Adventures in Hitchhiking

THE DEER
by Robert Feuer

It’s cold and the streets of Guerneville are dull and vacant as I pass the tortilla joint and aim my car homeward to Camp Meeker. Double-strength headlights blind me, outlining a figure by the side of the road, her thumb held out. With another revolution of my wheels I would have been past her.

My foot slips on the clutch, the car to shuddering to a halt as I lean over and pop the passenger door open. She’s dark, younger than me by maybe 20 years, and brings me a gust of cheap, store-bought scent floating on a cloud of alcohol, as she slides across the passenger seat with a sound that thrills; cold, moist, throbbing.

She weaves and bobs as the car squeezes onto the road, her head almost falling into my lap. She has the kind of drunk on that goes all the way down to the bones and stays there.

Words come from deep down her throat but none of them fit together. Is she real or an emanation, an embodiment of something somewhere, possibly within myself. My car clings to a road that twists and turns with only the river far below to catch me.

Past a brightly-lit golf course and lodge, safely tucked in for the night, sleepers envisioning rods and balls, she keeps talking. Occasionally I catch two sentences of her story that are put together well enough to take me somewhere. Is she crying or just spilling booze from the half-pint drawn from the folds of her black skirt?

The town of Monte Rio appears around a bend. A store that once was a gas station, bright tendrils of light exploring the darkness. A Quonset hut movie theater, a broad expanse of water reflecting a full moon. A young guy drowned there the other day, bloated with beer and visions of the life ahead of him.

Over a bridge that is failing, never to understand what it has been connecting all these decades; a sharp right, onto a main drag that once housed a seven-story hotel, where the train from San Francisco emitted summer vacationers. My rider waves at the bar, the Pink Elephant, though it’s dark inside and giving back only the overflow of the nights raucous events. Two men stand outside, leaning on their cigarettes, staring off into a night that’s promising to be long.

My companion yells at the bar for Harry, some mystic dark-souled hero who once may have filled her bed with liquid dreams. The two guys puff and look back with nothing-matters eyes.

Past the fire station, out of town for a four-mile stretch of backroad, little traveled at night. I’ve read this story before and I know its moves, always lurking just below the surface. My companion lapses into silence.

I feel her hand on mine as I shift down going into a sharp turn. I draw away, though it isn’t easy, with the weight of my solitary sexuality upon me. But stronger is my embarrassment, my sense of being out there all alone.

Suddenly, with a shriek from my passenger, an invisible deer leaps into our path, colliding heavily with the car. I pull over to inspect the damage. The hitchhiker jumps out, chasing the deer who is lumbering off into the brush. Holding her black hat on her head with jeweled fingers, her red skirt tearing at the low bushes, she disappears as well, repeating the words, “now she’ll never be a mommy.” When she emerges from a shallow wood there’s blood on her blouse. Her footsteps in the dark are sure-footed and possess grace; her eyes flash primeval, with the look of everyone who has ever been lost.

Only for a minute though. Then she stumbles, barks at the world, and throws away the bottle. I hear glass clash with rock, a breaking that is much larger than itself.

Back onto the road, her hand now on my leg. She needs a place to stay for the night, she blurts out. Her boyfriend might be at the bar, Negri’s, a few miles ahead, and he will put her up or put her down. If he’s not there, maybe she could…….. I roll up my window against a night that has drifted away from me, dreading where she might touch next. I think about the loneliness of my bed, then about her boyfriend, her harsh barking, the alcohol fumes, the possible diseases rising from her depths.

Occidental comes up much more slowly than it ever has before and finally there’s Negri’s, a beacon of salvation, a getting off place. She slides out of the car, making exactly the same sound she had made when getting in, only now it’s squishy and far away, with the threat of an anxious dawn. Before her back leg touches ground, she shrieks at the void, “Fuck Harry, I don’t need him.”

As I close the door I hand her five bucks for her trouble. And why not? She has ferried me down ten miles of lonely road and given me a story I will tap away at throughout the night.