"Big Truck, Tender Heart"

by Liz and Tom Q. MacClintock

Copyright ©2002
ISBN: 0-87714-670-5 eBook edition
ISBN: 0-87714-708-6 PB edition

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

DEDICATION

THE AUTHOR

These authors are Denlinger's "regulars" having written Hearts That Cross an Ocean. That nonfiction is their story, told through their letters, as to how they met online, fell in love, and got together over a ten thousand mile distance. Liz is an Australian and Tom's an American. They married in May, 1998, and they live and write from a small town on Australia's South Coast.

Although love stories are necessarily their forte, they also bring vast life experience to the tales they write. In this case, Tom was an interstate trucker. Between 1988 and 1996 he pulled freight over nearly a million miles of highway in all weather, all kinds of ter-rain, and 44 of the 48 Contiguous United States. Hence, all detail in Big Truck, Tender Heart is based on fact. Rarely would one find a novel so accurate in its supporting material. Past Hurts Healed is another tale set in 1997 on Australia’s South Coast, a kinder, gentler and slower paced world where these authors live.

THE BOOK

This is a romance placed in the unique setting of Interstate trucking. Thirty-four year-old Jessica Lockwood has been driving the Forty-eight for almost twelve years, the first ten and-a-half with her late husband. Her employer, Northern States Motor Freight, of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was recently acquired by Cody Steele whose specialty is buying businesses, making them efficient, and selling them at considerable profit. Steele also owns a Ford dealership from which he borrowed a sales manager whose only management tool is high pressure. That coupled with the insecurities inherent when businesses are bought by men like Steele has placed incredible stress on drivers like Jessica. Our story opens with her barging into Steele's office demanding a return to safer operation.

Cody reminds Jessica of her late husband whose hard-driving, workaholic ways had made her years with him so tough. She sees how she could desperately love this man and hate herself for it. Soon Cody sees how he could quite easily love Jessica but, before long, he's inescapably confronted with the fact, only four years earlier, his unreasoning devotion to work cost him his marriage and a home with two remarkable daughters on whom he dotes. He wonders if he has what it takes to ever be a good partner.

The second most powerful person in a trucking company is the Safety Director. The one at Northern States, Janice Roth, who had pretty much run the place for Steele's predecessor now feels her grip slipping as the new owner takes hold. That Cody finds Jessica attractive infuriates Roth who decides to have control at any cost.

We ride with Jessica and a student as she rolls through the breathtaking beauty of the United States of America and struggles with shippers, receiving clerks, dispatchers, and schedules imposed by new management that's never seen the inside of a big truck. To succeed against formidable odds demands all of Jessica's toughness, strength, grace and resourcefulness. Just as awesome is Cody's adversary - himself. For him to succeed, he must apply the strength of character and force of effort that made him the business achiever he is.

Sample

As tired as she ever remembered being, and just that angry, the woman dropped the 48 foot trailer in the big lot and bobtailed the half-mile to the tractor park. The sons of a bitches. The bastards. Carpetbaggers. Goddam turnaround specialists. New Age Bottom Line Barbarians.

As she felt every pebble and ripple in the concrete drive, she was reminded of how hard the heavy-sprung 12 thousand pound prime mover rode without a trailer attached. And as she bumped her way off the drive and into the unpaved lane where only a few other tractors stood, she wondered when those high weeds had last been mowed. Probably not since her bottom began getting callused – in the last Ice Age.

She rolled down the window and, with a flick of her wrist, turned the key and shut down the engine. Ahhhh! Magnificent silence. In her business, you don’t get much of that; it had been days since she last heard nothing and, despite her being preoccupied with greater issues, she took some time to savor something everyone else gets a lot of without even asking — magnificent silence. The warm midmorning breeze wafted into her nostrils as she scanned the scrubby scene around her.

The main building with offices and shops another half-mile away, stretched across the flat land from her left to her right. As though she had x-ray vision, she looked through the gray concrete block walls into the offices with their cacophony of telephones, copy and fax machines and people talking above the din and she reckoned in just a few minutes she’d add considerable to that din ‘cause she was mad as hell and wasn’t about to take it any more. Godammit, she cursed quietly to herself.

From one of the little bins in the dash, she removed a small cosmetics kit and hairbrush. Flipping down the visor and lining her face up with the little mirror, she tried to get her medium-length hair in some kind of order. With her blue eyes, the deep auburn shade looked good. But like its owner, it had a mind of its own and, today, it had decided to be unruly. The woman impatiently coaxed until she struck a kind of compromise with it. The one part that wouldn’t compromise was a curl in the front that sprang out over her right eye and drooped down to brow level where she’d see it and blow up at it — whew. The curl looked rather like a wood shaving made by a cabinet maker’s plane. Every now and then it would relax, stretch out, and look really neat in the rest of her natural waviness, but this was not one of those times. Whew. Oh, to hell with it. She twisted the dark red lipstick, applied it carefully, then snatched a tissue from another little bin in the dash and blotted it. Not too bad, she considered, despite feeling every day of her 34 years and after a long road trip, the last leg of which she’d started at four that morning after a shower and bacon-and-eggs breakfast.

She’d have to transfer dirty laundry and other gear to her pickup truck. But she didn’t want to make that transfer now, for fear she might lose the edge off the head of steam she’d built since pulling into the trailer lot. As a professional driver, she never allowed aggressive thoughts to enter her mind while pulling up to 80 thousand pounds of truck and cargo. But, the moment she finished backing it into its slot next to the other trailers and, peeeeeyoop, she heard the hiss of air that set the parking brakes, she had permission to get just as aggressive as she wanted and, by God, she wanted now and she better not lose it. Sometimes she believed she was too easy going. In this job, where all too many people didn’t care who was right but only who prevailed, too readily seeing the other’s position would be costly in time and money. This was one confrontation in which she would not do that!

Two more deep breaths of the idyllic scene and she rolled the window back up, opened the door, swung around, and climbed down the ladder. She inserted the key in the lock part of the door handle assembly which, at her five feet four inch height, was at her eye level. Like the transfer of gear, the post-trip vacuuming of the cab would be done later, after she’d taken the place apart brick by brick.

Resolutely, legs striding, she walked across the scrub to the building, swung open the front door, and walked in. Jill, the receptionist, saw her through the glass and, as she breezed in, smiled genuinely and said, “Hi, Jessica! Welcome back. Have a nice trip?”

“Oh, uh…uh” the woman fumbled. Then, realizing she wasn’t angry with Jill, broke a smile and lied, “Oh, just great, Jill! You okay?”

“Never better,” the receptionist lied right back as she watched the woman dash past and into the main office.

Getting by the front desk was easy. Getting by the next one wouldn’t be. Miss Appleton guarded her boss like an alligator in a moat. Good old Dorothea Appleton had been with the company since God evicted the tenants from Eden. The present owner had bought the business from the Muellers who, over twenty years earlier, had bought it from Miss Appleton’s employer.

In perfect posture, she sat on her tight little bottom on her little secretary’s swivel chair. Today she wore a dark gray suit, white blouse with pointed collar accented by a single strand of pearls. Every one of her perfectly-coifed, permed, chestnut-colored strands of hair was sprayed in place. The style would best be called “Queen Lizzie II,” the only difference between the two ladies being the color. The Royal hair had gone a natural gray while the Secretarial hair was a perfect unnatural chestnut brown. Her features, centered on a sharp nose, included a thin, often-pursed mouth and small, chestnut-brown eyes behind tri-focal horn rimmed glasses.

The clear lacquered nails of her unexceptional hands that protruded from ruffled sleeves of her blouse, wore no jewelry. As she perceived the approaching figure, her face took on the don’t-even-think-about-it look usually reserved for salesmen.

“He’s on the telephone, Mrs. Lockwood!” If her boss hadn’t been on the phone she’d have rushed in and apologized for the blatant intrusion of a woman in blue jeans! Who drives a truck! Dashing into Mr. Steele’s office unannounced! In her day, they took ladylike jobs, such as librarians, school teachers and, most nobly, nurses. Those jobs still exist in even greater numbers than in years past, but nowadays they have to…drive trucks! “Mrs. Lockwood!”

“That’s okay. I don’t mind!” the woman said not breaking stride until she stood in the middle of the office and looked at the back of a swivel chair occupied by the trucking company’s owner. It wasn’t a high swivel chair like God might use, and it wasn’t short like Miss Appleton’s either. It was high enough to hide all but the iron gray hair on top of the occupant’s head.

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