A thought comes to the hitchhiker, but it is not as comforting as he would have hoped. They will probably have to stop at some point in the night. This guy, the driver, has proven himself to be pretty steady behind the wheel, but no one can go on however long it’s been –at least twenty-four hours since Barstow, plus however far he had come before that- with just a few hours sleep. He looks worn, beyond worn, but also determined; and in someone who sets off at a moment’s notice across country –it is here that the hitchhiker realizes that it can be for no other reason than a) he’s on the run or b) he’s on the chase- it is usually the latter that wins out.

All of that comes out in a dramatically tired drawl. “Reckon it’s about eight a clock?”

“Ah dunno. Could be anytime, the way ahm feelin.”

“Tired?”

“No. I’s tired about two days ago. Now ahm juss….ahm juss goin.” There’s the determination, or the ability to ignore one’s own body, that the hitchhiker feared. He takes a page from the driver’s book.

“Is it fer family that yer goin up ta Michigan?”

The driver ruminates on this, but it’s not in the panicked way that got the hitchhiker into such a deep hole.

“You could say that.” With further thought, and a self-amused tension through his cheeks: “In-laws, acshully. Gonna pay them a visit.”

Maybe he said too much, but the past day and a half of running over the plot again and again, has gelled it into its own entity. It now exists outside of the driver and he’s starting to feel like he can controls who knows about it as much as he can control the weather. He’s almost so certain of the plan –constant repetition has smoothed out all the pesky, unknown variables- that it’s only a slight exaggeration for him to believe that it can carry itself out on its own.

Regardless, the hitchhiker senses that the terms of the conversation –a “verbal standoff” might be more accurate- however so slightly in his favor. It’s time for him to tease out his suspicions, and get a taste for the card up the driver’s rolled flannel sleeve.

“So it’s your parents?” This catches the hitchhiker sufficiently off guard. He forgets to put up his tough-guy elusiveness and squirms in his seat at the question. The light has left his eyes, but they remain sunken.

“What is?” The hitchhiker recovers and buys some more time with a question thrown back at the driver.

“You goin ta Mish’gun, right?”

There’s no way to respond to this. He remembers letting it slip about his parents being from Michigan when the driver pressed him about his accent –which he believes to be negligible, but was apparently pronounced enough to give him away.

Yet another question: “How much does this guy know?” It is unspoken, but written across the hitchhiker’s anxious brow. Little does he know that the driver –“this guy”- was just wondering the same thing.

“Ah yeah, but it’s fer a job ya see.” He has to think quick. “They gave us expenses for the bus, but I, ah…” The inside of the car goes from a cold stillness to scorching electricity in no time. “..I had more pressing expenses, you see.” That is followed by one of the weakest grins either of them have ever seen. The hitchhiker is in trouble: he can’t even convince himself. “Oughta do him right now,” is the only clear thought that will make itself felt, and it bears down on the hitchhiker’s skull like a molten weight. It must be contagious. The desperation in the faltering awkwardness of his answers has made the driver equally uneasy, and balmy. The wheel melts under his grip.

“…or when ah had the chance,” goes the refrain.

There’s that Hollister again. Tap tap, not too loud or it will arouse suspicion. It’s a reassuring four inches of metal under his big toe and not two feet from his closest hand. He’d have to fish for it though, and that would eat up precious time: the hitchhiker got a chance to glimpse the handle of the driver’s piece tucked into the rear of his waist.

Dumont

Whenever the driver thinks the mountains couldn’t possibly get any higher, another peak will appear, towering over the one before it. The pickup is a faithful, if tired, servant and continues its ascent unabated.

The white caps surrounding them on all sides burn in the diffused moonlight. It looks like the climb upwards will not stop until the two are either embedded in the brilliant snow crests, or they breach the clouds that barely scrape by their summits. The moon’s glow filters through a bilious curtain and reflects off the white-as-ivory peaks. One would expect a light so brilliant –though seemingly without a source- to carry heat; yet it has become bitingly cold inside the pickup. The driver and the hitchhiker openly lament their choice of wooly flannel for the one and denim jacket for the other.

Each of their separate plans had included stretches through the Rocky Mountains, wintry plains, and the northern lakes. The driver had previously been warmed by immediate thoughts of revenge upon discovering Paula, and Fresno’s mild winters require nothing more than the jacket he wears now. As for the hitchhiker, he had originally arrived in prison in the balmy weeks of early September, five years earlier. All he had needed was a plain denim jacket on Michigan’s temperate late summer nights. The same jacket had served him well upon his release from San Quentin just two weeks ago; but the pathetic San Francisco winter could hardly prepare him for the mile-high chill now invading the Chevy’s interior, and causing his flesh to prick up.

The mountain paths get narrower, though one would think it were impossible. There are points where one car would have to back up, sometimes for a mile, if another one is to get by. Luckily, no one is traversing the lonely trail on this Sunday night. A few tractor trailers, loosely lined up in an otherwise sloppy formation, rest at the bottom of a slope. A bright orange sign christens it

“Runaway Truck Ramp”. Their windows are solemnly dark.

The driver first makes sure to see if the hitchhiker is awake. His eyes flood with eerie moonlight, like two marbles at the bottom of an aquarium.

“Must’ve killed evey sonnofabitch in there,” he starts to joke to himself, but the smile never comes to his face. He checks the hitchhiker: there’s the smile that could tell of a thousand pleasures, but his eyes remain submerged in their icy blue depths, safely removing themselves from any joy in his face.

That peculiar phrase of the fat man’s steals into the driver’s head. “House a mirth, indeed,” he recites to himself. The driver isn’t sure what the word “mirth” means, but it sounds appropriate. It makes him think at once of both the hitchhiker and that dubious house of ill repute, and how the one seems to have been put on this Earth for the other.

“Mirth.” The driver rolls the word over his tongue and through his mind –he’s heard it before without ever questioning its meaning- before deciding that it must denote something like ‘wantonness’, though he wouldn’t know what that means either. The sentiment holds, all-the-same.

“Wha…whata you…”

“Oh ho, man. You missed a great time in there!” The hitchhiker springs up in his seat and stretches one arm out towards the dash and the other to the seat back as he turns to the driver. One hand is clutching a beer bottle while the other contains a bag of peanuts.

“You’d be amazed at what a few bucks in there can get ya.”

“Oh yeah?” The driver releases the words very cautiously, so they do not come out saying, “tell me more.” To cut the hitchhiker off before he can open his mouth: “You mean more than a bottle a beer an a pack a peanuts?”

The hitchhiker catches a hint of the sarcasm, though he is not usually good at picking up on such things.

“Oh yeah, a lot more.” He answers earnestly, despite the driver’s mocking tone. “You want one?” He pushes the bag of peanuts at the driver.

“I wanna get outta here.”

“Arright. Let’s hit that road.”

As they pull out of the pines and back onto the highway, the driver is amazed that they are finally leaving a place without an angry mob licking at their heels. He savors the slow turn of the pickup, as it cuts across two lanes to the eastbound side of the highway. In the process, the driver catches a sidelong glance at the hitchhiker. From a profile view –and this is the first time the driver notices it- his face takes on the inexplicable quality of at once smiling and seeming deathly intent on…something. The way his mouth turns up at the corners sets it in a jovial and constant smirk; while the creases running down from his eyes lend them the gravity of a man who has witnessed…a lot. The driver wonders, not so idly, if this is the frozen expression of someone who laughs while he murders. The driver is no longer relieved by the calm that sees them out of this pine-hidden whorehouse.

“I’ll pass.”

“You’ll pass?” The man is disconcerted by the driver’s seeming displeasure in an establishment built for just the opposite. He tries one last time to intervene.

“Hey buddy, ya gotta lighten up a little. Didn’ ya read the plaque out front? This here’s a ‘house a mirth’, a place ya come ta….”

The driver doesn’t remain seated long enough to hear the remainder of the boy-girl-child’s protest. He leaves the money on the bar -where it’s sat for one or two hours, the darkness and non-stop chatter has further warped the driver’s sense of time- and heads back, wobbly, into the blaze of an extraordinary gray late-morning. While his eyes adjust, all objects are submerged in daze of murky brightness.

There comes the shape of a long, luxury sedan. No, that is not his car. Next comes the familiar profile of pickup, but its finish –or what he can make out of it beneath a tinge of rust- is not the right color. Finally, he staggers upon its twin, parked slightly askew at the end of the row: a slightly better-cared-for model. Despite the blurry befuddlement of stepping out into a gray Rocky Mountain afternoon, he can tell that the car has taken a beating from the journey so far. The driver turns his gaze from the bowed dual-fender of his pickup to the jagged tree-line of the pine clearing. The snow-covered crests directly to the east, miles away but imposing all-the-same, does not fill him with hope. He turns back to the dutiful, smiling pickup and gives it a sigh, letting his shoulders fall forward and his chest draw inward. The driver is drunk with exhaustion.

He collapses into the driver seat, and the molded leather greets him like a pet. He is out before he can even register the slam of his door or the clink of a beer bottle as it falls from his hand.

The driver does not know what has awoken him: he’s still in the stage between sleeping and wakefulness. The sun seems brighter, though it is no less hidden than before. The hitchhiker has leapt into the seat next to him. It’s then that the driver recalls how it was the hitchhiker rushing into the car that had awoken him. The driver tries to speak.

“….you just gotta poke ‘em, just so…”

The driver butts in by way of a sudden swivel on the bar stool. He must be drunk, because he misestimates the force with which he’s pushed off the bar. His hand is met with the flab from some an unknown part of the man’s arm. That is enough to stop his tale of debauchery, or whatever it is, at a single phrase: “em’ flaps.” The driver either ignores or does not notice his alarmed look. Before the man can get out a “you aright buddy?”, the driver starts in.

“Sorry ta interrupt ya, but wha’s the deal wi’the drinks here?”

The fat man’s look turns into one of cheer. He has been waiting for such an opportunity to explain this, his favorite hideaway of easy virtue, since this newcomer, the driver, sat down.

“It’s free, bub. All of it. Ya can even help yr’self ta the hotplate over there f’ya want any.”

The diver glances down the bar, past his enormous neighbor, past the girls, each perched daughter-like on the knee of a crisply suited man. Against the back wall is a table, atop of which spits a black-iron skillet. A blue butane flame reaches up from beneath and licks its sides as well as the metal support propping it up.

The driver then turns to the plate of indecipherable glop, bubbling over on his neighbor’s plate.

“Free?” The driver is surprised they are even able to give the muddy goop away.

“Yeah,” more excited. “As long as you’re grabbin yr’self a girl at the end. Say! Which one you interested in? Sandy’s a real hoot but I’ve always liked Virginia…”

It’s funny: as regressed as these girls-for-hire may seem –sitting on men’s laps and cooing- it’s actually the driver’s overgrown-child of a neighbor that reminds him the most of a little girl.

“So would you care to take a look at our girls?” The madam makes a grand show of waving an open palm in the girls’ general direction. The hitchhiker and driver instinctively turn to each other. It’s become clear for whose benefit this side trip has been made, and the driver resigns himself to the bar.

“A few beers, an then I’m off.”

He doesn’t have to look –the squeals are indication enough- to know that hitchhiker has launched himself into the idle harem, and is now disappearing down the back hallway with whichever ones he has struck his fancy. Meanwhile the driver launches himself, though nowhere near as enthusiastically, into his first bottle of beer.

Even there at the bar, two girls are intent on working their way into the wallets of the few men perched on the stools. One man in particular, a husky bear in a shirt and tie, breaks away from a stream of girlish sniggers and sits down next to the driver. From the eager way he glances over, it is inevitable that he will try to engage the driver in conversation.

The driver will not, can not, engage back. He doesn’t understand why someone would care to socialize in a place such as this. It would seem that the company of fellow men is the last thing one would seek out here.

“Mibbe he’s bored v’all th’pluggin’. R’else, it’s no good anyways,” the driver explains to himself. Regardless, he has no desire to console a whore-chaser who’s had his fill of filling, and now wants to simply talk. The driver doesn’t know what he’s yammering on about anyway; something about “best girls west of Denver.” There’s a way the man’s words drift in and out, as if fragments of thought tangle in his vocal chords and he has to clear them out with a gruff “huhu, wadda ride she is” every now and again. As the words tumble out, one atop another before being swallowed back up whole, the man darts his head: from the driver, to the emaciated bartender hiding –or vanishing- in a corner, to the men and girls at the end of the bar, and back to the driver. It’s possible that he might just be talking to himself, or no one at all. The driver has no problem ignoring him, as long as the beers keep coming.

One bottle quickly becomes three and then six, with the odd shot of whiskey in between. The driver has been putting down money as he finishes each beer, but it never gets cleared from the bar. First ten cents, then a quarter, and now there sits a whole dollar and eighty cents –mostly in tips- but it remains untouched. Finally, he has to ask. His ribald neighbor is still on the same disjointed story that he started twenty, forty, sixty minutes ago.