“We can’t go no further. There’s nowhere left ta go. So juss get.” That comes out more pleading, more regretful, than the driver intended. The hitchhiker just hangs his head. His gun follows suit. He remembers the night he killed Paula as if it were tonight: the calm, expectant look on her face; his shock and subsequent apprehension at being caught so off guard by her acquiescence; and then finally the fatal shot, planned over countless nights in a cell, yet wholly unintended when it came.

As for the driver, it’s not clear whether the hitchhiker had been plotting to kill him all along. He had originally planned to kill Paula’s fiancé, if he happened to be home at the time. He wasn’t, so he let his sights travel the highways north and east, to Paula’s father in Michigan. Karl Warshansky -an unremarkable immigrant turned crusader for justice, in his proudly worn work-shirts, certainly deserves it. Paula wouldn’t have testified in the first place if it weren’t for him. Caring for the welfare of some nobody Mexican: it would make the hitchhiker laugh if it wasn’t so detestable. The sentence to be meted out on this unknown fiancé, however, remained an open question mark.

Now, the indefinite face of Paula’s husband-to-be –the hitchhiker had always imagined it to be ugly in a Slavic kind of way, maybe because Paula herself was half-Polish, though of an understated beauty- is filled out by the very American features of the driver. The moon’s glow reemerges and finds a smooth patch of the driver’s forehead. It follows the ridge of his nose: an uninterrupted line down to his upper lip, taught and rich with stubble. The driver’s eyes are hidden in shadow, but if they were visible, the hitchhiker would see that they’re lost. It’s not only the days without sleep that have sunk them inward and lent them a dead man’s abyss. The driver’s eyes have grown blind with his failure, having given up on ever seeking satisfaction.

The hitchhiker can stare all he wants, it’s not going to solve this impasse. There’s not much to stare at for long. The driver climbs back into his pickup. The engine has been running all along, but it only detaches itself from the hum of a night alive with uncertainty once the driver releases the clutch. The pickup rolls out of the driveway and the hitchhiker follows it with a full turn of his head. His body follows, as the car tears off down the road.