My thirteen-year-old daughter Olivia and I drove out the strip tonight for dinner like we do every week on Wednesday when I have her. As I rolled up to the stoplight between Long John Silver and Pizza Hut, resigned to idling near the land that time forgot, I saw a red roll-back towing a junk trailer, both heaped with scrap metal. When I pulled to a stop next to it, I noticed that, instead of stenciling a business name and address, someone had taken a white paint marker and tagged “Hank’s Hauling” on the driver door.
“Sketchy,” Olivia said, barely pausing her texting to a friend or maybe friends.
We were first at the light, a notorious long one, and I didn’t like the looks of Hank’s Hauling, so I was eyeballing the ancient orange Sentra in the left turn lane and keeping an eye on the light. Next thing I knew, the driver of the roll-back, maybe Hank himself, was beeping. I looked over to see him waving and all-around acting the fool, so I gave him my best WTF vibe, but he nodded and smiled and made what looked like a heart shape with his hands.
“Weird,” Olivia said, as if the beeping was from an awkward classmate. I didn’t exactly agree, but for the sake of how she might report my behavior, I gave him my best one-off wave and went back to focusing straight ahead. This seemed to delight maybe-Hank-himself, because he ignited the amber light-bar on the roll-off roof.
“What the sigma!” Olivia said with so much sarcasm that I knew she meant the opposite of whatever I didn’t know about the current connotations of the Greek alphabet.
“Yeah,” I said, “and what’s up with those Pinball Wizard lights?”
“Whatever,” Olivia said, but then that driver licked his tongue in and out across his lips while he made his sign again, and Olivia dropped her hands, folding the phone inside them and across the hem of her white, pleated skirt.
“Don’t look at him,” I said. “Don’t make eye contact.” I let him get the jump on us when the light changed. I stayed in the left lane, slow enough that I wasn’t alongside him, but he seemed to be trying to stay extra slow, too.
“Ewww,” Olivia said, but not as steady as she probably intended to sound.
When we got caught by the next light, I hung back two car lengths, making sure I didn’t stick us right beside Hank’s Hauling again. What looked to be a high school girl driving a Buick SUV pulled into the intersection, and maybe-Hank-himself beeped and waved, playing more than the fool at her, too. She reacted by ducking her head before she accelerated away.
“Maybe that truck driver’s just some simpleton,” I said, giving euphemism a shot. “I feel better seeing him act that way toward someone else. Less singled out.”
“Yeah, I don’t,” Olivia said. “What if he turns and goes to Smashburger, too?”
“We can maneuver faster than him. We’ll just do a touch-and-go in the parking lot and get back on the 4-lane and loop around and lose him,” I said, not meaning a word of those sentences either. Instead, I poked along in the left lane as we neared Smashburger, trying to gauge what that roll-back driver’s plan was and map out a counter plan.
What he did was stay in the right lane. What I did was time the last light, stopping for the early yellow as the roll-back slipped through. When we had a green, Hank’s Hauling was already idling at the next light, but I whipped into the turning lane for the off-ramp that Smashburger and Texas Roadhouse shared, found a space between two SUVs, and disappeared my car.
After that, the night passed uneventfully. No more sound and lights. No more sign language. Although Olivia kept looking over her shoulder for the roll-back and having none of it when I said, “Maybe he just tries the blinking lights every night like a firefly looking for attention.”
She made her “What the sigma?” face and said, “Or he’s one more creeper,” her voice as flat and toneless as Siri sending us on an alternate route. Like I needed directions. Like, this midsummer, her fourteenth birthday a month away, her freshman year two weeks after that, she was already a veteran of signs and symbols. Like the best side of me on a Wednesday night proved her mother right.
About the Author
Gary Fincke’s latest flash collection, In the Light and Dark, will be published in August by Pelekinesis Press. His work has been reprinted in Best American Essays 2020, The Pushcart Prize X and XXV, and Best Small Fictions. He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.
