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.