When you are an over-the-road trucker you will find yourself with no shortage of time on your hands. A guy can't drive a truck for more than a couple of months without getting bored with music and looking for a radio show that is more interesting to him. Some guys turn to sports talk, others to news. More than a few drivers can be spotted with a stack of audio books on their dash board. Paul found his attention to be captivated by the paranormal. He had been driving for only a couple of weeks when he stumbled onto an all night show that addressed topics like ghosts, aliens, and demons. 17 years later he still tuned in every night that he was up late enough to get the opportunity. This evening he wasn't driving late, but he had been waiting for this episode ever since the host had announced it and he wouldn't have missed it for anything.

I wish we would have never moved. After the incident at the party, however, it was necessary. My mom had a friend who used to live at the same motel where we did, and she told her of another motel a couple towns over where she was staying now. We moved there, and times got tough quickly. The guy who owned the place knew what my mom did for a living, and he was okay with it so long as she gave him 50% of what she made on top of the rent. We didn't have much food on account of that, and mom got generic cigarettes if she was lucky. By the time the rent was paid, all we really had money for was hot dogs and the drugs my mom used incessantly by that point.

Lawson Hole was every bit as beautiful as I remembered it. The snow melt every year feeds the river, making it run wild across the rocks in the gorge nestled between the mountains. I don't suppose I would be considered much of a romantic guy, but I think I did a pretty good job picking this place out for our picnic. Ashley had been lost in thought but the hiss of the brakes snapped her back to reality. "You have to use the bathroom or something?" I smiled across the truck at her. "Nope." She looked confused. "Why are we stopping here?" My smile grew bigger. "It's a surprise. Hop out and help me with something from the trailer."

I don’t know how many times I blinked, as if willing my eyes to dismiss the scene that was playing out in front of me, but I do know that it was the exact same number of times that they failed to change a thing. I was like a kid who woke up on Christmas Eve to see their Mom and Dad putting presents under the tree and enjoying the milk and cookies that had been so thoughtfully set out for Santa. Barring a very good explanation, my life philosophy was about to be permanently transformed.

I half expected that Ashley would pull away from my touch. I could see how devastated she was when she got in the truck, and I had no way to gauge her reaction since this was our first fight. As it turned out, I got no reaction at all. She didn’t pull away, nor did she lean to me in a sign of acceptance of my outreach to her. She just lay there motionless, leaving the whole weight of remedying the situation squarely upon my shoulders. If this situation were to be resolved amicably, I would have to find the way. While I didn’t like this new selfish side of her that I was seeing for the very first time, I felt genuinely bad that we were at this place. All of the closeness between us had vanished. For years now we had been as one. We awoke together, dined together, and slept together. Now all of the sudden, we were a thousand miles apart. Couldn’t she just reach out to me? Shouldn’t she apologize for just assuming that I would even want a baby around? She had caused this disruption, so why should I be reaching out to her?

In July of 1998 I took a job with a small trucking company in Inman South Carolina. They gave me an old T800 Kenworth to drive, as I was one of the new drivers. The owner had a couple of newer W900 Kenworths, but those were reserved for the guys who had been with him for a longer period of time. One week after I started working for him, he offered me one of those trucks... with a catch. The driver who had it had stopped at the I81 Auto Truck Stop in Max Meadows Virginia and gotten a motel room. Some time during the course of the night, he had gone into the bathroom and hung himself. I could have the truck so long as I was willing to take a bus there on Saturday, retrieve the vehicle, drive it back to our shop in South Carolina, and inventory and remove the drivers belongings so they could be returned to the family. I agreed to these conditions.

When Ashley and I first embarked on our journey together, I suspected that in short order I would get tired of her company. I wasn’t being pessimistic, but I had always been on my own to a large degree. Growing up, my school schedule was in a bit of a conflict with my mother’s work schedule. She was often sitting at the desk naked applying makeup when I got home from school, getting ready to go out on another nights work. And while she would stop in and check on me from time to time, I typically wouldn’t see her until the next day when I got home. After leaving the house, I had been by myself in college, and I had been trucking solo ever since.The thoughts of my impending boredom with my new reality didn’t surface much after my initial assertion. They would occasionally cross my mind only when the seasons would change, or something else would bring to the forefront the amount of time that had passed since we met.

After Sooner took her swan dive into the after-life, I entered into a new phase of my life. For awhile, I wondered why Hollywood had haunted my dreams so badly leading up to the event, and then appeared to urge me to get rid of the girl. Unfortunately, she had not returned since the incident that she had inspired for me to be able to ask her for clarification, so I was forced to draw my own conclusions. The only answers that I could come to in my mind were inconclusive and often contradictory. For awhile, I simply thought that she could not rest in peace thinking that I had killed her and her alone, as if the thought of being one of several was more akin to her liking than the thought of being the only. Yet this contradicted her philosophy in life, and her religious beliefs, so it could not be that. I entertained the notion that perhaps I had simply imagined some significance to the dreams that wasn’t really there, but that didn’t fit me. I dreamed frequently without looking for meaning in the jumbled pictures, so why would I do that in just this specific instance?

I was always a loner growing up. I didn’t have what you would call friends. I don’t suppose that I even had acquaintances for the most part. I didn’t stand out, even for not standing out. It was as if I flew completely under the radar. I didn’t get in trouble at school, and I didn’t win awards. I didn’t play any sports, and I wasn’t in the band. I walked in every day on time and took my seat, waiting for someone to tell me what I was doing wrong or right. It never happened, so I just assumed everything was ok. For the most part, is was as if I weren’t even there.

Following the death of the little slut from Hollywood, I was riding on a natural high. You could say that everything had worked out pretty much the way it should have, because I didn’t mean to kill her, so it was only right that people saw it as a death by natural causes. Yet I must admit that I did feel like I had gotten one over on the world. I spent the next year and a half with a bit of a superiority complex, and it was hard to knock me off of my game. When people angered me, I would tell myself that they simply weren’t worth my time. I had killed a girl, and they were the kind of people who just sat there and took it when life was fucking them over. Sure, they would piss and moan, but they wouldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Jeff slapped himself in the face again in a desperate attempt to fight off the sleep that was trying to invade his brain. He wasn't in any particular hurry to get anywhere, so this was a problem of his own making, but it was none the less the situation that he was in. In trucking there were two ways to stay awake when your body yearned for sleep. Clean and dirty. Make no mistake about it, Jeff wasn't above a chemically enhanced 72 hour driving binge, but the altoids box in the glove compartment of his 2010 Freightliner Cascadia was completely empty. Wasn't it? He reached across and opened in to check, not that he expected to find anything, but out of the realization at how stupid he would feel if there was something in there and he fell asleep at the wheel. Better to pop a pill and avoid the scene of the accident than to try to explain why it was in there to the cops and why he hadn't taken it to the drivers that would take pleasure at his misfortune when it was retold later at countless truck stops across the country. “Had a co-driver* right there in his glove box but he fell asleep and rolled her over right in the ditch on I 70. Fucking idiot.” The rumble strip jolted Jeff back to reality. He jerked the truck back into his lane and slapped himself again. No pills in the box.

I know you are probably not inclined to believe me, but I have no reason to lie to you. Petty games are not my thing, and I usually am a straightforward guy. I am too old to care what the consequences may be for baring my soul, and your opinion of me frankly isn’t that important. My story is, however, and the simple fact of the matter is that the first time I killed a girl it was an accident.