An Incidental Reckoning (37 page)

Carson waited for a smile to go with the joke.

"Well?"

"Uh, yes. That would be fine. Thank you."

Carson left the building, glad to escape the high-strung little man, and walked to his car to drive up to the campsite. From inside, he heard him shout.

"If you see any of those dirty little girls, you come get me, son."

Chapter 3

Karen Hunter trudged along the highway, her small duffel bag gaining a pound with each mile. If true, she thought, it should weigh about fifty pounds by now. She hadn’t walked fifty miles, but it felt like it. Her arms legs and hair were caked with a fine dust. She could taste and smell it, feel the grit beneath her clothes. And it would be dark soon enough.

Her last ride from a middle-aged man - ring on his finger, a father from the toys and French fries on the floor and Elmo book on the backseat - had ended abruptly. In a nervous and round-about way he had propositioned her. Disgusted, she had demanded to be let out, on the assumption of picking up another ride. But with few cars on the road and fewer acceptable prospects among them, she wished she had humored him a bit and let him take her to Jefferson City. She didn’t really feel threatened by him, just uncomfortable. He had seemed relieved to drop her off, saved from himself and able to face his wife on returning home. Karen knew she could never have led him on, anyway.

A sedan flew past. Its brake lights popped and the car pulled to the shoulder fifty yards in front of her. She wished for an old man and his wife, even looked forward to the inevitable lecture on the dangers of hitch-hiking and the detailed recounting of how it wasn‘t always so. She doubted she would be so lucky.

Approaching the passenger side, never the driver’s side to keep some distance between her and Charles Manson if need be, her heart sank on finding a young man, not ugly but not good looking, smiling at her and slouching down to look across the car in his best offering of a cool pose. One glance at the boy’s eyes, he only eighteen at the most, told her all she needed to know. The eyes told everything. No matter what polite or gentlemanly words came from their mouths, she always looked at the eyes. It didn’t take any special skill to decipher what his said.

His mouth said, “Hello. Did you need a ride somewhere? I’d be happy to take you wherever you need to go.” His eyes, however, wouldn’t stay fixed on hers, but flicked to her breasts and the details of her face and even at the door as though x-ray vision would let him see the parts hidden behind it. With it emerged a sense of being compared to chicks splayed in the pages of mens' magazines then cross-referenced with bouncing girls in porno flicks, then inserted into the fantasies they had spawned. He didn’t seem embarrassed at all by his bold visual assessment, and that unsettled her even more, as though fully expecting her to understand what getting in his car meant and that she’d get in anyway. Karen had discovered that the open road, strips of anonymity between civilized posts, peeled the wrapper off of carefully constructed personas for friends and family and the good and normal world to reveal what lay beneath. Usually.

“Hi. Thanks for the offer, but I broke down and my boyfriend will be along to pick me up anytime now.”

“I didn’t see any cars broken down back there.” His smile slipped and his face grew hard.

“It was on a side road. He’ll be coming this way on his Harley, so I thought I’d walk up to meet him.”

He seemed ready to say something else, something introduced by an ugly sneer that smelled the lie. Instead his face went flat, the lust driven fantasies folded and tucked back into his brain.

“Okay,” he said, his voice taking on the wounded tone of a boy scout denied his chance to earn a badge for helping a stranded girl to safety, “I just wanted to help. Be careful. You never know who you might run into out here.”

With one more sweeping glance over her person and a look of loss, he put the window up with a button on the driver’s door and pulled back onto the road.

Off to buy a Penthouse at a convenience store to try and salvage the evening,
she thought.

Karen blew out a breath and relaxed only when his vehicle disappeared from sight.

Of course the story of the boyfriend was a lie. She had found that the ambiguous figure of a leather-clad, no-holds-barred biker grinding the pavement to rescue his lady created uncertainty in any highway suitors' mind. She hoped that even the most hardcore highwayman wouldn't risk the hero appearing in the flesh to exact revenge for dark deeds rendered. So far so good.

She usually didn’t actually hitchhike, walking backwards with her with her thumb out. She didn’t need to. Men and boys pulled over with regularity, and it was easier to reject the bulk of them and their expectations if she had not solicited the ride in the first place. She only thumbed for station wagons, mini-vans and the occasional Winnebago if she could make out retirees through the big glass in time; cars that screamed family well before they’d reached her. Her last ride proved that it wasn’t a foolproof system.

Karen knew she was beautiful. She once at the age of fifteen overheard a colleague of her father comment that she was the sort of girl that made prison an acceptable risk. Lucky for him her father hadn’t heard. She had since been hit on by millionaires and truck drivers, once had a cocky quarterback almost vomit on her shoes while asking her out, and could write an encyclopedia of pick up lines if she ever cared to copy them down. She saw her five foot eleven frame, a large portion of it devoted to legs, exalted in the eager eyes of these men. She saw the long blonde hair that framed a face chiseled by a sculptor enamored with aesthetic perfection in the jealousy of girls and women.

Yet to her it was simply a fact of her existence, a condition that proved useful in some situations and bothersome in others, and sometimes both such as now, trying to get a safe ride into the city. She knew its power, and at one time had wielded it with effect, learning early how she could manipulate her classmates and teachers of both genders. High school marked the height of her reign, and she had voluntarily stepped down after a realization that in those halls and beyond things would never change; a never-ending search for power, sex and status - the boxed set of holy grails - with rules for the quest hammered into stone long ago. And it bored her.

Her “friends” didn’t understand. They felt entitled to their beauty and the perks that came with it. They crushed hearts and hopes with five inch heels and still made time to party and gossip and rule their little fiefdoms. They were hated and feared and adored, sometimes all in one sitting.

Not all, but enough.

Enough that her change in attitude and philosophy, at first attended by outrage and confusion and betrayal, in the end brought down mocking and ridicule as the cliques reconfigured to fill the power vacuum she had left. Some of the things said to her by these “nice” girls would create rosary bead imprints in the sweating palms of a confessional priest.

If she wouldn’t be one of them, they would treat her as one of
them,
the lowly underclass whose flesh covered them in a banal, unremarkable way, existing for cheap amusement; the wanna-but-would-never-be prom queens and football heroes who would amass piles of money to compensate for their unattractiveness. The ones with brains, anyway. Those without any of the magic ingredients would drink beer and watch professional sports, join bowling leagues and have babies so they could hate the prom queens all over again vicariously through their sons and daughters while secretly hoping their children would gain admission to the royal court. Yes it was cruel and cynical. But it contained more than one kernel of truth if not the whole cob.

And to
them
she was suspect
,
the rules and roles too well defined to allow one rogue hot chick to trash them on a whim. She possessed a lifetime pass to the world’s best rides, and few believed she would simply throw it away when they would spend all of their lives trying to earn a few tickets.

It was all very John Hughes-esque. But the reason “Pretty In Pink” and all the other flicks did so well, films she and her father enjoyed together before his death, was because they captured the unchanging truths of adolescence so poignantly. But Molly Ringwald wasn’t near pretty enough to play her. Maybe an arrogant thought, she thought, but simply acknowledging something to be true didn't make it arrogance. Her high school Humanities teacher had suggested that you could lie to the world, but should never lie to yourself. The first part she had her doubts about, but the second became a personal mantra.

Later, after graduation, leaving her home state of Illinois with a part-time construction worker nomad named Paul and finally settling for a while in Las Vegas, she thought she had found something real. The memories stirred with his name created a simultaneous flash of anger and stab of pain. She did not cry, though. She had finished with that. He could have his junkie whore and when he tired of her, assuming he could get off of the drugs she had seduced him with, he would know one day what he threw away. Consolation for the future perhaps, but of little help now. She sighed. If his truck had just lasted a bit longer, she would be in civilization again with more options.

When steam had poured out from under the hood of the old pick-up and left her stranded in Oklahoma, she didn’t dare call a tow truck, didn’t know if they’d be looking for a stolen vehicle from Vegas out here. Her part in burglarizing the pharmacy might also come to light, and she vowed she would not do time in prison. Her cousin had spent two years there for possession and had returned changed. Haunted. Karen would catch her staring into the sky as if waiting for a piece of her soul to return. She and Karen had shared everything growing up, but she wouldn't talk about this. It began a rift in the relationship that widened and turned the one person that truly knew her into another stranger.

She couldn’t discuss things with her mother, who coveted all the things Karen rejected, nor with her father who died from pancreatic cancer just when she had turned seventeen.

The truck barreled down the road and she heard it long before it came into view. Custom tires lifted it high over the asphalt. Mud spattered the tires and quarter panels like war paint; the pride and joy of a small-town boy that defined his manhood with his machine. Those boys usually had girlfriends draped across them, as much a requirement of the total package as the “Git-R-Done” decal on the back window. And a girlfriend would be most welcome to buffer the scent of testosterone filling the interior like a little pine tree hanging from the rearview mirror.

With trepidation, watching a treeline of jagged, uneven teeth waiting to devour the setting sun, unwilling to spend the night out here, she violated her rule, turned, and stuck out her thumb.