Hinkley

Although it is winter, the final shimmers of the day’s heat are dancing up from the asphalt as the driver passes a sign: “Hinkley, California. Pop. 221.” The inside of the car has retained a fair bit of that heat as well. The driver begins to notice the faint stickiness of sweat mixed with dust collecting along the valley down the middle of his back. It clings through a cotton undershirt to the flannel of his jacket, which in turn smacks against the vinyl seat-back whenever he shifts forward.

A lit-up clock face at a passing gas station reads five past seven. Judging from the way the night has settled the shards of deep blue, sticking out of the horizon, into a more welcoming purple, that could be correct. Then again, the gas station looks as if it may not have serviced a car in years.

The driver lowers his window while wondering what seven o’clock out in the desert, in the dead of winter, exactly feels like. Indiscernible: that’s what he decides. Time stretches both ahead and behind, disappearing much like the highway; both gradually fading under the weight of their own infinite expanse.

The driver, on the other hand, is a finite being in his essence, and he doesn’t do well with concepts much larger than himself. So he settles for: “Plenny a time. Better sel’in tho. S’gonna be anotha long-ass night t’night.”

The driver shakes his head, vigorously; but he can neither lose the phantom afterimages of the army trucks nor the sense that all appearances have become detached from their reality. His thoughts turn once again to the murderous. The driver’s belief that this is all part of a dream, like trudging through an absurd nightmare, will make it easy to kill. So easy, in fact, that he is at the verge of understanding how Paula's killer did it in the first place. Murder is easy when nothing feels real. The driver is about to understand the murder of his fiancée.

“Now I see!” He jumps. And in a quieter, more timid, turn of thought, “Ah’m really losin it”, almost afraid of what he might think of next.

If it wasn’t happening to him, the driver might have even thought it peculiar: the way hatred and murderous desire can link forces and take up residence in the body, like a parasite. Each one grows fat and ferocious by feeding off the other, until they intertwine and burn as a single entity. Parasitical vengeance has set the driver’s bowels aflame, and it threatens to consume him entirely.

Now, to breathe is to seek vengeance. Every step forward brings the driver another instant closer to the end. That thought, in itself, brings him a perverse sort of relief. It’s the fatal comfort that comes from knowing that each action, no matter how insignificant on its surface, joins a long –though not interminable- chain that will finally bring him to satisfaction, standing over the sludgy remains of that monster’s hacked-apart body.

The high beams from an oncoming truck break up into a kaleidoscope of swirling light. It’s not a truck, but the open-roof, square front of a jeep –like the type seen in the newsreels from Europe, all throughout the war- and there isn’t one, but many. They are accompanied by the riot of a mechanical roar that is usually associated with four-engine jetliners. Shhhhhhhhrooooooooom. The inside of the pickup is awash in the full floodlights of an entire convoy -more than that, it would seem- and the rumble of the passing camouflaged trailers is like an earthquake that threatens to throw the pickup clear off the road.

The train of covered flatbeds keeps coming: flapping conestogas of a militant fury. One dutifully coming on right behind another, the procession of four-wheel giants would seem to never end, when the highway is instantly sunk back into the silent glow of a premature dusk. There isn’t so much the fading tremble of motors as a low, gravelly ringing in the driver’s ears. It’s the night air outside that seems to be so quiet, hardly causing a rustle as it blows in through the window, that the driver has to ask if he actually witnessed what he just saw and felt. The afterimage of the headlights still dance across his retinas and causes the luminous specters of a convoy to permanently take up the road ahead; but is that proof enough?

“Wha’n hell juss happen’d?”

“Wuza goddammed, innocent kid, for Chrissakes. Ne’r did nuthin’ wrong ta nobody.” It’s as if he’s pleading, but with whom? Spittle collects between his clenched teeth. It hangs like the sheen that’s glossed over his reddened eyes.

A sniffle brings him back to the here-and-now and he collects himself in the bucket seat. He reminds himself that he has to be steady for the job; cool and collected and totally in control. He knows that every action –even this, the way he grips the wheel- must be well thought-out, or “premeditated” as they will call it in court, if all goes according to plan. And what a hastily drawn-up plan it is, but here he is as the pickup carries him another inch closer with every passing second. All he has to do is push ever so slightly down on that pedal.

---

When the driver found her, he just sat forever, right in that spot beside the front the steps, and stared. He doesn’t know how long it went on for because he can’t remember any of it. When he came to, the morning light was just beginning to break. He approximated a hastily dug hole with some of his ranch tools. It was nothing a bloodhound wouldn’t be able to sniff out in a couple of seconds -the driver has seen more than his share of pulpy mystery movies- but it will certainly buy him enough time for what he figures will be a two day drive, with minimal stopping.

For the rest of the day, the driver laid low indoors. When he finally got around to giving his trusty Chevrolet a cursory look-over and tune-up, it was just enough time for him to grab a few clothes together; all his cash -Paula didn’t have any, as far as he knows; the remaining bullets hidden in a matchbox; and the only thing left in this world that could bring any semblance of justice, though he knows nothing can bring back the piece of himself lost earlier that morning.

The driver wants to believe that he’s up for it; that when the time comes, he can hold the grip of his gun as steadily as he can believe the reality that has been thrust upon him, as if from above. The shock that first slashed him open and turned him inside out –forever destroying his very relation to the living- has now spread through his blood and settled into full-out septic shock.

The driver can't blame the Warshansky's for wanting to protect their daughter, when he thinks about the savage she dated before him. That low-life beat her then and has murdered her now. Mr. Warshansky was right to get him locked up; yet seeing how the ex-lover vowed revenge, anything less than a life sentence was not enough. His five-year sentence simply allowed his rage to boil to a murderous crescendo. Now the driver must finish where the criminal justice system left off, except this time, there will be no use for a trial.

The problem remains: if the driver were pressed to physically describe Paula's ex-lover, the man undoubtedly responsible for her death, he wouldn't be able to; nor could he identify Paula's murderer by his full, legal name. The driver has only ever heard snippets or veiled allusions to this man. He was such a dark stain upon her life, Paula always changed the subject whenever he came up. The driver had managed, over time, to piece together the story of how she and her father were able to put him away after a particularly violent outburst involving her and a young Mexican man . Apparently, Paula wasn’t as eager as her father to stand witness against him, but this lover had treated her badly enough so that she was relieved –like a freed prisoner herself- when the sentence finally came down: five to eight years for grievous assault.

Paula did mention how this man –never bothering to elaborate beyond a pointed “he”- was hell-bent on revenge. Even before the incident and the subsequent trial, she had made it clear that she did not want the relationship to continue; and that may have been what fueled that fateful attack. He fought, literally, to get her back by any means. When the law intervened, with the help of Mr. Warshansky and his reluctant daughter, and put her ex-lover behind bars, the focus of his rage shifted. If he couldn’t get her back, then he would have to simply make her and her family pay. The prison sentence began shortly before Paula and the driver met. She told him of the ex-lover’s pledges of revenge, but he never fully believed it; not until this morning.

“Goddammed sonnofabitch mutherfucker….” he simmers. The driver is sufficiently woken by the thought of Paula’s murderer -out there in the night just like the driver, at this moment crossing Lord-knows which state line on his way to Michigan. The driver’s hands fuse to the wheel as all the blood rushes from his knuckles. Its leather covering croaks under his unrelenting grip. He does not see a steering wheel but the neck of the man, the lowlife animal, he plans to relieve from its miserable existence. A gasp, a suffocating ball, rises to his throat.

At the outbreak of the war, a point of contact in the industrialized Midwest proved useful to those out of work and unable to fight. Many more in the driver’s extended family joined them up North later on, to assemble tanks and armaments in converted car factories. How strange the once-familiar wasteland of steam whistles and clock-in lines seems compared to this no-man’s land of…what, exactly? It has gotten dark so fast, and there is such a noticeable lack of electric lamps in the desert, that the driver seems to be racing through pure night.

The sound of the tires accelerating against asphalt offers its own, strange type of solace. Despite the driver’s current ragged state -where one moment brings despair, the next a flash of murderous rage, but always detached with a numbing exhaustion- it feels good to peel away from such a God-forsaken corner of the Earth. His mind stretches out in both directions of the highway, thinking of how many more there are out there just like this one: little hovels of failure. It makes him smile the smile of a man who’s lost everything, but can still manage to move, race down a deserted highway. It feels good to speed; not only for the rush it brings, but because every second brings him closer to…The Moment. He fantasizes about it –not knowing how long it will take or how far he will have to go to find it- and it leaves a metallic twinge in his mouth. He doesn’t know what Paula’s killer looks like, but the driver can see his stunned expression as he pulls the trigger. Bang.

He and Paula had moved down to California less than a year ago, so they could be closer to his sister in Fresno. She had left Michigan just as the driver and his sweetheart, Paula, were really starting to settle down and get serious about each other. They discussed marriage -as a formality, since they had come to feel 'as good as' husband and wife over the course of their four-year courtship- and possibly moving away. Once the driver's sister learned of their deepening commitment, and their desire to leave Dearborn, she extended an invitation for the two of them to join her out West. It took them three years of soul-searching and saving, but in the early hours of January 18, 1948, the couple loaded up their Chevrolet pickup truck and struck out on the road, with a new life together as their destination.

Now here he is, driving that same pickup truck every inch of the two thousand, three hundred and thirty-six miles back to Michigan. The reverse trip feels a lot less like a homecoming than it should. Maybe that’s because the driver has no one to return home to. In fact, he must go directly to the home of Paula’s family, Karl and Erma Warshansky. They are sure to be no more welcoming of him now -bearing news of their daughter's death at the hands of an ex-lover upon his release from prison, and a warning that they are next- as when they first laid their disapproving eyes on him.

Palmo

There are unknown dozens of forgotten settlements scattered throughout California’s central desert: mostly mining towns, or former outposts along an old Post route. It’s just as sad for those who stayed behind as it was for those forced to flee. The driver can barely make out the remnants of these dilapidating towns through the dust-caked windshield and the gloom of a wintry dusk, but they make him think of how it must have been for his Pa and Ma to leave the parched remnants surrounding Amarillo.

The driver knows it is a mistake to remind himself of Ma and Pa, but he's grateful for the few moments of distraction these thoughts afford. The howl of a dry desert wind brings him back to the present; but in his mind, there remains little difference between the parched Texas fields of his earliest childhood and the arid hovels all around him.

“Same eve-ware. Nah differen’ thin ‘ere,” the driver sums up as the last of the long-forsaken shacks of Palmo fade from view. A twinge of melancholy adds a certain fittingness to the drunken slur of his thoughts.

Lucky for him, the driver was too young to remember the squalor and sheer barrenness –of the once-abundant plains of wheat sheafs and steers' heads- that he and his parents left behind. The rails subsequently became a way of life for a lot of the dispossessed rural folk. That is to say, wherever boxcars continued to rumble, there remained the sliver of hope that once could escape. Ma and Pa, like so many others at the time, hopped a freight train for the growing industrial belt up North. In their case, the endless trains carried them parts of the way to St. Louis and Lansing, Michigan, before they finally settled in Dearborn, just outside of Detroit. Each time a freight would groan to life from a sleeping rail-yard, a frightened three-year old would be hoisted up by his side onto a rolling flatbed; all the while clutching that scrappy bear of a rag doll.

“F’that ol’ flop-rag din c’lect all the soot from Tulsey ta Dee-troy.”

At the thought of his younger self, the driver’s mouth breaks out into the effort of a smile. It can’t be called a memory as such, because all he can remember is being told the story of his parents’ exodus; countless times, not only by them but by cousins and farther-removed relations who bore a strange Texas brogue and who he only saw once or twice in his life.

The driver knows who killed his fiancée, his single reason for living, his life itself -oh dear, dear, irreplaceable Paula. It was the man who swore he would kill her, and her father, for putting him behind bars. His sentence wasn't very long, eight years at the most, so the past five years have been a waiting game. When the driver and his lady moved to California back in January, he had begun to think that things might not turn out so bad. They had hit a couple of rough patches, mostly involving a lack of employment and the money troubles that followed, but they felt that as long as they stuck together, everything would turn out all right. Even that morning, on his early-hours return home from work, the driver was thinking of how he was just one more paycheck away from buying Paula that diamond ring he had picked out. With that modest band and quarter-cut stone, it would seal their future together, and maybe even shield them from.......but then he pulled up the driveway and his headlights caught the prostrate figure, amidst a pool as dark as crude and half as slick.

The driver relives the moment with a wrenching pain of disgust, horror, and murderous fury. He doesn't realize it, but his hands grip the wheel as if it were the neck of the son of a bitch he has set out to find. His fingers grow numb and his forearms shake from the strain, but the driver can only focus on one thing: conquering every one of the torturous miles between here and Dearborn, Michigan, where Paula's parents wait and suspect nothing of her fate nor their own. The driver knows that he should stop and call them, tell them that their little girl has been murdered and now the killer is coming for them; but he can do nothing but press down harder on that pedal. There remains too much distance between himself and the man who stole everything from him earlier this morning.

It seems like days ago since he stepped foot in this automobile, unthinking, unfeeling: a pure gut reaction to what he had just discovered. Bending down to embrace the stiffening body, he felt the life rush out of him as forcefully as the blood must have poured out of Paula, his fiercely loved and murdered fiancée.

What else could he have done? Relied on the police? The wait -to have waited any amount of time at all- would have killed him right then. The only thing he could do was jump in his Chevrolet series AK pickup and....just drive, and pray he can get to Michigan in time to stop her killer from striking again, this time against Paula's family.

Every mile is an interminable stretch. The unchanging desert terrain makes it seem like the faster he goes, the more he is just speeding in place. The frustration is one of swimming against a jet stream, especially in a race such as this: against time and a killer on the loose. The driver ponders “Bakersfield” and “38” and they give rise to a jolt of anger.

“Shit! Am only out undred an’ ten, undred an’ tweny, mies a’most. An it’s arready dark”, the driver laments, searching the sky for some residual fragments of day, increasingly rare in these, the shortest days of winter.

When alone for long enough, the voice one uses to think becomes his only voice; louder and more real than the one he’s used to. The driver ponders this, perhaps aloud, but the voice he hears seems to whistle in off the wind blowing past the window.

“S'dammed cold for th'desert.”

It’s not so much a complaint as a wry affirmation. His face –tanned but pale in the early evening’s haze- doesn't change from a catatonic stare. It's been the same since he discovered her body sprawled in a pool of blood on the front steps of their home, ten hours prior. Most men would have panicked, called the police, and before they knew it, they'd be hauled in themselves for questioning; the most obvious evidence pointing to a domestic dispute turned deadly. Not in this case.