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.

“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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dearborn

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

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

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

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

Sturgis, Michigan

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

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

“Fraid not.”

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

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

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

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

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

Gary, Indiana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joliet

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

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

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

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

You dispicabill bitch-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

“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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

“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.

“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.

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

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.

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.

“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

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.

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.

“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

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“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?”

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.

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.

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….

“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.

“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

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.

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.