“They’re muscle r’laxers, ‘plenny legit,” the hitchhiker answers the unasked question. “Want one?”

The hitchhiker doesn’t wait for an answer, which isn’t coming anyway, before popping two into his mouth and chasing it with a swig of beer from a spare bottle. He slides the last one back into his pocket, along with a tangle of gold necklace that fell out in the process. It looks like the hitchhiker couldn’t leave such an abode as opulent as Miss Meriwether’s without claiming a few keepsakes. The driver doesn’t notice. He’s concentrating hard on something ahead, but not necessarily in his field of vision. He waits a long while before breaking the silence that had settled over them once again. It’s not that he wishes to know more of the hitchhiker’s deplorable hijinks. It’s just that the buzzing……hhhhhhhrrnnnnnnzzzzzzzz…………….it’s growing louder, and closer, yet coming from nowhere.

He manages to force out, “She’d been drinkin’ too?” The driver may not be able to recognize muscle relaxers when they’re melting in a sweaty palm, but he knows plenty about drinking, and when it can become lethal. His first introduction to drinking was through his father and his father’s friends, a good number of whom had gone blind or become paralyzed from a bad batch of bootleg.

“Aha. There in-lies our problem.”

The way the hitchhiker gleefully draws out “our” tells the driver that his albatross of a passenger actually considers himself free from fault. The driver grits his lips against his front teeth. Staying awake is going to mean suffering through more of the hitchhiker’s excruciating bullshit.

“Funny how ya can take one perfectly legal enjoyment, let’s say run-a-the-mill, doc-ordered muscle relaxer, and mix it wi’another wholesome pursuit: our true American pass-time, drinkin. Who’da thought the result could be so disas-ter-ous? I ask ya, who?”

Words like “funny” and “who’da thought”, innocently runoff by the hitchhiker, cannot mask the ill intention that lights a particularly malicious fire beneath his particular recounting. He either killed or nearly killed a woman back at that party. She may have been disgustingly wealthy and self-absorbed, like everybody else in that humongous house, but it seems awfully presumptuous –maybe just as conceited- of the hitchhiker to play judge and executioner. In this moment, the driver knows the hitchhiker has killed before. He doesn’t sense it, so much as sees it: a flash of Paula, lying there, the blood rushing from her body, a man walking away not-too-fast. He recalls the way the hitchhiker had first moseyed up to the pickup, as if there were nothing at all strange about flagging down a ride by jumping out in front of it.