Ah, fuck.”
When I woke I was staring up through the dirty windshield at a vast expanse of grey sky, my head resting on the sweater I had shoved between the driver’s seat and the side door. My legs were bent at the knees, feet resting on the floor of the passenger seat, tingling back to life as I sat up, my back ached. Jane was already up, digging through her pack on the grass below.
“Good morning!” she said as I crawled out of the truck.
I grinned. “Good morning. Thank god we found this place.”
When you hitchhike, luck is the determinate; luck is the Great Spirit which can giveth just as soon as taketh away. Last night He was with us, as the sun set too quickly in the Canadian province of Ontario. Our last ride had dropped us off not far from an abandoned auto shop, a car graveyard filled with potential shelter. Old El Caminos and Volkswagens were scattered around the lot, sinking into the earth after what must have been decades of neglect. It was beautiful, in a way, all that decaying metal returning to its source. We had tried opening a lot of doors until we found one that was unlocked, a green pick-up truck with all its windows intact. After I fell asleep I dreamt of moss upholstery and flowers growing out of dashboards.
Finding somewhere to sleep had made up for the last ride, a pair of construction workers who claimed they were “just going a little ways.” Sure, we said, we’d take any ride we could get. But they only drove about half a mile before pulling into a campground of some sort, asking us if we wanted some weed, a beer. We smoked their marijuana, drank a beer each from the 12-pack they grabbed out of the trunk of their car, and refused their offer to stay in their tent that night. “You can just take us back to the highway,” we said. They told us we were crazy, it was getting late, etc. “The road,” we said. So they dropped us off, we waved goodbye, and walked stoned and giggling until we found the carcass of a pick-up that we called home for the night.
Home is where the ass is.
Once we had shaken the sleep out of our systems we walked back to Highway One, the Trans-Canada highway. We had made good time so far, never waiting more than two hours for a ride. It helped that we were young, it helped that we were pretty. And it helped that our rides didn’t know about the knife I had strapped to my boot—just in case. I read a hitchhiking manual once that said women should never hitchhike. But I’d never let fear get in my way before, and I wasn’t about to start.
***
Our first ride that day was in a beat-up Ford. When it pulled over we ran to the passenger side window, bending to see the driver. “Where ya headed?” he asked.
“Alberta!” I was the negotiator. My jacket was cleaner and my hair considerably more normal looking. And besides, I looked two or three years younger than my age. Folks who wouldn’t usually pick up hitchhikers looked at me and saw their daughter, their niece. It was a sure thing. Jane had her guitar. That was her angle, to pull in the ex-hippie crowd, who were always good for a ride and some nostalgic conversation.
“I’m going that way,” he nodded.
“Great!” We hopped into the car.
There are tricks to every trade. When you get picked up you need a good story, you have to keep people interested. It gets kind of exhausting, actually. When it came to who rode in the passenger seat, Jane and I were switching on and off. That person had the most talking to do. Whoever sat in the back could stay quiet the whole fuckin’ time if they wanted to. Jane strummed her guitar and smoked simultaneously, a cigarette hanging out of the side of her mouth, John Wayne style.
“You girls must be as young as my daughter. How old are you girls?”
“I’m 21, Jane’s 25,” I told him. His eyebrows furrowed, he was probably wondering where that daughter of his was right now anyway. Was she home, with the door locked and all the windows shut? Or was she lugging a pack around in the wilderness of Canada, waving her thumb at semis as they passed?
“We’re from New York.”
“Yanks!” he said, laughing. I liked the way he laughed. Loud, and he hit the wheel with his palm. “Ah, what’re you yanks doing up here? You should always go south if you’re going on vacation, didn’t you know that?”
“Well, we’ve got to catch a circus.”
“A circus?”
“Yeah, we perform in a circus. Well, actually, we haven’t performed with this circus yet. But we will. See, Jane here, she’s a pretty serious tightrope walker. If she was ten pounds lighter she could balance on thread, I swear to god.”
“And you?” He kept his eyes on the road, smiling.
“Bearded lady. But you couldn’t tell today…I shaved in a rest stop before you picked us up…”
His palm hit the wheel, three times.
“Ah, I like you girls,” he said. “The circus. Well. Me, I’m just a janitor. At a high school. Not very exciting, except when I find love letters in the lockers at the end of the school year.”
I turned to him, grinned wide. “My dad’s a janitor.”
“Is he really?”
“Yeah. Been a janitor for most of his life. At a hospital, though. It’s tough work.”
“It sure is.”
“He said once, he went in to clean this operating room after a surgery. But this was way after the surgery had happened, he worked nights. So, anyway, he goes into the room, and there’s a fuckin’ amputated leg on the table.”
“You’re kidding!” He looks me in the eyes this time, to see if I’m telling the truth. I look right back.
“I’m not. They left the fuckin leg, for him to clean. Can you believe that? Jesus, all those $250,000 a year surgeons. Cutting people open in between their black tie dinners and their daytime fuck sessions with their secretaries. Raking in all that dough and leaving severed limbs for my father to mop up for minimum wage.”
“It’s a heavy world out there for the working man, that’s for sure, honey. It’s a heavy world out there for us.”
“I got suspended from elementary school once for hitting this girl. We were waiting after school for our parents to pick us up. She was making fun of this janitor, throwing Cheerios at his back as he cleaned the lunchroom. I went over to her, didn’t say anything, just punched her in the stomach. My mom had to come get me in the principal’s office. She lectured me on the way home, I think, but when I told my father what had happened he just looked away. ‘That’s what happens,’ he said. He bought me ice cream. I think he was trying not to be proud.”
It was quiet for a while. I looked out at the fog that hung thick and white over the grasslands. Canada’s wilderness was raw, like nothing I had ever seen before.
“And does your father know where you are now?”
I hesitated. “Not really.”
He stayed quiet. I turned my head towards the window again. “It isn’t something he really needs to know.”
Van Morrison came on the radio and the driver turned the volume up. “My favorite song of his,” he said. He sang off key and I watched the grasslands gradually turn back into forest as we drove west into the Province of Saskatchewan.
***
When I woke up it was dark. We were parked in a Motel 6 lot, and our driver was gone. I turned around and woke Jane up. “Do you know where he went?” She didn’t. I figured he’d run in to get a room for himself.
Five minutes later I saw him come out of the office and jog towards the car. It had gotten considerably colder; I could feel it when I touched my hand to the glass of the window. He opened the driver’s side door and leaned over, handing me a key. I didn’t take it.
“What’s that?” I asked. But I already knew what it was.
“I got you ladies a room.”
“Oh no, we usually camp outside. It’s okay, we’ve got sleeping bags and a tarp…”
“Don’t be stupid. It’s cold and you have no idea where you are. I got you a separate room—don’t worry. I’ll be on a whole different floor than you.”
“Ah, are you sure? You didn’t have to…”
He shook his head and put the key into my hand. I wrapped my fingers around it. It was cold just from the short walk to the car. “Thanks.”
We grabbed up our stuff and said goodbye before we went up to our room. “Thanks again,” I said.
“Good luck at the circus. Give your dad a call, huh?” He waved and opened the trunk, burying his head in to drag out a suitcase.
That night we ate Oreos from the vending machines and watched Seinfeld reruns. I could appreciate everything in that room. I held my hands over the heat as it emanated from the radiator, which clanked like a chain gang every once in a while and made my heart skip. I stood for a long time under the hot water in the shower and wrote my name in the steam on the mirror. Nothing makes you appreciate a good hot shower more than traveling. When I got out of the shower I stood by the window in a towel. “We didn’t even find out why he was going to Alberta,” I said to Jane over the noise of the TV. “Maybe that’s where his daughter lives.”
“Who cares?” she said. “I’m just glad we’re not sleeping outside again.”
“Mmm.” The heater clanked again at my feet, and I pushed myself into the space between the blinds and the glass, stared out. The forest lying beyond the highway stretched out into obscurity, unfathomable. I suddenly felt the impact of all that land.
For a minute I couldn’t remember where I was.
