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.