Back then it took a real man to truck ’cause them rigs would fight you. Just like horses, they were. They knew when you couldn’t handle them. Today — hell! Everything’s so automatic and hydraulic, even a 90-pound woman can do it.
Guess I shouldn’t knock it though. I’ll be able to keep driving these creampuffs till I’m 70. Not like Lucky. Hardly a dent and then his luck ran out on a stretch of 301 in Virginia. A blowout near a bridge and the wheel must’ve got away from him.
Ten years ago that was, and the company’d quit doubling us before that, but I still miss him. Things were never dull driving with Lucky. We was a lot alike. He used to tell me things he never told nobody else. Not just the things a man brags about when he’s drinking and slinging bull, but other stuff.
I remember once we were laying over in Philly, him going, me coming down, and he says, “Guess what I saw me today coming through Baltimore? A red-tailed hawk. Right smack in the middle of town!”
Can you feature a tough guy like him getting all excited about seeing a back-country bird in town? And telling another guy about it? Well, that’s the way it was with me and him.
I was thinking about Lucky last week coming down and wishing I had him to talk to again. Ninety-five was wall-to-wall vacation traffic. I thumbed my CB and it was full of ratchet jaws trying to sound like they knew what the hell they were saying. It was Good Buddy this and Smokey that and 10-4 on the side, so I cut right out again.
I’d just passed this Hot Shoppe sign when the road commenced to unwind in my head like a movie picture. I knew that next would come a Howard Johnson and a Holiday Inn and then a white barn and a meadow full of black cows and then a Texaco sign and every single mile all the way back home. I just couldn’t take it no more and pulled off at the next cloverleaf.
“For every mile of thruway, there’s ten miles on either side going the same way,” Lucky used to say and, like him, I’ve got this skinny map stuck up over my windshield across the whole width of the cab with I-95 snaking right down the middle. Whenever that old snake gets to crawling under my skin, I look for a side road heading south. There’s little Xs scattered all up and down my map to keep track of which roads I’d been on before. I hadn’t never been through this particular stretch, so I had my choice.
Twenty minutes off the interstate’s a whole different country. The road I finally picked was only two lanes, but wide enough so I wouldn’t crowd anybody, not that there was much traffic. I almost had the road to myself and I want to tell you it was as pretty as a postcard, with trees and bushes growing right to the ditches and patches of them orangy flowers mixed in.
It was late afternoon, the sun just going down and I was perking up and feeling good about this road. It was the kind Lucky used to look for. Everything perfect.
I was coasting down this little hill and around a curve and suddenly there was a old geezer walking right up the middle of my lane. I hit the brakes and left rubber, but by the time I got her stopped and ran back to where he was laying all crumpled up in orange flowers, I knew he was a sure goner, so I walked back to my rig, broke on Channel 9 and about ten minutes later, there was a black-and-white flashing its blue lights and a ambulance with red ones.
Everybody was awful nice about it. They could see how I’d braked and swerved across the line. “I tried to miss him,” I said. “But he went and jumped the same way.”
“It wasn’t your fault, so don’t you worry,” said the young cop when I’d followed him into the little town to fill out his report. “If I warned Mr. Jasper once, I told him a hundred times he was going to get himself killed out walking like that and him half-deaf.”
The old guy’s son-in-law was there by that time and he nodded. “I told Mavis he ought to be in a old folks’ home where they’d look after him, but he was dead set against it and she wouldn’t make him. Poor old Pop! Well, at least he didn’t suffer.”
The way he said it, I guessed he wasn’t going to suffer too much himself over the old man’s death.
I was free to go by 9 o’clock and as I was leaving, the cop happened to say, “How come you were this far off the interstate?”
I explained about how boring it got every now and then and he sort of laughed and said, “I reckon you won’t get bored again any time soon.”
“I reckon not,” I said, remembering how that old guy had scrambled, the way his eyes had bugged when he knew he couldn’t get out of the way.
Just west of 95, I stopped at a Exxon station and while they were filling me up, I reached up over the windshield and made another little X on my road-map. Seventeen Xs now. Two more and I’d tie Lucky.
I pulled out onto 95 right in front of a Datsun that had to sit on his brakes to keep from creaming himself. Even at night it was all still the same — same gas stations, same motels, same billboards.
I don’t know — maybe it’s different driving cross-country.
1980s
Robert Sampson
(1927–1992)
Robert Sampson was fascinated by pulp magazines. He published seven books on the subject and wrote countless articles for various “fanzines,” “prozines,” and mainstream periodicals. He was also a collector of pulp fiction — yet not a collector, for rather than storing his rare finds in plastic bags and locking them away from the sun, he read and enjoyed them, using them as they were meant to be used.
Sampson’s ultimate aim was not to legitimize pulp fiction, for part of its charm had always been its illicitness. Rather, he wished to celebrate its color, its wild invention, its absurd luridness, its exhausting pace, its glorious vitality. He was interested in both American and British versions of popular fiction, the kind of subliterary stuff that George Eliot once referred to as “spiritual gin.” Above all, he was intrigued by the mental and emotional processes that go into making an author a super-seller, such as the British phenomenon Edgar Wallace, who wrote a quarter of all books sold in Great Britain from 1927 to 1932.
Sampson envisaged a multivolume study dealing with all aspects of the pulps: the different genres (crime fiction, fantasy, science fiction, air-war, war, adventure, mystery, weird menace, Western, history) as well as the writers, editors, and publishers, many of whom were still alive in the early 1970s, when Sampson began his project. He called the series Yesterday’s Faces, and in 1991, the year before he died, the fifth (and penultimate) volume was published. As a monumental survey and critique of twentieth-century popular fiction, it is unique and invaluable. Other critical works include The Night Master (1982), on the superhero the Shadow; Spider (1987); and Deadly Excitements: Shadows and Phantoms (1989), which doubles as a nonseries commentary on pulp magazines and a volume of memoirs.
In his early years as a radio continuity writer, Sampson cracked one or two fiction markets, including Planet Stories and the digest Science Fiction Adventures. His story “Rain in Pinton County” appeared in New Black Mask in 1986 and won that year’s Edgar award for best short story from the Mystery Writers of America. Other stories appeared in A Matter of Crime, Weird Tales, Spectrum, Spectrum II, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction (1989).