Clayton Street is darker. Only a few porch lights remain lit here. This street is not traveled frequently enough to warrant the rows of streetlamps illuminating other, more favored arteries. At the end of the block is the house he wants. It’s lower than the older houses surrounding it. It is only one storey tall, and that’s mostly hidden by a wild tangle of bushes wrapping around its exterior. Moonlight hits the chaos of leaves and branches, causing them to turn a ghostly shade of silver.

There’s no reason the house shouldn’t appear as still as does. Despite its single-storey stature, it shares the same, defining characteristic with the other houses on the block: sunk as they are in a tomb-like repose, their occupants lost in a slumber just as deep.

The pickup rattles into the driveway. There’s no car. What was it that Mr. Warshansky drove? The driver remembers a long black sedan, but can’t recall the make. He gets out and inspect the garage door: firmly locked in place. Drawn shades block the view in through each window. The front door is similarly bolted. It’s late enough, but the driver has to knock. The Warshansky’s, if they answer, will undoubtedly be annoyed, but at least they’ll be warned. The driver wonders whether he’ll be able to get the point across any more forcibly now that he’s standing there in the flesh.

Now matter how hard he pounds, the thuds seem to get lost in the heavy oak of the door. He can imagine the silence of the interior: swathed in soft carpet, and furniture of tastefully patterned cloth. The quiet is too much. Nobody is home. That could be a good sign. The driver allows himself a sigh of relief. With it returns his exhaustion –it’s easier to stifle it when one is behind a wheel- and his vision washes in a hazy silver, as if the moonlight has pierced his eyes and burnt his retinas. He wants to collapse, is about to, but has to catch himself at what he sees when he turns around.

Standing at the edge of the lawn is familiar silhouette. The driver recognizes the medium height figure with a top of tousled hair, even in his tired delirium. The moonlight, however diffuse, catches a metallic gleam from something gripped in one hand.

“This it?” The driver has heard that low growl many times. It’s his own, but doesn’t recall saying anything.

The company inside: he could take or leave. A lot of them, some of whom he would consider former buddies, wouldn’t take so kindly to him simply popping his head in after all this time. Others would shrug and return to their pool game, if they broke from conversation at all. The ones staring straight ahead at the bar couldn’t be stirred no matter what; a bomb might as well go off. The days the driver misses, however few in number, are irredeemably in the past. Nothing can be done now but cruise on by, maybe a quick glance and a blink at the stark green neon border of otherwise shaded windows.

Pat’s marks the intersection with Ternes Street, where the driver must turn off to reach the Warshansky’s on Clayton. He is immediately greeted with the familiar regiment of stocky, semi-detached houses, gradually disappearing down neat rows. Their yards are compact and trim. A tired glow of families sleeping or preparing for bed settles over all of them, over every street. The driver thinks of how perfect these facades are for the lives led behind them: expressive enough to emit the hint of tidy, domestic contentment, but sturdy enough to retain and conceal the turmoil brewing within. Maybe that’s what Henry Ford, grandfather of industrial Dearborn, had in mind when he had these houses built for his plants’ future workers. As long as the walls were sturdy enough to contain the strife at the center, old Mr. Ford could be assured a focused worker while Dearborn’s civic life benefits from its outwardly docile denizens.

Large stone pilings hem the wood frame of every house, and provide the solid corners for a front porch. Lit from beneath by yard lamps and streetlights, the effect is of so many squatting pitbulls in a line, paws jutting out to steady their rotund bodies. They lend the streets a regal air, though nowhere could be more mundane. The driver is comforted at once by the order and seeming ordinariness of this and every one of Dearborn’s residential streets; which is odd, because as he passes the glow from each serene façade, he comes that much closer to facing the Warshanky’s and the fate that awaits them all. It’s comforting to know that the end, whatever it may entail, could be just a few more blocks ahead and to the right. For the first time, the driver understands the peace that so many have described as descending upon the person facing death.

Dearborn

The city is laid out on a gird, with Michigan Avenue cutting through like an electric current. The driver follows its gauntlet of neon signs, all staggered at different heights and shouting brand names and businesses with various intensities of color. None of the shops are open, of course, but the way they stand guard over the avenue, it never feels completely desolate; even at the lonely hour of eleven-thirty on a weeknight.

Some of the markers have changed since the last time the driver rode down the strip. Mickey’s dime store has disappeared. He and Paula used to sit there at the counter and sip malteds. Among the other couples and a few younger, high school kids, they would gaze at each other silently in that loving, hypnotized way where their adoring eyes said all. The driver likes to think that he and Paula still have, or had, that same unspeaking connection, but the delights of courtship can’t remain once a couple settles down and struggles to build a home.

In all the schemes they devised while sitting in that cramped fountain –about leaving Dearborn, starting a family and a life together, even choosing California as their destination- their talk never once mentioned coming back. The car lots and parts stores of ‘auto row’ glisten with rows upon rows, and ten-foot high displays, of American-made marvels. Even when they weren’t piecing them together on the assembly line, the workers of Dearborn could never escape the omnipresent fruits of their labor.

But where is Mickey’s? Among signs advertising acrylic paints, displaying the myriad rainbow they come in, and an improbable number of Irish bars –shamrocks and all- there remains no trace of the modest general store. The driver can’t even place where it once stood, that’s how much the car outlets have taken over in less than a year.
He comes upon the green cursive of Pat’s Tavern. It’s still open, with a few cars in its small parcel of a parking lot. That was his favorite of the Michigan Avenue watering holes, so it’s good to see that it has survived. Despite frequent moral outcries and the resulting shame hoisted upon those who frequent them, bars have a way of thriving in good times and bad. It’s the least the city’s workingmen can do to help keep the local economy going, and Pat’s was always worth it. With a pool table worn down in just the right, comforting way and a jukebox that guaranteed every selection would be well received, no matter who was doing the choosing, this tavern may be indistinguishable from all the other ones like it lining the strip, but it is one of the few things the driver misses about Dearborn.

Sturgis, Michigan

The driver dials Mr. Warshansky one last time, on a phone outside Carter’s Drug and Grocery. It’s in the process of closing down for the evening, but a kindly and withered man –apparently one in a long line of Mr. Carter’s- has agreed to let him use it before he locks it up for the night. The rings go on forever. The driver decides there is nobody home and can’t decide whether this is a good or a bad sign.

“Did you get in touch with who ya needed?” Mr. Carter has one of those strained though friendly old man’s voices. He smiles at everything he, and others, say –though he usually doesn’t catch much of the latter.

“Fraid not.”

“Oh dear. Am’sorry to hear that.” It’s a wonder how the elderly take the most minor of life’s setbacks to be great tragedies (and maybe vice versa), worthy of dramatic shows of commiseration. The driver appreciates the effort, but doesn’t wish to continue the conversation.

“S’arright. Thanks for the phone, though.”

“No problem. Now have yourself a safe trip. Where’d you say it was you’re heading.

“Dearborn.” The driver is already opening the car door and ducking in.

“Oh my, what a long ways. Well, you be careful.” Mr. Carter says this more to himself, in a ponderous, halting way; which is all for the best, because by the time he gets to the end of his train of thought, the driver is halfway down the road, a belch of dirt and exhaust trailing up behind him.

Gary, Indiana

It’s already dark by the time the driver reaches Gary. The array of smokestacks, cooling tanks, and any number of industrial skeletons huddling over the city are lit by a sulfurous orange glow. Some of the towers have needles of blue light coming off them. Looking out from the partially raised highway at the chaos below, one would believe that this city is busier at night than at any other point during the day.

The stench is toxic, and it’s not unusual to see plumes of black, blue-gray and purple smoke occasionally waft across all four lanes. It’s hard to believe that people can live amidst the constant frenzy of cranes, trucks, trains, and derricks, but they do; ninety eight thousand of them.

Once he gets through the main core of plants and factories, the driver comes upon where a good chunk of them live. Standing before him are four identical housing blocks in the style of grandiose, New Deal ambition (or wishful thinking, depending on which side of the walls one is standing). They are monumental in blandness as much as they are in size. Even in the midst of a night breathing with fumes and unseen fires, the driver can imagine their original brushed-sandstone facades of just a few years ago, now caked with a thorough layer of cancer-colored soot. It makes his own lungs wheeze, so he takes another drag from his cigarette. Somehow, its heady mix of nicotine and carcinogens serve as a relief from the living poison cloud seeping its way into the pickup from outside. The residential areas don’t smell much better than the wasteland of factories, rail yards and power plants, but the dispersed signs of life –lights in the windows, a few stray dogs, and the dead grass of a cemetery- stir something primal and reassuring within.

Luckily, Gary -for all its importance as a hub of industry, in conjunction with southern Chicago, serving America’s heartland- is geographically concise. The driver is in and out in a matter of minutes. The US Steel compound on the shore of Lake Michigan, abutting Gary directly to its north and complete with a sludge moat, razor wire walls, and latter-day turrets of cast iron, is slightly bigger that the city itself. As for which of the two is more unsightly, more grotesque in its rust sculptures and unblinking sulfur lamps: that is a question the driver is all-too-happy to leave hanging in the low ceiling of smog. It clings to the early evening horizon –stooped like fog and lit from below in an amazing, chemical orange- and disappears immediately behind him.

The signature at the bottom, following upon a hasty “Furever yur man,” is as incomprehensible as the jumble of letters on the page. That doesn’t matter. The driver isn’t interested in what it says. He’s just perplexed why the hitchhiker, a man of seemingly so few words, would take up two whole pages to address a dead woman; and why did he leave it here, now? The driver considers the hitchhiker’s open satchel, and how many times its contents threatened to spill out whenever he shifted his boots.

The light turned green a good while ago. Cars manage to navigate around the pickup, stalled at an intersection. The driver regains his bearings, but he cannot let go of the envelope. He had Paula’s killer next to him for two days and he did nothing but make small talk and lead him from one mishap to another; and eventually let him walk down the highway to escape unscathed. It makes Dearborn, Michigan seem hopelessly far.

The hitchhiker has just transferred buses in Chicago. The driver has at least four and a half hours left to ride, and the sun has almost completely sunk behind the walls of Joliet Prison. In an instant, the town loses the wonder of Giza on the Nile and regains the quiet composure of any Midwest settlement, hunkering down against what promises to be a long, winter’s night.

Joliet

Though the sun may hang listlessly over the horizon all day, when it finally goes down, it ignites the land in a gold and purple blaze. The highway melts to onyx and the cars sparkle like embedded jewels. Buildings are no longer buildings, but Egyptian tombs cowering before Rah. Even the old prison –an enormous block of stone surrounded by other, smaller blocks- is basked in the holy enormity of an ancient temple. Doubtless none of its inmates could ever see it in this light, even as a free man looking on from the outside. To them it can never be more than the pile of bricks that keeps them locked away. To the citizens of the surrounding town, too, “Joliet” means “prison”. One cannot be thought of without the other. The squat fortress sits amidst the jumble of houses, and the driver can do no better of a job at viewing them apart; almost as if the concentric rows of peaked roofs are simply extra layers of the prison’s walls.

The driver thinks of the hitchhiker inside, even though this is not the prison in which he served his time. He wears his favorite denim pairing: jacket and jeans. This one is printed with a long chain of numbers. The driver sees him sucking down cigarette after cigarette, steadily going through the carton stashes under his mattress. Every now and then he will scratch another mark on the wall; another day closer to his release. And once he’s out…

At a stoplight, the driver’s eye is drawn to a corner of white paper, sticking out from beneath the passenger seat. It’s an envelope with a name scratched on it: “P-A-U…” He doesn’t have to string the last two letters on before a flash of rage races through him, leaving his insides cold and shivering.

The driver picks up the paper and folded within it is another piece of paper. He pulls it out. Both sides are covered in rows of pen markings.

You dispicabill bitch-

You laffed wen I sed I wud come for you. You smiled as you put me away from the witness stand. And yur father- that peese of shit Polak. Hes’ the one that turned you agaynst me. Who wuda thot you was pea-brayned to go along with that sick sonnofa…

…staynding up for a louzy Been Eeter, eniway. You both deserve wat you get…

The hitchhiker drops the folded pages with a wheeze. He traces in his mind their trail of blood. It leads right up to and beyond the dual murders in Nebraska. It follows this bus across the industrial flatland of central Illinois; and somewhere out there it follows the driver.

He wonders, with an uneasiness that is made all the worse for seeming so out of place, if and how their two paths will reconvene. If he’s correct in assuming that the driver had Mr. Warshansky on the other end of the line in the truck stop, then the odds are good that he still lives in that brick bungalow on Clayton Street.

As it grows darker, the hitchhiker gets a clearer view of his reflection in the window. It looks less like himself than he remembers. The face reminds him of another man completely. The angle is exactly that of the driver’s, as the hitchhiker witnessed it from the passenger seat for nearly two days on the road. He sinks back into the seat until the landscape takes over. The surreal vision of cows standing in snowy fields sloping up towards factory smokestacks sees him off to sleep. As he goes, the woman next to him is still yammering on.

“You just don’t know what kind of crazies are running around out there. They’re everywhere.”