THE FOLLOWING SPRING I get my CDL, enroll in a three-week training course, and take a job with a trucking company called Dahl Transport. It’s a desperate measure, one to keep myself out of the eyes of the law and spread myself so thinly across America that I wont be able to hunt humans. I am one of three women who drive rigs for Larry Dahl, and, by anyone’s standards, the most attractive. The men outnumber us twenty-to-one. Linda Eubanks, Dodo Philbrooks, and, of course me.
Linda and Dodo are what the company calls old-schoolers. They wear their rigs just as well as they do their ‘Fuck you, you fucking fuck’ T-shirts. Linda still has a mullet—gray at the roots and bright red the rest of the way down. She lumbers into a room on barrel-sized thighs, her hacking laughter always preceding her. Her counterpart, and sometimes nemesis, Dodo, is the opposite. All bones and wrinkles, her face looks like an old piece of leather with too much hot pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. Dodo always smells like she’s been rolling around in an ashtray. When she’s angry, she throws things around and calls everyone a pansy bitch. I am the youngest hire in the company in twenty years, and the only reason I got the job was because I served Mr. Dahl coffee at the diner and asked him to make me a big, bad trucker. At first he laughed, but when I stayed glued to the spot, staring at him with the half empty coffee pot in my hand, he’d handed me his personal card and told me to come into his office.
I’d made an appointment to see him, and the following week I’d walked to his office on Madison, dressed in ripped blue jeans, my steel-toed boots, and a T-shirt that said: “Born to be a trucker.” Before I’d left my apartment, I’d tied a blue bandana around my head. It gave me the air of toughness. Mr. Dahl’s receptionist had looked me over like I had maggots dripping from my nose. But I knew a little bit about the shrewd Larry Dahl. He was an avid lover of the theater, a Star Wars groupie, and every spring he attended Comic Con, where if you scrolled back far enough on his personal Twitter page, you could see pictures of him dressed up as Obi Wan Kenobi. His fleet of trailers was painted bright colors, works of art according to their owner. Mr. Dahl was a flamboyant artist and nerd, and I was going to give him a show if it would get me the job.
When I walked into his office, he stood to greet me, laughing loudly at my ensemble and pausing to take a picture of me with his iPhone.
“Why do you want to drive a truck?” he asked, after he settled down behind his desk. “Why no college? Fashion school? Career waitressing?”
I pulled a face at all three of his suggestions.
“Because I like to do things that women shouldn’t be doing.”
“It’s a lifestyle, Margo. One that affects your family and friends. Don’t you have anyone to stick around for?”
I think of Judah, then shake my head. “No, no one.”
Mr. Dahl sat back, stroking his chin. It was a baby’s ass chin—not even the slightest bit of stubble there. “I see,” he said.
I took that as my cue to convince him. “Mr. Dahl. I am not like other girls. I don’t desire for silly, frivolous things. I like to drive. I like to see things. I like to be alone. I’m tough. You won’t have to worry about me. I handle high stress like I was born for it.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“My dad was a trucker,” I lied. “He died before I was born. It’s a profession I respect and believe in.”
The gavel of decision was struck. Mr. Dahl offered me a job, saying they’d train me themselves. I left his office with my new hire package clutched under my arm, marveling at my good fortune. I’d have to keep convincing him, of course. He’d be watching me carefully, making sure I had what it took to keep in time with the boys. But I didn’t care. I’d found that I was perfectly adaptable and good at most things I tried.
I got my first rig nine weeks after my training began. It was a Detroit Diesel DD15—beautiful and powerful. The smell of newness lingered around the cab when I climbed in for the first time. I was not as large or commanding as Dodo Philbrooks or Linda Eubanks, but I wasn’t a small, frail girl either. I fit in with these people the same way an ostrich fit in with the rest of the birds: classified as, but slightly off. And so began my new life as a trucker.
I’ve found Leroy Ashley. Tracked him down to a small beach house in the Florida Keys. I had to call his favorite lingerie catalog, a small company based out of Raleigh, North Carolina that specialized in crotch-less panties. At first I called pretending to be his wife, calling to confirm that they had the catalog shipped to my new address.
“Can you tell me what the new address is?” the girl said. “And I’ll let you know if it’s what we have on file.”
“No,” I snapped. “I already made this call, and you people messed up. You tell me what you have so I can see how incompetent your people are.”
“Ma’am…” she said.
“Look, I say. I lied. My boyfriend broke up with me and took our dog. I’m not sure where he is, but I need to find her. This was the only thing I could think to do.” I wasn’t sure why she believed my lie, or chose to have pity on me, but I hung up the phone with Leroy’s address scribbled on the back of an old power bill. A larger company would never have released that type of information. I lucked out.
I haven’t spoken to Judah since the day I left him at the airport. He’s tried to call, but I’m not ready. His e-mails say that he’s moved back to the Bone and has taken a teaching job at my old middle school. I think about Mo having him as a teacher one day, and I smile.
Mr. Dahl calls me into his office one day and asks if I want to take a job driving a truck of spearmint oil to North Miami Beach.
“It’s not your usual route,” he says. “But Sack is having that Lasik surgery on his eyes and can’t do this trip.”
I pretend to be put out, and then reluctantly agree when he offers me time and a half. Score-score! As I pass through the long stretch of Everglades called Alligator Alley, I wonder what is going through Leroy’s mind. Did he really think I wouldn’t find him? That I’d let it go? I laugh out loud and turn up my music. Taylor Swift, man; gotta love her.
Leroy is much the same. His hair, his diet, his job. His smug fucking face. I admire his moving across the country to get away from whatever trouble I could bring. It took dedication.
He must have Pine-Sol’d the shit out of his new house, the OCD beast. The morning after I drop off my load, I enter Leroy’s house much the same way as I did the last time. Everything is set up similarly, except he finally bought a new kitchen table. I like it; it’s black. I find his porn stash under the bed and page through the magazines while I wait. He has a gun in his bedroom, hidden behind the air conditioning grate. This is for me. I’m honored. I play with it for a while before I get bored and go look for a snack.
He gets home at six o’ clock. I hear him whistling as he walks through the door and drops his keys on the table. I know what he’ll do next; I smile when he opens the fridge and the bottle clanks. It’ll be a PBR for Leroy. Some things never change. I situate myself in the far corner, next to the window, and point my gun at the door. When he sees me standing in the shadows, Leroy Ashley drops his beer.
“Well, hello there,” I say.
The Pabst pools on the tile while Leroy stares at me.
“Oh come on,” I say. “You thought they’d keep my crazy ass locked up forever?” I toss him a pair of handcuffs. “To the bed,” I say. “And it would be my pleasure to blow a hole in that smug little mug of yours, so no tricky business.”
He lumbers forward. I watch him, my finger hooked around the trigger. I want him to do something stupid, just so I can shoot him. No. I can’t get emotional. An eye for an eye. I have to do this the just way.
“Anything you’d like to say?”
“I’ll fucking kill you, you cunt.”
I backhand him. “You’re all talk, you fuck. You should have done it when you had the chance.”
Oh my God, he’s so angry. I sit on the edge of the bed closest to his head.
“Tell me something,” I say. “Were you born this way? If you had better parents, would you still be a rapist?”
He blinks at me and yanks on his handcuffs. I tap him on the forehead with my pistol.
“Stop. That.”
“Fuck you,” he says.
“Leroy.” I laugh. “I have blonde hair!” I pat my ponytail to make my point.
“I don’t think you would. Seriously, that’s the saddest part. If your mom hadn’t been a selfish cunt, you’d be a semi-normal person.”
“Don’t talk about my mother,” he roars. I’m happy; it’s the first time he hasn’t cussed at me.
“You think we’re different? You’re better than me? I see the sick in your eyes,” he says. “I’m going to kill you.”
“This was a good conversation,” I say, patting his head.
He’s hollering loud as he can, eyes burning with hate, when I inject him with a sedative. Right in the neck. He flinches and tries to bite me. I smack his cheek and tell him, “No.”
I wait in my corner while he falls asleep, humming the new Taylor Swift song that I heard on the ride over. When Leroy is asleep, I cut off his penis. I put it into the little pink cooler that I brought with me and cauterize his wound with a new pink Zippo I bought at the 7-11.
I pack ice around his member, and then I take his eyes. Super messy work. But I think it’s fair. Without eyes, he will no longer be able to see women or carry out a plan to hurt them. I take off his handcuffs before I leave and pat his belly. “Rot in hell, you sick fuck.”
I carry the cooler with me, on the Greyhound back to Miami. It sits in the cab of my rig until I throw it into the desert somewhere in New Mexico. I didn’t know I was going to allow him to live until he let me live; an eye for an eye. But he will not live the same life as he did before. Perhaps this one will be worse than death. Leroy Ashley has been brought to justice.