Loud is How I Love You (12 page)

Girl, you wear me down, like a rubber tire . . .

I don’t know what I’m expecting when I climb up into Montana’s big rig, but I know this studded, red-pleather wonderland of bad taste isn’t it. The cabin is spotless save a spare pair of cowboy boots on the floor in front of the passenger-side captain’s chair, which, by the way, is covered in a plush Holstein-print seat cover. A black velvet curtain partitions off Montana’s mobile love nest, and Travis climbs in and positions himself just in front of it, sitting on top of a black, wooden box.

“That’s my mother you’re sitting on,” Montana says, pointing to the padlocked box under Travis’s ass.

“What?” he asks, his voice cracking as his face goes so pale I can almost make out the blood vessels in it.

“Her ashes,” Montana says. “I keep them with me on the road. Would you mind?”

“Oh, no, no, of course not,” Travis says, scrambling to get Montana’s mother’s remains as far from his ass as he can manage in that small space. He sits on the floor behind my seat. “Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here finding Jesus,” he says.

“You’re a praying man?” Montana asks.

“I am now,” he says.

The cabin reeks of stale cigarette smoke and about eighty of those pine tree car deodorizers. It’s like he never removes them, he just keeps adding more. (Okay, not eighty but probably twelve? Seriously, they are hanging right there off the plastic galactic dolphin figurine that’s glued to the dash.) There are strands of Christmas lights adorning the cabin, which I don’t even notice until Montana flips them on with a switch, like he’s had them hardwired in.

“They make me feel like I’m at a party,” he says.

Okay then.

The multicolored party lights cast a rainbow on an additional four plastic Jesuses, two wobbling hula girls, a fake baby cactus stuck to the dash with the words “stay sharp” lettered on the small clay pot. There’s an old Polaroid photo of a dog in a frame tacked to the dash. “Timmy, he was mine as a boy,” he tells me. “I miss him like I miss my own mother.”

“Are his ashes in the glove compartment or something?” I ask.

“Nah,” Montana says. “We buried him under the sweet potato patch. That crazy dog loved sweet potatoes.”

“Well, who doesn’t love sweet potatoes?” I say, because I’m just reaching here, for something, anything normal that we can all converge on.

“More of an Idaho russet man myself,” Montana says.

Great.

And now I’m really hoping Travis isn’t right about this being a very bad idea because he’ll never let me live it down. If we live at all.

But it’s too late to back out now, because we’re pulling away from the gas station, onto the highway. The loud cranking of the engine gives me a thrill. Again I’m not sure if this is the thrill one gets before a daring adventure or a death rattle. My stomach is in knots and I can’t even look behind me at Travis because I’m sure he’s cursing me and my stubbornness from here to Exit 9 right now.

“And one thing,” Montana says.

“Okay?”

“Don’t ask me to blow the horn.”

“I wasn’t going to,” I say.

“Yes you were,” he says. “Weren’t you?”

“No, I wasn’t. Honest.”

“Oh, come on. Really?”

“Really,” I say. “I mean, if you want to blow it—”

“I don’t,” he says. “It’s just the kind of thing kids always ask you to do.”

“Oh,” I say, feeling a little disappointed in myself for not thinking of it. “Well then, will you blow the horn?”

“No.”

“Under what circumstances would you consider blowing it?”

“None,” he says, exasperated. “Are you slow or something?”

I’m really bad at truckers, I decide. I definitely can’t figure Montana out.

He takes out a Camel unfiltered and lights it, offers us each one. I’m so nervous, I actually take one and I don’t even smoke. The minute I light my cigarette I feel like I want to vomit. I’m hoping I can just hold the thing until it burns all the way down and Montana won’t notice. Travis takes one, too.

“You don’t smoke,” I say to him.

“Neither do you,” he says. Then Travis takes a drag and coughs his face off for ten minutes. “I’m more of a Marlboro Red kind of guy,” he explains.

“You’re musicians,” Montana says, ignoring the fact that we are dying because we want to puke and can’t breathe. “So you’ll appreciate this.”

Then he blasts more Consequence over his brand-new, top-of-the-line Pioneer stereo, complete with subwoofer and a wedge of speakers right behind poor Bean’s head at full volume. And now Montana is singing at the top of his lungs, and I have no choice but to join him. Travis is sitting with his head down between his knees, probably trying to preserve the contents of his stomach, or maybe he really did find Jesus. Either way I approve because I don’t have to see the look on his face right now as he congratulates himself for being completely right about everything forever.

We sing one entire side of the cassette, twenty-five straight minutes of Consequence’s
Blue Aphasia
, and it really is a damned good album. I used to practice to it a lot, but I haven’t listened to it in a couple of years and it’s like discovering all over again how good these guys were. When I think of how they struggled, it makes me sad.

It’s not lost on me that Travis seems to know every song on it, too, as he jumps in to sing with us here and there. Montana is actually a great singer. I tell him this and ask if he’s ever been on the stage. He gets a faraway look in his eye, and then he tells us all about how he was in a Southern rock band back in the ’70s, down in Alabama, the Night Crawlers. (Shit, we’ve been calling him Montana all this time and he’s from Alabama? He doesn’t sound Southern at all, but I’m from Jersey, so what do I know?) Anyway, the Crawlers were a bar band, but they had big dreams. Got picked up by a small promoter down in Mobile and cut a single, got some local radio play. They played the bar circuit every weekend and they were good, he says. But then the singer started sleeping with the lead guitarist’s wife. When the guy realized what was going on between them, it was in the middle of a set and a big fight broke out on stage. The guy ended up knifing the singer. Right on the fucking stage. Luckily he didn’t kill the guy, but he did do time. After that, the band was obviously history.

“And now here I am,” he says with a big sigh.

I’m sitting there with my mouth hanging open. I’m speechless here. This is like a Shakespearean-level tragedy. Not just the betrayal, the knifing, the jail time. The broken dreams, the destroyed friendships, that’s what kills me.

“So, um, what instrument did you play?” Travis asks from his crouch on the floor. Not obvious at all.

“Guitar,” he says, staring straight ahead.

“Rhythm?” I ask, hoping beyond hope.

“No,” he says, glancing over at me, looking embarrassed. He takes out another Camel and lights it off the old one.

“Oh,” Travis says, his voice cracking.

“It was the worst night of my life,” he says, quietly. “And she wasn’t worth it, either. She ran off while I was inside.”

We’re painfully quiet now. You might even hear a pin drop except for the growl of the semi’s engine and the tail end of Consequence’s “Brook River Blues.”

“Love,” Montana says, shaking his head. “It really is a trip, ain’t it? Never know the places it’ll take you.”

Travis and I exchange a glance and I see he’s now fondling Cole’s Swiss Army knife lovingly.

“Maybe if I’d had a mind to go to college like you, Emmylou, I wouldn’t be driving a truck today,” Montana says. “Maybe I’d be a banker or something nice like that. Better hours, that’s for shit sure.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Well, what do bankers know about music? The road? Life?”

“I admire you trying to keep your grades up. I’m sure your mama’s proud of you.”

“Well I don’t know about that,” I say. “But she does put up with me, I’ll give her that much.”

“Of course she’s proud,” he says. “I know what happened to your dad was tragic, but he was a good man. He’d be proud if he could see you today.”

I am practically gagging here on the level of sleep-deprived emotional intensity I’m choking back. I look out the window, my eyes welling up with tears. Then I feel Travis’s hand in mine, holding it. He squeezes and I feel the first tears fall.

Then out of nowhere, Montana reaches up and grabs a pull-cord near the ceiling and yanks it down, and the loudest air horn I have ever heard blows right over our heads. On and on it goes for a full twenty seconds probably. “For Len,” Montana says, staring straight ahead at the white lines firing past us on the Turnpike. That woke up all of Cherry Hill, I’m sure of it. It was so worth it, because man, blowing a truck horn while cruising eighty miles per hour at five a.m. on the Turnpike is about as cathartic as turning your amp up to eleven. It’s that good. Fuck it, I’d rather be a trucker than a banker any day. I really would. I’d definitely rather drive a truck than teach English.

But I’m a musician, no matter whatever the hell else I do. Just like Montana. That’s what I tell him. He nods, because he knows it’s true. “You’re born to it, right?” he says. “You don’t get rid of it, no matter what you do. It stays inside of you,
and in some way, it colors everything else about your life.”

That’s perfectly true.

Montana tells Travis to go ahead and pull the black velvet curtain back and look what’s behind it, and Travis hesitates before he reluctantly complies. Back there, mounted carefully to the wall above a tidy bunk adorned with a tiger-striped comforter and velvet pillows is a gorgeous, vintage Martin acoustic.

“Go on and play us something, kid,” Montana says.

“Are you sure?” Travis asks. “I mean, this thing must be worth a fortune.”

“It was my granddaddy’s, so be gentle with her.”

Travis takes the guitar down carefully and he busts out a rowdy “Rocky Top.” We all sing along together, and Jesus, next to fucking Travis when it’s against the rules, this is turning out to be the best bad decision I may have ever made. South Jersey is rushing by. Eighteen wheels are carrying me to my exam like wings on the wind and I can feel it’s all going to work out. Somehow. But then as we’re on the last line of the song, Montana rips a disgusting burp.

“Oh Jesus,” Montana says, and his face goes pale. “Oh dear God in heaven . . .”

That’s when Travis and I get hit with a stench so foul that we both simultaneously start gagging. I quick put the window down and stick my head out.

“I’m sorry, but I need to pull over,” Montana says. “I’m real sorry. I think I got a bad egg salad in Virginia. I just . . . Sweet Jesus, oh Jesus . . .”

“Are you okay?” I ask, feeling alarmed.

“No,” he says. “I am not okay.”

Then he starts to vomit into his own mouth. He covers it with his hand as I scramble to find a plastic bag and fail, so I hand him a cowboy boot.

Montana barely manages to pull off the highway, into the James Fenimore Cooper rest area just south of Exit 6. It’s five in the morning and we’re still an hour from home, but I’m so horrified at the certainty that Montana has shat his pants that I’m not even thinking about my exam now. I’m mortified for the guy, I really am. First his wife sleeps with his singer and he goes to prison for stabbing a man, then he ends up alone, driving a truck the rest of his life with nobody but his dead mother along for the ride, and now this?

After we’re safely parked, Travis helps Montana drag himself out of the truck, across the parking lot into the service
facilities, and if I didn’t realize that Travis was part saint before, well, I do now. I don’t even know how many times Montana has to heave on the pavement as they cross the parking lot, and I can’t bring myself to consider what might be coming out of the other end. By the time they get inside, I don’t know what the man has left inside of him. He’s got to be made entirely of truck exhaust and forgotten dreams by now. Travis comes back out to the truck about fifteen minutes later.

“I called an ambulance,” Travis said. “It’s on its way. He’s got to be dehydrated, and who knows how bad he’ll get before it’s over.”

“Fucking rest area food.”

“Never buy vending machine egg salad,” Travis says. “That’s what I always say.”

“Salmonella?” I ask.

“Probably.”

Travis and I are sitting on a bench inside the facilities with our guitars and my backpack. Montana has managed to change his clothes and he’s sort of shivering in a heap here with his jacket wrapped around him, slouched over on the bench.

“Travis,” Montana says. “You have to get our girl to school for that test, you hear me?”

“I will,” Travis says.

“How are you going to get home?”

“We’ll manage it,” Travis says. “Just worry about you now.”

“She’s counting on you,” he says.

“I know,” Travis answers.

The ambulance finally arrives and a young EMT takes Montana’s blood pressure and temperature before they load him onto the stretcher. We follow them out, guitars in hand, and watch as they load him into the back of the ambulance.

“Do you have anyone you want us to call?” I ask. “Any family or anything?”

“I’ll be fine,” Montana says. “You just worry about that test.”

“Call and let me know you’re okay,” I say. I actually give Montana my phone number and address. “Write it on a postcard or something.”

“Don’t worry, Emmylou,” he says. “It’ll take more than a little egg salad to take me out of this world.”

As we watch the ambulance pull away, I feel Travis’s hand in mine and I squeeze it. I’m sure Montana is going to be fine, but seeing his big rig lurking in the parking lot like a sad and lonely giant fills me with an aching sense of melancholy.

And now it’s five forty-five in the morning and I’m still an hour from home.

“Fuck,” I say. “Now what?”

“Let’s try George again,” Travis says.

Thank God we have a second roll of quarters in my backpack. Travis calls three times in a row and finally, just as I’m about to really break down, George picks up.

“What the hell, George? What if I was in the hospital or something?” Travis says over the phone. “Did you fall asleep drunk on a Wednesday?”

George apologizes, says he’d fallen asleep with his headphones on and didn’t hear the phone ring. He promises that he and Molly will be here in an hour, never fear.