When Miranda and Eli drove into the IHOP parking lot, the red eighteen-wheeler was waiting for them, rumbling and smoking like a dragon. “Ruby the Mother Trucker” was painted on its doors in gold leaf. Miranda pulled up to it and Ruby leaned out the window of the cab. The hue of her curly hair matched the truck exactly.
“Don’t worry, honey. I’ll take good care of him,” Ruby yelled over the noise of the trick’s engine.
Eli laid his hand on Miranda’s thigh. “I’ll call you tonight.”
“Have a safe trip.”
She unhooked her seatbelt and leaned across the console to kiss him. As his lips met hers and his tongue slid into her mouth, she regretted her decision to let him go to Texas without her. It’s only for a couple of weeks, she reminded herself.
“Have fun visiting your uncle,” he said, reaching into the back seat for his pack.
“I will. See you soon.”
Despite his smile, his pale green eyes looked serious. For a moment, he seemed about to say something. Instead, he touched the tip of her nose lightly and got out of the car. Miranda fingered the Navaho silver bracelet on her wrist and watched him climb into the truck, a knot of loneliness tightening in her chest as they roared away in a cloud of diesel fumes.
When the truck rolled onto the highway, Ruby held out her hand to Eli.
“Welcome aboard. I’m Ruby.”
“I figured as much,” he said. “I’m Eli Hart. Thanks for the ride. I really appreciate it.”
Allher clothing, including her high-top sneakers, was ruby-red. A necklace of red stones hung around her neck, sparkling on her ample chest. Red globes the size of eggs dangled from her ears. Every finger on both hands sported a ring with a red gem.
Noticing him eying her jewels, she said, “They’re not real. Truckers don’t make that kind of money unless they’re hauling contraband. The boobs aren’t real either.”
He laughed at her unabashed admission. “Last night when your son first suggested I catch a ride to Texas with his mother, I pictured a matron with an SUV or maybe a Crown Vic.”
“And even when he told you I drove a rig, you didn’t expect the Mother Trucker, right?”
“No way,” he admitted.
Ruby pulled a pack of Camel filters from behind the visor and shook one out, then offered the pack to Eli.
“No, thanks.”
“Driving these long stretches gets lonely,” she said, the cigarette wagging between her crimson lips. “If you weren’t here, I’d most likely pick up a hitchhiker. My kid frowns on that.”
“Your son thought I’d keep you out of trouble?”
“Naw, he’s given up. He just likes to minimize it whenever possible.” She slid a CD into the console player and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s screaming guitar zinged through the cab. “Besides, you seem like you might have some trouble of your own.”
“What makes you think that?” he asked.
“Number one, you’re too old to be hitching around the country on a lark. Number two, people who travel by bus are usually poor or elderly, and you seem like a guy who’d drive a sports car. Number three, my son said you paid cash for an expensive dinner last night instead of using a credit card. I figure maybe you’re running from somebody.
Maybe that pretty girl’s husband?”
Her directness and perspicacity surprised him. “Nothing like that.”
“If the law or the mob’s after you, I’d rather know sooner than later.”
“It’s kind of a long story.”
“We’ve got a twelve-hour drive ahead of us.”
Eli shifted in his seat, settling in for the long ride. “Well, then…”
He told her about his job at Meditrina Vineyards, about the fungus that had killed their grapevines, and the research he’d done that showed the disease originated in France.
He explained that for years, French winemakers had been losing ground to the Californians, and that Meditrina was the rising star in the industry, winning awards and market shares that once belonged to the French.
“What’s ‘Meditrina’ mean, by the way?”
“Meditrina was the Roman goddess of wine, health, and longevity.” Wistfully, he thought about the life-sized marble statue of her at the entrance to the vineyard. “Our success turned out to be our downfall. I started spreading the word among California’s wine-growing community and blogging about my suspicions. Then one night about a month ago, somebody trashed my apartment, but the only thing they stole was my computer. A few days later, a French guy tried to knife me in the men’s room of a San Francisco restaurant.”
“How’d you know he was French?”
“His accent. He asked if I was Eli Hart, the vintner. When I said yes, he pulled a knife. I kicked his feet out from under him and slammed his head on the urinal. Another guy tried to grab me in the hall, but I chopped his Adam’s apple and ran.”
Ruby raised an eyebrow and examined him for a moment. “And I thought you were just a pretty boy.”
He shrugged. “I took a few self-defense classes.”
“Do you think they’re still hunting for you?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not taking any chances.”
He explained how he’d dashed into a costume shop near the restaurant and donned a jester suit, then kidnapped Miranda and escaped.
“Some guys will do anything to get a woman,” she said, shaking her red curls.
“I was desperate and scared.” Eli stared out the open window at the mountainous terrain. The wind ruffled his honey-colored hair. I need to get it cut, he told himself. The air was still cool, but he knew it wouldn’t stay like that for long. By midday, the temperature could reach one hundred and ten.
Ruby lit another cigarette and blew smoke shapes, not just rings but stars and trees and elephants. Eli watched for a while, trying to figure out how she did it, then gave up. “So what’s the craziest way you ever got a man?” he asked.
She laughed and her faux ruby necklace bounced on her silicone-augmented breasts. “I had one delivered to me, all wrapped up in a box.”
“You ordered a guy, like a pizza?”
“I was hauling appliances—washers, dryers, refrigerators and such. When I arrived at my destination and checked my load, I noticed one of the boxes was moving. It was making noise, too. I sliced it open with a box cutter and inside I found a man all bound up with duct tape.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, he was real cute—a young Spanish guy—so I climbed in with him. An immobilized man who couldn’t talk was just too good to pass up. I undid his pants and when he reacted favorably, I fucked him right there in the box.”
It took Eli a while to stop laughing enough to ask, “Why was he in the box?”
“He crossed a couple of bad guys who knocked him out, packaged him, and stashed him on my truck. They meant for him to end up in a warehouse and slowly die from dehydration. Of course, I cut him loose when I was done with him.”
Ruby ejected the Stevie Ray Vaughan CD and inserted one of Janis Joplin.
“Another time, a guy in a Porsche low-bridged my trailer,” she continued. “I was making a turn and the trailer stretched across both lanes of the road. It was night and raining hard. He was driving too fast. Never even saw me. That little car zipped right under my truck. Peeled his roof off, like the lid of a sardine can, but fortunately he didn’t get hurt. He managed to open one door and crawl out. I brought him into the cab while I phoned 911. I couldn’t help noticing his dick was sticking up like the Empire State Building. Turned out his kink was near-death experiences, and I don’t mean the woo-woo kind. We got it on twice before the cops showed up.”
“Driving a truck sounds pretty exciting,” Eli chuckled. “Maybe I should change professions.”
“Most of the time it’s duller than dirt,” she admitted. “But lots of guys find lady truckers hot. It’s all about power and control. A woman who can handle this humungous diesel monster is nobody’s plaything. She’s independent, gutsy, and she knows how to get where she wants to go.”
“You remind me of those pioneer women, driving their horse-drawn wagons across the Wild West.”
She patted the dashboard affectionately. “Yeah, got my five hundred horses right here.”
They drove on for a while without talking, listening to Janis belt out the blues in her raspy, soulful voice.
When the CD ended, Ruby said, “In my youth, I idolized Janis. She and I both came from the Texas coast. We were a lot alike: bad girls into sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. I guess we must’ve been baptized in dirty water.”
“At least you didn’t end up like her.”
“Now we’re back to the subject of power and control. Janis had plenty of power, but she lacked control. That’s where we differed.” She put on a Johnny Winter CD next.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m playing all Texas musicians to put you in the right frame of mind.”
“The right frame of mind for what?”
“Hot weather, hot food, and hot women.” She rolled down the elastic waistband of her red stretch pants to reveal vermillion flames tattooed just above her pubic hair.
Is she coming on to me? Eli wondered.
But when Ruby saw his expression, she laughed. “Well, the fire looked hotter thirty years and sixty pounds ago.”
They stopped for lunch in Roswell, New Mexico, where a UFO supposedly crashed in 1947. The town had never forgotten the incident. Every place Eli looked, he saw pictures of aliens and flying saucers. In a restaurant designed to resemble a spaceship, he ordered a “Martian Meat” sandwich that tasted like an ordinary hamburger and washed it down with a chartreuse “Moonglow Milkshake.”
“Tell me about this winemaker you’re going to see,” Ruby said, taking a bite of her Saturn Salad. Radishes, decoratively cut with curly rings that looked as though they’d come from her hair, and dotted clumps of iceberg lettuce.
“He calls himself Coyote Fortuna. We worked together at Meditrina before he founded Fortuna Vineyards.”
“What makes you think he can help solve your problem?”
“He knows about diseases that affect grapevines. And because he started his vineyard with some old vines he brought over from France—or stole, if you believe industry gossip.” Eli pensively stirred his milkshake with a straw. “He’s very cool and clever. I wish I had his composure—I’ve never seen him lose his temper.”
Ruby smiled and nodded in the direction of her eighteen-wheeler. “Temper’s like that big rig out there. Lose control of it and you can do a hell of a lot of damage.”
Eli couldn’t remember ever seeing a more desolate place than West Texas.
Tumbleweeds rolled lazily across the highway. Cacti dotted the landscape. Oil well pumps that looked like huge prehistoric birds pecked the parched red clay. The towns they passed through were few and far between, composed of little more than a handful of rundown buildings, old trailers, and an occasional gas station or convenience store. I sure wouldn’t want to break down out here, he thought.
He slept for a while, and when he woke up the flat land had given way to rugged hills. The blazing sun was sinking behind them. ZZ Top wailed through the speakers and Ruby tapped the steering wheel in time to the music. He stretched his legs and rolled his head from side to side to ease the stiffness in his neck.
“Sweet dreams?” she asked.
“Frustrating, actually.”
“Do tell.”
“I was with Miranda, back in Santa Fe, and she was naked except for her cowgirl boots. I desperately wanted to make love to her, but I couldn’t because I was a little green Martian and I didn’t have a cock.”
Ruby laughed and her jewelry jiggled. “I wonder how those ETs do it.”
“Maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re reproduced in petri dishes or stamped out like widgets on an assembly line.”
“I’m glad I’m an Earthling.”
By the time they reached Fredericksburg, dusk had settled over the quaint town with its wide main street and century-old stone buildings.
“Where do you want me to let you off?” she asked.
“The Comfort Inn. Do you know where it is?”
She nodded. “It’s just up ahead.”
Eli grabbed his backpack as they pulled into the parking lot. “Thanks again for the ride. It was interesting, to say the least.”
“Good luck solving your mystery. Take care of yourself.”
“I will.”
They shook hands and Ruby said, “I want to leave you with one last bit of Lone Star wisdom. What do you call a Texas woman who can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch?”
“I don’t know.”
“Darlin’.”