"I thought at the stroke of Reaganight all you people turned into yuppies and started sucking each other's blood."
"A few of us escaped into the hills. Listen,
Woodstock,
the picture, ever see it?"
"I don't know. I guess. Sure."
"Well, remember the scene where everybody's romping bare-assed in the mud? I'm the guy on the left with the beard and the big dick. God, the times we had. The photographers, those Maysles brothers? I thought they were government agents come to film us getting shot." He waggled his big head in disbelief. "A planet of wonders. Like to visit it again someday before I die." He looked over at his listener. "And now I'm immortalized on celluloid, how about that?"
The hitcher was working his lips, playing with a smile or attempting to dislodge a food particle from between his teeth.
"Grand ideas then. Thought I was gonna be a doctor. When the party ended. Really hit those books. Set up practice in the ghetto somewhere, saving the poor, the oppressed, while freely dispensing controlled substance prescriptions to myself and select friends. But, what do you know, here I be up in the tall cab hauling cow juice to Omaha. Wha' happened? Fuck if I know. Knots in the string I'm still unraveling. Gave up on planning, saving, hoping, all that bourgeois crap long ago. Now I just ride the bumps, open it up on the flats, nice and easy on the curves, trust the brakes hold should anything start piling up in front of me. This is happiness, near as any of us is permitted to approach. Sure, it gets lonely in here sometimes, but trying to outrun that is like trying to breathe without air. Rig's mine, you know. Oh yeah. Got this sucker paid off years ago. Lost my family over it, rolled over the family with all eighteen wheels, just mowed 'em down and kept on chugging. What else could I do? You tell me. Never understood the business, anyway. Took the kids out a couple times. No groove. Star seemed to like it better than the boy. Who knows? Maybe she'll take over the wheel from old dad. Gets good grades, though, maybe she'll be the doctor, you know how mumble mumble blah blah blah. . ."
The abrasive monotony of the man's voice merged with the road mix, with the wind, the machine, the tires, the traffic, and in the comforting darkness behind the hitcher's closed eyes appeared clear bands of soft light yellow as house paint alternating with symmetrically placed bars of darkness, and the bars, strangely enough, were horizontal and without visible termination. He could crawl out between them. He opened his eyes and the driver was staring at him.
"You were snoring, man. Loud."
"So folks tell me."
"You can imagine the entertainment value."
"No problem. Ticket holders should report to the nearest box office for a full cash refund."
"You're one funny guy."
The hitcher shrugged.
"Married?"
The hitcher studied his boots sitting demurely side by side on the floor of the cab, their modest size a frequent source of shame, children's feet really, that had no business being attached to a regular adult body. "Not anymore," he replied.
"I knew it. I always know. This line of work is a great teacher. You learn about human nature, how to recognize certain aspects. And the road, of course, is a colossal midway of busted marriages."
The hitcher received this observation without comment.
"So tell me
your
story."
"To add to the collection?"
"Research, pure scientific research. I'm thinking of penning a book about all this when I retire:
White Lines and Bugsplat
by Randolph Sawyers, Ph.D., pussies humped deeply."
"You don't need me."
"How much you need this ride?"
The hitcher looked at his hands, lying harmlessly in his lap. The man wanted a story, a story he would get. "Nothing special," he began. "Old sad song. Ex takes kid and splits. Hubby heartbroken. Call 1-900-TOUGHLUCK. See, Randy, I'm on a hunting trip here, and it don't matter how long it takes, a week, a month, a whole year, 'cause the hunt won't end until she's tracked down and bagged, so to speak. Word is, they're lying low in L.A., and that's where I aim to flush 'em out." He didn't acknowledge the driver but spoke his piece straight ahead, into the tinted glass of the windscreen and beyond perhaps to the audience at the end of the road.
"She just grabbed the kid and ran, huh?"
"I get so mad thinking about it, I get afraid of myself sometimes." He could actually see the little family posed in the photograph mailed out to friends and relatives the last Christmas they spent together. He could see his home, the hedge, and the hawthorn. He could see his boy. His freckled boy. He could see the immaculate white Little League uniform. He could see the ball, the gray scuffed red-seamed hardball. When he spoke, the words issued from between his teeth like solids, lumps of matter dropped one by one onto a sheet of metal. "I swear, when I find that boy, I'm going to hide him away so good it'll be like he never existed at all."
The driver nodded sympathetically. "It's the worst crime," he said.
"Interstate abduction. You fry for it."
The driver sighed. "I get to kiss my two, that is, I'm scheduled to enjoy the honor, every other weekend, but, hell, when am I home, out here eating up the miles, when is some accommodation going to be provided for me?"
"It's hard," agreed the hitcher.
"Hard and hard. Don't seem to be getting any easier, either." The driver turned toward the window to expel a clot of tasteless gum. "You ever been on a commune?"
"Maybe. What is it?"
"Okay." The driver prepared to lecture. "It's a place where like-minded people, free spirit types, you know, gather out in the country somewhere, and they live together and work together and share each other's lives. There's no private property. What one owns, all own."
"Who handles the money?"
"Nobody. There isn't any money."
"Sure. There's always money. Guess they kept you out of it."
"We only used money in town."
"So who handled it then?"
"Whoever needed to buy something."
"What a bunch of fools."
"Well, we slept together, too."
"In the fucking position?"
"Back on the old commune up in Vermont we were all one family. Every adult was every kid's parent, every kid was your kid."
"Every woman was your woman?"
"If she wanted to be."
"Sure, I remember now, I heard about these fuck farms. Full-grown men and women running around in rags and hair; whatever moves, gets nailed. The warden's some fat old broad with a mustache. She's from Russia and likes it in the ass."
"Enjoying yourself?"
The hitcher erupted into a fit of unpleasant laughter.
"What's so funny?"
"What ain't?"
Dangling in a tortured cluster from the post of a small fan bolted over the windshield were: a red, green, and yellow leather pendant in the shape of Africa; a set of used dog tags; a string of paper clips; a tarnished crucifix on a choke chain; several class rings; dozens of rubber bands; a peace symbol; a pair of healing crystals; a key ring filled with the popular cardboard evergreen trees doused in air freshener; and hanging by her broomstraw hair a naked doll with a round wrinkled belly and amber popeyes. When the driver hit the horn, it made a loud, tragic sound, the cry of a sea beast wallowing onward through storm and hunger. The ripening farmland slipped across the window glass unremarked by the hitcher's wandering eye; it considered other facts, other views.
The driver's prompting brought him back, directed his attention to an approaching overpass where a trio of ragged juveniles sat perched like ungainly birds along a high guardrail. "Got to watch out for those," explained the driver. "Ever see what a concrete block can do to a windshield, not to mention the person behind it? Friend of mine took one in the face on 1-70 outside Indianapolis last summer. Buried the head in a separate baggie."
The hitcher was silent.
"All kind of nasty stuff out here on the I."
And the driver's mouth kept going up and down, stuff spilling from that unquenchable hole, but the hitcher's antennae were down again, withdrawn into insularities of silence moving across his mind inscrutable as clouds, subtle shiftings that hinted at yet another twist to the kaleidoscope of personality, an intimation he surrendered wholly to, weak as an addict.
At the gas station the hitcher waited in the truck. He could see the driver inside, goofing with the cashier. He didn't know the driver's name. He didn't know if the name had been mentioned or not. He sat there by himself, in a world of himself, looking out at the wind pushing against a dirty Pennzoil sign. The sign was yellow. There were black letters. There were red letters.
The driver returned to the truck in a funny mincing walk, slightly stooped, as if advancing against invisible resistance, walking uphill across the flat oil-stained pavement. He was zipping his change, a handful of gray-green bills into a bulky cowhide wallet chained to his belt.
"Hey," the driver called, stepping up into the cab, tossing a cellophane-wrapped confection onto the hitcher's lap.
"What's this?" The hitcher's arms in the air, loath to touch this thing thrown at him.
"A moonpie, Billy. You look like the moonpie type to me."
"Don't eat that shit." The hitcher tossed it back. The driver shrugged, began tearing at a corner of the package with his teeth. "Damn crap's nothing but fat and sugar, but a rush is a rush, right, Billy?"
The hitcher was turned back toward the window, inspecting the pumps, solemn as soldiers, the coiled hoses, the stained rags, the squeegee the color of gum tissue. The loneliness of the American filling station, its orphaned objects.
The truck shuddered and rumbled. The driver stared at the hitcher's averted face. "Anyone ever tell you you look like Robert De Niro?" Apparently not. The truck charged out into traffic, opening a hole in the speeding wall of protesting four-wheelers. The driver was laughing now, sharing a joke with the passing scenery, and laughing. "Okay, then, you don't have to like me. Personally, I don't believe I like you much." The big rig rolled on and soon the driver was whistling to a private tune in his head and, after a while, he began to hum and a little later he hit the stereo On button and he was singing in an unrestrained, surprisingly melodious baritone, singing along with Madonna. All twelve cuts. In the hissing silence at the end the hitcher cleared the phlegm from his throat and said, "You mind pulling in over there," indicating with casual forefinger a nowhere-in-particular spot up ahead.
"What's the problem?"
"Over there," still pointing, more urgently now, "I'm not feeling well." He clutched his stomach. More hacking sounds.
The driver cursed, hauling in on the wheel and downshifting, cursing as he guided the massive truck to a crunching stop on the berm about a hundred yards from the nearest exit: FUEL FOOD POTTERYLAND & AVIARY
.
The hitcher, obviously ill, was hunched over at the waist, fumbling around between his legs. "Hey!" the driver warned, reaching for the other man's arm. "Not in the fucking cab." He saw the arm, the knife at the end of the arm, the hitcher's unveiled face, his own faltering hands, the flashing blade, and then the grim silent unfolding of the last curiosity.
The hitcher eased himself back in the seat. He was brimming with new liquid. He looked out through the windshield, glass freckled with blood. All was rich and strange. The driver was slumped against the door, head lolling back on its neck as if incorrectly attached. From behind the driver's eyes, lids fixed at half-staff, another person, the driver's brother or first cousin, seemed to regard him dispassionately through the thickening glaze. Let it be. The grained handle of the knife was planted in the driver's chest like an oversized switch. It pulsed softly in the charged air. The hitcher counted the pulsations until they stopped, mouthing each vital figure like a priest his Latin. 103. Subtract the nothing and you get 13. Well. Add what's left and you have 4, the number of letters in the hitcher's name. For certain. Mysterious is the manner of the world.
Somehow the CD player had started up again and the voice of a singer who had no voice irritated his ears with tinny electronically enhanced appeals to her own genital spirits. He punched every button before him, the music thundered on. He reached into the driver's pants, felt around for the wallet, from which he removed an ample wad of bills, and left it to dangle unzipped off the seat by its chain. He sat attentively before the smiling gazes of a hundred naked women, hands on his knees, carefully observing the driver. The eyes looked sticky, already drying out, like those of a fish at the bottom of the boat. The wind from passing traffic rocked the cab gently on its shocks. The hitcher's eyes blinked, blinked, blinked, registering with detached purpose what there was to be seen. Beneath the dull expressionless face the hitcher's heart thumped, swollen veins roaring with blood through the intoxicated darkness of his listening body. Suddenly he reached over and with a crude brusque movement yanked the knife from its resting place. He crouched forward, inspecting the blade's surface where blood beaded like oil, he pressed his tasting tongue once against the metal, wiped the blade clean on the driver's shirt and resheathed it against his leg. Then, fierce as an angel, he leaned across and kissed the driver's unresponsive lips, and left the truck, engine idling, music pounding, and marched off through the brush and the grass toward the words beckoning in the sky and the steel stilts that reared such advertising, the signs of civilization astride a conquered land, and, after a while, he started to whistle, and, a little later, he began to hum.
The rain had stopped, the clouds pulled apart and dissolved and the sun begun its long hot afternoon descent. His stomach, which had been talking for days now, directed him to the tiled oasis of a fast food chain, where he was careful to draw only the necessary notes from the bulge in his pocket. He sat in a corner, back to the wall, chewing on his food, tasting nothing, thinking nothing. The owlish father of a regulation family unit at a nearby table allowed the dismissive gaze of respectability to pass over him. The hitcher shoved the last of the mystery burger into his mouth and, still chewing, headed for the door, leaving a mess of litter for some minimum-wage slave to clean up.