He takes a gulp of about two or three and chews. The look on his face says its better to swallow them whole, and he does, with whatever’s left in a salvaged beer bottle.

“Well?”

“They’re sour, but nothin’ wrong with’m.”

This makes the driver laugh. The hitchhiker is still gagging. Worse yet: he can’t wrangle another drop from the bottle.

“Here ya go.” The driver hands him a pint of rye whiskey that he had been hiding in his jacket pocket, presumably for emergencies such as this. The two types of sour make a painful combination in the hitchhiker’s mouth, but he’s grateful all the same.

“Save some fer me.” Grabbing the bottle from his passenger, the driver knocks back a few of the evil green goobers. He has an easier time with them, perhaps learning from the hitchhiker’s example to just swallow them like a couple of aspirins.

They rumble in the driver’s stomach, but otherwise don’t cause much of a disturbance. He nearly forgets about them entirely when he feels himself pitch forward and the road opens up with a halo of sun or hellfire. The pickup is suspended in motion and the fields break into thousands of shards all around them.

The hitchhiker has complicated all that. Now, the necessity to choose what is and isn’t -possible and not possible- may be the only thing that saves the driver’s mission. Even if his suspicions turn out to be correct, it requires a clear and focused mind to make that decision. The driver can physically feel his exhaustion urging him to an edge where all would be lost.

“Ah, what’m I do-ing?!”

He’s dreaming, though awake, and yelling; all-the-while continuing to drive.

His screams wake the hitchhiker. He looks over at the driver and can tell something significant has passed; maybe some of the seeds he tossed out with his talk of prison have found agreeable soil in the driver’s suspecting mind. This just raises the hitchhiker’s own suspicions up a couple of notches.

“Y’aright?”

“Yeah, it’s just my stomach.” The driver feels obliged to give a brief rub of his abdomen and a grimace.

“I know what ya mean. Ya need ta filler up. With booze o’r food it doesn’t matter, but it needs somethin”

“There’s nothin’ around. An even if there were, it’s late.”

“I got these.” The hitchhiker produces his canvas satchel that was bestowed upon him by the Indian. Out of it tumbles a few clumps of what appear to be dried fruit. They’re of not-yet-ripe pistachio color.

“What are they?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m willin to try a handful if you are.”

“I’on know. Those In-jeens got some pretty strange…”

“Ah, c’mon. They’re juss fruit fer cryin out loud. They’ve juss been dried an….” The hitchhiker takes a whiff and his words almost curdle back on him. “Juss try em.”

He knows that Paula’s killer, her ex-lover- was serving time in Berta Breck, and then San Quentin. That is nowhere near Death Valley; but it’s possible that they’ll send free labor to wherever it’s needed. The whole story about being released in the middle of the desert didn’t add up, and it still leaves the driver with the urge to leave this convict at the side of the road, anywhere. Whether he’s left as a corpse or merely a stranded hitchhiker would depend upon, among other things, how cooperative he proves to be, which doesn’t seem likely judging by experience of the recent past.

The driver knows that this is what he must do, to spare his mission if not his own life. No one gets released from prison in the middle of Death Valley. Those are someone else’s clothes and that is a bag stuffed with a dead man’s, or several dead men’s, belongings. The pretense of traveling to Michigan is probably a cover. It’s clear that he is driving upwards of two thousand miles in the service of an escapee, or else he’s….. “Traveling to Michigan” sticks in the driver’s mind, his throat, and his gut, and refuses to dislodge. No further thoughts can surmount the mental coronary. The driver is left with those words merely running on a loop through his head.

He almost crashes the car. It swerves like an eel on ice, but there is nothing for miles to hit. The hitchhiker stirs. It doesn’t look like he’ll wake. The driver wonders if he strangles him now, would he be able to put up much resistance.

“Can’t be.” The driver has to dissuade himself from making any decisions that could jeopardize his intentions for coming out here in the first place. “I’m in no state to…I’m mean, what’re the odds, really?”

He knows the hitchhiker has stirred an irksome spot within him since he jumped into the pickup. The few things he says don’t sit right with the driver, and the idea of him being a murderer, and an escaped felon, are well within the realm of possibility.

It’s strange, maybe appropriate, how the driver has so far managed to evade that nuanced world where the possible and the impossible are two very separate modes of being, or non-being as one may have it. The driver has had to consider neither one nor the other since making that discovery nearly two days ago. Revenge, as an imperative, does not care for “can” and “cannot.”

“Sure. Juss a little, though.”

“Juss a little?”

“Yeah, petty stuff. When I’s a kid. Hardly worth mench’nin.”

“Oh, aright.”

“Why? Hwa’bout you?”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“Ha’long?”

“Ah, a couple a years in one joint. Got transferred ta’nother. Now here I am, free as a bird.”

“Y’mean ya juss got out?’

“Oh yeah.”

“Well hwa’bout what you said before, bout workin down..”

“Death Valley? They had us on a chain gang.”

“An they juss let ya out, right there an then?”

“When yer time is up, yer time is up.”

That left the driver in silence, alternately grappling with the nuggets of personal biography served up by the hitchhiker, and the sickening knot of tiredness, suspicion, blood-lust and whatever else is digging its claws into the lining of his stomach.

McCook, Nebraska

Falling from the heights of the Rockies to the wheat field flats of Nebraska is tantamount to putting a race car driver in a pushcart. If the driver was previously fighting off exhaustion with the sudden twists and plunges of a mountain pass, now he has only boredom as a companion. His other companion, the hitchhiker, nods off with his head occasionally pitching forward before jerking back violently to the headrest. This may wake him up briefly, and then in a droopy-eyed daze, if at all.

The driver doesn’t mind the lack of conversation. It’s just that the relentless flump-flump, flump-flump, of the tires on the asphalt lull him off like a rubber heartbeat. It provides the perfect –or unfortunate- soundtrack for unchanging scenery: endless rows of frozen stalks, for miles; and every thirty minutes or so, the darkened outlines of the same farmhouse-barn-silo triptych, sunk in the slumber of Midwestern winter.

The ground and road are covered in a fine frost, through which the rhythmic dashes of the middle marker can barely be discerned. The driver bemoans: he doesn’t even have the metronome of those yellow hyphens to watch, to keep time and measure distance. He wonders how far he would get if he were able to count each instant of their flitting past; or which would come first, hypnosis or insanity.

Orange pin pricks in the distance: they are either a factory or the same thing, a collection of smokestacks labeled a ‘city’ in these rural swaths. It’s too far off beyond the gentle curve of a field to identify anyway; and its gone before the driver would have had a chance to make up his mind, if he cared.

He recalls the conversation of an hour or so ago, when the excitement of an ancient, stone prison, with fortress-style turrets, passed their way.

“Ya ever been inside?”

“What? There?!”

“Nah, ya thick piece a…I mean in th’nick. Ya know, done time?”

“Good, now close that window. The bikers may not kill us, but that stench sure will.”

The driver obliges, but slowly. He relishes the hitchhiker’s protests with the mischievous glee of an older brother who has finally given in to his younger sibling’s cries. “Aw, aright,” says his teasing smile, and he has to wonder if it would be so out of place if he reached out and gave the hitchhiker a loving punch on the arm: not too hard, but enough for him to know who is in charge, of windows and everything else.

The driver settles for a mocking whine: “oooh, it smells.” His eyes have regained the hint, for the first time since he set out thirty-four hours ago, of the dance they would take on when he teased Paula and she would cry “no, not fair” just like a child.

As signs for the highway out of town spring to life from between the slaughterhouses, it clicks for the driver: Paula-Dearborn-California-murdered-road-Michigan. The driver wants to tack “hitchhiker,” as well, into the continuum but isn’t sure where. The returning waves of nausea tell him that he could place the hitchhiker anywhere in the story, and it would still make perfect sense.

The industrial buildings and lit signs advertising auto parts and pay-by-the-hour rooms shortly give way to modest sized office buildings. Those yield to a few ornate skyscrapers clustered around a central square. In its middle, families skate in circles on an ice rink while a solemn-looking Christmas tree –hardly any lights, just a few twinkling glass balls- stands guard.

The motorcycles have either amplified their engines or gained considerable ground. The way the ground shakes, the driver wouldn’t be surprised if it cracked the ice on the rink or caused a few of the massive glass ornaments to fall. The hitchhiker studies the one beer bottle left on the floor, and considers its efficacy if used as a projectile. His common sense physics tells him that the centrifugal force of the pickup would merely fling the bottle off the periphery if thrown. He frowns at the prospect and can’t help but wonder why the same wouldn’t happen to bullets. The hitchhiker’s bag rests at his feet and he can feel the handle of his Hollister Special Issue .38 with the toe of his boot.

The pickup takes to the roundabout and tree, rink, towers, and slow-moving vehicles become a swirling blur. The circle has several streets leading off it and each one is preceded by a sign announcing the street name and maybe where it leads. The pickup is swerving too fast, so the driver takes a guess and approximates which street will carry them in the same direction as they were headed before.

The lights of the city have gone out. There are long, shingled buildings on either side but the two might as well be back in the middle of the Rocky’s wilderness. Every now and then a rare streetlight will illuminate a sign painted on a brick façade, “Royce & Sons Curing and Packaging” or “Steers at 3 cents per kilo”; and that’s when the stench hits them. It’s not just of festering manure; but the carcasses, fresh or not, mingling with the chemicals of the tanning process, are enough to describe animal fear and torment.

“Jeezis. We may be safe here, but it smells like pure shit.” The hitchhiker cannot roll his window up fast enough. It doesn’t help. The driver has cracked his down a little bit more. He listens with the attentiveness of a bugle pup. There is a swirl of motorbike roar echoing off the brick walls far behind them. It dies off before it can get any louder.

“Shhhhhhhh. I don hear em no more. I don here nothin.”

The problem now is that the window escape has left the hitchhiker and the driver at the rear of the motel. They need to get to the pickup, still sitting at a pump in the front. If Nado and his henchmen haven’t already torn through every room upstairs looking for them, then they were sure to be waiting out front. All the driver can do is hope. The hitchhiker curses the bikers, crew opposite included, not so quietly as he catches a breath, and lets it go in one steady puff.

The driver sticks his head around a corner while motioning for the hitchhiker to stay back. The latter has so far failed to follow even the hint of an instruction, so it seems unlikely that he will start now. In fact, the hitchhiker bolts ahead. The driver barely catches, “ain’t hidin from these sons of bitches”; again, expressed in an angry gush of air.

“Wait…” It’s too late. The coast is clear, but the old man attendant has the hood up and his head stuck completely aside. It doesn’t take long for the driver to push him aside.

“Thanks pop, but we gotta run.” He slams the hood and jumps into the truck in an interrupted motion, without failing to notice that not so much as a square inch of it has been touched with a damp rag.

“As long as there’s juice in it, I’m happy.” The driver is wise to set his hopes low.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmm.Clink-clink-clink-clink.

“Ah hell pops. Wadja do?!” It sounds like there’s a tin can loose, rattling under the hood.

They don’t wait for a response from the absent-minded attendant, even a dismissive one, before they peel out of the parking lot and head down what appears to be the main drag into the city’s center. The bikers must have run out shortly after them, because they can hear the low growls and throat-clearing revs of bike engines, one more angrier than the other.

The driver has to weave between cars and lanes because the traffic is rather slow going. The pickup obeys dutifully, but not without a screech of the tires or a disconcerting rattle every now and then as protest.

“Up there,” the hitchhiker points to a spot further up the wall. It’s a man-sized hole, lined with the same gleaming metal that comprises the laundry-folding tables. They scramble up a shelf and, one at a time, pull themselves into the shoot. The door behind them rattles with the force of hundred pound sides of meat. It is locked but, judging from the sound of cracking wood, won’t be for long.

There is only one floor to climb before the driver and the hitchhiker come to the first opening. It’s a slot that pushes outward and leads into the identical carpeted hallway of every roadside inn.

The first one out helps to pull the man behind him. They stand in the mid-length of the hallway and either way looks the same. A lit exit sign advertises a possible escape, and they follow its glowing plastic promise.

Another stairway; and the gruff, angry voices that the driver, and certainly the hitchhiker, should be so used to by now, are rising from the level below. The bikers obviously wasted not time in so much as trying the average-waist-sized laundry chute, but this being a two-story motel, it didn’t take much more brain cells than that of the three oafs combined to figure out that there was nowhere for their chance nemeses to go but up. Another downside of the squat motel: once on the second floor, there was nowhere to go but down.

The hitchhiker and the driver have to abandon the idea of a stairway escape. They backtrack into the hallway where their only alternative for escape is a window.

The drop is not too painful, as long as they hang from the windowsill fully extended before letting go. There is a collection of bikers standing across the way, standing idly and smoking in an alley. Of course, they are not aware of the commotion taking place within the motel, so they interrupt their banter to watch the two shadows drop from the second-floor window with mild, if confused, amusement.