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.