Maybe in response to Speedy’s drowsy vulnerability, Buck’s litany had changed:
“AIDS is in the blood,” Speedy heard Buck say during one of his nods. “AIDS is in the semen. As long as the two don’t meet there’s no danger at all, even between strangers.”
Something touched Speedy’s knee, feather light, and his eyes opened wide. In the split second it took for Speedy to crash back into full wakefulness, his hand shot out of its own accord and grasped Buck’s jugular in reflex.
‘Shit,’ Speedy thought, his grip instinctively tightening around the vein as Buck tried to cringe away. ‘Not the same day I rise.’
The car swerved and fishtailed and Speedy eased up on his grasp a bit. “Easy boy, easy. Eyes on the road Buck – eyes on the road.”
Despite his terror Buck managed to slow the DeLorean and skid it to a shuddering halt on the shoulder.
Speedy dipped his free hand into Buck’s breast pocket and deftly tugged the wallet out that had called the coat home til now. He flipped said wallet open. It was crammed with a delightful amount of cash, and even some plastic.
He let go of Buck’s throat and climbed out the car. A wind was rising from the south.
Speedy turned away from the wind’s increasing force and started to pull the gull wing door down and shut, but paused when he noted Buck’s frantic gaze burning holes in him. He looked at Buck’s wedding ring on the hand squeezing the DeLorean’s steering wheel like Buck was trying to strangle it, and understanding came.
Speedy gave Buck the same flat stare he always used working a mark. He needed to do some major damage control now and he couldn’t let Buck lose track of who owned who here: “I got a deal for you. You don’t dime to the cops about this little donation, I don’t tell your wife what you wanted from me tonight.”
Speedy tugged the driver’s license out of the wallet. He flicked his thumb across the stiff edge of Buck’s license then held it up so Buck could see his own home address printed there. A buffet of wind hit the side of Speedy’s face hard enough to make him squint, and he raised his voice to be heard over it: “I figure she’s got to have her doubts already, right?”
Speedy could even picture her face, listening to Buck’s lies when he came in from trolling the gay meat markets, the face of a beard too scared to leave but not so stupid as to completely buy into her ‘husband’s’ bullshit. The way Buck’s face sagged from frantic to sullen confirmed Speedy’s assessment.
“I, I, but you don’t . . .” Buck started, defensiveness making him counter in reflex, the fish flopping on the hook.
Speedy made a chopping motion with his hand to cut Buck’s words in half. Speedy had to speak louder now against the steadily increasing wind: “It doesn’t matter to me that you’re gay. I don’t care, really I don’t.”
And that was true at least: Buck’s sexual preferences were none of Speedy’s business whatsoever.
Speedy took all the money from the wallet though he felt almost guilty about it – Buck had given Speedy a ride after all, even if he’d now demonstrated ulterior motives. Speedy took the driver’s license and all the plastic too – not for use, but maybe to unload down in the Bay Area before customer service caught up.
Speedy continued, almost shouting over what had now evolved into a full windstorm: “You don’t call the cops, and in exchange I promise I’ll mail your license back to you when I get where I’m going. I never tell a soul what happened here and your secret is safe.”
Speedy made a zipping move across his lips with thumb and forefinger, pantomimed twisting an invisible key at the corner of his mouth and then throwing the ghost key away.
But Buck’s gaze still roved warily across Speedy’s face as if searching for evidence of trustworthiness there. This man desperately needed to believe he could safely extricate himself from this current predicament.
The fact that Speedy was presently clutching Buck’s wallet had to be complicating Buck’s decision. Speedy unbent further at that realization and tossed the empty billfold onto the passenger seat. He gave Buck a non-threatening non-judgmental smile to seal the deal and Buck finally seemed to relax inside his skin, silently buying into the offer.
Speedy nodded in farewell, and tugged the gull wing door down and closed. Problem solved, he walked away down 101 with the DeLorean’s headlights illuminating his path.
After a few moments he heard Buck rev the engine. The pools of illumination cast by the headlights wavered from side to side as the DeLorean shuddered across the shoulder’s gravel in acceleration.
Speedy automatically stepped sideways off the shoulder in case Buck tried to run him over from behind. But the DeLorean only gunned past as Buck redlined it up the gears, screeching into the first curve in the road ahead and out of sight, trying to outrun his humiliation. Even over the howling wind, Speedy could hear the frustrated snarl of the sports car for a while after it was gone.
He walked along the benighted highway as it twisted through the dark wilderness, leaning forward against the force of the windstorm, which blasted up the highway from the south as if channelized by it. The white sky overhead was shredding its way clear and Speedy could actually see now by the naked light of the full moon.
For the moment he felt content. Although Speedy was on foot he hadn’t let Buck dominate him. He had comfortable boots on his feet, and even a pocket full of spending loot. He’d already come up in the world since raising and his possibilities seemed endless.
Traffic was sporadic in both directions. But whenever the increasing glow of headlights announced a vehicle’s approach, Speedy faded to stand in the looming timber stands just off the highway’s shoulder. The tree branches above him creaked in the wind as he waited for each car to pass before returning to the road.
Once CHP rolled past him as he watched invisible from up in the mold-smelling tree line amongst the wet ferns. As he waited for po-po to pass, the undergrowth seethed and the tree branches overhead creaked in the wind.
The CHP roller didn’t have its trouble lights flashing red against the darkness and it wasn’t blurping its siren. It wasn’t driving slowly like it was on the hunt and the officer behind the wheel wasn’t scanning the sides of the road as he went past.
Speedy figured that Buck hadn’t dimed him. Yet.
It had been the smart move to leave Buck his car, Speedy told himself. If he’d just abandoned Buck on the side of the road, the Man would have automatically gotten involved – the first passing roller would have put out an APB on that oh-so-conspicuous De Lorean. Speedy clung to his belief that it was also the smart move for Buck not to say anything (unless his wife already knew, unless he was thinking of blowing her off anyway, the paranoid reptile part of Speedy’s brain insisted on whispering in the back of his head).
In between hiding in the shrubbery just off the shoulder, Speedy scanned continually for any routes that might get him all the way off Highway 101, just in case Citizen Buck did give him up to the Man once the heat of the moment wore off. But all Speedy saw were steep slopes leading up to high ridges. The crests were thick with huge trees, whose skyscraper-tall crowns waved slowly even in the gale force wind. There was nowhere to run to.
Even though these vertically wooded hills appeared impassable to him, Speedy figured he could still scuttle up into the redwoods as far as he needed to if the Man decided a crazed ex-con fugitive was on the loose along this stretch of road.
But he was still a big city boy – a creature of the urban jungle, of concrete and asphalt, streetlights and neon. He was out of bounds, and this wilderness was new to his experience.
Where others might have noted the cathedral-like grandeur of these redwoods, the whole nature thing left Speedy unmoved. He was no Jeremiah Johnson. He didn’t know the rules of survival here, and he was leery at the prospect of even trying to hide in such a non-human environment.
After hiding from the umpteenth car he finally decided he had to speed up this cockroach leapfrogging and traffic-dodging down the road
. He started to jog after hiding from each car that passed, and then he was scrambling along full bore between the cars, the moonlit gray highway guiding him between the yawning windswept woodland blackness to either side.
But he started feeling more and more squirrelly as he ran through the storm. He still had leftover adrenaline from strong-arming on Buck. He was still basically imprisoned within the narrowly confined course of this tree-walled mountain interstate – he was trapped at the mercy of the Man and running like a contemptible rat in a maze. Speedy was getting spun up to the point of serious angst-iness.
Even over the gale Speedy heard a rippling explosive gargantuan C*R*A*C*K uphill to his right, and he stopped cold, his heart stumbling once before recovering. As he watched, a giant redwood uphill to his left, the tallest one in sight, s-l-o-w-l-y wavered off from vertical with regal reluctance, its incredible football field length gaining speed faster and faster as it fell, toppling as inevitable as doomsday.
It didn’t just hit, it SLAMMED into the ground amongst its fellow lesser giants with a seemingly endless rolling thunderclap sound of impact that was loud even over the wind. The butt end of the trunk, though almost 10 yards in diameter, bent like a bow with the force of the redwood’s fall; the snapped roots at the toppled tree’s base end kicked up into visibility, shuddered for a few seconds while explosively showering clumps of dirt as big as Speedy, and then fell back again.
Speedy goggled at the gap in the tree line where the gale-murdered redwood king had reigned a few seconds before, and at the long scar it had torn into the forest when it fell. He was trembling in shock and awe at the sheer alienness of all this, and by actually having witnessed nature’s display of power.
Clouds scudded across the moon as if fleeing the windstorm that poured through the black masses of redwood trees on either side of the road, savagely rustling through their foliage loud enough to sound like a deep fat fryer in action. The rising and falling wails of the wind screamed out a litany of incoherent threats.
Unreasoning terror welled up within Speedy; some primal part of his brain almost expected armies of bogeymen to converge on him from the wind-tossed darkness about him. The branches of the closest trees thrashed in the heavy wind like the arms of blind giants groping for the human interloper, as if trying to snatch up and crush this shivering monkey afraid and friendless in their territory.
“Boo,” Speedy screamed in rage at the roaring night wind, spreading his arms and fingers wide to make himself bigger against the claustrophobic dark and the threatening redwoods.
Like magic it all became harmless again. His surroundings were just high wind and redwood trees, mountains and darkness and cloud swept sky – nothing more or less.
Speedy took a deep breath to simmer down, then snickered in self-mockery and started jogging again, in a loping stride that ate up the miles despite the powerful headwind.
He and Buck had parted company in the dense middle of the piney woods. After Speedy had run a while further, 101 began switch-backing down the foothills out of the old growth redwoods and into rolling chaparral: low hills covered with dry yellow grass, interspersed with occasional clumps of trees and shrubbery.
The gale lessened as he wended back and forth down the switchbacks, finally nearing calmness. The scent of sage rose to hit Speedy’s nostrils in the stillness, not unpleasantly. It smelt pungent and menthol-y, a little like the Kools and Newports the brothers all smoked inside.
Speedy saw something maybe a half mile in front of him and to his left; it looked like an artificially straight berm of earth. The berm was at a lower elevation than where Speedy was currently walking, so he could look down on it nestling among the foothills about a hundred yards off the highway. The berm was roughly square and obviously artificial even though covered in grass and dotted with a few patchy clumps of shrubbery and small trees. Its near side extended for roughly a quarter mile down the road like a fortress of mounded dirt; at thirty feet tall the sloping ramparts were too high for Speedy to see the ‘fortress’s’ interior even from above.
As he hit the flatlands an off-ramp came into view up ahead, leading to a well-lit fifty-yard gap in the center of the berm. A big rig swung off the highway and decelerated toward the opening in the berm, the engine moaning a sad song as the driver downshifted. The truck disappeared into the gap’s lit-up maw.
During a momentary lull in traffic Speedy left the highway on sudden impulse, trotting across a field of waist-high dead grass rippling in the light wind. He listened for oncoming engines on the highway behind him and he glanced back frequently to watch for approaching headlights from either direction, dropping prone in concealment as needed.
By the time he’d reached the base of the berm at least half a dozen trucks had entered or exited the gap to his left. Speedy lay in the tall grass at the bottom of the towering squared mound of grassy earth and looked up at where the long berm’s top met the sky. The berm’s edge extended horizontally beneath the moon’s loveless rays like the ramparts of an abandoned castle.
Speedy could hear the irritated grumbles of big-rig engines on the other side of the berm, as well as muffled sounds of other activities he couldn’t identify. He reared up to look back one more time at the highway, searching for pursuit and seeing none.
He began climbing the steep slope, staying amongst the thicker patches of grass and vegetation as best he could. At the berm’s skyline he came to a patch of bushes big enough to actually conceal him, and dropped prone to slither into the midst of it. Speedy leopard-crawled forward on his belly, knees and forearms until he could peep over the rim of the berm and spy out what was on the other side.
The grassy berm Speedy lay atop was only one side of a huge hollow square. All four sides were level mounds of brush- and tree-dotted earth ten yards tall, a quarter-mile long and perhaps a hundred feet wide. The berm Speedy was lying on was the only one with an opening in it.
Filling the hollow center was a billiard table expanse of cracked pitch-patched asphalt. A large one-story building like an oversized drive-in theater snack bar squatted in the exact middle of the lot, covered by enough neon to blind a pimp and surrounded by concentric groupings of parked big-rig semis and trailers. A miserly grid of parking lot lights provided isolated islands of illumination.
It was a truck stop.
Speedy looked back along the way he’d come, surprised at the actual distance he’d had to slink in from Highway 101 now that he could view his route from higher ground. The intermittent flow of highway traffic continued in both directions back there, indifferent to his paranoia.
He still saw no sign of pursuit but he had no faith that Buck hadn’t dimed him, had no reason to think CHP wasn’t about to hunt up his back trail any minute sweeping and scouring the highways and byways for him. It wouldn’t take much effort on their parts to sweep up a lone wolf like himself once he was actually on their radar.
Even though he was in a hella hurry to get home to the Bay Area, it was the shrewder move to stay off the highway for a little while. Speedy studied the truck stop inside the berm, casing it, profiling all the comings and goings.
The wind sighed through the foliage he was hiding under. The full moon’s rays were muted to a dappling as they shone through the rustling branches, painting him and the ground he laid on in a cool, dim, hypnotic pattern of shifting spots of light tinged by pale reds and yellows from the terminal’s neon. Exhaustion blindsided him and sucker punched him into oblivion as his dimming gaze watched the trucks with predatory intentness.
Speedy slept.
He woke just before sunrise. At first he thought it was just his chattering teeth and overall shivering that had shaken him into wakefulness. He was as sodden with discomfort as a hung-over junkie to be sure. The clammy pre-dawn air and the stone-hard ground he’d laid on had sucked away the body heat from his bones like giant leeches.
The moon was down. Although the horizon was perceptibly brightening with the approaching sun, most of the light illum
inating his surroundings still spilled up from below, from the lights of the truck stop on the other side of the berm’s ‘skyline.’ Those artificial lights’ pale glow silhouetted the shrubbery surrounding him.
Speedy sensed movement all around him and froze as best as he could given his shivering; he breathed as shallow as possible, mouth open to improve his hearing. He’d been sleeping on his belly, and was facing the ground as he opened his eyes. He kept his gaze pointed downward as he forced his eyes unfocused, willing his peripheral vision to pierce the darkness around him. He had to know what was going on here; ignorance was fatal.
There were things moving around him, lots of them; small cat-sized blobs hopping about or sitting still. Once more Speedy was reminded of just how alien all this was to a city boy like him – he had no idea what to make of any of it. The hairs on the back of his neck rose and stood to attention.
Something landed on the ground right next to him with a thump, and he rolled up fast and silent onto one elbow, his other arm shooting out to grab it in what would have been a blur if anyone had been there to watch. Something warm and small and furry dangled from his grasp, gyrating and keening frantically as it tried to get away. Speedy didn’t relax his grip despite almost freaking out himself, instead cautiously pulling it closer and squinting at it in the dim reflected light from the truck stop below.
It was only a rabbit.
Speedy lowered his arm and relaxed his grip as he lay back down on the cold ground, weak with reaction as the terrified bunny sped off. He looked up at the dimming stars and was racked by spasms of silent laughter, shaking in hilarity without making any sound that might attract lurking threats to him. The shudders of soundless laughter gradually subsided, almost painful in the necessity to keep them silent and private.
Speedy rolled over to rest on his elbow again and looked around him amidst the harmless Rabbit Kingdom, an intruder spying on them as they went about their rabbity business.
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