“Cool it, honcho. We’re just gettin smokes an fillin up the tank.”

“Oh, is that right?”

It’s the hitchhiker’s turn. “Listen, Bluto. You should consider wearin a helmet. A few less hits ta the head, an maybe you wouldn go round askin so many questions.”

If the pudgy, whiskered face hadn’t already been red, it would certainly have flared a dangerous scarlet in anger.

“D’ja hear what this shrimp said ta you, Nado? He thinks you’re slow or somthin.”
This biker doesn’t do much to lend confidence in his friend’s intelligence. The man named Nado -short for Tornado, which is itself a stand-in for a more conventional birth name, like Jonas or Petey- is still registering his insult, though his body would seem to have long responded with a puff in the chest and drawing back on a flab-hidden neck.

“Let’s getum,” declares the one biker who had theretofore remained silent. He, too, had a gang name, Bison, but it never caught on. His fellow bikers continue to call him by his birth name, which happened to be Petey.

The three rush the counter as a single wall of denim and fat-coated muscle. The hitchhiker and driver have to hurdle over the Formica slab, without any regard for the poor cashier woman behind it. She shrieks as an avalanche of tobacco pouches and snuff tins showers her, along with the hitchhiker and the driver. The three bikers briefly try to get a trunk-sized leg up before deciding it to be easier to simply pile out the front door.

The hitchhiker and the driver exit through a rear office. It leads to the area behind the front desk, where a bewildered clerk and phone operator cower, looking like cornered animals. They two spotted by Nado, Petey, and the instigator, named Choke, who are standing in the middle of the lobby.

The two follow through to some sort of mail-sorting room. They overturn the long tables in their way and paper flies up like a Fifth Avenue parade. The adjoining room is very bright and sterile. It too has long tables, but they are completely clear and shine like a polished bumper.

From the looks of the linen-stuffed shelves running the length of the walls, they have come to a laundry storage room. From here, the only other door leads, presumably, into the main hallway connecting off the lobby. The thuds of boots on carpet grow louder and shake the fixture suspended from the ceiling.

“Ah what can I do ye fer, boys?” He sounds exactly as someone would imagine from a Rip Van Winkle pump attendant.

“Filler up wi’this.” The driver hands the man a folded dollar. He doesn’t look at it as he puts it in the front pocket of his overalls and circles the car, studying it as if it were on an operating table.

“Looks like ye boys’ve been through the wa-ar.” He confirms this with a finger-scrape of the hood. It yields a yellowed gray streak, and the attendant scrunches up his face like someone has just shat in his hand.

“Don be afraid ta giver a good scrubbin, ol man.” The driver doesn’t say that facetiously. He saw the bucket of no-doubt icy, soapy water beside where the man sat, and expects a full scrub down for his money. The attendant just folds his arms at his sides and shakes his head. Apparently, he would prefer to treat already buffed and polished vehicles. In that case, he should quit the gas station and go work as a chauffeur for Jeanie Meriwether’s crowd; though he’d have to lose the greasy overalls and trim back the beard a bit.

“Let’s go in fer some smokes.” The hitchhiker heads for the brightly lilt store in the motel’s foyer. It shines with slick tiled floors and the reflection off a chrome plated ice box. It reminds him of how quickly it become dark, especially up in the mountains; and cold. He runs to the glowing coil heater behind the door.

“Might as well. It’s getting a bit nippy out here anyway.”

Inside, they are not alone. A pairing and a half of grizzly bikers take up almost the entire store. The hitchhiker and driver scrunch against the rack of rolling papers and tobacco. The bikers are laughing with a deafening gut-belch. Something has stirred their derision, and they toss packets of potato chips and clink bottles from the cooler with glee.

“Hahahahaha.” The biggest of the three turns around and bellies up to the duo huddled at the counter. “What is this?” It’s a bear of a growl, gurgled with beer and phlegm.

Denver

At last there is a break in the mountains. The pickup crests admirably over its last ridge and takes a nosedive along the plunging rock face. The road continues to twist and turn at sharp variances, and the pickup adopts the motions of a downhill skier, negotiating the slalom

The descent is swift. Wheels crunch over rocks just before they’re swept over the ledge of the road, and tumble noiselessly to an unknown fate. A green-gray floodplain stretches up to meet the mountain. It rears up at such an obedient angle that it looks like it will gracefully catch the pickup, just before it would otherwise crash to the ground.

At little further out, the city of Denver rises like a model in miniature. There stand a few stalactite blocks of sandstone amid a mess of similarly colored, but stouter, slabs. The first lights of early evening have switched on in a grid of otherwise darkened squares. Atop one building, standing opposite an aged clock tower, the Old West lettering of a Wells Fargo sign shines bright, lending an orange hue to the streets below.

The pickup is even with the highest rooftops within minutes. On the final, sloping turn into the city, a bottom-lit water tower rises up from the low-lying, brick industrial buildings lining the avenues. It seems to straddle an entire block. It announces, “Denver Cobbling- A Mile High, and a Foot Above the Rest”. Next to it, the neon sign for the “Fool’s Gold Motor Inn”, although towering well over the two story motel, seems diminutive by comparison. The pickup pulls up beside one of the two gas pumps at the motel’s forecourt.

“I’m fillin er up,” the driver explains as he hops out. The hitchhiker follows suit.

“Nah, the ol’ guy’ll do it.” He motions to a sleepy-looking white-bearded man lounging in overalls and cloaked with a wool blanket. He is leaning against the brick wall of the garage with his boots propped up on a barrel. His chair crashed forward when he sees the duo. The hitchhiker can imagine his bones creaking as he staggers to raise himself. He lurches forward, first on one foot, then on the other, as if walking were a new, and dangerous, venture for him.

The driver, satisfied with his vague but honest admission –and as good a warning for anybody planning on following him into the Beaver State- sinks into his seat like a man readying for bed. The hitchhiker also slumps back, but it tells of the inferior player for whom losing never becomes less frustrating.

The moon rises behind the clouds, trailing the pickup truck. A passing big rig toots its horn. There’s a certain way these mountain roads can bring a person so close to death, yet without ever having to fear that that moment is now. The warning is always of the next ridge, around that corner; but each turn is equally dangerous.

The driver and the hitchhiker have come perilously close to stumbling upon a common and fatal detail. They carry a third passenger who cannot be seen but whose weight on both of their minds has continuously made itself felt. As they relax in their seats and lose themselves in the pickup’s steady slogging through the rock-face, little can they know that not only are they heading to the same place, but they’re going to have to run the same risks to get there.

“An your wife?”

Checkmate: the driver’s face goes dead. It was already white between the reflection off the snow caps and the smoky underbelly of the clouds.

“Paula, she’s dead.” He should just say it. Then this bastard can come out and pony up to whatever warped game he’s set out on in the first place. The driver gives pause to ask himself, “weren’t I juss the one tryin ta get something outta him?”

He still isn’t sure what it is he wanted to hear from the hitchhiker, and it occurs to him that maybe the hitchhiker isn’t retaliating at all. He could innocently be asking after his wife, since it was him that mentioned the in-laws. The driver had become so caught up in his own suspicions that he automatically assumed the hitchhiker was doing the same; but an innocently posed question doesn’t bring the type of eager anticipation that has so evidently staked a claim on the hitchhiker’s face.

“No wonder this scumbag has to play Thai-pen footsies, or whatever it’s called. He can hide an expression to save his life.”

If the driver had followed that thought, he might have realized how literal it is. Instead, he reverts to a time-honored form of deception: the snippet of truth.

“She’s back in California.”

“Well I don’t assume you’ll be gone too long. You got no bags!”

The driver decides to take this as the light-hearted quip that the hitchhiker meant it to sound.

“Ah, plenty a things fer me up in Michy-gan. Plenty. A. Things.”