“Well, mibbe for you, but av gotta keep on movin’.”

The hitchhiker won’t have any of this.

“Ha. Y’think y’know a casino that pays out better odds than-ere?” His voice takes on the shrill of an old Forty-Niner. “Not a chance. Now h’wat’s yer game?” He gives the driver a haunting stare, one that is insusceptible to the grip of reason.

“I don’t think ah…”

“I said, what’s, h’yer, game?” It’s clear that the hitchhiker is not fooling around. The driver reminds himself of his plan to try to augment his savings with a few lucky throws. He figures it might as well be in this phosphorescent circus as any other.

“Arright. Lemme pull around.”

True to the neon eclecticism of the town, and this casino in particular, there are strange, ringleader-attired bellhops to see the two into the lobby. Their outfits clash as much in color –aqua, palm tree green, and a very dehydrated urine-gold- as they do with the supposed theme of this casino-hotel disaster.

“Weeeeeelcome, se-ahs,” one of the attendants affects in a poorly placed, mock English accent. From the insistent look on his face -a desert-bumpkin’s poor effort at Anglo-perfected pomp- he does not intend satire. In his hand, where a whip would somewhat complete the attempt at circus performer, is the traditional British riding crop. It is teal. His matching hat is a bizarre amalgam of riding gear, pith helmet, and Queen’s guard issue. The overall effect is jarring.

The lobby is a mess of the same colors, except they come in a dizzyingly patterned carpet and flow down the walls in a waterfall of drapery. Guarding the twin stairs leading up to the main room are two giant lions, paws outstretched over whoever decides to venture into the cavernous hall. A real waterfall pours its way into a Roman fountain in between the two staircases. From on high, a mirrored ceiling reflects the collision of fabrics, colors, and the tops of people’s heads.

Las Vegas

The town is fit only for undesirables. They are everywhere: strolling aimlessly down a sidewalk before reaching its corner and turning around, repeating God-knows how many times. Even less scrupulous varmint lean against empty and cracked windows. Some are in doorways and some just seem to lay down wherever they happen to find themselves.

The driver has never seen any place like it. The hitchhiker mimics the excited twitching of the unenviable residents before it becomes evident that he is one of their kind. Each is compiled from the same refuse, left over after all the good in humanity had been lovingly fashioned. The driver thinks that even the smell of disreputability has intensified in the car since they turned onto the main drag. This street is desperate, but the side-streets are even worse.

The driver spots silhouettes, like disembodied shadows, down every alley. So much like the rodents they resemble, they scurry at any threat of light or human touch. Some may well be women, but they would be so beyond repair that it wouldn’t make a difference if they happened to be a wife or mother.

The driver thinks of how he once understood the pitfall of Las Vegas to be its enticement for one to stretch well beyond his means. Looking around, he understands that that couldn’t possibly be. Las Vegas is a hole where those who didn’t have any means to begin with come to fester, find company, and….then what? The hitchhiker has motioned for him to stop.

“Nah, not this one. The one up there, with all the crazy lights.” He may as well try to pinpoint a particular species of fish by saying it has gills. The entire strip is lit up like a Christatmas tree in an electric chair. Each hotel/casino has its own disorientating dazzle of lights. The hitchhiker has not noticed his gaffe, and merely points to a jumble of electric green palms and flashing letters. The car rolls up in front of a hotel’s name, “El Dorado”, emblazoned in a cursive of gold and emerald lights.

“Here we are. City of gold.” The hitchhiker has the subdued hysteria of a one-toothed prospector from the old gold rush days. The driver can’t tell if the hitchhiker has allowed himself to be carried away in his own excitement, or if he is genuinely deluded about ‘striking it rich’.

The driver begins to suspect that here, right now, on this highway with a lunatic stranger, is where he is supposed to be, and that his and Paula’s fate, intertwined as they are, could be no other. Paula’s death is no longer the senseless, brutal act of a subhuman. It is her, it’s who she is, and the driver, because he loves her, honors her fate. But what of the fate of the man who brought her to her destiny: the love-scorned killer, who might have plotted this entire chain of events from a prison cell on the San Francisco Bay?

The driver, because he is the link between the two –Paula and her murderer- and this makes him certain in what he has to do. Every mile that brings him closer is not only an accomplice, not just a means to an end, but reassurance that he can do nothing else. The cacti nod their agreement, with arms raised in capitulation, and the boulder-formed mountains give assent in their very sturdiness. The phrase, “I can do no wrong,” sticks in the driver’s mind as if he were able to have read it off a billboard, and now can’t shake the colorful lettering of the phrase from his mind.

The driver spies the hitchhiker with a grimacing face, entertaining himself by bobbing up and down in his seat.

“An’ how does he fit into all this?” The thought is worrying. Not only does the hitchhiker appear to be dead weight, but also a liability. “Was stupid ta pick him up.” Then the driver realizes that it happened just as assuredly as everything else has so far. That, in itself, is to be the hitchhiker’s reason for being there; nothing more.

The driver feels the juxtaposition, really a battle, of exhilaration and dread. They spin within him like the sides of a flipped coin. It flops in his stomach, and there’s a wrenching down to his testicles. Facing his fate feels like a freedom that makes him sick. It washes over a sense of loss that threatens to take him with it.

Freedom and loss, exhilaration and dread: these are the pairings where one side cannot fully cancel out the other; nor can the driver escape every wonderful, torturous second squeezed from their combination. All he can do is floor the accelerator. The lights of Las Vegas jump up before reaching out to suck in the pickup, and its happenstance travelers.

The driver can feel the wad of cash straining at the cloth of his trousers. He estimates how much he can afford to lose and how much could yield a sizable payout. He decides on a chunk of his savings equivalent to a month’s pay. If he can double that, it will earn him some breathing room, perhaps some extra time playing vigilante, before he has to look for another job. (It could be on a ranch, but not the one he left behind this morning. He knows there will be no good reason for him to ever return. That means to the ranch, to Fresno, or to the state of California.)

Money had been a sore point for the driver and Paula. She accused him of being stingy. She would ask, in a quasi-accented chirp learned from her mother, “What’re you doin with that whole other chunk a yer paycheck, anyways?” The driver would simply shrug her off. No amount of haranguing would make him give away the surprise.

Because of his unofficial employment status working at a junkyard at the time, no jeweler would allow him to pay in installments; so he had to save it all up himself, putting away those sorely-needed three dollars every week into his secure hiding spot. He figured after a year, he would have enough saved up to finally buy Paula an engagement ring.

The driver had put the money aside in the hope of turning a promise –his commitment to Paula- into a reality. That reality was stolen from him in a single gun shot this morning. All he can do now is use that money to honor that promise and avenge Paula’s death. He figures the more of it he can get, the quicker he can put this reality to an end. The risk of loss inherent to gambling suddenly loses its romantic sheen, all-the-while becoming engorged with meaning. When all has been lost, there remains nothing worth gaining. That the driver is able to retain his sense of mission, in the face of a despondency as gaping as death, is a feat in itself.

He searches for Paula’s face but can only bring up the petrified, blood-splattered visage of shock and –could this be right?- anger at having been wronged. That is definitely not her. The driver’s fiancée, the warm-hearted woman he loved more than anyone, was nowhere in the frozen body he came home to this morning, half-sprawled and defiled on the concrete steps of their home. Nor will she be found on the hopeless streets of a gambling mecca.

Neither forward nor back will the driver find his stolen love. This thought leaves him empty, but in a lightheaded, almost-carefree kind of way. The driver’s on the verge of discovering the futility of all activity, since there is nothing he can do to bring back Paula. She was his reality. Without her, nothing feels real; a revelation at once liberating and frightfully soul crushing. The driver decides to inspect the hitchhiker once again, curious to see how his cagey passenger appears in this new light.

He can tell from the way the hitchhiker is fully propped up in his seat, rubbing his hands together like a fatso before a feast, that he has something in store once they reach town. His eyes are glazed over and filled with the electric oasis glittering before them. The hitchhiker is no longer in the pickup but several miles ahead, attending to both the mahogany tables of the glitzy casinos and the shabby felt of the rundown ones.

The driver follows him and thinks of how he might be able take a sizeable chunk of his cash and, giving his legs a good stretch with a quick trip around the casino floor, double it; maybe more. That would be after he loses the hitchhiker, of course. The latter is itching at his legs at the prospect of jumping out of the car and throwing himself into the dancing lights. All the better, the driver figures. Losing him will not be a problem; just open the door and watch him go.

On the open road, especially at night, the sky is everywhere one looks. A number of stars fall from their positions guarding the desert from on high and huddle together on the horizon. They change hue as well, going from a faint, simmering blue to a confident orange. Interspersed are occasional beams and flares. It’s as if comets have inverted their course and are now taking off from Earth, breaking out into the darkness from the gilded launch pad ahead. It’s not immediately obvious that these celestial wonders are in fact the man-made flourish of the burgeoning Las Vegas skyline, as unnaturally bright as it may be.

The sight reminds the driver of the one time he and Paula took a trip to Los Angeles, to find a distant relative of hers. Lost in the hills surrounding the city, they finally came upon the shimmering mirage of Hollywood. But that was more the gradual culmination of the lone pin pricks hidden high atop the tree covered hills. They wound their way over and through these dark mounds until they came to one last hillside. There, the tiny points of light became more frequent as they proceeded down the hill, before finally collecting in a vast pool in the valley below. Upon closer inspection, as the driver descended into the glitter of Los Angeles, the magnificent glow was actually broken up into an ordered grid of intersecting axes. Rectangles of light, with the black outlines of palm trees in the middle, followed one upon the next. They stretched out into the horizon, where they merged into a wavy blur. Above that resumed the calm composure of night and a few stars.

Entering Las Vegas is the opposite experience. The night draws in and gives way to what could be mistaken for a solar flare on the Earth’s surface. The highway, a black eel by comparison, takes them closer. It looks like a city of gold caught in the brilliance of day, except it is almost ten thirty at night. This lifts both the driver’s and the hitchhiker’s spirits. They feel like explorers who have either found their El Dorado or gone mad trying. Either way, the exhilaration wakes them up.

For the first time, it feels like there are actually two of them in the car, breathing the same air and catching the same eyeful of man-made beauty. It’s a breath that quickens; and the vision is one taken in by eyes that brighten. The hitchhiker’s mouth waters and the driver’s hands tighten up on the wheel. He knows that there should be -and there are- more grave concerns on his mind.

The hitchhiker has dozed off. His hands are collapsed in his lap and his bag has fallen to the floor. The driver can almost sneak a glance at its contents, as the half-filled bag is not fastened. When the hitchhiker stirs, his boot catches the opening of his pillowcase-cum-satchel and slides it further ajar. The contents would fall out if it there wasn’t a big bulge of something inside, blocking the way.

“Hrmmmmm.” The driver’s interest is peaked, but the headlights of an oncoming car bring his attention back to the road. In the shadows that sway over them as the approaching car passes, the hitchhiker turns and groans, waking himself up in the process.

“Where’re we?” He stretches his arms and his chest expands forward until the driver expects it to pop. His legs follow suit, in the limited space of the cab, and incidentally kick the bag back on its side and out of view. The driver can swear he heard a metal clunk in the process, but is already delivering an answer before he’s realized it.

“Dunno, really. I’d say ‘bout half’ar frum Vegas.” The driver tacks on that magic word, “Vegas”; pronounced in his lazy Michigan-cum-central-California drawl and without the slightest hint of the word’s Spanish origins, so comes out more like “vay-giz”.

The hitchhiker flashes a childish grin in response. That would make the driver the parent. The latter carries a stern expression, presumably intended to ward off any asinine child’s play before it begins.

If there is anywhere to test the driver’s resolve, it’s in Las Vegas. Not that the driver claims to be a convincing handler. He’d much rather prefer not to take on the role, but short of throwing his passenger out of the car in the middle of the uninhabited Nevada desert, he will, at the very least, have to insist that they part ways once inside the city of gold-leaf brassieres.

“What’ll ah say?” The driver has not considered it so far. “S’there anything? ‘You hurt me’? ‘You kilt her’? ‘Now yull feel what she felt’?” He had better keep on thinking.

It dawns on the driver that dying, or being on the verge of taking a life, is so unlike anything else in the realm of human experience that no one can know what to say until they’re finally there. Even then, it is doubtful that the experience can be hemmed in by words, even if the driver had an encyclopedic knowledge of the English language. Since he doesn’t, the thought crystallizes in the driver’s mind as, “Shit! Ah’ll be so hungry for that bastard’s blood, ah won have a cun-hair’s in’tress in h’wut lass words he hears.”

This does not relieve the driver from the burden of having to decide exactly how he wants to kill the man. He only knows he wants to inflict as much pain as possible. He has at least another day and a half of driving, and God-knows how long of hunting down the sick son of a bitch, to go over all the gruesome possibilities.

“Keep’m alive,” goes through the driver’s head. “Skin’m, cut’m, choke’m, but keep’m alive an keep’m conscious for as long as you can.” The driver wishes he brought a knife in addition to his .44. He looks over to the hitchhiker enveloped in darkness, slumped on the seat. The driver can’t help but wonder what he’s carrying.