The driver doesn’t give much weight of consideration to the heavy plaque, even if he could read its mocking welcome. On the bottom is a stamp of what appears to be a city council or guild.

He sizes up the building once more. It doesn’t appear to be so old as to warrant a historical marker, but he doubts to what extent bare logs can show their age. He inspects the seal a little closer before finally heading inside. On it is an engraved banner, running between a raised buffalo’s head and the smiling face of an early pioneer. The banner reads:

International Conspiracy of Travelers and Merrymakers, First and Founding Lodge

“In to….inner…inner nashnul…. consp…con piracy….Aw hell, a joke,” the driver decides without getting through the second word.

The inside is as dark and cool as could be expected from a cabin without windows in the middle of December. They make out a bar running along one wall, with a few hunched backs facing out, and take a few more steps into the chilly interior.

“Well how you boys doin’?”

A very white, powdery face, with eyes and lips painted in exaggerated clown colors, shines out of the darkness. A madam: she wears the tiered, sparkly gown of someone from the flapper era. The dress is meant to hide her figure, but both the driver and the hitchhiker can tell, even in the absence of much lighting, that she is short and stocky, with a poof of lemon-yellow hair cocked atop her head.

The hitchhiker breaks into a grin. He can already see beyond the kindly smile of the house mother and into a dark corner, where there awaits several young girls, looking at once bored and anxious. They wear colors to a similar jarring effect as their ill-attired matron, but on these girls, they are meant to draw attention to their frail bodies, not away. Their robes are skimpy and completely open, while their faces look like they have been transplanted from over-made dolls.

Grand Junction, Colorado

From the outside, it appears to be a long, but otherwise nondescript, log cabin, set well off the main road and barely visible in a mess of pines. There are no signs: either on the approach or atop the lodge’s green-slate roof. The hitchhiker swears that he knows this place to be a great “stopin-off joint”, whatever that may mean, on the way into Grand Junction, the main city on Colorado’s western frontier. The hitchhiker’s enthusiastic endorsement should have been the first indication to the driver, if he needed any at all, that he would have been best served cruising right along and never going anywhere near this no-frills cottage.

There are several cars out front. Among them: a rusty pickup, a later model than the driver’s Chevy, but looking many years past its prime; and a brand new Cadillac that is so glistening with care and pride, that the exact shade of its canary yellow finish remains indeterminable. It makes the driver feel funny to admit it to himself, but the sight of a pickup truck –however much in worse shape than his own- parked next to an expensive automobile sparks some degree of comfort within him. It’s not that the driver has ever considered himself an egalitarian, but he has to admire a place that is able to attract a clientele –if that’s the proper term for it- that arrives in such a disparity of class-specific vehicles. That the hitchhiker, whose brief record on the road should disqualify him from any form of trust, is leading the charge up to the discreet-looking entryway concerns the driver nonetheless.

There are no windows, but at least it has an official-looking plaque. Sure enough, to the right as they enter, displayed at shoulder level, is a polished bronze square. It reads:

In this place
August fifth, eighteen sixty-eight the date
Settled a humble man
With modest dreams, of a simple plan
Up to the mountains of Conistock
And down the stream to Firth
He mapped the land
With a steady hand
Until founding this house of mirth

Now to share with you
Weary traveler or two
A place to relax your bones
You can sit and rub dice
With ladies so nice

That you may never wish to go home

“Yeah, my parents were from Dee-troy,” the hitchhiker answers very quickly this time.

“Oh, I’m from round there m’self. Not originally, but we moved out there when I was bout ten. Ya know Dearborn?”

“Nope,” again, too quick; but this time it rides on an insistent breath of finality. The driver decides not to push the issue. He figures he’ll get to the bottom of this whole Death-Valley-worker-hitchhiking-into-the-middle-of-the-country business eventually.

The thought renews another wave of nauseous panic; as if once he does get through to the hitchhiker’s story, it will somehow affect his plans as well. The driver can’t have that and dismisses the queasiness pitting itself in his stomach with a rub and a complaint of “goddamned pie.”

“Not feelin’ too good?” The question comes out as a taunt.

“I dunno. Must’ve been somethin’ I ate.”

“Well you’ve been driving quite a while, an at was quite a bit of excitement back there. You wanna take a break?”

Break or no break, the thought of giving the wheel over to the hitchhiker, this most troubling and troublesome character, repulses the driver. It is getting close to mid-day and even though it is winter and cloudy, the glare off the salt-bleached planes is taking a toll on the driver’s eyes. When he blinks, he sees the same image of a black, unfurled snake –with the same dotted stripes running down its back- set against a blank, but rocky, terrain. The serpentine road is flaked with scales of saline grit. They sparkle in the diffused sunlight, much like the clods of gray dirt clumped in the corners of the windshield and streaked across the glass by useless wipers. The thought of so much salt around them, everything caked with it, causes the driver’s eyes to sting and his throat to grow parched.

“Arright. I’ll stop off once we hit Colorado.”

The pickup has already begun to groan on the increasing grade that leads into the Rocky Mountains. Too far in the distance, their tops disappear somewhere between the brackish residue staining Utah’s foothills and the droopy ceiling of clouds, pregnant with gloom above.

“Wind muss’ve kicked it up from th’salt flats.”

The clumps become even more infrequent before the haze lets up and the two are released onto a perfectly clear highway. The driver can see the remains of the storm in the rearview, and the pickup has been painted a new shade of dirt-white, but the suddenly restored calm makes the whole episode seem like a hallucination. It would have to be a collective one, though, because the hitchhiker is still bouncing from the excitement.

He continues to cough out his “can’t believe it”’s and “who would’a thought”’s, though the salt clouds have quickly faded from view. The driver feels the exhilaration too, but it is more from the prospect of finally having the hitchhiker awake and alert to answer some questions. The driver knows how easily the hitchhiker can clam up once again if he is so much as prodded with the wrong tone. He lets the excitement abate a little, while he gathers himself, his thoughts.

The driver isn’t sure what he hopes to get out of the hitchhiker, but knows that there is something to be found. It will either prove that his instincts are wrong and the hitchhiker is merely shy, but has nothing to hide; or else the driver is justified in wanting –however inexplicably- to stop his passenger in his tracks, with whatever blunt object happens to be at hand. When the hitchhiker starts clicking his jaw, loudly, in time to the squawking of the wipers as they grind dry salt crumbs into the windshield, the driver realizes that no matter what the hitchhiker’s story ends up being, it won’t make him any less of a nuisance; or a liability, as far as his mission is concerned.

“So where-ju say you was comin from?” The driver asks shortly after the last and fruitless squeaaaaaak of wiper blade. The hitchhiker doesn’t answer right away, but he can’t let this question hang in the air as he’s done with all the others. He feels if he doesn’t answer now, then that will be telling the driver too much.

“Death Valley, round Mesa Verde. We were routin ducts to th’coast.”

“At’s right,” thinks the driver. “He’d said somethin’ bout those ducks b’fore, but ah never quite got it.”

“Funny, cos you kinda have-a…a sorta…Mishy-gun type a twinge…”

Richfield

It is not quite cold enough for snow, but a white cloud wafts across the two-lane highway, just a few hundred yards ahead. It is too dense, and contained in too neat of a billow, to be snow; nor does it float with the lightness of smoke. The pickup is too close upon it, and going too fast, for the driver to resist entering the opaque fog.

The pickup is soon bombarded with a deluge that has the consistency of hail; but instead of balls of ice, clumps of tiny, rough crystals pound the windshield. Each one explodes in a thud. The hitchhiker is awoken, if he was actually sleeping in the first place, by the erratic, dull plops.

“What the fuck?!”

“I dunno. There was juss a huge cloud an’ then…..an’ then this!”

The driver swerves to avoid the fist-sized clods, but they’re everywhere. They rock the hood in metallic rasps and the wipers struggle as they choke on the mysterious debris from above. It fills out the treads on the pickup’s tires and causes it to skid from one side of the road to the other. The driver wrestles with the wheel. It puts up a good fight in return, and the pickup takes him across the middle line into the oncoming lane; or so he has to guess since the road is covered with the same even, sparkling blanket as in a snowstorm. He estimates the truck must have lurched twenty feet to the left, and he’s lucky if he can keep it from diving off the road altogether. Sweat soaks into his clothes and stings his pores.

The hitchhiker hurriedly rolls up his window to close the gap that had been left open. In the meantime, a chunk hits the side of the roof and some of the fallout rains onto his shoulder. He gets a chalky finger-full and brings it to his nose. He snorts and immediately coughs and chokes. There is no mistaking the dry, saline bite enflaming the back of his throat.

“Salt!’ He reminds the driver of a prospector who’s hit gold. Though salt is probably the most widely available mineral on earth, it takes on an alien quality when it’s pounding down from the sky in a torrent.

Ignoring the driver’s –or his would-be son in law’s- well-intentioned warning, Mr. Warshansky asks to speak to Paula. A pile of plates at the washing station topples into the sink and the entire diner is briefly immersed in the clatter.

“Where are you?” There’s a new urgency to Mr. Warshansky’s voice. His English is usually of the studied assimilated-immigrant variety, but when he gets angry, it reverts to a straight-off-the-boat pidgin. “Ver’z Paula? I demand to zpeek to…” Click.

The hitchhiker appears at that moment from behind the swinging bathroom door. The panic returns, but this time it is accompanied with the urge to kill, lash out, do anything to cover the driver’s tracks along with his ultimate plan.

The driver remains still and the hitchhiker stands even more frozen. His eyes say it all: “I know you” and at the same time, they are desperately trying to remain calm, stay focused, and reveal nothing to the driver, whose chest is heaving up and down just a few feet away. Whatever happens, it is certain that they will not go back to being mere strangers. Something has slipped out: something huge but as-yet undefined. It feels like a revelation, though neither man feels as if he has any better a grasp on the other than he did moments ago. If anything, doubt -and a deadly suspicion- pours through the air between them. It becomes heavy and pulsing, as with an electro-static charge whipped into a fury between the two poles. Neither dares to move, lest an answer materializes from out of the super-charged air. Their eyes scorch, practically unblinking, as each faces down the man standing opposite.

The stare-down cannot last. A young woman darts past, dragging a young boy with chocolate sauce completely down the front of him, into the woman’s room. The hitchhiker breaks the stalemate, as his eyes latch onto her ass and keep hold. The buttocks are small but round, and the sheer fabric does much justice to their shapeliness. He thinks of how he’d like to finish his pie off her ass crack, but the bathroom door swings back to disrupt the view. He looks back to the driver, who is already straddling a stool at the counter.

The hitchhiker approaches, but neither one looks at the other. That moment has passed. It’s the rest of their time together that remains a question mark. The hitchhiker puts two dimes on the counter and says to no one in particular, “I’ll be outside.”

“Hiya, Mista W’shansky?”

The driver is met with silence, but it’s the kind of drawn-out pause where one can tell the person is searching his memory, even if you can’t see him scrunching his brow and narrowing his eyes. The old man hasn’t heard this voice since well before his daughter ran off to California with that peculiar fellow who worked at the city lot. It clicks, but he’s far from elated. A simple “ah yeah” will have to suffice.

The driver’s best attempt at a friendly, “how’ve ya been? I know it’s been a while” is met with a very clipped “fine,” meaning, “hurry, up and get to the point already, you damned delinquent.”

“Well, I’m juss callin’ cos, ahm not sure if ya know, but Paula’s ah….you see Paula’s er….” Just as the driver is struggling with how to put it, the hitchhiker brushes past and pushes through the men’s room door. Panic rises up in the driver’s throat. He doesn’t know why, but he feels that having the hitchhiker catch that last, stuttering fragment of conversation will end up costing him a little further down the road.

The driver’s mind is still reeling with an indistinct fear, paranoia; as in “what’ve ah juss done?” He doesn’t have to say much more. Mr. Warshansky’s simple “mrhhhhhr” brings him back to the conversation and says that he already knows about the release of Paula’s ex-lover. If only he knew the rest.

The driver continues at a stuttering pace. “An he’s outta prison” -that “an” being tangential to nothing- “so’s you might wanna lay low fer a lil while. Seeing as you had a…you were involved in the proceedings as well, as I understand it.”

It was Mr. Warshansky who pressed charges on behalf of the poor Mexican man –really just a boy- who became half-disfigured when he dared to intervene in the attack on behalf of Paula. He was a stranger and certainly disdained, if not completely overlooked, in the community. Mr. Warshansky knew that this man did the honorable thing and wanted to acknowledge it, even if it meant he would be rendered an outcast as well. He testified in court and forced Paula to also take the stand against her boyfriend, who was charged with grievous assault.

The boyfriend was by no means a well-regarded figure, either. In fact, he was a shady drifter about whom people knew little, but they sensed enough to know that his contribution to Dearborn’s civic life would be nil, if not actually draining the city’s moral stock. Still, it was a case of a Mexican –for all purposes, a non-entity to the jury of white working-class peers- seeking justice against a menacing, criminally-involved, but indisputably White man. The verdict would have been all-too-predictable if it wasn’t for Mr. Warshansky’s –and therefore Paula’s- involvement.

No one notices the driver and the hitchhiker as they claim their spot, and the comradely wolfing of food –mostly pancakes soggy with syrup and equally wet eggs- continues undisturbed on both sides. A portly and unsmiling waitress pushes two separate pages towards them. The driver continues walking past the stools.

“Gemme a pie an a coffee, will ya? I gotta make a phone call.”

The hitchhiker sniffs a quasi-affirmative response, but the driver is already picking up the receiver adorning a wood paneled wall at the rear.

The driver puts a finger to the black rotary when he realizes he can’t remember the full number. He should. With the exception of the past year, he’s been calling there ever since the Warshanskys got their phone put in. He remembers that night, though, and how excited little Paula was. She made him call as soon as he had driven to the first payphone, on Marlyborne Road. He had the first two letters and following four digits written out in Paula’s girlish curlicue cursive. How could he have forgotten? She wanted to talk all the time, as soon as he got off work. So he’d pull it out of a pocket and there it would be, between his blackened fingers: that crinkled, yellowing piece of paper. Except by that point, he held onto it more as a memento. He had long memorized the number, but wouldn’t dare throw it away.

Now here he stands, however many years later, in front of another payphone with a completely different type of urgency coursing through his dialing finger. For a moment, he thinks it’s possible he may still have the paper. After all, he never threw it out, as far as he can recall. The driver even reaches for his wallet before he remembers how he had dumped out its contents onto the bed and never bothered to pick them back up.

How long ago all that seems. The memory is recounted with such an underwater, dream-like quality. He was in shock. The driver can’t begin to imagine what else he might have done in those crazed hours after the discovery yesterday morning.

Then it comes to him. The first two letters: WP for Woodland Park, the Warshanky’s neighborhood in Dearborn. His finger merely fills in the rest, without the actual numbers ever consciously coming to mind. It’s as if his finger remembers exactly how far on the dial to go with each spin. It rings, and keeps ringing. The driver is sure it is a wrong number when he hears the click, and the wary answer of an aging, though familiar, voice.

Cedar City, Utah

Just over the state line, tankers and big rigs idle outside a squat cinderblock building. They are stretched out haphazardly at awkward angles to one another. The pickup manages to navigate this maze of four-foot tires and spitting exhaust pipes slowly. The tires kick up the dry, gray-white dust common to the salt flats. It floats away in billows on the wind.

The same crème-colored dirt cakes everything: not only the trucks but the low hedges lining the rest stop. It collects in an opaque film on the diner’s windows.

There hangs overhead what must have once functioned as a large neon sign. The arrow under the cursive “Come on in” points directly to the door, through which the driver and the hitchhiker enter.

The inside is not much cleaner. In this case, instead of windswept dust, it is a grime of part-cigarette smoke, part-bacon grease, that seems to coat everything inside.

They approach two free stools at the counter. The vinyl cushioning croaks with the wear of ages and the linoleum tabletop has a dull glare; the kind that would never wash clean with any amount of bleach and hot water and vigorous scrubbing.

This rest stop, much like the stretch of highway it is found on, clearly settled into the comforts of dilapidation long ago, and will continue to remain so until a terrible windstorm or a stray tractor trailer finally has the good fortune to knock it down. For now, like so many years past, it stands proudly askew in its concrete, Spanish tile-trimmed shell.

The counter is full with a few variations of the cross-country trucker type: crisp denim cuffed at the ankle, the inevitable plaid flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows, and the backs of fifteen or so sandy blonde to chestnut brown hair, nodding in silent diligence. All down the row come the tinkle of silverware on ceramic, the slurp of coffee, and a few satisfied belches, along with hurried guffaws and a few grumbled words in passing: the mark of men who can’t afford to simply lounge and eat.