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part two of the story
Road Trip

Bill Tope

    “Heathen?” said Beth.
    “Yes, but I love you children all the same,” conceded the man, who introduced himself not as Dan Quayle but as Ty Gardiner, itinerant preacher! At last I glanced around the van, which was filled with fresh, pink, uplifted faces, a radiant smile upon every visage. “Are these...” I began and Ty nodded and smiled. “Disciples of the Blessed Father, Mother, and Holy Spirit, Amen!”
    “Amen!” chorused the masses.
    “How close are you coming to Missouri?” Beth finally thought to ask.
    “‘Bout four hours from St. Louis,” replied the preacher. “We hail from Indiana,” he added. We arrived, but only after three and one half hours of arduous proselytizing. “We’ll give you a place to sleep tonight,” offered Ty. We gratefully accepted his hospitality, eating a late supper at one of the flock’s homes and then sleeping on the carpeted floor of his wonderfully air-conditioned living room. Next morning we slipped away, leaving behind a thank you note on their fridge. By 6 a.m. we were on the road again. We parked ourselves on I-70, some 280 miles from Missouri.
    This time we had luck—if you can call it that—straight away, flagging down a bronze colored Mustang. He stopped his car about 100 feet away and that should have given us some inkling as to the driver’s character. But we jogged to the car and he beckoned us in.
    “We’re on our way to St. Louis,” said Beth. Silence. We settled back in the seats and looked expectantly at him. But he sat stiff as a board, saying nothing. Another hint. Another inkling. He simply floored the accelerator and down the highway we sped. I glanced out the window and saw that we were nearing a state park: recreation areas, camp grounds and the like. He stopped at the entrance to the park. I looked at him in his rearview mirror. He had a dark scowl and jowly cheeks, but I could tell little else about him. Suddenly he barked out,
    “Cash, grass or ass!” apparently setting the parameters for our continued journey. Beth and I exchanged a glance; she frowned, then piped up:
    “We’ve got some pot, man...”
    “Not the option I would have chosen,” he remarked in an oily voice.
    “Hey, we don’t have any bread,” she protested.
    “Not my problem,” he said matter-of-factly. In the mirror I could tell he was grinning malevolently. Menacingly.
    “Then I guess we’re all out of luck, then,” said Beth. I heard a dry chuckle from the man.
    “I was hoping to get to know you a little better, Honey.”
    “I’m not your honey,” she snapped, “and you’re not getting any ass!” He smirked into the mirror.
    “Let’s get out of here,” she muttered, and grabbed the handle of the door. But at that precise moment, he floored the gas pedal, throwing us back in our seats. He turned into the park and sped down the tree-lined path, the pines just a blur as we flew by. “What are you doing, man?” Beth demanded to know. He said not a word, but drove steadily forward till at last he took a sharp right into a dense copse of conifers. There, hidden beneath a canopy of foliage, stood a small rustic cabin, constructed of logs. He stomped on the brake, propelling us forward, into the backs of the front seats. While we were recovering from the shock of apparently being abducted, he exited the car and swept open Beth’s door.
    “Get out!” he ordered. “Both of you.” He had somehow magically turned up a gun, a heavy, ugly black revolver. And he was aiming it at point blank rage, at Beth’s pretty head. “This way,” he muttered, waving the gun carelessly. We fell in line, preceded him up a short flight of stairs and into the cabin. It was already unlocked. He told us to get against the far wall. When we had complied, he turned and locked the door. He pocketed the keys and turned to regard us, his prisoners. “Okay, you,” he growled. “Take off your clothes, all of them!” Again he waved his pistol in a menacing fashion. He was a tiny man, no more than five feet in height, weighed perhaps 115 pounds. He looked remarkably like an emaciated version of Richard Nixon! There was something a little surreal about all of this, as if we’d gotten caught up a cartoon or a comic strip. A Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic book. I was just unfastening a button on my shirt when Beth said, forcefully,
    “No!” We both blinked at her in surprise.
    “Whadda ya mean, no?” demanded the man. “I’ve got a gun,” he reminded her.
    “I don’t give a shit,” Beth retorted. “You got a gun: freakin’ use it!” His mouth fell open but no words came out. Clearly he hadn’t expected any such resistence; this was not in his script. “You probably can’t even get it up!” smirked Beth acidly.
    “I can so...” he began, thoroughly flustered and waving the gun at the floor now. Acting on pure instinct, Beth stepped forward and kicked him solidly in the crotch with her size 6 Keds. He gasped, curled up into a fetal position on the floor, and the gun discharged, leaving a crease in the pine planks. I rushed forward and seized the pistol, handed it to Beth. I hated all firearms.
    “Ooh,” he groaned plaintively. “I think you really hurt me!” He held his hand over his privates. Beth didn’t deign to even comment on that remark, other than to note that it must be a “small injury.” We stood and stared down at the writhing figure.
    “What should we do with him?” I asked rhetorically.
    “I think we should just shoot him,” Beth suggested. The man’s eyes grew wide as he seemed suddenly to appreciate the position he was in. The gun in Beth’s hand seemed to have grown larger.
    “But,” he protested, “I never touched you. Never.”
    “No, but you were going to,” Beth pointed out.
    “Well, he’s right, in a way,” I chimed in. “You can’t execute a man for bad intent.” It was a bit of a specious argument, but I didn’t want blood on my hands; things were rapidly lurching out of control.
    “But, think of all the women and girls he’s raped before. This wasn’t the first time: he had a plan, a technique, a method. He had a gun. He had this cabin; it wasn’t even locked; he expected to use it. He’s a bad dude. He’s a freakin’ predator, man!”
    “I promise I won’t do it no more,” the man croaked pathetically.
    “Damn straight,” muttered Beth, narrowing her eyes at him.
    “I got money,” he said enticingly, and held out his thick wallet. “I got a car. I’ll drive you anywhere you want to go. I’ll take you all the way to St. Louis,” he promised. I perked up a bit at that.
    “What do you think?” I asked her.
    “I think, Genius, that the first chance he gets he’ll drive us to a police station and turn us in to the cops. Or he’ll drive off the road and wreck his car, then claim he was hijacked by some looney hippies or rogue criminals And that’ll be us! We can’t trust him.”
    “So, then now what?” asked the little man, still lying upon the floor.
    “Yeah, now what?” I echoed. I was clueless.
    “We will take your bread,” she decided, snatching the wallet from his hand. “And you will lend us your car for a while, yes?” she asked him mockingly.
    “Sure, sure,” he said eagerly, handing over the keys.
    Finally, we were set. To forestall any immediate pursuit we took the man’s clothing, including his shoes. We looked at him, a small, wimpy, ageless but pathetic figure. There was no one else in the park as far as we could tell, and since the cabin was several miles from the highway we figured we’d get a good head start. Back out in the hot Indiana sunshine, we climbed in the car, motored slowly back down the path and then westward, toward St. Louis.
    “This is all right,” I said happily, driving carefully, growing accustomed to the unfamilar controls. “Now we got a ride home.”
    “Wrong,” declared Beth. My expression posed a thousnd questions. She said, “Eventually that little schmuck is going to contact someone, an official, an authority figure of some kind. Next he’s going to explain how he was just being a nice guy, a good Christian fellow, by picking up two kids. They turned out to be carjackers and took all his clothes, his money, and ripped off his car.”
    “But we can tell them how...”
    “Won’t matter. We can’t tell nobody nothing! He’s The Man,” she pointed out. “They’ll never believe us, two hippies with pot on their breath...” I immediately breathed into my hand, sniffed my palm. “...guy like that’s probably got a wife, a couple kids back home in LaGrange, or wherever. No. We’ll put a few miles on it, dump it somewhere and then beat it.”
    “You mean we’ll have to keep hitchhiking?” I asked bleakly.
    “No, man, we’ve got like five hundred bucks. That’s more than enough for two bus tickets home.” I gladly nodded my understanding and she just smiled knowingly. We ditched the Mustang in the parking lot at a Kroger’s in a little town named Falso, then repaired to the nearest Greyhound station, only four or five blocks away.
    One would think that the bus ride on the last leg of our journey would be the denouement, but no. The unsuspecting riders hadn’t anticipated anything as tumultuous as Hurricane Beth.
    The first thing that perturbed her was the fact that she couldn’t smoke on the bus. “Hey, I’m an American,” she cried loudly. “I’ve got rights.” But to no avail. So, getting no solace from tobacco, she proceeded to get her buzz from tiny ecru tablets, called White Cross, a sort of low-grade speed, a poor-man’s Black Beauty. She ate them copiously. And, abetted by the delusional power of the White Cross, she became animated, speaking up loudly, and often.
    “Hey, man, do you think that asshole ever got free?” she asked giddily. This outburst was followed by admonitions from some of the numerous other riders, most of whom were senior citizens with blue hair.
    “Ssh!” they reproved her. “Keep quiet,” they said.
    “Hey, I’m a citizen,” she hissed. “I’ll talk as much as I want to!” They met her glare with frozen faces and tight lips of their own.
    “Can’t you be silent?’ an elderly woman implored. At length, this exchange was cut short by the bus rolling into the parking lot of what amounted to yesterday’s version of the modern convenience store. More of a general store than anything else, it sold locally-raised honey and pecan pies and peanut rolls and popcorn and, of course, cigarettes. Beth flew from the vehicle and hurtling through the door, bought no less than three packs; back in those days that cost her maybe two bucks in all. Next she assumed a position to one side of the little store, out of the wind, and proceeded to light up one after another. Not a user of tobacco myself, I did pause to join Beth and smoke a joint. Finally, her batteries recharged by the infusion of nicotine, Beth calmed down and raised no more alarm.
    Arriving in St. Louis in the early morning, we immediately sought out transportation back to Edwardsville. Never before had the promise of home seemed so sweet; I couldn’t wait. Unfortunately, we discovered that the first bus to Edwardsville left no sooner than six hours later. Resigned to our fate, we collapsed onto a bench in the small station and ate our hamburgers and fries. I longed for a tooth brush. The sun still hadn’t come up when we passed into a dreamless sleep. When we awoke, the bus station was a circus: Hari Krishnas proliferated, handing out books, sticks of incense and pieces of candy. We stepped outside.
    “Here, take a sweetie,” said an impossibly tall man with a bald head, a ground-length frock of kaleidoscopic design, and wire rimmed glasses. The candy looked a bit like little lumps of mud-colored Play-Dough; they contained who knew what. We politely declined. “Please,” he implored again, “take a sweetie.” Once more we begged off. “Take the damn sweetie!” he rasped angrily, actually stamping one sandal-clad foot in the dirt.
    “Okay, okay,” said Beth, finally relenting. The Hari Krishna smiled benevolently.
    “You a good little mama, Miss,” he said serenely, then turned away.
    Part of the excitement was the imminent rock concert being held at the local arena. “Who’s playing?” I asked someone inside the station. Smiling the drug-fueled smile of the 70s’s teenage rock enthusiast, he replied,
    “Jethro Tull!” Beth and I exchanged a glance which said, “This is where we came in,” or maybe, “Been there, done that.” The time passed, like kidney stones, but at last we boarded our bus, bound for home. This phase of our adventure passed without incident; Beth was still heavily into her White Cross dietary supplements. I could see her hands trembling.
    After we arrived at the Edwardsville Greyhound Station we started walking towards Beth’s home, less than a mile away. Beth lived in a home known as “Hale House,” the name a cheap ripoff of the famed “Hull House” of Chicago, founded by Jane Addams. But there the similarity ended. The house was located on Hale Street, in the tony section of town, hence the name. The home was owned by Professor Bob, the Sociology teacher. Several of his students stayed there, for which they paid rent. Bob, in his turn, used the rent payments to pay off his mortgage, thus accruing all the equity. In light of Bob’s Socialistic, citizen-of-the-world, share the wealth persona and affected liberal personal philosophy, this seemed a tad hypocritical. It reeked of a nonconcern for his fellow man. He did in fact boot everyone out later, when he decided to get married. But the kids, being kids, seemed not to mind, and relished getting high there every night on his sofa, watching Saturday Night Live and Monty Python. Bob was their mentor, their teacher, their guru.
    Arriving home, Beth fitted her key to the lock and pushed through the front door. We found everyone—all those who had abandoned us—there, looking a little guilty, I thought. “Hey, what happened to you?” asked Professor Bob earnestly. “We were worried about you!”
    “Were you?” I asked dryly.
    “Sure,” said the other Bob, stepping forward. He grinned; his rodent-like eyes bloodshot, his pupils widely dilated. “What did happen to you?’ he persisted. Measuring him with my eyes, I replied, loud enough for all to hear, “We got left behind by a bunch of self-involved, selfish, indifferent peckers!” This remark seemed to take all the oxygen out of the room and left everyone standing around, staring at their shoes. But not Beth. She giggled and hugged each one of them in turn, then cried, “Let’s get high!” Turning to me, she asked, “You have to leave, right?” I nodded curtly. Clearly, we’d had more of one another’s company than we’d ever bargained for. In fact, I never had much more to do with any of the denizens of Hale House or their subsequent acolytes.
    Before departing, I rummaged through the returned luggage and found my bag; I riffled through it and discovered that my watch, my pen knife and other artifacts, including all my drugs, were conspicuously missing. Dismayed, but unsurprised, I silently shook my head. I lived more than a mile away but no one offered me a ride. Big surprise. I left without another word.
    Clopping down the porch steps, I set off down the tunnel of cottonwoods lining either side of the sidewalk. I got some distance away before I heard the slamming of car doors. Turning back, I observed a cluster of men standing about, clad in windbreakers with the letters FBI and DEA stenciled on the backs. As a unit they approached the house, walked up the steps. I paused for an instant, watching. Then the agents, wielding firearms and bearing a battering ram, pounded with their firsts upon the door. Loudly. Silently, I turned away and just kept walking.

 

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