He was the man by the side of the road, a character as essential to the motoring experience as the wired trucker, the joyriding lovers, the renegade cop, and the demented justice of the peace; rootless, feral, devoid of affect, he was the human scarecrow in a field of bad dreams to the media-addled brains cruising warily by, but eventually one would stop, one always did.
His name was Templeton Moore, seventy-six years ancient and not feeling too good about it. "I'm old, buddy, I'm not a person of silver, I'm not chronally challenged, I'm old, I can see the barn and it's fucking black." His Dart smelled vaguely of chili powder, which the hitcher realized later was the aroma of the old man himself. Moore was wearing a white long-sleeved shirt with yellowing cuffs and a monogrammed pocket. The wife was a half-century-old stick of incendiary material he should have put the match to decades ago. Then French-kissed the exhaust pipe himself, saved everyone a load of grief. Himself especially. Eyes a blur, teeth a porcelain cemetery, joints rusted, and time a Jap bullet train straight to the shit heap. "I can see that you're listening, but you're not hearing me. Okay. No one could ever tell me anything, either. You'll find out for yourself your ticket's already been punched, and, frankly, now that I get a good look at you, I don't know how well you're going to hold up during the rest of the trip. No exemptions, you know, your brain'll crumble like dry cheese, your ball hairs'll turn white, and wait 'til your fingerprints develop wrinkles. Then remember Templeton Moore, remember what I told you, what I tell all my young riders."
The hitcher expressed his intention to live a preposterously long life.
"Then start working on it now, bud, ain't gonna be a gift. First, you got to figure out time, how to handle it, how to live in it, how to control it. My dad always claimed time was a riddle to him and he blew a valve at forty-four. Most everything was a riddle to him. But what I'm talking about here is taking the riddle out of this time business, making it punch a clock for you, understand?"
But the hitcher, whose own personal program for addressing existential mysteries seemed thoroughly functional and effective, was no longer in attendance, was engaged in fact by the magic of silky blue snakes slithering on the air up into the bright yellow hat worn by the lamp beside the big chair where he now reigned, an enchanted four-year-old upon Dad's bony knees, transfixed for all time by the miracle of this continuous untangling off the end of Dad's cigarette burning unattended in the glass ashtray with the deer's head on it, a perpetual slipping free from the knot that gave him silly sensations in his stomach, and any minute now Dad's hairy hand would reach out and. . . it was gone, glints in the day's ore, reminders that despite fluctuations in the surface weather, down in the shafts, deep in subterranean chambers, there were random deposits that would always be dangerously radioactive.
The old man was still grumbling on about the vexations of aging, the graying luxuriance of nose hair, for instance, these obstinate tufts of winter, and so on, when the hitcher said the next stop, the one coming up right about now, would do him fine.
"You haven't understood a word," claimed the old man.
"Time," replied the hitcher. "Do it before it does you." As he turned to go, the old man reached over, touched him lightly on the knee, searching him out with his pink dachshund eyes. "Be careful," he warned in a ripe whisper, "the way is filthy with creeps."
The hitcher got out. He watched his ride dwindle off into space, then turned to confront the oncoming craziness of untold rides he would never have. He was just so damned tired. Behind him a shoulder-high wire fence rattled in the clean late afternoon wind. He tossed his pack over and followed after it. He lay on his back in a sibilant field of wheat under a swarming skyful of musings and memories there weren't any solutions to.
That night his only sleep was obtained in larcenous snatches on a coarse woolen blanket on the floor of a van between a shifting pile of ax handles and a flea-ridden German shepherd whose intrusive snout he kept waking to find burrowed into his crotch. His bones seemed to be bolted to the rollicking frame. The driver this time was big, bearded, with stubby eyes the color of his hair, and he'd directed his passenger, with obvious irritation, into the back of the vehicle after the hitcher kept nodding off during these extended discourses on the compelling centrality of post-Zep heavy metal. "It doesn't all sound the same, man, no way, people who say that aren't listening, everything seems the same if you don't pay any attention to it, damn, I get so mad. . . hey, what's that on your arm?"
The hitcher was unaware he had been so exposed. What the hell. He pushed the shirtsleeve the rest of the way up to reveal from wrist to bicep a fantastic limb virtually drenched in ink, a second sleeve, darkly patterned, flush with the surface of the skin. Professor Rock 'n' Roll switched on the overhead for a closer look. No panthers or skulls, no dragons or nudes, these tattoos offered an unexpected jungle of pure design, spirals and knots, mazes and mandalas, interwoven and overlapped in a deliberate thwarting of the desire for representation, this prime example of tribal Hackwork spoke to an inner, more private eye.
"It's almost like smoke," observed the driver before an angry horn redirected his attention and the wandering van back onto the road. "Son of a bitch. You could get dizzy staring into that. What's it supposed to be?"
The hitcher smiled, as if the question were familiar, as well as the answer. "The inside of my head."
"Cool." The driver looked away, then back again. "Can't say it looks real inviting."
"Wasn't meant to."
"I'll say this for you, you got Rikki Ratt whipped."
"Who?"
"Rikki Ratt, skin-beater for Burning Sore, you know, boom da-boom boom boom-boom, gonna slay ya, boom, gonna flay ya, boom, down at the Blood Depot, boom boom boom. He's famous for his tats."
"I don't bother with that noise."
"You got the look."
The hitcher rolled down his sleeve. "But not the stomach."
Shortly before dawn the hitcher was roused from semiconsciousness by the bark of the driver's voice calling out the name of the next town like a conductor announcing a stop. He was leaving the interstate for a county road at the end of which squatted an impenetrable converted garage that was home to him, his priceless collection of three-thousand-plus headbanging classics in all formats, and five jumpy dogs.
"Much obliged," said the hitcher, tipping an imaginary hat, playing it out as if it really were a movie. Gathering his belongings together beneath the suspicious gaze of the drooling canine.
"Hasta luego," said the driver, offering a parting hand.
"Taco chip," replied the hitcher, rejecting it.
The hitcher drifted up the dew-christened hill to a harshly lit Gas 'n' Gulp, where he ordered the "early riser" special. The bleached blonde across the room was flirting with him over a copy of the critically acclaimed fiction
In Your Face
, stopping dutifully at the conclusion of each chapter to connect the dots of the accompanying illustration. She was suffering from a bleeding ulcer she still thought of as indigestion, too many cups of black coffee, too few bowls of bran. A low-stress-lingering-over-glass-of-milk-and-one-glazed-doughnut her brave concession this morning to the virtues of healthy dining. The hitcher looked her over, with clothes and without (warm, fuzzy), and left a fat tip for the waitress who seemed to like him, too.
The hitcher paused outside the door beside the newspaper vending machines,
search for missing girl continues,
picking his teeth, and surveying with mild contempt the distant white steeple and leafy trees bunched like circled wagons against the far sky. Who but an unbaptized fool would live in such a nowhere town?
A departing trucker whom he asked for a lift kept right on walking, as if he weren't even there, and a roaring rose up in his head terrific as a train, and as quickly subsided, leaving the world bereft of one of its dimensions, flat, oppressive, without succor, but he endured, and eventually objects popped reassuringly back into place. Everything was as it was, more or less.
The hitcher shifted the pack on his shoulder and headed out for the road. Two hours later he got his first ride of the day from a one-armed ex-cop who drove him fifty miles and warned of the youthful enthusiasms of his unretired brethren. The hitcher thanked him for the mileage, the advice, quietly amused by his own apparent lack of curiosity about the missing limb. He didn't enjoy calling attention to another's obvious disability for fear that at some unreachable level such disrespect brought serious bad luck.
In minutes an impressively luxurious sports car of a make he didn't recognize had glided to a purring stop at his feet, but when, hand at the door, he leaned down and saw the smiling black man at the wheel, he waved the machine away, turned his back to the muffled curse, the upraised finger, the ricocheting gravel.
"It's a free country," he spoke to the renegade wind.
He rested for a while in a meadow of flowering clover, lying on his side, chewing on a stem of grass. A trucker slowed, motioned to him from the cab, but right at that particular moment he simply did not feel much like getting up. He waved back. The truck moved on.
Sometime later he started up from his contemplations (segmented hope in muttering coils drowsing in dream juice) to behold idling before him a remnant of a car, the battered hull and oxidized paint of a green Ford Galaxie, late sixties vintage. Behind the wheel a guy who looked like any other guy. He got in.
The radio was tuned at excessive volume to the fervid testimonies of evangelist Bob Bird broadcasting live from the super spire of the Spiritual Fitness Cathedral in San Bernardino, California. God was not a game show host nor heaven a lottery prize.
"Where to?" the driver asked, his eyes so clear, so gray, so sharp, the day's light was being honed inside.
"Whichever way you're headed is fine with me."
"Well now," confessed the driver, "already we got a problem. I was hoping you were going to tell me."
The hitcher, upturned hands cradled like bowls in his lap, watched without comprehension the singing road rolling up under the hood. Remember: the blood that was shed for thee shall anoint all thy days and make them holy.
"Would you mind," the hitcher asked, "toning the rev there down a mite?"
"Sorry," the driver apologized. "You know how it is when you're alone."
The hitcher arranged his features to indicate that he did.
"You tend to collect at the edges. You turn up the volume. You sing out loud. Talk to yourself. Move around in your head. Try to make something out of nothing. You know. A party of one."
"The way you're headed now is fine with me."
"Heard you the first time. I was improvising, so now I guess we improvise together." He extended his hand. "Hanna," he said. "Tom Hanna."
"Ray Sawyers," said the hitcher. The driver's grip was soft and bloodless, like shaking hands with a glove.
"Nice meeting you, Ray. I like a man who lacks direction. I like your honesty. We're the last of the buffaloes, us honest men. We may not know where we're going, but at least we do know where we've been."
The hitcher realized the driver had been staring openly at him. "What?" he asked.
"Where you from, Ray?"
"Oh." He considered the window. "Vermont," he said.
"Vermont? What a coincidence. My brother-in-law runs a ski shop in Killington. You anywhere near there?"
"No, no, north of there, actually. Really hasn't got a name, no town or anything, it's up in the woods, the mountains there, more of a commune like."
"A commune? I didn't know there were any of those still around."
"Oh yeah, there's a few." The hitcher weighed the evidence in the driver's face. "The dream has not died."
"No kidding."
"As long as some seed is put aside, the crop can be raised up again." He paused. "When the land is ready."
"Yeah? And is the land ready?"
The hitcher turned his notice to the shifting panorama outside the car. "Soon."
"Well, I'm amazed. Never would have taken you for the commune type. No offense."
"I've been away."
"So now, you're what -- on vacation or something?"
The hitcher leaned down to let his fingers briefly and oh-so-casually check for the comforting bulge beneath his trouser leg. "You might say I'm scratching an itch. When you gotta go, you gotta go, know what I mean?"
"Absolutely."
"Traveling man."
"Break a lot of hearts."
The hitcher displayed an extravagant grin. "That, too."
"Hazards of the rambling life."
"What about yourself?"
The driver concentrated on the driving. The hitcher waited. The odometer counted off the tenths of a mile. The pastor's voice in the background the hushed monotone of a sportscaster providing dramatic commentary on crucial action at the final green. The driver looked around, as if he were under surveillance. "I don't reveal this to everyone." He took a breath. "I just got out of the joint."
The hitcher's face moved and stopped and moved again.
"What's so funny?"
"Not a thing," replied the hitcher, deadpan. "What was the charge?"
The driver waited until the hitcher was staring directly at him. "Murder," he said.
Nothing moved on the hitcher's face. "I guess you're more dangerous than you look."
"It was a mistake."
"Never doubted it, Tom."
"The gun wasn't mine. I didn't know it was loaded and, yes, I know how that must sound."
Now the hitcher seemed truly amused. "I ain't even gonna ask."
"We were just trying to scare the guy, Wylie and me, wave the barrel in his nose and grab the cash. I don't know, it's hard to piece together now, we were so nervous, it was like everything was under a wide-angle lens, you could see the whole store from wherever you stood, then somebody moved and the gun popped and the store guy was stone dead in an instant. Wasn't supposed to happen. Cops were there before we could get out of the damn parking lot."