Favor For a Favor
A POG novel
By Tim Williams
POG (pōg) Acronym for 'Personnel Other than Grunt.' Used by
members of the infantry to identify and to marginalize the
contributions of non-infantry Military Occupational Specialties.
Chapter 1
Most of the morning dew had evaporated by the time I rolled out of bed. The sun had cleared the eastward mountains by a little after seven in the morning, over my house in the foothills north of the Buffalo Park area. It was a small place, but I didn't need a ton of room. With as much time as I spent gone, the last thing I needed was a yard to maintain when I was home. Not that there was any grass to mow, but the scrubby bushes that did grow in the high desert required occasional pruning to ensure they didn’t take over.
I had bought the place two years earlier as a burned out shell. Even in that condition, it was the most expensive house I had ever bought at the time. After I finished the renovation, I could have sold it for three times what I paid. But even with my nomadic lifestyle, it was nice just to have a place to call my own.
One of the best things about the location of the house was that I could get to I-40 in less than half an hour. I didn't fly anywhere. I wasn’t afraid of flying; I just liked to have my truck wherever I went. I could get to anywhere in the lower forty-eight states in two or three days.
My interest in Flagstaff stemmed from the time I had spent driving semi trucks. The company that I drove for was headquartered in Phoenix. Any load headed northeast, which most of mine were, had to go through Flagstaff. I liked the views there, and that it snowed most winters. To the casual traveler, it was a good place to stop for gas and grab lunch. But with each trip through, I found something else to like about the area, and eventually decided to buy a house there. I just couldn't believe how much it cost to buy a house there.
It had been almost a month since the last time I had hit the road when my phone rang around noon. It was my friend Jason from the Marines. I hadn't heard from him since my last day at Cherry Point, other than the sporadic email conversation. It was the only way we really stayed in touch. He refused to have anything to do with social media, and neither one of us was that big on talking on the phone.
"What's going on, stranger?" I asked.
Noon for me would have been two in the afternoon for him, which seemed like an odd time for him to call.
"Same shit, different day, you know?" he said. "How long has it been since you came up this way?"
I had been stationed at Cherry Point with him for a little more than half of my military career. Not the most exciting place, but the beaches were nice in the summer. It was where I had learned to surf.
"It's been a couple of years now," I told him. "Not since I picked up that load from the Moen plant when I was doing the trucker thing. But you were out of the country, I think."
"Dude," he said, "you need to make another trip up here. It sucks now. Everyone is either gone somewhere else, or too busy with their families to raise any hell anymore. I'm bored to death."
"Not much of a sales pitch you got there," I said. "Why don't you take a vacation somewhere, and I'll meet you there?"
"Because this place will still suck when I get back,” he said. “I need you to come and help me jumpstart a little excitement around here. Get some new blood in the group."
'The group' referred to the dozen or so of us that used to hang out together. From the sound of it, he was the last man standing. Personally, I couldn't believe he was still in the area. I thought he would have been sent somewhere else by then.
"You know I'm not the best at making new friends," I told him.
"Then we'll get along great with the enemies of our new enemies," he countered, "Now get your ass packed and get going. Next time I call you, I don't want to hear anything but Eastbound and Down playing on your stereo."
That last bit was obviously meant as a trucker joke, even though I actually did have that song on my iPod. There was no way he could have known that, though. Still, I decided to humor him. I was starting to get cabin fever, anyway.
"OK, what's today... Tuesday?” I said, thinking out loud. “I can be there by this time Thursday afternoon. But you better have a place ready for me to crash as soon as I get there.”
My personal record for the I-40 run was a little over 53 hours, when I had left Twentynine Palms, returning to Cherry Point a decade prior. I only stopped for gas and a quick nap here and there. I figured that with the headstart from leaving out of Flagstaff, I should be able to cut it down to inside of 48 hours.
"The earlier you get here, the more sleep you can get,” he said. “But, you know, Thursday night is Ladies' Night at Roper's. I’m gonna need a wingman."
Roper's was a country and western nightclub a few miles out of town. I had outgrown closing down bars in my late twenties, but apparently Jason was still going strong.
"Alright, man, you're the boss,” I said. “Let me get off this phone and throw some clothes and stuff in a bag. See you Thursday,"
"You got it, brother,” he said. “Out."
Leave it to one of the least Gung-ho Marines I had ever known to use two-way radio lingo on the phone. Jason was the guy who always seemed like the most likely to be a defendant at a court martial, without having ever actually been in trouble with the authorities, military or civilian. He was the master of the gray area. When the Marines cracked down on visible tattoos, he was the guy taking leave the week before the new policy took effect so he could get sleeves done on both arms and get them documented so they'd be grandfathered in. When they started trying to take housing allowance away from single NCO's, he answered by marrying a stripper. So instead of collecting the housing allowance at the single rate, they had to pay him the family rate. Any time there was word of a new policy, Jason was thinking of a way to skirt around it. The brass hated him, but there was never anything they could do about it. He always did his best to be legitimately untouchable.
I went down the hall to my bedroom and grabbed my overnight bag. Between the Marines and trucking, I had learned to fit enough clothes and hygiene gear into an overnight bag to last a week.
I had never been a really flashy dresser. In fact, I tried to be as low-key as possible. I wore relaxed-fit blue jeans and plain gray t-shirts. My biggest requirement for clothes was that they had to be comfortable. I wasn’t big on jewelry or name brand logos. I didn't want anything about my appearance to stand out or be remembered.
I straightened up the few things I had out, grabbed my keys, and locked the door behind me. One of the nice things about living in the middle of nowhere was that nobody asked a lot of questions when I didn't come around for weeks or sometimes months on end. I told the few neighbors I had actually met that I was a traveling consultant for an internet marketing firm. It sounded generic and boring enough that nobody ever asked any questions.
Most of the neighbors were pretty private, themselves. The first one I met introduced himself as a retired Air Force Colonel. He and his wife spent as much time gone as I did, traveling the country in their motorhome. Another one was a city official, though I didn’t pay attention when he told me which department he ran. For the most part, we all mutually ignored each other's comings and goings.
Before I started the truck, I checked my independent shipping app for any shipments going my way that would fit in my truck. I had gotten lucky doing that in the past, and it covered the cost of food and gas for the trip. Other times, I had come up completely empty.
Luck was on my side that time. There was a riding lawnmower, weedeater, and a generator that needed to get from Winslow to Knoxville, which were both on my route. I entered my bid for about a hundred dollars over what I figured gas would cost, and hit the road. I hadn't even made it to town before the notification came across that my bid had won. Apparently, it was an urgent shipment.
I stopped for gas in Flagstaff and entered the shipper's address into my GPS. I grabbed a case of bottled water and a few bags of gummy worms from inside the truck stop, and pointed the truck east. There was nothing in particular about gummy worms that I could identify that would explain why I liked them so much, but they were my favorite candy and just about my only real indulgence.
My truck was in pretty good shape for its age. It was nothing too fancy. It was a Toyota Pickup from the early nineties, before they came up with the Tacoma nameplate. The extended cab area behind the front seats didn’t even have a seat; just a shelf. Its only real advantage over the regular cab was that I could recline my seats. Mine was a four-wheel drive model, with a set of all-terrain tires that looked bigger than they actually were on such a small truck. The paint was fading on all of the horizontal surfaces, but the engine still ran like new. It wasn't much to look at, but there was nothing in the world I would’ve traded it for.
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