I forget the
name of the guy who was driving. I remember his face and
his red hair, but I can’t remember his name anymore. The
other guy, who was also sitting up front and knew the way,
was Red’s friend, but Red didn’t introduce us when we swung
by his place to pick him up. So obviously I couldn’t tell
you his name either, seeing as I never knew it.
Red was driving
like a maniac. His friend kept telling him he knew the way
and we’d be on time, but it didn’t make a difference, and
Red said if we kept distracting him we’d all wind up in an
accident with our faces half scraped off and miss the best
part of the party.
So his friend
quit giving him advice and started just giving him directions.
We left town
and passed through the ugly neighborhoods out east that depress
me every time because they remind me of my grandmother with
Alzheimer’s.
Then we headed
down this bullshit county road that kept turning right and
left, I think me and Red’s friend both wanted to hurl. But
we were afraid to tell Red to slow down. Besides, it was
getting dark and that was making him nervous. To him, all
that darkness meant we were definitely going to be late,
and there wouldn’t be anything left to eat but cold pizza
and a few stupid anchovies.
After a while
Red’s friend asked him to pull over so he could check his
map.
That drove
Red wild. He slammed on the brakes, got out of the car, and
started screaming at his friend, who was supposed to have
been there before and know the way. His friend replied that
he hadn’t come to get yelled at, and he just needed two minutes
to check the map or no one was getting to the damn party
before dawn.
That didn’t
exactly chill Red out, but he shut up and got back in the
car. He asked me for a cigarette, I said I didn’t smoke,
then he called me a total asshole and said I’d wind up fucking
my health over completely by not smoking.
His friend
sat back down. “In a mile or so, there’s gonna be a weird
tree that looks like a hitchhiker; that’ll be a landmark.”
I said it was
so dark we wouldn’t see the tree and that with all this,
we were totally going to miss the party.
Red said I
was an asshole.
His friend
told me to shut up.
After
a while we still hadn’t seen the tree. Red was quiet but that didn’t
exactly put me at ease. His friend was getting more and more
nervous, staring holes into his map, and at one point I thought
I heard him mutter a prayer that we’d pass some place he
recognized.
I just stared
out the window at the fields all black in the night, counting
the first fireflies the car sent waltzing past the fences.
“You’re a fucking
asshole. You know how much going to this party cost me?” Red
said to his friend.
“I bet it hasn’t
even started yet,” his friend said quietly.
“I bet they’ve
eaten everything already. And it’s all your fault.”
They were yelling
at each other when, in the headlights, I saw what looked
like a really tall blonde girl trying to hitch a ride.
“Hey,” said
Red’s friend, sitting up.
“What?”
“Didn’t you
see that, on the side of the road?”
“I didn’t see
a thing.”
“It looked
like this really tall blonde girl trying to hitch a ride.”
“So?”
“So it’d be
nice to give her one.”
“We’re in a
hurry, we’re not giving her a thing.”
“But a girl
like that could run into some psycho who’d have his own party
all over her. We could save her from that.”
“Plus maybe
she’s going to the party and she knows the way,” I chimed
in.
“Yeah,” said
Red’s friend, “maybe she even knows a shortcut.”
So Red finally
said all right, we’ll go back and pick her up, but if this
blonde held us up he’d ditch us there and go to the party
by himself.
We turned around
and headed back; Red already seemed to be sorry he’d listened
to us. His friend and me kept our eyes on the side of the
road for the hitchhiker.
We’d passed
the point where I first spotted her without seeing a thing.
My blood ran cold; I was already picturing Red hauling us
out of the car.
“So where’s
your tall blonde now?” Red said in a low voice.
Since we didn’t
say anything, he slowed down. “Well, you’re about to try
and hitch a ride just like her.”
Then his friend
started yelling, “There she is! There she is! We just passed
her, she’s back there!”
Red hit the
brakes and looked. “Can’t see a thing.”
“That’s ‘cause
it’s dark out, I saw her in the headlights, she’s just behind
us,” said his friend, getting more and more worked up.
Red was pissed
off, but he put it in reverse and started back.
“Uh, you might
want to turn around.”
“I’m turned
the fuck around!” Just then we heard a muffled thump out
back and felt the car rolling over something.
“Shit!” said
Red, stopping.
“Shit,” said
his friend.
We all got
out, Red with a flashlight, and went to check out the rear
end. There was nothing, the bumper was just dented a little.
“I thought
we ran something over after hitting it.”
Red got down
and looked under the car. “Oh, shit. The blonde, I hit the
blonde.”
His friend
and I got down and saw a tall blonde lying under the car.
“We have to
get her out of there,” said Red’s friend, lying down and
trying to grab a piece of the girl.
She was in
kind of bad shape. She was bent in half all wrong, totally
flattened, demolished, except her thumb, which was still
stuck out. It was the only thing funny in this picture.
“That’s gross,” said
Red’s friend.
Red looked
really bad. “So what are you gonna do now? Got any other
great ideas to get us in deeper shit?”
“With all this
they’re gonna accuse us of doing things to her before knocking
her off,” said the friend, who was starting to lose his shit.
“You have a
twisted mind,” I told him.
“That’s how
cops think. Twisted cops, all cops are twisted. If we call
them, we’re screwed.”
“At any rate
we’re not gonna waste any more time, because I’ve got a party
to get to, and all this bullshit is making me late. So you
figure it out, because I’m outta here in two minutes,” said
Red.
“Best thing
would be to put her in the trunk and we’ll think about it
later,” I suggested.
Since Red’s
friend seemed OK with that, we opened the truck. The blonde
was oddly heavy, and made weird cracking sound like loads
of crushed-up girl parts were shifting around inside her.
Once we got
her in the trunk, Red’s friend started nosing around the
car with the flashlight.
“We can’t leave
any clues,” he said. “The smallest thing and they’ll follow
the trail all the way to us.”
I saw him checking
the ground, sometimes getting down for a closer look.
I was starting
to get sick of this shit. It was dark and cold and I didn’t
like that. But Red’s friend had scared me with all that stuff
about cops, so I started checking the ground, too.
A few yards
away I found a lock of blond hair, which I stuffed in my
pocket.
I wasn’t seeing
anything else suspicious when suddenly Red’s friend started
howling, “A PIECE OF TITTY! THERE’S A PIECE OF TITTY IN THE
MIDDLE OF THE ROAD!”
Red, who was
sitting in the car, yelled back that in a second he was out
of here, titty or no.
I walked over
to his friend and saw the white thing at his feet.
“Can you believe
it? She left her titty in the middle of the road.”
So I looked
at it, and told him he was losing his shit, since it wasn’t
a titty but a chick’s purse, the little round kind. I got
back in the car. The friend followed me, holding the purse
with a grossed-out look.
“Now she can’t
show us the way even if she knows it,” Red said.
“Maybe she
had a map on her,” I said.
Red turned
around and stared at me, furious. “You want to get her out
of the trunk and pat her down for a map?”
“Well…yeah.”
“Get it through
your head: that girl got run over by a car with the three
of us in it. Do you have any idea what it’d be like to search
a body in that condition? The thought of getting a lady’s
blood all over my hands like that makes me want to hurl.”
“We don’t have
to search her. If she had a map, it’d be in her purse,” said
Red’s friend, suddenly sitting up.
“You think
a blonde like that puts a map in a purse? A bitch like that,
her purse is for a spare pair of pantyhose and colored pencils
for her face for when she goes to the bathroom. If she had
a map, she’d keep it in a pocket or she’d have lost it long
ago,” Red said.
His friend
opened the purse anyway and rummaged around.
“Well?”
“Nothing. Not
even a pair of pantyhose. Just a box of mints and her ID,
that’s all. Her name was Minitrip.”
“A chick with
bad breath,” I said.
The friend
passed out mints to me and Red, then took one for himself.
The mint taste
mingled with the country night and made me feel like it was
the middle of winter. I shivered, and thought that sucking
on a dead girl’s mints really didn’t get you much.
The car sped
down the little country road. Now it was completely dark.
A few luminescent bugs fluttered along the side of the road,
making like they wanted to follow the car. I thought bugs
that flew along after cars must be kind of like dolphins
for truck drivers.
Red’s friend
didn’t look good. He’d finished the box of mints in no time
at all, and was now all hunched up in his seat waiting for
his friend to jump on him.
For one thing,
it was starting to get really late now; you could feel it
in the air. The feeling was getting on Red’s nerves, because
he was probably thinking he was in the process of completely
missing this party he’d shelled out so much for.
All of a sudden,
he stopped by the side of the road.
The cloud of
luminescent bugs stopped too, making figure eights over us.
Red got out
of the car and opened his friend’s door.
“Get out,” he
told him.
His friend
got out.
Then he came
over and opened my door. “You get out, too. I want one of
you to get the girl out of the trunk and see if she’s got
a map.”
I wasn’t too
big on the idea, especially since I saw no reason why I should
do it.
Red and I turned
on the friend.
“You want me
to get that dead girl from the trunk and search her? That’s
the grossest thing I’ve ever heard. There’s no way I’ll be
able to do that, have you seen the state she’s in? She’s
so ugly I can’t even look at her.”
“It’s your
fault this whole night got fucked up, so you’re the one who
has to do it,” Red told his friend.
“Yeah, you
had to get us lost,” I added, since I had no desire to lay
my hands on the girl either.
I thought the
guy was going to cry. We waited for him to make up his mind
to get the girl out. He finally realized standing around
out here in cold making a fuss about it wasn’t going to help
his case, and headed around back, cussing out our mothers.
Red lit a cigarette
leaned on the hood. I shifted from one foot to the other,
watching the phosphorescent bugs make electroencephalograms
above the fences.
We heard the
guy pull the girl from the trunk and let her drop on the
ground.
Red was making
these amazing smoke rings.
Then we heard
his friend scream. “Shit, shit, shit, she’s not dead, SHE’S
NOT DEAD!”
Minitrip was
seated on the ground, her butt in a puddle of blood.
We were all
standing around her. Red, who was even more furious than
before, and his friend, who was scared stiff.
Without noticing
our presence, she was swaying back and forth with little
movements like a broken watch, blood dripping from her everywhere,
and her hair sticking to her face.
“She looks
shaky,” I said.
Red decided
to speak to her.
“Miss?” he
said.
But the girl
kept swaying back and forth.
“Maybe she’s
crazy,” said the friend.
“You’d have
to be crazy to go hitching alone at this hour,” I said.
Red wasn’t
giving up. “We’re looking for a party that’s supposed to
be somewhere around here.”
The girl rocked
without answering.
“She’s crazy.”
“She’s totally
lost it,” said his friend.
“Yeah,” I said. “A
real loony.”
The fireflies
had left for other phosphorescent adventures, taking their
strobelight frenzy with them.
I had the impression
the ambiance had fallen a few notches as a result. The girl
had stopped to-and-froing, and now sat there unmoving, her
ass in the blood.
Red made a
face that said a great deal about the state of his mood,
while his friend, I think, would rather have been turned
into a watermelon than be there.
“We’ll have
to take her to the hospital,” I said.
“Yeah, great
idea. That way when she starts talking she’ll say we flattened
her first and then we threw her in the trunk and then we
pulled her out to steal her stuff,” said the friend.
I had to admit
he wasn’t far off, and this whole business was starting to
stink.
So there we
were, wondering what to do with this hitchhiker when Red
walked around to the front of the car and came back with
the jack.
“Well, I don’t
want any part of her.” And raised the jack and brought it
down on her several times.
It made a soft
noise, and she began to scream, holding her head. He hit
her for a while, without result.
“I can’t believe
how thick her skull is.” Then he added something, but we
couldn’t hear what because the girl, who’d been so quiet,
wouldn’t stop screaming now.
“She needs
to stop. She needs to stop, now,” Red’s friend kept saying
over and over again.
I figured if
we hadn’t started hitting her in the face with the jack like
that, she would never’ve started screaming.
So Red asked
me if I really wanted to wind up in jail because of some
girl who couldn’t even hitch a ride right.
I didn’t say
anything; I knew he was right, and we had to get this over
as soon as possible.
“Best thing
to do is run her over again,” said Red.
I grabbed Minitrip
by the legs, and Red’s friend took her arms.
She’d stopped
screaming for a second, but now she started howling even
louder, like she suspected we were about to do her a bad
turn.
We laid her
out on the ground in front of the car.
Of course,
ever since the jack, the girl didn’t want to stay down anymore,
and she kept getting up only to sit back down and shield
her head with her hands.
Red’s friend
kicked her so she’d stop moving, but that only got her more
worked up. I tried to strangle her in turn. She seemed to
pass out. She remained still, not screaming or wriggling
anymore.
Red blinked
the lights to tell us he was getting impatient. We laid the
hitchhiker across the road and got back in the car.
Red started
up and drove toward the girl.
All white and
blonde like that, with red stains all over her clothes, she
looked like a little trapeze artist from the circus. The
headlight beams were like the spotlight, and the three of
us in the car were the audience.
The car rolled
over Minitrip, we felt a little bump; I told myself the trapeze
artist had smashed her face in, for good.
“This time
we’re leaving her there,” said Red. “Girls get run over every
day.”
“It should
even happen more often. Less trouble for us,” his friend
replied.
Then they started
to laugh. Me, too.
After a shitty
night like that, it’s nice to be able to relax a little.
©Editions
Julliard, Paris, 1997
# # #
