La Salle, Illinois

The middle-aged woman sitting next to the hitchhiker seems friendly enough. She got on shortly after they crossed the river into Rock Island. Lucky for the de-commissioned office she replaced, too. Another second of that guy’s lip –“where the ball, Prince Charming?”- and he would have gotten it; and much worse than from those goose-stepping Kraut sons-of-bitches. No, the lady is a nice change of company. The hitchhiker might even call it a relief. He’s wondering how much to answer of her well-meaning enquiries.

“Dee-troit, achsully. To visit m’family.”

“Yeah, I spose it is for the Christmas hol’day.”

“No, f’course I knew it was. Sept it’s more of a homecoming…”

“It’s been bout five years.”

The hitchhiker is getting better at this. It must have been the brief but persistent questioning of the driver that got his ‘story’ –at first, a jumble of off-the-cuff answers- finally rounded out into a coherent-enough whole. The woman is not as determined as the driver, though. The hitchhiker would be damned if he knows what got that guy –Paula’s hell-bent vigilante of a fiancé, it turns out, as things often do in such an accidental world- sniffing down his trail in the first place. If it had been physical recognition, the driver would have been onto him long before Las Vegas. Instead, something set him off around Cedar City, Utah, shortly after the wild night at that actress’s house.

The hitchhiker recalls the evening –the girl’s head flopping back as if all her tendons had melted, the blood spurting from her nose and how he’d never seen anything more beautifully ruby, and how the mansion emptied out to see him and the driver off into the desert night or early morning- and smile creeps into his face. The woman next to him thinks it’s in reaction to her incomprehensible story about her children, or her cats, or even her children’s cats. The hitchhiker has drifted off miles ago, but his eyes light with the look he first flashed the driver when he caught him on the phone at that truck stop in Utah.