He looked up. “You want to hear my story? You won’t believe me.”
“Suppose you try me.”
“I guess you can say I couldn’t believe she was in love with me.”
“They always start that way, don’t they, stories like this?” I said.
“Yeah, guess so.”
“You talking about Vera, the dead girl?”
“No, not that bitch, gimme a break. It started long before that. In New York. Her name was Sue, Sue Harvey.” He rested his head in his hands, with his elbows on the table, and after gathering his thoughts, continued. “She was the songbird in a club where I played piano with a jazz trio. Sue had those dark green eyes and a waist so slender, every time she bent over you’d expect something to break. We were engaged, but she wanted to be a movie star, took off for the Coast.”
“Is that why you were heading to L.A. when all this started? You were chasing some skirt named Sue?”
Roberts raised his head and looked up at me. “I keep trying to forget what happened and wonder what my life might have been like if that car of Haskell's hadn't stopped.”
I listened for almost twenty minutes. He told the forbidding tale of a common man whose life had spiraled and tanked as he made one tragic decision after another while hitching rides across the country, heading to the land of broken dreams, chasing a dream of his own: a singer named Sue. At the end of his story, Roberts froze for a moment, then turned to me and continued in a chilling, calm voice: “I didn’t kill him. But Haskell was dead. It was an accident.”
“Then you stole his car,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“And then you picked up the woman named Vera, bumming a ride, and continued on toward L.A.”
“Yeah.”
“What about your girlfriend, Sue?”
“Never saw her again, never spoke to her. Leave her outta this.”
I looked down at that pitiful creature, balled into a heap, and said under my breath, “What about Vera, dead in the motel room? When you twisted the cord around her neck and strangled her with your bare hands, was that an accident too?”
Highway 54, Arizona, July 1945
The asphalt road ran straight and went on for miles. It came out of the mountains in the far distance, bottomed out, then gradually climbed across the desert floor, heading up into the small rocky hills ahead. At the base of the slope, looking back from where he had just come, Al Roberts kept an eye on the car as it shimmered, almost floated in the vaporous heat currents, growing larger, moving closer in the afternoon glare.
He continued to walk along the sandy edge of the road, heading west. But he stuck out his arm, his hand slightly closed with his thumb pointed in the direction he was moving.
Roberts hadn’t seen another car in hours and the last one had zoomed by without slowing down, kicking up small dirt devils at his feet. The sun hung high in the colorless sky, and his lips were parched and raw from lack of moisture. He was bone-weary and he hadn’t had a meal in two days. Not a bite of food since that trucker staked him to a hamburger at a diner on the outskirts of Tucumcari, New Mexico. But then, after riding with him for a couple hundred miles, the trucker had to head back to Detroit and after stopping to pick up a load of cantaloupes, he dropped Roberts off just inside the Arizona border. He’d been hoofing ever since.
Roberts had been on the road for almost three months, traveling from New York, riding buses for part of the trip but mostly hitching rides. Down to his last ten dollars, he knew there’d be few meals and no more bus tickets, but he was determined to get to Los Angeles even if he had to walk the rest of the way.
He glanced back; the approaching automobile started to slow. Maybe this one would stop and the guy driving it would give him a lift.
Roberts lowered his battered suitcase to the asphalt, and with the back of his hand wiped the sweat from his brow and swore an oath to himself. When he arrived at his destination, he’d marry her. He wouldn’t let her slip away, by God, not this time. Roberts wouldn’t let her walk out on him again. He’d die first.
The car, a fancy convertible, pulled up next to him. The man, alone behind the wheel, nodded. Roberts heaved his suitcase into the backseat and climbed in.
Roberts, now driving, pulled to the side of the road and quickly glanced around. It was dark, raining hard, and he spotted no other cars traveling on this deserted stretch of highway. They had left Yuma just fifteen minutes ago. The man had flashed a roll while paying for their dinner at some roadhouse cafe, then asked him to drive when they climbed back into the convertible. They’d cruised silently through the early evening. Storm clouds gathered in the distance while the man slept.
And now the man was dead, tumbled out of the car and banged his head on a rock when Roberts opened the passenger door to put up the convertible top.
Roberts peered at the harsh, barren wasteland out beyond the highway, then back at the girl standing there. Her legs were nice, long sculptured calves that went on forever. The rest of the package wasn’t bad either. He shook his head; her figure would improve any landscape.
He knew how it was, alone on the road, bumming rides from strangers. It had to be worse for a woman, especially a dish like her. He screwed the radiator cap down tight, slammed the hood and took another look at the woman, not twenty feet away. “Hey you,” Roberts shouted. “C’mon, if you want a ride.”
She gave him the quick once-over, then walked with a brassy saunter to the convertible, opened the door and climbed in. She stowed her small suitcase in the backseat.
He cranked the motor to life and pulled away from the pump island. He drove slowly forward to where the gas station’s pavement met the road, accelerated, and headed west.
After a few minutes, cruising along the highway with neither of them saying anything, Roberts tried to get a little conversation going, nothing deep or personal, just something to break the ice. But she didn’t respond. Oh, she nodded or shook her head once or twice to his direct yes-or-no questions, but that was it. He told her his new name, Charles Haskell-the name on the dead guy’s driver’s license, the name he’d use until he arrived in L.A., where he could dump the car and walk away. When he asked the girl what her name was, she answered him in a curt manner: “Vera.” She didn’t embellish.
Roberts couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something creepy about her. The way she sat, stiff as a board, just staring at the road ahead. And that look on her face, like she could eat a rat and spit out the bones without thinking twice.
And her eyes: hard, angry, like her guts were on fire. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, twenty-five, and yet she had the look of someone who had seen life through a broken mirror, all distorted with hard angles and sharp edges. But she had pretty features and if she were cleaned up, she’d turn every head in a joint.
Sneaking another glimpse at his passenger, he wondered what a girl like her was doing out here alone in the desert, a million miles from nowhere. And he began to wonder if it was such a good idea picking her up. He looked at her again, but now she sat with her head tilted back, resting it in the V where the seat met the door. She slept, peaceful and calm. He thought she must be in terrible trouble, maybe only finding a reprieve or comfort in sleep.