Skeleton Crew

'My fault. I can't feel what I'm doing yet.' “I—' She stopped, seemingly at a loss. I suddenly realized that she was scared. I felt my first reaction to her swim over me again—to protect her and take care of her, make her not afraid. 'I need a ride,' she finished in a rush. 'I didn't dare ask any of them.' She made a barely perceptible gesture toward the truckers in the booth.

How can I make you understand that I would have given anything—anything—to be able to tell her, Sure, finish your coffee, I'm parked right outside. It sounds crazy to say I felt that way after half a dozen words out of her mouth, and the same number out of mine, but I did.

Looking at her was like looking at the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo come to breathing life.

And there was another feeling. It was as if a sudden, powerful light had been turned on in the confused darkness of my mind. It would make it easier if I could say she was a pickup and I was a fast man with the ladies, quick with a funny line and lots of patter, but she wasn't and I wasn't.

All I knew was I didn't have what she needed and it tore me up.

'I'm thumbing,' I told her. 'A cop kicked me off the interstate and I only came here to get out of the cold. I'm sorry.'

'Are you from the university?'

'I was. I quit before they could fire me.'

'Are you going home?'

'No home to go to. I was a state ward. I got to school on a scholarship. I blew it. Now I don't know where I'm going.' My life story in five sentences. I guess it made me feel depressed.

She laughed—the sound made me run hot and cold. 'We're cats out of the same bag, I guess.' I thought she said cats. I thought so. Then. But I've had time to think, in here, and more and more it seems to me that she might have said rats. Rats out of the same bag. Yes. And they are not the same, are they?

I was about to make my best conversational shot—something witty like 'Is that so?'—when a hand came down on my shoulder.

I turned around. It was one of the truckers from the booth. He had blond stubble on his chin and there was a wooden kitchen match poking out of his mouth. He smelled of engine oil and looked like something out of a Steve Ditko drawing.

'I think you're done with that coffee,' he said. His lips parted around the match in a grin.

He had a lot of very white teeth.

'What?'

'You stinking the place up, fella. You are a fella, aren't you? Kind of hard to tell.'

'You aren't any rose yourself,' I said. 'What's that after-shave, handsome? Eau de Crankcase?' He gave me a hard shot across the side of the face with his open hand. I saw little black dots.

'Don't fight in here,' the short-order cook said. 'If you're going to scramble him, do it outside.'

'Come on, you goddammed commie,' the trucker said.

This is the spot where the girl is supposed to say something like 'Unhand him' or 'You brute.' She wasn't saying anything. She was watching both of us with feverish intensity. It was scary. I think it was the first time I'd noticed how huge her eyes really were.

'Do I have to sock you again?'

'No. Come on, shitheels.' I don't know how that jumped out of me. I don't like to fight. I'm not a good fighter. I'm an even worse name-caller. But I was angry, just then. It came up on me all at once that I wanted to kill him.

Maybe he got a mental whiff of it. For just a second a shade of uncertainty flicked over his face, an unconscious wondering if maybe he hadn't picked the wrong hippie. Then it was gone. He wasn't going to back off from some long-haired elitist effeminate snob who used the flag to wipe his ass with—at least not in front of his buddies. Not a big ole truck-driving son-ofa- gun like him.

The anger pounded over me again. Faggot? Faggot? I felt out of control, and it was good to feel that way. My tongue was thick in my mouth. My stomach was a slab.

We walked across to the door, and my buddy's buddies almost broke their backs getting up to watch the fun.

Nona? I thought of her, but only in an absent, back-of-my-mind way. I knew Nona would be there. Nona would take care of me. I knew it the same way I knew it would be cold outside. It was strange to know that about a girl I had only met five minutes before. Strange, but I didn't think about that until later. My mind was taken up—no, almost blotted out—by the heavy cloud of rage. I felt homicidal.

The cold was so clear and so clean that it felt as if we were cutting it with our bodies like knives. The frosted gravel of the parking lot gritted harshly under his heavy boots and under my shoes. The moon, full and bloated, looked down on us with a vapid eye. It was faintly ringed, suggesting bad weather on the way. The sky was as black as a night in hell. We left tiny dwarfed shadows behind our feet in the monochrome glare of a single sodium light set high on a pole beyond the parked rigs. Our breath plumed the air in short bursts. The trucker turned to me, his gloved fists balled.

'Okay, you son-of-a-bitch,' he said.

I seemed to be swelling—my whole body seemed to be swelling. Somehow, numbly, I knew that my intellect was about to be eclipsed by an invisible something that I had never suspected might be in me. It was terrifying— but at the same time I welcomed it, desired it, lusted for it. In that last instant of coherent thought it seemed that my body had become a stone pyramid or a cyclone that could sweep everything in front of it like colored pick-up sticks. The trucker seemed small, puny, insignificant. I laughed at him. I laughed, and the sound was as black and as bleak as that moonstruck sky overhead.