The driver suddenly wearies, not just at the return of his murderous suspicions of the hitchhiker, but at everything: the whole trip –to Michigan, and they’ve only made it so far to Nebraska!- and what it stands for. He’s sick of missing Paula and being caught, stuck, in this scenic but never-ending no-man’s land between where her life left off and his….

The driver doesn’t know what’s to become of his, but he doubts whether any of it -no matter what he does or fails to do, no matter how many other lives he manages to drag down with his- could ever honor what he lost, back there, over one-thousand, five hundred miles ago. This thought, or jumble of half-thoughts, is depressing enough; but to be forced to play nanny to this dysfunctional cretin as well, is too much for waking consciousness to take. He passes out and would have collapsed onto the table if the chair wasn’t just a few more inches away.

Waking again: he’s gone, she’s gone, and the door swing wide open to douse the room in the crispness of morning, along with its first drops of light. Assuming the two have run off together, the driver should be thrilled, or at least relieved, as long as they haven’t taken the pickup with them. He’s oddly neutral, spent, completely uncaring: as long as the car is still there.

Walking out onto the front balcony to begin his third day in the same change of clothes, he scans the parking lot. Right where he left it waits his trusty, latter-day steed, of metal and chrome. Its scruffy windows giving off their own distorted interpretation of the pre-light of dawn, the driver doesn’t know if he’s ever seen anything more beautiful that wasn’t in a human.

With the hitchhiker gone, he can decide whether to carry on or to head back. It embarrasses him to think that he had to wait for that man to disappear before he could face such a decision. Then he suspects that he may have continued traveling precisely because of the hitchhiker. Trying to escape a passenger simply by driving faster; when he puts it like that, the driver knows it doesn’t make any sense. Yet when he gazes once again at his pickup, it takes on a completely different shade of animal in the absence of the hitchhiker. The driver dreads the emotion threatening to breach his surface, even though no one is around to witness it, and it is doubtful whether he can stop himself, when a noise causes that and every other emotion he’s ever had to grind to a halt.

Before the driver is the hitchhiker –who hasn’t responded to the driver’s protest, which causes the latter to doubt whether or not he actually screamed it- propped next to, and partially on top of, the young woman. One hand has disappeared up her dress while another pries at a black and blue breast that has flopped out.

The driver is sickened, but the taste that enters his mouth is the same metallic tingle that began his journey down the peyote hole last night. He prudently chokes it back, even though that causes it to burn even more drastically within his chest. His head burns too, though it is of the slow roasting of coals: a base of anger inflamed, if he can believe it, with betrayal. That her restrains have been undone or loosened clinches it. It shouldn’t, since the girl would not be able to do much with those mangled twigs even if she were conscious; but it smacks of spite against him. The driver knows he is being overly sensitive and irritable –probably from the drugs- but instead of fighting it, he goes with the unreasoned fury growing within and lends it his entire body on which to be nourished.

This time the driver does manage to escape the chair, though the chair kind of comes with him, and he is on top of the hitchhiker; not for long, because the hitchhiker is soon on the floor.

“What the hell are you doing?” The hitchhiker scolds like a moody teenager, and each word pounces like a separate, well-pronounced predator.

To his own surprise, the driver is sorry. Although he knows what the hitchhiker was doing, or attempting to do, was wrong; he reminds himself that he shouldn’t really care for the fates of either of them. Let them tear each other to shreds, and then fuck that way: that’s how little he wishes to care; but he does, obviously.

“C’mon, the girl can barely walk, an she’s not even moving.” This sounded lame to himself, so the driver can only imagine how much derision the hitchhiker will find in it. The latter simply gets up, brushes himself off, and sulks back to his own bed. An overgrown child indeed; though the driver doubts how much the hitchhiker actually feels himself to be reprimanded, and whether it’s not just a show to get the driver off his case. Either way, the latter figures as long as the hitchhiker has returned to his allotted bed, there’s not much more he can do, short of….

“Whatta we do now?” the hitchhiker searches the driver once he’s fully caught his breath. It’s obvious that the driver is calling the shots, and not just because he was the one behind the wheel.

“I’un know. We should pra’bly tire up. N’case she wakes.”

They look around for any type of rope. The closest they come are the electrical cords for a lamp and a bedside clock, before they decide that tightly twisted sheets will work just fine. They tie the poor girl to the bedposts and gag her mouth, just to be safe. Her face has come away from the ordeal undamaged, for the most part; just a couple of scrapes and bruises. Even with the patches of dried blood, they don’t take away from the natural beauty she evidently possesses. Her nose may be a bit too thin and cheek bones a little too sharp –again, the idea of an alluring witch comes to mind- but in the repose of unconsciousness, they give off the air of a concentration directed inward. The driver is impressed, while the hitchhiker is drunk, high, and most likely horny. That is not to say who holds the better of intentions for her, assuming either the hitchhiker’s or the driver’s can be considered ‘good’ in the first place.

The hitchhiker and the driver both know that she needs medical attention. That can be gleamed easily enough just by looking at her. They don’t dare touch the sodden, torn dress or rearrange her body other than how it lays now, lopsided on a bare mattress.

The whiskey is finished off quickly and, combined with the tail end of a peyote comedown, the driver nods off where he sits. Just as he’s dropping off into a darkness that is not as harrowing as the one experienced during his hallucinatory ordeal, he takes note of the hitchhiker: where he is and what he’s doing. He’s still laid out on the opposite bed, but it’s not clear whether he’s asleep or awake. His head is propped up against the wall. It doesn’t seem too comfortable, but it’s at an angle that makes him look like he’s gazing at something further down his body, or perhaps slightly over the edge of the bed, or at the bottom of the adjacent wall. A hand rests on his stomach, but that could very well be to push his jacket down to keep it from obstructing the view. Whatever that view may be, the driver isn’t able to decide any further before he is out completely. He won’t be awoken until he hears the whispers and low groans, and the ominous rattle of a wood-frame bed.

“What the hell’re you doin?!” The driver’s grogginess is like an opaque wall separating him from the world. His brain tells his muscles, especially those in his thighs and calves, to move, quickly; but the neuro-motive effort is wasted on a still-slumbering body.

“It’ll be five for the night, and five for deposit.”

The driver drops two crumpled fives on the counter while the clerk reaches to the pegboard to grab a key.

“Number eighteen,” he announces. “Upstairs, and just around the corner.”

The driver takes it by its ridiculous wooden adornment: a carved and painted blue whale. It makes him vaguely aware that the few other keys on the board were attached to different, though similarly crafted, animals. Through the glass door he notices that the motels sign is a large ark, like the biblical cartoon of Moses’s, if the driver’s religious knowledge serves him correctly. Above that, written in fat, happy-looking rain drops beneath a light-up thundercloud, reads “Forty Winks, Forty Nights Motor Inn”; while black letters on a celluloid marquee advertises rates simply as “biblically low”.

“Checkout’s ten a clock,” a bored voice calls out from behind as he exits the office. The clerk wastes no time in settling back into his chair and returning to his inattentive watch over the front desk.

The driver pulls the pickup as close as he can to the staircase leading up to the second floor walkway. It’s underneath a porch light that would reveal the hairs on an ant’s head, let alone the mangled, unconscious body of a biker’s girlfriend. Luckily, it is late and there’s no one around.

Each one takes a side and half-drags, half-lifts her up the stairs. Her feet clunk one step at a time, and towards the top, she loses a shoe.

They get her in and toss her on a bed. The hitchhiker falls onto a bed adjacent while the driver sinks into a chair. They both gasp to recover from the haul up the stairs. Either unconscious weight is as good as dead weight, or the drug has greatly sapped their strength. The driver unscrews the top of his rye and turns it straight up, into his mouth. The hitchhiker reaches out across the bed and the driver isn’t so cruel as to deny him a swig. They both mark their refreshment with a loud smack and a drawn-out sigh.

Lincoln

Since the hitchhiker is covered in blood, it is the driver that checks into the motel. A bearded man is asleep behind the counter. The little bell on the counter is rung once, twice, three times in rapid succession until he finally comes to. Rubbing his face and groaning with all the effort it takes to raise his portly body, the man looks sufficiently annoyed.

“Yeah?”

“ ‘Yeah?’ What? You think I’ve drove thousin some-odd miles juss ta shoot the breeze with ya, pardner?” The driver is incredulous at the clerk’s gall, but decides that he is more desperate for the room than a fight -and running the risk of being kicked out before he’s even checked in- so he returns an obvious question with an obvious question of his own.
“Ya gotta room?”

“Fer how many?” This really is too much.

“How many do ya see? Juss me..” “…you grizzly somafabitch,” he wants to add but, again, he needs the room.

“Arright, fill this out.”

He must be joking. The hairy man pushes a one page form across the front desk. There’s a pen on a string, taped to the wooden counter top.

The lasting effect of the drugs –peyote, which the driver had mistakenly recognized as strepatche, the cured buffalo meat- makes it impossible to decipher one string of words and blank lines from another, even if he were able to read. He scribbles in nothing in particular, just a string of jibberish; but he does it for long enough, and with a sufficiently concentrating face, that it approximates what one would possibly do if really filling out such a form. The clerk grows tired of the charade before the driver.

“Arright, that’s enough.” He grabs the paper away, as if it will just end up in the trash anyway.

In the next moment, the biker and his woman are on the hood. The front of the pickup lilts with the weight and a there is a denting noise like that of a crushed can. The woman falls immediately to the wayside, but the biker rolls up onto the windshield. It begins to crack. The driver is somehow manages to bring the car to an instantaneous stop, and the biker is gone like a spec of dirt caught by the wind.

The dying down of the engine brings a momentary calm. It is underscored with the rolling thud of arms, belly, and head body flopping against asphalt. It finally comes to a halt with a muffled crash: a great weight hitting frozen dirt.

The way the pickup has swerved to a halt, its headlights follow the asphalt to the highway’s shoulder, where it drops off into an unseen ditch. Streaks of blood glisten in the light. They too disappear at the road’s ledge.

The driver staggers out of the car and he is followed closely by the hitchhiker. They both manage to stumble towards the ditch, miraculously without falling in.

“Shit.”

They can barely make out a denimed whale below. It doesn’t move. A little further off in the blackness of an empty field, a motorcycle sputters with the diesel whimpers of a wounded animal.

“Let’s get outta here.”

They turn back to the pickup but quickly catch sight of a white figure in a torn dress. She resembles a lithe insect, half squashed but still managing to flop a displaced limb and pull itself along the ground. She too glistens with red and her arms are arranged in a way that no arms ever should.

The hitchhiker runs for her and she collapses completely. He is able to hook two arms under hers and pulls. The scrape of flesh on the coarse roadway is painful to listen to. More of the deep, red wine, left behind in a pool: it colors the hitchhiker’s sleeves, up to his elbows.

The driver wants to yell that he can’t throw her inside the truck, but he knows they can’t leave her out here either. She slumps in the middle and the almost simultaneous slamming of car doors signals the close of yet another chapter –really no more remarkable than the ones to come before- in the adventures of the hitchhiker and the driver, as they batter their way through the American West, under an American Sky, on into another American Night.

“Lessgo arready.” It is the hitchhiker –real or apparition- sitting in the seat opposite. His head drips: not with sweat, but its actual form and contours drip onto the seat and dashboard. “Less-go-ar-ready” the puddles of hitchhiker tremble in a sluggish bass.

The pickup is moving, but it’s not the linear movement of a car or any vehicle guided by a road and tires. The driver can’t even be sure if he is the one directing the car. He himself feels like his is sinking and he only clutches at the wheel as a life preserver.

Lights crash into one another and pieces of highway appear from the chaos every now and again, but the scene outside the windshield is nothing comparable to driving. A spaceship or submarine would be more believable; races of creatures flit by that could only exist in the outer reaches of the chartable world.

The driver has to stop. He pushes down on the pedal that he believes will do the trick, but the amorphous colors only grow brighter, and speed up with the urgency of those in a chase.

A familiar sound brings the driver partially back to the situation. He doesn’t recognize it at first, but its whirring vibrations slow down until it becomes the recognizable flatulence of a motorcycle.

“Bikers!”

Just like that, they appear; as if naming them is enough to summons them into existence. Except there’s only one: a hulking mass of a man with a woman clinging on to his shoulders. Her black witches hair trails them like the streamers of a kite.

They surpass the pickup from the adjacent lane and then dart out in front. Every hallucinating cell in the driver’s body is telling him to catch them. The hitchhiker voices his support in a polyphonic mess of “whoooooppeeeeee”s and “gogeduuuuuuuuuuum”s.

The rear wheel of the bike is like a spinning taunt. It speaks to the driver, mocks him, and dares him to come anywhere close to its gravelly spit. The driver doesn’t have to shift gears or press down on the pedal before the pickup’s hood is on the bike’s rear tire, like an attack dog sinking its teeth into its prey.

Settlers Top

The vomiting duel went on for twenty minutes before showing any sign of letting up. In between cries of “wha’ the hell d’ja do ta me?” and “it’s poison, ah tell ya! Damned In-jeen poison!” the two seemed to wretch up not only the few morsels of a mysterious green, but everything else they have eaten in the last twenty-four hours.

The sickness abates, but the night continues with its fires and prehistoric creatures that seem to come and go with the twitch of every shadow. The driver gathers enough strength to bring him back to the pickup, but once inside, he feels like it is just enough to stay breathing. The sweat dancing on his skin makes him feel like a reptile. He imagines a gecko sunning lazily on a rock, then he sees it, as his own reflection in the windshield.

He knows the best thing to do in this situation would be to sleep it off; but every time he closes his eyes, the fires of hell reach out to claim him for himself.

“Am I dying?” From how it feels, it would be a reasonable question.

Even though it feels like permanent insanity, he retains enough wits to figure that all drugs wear off eventually, the length of time depends merely on the dosage. He remembers swallowing whole two –or maybe three- of the wretched stubs.

It turns out that they are the buttons of a cactus. The Indians use them for their satanic rituals. They even have a name for it. If only he could remember what that damned Indian called it.
“Strip out, somethin’.”

“Strip-hot-shee.” He sees the hitchhiker waver into existence like gasoline fumes. It’s a memory or a hallucination, but there’s the hitchhiker standing with the Indian. Paranoia sweeps him up like the sudden nausea previously.

“Both of em. They’re out ta kill me!” He spins around frantically, searching for the hitchhiker. There are pairs of eyes everywhere. The whole darkened farm-scape has come alive to watch the show. There comes a voice that could be many voices, but it rings out a few shimmering words.