Trucksong Read Online Free

truck detailers had control of. Me and Isa stood by the gear while he blinked the patchfile tags through his linkmaker on the trucks’ freek. Down off the side of the road, in a small gully, they grouped in the groove, pumping a rocking dub through their sound systems. It was a growing, growling mess, heavy bass and drumthump hitting you in the chest so you felt it rather than heard it. Felt the power of it, felt the falling snare hit rimshot crack on the frontbeat and the lazybones shaker on the back. Horns dripping wet with delay and the whole thing was a jammy vibe right from the start. They were patterned indies, dressed in decals and lightshifting scrollwork moving all the time, you couldn’t look at them for long because you wouldn’t move at all, you’d just be there in a trance.
    Smoov was well skilled and used to the ways of indie trucks. He knew how to wrangle them, how to tame them with patches, make them do what he wanted done. I’d watched him do it and I learned a few things over the years. I’d learned how the trucks would trade with riders and showmans like Smoov, how they’d swap their truckdream haze for patches that the riders made to trip out their truckminds. And the sounds they jammed shifted and changed over the years in different phases too, rolling through their culture like the phases of the moon meeting back around the beginning again. This time Smoov was trying to get rid of some old junk patches and at the same time to feel his way into this new mob. They might have some contacts, there might be some roading. They could help us shorten the time between two points in the backroads, or give him some sweet haze that he could get high off.
    He went down to the mob and they didn’t move or nothing. There were droans skittering and flapples flying around, scrounging for parts, but this wasn’t a big meet up and there were slim pickings. The indies didn’t give any sign they’d seen Smoov, they didn’t care. He was just a puny bloke and they were humming with power and tech and gleaming with moving glyphs and paintwork. Beats rocking, donks throbbing, swapping sounds and patchtag files to change the patterning of their minds, and Smoov always had something tasty, something good to share and trade for the haze that kept the backroads running nice and smooth like the outside of Smoov’s linkmaker worn shiny from being clutched in his hand.
    Down by the side of the creek I sat with Isa while we waited and she told me the story of the creatures in the rocks that came out at night when no one’s looking and stole the breath from young babbies and how the indie trucks came on the land and rutted like wild animals, smashing into each other and flying sparks in the night sky and making babby trucks that over time had come to learn how to make the haze to pull the best riders with the best patches.
    I sat there letting the sound of her voice fall around me like soft rain. I was in heaven. Then she started talking about this bloke called Crow and I snapped out of me dream, remembering that crow on Mum’s body.
    ‘Crow wears a coat made from shredded truck tyres and he’s a scavenger, a trickster. He roads slow from camp to camp, stickin his beak in to any business where there’s profit to be made from the shreds of others’ pain. He’s always ready to extract his toll from sufferin. But he’s got a magic about his self, he can change his shapes dependin on the company he keeps and he knows the ways of the backroads truckriders and how to live off the land as well. He can turn others’ minds around to do his own work with a crinkle of his white eye.’
    I said, ‘I never heard that before.’
    ‘It’s true,’ Isa said. ‘True fact. I ain’t seen him meself but I seen the marks he’s made in the world.’
    Later on Smoov came back and he was high on wild indie truckdream haze. He talked a hundred mile an hour about them indies that was also tuning to the Wotcher’s freek.
    He said,