FanStory.com - Truckin, ch 3by Wayne Fowler

In the last part Clyde decided that not only did Jane Ann need avenged, but the country, other innocent people, needed protected from criminally dangerous truck drivers. Clyde resolved to sideline trucks for a couple hours by shooting out tires.

The rifle method worked. For a time Clyde stopped thinking electronically. And he was satisfied that he could work through his nerves. By the time he’d reached home from his first hunting truckers venture – one success and one aborted fiasco, having seen a dozen more potential targets, criminals behind the wheels of monster trucks, he’d resolved to immediately return to action.

He increased safety concerns by always eating at drive-thru fast-food places when not eating his nutrition bars, and by avoiding all diners and cafes, especially those at truck stops. Also, by always staying at non-chain, low-rent, no-tell motels that accepted cash, along with sleeping in rest areas he could avoid having to use a credit card and leaving behind a paper trail. Clyde knew all his past movie-watching would come in handy. The problem with rest areas, though, was that truckers used the same facilities as automobile drivers, which meant he could rest, only, and not risk using the restroom facilities.

On his next few excursions, safaris, as he called them, he never stopped a truck within a half-day of his home, not desiring to lead investigators to his house. Likewise, considering patterns on an investigator’s map showing a large hole circumnavigating his residence, he would plink one now and then as he passed by, not stopping. Scattering them like buckshot across the country was his plan – no timing routine and no map routine. He would, though, allow pins in an investigator’s map around his home on passes through, passes not associated with long stayovers at home. The jittery nerves never repeated.

By the time he matched the famed Billy the Kid, though Clyde did not notch his gun, he began to realize a pattern to his kills. U.S. mail trucks, furniture haulers, and certain national store chain trucks never got his attention, and never committed the crime that put them on his radar. Others self-identified with regularity, especially Xarious Trucking. He resolved to remain pattern-free, even if it meant taking a pass on a worthy subject, letting one escape justice. Clyde’s thinking was along the lines of Jesse James and the Pinkertons. Target a line too often, and someone, the firm or the cops, might set a trap, veritably opening the side walls of a tractor-trailer with a hidden Gatling gun to blast him to smithereens. He would be an equal-opportunity vigilante and still do his best to avoid any pattern.

But all the planning in the world couldn’t beat bad luck. He was eastbound on I-10, almost to New Mexico. As soon as he’d popped and stopped a passing-lane violator, one that he’d had to shoot out the passenger side tire, firing through his open window from the slow lane, Clyde discovered a vintage Firebird on his tail. The classic sports car of the late sixties, or early seventies, had been coming along at a pretty good clip and intending to pass the truck on the right all along, the same as it appeared Clyde was. Clyde found him on his bumper just as he’d withdrawn the rifle. He might not have seen the deed, but he sure enough saw the result – a blown right front truck tire and a Ford Taurus merrily cruising along.

With a sudden burst of speed, the Firebird drew beside him, despite Clyde’s acceleration to 100mph. The Firebird driver, a senior himself, probably an ex-cop, Clyde thought, pointed to the side of the road. Hitting his brakes hard, Clyde watched as the Firebird, without anti-lock brakes, spun to a stop, half on the shoulder, and half not, facing the desert. Clyde sped by. The rear-wheel drive Firebird fishtailed, spinning tires lunged the Firebird back from the shoulder, onto the roadway, and then back to the shoulder, the right tires in gravel. Tromping on the gas, the carburetor muscle car hiccupped, choked, and sputtered, requiring the driver to nurse it to performance speed. By then, Clyde was off I-10 and hidden by an abandoned business building, watching for the Firebird to fly past. It never did, apparently opting to stay on 10, unwilling to let off his hard-won 6000 rpm. Eventually meeting with Troopers, he was able to offer no better description than had the trucker.

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Realizing a flaw in his routine, the next time he made it home Clyde spent two weeks becoming a shift worker, adapting himself to the nightlife. He’d never before worked the midnight shift, sleeping in the daytime to wake when others were settling in for the night, beginning his hunt after dark. He quickly learned that there would be far fewer targets. With fewer trucks on the road, there were naturally fewer trucks to pass one another.
He considered disabling the license plate lamp, but thought better of it, not wanting to be pulled over and a curious or super-observant cop figure him out. And with his headlights, a trucker might be able to read his plate anyway. Far better to keep to his routine. One distinct benefit to night-fighting, though, was the ability to forego disguising himself, worrying about glasses and hats, long sleeves, short sleeves, jacket color and such.

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Know your enemy. Clyde realized that except for the obvious – tires, he was pretty much ignorant of the workings of a semi-truck. Everything he thought he knew, was conjecture and guesses based on movies and perhaps falsely transferring automobile science to trucks. He also wanted to know exactly how truckers thought, and how they were trained.

Waiting for a local truck driving school to begin its next class, Clyde watched as many YouTube videos about trucking as he could find. There were a few by truckers, themselves, offering counsel and advice to fellow drivers. He found comfort in their straightforwardness, telling truckers not to take a hundred miles to pass others, to be the better man, and to pull in behind one that wouldn’t yield. “Look,” one guy said in a video, “You’re driving a new truck that’s governed at sixty-seven. You’re in a seventy and four-wheelers are doin’ seventy-five or eighty. You don’t try to pass another truck that for whatever reason is only goin’ sixty-six. No! You get beside him, wake him up, and he speeds to sixty-eight. You will never pass. You’ll just make people mad, mad enough to pass on the right, pass on the shoulder, who knows. You will be the hazard.”

Most YouTube videos, though, were truckers who dash-cammed brake checkers, those like his past self who had, after finally passing a truck, cut them off and immediately applied brakes, slowing the trucker down. Without fail, the complaining trucker neglected to mention what transpired before the brake-checking. Only once did a trucker acknowledge – “maybe he thought I took too long to pass.”

Getting a jump-start on the class, Clyde downloaded the state CDL Handbook, finding a treasure trove of information, all the way from truck handling and truck operation mechanics to state laws and regs. Air brakes had spring brakes, automatically engaging whenever air was lost. Trucks took as much as a third of a mile to stop at eighty miles per hour. The safe following distance was ten feet for every second of travel time – double that on wet roads. It took longer to stop an empty truck than a heavy, full one. Bobtail trucks take longer to stop than combination rigs. Tanker trucks handle differently than regular tractor-trailer outfits. Locked-up brakes present potentially dangerous skidding and jack-knifing. Rollover is a constant threat depending on curves, winds, and of course, erratic driving practices. Clyde gained a new appreciation for public safety, glad that he’d already determined to isolate targets by following bad drivers until they were safely away from other vehicles.

Clyde also appreciated that competent, professional drivers, those with full knowledge of the law and their rigs, careful and considerate of the public’s safety, as well as their rights to the road, deserved his respect every bit as much as any other professional. He was controlling an 80,000-pound machine with all its moving parts at seventy or eighty miles an hour, surrounded by drivers of every degree of competence and awareness, often sleep-deprived through no fault of his own, separated from family for extended lengths of time, driving in every adverse climatic condition, and usually under time pressures. Furthermore, he was responsible for a myriad of state driving laws, state after state, as well as laws relating to the condition and performance of his vehicle, often a vehicle to which he had no control, being owned and maintained by his employer.

It was almost enough to make Clyde give rise to question – until he remembered what Santa Claus had done to his beautiful bride, his heart’s beat, his reason for living.

Waiting for trucker school to start, the break from action far longer than he wanted, Clyde watched YouTube trucker fails, wrecks involving trucks and heavy equipment. The videos effectively balanced his appreciation for competence and excellence among truckers, exposing a world of careless and incompetent idiots, exposing the public to who-knows-what-all danger.

Once in class, Clyde wasn’t particularly interested in the how-to’s of driving. There were, of course, a few interesting tidbits relating to safety, but having no intention of taking the CDL test, let alone passing it, he was free to selectively focus. To him the initial orientation speech was worth the price of admission: “You are not Knights-of-the-Road. Like Roger Miller said, you are Kings of the Road! It’s yours. It’s your workplace. You don’t go into a restaurant kitchen and tell the chef what to do, four-wheelers don’t get in your workplace and tell you what to do! Unless they wanna wipe their butts with corn cobs, if they wanna eat tonight, if they want their GameBoy or new telephone delivered, they’ll get outta the way an’ let you deliver your loads. Their Constitutional pursuit of happiness depends on you! Surface roads are made for cars. They should get out of our shop!”

Clyde was steamed, self-control nearly impossible.