“I’ll tell you, ahm-in tight with one a the six or seven men who started th’whole shit-stompin, whore-fuckin, hard-drinkin, money-pissin hole of a town in th’firs place.”

The driver feels compelled to feign a certain amount of awe equal to the hitchhiker’s gusto. He could care less about Las Vegas, let alone who this joker knows and what he has planned there. He figures any minute wasted there, or anywhere, is a minute given without a fight to his prey: the animal who took Paula. There is no way that this cretin is going to get off so easy, especially not with a diversion in some desert hole with some unscrupulous wayfarer he just met. If the hitchhiker wants to live it up for one night in Las Vegas, then the driver would be happy to leave him anywhere on Freemont he pleases.

Enormous organ cacti push up all around the two as they head further east. The prickly spires are hard to make out against the dark blue curtain of stars. If anything, they are blacker than the sky itself. Cutouts, as if tailored from pure night, mark the land in shapes of giant cacti. Their monstrous, invisible fingers twist over each other as they stretch up and out, grasping towards nothing.

The driver drinks in the air as it refreshes his nostrils, his throat, his dry desert lungs. There’s a sweet crispness to the air, but he can’t be sure if it’s actually emanating from out there, in the desert, or is merely how he imagines an arid winter should smell. Either way, as sweet and briefly rejuvenating as it may be, he would sooner trade it all in to be standing face to face with the coward who took his love, his life. Better yet, he would forfeit his life to kill, to maim, or to make his fiancée’s killer live forever, as long as it is with a pain so unbearable that he would beg for a death that never comes.

Thoughts of revenge, and the million different ways to inflict it, make the driver’s chest grow warm, like the afterglow of whiskey. Better than whiskey, it takes him away to a day or two into the future. Unlike the time travel of a drunken haze, the driver is certain of this future and it is clearer than any alcoholic hallucination:

He has tracked down and surprised the vermin, of whom he has never seen and only knows a name; or a nickname, to be precise. The man is armed. He reaches for his piece and the driver allows him, all the while watching coolly from behind a pointed barrel. “Go head. Make yer move.” The dialogue will have to be revised -or better yet, improvised on the spot- so it sounds less like the outtakes from a ‘B’ Western.

Broken Pass

“Whathca doin’, bud?”

The pickup slows to a halt at the side of the road. An organ cactus is caught sprouting up in the headlights, bottom-lit by the beams, as its winding spires become lost in the shadows.

“Jess need ta stretch ma legs.”

The hitchhiker is turning towards the driver, who is already swung halfway out of the cab.

“Suppose, ah could use a piss m’self.” He breaks off into a quick stagger in the opposite direction. A quick zip is followed by a long train of urine. Steam rises off the rocks and dissipates in the night air.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggh.” The hitchhiker believes relief, like many experiences, is more enjoyable if it can be shared, or at least verbalized loudly.

“Havin’ fun o’r there?”

The driver makes his way back to the car but is careful not to glance in the hitchhiker’s direction. He’s still shaking it off with a full body-shiver and a jump.

“Not as much fun as the two of us are gonna have once we get ta Vegas.”

The hitchhiker joins him in the cab. The driver is incredulous. He wants to object, “What? Y’think we’re the bess a buds now that we’ve shared a two hour car’ide?” The hitchhiker does not look like the type to be put down so easily. The driver settles upon a look of caution, and tries to affect the interrogator’s low, feeling scowl.

“Ever been?”

“Ha! Ever been?!”

The driver immediately regrets his attempt at geniality. He knows he’s going to pay for this feigned interest a little further down the road.

“Get’n here b’fore y’fall out.”

The hitchhiker continues his child’s play undeterred, as if he hasn’t heard the driver’s admonishment. Giving his passenger the benefit of the doubt, the driver’s about to repeat himself, louder and with a greater quiver to his voice, when the hitchhiker slides back in.

“Jess takin’ in th’view.”

The hitchhiker’s smile doesn’t fade but slips meanings. It turns from simple bemusement to a veiled threat without so much as the quiver of a whisker. The driver does not fool himself into thinking that the hitchhiker has missed the meaning of so many abandoned objects, all on display for passersby.

Death and loss are all around them. They’ve been there from the beginning. The only difference now is that one of them fights, resists, these unavoidable tropes while the other lives in them, and makes them his home. Whichever one is a better survival strategy remains to be seen. Both men are here, gazing at the same desert wasteland and soaking in the same chill of night.

“Can’t wait fer Vegas. Tha’should be some fun.” The hitchhiker settles into his seat with his boots up on the dash. The yellow tarnish of his unlit cigarette is more effective as an ornament to his weather-beaten face. His eyes are wild, yet focused on something in the distance. The driver looks over. His face can barely hold back his unease. It comes out as pursed lips and watering eyes. He wants to lay down the ground rules right away, or thinks about how he should have from their first moment together, but fears for giving himself away. There is to be no stopping in Vegas, or anywhere else he happens to pass through with this menacing figure. The driver castigates himself for how stupid it was, even fatal to his mission, to pick up a stranger. If he is that desperate for company, he figures he should have stopped off for a whore.

The driver is overcome with the desire to pull over and force the hitchhiker out. He looks over once again, hoping for an opportunity, or a sign, but knows he can do nothing with this medium-built drifter, dozing off with his collar pulled up to his cheeks, cowboy style. He tries to settle-in himself, as much as he can. The driver feels his own chin digging into his collar. The rough wool is comforting against the wind. He tries to bring a cowboy tune to mind but can only think of one: theirs. He sees her smile and has to stop.

Primm, Nevada

Unincorporated San Bernardino County meets the Nevada desert through a smattering of small, unlit shacks. Mostly abandoned, they could not have served as more than a weigh station or postal exchange, and not since the turn of the century. It’s through these lonesome guard-shacks that the duo in the pickup make their way toward Primm, just over the Nevada border. There, the shacks, no bigger than the ones left behind, are clustered closely together, with their front porches abutting the shoulder of the highway.

It’s sobering to see the artifacts of everyday life, the not-so-essentials, left in a clutter, as if their owners upped and fled without time to pack them up. There are the rusted outlines of washing tubs and car parts, but the objects that look the strangest left alone are those incidental to the adult world. A wooden tricycle, no doubt carved by someone’s grandpa before he completely lost his sight or surrendered the use of his hand to rheumatism, sits with its direction wheel askew, caught in mid-peddle. A grounded tire-swing, fortified with years’ worth of mud, now serves as home to a family of rattlesnakes, and there’s no telling how many scorpions the upturning of that deflated ball would yield.

The driver accelerates in the face of these remnants, staring him down from the silence of the roadside. Frozen in time, their everydayness is transformed into a threat, a testament. They each speak in their own tone, “you too, and all those things to which you never give thought, are just like us: hideous in our ordinariness.”

The hitchhiker displays a different reaction altogether. He half hangs out the window with a cigarette dangling from his lips in a -overly clichéd?- display of effrontery. His golden brown hair laps into his face and it seems to feel good. If he’s ever ruminated on man’s fate a day in his life, nobody would know it.

“Jess a bunch a crap,” he would say if pressed. “Why you all gettin’ sent-a-mental bout some throwaway garbage tha’nobody wants, no how?” Nobody’s asked him, so he remains content to smile, smoke, and take in the debris with the detached air of a king, or an executioner. The driver is unnerved by the hitchhiker’s ease, but knows better than to let on. He tries to cover up his concerns with a playful warning.

The driver takes in what is undoubtedly a careful selection of words. Chosen for efficiency and clipped for effect. It is no wonder why the old boy took so long to respond. It’s not that he is mute or dimwitted; just the opposite. He’s one of those lucky and rare men: skilled in the selection and performance of phrases to evoke whatever he pleases in the listener. Even the way he wobbled between “working” and “the ducts”, suggesting the hesitancy of an alibi, could have easily been tacked on for flourish. One never could tell; yet there is something about the overall affect of an accent –definitely from up North, but even more familiar than that- that doesn’t sit well with the driver.

“Least th’somofabitch can talk,” is how the driver puts it to himself.

The gloss from his passenger’s words dissipates in the base of the driver’s spine. As he enjoys their last glimmer, he forgets exactly what the hitchhiker said.

“Sumin to do w’ducks?” the driver has to ask himself, but decides upon an unconvincing, “Erherrrrrr.”

That settles that conversation. It covers where he’s been and what he’s been doing. The driver wonders if he should reciprocate.

“V’only juss been through there m’self.” Compared to the hitchhiker, the driver’s voice is gruff, like that of a lifelong smoker and drinker. His words are sloppy, as if they’ve had to topple over each other in the fight to escape his slack lips and tongue. The driver is suddenly embarrassed at the hollowness and irrelevance of his response. Thinking he can save it with an addendum, “Juss now, acsh’ly.”

The hitchhiker’s return to silence allows this retort to hang in the air. It’s possible that he’s picked up on the driver’s uneasiness with forced small talk. Silence is no better. The driver squirms and his face flashes in a tic, while the hum of the asphalt draws the awkwardness out further. This delights the hitchhiker and he lights up a cigarette to further his enjoyment.

“Smoke?” The hitchhiker holds out a fresh pack. He allows himself to fall –comfortably but not with abandon- into the bond which humiliation tends to form between perpetrator and victim.

“Got m’own, thanks.” The driver waves him off as a retort. “But m’happy t’join ya, though.” He too feels drawn into the complicity that spills out from those few, hastily spurt out words. It’s an unlikely form of comfort, warming like the cigarette smoke that fills his chest and the car.

The thought returns, “Mayn’t be such a bad ride, f’terall.” Or at least, not as lonely. Ninety-eight miles to the state line.

Manix

“You goin’ far?”

The hitchhiker says nothing.

“Ain’nosey. Only reas’n ah’sk is you don’ seem ta be carryn’ much.”

The hitchhiker doesn’t move. His stare remains fixed into the distance. Minutes go by –made of halting, interminable seconds- and the driver can’t make out so much as a breath from his new companion. He turns with what could be taken as an annoyed look on his face, but he might just be checking to see if the old boy is still alive.

Silent type: the driver thinks about how although he’s been working as a ranch hand for nearly a year, ever since that junk yard incident in Fresno, he has never bought in to the whole cowboy mystique. The driver always figured it was all for the movies, and emulated by little boys and grown pansies who want to seem tough. But the silence that seems to be sucking all the air out of the pickup truck is doing quite a number on him. He would cough, or sigh, or otherwise make some notion of his presence felt, but he can’t muster the wind from his lungs.

A few beads of sweat break out on the driver’s forehead. He goes to wipe them but his forearm’s stuck in his lap. They dance around in hesitation before gathering into a single stream and running down to the side of his neck.

“This’s scrushiating,” he chides to himself. The driver’s about to crack a window or pull over, when the hitchhiker hums out a low rattle.

“I’ve been down Death Valley. Workin th’ducts.” He has a country singer’s baritone, rhythmic and dependable. It could prove enjoyable, even, if there wasn’t a trace of doubt quivering on the down syllable, “Val-ee”.

The car flies up an on-ramp and merges across a solid white line onto the highway. There is a series of orange-lit streetlamps that escort the traveler out of the city. They whiz by in a hypnotic succession, -light, dark, light, dark- but the flashing-movie-projector effect is interrupted by a silhouetted figure standing below the final post. He is walking out into the road, waving one arm while a sack dangles from the other. He stands directly in its way, but the pickup does not slow down.

The driver sees the deranged figure, and has to swerve to avoid hitting him. The tires screech and the pickup fishtails and the driver has to lean on the brake pedal with all of his weight to prevent the car from careening into the metal guardrail at the meridian.

The hitchhiker takes this abrupt stop as a hopeful sign and rushes over to the vehicle, idling just out of the last streetlamp’s reach. The dark figure scurries up to the door and peers through the window, the sack slung over his shoulder in anticipation of an affirmative response. The driver says nothing, giving the man a sidelong glance and turning back to face the windshield. His hands tighten on the wheel and the pickup lurches forward, but not before the hitchhiker has wrenched open the door and half-jumped onto the passenger seat.

With that one insistent movement, the situation has darkened from a mere plea for a stranger’s kindness to a more sinister demanding, like the taking of a hostage. The driver feels no urge to argue, or even acknowledge this interloper beyond a frozen look up and down. There is time for little else as the pickup starts for the last lights of Barstow. Beyond their sulfur-tinged flicker grows a chilly expanse: empty, dark and silent, punctured only by the dotted lines of the road and the shifting of two strangers’ bodies in a car. There are still one hundred and fourteen miles to the Nevada border.

The driver finally makes his way past the blinking marquee and illuminated steeple as the sea of revelers tapers off at the rear. The darkened side streets, abandoned as before, now feel comforting. The driver and his pickup soak in their cool shadow. He thinks how the real ghost-towns are those of solid buildings populated by the living dead, and not those long-ago abandoned and left to rot.

A procession of ghouls: this type of derision reserved for the mindless, God-fearing town-folk comes easy to the driver, but he is surprised that it does not bring with it the usual glee. Instead, he feels the waft of loneliness, the one he first detected hanging over the town square. It trails his car like the remnants of skunk, and now it’s taken up residence in the cab.

“Ah, good ol’ loneliness. I don’ get many companions, so ah’ll take ya as y’are.”

The driver comes to a roundabout with five roads leading off it. Each one looks like the same dead, dark street from which he came. Since he is still the only car out, he slows to a creep at its center.

“Which way, which way?”

The circle appears to be a mini-hub of commerce, as there is a launderers, a car dealership, and yet another church coming off its center. It is hard to tell whether they are shuddered permanently, or just for the weekend. The way the dust settles on the outskirts of desert towns, it takes only a few days to achieve the effect of what numerous years of neglect would do to a downtown building.

They look forlorn, but in a way that is strangely suiting. The driver convinces himself he’s on a Hollywood back-lot, and then he can’t imagine these dusty buildings any other way. Even daylight would seem to rob them of their purpose. They remind us that we need the old, if only to show us that in the end, time conquers all.
It’s a perfect, if overdue, farewell to Barstow. The driver spots a sign for the highway just in time. He knows it to be a highway marker from its reflective green brilliance. Next to the worn cobblestones of the church wall, the sign glows in a halo of newness. It is poetically brief, with white letters printed on bright green metal: “Highway Entrance Ahead.”