“Don’t worry,” Jay said, the assurance quite blind he realized. He had no idea who this was, and the hour and the remoteness of the spot they’d been unfortunate enough to break down in was making the moment no less unsettling. “It’ll be fine.”
Mari stuck very close to him as the door of the big pickup opened and a tall, thin figure emerged, cutting a lanky black hole across the glare as it approached them.
“You folks break down?” the man asked them, pushing his ancient straw cowboy hat back on his head.
“Radiator or something, it looks like,” Jay said, and the man nodded. He had that stern, competent look about his face, that thing he could remember from childhood. It was the way the farmers of Dane County looked from before dawn until after sunset, that ‘get the job done’ attitude that his father had tried to muster, with some success. This man, though, was that attitude in walking talking life, Jay thought, and considering his choice of wheels and their place on the landscape, it was a fair bet, he decided, that the fellow who had stopped knew the feel of the good earth beneath his boots and under his nails.
Mari, though, could sense none of this and kept a soft grip on Jay’s elbow as visions of some lone prairie madman doing them in drummed in her head.
“It’s notta good place to be stuck,” the man told them, crossing his arms, sinewy poles covered by a cool plaid cotton. “I could take a look at ‘er, if you’d like.”
“That’d be nice,” Jay said, and Mari squeezed his elbow hard, disapproving.
“I’ll just get my flashlight,” the man said, and left them for a minute.
“Jay, we don’t know him, or anything about him,” she said, making him look at her. “He could be getting an axe right now!”
“What are we going to do, Mari?” he asked. “What?”
Then the man was back, moving around the opposite side of the Honda from them, a long black pipe-like flashlight in hand. “All right if I pop the hood?”
“Sure,” Jay told him, then crutched his way beyond the front of the car to watch, Mari almost attached to his arm, her blue eyes slitted from the headlights slicing across the Honda’s roof.
The man came to the front after popping the release and felt under the slightly risen hood for the latch. He found it and raised the hood, stilting it up with the metal pole hinged to the frame. Steam drifted out and swirled around him as he shined his light onto the engine. He leaned down, brushing a clear path through the steam with back and forth swats of his thin and tan hands, and seemed to focus on one spot where a gout of the white vapor was rising. He stood again after that and turned toward Jay and Mari.
“Just a hose, looks like” he told them, but it might as well have been the whole damn transmission where their resources were concerned. He wiped the dampness of the condensed steam from his right hand and held it out to Jay. “Gus VanDerPool. I’m pleased to meetcha.” Jay shook it, then he tipped his hat to Mari.
“I’m Jay, this is Mari.”
“Ma’am,” Gus VanDerPool said, acknowledging Mari, showing even a glint of teeth to her. “You know, I’ve got a can of water in the truck, and I’m purty sure I got a hose clamp and some scrap in the tool box, so if you’d like I could see if maybe we could mend this up and getcha on your way.”
Mari brightened at his offer, letting go of Jay and pulling her sleeves down. “Thank you. Really. Thank you very, much.”
“The same from me, sir,” Jay said. “Lucky for us you came by. Especially this time of night.”
“Mornin’,” Gus VanDerPool corrected him. “You can thank my brother for that. I’m headin’ up to Gretna to give a hand with his crop. Early work, ya know.”
“Well, again, thanks,” Jay said, and then backed a few yards away to half sit against a berm of earth piled along the highway. They watched their gentle savior go back to his truck and search noisily for something in the big tool box fastened between the sides of the bed. A moment later he was back at the front of the Honda with some tools, the clamps and scrap piece of hose, and a five gallon can of water. He bent into the engine compartment and began to work, his flashlight balanced atop the battery.
“I’m sorry,” Mari said to Jay, and he looked from the repairs in progress to her. “I get scared.”
“It’s okay,” he told her, fairly sure he understood. “Is that why you got so upset when it broke?”
She nodded and looked off, that sure sign of emotion rising. “Charles took care of everything. Always made sure the oil got changed, and the tires got rotated, and the brakes got done. If something broke, he just fixed it. He could make anything better. He made my life better. He made me feel safe.” She shook her head at the starry darkness above the fields opposite the interstate. “I hate not feeling that way.”
Jay put a hand on her shoulder as a few tears skimmed down her cheeks.
“Just a needy woman, I guess, huh?” Mari said, sniffling a chuckle and wiping her eyes.
“Everyone needs,” Jay said.
She looked to him. “Really? What do you need, Jay?”
His gaze averted now, scouring the dry earth at his feet. The hand he’d had to her shoulder settled back to the crutches that lay against the berm at his side. “I need my life back. I need to not be held hostage by a bunch of coins, or whatever it is that’s behind them. I don’t need another chance at life—just chance back in my life.”
She nodded at him, and then looked to the man tending her broken car. “Should we give him something for helping us? Some money?”
Jay glanced at Gus VanDerPool, his busy hands wrenching something amidst the fading drifts of steam. “We probably should. He may not take it, but we should at least offer.”
“Hey,” Mari said, nudging him as she sniffed the last bit of emotion from her face. “How did you make it?”
“Make what?” Jay asked, turning to her.
“
It
. A living. What did you do besides collect those bottles for change?”
“That’s all I did,” he told her, to her obvious wonder.
“You made enough to live on? In that small town?” She doubted him with a narrowing stare. “What was your rent?”
“I don’t pay rent.”
“Excuse me?”
“It was an arrangement,” he told her.
“What kind of arrangement is free rent? Where do you sign up for that?”
He shrugged at her mild astonishment. “When I arrived in Plainview the old man who owned the shoe store under my room was about to shut it down. A lot of people were already leaving town because the military base out at Whistle Creek was closing bit by bit, and his business was drying up. He was moving to Minneapolis to stay with his niece—temporarily, he said. But who would come back to a dead town? Anyway, he saw me hanging around by Truman Park, and he pretty much knew like everybody in town that I didn’t have a place to live, and—”
“You were living on the streets?” she asked, surprised and sad at once.
“In stairwells and in the park,” Jay explained. “But that wasn’t for long. A few weeks at most. Then the old man asked me if I’d stay in the room above his store and make sure no one trashed the building.” Jay snorted. “Like there was going to be anyone left to turn into hoodlums.”
“So he just let you stay there?”
“Yes he did.”
“And you found enough bottles and cans in a dead town to pay for food, and clothes, and electricity, and water?”
“Yes I did,” Jay replied, wondering what she was driving at, because she wasn’t just interested in the way he supported his meager lifestyle.
“Don’t you find that funny?”
“What?”
“That there were enough cans and bottles just thrown away to support you, and that you got a place to live
rent free
? I mean, could you have stayed in Plainview if either of those things didn’t happen?”
“No,” he answered after a pause, starting to see what she was getting at now.
“The very place we came together is the same place you got a free place to live and enough recycling to feed yourself. God, there’s all these little things that point to this being so ‘meant to be’, do you know what I mean?”
“I guess so,” Jay said, truly seeing it now. Sure, cars and trucks would toss bottles and cans as they drove along roads, but would they really have chucked
that
many? As many as he had found and redeemed over the years? Because if not, wouldn’t that mean this was a much bigger thing than even they were imagining? Wouldn’t it?
Jay was suddenly very, very intrigued by what might be waiting out Amarillo way.
“Done, folks,” Gus VanDerPool said, standing in front of the Honda with one foot on the bumper and the five gallon can balanced sideways on his knee, spilling water into the radiator.
Jay and Mari got to their feet—and crutches—and went to him.
“Just a little bitty tear in the hot hose, the one comin’ out of the block,” he explained as water filled the radiator and splashed over the engine, cooling it and drenching the dirty asphalt beneath. “The clamp and the scrap went on there fine, and it should hold ya ‘til you get the hose replaced.” A little more seriously he looked at them now. “You prob’ly oughtta have all them hoses looked at, ‘cause they’s graying up a bit. Old, ya know. Could be time fer a change.”
“We’ll do that,” Jay said, but he had no idea when or if the chance to heed the advice would come around.
The radiator brimmed finally, and Gus VanDerPool lowered the water can from his knee to the ground, capping it and then the radiator, making sure the latter was screwed past the point where it would pop off once the engine temperature got up again. He tucked his tools in one back pocket, his flashlight in the other, and closed the hood. “Well, yer all set to get on.”
Mari stepped up a bit now. “Would you let us give you something for your trouble? Pay for the part, or something?”
“Weren’t no trouble,” Gus VanDerPool said. “And the clamp, sheesh, I got a box of ‘em in the shed at my place. Pack rat, my woman says I am. Me, I say for everything there’s a reason, and don’t that make a lot of sense right here and now?”
“It does,” Jay said, a prickle of cold racing up his back. “I couldn’t agree more.”
“If you all wanna repay me, though, do the Christian thing and pass the kindness on. G’night to ya, folks.” He tipped his hat to Mari, then Jay, and lifted his can and headed back to his truck.
They stood there until he was back in his truck and had pulled around them onto the interstate, tossing them a wave through his passenger window before heading off into the dark morning.
Mari looked to Jay, and it was he who said it this time. “Spooky.”
Thirty Eight
Hitching The Hard Way
Missouri and half of Kansas lay behind them, swallowed by a night that had become a day that spread like a warming blue haze upon the endless plains ahead. Jay drove now, the sun a swelling yellow oval in the rearview. Mari slept beside him, curled into a fetal ball, her face pressed close to the passenger window and her two hands clutched together below her chin as if in prayer. Every so often he would glance at her, would see the misty rounds of her breath left on the window, and then look back to the road that seemed all theirs.
The miles rolled onto the odometer with almost transparent ease. Ticking another tenth, another half, another whole down the interstate. Marking their slow progress as the Honda valiantly carried them on, semis and old cars and new cars coming up fast and zipping around them in the right lane. But they were moving, progressing, following directions. Following the will of the coins, Jay thought. Whatever they wanted. Whatever they said. As long as this all would end. For that, anything. Anything.
He turned again to Mari and thought,
For her as well, for her as well,
and then back to the flat black ribbon ahead he looked. And when he did, something caught his eye. Something small, something dark, something moving. Something not far in the distance traveling along the right shoulder of the interstate. A person, he now could tell, with one arm extended toward the lanes of traffic, the classic hitchhiker’s walking pose. And he and Mari thought
they
had had it rough when the radiator hose blew some hours before. This small person in head to toe dark clothing was out in the middle of prairie-nowhere, almost to some metropolis called Ogallah, and was thumbing for a ride from cars and trucks doing seventy plus in the fading dawn. Lotsa luck, Jay thought.
But that was cruel, wasn’t it? It was a realization that struck him as he drew nearer this dark person, who was now very clearly a female dressed up and down in black. A female who looked back as the sputter of the approaching Honda reached her, her face a pale orb broken by aphotic eyes and a mouth painted the depth of pitch. She looked like a spectre upon the highway. And she looked to be no more than sixteen.
...do the Christian thing and pass the kindness on...
Gus VanDerPool’s terms of repayment rang in his head right then, as did a sense of concern for this young thing out upon the road all alone, and so Jay put his foot gently to the brake and steered to the shoulder not far past the hitchhiker.
As he passed he noticed her hand ill equipped for what had been tasked, for it was missing its thumb.
Mari felt the car slow and vibrate onto the shoulder, and woke from a deep slumber. She stretched, and yawned, and sat up in the seat. Through the windshield she could see they were pulling off the highway. As they came to a stop she asked sleepily, “Is it my turn?”
Jay twisted and looked through the back window. The young girl was trotting toward them, a purse-like bag as dark as the rest of her swinging from one shoulder. “No. I stopped for a hitchhiker.”
Mari pepped up, that fear rising as it had before Gus VanDerPool turned out not to be an axe murderer. “A hitchhiker. Jay...”
“She’s just a kid, Mari. Look.”
Mari did, turning right just as the girl reached the car. She knelt and looked in through the glass at her would be co-riders. She didn’t smile, or if she did the black of her makeup simply smothered the bright expression then and there. Her nose was pierced, two studs passing through over a small ring that looped in and out the left nostril, and two more small silver rings adorned the left side of her lower lip. Her left eyelid sported a silvery-blue ring as well, and beyond that it could not be said if any more of her anatomy had been skewered, as from the high buttoned neck of her shirt to the thin soles of her made-for-show boots, she was wardrobed in things the color of dreamless sleep.