Hidden America Read online

  Already for the third or fourth time today Gretchen Wilson comes on the radio and Sputter reaches and turns the volume up. “I don’t waste my time on / Manicures and spray-on tans, / And I don’t pay no never mind / to the calluses I’ve worn on my hands . . .” She slaps her thigh as she sings, and belts the chorus: “I work hard, I play harder, / I’m a good-timin’ American daughter . . .”

  She raises her hand for a high five. “That’s it, girl! That’s it!” With that, she lets out her Sputter laugh, a rolling boom that requires all of her. She can just as quickly cry. Anything about innocence violated, a dead animal, an orphaned child, will make the tears pop. I have already decided not to tell her about my parents, not because of her characteristic fragility, but because of the acuteness of my own.

  “So, do you like my truck?” she asks.

  “Oh, I do,” I say, politely.

  “I mean, I know it’s not a Peterbilt,” she says.

  “This isn’t considered a fancy truck?”

  “It’s kind of like a Pinto,” she says.

  She doesn’t own it—as most drivers don’t anymore. The era of the independent owner-operator largely ended when fuel prices began going crazy in the 1980s, giving way to a system of fleet owners—like Rob back in Kalida—who own all the trucks, hire the drivers, and do the dispatching. Fleet owners work sort of like restaurant franchisees, contracted by one of the bigs, Con-way, J. B. Hunt, or, as in Rob’s case, Landstar. Sputter gets her weekly paycheck from Rob, who provides full benefits, and she gets paid a percentage of each haul she makes, split among her, Rob, and Landstar. She takes home about forty grand a year.

  When Sputter first started hauling for Rob, he wasn’t too sure about her. To begin with, he wasn’t used to seeing black people in the middle of Ohio. And a woman? She could sense his reluctance. She knew he would just need time. Now they’re like family and he spoils her. Every time Rob buys a new rig for the fleet, he offers it to Sputter before any of his other thirty drivers—it’s been her turn for a new truck for two years now—but she says no, a thousand times no. A truck, she tells him, is like a pair of jeans: it takes a long time to get it molded to your body just right. Rob lets her take off during the worst of winter because she’s afraid to drive on ice. He honors her request to keep her routes within the Midwest. He knows how hard it is to find—and keep—a good trucker, and he knows he has something special in Sputter.

  In the era of no jobs, jobs, jobs, long-haul trucking is one place were there are jobs aplenty—about four hundred thousand openings at the moment, and thousands upon thousands expected on top of that in the coming years. It is by any measure an industry in crisis, a culture America can’t afford to have collapse. Image-wise, the postmodern trucker isn’t who a trucker was back in the days of B.J. and the Bear and Burt Reynolds and Smokey and the Bandit. The 1970s was the trucking heyday, at least as far as pop culture went. But even before that, starting way back in the 1940s, truckers were cool and mysterious. Here was the new American cowboy, the maverick carrying the torch of freedom and mischief and cigarette butts flicked to the wind.

  That’s all gone now. Now it’s just a shitty job. You’re gone all the time. Corporate fat cats telling you what to do, or the government saying you can drive up to eleven hours a day, and then you have to sleep for ten. Since pay is by the haul, the incentive is to break the law, fake your logbooks, which everybody does. You eat crappy food. You get lonely. You get fat.

  Sputter complains about none of this, wondering only how long she can keep it up. The toll on her body—her knees are giving out from climbing up and down, down and up, into the cab. And then there is the career/family dilemma same as any woman has. “How can you raise kids and drive a truck?” she says. “Did I tell you I’m thirty-five? Did you know I was that old?” The sun is drenching her chin, a glow reflecting up.

  “One minute Michael wants babies and the next he doesn’t. He’s fifty-one. I told him, I said, ‘Michael, there’s not much time left for babies.’ I said, ‘Let’s go to a doctor and get fertilized and have as many as we can have.’ He said, ‘I’ll give you one.’”

  —

  LATE INTO THE NIGHT we chug slowly through the lot at a Travel America truck stop and find a space away from the harsh glow of Qiznos red and green and flashing L-O-T-T-O pink neon. Sputter lines all three axles of the rig just so, shifts into reverse, and puts her whole body into spinning the mighty steering wheel as she backs the seventy-one-foot eighteen-wheeler into an impossibly skinny slot. It’s dark over here, a good spot, and we have neighbors on either side of us, rigs rumbling. Most truckers keep the engines on all night, for the air-conditioning in the summer and the heat in the winter. People always ask Sputter if she’s afraid out here all alone, and she always tells them no. The guys are more or less respectful and she can handle herself. When the lot lizards in heels and tight tops come knocking at her door, they freak out when they see she is a woman, and she tries to reason with them to go back home and find another way to make a living. You can do better for yourself!

  She throws a switch and the truck exhales a loud, satisfying hiss. “Okay,” she says with a long sigh, as if to answer. She rubs her knee. Stupid knee. They don’t make rigs with women’s bodies in mind. Of course not. Last year she joined an organization, Women in Trucking, which she thinks is awesome. Only about 200,000 of the nation’s 3.5 million truckers are female. Most of her friends in Women in Trucking have grown kids, started doing this after. Some have husbands who drive, both of them trading off, like living in an RV together. She imagines Michael doing something like that and laughs out loud at the thought. He-would-die!

  “Did you bring pajamas?” she asks me, throwing another switch on the dashboard jammed with dials and gauges and lights. She takes a sip of water from a Gatorade bottle she filled with tap water at home.

  “You wear pajamas out here?”

  “More like sweats and a T-shirt,” she says. “I bring them to the shower with me and get changed.”

  “Then that’s what I’m going to do,” I say, and we crawl to the back of the cab to gather our shower things, entering a capsule of a home: a twin bed topped by a fuzzy blue decorative pillow; a refrigerator stocked with apples, grapes, and soda; a microwave; and cubbies built into the walls holding shampoo, Febreze, Lubriderm Advanced Therapy Moisturizing Lotion.

  “Showers cost nine dollars,” Sputter says, “but I have a membership card so we’ll get a discount.”

  I ask her to please confirm that these are not group showers, not one big public room of dripping faucets.

  “We’re not in prison, girl!” she says, and begins digging through a canvas tote. “I bought you some shower shoes, but now I can’t remember what I did with them.” I tell her to stop with the gifts already. Earlier she presented me with a new set of flowered sheets and two lemon-yellow bath towels. “I want you to be comfortable,” she says. “How often do I get to host a guest?”

  Together we ready the sleeper cab for the night, make a little nest out of two fuzzy green beanbag chairs, and argue about who gets the real bed (“No, you!”) and who gets the beanbags, and of course she wins. She sets two alarms, one to wake up Michael so he won’t be late for work in the morning, and the second to remind Michael to feed her cats before he leaves. She wonders if Michael shampooed the carpets, but she knows the answer is no, so she decides not to call him.

  “I wish Michael was more like my father,” she says again, this time through bobby pins in her teeth. “But I guess a lot of women are like that, just always looking to replace their dad.”

  She insists that everything in her life goes back to her dad, watching him work on those rigs. As a child, she devoured his legend: a sharecropper who emigrated north for work, arriving practically shoeless in Cleveland, where he got the job at the garage. That job was everything to a man like him. That job was America itself. He had six kid
s. Sputter was the youngest. How she dreamed of climbing on his big shoulders, him parading her through town like his pride and joy. She dreamed. It got so she dreamed of becoming a broken-down old truck so that he would spend as much time with her as he did with those rigs.

  “I’m going to become a truck driver,” she told him one day. He said she would have to learn how to fix one before she drove it. “Well, you can teach me!” she said. (And wasn’t that the whole point?) He said, “No.” Then one day just after high school graduation, a recruiter from the U.S. Army called and Sputter answered the phone and listened to his pitch. “Well, can you teach me to fix a truck?” she asked, and the guy said he could. “Can you make me a truck driver?” she asked, and the guy said he could do that, too, so she went down to the recruiting office and signed up that very day.

  She doesn’t talk about the army, boot camp, all the hard work learning. She doesn’t talk about how difficult it’s been to be a black woman making it in a white man’s world. She talks about being like her father, making her father proud, being a good worker, never lazy, always thrifty, changing the oil herself.

  There is a boom. A pounding on the driver’s side door. Boom, boom, boom. She moves quickly to the front, looks out. A thin man, smoking, holding a shaving kit. She cracks her window.

  “Shower wait’s over an hour,” the guy says. “Don’t bother.”

  “Oh, okay, thanks, buddy,” Sputter shouts down to him. “Appreciate it!”

  We bail on the shower, decide to get up early to beat the rush. “Oh, my Lord!” she says, checking the time. She reaches, turns the satellite radio to HLN’s Nancy Grace, comes back and flops into the beanbags. She gathers her curls into a bandanna, hushes me. Sputter has a lot of friends on her various radios (especially infomercials; late at night she calls the 800 numbers to chat with various operators standing by), but none can begin to compare with Nancy. “He should not be out on bail!” she says to Nancy, about someone Nancy thinks strangled the niece of someone Nancy has on her show. “Why-is-he-out-on-bail?”

  I put my head on the pillow with the thud of a thousand centuries. The cumulative exhaustion of these past months is so complete I think only a coma will help.

  The ceiling curves low over the bed, a tight little cave, and sounds are muffled, flat and private back here. I think about how people go off to spas for peace and tranquillity after they get done with some big tragedy in their lives, to heal, to finish mourning, or to begin. A long-haul truck with a radio pumping out sad and outrageous tales of strangled teenagers can, I suppose, serve the purpose.

  Finally Nancy says, “Good night, friend.”

  “Good night, friend,” Sputter says softly, and cuts the sound.

  —

  APPARENTLY, I FALL ASLEEP. I know this only because I pop awake, thinking about Elaine, Sputter’s sister. I sit up straight and fast, as you do. My eyeballs feel cold each time I blink, and the darkness is the same, open or shut. Sputter is snoring softly.

  I keep going over it. We were in the living room and Elaine told me she worked for the elderly, and I asked her if she liked her job and she said she did. “Well, that must be difficult work,” I said, then regretting the words as soon as they came out. I had just spent the past six months of my life dealing with women like Elaine. Always women. In and out of the assisted-living center where my parents lived out their last days. Round-the-clock care, smiling caretaker after smiling caretaker. Picking my mom up like a little bird, placing her in bed, dressing her legs, dark, fleshy fingers against pasty, thin white. Difficult work?

  Those women were saints, we said. The patience. The kindness. The sheer endurance of their cheerfulness. It hurt too much to imagine that they might only be pretending to care—just doing a job, getting a paycheck—although that fear pressed constantly on my chest. What if they were only pretending? What if CiCi or Aletha or Pauline got home and made fun of my dad for needing his blanket just so over his toes, or cursed my mom for wetting the bed? Was that what these people did when they got home? Was that the hidden truth?

  Here was Elaine, one of them. It was like meeting a favorite actor on TV. You want them to be their character. Please, just be that character. If Elaine’s job turned out to be just a job, if she didn’t love the old lady whose hair she washed, didn’t adore the old man she danced with—if she made fun of the old people, or showed any lesser crack at all—I would have had to run to the bathroom to throw up.

  “That must be difficult work.” The words were bouncing echoes in my head.

  “You have to have a soft spot for seniors,” Elaine answered. Those were her actual words. “It’s a calling,” she said. She remained a lanky figure in shadow. “And I always have had the soft spot,” she said. “I can’t explain it. I just like to think that at the end of the day, or the end of their life, somebody came into their life that made a difference. And they didn’t feel old or mistreated or anything like that. Someone took time with them and gave them a hug and gave them love.”

  I didn’t say, “You’re an angel,” like you’re supposed to say at a time like that. I didn’t say it because when people say a thing like that, they don’t mean it the way I would have meant it. “You-are-an-angel!” Literally, here was a person who came out of nowhere and extinguished a fire.

  When I think about the women of hidden America, all the labor that traditionally falls on the shoulders of women, I think they are an enormous army of soldiers hidden in camouflage. The caretakers, the nannies, the maids, the sisters and the surrogate sisters, the mothers and the surrogate mothers, all those people tending hearts.

  —

  THE SHOWER IS SURPRISINGLY FINE, Lysol clean, a two-room booth with a separate changing area and a little red light outside to show it is occupied, sort of like a Catholic confessional. I meet Sputter afterward for some eggs in the truck stop diner and we hit the road by dawn, emerging into the day about two hours outside Walcott and the Jamboree, according to the GPS on the dashboard. We remark on the sharp hues of daybreak—another hot one ahead!—and we talk about Michael. Everything keeps coming back to Michael.

  Two years ago, Michael heard the sound of Sputter’s laughter at a comedy club, and it was the laughter that drew him. Who laughed like that? Out of what kind of woman was such an outrageously joyful sound even possible? He got her phone number. She thought, Hey, a free meal if he shows up, and was shocked when he did. She had on her favorite brown pants and a paisley shirt, and he smelled sweet and looked cute in his workout suit, blue and shiny. “I eat chicken, corn, and mashed potatoes,” she told him. “That’s it.” She told him she didn’t trust casseroles or anything mixed together or anything unknown. She knew nothing about the kitchen beyond the microwave and she was not interested in learning. She laid down these and many other laws. Michael hung in there, worked on softening the heart piled beneath all those rules. She had never been in love before. She was afraid of losing control, of the responsibility, of being seen and being known—mostly of losing control. Eventually, she let go. She fell in love. She let him in. She wonders now if he understands how huge this is, if anyone can possibly appreciate how abundantly huge.

  “He didn’t show his habits when we first got together,” she says. “Oh, he loved my cats. He cleaned my attic. He was cream of the crop. It was, like, ‘Where did this guy come from?’ But then the laziness came out. It was always in there, but it was hidden.”

  “I’m sure he’s got a lot of good qualities,” I say. I don’t think I’m defending Michael so much as defending love.

  Her phone rings. It’s her mother. “Hey, what’s up?” Sputter says, answering. Her mother wants to know where Elaine is and if Elaine remembered to put the fish bait in the refrigerator.

  “Mom—I’m in Iowa,” Sputter says. “I’m in my truck.”

  Her mother wants to know could Sputter call Elaine and ask her about the bait.

&n
bsp; “Well, okay, sure, Mom,” she says, hanging up, and then she turns to me. “You have to admit that’s a little weird. Why can’t she just call Elaine herself?” She’s been sitting so long, she’s slumping, her body filling the seat like a loaf of bread in a loaf pan.

  “And here’s another thing,” she says. “I’m out here all alone on these highways and she doesn’t worry about me. Don’t you think that’s odd? Shouldn’t a mother worry about her kid? I’m telling you, I can’t really grab her sometimes.”

  “It’s a little weird,” I offer. “My mother worried constantly.” It is the first time I refer to my mother in the past tense. It feels hot, like a sin.

  “Bait?” I say to Sputter. “Your mother was calling about bait?”

  “She fishes,” Sputter says. “I went once. I didn’t like the bugs. No one will go with her except sometimes Cheryl. Cheryl is the sister I’m closest to. Ten years older. She’s the head, I’m the tail. She calls me her best friend. She’s got eight kids. She always talks about riding with me, but she hasn’t done it yet.”

  She reaches for the Gatorade bottle, sips the tap water she keeps refilling at various truck stops. The soda she stocked the refrigerator with is for me; she will not drink my soda. I did not ask for the soda.

  “The one I get along least with is Elaine,” Sputter says. “The way me and Cheryl see it, Elaine tries to have my mom all to herself. And this is another thing about Elaine: She thinks she’s a great cook. She’s not. It’s bland.”

  Josh Thompson comes on the radio and Sputter turns the volume up, bounces her chin while she sings. “You can leave us alone.” She pauses for this next part, looks at me, points her finger to the beat: “We’re about John Wayne, Johnny Cash, / And John Deere way out here.”

  It’s an odd anthem for a black woman from Cleveland, and I wonder if it’s worth pointing that out, but decide against it. We fall silent for a stretch, listen to the song. There is nothing but corn on either side of us, green and green and green touching the sky. My mind drifts naturally back. I’m trying to get the grief over with, and part of that is playing the same movie over and over again in your head. (Like the ending is going to change?) I think about the funeral and the church. Your voice is puny when you are making funeral arrangements. You may be talking or you may just be moving your mouth like a starving baby sparrow.