“Sorry,” he said indifferently.
“He’s gonna heal it hisself,” one of the truckers in the booth called over.
The blue-rinse twins paid their checks and hurried out. One of the knights of the road sauntered over to the juke and put another dime in. Johnny Cash began to sing “A Boy Named Sue.” I blew on my coffee.
Someone tugged at my sleeve. I turned my head and there she was — she’d moved over to the empty stool. Looking at that face close up was almost blinding. I spilled some more of my coffee.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice was low, almost atonal.
“My fault. I can’t feel what I’m doing yet.”
“I — ”
She stopped, seemingly at a loss. I suddenly realized that she was scared. I felt my first reaction to her swim over me again — to protect her and take care of her, make her not afraid. “I need a ride,” she finished in a rush. “I didn’t dare ask any of them.” She made a barely perceptible gesture toward the truckers in the booth.
How can I make you understand that I would have given anything — anything — to be able to tell her, Sure, finish your coffee, I’m parked right outside. It sounds crazy to say I felt that way after half a dozen words out of her mouth, and the same number out of mine, but I did.
Looking at her was like looking at the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo come to breathing life.
And there was another feeling. It was as if a sudden, powerful light had been turned on in the confused darkness of my mind. It would make it easier if I could say she was a pickup and I was a fast man with the ladies, quick with a funny line and lots of patter, but she wasn’t and I wasn’t.
All I knew was I didn’t have what she needed and it tore me up.
“I’m thumbing,” I told her. “A cop kicked me off the interstate and I only came here to get out of the cold. I’m sorry.”
“Are you from the university?”
“I was. I quit before they could fire me.”
“Are you going home?”
“No home to go to. I was a state ward. I got to school on a scholarship. I blew it. Now I don’t know where I’m going.” My life story in five sentences. I guess it made me feel depressed.
She laughed — the sound made me run hot and cold. “We’re cats out of the same bag, I guess.”
I thought she said cats. I thought so. Then. But I’ve had time to think, in here, and more and more it seems to me that she might have said rats. Rats out of the same bag. Yes. And they are not the same, are they?
I was about to make my best conversational shot — something witty like “Is that so?” —
when a hand came down on my shoulder.
I turned around. It was one of the truckers from the booth. He had blond stubble on his chin and there was a wooden kitchen match poking out of his mouth. He smelled of engine oil and looked like something out of a Steve Ditko drawing.
“I think you’re done with that coffee,” he said. His lips parted around the match in a grin.
He had a lot of very white teeth.
“What?”
“You stinking the place up, fella. You are a fella, aren’t you? Kind of hard to tell.”
“You aren’t any rose yourself,” I said. “What’s that after-shave, handsome? Eau de Crankcase?”
He gave me a hard shot across the side of the face with his open hand. I saw little black
dots.
“Don’t fight in here,” the short-order cook said. “If you’re going to scramble him, do it outside.”
“Come on, you goddammed commie,” the trucker said.
This is the spot where the girl is supposed to say something like “Unhand him” or “You brute.” She wasn’t saying anything. She was watching both of us with feverish intensity. It was scary. I think it was the first time I’d noticed how huge her eyes really were.