from Road Women
The Field of Dreams truck stop was different from the other rest stops and visitor centers they’d performed at simply because of its vastness. The atmosphere was more festive. The parking lot made her think of a Six Flags parking lot, the rows and rows of cars, and lumpy sweating figures milling through them holding cheap mugs and teddy bears emblazoned with the truck stop’s logo. The people here were different too. Softer and more earnest. They stared as she lugged her cello toward the entrance.
Inside of the place, there were dozens of rotating clothing racks with starchy T-shirts in every color. Fluorescent lights and upbeat pop music. Fat kids, tired mothers, fathers with fading army tattoos and farmer tans. It was places like that that always made her feel lonely. She couldn’t understand why the people there seemed so happy and comfortable, and that made her feel like there was something about her that was not quite right. She fumbled in her pocket for her phone, thinking she could send Kyle a message, perhaps a photo of the giant cartoon hot dog near the food court, tipping its cowboy hat at patrons. But when she pulled the phone out of her pocket it felt too silly and feminine and she swallowed down that weak feeling and thought about David’s chords.
He was composing new work. That was, of course, a part of the project, a line item in his grant proposal. Naively she had thought that maybe she’d be able to collaborate with him on these new songs, though they’d never discussed that. Instead, his process remained completely obscure to her. They would go their separate ways in the evenings, and in the mornings he would return to her with new chords, and he would slowly and patiently feed them to her in the dewy parking lots of highway motels and convenience stores and diners. It flattered her that he believed she could faithfully reproduce them each evening after she’d learned them, and so she did. It surprised her how much focus she could muster when her days were filled with the idle passing of hours in transit or waiting or dully focused on the road and the car’s practical machinery.
She was a good cellist. She had been playing the cello so long she could not remember if she’d ever wanted to or if someone else had thrust it upon her and forced her to continue until it became second nature. She’d gone to school for it. In fact she’d gotten not one but two degrees in musicology and musical performance, respectively, which just meant that she’d played the cello ceaselessly for about six years.
That had felt like a really purposeful period in her life. Composing her master’s performance had felt like a transcendent experience. She worked at all hours of the day and night, forgetting to eat. It was all she thought about. And then it had come out of her like a stillbirth. She knew she could not do anything with it.
But playing David’s songs already had that resonance of purpose she’d almost forgotten. It was like quilting, she thought, though she’d never actually quilted. The chords fit together in such an effortless, almost practical way. She could slip into those songs the way you could slip into a dream.
Lydia trailed behind David as he shook hands with various men. These men always looked slightly confused, as if they had forgotten they’d ever spoken to David and that plans had been made, but they always produced a space where Lydia and David could set up their instruments and perform.
They were directed to an area beside the buffet in the diner. They were beneath a dusty Tiffany-style pendant that made Lydia feel hot and stuffy. She had always associated the smell of buffets with the elderly and, indeed, the diner was full of old people milling about with canes and walkers, bent painfully over their plates of beige foods. For those people, David and Lydia were nothing more than extravagant obstacles in the dining room.
It didn’t matter. Long ago, Lydia had resolved to think about her audience as little as possible. They were purely decorative. She and David began to play and she willed herself into a kind of trance.
In those first notes, everything always felt delicate—her focus, their coordination with one another, the song itself. And then as they began to find the rhythm of things, there was more ease. It was kind of like driving, in fact. How important it was that her attention did not waver, but how simple it was to simultaneously think of other things. Her mind did wander. She thought about that video that she had shown David with brief and piercing embarrassment, and then she thought of a different show. A chaotic and intimate set that Tunnel Vision had played in a shed in Indiana. There had been no phones taking videos that night and if there had been they would have been swept away within the crowd, which rotated angrily like a tornado or a swarm of bees. Lydia had felt herself rise to that energy. She’d left her own body and was tethered above it like a chandelier. Someone had kicked over the mic stand and the amps had blown out the lights, and it didn’t matter. Everyone knew the chorus and they all screamed it. Most shows were not like that.
She opened her eyes and they were still in the song. Most of the people in the room were unmoved, but there was a man at a booth to her right who was studying her with an eerie fascination. He was a burly man with red hair and a red beard and underneath that beard she could make out that his lips were a stiff, straight line. She knew that people were meant to watch, but she wished that he would not watch so carefully. Like the woman in Kenosha, she sensed that it was not her performance that he was scrutinizing but her appearance. She was a visibly brown woman in an otherwise white landscape, and she stuck out like a smudge. Even more so, she could feel that these people wanted to identify her in a racial context, and they could not, because her racial identity was imprecise, neither entirely Asian nor white. She, herself, did not know how to answer that question on job applications or government forms. No one asked her on the road. Maybe she repulsed them, she thought. Or maybe they were afraid of her.
She felt the strings become more rigid beneath her fingers. There was that self-consciousness. She closed her eyes again and tried not to shrink beneath it.
The end of their performance was always anticlimactic. At the diner, some people clapped politely. Others seemed surprised. Maybe they hadn’t realized there had been people in the room playing music, had thought it came from the speakers. David always shook her hand and thanked her dutifully, as though they weren’t about to head to the same car and drive to the same motel.
After she had packed her cello back into its case, she stood up, and the man with the red beard was in front of her. He extended his arm and she shook it.
“Pete Palmer,” he said. “The Preacher.”
“Lydia,” she replied, scanning her mental inventory for some evidence of this man. David had already meandered out of the diner and was probably halfway to the car.
“I heard about y’all,” said Pete.
“How?” asked Lydia.
They had no social media presence, no following, no promoter posting tour dates. Their project didn’t even have a name. David maintained a Wordpress blog pretty religiously—Lydia read it sometimes on rest stop toilets—but the cities where they played were hidden within paragraphs of hapless musings and dense philosophy.
“Know a guy in Saginaw, says he served you a drink,” said Pete. “That sound about right?”
“That could be,” said Lydia.
“Said you were a traveling band.”
Lydia nodded.
“Are you from around here?” she asked.
“No, I’m from Memphis,” said Pete.
“Are you a preacher?”
“Something like that.”
It was funny, Lydia thought, how men started to become so much less threatening when they were in front of you. She could tell, for instance, that Pete was trying to be mysterious. He didn’t know that it made no difference to her whether he was a preacher or not.
“Well it was nice to meet you,” said Lydia. “Thanks for listening.”
She made for the exit and Pete trailed behind her.
“Say, why don’t you come meet some of my friends out later for a drink,” said Pete. “Not much else to do around here if you don’t want to waste your money on cheap junk.”
Regarding him now with a new kind of awareness, Lydia noticed that he was a young man, not much older than herself, and maybe a year or two younger. He had a wide-eyed look to him, freckles, and a crew cut that made him seem a little defenseless.
“Where’s the bar?” she asked.
“About three miles south of here,” said Pete. “Your boyfriend drive?”
“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my accompanist,” said Lydia, “and anyway he won’t want to come.”
“I can give you a ride,” said Pete. Then he added, “You won’t be back too late. I know you’re on the road. So am I.”
She made some quick deliberations in her mind.
“Ok,” she said. “Come to the Comfort Inn around 9:30. Meet me in the parking lot.”
The boy working the front desk at the Comfort Inn could not have been older than twenty-two. He had asked if he could help her with anything when she walked in and she had told him that her friend was staying at the motel, and then had proceeded to spread herself out on the chaise longue in the lobby, which smelled faintly of cigarettes and body odor. She ate sliced apples out of a plastic tray she’d bought at a gas station, dipping them into a jar of peanut butter. The boy looked at her curiously or suspiciously from time to time, but mostly he played Clash Royale on his cell phone.
She was a small woman and she had the metabolism of a child. She was always either hungry or bloated. Her body was always getting in the way. She had the frame of an athletic person and had maintained it through years of carless trudging from one end of the city to the other, cello or amps in tow. She did not know what kind of clothes looked good on her, or even how she might want to appear. Since she was very young, she had felt distracted by the idiotic inclination that she could fashion a new body for herself, one that would look more delicate and unassuming. She felt jealous of women without curves. They were like coat racks—you could hang anything on them and it would appear artful.
On the road, her life felt dictated by her body in much more straightforward ways. There was the fact of her visibility, which she knew made her more vulnerable, but she couldn’t quite be shaken into feeling like she was truly in any danger. It was those same aspects of her appearance and identity that made people see her as nonthreatening and generally competent. All her life she had gotten away with being a layabout, with slacking her way through the workday. She had learned that people felt guilty reprimanding her. She loathed wasting time in offices. Always, there was the constant nagging feeling that she should be producing work instead of emails and spreadsheets. She should be producing revelatory creative work. And aside from that she had never had ambitious professional aspirations.
On the road, she felt small, and it felt good to feel small. There was an anonymity to it. She knew she stank. She either felt hungry, tired, or sick. She ate gas station hot dogs and chewed nicotine gum to stay awake. No one told her not to. She didn’t need to look any certain way. She didn’t really want anyone to look at her at all.
Outside the world shifted into a more melancholy shade of blue. The days were still long and the heat was unbearably sticky. She’d read that, in Iowa, even the corn sweats, and that sweat rises up into the air and penetrates everything like a sickness. She’d be swimming in it by morning.
She walked out into the parking lot with her cello in the haze of dusk just as Pete the Preacher was pulling his truck in. He was early.
“Planning to regale us again at the bar,” he said, gesturing toward the instrument.
“I was about to stash it,” she said. “Give me a minute.”
In David’s car, she pulled a tarp over the cello and checked the doors were locked. Then she hopped into Pete’s truck. She believed that if she flung herself into the world without expectations, it might toss her around a bit, but in the end she’d find herself upright. That hadn’t failed her yet.
They drove and it grew darker. He offered her a cigarette and she accepted. She could make out the little matchbox shapes of houses in housing developments, post offices, and school buildings, all of them sad and grey, and the grass all burnt up from the sun. No, she thought, it wasn’t right to judge that town, those places that were purely functional. Things did not always have to be beautiful. Sometimes it sufficed to just be functional. And inside those little matchbox homes, she thought, perhaps there were nice ceramic lamps with neat and tidy lampshades and repurposed credenzas that had been passed on for generations. What do they read in this town, Lydia thought. Agatha Christie, probably.
“You wanna see something?” Pete said.
“Ok,” said Lydia.
He handed her a key. “There’s a lockbox under your seat,” he said. “Why don’t you open it?”
She took the key and bent over fiddling with the box that was fastened to the seat below her. After a few seconds of this tinkering the lock gave and she felt the cold grip of a handgun and froze up.
“Just got it,” he said. “Pop that right out and take a look.”
Lydia didn’t really feel inclined to take a look, but she felt as though she should appear knowledgeable about guns, so she did. It was a compact little number with a shiny wooden grip and a cartoonish curve to its gears and barrel. Holding this one, she felt like it could’ve been a toy, just heavier.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. She wasn’t sure why. She glanced at Pete, and a look of disdain momentarily clouded over his face.
“It’s a logistical thing,” Pete said, dryly. “I can’t be caught unawares with that Highway Siren out on the roads.”
“You mean the trucker killer,” said Lydia.
“I reckon they’re the same,” he said. She waited for him to say more, but he did not. Instead, he explained this particular gun model’s practicality, emphasized its lethality. He told her that there were private arms dealers who wanted to work specifically with truck drivers, and that was how he had evaded sales taxes on his gun. She knew that he meant to impress her with his knowledge, but all his talk made her keenly aware of his greenness, and she wondered just how long he had been a truck driver, but she didn’t ask him.
They pulled into the parking lot, a big patch of empty dirt. The bar was called Nine Mile Station. It was a wide, squat structure across from some houses on a quiet street. Pete held out his hand to collect the gun and she had a brief fantasy of pointing it directly at him, removing the safety. Firm grip, slow, steady trigger compression, and follow-through. It was foolish of him to trust her, she thought. She could turn on him so easily. But she did not. She handed the gun back to him and he clenched his big hand around it protectively.
Inside, the walls were wood paneled and the roof had big brown stains on it. There was a row of fantasy football trophies behind the bar, Packers banners hung beneath multicolored string lights. One wall was a gallery of framed photos of people who’d gotten drunk there, no one famous. A few fans spun heavy, warm air in every direction. It was the kind of unassuming place she liked. Cheap drinks, nothing political on the television, everyone getting so drunk it was hard to tell when you were too.
Pete’s friends heckled him when they walked in.
“At least now I ain’t the ugliest motherfucker in here,” said a man in a checkered shirt and a bolo tie.
She learned their names. The man with the bolo tie was Ray, and then there was Henry, who did not take his eyes of his whiskey even as he spoke, and Lee who wore thick-rimmed glasses and a shit-eating grin. They talked over and under each other, trying to amuse her by insulting one another. Pete made a beeline for the bar and ordered himself a boilermaker “and a Jack and Coke for the lady.” It was evident that they were intrigued by her, and she had become accustomed to being a novelty, so it didn’t bother her much. Maybe on some level, that was why she had accepted Pete’s invitation in the first place, she thought, bitterly. She’d just been craving some attention.
This she stewed on silently while they laughed and joked. Then abruptly she stood up. She could feel their eyes on her. She walked over to the jukebox and flipped through tracks, not reading any of them. Get it together, Lydia, she thought. Don’t act crazy. She put on Tammy Wynette. It was “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad.”
When she walked back to the table, they were talking to a bartender who they introduced as Molly. She’d brought Lydia’s Jack and Coke. She had lip filler and an unconvincing nose job that Lydia estimated made her appear two to five years older than she actually was. Her laugh was tragically abrasive. They were talking about the weather.
“I don’t mind the heat if it means the women in Kansas City will have their sundresses on,” said Ray.
“Sundresses!” Molly giggled, “Well aren’t you a gentleman.”
“All you’re going to get a load of in Kansas City is sweat stains,” said Henry.
“Is that where you’re from?” Lydia asked.
“That’s where I’m headed,” said Ray. “I’m from New York.”
“He’s from Jersey,” said Pete.
When Molly walked away, Ray leaned into her and said, “She likes me,” and then he winked.
They asked her questions about the tour. They couldn’t quite understand the point of it, she could tell, and nothing she explained to them seemed to make things any clearer.
“So, you don’t make any money?” asked Lee.
“Well, we kind of made the money up front,” said Lydia, “It’s…funded.”
“I saw the Boss at Madison Square Garden last year,” said Ray. “Cost me a fortune. But he makes most of his profit off merch sales. Heard he makes more than 100k each show just off T-shirts.”
“Y’all should get merch,” offered Lee.
“It’s not that kind of show.”
“Y’all are like a couple of traveling hobos,” said Henry.
Lydia thought about this.
“Not exactly, I mean, Bruce Springsteen is a commercial musician, and that’s different from what we do—,” she trailed off, not knowing how else to explain.
Then she said, “I used to be in a punk band. I played bass.”
Then, as if to prove it, she showed them the video from the Detroit show. Maybe because of the drinks or her company, she didn’t feel embarrassed by that video anymore. Instead, she thought it lent her some street cred. The men all laughed, but it was an appreciative type of laughter. She had surprised them.
“Why’d you stop doing that?” asked Pete.
“It was my boyfriend’s band and I broke up with him,” Lydia lied. Immediately, she wanted to take it back. She had made herself seem silly and unserious. She saw how quickly their opinions of her had changed. She’d gone from having talent and authority, to being submissive and expendable.
“You’re the kind of girl that’s always around a flock of men,” said Ray.
“Don’t get started now, Ray,” said Pete.
“I’m not,” said Ray.
They were all quiet for a moment. Lydia peered at Ray over the top of her glass, willing him silently to go on. She wondered how drunk he was, and what else he thought of her.
“Like the Highway Siren,” said Ray. “I’ll bet she’s just like that too. That kind of woman you ain’t ever see without a flock of men around her.”
“Why do you call her the Highway Siren?” asked Lydia.
“That’s what everyone calls her on the CB,” said Lee.
“It’s cause she lures truckers to their deaths with her feminine wiles,” said Pete.
“She charms her way into the passenger seat and then flanks and quarters them in the backseat,” said Ray.
“He exaggerates,” said Pete.
They dropped the murder talk for a while. Henry and Lee played pool. Pete played a Billy Idol song on the jukebox and he and Ray argued about the difference between glam metal and hair metal. They all listed off cities and towns they’d been to and told each other what they’d done there and whether they cared to go back. What was she even doing? She was wasting time. She was poisoning herself with booze and stupid games and the attention of a few men she wasn’t even attracted to.
Still, she felt compelled to bring up the murders again and was waiting for the right time to do it. She was struck by the name they’d given her—The Highway Siren. They revered her. She was like the stem of a funnel they spun around. She knew they’d return to her eventually.
“Did you know anyone she murdered?” Lydia suddenly asked.
Ray and Pete looked at her like she was a child who’d cursed at a dinner party.
“The Siren, you mean?” said Ray. “No, not personally.”
“You’d have to be a jackass to pick up a broad at a truck stop.” He went on, “They’ve got cameras on the front of all the trucks and GPS trackers. You’d get fired over some whore.”
“Pete picked me up,” Lydia said.
“That’s what I mean,” said Ray, laughing.
“I own the truck,” said Pete, “I can pick up whoever I want. Besides, if you were the Highway Siren you’d be just about the least discreet murderess this side of the Mississippi. Everyone at the Field of Dreams Diner saw me talking to you.”
He was right, she realized. Now even David probably thought she’d been fucking truckers from Delaware to Iowa.
“The Preacher’s not careful with his investments,” said Ray slowly. “Sometimes you get a self-conscious man, wants to prove himself. He’ll pick up a rest stop hooker to show everyone he can. But this one’s got him bested. She gets him all horny and unsuspecting in the backseat and then tells him she wants him to take her someplace romantic. So they go to some barn to make out and she slits his throat. Next day he’s in the hay with his guts spilled out like venison.”
“That’s how she does it,” said Pete. “Led as a lamb to slaughter.”
“She doesn’t shoot them?” asks Lydia.
“No gun wounds,” said Ray. “She field dresses them. It’s careful, precise work.”
“But it’s wasteful,” said Pete. “A true hunter isn’t wasteful.”
Lydia could feel herself getting sleepy. She had to stay vigilant. This was the part where Pete would try to lead her to some seedy motel, and if she was tired enough, she could be convinced. He was not a dangerous man, and not very clever either. She knew where he kept his gun.
“I should be going,” she said.
“I suppose that’s my cue,” said Pete.
In Pete’s truck, she flipped through radio stations that were mostly ads for mattress discount warehouses and strip clubs. The salesmen’s voices made her feel dizzy and unmoored. She kept thinking about what a man’s body would look like gutted like an animal’s, and she couldn’t help but imagine Pete in this way. His guts, she thought, would be so much larger than hers. She got the sense, not for the first time on that tour, that she was waiting for something, and it irritated her. There was nothing to wait for. Everything that was happening to her was already happening.
“Why do they call you the Preacher?” she asked Pete.
“Because I’m a man of God,” he said, and he pointed at a little Virgin Mary figurine on his dashboard.
“Are you a believer?” he asked.
“I was raised Catholic,” she said, “but we stopped going to church when I was in high school.”
He shook his head. “These modern churches don’t preach what’s right anyway. They preach like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. They preach sin.”
He took the back roads. There were few lights. Barns and tractors sprung up like phantoms beside them.
He went on, “I was raised by my mother and she was religious on paper, but not in practice. We had a turbulent relationship. When I was sixteen, I ran away and spent a couple years on the road, hitchhiking and doing odd jobs, getting paid under the table. At one point I just felt in my heart that God had me, like I was this little point on his Google Maps app he could just zoom in on.”
She smiled reciprocally, but said nothing. She couldn’t relate. On the road, she felt really and truly isolated. If she stopped sending messages back home, she might even fully cease to exist.
Pete flipped on his brights and she watched his face harden into something more serious.
“You sleep in that man’s bed, and you’re not his wife,” he said.
“Who?” Lydia asked, surprised. She had thought for a moment that he’d meant Kyle, that he’d somehow plucked him out of the recesses of her mind.
“Do you mean David? It’s not like that. It really is strictly professional.”
“Where do you sleep?” asked Pete. There was something in his voice that made her stiffen and lean away from him.
“I get my own room,” she said.
“You let him put his hands on you,” said Pete.
He could be driving her anywhere, she realized. She had no clue where they were. She knew that his gun was beneath her seat. But what if he had moved it while they were at the bar? Had she even seen him put it back in the lockbox? She couldn’t remember now. If there was no child lock on the door, and she didn’t think there would be, she could open it right now and tuck and roll and run. What would he have to say for it to come to that? Outside there were just barns and big piles of dirt. Perhaps there was even a body somewhere out there, gutted and stewing in the heat.
“I want to stop talking about this,” she said, but her voice came out smaller than she’d intended.
“You do meet a lot of women driving. Some of them trucking too. But it does something to their minds that ain’t right. They get sick-like. Start thinking like men, but all demented. Road women are cold and perverted. Once they get like that there’s no domesticating them again. You think I’m exaggerating. They’re feral.”
She saw the exit for the truck stop and its lights glimmering through the trees. They couldn’t be more than a mile from the motel now. The right thing to do was to keep him talking.
“What if you’ve got it wrong,” she said. “What if they were sick like you’re saying they are before they even started driving. And that was what got them to driving in the first place.”
“No,” said Pete, “no, no. You’re not from this world, so you don’t understand. You just got here, you see what I mean? I can tell you’re running from something. You won’t outrun it. You’ve gotta listen.”
“You don’t know me,” she said, her hand on the seat belt release. “You don’t know anything about me.”
They were pulling into the motel parking lot. It was too late now to whip his gun out from below her seat and splatter his brains on the driver’s side window.
“If I was him, I’d marry you,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
She flung the door open and stumbled out into the parking lot.
“Thanks for the ride,” she said, walking toward the motel’s entrance at a clip. She could feel his eyes on her body. She stood in the lobby until she saw his headlights recede into the darkness.
Rhea Ramakrishnan is a writer and musician from Baltimore. Her work has been published in Joyland, swamp pink, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. She teaches high school English.