For Jerry Wayne
As far back as Breeze could remember, he wanted to be a trucker. The real deal, man. Make long hauls. Pull over on an off-ramp and sleep in his truck, feel the night riders go rumbling by. Breeze’s legal name was Terry. The last time anybody’d called him that, he was playing D-line for a tiny Baptist college in Arkansas, getting paid to sack the quarterback and hang out with pretty white girls. A full-ride scholarship to a four-year institution, a free bachelor’s degree in business. All that, and Breeze never lost sight of the dream.
“Cool Breeze” had been his daddy’s handle. Still remembered the old man calling late at night, talking to his boy like a trucker on the CB. “Ten-four, Breeze Junior. Over and out.” All those fatherless nights left an impression. Made young Breeze pine for his daddy, made him want to get out there with him.
He was out there now, parked in the lot behind a Flying J, pushing forty. The OG Breeze had died on the road somewhere between Greensboro and Raleigh before his boy ever had the chance to catch a ride. That was the first dream, the one that got replaced by this new, unreachable one, each mile of long blue highway leading to the next.
Breeze had been a trucker going on twenty years now. Finally got a long haul just like he’d wanted. Greensboro to Denver. One thousand five hundred and seventy-six miles. Took him four days, round trip. Ninety-two hours and a little change, between twenty and forty-five minutes. Twenty if Breeze’s pump wasn’t acting up.
Breeze had been diagnosed with diabetes at age four. Got the pump at six. One of those old-school kinds that looked like a beeper. Had the same basic setup through college. The clear plastic tubing going into the port on Breeze’s hip freaked the other brothers in the locker room out. They started calling him “Bane”—that bad guy from Batman with the steroid drip. Breeze didn’t like that, afraid it might take the place of his father’s name.
It didn’t, but diabetes made life a struggle. Nobody’d said much about the disease when Breeze was back in college. They just taped a pad over his pump and sent him out on that field. Trucking was different. Mr. Harrell, the redheaded old man who owned the company, didn’t want Breeze making long hauls, thought the pump might malfunction and send the truck careening over a safety rail in the Smokies. Always the Smokies, like he didn’t think the big Black kid had what it took to make it out of North Carolina.
Breeze made his first long haul—made it all the way to Denver and back—two years into driving for Mr. Harrell. Had to work twice as hard as the other guys. Breeze blamed the pump, but there were other reasons.
Twenty years is a long time to make the same four-day trip each week, even for a man like Breeze, a simple man, like that Lynyrd Skynyrd song his daddy liked so much. Not slow and definitely not stupid. Just simple, contented, but getting tired the closer he got to forty, really tired of Mr. Harrell’s son Jess.
The pump didn’t bother Jess. That wasn’t his problem. Breeze knew it the moment he caught the kid looking him over, blue eyes lingering on the beads in Breeze’s dreads.
“The hell are those?”
“Beads. My mama does them.”
“Your mama?”
“Yessir.”
“You live with her or something?”
“Yessir.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
Lying flat on his back in the sleeper cab, Breeze remembered nodding and wondering what the beads his mother braided into his hair had to do with anything. They were turquoise beads, made from some sort of turtle shell and dyed in a third-world country.
Breeze had started growing the dreads in high school. They were so long now, he had to hold them up when he sat down on the toilet. Any time he stepped foot in a truck stop bathroom, Breeze put on a pair of latex gloves, extra-large ones he’d ordered straight from a medical supply store. He didn’t like germs, but he was thinking about them, thinking about how dirty his life had become after he’d let those men pack the big blocks of weed into his fifty-three-foot trailer.
That was back in Colorado, up the mountain in the outskirts of Golden. Breeze made the mistake of calling the men “Mexicans” and learned real quick they were from El Salvador. Sounded personal, the way they snapped at him. It should’ve been his sign, a signal he’d made a wrong turn and lost sight of his dream, but this far down the road even the wrong turns were behind him.
This was it, the final haul, the one Breeze had scheduled on his off week. He’d also paid his buddy a thousand bucks, cash, just to use his truck, a rig that didn’t belong to Harrell Enterprises. As long as Breeze made it back to Greensboro without getting busted, Mr. Harrell would never have to know nothing about it.
Breeze was in Arkansas now, two hours north of where he’d played his college ball, hiding out back of that Flying J. Still had fourteen hours’ worth of driving left but couldn’t keep his eyes open as he rolled up on exit 81, the white text on the green sign blurring. He’d taken the off-ramp and pulled into the first truck stop. Breeze couldn’t go one night sleeping on the road without some thick-necked officer shining a Maglite into his cab.
Nobody’d messed with him so far. The other truckers mostly kept to themselves. There were a few talkers in every bunch, old-timers that bought coffees and sat sideways in Subway booths. There were more Subways at truck stops than anything else these days. Most all the McDonald’s were replaced around the same time that Jared dude started talking about eating sandwiches and dropping all those pounds.
Breeze pinched the roll of fat beneath his navel and pined for a Big Mac. He was pushing three hundred and sick of meatball subs; his college days, his playing weight, in the rearview like everything else. Breeze knew he’d never see two-twenty again, the same way he knew he’d never watch the sun come up over the Rockies, orange light inching its way over the hood of Mr. Harrell’s big Mack truck.
He’d miss that.
He’d miss all of it, but that was the deal he’d made with himself. One haul—one score—and then he was out. He’d buy that house on 6th Street his mama couldn’t quit talking about and move Josephine, his mama’s mama, in there too. Get them out that duplex where the rent just kept going up.
Been that way too long. Breeze was sick of it. Sick of everything but the road. Maybe there was a way to keep driving, a way to keep chasing the original dream. Maybe there’d be enough money he could make a down payment on that house and get a truck of his own, leave Mr. Harrell and his son behind. Maybe . . .
Breeze heard small wheels rolling over rough concrete—a sound that took him back to his youth—and pulled open the cab window’s curtain. There was a girl two trucks down had what looked like roller skates on except the wheels were in a straight line.
Blades, Breeze thought, and wiped his eyes. Rollerblades.
The chick was still standing there, had her upper half, her head and shoulders, pushing into another truck’s cab. She leaned back and Breeze saw her body cast in yellow and dull orange, the safety lights revealing the dimples in her cheeks and what looked to be stringy blonde hair. Breeze liked how thin it was, so different from his thick, matted dreads. He held tight to the curtain and watched the girl disappear into another man’s cab.
The girl said her name was Tracey. Breeze wondered what name she’d told the last man, the one who’d given her the crumpled bill sticking out from under her left bra cup. Ten bucks wasn’t enough to buy two gallons of diesel these days.
“You gonna let me in or what?”
Breeze had his hand on the door, his fingers wrapped around the handle, leaving a crack just wide enough he could see her left eye winking at him. Breeze said, “Nah, I’m good,” and went to pull the door shut, but the girl’s hand found his, a pale index finger rubbing the knuckle of a big brown one. Made Breeze’s insides pull tight and burn.
“Good? What’s that even mean?” she said, still doing that thing with her finger.
Breeze didn’t know. He never did, not when it came to women. Three more years and Breeze would be a forty-year-old virgin, a real one, not just some joke in a movie. Ten bucks and that wouldn’t be the case. Or maybe ten would only get him halfway there. It didn’t matter. That wasn’t the way Breeze wanted it to go.
“Hear me in there, big boy?”
Breeze heard her. He felt her still going at his finger too.
“Just let me come in, sit a while. I can tell you ain’t the kind of man has to do something.”
“Yeah?” Breeze said. “How’s that?”
She laughed and it sounded real, different than her smile had been earlier. “I can feel it,” she said, running a fingernail down the middle of his palm to his wrist, stopping over a pulsing vein. “Right there.” She pressed down. “That’s your heart, baby. I can feel it.”
Breeze let her feel it until it was going good and fast, fast enough to make him forget all those bundles of grass stacked in his trailer. Breeze didn’t invite her in (he’d remember that later, when all of this was over, and recall something his mother’d told him once about vampires). He just let go of the door and it fell open another inch or two, enough space for the girl to slide through, her rollerblades clanking against the truck’s nerf bar.
Breeze started calling her “Rollergirl” in his mind. He liked it better than Tracey because Tracey was a lie. Rollergirl had a ring to it, an edge, like something from one of the graphic novels he had stuffed under his mattress, a bunch of pretty Asians in school uniforms staring back at him with eyes too big to be real. The other brothers on that Baptist football team gave Breeze shit about SpongeBob. How he was all the time watching that kiddie cartoon. Breeze couldn’t see Rollergirl in Bikini Bottom, and that was fine. He liked her right where she was, sitting on his bunk with one leg folded beneath her, fiddling with a strip of leather tied tight around her neck.
“What’s that?” Breeze pointed. He was in the driver’s seat with his shoulders turned, uncomfortable at first but feeling better now that he’d put his gloves on. Rollergirl didn’t say a word about it. Didn’t care one bit the big Black man had popped on some latex gloves soon as he got her in his truck.
“Raccoon dick bone.”
Breeze swallowed and ran a thumb under the glove’s bottom part. The little rolled-up lip reminded him of a balloon. “A dick bone?”
“Yeah. I stole it.”
Breeze squinted, trying to picture who she’d swiped it from.
“The idea, not the bone. Got this little thing at a Kum & Go just up the road.” She let the smooth, gently curved bone fall back to the dip in her neck. “Watched this show on Netflix where a chick wrote these fancy stories about a truck stop girl. Had a bunch of smart people eating that shit up, thinking she was the girl. Like she was really dumb enough to tie something like this around her neck”—she touched a thumbnail to the bone—“and do what I do every other night.”
Breeze didn’t ask why she took so much time off. She was working tonight, sitting right there with her legs crossed like a kindergartner, the rollerblades like big black Mickey Mouse shoes.
“I work by the hour, man.” She shrugged. “It all costs the same.” She shrugged again. “Just thought you should know.”
Breeze took hold of a dreadlock and rolled it between two fingers. He didn’t like the way his hair felt through the rubber. Couldn’t get used to it. He wondered what she’d feel like. Would he take the gloves off if she asked him to? If it came to that?
“Some guys let me nose around in their trailers.”
“Not me.” Breeze said it too fast and knew it the moment she looked up at him.
“What you got back there?”
Breeze shook his head.
“Come on, man.” Rollergirl had the bone in her fingers again, jabbing it at him. “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. Most guys,” she said, upper lip curled, “most guys get off on that shit, letting me peek at what they got back there.”
“Not me.” Breeze liked the way his voice sounded now.
“Come on,” she whispered. “You’re off the clock, okay? You’ve got my full fucking attention. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met a man like you.”
“Nothing special about me.”
“Big-ass Black dude with inch-thick dreads threw on a pair of doctor gloves soon as I crawled in here?” She ran a hand through her greasy hair and held it at the top. “Thought I’s about to get into some super kinky shit, but that ain’t it, is it?”
Breeze laced his fingers in his lap and turned away.
“You think I’m dirty. You put them gloves on,” Rollergirl said, no longer whispering, which made it worse, “so you wouldn’t have to touch me?”
Breeze could tell he’d hurt her feelings, hurt her worse than if he’d just forked over ten bucks and had his way with her. It could’ve all been over already. It should’ve been, but she was still sitting back there, tapping the rollerblade brake pads against the wall.
Breeze watched her in the rearview mirror and reached for his glove box. His wallet was in there beside a .22 caliber pistol that had once belonged to his daddy. Two decades on the road and he’d never had to use it. The other truckers left him alone. There weren’t a lot of six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound Black men driving big rigs. There were a lot of potbellied white dudes and a few squatty Mexicans. Breeze was thinking about the men who’d loaded his trailer, those guys from El Salvador, when Rollergirl took hold of his dreads and pulled.
Hard enough Breeze’s whole body came straight up in the seat and the glovebox flopped open. Breeze cut his eyes and saw the silver pistol sitting on top of his wallet, not beside it. The girl saw it too. Breeze could tell by the hitch in her breath, a shallow rasp as she pulled his hair back farther and whispered, “Mama gonna fix what ails you, big boy. I’m gonna wash you clean.”
The girl was naked now, butt naked in the dim lit cab, her body a sliver of pale, hairless flesh. Breeze guessed she was probably sixteen, another man’s dream but a nightmare to the virgin trucker.
Holding him at gunpoint, she’d duct-taped his wrists to his thighs and tied his hair in knots behind the driver’s seat. A whole bunch of them, working her way down, the same way Breeze’s mama braided in the beads. After that she’d gotten naked, dancing around with the gun as she’d undressed, shedding her gym shorts like a scab. She’d put the pistol barrel in her mouth—all the way up to the trigger guard—before she reached around to unclasp her bra. Those wire cups weren’t holding anything up. She still had the .22 in her mouth, slinking toward Breeze. The girl’s eyes grinned above the hammer, growing wider with every step.
Breeze writhed but his hair held tight. He knew what he had to say. It was the only thing that might stop her.
“It ain’t you. Okay? I didn’t think you were dirty. It’s just—”
Rollergirl plucked the pistol from her mouth and leaned forward. The bone dangled over her clavicle. The necklace was the only thing on her.
“I get it. You’re a freak, a germaphobe, or whatever, but I’m your new doctor, baby. I’ve got the prescription.”
The word was right there, Breeze’s lips already at work forming the first syllable, that hard-V sound, but he swallowed it down and said, “I’ll pay you. Twenty bucks, just to go. Okay?”
The girl bopped Breeze’s nose with the raccoon bone.
“Naw, that wouldn’t be fair. Besides, what kinda man”—she ran both hands up the length of her body, like a magician’s assistant—“turns all this down?”
This girl didn’t deserve to know Breeze’s secret, the part of himself he’d kept protected for so long. She wasn’t going to take it from him either. The thought cleared the highway in his mind. The trailer’s contents didn’t matter. Not in that moment. In that moment, all Breeze wanted was his phone.
He had to push his thingy off to the side, but he finally hooked a finger into the front-right pocket of his sweatpants. Got his thumb in there next while the girl was busy licking that bone on her necklace, really going at it with both eyes closed. Breeze squeezed his smartphone on both sides, hoping the trick he’d seen online about how to make an emergency call without dialing the number was real. Just had to hold those two buttons down for five full seconds. Two more and he’d be home free.
There was no way to tell how much time passed before the girl spit the raccoon bone out and yanked Breeze’s pants down, both legs at the same time. The phone thumped onto the floorboard. Breeze heard it but couldn’t see anything except the girl, staring down at his lap.
She wasn’t looking at his phone or his thingy. She was pointing at his pump, the port and that clear plastic tubing that had freaked his teammates out.
“The hell?” She clapped both hands over her breasts and scooted backward across the passenger seat. “Are you, like, sick or something?”
It took Breeze a second, but then he nodded and said, “Yeah. I’m sorry. I tried to tell you. It’s just that—”
“You’re contagious . . . that’s it? That’s why you was wearing them gloves?”
Breeze didn’t nod this time. He didn’t have to. He just stared up at her and let what fear was left in his eyes send the strange girl on her way.
The air smelled of bleach. Breeze had fresh clothes on and the sheets stripped off his bunk. He’d already scrubbed the cab. Took him five minutes, making sure to deep-clean any spot that girl had touched. Took him another five to scrub himself and haul all of it—the sweatsuit, the bedsheets, the soiled wipes and rags—out to the dumpster behind the Flying J. Ten minutes. That’s how long it had taken Breeze to completely erase Rollergirl from his life.
It was late, closing in on one in the morning, and Breeze had a long day ahead of him, the final stretch of his hush-hush haul. All he had to do was unhitch the trailer at a warehouse in Raleigh and collect his payment. Five times what he’d make in a year driving for Mr. Harrell, especially considering the cost of diesel.
Fuck Bill, Breeze thought, and he reached for his phone, finally allowing himself to think of Mr. Harrell by his first name. Maybe it was time for Breeze to do the same. Get home and tell his people to start calling him Terry from now on. No more handles. No more long hauls.
A siren yipped.
A space inside Breeze’s heart—the place he’d kept the memory of his father for so long—split open and the original dream slipped away. Breeze didn’t look up. He kept his eyes on his phone. The glass reflected the blue lights. Breeze checked his recents and saw three numbers at the top of the list. The emergency call had gone through.
As the officer sidled up to the big rig, Maglite blazing inside the cab, Breeze remembered the girl, the one he’d let get away, and knew he couldn’t forget her now if he’d wanted to. Not Rollergirl. Never again. 
Eli Cranor played quarterback at every level: peewee to professional. These days, he serves as the writer in residence at Arkansas Tech, where he also lends his eye—and sometimes, his arm—to the university’s football team.
Illustration: Sam Hadley
