Lost Highways (A Valentine Novel) (3 page)

“Are you okay?” she asked again, finding her voice on the lonely road sounded a little startling.

“I wrecked my car,” he said hoarsely. “It’s down there.”

She stepped forward a few more feet and saw that the land dropped away sharply some feet past the graveled roadside. The roof and rear end of a car, a sporty type, glowed in the thin moonlight. There came a faint hissing and the smell of stirred dust.

“It’s not comin’ out of there as easy as it went in,” she said, which was the first thing that came to her mind.

He said he didn’t think she had hit him.

“I was just getting up to the road, and your headlights startled me,” he said. “I slipped back down.”

“I didn’t hit you?”

“I don’t think so. I think I slipped on the gravel.”

He seemed a little confused, which she thought would be natural, given the situation, although she did not discard the possibility of him being under the influence of something.

Nevertheless, she took it as good news that she had not run him down. She felt redeemed. She had not been a totally irresponsible driver after all. Feeling very expansive, she immediately offered to give him a ride, and he accepted.

The next instant, she wondered if she might have been a little foolhardy, but there really wasn’t anything else she could do. She couldn’t very well leave him there twenty miles from anywhere and vulnerable to any crazy who might come along, such as drunk cowboys looking for mischief or a carload of illegals looking for a good suit of American clothes. And it could very well be all the way to Abilene before she could find help she could send back.

She also sensed he was no threat, in the way a woman always knows these things. Rather than overcoming her, she felt he was pretty well overcome. She felt responsible to help.

Not wanting him to get the idea that she herself might be dangerous, she took care to keep the little Colt out of sight as they got inside her truck and told him to just scoot her old boots out of the way on the floorboard.

In the low glow of the overhead light, her first impressions of him were immediately confirmed. He was young and thin,
and, more, he was very handsome. Inside the confines of the cab, he seemed even taller than she had first judged. He sort of folded himself into the seat and sat gingerly and all compressed, like a person does when they’re uncertain of touching the furniture. Or as if not certain what to do with himself.

His face was a pasty color, she saw just before he closed the door and the light went out. As she shifted into gear and started off, she decided not to replace the gun in its pocket but tucked it beside her thigh, near at hand.

Then she experienced a little panic, remembering her recent maneuverings and Lulu in the trailer. Stopping more quickly than she had intended, she threw the lever into park and opened the door at the same time. The stranger looked at her with a startled expression.

“I’ll be right back. I have to check my mare.”

She had forgotten the puppy, too. He stretched over the side of the truck bed, sniffing eagerly as she passed. She thought that she was picking them up all over the place this night.

She flipped on the interior trailer lights and saw Lulu’s form through the screen. Stepping on the running board, she looked inside, making certain the mare was on all four strong legs. Lulu gave her what amounted to an accusing look when she did not receive a Twinkie cake.

Relieved, Rainey returned to the truck, which rumbled softly. She suddenly felt very foolish—
why, he might have jumped behind the wheel and driven off, with her truck and her horse
.

Then, when she opened the driver’s door and the overhead light came on, she found herself looking at her daddy’s little Colt resting in the man’s wide palm.

“I believe this is yours,” he said, stretching it toward her.

She stared at it.

He said, “An offhand thought is that you might need to keep your gun out of the hands of the person who is the threat.”

“Thank you,” she said with inordinate politeness, taking the gun from him as she slipped behind the wheel.

He nodded and sank back, resting his head on the seat back.

She replaced the gun in its pocket and shifted into gear, heading on down the highway.

“Where would you like me to drop you?” she asked.

“Wherever you’re headed will be fine,” he said.

The very weariness in his voice caused her to look at his face in the shadow, his head back and his shoulders sagging. She herself had felt such weariness. It was more than of the present moment, but went bone deep and encompassed a weariness of all of life.

She said slowly, “I’m goin’ up to Childress, but I’m goin’
through
Abilene, if you want to go there. It’s probably the first town where anything’s goin’ to be open.”

“Okay,” he said.

So there she was, going down the road, with a stranger who appeared to have no better direction than she did. As the big diesel engine wound out and picked up speed, the accelerator suddenly seemed harder to push. The truck acted as if it had taken on an enormous addition of weight and was having a hard time getting going.

The puppy came up on the back window with a pretty good thud, but the stranger didn’t so much as twitch. He’d folded his arms and slumped down in the seat, his eyes closed.

She drove on down the highway, peering through the wind-shield as far ahead as the glow of the headlights cut the dark.

He had fallen fast asleep. Thinking that the wind might be a bit too much on him, she pushed the button, closing his window. He didn’t move.

A few seconds later she caught a scent—not alcohol, as she had continued to suspect, but some expensive, alluring men’s cologne that made her shift in her seat.

When she drove through a small sleeping town with a single empty main street, she slowed beneath the pole lamps, trying to get a better look at her passenger. His hair was dark and thick, long on the top and combed straight back from his face.

She thought him good-looking, but with his eyes closed, he seemed a little refined for her taste, which had the poor tendency to run toward tough-looking men. Robert had been six foot and thick, with a big crooked nose, and Monte had the sort of wild dangerous look to him that made women lose their good sense.

She judged him to be at least thirty. She made this assumption more from his shoulders, which were those of a man in his prime, than from his face, which could have been as young as twenty-five. It was so hard to tell people’s ages these days.

She guessed that whatever this stranger did was indoors; his face was smooth, and she suspected he had the type of careful tan a person would get from a golf course or tennis court. Maybe a week in the Bahamas. His shirt beneath his sport coat was the fashionable no-collar type, silk or some fine cotton, and the watch on his wrist looked most definitely expensive. No wedding band, although that didn’t mean he wasn’t married. Robert had broken out from every ring she had given him, and Monte had simply removed his most of the time, using the excuse that wearing a ring in the oil fields was too dangerous.

A lawyer or stockbroker, she thought. His car would be either a Mercedes or a BMW. On another look she thought that he might be a scientist of some sort. Where this idea came from she couldn’t say, but there was an aura of confused intelligence about him, a professor, perhaps, but since Robert had become a professor, she generally didn’t like to think about them.

The truck did not ride like a Mercedes, and while crossing a railroad track, her passenger bounced severely, causing his arm to flop out.

At that point she left off worrying about him being a professor, and her mind sped quickly over how he had seemed spaced out, certainly unsteady, how his face had been pasty, and then he’d fallen almost immediately to sleep.

She became concerned that he had fallen into a coma, or, worse, possibly died right there in her seat. He had, after all, just come out of a car wreck.

Alarmed, she glanced repeatedly at his chest. She thought she spied movement, but that would not rule out a coma. She wondered how far away a hospital might be, and how she would explain coming up with a dying or possibly dead stranger in her truck.

Charlene had often accused her and Mama of being morbid and dwelling far too much on death. They didn’t consider themselves morbid so much as down to earth. Death was a part of life. Rainey didn’t fear it or find it untouchable, while Charlene could hardly bring herself to go to a funeral.

In fact, her sister had gone to only one funeral in her entire life, and that was Mama’s. Even then she’d had to get up in the middle of the graveside part of the service and go down to the limousine, where she stood bawling and shredding Kleenex.

Mama and Rainey, on the other hand, dealt with all sick and dying family members, as well as horses, dogs, cats and once a pet parrot. Any animal that needed to be put down, she or Mama were called in to handle it. Mama’d had her own vet supplies, and she would give the animal a shot, while Rainey held its head.

At twelve, she had helped her mother care for her grandfather,
who spent his final six months in bed in their living room. She would sit with him and tell him the color of the sky and the trees, because he’d gone blind by then. The last week of his life, he slipped into a coma, and she sat and told him the color of the sky in detail and the latest report of farm market prices, which had always been his special interest.

Charlene, who’d still been at home then, would run through the living room as long as their grandfather was there. She threw a fit about Rainey being allowed to sit with him, especially when he had gone into a coma. She maintained that Rainey was too young to endure such a thing. She just about came undone when she found out Rainey had been sitting there holding his hand when he died.

“Good God, she will be scarred for life, bein’ exposed to all this sickness and death,” Charlene said.

Rather than being scarred, what Rainey had discovered early was a gift for taking care of people. Her job at Blaine’s Drugstore often required she deliver prescriptions, and along with the bags of medicine she would dispense sympathetic care, too, if needed.

That was how she met Monte. He was laid up with a leg broken in three places from rolling a motorcycle and was all alone in his studio apartment above Mr. Ryder’s garage behind the auto parts store. When she delivered his pain prescription, she had to go in, get a glass of water and put the pill right in Monte’s hand. He had no one at all to care for him, which was amazing, considering all the women he had after they were married. Maybe she had simply been the first female to walk through the door that afternoon.

She had stayed to get him something to eat and straighten up his place.

She had been ripe for Monte. She had begun to think of going back to school to be a nurse, when she married
Monte instead. Mama said being married to Monte worked out to be the same thing as being a nurse. She meant nursemaid.

That was the type of man that she always seemed to find. She looked over at her passenger. He was slumped down more than ever.

Reaching out, she gave him a tentative push on his arm. He stirred, and although he didn’t awaken, she felt confident that he wasn’t dead. She would find out if he was in a coma when she reached Abilene.

Continuing on along the lonesome Texas road beneath the stars and the half-moon, with the stranger’s faint scent around her, she wondered about him in the natural way of a woman without a man wonders. How had he come to be stranded along the road? What did he do for a living? Did he have a girlfriend or was he married? What might he be like in bed?

Sweet Circumstance

I
n Abilene she pulled into a Texaco Star Mart; it was one of those brand-new big ones being built all over the place. Several cars sat at the fuel islands, and several more were parked in front of the store. Rainey pulled her rig to the side, where it wouldn’t block traffic.

Thankfully, her stranger’s eyes fluttered when she shook him.

“Wake up. We’re in Abilene,” she said, giving his arm a rather forceful shake.

His eyes opened. They were smoky in the fluorescent light that reached them from outside.

“We’re in Abilene,” she told him again and studied his eyes, worry rising quickly. At first he looked a little confused, and then he looked frantic.

Giving out a groan, he fumbled to open the door and threw himself out, where he immediately went to vomiting.

She thought to grab napkins from the glove box, stuffed the pocket Bible back inside, and hurried around to him.

He was a pitiful sight, bent over by his cramped stomach. The puppy was hanging way over the side of the truck, sniffing. Concerned that the dog would jump down, she stepped over to shove him back. At that particular moment, she got a good look at the stranger’s head in the silvery glow, and her own stomach constricted.

“Did you know your head is bloody?”

It was on the right side, which was why she hadn’t seen it in the light of the truck cab. It looked the same as a big grease spot, but she knew it was blood.

He looked at her with a mixture of confusion and surprise. He felt gingerly around his head and then looked at his fingers.

She was immensely glad she had picked him up. At least she had done the right thing there.

Peering harder at the blood spot, she said, “It looks like it’s dryin’.”

She handed him a napkin to wipe his mouth. He wiped his fingers instead, so she handed him another and suggested he sit on the running board of the trailer, while she got a bottle of water from behind the truck seat.

“Here.” She handed him the bottle.

He tilted the bottle upward, swished water in his mouth and spat it out in a forceful stream. She regarded the action as a hopeful sign that he was okay, although the way he dropped his head did not seem altogether positive.

She stared at him, and her mind went far astray thinking how undoubtedly his car had gone off the road in a split second, just as it had been a split second when she had almost run him down while she’d been lost in thought and music.

How quickly things could happen, lives go all askew, when one was just going along.

Bringing herself back to the present, she took the bottle of
water from his hand, wet a couple of napkins and handed them to him to cool his face. He said a hoarse thank-you.

Thinking it prudent to get an assessment of the wound, she boldly bent close and gently parted his hair with her fingernails. “You have a pretty good goose egg here,” she said.

Blood matted a spot about the size of a silver dollar. Luckily it was on the hard bone well above his temple. His hair was silky, thick and the color of mahogany. She felt the life of him beneath her fingers and her nose.

“We’d best get you to the hospital,” she said, quickly stepping back.

“I’m all right. I don’t need to go to a hospital.”

He spoke in a drained voice that was hardly assuring. She did not think she should take his word for his condition.

“Oh, I really think you had better.”

“I’ll be all right. I just need a few minutes,” he said in a sudden sharp manner that she did not think was called for.

She clamped her mouth tight against a retort. And as she couldn’t see wrestling him into her truck to rush him to the hospital, she waited for him to either collapse or to regain what she considered full composure.

Another minute and he took the bottle of water from her and again rinsed his mouth several times, each time spitting out the water in a forceful manner that succeeded in greatly easing her tension. Obviously he had enough strength that he was not likely to die any moment. Although there could be long-term ramifications from a good blow to the head.

“I think you could have a concussion. You passed out in my truck and threw up. Those are definite signs.”

“I slept,” he said, this time taking a swallow of the water.

She watched him for a long minute, and then she said, “You should go to the emergency room, and the police can be called
from there. You’ll need to report your car. And possibly we should report about my almost running you down. I might have added to your injury.”

It probably wasn’t too sterling on her part, but she did think drearily about a big rise in her insurance premiums; undoubtedly his insurance company would find a way to put a lot of it on her. It was seeming like a bigger mess all the time. She imagined a hospital, the empty halls at this time of night, painful fluorescent lights, and reams of forms to be filled out. They would likely be there all night.

The next instant she noticed him looking up at her, his expression saying clearly that he considered her a very bossy woman. She might have jumped in with a good comment that these things really needed to be done, but a Trans Am flying around the rear of the trailer distracted her. The sporty black car, music booming, zipped up to stop with a squeal of tires in front of the nearest fuel pump, an action that irritated Rainey no end. She didn’t know why people had to speed into gas stations. Had she been crossing the lot, she could have been run over.

Then her stranger—somewhere along the line she had started thinking of him as
her
stranger—suddenly stood.

“I’ll just go in to the men’s room there and wash up,” he said, indicating the store. He started away, rounding the Trans Am and fuel island with a stiff but steady enough stride.

She snatched her purse from the truck and hurried after him, asking, “Are you sure you should move a lot?” She tried to get close enough to be ready should something happen, like his keeling over, and when he stopped to open the door, she was so close that she bumped up against him.

“I’ll be fine, if you don’t manage to knock me down,” he said and went on into the men’s room.

She took the opportunity to go into the ladies’ room, where she combed her wind-blown hair. If she had one vanity, it was her hair, her best feature in her own and everyone else’s estimation; auburn, verging on true red in the sunlight, it waved and swirled to her shoulders. It always seemed to draw a man’s eye. She checked her makeup to make certain she didn’t have any mascara smudges, and she freshened her lipstick, a natural dusky peach. With relief, she noted that the finish on her fingernails still looked respectable. There were few things she disliked more than tacky chipped nails.

When she emerged from the ladies’ room, she saw her passenger walking down one of the aisles. Going directly to him, she noted that he appeared to have regained his full strength. His hair was damp, freshly combed back and shiny.

“Do you feel better?” she asked. In that split second she realized she was as disappointed as she was relieved—her ministrations would not be needed.

When he turned to her, she saw that his eyes were a soft brown, like a buckeye seed, with very long lashes for a man. They had cleared completely, but she was somewhat jolted by a shadow of sadness within them.

“I’m okay,” he said, averting his eyes. “Except for a headache.” He took a box of ibuprofen from the shelf.

“Maybe you shouldn’t take any before you see a doctor—in case you have a concussion.”

“I’m awake and responsive, and I have a headache,” he said, then walked to the counter to pay.

She went slowly after him, feeling a disquieting sensation—a sense of being dragged along by circumstances that wanted to get out of hand. She watched him shake three ibuprofen tablets
into his wide palm and pop them into his mouth before she could point out that the directions on the bottle said one, two maximum, unless instructed by a physician.

She halfway expected him to start coughing, the pills lodging in his dry throat. Then she realized that he was very tall. She herself was just over five foot six, and she was looking up at him. A thick strand of his dark hair had fallen down over his forehead. He rubbed his hand over the back of his hair in an absentminded manner.

Still a little concerned about the ibuprofen, she suggested a snack. He tersely declined food of any sort but said he would have some coffee. He stepped to the coffeemaker, but she was closer and got it for him, while he stood beside her. She got herself a Coke. He dug into his pocket for money to pay, but she came up with bills first. After she paid, she turned to see him frowning at her. He said a brusque, “Thank you,” and she said equally tersely, “No problem.”

Without further comment, they took their drinks back out to her rig. Okay, Lord, now what? Rainey thought. How did she manage to get herself into such situations? It occurred to her that she didn’t know his name.

When the puppy yipped at them as they approached, she recalled him with some surprise. He had shown amazing restraint in not getting out of the truck. She thought that if he got out, she could just drive off and leave him. He probably had that all figured out.

Turning, she went to check Lulu, feeling a little guilty for not looking in on the mare first thing upon stopping. Lulu was dozing and disinclined to stir enough to look out the open window, once she saw there was no forthcoming Twinkie.

Rainey returned to her pickup, where her stranger stood looking down the street and again stroking the back of his hair in that absentminded fashion.

“My name’s Rainey Valentine,” she said.

He blinked, then gave his name as “Harry Furneaux” and offered his hand. She thought the name suited him perfectly.

“Do you remember the accident? Do you know how it happened?”

He nodded. “Deer in the road—a line of them came running across in my lights. I swerved to avoid them, hit the gravel, I guess.”

“Deer can total a car. One of my friends had one come through the windshield and almost kill her.”

He repeatedly raked his hand through his thick hair. “My head feels like a watermelon.”

“Jell-O gettin’ old,” she offered. “That’s what my ex-husband Monte said when he hit his head once. He fell off an oil rig and was knocked out, and when he came to, he was muddled for half the day, wasn’t even certain who I was.”

Watching him, her anxiety began to rise again. “You really should see a doctor. Vomiting like you did could mean a concussion, and there can be long-term ramifications from a blow on the head. We should make a report to a doctor and the police, so that there’s an official record for my insurance company.”

“There’s no need,” he said and downed the final bit of his coffee. “I’m fine. See—one finger, two fingers. I’m at a convenience store in Texas, America, and I don’t think I’m the President or God. I’m not, am I?”

“No.”

“There. The doctor would say take aspirin and rest, and I’m doin’ that, so there’s nothin’ more to be done.”

She thought that he had the best command of sarcasm of anyone she had ever known, not counting her mother.

He also had a stubborn look that she thought was really pushing it, considering the circumstances; however, she had to
agree with his point. Rest and aspirin had been about all the doctors had told Monte to do, too.

And she did not consider his attitude about not wanting to go to a hospital uncommon. All the men she had known had an aversion to hospitals. With the exception of her mother’s death, her father had steadfastly refused to even set foot in one, even when each of his children had been born. When Robert had had his appendicitis attack, he’d lain around moaning and groaning for half a day before giving in and letting her take him to an emergency room, where he’d had to go directly into surgery. Monte, who had climbed oil rigs for a living and raced Harleys for self-expression, had been inclined to run on seeing a nurse with a needle.

“Look,” her stranger said then. “I appreciate you picking me up out there.”

“You’re welcome.”

They gazed at each other. Rainey felt a quickening inside herself, a very strong sense that she did not want to quit looking at him. As she tried to hide it, she wondered what was called for on her part, and what was behind the sad weariness in his beautiful brown eyes. And what it might feel like to kiss his lips.

“What are you goin’ to do about your car?” she asked, averting her eyes to sip on her Coke. “Don’t you think you need to make a report to the police for insurance purposes?”

“I think it’s fairly evident that I crashed.” He was looking in the distance again. “The car’s not going anywhere. I’ll call someone to go get it tomorrow.”

So he was not concerned about his car.

“Do you think you could drive me to a motel?” he asked.

“A motel?” She had an odd difficulty imagining any point beyond that moment in the Texaco parking lot.

Then, before they could proceed with their conversation any
further, a fight broke out over at the Trans Am that was still beside the fuel pumps. There were four young men, of the type that wore lots of black clothing and silver rings in their ears and on their fingers. Two of them immediately went to blows. Rainey recognized one as being the driver of the Trans Am.

It was a very short-lived altercation, breaking up before anyone could step in, when the driver of the Trans Am was punched in the nose and cried out and turned away. Two young men drove off in a roaring Mustang, leaving the injured young man on his knees on the pavement, his friend hovering over him.

Rainey immediately got the napkins from her glove box and hurried toward him. A clerk came jogging out of the store. The young man—boy was what Rainey thought—was holding his nose and crying that he was bleeding to death.

“It just seems that way,” she told him, pulling his hands from his nose and stuffing napkins in their place. Blood was indeed gushing in an alarming amount.

Then her stranger was beside her. “Here…put this penny under your upper lip,” he instructed, and when the boy fumbled, her stranger did it himself, while the young man looked at him with wide, teary eyes. Her stranger told the young man to press hard on the penny and hold his head back and that the bleeding would quickly stop.