull-off on the Tulsa side of the river for the last stretch. He waited on second to third every time. Coming down the ramp onto Mingo he looked over and Hank was looking at him with his chin on his fist, not at the road, which Hank never did.

“What,” Sam said.

“Nothing,” Hank said. “I’m allowed to look at a man drive a truck.”

At the yard Royce came out on the steps with Walt behind him. Royce didn’t ask anything. He held out his hand for the keys and Sam put them in it.

“Take your time,” Royce said. “New Year’s. I meant it.”

“She pulls left,” Sam said. “A hair. Over seventy.”

“So does he,” Walt said from the steps, and pointed his cup at Hank, and went back inside.

---

That night Hank lit the wall heater in the front room for the first time all winter. It was an old blue-flame Dearborn under the window, and it knocked and popped as it warmed, and the room filled up with that dry heat that smelled like dust burning off. Mrs. Pruitt had brought over a little tabletop tree on Sunday with a string of colored lights and set it on the TV without asking, and it was the only other light in the room.

Hank got the old quilt off the closet shelf and spread it on the floor in front of the heater, and folded it double, and put both pillows from the back bedroom on it.

“My knee’s going to vote,” Hank said, “so I’m getting it a cushion.”

Sam stood in the doorway and watched him do it.

“Can I ask for something?” Sam said.

Hank straightened up. “Ask.”

“I want you to have me down here. On the floor, by the heater.” Sam’s voice came out rough. “I want it slow, and then I don’t want it slow. And I want you to finish on me after. Not in the rubber. On me. I’ve never asked you that.”

Hank looked at him across the dim room for a long moment. The little tree blinked red and green on his face.

“Yes,” Hank said. “All of it yes. And wait’s still the word.”

“Wait’s still the word.”

“Then come here and let me take your clothes off.”

He did it standing by the heater, slow, the way he’d done it the week before, but with his mouth this time. He pulled Sam’s flannel off his shoulders and kissed the top of his shoulder where it had been. He knelt, knee popping, and undid Sam’s belt and pulled his jeans down and kissed his hip bone and the soft of his belly, and then the inside of his thigh, while Sam stood there with his hands in Hank’s hair and his cock getting thick and heavy an inch from Hank’s face. Hank didn’t touch it. He breathed on it. He put his mouth on the crease of Sam’s thigh and sucked a mark there.

“Hank. Christ.”

“I’m taking my time. You asked for slow.”

“I asked for slow and then not slow.”

“We’re still on slow.” Hank stood up, slowly, using Sam’s hip, and pulled his own flannel over his head without unbuttoning it and dropped it. “Now you.”

Sam undressed him down to the boots, and then knelt on the quilt and worked each boot off while Hank stood over him with one hand on Sam’s shoulder for balance. When Hank was naked the heater threw orange light up his big hairy legs and his belly and his chest, and his cock hung thick and half hard, and Sam leaned in and took it in his mouth without asking. Hank made a low sound and held still. Sam sucked him slow until he was stiff and heavy on Sam’s tongue, tongue pressed flat under the head, Hank’s breath going short above him and his belly hair brushing Sam’s nose every time Sam took him deeper. “Easy,” Hank said, hoarse. “Easy, or this is over before the good part.” Sam ignored him for one more slow pull, and then Hank pulled him off by the jaw.

“Lie down,” Hank said. “On your belly. Head to the heater.”

Sam lay down flat on the doubled quilt on his stomach, legs together, his cheek on one pillow and the heat of the Dearborn on his face. Behind him he heard the box from the nightstand and the Petro tube come out of Hank’s jacket pocket, the rip of a wrapper, the click of the cap: a rubber, and the water-based tube, plenty of it, one plain sound after another. Then Hank was kneeling astride the backs of Sam’s thighs, one heavy hairy knee on the quilt on either side of him, and he spread Sam with one big thumb, and his slick fingers were between his cheeks, and he pushed one finger into him slow.

“That’s it,” Hank said, low, behind him. “Easy. You’re warm all through.”

“It’s the heater.”

“It isn’t the heater.”

A second finger. Sam groaned into the pillow. Hank worked him open with his fingers curled, patient, crooking them every few strokes to touch the place that made Sam’s hips jerk, never staying on it. He did it for a long time. He did it until Sam was lifting his ass off the quilt into his hand and swearing.

“Hank. I’m ready. I’ve been ready.”

“I know you have. I want to hear you say how ready.”

“I’m so ready I can’t think. I want you in me. I want your cock in me, please, right now, Hank, please.”

Hank pulled his fingers out. Sam heard the knee crack and Hank grunt as he shifted, and then Hank did something new. He stayed up on his knees astride Sam’s thighs and squeezed them together between his own, and he put one hand flat in the middle of Sam’s back. Sam lay pinned on the quilt under him, legs shut tight, nothing open to Hank but the one place.

“Hank.”

“New,” Hank said. “You all right like that?”

“I’m all right. Oh God. I can’t move my legs.”

“You can’t. That’s the idea.” Hank’s thumb pulled Sam’s cheek aside and he set the blunt head of his cock against Sam’s hole. “Watch the fire, not me. Just feel it.”

He pushed in.

It was slow and it was tight and it came at an angle Sam had never had, his legs locked shut and Hank’s weight coming down through his hips, and Sam’s jaw went slack and a long, low noise dragged out of him. Hank kept coming. He sank in until his belly was pressed against Sam’s ass and his balls rested on the backs of Sam’s thighs, and then he held still and let out a breath through his teeth.

“Jesus. Sam. You’re so deep like this. I’m in you so deep.”

“You’re halfway to my ribs. Hank. I can feel you everywhere.”

“Good. Hold on to the quilt.”

Sam held on to the quilt. Hank started to move.

He pulled almost out, so slow Sam could feel the ridge of the head drag the whole length of him, and stopped with only the tip inside, and waited. Sam’s hole fluttered around it. Sam whined. Hank pushed back in an inch and pulled out again and waited again, and did that until Sam was pushing his hips back at him and getting nowhere, because his legs were locked between Hank’s knees and Hank’s hand was flat on his back.

“You can’t go anywhere,” Hank said. “You know that? You can’t move a thing. You just have to lie there and take what I give you.”

“Stop teasing me. Hank. Give me all of it.”

“Ask nice.”

“Please. Please fuck me. Please put it in me deep and keep it there. I’ll ask as nice as you want. Please.”

Hank gave him all of it in one long push and Sam’s head came up off the pillow. Then Hank settled into it.

Slow at first, the way Sam had asked, long pulls out and long pushes back in, Hank’s big hand spread between Sam’s shoulder blades, holding him down. On every push the head of his cock slid along the spot inside Sam and Sam gasped, and Hank felt him gasp and did it again the same way, and again. The heater hissed. The little tree blinked. Sam watched the blue flames through the grille and moaned every time Hank filled him, a long open sound he didn’t try to keep down, and under him the quilt went damp where his mouth was.

“That’s it,” Hank said. “That’s how I want you. Flat on my floor and taking it, and soaking my quilt.”

“Don’t stop.”

“I’m not stopping. I’m taking you slow till you beg.”

“I’m begging. I’m begging now. Please, Hank, fuck me open.”

“Not yet you’re not.” Hank rolled his hips and ground deep and stayed there, and Sam cried out. “That’s begging. That’s what it sounds like. Now we’ll see.”

He started to fuck him in earnest then, short hard strokes from the hips, and the sound of it filled the front room, slap and slap and Sam’s voice going up with every one. Sam’s legs were trapped shut between Hank’s knees and Hank’s hand was on his back, and there was nowhere for any of it to go but in. His cock was pinned under him, hard and wet, and every thrust ground it down into the rough cotton patchwork under his own weight and Hank’s.

“Hank. God. Fuck me. Fuck me like that, don’t stop.”

“Tell me whose floor you’re on.”

“Yours. Your floor. Yours.”

“And whose truck are you driving?”

Sam’s breath caught. Hank stopped dead, deep inside him.

“Say it,” Hank said. “Whatever it is. I want to hear it with my cock in you.”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. He was shaking. “I don’t know yet. Hank. I don’t know.”

“That’s an honest answer.” Hank leaned down on one fist by Sam’s head until his beard was against Sam’s ear. “That’s all I want from you. Honest. Now I’m going to fuck you till you come on my quilt.”

He pulled back and drove in, and didn’t slow again.

“Your legs are shaking,” Hank said after a while. “I can feel them going under my knees. Stay down. Stay put for me.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I can’t. Hank. Rougher.”

Sam lost track of everything but the angle and the heat. Hank’s hips slammed against his ass. Hank’s breath was loud and ragged above him and he was swearing low and steady, “Fuck, Sam, fuck, you’re so tight shut like this, I’ve got nowhere to go but in you,” and the old floorboards under the quilt creaked in time. Sam’s cock ground into the quilt under him on every stroke, rough cotton on the wet head, pressed down and rolled, and the pressure of it and Hank’s cock hitting deep inside him on every stroke started to build into one hot unbearable thing.

“Hank. I’m going to come on the quilt. I’m going to come on the good quilt.”

“Then do it. Come on it. Do it and I’ll wash it myself.”

Sam laughed, a broken sound, and then he couldn’t laugh. Hank leaned his weight onto the hand on Sam’s back and came down into him steeper, and the next stroke mashed Sam’s cock into a fold in the quilt and hit the spot inside him at the same time, and Sam came. He came shouting into the pillow, pinned flat, his whole body seizing, pumping into the patchwork under his belly in long hard pulses while Hank fucked him through it and his hole clenched and fluttered around Hank’s cock.

“Christ,” Hank said. “Oh Christ, I can feel you. Sam. Can I, now. Can I pull out.”

“Yes. On me. Please.”

Hank pulled out. Sam felt the rubber come off with a snap, and then Hank laid his bare cock in the slick crease of Sam’s ass and rocked against him there, hips only, sliding hot and wet up the cleft and back, his knees still squeezing Sam’s thighs like he’d forgotten they were there. “There,” Hank said through his teeth. “There, there,” and he groaned, deep in his chest, on and on, and came across Sam’s hip and the small of his back in hot heavy stripes, one after another, still rocking against him until he was spent.

Then it was quiet except for the heater.

Hank swung one knee off, slowly, and rubbed the backs of Sam’s thighs with both hands where his knees had been, like he was putting the feeling back. Then he lay down beside him, knee cracking, and put his arm over Sam’s back, and didn’t care what he was lying in.

“I’m going to wash that quilt,” Hank said into his hair.

“You said.”

“I’m going to wash it before Walt sees it Saturday. That man notices quilts.”

Sam laughed until his stomach hurt. Hank held on to him and laughed too, low, against his shoulder.

---

Later they lay on the clean side of the quilt under Hank’s flannel and Sam’s flannel spread over them like blankets, because neither of them wanted to get up and leave the heater. The tree blinked. Hank’s breath slowed.

“Thursday’s Christmas Eve,” Hank said.

“I know.”

“I bought you something. It isn’t in a box.” Hank was quiet. “There’s an envelope in the kitchen drawer with the fuses. I’ve had it since last Tuesday. It isn’t a letter to Walt.”

Sam turned his head. “What is it?”

“Thursday, sweetheart.” Hank pulled him in. “I’m going to give it to you Thursday. And you’re going to read it to the end before you say anything. And then you’ll have two doors instead of one, and I don’t know if that’s a present or a mean thing to do to a man at Christmas.”

Sam lay awake a long time after Hank was asleep, watching the blue flame, thinking about an envelope in a drawer with the fuses.