"Well you just watch out for those Nebraska staties. They'll have your ass, honey."
"You hitched out here?"
She had a pretty face, Mary Beth, kind of Indian-looking. A pretty face floating on three chins.
"Honey," she said, "I used to live here."
"You're kidding."
"Daddy had a little place up the road a ways. Corn and hogs."
"You don't seem like you're from the Midwest."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
They passed a panel truck with a red, dripping steak painted on it and Brian's stomach did a triple-gainer. He wished he was sitting down to lunch somewhere. Or in the back getting some sleep with Justine. But he liked Mary Beth all right, she was the first woman who'd ever picked him up hitching. In fact she was the first woman he'd said more than hold-the-pickles-hold-the-lettuce to since he started hitching in New York.
"I just meant that I thought you were brought up in San Francisco," he said.
"People who don't understand make fun of farmers." Mary Beth braked a little to let a semi pass, her foot-flab spreading on the pedal. "Farmers aren't stupid. People who make fun don't know what goes into the life. Farmers, they got a lot of strange ideas about the rest of the world and from a distance it looks like they're just small-minded and dull but it's not like that."
"I don't suppose it is."
"The farm belonged to my grandfather and his father before that. He handed down a debt with the farm and it got a little bigger every year. You don't live so bad and you've got good to eat and a lot of money goes through your hands every year but none sticks. Mostly small farmers never clear out of debt. There's this big hole of loans and mortgages and federal land deals that you fall into and never get out of. My daddy worked the fields six days a week. On the seventh he fixed machinery.
"And it's just natural that from down in that hole a farmer can't see clear what's going on in the outside world. He thinks he's at the heart of the country and everybody should be watching him. He goes under and they don't eat. He can't be done without. That's where that farmer ego comes from, all that redneck pride. He's the backbone of the whole fucking nation, he thinks, with all the politicians and welfare chiselers feeding off his work just cause they outnumber him. Like locusts. So he trusts only himself and hard work and his fields. But they're not stupid, farmers. No way."
Brian nodded. "Then you liked it, even though it was hard?"
Mary Beth laughed. She had a great laugh, strong and throaty, that sent shock waves of flesh rippling all over her. "I hated it, honey. Every damn second of it."
She put her hand on his knee, still laughing, and squeezed. It was nice.
"You ever been out here in the summer? When the corn is still up?"
"No. But they got corn in the East."
"Not like here they don't. Our house is — was — a good quarter-mile in from the main road. I had to walk out for the school bus every morning. Through all this corn. It was worst when the corn was high, way over my head when I was a little girl."
She paused and grinned a little to herself. "Young and short," she said. "I really wasn't ever what you'd call little.
"Anyhow, the corn was planted so the rows opened up to our quarter-mile of driveway. You know how from a distance, from the highway, you come at a cornfield from a certain angle and it's this solid block of stalks, then suddenly you're alongside and zing! those rows open up to you one after another, riffling by till the angle changes enough and it's all solid again?"
"Yeah," said Brian. "It's kind of neat."
"Well up close, right next to it, it's not so neat. The angle never changes. They just keep swinging open, one after another, and you're lost in them, under the tops of them, and you can't see the end of the road. Made me dizzy. Made me sick to my stomach sometimes, I'd stop and hang my head down toward my knees till it passed and then tried to walk with my eyes shut. But I knew they were still out there, I could see them behind my eyelids and it wasn't any better. Every morning before school, every evening after, to and from Bible class on Sundays. I still see those rows in my nightmares sometimes."
"Sounds like it's got a hold on you."
"Honey, my ears still perk up when the weather report comes over the news. There's a thunderstorm at night and I can't sleep. Mission and Fourth Street, nothing but peep shows and pawnshops, but some part of me is still worried about how the damn crop is doing."
Mary Beth wore at least a half-dozen rings, mostly turquoise and ivory. They gave the only hint that there were joints in her breakfast-sausage fingers. She wasn't wearing a bra. Brian could see her nipples standing out under her shift, the circle around them soaking through with sweat. His stomach started flipping when he looked at her breasts, he tried to avoid it. She was wet under her arms and in all her creases and the inside of the car had her sweet flesh smell. Brian could almost see the warmth coming off her, thick mammal waves of it wrapping him round the shoulders and neck, making him pleasantly sleepy, pleasantly horny.
Horny. It surprised him. Even with all the hitchhiker stories he'd been told, all the stuff Russ Palumbo used to whisper in study hall, it surprised him. About all the women out cruising for action. They pick you up, see, cause they know they'll never see you again. So they can do anything they want and not feel guilty. Palumbo was an asshole and full of it but he wasn't the only one with stories. Brian felt a little ashamed, a little left out, seventeen years old and he'd never been approached by a woman. No bored housewives, no nymphomaniacs, no sex-starved librarians. And here it was happening and he was surprised that he was a little excited. She was so big.
And she talked. In the road stories and in his daydreams the women never talked much. Mostly they clutched. They clutched and they clung and they pleaded and whimpered and moaned and panted and were ever so grateful afterward. Mary Beth had talked almost nonstop since he'd gotten into the car, mostly about personal things, things that made him uncomfortable. About her mother's funeral. About her hemorrhoids. She'd showed him the bruises on her arm and hip where her last boyfriend, a biker who did too much speed, had hit her in their parting fight. She was like an open wound, Mary Beth, all her hurt just kept pouring out and there always seemed to be more.
"Daddy wanted a boy," she said. "Wanted boys. He got me and that was it. Oh, Mama tried, Mama tried against doctor's orders and dropped a couple of things that would have been boys if they lasted a few more months. Little monsters. They had to take her works out then and I think she was relieved. It all went into me. Twelve pounds at birth and I just shot out from there.
"I always had to follow Daddy around after school and on weekends. It was like my punishment for being a girl. He didn't talk to me except to ask for the wrench I was holding or whatever and he didn't show me how to do anything. Didn't teach me the work. He just wanted me there. And I was so damn eager to please and afraid I'd do something wrong it makes me sick. When I remember my Daddy I mostly don't think of his face, I see the back of that sunburned neck bent over some tractor or patch of crop. Don't be in my light, he'd always say when I came close for a look. Girl, you block out the sun."
It wasn't the talking alone that made Brian uneasy. People who picked you up usually wanted you to either entertain or to provide an audience. He was used to that. He got the feeling Mary Beth wanted more, and he didn't know if he had it to give.
"Mama, she went the other way. Just poured all her femininity into me. She was at her sewing machine every spare minute so's she could keep me dressed like a little storybook girl. Of course, I'd already busted out of the junior Chubette department and was destined for bigger things. You can imagine how I looked. A heifer in organdy. I got a little older and she put me out on the block with the rest of the young girls, all groomed and curried at the school dances and the grange dances and the damn church dances. She'd drop me off in the car, happier than a pig in shit, and I'd just want to crawl under the sidewalk. All I remember about those dances is one or another of my string of first cousins slouching over with his hands in his pockets, mumbling, 'Let's go, Mary. It's my turn.' to