How long it’s been, exactly, is indeterminable. The driver puts a hand to the hanging orb of sun as it barely clears a ridge of pines in the distance. It’s impossible to tell time the way the Indians do, with a sun that refuses to rise above the ten o’clock point before sinking back down.

“Damn winner.” The light comes in so slanted, it could be four pm all day. Every shadow races to the northern horizon; not in the shape of pine trees or frozen wheat stumps but merely in never-ending streaks, as if the Earth has been painted with stripes of night.

If the driver had to estimate (which he does, since he doesn’t wear a watch) how long he’s been standing there next to his broken down pickup, he would say an hour. It’s been twenty six minutes. Apparently, as the days grow shorter, time stretches out.

A tow truck grows out of the distance. It passes the driver and his jalopy, and shows no sign of slowing down until its break lights liven to a hopeful red. It’s backing up, slowly. The driver’s guess is that it was not sent out on a call, at least not for him, but just happened to be passing by. His suspicions are confirmed when a potbellied man jumps out of the cab and approaches the car. He tilts his bald head and furrows his brow as if he doesn’t know what to make of the sight in front of him. The driver wants to tell him that if he can’t recognize a car when he sees one, then he’s gone into the wrong profession. The man jumps to life once he realizes how long he’s been standing there with a skeptical wince and how confused he actually looks.

“Wha’happened?”

“It’s th’rady-ator. Pletely blew out on me.”

The man takes a look anyway. He takes even longer to inspect the charred insides under the hood. It’s not a mathematical theorem, it’s a radiator cap that wasn’t screwed on tight enough. The driver suddenly feels the bite of impatience. He’s surprised by how similar it tastes to rage.

“Ar righty.” He groans up from the hood as if he’s just finished taking a leak. “Tell you h’wat. I’m heddin downta I-wa Cid-ee on a call. I kin tow ya ta a gur-age there, a great guy, I know im, an we kin call it an eve-in tweny.”

Twenty dollars for a tow is robbery. The garage will probably charge even more than that for repairs, if this tow truck man is as chummy with its owner as he makes out. The only saving grace is that it’s an hour’s ride in the right direction. The driver swallows his objections and follows the man to his truck. More grating than the outrageous price –Americans’ entrepreneurial talents really shine in times of other people’s crisis- is the driver’s relegation, however brief, to the role of hitchhiker.

“Goddamned radiator!”

He’s convinced that the view from the passenger side isn’t half as good. At least this driver seems happy to carry his fare with hardly any questions. Just a couple of preliminary grunts and they’re off. The sun shines directly through the passenger window, blinding in its wintry weakness.

The truth is like the acrid smell of burnt metal, emanating from the pickup. It engulfs the driver, so he dare not breathe, and makes his stomach feel like it is burrow its way up his esophagus. His head at once feels weightless and stabbed through with countless pins. His mind may have so far been able to justify his lack of action, but his body will not. He is too sick to level a gun. He vomits over the carburetor and half on the timing belt. The hitchhiker brings him a cigarette and surprisingly, it settles his gut. All he needed was one type of smoke in order to counteract the other.

“I’m gonna head back n’ta town an get you a tow.” The “you”, as opposed to an “us”, is all that registers with the driver. He knows it shouldn’t bother him, and he’s actually more annoyed at being annoyed than anything else.

The hitchhiker can leave him; that’s what he’s wanted ever since the first stirrings of trouble in Vegas, or even before that, if he had been particularly observant. So why does he feel the urge -as overpowering as the one that almost had him flee in the face of the rogue cop- to follow the hitchhiker, follow him anywhere, even if they never make it back into Fort Winslow? The driver’s trust of, and patience for, the hitchhiker was spent long before it was even established, that much he knows. Yet to be left here alone at the side of the road, with the well-intentioned and rightfully suspicious Iowans zooming past in their cars, seems a lot worse than a silence-filled car ride with the man who may or may not be Paula’s killer.

The driver manages to convince himself that he needs to keep an eye on this man, just to be safe, but he can’t take a single step in his direction. The driver watches the immaculate white shirt, slightly puffed out under two austere suspenders, fade into the frozen midday brilliance. It’s an absurd sight: not just the hitchhiker tramping along in his Sunday best, but the two of them, parting ways with nothing but the silence of barren fields growing between them, and the occasional swooooosh of a passing Dodge.

Fort Winslow

The engine chokes to a gurgle even before the smoke starts rising from the hood. It smells of burning rubber. Not the good kind, like at the start of a race when tires peel away their own flesh, but the kind that reeks of melting tubes and wires and spits up a hiss of fluid. The driver watches in horror as the smoke clouds over to gray, and then pure soot black. The hitchhiker can’t help but find it amusing. The show becomes outright hysterical once the driver pulls over, though he can’t see much of the road ahead.

He manages to pop the hood with a rag. Flames as tall as him leap out. All the driver can do is swat them with that little hand towel of his. It’s completely ineffectual but they soon settle down of their own accord. Next comes the large plumes of a fried radiator, cooling in the midday frost.

The driver is incredulous: overheating in December. It’s almost embarrassing. He thinks back to the old gas station attendant in Denver and wants to strangle him with his own Rip Van Winkle beard. That’s not enough. He rages at the Grinnell hostess, Mrs. Warshansky, even the biker’s girlfriend; though none of these women would know the first thing about a car radiator, let alone how one overheats.

Most of all, the driver resents his free-loading passenger. The man sits there and giggles at the farm animals and place names of the atlas with no help towards giving directions. He goes running off, causing all sorts of trouble the driver is left to clean up after him. Then the man sits there scarfing down a three-pound steak while he is trying to get through to thickheaded bitch Dorris Warshansky, to warn her about Paula’s murderer who, for all he knows, could be the hitchhiker himself, as deranged as he obviously is.

The driver knows, on a barely discernable level, that the only person that warrants any scorn is himself. He can level all the accusations, suspicions, or guilty verdicts he pleases on the wayward hitchhiker, or on anyone else for that matter (the thought of the old man attendant burns his insides raw). Unless he does something himself to put an end to it, the driver is as complicit as anyone at which he tries to point a finger.

“Anything for you, dear?” Everyone under forty -even two killers- is a “dear” in the eyes of paternal Midwesterners. There’s no question of them letting someone get up from a table without being sufficiently overfed. The driver declines but has neither the arguing power nor the stamina to talk down the friendliest woman in all of Iowa, unless they’re all as bad as she. He escapes with a mere bowl of “Big Betty’s Homemade Chili.” The woman automatically denies being Big Betty, though she isn’t asked, before launching into a story about how Betty was the woman who founded this guest house way back when, and she dies when they filled up during a snowstorm and she gave her bed up for some weary traveler, or some such malarkey. The hitchhiker doesn’t mind the fable of biblical length –and with as little bearing on the present- because he is working hard to finish the pile of food, now mixed into a puddle of fatty gravy, on his plate. The driver wishes this woman would die; either from overzealous compassion, like kind Lady Bertha, or a hole in the chest the size of a Cadillac motor courtesy of Dr. Barringer, it doesn’t matter.

The chili arrives –a steaming pot of orange glop- and they are ready to split. The bill comes to two dollars and change, so they leave a five dollar bill, even though this invites the risk of the kind host fussing profusely until one of them goes deaf; and she does, all the way out to the pickup.

Once inside the truck, the driver and the hitchhiker exhale as if they haven’t taken a breath since they entered the old lady’s establishment. They can mark yet another entry off their own personal atlases of places to never visit again.

The hitchhiker picks up the road atlas and finds himself engrossed once more. This time, he wishes he had a pencil so he could mark the smiling face of a fat pig woman over Grinnell. Next up: a windmill named Pleasant Valley, somewhere between here and the corn cob of Iowa City. The hitchhiker thinks how more useful it would be for a road atlas to predict the weather than to make cartoon characters out of America’s cities. At least Pleasant Valley sounds nice. Looking up, there’s nothing but cold, blue skies ahead.

“Who is this?”

“I’m sorry Mrs. W’shansky, I don’t mean to take up your time…”

“Oh, it’s you. Well please don’t.”

“Please. It’s very m’portant. You folks have-ta get outta there, least fer a little bit..”

“Now listen here, sonny. You got my Karl all worked up last time you called, he’s not been well lately and we you go around exciting him like that.”

“I’nderstand. It’s juss that….it’s not safe…”

“What’s not safe? Is this about money?”

“No, not all…”

“Paula?”

“Not exactly…”

“Then I’m afraid we have nothing to discuss.” Click.

“Stupid, blabbin, won’t shut up fer a moment….” The driver grows a darker shade of tomato as he lists the grievance against Mrs. Warshansky. He sums up with a “…gonna get what’s comin ta her, an have nobody ta blame but herself.”

The driver rejoins the hitchhiker, who is launching into a steak so large, it overhangs both sides of the ornamental plate. Two pools of grease collect on the tablecloth at either end of the great slab. Atop it is a mess of fried onions and to the side, a sizzling mound of chopped potatoes. The smell is mouthwateringly greasy, and though the driver wouldn’t consider himself to be hungry, he sure could do with a hearty slice of that steak and a mouthful of the crackling onions.

There are enormous oak cabinets arranged against every wall. Behind their locked glass doors is displayed an incredible amassing of porcelain dolls and China dishes, none of which are ever to be used.

Over whatever wall space not taken up by these rosewood fortresses hangs a taxonomy of finely-painted animal portraits. Everywhere the driver and the hitchhiker look, if they were to give their surroundings a more thorough inspection, they are met with the imploring eyes of all manner of fauna. Most disturbing about these gold-framed instances of nature is how unnatural they appear. Though the style is as realistic as one can get outside of photography, the animals are frozen in the stiff poses usually reserved for portraits of European royalty or, the American equivalent, so-called captains of industry. A fox scowls and a hummingbird, in mid-hover, cocks its head to one side, inquisitive of a flower. It is visitors to this purgatory for tchotchkes, parading as an eatery, that should be quizzical, or at least weary. The hitchhiker merely wonders if he’s missed the chalkboard menu, as he continues to scan the clutter of cuteness for any sign of food. Even the air smells of mothballs and advanced old age, not the most appetizing of scents. The driver itches to leave before they’ve even stepped inside.

The owner/hostess meets them at the door. She is plump, with a stained apron that probably remains on her day and night. Her face bulges with two ruddy cheeks and a tight gray bun atop her head. Her smile, also incessant, causes her eyes to squint to the point where one can’t tell if they’re open or closed. She is exactly the person one would expect to live in, or at least run, this monument of bad taste.

True to her look, the woman is friendly -overly friendly, it has to be said- and makes a grand show of leading the driver to the booth at the side of the house, where they had a phone put in.

“Oh, yes, yeeeeeeesss. Of course you can make a call. Just follow me, but of cooooourse.”

The driver thinks it a shame that there exist people so nice that they will eventually end up punched in the mouth, just out of sheer annoyance. He leaves the hitchhiker to his own devices, tucked into a corner in the over-decorated dining room.

The numbers come much easier this time. The driver has spun the dial so eagerly –its new or recently oiled- that he fears he may have added one too many digits. There are fewer rings this time, and a raspy woman’s voice answers.

“Mrs. W’shansky?”

Grinnell, Iowa

It’s only with the Iowa border that the driver’s road atlas of “America’s Heartland” begins. That’s just as well, because its tangle of multicolored snakes means next to nothing for the driver. As for the hitchhiker, he enjoyed spotting the odd names of small towns for approximately thirty second before growing tired of the game. He was ready to toss it out the window when a sudden vision of the contents of the policeman’s head exploding out its rear came to mind. He threw it back on the floor, where he had originally found it.

In this part of America, one can normally find a highway running east-west and ride it clear through at least two states, often more. That’s the case with the route the driver and the hitchhiker now find themselves on, Number 6. The atlas shows it terminating with a farm tractor over Toledo, Ohio. That map is really good for finding out which produce and manufactured goods come from which part of the country. Other than that, they might as well have used a picture book.

The driver wants to stop in Grinnell. It’s definitely not to go sightseeing: the town consists of a few agricultural banks, insurance offices, and the rest is warehouses for moving freight on to the rail junction. Even in Des Moines, the largest city in western Iowa, the buildings would only impress someone who’s never been to either coast of the United States. Looking around, the driver surmises that is probably the case for most Iowans. Des Moines major shopping district took all of five minutes to traverse. The windows of their finest shops consisted mostly of plain-looking flower print dresses. As for men’s wear, the flashiest item to be found was the straw-woven top hat, which is apparently a local innovation.

The driver pulls into a country kitchen –which means the converted front room of an old couple’s house- on the pretense of making a phone call. “Converted” may be stretching the point. The place looks just like the home of a cooped-up grandmother, except with more doilied chairs pushed up to a few long tables, covered with vases and embroidery.

A thought disrupts him, and makes him wish he never delved into the topic in the first place: what if the killer felt nothing? Is it possible: that he could take so much, rob the world of Paula and therefore the world itself, and put no more thought into than a breath of air? The prospect makes the driver want to wretch. He will kill this hitchhiker if that’s what it comes to; that is, if he really is fleeing east from Fresno, hitching all the way out to Michigan not to find work, but to finish a job. All the driver asks is for the tiniest bit of relief once he’s squeezed the trigger. He imagines the hitchhiker’s head atop the policeman’s body, and its slow motion, cranial detonation. This time, he’ll be sure to stand far enough away; and in the future, it’s standard issue bullets all the way. He can’t afford to keep changing clothes every time he kills someone.

“Here, put these on.” The hitchhiker pushes over a brown paper folded over at the top. The driver rips into it and pulls out a pair of pressed, dark blue denims –the kind like the teenagers where, with the bottoms cuffs rolled up- and a dark wool sweater. It’s big, too big, but certainly looks warm.

The driver doesn’t think twice about pulling down his blood-splattered trousers in front of the hitchhiker. He’s just happy to be out of those things, filthy to the point of being stiff and scratchy. By comparison, the newly dyed denim feels like new skin. The hitchhiker is more than content to sit by and watch excitedly. The obvious comfort that the driver enjoys in his new clothes brings the hitchhiker a happiness that comes when someone has finally found their purpose. It’s the best three dollars and eighty cents he’s spent in a long time.
The driver balls all of their old clothes back into the paper bag and finds a dumpster in which to lose it. He’s careful to bury deep down. Apparently he’s not the only one to use this dumpster off a Plattsmouth main street to stash the remains of a body. Whatever he had to dig through to sufficiently hide their evidence, it smells ten times worse than the dried remnants caking their former jackets.

By the time they pull back out onto the main street, most of the morning’s foot and car traffic has died down. Remaining is a fitting combination of the old –but not homebound- and the few, visible unemployed of Omaha. Far from resenting the presence of the other, the two get along famously. It appears that in the absence of work, conversation is hard to come by, and one becomes grateful for wherever he can get it. They’re all “he”’s basking in the brilliant but cold sunshine. It’s not that woman aren’t unemployed or old; a majority of them comprise the latter. It’s just that for these towns whose civic pride is the healthy monotony of its commerce and the unremarkable orderliness of its public affairs –worlds that are both firmly in the control of men- a clean house and well-fed children won’t count for much. Only when such things are lacking do they warrant attention, and then never in a good way.

A church bell rings out the time and sees the two men out of town, as they pass the main and deserted square. It has just struck eight thirty in Omaha, Nebraska and everybody is exactly where they’re supposed to be, even the idlers. It’s the two travelers in a well-weather pickup that don’t belong, not just here but anywhere children play and old wives shop. They know this, and honor this arrangement by leaving the town promptly. With any luck, they will never have to return to the state of Nebraska again.

“At’s arright. I got it.”

The hitchhiker dodges cars as he makes his way across the busy main street.

“Crazy somofa…”

He can survive angry gangsters and murderous bikers, but he’s going to get run down by an old man in a Ford. Unbelievable. He looks ridiculous too. The hitchhiker’s other change of clothes was a pristine, starched white shirt and gray slacks, held up high by classic leather suspenders. There was a wide striped tie as well, but he elected to leave that in the bag.

It’s strange to go from an ordinary workingman’s denim jacket and spun-thread trousers to looking like a poncey bank apprentice, straight from the graduating class of some accounting school. The driver recalls the conversation regarding the hitchhiker’s time served. What he said about being sentenced to one jail and then being transferred to another: it sounded too much like the man he was after. The part about working down in Death Valley didn’t add up, though; and now here he is, darting out in front of cars in Omaha, Nebraska, about to treat a stranger to a new set of clothes. The driver asks himself: is that bizarrely formal shirt and suit pants the same courtroom attire that Paula, and her father, faced down from the witness stand when they put her attacker –now murderer- away for the past five years. The driver tells himself that if he was around at the time, he would have blown the son of bitch away right there, from a back row seat in the courtroom, or on the courthouse steps as they dragged that lowlife away.

“What’s stopping ya now?” The question that had been haunting the driver, really since he was first faced with the odd drifter, finally bubbles up into words. True, they’re not eloquent enough to express the tangle of doubt and suspicion the driver knows only as a relentless nausea and a dull, burning throughout his eyes and ears that he has so far been unable to shake. If only he could know for sure, he could act, and be done with this whole ceremony that has managed to stretch itself into a two-day-plus road trip. Feelings are fine -even harrowing, shit-wrenching gut feelings- but the driver wants to feel, most of all, whatever it was the murderer felt that night when he took Paula’s life. If it was elatedness, then he wants the pull of that trigger to be the happiest moment of his life. If it was regret, then the driver will be the most sorrowful son of a bitch to ever fire a gun; if that’s what it takes to make this animal pay.

Omaha

The city is already bustling with that peculiar type of middle-America industriousness inherited from burgher grandfathers and prim, Nordic grandmothers. It’s not even eight o’clock. Shopkeepers raise the shudders on stores that won’t be open for another hour. They like to spend the first part of their work day cleaning the floors, counters and displays -which were already thoroughly wiped down and inspected before they closed out Saturday- and inspecting the books just one more time, for piece of mind’s sake.

Old women wheel their shopping carriages, not yet full, as they stop at every turn to chat with one another and gossip about whatever could possibly be so pressing at such an early hour. Children in every stage of development –from mere toddlers to near-teenagers- scamper around them on their way to school. They play with a lack of self-awareness that they will soon lose forever, in just a couple of years. Men in suits and hats are stern but polite. They haven’t yet picked up the morning paper, but their minds are already whittled down to the minutia of cattle prices and railroad investments. They will continue on in that way until they finally break for lunch, at a respectable 2:15 pm.

The hitchhiker and the driver take this all in and feel thoroughly out of place. The driver has been tempted the entire way in to flick the remaining pieces of police officer off his flannel jacket, but where would they go? The driver can’t have them lying on the floor of the pickup either, so he’s stuck for the moment with the stinking strips of entrails.

“Fuckin s’ploding bullets.” The funny part is that he originally mixed them on whim, during some down time at the ranch. A friend there showed him the correct –that is, explosive but a hair short of dynamite- proportions of fertilizer compounds and gunpowder; heated, strained, and poured into a casing. “L’ take a fuckin man’s head-off.” That guy wasn’t kidding.

The driver spies a vacant lot and pulls in. Across the way is an apparel shop, just opening up.

“Arright. You go in there an get me anythin at fits.” The driver points a five dollar bill at the hitchhiker but he waves him off.