“I’m twenty-one.”
“Good for you,” he said bitterly. “If the world’s so sane, what’s a kid like you doing hitchhiking to Las Vegas in the middle of winter? Planning to spend the whole night hitchhiking along Route 7 and probably getting frostbite in your legs because you’re not wearing anything under those pants?”
“I am so wearing something underneath! What do you think I am?”
“I think you’re stupid!” he roared at her. “You’re going to freeze your ass off!”
“And then you won’t be able to get a piece of it, right?” she inquired sweetly.
“Oh boy,” he muttered. “Oh boy.”
They roared past a sedan moving at fifty. The sedan beeped at him. “Eat it!” He yelled. “Raw!”
“I think you better let me off right now,” she said quietly.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’m not going to crash us up. Go to sleep.”
She looked at him distrustfully for a long second, then folded her arms and closed her eyes. They went past exit 9.
They passed exit 2 at five after four. The shadows stretching across the road had taken on the peculiar blue cast that is the sole property of winter shadows. Venus was already in the east. The traffic had thickened as they approached the city.
He glanced over toward her and saw she was sitting up, looking out at the hurrying, indifferent automobiles. The car directly in front of them had a Christmas tree lashed to its roof rack. The girl’s green eyes were very wide, and for a moment he fell into them and saw out of them in the perfect empathy that comes to human beings at mercifully infrequent intervals. He saw that all the cars were going to someplace where it was warm, someplace where there was business to transact or friends to greet or a loom of family life to pick up and stitch upon. He saw their indifference to strangers. He understood in a brief, cold instant of comprehension what Thomas Carlyle called the great dead locomotive of the world, rushing on and on.
“We’re almost there?” she asked.
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Listen, if I was hard on you-”
“No, I was hard on you. Listen, I’ve got nothing in particular to do. I’ll take you around to Landy.”
“No-”
“Or I’ll stick you in the Holiday Inn for the night. No strings attached. Merry Christmas and all that.”
“Are you really separated from your wife?”
“Yes.”
“And so recently?”
“Yes.”
“Has she got your kids?”
“We have no kids.” They were coming up on the tollbooths. Their green golights twinkled indifferently in the early twilight.
“Take me home with you, then.”
“I don’t have to do that. I mean, you don’t have to-”
“I’d just as soon be with somebody tonight,” she said. “And I don’t like to hitchhike at night. It’s scary.”
He slid up to a tollbooth and rolled down his window, letting in cold air. He gave the toll taker his card and a dollar ninety. He pulled out slowly. They passed a reflectorized sign that said:
“All right,” he said cautiously. He knew he was probably wrong to keep trying to reassure her-probably achieving just the opposite effect-but he couldn’t seem to help it. “Listen, it’s just that the house is very lonely by myself. We can have supper, and then maybe watch TV and eat popcorn. You can have the upstairs bedroom and I’ll-”
She laughed a little and he glanced at her as they went around the cloverleaf.
But she was hard to see now, a little indistinct. She could have been something he dreamed. The idea bothered him.
“Listen,” she said. “I better tell you this right now. That drunk I was riding with? I spent the night with him. He was going on to Stilson, where you picked me up. That was his price.”
He paused for the red light at the foot of the cloverleaf.
“My roommate told me it would be like that, but I didn’t believe her. I wasn’t going to fuck my way across the country, not me.” She looked at him fleetingly, but he still couldn’t read her face in the gloom. “But it’s not people making you. It’s being so disconnected from everything, like spacewalking. When you come into a big city and think of all the people in there, you want to cry. I don’t know why, but you do. It gets so you’d spend the night picking some guy’s bleeding pimples just to hear him breathe and talk.”
“I don’t care who you’ve been sleeping with,” he said and pulled out into traffic. Automatically he turned onto Grand Street, heading for home past the 784 construction.
“This salesman,” she said. “He’s been married fourteen years. He kept saying that while he was humping me. Fourteen years, Sharon, he keeps saying, fourteen years, fourteen years. He came in about fourteen seconds.” She uttered short bark of laughter, rueful and sad.
“Is that your name? Sharon?”
“No. I guess that was his wife’s name.”
He pulled over to the curb.
“What are you doing?” she asked, instantly distrustful.
“Nothing much,” he said. “This is part of going home. Get out, if you want. I’ll show you something.”
They got out and walked over to the observation platform, now deserted. He laid his bare hands on the cold iron pipe of the railing and looked down. They had been undercoating today, he saw. The last three working days they had put down gravel. Now undercoat. Deserted equipment-trucks and bulldozers and yellow backhoes-stood silently about in the shades of evening like a museum exhibit of dinosaurs. Here we have the vegetarian stegosaurus, the flesh-eating triceratops, the fearsome earth-munching diesel shovel. Bon appetit.
“What do you think of it?” he asked her.
“Am I supposed to think something?” She was fencing, trying to figure this out.
“You must think something,” he said.
She shrugged. “It’s roadwork, so what? They’re building a road in a city I’ll probably never be in again. What am I supposed to think? It’s ugly.”
“Ugly,” he echoed, relieved.
“I grew up in Portland, Maine,” she said. “We lived in a big apartment building and they put this shopping center up across the street-”
“Did they tear anything down to make it?”
“Huh?”
“Did they-”
“Oh. No, it was just a vacant lot with a big field behind it. I was just six or seven. I thought they were going to go on digging and ripping and plowing forever. And all I could think… it’s funny… all I could think was the poor old earth, it’s like they’re giving it an enema and they never asked if it wanted one or if there was something wrong. I had some kind of an intestinal infection that year, and I was the block expert on enemas.
“Oh,” he said.
“We went over one Sunday when they weren’t working and it was a lot like this, very quiet, like a corpse that died in bed. They had part of the foundations laid, and there were all of these yellow metal things sticking out of the cement-”
“Core rods.”
“Whatever. And there was lots of pipe and bundles of wire covered with clear plastic wrap and there was a lot of raw dirt around. Funny to think of it that way, whoever heard of cooked dirt, but that’s how it looked. Just raw. We played hide-and-go-seek around the place and my mother came over and got us and gave me and my sister hell for it. She said little kids can get into bad trouble around construction. My little sister was only four and she cried her head off. Funny to re-member all that. Can we get back in the car now? I’m cold.
“Sure,” he said, and they did.