Opening of my second novel, RADIANCE

Prologue

            The Driver slapped himself hard on his right cheek to stay awake.  He yawned and reached out to turn on the radio. Elvis was singing “All Shook Up” and the driver sang along, imitating The King’s classic staccato delivery, hiccoughing along with my hands are shaky and my knees are week. Enjoying this, he turned the radio up louder.  It was sleeting and he had to keep swiping at his windshield to make a porthole through which he might possibly be able navigate this crappy road.  The road was called the Golden Road because the dirt in this part of Maine had a strange yellow tinge.

            The Driver had driven The Golden Road five days a week for the past decade, in all conditions,  and it never got any prettier.  He should not have had that third beer after he punched out, but the job was punishing. Even the name of his Union embarrassed him, The International Brotherhood of Pulp.  He had lost track of how many logs he and the others had gotten onto the conveyer belt that day for processing, but if the pain in his lower back was any gauge, the answer was too many. He yearned for an easier job, but the paper mill was the only game in town. At least his thirty mile commute from the Millinocket Mill was paved. He slapped himself again and shook his head, taking in a great gulp of air through his mouth.  Sometimes he wanted to just keep driving, chance the storied unpaved stretch of The Golden Road that led right on up to Canada, to the St. Zacharie Border Crossing, one of the few with no inspections.  He would just drive right through and begin again.

            The Driver’s chin bobbed down onto his chest and the next thing he knew, the car was on the other side of the road, aimed at a birch tree.  He snapped to, swearing and grappling wildly for the steering wheel,  righting the car only seconds before it would have ploughed into the tree.  He was wide awake now, heart galloping.  Dion sang The Wanderer and the driver sat forward in his seat, downed the dregs of some cold coffee,  and gave himself a loud pep talk.  After a few minutes, he saw something coming towards him, and even though the beast was far away, he could tell by its sideways lope and eerie nonchalance that it was a coyote. He slowed down and swiped at the windshield again, rolling down the passenger window just a crack, which immediately sent icy rivulets streaming down the interior glass but did little to help his view.  As he got closer he saw that the coyote was a mangy, half-starved thing, an elder, and also that there was something glowing in front of its muzzle. What the hell? Was the beast carrying a flashlight?

            The driver rubbed his eyes. In the soupy early dark, the object gave off a dull glow, not green exactly, but not pure white either.  The coyote continued coming straight at the driver,  walking steadily down the middle of the road, his head bowed against the sleet, or perhaps from the weight of whatever was clamped between his teeth. The driver slowed to a halt now to try and get a better look at the object. He recognized it first as a bone, and then, if he was not mistaken, a human bone, a small femur,  one end broken and jagged, the other notched where it had once fit into the joint.  And this bone: it glowed.

            The coyote stopped walking and sat down in front of the car. It dropped the bone and looked up at the driver,  then shook the moisture out of its coat, lay on its stomach, and began to gnaw methodically on the bright treasure. The driver honked and pulled out to go around the animal, gunning the car and not looking back. The next day he would tell himself he had imagined the whole thing, that it was the beer, that he should not try to make that drive when he was exhausted. And the driver of the logging truck that came up that same road two hours later and saw something small and glowing off on the shoulder would think it was a torn woolen scarf, knitted with some sort of glinting, metallic yarn. Gradually, as animals and time nibbled away at the femur bone, the next passerby who saw it at night would mistake it for a some spilt paint,  small but surprisingly bright there on the side of the road.   The old coyote had long since returned to the woods, where the others in its pack mostly slept during the day. At dusk, a female checked in on her three new pups.  Each had been born with six toes instead of the normal four, so their paws were big and cumbersome, and they licked at them often to remove the now that hardened there. The pups were eager to emerge from the den, and they stretched and tumbled out into the night, each carrying a small bone between its teeth, picked from the larger hoard piled deep inside, bones that radiated with a strange and persistent light.