Dead Meat
A Thanksgiving Tale
The hundred miles east of Blythe is a particularly desolate stretch of Interstate 10. It’s a slice of Arizona desert where even the saguaro cacti struggle to thrive, most of them standing yellowed if not splayed open, begging for a summer dust storm to put them out of their misery.
But Artie Chestnut didn’t mind it. As a fifty-nine-year-old truck driver, passing Phoenix meant he was almost to Los Angeles, leaving him more or less a straight shot with nothing worth noticing till you hit the breast augmentation billboards outside Palm Springs.
Artie had been driving all night, his brain settled into a lower state where he was functionally aware of only the passing cars on his left and the small, green mile markers on the right, counting down the minutes before he reached California and could start thinking about dumping one frozen load of God knows what and grabbing another.
It was amidst this sludge-like mental state that Artie spotted the black digital construction sign, rolled into position on the right shoulder a quarter-mile ahead. His brain registered it as an anomaly and responded in kind, with a graceful downshift as his tan arms and pasty legs worked in concert, raising the rig’s RPM’s back above three thousand.
As the sign came into focus, Artie expected to read one of the typical offerings:
“PREPARE TO SLOW”
“RIGHT LANE CLOSED AHEAD”
“CLICK IT OR TICKET”
But what greeted him—in flashing orange letters—was a very different message:
“YOU SUCK.”
And then it was gone, fading from his cab’s side mirror at a clip of 73 miles per hour.
“What the hay?” Artie said.
“What the hay?” was one of Artie Chestnut’s favorite expressions. He said it when traffic was stopped for no reason and he said it when he passed pretty girls traveling with ugly guys and he said it whenever he landed back at his one-bedroom condo in Bentonville and realized he was low on beer.
Artie’s shock was quickly replaced by a laugh as he considered the thousands of travelers who had driven past that sign throughout the long night. People like him who were desperate for any dispatch from the desert and ready to absorb the truth of whatever it might say, only to be met with the least inventive of all known insults.
After a mile, Artie’s laugh faded to a cigarette-stained smile. And by mile marker 27, the smile was gone, replaced on his sunken face by a glum emptiness. But in that sliver of a second, before his mind reset to its previous mode, a thought managed to slip its way into Artie Chestnut’s conscience.
Maybe I do suck.
This was not a man prone to introspection. For almost six decades, he had done things his way and that was that. Sure, there were the two divorces. But his first wife was certifiable, or at least she was by the time they called it quits.
Wife number two simply wanted more from Artie than any reasonable man could give. She could ask him questions right to the point of falling asleep, and yet by 7a.m.—despite not leaving bed once—she arose with a whole new list of questions to ask! Artie used to complain that if he wanted to be interviewed non-stop, he’d marry Oprah.
He wasn’t any better with their daughter. She was a touchy-feely kid and Artie was not a fan of touching or feeling. When she wasn’t trying to swing from his arms like a monkey, she was showing off her art and her dancing and her singing. From his perspective, she wasn’t particularly good at any of them. Artie knew better than to tell her that outright, but he also wasn’t going to lie and then watch his only daughter devote her life to something dumb like dance.
She did anyway. Down in Tallahassee. Where she met plenty of boys happy to give her the attention her dad never would. Artie struggled to remember the last time they spoke. He sometimes thought about calling her. Every once in a while. During a long haul. But he never knew what to say.
Artie hurtled west, his mind filling with more memories, most of them bad. He was beginning to resent that construction sign. He had been perfectly fine until then. He had been four and a half hours from the loading dock, five and a half from settling down on the inflatable mattress in the back of his rig and calling it a night.
But not anymore. Now every mistake seemed to press in on him. The broken relationships. Lost friendships. Missed opportunities. The worst part was he couldn’t go back. He could only push ahead.
Load.
Drive.
Unload.
Repeat.
But he could only do this for so long. Eventually, he’d age out. His back would break down or his eyes would fail and he’d lose his Class-A license. And then what? Then there was nothing.
Maybe I should just end it all, he thought. Right here on this stretch of nothingness.
The idea quickened his pulse. It was a fitting place, really. Everything between his rig and the Colorado River was already dead or dying. He might as well join them.
Artie knew just the spot too. On the descent. A couple miles east of the border. It was a medium-sized grade, but also curvy, the deadliest combination for truckers trying to push through after ten hours of night driving. There was even a runaway truck ramp. Right in the median. If he built up enough speed and pulled left, he could hit the side of it and take flight, landing sideways at which point physics takes over and all sorts of horrible things will happen, ending no doubt in a gruesome, fitting death.
Artie was impressed with himself. It was dramatic. Loud. Final. Plus by using the runaway truck ramp, it would give the appearance he was trying to save himself instead of the opposite. This would preserve his life insurance policy and give his daughter a little something to make up for all the other things he couldn’t.
After eighty miles of desert flats, the tractor-trailer passed the interchange with Route 60 and edged downhill. Artie was excited, a buzz in his fingers as he checked his mirrors, signaled left, and pulled into the fast lane. The timing had to be perfect. Too fast and he’d hit a railing on the curve and only succeed in blowing a few tires. Too slow and he’d never get the jump he needed to guarantee his grisly, flame-filled demise.
Artie held the rig at eighty-five through the curves. He passed a dozen other truckers as he went, ignoring their concerned looks and focused solely on the road. When he hit the straightaway, he pushed his foot to the floor and gave it all he had.
90…
95…
100…
The gravel-filled ramp was in sight, half a mile ahead.
Artie guided his 40,000-pound missile out of the fast lane and onto the left shoulder. Then, with precision, he edged a few feet more. Onto the desert itself. And finally, with one violent tug of the wheel, Artie Chestnut and his semi hit the right side of the runaway truck ramp at 107 miles per hour.
The rig launched at a glorious twenty-degree angle, the beauty of it enhanced by backlight from the rising Arizona sun. Just as Artie imagined, the tractor-trailer entered into a barrel roll. What he did not calculate was just how much airtime he would have traveling at such a blistering speed.
Rather than return quickly to Earth and crash on its side like he thought, the cab and the trailer continued to spin. Through the front windshield, Artie saw the morning lights of Blythe rotating clockwise in his field of vision. For a moment, Artie’s world was upside-down.
But he wasn’t done spinning. The barrel roll continued. And, to Artie’s dismay, as the rig reached the asphalt, his world was once again perfectly right side up.
The eighteen wheels hit the left shoulder of Interstate 10 in graceful fashion, sending one large shudder through the truck before they continued their otherwise uneventful journey to California.
“WHAT THE HAY?!” Artie yelped.
He was so stunned that he didn’t even slam on the brakes, a move that probably would have achieved the same deadly result as the flight. He just let the truck naturally lose momentum as the road flattened out and the mandatory weigh station approached a mile ahead.
As traffic at the border slowed, Artie gently applied the brakes, downshifting from 60… to 50… to 40… rolling into the weigh station at a sluggish 10 miles per hour.
A California highway patrolman approached the cab and signaled for Artie to roll down his window. He was just starting his shift and was sipping a pink drink from the local Blythe Starbucks.
“How’s your morning?” the officer asked.
“Well…” Artie stumbled, unsure where to begin. “I’m here.”
“Better than the alternative,” the officer quipped, then signaled for Artie to drive forward onto the scale. But the moment he did, Artie heard the officer holler from behind. “WHOA WHOA WHOA!”
Artie leaned out the window. “There a problem?”
The officer pointed toward the back of the trailer with his drink. “Your gate’s open.”
“Oh,” Artie said. “It must have happened when I… back there on the—”
“I don’t care how it happened. Get your dumb ass back here and close it!” he barked.
Artie put the rig in park, grabbed his gloves, and hopped out. His legs were still quivering with adrenaline. “Sorry about that.” Artie arrived at the back of his open trailer and, for the first time since Arkansas, saw the load he’d been transporting for the last 1,300 miles.
Turkeys.
Frozen turkeys. Thirty-eight thousand, nine hundred and twelve pounds of them, according to his manifest. A few loose ones wobbled on the edge of the truck bed, ready to escape. Inside, another twenty had rolled to the far corners, set free from their tied-down pallets during their brief flight.
The officer had his temperature gun out and was shooting a red laser at the birds.
“We okay?” Artie asked, worried the entire load was about to fail inspection.
The officer showed Artie the number. Two-point-two degrees. “Close enough,” he said.
Artie climbed into the semi and returned them to their bins, one by one. Stupid turkeys, he thought. For stupid Thanksgiving. For stupid families and their stupid friends and—
“Ya know,” the officer interrupted from back on the ground, “if one of those just happened to roll off your truck and land in my arms, it would make me pretty popular at home.”
Artie looked down at the inspector, trying to act tough while drinking his girlie pink drink and smiling like a goon. The old Artie would have likely said “Get your own damn turkey.” Because, as that flashing sign on the shoulder declared, the old Artie Chestnut sucked.
But this one did not.
This Artie Chestnut had confronted his past, acknowledged his shortcomings, faced death, and lived to tell about it. This Artie Chestnut, as he was only now beginning to realize, had been given a second chance.
Which explains why Artie grabbed a bird from the trailer, the biggest one he could find, and handed it to the officer. “Happy Thanksgiving,” Artie said.
“Hey! Thank you very much. My wife is gonna flip when I tell her how I got this.”
“You’re welcome,” Artie said as he yanked down the gate and latched it closed.
The officer trailed Artie back to the cab. “How about you? You gonna see your family for Thanksgiving?” he asked.
Artie pulled himself up into the cab and buckled his seat belt. “I’m gonna try,” he said.
And he meant it.