Mort had not always been a trucker with a roaring hard-on. Once he had been a little boy with a hairless little pecker, but that had been twenty years earlier. For as long as he could remember—as long as he had been big enough to reach the pedals and get a Class 2 license, he had been doing just what he was doing now: pulling.
At the moment he was pulling fifty thousand pounds of container across the continental divide for some manufacturer who couldn’t wait an extra three weeks for his merchandise to go from Dallas to Yokohama via the Canal. Hence Mart was using a twinscrew KW tractor to move the container to San Pedro and save a few thousand slow salt water miles and everybody concerned was having kittens and the ship with the unpronounceable name was running up bills for demurrage and port fees even faster than the dollar was declining.
A casual motorist heading west from El Paso or Las Cruces might not even realize he was crossing a continental divide, so gentle is the rise. But Mart, with fifty thousand pounds behind his tractor, was aware of it every time he watched the tach needle slowly drift down into the red. He grumbled a complicated curse as he fought the front box of the Fuller down a gear while simultaneously bringing the rear box up one, which resulted in the rig settling down seconds later, tach needle two-hundred revs up into the green and the drive train ‘split’ half a gear down.