Hitchhikers
Kate Spofford
Hitchhikers
a Wolf Point novel
by Kate Spofford
Table of Contents
Other Books in the Wolf Point series
About the Author
Copyright Information
-1-
Rain is drumming on a tin roof overhead when I open my eyes to darkness. My nostrils inhale the scent of wet hay, dust, and a far gone hint of manure: a barn. I am up high, in the hayloft. Below I catch small noises–dripping water, scurrying sounds along the walls. I sense no humans, no large animals. I exhale in relief. Animals always seem to know.
I can’t have been sleeping here long; my muscles are sore and my eyes grainy. I burrow into the moldy straw, trying to curl around this temporary safe feeling. Shivering, I pull my torn ski jacket tight around me and squeeze my eyes shut. They pop back open.
As always after my blackouts, dread sits in my stomach. Something bad has happened. I’m not going to be able to go back to sleep until I know what.
Still, I try.
Listening to the rain, I have no idea what time it is, and my cracked watch is no help. The hands point to quarter past twelve as they have for the past three years – almost three years, I remind myself, then shudder.
don’t want to remember
I try to think of nothing, but my senses won’t allow this, so I focus on the smells, and catalog the scents in my head. There are crops nearby, corn mostly, also tomatoes and sunflowers, cucumbers and snap peas and peppers. Traces of hours-old car exhaust. A bit of fuel left in a can down below. I’m thankful for the rain, which drowns out most noises and washes away heavier traces of scent.
My eyes are half-closed, staring into a darkness which slowly grows clearer.
The last thing I remember is hitchhiking.
“Where you headed, son?”
The man driving the rusty blue pickup is older, his hair mostly gray and covered with a worn cap, his paunch straining the stomach of his flannel shirt.
Regarding him warily. “As far as you’re going.”
“Hop in.”
Hesitating a beat, glancing at the heavy sky before climbing into the truck cab. Keeping to my side of the seat, my hand on the door handle and my senses on the alert. Perverts have a smell about them, a dirty semen smell masked by something minty. This man at least smells honest.
“You from around here?”
“No.”
“You’re lucky it was me who picked you up. Lots a trucks comin’ down this road. Lotsa men who’d take advantage of a young boy.”
Saying nothing, staring out at the countryside passing by the window. The houses here far apart, the landscape lonely and isolated. Rolling over the miles in between.
“You’re young. I know you’ll tell me you’re older, sixteen or eighteen or whatever you think I want to hear.” Fat raindrops splatter on the windshield and the man flicks on the wipers. “You oughtn’t to be out on the road alone.”
Still I remain silent.
“What’s your name, if you don’t mind me askin’?”
“Dan.”
Wishing briefly that he would stop talking, and a wave of nausea hits me like a wall.
Gripping the door handle.
“Good name. So many kids these days with weird names. Parents namin’ their kids after soap opera stars or fruit or some shit like that…”
Shut up, old man…
My stomach lurching.
There’s a dark farmhouse up ahead, deserted. Good. “Can you let me off here?”
“I’m not going to leave a young boy stranded on the side of the road in this weather. Not this close to the city. Hey, you okay?”
“Fine.” Black spots dancing across my vision. “Here’s fine. It’s fine.”
“You can stay the night with me, eat something. Look at you. You’re nothing but skin and bones. You can stay at my place, and head out in the morning. It’s only a couple minutes up the road.”
Blinking hard, swallowing, but it doesn’t help.
“Please, sir, let me off?” My voice a croak.
“Seriously, kid. Two minutes.”
Can’t you feel it coming, old man?
The pressure in my head increasing, and I surrender myself to the darkness.
My stomach growls.
-2-
Crouching low to avoid the roof, I hunt for the ladder down from the hayloft. I crawl along the edge, feeling with my hands. No luck.
It could be that I somehow knocked the ladder over when I climbed up. I peer down over the edge of the loft. I can see through the darkness clearly enough to see that there is no ladder down there on the floor.
How the hell did I get up here? It’s at least a ten foot drop to the floor. I don’t even see a stack of hay bales or a box or anything to climb up on. Over the past three years I’ve woken up in strange places, but this is definitely a first.
One lap around the hayloft later, I determine that there are two ways to get down: through a small door at one end, through which hay would have been loaded back when this farm was busy and prosperous, and the straight drop down into the barn. Twenty feet down through the small door, ten feet inside.
I lay with my legs hanging over the edge of the loft and inch backwards until I am dangling. One movement and I am hanging from the loft by my fingers; a deep breath and I let go.
The floor hits me and I roll with it, but the fall has knocked the breath out of my lungs. I lay for long moments on the dirt floor of the barn, until the hunger forces me to my feet again.
A search of the barn turns up only moldy hay and a small bag of rotting grain.
The barn door is slightly ajar. I peek outside into the sheets of rain pouring down.
Beyond the barn door stands that dark farmhouse I’d seen from the road. The house, the back of it anyway, is white and old-fashioned and rambling. The windows are dark, but it is still night. If the occupants are asleep, it might be possible to sneak in and raid the kitchen.
I take a deep breath and dash into the rain, hoping to avoid getting wet but failing miserably. I take a moment on the back porch to wring the wetness from my jacket and the frayed cuffs of my jeans. I am not sure why I do this kindness for whoever owns this place, but I do.
The back door is unlocked. I drip into a worn carpet in a hallway that smells of old people. My sneakers sloshing, I creep to the front of the house, to the kitchen.
The house is not abandoned, as I had hoped. Though devoid of the numerous knick-knacks that appear on every shelf and table in the place, the small kitchen is stocked with food.
I am reaching into the refrigerator when I find myself in blackness.
* * *
Sometime later I awaken on the linoleum floor, surrounded by opened cans and boxes and bags, all empty. Gripping the countertop for support, I pull myself up, feeling weak and disoriented. A stray glance out the front window into the coming morning shows me the man’s truck.
It is the worst omen I could have received.
My nose finds the trail of blood from the front door to the stairs; my eyes follow it up and up until finally my legs follow. I drag myself up each step, trying not to breathe, not to inhale that sickly scent like rusty death.
I must do this. I must face what has been done. Perhaps it is not my fault, but I feel that it is. I climbed into that truck. I put that man in danger.
Only one door stands open at the head of the stairs, and the blood leads me there anyway, but there is a stronger trail, one of decay and rot and a wet animal scent.
For a long time I refuse to look. My gaze rests on the brass doorknob of the room and the smear of blood marring its reflective surface. The smear does not look like a hand print. Could there be any trace of me here?
They lie on the bed, the man curled around the woman, or most of her. The lower part of her body is missing, replaced by the tentacles of her intestines dripping onto the quilt. I know without looking where her legs are, and bile rises in my throat.
The man’s face looks back over his shoulder, still wearing an expression of shock. Or perhaps that is only because his jaw has been ripped loose of its mooring and hangs open.
I cannot be certain, because I have begun to vomit through my fingers, but it looks to me like his jaw had been gnawed with very sharp teeth.
Vomit pours onto the now hopelessly stained carpet until dry heaves wrack my body.
All I can think, as I lie with my sweaty forehead pressed into the grit on the rug, is Now my stomach is empty. Now I have nothing to keep the darkness at bay.
-3-
My sneakers sink into each mud puddle. Even the dirt wants me to stop and surrender. I plod along, determined not to give in to the dizziness, the weakness, or the weariness.
The best I could do was to cover the old couple with another quilt. With no food in my belly, it’s pointless to waste my energy on burying them. I am tempted, if only because it means the police might show up in the meantime and arrest me, and lock me up someplace safe. But I have the feeling that the first visitor would not be the police. It would be a neighbor, some kindly old woman bringing over a plate of cookies, or a son or daughter with their toddling children in tow, and then there would be a mess.
There is no way I could begin to remove evidence from that room. After all this time it blows my mind that the police haven’t caught up to me yet.
I’m a monster.
I slump along, like the beast toward Bethlehem, soaked through by rain and mud and tears. The desolate countryside accompanies me.
“You little monster.”
A hand grabbing me, jerking my arm up at an impossible angle.
“Look what you done!”
My face pushed into the shards of glass. Cutting into my cheek. Glass and tears and a child’s blood.
“…little monster…”
My first memory. Where was my mother when my father was grinding a four-year-old’s face into a broken mirror? I don’t even remember if it was my fault or not, the mirror. Somehow it was broken and somehow it was my fault.
Anger begins a slow burn deep inside me but I tamp it down. The drizzle is cold. Drizzle cold over my anger.
I can keep it away. I can control this.
Breath hot in my face. “You’re a little bitch, just like your mother.”
Stay out. Stay out of my head.
If only there was something other than this flat Midwestern landscape to look at, to keep my mind from those thoughts. Rolling waves of grain all the way to the horizon, ramshackle buildings dotting the fields. A tree! I run stumbling toward it. I’ll climb it. I’ll sleep in the branches like a bird.
Behind me, a trailer truck rumbles past. The earth quakes beneath my sneakers.
I run out of energy long before I reach the tree. The mud slows me down, and the tall stalks of wheat.
It’s like an ocean, the wheat. I’m drowning in it, barely keeping my head above water. It’s too much. I lie down where I am, the wheat enveloping me. Blue skies and amber waves of grain. Reminds me of second grade, the school concert at the end of the year. My class sang “America the Beautiful.” Second grade, back when things were safe.
Safe. Ha! Just because I wasn’t homeless back then doesn’t mean I was safe.
I was never safe. Any small infraction could cause my father’s wrath, or not. I never knew what would set him off. The only sure thing was if my father was drinking and my uncles were around, I stayed clear.
Blackness.
A flash, a darkening of the bright blue sky. I knew it would happen sooner than later. The hunger often does it.
Probably the only reason I haven’t starved to death yet.
Darkness descends.
-4-
I wake at the base of the tree, staring up into its branches.
I feel comfort when I have slept in nature like this, unlike last night in the barn. Yet I stay to the roads, avoiding the forest. Something about the empty shadows between the trees frightens me.
So alone that even the trucks rumbling by are company to me.
Three years. That should be enough time for everyone to have forgotten. Of course the police don’t forget, but so long as my face on the WANTED poster isn’t still hanging up at the post office, maybe I can go home and see my mom, let her know I’m okay.
No.
My sixteenth birthday is in two months. If I go home and get caught, I could be tried as an adult. And if they know about all the others… the results of my blackouts…
There have been more than a hundred.
I should hide. The forest offers herself to me. I can feel a presence there, and a pull. If I let myself go, I might disappear into those woods, and no one will hear of Daniel Connors again.
While it might be better for the human race if I do disappear, I have only myself to cling to.
This is partly the reason why I have drifted into the Midwest, away from forests. That, and the winter I can feel coming.
I barely survived my first winter on the run, with its heavy snowfalls and cutting winds. Many nights I spent in homeless shelters, cold and hungry. I made a habit of hanging around in 24-hour Walmarts, sleeping in bathroom stalls at gas stations. More than once I took up a trucker’s offer of a night in a cheap motel, though luckily I do not remember most of those nights. There are many nights which are completely gone from my memory.
I try not to think about how many lives were lost that first winter.
Last winter was better, but only because I found an abandoned house and spent my days scrounging through dumpsters for food and whatever I could burn.
I didn’t need much food, at the rate I blacked out, though I knew from the remains I found at my abandoned house that I killed mostly animals.
Summers are better. More food around, more places I can sleep. This summer hasn’t been so great, and the ribs poking through my chest can attest to that. The animals hide. I am too cold and wet to sleep well.
Now summer is turning into autumn. The rain, the cooler nights. I knew for sure when I started seeing school buses trundling over the patched up roads. Soon the leaves of this tree will turn brown and spiral to the ground.
I’ve heard that Texas is warm, even in the winter. Out in western Texas, there’s lots of open space. No people, no forest. Ghost towns. Maybe I can learn how to hunt rabbits and drink water from cacti. And if Texas is too cold, I’ll keep going south, all the way down to Mexico.
Chewing on a blade of wheat grass to keep my stomach from growling, I head off down the road again.
-5-
The roads are empty today.
I come across a cornfield. It is not time for corn to be ripe, but I am hungry enough to steal a few budding ears and tear at the hard kernels with my teeth. I pass one farmhouse where there are no cars in the driveway, and I snatch some tomatoes from the garden in their yard to eat like apples as I walk.
Walking has a rhythm that lulls the mind. I am able to keep from those dark thoughts that haunt me at night. Now it is wondering about the people in the distant houses and what their small lives are like. Have they traveled as I travel? Do they know fear?
I imagine they are all happy, content, eating Thanksgiving dinners around crowded tables and talking about the future.
I see the trees, whispering to one another in the breeze.
Clouds drifting in the sky, nowhere to go in a hurry.
There is never really silence. Always crickets, or birds, the drone of insects. It is a comfortable noise. Nothing alarming.
Until I hear the footsteps behind me.
The steps are light and quick, in a rhythm that tells me these do not belong to a human. Still, I feel my hackles rise, my
senses extended to know what this creature is who approaches my back.
When it is closer, I hear the panting, the whooshing of a wagging tail.
I smell dog.
Putting my head down, I walk faster.
Usually animals stay away from me. They can smell the evil on me like a disease, and they turn tail and run. Sometimes before I even know they are there.
Dogs aren’t like other animals. They’re loyal to humans. A cat will run. A horse will gallop. A squirrel will scamper away. They have no reason to fight. Dogs will protect their territory, their humans, even if it means fighting me.
I never had a dog growing up. I’d watch reruns of Lassie and Benji and wish I had a dog, but it was always
“Ain’t no way in hell you’re getting a dog.”
Even if we were out walking around, and we’d see a dog coming up on the street, my father would grab my arm and yank me to the other side of the road.
“You afraid of dogs, Dad?”
“I ain’t afraid of nothin’. That dog’s afraid of me.”
I never believed him. And if I came across a dog when I wasn’t with my dad, well, those dogs loved me. They trotted on up and sniffed me all over and licked me and lay on the ground with their bellies up.
Until this all happened.
Ever since I started blacking out, dogs don’t like me so much. They see me coming up the road and their whole body goes stiff. Hair raised on their backs and all. Mostly I can just keep to the road, or cross the street, and they stare after me. Waiting. Waiting for me to make one move toward them, one threatening inch toward their family. I keep my head down and try to breathe and keep myself calm, because I feel that pull too. The beast in me doesn’t want to back down from a stupid animal. I keep my head down and walk on by. And nothing happens.
Other times they go fucking crazy.
This one time, I ended up in a neighborhood. I wasn’t paying much attention to where this truck driver let me off. Houses all around, nice big yards full of toys. I walked through it, head down and legs moving as fast as my tired muscles could go, hoping no one would see me and report a strange homeless-looking kid on their perfect street.
The dog was a golden retriever. They say those are the friendliest kinds of dogs. They look it, in all the pictures. Smiling mouths, playing with little toddlers and bright red Frisbees.
