Hitching to Nebraska

by Cynjen

I was walking. The sun had reached a point on the horizon that could be legitimately described as low; the hot, dusty day sinking slowly into night. I walked onwards beside the highway, the vague hope of finding shelter becoming more substantial with each passing hour. Deserted fields stretched in every direction, not a farmhouse or gas station in sight; no signs that the desert had been discovered by man except for the sweltering tarmac to the right of me and the neatly ploughed furrows in the dirt to my left. I paused to shift the weight of my bag from one shoulder to two, knowing that it would only be a matter of time before it slipped again. Restraining myself from looking at my watch, I indulged the image of my mother's rage at my inability to call her, to tell her where I was. She wanted me home; now, with night drawing in and my belly beginning to growl, being there didn't seem like the bad idea it had when I set out.

A rumble in the distance behind me made me stop again. Shading my eyes against the setting sun, I caught sight of a tanker rolling inexorably towards me across the grim landscape. Immediately, I was jumping and shouting, thumbs jerking in the international sign-language of hitchhiking. "Hey! Stop! Please!" I thought I would yell myself hoarse, and hoped against hope that he would take pity on a single, scraggy, feckless youth. The huge truck bore down upon me and I was beginning to believe he would pass me by when the pitch of the engine dropped and the giant beast shuddered to a halt beside me. With a sigh of relief, I read the company name on the cabin door. 'Metcalf Milk, Coylan, NA.'

I opened the door and looked up at the driver. He was a strange looking man; gray, sagging skin on the stereotypically large body of a trucker gave the appearance that he had once been much larger, but his face had a slimness that betrayed his weight as something that, if not recent, had not been with him all his life. He was middle-aged going on old, his craggy face imbued with a sharp intelligence that belied his slow, slothful body.

"Hey," he said, his voice thick and deep but friendly. "Where you headed?" His accent was unfamiliar to me -- slightly Latin, perhaps, but thinned by years of speaking English.

"Deersbrook," I said with a smile which must have betrayed my delight in being picked up. "If you're going to Coylan, I can catch a bus from there."

He cocked his head. "Sure," he said. "Hop in."

The cab was rumpled, but not dirty. He cleared some candy wrappers from the passenger seat as I climbed in and as I sat, my feet crunched more of them on the floor. The windshield carried some dust, but not of the ingrained variety. As soon as I shut the door, he touched his foot to the accelerator and the behemoth lumbered forward again.

"My name's Jack," I offered.

"Angelo," he replied. "We'll be in Coylan before dawn."

The sky was already much darker than it had been not a half hour before, clouds lowering after a hot day, thunderheads closing in from the east.

"Thanks for the ride," I said by way of conversation. "I don't know what I'd've done outside tonight."

"That storm's been following me all the way from Utah," he grunted. "It ain't goin' to break till we hit Route 80."

My eye caught a photograph on the dashboard, maybe thirty-five, even forty years old from the clothes the kids were wearing. It was two guys and a girl -- a gorgeous blonde with hair that still shone, lustrous, and a captivating smile beaming out at us from history.

"Who's that?" I asked.

--------------------

:flash: Jubilee, pitching to Ev on the third strike.

:flash: Monet, modelling her latest glare.

:flash: Jono, spoon-feeding Paige chicken soup.

:flash: Ev, showing off his signed Rams' Superbowl shirt.

:flash: Paige, dressed up for the senior prom.

:flash: Jubilee, in mid-rotation above the asymmetric bars.

:flash::flash::flash:

--------------------

He laughed; a short, gruff, unexpected noise. "That's me an' some friends of mine in high school. I'm the skinny nino on the left."

I looked. Sure enough, the grey, fat, old guy next to me bore the same facial structure and sarcastic grin as the thin, relaxed character with his arm around the blonde. "And her?"

"Her name was Paige. We dated for a while," he said briefly. "The other guy is Jonothon." He was a tall, gaunt man-boy, dressed solely in black, with what looked like a scarf around his lower face. "He was pretty much the best friend I ever had; we lost contact after college. But we had a great time in high school. Never a dull moment." He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. "You interested, or just making conversation?"

I admitted that I was actually interested and his face stretched into a wide, elastic grin. "I've got a load of pictures," he said. "You don't get much company on the road." He reached down into the cab door's side pocket without his eyes leaving the road and pulled out a book. I took it and laid it open in my lap. Photographs of varying sizes spilt from every page; some seemed to have been stuck down at some time, but had come away from the paper leaving dried-glue shadows behind them. "They're all mixed up, but I think I wrote on the backs of most of 'em."

I gathered together a bundle of the pictures and arranged them into an orderly pile. Beside me I heard a faint snort. "You're one of those tidy people?"

"I like things to be organised, yeah."

"Ah, there's nothing to be ashamed of. Tidy people have a lot to offer the world."

There was silence for a while as I skimmed the first few snaps. Initially, Paige and Jonothon featured, then the focus switched to a Chinese girl. I held up a picture. "Who's she?"

He glanced sideways momentarily before returning his gaze to the road. We had passed onto Route 80 and, as he had predicted, the clouds were beginning to send down their rain, at first only drop by drop, but within no time, by the bucket-load. "Jubilee, we called her. She was hot." A smile of memory crossed his face. "A real firecracker. It was kind of a tradition with her adopted family to be in that school and she was so territorial with new kids. A practical joker, too. One time we'd been getting hassle from the locals and we knew they'd be comin' up on Hallowe'en to egg us, so we waited for them in the driveway. Jono was a burning skeleton, I was a dripping mummy, Monet -- that's the sleek Algerian girl, there's a couple of pictures of her -- picked up their truck -- she was really strong -- and Jubilee, who planned it all, did her firecracker thing and dazzled 'em. That was one classy prank."

I smiled along with him. "Why were they hassling you?"

"We were...it was very exclusive. You'll find a photo of the buildings in there, too. It's your typical private school."

I was surprised. "It was a private school? I don't mean to be rude, but..."

"You weren't expecting a Latino truck driver to have gone to a school like that?" He laughed again, unnervingly.

"No," I admitted, shamefaced.

"Well, that's what the school was like. It was devoted to confounding people's expectations, showin' them that there was more to people than could be judged from first sight. I went to college, too, you know. Up in New York. Majored in crystallography." He paused. "Went to work back in California in a chemicals plant. Dios, but I hated that job. I've never been so brain-numbingly bored in my life, and the cretins I worked for..." He sighed. "Went and got trained up as a computer analyst instead; moved to Nebraska. Then the bottom fell out of the computer industry -- remember, when they brought in all that biotech? Nah, you're probably too young. Couldn't afford to go back to college and retrain again. Got the first job I could lay my hands on -- driving this truck. Been doing it fifteen years, now."

"You going to do it forever?"

He sighed, his body sagging heavily into the upholstery. "It's not a bad job. Some people just can't stick it; their families can't cope with the hours. I don't have that problem -- no family at home to go back to." He sounded bitter but resigned to his situation.

"You never married?" I asked carefully.

"Yeah, I married." He was silent for a while. I hoped to God I hadn't offended him, knowing my mother's reaction any time her first marriage was mentioned. The rain struck the windshield in sheets, noisily filling the awkwardness. I was preparing to change the subject when he spoke again, quietly. "I married in college. She left me for a mailman from Omaha twenty years ago. We were together twelve years."

I shifted uncomfortably. "Sorry, man."

He looked a me for a moment. "Hey, no problem. It happened." After a second the elastic grin appeared again. "You're not travelling cross-country for some girl, are you?"

I blinked. "No," I said. "My mom's burying my step-dad."

He nodded. "Ah, you are, then. But moms are allowed."

I flicked through more of the pictures as he drove us closer to our destinations. They showed the Algerian girl, Monet, disdainfully posing with Jubilee and another guy -- Everett, from the note on the back. Then the school he'd talked about, truly as magnificent as any Ivy League college. Pictures and pictures of a teenager's life; baseball games, parties, field trips and graduation. Thirty-five years gone, and he was living in his memories. I repressed the urge to ask what was up with that and carried on skimming, a once-keen voyeur disturbed by what I saw.

We pulled into a gas station and I excused myself to the bathroom.

--------------------

:snip: Her head, her thick pink locks.

:snip: Her body, swathed in silk scarves on our wedding night.

:snip: The whole picture, a sickening reminder of perfection.

:snip::snip::snip:

--------------------

When I climbed back in, he was looking through the photographs himself. "Sorry they're all high school ones," he said. "College and after were mainly of my wife... I don't keep them around."

"Understandable," I said.

"It's not that I'm not over her, you know..." He trailed off, realising he was protesting too much. I desperately grasped for a change in conversation, loathe to have to listen to a grown man justify his failed life. "You majored in Crystallography?" I started. "What's that about?"

"Crystals," he snorted, as he started up the tanker again. "Really, it's not that interesting. You at college?"

I nodded. "Journalism."

"Ahh." He smiled the smile of history. "Yeah, I thought about doing that; my English wasn't good enough. It's a good profession."

I blinked, deja vu creeping up my spine. An unbidden image of my mother, frowning as she waved me goodbye, rose in my mind's eye and I had to shiver to dispel the awkward residue of our last meeting. "I'm enjoying it a lot, actually. My mom wasn't too keen on me doing it -- she wanted me to be a doc or something."

"Heh, don't all moms?"

"She was pretty cool about it, though. Some kids have a really tough time persuading their parents that it's better to do a course they're interested in than something that'll make them look smart."

"Yeah, and some parents have a tough time convincing their kids to do something they're good at, rather than something they think will make them look smart. At least, that how it was with some of my friends. Well, Paige, anyway."

"What did she want to do?"

"She wanted to emulate her brother, go to the university he had gone to, that sort of thing. Ended up becoming a teacher, of physics, I think. Last I heard she was teaching at our old high school."

I nodded and murmured a noncommittal 'cool' and we lapsed into silence again. The rain on the windshield was hardly being swept away by the wipers before more blocked the view. Angelo was hunched over the wheel, peering out into the night, utterly concentrated on his driving. I contented myself with listening to the fall of the raindrops on the outside of the cab, a noise with no rhythm, like static.

I closed my eyes and made pictures from the noise. I thought of my mother and our continual battles, of my step-dad and his utter silence. And I remembered my childhood, my happy childhood, before I discovered that my parents were real people too. My mom had had a life before me, before 'dad', and I struggled with it. So I had no maternal family, was that too unusual? So my mom had an old suitcase without a key, so she seemed to get the most extravagant haircuts, even when we had no money to spare...my mom was an enigma. My mom...

After a long while, he spoke again. I had become drowsy and my head jerked up so sharply, I almost missed his question.

"So, were you close to your stepfather?"

"Not particularly. He resented not being my biological dad. But mom loved him, and all that, so I have to make the trip. Although mom and I haven't been that close for a while, either."

"Were they married long?"

It seemed to me he more didn't like the weather's lulling tones than felt a need to know my family history, so I just talked until my mouth got dry. "She married him when I was age two, so I don't remember a home life without him. Actually, I thought for a long time he was my dad, because she never referred to my real one; I only found out a few years ago, when I was filling out some forms and I had to dig out my birth certificate. It turns out she first registered me with my biological dad's surname, though she'd left the 'father's name' part blank, then changed it to my step-dad's a few months later. And get this: my step-grandma then told me that mom and my step-dad were seeing each other, (even got engaged!) before my biological dad knew anything about it. Since that revelation, home-life hasn't been the most nurturing environment, if you know what I mean..."

--------------------

:flick: Light; my wife in bed with another man.

:flick: Dark; my wife still in bed with another man.

:flick: Light; enough to hot-wire her lover's car.

:flick: Dark; enough to crash her lover's car.

:flick: Light; an empty motel room all to myself.

:flick: Dark; an empty motel bed all to myself.

:flick::flick::flick:

--------------------

He snorted, a half-pained, half-amused sound. "Yeah, I know what you mean. You ever meet your real dad?"

"No, I guess I never felt the need. And Mom would've thrown me out if I'd tried." I remembered her tear-stricken face the one time I'd suggested it. She screamed at me like a banshee and told me never to mention 'that man' again. I only knew his surname, anyway, so I couldn't imagine getting far.

"Maybe when you're a father yourself, you might want to know." He spoke quietly, a kind of choked-up longing in his throat.

"Yeah," I agreed, "but I'm not in a hurry."

There was a crack of lightening and he diverted all his attention back to the road. "We're nearly in Coylan. I'll drop you on the corner of Tanton Heights and Main."

I nodded. The bus station was only two minutes walk along Main Street; the milk depot was the other end of the Heights, which ran all the way through town. I was nearly home and thanked my luck for finding me such a convenient ride.

The next thirty minutes dragged, but finally he was pulling up beside the familiar dinginess of the 24-hour 'Lion's Main' cafe. He stopped the engine and, looking me square in the face, said, "You've been great company, kid. If you're ever in Coylan again, look me up and we'll go for a drink."

From anyone else, this would just have been a friendly way of saying 'goodbye', but he seemed so genuine that I couldn't help but accept. "I will," I said, smiling, "except I'm going to need to know your last name. I can't really go around Coylan just asking for 'Angelo'."

"Espinosa," he said. "I'm Angelo Espinosa."

The world stopped and I was paralysed.

After what seemed an age and a half, I got control of my limbs again and jumped down from the cab into the driving rain, heart pounding. "Thanks," I said, as he threw me my bag.

"My pleasure," he smiled. "Really."

He started to shut the door but I put my hand on it to stop him. Taking a deep breath, I asked, "What was your wife's name?"

He looked at me hard for a moment, his grey eyes more piercing than I had expected. "Gaia Romani."

I nodded, a twenty-year jigsaw fitting into place. "I thought so," I said, casually. "She's my mom." I took my hand off the door and I walked away, waving over my shoulder.

He called after me, his voice battling the screaming winds with terminal futility. "What did you say? Jack? What did you say?"

I kept walking.

---End---

back to Cynjen's stories | X-Men archive | comicfic.net