“Mrrrrrhrrrrrrr,” concurs the hitchhiker. He hardly touched the sopping platter in Smokey’s smoky club, and didn’t eat at the party. He was too busy…well, he missed the opportunity all the same.

“Wha’d ol chief woodenhead give ya? A bunch a dried bull testicles?”

The hitchhiker opens the sack cautiously and spills some of the contents into his hand. They’re unidentifiable, but certainly dried.

“Dunno.” He takes a whiff and reels back. “Aw God! They’re moldy!” He throws them back into the bag, twists the string, and wipes his hands, reluctantly, on his trousers. The sets the driver off laughing.

“Goddamned savages! They’ll dry horse shit an’ tell you it’s a delicacy.”

“Well just be glad you didn juss pop em inta your mouth.” The driver continues his chuckle. “I’m sure we’ll fine some place soon nuff.”

The thought comes over him: he sounds like a father –not his father, though- consoling a hungry child. He wonders: how is it possible for him to be feeling like a father to this reproachable tramp when, not minutes ago, he was ready to clock him over the head with a rock and abandon him to the Nevada wilderness, shit-drying Indians and all? The hitchhiker looks over with a mealy grin and the driver is more perplexed at his own emotional floundering than anything else.

One minute he’s flying off into a rage, and now he wants to find this unruly stranger a hamburger joint. Maybe that’s what parenthood is: a never-ending, and wildly fluctuating, parade of incongruous emotions. A few days ago, with Paula scheduled for a doctor’s visit, the driver was entertaining thoughts of soon finding out for sure. Now, it will take a little bit longer. The dismal train of though is derailed.

“A diner!” The driver makes the momentous discovery of a rusting sign. It could be pointing down the road to a truck stop that was demolished years ago, but it offers just enough a hope. The promise is in “38 Miles” and includes a gas station.

“Fuckin’ Indee-ans. Talkin ta spirits an all that crap.”

The driver, for all his despondency, has to laugh at this recollection of the blank-stared Indian.

“Yeah. ‘Oooooh, I zee a woo-man in your foo-cha. Wooooooo.’”

“Well, I hope she’s got big ol’ bags, at that.”

They join in a laugh that brings them back to their shared concentration over the rhythms of the road. There’s the clickity-clickity-clickity of a hubcap not completely fit into the wheel. Every now and again, the rear bed rumbles, and the driver will flick the wipers, ineffectively, across a filthy windshield, to a hair-raising squeeeeeeeak. At least the noises, regular and halting alike, are a substitute for having to talk. This suits the hitchhiker and driver just fine. Each of their minds are too preoccupied for small-talk, anyway.

Among the various squeaks, clickity’s, and rumbles –and the occasional shifting in place of each man- remains the peculiar words of the Indian: “There is a woman….was.” Neither the driver nor the hitchhiker would dare guess how deeply the Indian’s invocation still haunts the other. Nor is there any way they could know how those words, spoken through an otherworldly fog of fatality, conjured up the same exact face in the mind of each man; or almost the same face, as they were separated by a few moments before and after her death. Paula! The driver moans and lets it settle on the advancing light of morning. The despair sinks through his gut, as if it were the morning light itself soaking through the low ceiling of clouds overhead. It finds the knots of exhaustion buried in his stomach and melts them down. They unravel, leaving only the loose strings of hunger.

“Sure am hungry, though,” the driver considers.

The driver manages to open the pickup’s door. The click is enough to awaken the Indian. He grabs the hitchhiker before he, too, is able slink into the car.

“Take this!”

The Indian has one more offering for the besieged duo. He doesn’t have to go back to the stand to fetch it. He pulls a small, canvas bag from his front pocket. It is tied at the top with string. The hitchhiker waves it away –the aftertaste of the so-called strepatche still slimes around his mouth- but the Indian insists.

“You’ll need it. Both of you.” He places it in the hitchhiker’s unwilling hand. The hitchhiker figures it’s easier to simply take it –he can toss it out the window later- than argue anymore with this possessed, or insane, savage. Instead of resistance, he offers a one dollar bill; amazing, since all the prices listed on the hand-painted board are in pennies, maybe some nickels.

“Thank you, friend. You will find each other. May the Spirit be with you.”

“Arright, enough,” the driver yells at himself as he forces the pickup away. He thinks that if he can get away fast enough, he will not have to face what just happened –or failed to happen: “f’it weren’ fer that damned Ind’un.”

The pickup’s tires squeal and spit out a stream of dirt. It chalks the Indian in beige dust from the knee down. Regardless, he waves, and while not smiling, there’s a gleam in his eye that holds out hope for the both of them.

“The fuck was tha’bout?”, the driver offers to the hitchhiker. The latter shrugs his shoulders. He really doesn’t know either; but on some level that he can only feel as a queasy body sensation, he suspects that the Indian recognized more in them than just a happenstance driver and his passenger.

The driver lights a cigarette with his palms resting on the top of the steering wheel. A vague sense of worry has been growing within, as subtle as the onset of seasickness. The nausea fights its way through a gut already wrenched with exhaustion and rage. The first sip of smoke fills the driver’s lungs. As it passes over the tongue, the taste buds, and through the esophagus, it reigns in the queasiness of his anxiety into a palatable bite; like the mere aftertaste of the day’s first cigarette. The hitchhiker’s already on his fifth.

“I’m fine, thanks.” He manages to summon the beginnings of a smile from somewhere. It doesn’t hold for long.

“Wait!”

The two, to their bewilderment, actually stop in their tracks. The call sounded like an animal’s, except with the human ability to speak. Only a few feet from ‘their’ vehicle, the Indian’s voice has become someone, or something, else’s entirely. It is a warning, and it is hardly of this world.

The two face him. They are met with unresponsive eyes, set in a creaseless face that has gone slack. It is the checked-out look of someone waiting for or listening to a lengthy set of instructions. They wait a few pauses that drag on too long. Finally fed up, the driver cuts into the Indian’s silent, one-way exchange.

“Hey look buddy”, not ‘friend’. “We gotta go…”

“You two are on a journey…”

The hitchhiker checks with the driver before cracking into a yeah-tell-us-something-we-don’t-know smile.

“There is a woman…,” the voice trails off into a mournful pause. “Was..”

“This is nonsense,” the driver tacks on. At the same time, his thoughts flash to Paula, in the same prostrate position as before. The hitchhiker too, sees her face: same blood-drained pallor, same smirk of surprised relief, only a few hours earlier. The images are too vivid for either to notice that the other has sunk to a look of the utterly forlorn.

“Friend.” There it is again. He turns slightly towards the Indian, who is holding before him a strip of dark red bark, looking as proud as anyone ever has over dried meat.

“Try it.” The Indian lifts it up to the hitchhiker, obviously very eager to share this delicacy with, what he believes to be, a representative of civilized taste.

The driver is closer, but not yet close enough to save the hitchhiker from the chewy piece of meat before him. It is already in his hand, greasing up his thumb and forefinger; and before he can stop himself, the dangly strip is in his mouth. It tastes like fat and dirt somehow combined into one chalky, gristly mouthful. He hastens to get it down. Without water, it is almost an impossible chore. The Indian senses his discomfort and fetches a bladder presumably filled with water.

“Whatchya doin?” It is not a friendly inquiry, and the driver eyes the Indian up and down, even more menacingly, as the Indian trots back holding the buffalo gourd. It is doubtful whether the Indian caught a glimpse of the fist-sized rock the driver had been carrying. He dropped it as soon as he saw the Indian reappear from the shack. Still, the Indian looks him up and down, appraises him, in an unnervingly knowing way. The same haunting smile says, at once, “I know what you’re doing” and “I won’t interfere.” The driver has never had his intentions so clearly read, nor has he ever had them communicated back to him in such an uncomplicated, yet wholly revealing, smile. He realizes how readily, and yet as if on a whim, he was about to put an end to the hitchhiker’s travels. He hopes his face –or however else the Indian managed to read him- doesn’t show remorse. What he feels is more akin to a minor setback.

“You’re friend here was just sampling some of our family’s strepatche. Would you care for some?”

It is suspicious how the Indian’s English is more assiduous than the so-called ‘native speakers’ standing before him. The driver doesn’t like the whole situation. He lets it be known with a disgusted look upon his face. As hungry as he is –peculiar, since he managed to sufficiently stuff himself at Miss Meriwether’s just two hours ago- the driver is not willing to so much as touch this wild man’s wares, let alone ingest them.

“Must not be eatin much out here,” the hitchhiker muses to himself as he eyes the strange man up and down. The Indian approaches, smiling back, but in an eerie way that seems to go straight through the hitchhiker.

“How ya doin’?” The hitchhiker is openly cautious. He can’t recount every tale he heard growing up, like so many other young white boys, about Indians luring white men into traps at the side of the road, with a broken down car or an innocent-looking roadside stand, like this one.

“Fine.” The Indian says it in a studied way, as if he is delivering a true assessment. “You caught us just as we were opening up shop. Perhaps you’d like to take a look?” He motions towards the flimsy crates. A few dark-skinned, Asian-looking children, between the ages of a few months and eight years old, sit solemnly, staring towards the ground but really at nothing. Somewhere in the back, their mother fusses with a fire.

“Nah we’re just stoppin’ furra…” he looks at the driver, farther off from the road than true privacy would require, “..ta stretch a-legs,” the hitchhiker wisely continues.

“Have you ever tried strepatche?” It comes out “strip-hot-shee”, in three quickly spat words.
“Strip who?” The hitchhiker doesn’t really care to carry the conversation any further, but the driver still hasn’t returned. “What in the hell did-ee have ta piss so far away for?” The hitchhiker turns that even shade of annoyed, a hair past confused and just on the cusp of breaking into outright agitated. Its color is the orangey side of rust.

“Stip, hot, shee” the Indian gently explains, like a caring teacher. “Dried buffalo rump!” He says it in such an obvious way, the hitchhiker is almost tempted to go along and respond, “Oh! Strip, hot, shee! V’course!”; but he doesn’t. He settles on a noncommittal “hrmmm.”

The Indian becomes inspired. “Hold on! I’ll get you some.”

The hitchhiker studies hard at the ground between him and where the Indian has just run off to fetch some of the dried meat. His face may indicate the calm appraisal of a gourmet on the verge of a great discovery, but he is really wondering why the driver is taking so long in getting back, and why he, the rough-and-tumble, take-no-shit hitchhiker, is standing on the side of the road, making small talk with some “danged scalper.” He decides the situation is thoroughly ridiculous; and turns to spy the driver making the long trip back, slowly. He’s carrying something. The hitchhiker reminds himself of his gun, tucked into the sack lying on the passenger side of the pickup.

“Hey, watcha doin?” The hitchhiker isn’t too alarmed that the pickup has suddenly lurched to the shoulder. He finds what he believes to be the driver’s irrational outbursts wholly entertaining. He views the waves of rage as one would a performance; with bemused detachment, even when they’re directed at him.

The pickup jerks to a halt just feet from where a roadside stand is setting up for the day. The hitchhiker has to wonder if the driver even realizes that he came close to leveling a group of Indians, a whole family of them, laying out their wares on woven blankets atop wooden crates. The driver steams out.

“I’m goin’ fer a piss.” He takes the keys with him.

It can’t be too long past six in the morning, but there’s something about how there is no real sunrise in the desert during winter –the light just breaks and scatters evenly throughout the dull clouds- that can make a person’s appetite grow rampant, and fast.

The hitchhiker looks on at the Indians’ charred stalks of corn and flattened strips of cured meat: a proper travelin’ breakfast if ever there was one.

“Friend.”

The hitchhiker looks up into the silhouette of a fairly tall Indian. He look be the head of the household setting up the stand. There is no headdress or bow slung across his chest. The hitchhiker figures he must be one of “ ‘em or’nary een-dians”; the kind that still carry that stony wise air, but couldn’t spark a flint fire to save his life.

He appears from out the darkness of the makeshift stand. Linen pants and a leather vest, though it can’t be above fifty degrees, hang off his lithe frame.

The driver shakes his head and tries to lift himself up from his seat, where he’s almost slumped off into unconsciousness. He knows he’s losing it. The ghostly visions –of Paula, of himself coming home to find her, and yes, even of the hitchhiker, distorted by moonlight as he draws a revolver to the girl’s face - they come with every prolonged blink of his eyelids. He can’t keep his eyes from closing, but that doesn’t stop the driver from bringing the brunt of his rage down on the hitchhiker.

“Fer Chrissakes! Ya coulda killed the woman!” His face cannot match the animation of his words. It maintains the same gray mist as that shrouding the road, hanging just over its surface out in the distance.

“Hey, it’s not like I put a gun to her head.”

There’s a flash like lightning. It’s briefly illuminates Paula’s blank face. It’s a gun shot, and her face vanishes along with the light.

“Dozen matter.” The driver notices his rage quickening. There’s something about the hitchhiker that is able to stir up all the fury that has otherwise been compressed and contained by an overriding exhaustion. It’s a rage saved not only for those he hates the most, but for those he knows enough to hate so murderously. The feeling is so overwhelming, the driver feels that he must know the hitchhiker from somewhere, though he is sure that he would remember that goofy mug and ridiculous flop of sandy hair if he had ever seen it before.

The driver is tempted to ask, and he almost gets the words out, but doesn’t know where to begin. He will reveal whatever scraps of his own story he has to; but he can no longer fight the urge to crack this wayward passenger open, dissect him, and size him up, so the driver can know exactly how much of a sick-o he’s dealing with. Most of all, the driver finds himself overcome with the desire –no, the necessity- of stopping the hitchhiker right here and preventing him from going any further.

It’s not merely a case of having ‘a bad feeling’ or even more simply ‘not liking the looks’ of someone. It’s corporeal. Every nerve-ending in the driver’s body twitches at once. They scream out in a primal and violent recognition of danger. He throbs with it: to save himself, and his mission, he must get rid of the hitchhiker. Does he even need to know why?