The big truck lumbered and creaked as it slowed down to nothing under one of the maples that lined the road circling the lake. After an hour the truck had idled almost long enough to warm us, the raw edge of spring was yet to soften. We had come to the park, my driver and I flushed out the day before by a random trade supervisor who lucked into getting his breakfast at the Burger King that hidden us since March. In mid-May the sun had still yet to rise by six o’clock so we decided there was no point in doing this shit in the pitch black. It was after one stop off Patterson, I spilled out of the truck, and looking up, couldn’t find the three hundred pound claw of the boom. Instead a shape arced soundlessly and huge just over my head. I made out Orion’s arched shoulders twinkling through a web of black and mostly naked tree limbs.
So instead we slept. Each week finding a new spot, driving in silence through the empty city; not from a dislike of one another, but after eight months together, seemed like the right approach for the morning. Nothing was said about the park, we just wound up there. My driver pulled the air brake, leaned his head against the window and promptly started snoring softly. He had developed the talent to doze off nearly anywhere. Two kids and three jobs will do that to a man. I bunched the hood of my jacket up and nestled against it, squinting out the cold window into the cold of the lake, dark as Homer’s wine-dark. Three geese on the water, I dozed. I dreamt about the muscles that made up my girl’s neck and how they were like a song. I thought that if that were so, then surely each morning my truck must be a prayer to the city. Maples thrust ragged fingers into the horizon which had started to bleed pink. Pink and blaze orange crept into the lakes reflection. One long dogwood rose yonder like a ghost.
The radio, turned down to a murmur, had a speaker located just behind my head. I couldn’t remember when it was but at some point that winter Steve Harvey had dedicated the first five minutes of his radio show with some thoughts about spiritual matters. As I went in and out of consciousness he sounded as though he were singing, his leathery baritone as alien as a foreign language. There in the blue morning, he whispered to me.
“Now I’ve been talking with a lot of people these days and I know it’s hard right now. It’s likely going to get harder and you may think that God has forsaken you. That he’s abandoned you and you’re all alone. Well I’m here to tell you that’s a flat-out lie, cause he’s got you and he’s always, always had you, even when you weren’t listening out for him. I want you to know that I’ve got you too and I’m here to tell you right now that He didn’t bring you all this way to let you down now. I know it feels like you keep hammering and nothing is breaking loose and nothing is coming together and every year you just feel more tired all the time. Well I’m here today to tell you that it gonna come together, you just got to keep on going, and never quit. Just keep going and don’t you ever, ever give up.”
