He is overpolished. The peeling skin hangs off his face, which shines from the hot water and the fever he carries. He has lost weight. The trucker’s pants are six inches too large around the waist and ride high above his blasted ankles. He takes the belt from the splint and threads it through the loops. He still has no shoes so he carefully reties his tire sandal and slips the boot over his damaged ankle. He throws his old clothes in the wastebasket, holds the CAT hat in his hand, drops the besmeared washcloth back in the plastic bag, and leaves the washroom.

He stands in the tiled entrance to the diner scanning for the trucker and finds him hunched over a plate of corned beef hash, the snotlike yolks of his eggs churned into the greasy pile of glistening hash along with strings of undercooked hash browns. He is alone. Other truckers bend over their food like convicts and carry on conversations that Simon can barely hear over the clink of forks and coffee cups and the counterpoint of complaints between sagging waitresses and cooks through the opening to the dim and grease-pocked kitchen. Simon slides in the booth opposite the trucker.

“Well, shit,” the trucker says, drawing the sounds out around his mouthful of food, “you’re clean.”

“Clean enough, anyway,” offers Simon.

“I’ll buy you breakfast, but that’s it. You say you’re gettin off at the Cities and you’d better, cause if not, you gonna starve. I ain’t the Sal-fuckin-vation Army.”

“Yeah, I got it.”

With that the trucker continues eating and Simon unwedges the plastic-veneered menu from the slot in the rack of condiments, orders and sits back waiting for his food, his stomach still gurgling from the swamp water. The rush of appetite and the sullen banter under the ineffectual lighting numb Simon into a half-sleep but he fights it until the food and coffee come. He eats and they leave. They board the semi to float above the highway and gust other lesser motorists into the slow lane. Simon is carried into the faint orange sun of the city.

23

The trucker drops Simon off in the warehouse district. He waves but the trucker busies himself with his load, throwing the dead pins on the heavy steel doors of the trailer.

Simon turns, uneasy within the soiled geometry of the warehouses with their chipped cement aprons and blackened bricks. He walks painfully from Second Street to Hennepin, the breakfast still gurgling in his stomach. He stops every few yards and leans on parking meters, mercifully spaced and even. He is thankful for the sameness, the predictability of the city. His foot still throbs and he has no shoes. Only eight blocks, he thinks, only eight until I can lie down.