51: That afternoon, what with one thing. . . .
That afternoon, what with one thing and another, we got lost over in Iowa. As get-losts go, it wasn’t a bad one—all we had to do was pull off at a truck stop, find our bearings, and backtrack twenty miles—but it put us late, so it was black dark by the time we crossed the river at Sioux City. We stopped for supper on the Nebraska side, and afterwards Marion took over the wheel again. That was when I figured out one reason why the old man had sent me along. When you haul cattle, you have to clean out the trailer, which was one thing Marion Saunders couldn’t do with a broken foot.
Now, there are different ways to do this. You can throw the manure off at the feedlot, where they’ve already got a pile of it, if they’ll let you, but usually they won’t. You can stop at a truck wash and pay thirty dollars. Those are the legal methods. With two drivers, the other thing you can do is, on a dark two-lane highway, where there’s not much traffic between towns, one guy drives while the other guy scoops the shit out the door at the back of the trailer. If he’s ecologically sensitive, he can try to direct it toward the shoulder of the road. If you get caught, of course, it costs you more than thirty bucks.
I was not happy back there, scraping away at cowshit in the dark. It was cold, with a sixty-mile-an-hour wind screaming in the slats of the trailer, and I spent half my time hanging on and another third lurching around and banging into the partitions, which only left a sixth for actually shoveling. I made some progress—a layer of shit had frozen to the aluminum and would’ve taken a jackhammer to get rid of—and worked up a sweat under my coveralls, while my cheeks were freezing. (The kind of trailer we were pulling is called a “pot,” short for potbelly, and it’s divided into compartments: one upper, one at the back, one lower, and another at the front. Cattle hate them, truckers hate them, but they hold more cattle and make more money than a straight trailer.)
I’d cleaned the top and rear compartments, more or less, and was working away in the belly of the truck. I’d carried a scoopful back up the ramp and flung it—that’s a little dangerous too, you wouldn’t exactly want to fall out onto the pavement—and was on my way to get another, when Marion Saunders hit the air. I flew half the length of the trailer before contacting the floor; I landed at the lowest point and skidded to the front, pushing shit ahead of me, till the shit and I slid up the front ramp and fetched against the gate that closed off the forward compartment. Thank God, the scoopshovel went some other direction.
It could’ve been worse; I’d landed facing backwards, so my mouth was free of cold manure. At the time, though, I didn’t think of that. With icy stinking moisture trickling down my neck and soaking through my coveralls, I lay too bruised to move a muscle and thought of ways to murder Marion Saunders.
“Are you all right?” a shaken voice asked. I thought I detected a faint note of apology, not nearly enough for me. I held my silence, hoping he’d get close enough so I could bite his leg. The beam of a flashlight flicked around the trailer, finally resting on my face. It must’ve been apparent that I wished to injure him, because he stood back well out of reach.
“You son of a bitch,” I began. “You scum-sucking maggot-infested butcher’s reject of a bloated pig. You syphilitic snake-molesting stone-hatched splatter of monkey sperm—”
“Hold up your hand,” he said. “I can’t see you under all that cowshit.”
Well, there was really nothing I could say to that. I held up my left hand—it was good to know I could move, after all—and he gave me a pull. In a second I was on my feet, free from the sucking muck. “Marion,” I said with tears in my eyes, “when I get out there, there had better be a disabled school bus across the road.”
“Sorry, man,” he said. “So sorry.” He kept shining the light on my face, so I couldn’t see if he was snickering. “Anything broken?”
I pushed past him, a little wobbly on my feet, and found the open door of the trailer. I climbed down and limped around to the front of the truck. Nothing. There were black tracks on the asphalt, still smoking. I went down the embankment, crossed the ditch, climbed over a barbed-wire fence, and walked out into a meadow, where I found a haystack and sat down out of the wind.
After a minute or two I saw the yellow beam of the flashlight coming toward me. “You’d better get some batteries for that flashlight,” I said when he got closer. “Those are about dead.”
“Come back to the truck,” he said. “You’ll freeze to death out here.”
“Give me a cigarette,” I said. “And I don’t mean marijuana, damn you.”
“I could use one myself,” he said. “They’re in the truck.”
“I don’t see any school bus across the road.” My voice shook with bitterness. “I don’t see children’s corpses.”
“I said I was sorry. What do you want me to do?”
“Tell me why I’m sitting here saturated with the dung of herbivores,” I said. “Where the hell are we, anyway?”
“We’re about twenty miles out of Greeley. The weigh station is coming up in another ten minutes, if you think you can drive.”
“Oh, all right, you bastard,” I said. “Help me up again.” I gave him my left hand because my right arm felt numb. He took my elbow and led me across the meadow, though it was him that was shivering, and not just from the cold.
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