We still run as a team

The sleeper in a Cascadia is seventy-four inches wall to wall. I'm seventy-seven. So I sleep with my feet up against the window side, knees bent, and by about day nine my hips quit sitting right. Every tall guy does it. Nobody brings it up.

Team means two men and one truck. One drives and one's in the back. The wheels basically don't stop. Solo, Columbus to Fontana is four days out, because you get eleven hours of driving inside a fourteen-hour window and then you're off for ten whether you're tired or not. On a team my ten runs while he's rolling, so the load gets there in half the time and the money's better. Most guys can't do it. It's eleven days in a space about the size of a hall closet. The curtain between the bunk and the seats is a piece of fabric with a magnet sewn into the hem.

My uncle has a share in the company. He does the boards. He's the one who takes a man off them too. I don't pick the run and I don't pick who's in the other seat.

At the terminal I'm Abe. A dispatcher nine years ago couldn't get all the way through Abdirahman and it took. It's on my locker. My mother's never said it once. She calls Fridays and asks did I pray. Then did I eat. Same order every week, and she uses the whole name both times.

Yusuf came to us from a carrier up in Minneapolis. Our first run was Columbus to Sparks hauling paper out of Chillicothe. He drove the first leg and I got in the back and lay there about two hours not sleeping, because you don't sleep behind a man you don't know. You lie there and you learn how he takes the ramps. Whether he rides the brake down a grade. He's good. He's better than me on a grade and I've been doing this eleven years.

Second one was Seattle and back with a reefer. Rained the whole way out there.

The third one we loaded out of Salt Lake going home and we were ahead. Appointment in Columbus wasn't till Tuesday morning and we were most of a day up on it. You can't come early to a dock. They'll put you back out on the street and you'll sit anyway with a guard looking at you, so you'd rather sit somewhere you picked yourself. He pulled off at the rest area past Ogallala around nine at night. Those fill by eight in the summer and all that was left was the far end by the dog run, so we backed in against the fence.

He had the thermos with him, the tea his mother sends him out with, cardamom in it. We ate at the picnic table because the bugs weren't bad that night. There was a guy two spots down running his APU with his window open, and a woman walking a little white dog in circles in the grass under the pole light.

Around four-thirty I got the rug out from under the passenger seat and went down between the trailer and the fence. He came out a couple minutes after with his and put it down next to mine. He put it maybe eighteen inches off my left shoulder.

We got into Columbus that afternoon. He took the paperwork into the office. I found my own truck in the lot and drove home and slept nine hours.

That was eleven runs ago.

The log's electronic now. The box plugs into the port under the dash and it knows when the wheels are turning.

We talk the whole eleven days. His brother's got a shop up in Rochester, transmissions mostly. His mother's back is bad and he told me what they quoted her for the surgery, and I've thought about that number since. When my ex-wife's lawyer was still sending things he knew about it before my own brother did. Dettmer. I could still pick that man's voice out of a room. Yusuf's never once brought any of it up in front of anybody at the terminal.

I buy two coffees now. Used to be one.

His mother knows my mother through the mosque on Morse. In August there was a wedding, his side, a cousin. My mother was there. Yusuf was there in a grey suit. He sat with the men from his brother's shop. I was down the other end where they put me. On the way out my mother told me that Yusuf's mother says the two of us are always together, and she said it like it was a good thing.

Three weeks ago we were coming back east out of Elko and I was up and he was supposed to be down. Middle of the night, nothing on 80 but the reflectors. He came out through the curtain and sat in the passenger seat and put his feet on the dash the way he does. He hadn't come up front on my shift since Nebraska. He didn't say anything for a long time, and then he said my name. The other one.

Diesel in Rawlins was three-nineteen that week and better than a dollar more once you're into Nebraska, so everybody going east fills at Little America. Get there after two in the morning and you're sitting in line for it.

He sat there another forty minutes or so. Then he went back through the curtain.

Boards go up Thursdays. I went in last week to turn in my paperwork and my uncle already had the two of us on the next one, Columbus out to Fontana again with a Tuesday appointment, which puts us somewhere around Nebraska on the fourth night if the weather holds.