A Fragment of Frank
A short story
Cruising down the 405 not long after dawn, Frank’s practiced eye spotted the downed Christmas tree in the third lane from the left at well over 1,000 yards. Slowing down carefully, he pulled his white Toyota pickup truck over to the shoulder as far as he could get off the freeway. He reached up out his driver’s side window and turned on the orange flashing light that he’d mounted on the roof of the cab, then put on his gray canvas gloves and got out of the vehicle.
The 405 was never without traffic, but at this early hour it wasn’t as thick as it would be shortly. Three weeks after its holiday time, the large Noble fir was dry and crackly, and had already shed some limbs and many needles from being hit. Frank figured that more hits might send the tree skittering further away from the shoulder, so he took a deep breath and ran into the road. He grabbed at the tree, hefted it in his arms and hustled back to the truck, ignoring the honks of outraged drivers who seemed to take issue with his act.
The dead tree went into the truck bed, joining a broken recliner and part of a crusty muffler. Frank took off his gloves and climbed back in the driver’s seat. He made a little tick on a small pad of graph paper he’d attached to the dashboard, filled with similar marks. It was almost time for a new page. He drank from the 7-11 cup of 7-Up that sat in his cupholder, and changed the radio station to something with more of a beat. He turned off the orange light, and tapping his hands on the steering wheel in time to the music he watched traffic in his side mirror until he had an opening to pull back onto the freeway. This took a couple minutes, as his mid-sized truck didn’t have a lot of get-up-and-go.
It didn’t take long for another situation to appear. He had barely merged onto the 710 going north when he spotted a silver BMW 5-series barely pulled off to the side at an angle, its hazard lights blinking. He pulled up behind the vehicle, but not too close, and saw that a single person was sitting in the car. From experience, he knew that a BMW driver could either be anxious and sad, or frustrated and mad. He shrugged internally and made his way to the passenger side of the car.
The person inside was tapping intently on their device and didn’t notice him, so he rapped on the window and said, “Hi there, do you need some help?”
The short-haired blond woman jumped in her seat and looked at him wide-eyed. “No! No, I’m fine!” she yelled back, more loudly than was necessary.
“Car trouble?” Frank inquired.
“No, no, I just have to send a message,” she said. Her eyes were red-rimmed as if she’d been crying.
“Well, OK. Just, it’s not very safe to be on the shoulder the way you are. Your car’s still almost in the road,” he replied.
“I’ll be fine. Thanks,” she responded, still half-shouting. She looked back down at her device. Her divorce was the only thing that meant anything to her right now. Frank stood there for a moment, then walked back to his truck. There was no helping some people.
Just a bit further up the 710, more than one wooden palette must’ve fallen off a truck, disintegrating into splintered boards and shards that spanned three lanes of traffic. Fortunately, it was the slower lanes, but unfortunately, morning rush hour was picking up. Frank managed to grab and get some of the bigger pieces into the truck bed, but he had to leave the rest to the churning action of the never-still road.
He felt hungry then for his first meal of the day, and took himself to a familiar hamburger restaurant on Rosecrans Ave for a burger and chili-cheese fries. Plus another 7-Up (actually Sprite). Then he was back out on the freeways, cruising and keeping a look out for hazards and needful people. The next bunch of hours passed in a similar vein.
The sun was setting over the Pacific ocean, far from his apartment in Koreatown, when Frank finished his day of service and pulled into his complex’s assigned parking space. He’d have to gas up first thing in the morning, but he had plenty of room for more detritus in the bed. He patted the truck’s tailgate fondly and murmured a word of appreciation to his reliable beast.
His daughter, Tessa, was bent over her phone at the dining room table when he came in. She didn’t look up at him but said hi when he greeted her. He pulled a small pizza from the freezer, and popped it into the toaster oven. It was so great how quickly those things heated up food; he wasn’t sure why he’d gone so long without having one. He went to the couch to eat, flipping on the tv with the remote.
At some point, a baby started crying in the other room, and after awhile Frank said, “Tessa?” Without replying, she got up and went in to tend to her child. She came back out and said, “Diapers are so disgusting.” Then she went back to whatever she was doing on her phone. Frank sighed, then lost himself in a show about History. Later, he woke with a start, now sitting in a dark room, and took himself to bed.
Very early the next day, he started his routine. After gassing up, he ran one of his east-west routes. He hopped onto the 10 heading towards Pomona, and within minutes pulled up behind an old silver Civic on the shoulder that had nobody in it. Its left rear quarter panel was badly dented, and it sported mismatched wheels. Frank called in the abandoned vehicle to the proper authorities, then kept going.
Next up on the shoulder was a motorcycle, a large Harley touring machine decked out in bags with tassles. The large man clad in matching black leathers with his phone pressed to his ear welcomed Frank’s arrival, but he was too embarrassed to admit that he had run out of gas. He blustered something about carburetors and told Frank that AAA was on its way, waving him off with a jolly fake smile.
The next few incidents were debris-related. Frank didn’t clean up the dead animal making a mess at the start of an offramp, but he called it in to the right organization. Then it was lunch, and more time on the 210 headed west back towards Burbank. He spent an extra long time towards the end of his day helping two LA-styling young women who were stranded in a VW Bug covered in flower stickers; the smoke pouring from the engine was a pretty good indicator of the car’s fate. One of them even gave him a kiss on the cheek before they left in another friend’s car. His blush burned for a good ten minutes, and he felt the light press of her hands on his shoulders for a long while after. He was well through another sheet on the graph pad by now.
When he got back to his apartment, the sun had already set. He heard the baby crying before he made it through the door. The apartment was dark, and nobody replied when he called out, “Tess? You here?” He went into Tessa’s room where her baby boy was lying in a crib, red-faced and bawling, his tiny fists waving wildly in front of his face. His diaper was thoroughly soiled and leaking poop onto the already-stained sheets. When he spotted Frank, he quieted immediately into whimpering and stared piercingly at the grown man with his hazel eyes. With a shock that ran through his body, Frank momentarily saw his dead son, Jack, in the infant’s face. Jack, who had loved to drive, who’d loved to eat chili-cheese fries. With trembling hands, Frank picked up the baby and began cleaning him up.
The child’s wailing resumed, and he kept trying to shove his hand into his mouth. Laying on the couch while Frank prepared a bottle of formula, the baby’s wails rose and fell in time with his gasping breaths. When Frank finally put the nipple of the bottle against his mouth, it took some moments for the sputtering breaths to subside enough that the baby could suckle. Frank quietly prepared a second bottle when the first was emptied.
Tessa didn’t respond to Frank’s texts and eventually, his calls. The last time she’d left the baby like this, just a few weeks ago, it had been over three days before she returned to the apartment. Frank kept the baby on his lap as the little one tumbled directly from feeding into sleep. He gently brushed some crust from the boy’s miniature eyelashes. He used the remote and settled into a documentary about War.
The next morning, ahead of dawn, Frank scooped the baby up with him on his way out the door. He remembered to grab the jar of formula. Frank buckled the baby into the passenger seat, in their third-hand car seat that thankfully had been left at the apartment.
“It looks like you’re riding shotgun with me today, little man,” he murmured. The tiny boy waved his feet and hands in the air, and gurgled as if he might be enjoying himself. “Let’s go see what’s out there.”
Author’s Note: Inspired by once living in Los Angeles and traversing its arteries, and noticing the omnipresent existence of roadside debris. Where does all of it come from? Can any of us truly fathom all the lives that are unfolding everywhere, all the time?