Chapter 34

Keep on Truckin’

Dad is doing long-distance trucking for a company out of Brownsville now for some time, and he’s in the middle of darkest Mississippi headed for a Ford factory in the south with his new partner, an old man named Jim who’s been doing the route for fifteen years.

It’s three in the morning when they’re approaching Tennessee and a tire in the driver-side rearmost axle blows and shreds and catches fire from the friction. Dad is driving and watches it all happen in the side-view mirror. He panics, wakes up Jim, and tries to pull off the interstate.

“Keep on truckin’!” yells Jim from the bunk, pulling on his pleated denim jeans in a hurry. “Keep on truckin’!”

Dad, unsure of what to do, does instead as he’s told and he downshifts, presses hard on the accelerator, and moves the rig back into “the hammer lane.”

The tire is alight, glowing orange in the sideview mirror as Jim climbs into the passenger seat and soporifically readjusts his glasses. “Keep on truckin’,” he mumbles, mostly to himself, patting his shirt pockets for his smokes.

Sure enough, the tire burns out in a matter of minutes, shreds itself over the course of a hundred miles, and billows for a couple hundred more but they make it into Memphis, all the way to Galilee.

This is what I think about the morning I awake with a pain in my lower back. It’s very likely my kidney, maybe my liver, and I get upset at my deterioration, so I grab a beer at nine that Saturday morning.

Take that, kidney. Screw you, liver. Gonna keep on truckin’. Gonna make it into Galilee.