I Caught Him in the President's Office, So I Painted My Own Name novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Forty a Pair

Stephanie rents a room above a truck stop and paints mudflaps, until a club prospect tells her the county is closed to her and a stranger climbs out of a trucker's rig.

I drove with Kendra's photo open on the seat beside me until the screen went dark.

My mother's Iwata was under that lamp, and her thumb was on the trigger.

I wanted to turn around and take it back out of her hand.

I had nowhere to take it to, and no proof the thing was mine.

Haskell's Truck Stop sat on Route 21 six miles past the garage, with a gravel lot big enough for forty rigs.

I parked beside a refrigerated trailer and sat in the cab with my two thousand dollars and no idea what to do with it.

A knock on the glass made me jump.

A woman in a denim apron stood there holding two coffees, with a gray braid down her shoulder.

"You've been sitting in my lot for an hour," she said. "Either you're dead or you're hungry."

"I'm neither."

"Then come in and be neither where it's warm."

Her name was Birdie Haskell, and she ran the place with one cook and a pot of coffee that never went off the burner.

She put a plate of eggs in front of me and sat down across the booth with her arms folded.

"You're Dutch Telford's wife," she said.

"Ex-wife. Since eight o'clock this morning."

"I saw your paint on a Harley outside Missoula once. Thought, whoever did that has real hands."

She looked at my fingers, still stained with gray primer.

"He said he did it."

"He says a lot."

"Mm." She turned her coffee cup a quarter turn.

"I've got a room upstairs. Three hundred a month, heat included, a bathroom down the hall."

She nodded toward the back. "And a bay out there where the tire man used to work."

I stared at her.

"I don't have a job," I said.

"You have two hands and a compressor in your truck bed. I saw the tarp."

She stood. "Eggs are on the house today. After that you pay like everyone else."

I took the room that night.

It had a narrow bed, a window facing the diesel pumps and a radiator that clanked all night.

I lay on top of the blanket and listened to rigs idling outside, and I did not cry there either.

In the morning a trucker from a gray Peterbilt knocked on the bay door where I was setting up the compressor.

He was six and a half feet tall and carried his mudflaps under one arm.

"Birdie says you paint," he said.

"I paint."

"My wife's got a bulldog. They both love me, God knows why."

He held out the flaps. They were scuffed black rubber with nothing on them.

"Can you do both?"

I looked at the blank rubber, and something in my chest that had been clenched for two days loosened an inch.

"Forty dollars a pair," I said, because I had no idea what to charge. "Back by dinner."

"Forty?" He frowned. "That's a steal."

"Then bring me a friend."

I did his wife in swept chrome script, and the bulldog in a spiked collar with a sulky look in his eye, and I used every shade of red I had left.

By dinner he was standing in the doorway with his hat in his hand.

He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "She's going to cry," and handed me two twenties and a third bill he said was for the dog.

By Friday I had six orders.

By the next Wednesday, drivers were parking in the far lot just to wait their turn.

They drank Birdie's coffee out of paper cups and argued about whose girlfriend got the best flames.

Nobody asked me who I was married to.

On the second Thursday a club truck pulled into the lot, and a prospect I knew got out of it with his shoulders hunched.

He was twenty-two. He'd eaten at my table. He wouldn't look at me.

"Dutch says you can't paint in this county," he said to the ground.

"It's club paint. Style, designs, all of it. It belongs to the garage."

"It was signed over. I wrote the last line myself. Everything I make after the date is mine."

"I'm only supposed to say it."

"Then you've said it."

His jaw worked. "Kendra says to tell you the drivers will stop coming once they hear whose wife you were."

"I'm nobody's wife. Tell her that."

Birdie had come out onto the back step with her arms crossed.

"Son," she said, "this lot is mine, and so is the shotgun behind my register."

"Go back and tell them I said so."

He went.

She watched the truck out of sight, then looked at me.

"I like you better than the last three tenants combined," she said. "Don't make me regret it."

That night I stayed up late laying out reference sketches, my first work in ten years that had no one else's name on it.

The next afternoon, a flatbed pulled in with a vintage Triumph strapped to the back and my mudflaps hanging on its trailer.

They were a pair I'd done for a driver heading west on Tuesday. Blue koi with copper scales.

A man climbed down from the flatbed's cab and stood looking at the flaps for a long time.

He was tall and broad, in a worn leather cut with a plain patch on the back that read NOMAD.

There was a scar through his left eyebrow.

He walked straight toward my bay door, and he did not stop until he was standing in it.

"Who painted these?" he said.

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