Bears Discover Fire

When we Flat Toppers run, we run. I just barely pulled over and was back in low-two before he was up the ladder and through the inside airlock lens, peeling off his garbage bag like a landlobster molting. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. He had greasy blond hair tied back with a rubber band under a Delco cap, and under his garbage bag a wind-breaker over a T-shirt. Glad to see he had a coat at least. Boots had “hand-me-down” written all over them.

Carried his things in a K Mart plastic bag.

He combed the rain off the bill of his cap with one finger and perched on the edge of the seat until I swept the CDs off the seat into my own hat and dumped them into the glove compartment.

“Nice gun,” he said. I had a Brazilian 9 mm in the glove compartment. I closed it.

“Wet out there,” he said.

I nodded and popped Ricky Skaggs into the player. I hadn’t picked him up for conversation. I picked him up because I’d done some hitchhiking myself at his age. Sixteen going on twenty-one.

“Appreciate your stopping,” he said.

“Nice rig,” he said.

I was pulling a two-piece articulated, with a Kobo-Jonni. The KJ is an eight-liter steel diesel with that mighty ring that engines used to have before they went to plastic. A lot of guys fall all over the new plastic mills cause they don’t need oil, but I like oil. I had built the KJ three times, and was just through breaking in the third set of sleeves. Plastic, you just throw away.

The kid told me his name but I forgot it. “They call me CD,” I said. I popped out Ricky and popped in the Hag to show him why.

He had those narrow eyes and sallow skin, like he’d never seen the sun, and if he was from south and east of Louisville he probably hadn’t. And I could tell by his accent he was. Listen, I knew this kid. He was me thirty years ago. You narrow up your shoulders and narrow up your eyes, and since everything in the world is new to you, try to look and act like nothing is.

“I’m going up to Hazard,” he said.

I had figured that from his being by the cogway sign.

“My pa works up there at the robot train,” he said.

“Guess you’re going on over Flat Mountain,” he said.

Anybody could tell that from my airlocks. He said it as if it was the most natural thing in the world, but it wasn’t.

Not many trucks go over Flat Mountain. Most just go up the cog-way to Hazard and offload for the robot train, and come right back down.

“Well, there it is,” he said.

The bottom part of Flat Mountain is the only part most folks ever see. Since it’s almost always raining under the cloud shadow, you can almost never see it from more than ten miles away. We were rounding the old Winchester bypass just east of where Lexington used to be, and from there it looks like a wall of logs and trash and rock, running almost straight up into the clouds that are always there at 11,500.

I turned off onto the Crab Orchard feeder road, which follows the front twenty miles south and west, then turns in at a ghost town, Berea, where the wall eases off to a little less than 45 degrees. There were about six trucks ahead of me at the cogway, none of them Flat Toppers. I got in line next to a stream choked with old cars and house pieces. It didn’t have a name. Lots of these new rivers don’t have names.

While we were in line for the cogway I called Janet and the girls from my cab phone and the kid got out. Maybe he was embarrassed by all the family stuff. I watched him walking up and down under the long board shed trying all the candy bar machines. I moved the truck up ten feet at a time and other trucks pulled in behind me. Gravy Pugh came by in his yellow slicker to clip my ticket. “Going up top?” he asked. “Watch out, CD, lobsters got Sanders yesterday.”

This is his standard joke. I don’t lobster anymore and he knows it.

“Snapped his pecker off,” he said, and clipped another corner off my violet Crab Orchard Cogway pass.

The kid climbed back into the truck just as I was flagged to the approach grade. He was shivering. He had left his garbage bag in the truck and it rains about as hard under the board shed as outside of it. When I was his age I had hitchhiked a thousand miles, but this was out west where it never rained in those days. I let the flagman wait while I leaned up over the seat and fished a dry flannel shirt out from under the tools and spare parts. The kid pulled off his Tshirt and wrapped my flannel shirt around him. He could have fit in it twice.

“I hope your pa’s expecting you,” I said. “You know, you can’t go around outside up at Hazard.”

“I been up there,” was all he said.

The guy behind me was honking but Gravy didn’t let him around. The cogway never stops, and there is a certain trick to magging on. The ramp is concrete but it’s cracked and crazy tilted, and there’s only one stretch where you can make enough speed for a hitch. If you miss, you have to turn down the cutoff and get back in line. I always make it, but I’ve been doing this run for twelve years.