Title: Drenched.
It was watching her get drenched in the wave of filthy, oily rainwater thrown up by the passing truck that clinched it for me. I slammed on the brakes and swallowed the heart that leapt into my mouth when the gigantic tractor-trailer hard on my heels bellowed furiously and pulled snarling past me, blatting its double air-horn. For me the next few seconds were tense and chaotic. I was determined to stop for that pathetic hitchhiker and the trucks among whom I was sandwiched were equally determined to frustrate my efforts.
By the time I got my Range Rover onto the hard shoulder I was a good two hundred yards down the road. I put the car into reverse and snaked my way back to where she was standing calmly waiting. Lank, dripping hair hung over her eyes and a backpack lay in the puddle at her feet. I leaned over and threw the door open right at her, inviting her into the car. It took but a moment and we were sealed into the Range Rover’s aristocratic, purring cocoon. Give me luxury every day. I don’t care how much gas it guzzles or how many water-buffalo had to die for the seats. ‘If you have it,” I say, “Flaunt it.”
“You’re a mess.” I said to my passenger after glancing at her. It was understatement. There was something indescribably scruffy, even grungy about her. But she looked calmly back at me, her eyes friendly and reassuring. “Just a kid.” I thought.
I drove on in silence for a minute, before the girl spoke.
“I’ve had you marked for the last twenty minutes,” she said, “Ever since you pulled out of the rest stop.”
My jaw dropped. I risked another glance at her, but her eyes remained steady, and the friendliness of her gaze never wavered.
“Look,” I said briskly, “I picked you up because I felt sorry for you in the rain and the trucks were splashing you. Please don’t turn out to be a total weirdo, please. ‘Cos I don’t want to have to put you out in the rain again.”
“It’s not raining.” She said quietly.
I looked at the road and felt my guts squirm all the way up my esophagus.
It was dry and dusty. My windshield was speckled with dead bugs and sand. No puddles, no splashing, no swishing wiper blades and rain maddened truckies. “No rain has fallen here for days,” I thought.
“I placed that whole rain and truck-splashing scenario into your head so you would stop for me.” She added, continuing, “I liked the look of you, and wanted to be sure. You’re basically a kind person and the bedraggled neophyte seemed the best hook.”
I risked another glance at her. I wanted to say something but had no idea what was come over me.
“I’m not a bedraggled neophyte.” She confided. “I’m the hitchhiker from hell.”
I dragged my eyes away from the road one more time to search her face for meaning. Surely, no one saying such menacing things could be so safe-looking?
I wanted to slam my foot on the brakes. And it was not the thought that being the driver of a vehicle traveling at high-speed gave me some tactical advantage that prevented me from slowing. I didn’t feel able to slam anything. I just wanted to keep on driving as I am used to driving.
“Pull into the next truck stop.” She said. “It’s three miles down the road, you’ll see a big sign with a 76 on it. Let’s have something to eat.” She narrowed her eyes and tilted the seat backwards with a sigh, turning her head as though to watch the scenery passing outside her window. I was thinking at a greater speed than I was driving, like my thoughts were doing at least two hundred miles an hour, maybe more. Not one coherent thought of course, there never is, when you really need one. Just jumbled fragments and silent screams, the sounds of tables being turned and the scurrying of warm furry mammals racing for dark hiding places in my brain.
Bereft of speech, I felt my tongue caked with epoxy to the roof of my mouth. It was impossible to utter a sound of protest, as it was impossible to drive past the 76 Truck Stop. As it was impossible to turn to this calm collected young woman next to me and vent my rage.
Perhaps it was just me and my hang-ups, but I felt many eyes on me as I stepped into the greasy-spoon-diner part of the truck stop. Perhaps it was the expensive chinchilla coat I was wearing, or the high heels I still had on from the morning’s shopping spree at the mall. It was a busy little place. I saw hand painted signs advertising showers and telephone cards. A couple of slot machines and many telephones, shops selling souvenirs and all sorts of religious kitsch in cellophane wrapping paper and votive candles. It was a mélange of bad taste and piss-poor ventilation. I’d never get the cooking fat smell pout of my expensive clothes.
I hadn’t even had time to orient myself in the room and tell myself where the exits were, and which wall I should sit with my back to when my little hitchhiker rapped noisily on a Formica table with a glass/plastic salt cellar.
“This woman here,” she shouted, “Wants to sell her fur coat. Who’ll give me thirty dollars. It’ll get us a tank of gas, you know.” She added this more quietly by way of explanation to a woman sharing coffee at the next table. A murmur of debate or wonder or relief carried across the room. She and I looked around as anxiously as anyone for who might be ready to buy my twelve thousand dollar coat for thirty dollars?
“No buyers?” She mused. “Here, take it off and pass it around. Let people feel it, you know, feel the fur, it’s real, you know.” She added needlessly.
“Nothing fake glistens like that,” I found myself thinking. “What’s the matter with you people, can’t you see a fur coat yet?”
I took it off hastily and draped it over my arm. Walking up to the nearest table I thrust it under the gaze of two three-day-stubbled truckers, just minding their own business.
“Here feel.” I sobbed. It’s like there was this huge lump in the back of my throat.
“Why am I crying?” I thought.
A loud shout from across the room brought my attention back to my companion and the situation. A woman with blue rinsed hair and purple rayon slacks was holding up thirty dollars. I felt so relieved all of a sudden. Somebody, someone at least realized what was what, and was not going to let my coat go unappreciated. She came and claimed her merchandise and the girl handed her the coat. Then she took my arm and gently pushed me onto a banquette in a booth by the window.
“What am I thinking?” I thought.
“Are you confused?” she asked me.
It was as though the floodgates of my verbosity were given permission to fly open without restraint. I gabbled for an eternity about the feelings I was having, the confusion, the compulsion to obey, the inability to comprehend my absolute obedience to her every suggestion. I spoke about all my perplexity and all my consternation.
“You do realize, don’t you,” She asked me, “That you haven’t said one word about fear?”
Once more I had the verbal diarrhea. I told her how much I trusted her and how little there was in what I saw of her to worry me, and how far I was from fear of her.
“I know all that,” She said, with that same calm look in her friendly eyes. “I know all that, and that’s what makes all this such an interesting hitchhike, don’t you think?”
I cold snake chilled its way up my spine, creepy and leaden. “Something really nasty is hiding in this woodshed. I am chatting with little red riding hood’s grandma. Why aren’t I screaming in panic? Why aren’t I running for my life? Why aren’t I afraid?” All these thoughts and more raced each other through my mind, but not one fearful alarm bell went off in my psyche, not one panic button got pressed. I was crying with frustration at my inability to access my innermost self-preservation instincts.
Her words, “That’s what makes all this such an interesting hitchhike,” were working their way under my skin. She finished her coffee and Danish while I sat there waiting for her next unpredictable move. It didn’t take long. Brushing crumbs off her lips with the back of her hand, she said, “Let’s sell the car.”
Outside, the dust blew into my eyes in the cold bluster of the afternoon. Everywhere about me among the vast rows of parked beasts were vibrating, shimmering iron boxes. Slumbering trucks burbled like rumbling carnivores. Blue diesel smoke belched from silver pipes and my heels dug through the oil-softened asphalt to make me clumsy in the path of the snaking behemoths trucking in and out of the pumps and the wash bays and the sleep berths and the chat groups.
“Don’t you just love it?” said my keeper, her voice filled with excitement. “Isn’t this all worth coming back from hell to enjoy?” she added. The ground beneath us trembled with the surge of engines and the noise of engines and the heat of engines. She approached a car transporter whose driver was enjoying a smoke and a coffee with his friends. She left me basking in the sunlight shining out of a washed out sky, while she sold my car. We stood watching as it was winched up onto the back of a flatbed. The wind plucked at my flimsy dress and the sweat gathering beneath my armpits chafed at the seams of the blouse. He tucked the registration documents and title papers into the chest pocket of his overalls and fired up his rig. My girl did not even stay to watch him drive back out onto the highway. She led me gently away to the wash bays. There I was made to drink soap water and stand beneath the jetting spray rod of a laughing trucker
She bought us a westward ride in the back of a huge empty double trailer. Consolidated Freightways it said on the side of the wagon. Inside we were but a pair amongst a large group of homeless travelers.
“No-one but yobs hitches their way cross country on trains anymore,” she explained. “You gotta know yer truckstops and move at speed, woman. This is the life. Now lie down and earn us the next fare. I wanna hitch to Carson City before Wednesday.”
They swarmed over me in the back of the speeding truck, the fellow travelers with their crumpled dollar bills in their hands, not willing to part with it until after finishing on me. These men were sure to be sure they had full value for their dollar. Water from the truck-wash still seeped its way through the patched aluminum walls of the trailer to splash gritty and grimy into my eyes. Now a drop, and now, as the vehicle lurched over a pothole, a rush like a stream of urine flung by the wind and movement. I clutched at straws, coats, anything to lie comfortably on. But the coats, to my dismay covered the makeshift latrine and the man doing me shoved me too roughly for me to be able to avoid the slime and the puddle.
“You’re a mess.” My tormentor said, crouching over me. Her eyes so calm and reassuring, so safe and good humored.
She urinated onto the coat I was lying on and beckoned me to shift my rump to lay in it. It was still warm. A man holding a tin of brass polish leered drunkenly at me. He toasted me in his chosen beverage and splashed my face with creamy chemicals.
“Lap it up.” She ordered. My tongue tentatively probed the outside of my cheek for brass polishing liquid. It burned the roof of my mouth and scorched my tonsils as it went down. Only now, with the chemicals in my mouth did she first begin to touch me. Kneeling with her knees either side of my head. Unbuttoning my blouse enjoying my skin. Flipping the skirt and panties the men had ignored off from around my knees; she beckoned the drunken man closer.
“Coat her tongue and mouth with Brasso, do it, do it quick, now. I need to feel it fresh.”
Her crotch wavered over my face only long enough for the man to choke me with the glop of his drink. Coughing and retching and gasping for breath my tongue entered her again and again. I tried for some relief from the burning, rubbing my tongue inside her.
“Ah AAAaaah AhAhHA.” She cried in ecstasy. “Oooohhooooo. This is the life...”