ROADSIDE
by Daniel Thant

Just watching the concrete crawl along beneath my feet, wishing the earth would open up so I could fall down inside. My sleeping bag is under my arm, the ancient green sleeping bag I stole from a Goodwill in Ohio five months ago. I've never washed it so it's full of dirt from my clothes and shoes. I can feel the hard road on my feet - the soles of my shoes are almost gone, my jeans worn to an oily silver. Four days of beard on my face and I haven't had a haircut in two months; my hair is like cobwebs. My skin tanned from the sun and highway dust, and this smell of alcohol and sweat on me . . . I keep my eyes down so I don't have to see, and come to find out it works both ways - most people only pay back the attention they're given. I've made parts of the world invisible, and I've tried to stay hidden inside them. But it isn't easy to stay hidden - the subconscious resists anonymity.

At one time I could have kept my focus and stayed invisible when I was drinking, and then I met this girl one night at a liquor store. I saw that we were the same animal: she was sitting leaning against the side of the brick, her eyes in the dirt and a bottle of liquor between her shoes. She was only sixteen but she said she was twenty-two and we were watching the moon, like a chalky fingerprint on a blackboard, way up, free from the city. She told about escaping her foster home and I thought we were the same animal, I figured we should keep me company.

Next day I caught sight of myself in a storefront, my crazy bright eyes and old clothes and hair. She was still with me, all dressed in corduroy with her young face and her pierced nose, a runaway. She didn't know the first thing about me or how to live on the side of a road - in the daylight she was just a kid. I told her to go home, back to her foster family, and then I slipped away down an alley and lost her.
I thought I did. But we had seen straight through each other, I guess. Guy in an eighteen-wheeler passes me going the other way, and I know a little ways down the highway he'll see another hitchhiker, a girl in brown corduroy and a backpack.

I told her to look at me, I'm wasting away from the drink and not enough food. I've got a few crumpled bills in my pocket, and if I get my way I'll be drunk on it tonight. Everything I touch is a curse.
She shook her short brown hair at me, as if to shake my words out of her ears. She can walk farther and faster than me, I can't lose her. Used to be I could throw myself in front of traffic whenever I felt it without the fear of being run down - now she'd find the body. Now my own corpse is an obligation. If she found me dead I'd be turning her into me, like when my wife died of heart failure at thirty-five, taking our unborn daughter with her. By the time I came home from teaching one Wednesday night at the community college it was too late. I've always been finding things out after the fact, like that. So I have to keep alive because she's back there watching, like I got a surrogate daughter, a ghost following me with those dark, observant eyes.

Now it's getting into dusk and the highway is practically empty, just a few distant headlights. I'm walking through swarms of fireflies near a hedge of trees when a pickup truck stops over on one side and the man inside says, Hey you need a ride buddy. I say sure and walk over there, throw my sleeping bag in the bed. I climb up inside real slow, and real guilty. The middle of nowhere, Montana. But when I turn around to look, she's standing right there, looking me right in the eye, claiming way too much of what she doesn't even know she's seeing. She tosses her backpack in and I give her a hand up. We lean against the cab and the truck moves down the highway and she keeps watching me, making it hard to fall asleep.

© DANIEL THANT 2000

ROADSIDE
another roadside attraction

MISOGYNIST
Tough love

SHOTGUN INCIDENT
Protect the ones you love? New Dec 2003
More Fiction in Dreamscapes

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