The highway ends its circumference near the New Hampshire border, where it joins Route 95 in Salisbury, on the coast. Brett's tractor lumbered north on 95. I'd drunk all my coffee and eaten all my sandwiches by then and the early winter evening sun was starting down. South of where we were, Route 95 went through Smithfield where Susan had lived until last year. I felt a little homesick. I hadn't seen her in six days. Lucky I was tough as a junkyard badger or I'd be missing her badly.
Brett stopped for coffee and a men's room on the Maine Turnpike between Portsmouth and Portland. I used the men's room while he bought coffee and bought coffee while he used the men's room. He had no reason to recognize me. I'd looked at him in the library and again on his way to Emmy Esteva's. But he'd had no reason to look either time at me.
Then we were on the road again, northbound. Brett had bought a couple of cheeseburgers to go, but I settled for coffee. I'd sampled the road food in Maine and preferred hunger.
It was a little short of eight when we pulled into the parking lot of a Holiday Inn just off the highway. There were a couple of other chain motels next to each other across the street.
Brett climbed down out of his tractor, pulled his overnight bag after him and went into the motel. I parked down the line of cars and turned off my lights and left the motor running and the heat on. Actually in Susan's car you didn't put the heat on, you set the digital thermostat to whatever temperature you wish and the thing cycles on and off automatically. I had it set at seventy-two.
Brett had parked in the early evening and taken his overnight bag and gone into a motel. According to my collection of Dick Tracy Crime Stoppers, this was a clue that meant he planned to sleep there. What it was not a clue to was when he would wake up and pull out. I shut off the motor. If I checked into the motel and went to bed and woke up and found Brett gone I would feel inadequate, and the feeling would accurately mirror reality. I turned up the collar on my leather jacket, zipped it up close around the neck, and eased down in the driver's seat. If I fell asleep, the sound of the big diesel tractor starting up would wake me, and I wasn't good at sleeping in cars and on airplanes.
Around midnight I started the car again and let the heater run for a while and when it was warm I shut it off again. If I ran the motor all night I'd be low on gas when we started off and I'd run out before Brett had to stop, or I might. I figured he still had a ways to go, or he'd have gone there before he stopped for the night. Unless this was the last place to stay before we plunged off into the wilds someplace. Maine is not teeming with motels.
Around 2:00 AM, I felt somewhat like a wire coat hanger. There are not that many positions to assume while trying to sleep in a carrot-shaped sports car. I started the engine to let things warm up again and got out and stretched.
There was a light in the motel lobby and there were high cold stars and there was nothing else but the collection of silent cars and trucks. Once as I stood in the harsh cold a vehicle whooshed by on the turnpike back of the motel. I got back in the car.
Dawn came late, around six o'clock the first hint of it in the black sky thinning toward gray, and then the beginnings of visibility before there was any touch of color in the eastern sky. The motel kitchen was kicking into action. I could smell coffee. At six-thirty Brett came out of the motel and headed for his tractor. I cranked Susan's car over and was a little ways behind him when we rolled out of the parking lot and back up onto the Maine Pike and away from the smell of coffee.
Chapter 18
We went off the Maine Pike near Brunswick and wound along the Maine coast on Route 1 through towns like Damariscotta and Waldoboro past Rockland and Camden to Belfast.
Belfast is on the side of a hill that slants down to an active waterfront on Penobscot Bay. It was a Maine town, a lot of white houses with low foundations. Barns and carriage houses still frequent, the smell of the ocean, a stillness that was not simply of the winter but seemed to emanate from the permanent condition of quiet and slow time.
Brett's tractor headed down the sloping main drag toward the wharf and pulled in next to a warehouse done in weathered vertical boards. The name, PENOBSCOT SEAFOOD, INC., was spelled out in white wooden letters mounted across the front. Brett got out and went in through the front door. I parked on a slant in toward the curb in front of a hardware store maybe a hundred yards up the hill and walked down toward the wharf.
The wind off the water was had, and the footing was slippery from frozen spray. There was old snow mounded against the side of the fish warehouse and piled in dirty embankments around the parking area where five or six refrigerator trailers were parked. The smell of fish was strong and the smell, too, of coal oil that must have come from a heater in the warehouse office. I edged into the doorway of a store that advertised rainbow ice cream. It wasn't much of a day for rainbow ice cream and there was no traffic in the doorway. The sky was low and gray and heavy and spit snow in insignificant spatters that made people put their windshield wipers on intermittently. I felt a little sick from hunger and lack of sleep and I was getting a headache because I hadn't had coffee for nearly twentyfour hours. I was shivering: A hot shower would be good, and a stack of corn cakes with maple syrup and two cups of good coffee then into bed for twelve hours and then have dinner with Susan. It was about four hours to Susan's condo where all of this was available and more. My feet were cold. My Avia aerobic shoes were gorgeous and comfy but were not designed for standing in doorways in the snow on the coast of Maine in the winter. Brett came out of the fishhouse with a tall thin guy wearing a tan down vest over a red woolen shirt. Brett got into the cab of his tractor and the guy in the down vest walked over to a refrigerator trailer and waited. The tractor started up and Brett ground it into reverse. The guy in the vest gestured him back and Brett backed the truck up and locked in with the trailer. There was no lettering on the trailer. The guy in the vest came up to the tractor and stood on the running board talking for a moment through the open window with Brett. Then he stepped down and headed back into the warehouse and Brett turned the big trailer tractor up the main drag again and crawled on out of Belfast. I went to the car, got it going, and crawled along behind him. The snow was spitting a little faster as we went, fast enough for me to move the wipers from Int to Lo.
Brett didn't go home the way he came. He took Route 3 to Augusta and picked up the Maine Pike southbound. I tooled edgily along behind him. The snow was intensifying and Susan's car, while splendid for exceeding the speed of sound on a dry highway, was harder to manage on a slick surface. The drive had so much torque that the wheels tended to spin any time you accelerated. Fortunately, Brett must have been nervous in the snow because he stayed down under sixty and I was able to slither along behind him without spinning off into a ditch.
A little after noon, Brett pulled the rig off into the parking lot of the rest stop on the turnpike south of Portland and parked it back of the restaurant. I came in after him and parked Susan's car in close to the restaurant and locked it and put the keys in my pocket. Brett had already gone in, his head ducking into the snow that was coming harder as the day developed. I walked over to the truck. It was locked. I went around back to the trailer. It was locked. The trailer had Maine plates on it. I went back around to the driver's side of the cab, shielded by the cab from the restaurant, and sat on the running board, and hunched my shoulders, and put my hands in my jacket pockets, and shivered.
