THE DAY THE TRUCKER’S CODE CAME TO LIFE
The Trucker’s Code was no big deal to the other drivers down at the warehouse. Just a coffee-stained sheet of paper tacked to the wall in the break room. But all that changed the day Pip Street hired on as a driver. Pip had just lost everything, and to a man who had just lost everything, the Trucker’s Code was big deal. He saw it as his way back—back to self respect, back to being able to hold his head up in front of Bonnie. Less than twenty-four hours ago he had fled from North Carolina to Texas. In the night. Him and Bonnie. And so, clutching the coffee-stained Code in one hand and the crisp new contract to drive an eighteen wheeler in the other, he rushed home to Bonnie, his everything, the only one who hadn’t given up on him... Bonnie immediately saw how much the document meant to Pip, so while he was gone on his first three-day road trip, she cross-stitched the words onto a piece of cloth. Since she had no money for fabric, she cut a piece from the gown she had worn the night she was crowned Miss Fort Worth. That tore Pip up. He promised her he’d make good this time and vowed he’d live or die by the teachings in the Trucker’s Code, unaware of how soon the document would claim that commitment…and unaware that the mad dog from North Carolina was hot on his heels… The Trucker’s Code was about to come to life… (Copyright, 1988, 1998 O. J. Bryson)
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(Don't worry, little boy. We have plenty in stock, now.)
A note to truckers from Dr. Jay Bryson,
the author of The Trucker's Code,
which appears in his novel, The Box:
How long has
it been since you heard of a novel that had an ordinary person as the hero,
especially a trucker?
I couldn’t
drive an eighteen-wheeler if you held a gun on me. But an event happened to me
as a child that branded a love for trucks into my bones. When I was little, my
uncle told me that when I got big he would buy a truck, let me drive it, and we
would split the profit. Every truck I saw after that, I imagined was the truck
my uncle would someday buy—at least until I got big. As I was writing THE BOX,
which is three novels, each connected, I took Pip, the hero, through the stage
as a cowboy, as a watermelon tycoon, and then as a trucker. But all of the
preliminary scenes were aimed at getting to the trucker story. Here is a little
of the plot dealing with trucking:
The Box is the story of Pip, an ordinary man, who leads a three-mile-long convoy of truckers in a race across Texas, trying to rescue a kidnapped child. Traveling at breakneck speed in his high-speed Mack truck, Pip’s hands couldn’t reach the high and mighty, but for fifteen years he’d been making friends with the weak and lowly, and some of them had friends in high places. Some knew lawyers, some knew senators, some knew helicopter pilots, and one lady in a nursing home, Aunt Molly, knew an air traffic controller. Between Pip, Aunt Molly, her nephew--the air traffic controller--and a few others in high places, that convoy of truckers brought a little karma down on one Texas Courthouse, and one child stealer got his comeuppance.
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