“He’s bout, five six, five seven, light brown hair, brown eyes…” The driver is doing even worse, and he knows it.

From somewhere in the mess of drab, a voice croaks, “What? Some dreamboat of yours?” This crack is met with a chorus of laughs, all in the same frostbitten chortle. The driver wants to reach around and blow this collective lesion on humanity away, shot by shot, but he needs their help more than he needs their respect. Who are they, anyway? If he can keep his cool, he’ll gain vengeance soon enough; against them and all forms of lowlife who dare pose as human. An image flashes into his head: the hitchhiker darting across the street in Omaha, ridiculous in his trial whites. He had no other change of clothes left.

“He’s got a dress shirt, s’spenders, dark slacks.”

The group is no longer laughing. In fact, they’ve grown even more pallid, if that is possible. Another voice –or who can tell, maybe the same one- speaks up, again from deep within the collective grime.

“Yeah. He was practically thrown from a car just down the road. Some screaming match or something. Then he went into the depot.” A thumb rises up from nowhere and point behind them, through the double doors of the barely-lit bust station. They’re glass, but might as well be of wax paper. The place is so filthy that the homeless inside –presumably of a class looked down upon by the hitchhikers outside- don’t dare sit on the benches, even if they weren’t completely ripped apart. A river of putrid liquid –perhaps it was once water at some point long ago- pours through the middle with no identifiable source. If a blind man were to wander inside, the smell alone would tell him that he missed the bus station and somehow wandered into one of the circles of hell.

None of this registers with the driver. Without a word of thanks or even a nod to the group of idlers, he is through those slimy doors and searching the board above the ticket window. From the list of broken words –“Indianapolis”, “Kenosha”, “Deerfield”- he recognizes only one: “Chicago”. From there, the hitchhiker would be able to catch another bus to Detroit, with maybe a stop-off directly in Dearborn.

The driver doesn’t bother to pay for the gas before taking off. From somewhere out of the huddle across the street, a gloved hand rises to give him a ‘thumbs up’: a sign of solidarity and maybe a plea to be taken along as well.