Furnace. Muriel Gray
dyed, and even from this distance Josh decided she was wearing too much make-up; a red gash for a mouth, arching eyebrows drawn in above deeply-set eyes.
He had seen plenty of women like that at the big Midwest truck shows, hanging on the arm of their company-owning husbands; women who spent money tastelessly as though the spending of it was inconvenient and tiresome but part of a dutiful bargain that had been struck.
Josh would barely have glanced at such a woman had he seen one sipping sparkling wine in a hospitality marquee, while her husband ignored her to do business with grim-faced truckers.
But here, standing outside a foodstore in this rural nowhere at seven o’clock on a spring morning, she looked remarkably out of place.
More than that. The most extraordinary thing about her was that she was staring directly and with alarming intensity at Josh. It wasn’t the annoyed and studied glare of a concerned citizen, the look a middle-aged woman with nothing better to do than protect small civil liberties might throw a noisy truck.
It wasn’t aimed at the truck. It was aimed at him.
In front of him, the master class in lunatic parking had ceased, the man at the wheel waving a gnarled and arthritic hand from his window again in mute thanks, and still the woman’s eyes continued to bore into Josh as she stood erect and unmoving, her body unnaturally still, on guard behind the writhing baby. For one fleeting, crazy moment Josh thought he might be inventing her, that a part of his guilty and fevered mind had conjured up this stern female figure to reprimand him for his paternal inattention.
‘That’s right, you useless dick,’ those eyes seemed to be saying. ‘This is what a baby looks like. You can look but you certainly can’t have. Only real men get these. Real men who stay home.’
He blinked at her, hoping that her head would turn from him and survey some other banal part of this quiet street scene, proving that her stare had been simply that of someone in a daydream, but her face never moved and the invisible rod that joined their eyes was becoming a hot solid thing.
There was no question of him stopping at that store now. Josh wanted out of there, away from that face, away from that tiny baby.
He fumbled for the shifter, starting the rig rolling clumsily by crunching his way around the gear-box as he picked up speed. A row of shiny shop windows to his left across the street bounced back a moving picture of Jezebel as she roared up through the gears. It was the clarity of that reflection as it distorted across undulating and different-sized glass that gave her driver an excuse to admire the mirror-image of himself sitting at the head of his gleaming electric-blue Peterbilt, and take his eyes momentarily from the face of the woman who was still standing like a lawyer for the prosecution on the sidewalk ahead.
Had she been waiting for that irresistible weakness that is every trucker’s vanity, to catch a brief glimpse of themselves on the move, and see themselves as others do? Josh would never be sure. How could he ever be sure of anything that happened that morning?
His eyes flicked back from the moving reflection down to the speedometer which showed around twenty, and then looked forward again. Back to the road and those eyes glaring at him from across the street.
She pushed the stroller like an Olympic skater, propelling it forward with a theatrically benevolent outward motion of the arms which culminated in a triumphant crucifix, palms open, shoulders high, as if waiting for a panel of judges to hold up their score cards. The timing and positioning was spectacularly accurate. She hadn’t pushed until Josh had been exactly level with her, so that the front wheels of the stroller rolled at an oblique angle beneath the double back tyres of the tractor unit.
That expertly judged speed and angle let the outer tyre snag the frame and flip it on its side under the rig, giving all eight wheels the opportunity to travel directly over the stroller and its contents.
It was almost as if Josh’s hysterical intake of breath was the force which pulled his right leg up and slammed his foot down on the brake. But there was little point in the action. His chair had already bounced in response to that small shuddering bump, the slight motion the truck’s suspension registered as it negotiated a minor obstacle, the same motion that would indicate Jezebel had run over a pothole or a piece of lumber on the highway. Only this time it wasn’t a piece of lumber. It was eight pounds of brand-new flesh, bones and blood, strapped into its flimsy shell of plastic, aluminium and canvas.
The force of the braking threw Josh forward into the steering wheel, and after he whiplashed back with a winded grunt he snapped his head round, eyes and mouth as wide open as the muscles were designed to allow, wildly scanning the view from his open window as he panted for breath. In those few seconds that felt like minutes, he noticed three things. The first was that the woman in the pink suit was gone. The second was that the reflection in the store window showed him quite clearly that there was a small mangled mass beneath the trailer, caught untidily between the back wheels of the cab. The third was that the mother was emerging slowly, as if in a dream, from the door of the store, her mouth making a dark down-turned shape that was impossibly ugly. It took a few more seconds before her screams started. First her arms twitched at her sides and her body appeared to quiver with some internal electric current, and then it was as if that current had been suddenly cut. She collapsed to her knees like a prisoner about to be executed, and her dark open mouth shaped the cry that savaged the morning air with the naked brutality of its pain.
Behind her, in the open doorway, her toddler stood howling until adult arms swept it inside.
Josh was out of his cab and scrambling desperately beneath the trailer before he had time to consider what he might find there. Had he stopped to think he would never have approached that soup of flesh, but his body was working to some private agenda that had little to do with logic or thought. It moved and acted on instinct, as if unthinking swiftness of action could somehow undo what had most certainly and irreversibly been done.
The towelling one-piece babysuit had held most of its contents together, but it had expanded when the body inside changed shape, so that now it was not so much a garment as a large, sticky, flat sack. The blood seemed so thick and black, but the worst of it was the way the main aluminium support of the stroller had embedded itself in the middle of the baby’s skull, splitting the head in two in a diagonal line from one eyebrow to a tiny shoulder. It had forced both eyes from their sockets before they, too, were mashed into the glistening corpse.
Perhaps he thought the child would be unrecognizable. He was disappointed. The mess was still so obviously a baby that Josh put out a trembling hand and fingered one tiny foot that had somehow remained intact, regretting it instantly when his gentle touch made it shift slightly with a sickening slick sound. For a crazy moment, lying on his stomach beneath the trailer, he thought about those cartoons where the victim is run over by a road roller and peeled off the road in a long flat strip, and he wanted to laugh.
He wanted to shake with laughter, wanted to feel tears of mirth pour down his cheeks, and hold his sides as they ached with the effort of hilarity. But the sound he was already making, accompanying the stream of salty tears dripping from his chin, was a thin, reedy wail that came from the back of his throat. It was a sound very far away from laughter.
He lay there for a long time, then there were hands on his legs, pulling him out from under the truck. Gentle hands, squeezing him reassuringly as they tugged him back. And voices. Calm voices that sounded miles away, saying things like ‘come on now, fella’, ‘leave it now’, ‘come on there’.
Josh went limp. He was pulled free of Jezebel by three pairs of hands and manhandled into a sitting position. A man wearing thick spectacles and a blue cotton coat with ‘Campbell’s Food Mart’ stitched on the pocket, was kneeling in front of him, looking concerned.
Behind him were two lanky teenagers, one with the same coat and one in a T-shirt and low-slung jeans. The man was talking softly, as if to a wounded animal.
‘S’okay. S’okay now. Weren’t nothin’ you could’ve done there, fella. Sheriff’s on his way. You just sit tight.’
Josh looked at him dumbly and then turned to the sidewalk in front of the