Another time she got jumped in the alley coming to work. Gave up her wallet and still got kicked in the head. She was bleeding like crazy — the way head wounds do — when she got to the plant, but just wadded up a handful of newspaper and held it over the cut ’til it stopped bleeding. It wasn’t a really big cut — didn’t need stitches or anything, just a butterfly — but the bruise around it was pretty scary looking. This time a few of the drivers tried to talk her into going to the hospital, but she wouldn’t. She took some aspirin, and after a while started whistling, because most of the money she had on her was in her boot. She wouldn’t even call the cops.
“Five bucks,” she said, and shrugged. “He probably needed it more than I do.”
There were other incidents: cuts, more bruises, falls off the dock or a slick bumper; Frank thought maybe she was a little accident-prone — some people just were — but she’d always put her head down and go back for more.
Tracking her wasn’t easy. It’s not like she was either soft or hard, just… accepting, or something Frank didn’t have a word for. Zen. Maybe. Like a little monk, though he couldn’t see her liking the comparison, so he never said it out loud.
He could tell she liked working the dock okay, but what she loved was driving the big trucks, the bobtails. Back then you didn’t need your Class C, just a regular driver’s license and a right arm strong enough to shift the gears. On Sundays they’d send her out with the overflow: the bundles that wouldn’t fit in the small trucks. She’d take the ones for the Avenues to a bank on the corner of Geary and Arguello, stack them against the brick wall all nice and neat, then go trade extras for just-made, still-hot bagels and hand them out when the drivers came to pick up their loads. It was nice, like a little oasis in the middle of the night; a place to stop and catch your breath, to find you weren’t totally alone out there.
When Frank worked the Sunset, he’d see her truck sometimes — late, when she was done — at Ocean Beach or somewhere along Great Highway, the girl looking so small in the driver’s seat, forehead resting against the steering wheel, staring through it at the ocean while the sun rose behind her. Or not, since out there the sun didn’t always rise. Sometimes he’d stop and talk to her, but he learned to recognize a certain look that said probably best to leave her alone.
Not everyone was comfortable around her. They’d always been an all-boys club, and letting a girl in meant something had gone haywire, seriously. She took some grief from a handful of blabbermouths, and mostly rolled with it, but a couple of times she went off. The way it looked to Frank was the ones she went off on had it coming. Even when she wasn’t taking down some joker talking about her ass or whatever, she had a mouth on her that would surprise a fellow, for real. He was glad she never got mad at him.
There was one driver she got close to early on: Eddie, who everyone suspected and later found out for sure was gay. A fag, then. A homo. “Gay” wasn’t even a word yet, at least not one any of them had ever heard. Anyway, Frank would see them together a lot, and the thing he noticed was how often Eddie could make her laugh. It was nice to see, nice to know she could do that. Some of the guys referred to them as “the girls,” but Frank didn’t. Because he didn’t think it was all that funny.
One morning she and Frank were coming in at the same time after last call, driving side by side on Geary. It was a warm day already and they both had their doors slid open. She had her whole left leg out the driver’s side, her foot up on the side mirror bracket — a total gangster lean. A car pulled up next to her in the turn lane, and the guy driving yelled through his passenger window: “Is that a good job?”
“This is a great job,” she said. And she was smiling wide, bopping her head to some happy song inside it. She threw a paper to the guy through his window and took off waving when the light turned green.
After they got back to the plant and checked in, she and Frank walked out together.
Riley said, “You want to go get a beer? I know it’s kind of early, but—”
“Early? We just finished an eight-hour shift.”
They walked over to the M&M, drank a pint, ate some fries, and talked about the job, the clueless supervisors, the chance of rain on Sunday (rainy days were a pain in the butt). He asked her about Wyoming, and she looked puzzled for a second.
“Oh. You mean Montana.”
“Yeah, right. Montana, sorry.”
“It’s okay. Easy to confuse those places, I guess, if you’re not from there.”
She told him about the farm, the dog, her parents. “They’re pretty laid-back,” she said. “They’re really nice people.” She hesitated, gnawing at her lower lip. “I should probably write to them or call more often. I bet they worry about me, off in the big city. Especially my dad. You know how dads are.” For a second, she looked about twelve.
“Why did you leave?”
“It was time. I wanted to see the ocean something awful. I think I may have been a fish in a past life. Like a flounder. Both eyes on one side of my head.”
“That would be interesting,” he said. “Make it kind of hard to drive.”
She picked up a french fry and put it back down on the plate. Straight-faced, she nodded. “That’s true.”
It was easy for her to make him laugh.
He asked if she had more family, brothers or sisters. She made a movement with her head, but he couldn’t tell if it was a nod or a shake. She took a long drink of beer and said, “Have you ever seen a barn cat?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Really? A guy from Texas?”
“Not a lot of barns in Dallas.”
“Oh. I see.”
She told him how they jump, springing into the air like grasshoppers, or those tiny African bush babies she’d seen once on TV.
“When you open the barn door,” she said, “it’s like the whole place comes alive. All these scrawny little cats climbing the walls or shooting straight in the air like bottle rockets.”
“Did they have names?”
“Yeah,” she said. “They still do, I bet. My dad names them all Slick or Slim. Or some variation, like Slick Britches or Slim Bob.”
“He can tell them apart?”
“Mostly. He’s like that. Pays attention to things he thinks need attention paid to.” She turned her head toward the window. Frank looked to see what she was seeing, but it was just another day on Howard Street: construction, double-parked cars, a guy passed out at the bus stop, still holding tight to an empty Colt 45 bottle. He figured she was probably missing home, which was perfectly natural. We all miss home sometimes.
She insisted on paying. “A shitload of overtime last week,” she said.
Eventually she had enough seniority to get her own home-delivery district, where she got to hire her own kids and teach them all the tricks she’d learned from Primo, and some new ones she’d taught herself. She ran a tight ship, and the kids did a good job for her. Later on, when she started calling in sick, hers was the best district to sub on, because you knew there wasn’t going to be any trouble. Just get the papers out to the corners, and the kids would do the rest. No complaints, no hassles, no showing up late or not at all. It was sweet; she kept it that way by treating them right, like adults, like human beings. And for a time it seemed like she’d found her spot, a place she could be contented, a place she felt like she knew what she was about.
She and Frank met regularly for coffee during work, helped each other with down routes, killed time together at random corners waiting for complaints or last call. Sometimes Eddie would join them; sometimes one or two of the other drivers. She said they should form a band, call themselves the Vampires.