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For a few months Keith's extracurricular activities were inhibited by the presence of an unwanted codriver who insisted that driving truck couldn't be too complicated if Keith could do it. “Dad always tried to integrate himself into my jobs, but I never expected to see him in my truck. Believe me, it wasn't my idea. He went out and got himself a commercial license, which meant he could drive anything up to eighteen-wheelers. Then he went to my boss and said he wanted to start a business hauling produce, but first he had to learn to drive truck, and what better way than with his own son?

“I was leaving Seattle when I was ordered to return to the main office and pick up a loaded trailer going south. The boss said, ‘You'll have a helper. His name is Les Jesperson.' Was I pissed!”

In an odd reversal of their relationship, father and son drove together for two months, Keith as teacher and Les as student. Their situation provided frequent opportunities for the son to feel superior, and Keith took full advantage. “The first time Dad drove, he was grinding the gears something awful. I tried explaining to him, ‘Dad, the rpms of the motor has to match the rpms of the gearbox. If one's running faster than the other, it's not gonna work right.'

“‘No, no,' he says, ‘it's not my fault—it's this goddamn truck.' Etcetera, etcetera. Just like Dad—he was never wrong.

“I told him what to do over and over, and he still didn't get it. I said, ‘
Goddamn it, Dad,
you're grinding my gears to pieces!'”

“He tried again, and it's clank clank, clunk clunk, grind and grind. You could smell the smoking plates. I was thinking how glad I was that I didn't own this truck. It was a dark umber-and-bronze 1984 Freightliner conventional, with a four-hundred horsepower Cummins motor and a thirteen-speed gearbox—too nice a truck to be headed for the junkyard.

“Dad kept making things worse with every shift. I finally blew up and said, ‘Pull this truck over right now!'

“He said, ‘You're mad, aren'tcha?'

“I said, ‘Dad, I'm
way
beyond mad. Now pull over and get out!'

“It's nighttime, we walk to the back of the truck, and he says, ‘Are you pissed, Keith?' He's ready for me to jump down his throat.

“I said, ‘Dad, stand there. Just take a few breaths.' Then I said, ‘Are you all nice and rested, now? Relaxed? Comfy? You're just fine?'

“‘Yeah.'

“I said, ‘Now Dad, you're gonna get in the truck, climb into the sleeper, and go to sleep.'

“'You're not mad, Son?'

“I started laughing. I couldn't help myself. He says, ‘What's funny?'

“I says, ‘Think about it, Dad. Remember when you used to say, How many times do I have to tell you something, Keith?—and now I'm telling you the same damn thing.'

“He got into the sleeper, and every once in a while I'd hear grumbling. I said, ‘Don't get too cozy back there, Dad. We'll try again in a while. If you keep grinding those gears, I'll dump you at the next truck stop. It's a long walk home.' That felt good. He shut up after that.”

The next day the wrestling bears pulled into loading docks in Watsonville, California, and Keith instructed his father to back the big semi into Door 6. “I went inside and took a leak, and when I came out, the guys on the docks were laughing their asses off. Dad was all cockeyed with the truck. One of the lumpers asked me, ‘Where'd that dude learn to drive?'

“I got in the cab. Dad's face was beet red, and he was cussing a blue streak. I said, ‘Move over!' I said, ‘You're making it more complicated than it is.' I spent a half hour showing him how to park the rig in the dock. He still didn't get it. He said, ‘Son, I'll never be able to drive a truck like you. You act like this is a sports car!'

“I said, ‘Dad, it
is
a sports car—a seventy-two-foot sports car. You can't let it drive you. You gotta be boss.'

“He finally gave up. Last thing he said was, ‘That goddamn transmission must have a hundred gears, and I bet I stripped every one of 'em.'

“I was so happy to get rid of him. Driving with him was like driving with women. They enjoy the scenery and I do the work. Now I was free to do as I pleased.”

Solo again, Keith was driving on Highway 97 near Goldendale, Washington, when the headlights on his Peterbilt silhouetted a female walking her bicycle in the rain. “She was shivering, and I stopped to give her a lift. I gave her my coat to get warm. I noticed that she was Indian, maybe fifteen years old, but stacked. Something about Indian girls always turned me on—maybe it went back to the ones I knew in Chilliwack. My rape fantasies were running wild even before I stowed her bike in the load of scrap steel.

“I decided to take this girl on the spot. My heart was pounding in my shirt as I parked at a wide spot on top of Maryhill. She must have read my mind. The second I reached for her, she opened the door to get out. I grabbed at my coat and off came her sweater, exposing her bra. She ran like an antelope. I had the sickening feeling that the situation was getting out of hand and I was headed for deep shit.

“After she ran about fifty feet, she turned around and yelled for her bike and sweater. I said, ‘Come back! I was just trying to get my coat.' By this time I was really scared. I handed over her sweater, reached into the load and pulled out her bike. Then I took off at top speed.

“I kept thinking about all the ways I could be caught. The name on the truck. A load that could be traced. My log. There weren't many drivers as big as me. I'd tried to take a minor against her will, and that was a penitentiary offense. I figured she'd go home and tell her sob story to Daddy and I'd be on my way to prison.

“I didn't sleep for a week. I kept listening for a knock. Every birdcall sounded like a siren. When I was on the road, I looked in my rearview mirrors more than my windshield. Whenever I spotted a police car in a truck stop or a rest stop, I rushed off to the next one.

“But nothing ever came of it. Everybody knows that most rape victims don't go to the cops. I kept reminding myself what a close call I'd had. I swore I'd
never
try anything like that again. I would still chase women, but on their terms only. If they wanted sex, okay. If they didn't, bye-bye. The Maryhill moment haunted me. I knew that from now on I had to control my fantasies. If I wanted sex, I had to get it from Rose. Or masturbate. There was no other choice.”

 

Within a few months of the near miss, Keith had to conclude that he would never be able to satisfy his sexual needs at home. For a while he vented his frustration on familiar targets. “I hit a cat with a rock while my son Jason was with me. He began to cry as I kept stoning the cat. I threw the carcass in a ditch down the roadway. When I was by myself, I caught a neighbor's dog and killed it in steps, holding its head underwater and then letting it breathe, then up and down till it drowned. It was an early version of the death game that I played later. The technique made it last longer and gave me a hard-on.

“I couldn't hide my attitude about animals from my family. My children knew that their father would kill a cat or dog if he caught it. I would corner cats and agitate them with a pole till they struck back, and then I'd wring their necks. In winter I'd douse them in cold water and put them out in zero weather. I'd splash them with gasoline and light 'em up. I beat my own kids' dog to death. He had bad hemorrhoids and I had no patience with problems like that. I took him out back and smashed his head. My kids cried for days. Nothing I did would console them.”

 

With the incident at Maryhill still fresh in his memory, Keith decided to give professionals a try. “My first real hooker experience came when I drove into the Oceanside rest area on I-5 between San Diego and Los Angeles. Linda was petite, had little titties, and wore a long peasant dress and glasses. She looked more like somebody's kid sister than a truckers' whore. She was very energetic and I spent three hours getting my twenty bucks' worth.

“She liked my loving so much that she gave me her home phone number, and I called her whenever I was near. Great sex, and free! I fantasized about her and requested loads to San Diego just to see her. Every encounter was the same as the first. We kissed like lovers, and for an hour or two we
were
lovers.

“On a trip to Denver I sat three days waiting to get loaded. I took a waitress named Dee Dee into my truck and screwed her. Turned out she was a kiss-and-tell gal. Pretty soon the other girls were sniffing around to see if I was as good as she said. I decided I didn't need the publicity and dumped Dee Dee for good.

“By now I was getting pretty good at sex, and one of the reasons was because I could never arouse my wife. That made me work extra hard on the others. I treated every screw the same. First, I would hold them to feel the warmth of their skin against mine. Then I would use foreplay to get to know them better. To me, the ejaculation part was almost an afterthought. Hookers knew they could get more out of me than just sex.

“A whore named Sharon told me to slow down and fuck her till she came. I did what she asked. We went at it a second and a third time before she let me go. She put out the word that I was big and patient, and other hookers wanted to do me for free. It reached the point where I was almost annoyed if they asked for money.

“On my truck routes I had whores from eighteen to fifty-five. When I got home I'd try to have sex with Rose, but it was never anything to scream about. By this stage of our marriage, once a week was too often for her. I needed it every day, two or three times if I could get it. I was masturbating more than ever.”

Now and then Keith took another wild stab at being a family man. In the summer of 1987 he drove his six-year-old son to southern California on a produce run. “Jason had a blast. A couple of weeks later Rose asked to ride. We drove to Phoenix with a load of Washington apples and picked up tomatoes in Nogales, Arizona. She thought it would be a holiday, but she found out that trucking was hard work. When she wasn't sleeping, she was griping. At the end of a week she said she would never ride in a truck again. That suited me fine.”

 

Family members heard a different version of Rose's disenchantment. One said, “They got to Phoenix, and Keith took her out to dinner. On the way back to their hotel they walked past a black limousine with two guys who looked like pimps. Keith shoved her toward them. He said, ‘Here! You can have my wife.' Then he laughed.

“When they got back home, he went out to the irrigation canal and strangled a cat. He dropped the carcass on the ground to show his kids. At the time they were six, five and two. Rose told me he had a glazed look in his eyes. He explained that the cat didn't get out of his way. It must've fought for its life because he had deep scratches up and down his arms. Rose got angry and brought the kids in the house. That's when the rest of us began to wonder about his sanity. Rose had wondered for years.”

 

Keith remembered the Arizona trip as the start of terminal warfare with his unhappy wife. They'd been married for twelve years and agreed on few subjects other than the well-being of their children. “When I felt like hitting Rose, I took long walks or bike rides to cool down. It reached the point where I wasn't home even when I was home—my head was at some truck stop or in my sleeper. I found excuses to get away, killed the odd animal, set a few fires, shoplifted. I got in fights with strangers for the first time in my life.

“On the road I pushed myself even harder. I guess I was running from something, but I didn't know what. I chased NoDoz with coffee and Jolt and Dr. Pepper. I tore up my stomach with chocolate-covered coffee beans. Sometimes I slapped my face to stay awake. I did crazy things like driving from Washington to Florida without sleeping. I'd switch on cruise control and start to nod over the steering wheel or hear an air horn and discover I was crossing the center line.

“I had the shortest fuse on the highway. I caused accidents and wrecked four or five trucks, including one of my own. I lost a couple of jobs that way. Once I was driving at sixty miles an hour near Four Corners, California, when a trucker tried to ease past me in the face of oncoming traffic. When he got alongside, he yelled on his radio for me to let him in—quick.

“I told him to back off. ‘Try again when you got enough speed!'

“He screamed like a maniac—‘You're supposed to yield! It's the unwritten law of truckers,' blah blah blah. I lost my temper and ran him off the road. Never heard a word about it.

“I was driving south on Highway 97 in Oregon when an interstate trucker tried to pass me the same way. When he pulled alongside, he turned his signal on to claim the right-of-way. I didn't yield, and he gets on the CB and calls me crazy. I ran him onto the shoulder. I did that to a couple of other drivers, too. I'd become a one-man wrecking crew. There was an unwritten code among truckers, and it saved my ass. Nobody ever ratted me out.”