American Night- a Web Novel

2008-04-10T01:40:00.000Z

How much farther does the driver have to go? He made it to Michigan as planned, though it took a little longer than he originally estimated. Judging from the deathly-rattle somewhere beneath its hood, he’s not even sure his pickup, the closest he has to a friend, can make it much further.

The Driver has no home to return to; no family to console him and tell him everything is going to be all right; no job; only fifty-six dollars left in his pocket; and worst of all, no one with which to share his loneliness. He can’t bear to bring Paula’s smile to mind. The way it would break at mere strangers, and invest them with unquestioning trust, never failed to warn him. Now, the driver would rather shiver. He figures he doesn’t deserve its redeeming radiance.

The thought of her name, however, brings with it a wholly different kind of warmth: the burn of failure. It eats through the fog of exhaustion like a parasite and intensifies as he reads, or recognizes, the first letters printed on that white envelope, lying on the passenger floor. He won’t throw it out, the driver knows that much. Bound up in the hasty scrawl –a broken “P” and a jumbled “au”- is the sole remnant of the woman he loved and the man who took her away. It doesn’t seem so strange, when he considers it, that the two should stay with him; both in memory -however tortured and mixed- and in the form of a pale rectangle lit up by a fading moon.

The headlights find a sign and drag it out from the night. It reads:

“Now Leaving Dearborn: Drive Safely.” It’s going to be a long ride, no matter where he goes.

2008-04-08T01:12:00.000Z

“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.

2008-04-03T01:18:00.000Z

That doesn’t explain why the driver is so shocked to see that his gun has been raised, and now points at the hitchhiker’s chest. He did it without thinking, maybe as a reaction to the hitchhiker drawing his. Neither of them seems particularly enthused to have two barrels separating them where several hours ago there was only a worn gear shaft and staid silence.

Face to face with Paula’s murderer: how many times has the driver dreamt of this moment since he first found the body, her blood drained from a wound five years in the making? He wants to pull the trigger. He wants nothing more than to watch this savage’s body fall to the well-maintained lawn, one piece at a time in meaty strips of gore.

He can’t pull the trigger because that will leave him completely alone. He’s alone now, to be sure, but the hitchhiker provides that kind of solidarity in loneliness that can only be enjoyed by two men who have nothing left in this world, except maybe their own, tortured companionship.

The driver loved Paula. There’s no other way he can express the devotion that burnt him up so completely; for which he was willing to drive to the end of every highway, even if that meant the end of himself as well. This is the end, and Paula’s murderer, the hitchhiker, is as much a part of it as is the driver or his late fiancée.

He wants to pull the trigger –for her, for them- but he doesn’t want to do it first. He waits for the click of the hitchhiker’s hammer. It never comes. A cloud shrouds the moon like a mortician covering a corpse’s pale face. It becomes so dark that eyes open or closed, living or dying: it’s all indiscernible. It’s all the same chilling wait. The driver waits. The hitchhikers waits, breaths, points. There’s absolutely no sound.

“Get outta here.”

The hitchhiker doesn’t stir.

“I said ‘get’!” In another beat, and sadder, “Fine, I’ll get.”

The driver floats to his pickup. The hitchhiker follows and the driver can’t help but be reminded of an abandoned puppy, begging not to be left behind.

2008-04-01T01:16:00.001Z

The hitchhiker doesn’t move for a very long time. Standing perfectly still on a cold winter night, one can actually feel the darkness creep over one’s skin as it lurches imperceptibly towards morning. That’s what the driver feels right now, except it stings like a line of fire ants winding their way up his neck. The extreme edge of exhaustion can be so disorientating –like the body hasn’t waited for sleep before slipping into a dream- that the driver wonders if he had somehow mistakenly ingested more of that Indian drug. He feels the hazy lurching of its first few moments, same as he did that night –how long ago?- in McCook, Nebraska. The driver’s thoughts, breathing, heartbeat, slow to a halt, as if swallowed in sludge. The hitchhiker becomes not so much a figure submerged in shadow, but a thought suspended in time.

That’s why it comes as a relief when the hitchhiker takes a step forward, then another; because it causes everything to catch up in real time. It doesn’t take many before they are within arm’s reach. They both tense up.

The driver’s nausea, so persistent up until now, congeals into audacity. He can feel it harden every bone, starting with the base of his spine and working its way up. The driver’s back grows rigid and it has the effect of making the driver seem even taller than the man before him. They are both equals, however, due to the freezing steel each holds in his hand.

The hitchhiker stares. In the recesses of shadow, it means very little. His breathing remains tired but steady. The shots of vapor spouted from each man’s nostrils meet somewhere in between them, before rising up in a tangle: the breath of two stranger’s commingling and caught in the faint moonlight.

“You ain’t gonna stop me.” A flat voice travels on the hitchhiker’s breath.

“You gonna shoot?”

“F’at’s what it takes.”

“Watcha waitin fer, then?” With this taunt, the driver realizes that while he was driving the two thousand three hundred and thirty six miles -fighting crippling exhaustion and the loneliness of a highway with only two modes, straight and flat- to stand at this spot tonight, all of it was just waiting; waiting for this moment. Now that it’s arrived, his task is so certain that it might as well have been written down ahead of time.

2008-03-27T03:03:00.000Z

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.

2008-03-25T01:21:00.000Z

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

2008-03-20T01:20:00.001Z

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

2008-03-18T01:17:00.000Z

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

2008-03-13T02:55:00.000Z

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.

2008-03-11T01:10:00.000Z

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

2008-03-06T05:19:00.000Z

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…

2008-03-04T05:18:00.000Z

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.”

2008-02-28T02:04:00.000Z

Slain Cop, Murdered Biker: Evidence Points to a Connection

The body of the text tells the rest of the story; or what a reporter could scratch together from the bloody remains at the roadside. It delves into the background of the officer, a Sgt. Luke Winchester –did he report to a Capt. Smith and Chief Wesson?- and his “well known” connection to criminal rackets, including the heroin and prostitution in which the biker gangs of the Midwest “infamously” trafficked. Looks like the crack team at the Davenport Reporter’s crime desk wrapped this case up succinctly, with no further need to engage in the pesky detail of what an on-duty member of the Lincoln Police Department was doing forty miles to the east in Weston.

The hitchhiker reads on, briefly, about how the brutal murder –the local rag does a good job of detailing the effect ammonium nitrate-packed bullets have when fired at close range- was payback for the murder of motorcycle gang leader, Tommy “Tornado” Wilkinson, aka “Nado”, who was run off the road and killed earlier this morning . The inside column bears a photo of the grizzly leader, shadowed in profile as he raises some sort of braised meat to his mouth.

How the paper managed to draw such an elaborate story together in the six or seven hours since the murder transpired impresses the hitchhiker. Really, it makes him scoff at the eagerness of a small town rag such as this to seemingly solving two murders at once, simply by linking the one the other. The worse part is that the law-abiding citizens of Davenport and all of eastern Iowa will lap it up without the question. It has the woman sitting beside the hitchhiker tail-spinning into a tizzy.

“I tell ya, you can’t go outside anymore…”

For the hitchhiker, the newspaper’s clear-cut conclusions –even if they are window-dressed as mere insinuations- are cause for doubt over its journalistic integrity, and not alarm over a sudden alliance between bikers and rogue cops. As rich as it is with the gore and intrigue borrowed straight from crime novel fantasies, the driver is most incredulous over what the story fails to include. No room is left for either him or his accomplice, the driver. One would think that to be a positive note, as it leaves him –and the driver, but most importantly, him- free from the suspicion of straight cops and the retribution of dirty ones. Yet it leaves him crumpling under the same dead weight of loss that first befell him when he shot Paula. It hadn’t managed to return so heavily as long as he was with the driver. Now, he glances out the window and the combination of gray factories set against open, white fields makes his breath go short.

2008-02-26T02:10:00.000Z

What were the words exactly? The bathroom door swung open and he had half his face to the wall, pleading with the receiver in his hand. What was it?

“….juss callin’ cos, ahm not sure if ya know, but Paula’s ah….you see Paula’s er…”

The hitchhiker hears the voice quiver as unsteadily as the bus’s windows rattle over every pothole. The hitchhiker knew at that point. He thinks of the showdown that followed after the driver hung up: two faces set in silent challenge, while at the same time searching for the slightest tic that would give the whole game away. He can’t remember the driver moving a single muscle, locked into a gaze that could find a fissure on the moon. The hitchhiker, on the other hand, knows his poker game to be deficient enough to warrant a “Plan B”, which has increasingly become his “Plan A” as he gives up as many chips as blank stares, and finds that he must reclaim the lost money somehow. So maybe he cracked at the diner. There was, after all, that tidy piece of blond tail brushing by, just at that moment…

“Oh, would you just look at this!”

The woman in the next seat pushes her way through the hitchhiker’s dewy recollections, just at the point where…

“It’s just animals out there these days. Animals.”

She’s pushing a creaseless copy of the Davenport Reporter his way. Usually, the doings of corn-peddlers doesn’t interest him in the least bit, but the front page photo rings an alarm, even if he hasn’t yet fully recognized the figure. The hitchhiker can be forgiven for being a little slow to place the face. After all, the man pictured before him didn’t manage to hang onto it for very long before it was splattered across the two lanes of Route 6, just outside Weston, Nebraska. Above it, the second bold-faced headline of the day:

La Salle, Illinois

2008-02-21T02:06:00.000Z

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.

2008-02-19T02:50:00.000Z

“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.

Davenport

2008-02-14T02:16:00.000Z

A peculiar collection of men catches the driver’s eye as he’s gassing up at “Lil Billy’s Gas n Go”. They’re huddled across the street, guarding the walkway leading up to the bus depot. It’s the type of gathering that one can tell is a permanent fixture to the otherwise desolate streetscape, even if none of its individual members stay for more than a few hours at most. They wear a nearly uniform drab. Everything is washed in the same colorless languor: coats, skin, hair, and the stench of despondency that comes from people desperate to get anywhere, but with no place to actually go.

Their faces, too, are ashen. The driver spies a few dirty cheeks and foreheads peering out of caps as the men battle, and fail, to cover every inch from the cold. The most remarkable thing is that they don’t seem to be of any particular race. The driver assumes they’re white, merely because the rest of the state –and entire middle of the country, outside of major cities, really- is as well. Yet there’s something about the way they can’t seem to stand up straight and only communicate –on the rare occasions they do- with grunts and nods that points to the future mongrelization that so many politicians fear will result from the mixing of America’s various races and ethnicities, including whites. The driver does not consider himself to be a racist -after all, who but the most extreme of racists proudly declares themselves as such? But there’s something about the group -really a single entity with a few variations on the same indistinct head, and pairs of insect-like limbs rubbing together to stay warm- that makes the driver want to lose every morsel he’s eaten in the past twenty-four hours. It could be the combination with the gasoline fumes too, though that’s a smell he usually relishes. It’s the way the bundled limbs occasionally break away from each other and stick out into the road, whenever the rare car sloshes by. Hitchhikers! The driver runs over with the nozzle still pumping into the car.

The group registers the stranger sprinting to their perimeter. They don’t budge, but merely flaunt their disregard with studied indifference. There’s more important things to tend to, like staying warm or flagging down a ride. The driver has a car –they’ve been watching him too- and that detail earns him at least a collective ear from the creature, aloof but carefully curious at the same time.

“I’m lookin for someone…” The driver realizes this is a horrible start, and whatever suspicions the group must have of him, they are by now warranted. “Shit!”, but he keeps going.

2008-02-12T02:08:00.000Z

The minutes that follow, on the edge of that same scratchy chair, are unbearable. The driver recalls as much as he can of the phone call. There’s no doubt that the man on the line was Mr. Warshansky’s, though the voice wasn’t right. It seemed a lot more distant than the miles of telephone wire would have normally rendered it. That’s not to say it wasn’t clear. Every word spun itself from the man’s lips, into the receiver, through the myriad of cables and operator boards, and directly into the driver’s brain, where they now burn singularly, each like a glowing iron, throughout his entire body. Still, he can’t shake voice. Why did it sound like Mr. Warshansky doing his best imitation of the driver -“an you won’ call here no more”? Or was it the other way around?

The driver’s rage might stifle his recollection, but not his certainty. There’s no question the voice was describing the hitchhiker. Though to Mr. Warshansky, of course, it would only be a hazy memory of a man who disappeared from Paula’s life with as little fanfare as the day he first came over to pick up that well-developed sixteen year-old. To the driver, it was the directive to kill that he had been waiting for, though he was not sure from where it would come, if it came at all. Now, to ask him to hold off on that order –even if it’s a mere fifteen minutes extra in that waiting room/office while a last hose is tightened- seems unpardonable.

The driver is already a murderer, technically speaking. Only now, however, does he feel that status –can it be called a title?- swell to the crux of his fate: as certain as he is Paula’s fiancé and the proud carrier of a .44 Barringer ‘Night Hawk’, complete with dual-action hammer. His fingers curl –he can’t stop them- around imaginary triggers and squeeze all six rounds into the large desk opposite. Meanwhile, sweat collects around the metal of the real trigger, tucked into the back of his new denim jeans. The seven hundred miles to Dearborn close in until they are reduced and purified to the twenty-two feet separating the driver from his pickup in the next room. He wills the mechanic to yell out the ‘ok’ –he can hear his young, scratchy voice as clearly as if it was his own- until he finally does. The driver is in his pickup before the hood can be slammed and the three ten dollar bills thrown on the desk can uncrumple. If he didn’t have to stop for gas –the tank had less than a quarter remaining when the pickup broke down- he wouldn’t stop at all.

2008-02-07T05:40:00.000Z

He lifts the receiver on the desk effortlessly, as if in a dream. In another instant, he’s on the phone once again to Mr. Warshansky.

“I won’ bother you an’more f’ya can tell me juss one thing.”

“Go ahead.”

“Wha’did Paula’s ex…you know the guy who….well, wha’did-ee look like?”

“Eh? Have you lost your mind?”

“Juss tell me.”

“An you won call here no more?”

“At’s right”

“Alright. Let’s see if I can remember, though I don’t particularly care to.”

“Please, Mr. Warshansky…”

“Ok, alright. Well, he wasn’t very tall, a little shorter than you, I suppose. Light brown hair, worn kinda long, in a mess. Blue eyes. And the sonnofabitch walked around like he was owed the world. There! Is that enough for you, ya crazy….”

The driver can’t hear the rest. A bolt of urgency snaps through his body and wakes him up. He has to get to that pickup and get back out on the road.

Peeking his head into the garage: “Hey, you gonna have my car ready any time soon?”

The sole mechanic, without removing his head from deep beneath the pickup’s raised hood, responds, “hold on, I’m working on it.”

The driver itches with the desire to take off with the man’s head still inside. He would press the petal down as far as it would go. The silos of the farmland and the towers of the cities alike would get blended into the same singular blur, whipping by the driver’s windows. Road signs would become meaningless –or even more meaningless- as they whisk by in a flash of green, no letters.

The driver can only tighten his fists in anticipation. The bulge of car keys in his front pocket burns his skin straight through the fabric.

“Fuckin’ hicks. How long’s it take ta fix a lousy car?”

Iowa City

2008-02-05T02:50:00.000Z

The city is white with a recent snowfall. There’s not a lot of the stuff, just enough to lend the streets, sidewalks and buildings the gleam of freshly polished porcelain. The occasional whip of wind rouses a powdery mist off parked cars. It’s enough to keep all but a few buttoned up figures indoors. Inside the garage’s office cum waiting room, the driver can hear the faint whistle of winter gaining strength as it blows along open but empty storefronts and rattles windows. He’s glad to be there, slunk in a ratty green chair and warmed by an electric heater. It’s only when the wind climaxes at a squealing pitch that he feels the shiver deep within his marrow.

The garage owner appears before him, looking stern in a business-like tie, shirt and suspenders. He flops a file down on his desk and gives a grimace of stubbornly tolerated discomfort. This reminds the driver of a Hollywood detective, pained by the persistence of a seemingly insolvable case. It never occurs to the driver how much his experiences are filtered through the lens of popular movie tropes: the hard-boiled detective, the irresistible –and blond coiffed- femme fatal, the drifter with a troubled past, and so on. That’s why it’s odd he never sees himself as filling any similarly clichéd role. Maybe the driver, like everybody else, likes to think of himself as unique, laying just this side of a summary definition. He shoots the owner a quizzical look stolen straight from the actor’s handbook: palms up and open, resting on each knee.

“Good news is we can save your radiator. Some of the grating charred, but we can fix that.” He straightens himself up, standing behind his desk chair. His hands go from the chair to his waistband. He gives it a routine tug.

“Bad news, is it’s gonna be bout three hours. I’ve only got one man on today, an he’s swamped as is. You can stick around a little, can’t ya?” His expression goes from stern to jolly with a quick flap of the jowls. The driver really can’t afford to waste the rest of the afternoon, especially when he’s gotten this close to Michigan. He sinks further into the chair and the scratchy cushions absorb the weight of his tired body as the waves of heat coming off the electric coil threaten to send him into a cataleptic sleep. It’s comforting, luxuriant even, and he’s so exhausted that he doesn’t care to go anywhere else. He decides to merely ask after the cost, with eyelids sinking fast.

“It’s gonna be thirty dollars, with parts, labor, an tax.” The owner delivers the news with a matter-of-fact tap of his suspenders, as if they are the abacus used to compute such estimates.

“Parts? You juss said th’radiator could be saved.” The driver knows he’s going to get bilked no matter what, but this is the most resistance he can muster while fading into a warm pool of unconsciousness.

“The radiator, yes. But we’re gonna have ta scrap all the hoses and valves that got singed. Ya know, you’re really lucky in a way….” So comes the con’s assurance that it could have been a lot worse, and how the driver’s lucky he’s only being swindled for thirty: a small price to pay if it will get him the rest of the seven miles. He agrees with a curt “fine, juss get it done,” before nodding out completely. The last thing he feels is the worn-thin cloth of the chair against his neck; and he’s gone.

2008-01-31T02:20:00.000Z

How long it’s been, exactly, is indeterminable. The driver puts a hand to the hanging orb of sun as it barely clears a ridge of pines in the distance. It’s impossible to tell time the way the Indians do, with a sun that refuses to rise above the ten o’clock point before sinking back down.

“Damn winner.” The light comes in so slanted, it could be four pm all day. Every shadow races to the northern horizon; not in the shape of pine trees or frozen wheat stumps but merely in never-ending streaks, as if the Earth has been painted with stripes of night.

If the driver had to estimate (which he does, since he doesn’t wear a watch) how long he’s been standing there next to his broken down pickup, he would say an hour. It’s been twenty six minutes. Apparently, as the days grow shorter, time stretches out.

A tow truck grows out of the distance. It passes the driver and his jalopy, and shows no sign of slowing down until its break lights liven to a hopeful red. It’s backing up, slowly. The driver’s guess is that it was not sent out on a call, at least not for him, but just happened to be passing by. His suspicions are confirmed when a potbellied man jumps out of the cab and approaches the car. He tilts his bald head and furrows his brow as if he doesn’t know what to make of the sight in front of him. The driver wants to tell him that if he can’t recognize a car when he sees one, then he’s gone into the wrong profession. The man jumps to life once he realizes how long he’s been standing there with a skeptical wince and how confused he actually looks.

“Wha’happened?”

“It’s th’rady-ator. Pletely blew out on me.”

The man takes a look anyway. He takes even longer to inspect the charred insides under the hood. It’s not a mathematical theorem, it’s a radiator cap that wasn’t screwed on tight enough. The driver suddenly feels the bite of impatience. He’s surprised by how similar it tastes to rage.

“Ar righty.” He groans up from the hood as if he’s just finished taking a leak. “Tell you h’wat. I’m heddin downta I-wa Cid-ee on a call. I kin tow ya ta a gur-age there, a great guy, I know im, an we kin call it an eve-in tweny.”

Twenty dollars for a tow is robbery. The garage will probably charge even more than that for repairs, if this tow truck man is as chummy with its owner as he makes out. The only saving grace is that it’s an hour’s ride in the right direction. The driver swallows his objections and follows the man to his truck. More grating than the outrageous price –Americans’ entrepreneurial talents really shine in times of other people’s crisis- is the driver’s relegation, however brief, to the role of hitchhiker.

“Goddamned radiator!”

He’s convinced that the view from the passenger side isn’t half as good. At least this driver seems happy to carry his fare with hardly any questions. Just a couple of preliminary grunts and they’re off. The sun shines directly through the passenger window, blinding in its wintry weakness.

2008-01-29T07:10:00.000Z

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.

Fort Winslow

2008-01-24T07:30:00.000Z

The engine chokes to a gurgle even before the smoke starts rising from the hood. It smells of burning rubber. Not the good kind, like at the start of a race when tires peel away their own flesh, but the kind that reeks of melting tubes and wires and spits up a hiss of fluid. The driver watches in horror as the smoke clouds over to gray, and then pure soot black. The hitchhiker can’t help but find it amusing. The show becomes outright hysterical once the driver pulls over, though he can’t see much of the road ahead.

He manages to pop the hood with a rag. Flames as tall as him leap out. All the driver can do is swat them with that little hand towel of his. It’s completely ineffectual but they soon settle down of their own accord. Next comes the large plumes of a fried radiator, cooling in the midday frost.

The driver is incredulous: overheating in December. It’s almost embarrassing. He thinks back to the old gas station attendant in Denver and wants to strangle him with his own Rip Van Winkle beard. That’s not enough. He rages at the Grinnell hostess, Mrs. Warshansky, even the biker’s girlfriend; though none of these women would know the first thing about a car radiator, let alone how one overheats.

Most of all, the driver resents his free-loading passenger. The man sits there and giggles at the farm animals and place names of the atlas with no help towards giving directions. He goes running off, causing all sorts of trouble the driver is left to clean up after him. Then the man sits there scarfing down a three-pound steak while he is trying to get through to thickheaded bitch Dorris Warshansky, to warn her about Paula’s murderer who, for all he knows, could be the hitchhiker himself, as deranged as he obviously is.

The driver knows, on a barely discernable level, that the only person that warrants any scorn is himself. He can level all the accusations, suspicions, or guilty verdicts he pleases on the wayward hitchhiker, or on anyone else for that matter (the thought of the old man attendant burns his insides raw). Unless he does something himself to put an end to it, the driver is as complicit as anyone at which he tries to point a finger.

2008-01-22T06:57:00.000Z

“Anything for you, dear?” Everyone under forty -even two killers- is a “dear” in the eyes of paternal Midwesterners. There’s no question of them letting someone get up from a table without being sufficiently overfed. The driver declines but has neither the arguing power nor the stamina to talk down the friendliest woman in all of Iowa, unless they’re all as bad as she. He escapes with a mere bowl of “Big Betty’s Homemade Chili.” The woman automatically denies being Big Betty, though she isn’t asked, before launching into a story about how Betty was the woman who founded this guest house way back when, and she dies when they filled up during a snowstorm and she gave her bed up for some weary traveler, or some such malarkey. The hitchhiker doesn’t mind the fable of biblical length –and with as little bearing on the present- because he is working hard to finish the pile of food, now mixed into a puddle of fatty gravy, on his plate. The driver wishes this woman would die; either from overzealous compassion, like kind Lady Bertha, or a hole in the chest the size of a Cadillac motor courtesy of Dr. Barringer, it doesn’t matter.

The chili arrives –a steaming pot of orange glop- and they are ready to split. The bill comes to two dollars and change, so they leave a five dollar bill, even though this invites the risk of the kind host fussing profusely until one of them goes deaf; and she does, all the way out to the pickup.

Once inside the truck, the driver and the hitchhiker exhale as if they haven’t taken a breath since they entered the old lady’s establishment. They can mark yet another entry off their own personal atlases of places to never visit again.

The hitchhiker picks up the road atlas and finds himself engrossed once more. This time, he wishes he had a pencil so he could mark the smiling face of a fat pig woman over Grinnell. Next up: a windmill named Pleasant Valley, somewhere between here and the corn cob of Iowa City. The hitchhiker thinks how more useful it would be for a road atlas to predict the weather than to make cartoon characters out of America’s cities. At least Pleasant Valley sounds nice. Looking up, there’s nothing but cold, blue skies ahead.

2008-01-17T02:36:00.000Z

“Who is this?”

“I’m sorry Mrs. W’shansky, I don’t mean to take up your time…”

“Oh, it’s you. Well please don’t.”

“Please. It’s very m’portant. You folks have-ta get outta there, least fer a little bit..”

“Now listen here, sonny. You got my Karl all worked up last time you called, he’s not been well lately and we you go around exciting him like that.”

“I’nderstand. It’s juss that….it’s not safe…”

“What’s not safe? Is this about money?”

“No, not all…”

“Paula?”

“Not exactly…”

“Then I’m afraid we have nothing to discuss.” Click.

“Stupid, blabbin, won’t shut up fer a moment….” The driver grows a darker shade of tomato as he lists the grievance against Mrs. Warshansky. He sums up with a “…gonna get what’s comin ta her, an have nobody ta blame but herself.”

The driver rejoins the hitchhiker, who is launching into a steak so large, it overhangs both sides of the ornamental plate. Two pools of grease collect on the tablecloth at either end of the great slab. Atop it is a mess of fried onions and to the side, a sizzling mound of chopped potatoes. The smell is mouthwateringly greasy, and though the driver wouldn’t consider himself to be hungry, he sure could do with a hearty slice of that steak and a mouthful of the crackling onions.

2008-01-15T02:22:00.000Z

There are enormous oak cabinets arranged against every wall. Behind their locked glass doors is displayed an incredible amassing of porcelain dolls and China dishes, none of which are ever to be used.

Over whatever wall space not taken up by these rosewood fortresses hangs a taxonomy of finely-painted animal portraits. Everywhere the driver and the hitchhiker look, if they were to give their surroundings a more thorough inspection, they are met with the imploring eyes of all manner of fauna. Most disturbing about these gold-framed instances of nature is how unnatural they appear. Though the style is as realistic as one can get outside of photography, the animals are frozen in the stiff poses usually reserved for portraits of European royalty or, the American equivalent, so-called captains of industry. A fox scowls and a hummingbird, in mid-hover, cocks its head to one side, inquisitive of a flower. It is visitors to this purgatory for tchotchkes, parading as an eatery, that should be quizzical, or at least weary. The hitchhiker merely wonders if he’s missed the chalkboard menu, as he continues to scan the clutter of cuteness for any sign of food. Even the air smells of mothballs and advanced old age, not the most appetizing of scents. The driver itches to leave before they’ve even stepped inside.

The owner/hostess meets them at the door. She is plump, with a stained apron that probably remains on her day and night. Her face bulges with two ruddy cheeks and a tight gray bun atop her head. Her smile, also incessant, causes her eyes to squint to the point where one can’t tell if they’re open or closed. She is exactly the person one would expect to live in, or at least run, this monument of bad taste.

True to her look, the woman is friendly -overly friendly, it has to be said- and makes a grand show of leading the driver to the booth at the side of the house, where they had a phone put in.

“Oh, yes, yeeeeeeesss. Of course you can make a call. Just follow me, but of cooooourse.”

The driver thinks it a shame that there exist people so nice that they will eventually end up punched in the mouth, just out of sheer annoyance. He leaves the hitchhiker to his own devices, tucked into a corner in the over-decorated dining room.

The numbers come much easier this time. The driver has spun the dial so eagerly –its new or recently oiled- that he fears he may have added one too many digits. There are fewer rings this time, and a raspy woman’s voice answers.

“Mrs. W’shansky?”

Grinnell, Iowa

2008-01-10T02:13:00.000Z

It’s only with the Iowa border that the driver’s road atlas of “America’s Heartland” begins. That’s just as well, because its tangle of multicolored snakes means next to nothing for the driver. As for the hitchhiker, he enjoyed spotting the odd names of small towns for approximately thirty second before growing tired of the game. He was ready to toss it out the window when a sudden vision of the contents of the policeman’s head exploding out its rear came to mind. He threw it back on the floor, where he had originally found it.

In this part of America, one can normally find a highway running east-west and ride it clear through at least two states, often more. That’s the case with the route the driver and the hitchhiker now find themselves on, Number 6. The atlas shows it terminating with a farm tractor over Toledo, Ohio. That map is really good for finding out which produce and manufactured goods come from which part of the country. Other than that, they might as well have used a picture book.

The driver wants to stop in Grinnell. It’s definitely not to go sightseeing: the town consists of a few agricultural banks, insurance offices, and the rest is warehouses for moving freight on to the rail junction. Even in Des Moines, the largest city in western Iowa, the buildings would only impress someone who’s never been to either coast of the United States. Looking around, the driver surmises that is probably the case for most Iowans. Des Moines major shopping district took all of five minutes to traverse. The windows of their finest shops consisted mostly of plain-looking flower print dresses. As for men’s wear, the flashiest item to be found was the straw-woven top hat, which is apparently a local innovation.

The driver pulls into a country kitchen –which means the converted front room of an old couple’s house- on the pretense of making a phone call. “Converted” may be stretching the point. The place looks just like the home of a cooped-up grandmother, except with more doilied chairs pushed up to a few long tables, covered with vases and embroidery.

2008-01-08T02:12:00.000Z

A thought disrupts him, and makes him wish he never delved into the topic in the first place: what if the killer felt nothing? Is it possible: that he could take so much, rob the world of Paula and therefore the world itself, and put no more thought into than a breath of air? The prospect makes the driver want to wretch. He will kill this hitchhiker if that’s what it comes to; that is, if he really is fleeing east from Fresno, hitching all the way out to Michigan not to find work, but to finish a job. All the driver asks is for the tiniest bit of relief once he’s squeezed the trigger. He imagines the hitchhiker’s head atop the policeman’s body, and its slow motion, cranial detonation. This time, he’ll be sure to stand far enough away; and in the future, it’s standard issue bullets all the way. He can’t afford to keep changing clothes every time he kills someone.

“Here, put these on.” The hitchhiker pushes over a brown paper folded over at the top. The driver rips into it and pulls out a pair of pressed, dark blue denims –the kind like the teenagers where, with the bottoms cuffs rolled up- and a dark wool sweater. It’s big, too big, but certainly looks warm.

The driver doesn’t think twice about pulling down his blood-splattered trousers in front of the hitchhiker. He’s just happy to be out of those things, filthy to the point of being stiff and scratchy. By comparison, the newly dyed denim feels like new skin. The hitchhiker is more than content to sit by and watch excitedly. The obvious comfort that the driver enjoys in his new clothes brings the hitchhiker a happiness that comes when someone has finally found their purpose. It’s the best three dollars and eighty cents he’s spent in a long time.
The driver balls all of their old clothes back into the paper bag and finds a dumpster in which to lose it. He’s careful to bury deep down. Apparently he’s not the only one to use this dumpster off a Plattsmouth main street to stash the remains of a body. Whatever he had to dig through to sufficiently hide their evidence, it smells ten times worse than the dried remnants caking their former jackets.

By the time they pull back out onto the main street, most of the morning’s foot and car traffic has died down. Remaining is a fitting combination of the old –but not homebound- and the few, visible unemployed of Omaha. Far from resenting the presence of the other, the two get along famously. It appears that in the absence of work, conversation is hard to come by, and one becomes grateful for wherever he can get it. They’re all “he”’s basking in the brilliant but cold sunshine. It’s not that woman aren’t unemployed or old; a majority of them comprise the latter. It’s just that for these towns whose civic pride is the healthy monotony of its commerce and the unremarkable orderliness of its public affairs –worlds that are both firmly in the control of men- a clean house and well-fed children won’t count for much. Only when such things are lacking do they warrant attention, and then never in a good way.

A church bell rings out the time and sees the two men out of town, as they pass the main and deserted square. It has just struck eight thirty in Omaha, Nebraska and everybody is exactly where they’re supposed to be, even the idlers. It’s the two travelers in a well-weather pickup that don’t belong, not just here but anywhere children play and old wives shop. They know this, and honor this arrangement by leaving the town promptly. With any luck, they will never have to return to the state of Nebraska again.

2008-01-03T02:20:00.000Z

“At’s arright. I got it.”

The hitchhiker dodges cars as he makes his way across the busy main street.

“Crazy somofa…”

He can survive angry gangsters and murderous bikers, but he’s going to get run down by an old man in a Ford. Unbelievable. He looks ridiculous too. The hitchhiker’s other change of clothes was a pristine, starched white shirt and gray slacks, held up high by classic leather suspenders. There was a wide striped tie as well, but he elected to leave that in the bag.

It’s strange to go from an ordinary workingman’s denim jacket and spun-thread trousers to looking like a poncey bank apprentice, straight from the graduating class of some accounting school. The driver recalls the conversation regarding the hitchhiker’s time served. What he said about being sentenced to one jail and then being transferred to another: it sounded too much like the man he was after. The part about working down in Death Valley didn’t add up, though; and now here he is, darting out in front of cars in Omaha, Nebraska, about to treat a stranger to a new set of clothes. The driver asks himself: is that bizarrely formal shirt and suit pants the same courtroom attire that Paula, and her father, faced down from the witness stand when they put her attacker –now murderer- away for the past five years. The driver tells himself that if he was around at the time, he would have blown the son of bitch away right there, from a back row seat in the courtroom, or on the courthouse steps as they dragged that lowlife away.

“What’s stopping ya now?” The question that had been haunting the driver, really since he was first faced with the odd drifter, finally bubbles up into words. True, they’re not eloquent enough to express the tangle of doubt and suspicion the driver knows only as a relentless nausea and a dull, burning throughout his eyes and ears that he has so far been unable to shake. If only he could know for sure, he could act, and be done with this whole ceremony that has managed to stretch itself into a two-day-plus road trip. Feelings are fine -even harrowing, shit-wrenching gut feelings- but the driver wants to feel, most of all, whatever it was the murderer felt that night when he took Paula’s life. If it was elatedness, then he wants the pull of that trigger to be the happiest moment of his life. If it was regret, then the driver will be the most sorrowful son of a bitch to ever fire a gun; if that’s what it takes to make this animal pay.

Omaha

2008-01-01T02:19:00.000Z

The city is already bustling with that peculiar type of middle-America industriousness inherited from burgher grandfathers and prim, Nordic grandmothers. It’s not even eight o’clock. Shopkeepers raise the shudders on stores that won’t be open for another hour. They like to spend the first part of their work day cleaning the floors, counters and displays -which were already thoroughly wiped down and inspected before they closed out Saturday- and inspecting the books just one more time, for piece of mind’s sake.

Old women wheel their shopping carriages, not yet full, as they stop at every turn to chat with one another and gossip about whatever could possibly be so pressing at such an early hour. Children in every stage of development –from mere toddlers to near-teenagers- scamper around them on their way to school. They play with a lack of self-awareness that they will soon lose forever, in just a couple of years. Men in suits and hats are stern but polite. They haven’t yet picked up the morning paper, but their minds are already whittled down to the minutia of cattle prices and railroad investments. They will continue on in that way until they finally break for lunch, at a respectable 2:15 pm.

The hitchhiker and the driver take this all in and feel thoroughly out of place. The driver has been tempted the entire way in to flick the remaining pieces of police officer off his flannel jacket, but where would they go? The driver can’t have them lying on the floor of the pickup either, so he’s stuck for the moment with the stinking strips of entrails.

“Fuckin s’ploding bullets.” The funny part is that he originally mixed them on whim, during some down time at the ranch. A friend there showed him the correct –that is, explosive but a hair short of dynamite- proportions of fertilizer compounds and gunpowder; heated, strained, and poured into a casing. “L’ take a fuckin man’s head-off.” That guy wasn’t kidding.

The driver spies a vacant lot and pulls in. Across the way is an apparel shop, just opening up.

“Arright. You go in there an get me anythin at fits.” The driver points a five dollar bill at the hitchhiker but he waves him off.

2007-12-27T02:24:00.000Z

There follows the familiar sound of a sack of flour hitting the asphalt, accompanied by a hurt grown. The driver can’t be sure why the hitchhiker seemed to light up when the cop revealed that he is from Fresno, but the reaction doesn’t sit right with the driver. An urge stronger than the force of a hundred hitchhikers slamming into the pickup is telling the driver to take off, leave the two of them to sort out whatever the policeman was sent to sort out, and he can be in Dearborn by nightfall. The keys are still in the ignition, all he has to do is give them a turn and he’s as good as gone. His hand finds the grip of his gun instead.

“Why?”, but there’s no time. He sneaks alongside the truck. The policeman is directly behind it, while the hitchhiker cowers on the pavement between the two. The cop is backing up to firing distance as he reaches for his belt. The cop catches the driver coming at him, barrel first, and draws. There are simultaneous shots, but the cop’s has gone wide.

At the last moment possible, the hitchhiker was able to grab the cop’s legs and bring him down. Far from incapacitated, the cop struggles and kicks in a tangle of beige legs and denim arms. Another blast from the driver’s Barringer is enough to separate the uniformed man from the bloodied hitchhiker.

The latter checks himself for a gunshot wound as well. The driver may know more than he lets on. If he does, then the hitchhiker could have easily lost as much of his head as the cop. There is the expression ‘to lose one’s head’. In the case of the overzealous police officer, it wasn’t so much ‘lost’ as evenly distributed across two lanes of highway. The hitchhiker rubs the hair falling down his neck; as much for reassurance as out of disbelief at the painted highway before him.

“Whatcha got in there? Shot gun shells?” The hitchhiker only now realizes how the blast continues to ring in his ears, and trembles upon every one of his words.

“A lil somethin’ I cooked up m’self. Bullets fron-loaded wi’some-monium nitrate. Splode on m’pact.”

To the hitchhiker’s shocked, if somewhat deaf, expression the driver wants to add, “an don’t you forget it.” Instead, he smirks at the gun and then back at the hitchhiker. Both of them think –how will they ever forget?- how the cop’s head broke up like a pumpkin dropped from on high. Just like that: a stringy, pulpy goo everywhere.

The morning traffic should be starting up soon, and it doesn’t speak well for a man’s innocence to be standing on the roadside with half a policeman. They leave the corpse as it lies and wipe as much brain and fragments of skull as they can from the rear of the vehicle. Their clothes are also splattered. The hitchhiker has one change in his bag. The driver will have to wait for the first shops to open up in Plattsmouth, the next moderately sized city, before he can ditch his shirt and pants. It’s going to be one sickening ride into the city.

2007-12-25T02:23:00.000Z

“Is something the matter?”

“Now.” He snatches the card but he obviously already know with whom he’s dealing.
“So you’re all the way from Fresno, Cally Fornya.” The hitchhiker perks up at this, but he’s already caught in the policeman’s glare.

“You. Let’s see some ID too.”

“But I wasn drivin off-cer.” The hitchhiker sings his best hillbilly impersonation.

“I said let’s see some ID.”

“Jee, s’pose I don have any. Well luck be…”

“Out of the car.”

The policeman is already swinging around for the passenger door while simultaneously undoing the latch on his holster. The hitchhiker is up on his feet, too. Before he slams the door, he gives the driver a meaning-laden look amidst all his mockery. Carefully, he points with his eyes from the driver, down to his pillow case bag, and then over to the policeman, who is already hauling one arm behind him and shoving him towards the rear of the truck. Words are imprecise as it quickly escalates to a back-and-forth of angry shouts. The policeman’s voice is prevailing, though it’s no clearer what he’s barking. A thud rocks the pickup and the driver turns to see the hitchhiker laid up against the side of the pickup.

“What’id he mean, with’at bag?” The driver reaches for it with a couple of curious outstretched fingers. Before he can lean over completely another thud rocks him from the seat. He can’t see the hitchhiker any more but judging from the sound, the combined weight of the two struggling men was thrown against the chassy.

Weston

2007-12-20T02:19:00.000Z

They hear the inevitable whirl of motorcycle engine ten miles before Omaha. The driver is surprised by how quickly they were found. The morning has only begun to break over the frozen flatlands, where a million tiny stubs of wheat stalk –arranged in neat, infinite rows- seem to fracture the sunlight into as many golden shards. A few lonely silos watch over it all, while an even lonelier blackbird circles, but never manages to escape the dreariness of yet another crisp, clear winter’s day in Nebraska.

It sounds like only one engine, but in the silence of the fields, it carries on forever. The hitchhiker is equally perplexed. Surely the biker gang would have come out in great numbers to run down and lynch –or drag by motorcycle, or whatever it is they do- the brutes that killed their leader.

In the rearview is a uniformed man who sits atop his bike proudly and not threateningly, like a sheriff riding into town on his horse. Closer yet: it is a sheriff, or at least some arm of the state’s highway patrol. The driver and the hitchhiker know that this is not going to be good –a shade preferable to dealing with the biker gang- but at least the officer has arrived alone. Maybe he knows nothing of what they’ve done, or maybe he just wants to pass by. The pickup slows, then slows some more, and the policeman in the rearview slows with them.

Eventually they come to a stop, the bike tailing the pickup. Its roar dies down to a putter, and suddenly the policeman doesn’t seem so admirable or officious, waddling up the window in his birches. The driver already had the window down. He becomes increasingly unnerved as he can’t find anything to do with his hands. The hitchhiker has it easy. He pulls out another cigarette, lights it coolly, and leans back in his seat to take in the show.

“Can I see some ID?”

The first things to make the driver suspicious: although he often sped through the night just eat up time and distance, he was actually going a reasonable speed when the policeman appeared, even though there was no speed limit posted. Second, the policeman asked for ID, not a driver’s license. The driver, and certainly the hitchhiker, has had enough dealings with the law to know that when it comes to any kind of automobile, they have to ask for a driver’s license. Also well known is the prevalence of ‘crooked’ cops, and their willingness to work with common criminal, including biker gangs, if it meant a little more padding for their pockets. This cop looks straight –fine-combed mustache and all- but he walks with a swagger that says he feels himself to be way above the lowly status of beat cop. There’s definitely some unscrupulous characters supporting the cocksureness to those steps.

2007-12-18T02:14:00.000Z

Confusing it for an offer of a makeshift tourniquet, the driver initially waves it off. “Thanks, but’am not bleeding that much.” The words are spat out with scorn, though it’s not clear who it’s intended for.

“Nah, ya thick shit. Th’story. On th’front page.”

Blood rises to the driver’s face in equal parts pain, impatience, and embarrassment at his limited reading capabilities. The familiar words “motorcycle” and “dead” in the headline is enough for the driver to guess that the anachronistic-looking photo is of Nado. Taken altogether, he is able to piece together the information.

“Shit.” The word is slow and drawn out, but also rich with inflection. It could say as much about his ever-increasing pain as the perennial riddle of human mortality. The driver is capable of deep thought when it is presented right before him; but when such pondering concerns a man who rushed him in a gas station store and possibly tried to run him off the road, one can’t expect the driver to be too sympathetic.

The driver limps to the pickup, leaving the paper where it lies on the ground. The hitchhiker hangs back a little. His eyes unwittingly float over to where he last saw the biker’s girlfriend disappear. The hitchhiker can’t see much beyond a dumpster, but he imagines that he and the driver are both being watched and laughed at. The girl will get back to Nado’s mates -who will undoubtedly hear of the news once they wake up, assuming they’ve gone to sleep- and a gang of an unknown number of bikers will soon be searching every highway, side road and parking lot for two men in a rust brown, mud-caked pickup. Where will they be when Nado’s gang receives word? And how far can a girl with multiple fractures and a swollen-shut eye get anway?

The hitchhiker catches the oversized plastic donut in the coffee shop’s window. It’s lit in friendly cursive: “Always time for a donut.” At its center, two baker’s fingers point to a six and somewhere between a three and a four. The hitchhiker jumps into his side of the car as he has so many times before. It’s time for them to go.

2007-12-13T02:10:00.000Z

“What was that?”

He spots a woman’s high-heel shoe laying flat on the third step from the top of the motel’s stairway. It glistens, singularly lit by the persistent lamplight, so that the effect is similar to that of a lone artifact in a museum’s display case. That’s when he remembers: the girl! He chases through the parking lot to the motel’s back end. The hitchhiker probably would have caught her, or at least spied which back alley she ran down, if he hadn’t frozen at the sight of another shadowy figure. This one is hovering to the ledge of the motel’s balcony railing. It’s the driver and there’s something in his hand.

“Which way she go?!” He catches the hitchhiker in the gleam of his .44.

“You gonna shoot her?”

The driver answers with the clear and concise cock of the hammer.

“That-a way, but don’t”
“Somofabitch! You realize if she gets word back to those bikers what we done, we’re finished?” The driver is already at the end of the balcony before he’s finished explaining. He puts one foot down on the stairs and then another. He’s caught and he’s tumbling down. A bang rips the air, physically, while the blink of a flash illuminates the driver: ass coming over head in mid-somersault. He lands with full force on the concrete slab at the bottom. The driver doesn’t dare move, but his gun is still pointed out and above him.

“Quite a spill.”

“Fuck you.”

“I think we got bigger things to worry bout than some biker cooz.”

The driver simultaneously understands and is perplexed at how the hitchhiker could possibly know of his plan: had he said something in his sleep or while he was laid out on Indian crank? Before the driver can search the hitchhiker’s face for a clue –he’s a darkened mess with the lamp hanging overhead anyway- a newspaper is thrown over his numb, sure-to-be-hurting-soon body.

2007-12-11T02:16:00.000Z

Those last few words pass the hitchhiker by, but he hears “biker” and puts his lick-cleaned hands on the linoleum.

“It’s right there on the front page.”

Sure enough, the paper is plastered with a giant photo of a man who would appear to be the biker known simply as Nado. Though the driver and the hitchhiker had seen all three up close –much closer than they would wish- the picture is only vaguely recognizable. Its an official headshot, probably taken from a lineup. While Nado’s wild beard is there, cut slightly shorter, as well as his off-the-rails stare, the mimeographed print of black and white lends the figure a more historic, and thereby unreal, quality. It’s as if the photo was found at the back of a drawer while some academic researcher, far off in the 21st century or even later in this century, was compiling a dossier on criminal culture in the 1940s.

As we can see here, it was the mark of gang members such as this one to attempt an approximated air of barbarism through their unkempt looks and a wild-eyed stare. It proved effective in distinguishing themselves from benign, motorcycle hobbyists, but it is questionable to what extent this look actually served to intimidate rival gang members and the authorities.

The hitchhiker holds the flattened, though no less haunting, stare and can hear the prissy, egghead voice continue in this manner for quite some time. It jars with the very flat, matter-of-factual block letters of the headline.

Motorcycle Gang Leader Found Dead Along Route 6

Why does the hitchhiker feel such a flutter of glee rise up his throat from his ribcage, like a hummingbird inside come to life? It commingles with the rush of sugar from the muffin and the caffeine kick from the coffee, and the hitchhiker cannot sit on that stool for another eternal second. He grabs the paper, leaves a pocketful of change and runs back for the motel. Stranger than his thrill at learning that they actually finished off that son of a bitch biker, is his immediate desire to tell the driver. The shadow of a woman at the opposite end of the motel breaks the hitchhiker’s enthusiasm. It hobbles like no human ever has.

2007-12-06T02:15:00.000Z

“What can I get ya?” The clerk interrupts his wiping of the counters only for a second, to inspect the hitchhiker. He obviously gets many marginal characters in here, the only ones to be found with nowhere to go after the rest of the Midwest has long gone to bed, so he knows that minimal eye contact is best, even if these drifters are longing for some sort of a connection. The hitchhiker’s brilliantly blue, but unfocused, eyes certainly warrant the same, if not more, cautious treatment.

“A coffee. An a muffin. Please”

“Which one ya like?” The clerk nods to the shelf behind him seemingly without moving his head, a carefully practiced feat.

“Mmmmmmm, blueberry.”

“Comin right up,” as he drops the cup of coffee on a saucer in front of the hitchhiker. The latter stares and sips, and gives the muffin the same unflinching treatment once it arrives. The clerk wishes to carry on with his tidying up and regular, idle routine, but is unnerved by the way the hitchhiker seems to eat without blinking.

“It’s not natural, and I’m certainly not turning my back on that,” the clerk reasons to himself before cutting the string around the stack of newspapers that old Thom McCarroll just dropped off –his route begins at 5:30 am every weekday, starting just down the road at the print shop- and flicks one at the hitchhiker. It lands without the stranger so much as flinching. He’s finished the muffin in a few hungry bites and is now licking his blackened fingers.

“This’s excruciating,” thinks the clerk. He decides its better to engage the man, as long as it’s done with full attention to what he says.

“D’ja hear about wha’happened to that biker gang West on The Route, out round Mackey ways?”

2007-12-04T02:20:00.000Z

There’s no way the hitchhiker could sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he would see a bright blue afterimage of the room; like a photo negative, except it would shimmer with the brilliance of a summer’s day. Between the peyote aftereffects and the sight of a pretty young thing –no matter how banged up and damaged- in the next bed over, the hitchhiker burned with the desire to not only stay awake, but to wrench as much out of these pre-dawn hours as he could. Unfortunately, the driver had already once stepped in and spoiled his fun, just as things were getting good. The hitchhiker’s restlessness led him to wonder what lay beyond that peeling motel door; what unknown opportunities –for fun, for mischief, for anything- would rear their head once he stepped out into the gray pre-dawn outside.

Much as he expected, the air was shockingly cold –like the driver, he considered his clothing needs only as far as the modest chill of the California desert. It woke him up further -not the effect he was looking for- until he thought the wet in his eyes would freeze over; but they only became wetter. The immediate freeze had originally made him double over, but he was soon able to straighten himself up and greet the barely brightening sky over Lincoln.

Water towers and the masonry of roofs could not have stood more still, nor have hid in greater relief from the streetlamps below. They were glossed with an unnatural painterly quality, as if the whole night had passed through and left them coated in a residue of its black-but-crystal-clear lacquer. If the whole scene had collapsed as one Hollywood backdrop, the hitchhiker would hardly have been surprised.

Besides gazing at its modest skyline, Lincoln, Nebraska doesn’t offer much else for the early riser (or for those to skip bed entirely). The motel is lit in a gentle, but lonely, glow from a coffee shop next door. It catches the hitchhiker’s attention. It must be a twenty-four hour operation, but there is no one inside apart from a young clerk in a white apron. The oversized booths lining the wall of windows seem a bit uninviting, but there’s one of about a dozen stools at the counter with the hitchhiker’s name on it (or maybe it just reads “the hitchhiker”) and he’s as good as inside from the moment he sets foot down the motel’s second-story staircase.

The clerk doesn’t show it, but he’s glad to see another living soul, even if it is the unenviable sight of an unkempt hitchhiker. The sugary smell of glaze will do well to hide the no-doubt gamey confirmation of his past two days and counting on the road. The hitchhiker allows the scent of brewing coffee and warm pastries to fill his nostril, before shortly filling his belly.

2007-11-29T02:07:00.000Z

The driver suddenly wearies, not just at the return of his murderous suspicions of the hitchhiker, but at everything: the whole trip –to Michigan, and they’ve only made it so far to Nebraska!- and what it stands for. He’s sick of missing Paula and being caught, stuck, in this scenic but never-ending no-man’s land between where her life left off and his….

The driver doesn’t know what’s to become of his, but he doubts whether any of it -no matter what he does or fails to do, no matter how many other lives he manages to drag down with his- could ever honor what he lost, back there, over one-thousand, five hundred miles ago. This thought, or jumble of half-thoughts, is depressing enough; but to be forced to play nanny to this dysfunctional cretin as well, is too much for waking consciousness to take. He passes out and would have collapsed onto the table if the chair wasn’t just a few more inches away.

Waking again: he’s gone, she’s gone, and the door swing wide open to douse the room in the crispness of morning, along with its first drops of light. Assuming the two have run off together, the driver should be thrilled, or at least relieved, as long as they haven’t taken the pickup with them. He’s oddly neutral, spent, completely uncaring: as long as the car is still there.

Walking out onto the front balcony to begin his third day in the same change of clothes, he scans the parking lot. Right where he left it waits his trusty, latter-day steed, of metal and chrome. Its scruffy windows giving off their own distorted interpretation of the pre-light of dawn, the driver doesn’t know if he’s ever seen anything more beautiful that wasn’t in a human.

With the hitchhiker gone, he can decide whether to carry on or to head back. It embarrasses him to think that he had to wait for that man to disappear before he could face such a decision. Then he suspects that he may have continued traveling precisely because of the hitchhiker. Trying to escape a passenger simply by driving faster; when he puts it like that, the driver knows it doesn’t make any sense. Yet when he gazes once again at his pickup, it takes on a completely different shade of animal in the absence of the hitchhiker. The driver dreads the emotion threatening to breach his surface, even though no one is around to witness it, and it is doubtful whether he can stop himself, when a noise causes that and every other emotion he’s ever had to grind to a halt.

2007-11-27T02:12:00.000Z

Before the driver is the hitchhiker –who hasn’t responded to the driver’s protest, which causes the latter to doubt whether or not he actually screamed it- propped next to, and partially on top of, the young woman. One hand has disappeared up her dress while another pries at a black and blue breast that has flopped out.

The driver is sickened, but the taste that enters his mouth is the same metallic tingle that began his journey down the peyote hole last night. He prudently chokes it back, even though that causes it to burn even more drastically within his chest. His head burns too, though it is of the slow roasting of coals: a base of anger inflamed, if he can believe it, with betrayal. That her restrains have been undone or loosened clinches it. It shouldn’t, since the girl would not be able to do much with those mangled twigs even if she were conscious; but it smacks of spite against him. The driver knows he is being overly sensitive and irritable –probably from the drugs- but instead of fighting it, he goes with the unreasoned fury growing within and lends it his entire body on which to be nourished.

This time the driver does manage to escape the chair, though the chair kind of comes with him, and he is on top of the hitchhiker; not for long, because the hitchhiker is soon on the floor.

“What the hell are you doing?” The hitchhiker scolds like a moody teenager, and each word pounces like a separate, well-pronounced predator.

To his own surprise, the driver is sorry. Although he knows what the hitchhiker was doing, or attempting to do, was wrong; he reminds himself that he shouldn’t really care for the fates of either of them. Let them tear each other to shreds, and then fuck that way: that’s how little he wishes to care; but he does, obviously.

“C’mon, the girl can barely walk, an she’s not even moving.” This sounded lame to himself, so the driver can only imagine how much derision the hitchhiker will find in it. The latter simply gets up, brushes himself off, and sulks back to his own bed. An overgrown child indeed; though the driver doubts how much the hitchhiker actually feels himself to be reprimanded, and whether it’s not just a show to get the driver off his case. Either way, the latter figures as long as the hitchhiker has returned to his allotted bed, there’s not much more he can do, short of….

2007-11-20T02:17:00.000Z

“Whatta we do now?” the hitchhiker searches the driver once he’s fully caught his breath. It’s obvious that the driver is calling the shots, and not just because he was the one behind the wheel.

“I’un know. We should pra’bly tire up. N’case she wakes.”

They look around for any type of rope. The closest they come are the electrical cords for a lamp and a bedside clock, before they decide that tightly twisted sheets will work just fine. They tie the poor girl to the bedposts and gag her mouth, just to be safe. Her face has come away from the ordeal undamaged, for the most part; just a couple of scrapes and bruises. Even with the patches of dried blood, they don’t take away from the natural beauty she evidently possesses. Her nose may be a bit too thin and cheek bones a little too sharp –again, the idea of an alluring witch comes to mind- but in the repose of unconsciousness, they give off the air of a concentration directed inward. The driver is impressed, while the hitchhiker is drunk, high, and most likely horny. That is not to say who holds the better of intentions for her, assuming either the hitchhiker’s or the driver’s can be considered ‘good’ in the first place.

The hitchhiker and the driver both know that she needs medical attention. That can be gleamed easily enough just by looking at her. They don’t dare touch the sodden, torn dress or rearrange her body other than how it lays now, lopsided on a bare mattress.

The whiskey is finished off quickly and, combined with the tail end of a peyote comedown, the driver nods off where he sits. Just as he’s dropping off into a darkness that is not as harrowing as the one experienced during his hallucinatory ordeal, he takes note of the hitchhiker: where he is and what he’s doing. He’s still laid out on the opposite bed, but it’s not clear whether he’s asleep or awake. His head is propped up against the wall. It doesn’t seem too comfortable, but it’s at an angle that makes him look like he’s gazing at something further down his body, or perhaps slightly over the edge of the bed, or at the bottom of the adjacent wall. A hand rests on his stomach, but that could very well be to push his jacket down to keep it from obstructing the view. Whatever that view may be, the driver isn’t able to decide any further before he is out completely. He won’t be awoken until he hears the whispers and low groans, and the ominous rattle of a wood-frame bed.

“What the hell’re you doin?!” The driver’s grogginess is like an opaque wall separating him from the world. His brain tells his muscles, especially those in his thighs and calves, to move, quickly; but the neuro-motive effort is wasted on a still-slumbering body.

2007-11-15T02:21:00.000Z

“It’ll be five for the night, and five for deposit.”

The driver drops two crumpled fives on the counter while the clerk reaches to the pegboard to grab a key.

“Number eighteen,” he announces. “Upstairs, and just around the corner.”

The driver takes it by its ridiculous wooden adornment: a carved and painted blue whale. It makes him vaguely aware that the few other keys on the board were attached to different, though similarly crafted, animals. Through the glass door he notices that the motels sign is a large ark, like the biblical cartoon of Moses’s, if the driver’s religious knowledge serves him correctly. Above that, written in fat, happy-looking rain drops beneath a light-up thundercloud, reads “Forty Winks, Forty Nights Motor Inn”; while black letters on a celluloid marquee advertises rates simply as “biblically low”.

“Checkout’s ten a clock,” a bored voice calls out from behind as he exits the office. The clerk wastes no time in settling back into his chair and returning to his inattentive watch over the front desk.

The driver pulls the pickup as close as he can to the staircase leading up to the second floor walkway. It’s underneath a porch light that would reveal the hairs on an ant’s head, let alone the mangled, unconscious body of a biker’s girlfriend. Luckily, it is late and there’s no one around.

Each one takes a side and half-drags, half-lifts her up the stairs. Her feet clunk one step at a time, and towards the top, she loses a shoe.

They get her in and toss her on a bed. The hitchhiker falls onto a bed adjacent while the driver sinks into a chair. They both gasp to recover from the haul up the stairs. Either unconscious weight is as good as dead weight, or the drug has greatly sapped their strength. The driver unscrews the top of his rye and turns it straight up, into his mouth. The hitchhiker reaches out across the bed and the driver isn’t so cruel as to deny him a swig. They both mark their refreshment with a loud smack and a drawn-out sigh.

Lincoln

2007-11-13T02:25:00.000Z

Since the hitchhiker is covered in blood, it is the driver that checks into the motel. A bearded man is asleep behind the counter. The little bell on the counter is rung once, twice, three times in rapid succession until he finally comes to. Rubbing his face and groaning with all the effort it takes to raise his portly body, the man looks sufficiently annoyed.

“Yeah?”

“ ‘Yeah?’ What? You think I’ve drove thousin some-odd miles juss ta shoot the breeze with ya, pardner?” The driver is incredulous at the clerk’s gall, but decides that he is more desperate for the room than a fight -and running the risk of being kicked out before he’s even checked in- so he returns an obvious question with an obvious question of his own.
“Ya gotta room?”

“Fer how many?” This really is too much.

“How many do ya see? Juss me..” “…you grizzly somafabitch,” he wants to add but, again, he needs the room.

“Arright, fill this out.”

He must be joking. The hairy man pushes a one page form across the front desk. There’s a pen on a string, taped to the wooden counter top.

The lasting effect of the drugs –peyote, which the driver had mistakenly recognized as strepatche, the cured buffalo meat- makes it impossible to decipher one string of words and blank lines from another, even if he were able to read. He scribbles in nothing in particular, just a string of jibberish; but he does it for long enough, and with a sufficiently concentrating face, that it approximates what one would possibly do if really filling out such a form. The clerk grows tired of the charade before the driver.

“Arright, that’s enough.” He grabs the paper away, as if it will just end up in the trash anyway.

2007-11-08T02:17:00.000Z

In the next moment, the biker and his woman are on the hood. The front of the pickup lilts with the weight and a there is a denting noise like that of a crushed can. The woman falls immediately to the wayside, but the biker rolls up onto the windshield. It begins to crack. The driver is somehow manages to bring the car to an instantaneous stop, and the biker is gone like a spec of dirt caught by the wind.

The dying down of the engine brings a momentary calm. It is underscored with the rolling thud of arms, belly, and head body flopping against asphalt. It finally comes to a halt with a muffled crash: a great weight hitting frozen dirt.

The way the pickup has swerved to a halt, its headlights follow the asphalt to the highway’s shoulder, where it drops off into an unseen ditch. Streaks of blood glisten in the light. They too disappear at the road’s ledge.

The driver staggers out of the car and he is followed closely by the hitchhiker. They both manage to stumble towards the ditch, miraculously without falling in.

“Shit.”

They can barely make out a denimed whale below. It doesn’t move. A little further off in the blackness of an empty field, a motorcycle sputters with the diesel whimpers of a wounded animal.

“Let’s get outta here.”

They turn back to the pickup but quickly catch sight of a white figure in a torn dress. She resembles a lithe insect, half squashed but still managing to flop a displaced limb and pull itself along the ground. She too glistens with red and her arms are arranged in a way that no arms ever should.

The hitchhiker runs for her and she collapses completely. He is able to hook two arms under hers and pulls. The scrape of flesh on the coarse roadway is painful to listen to. More of the deep, red wine, left behind in a pool: it colors the hitchhiker’s sleeves, up to his elbows.

The driver wants to yell that he can’t throw her inside the truck, but he knows they can’t leave her out here either. She slumps in the middle and the almost simultaneous slamming of car doors signals the close of yet another chapter –really no more remarkable than the ones to come before- in the adventures of the hitchhiker and the driver, as they batter their way through the American West, under an American Sky, on into another American Night.

2007-11-06T02:15:00.000Z

“Lessgo arready.” It is the hitchhiker –real or apparition- sitting in the seat opposite. His head drips: not with sweat, but its actual form and contours drip onto the seat and dashboard. “Less-go-ar-ready” the puddles of hitchhiker tremble in a sluggish bass.

The pickup is moving, but it’s not the linear movement of a car or any vehicle guided by a road and tires. The driver can’t even be sure if he is the one directing the car. He himself feels like his is sinking and he only clutches at the wheel as a life preserver.

Lights crash into one another and pieces of highway appear from the chaos every now and again, but the scene outside the windshield is nothing comparable to driving. A spaceship or submarine would be more believable; races of creatures flit by that could only exist in the outer reaches of the chartable world.

The driver has to stop. He pushes down on the pedal that he believes will do the trick, but the amorphous colors only grow brighter, and speed up with the urgency of those in a chase.

A familiar sound brings the driver partially back to the situation. He doesn’t recognize it at first, but its whirring vibrations slow down until it becomes the recognizable flatulence of a motorcycle.

“Bikers!”

Just like that, they appear; as if naming them is enough to summons them into existence. Except there’s only one: a hulking mass of a man with a woman clinging on to his shoulders. Her black witches hair trails them like the streamers of a kite.

They surpass the pickup from the adjacent lane and then dart out in front. Every hallucinating cell in the driver’s body is telling him to catch them. The hitchhiker voices his support in a polyphonic mess of “whoooooppeeeeee”s and “gogeduuuuuuuuuuum”s.

The rear wheel of the bike is like a spinning taunt. It speaks to the driver, mocks him, and dares him to come anywhere close to its gravelly spit. The driver doesn’t have to shift gears or press down on the pedal before the pickup’s hood is on the bike’s rear tire, like an attack dog sinking its teeth into its prey.

Settlers Top

2007-11-01T01:26:00.000Z

The vomiting duel went on for twenty minutes before showing any sign of letting up. In between cries of “wha’ the hell d’ja do ta me?” and “it’s poison, ah tell ya! Damned In-jeen poison!” the two seemed to wretch up not only the few morsels of a mysterious green, but everything else they have eaten in the last twenty-four hours.

The sickness abates, but the night continues with its fires and prehistoric creatures that seem to come and go with the twitch of every shadow. The driver gathers enough strength to bring him back to the pickup, but once inside, he feels like it is just enough to stay breathing. The sweat dancing on his skin makes him feel like a reptile. He imagines a gecko sunning lazily on a rock, then he sees it, as his own reflection in the windshield.

He knows the best thing to do in this situation would be to sleep it off; but every time he closes his eyes, the fires of hell reach out to claim him for himself.

“Am I dying?” From how it feels, it would be a reasonable question.

Even though it feels like permanent insanity, he retains enough wits to figure that all drugs wear off eventually, the length of time depends merely on the dosage. He remembers swallowing whole two –or maybe three- of the wretched stubs.

It turns out that they are the buttons of a cactus. The Indians use them for their satanic rituals. They even have a name for it. If only he could remember what that damned Indian called it.
“Strip out, somethin’.”

“Strip-hot-shee.” He sees the hitchhiker waver into existence like gasoline fumes. It’s a memory or a hallucination, but there’s the hitchhiker standing with the Indian. Paranoia sweeps him up like the sudden nausea previously.

“Both of em. They’re out ta kill me!” He spins around frantically, searching for the hitchhiker. There are pairs of eyes everywhere. The whole darkened farm-scape has come alive to watch the show. There comes a voice that could be many voices, but it rings out a few shimmering words.

2007-10-30T01:18:00.000Z

He takes a gulp of about two or three and chews. The look on his face says its better to swallow them whole, and he does, with whatever’s left in a salvaged beer bottle.

“Well?”

“They’re sour, but nothin’ wrong with’m.”

This makes the driver laugh. The hitchhiker is still gagging. Worse yet: he can’t wrangle another drop from the bottle.

“Here ya go.” The driver hands him a pint of rye whiskey that he had been hiding in his jacket pocket, presumably for emergencies such as this. The two types of sour make a painful combination in the hitchhiker’s mouth, but he’s grateful all the same.

“Save some fer me.” Grabbing the bottle from his passenger, the driver knocks back a few of the evil green goobers. He has an easier time with them, perhaps learning from the hitchhiker’s example to just swallow them like a couple of aspirins.

They rumble in the driver’s stomach, but otherwise don’t cause much of a disturbance. He nearly forgets about them entirely when he feels himself pitch forward and the road opens up with a halo of sun or hellfire. The pickup is suspended in motion and the fields break into thousands of shards all around them.

2007-10-25T01:09:00.000Z

The hitchhiker has complicated all that. Now, the necessity to choose what is and isn’t -possible and not possible- may be the only thing that saves the driver’s mission. Even if his suspicions turn out to be correct, it requires a clear and focused mind to make that decision. The driver can physically feel his exhaustion urging him to an edge where all would be lost.

“Ah, what’m I do-ing?!”

He’s dreaming, though awake, and yelling; all-the-while continuing to drive.

His screams wake the hitchhiker. He looks over at the driver and can tell something significant has passed; maybe some of the seeds he tossed out with his talk of prison have found agreeable soil in the driver’s suspecting mind. This just raises the hitchhiker’s own suspicions up a couple of notches.

“Y’aright?”

“Yeah, it’s just my stomach.” The driver feels obliged to give a brief rub of his abdomen and a grimace.

“I know what ya mean. Ya need ta filler up. With booze o’r food it doesn’t matter, but it needs somethin”

“There’s nothin’ around. An even if there were, it’s late.”

“I got these.” The hitchhiker produces his canvas satchel that was bestowed upon him by the Indian. Out of it tumbles a few clumps of what appear to be dried fruit. They’re of not-yet-ripe pistachio color.

“What are they?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m willin to try a handful if you are.”

“I’on know. Those In-jeens got some pretty strange…”

“Ah, c’mon. They’re juss fruit fer cryin out loud. They’ve juss been dried an….” The hitchhiker takes a whiff and his words almost curdle back on him. “Juss try em.”

2007-10-23T01:10:00.000Z

He knows that Paula’s killer, her ex-lover- was serving time in Berta Breck, and then San Quentin. That is nowhere near Death Valley; but it’s possible that they’ll send free labor to wherever it’s needed. The whole story about being released in the middle of the desert didn’t add up, and it still leaves the driver with the urge to leave this convict at the side of the road, anywhere. Whether he’s left as a corpse or merely a stranded hitchhiker would depend upon, among other things, how cooperative he proves to be, which doesn’t seem likely judging by experience of the recent past.

The driver knows that this is what he must do, to spare his mission if not his own life. No one gets released from prison in the middle of Death Valley. Those are someone else’s clothes and that is a bag stuffed with a dead man’s, or several dead men’s, belongings. The pretense of traveling to Michigan is probably a cover. It’s clear that he is driving upwards of two thousand miles in the service of an escapee, or else he’s….. “Traveling to Michigan” sticks in the driver’s mind, his throat, and his gut, and refuses to dislodge. No further thoughts can surmount the mental coronary. The driver is left with those words merely running on a loop through his head.

He almost crashes the car. It swerves like an eel on ice, but there is nothing for miles to hit. The hitchhiker stirs. It doesn’t look like he’ll wake. The driver wonders if he strangles him now, would he be able to put up much resistance.

“Can’t be.” The driver has to dissuade himself from making any decisions that could jeopardize his intentions for coming out here in the first place. “I’m in no state to…I’m mean, what’re the odds, really?”

He knows the hitchhiker has stirred an irksome spot within him since he jumped into the pickup. The few things he says don’t sit right with the driver, and the idea of him being a murderer, and an escaped felon, are well within the realm of possibility.

It’s strange, maybe appropriate, how the driver has so far managed to evade that nuanced world where the possible and the impossible are two very separate modes of being, or non-being as one may have it. The driver has had to consider neither one nor the other since making that discovery nearly two days ago. Revenge, as an imperative, does not care for “can” and “cannot.”

2007-10-18T01:11:00.000Z

“Sure. Juss a little, though.”

“Juss a little?”

“Yeah, petty stuff. When I’s a kid. Hardly worth mench’nin.”

“Oh, aright.”

“Why? Hwa’bout you?”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“Ha’long?”

“Ah, a couple a years in one joint. Got transferred ta’nother. Now here I am, free as a bird.”

“Y’mean ya juss got out?’

“Oh yeah.”

“Well hwa’bout what you said before, bout workin down..”

“Death Valley? They had us on a chain gang.”

“An they juss let ya out, right there an then?”

“When yer time is up, yer time is up.”

That left the driver in silence, alternately grappling with the nuggets of personal biography served up by the hitchhiker, and the sickening knot of tiredness, suspicion, blood-lust and whatever else is digging its claws into the lining of his stomach.

McCook, Nebraska

2007-10-16T01:20:00.000Z

Falling from the heights of the Rockies to the wheat field flats of Nebraska is tantamount to putting a race car driver in a pushcart. If the driver was previously fighting off exhaustion with the sudden twists and plunges of a mountain pass, now he has only boredom as a companion. His other companion, the hitchhiker, nods off with his head occasionally pitching forward before jerking back violently to the headrest. This may wake him up briefly, and then in a droopy-eyed daze, if at all.

The driver doesn’t mind the lack of conversation. It’s just that the relentless flump-flump, flump-flump, of the tires on the asphalt lull him off like a rubber heartbeat. It provides the perfect –or unfortunate- soundtrack for unchanging scenery: endless rows of frozen stalks, for miles; and every thirty minutes or so, the darkened outlines of the same farmhouse-barn-silo triptych, sunk in the slumber of Midwestern winter.

The ground and road are covered in a fine frost, through which the rhythmic dashes of the middle marker can barely be discerned. The driver bemoans: he doesn’t even have the metronome of those yellow hyphens to watch, to keep time and measure distance. He wonders how far he would get if he were able to count each instant of their flitting past; or which would come first, hypnosis or insanity.

Orange pin pricks in the distance: they are either a factory or the same thing, a collection of smokestacks labeled a ‘city’ in these rural swaths. It’s too far off beyond the gentle curve of a field to identify anyway; and its gone before the driver would have had a chance to make up his mind, if he cared.

He recalls the conversation of an hour or so ago, when the excitement of an ancient, stone prison, with fortress-style turrets, passed their way.

“Ya ever been inside?”

“What? There?!”

“Nah, ya thick piece a…I mean in th’nick. Ya know, done time?”

2007-10-11T01:11:00.000Z

“Good, now close that window. The bikers may not kill us, but that stench sure will.”

The driver obliges, but slowly. He relishes the hitchhiker’s protests with the mischievous glee of an older brother who has finally given in to his younger sibling’s cries. “Aw, aright,” says his teasing smile, and he has to wonder if it would be so out of place if he reached out and gave the hitchhiker a loving punch on the arm: not too hard, but enough for him to know who is in charge, of windows and everything else.

The driver settles for a mocking whine: “oooh, it smells.” His eyes have regained the hint, for the first time since he set out thirty-four hours ago, of the dance they would take on when he teased Paula and she would cry “no, not fair” just like a child.

As signs for the highway out of town spring to life from between the slaughterhouses, it clicks for the driver: Paula-Dearborn-California-murdered-road-Michigan. The driver wants to tack “hitchhiker,” as well, into the continuum but isn’t sure where. The returning waves of nausea tell him that he could place the hitchhiker anywhere in the story, and it would still make perfect sense.

2007-10-09T01:15:00.000Z

The industrial buildings and lit signs advertising auto parts and pay-by-the-hour rooms shortly give way to modest sized office buildings. Those yield to a few ornate skyscrapers clustered around a central square. In its middle, families skate in circles on an ice rink while a solemn-looking Christmas tree –hardly any lights, just a few twinkling glass balls- stands guard.

The motorcycles have either amplified their engines or gained considerable ground. The way the ground shakes, the driver wouldn’t be surprised if it cracked the ice on the rink or caused a few of the massive glass ornaments to fall. The hitchhiker studies the one beer bottle left on the floor, and considers its efficacy if used as a projectile. His common sense physics tells him that the centrifugal force of the pickup would merely fling the bottle off the periphery if thrown. He frowns at the prospect and can’t help but wonder why the same wouldn’t happen to bullets. The hitchhiker’s bag rests at his feet and he can feel the handle of his Hollister Special Issue .38 with the toe of his boot.

The pickup takes to the roundabout and tree, rink, towers, and slow-moving vehicles become a swirling blur. The circle has several streets leading off it and each one is preceded by a sign announcing the street name and maybe where it leads. The pickup is swerving too fast, so the driver takes a guess and approximates which street will carry them in the same direction as they were headed before.

The lights of the city have gone out. There are long, shingled buildings on either side but the two might as well be back in the middle of the Rocky’s wilderness. Every now and then a rare streetlight will illuminate a sign painted on a brick façade, “Royce & Sons Curing and Packaging” or “Steers at 3 cents per kilo”; and that’s when the stench hits them. It’s not just of festering manure; but the carcasses, fresh or not, mingling with the chemicals of the tanning process, are enough to describe animal fear and torment.

“Jeezis. We may be safe here, but it smells like pure shit.” The hitchhiker cannot roll his window up fast enough. It doesn’t help. The driver has cracked his down a little bit more. He listens with the attentiveness of a bugle pup. There is a swirl of motorbike roar echoing off the brick walls far behind them. It dies off before it can get any louder.

“Shhhhhhhh. I don hear em no more. I don here nothin.”

2007-10-04T01:36:00.000Z

The problem now is that the window escape has left the hitchhiker and the driver at the rear of the motel. They need to get to the pickup, still sitting at a pump in the front. If Nado and his henchmen haven’t already torn through every room upstairs looking for them, then they were sure to be waiting out front. All the driver can do is hope. The hitchhiker curses the bikers, crew opposite included, not so quietly as he catches a breath, and lets it go in one steady puff.

The driver sticks his head around a corner while motioning for the hitchhiker to stay back. The latter has so far failed to follow even the hint of an instruction, so it seems unlikely that he will start now. In fact, the hitchhiker bolts ahead. The driver barely catches, “ain’t hidin from these sons of bitches”; again, expressed in an angry gush of air.

“Wait…” It’s too late. The coast is clear, but the old man attendant has the hood up and his head stuck completely aside. It doesn’t take long for the driver to push him aside.

“Thanks pop, but we gotta run.” He slams the hood and jumps into the truck in an interrupted motion, without failing to notice that not so much as a square inch of it has been touched with a damp rag.

“As long as there’s juice in it, I’m happy.” The driver is wise to set his hopes low.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmm.Clink-clink-clink-clink.

“Ah hell pops. Wadja do?!” It sounds like there’s a tin can loose, rattling under the hood.

They don’t wait for a response from the absent-minded attendant, even a dismissive one, before they peel out of the parking lot and head down what appears to be the main drag into the city’s center. The bikers must have run out shortly after them, because they can hear the low growls and throat-clearing revs of bike engines, one more angrier than the other.

The driver has to weave between cars and lanes because the traffic is rather slow going. The pickup obeys dutifully, but not without a screech of the tires or a disconcerting rattle every now and then as protest.

2007-10-02T01:27:00.000Z

“Up there,” the hitchhiker points to a spot further up the wall. It’s a man-sized hole, lined with the same gleaming metal that comprises the laundry-folding tables. They scramble up a shelf and, one at a time, pull themselves into the shoot. The door behind them rattles with the force of hundred pound sides of meat. It is locked but, judging from the sound of cracking wood, won’t be for long.

There is only one floor to climb before the driver and the hitchhiker come to the first opening. It’s a slot that pushes outward and leads into the identical carpeted hallway of every roadside inn.

The first one out helps to pull the man behind him. They stand in the mid-length of the hallway and either way looks the same. A lit exit sign advertises a possible escape, and they follow its glowing plastic promise.

Another stairway; and the gruff, angry voices that the driver, and certainly the hitchhiker, should be so used to by now, are rising from the level below. The bikers obviously wasted not time in so much as trying the average-waist-sized laundry chute, but this being a two-story motel, it didn’t take much more brain cells than that of the three oafs combined to figure out that there was nowhere for their chance nemeses to go but up. Another downside of the squat motel: once on the second floor, there was nowhere to go but down.

The hitchhiker and the driver have to abandon the idea of a stairway escape. They backtrack into the hallway where their only alternative for escape is a window.

The drop is not too painful, as long as they hang from the windowsill fully extended before letting go. There is a collection of bikers standing across the way, standing idly and smoking in an alley. Of course, they are not aware of the commotion taking place within the motel, so they interrupt their banter to watch the two shadows drop from the second-floor window with mild, if confused, amusement.

2007-09-27T01:11:00.000Z

“Cool it, honcho. We’re just gettin smokes an fillin up the tank.”

“Oh, is that right?”

It’s the hitchhiker’s turn. “Listen, Bluto. You should consider wearin a helmet. A few less hits ta the head, an maybe you wouldn go round askin so many questions.”

If the pudgy, whiskered face hadn’t already been red, it would certainly have flared a dangerous scarlet in anger.

“D’ja hear what this shrimp said ta you, Nado? He thinks you’re slow or somthin.”
This biker doesn’t do much to lend confidence in his friend’s intelligence. The man named Nado -short for Tornado, which is itself a stand-in for a more conventional birth name, like Jonas or Petey- is still registering his insult, though his body would seem to have long responded with a puff in the chest and drawing back on a flab-hidden neck.

“Let’s getum,” declares the one biker who had theretofore remained silent. He, too, had a gang name, Bison, but it never caught on. His fellow bikers continue to call him by his birth name, which happened to be Petey.

The three rush the counter as a single wall of denim and fat-coated muscle. The hitchhiker and driver have to hurdle over the Formica slab, without any regard for the poor cashier woman behind it. She shrieks as an avalanche of tobacco pouches and snuff tins showers her, along with the hitchhiker and the driver. The three bikers briefly try to get a trunk-sized leg up before deciding it to be easier to simply pile out the front door.

The hitchhiker and the driver exit through a rear office. It leads to the area behind the front desk, where a bewildered clerk and phone operator cower, looking like cornered animals. They two spotted by Nado, Petey, and the instigator, named Choke, who are standing in the middle of the lobby.

The two follow through to some sort of mail-sorting room. They overturn the long tables in their way and paper flies up like a Fifth Avenue parade. The adjoining room is very bright and sterile. It too has long tables, but they are completely clear and shine like a polished bumper.

From the looks of the linen-stuffed shelves running the length of the walls, they have come to a laundry storage room. From here, the only other door leads, presumably, into the main hallway connecting off the lobby. The thuds of boots on carpet grow louder and shake the fixture suspended from the ceiling.

2007-09-25T01:36:00.000Z

“Ah what can I do ye fer, boys?” He sounds exactly as someone would imagine from a Rip Van Winkle pump attendant.

“Filler up wi’this.” The driver hands the man a folded dollar. He doesn’t look at it as he puts it in the front pocket of his overalls and circles the car, studying it as if it were on an operating table.

“Looks like ye boys’ve been through the wa-ar.” He confirms this with a finger-scrape of the hood. It yields a yellowed gray streak, and the attendant scrunches up his face like someone has just shat in his hand.

“Don be afraid ta giver a good scrubbin, ol man.” The driver doesn’t say that facetiously. He saw the bucket of no-doubt icy, soapy water beside where the man sat, and expects a full scrub down for his money. The attendant just folds his arms at his sides and shakes his head. Apparently, he would prefer to treat already buffed and polished vehicles. In that case, he should quit the gas station and go work as a chauffeur for Jeanie Meriwether’s crowd; though he’d have to lose the greasy overalls and trim back the beard a bit.

“Let’s go in fer some smokes.” The hitchhiker heads for the brightly lilt store in the motel’s foyer. It shines with slick tiled floors and the reflection off a chrome plated ice box. It reminds him of how quickly it become dark, especially up in the mountains; and cold. He runs to the glowing coil heater behind the door.

“Might as well. It’s getting a bit nippy out here anyway.”

Inside, they are not alone. A pairing and a half of grizzly bikers take up almost the entire store. The hitchhiker and driver scrunch against the rack of rolling papers and tobacco. The bikers are laughing with a deafening gut-belch. Something has stirred their derision, and they toss packets of potato chips and clink bottles from the cooler with glee.

“Hahahahaha.” The biggest of the three turns around and bellies up to the duo huddled at the counter. “What is this?” It’s a bear of a growl, gurgled with beer and phlegm.

Denver

2007-09-20T01:12:00.000Z

At last there is a break in the mountains. The pickup crests admirably over its last ridge and takes a nosedive along the plunging rock face. The road continues to twist and turn at sharp variances, and the pickup adopts the motions of a downhill skier, negotiating the slalom

The descent is swift. Wheels crunch over rocks just before they’re swept over the ledge of the road, and tumble noiselessly to an unknown fate. A green-gray floodplain stretches up to meet the mountain. It rears up at such an obedient angle that it looks like it will gracefully catch the pickup, just before it would otherwise crash to the ground.

At little further out, the city of Denver rises like a model in miniature. There stand a few stalactite blocks of sandstone amid a mess of similarly colored, but stouter, slabs. The first lights of early evening have switched on in a grid of otherwise darkened squares. Atop one building, standing opposite an aged clock tower, the Old West lettering of a Wells Fargo sign shines bright, lending an orange hue to the streets below.

The pickup is even with the highest rooftops within minutes. On the final, sloping turn into the city, a bottom-lit water tower rises up from the low-lying, brick industrial buildings lining the avenues. It seems to straddle an entire block. It announces, “Denver Cobbling- A Mile High, and a Foot Above the Rest”. Next to it, the neon sign for the “Fool’s Gold Motor Inn”, although towering well over the two story motel, seems diminutive by comparison. The pickup pulls up beside one of the two gas pumps at the motel’s forecourt.

“I’m fillin er up,” the driver explains as he hops out. The hitchhiker follows suit.

“Nah, the ol’ guy’ll do it.” He motions to a sleepy-looking white-bearded man lounging in overalls and cloaked with a wool blanket. He is leaning against the brick wall of the garage with his boots propped up on a barrel. His chair crashed forward when he sees the duo. The hitchhiker can imagine his bones creaking as he staggers to raise himself. He lurches forward, first on one foot, then on the other, as if walking were a new, and dangerous, venture for him.

2007-09-18T01:20:00.000Z

The driver, satisfied with his vague but honest admission –and as good a warning for anybody planning on following him into the Beaver State- sinks into his seat like a man readying for bed. The hitchhiker also slumps back, but it tells of the inferior player for whom losing never becomes less frustrating.

The moon rises behind the clouds, trailing the pickup truck. A passing big rig toots its horn. There’s a certain way these mountain roads can bring a person so close to death, yet without ever having to fear that that moment is now. The warning is always of the next ridge, around that corner; but each turn is equally dangerous.

The driver and the hitchhiker have come perilously close to stumbling upon a common and fatal detail. They carry a third passenger who cannot be seen but whose weight on both of their minds has continuously made itself felt. As they relax in their seats and lose themselves in the pickup’s steady slogging through the rock-face, little can they know that not only are they heading to the same place, but they’re going to have to run the same risks to get there.

2007-09-04T02:07:00.000Z

“An your wife?”

Checkmate: the driver’s face goes dead. It was already white between the reflection off the snow caps and the smoky underbelly of the clouds.

“Paula, she’s dead.” He should just say it. Then this bastard can come out and pony up to whatever warped game he’s set out on in the first place. The driver gives pause to ask himself, “weren’t I juss the one tryin ta get something outta him?”

He still isn’t sure what it is he wanted to hear from the hitchhiker, and it occurs to him that maybe the hitchhiker isn’t retaliating at all. He could innocently be asking after his wife, since it was him that mentioned the in-laws. The driver had become so caught up in his own suspicions that he automatically assumed the hitchhiker was doing the same; but an innocently posed question doesn’t bring the type of eager anticipation that has so evidently staked a claim on the hitchhiker’s face.

“No wonder this scumbag has to play Thai-pen footsies, or whatever it’s called. He can hide an expression to save his life.”

If the driver had followed that thought, he might have realized how literal it is. Instead, he reverts to a time-honored form of deception: the snippet of truth.

“She’s back in California.”

“Well I don’t assume you’ll be gone too long. You got no bags!”

The driver decides to take this as the light-hearted quip that the hitchhiker meant it to sound.

“Ah, plenty a things fer me up in Michy-gan. Plenty. A. Things.”

2007-08-30T01:18:00.000Z

A thought comes to the hitchhiker, but it is not as comforting as he would have hoped. They will probably have to stop at some point in the night. This guy, the driver, has proven himself to be pretty steady behind the wheel, but no one can go on however long it’s been –at least twenty-four hours since Barstow, plus however far he had come before that- with just a few hours sleep. He looks worn, beyond worn, but also determined; and in someone who sets off at a moment’s notice across country –it is here that the hitchhiker realizes that it can be for no other reason than a) he’s on the run or b) he’s on the chase- it is usually the latter that wins out.

All of that comes out in a dramatically tired drawl. “Reckon it’s about eight a clock?”

“Ah dunno. Could be anytime, the way ahm feelin.”

“Tired?”

“No. I’s tired about two days ago. Now ahm juss….ahm juss goin.” There’s the determination, or the ability to ignore one’s own body, that the hitchhiker feared. He takes a page from the driver’s book.

“Is it fer family that yer goin up ta Michigan?”

The driver ruminates on this, but it’s not in the panicked way that got the hitchhiker into such a deep hole.

“You could say that.” With further thought, and a self-amused tension through his cheeks: “In-laws, acshully. Gonna pay them a visit.”

Maybe he said too much, but the past day and a half of running over the plot again and again, has gelled it into its own entity. It now exists outside of the driver and he’s starting to feel like he can controls who knows about it as much as he can control the weather. He’s almost so certain of the plan –constant repetition has smoothed out all the pesky, unknown variables- that it’s only a slight exaggeration for him to believe that it can carry itself out on its own.

Regardless, the hitchhiker senses that the terms of the conversation –a “verbal standoff” might be more accurate- however so slightly in his favor. It’s time for him to tease out his suspicions, and get a taste for the card up the driver’s rolled flannel sleeve.

2007-08-28T01:09:00.000Z

“So it’s your parents?” This catches the hitchhiker sufficiently off guard. He forgets to put up his tough-guy elusiveness and squirms in his seat at the question. The light has left his eyes, but they remain sunken.

“What is?” The hitchhiker recovers and buys some more time with a question thrown back at the driver.

“You goin ta Mish’gun, right?”

There’s no way to respond to this. He remembers letting it slip about his parents being from Michigan when the driver pressed him about his accent –which he believes to be negligible, but was apparently pronounced enough to give him away.

Yet another question: “How much does this guy know?” It is unspoken, but written across the hitchhiker’s anxious brow. Little does he know that the driver –“this guy”- was just wondering the same thing.

“Ah yeah, but it’s fer a job ya see.” He has to think quick. “They gave us expenses for the bus, but I, ah…” The inside of the car goes from a cold stillness to scorching electricity in no time. “..I had more pressing expenses, you see.” That is followed by one of the weakest grins either of them have ever seen. The hitchhiker is in trouble: he can’t even convince himself. “Oughta do him right now,” is the only clear thought that will make itself felt, and it bears down on the hitchhiker’s skull like a molten weight. It must be contagious. The desperation in the faltering awkwardness of his answers has made the driver equally uneasy, and balmy. The wheel melts under his grip.

“…or when ah had the chance,” goes the refrain.

There’s that Hollister again. Tap tap, not too loud or it will arouse suspicion. It’s a reassuring four inches of metal under his big toe and not two feet from his closest hand. He’d have to fish for it though, and that would eat up precious time: the hitchhiker got a chance to glimpse the handle of the driver’s piece tucked into the rear of his waist.

Dumont

2007-08-23T01:11:00.000Z

Whenever the driver thinks the mountains couldn’t possibly get any higher, another peak will appear, towering over the one before it. The pickup is a faithful, if tired, servant and continues its ascent unabated.

The white caps surrounding them on all sides burn in the diffused moonlight. It looks like the climb upwards will not stop until the two are either embedded in the brilliant snow crests, or they breach the clouds that barely scrape by their summits. The moon’s glow filters through a bilious curtain and reflects off the white-as-ivory peaks. One would expect a light so brilliant –though seemingly without a source- to carry heat; yet it has become bitingly cold inside the pickup. The driver and the hitchhiker openly lament their choice of wooly flannel for the one and denim jacket for the other.

Each of their separate plans had included stretches through the Rocky Mountains, wintry plains, and the northern lakes. The driver had previously been warmed by immediate thoughts of revenge upon discovering Paula, and Fresno’s mild winters require nothing more than the jacket he wears now. As for the hitchhiker, he had originally arrived in prison in the balmy weeks of early September, five years earlier. All he had needed was a plain denim jacket on Michigan’s temperate late summer nights. The same jacket had served him well upon his release from San Quentin just two weeks ago; but the pathetic San Francisco winter could hardly prepare him for the mile-high chill now invading the Chevy’s interior, and causing his flesh to prick up.

The mountain paths get narrower, though one would think it were impossible. There are points where one car would have to back up, sometimes for a mile, if another one is to get by. Luckily, no one is traversing the lonely trail on this Sunday night. A few tractor trailers, loosely lined up in an otherwise sloppy formation, rest at the bottom of a slope. A bright orange sign christens it

“Runaway Truck Ramp”. Their windows are solemnly dark.

The driver first makes sure to see if the hitchhiker is awake. His eyes flood with eerie moonlight, like two marbles at the bottom of an aquarium.

2007-08-21T01:10:00.000Z

“Must’ve killed evey sonnofabitch in there,” he starts to joke to himself, but the smile never comes to his face. He checks the hitchhiker: there’s the smile that could tell of a thousand pleasures, but his eyes remain submerged in their icy blue depths, safely removing themselves from any joy in his face.

That peculiar phrase of the fat man’s steals into the driver’s head. “House a mirth, indeed,” he recites to himself. The driver isn’t sure what the word “mirth” means, but it sounds appropriate. It makes him think at once of both the hitchhiker and that dubious house of ill repute, and how the one seems to have been put on this Earth for the other.

“Mirth.” The driver rolls the word over his tongue and through his mind –he’s heard it before without ever questioning its meaning- before deciding that it must denote something like ‘wantonness’, though he wouldn’t know what that means either. The sentiment holds, all-the-same.

2007-08-16T01:41:00.000Z

“Wha…whata you…”

“Oh ho, man. You missed a great time in there!” The hitchhiker springs up in his seat and stretches one arm out towards the dash and the other to the seat back as he turns to the driver. One hand is clutching a beer bottle while the other contains a bag of peanuts.

“You’d be amazed at what a few bucks in there can get ya.”

“Oh yeah?” The driver releases the words very cautiously, so they do not come out saying, “tell me more.” To cut the hitchhiker off before he can open his mouth: “You mean more than a bottle a beer an a pack a peanuts?”

The hitchhiker catches a hint of the sarcasm, though he is not usually good at picking up on such things.

“Oh yeah, a lot more.” He answers earnestly, despite the driver’s mocking tone. “You want one?” He pushes the bag of peanuts at the driver.

“I wanna get outta here.”

“Arright. Let’s hit that road.”

As they pull out of the pines and back onto the highway, the driver is amazed that they are finally leaving a place without an angry mob licking at their heels. He savors the slow turn of the pickup, as it cuts across two lanes to the eastbound side of the highway. In the process, the driver catches a sidelong glance at the hitchhiker. From a profile view –and this is the first time the driver notices it- his face takes on the inexplicable quality of at once smiling and seeming deathly intent on…something. The way his mouth turns up at the corners sets it in a jovial and constant smirk; while the creases running down from his eyes lend them the gravity of a man who has witnessed…a lot. The driver wonders, not so idly, if this is the frozen expression of someone who laughs while he murders. The driver is no longer relieved by the calm that sees them out of this pine-hidden whorehouse.

2007-08-14T01:12:00.000Z

“I’ll pass.”

“You’ll pass?” The man is disconcerted by the driver’s seeming displeasure in an establishment built for just the opposite. He tries one last time to intervene.

“Hey buddy, ya gotta lighten up a little. Didn’ ya read the plaque out front? This here’s a ‘house a mirth’, a place ya come ta….”

The driver doesn’t remain seated long enough to hear the remainder of the boy-girl-child’s protest. He leaves the money on the bar -where it’s sat for one or two hours, the darkness and non-stop chatter has further warped the driver’s sense of time- and heads back, wobbly, into the blaze of an extraordinary gray late-morning. While his eyes adjust, all objects are submerged in daze of murky brightness.

There comes the shape of a long, luxury sedan. No, that is not his car. Next comes the familiar profile of pickup, but its finish –or what he can make out of it beneath a tinge of rust- is not the right color. Finally, he staggers upon its twin, parked slightly askew at the end of the row: a slightly better-cared-for model. Despite the blurry befuddlement of stepping out into a gray Rocky Mountain afternoon, he can tell that the car has taken a beating from the journey so far. The driver turns his gaze from the bowed dual-fender of his pickup to the jagged tree-line of the pine clearing. The snow-covered crests directly to the east, miles away but imposing all-the-same, does not fill him with hope. He turns back to the dutiful, smiling pickup and gives it a sigh, letting his shoulders fall forward and his chest draw inward. The driver is drunk with exhaustion.

He collapses into the driver seat, and the molded leather greets him like a pet. He is out before he can even register the slam of his door or the clink of a beer bottle as it falls from his hand.

The driver does not know what has awoken him: he’s still in the stage between sleeping and wakefulness. The sun seems brighter, though it is no less hidden than before. The hitchhiker has leapt into the seat next to him. It’s then that the driver recalls how it was the hitchhiker rushing into the car that had awoken him. The driver tries to speak.

2007-08-07T01:17:00.000Z

“….you just gotta poke ‘em, just so…”

The driver butts in by way of a sudden swivel on the bar stool. He must be drunk, because he misestimates the force with which he’s pushed off the bar. His hand is met with the flab from some an unknown part of the man’s arm. That is enough to stop his tale of debauchery, or whatever it is, at a single phrase: “em’ flaps.” The driver either ignores or does not notice his alarmed look. Before the man can get out a “you aright buddy?”, the driver starts in.

“Sorry ta interrupt ya, but wha’s the deal wi’the drinks here?”

The fat man’s look turns into one of cheer. He has been waiting for such an opportunity to explain this, his favorite hideaway of easy virtue, since this newcomer, the driver, sat down.

“It’s free, bub. All of it. Ya can even help yr’self ta the hotplate over there f’ya want any.”

The diver glances down the bar, past his enormous neighbor, past the girls, each perched daughter-like on the knee of a crisply suited man. Against the back wall is a table, atop of which spits a black-iron skillet. A blue butane flame reaches up from beneath and licks its sides as well as the metal support propping it up.

The driver then turns to the plate of indecipherable glop, bubbling over on his neighbor’s plate.

“Free?” The driver is surprised they are even able to give the muddy goop away.

“Yeah,” more excited. “As long as you’re grabbin yr’self a girl at the end. Say! Which one you interested in? Sandy’s a real hoot but I’ve always liked Virginia…”

It’s funny: as regressed as these girls-for-hire may seem –sitting on men’s laps and cooing- it’s actually the driver’s overgrown-child of a neighbor that reminds him the most of a little girl.

2007-08-02T01:22:00.000Z

“So would you care to take a look at our girls?” The madam makes a grand show of waving an open palm in the girls’ general direction. The hitchhiker and driver instinctively turn to each other. It’s become clear for whose benefit this side trip has been made, and the driver resigns himself to the bar.

“A few beers, an then I’m off.”

He doesn’t have to look –the squeals are indication enough- to know that hitchhiker has launched himself into the idle harem, and is now disappearing down the back hallway with whichever ones he has struck his fancy. Meanwhile the driver launches himself, though nowhere near as enthusiastically, into his first bottle of beer.

Even there at the bar, two girls are intent on working their way into the wallets of the few men perched on the stools. One man in particular, a husky bear in a shirt and tie, breaks away from a stream of girlish sniggers and sits down next to the driver. From the eager way he glances over, it is inevitable that he will try to engage the driver in conversation.

The driver will not, can not, engage back. He doesn’t understand why someone would care to socialize in a place such as this. It would seem that the company of fellow men is the last thing one would seek out here.

“Mibbe he’s bored v’all th’pluggin’. R’else, it’s no good anyways,” the driver explains to himself. Regardless, he has no desire to console a whore-chaser who’s had his fill of filling, and now wants to simply talk. The driver doesn’t know what he’s yammering on about anyway; something about “best girls west of Denver.” There’s a way the man’s words drift in and out, as if fragments of thought tangle in his vocal chords and he has to clear them out with a gruff “huhu, wadda ride she is” every now and again. As the words tumble out, one atop another before being swallowed back up whole, the man darts his head: from the driver, to the emaciated bartender hiding –or vanishing- in a corner, to the men and girls at the end of the bar, and back to the driver. It’s possible that he might just be talking to himself, or no one at all. The driver has no problem ignoring him, as long as the beers keep coming.

One bottle quickly becomes three and then six, with the odd shot of whiskey in between. The driver has been putting down money as he finishes each beer, but it never gets cleared from the bar. First ten cents, then a quarter, and now there sits a whole dollar and eighty cents –mostly in tips- but it remains untouched. Finally, he has to ask. His ribald neighbor is still on the same disjointed story that he started twenty, forty, sixty minutes ago.

2007-07-31T01:36:00.000Z

The driver doesn’t give much weight of consideration to the heavy plaque, even if he could read its mocking welcome. On the bottom is a stamp of what appears to be a city council or guild.

He sizes up the building once more. It doesn’t appear to be so old as to warrant a historical marker, but he doubts to what extent bare logs can show their age. He inspects the seal a little closer before finally heading inside. On it is an engraved banner, running between a raised buffalo’s head and the smiling face of an early pioneer. The banner reads:

International Conspiracy of Travelers and Merrymakers, First and Founding Lodge

“In to….inner…inner nashnul…. consp…con piracy….Aw hell, a joke,” the driver decides without getting through the second word.

The inside is as dark and cool as could be expected from a cabin without windows in the middle of December. They make out a bar running along one wall, with a few hunched backs facing out, and take a few more steps into the chilly interior.

“Well how you boys doin’?”

A very white, powdery face, with eyes and lips painted in exaggerated clown colors, shines out of the darkness. A madam: she wears the tiered, sparkly gown of someone from the flapper era. The dress is meant to hide her figure, but both the driver and the hitchhiker can tell, even in the absence of much lighting, that she is short and stocky, with a poof of lemon-yellow hair cocked atop her head.

The hitchhiker breaks into a grin. He can already see beyond the kindly smile of the house mother and into a dark corner, where there awaits several young girls, looking at once bored and anxious. They wear colors to a similar jarring effect as their ill-attired matron, but on these girls, they are meant to draw attention to their frail bodies, not away. Their robes are skimpy and completely open, while their faces look like they have been transplanted from over-made dolls.

Grand Junction, Colorado

2007-07-26T01:15:00.000Z

From the outside, it appears to be a long, but otherwise nondescript, log cabin, set well off the main road and barely visible in a mess of pines. There are no signs: either on the approach or atop the lodge’s green-slate roof. The hitchhiker swears that he knows this place to be a great “stopin-off joint”, whatever that may mean, on the way into Grand Junction, the main city on Colorado’s western frontier. The hitchhiker’s enthusiastic endorsement should have been the first indication to the driver, if he needed any at all, that he would have been best served cruising right along and never going anywhere near this no-frills cottage.

There are several cars out front. Among them: a rusty pickup, a later model than the driver’s Chevy, but looking many years past its prime; and a brand new Cadillac that is so glistening with care and pride, that the exact shade of its canary yellow finish remains indeterminable. It makes the driver feel funny to admit it to himself, but the sight of a pickup truck –however much in worse shape than his own- parked next to an expensive automobile sparks some degree of comfort within him. It’s not that the driver has ever considered himself an egalitarian, but he has to admire a place that is able to attract a clientele –if that’s the proper term for it- that arrives in such a disparity of class-specific vehicles. That the hitchhiker, whose brief record on the road should disqualify him from any form of trust, is leading the charge up to the discreet-looking entryway concerns the driver nonetheless.

There are no windows, but at least it has an official-looking plaque. Sure enough, to the right as they enter, displayed at shoulder level, is a polished bronze square. It reads:

In this place
August fifth, eighteen sixty-eight the date
Settled a humble man
With modest dreams, of a simple plan
Up to the mountains of Conistock
And down the stream to Firth
He mapped the land
With a steady hand
Until founding this house of mirth

Now to share with you
Weary traveler or two
A place to relax your bones
You can sit and rub dice
With ladies so nice

That you may never wish to go home

2007-07-24T01:18:00.000Z

“Yeah, my parents were from Dee-troy,” the hitchhiker answers very quickly this time.

“Oh, I’m from round there m’self. Not originally, but we moved out there when I was bout ten. Ya know Dearborn?”

“Nope,” again, too quick; but this time it rides on an insistent breath of finality. The driver decides not to push the issue. He figures he’ll get to the bottom of this whole Death-Valley-worker-hitchhiking-into-the-middle-of-the-country business eventually.

The thought renews another wave of nauseous panic; as if once he does get through to the hitchhiker’s story, it will somehow affect his plans as well. The driver can’t have that and dismisses the queasiness pitting itself in his stomach with a rub and a complaint of “goddamned pie.”

“Not feelin’ too good?” The question comes out as a taunt.

“I dunno. Must’ve been somethin’ I ate.”

“Well you’ve been driving quite a while, an at was quite a bit of excitement back there. You wanna take a break?”

Break or no break, the thought of giving the wheel over to the hitchhiker, this most troubling and troublesome character, repulses the driver. It is getting close to mid-day and even though it is winter and cloudy, the glare off the salt-bleached planes is taking a toll on the driver’s eyes. When he blinks, he sees the same image of a black, unfurled snake –with the same dotted stripes running down its back- set against a blank, but rocky, terrain. The serpentine road is flaked with scales of saline grit. They sparkle in the diffused sunlight, much like the clods of gray dirt clumped in the corners of the windshield and streaked across the glass by useless wipers. The thought of so much salt around them, everything caked with it, causes the driver’s eyes to sting and his throat to grow parched.

“Arright. I’ll stop off once we hit Colorado.”

The pickup has already begun to groan on the increasing grade that leads into the Rocky Mountains. Too far in the distance, their tops disappear somewhere between the brackish residue staining Utah’s foothills and the droopy ceiling of clouds, pregnant with gloom above.

2007-07-19T01:09:00.000Z

“Wind muss’ve kicked it up from th’salt flats.”

The clumps become even more infrequent before the haze lets up and the two are released onto a perfectly clear highway. The driver can see the remains of the storm in the rearview, and the pickup has been painted a new shade of dirt-white, but the suddenly restored calm makes the whole episode seem like a hallucination. It would have to be a collective one, though, because the hitchhiker is still bouncing from the excitement.

He continues to cough out his “can’t believe it”’s and “who would’a thought”’s, though the salt clouds have quickly faded from view. The driver feels the exhilaration too, but it is more from the prospect of finally having the hitchhiker awake and alert to answer some questions. The driver knows how easily the hitchhiker can clam up once again if he is so much as prodded with the wrong tone. He lets the excitement abate a little, while he gathers himself, his thoughts.

The driver isn’t sure what he hopes to get out of the hitchhiker, but knows that there is something to be found. It will either prove that his instincts are wrong and the hitchhiker is merely shy, but has nothing to hide; or else the driver is justified in wanting –however inexplicably- to stop his passenger in his tracks, with whatever blunt object happens to be at hand. When the hitchhiker starts clicking his jaw, loudly, in time to the squawking of the wipers as they grind dry salt crumbs into the windshield, the driver realizes that no matter what the hitchhiker’s story ends up being, it won’t make him any less of a nuisance; or a liability, as far as his mission is concerned.

“So where-ju say you was comin from?” The driver asks shortly after the last and fruitless squeaaaaaak of wiper blade. The hitchhiker doesn’t answer right away, but he can’t let this question hang in the air as he’s done with all the others. He feels if he doesn’t answer now, then that will be telling the driver too much.

“Death Valley, round Mesa Verde. We were routin ducts to th’coast.”

“At’s right,” thinks the driver. “He’d said somethin’ bout those ducks b’fore, but ah never quite got it.”

“Funny, cos you kinda have-a…a sorta…Mishy-gun type a twinge…”

Richfield

2007-07-17T01:14:00.000Z

It is not quite cold enough for snow, but a white cloud wafts across the two-lane highway, just a few hundred yards ahead. It is too dense, and contained in too neat of a billow, to be snow; nor does it float with the lightness of smoke. The pickup is too close upon it, and going too fast, for the driver to resist entering the opaque fog.

The pickup is soon bombarded with a deluge that has the consistency of hail; but instead of balls of ice, clumps of tiny, rough crystals pound the windshield. Each one explodes in a thud. The hitchhiker is awoken, if he was actually sleeping in the first place, by the erratic, dull plops.

“What the fuck?!”

“I dunno. There was juss a huge cloud an’ then…..an’ then this!”

The driver swerves to avoid the fist-sized clods, but they’re everywhere. They rock the hood in metallic rasps and the wipers struggle as they choke on the mysterious debris from above. It fills out the treads on the pickup’s tires and causes it to skid from one side of the road to the other. The driver wrestles with the wheel. It puts up a good fight in return, and the pickup takes him across the middle line into the oncoming lane; or so he has to guess since the road is covered with the same even, sparkling blanket as in a snowstorm. He estimates the truck must have lurched twenty feet to the left, and he’s lucky if he can keep it from diving off the road altogether. Sweat soaks into his clothes and stings his pores.

The hitchhiker hurriedly rolls up his window to close the gap that had been left open. In the meantime, a chunk hits the side of the roof and some of the fallout rains onto his shoulder. He gets a chalky finger-full and brings it to his nose. He snorts and immediately coughs and chokes. There is no mistaking the dry, saline bite enflaming the back of his throat.

“Salt!’ He reminds the driver of a prospector who’s hit gold. Though salt is probably the most widely available mineral on earth, it takes on an alien quality when it’s pounding down from the sky in a torrent.

2007-07-12T01:14:00.000Z

Ignoring the driver’s –or his would-be son in law’s- well-intentioned warning, Mr. Warshansky asks to speak to Paula. A pile of plates at the washing station topples into the sink and the entire diner is briefly immersed in the clatter.

“Where are you?” There’s a new urgency to Mr. Warshansky’s voice. His English is usually of the studied assimilated-immigrant variety, but when he gets angry, it reverts to a straight-off-the-boat pidgin. “Ver’z Paula? I demand to zpeek to…” Click.

The hitchhiker appears at that moment from behind the swinging bathroom door. The panic returns, but this time it is accompanied with the urge to kill, lash out, do anything to cover the driver’s tracks along with his ultimate plan.

The driver remains still and the hitchhiker stands even more frozen. His eyes say it all: “I know you” and at the same time, they are desperately trying to remain calm, stay focused, and reveal nothing to the driver, whose chest is heaving up and down just a few feet away. Whatever happens, it is certain that they will not go back to being mere strangers. Something has slipped out: something huge but as-yet undefined. It feels like a revelation, though neither man feels as if he has any better a grasp on the other than he did moments ago. If anything, doubt -and a deadly suspicion- pours through the air between them. It becomes heavy and pulsing, as with an electro-static charge whipped into a fury between the two poles. Neither dares to move, lest an answer materializes from out of the super-charged air. Their eyes scorch, practically unblinking, as each faces down the man standing opposite.

The stare-down cannot last. A young woman darts past, dragging a young boy with chocolate sauce completely down the front of him, into the woman’s room. The hitchhiker breaks the stalemate, as his eyes latch onto her ass and keep hold. The buttocks are small but round, and the sheer fabric does much justice to their shapeliness. He thinks of how he’d like to finish his pie off her ass crack, but the bathroom door swings back to disrupt the view. He looks back to the driver, who is already straddling a stool at the counter.

The hitchhiker approaches, but neither one looks at the other. That moment has passed. It’s the rest of their time together that remains a question mark. The hitchhiker puts two dimes on the counter and says to no one in particular, “I’ll be outside.”

2007-07-10T01:22:00.000Z

“Hiya, Mista W’shansky?”

The driver is met with silence, but it’s the kind of drawn-out pause where one can tell the person is searching his memory, even if you can’t see him scrunching his brow and narrowing his eyes. The old man hasn’t heard this voice since well before his daughter ran off to California with that peculiar fellow who worked at the city lot. It clicks, but he’s far from elated. A simple “ah yeah” will have to suffice.

The driver’s best attempt at a friendly, “how’ve ya been? I know it’s been a while” is met with a very clipped “fine,” meaning, “hurry, up and get to the point already, you damned delinquent.”

“Well, I’m juss callin’ cos, ahm not sure if ya know, but Paula’s ah….you see Paula’s er….” Just as the driver is struggling with how to put it, the hitchhiker brushes past and pushes through the men’s room door. Panic rises up in the driver’s throat. He doesn’t know why, but he feels that having the hitchhiker catch that last, stuttering fragment of conversation will end up costing him a little further down the road.

The driver’s mind is still reeling with an indistinct fear, paranoia; as in “what’ve ah juss done?” He doesn’t have to say much more. Mr. Warshansky’s simple “mrhhhhhr” brings him back to the conversation and says that he already knows about the release of Paula’s ex-lover. If only he knew the rest.

The driver continues at a stuttering pace. “An he’s outta prison” -that “an” being tangential to nothing- “so’s you might wanna lay low fer a lil while. Seeing as you had a…you were involved in the proceedings as well, as I understand it.”

It was Mr. Warshansky who pressed charges on behalf of the poor Mexican man –really just a boy- who became half-disfigured when he dared to intervene in the attack on behalf of Paula. He was a stranger and certainly disdained, if not completely overlooked, in the community. Mr. Warshansky knew that this man did the honorable thing and wanted to acknowledge it, even if it meant he would be rendered an outcast as well. He testified in court and forced Paula to also take the stand against her boyfriend, who was charged with grievous assault.

The boyfriend was by no means a well-regarded figure, either. In fact, he was a shady drifter about whom people knew little, but they sensed enough to know that his contribution to Dearborn’s civic life would be nil, if not actually draining the city’s moral stock. Still, it was a case of a Mexican –for all purposes, a non-entity to the jury of white working-class peers- seeking justice against a menacing, criminally-involved, but indisputably White man. The verdict would have been all-too-predictable if it wasn’t for Mr. Warshansky’s –and therefore Paula’s- involvement.

2007-07-05T01:09:00.000Z

No one notices the driver and the hitchhiker as they claim their spot, and the comradely wolfing of food –mostly pancakes soggy with syrup and equally wet eggs- continues undisturbed on both sides. A portly and unsmiling waitress pushes two separate pages towards them. The driver continues walking past the stools.

“Gemme a pie an a coffee, will ya? I gotta make a phone call.”

The hitchhiker sniffs a quasi-affirmative response, but the driver is already picking up the receiver adorning a wood paneled wall at the rear.

The driver puts a finger to the black rotary when he realizes he can’t remember the full number. He should. With the exception of the past year, he’s been calling there ever since the Warshanskys got their phone put in. He remembers that night, though, and how excited little Paula was. She made him call as soon as he had driven to the first payphone, on Marlyborne Road. He had the first two letters and following four digits written out in Paula’s girlish curlicue cursive. How could he have forgotten? She wanted to talk all the time, as soon as he got off work. So he’d pull it out of a pocket and there it would be, between his blackened fingers: that crinkled, yellowing piece of paper. Except by that point, he held onto it more as a memento. He had long memorized the number, but wouldn’t dare throw it away.

Now here he stands, however many years later, in front of another payphone with a completely different type of urgency coursing through his dialing finger. For a moment, he thinks it’s possible he may still have the paper. After all, he never threw it out, as far as he can recall. The driver even reaches for his wallet before he remembers how he had dumped out its contents onto the bed and never bothered to pick them back up.

How long ago all that seems. The memory is recounted with such an underwater, dream-like quality. He was in shock. The driver can’t begin to imagine what else he might have done in those crazed hours after the discovery yesterday morning.

Then it comes to him. The first two letters: WP for Woodland Park, the Warshanky’s neighborhood in Dearborn. His finger merely fills in the rest, without the actual numbers ever consciously coming to mind. It’s as if his finger remembers exactly how far on the dial to go with each spin. It rings, and keeps ringing. The driver is sure it is a wrong number when he hears the click, and the wary answer of an aging, though familiar, voice.

Cedar City, Utah

2007-07-03T01:15:00.000Z

Just over the state line, tankers and big rigs idle outside a squat cinderblock building. They are stretched out haphazardly at awkward angles to one another. The pickup manages to navigate this maze of four-foot tires and spitting exhaust pipes slowly. The tires kick up the dry, gray-white dust common to the salt flats. It floats away in billows on the wind.

The same crème-colored dirt cakes everything: not only the trucks but the low hedges lining the rest stop. It collects in an opaque film on the diner’s windows.

There hangs overhead what must have once functioned as a large neon sign. The arrow under the cursive “Come on in” points directly to the door, through which the driver and the hitchhiker enter.

The inside is not much cleaner. In this case, instead of windswept dust, it is a grime of part-cigarette smoke, part-bacon grease, that seems to coat everything inside.

They approach two free stools at the counter. The vinyl cushioning croaks with the wear of ages and the linoleum tabletop has a dull glare; the kind that would never wash clean with any amount of bleach and hot water and vigorous scrubbing.

This rest stop, much like the stretch of highway it is found on, clearly settled into the comforts of dilapidation long ago, and will continue to remain so until a terrible windstorm or a stray tractor trailer finally has the good fortune to knock it down. For now, like so many years past, it stands proudly askew in its concrete, Spanish tile-trimmed shell.

The counter is full with a few variations of the cross-country trucker type: crisp denim cuffed at the ankle, the inevitable plaid flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows, and the backs of fifteen or so sandy blonde to chestnut brown hair, nodding in silent diligence. All down the row come the tinkle of silverware on ceramic, the slurp of coffee, and a few satisfied belches, along with hurried guffaws and a few grumbled words in passing: the mark of men who can’t afford to simply lounge and eat.

2007-06-28T01:04:00.000Z

“Mrrrrrhrrrrrrr,” concurs the hitchhiker. He hardly touched the sopping platter in Smokey’s smoky club, and didn’t eat at the party. He was too busy…well, he missed the opportunity all the same.

“Wha’d ol chief woodenhead give ya? A bunch a dried bull testicles?”

The hitchhiker opens the sack cautiously and spills some of the contents into his hand. They’re unidentifiable, but certainly dried.

“Dunno.” He takes a whiff and reels back. “Aw God! They’re moldy!” He throws them back into the bag, twists the string, and wipes his hands, reluctantly, on his trousers. The sets the driver off laughing.

“Goddamned savages! They’ll dry horse shit an’ tell you it’s a delicacy.”

“Well just be glad you didn juss pop em inta your mouth.” The driver continues his chuckle. “I’m sure we’ll fine some place soon nuff.”

The thought comes over him: he sounds like a father –not his father, though- consoling a hungry child. He wonders: how is it possible for him to be feeling like a father to this reproachable tramp when, not minutes ago, he was ready to clock him over the head with a rock and abandon him to the Nevada wilderness, shit-drying Indians and all? The hitchhiker looks over with a mealy grin and the driver is more perplexed at his own emotional floundering than anything else.

One minute he’s flying off into a rage, and now he wants to find this unruly stranger a hamburger joint. Maybe that’s what parenthood is: a never-ending, and wildly fluctuating, parade of incongruous emotions. A few days ago, with Paula scheduled for a doctor’s visit, the driver was entertaining thoughts of soon finding out for sure. Now, it will take a little bit longer. The dismal train of though is derailed.

“A diner!” The driver makes the momentous discovery of a rusting sign. It could be pointing down the road to a truck stop that was demolished years ago, but it offers just enough a hope. The promise is in “38 Miles” and includes a gas station.

2007-06-26T01:21:00.000Z

“Fuckin’ Indee-ans. Talkin ta spirits an all that crap.”

The driver, for all his despondency, has to laugh at this recollection of the blank-stared Indian.

“Yeah. ‘Oooooh, I zee a woo-man in your foo-cha. Wooooooo.’”

“Well, I hope she’s got big ol’ bags, at that.”

They join in a laugh that brings them back to their shared concentration over the rhythms of the road. There’s the clickity-clickity-clickity of a hubcap not completely fit into the wheel. Every now and again, the rear bed rumbles, and the driver will flick the wipers, ineffectively, across a filthy windshield, to a hair-raising squeeeeeeeak. At least the noises, regular and halting alike, are a substitute for having to talk. This suits the hitchhiker and driver just fine. Each of their minds are too preoccupied for small-talk, anyway.

Among the various squeaks, clickity’s, and rumbles –and the occasional shifting in place of each man- remains the peculiar words of the Indian: “There is a woman….was.” Neither the driver nor the hitchhiker would dare guess how deeply the Indian’s invocation still haunts the other. Nor is there any way they could know how those words, spoken through an otherworldly fog of fatality, conjured up the same exact face in the mind of each man; or almost the same face, as they were separated by a few moments before and after her death. Paula! The driver moans and lets it settle on the advancing light of morning. The despair sinks through his gut, as if it were the morning light itself soaking through the low ceiling of clouds overhead. It finds the knots of exhaustion buried in his stomach and melts them down. They unravel, leaving only the loose strings of hunger.

“Sure am hungry, though,” the driver considers.

2007-06-21T01:14:00.000Z

The driver manages to open the pickup’s door. The click is enough to awaken the Indian. He grabs the hitchhiker before he, too, is able slink into the car.

“Take this!”

The Indian has one more offering for the besieged duo. He doesn’t have to go back to the stand to fetch it. He pulls a small, canvas bag from his front pocket. It is tied at the top with string. The hitchhiker waves it away –the aftertaste of the so-called strepatche still slimes around his mouth- but the Indian insists.

“You’ll need it. Both of you.” He places it in the hitchhiker’s unwilling hand. The hitchhiker figures it’s easier to simply take it –he can toss it out the window later- than argue anymore with this possessed, or insane, savage. Instead of resistance, he offers a one dollar bill; amazing, since all the prices listed on the hand-painted board are in pennies, maybe some nickels.

“Thank you, friend. You will find each other. May the Spirit be with you.”

“Arright, enough,” the driver yells at himself as he forces the pickup away. He thinks that if he can get away fast enough, he will not have to face what just happened –or failed to happen: “f’it weren’ fer that damned Ind’un.”

The pickup’s tires squeal and spit out a stream of dirt. It chalks the Indian in beige dust from the knee down. Regardless, he waves, and while not smiling, there’s a gleam in his eye that holds out hope for the both of them.

“The fuck was tha’bout?”, the driver offers to the hitchhiker. The latter shrugs his shoulders. He really doesn’t know either; but on some level that he can only feel as a queasy body sensation, he suspects that the Indian recognized more in them than just a happenstance driver and his passenger.

The driver lights a cigarette with his palms resting on the top of the steering wheel. A vague sense of worry has been growing within, as subtle as the onset of seasickness. The nausea fights its way through a gut already wrenched with exhaustion and rage. The first sip of smoke fills the driver’s lungs. As it passes over the tongue, the taste buds, and through the esophagus, it reigns in the queasiness of his anxiety into a palatable bite; like the mere aftertaste of the day’s first cigarette. The hitchhiker’s already on his fifth.

2007-06-19T01:10:00.000Z

“I’m fine, thanks.” He manages to summon the beginnings of a smile from somewhere. It doesn’t hold for long.

“Wait!”

The two, to their bewilderment, actually stop in their tracks. The call sounded like an animal’s, except with the human ability to speak. Only a few feet from ‘their’ vehicle, the Indian’s voice has become someone, or something, else’s entirely. It is a warning, and it is hardly of this world.

The two face him. They are met with unresponsive eyes, set in a creaseless face that has gone slack. It is the checked-out look of someone waiting for or listening to a lengthy set of instructions. They wait a few pauses that drag on too long. Finally fed up, the driver cuts into the Indian’s silent, one-way exchange.

“Hey look buddy”, not ‘friend’. “We gotta go…”

“You two are on a journey…”

The hitchhiker checks with the driver before cracking into a yeah-tell-us-something-we-don’t-know smile.

“There is a woman…,” the voice trails off into a mournful pause. “Was..”

“This is nonsense,” the driver tacks on. At the same time, his thoughts flash to Paula, in the same prostrate position as before. The hitchhiker too, sees her face: same blood-drained pallor, same smirk of surprised relief, only a few hours earlier. The images are too vivid for either to notice that the other has sunk to a look of the utterly forlorn.

2007-06-14T01:08:00.000Z

“Friend.” There it is again. He turns slightly towards the Indian, who is holding before him a strip of dark red bark, looking as proud as anyone ever has over dried meat.

“Try it.” The Indian lifts it up to the hitchhiker, obviously very eager to share this delicacy with, what he believes to be, a representative of civilized taste.

The driver is closer, but not yet close enough to save the hitchhiker from the chewy piece of meat before him. It is already in his hand, greasing up his thumb and forefinger; and before he can stop himself, the dangly strip is in his mouth. It tastes like fat and dirt somehow combined into one chalky, gristly mouthful. He hastens to get it down. Without water, it is almost an impossible chore. The Indian senses his discomfort and fetches a bladder presumably filled with water.

“Whatchya doin?” It is not a friendly inquiry, and the driver eyes the Indian up and down, even more menacingly, as the Indian trots back holding the buffalo gourd. It is doubtful whether the Indian caught a glimpse of the fist-sized rock the driver had been carrying. He dropped it as soon as he saw the Indian reappear from the shack. Still, the Indian looks him up and down, appraises him, in an unnervingly knowing way. The same haunting smile says, at once, “I know what you’re doing” and “I won’t interfere.” The driver has never had his intentions so clearly read, nor has he ever had them communicated back to him in such an uncomplicated, yet wholly revealing, smile. He realizes how readily, and yet as if on a whim, he was about to put an end to the hitchhiker’s travels. He hopes his face –or however else the Indian managed to read him- doesn’t show remorse. What he feels is more akin to a minor setback.

“You’re friend here was just sampling some of our family’s strepatche. Would you care for some?”

It is suspicious how the Indian’s English is more assiduous than the so-called ‘native speakers’ standing before him. The driver doesn’t like the whole situation. He lets it be known with a disgusted look upon his face. As hungry as he is –peculiar, since he managed to sufficiently stuff himself at Miss Meriwether’s just two hours ago- the driver is not willing to so much as touch this wild man’s wares, let alone ingest them.

2007-06-12T02:41:00.000Z

“Must not be eatin much out here,” the hitchhiker muses to himself as he eyes the strange man up and down. The Indian approaches, smiling back, but in an eerie way that seems to go straight through the hitchhiker.

“How ya doin’?” The hitchhiker is openly cautious. He can’t recount every tale he heard growing up, like so many other young white boys, about Indians luring white men into traps at the side of the road, with a broken down car or an innocent-looking roadside stand, like this one.

“Fine.” The Indian says it in a studied way, as if he is delivering a true assessment. “You caught us just as we were opening up shop. Perhaps you’d like to take a look?” He motions towards the flimsy crates. A few dark-skinned, Asian-looking children, between the ages of a few months and eight years old, sit solemnly, staring towards the ground but really at nothing. Somewhere in the back, their mother fusses with a fire.

“Nah we’re just stoppin’ furra…” he looks at the driver, farther off from the road than true privacy would require, “..ta stretch a-legs,” the hitchhiker wisely continues.

“Have you ever tried strepatche?” It comes out “strip-hot-shee”, in three quickly spat words.
“Strip who?” The hitchhiker doesn’t really care to carry the conversation any further, but the driver still hasn’t returned. “What in the hell did-ee have ta piss so far away for?” The hitchhiker turns that even shade of annoyed, a hair past confused and just on the cusp of breaking into outright agitated. Its color is the orangey side of rust.

“Stip, hot, shee” the Indian gently explains, like a caring teacher. “Dried buffalo rump!” He says it in such an obvious way, the hitchhiker is almost tempted to go along and respond, “Oh! Strip, hot, shee! V’course!”; but he doesn’t. He settles on a noncommittal “hrmmm.”

The Indian becomes inspired. “Hold on! I’ll get you some.”

The hitchhiker studies hard at the ground between him and where the Indian has just run off to fetch some of the dried meat. His face may indicate the calm appraisal of a gourmet on the verge of a great discovery, but he is really wondering why the driver is taking so long in getting back, and why he, the rough-and-tumble, take-no-shit hitchhiker, is standing on the side of the road, making small talk with some “danged scalper.” He decides the situation is thoroughly ridiculous; and turns to spy the driver making the long trip back, slowly. He’s carrying something. The hitchhiker reminds himself of his gun, tucked into the sack lying on the passenger side of the pickup.

2007-06-07T01:13:00.000Z

“Hey, watcha doin?” The hitchhiker isn’t too alarmed that the pickup has suddenly lurched to the shoulder. He finds what he believes to be the driver’s irrational outbursts wholly entertaining. He views the waves of rage as one would a performance; with bemused detachment, even when they’re directed at him.

The pickup jerks to a halt just feet from where a roadside stand is setting up for the day. The hitchhiker has to wonder if the driver even realizes that he came close to leveling a group of Indians, a whole family of them, laying out their wares on woven blankets atop wooden crates. The driver steams out.

“I’m goin’ fer a piss.” He takes the keys with him.

It can’t be too long past six in the morning, but there’s something about how there is no real sunrise in the desert during winter –the light just breaks and scatters evenly throughout the dull clouds- that can make a person’s appetite grow rampant, and fast.

The hitchhiker looks on at the Indians’ charred stalks of corn and flattened strips of cured meat: a proper travelin’ breakfast if ever there was one.

“Friend.”

The hitchhiker looks up into the silhouette of a fairly tall Indian. He look be the head of the household setting up the stand. There is no headdress or bow slung across his chest. The hitchhiker figures he must be one of “ ‘em or’nary een-dians”; the kind that still carry that stony wise air, but couldn’t spark a flint fire to save his life.

He appears from out the darkness of the makeshift stand. Linen pants and a leather vest, though it can’t be above fifty degrees, hang off his lithe frame.

2007-06-05T01:42:00.000Z

The driver shakes his head and tries to lift himself up from his seat, where he’s almost slumped off into unconsciousness. He knows he’s losing it. The ghostly visions –of Paula, of himself coming home to find her, and yes, even of the hitchhiker, distorted by moonlight as he draws a revolver to the girl’s face - they come with every prolonged blink of his eyelids. He can’t keep his eyes from closing, but that doesn’t stop the driver from bringing the brunt of his rage down on the hitchhiker.

“Fer Chrissakes! Ya coulda killed the woman!” His face cannot match the animation of his words. It maintains the same gray mist as that shrouding the road, hanging just over its surface out in the distance.

“Hey, it’s not like I put a gun to her head.”

There’s a flash like lightning. It’s briefly illuminates Paula’s blank face. It’s a gun shot, and her face vanishes along with the light.

“Dozen matter.” The driver notices his rage quickening. There’s something about the hitchhiker that is able to stir up all the fury that has otherwise been compressed and contained by an overriding exhaustion. It’s a rage saved not only for those he hates the most, but for those he knows enough to hate so murderously. The feeling is so overwhelming, the driver feels that he must know the hitchhiker from somewhere, though he is sure that he would remember that goofy mug and ridiculous flop of sandy hair if he had ever seen it before.

The driver is tempted to ask, and he almost gets the words out, but doesn’t know where to begin. He will reveal whatever scraps of his own story he has to; but he can no longer fight the urge to crack this wayward passenger open, dissect him, and size him up, so the driver can know exactly how much of a sick-o he’s dealing with. Most of all, the driver finds himself overcome with the desire –no, the necessity- of stopping the hitchhiker right here and preventing him from going any further.

It’s not merely a case of having ‘a bad feeling’ or even more simply ‘not liking the looks’ of someone. It’s corporeal. Every nerve-ending in the driver’s body twitches at once. They scream out in a primal and violent recognition of danger. He throbs with it: to save himself, and his mission, he must get rid of the hitchhiker. Does he even need to know why?

2007-05-31T01:08:00.000Z

“They’re muscle r’laxers, ‘plenny legit,” the hitchhiker answers the unasked question. “Want one?”

The hitchhiker doesn’t wait for an answer, which isn’t coming anyway, before popping two into his mouth and chasing it with a swig of beer from a spare bottle. He slides the last one back into his pocket, along with a tangle of gold necklace that fell out in the process. It looks like the hitchhiker couldn’t leave such an abode as opulent as Miss Meriwether’s without claiming a few keepsakes. The driver doesn’t notice. He’s concentrating hard on something ahead, but not necessarily in his field of vision. He waits a long while before breaking the silence that had settled over them once again. It’s not that he wishes to know more of the hitchhiker’s deplorable hijinks. It’s just that the buzzing……hhhhhhhrrnnnnnnzzzzzzzz…………….it’s growing louder, and closer, yet coming from nowhere.

He manages to force out, “She’d been drinkin’ too?” The driver may not be able to recognize muscle relaxers when they’re melting in a sweaty palm, but he knows plenty about drinking, and when it can become lethal. His first introduction to drinking was through his father and his father’s friends, a good number of whom had gone blind or become paralyzed from a bad batch of bootleg.

“Aha. There in-lies our problem.”

The way the hitchhiker gleefully draws out “our” tells the driver that his albatross of a passenger actually considers himself free from fault. The driver grits his lips against his front teeth. Staying awake is going to mean suffering through more of the hitchhiker’s excruciating bullshit.

“Funny how ya can take one perfectly legal enjoyment, let’s say run-a-the-mill, doc-ordered muscle relaxer, and mix it wi’another wholesome pursuit: our true American pass-time, drinkin. Who’da thought the result could be so disas-ter-ous? I ask ya, who?”

Words like “funny” and “who’da thought”, innocently runoff by the hitchhiker, cannot mask the ill intention that lights a particularly malicious fire beneath his particular recounting. He either killed or nearly killed a woman back at that party. She may have been disgustingly wealthy and self-absorbed, like everybody else in that humongous house, but it seems awfully presumptuous –maybe just as conceited- of the hitchhiker to play judge and executioner. In this moment, the driver knows the hitchhiker has killed before. He doesn’t sense it, so much as sees it: a flash of Paula, lying there, the blood rushing from her body, a man walking away not-too-fast. He recalls the way the hitchhiker had first moseyed up to the pickup, as if there were nothing at all strange about flagging down a ride by jumping out in front of it.

2007-05-29T01:40:00.000Z

“J’ya catch a name?”

“Lilith some-thin r’other. I dunno. We were busy gettin ta other things.”

Suddenly, the driver is reluctant to continue the conversation that gave him such a warm sense of complicity just seconds ago. It’s not because he’s afraid of what the hitchhiker might say. He has nothing to counter with, no exploit of how he managed to seduce an unsuspecting starlet. The thought of Heather, those lips gushing over that slime-ball, Tilly, and his glamorized criminality, is enough to make the driver wish for the return of silence and the continuation of the sourceless drone that had been busy digging into his skull.

“S’at what got ya n’trouble?”

“Not s’actly.” The hitchhiker says this with a smirk. The driver could tell he had been waiting for this moment, and he doesn’t even have to turn to the hitchhiker to see him gloating. He can feel the radiance of the victor pouring off him. The air inside the car is hot and noxious with it, as if an exhaust pipe has just burst.

“It was these, to be precise.”

The hitchhiker makes a show of slipping his hand down his front pocket. It returns with three powdery white pills. The driver can’t begin to imagine what they are. The hitchhiker picks up on the driver’s perplexity, though the latter has done a fine job of hiding it, and is eager to let him in on the secret. He continues to wait for the driver to take a questioning glance in his direction, maybe shoot the pills a quizzical look. The driver does not relent. He continues to stare ahead, dousing the windshield with a look made stern with exhaustion. It’s the hitchhiker’s turn to give in.

2007-05-24T01:15:00.000Z

Hmmmmmmmmmmzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

He has to find a way to speak, to get the energy from some hidden reserve, or else he will go deaf from the delirious buzzing.

“Well, you wanna tell me hw’appened back there, g’zactly. I mean, if yer gonna be gettin my sideviews blown off n’all…”

The hitchhiker snots. It’s a wet raspberry between tightened lips. He tries to hold back laughter but it comes out as a quaking fit.

“Ghaaahaaahaha.”

“Was’so funny?” The driver can’t be that annoyed, now that he’s gotten the hitchhiker to respond.

“The girl.”

“H’wat? Wha’girl?”

“I dunno. The one back there, at th’party.”

“H’yeah, thir were lotsa girls. Red’eads, brunettes, pritty ones, reeeeeal pritty ones…”

“Jeez. I guess it was a darkish blond, wi’a lil bit a red thrown in…”

“Ha, ha. Well that clears it up nice.” The driver sinks back and turns quickly to glance at the hitchhiker. He wants to take in this rare moment of brotherly jibing, without appearing to enjoy it too much. His tiredness has retreated for now.

“W’she one a tha lookers?”

“Sure, sure. Famous n’all that.”

Little Creek, Arizona

2007-05-22T01:33:00.000Z

Whatever adrenaline the driver has been running on, it has congealed into a heavy sludge, making his arms and eyelids too heavy to support for much longer. In all their excitement -a high coming on as fast as a ’41 Chevrolet half-ton pickup will go- the driver and the hitchhiker hadn’t exchanged a single word. The passing of the enormous bottle, back and forth, substituted for conversation; until it was emptied once they rejoined the paved highway running the northeast corner of Nevada. Then, the bottle met with a quick, but appropriately musical, smash against a roadside boulder as the pickup sailed past.

The driver isn’t curious as to exactly what was at the root of the commotion, undoubtedly provoked by the hitchhiker, back at Indian Hill. If he imagines the worst, he would probably not be too far off.

The driver’s body begins to drain, and he feels that unless he can somehow revive the rush that came with such a narrow escape –it had previously turned his body into a molten flow of alertness- he’s going to stop the car and not be able to start if for a really long time. The exhaustion of the past day –day and a half, counting the double-shift on the ranch two nights prior- threatens to derail his whole plan.

“Michigan, killer, killed her, kill her….” The driver looks at the hitchhiker, who is wired. Soaked in perspiration, there are rivers of sweat finding their way down the passenger’s forehead and neck.

“You ok, buddy?”

The hitchhiker’s eyes, wide in their sockets, are almost big enough to reflect the entirety of the early morning gloom before them. He says nothing.

“So where’ma takin’ you enways?”

The hitchhiker stares straight ahead, eyes enormous but unfocused. An electric hum seems to take over the car. It either emanates from the electric current pulsing though the hitchhiker’s sweat glands, and causing them to go wild, or it’s the drone of exhaustion spinning itself out behind the driver’s eyes. His vision dims, the hum grows louder. The driver’s head lurches forward.

2007-05-17T01:13:00.000Z

Made an accomplice by proximity for the second time in one night, the driver has to wonder if there is any other way to exit a place with this guy other than with an angry mob at their heels. This time, it is for a transgression that isn’t readily apparent –the hitchhiker stormed out from the house with only one of those giant Champagne bottles, not an armful of money- but obviously warrants their blood all the same. This time, the driver can’t help but hope that the hitchhiker’s affront was really good; meaning something from which these beautiful, rich faces always believed themselves to be protected.

The hitchhiker has an elated though frantic look; not just on his face, but it’s also in the way he gives a full leg up to every hedge and rock on their climb to the front of the house -or its winding driveway, to be exact. He wields the outsized Champagne bottle with surprising grace, like a runner in a baton relay. A fountain of foam adorns their trail.

The uphill climb is brutal, as they ascend at a diagonal in order to skirt the perimeter of the house. The first dazzle of a polished windshield appears and tells them that they have reached the front drive. Angry shouts meet them from on high. The pickup is already in view by the first intelligible words, or screams, escape from the crowd.

“Get them! They tried to kill her! They tried to poison our sweet Lilly!”

There is no fumbling of keys, just the smooth belch of ignition. It briefly blocks out the rising cries for vengeance.

The pickup is facing an unfortunate angle, half-turned off the driveway. The front tire peers over a ditch and there are a number of low shrubs blocking the way. The driver releases the brake and gravity does the rest. They are jostled over every furrow and upturned root on the way down to the main road below. The various parts of the pickup rattle against each other, and it feels as if each will go its separate way on the next bump.

The outrage of the crowd gathered high atop the hill is overcome by a screeching fury, kicked up by the rear tires of the pickup as they leave behind the muddy driveway. The battered vehicle is on its way, doing the top speed the unpaved path will allow. There comes a crack of thunder. The only indication that the two have become a target, that the sudden explosion of shrapnel and glass was meant for them, is that the side mirror of the pickup snaps away in a few shards: gunshot.

The pickup finds, or lurches into, the main road and continues in the same direction that had originally brought them out to Indian Hill, away from Las Vegas. The horizon is overlaid with the night just turning purple: the promise of daybreak, still a good hour off.

2007-05-15T01:13:00.000Z

Water continues to rush over the numerous outdoor tiers, staggered and stacked one atop another. Its uninterrupted flow through the massive formations of carved stone at the very bottom makes any other activity seem frivolous. The calls from inside the house are washed over by the gush of waterfalls, until they sound like the static-filled fragments of a radio serial. The driver imagines the party’s guests gathered around a shiny Motorola cabinet, idly taking in the broadcast as it unfolds through large, over-heated vacuum tubes. A figure comes lurching through the entryway, bottle in hand, and the driver’s daydream is irretrievably broken.

He doesn’t have to wait for the face to come into the light to know it is the hitchhiker. There is nowhere to go except off to the side, over the railing, and into an enormous shrub. The spines running along the edge of its thick leaves makes it seem none-too-comfortable, while its broomstick-thin branches speak doubts as to its sturdiness.

The driver doesn’t have time to weigh his options, whatever they may be. The hitchhiker has spotted the driver and yelled out for him to follow. The driver needs no better an example of the point where bravery and stupidity become two names for the same act, than to watch the hitchhiker dive over the railing and into the bush, without so much as a peek at what might be waiting below.

The driver is less daring, but doesn’t wait for the crowd to catch up before leaping from the platform and into the waiting arms of the giant hemlock. Behind him grows the angry baritone of Tilly and the excited “oooohs” of Heather, or any other of the interchangeable beauties adorning the party.

Tilly peers down to where the base of the shrub meets the hillside in shadow. The hitchhiker and the driver hit the dirt and roll. Tilly won’t take the plunge and risk ruining his custom-made suit. The two escapees have a few seconds jump on the mob gathered at the rear veranda, peering over its balcony into the dark hillside below, before it rematerializes at the front of the house.

2007-05-10T01:09:00.000Z

“He split bout forty mints ago…”

“What the hell you sayin, ‘he split’?! You mean he took off?”

“Ah’dn know. Ah’ven seen ‘im. V’been out here…” -“..wi’da purty lady,” his exaggerated accent almost veered off into saying.

Tilly takes a good long look at Heather, up and down. She’s been lost in total submission, mesmerized by the way his brow collects fiercely over his eyes; even the way the spit pools at the clef in the middle of his large, purple bottom lip.

He wants to growl “watch you lookin at?” but can only come up with a low, “hmmmph. I’m gonna find that cheatin mothafucka and he’s gonna pay me my money.”

Tilly threatens the driver with a sharp finger to his sternum. The driver doesn’t flinch. He also doesn’t care what happens to either the hitchhiker or this goon. Let one waste of human life worry about another, he thinks satisfactorily to himself. The driver doesn’t bother to glance at Heather before turning towards the entrance leading back inside. He manages two steps through the open glass doors when the night erupts in a deathly, high-pitched scream. The sound immediately brings to mind a wild animal. Perhaps it has snuck into the house and attacked a guest.

The driver cannot see specific figures, but can sense that there is a great commotion inside. He hesitates to come any closer, knowing that the hitchhiker –his de facto companion- and not a stray desert creature is probably the cause for such a deathly shriek.

Sure enough, voices –those of several authoritative men and the gasps of one breathless woman- follow upon the waves of turmoil. They float through the veranda doors much like the light chatter moments before. It’s strange how the calm of the night manages to deaden their urgency. Clips of “oh my God, she’s not breathing” and “where is dat sonnofabitch”, the latter in a more familiar black patois, are neutralized by the desert stillness.

2007-05-08T01:08:00.000Z

“Tell me, was it hard, y’know, for a guy like you, to get set up in Tilly’s crowd?” She smiles into his eyes, and takes his momentary confusion for modesty.

The driver sputters, “I…well…um…”, while his interior loop is incredulous and spiraling, like a film strip spun of its reel. “How can this overpaid, over-hyped pinup mistake me for one of ‘em scummbags, these asslickers of that jambo cocksucker….”

His mind is all over the place. The driver thinks back to his amazement when neither he, nor the hitchhiker, nor even their black teenage guide, were given a second look as they strolled through the party undisturbed. “I can’t believe ‘em rich assholes actually fear, r’worse yet, actually r’spect, this so-called Tilly an’ his measly band a garillas. An ta think, this ‘ere Heather tart was gearin up ta jump me right here an now ‘cause of it….”

To the driver, that is as worse an indictment of Hollywood as any he could have derived from off the top of his head. His mouth wants to spit out the delicious odor from that cigarette. He wants to find the hitchhiker -or better still, not find him- and get the hell out of there. The driver should be chiding himself for how long he has allowed himself to stray into this party: no more than a horrid instance of fame’s celebration of nothing but itself.

The driver is gathering his disgust and turning it into momentum, so that he can storm off and leave all of this behind him for good, when Tilly rushes him, forcing his back against the railing.

“Where is that shittin’ cracka friend a yours?”

The driver answers with a take-no-shit stare.

“I aint playin with you honkey. You betta start talkin.”

Heather, standing next to them, puts her delicate hands to her mouth to feign fright, but inside she is lit with something else entirely. Tilly, confronting what she believes to be one of his own guys, has unleashed the greenhouse thermostat upon her poor, sensitive, tiny flower down below. It is aglow with moisture, but the pressure growing against the walls of its stamen is too great. If the two men -Tilly and his supposed henchman- end up coming to blows, she knows the thrill will be too much for her and her soft underbrush, aflame with desire, and she will have to run off. She also knows she won’t be able to, and is afraid of what will happen then.

2007-05-01T01:17:00.000Z

There’s a tone in the woman’s voice, where everything she says is not a definitive statement, but an invitation to participate. How badly the driver wants to participate. He doesn’t know what’s stopping him.

Rather he does, but he can’t feel it. He knows it’s there –his heart palpitates the letters, P-A-U…- but it might as well not. That’s how alone he feels with this woman. Not even his insides feel like companions, just electrical conductors. Here stands the driver, helpless, but also blissfully given over to this, his inadequacy before pure, distilled beauty. The driver stands alone with a Name, but she hasn’t said -or at least he didn’t catch- which Name.

“I’m Heather.”

She produces a delicate bird of a hand and it flutters between three or four of the driver’s fingers before flying off. He is so afraid of breaking it, of shattering its neat, symmetrical bones, that he hardly dares to grasp; just a little bit of pressure to say…he can’t think of what to say.

She throws off a first name, like he’s being introduced to the wife of a guy from the ranch. “Oh hiya, Heth. Jim sure has told me lots bout ya.” Not likely. Even the driver has heard of Heather Sinclair, though he wouldn’t have been able to pick her out from a lineup among other svelte brunette starlets. The driver hates Hollywood; and he’s only ever gotten as close as that descent from the starlit hills over Los Angeles, however many months ago.

Now he stands face to face with it, or at least one of its most defining faces of the past twenty years. Heather is looking at him expectantly. A slight breath escapes from her lips. The driver searches for words. A noncommittal “Yeahr,” is all he can come up with. It’s not even an interested, tell-me-more-about-it ‘yeah?’; just a plain old ya-got-that-right kind of ‘yeah’. It makes Heather smile all the same and a delicate talon of tanned fingers lands on his arm.

2007-04-26T02:28:00.000Z

“You’ve got a light?” To her credit, her tone is neither condescending nor forced in its ordinariness. It is what it is; just how the woman, a stunning starlet, can only be what she is: Hollywood royalty. The lady sovereign is asking him for a light. He can do that.

“Sure-er.”

The way she gently, almost not at all, takes the hand holding the lighter, while never breaking her gaze, is obviously practiced; but it works perfectly, as always. The driver, as free from illusion as one would ever want to be, cannot help but feel the calculated tingle filling his stomach and groin. They course with an electric current, conducted through the infinitesimal tap of a screen goddess upon the lowly ranch-hand of Fresno.

The starlet recognizes her effect all too well. She enjoys the driver’s reaction, try as he might to hide it, with knowing eyes. They flash with corneas of smooth, brown marble. A smile comes to her lips. They part imperceptibly, and a rush of misty blue smoke comes dancing out. The cigarette smells of heaven, or closer yet, honey mixed with vanilla. A man would kiss those lips just to get a taste of that divine scent. The driver’s heart leaps. It whispers “Paula”, as a reflex, but his mouth has never watered, as it does now, at the smell of laundry powder wafting from his fiancée’s stringy hair.

The driver knows to walk away. There’s nowhere else this encounter can lead and he may as well save himself from any foolish hopes; or fantasies, more like it.

He thinks of how he had excused the exemplary woman for her initial comment, reminding himself that she is only human. “Well, arent’ah human too?” Not just human, but a flesh and blood man. “An’ wat’she?”; beneath the perfectly kept-up exterior, of course.

Against the driver’s best intentions, a picture of the woman’s genitals comes into his head. They are not vulgar and sticky like most. He sees the partial split of a nascent bud. It has the burning, plastic flamingo type of pink that he has never actually seen in nature, let alone in such a complex flower. Its petals, though sure to be delicate, have a fleshy appearance as if one could bite into them and juice would flow out: a fruiting flower, this rare and softly curved specimen. The driver would part the lips slowly, to release the same honey-and-vanilla fragrance, only this time it would gush out in a sweet musk, not smoke, and envelop him so that he would never want to leave.

All of this invades the driver’s mind while the woman replies, “thank you.” It’s the clearest he’s ever heard those words pronounced. They leave a ring in the night like an old church bell over a cemetery, when no one is around to hear.

2007-04-24T01:19:00.000Z

Las Vegas twinkles out there, in the not-so-great distance. It tells the driver there is something he is supposed to discover -somebody or something wants him to discover it- as he stands here at this balustrade, on a perfectly clear night. Perhaps there’s a hidden code being transmitted through the wobble of the city’s lights, as they get caught in the waves of heat escaping the Earth. Searching the horizon, reading the blinking lights, the driver has to ask, “What? What is it?” That’s when he feels the presence at his side.

“Beautiful, no?”

She is. Flowing silk locks spill out in perfect ringlets from beneath a tipped-back hat. Her glossed lips sparkle just like the city in the distance. She has the untouched look of someone who does not go out, but spends her time inside at the continual care of experts. The driver believes a gust of the dry wind may blow the whole façade away.

He does not turn his gaze from the view over the city. The intonations of her scent, however, cannot help but draw his attention. Unmistakable and almost imperceptible, it’s like three or four petals left out in the rain. It tells the driver that this woman, whichever one of the well-known names, never steps down into his world; for anything, let alone to ask his opinion on the view. If someone like him were assigned to fix her car, or any other mechanical accessory invented to ease her life as much as possible, he would never enter into her consideration. She would merely mention it to an assistant -not even her husband, though the absence of a ring says she doesn’t have one- and the order would be passed down through the established network until if was finally barked as command, complete with deadline and the bosses growl “do it now! It’s for so-and-so”: a Name he’s heard everywhere, but might as well be the Viceroy of Hindustan for all he cares.

That’s why he takes the supposed question as a slip in this Somebody’s veneer. She is human, after all, and that’s what humans do: they reach out to others. It’s just that sometimes they misjudge who is and who isn’t fair game. He should just ignore it and save them both the embarrassment of having to negotiate, and inevitably fail, the untranslatable divide between a Name and a mere stand-in for somebody, or nobody, else. It’s too late.

2007-04-19T01:14:00.000Z

The driver catches a whiff of chilled seafood mixed with steaming meats and greens. A mound of snow-crab legs is dumped out over a bed of shaved ice before him. It looks like the tangle of a multi-limbed space creature. The driver wastes no time in lunging for the pink tubes poking out at every angle. The teenager spots his posse in the corner. The two, unnoticeably to each other, go their separate ways.

Having had his fill of exotic seafood, prime cuts of steak, and more sickly sweet cocktails, the driver steps out onto a wide-open veranda, crowned at its edge by towering palms. It descends onto different levels of pools, each connected by waterfall. The water is aglow with a warm turquoise, and the surface froths with delicious bubbles where one pool spills into the next. At the very bottom, the water collects into a dimly lit grotto, shrouded by ferns as large as a car. From there, it’s anybody’s guess as to where the rocky lagoon leads.

The driver takes a large gulp of the humid, chemical smell. In his lungs, it forms an odd combination with the dry desert air. It tickles until he coughs. He climbs the veranda to its crest, where it peaks forty feet over a ridge. Ahead are the twinkling lights of Las Vegas, like a miniature and newly formed star system. They are so clear, they look like as if they can be grabbed, if only he could reach out just a little further over the railing.

The driver leans on the balustrade and reflects: it’s the tranquil times like this that makes the driver want to celebrate with a cigarette. He reaches into his front pocket. The box is there, just as he thought it would be, but he decides to overcome the urge. Sure, nothing adds to those rare, calm moments in life –where all the storm clouds happen to part, if only for a second, to tease with a glimpse of something greater, something worth slogging on for- like a cigarette; but he realizes that this moment is different. The way everything has come together -the discovery of Paula’s body early this morning; the split decision to take off on the road right away; the hitchhiker; the sloppy heist and subsequent chase back in Las Vegas; and now this glimmering party- it won’t let him shake the suspicion that it has all led up to this moment for a reason. The driver also suspects that this is the most tranquil and lucid things are going to be for quite some time. Dare he enjoy it?

2007-04-17T01:14:00.000Z

The hitchhiker still owes Smokey his cut of the loot. Technically, they are out of Las Vegas proper; but he’s not sure to what extent standing out amidst a celebrity’s party counts as cover.

Looking around, there seems to be a good amount of Grade A tail, as well. The hitchhiker decides that the Hollywood life is one he can enjoy, if only for a night. Picking up on the scent of possible mischief-to-be-had, the hitchhiker strays from the other two, who don’t notice anyway. They, too, are equally absorbed in observing the goings-on around them. The luxury -and the way these people can’t even see it, because it is their norm- is utterly alien. It tells them that neither one should be there.

Neither of them rank anywhere near the social or economic heights that would enable them to imagine, let alone understand, soirees such as this. The driver’s skin color entitles him to certain luxuries that the black teenager –all black teenagers and by extension, all blacks- would never dream of; but class renders them both outsiders here. The two have known exclusion as a way of life, but the similarity ends there.

The driver exiled himself from the factory-bound routine of working-class security because its family life is dysfunctional, often unbearable, and he refused to have the same for his children. The teenager, on the other hand, could be the story of black America itself; in that the only sentiment lavished on him is scorn, and all he is ever given are the scraps no one else is willing to eat. Unlike the driver, the teenager’s problems can hardly be remedied by simply picking up and moving to another state. First: his livelihood has already been established here in Las Vegas, and for a person facing such little life opportunities, a shot at some dough, no matter how it’s earned, can not be passed up for anything else. Second, and more damningly: his mortal failure is etched into his skin, on his body, and is therefore certain to replicate itself wherever he goes.

The gulf between two –the driver and the teenager- is as impassable as that between the Negro’s shack and the blue-collar cottage. When the driver stands next to the teenager, that’s as close as their worlds get. The virtue of being outsiders does not make them allies, and their convergence of paths has just about spent its purpose.

2007-04-12T01:30:00.000Z

The food is piled high on platters. The driver thinks of the last bit of food he ate, a pitiful apple, on the ranch late last night. The hitchhiker thinks of the disgusting “nigger food” he was offered at the illicit club, and hatred burns in his belly. The teenager hasn’t eaten since this morning. He wouldn’t dare to even think of touching the food in this rich, white person’s party. Although no one has eyed him, which in itself is disconcerting, he is too ingrained with the severe restrictions on the behavior of a black person, when found in the company of anybody other than other black people. His momma would laugh, and then yell, if he ever told her where he was this evening. Even the servants are white (and not necessarily poor).

The hitchhiker decides to wait until he has separated from the driver and the teenager before he digs in to the leg of lamb, just set down on a table and steaming in its own juices. The smell makes his stomach grumble as his tongue wells up against the roof of his mouth. The driver unabashedly grabs at a pile of lobster tails and sucks the meat. He continues his stroll and passes casual glances around the room, as if he didn’t have the sizable hunk of pink-red armor sticking out of his mouth: the strange pacifier of the black-tie set. The teenager looks at a ransacked and discarded tray of crackers and hunks of cheese. His hand unwittingly reaches toward it, but the pangs of guilt -actually a complex grab-bag of emotions based upon the blacks’ hatred of their own stereotype, combined with the constant fear of fulfilling it- keep it from going any further.

The hitchhiker spies the black band, about six or seven “smokeys”, including Smokey himself, in the corner. They look more impressive in their eggplant and taupe suits here -under lights so brilliant, they seemingly come from nowhere, and everywhere- than they did in the darkened club. They stand huddled in the same semi-circle formation that they always fall back into as a default. No one says anything in particular, but they are content to merely look around and take in the scene that couldn’t be more opposite to what they are used to. Smokey has on display his usual look of a proud owner: even though he may not know a single soul in this room, he can still gaze out upon it as if everyone here is working under his auspice, even if they do not yet know it.

2007-04-10T01:13:00.000Z

Inside the main room, if that’s what it can be called, there are too many levels and walkways and mezzanines to count. Each one is filled with people, dressed in what the couture-oblivious trio can only assume is the height of fashion, or what passes for it on the western coast of America in the late 1940s.

Colors would appear to be out. In that sense, the clothes match the manor’s minimalist décor. The women wear many varieties of black and white patterns. In very tight and sheer dresses, enormously brimmed hats –one sprouting a two-foot long black feather- and modestly long skirts for the few older women dispersed throughout the crowd. The females of the party have somehow managed to combine haute couture with understatement, a feat remarkable in itself.

The men are more predictably attired in boring but very expensive suits. All the imaginable shades of navy are represented, along with a few colorful candy-stripes and an army of white sports coats. Those are the servants, carrying dazzling silver trays with every delicacy of hors d'oeuvres. Neckties and pocket handkerchiefs offer a little more in the way of character, while a good number of flamboyantly puffed ascots –usually tucked into a deep maroon or cherry smoking jacket- are meant to signify the dandies among the crowd.

Cigars, strong and aromatic, are the accessory of choice for men. Some women –and a few of the more questionable men- flaunt long cigarette holders while barely ever seeming to take a puff. The air inside is remarkably clear and dry, though there aren’t any signs of fans or vents. One of the oldest men handles a cane with an ornately jeweled knob. It sparkles from across the room, and from anywhere else one may venture within the house.

The hitchhiker is quick to grab a heavy bottle of Champagne from an ice bucket. Anywhere else it may have been deemed a ballsy act, but here, every surface is adorned with colorful bottles, sleek glasses, and enormous lopsided decanters filled with vintage wine. The alcohol is all carelessly poured into glasses from which two sips may be taken before being discarded in favor of a different drink, and so on. The driver allows himself to be poured a colorful fruit juice cocktail, while refusing the elaborate peeled-fruit garnish, from a server who has the same practiced air of contempt as the drivers outside. The teenager doesn’t want to make a fuss -or attract attention, as hard as that is proving to be- so he is happy to grab a half-empty beer bottle and suck from that.