John Rogers Cox, Gray and Gold
Hitchhikers
I dropped them off at a rural crossroads in Kansas, with cornfields on all four corners and a bullet-riddled stop sign clanking in the wind. I waved goodbye, but I don’t think they noticed.
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The previous morning I had stopped for gas along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. One of the girls had come up to me and asked, while staring down at the pavement, “Are you heading west, mister?” I thought it was odd that she called me mister. I was only a few years older than her. She may have been fifteen at the most, and her companion was probably all of twelve. Back then, so long ago, I was still a few months shy of twenty.
I told them that it would be okay and they could get in. They climbed into the back seat of my Torino, and there they stayed the entire day. The younger one was built like a bowling pin; the older one was non-descript, dishwater hair, somewhat skinny and pale. We drove on for hours and hours, through Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, and they didn’t utter a word, either to me or each other.
That night we slept on the side of the road somewhere in Missouri, because you could do that in America back then, find a farm lane and pull off. We spread out a blanket next to a cornfield and we lay there staring at the stars.
I woke the following morning in a fitful dream as if an anaconda was crushing me. The older girl had entwined her arms around me and was squeezing me desperately in her sleep. As I carefully extricated myself, I noticed the needle marks on her right arm. Oddly, it occurred that she was left-handed, just like me.
That day we didn’t talk much, but I learned that they were fleeing Boston and had hopes of finding refuge with the younger girl’s grandparents, who were farmers in the middle of nowhere. I’m not sure if the grandparents were expecting them. At the crossroads, the wind rustled the cornfields and the sky stretched lonely and silent into infinity. I waved goodbye to them, but they looked so forlorn and I don’t think they saw me.
I put the Torino into gear and slowly drove away. After a while, I found a highway heading west, towards Denver, and later that evening I watched the sun descend behind the Front Range, an immense wall of rock that comes screaming up out of the plains.
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