Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 66 - Manual Transmission

PART V - NOW AND THEN

Photo by Hari Perisetla on Unsplash

PART V - Now and Then

Charlie hadn’t driven a stick shift in nearly twenty years, more if you counted the time he’d apparently been dead. Still, he’d wielded one often enough while in the Navy that the smooth pop of the clutch and clanging rigid switching of gears came back as easy as breathing — like riding a bicycle, as they say — but not quite, as he’d never actually managed the manual transmission of something as cumbersome and significant as an eighteen wheeled semi like the long lumbering behemoth he’d easily appropriated from the shipyard.

Its keys were left on a rack of hooks just inside the loading dock terminal to the right of the door. Making it even easier, they were stamped with KENWORTH right into the metal and were attached to a bright yellow plastic fob with “Key West Shipping and Transport” printed on its surface in fading black letters. He only had to open the door and take the keys, and he was on his way.

The eighteen-wheeler was a double-sized unit with a sleeper cabin in the back. A clipboard discarded on the passenger seat detailed the lengthy transport log of daily jaunts from Key West to Miami, then up the eastern coast of Florida via Interstate 95 as far north as Jacksonville, back and forth nearly every day.

Four other semi-trucks were parked perpendicular to this one, some providing even better accouterments than the one that became his home for the next several days. Still, only this one — shiny red and sparkling — had a flatbed attached to the rig. Charlie could have switched out the trailers, but he would have quickly lost half a day trying to figure out how.

It took him three full days of nearly non-stop driving to make it to Illinois. The countless miles of mid-western farmland he passed along the way filled him with a growing sense of overwhelming claustrophobia. He’d grown far too accustomed to the endless expanses of water, of cruising into horizons so far into the distance that even with binoculars, he couldn’t see land in any direction. But as he navigated the semi through repeated logjams of traffic and narrow side streets to make a better pace and perhaps catch up somewhere along the way with Gordon and Becca, he felt like a prisoner in the tight confines of endlessly billowing fields.

With the passing miles, he found himself slipping into imaginary conversations with Becca, Gordon, and even his ex-wife Josephine without even realizing he was doing it until he’d already worked himself into a tizzy just by his own imagination.

“You may be some smart-aleck doctor,” he’d mutter to a fictional image of Becca that floated before him as he drove. “But if you’re so smart, how is it that you don’t even know what’s going on out there, huh?”

Then, to a specter image of Gordon, he’d scold, “And I don’t know why you’re even helping her, boy. You know she’s going to make it even worse. You know she will. You’re looking for magnets in microwaves? Really? That ain’t going to make an ounce of difference. It’s busy work she’s got you doing, is all. And you’re going to end up getting me killed again is all that’s going to get you.”

He may not have been a fancy, well-educated astrophysicist doctor like Becca, co-founding some big-wig initiative as she’d described over dinner one night. ENH Initiative, she’d said - whatever that means. But he’d spent enough time around people much smarter than him — naval officers, shipyard commanders, and the like — to know that a much better solution was available if she was looking for magnets.

Bluntly, he didn’t trust her, which was the honest truth, so he said nothing. He wanted to trust her and always wanted to think the best of folks, but that also caused him trouble with Josephine. Too trusting. And look where that got him.

He didn’t think they’d actually leave, and he didn’t want to be left alone in Key West again. He was especially frustrated that Gordon chose to go along with her, especially since he felt he saw a bit of himself in Gordon. Perhaps more honestly, he saw in Gordon a part of what he wished he could see in himself, a part he always wanted but never quite was, even when he tried to convince himself otherwise.

He wasn’t particularly surprised when Gordon did the honorable thing and chose to escort Becca back to Chicago. The fact that she’d already made her way across the country on her own notwithstanding, it didn’t seem right to let her do that again. Charlie wondered if he would have let Becca leave on her own had Gordon not been there to go along with her.

He’d learned when he got stuck miles prior, back in Atlanta, that looking for gas in the hubbub of a big city was an act of futility and a guaranteed delay, so he stopped for his last gas tank while still in northern Indiana.

“You have a Chicago phone book back there?” he’d asked the store clerk sitting bored on the other side of the counter, staring blankly at the panicked newscast crackling from the small black and white television propped up on a bar stool. Charlie guessed the man was probably the owner of the gas station; he supposed the man had just picked up where he’d left off, ringing up gas tanks and Pepsi bottles, but somewhere along the way, Charlie had quit caring about what people had been doing before all this. He quit asking. “Yellow pages, if you have them.”

The man thumped a phone book onto the counter, and as Charlie went to open it, he realized he had no clue what category he’d look up to find what he was searching for. Laboratory? Magnet Shop? Black Hole Repository?

“I take that back,” Charlie said. “How about white pages?”

The man behind the counter scratched the scruff on his chin and gave Charlie a dead-eyed stare as he bent with an effort to lug a copy of the lumbering book from underneath the counter.

“That all?” the man asked solemnly.

“That’ll do,” Charlie said, thumbing his way through the book, doubt breathing down heavily as he flipped through the pages. Why on earth would a company dedicated to the crazy stuff that caused all this be listed in a phone book? And how could he have possibly just traversed nearly fifteen hundred miles without having that realization until now?

As he approached the “E’s” in the phone book, it dawned on him that ENH was most likely an acronym, and then what?

He slid his finger down the page, first one column and then the next, scrolling through the lines of text before flipping the page and doing it again.

And there it was. Couched between two other sets of letters that both meant as little to him as ENH — ENG Incorporated and ENL Enterprises - was a single-line listing for ENH Initiative.

“There’s a payphone outside by the toilets,” the man behind the counter said, extending his courtesy as far as he could.

“Don’t need a phone,” Charlie said as he slid the phone book back across the counter. “I got what I needed. I got an address.”

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