Need a lift?

A story by J. Aaron Courts

I have a confession to make. A confession, of sorts. I don’t know that it was a crime—what I did to an old man hitchhiking along the interstate seven or eight years ago. But would I do it again? I have. Will I do it again in the future? I think so.

My uncle was a regular hitchhiker in the 1980s. He lived in Southern California but stuck his thumb out all the way to Southeast Texas and back several times per year. That is until a man turned off the interstate onto a stretch of desolate, desert road, pulled out a knife, and tried to sexually assault him. He wasn’t counting on my uncle carrying a pistol.

My uncle told me the story when he was home on one of his visits. I loved when they fell in summer. He’d stay in his childhood bedroom at my grandparents’ house when he returned, and we’d go there to swim in their pool. He was so big and strong he could throw us from the steps, in the shallow end, to the middle of the deep end, on the far side of the blue and white safety rope that divided the pool in two. I was seven or eight and completely fascinated by the man.

I’d ask him about his long walks from California anytime I could get him alone and then sit and listen to his adventures in between blender churns. He fixed large batches of Piña Colada and would pour me a small cup and always make me drink it, then and there, before my mother saw. I would fantasize about walking with him across the country until a brain freeze hit and hijacked my body. Dodging wadi flash floods. Or spotting bright, unexplainable orbs against a New Mexican night. Or bikini babes waiting our return, where California sand meets the cold, blue Pacific. Then the tongue, inevitably pressed to the roof of my mouth, would become reality’s beckon, and I’d answer.

But this time, his encounter had been with a man and the man’s knife, in a small black truck, somewhere in the starlit desert. My drink thawed in my hand without ever passing my lips and my grandmother’s cat licked the condensation pooling on the bar. I rubbed the cat’s back, and it licked my wet palm with its sandpaper tongue, and I thought about how much sand my uncle must have crossed to get back home.

“What happened after you got out of the truck?” I asked.

“I walked.”

“That must’ve been—”

“It was a long walk out of the desert.”

---

The dangers faced by those choosing to hitchhike are both real and obvious. It’s estimated some two thousand seven hundred people were victimized along our nation’s highways and interstates in the time between my birth and when I saw the old hitchhiker. And yet it’s the wandering hitchhiker who’s often feared the most.

My mother made me swear I would never pick up hitchhikers when I got my driver’s license at sixteen. She’s forced me to reaffirm the oath several times in the decades since. Now, my wife asks why I would ever pick one up. It’s a good question, and apt, because I never kept my word to my mother, and because I still do pick one up on occasion. But that’s not my confession. Not exactly.

In 2016, I drove from Fort Sill to Camp Lejeune on Christmas Eve. My little brother was stationed in Oklahoma, and I was stationed in North Carolina. He’s mechanically inclined, so I had him build custom go-karts for my wife and daughters. I was driving through the night to have them in the backyard by morning, but the drive was going slow. Accident after accident clogged the interstate. I caught a flat on my trailer and had to change the tire on a dangerous bend, then caught another flat on my truck from a screw and had to change that too. And the weather was bad. The roads were slick with oil and black slush from a recent storm, and another darker, more ominous storm was gathering the horizon.

I saw a hitchhiker walking down an access road near the border of Arkansas and Tennessee as I filled up my truck with gas. I was already shivering, using the open door of my truck to shield me from the wind and the old man was walking directly into it. I grabbed a bag of jerky from inside the convenience store, and a few bottles of water, and set off in the same direction. I pulled beside him half a mile down and offered him a ride. I assumed he would jump in eagerly, but the hard life of a man on the road had sharpened his suspicions. I watched him eye me and grind the gums of a toothless mouth. He leaned back and studied the trailer. Mist began to fall, and the shoulders of his faded green field jacket soaked up the water like a sponge. I wondered how long it would be before it turned to sleet and snow.

“What you haulin’?” he asked. His jaws churned and his gums smacked, toothless, and the hand he rested on the open window shook. He slid it closer to the passenger vent and I turned the heater up.

“Go-karts for my girls,” I said. “My wife and daughters. Santa’s making an early morning delivery.”

He leaned his head in the open window a bit and looked in the backseat.

No black duffle bag. No plastic-lined seats. No duct tape. No rope or knife. If I was a murderer, I wasn’t worried about getting away with it.

---

I’ve only hitchhiked myself once. A friend and I got my Bronco stuck mudding when I was teenager and we were walking down a narrow gravel road, headed back to town for help. Pine trees were dusted white their first ten or so limbless feet on either side of the road and yellow with pollen to their peaks. A blue Ford pickup overtook us and the man driving offered us a ride in the bed. My friend hopped in first and sat on an old spare tire, and I hopped in second. I used the sidestep and noticed the man lean over and open his glove box as I did. He pulled a small, blue steel revolver out and set it in the bucket seat between himself and a small dog that stayed curled and apparently uninterested in the revolver. The man seemed straightforward enough, but I pointed it out to my friend and watched carefully to make sure he slowed as we approached the first gas station.

“I grabbed some jerky and water when I filled up,” I said to the old man—the hitchhiker—in Tennessee.

His hair was matted, and his surplus field jacket had officially soaked through to his chest. He leaned his head in again, this time inspecting the floorboard and front seat and the arm rest pulled forward that separated what would be his from my own, if he decided to accept my ride. He didn’t see anything.

He didn’t see the asp—a telescopic steel baton—which I keep in the door compartment beside my leg.

He didn’t see the folded hunting knife I keep in my pocket, that has removed the flesh and intestines of many things.

He didn’t see the Springfield 1911 either, a flat black single-action semi-automatic pistol, loaded and warm under my thigh, pointed in his direction for however long he decided to hitch a ride.

“I’m headed to North Carolina,” I said after some time. “I gotta stick to the interstate, but I can take you as far as, oh I don’t know, say, Greensboro if you want.”

I wonder now if he sensed the pistol pointed at him as he slowly decided whether the ride would be safe or not. Safe enough. My truck wasn’t small, but it was black, and I wondered if some clean-cut driver ever turned off a desert road with him. If he’d ever gotten into a vehicle without plastic, or rope, or a knife, only to regret it a few miles later. If he was ever, maybe, two thousand seven hundred and one.

Did he know I was prepared to kill him?

That I knew how I would do it. That I could do it without even tapping the brakes.

Could he feel the chambered round pointed at his chest, even then, from just a few feet away?

He opened the truck door and slid into the seat.

“Nashville will do.”