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Winter Hitchhikers

Clyde Daniel Bearre

    He saw her in the distance. A small figure pressed against the winter gusts, her black overcoat billowing like the broken wings of a blackbird.
    Hell of a night to be walking, he thought as he turned up the controls of the pickup truck’s heater.
    His headlights glinted off a metallic shopping cart. The cart wobbled in a crippled rhythm causing him to suspect a bent wheel.
    Bet she’s got all her worldly possessions crammed inside that rickety grocery cart — everything from her only extra pair of socks to her next meal.
    As he approached, she broke stride and peered back over her shoulder. Her frail hand, with thumb up, beckoned a ride. Snow, in scattered contrast, swirled around her dark figure. Getting closer, the little cart tugged on his focus once again. Proof of his prediction, the cart brimmed to the point of bursting with the woman’s rolling assets. A colorful array of belts squeezed the shopping cart’s swollen girth like a tourniquet. Along with the tradition brown and black, there were yellow, green, blue, purple and red belts.
    “I wonder why she has so many belts?” he wondered before telling his self, “Blow right by her. Don’t look her way. Her problems ain’t mine.” He looked at her anyway as he passed. Her sullen, sunken eyes met his with a pitiable plea. He tapped the brakes . . .
    What the hell am I doing?
    He accelerated.
    Suddenly, his chest tightened. He couldn’t breathe. Something had past between him and the hitchhiker, something unclear but, for him, very real. Like a frozen snake guilt slithered through his conscience.
    To combat his feeling of contrition he rationalized: It’s complicated. You don’t go picking up strangers. Especially hitchhikers. Not even if it’s near freezing and the next town is five miles away. You just don’t do it in such dangerous times. He tried to laugh. Remember what Ma always said –
    Don’t pick up hitchhikers.
    He looked in his rearview mirror. The woman was standing still, watching him drive away. Self-reproach nagged him like a judgmental heckler. He felt as if he’d clubbed a baby seal. As her shadowy image faded in the flurrying snow, she raised an ungloved hand. This time, instead of an uplifted thumb, she pointed to the starless sky with her middle finger and shook it vigorously.
    He grunted as if the wind had knocked from him. He slammed the brakes, sending the pickup into a sizzling skid. He eyed the hitchhiker in the review mirror. In spite of her flagrant arrogance, guilt continued to spin his moral compass.
    He snickered, Spunky old lady. She’s gotta be crazy being out in this rotten weather. The engine hummed in what seemed like accordance. She’ll not make it through the night if I don’t pick her up. He studied her sable silhouette in the snow storm. “What the hell.” He threw the truck into reverse.
     As he coasted backwards, the woman’s pathetic plight focused. No more than five foot two her sickly slenderness somehow defied the squall. Beneath her overcoat he caught a glimpse of a Chicago Bears sweatshirt peaking out like a shivering child. Her blue jeans were torn in the knees and she wore socks for mittens.
    Stopping next to her, he went to get out of the pickup and help her with the cart. The woman, however, quickly opened the tailgate and, with strength that betrayed her scant build, hoisted the cart into the truck bed. With a nervous sigh, he closed his door, leaned across the seat, and opened the passenger door.
    Stepping up into the pickup truck, she said in a low, husky cigarette-scarred voice, “I like blue trucks.”
    “So does my wife,” he said.
    A strange discomfort and strong repulsion rippled through him in response to her proximity and obnoxious bouquet. Body odor, wet hair and stale cigarettes mingled like dirty rats in a garbage pail. She appeared to be in her fifties but he suspected she was younger than she looked. Her haggard face revealed years of bad experiences and hard living like a roadmap through hell.
    “So, what are you doing out on a night like this?”
    She eyed him with suspicion and said, “Hunting.”
    “Yeah, right, hunting,” he said, trying to dismiss the cold frighten feeling her response had instilled in him. Hunting?
    “So you’re married?” she asked, hugging herself in front of the dashboard heat vent.
    “Sure am,” he said. “Goin’ on twelve years.”
    “That’s unfortunate,” she said in a tone that caused the hairs on the back of his neck to prickle.
    “Got any kids?”
    “Three, two girls and a boy.”
    She grimaced. “That’s unfortunate.” Her tone was not judgmental, only bleak.
    “Why is being married with kids . . . unfortunate?”
    Her eyes flared with a solitary light. “Believe me. Unfortunate is what it is.”
    Reaching inside her overcoat, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
    “Oh no, please, don’t smoke,” he said with an urgency that embarrassed him. “My wife will kill me if I let you smoke in the truck. It’s almost brand new.”
    Her left eyebrow lifted like a question mark on her wrinkled face. “That’s unfortunate.”
    She put a cigarette in her mouth in spite of his protest and reached into her overcoat for what he thought was her cigarette lighter.
    “Please, lady, no smoking.”
    With her hand still tucked in under her overcoat she demanded, “Pull this fucking thing over.” Her black eyes roiled with hate.
    Astounded and a bit frightened, he pulled the truck off the road and stopped.
    “I can’t believe you’re goin’ to get back out in this weather because I won’t let you smoke.“
    “Who says I’m getting’ out?”
    From inside her overcoat she pulled a survival knife. The blue glow of the dashboard glinted off of the knife’s serrated blade. With a lunge, she plunged the cold steel through his rib cage and into his lung and liver. His breath rushed from him. She held the survival knife in his gut for a moment before, with an effort, jerking it out. He fought back a hot, hateful nausea.
    “Why,” he gasped, “I was trying’ to help you.”
    A grim smile creased her weathered face. “I’m the hunter. You, you are the unfortunate prey.“ She lit a cigarette. “Besides, I’m fucking cold.”
    Avoiding the blood that gushed with every dying beat of his heart, she unbuckled his belt and yanked it from his pants in one practiced motion. Frisking him, she found his wallet. She unfastened his seat belt, reached across his limp body, and opened the driver’s side door. As she shoved him out of the pickup, she asked, “Didn’t your mother ever tell ya not to pick up hitchhikers?”
    He hit the icy pavement sickening thud. Laying flat on his back, he looked up at her and said, “But . . . I’ll die out here.”
    She peered down at him from behind the steering wheel. “That’s unfortunate.”

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