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.