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.