It’s a Tuesday and I’m driving a refrigerator truck South on 91 to Jersey in one-hundred degree heat. The truck is filled with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. I’m not unaware of the consequences if I should break down or, God forbid, launch my vehicle into orbit off the George Washington. Maybe that’s what motivates me to pick up a hitchhiker at the Northampton exit? I want someone to bear witness should this be my final run.
The hitchhiker is wearing a sweaty Black Dog t-shirt and flip flops. Apparently, I make him feel right at home because within two seconds the flip flops are off and his feet are on my dash.
Are you kidding me? I say.
He puts his feet back on the floor.
We’re not maybe ten minutes down the road, and the hitchhiker is dying for a smoke. I won’t let him. The fumes can infect my cargo, I tell him. He doesn’t believe me, but what can he do? I’m the driver and he’s the hitchhiker. There’s a hierarchy. A hierarchy that’s been established since man first learned to drive an ox cart and picked up some bearded guy thumbing his way to Nazareth.
My hitchhiker bounces his leg up and down and talks a lot.
He met his wife on the Internet, he says. She didn’t speak English. He didn’t speak Spanish. So they translated their emails with software. She was a model, he says. He shows me a picture.
I nod. What am I going to say? That’s some hot fuckin’ broad? I wish I could take a run at her? No. He might call the “Do You Like My Driving?” number on the back of my rig like that red Quatro asshole I gave the finger to a few weeks back. So I keep my mouth shut and listen.
It’s not easy. I have the windows open. The heat and noise and exhaust from the rush hour traffic is getting sucked into my cab. The hitchhiker wants me to shut the windows and turn on the AC. If he wasn’t there, I’d think about it. But it was a principle thing at this point. He expects limousine service? He’s a hitchhiker.
That said, I didn’t want to come across as unreasonable. Maybe my hitchhiker isn’t a saint? Maybe he has a gun in his backpack? So I spell out, calmly and rationally, that I don’t want to divert energy from the refrigerated compartment. The truck is working overtime because of the heat. As purveyors of a premium ice cream product, Ben and Jerry’s insists on a lower temperature than other ice cream manufacturers to maintain the integrity of their brand. If I was hauling Bryer’s, or that crap they sell at Price Chopper, who gives a goddamn, right? But under the circumstances I needed to conserve, sacrifice my own personal comfort, anything, to prevent a white haze from forming on the surface of the Cherry Garcia, a particularly vulnerable flavor to the vagaries of climate change.
At this point, I’m pretty worked up and waving my hands. The hitchhiker takes all this in.
You’re a careful man, he says.
Gotta be. One wrong move and I got soup on my hands.
His leg is bouncing faster now. I figure he’s got to pee. The wife, I ask. Did she ever learn English?
Yeah, he says, shouting over a blue Impala with a hanging muffler, dragging sparks.
Then he slides closer to me on the bench so I can hear. I get a little nervous he might be a fag, but then he goes on with his story and I calm down.
His wife learned English watching Judge Judy, he says. Her first words were, “Baloney” and “You’re in the doggie house.”
I pass a Winnebago with a satellite dish mounted on the roof. The thing is swiveling and, as I drive by, I can see some kids inside trying to watch a basketball game on a small flatscreen.
How did she get here? I ask.
She swam, he says. How do you think she got here?
After this crack, I’m wondering if I should leave this jerk in the breakdown lane. Obviously, there are many ways a hot Latin chick can enter this Land of Opportunity, and not all of them are legal.
Maybe she came in someone’s friggin’ trunk, I say.
He sees I’m angry and realizes which side his bread is buttered. He’s a perceptive hitchhiker. I see that he’s reading me at the same time that I’m reading him. Maybe he thinks I’m the one who is dangerous? There’s always that risk, you know, for both parties when you engage in a hitchhiking transaction. One of you could have just gotten out of Leavenworth.
No, she flew, he says. Into Kennedy. It was winter. I’ll never forget seeing her for the first time. No coat. No hat. Just tight black pants, a tight white blouse, and long dark hair. I had a beard at the time. Later that night, she would discover my toenails were painted pink, which is a whole other story I won’t go into. Anyway, at the airport she kissed me on the lips and that was that. It was March 6th. Five months later we got married under a tree by a justice of the peace during his lunch break from the post office.
I was a little nervous about the pink toenails, but still curious about the wife.
Did she know where Northampton was? I ask.
No clue, he says. After several weeks, she tells me with her hands that she has to go back to Guatemala, she forgot something. Two weeks later, she returns with her 14-year-old son who is the size of a refrigerator. The kid doesn’t speak a word of English either. I feel like a foreigner in my own home. They’re looking at me sideways and jabbering away. I have no idea what they’re talking about.
One day it snowed hard, the hitchhiker says. One of those famous Northeasters we get, with drifts up to here.
He holds his hand against my cab’s ceiling. Then he goes on with his story.
I thought they might like to pitch in and do the walkway, so I show them a pair of shovels and point outside. Later, I’m thinking where the hell are they, and glance out the window to see they’ve cleared the entire front yard. They didn’t understand. They thought I meant shovel all of Massachusetts. I ran out to stop them. They’re hot and steaming and stripped down to their t-shirts, cursing my name in Spanish. I could never get the kid to shovel snow again.
The hitchhiker slides back over to his side of the cab and leans out the window.
You ever get married? he shouts. He has to shout because we are going through Hartford and are next to a Boar’s Head meat truck, the one with the ugly pig snout printed on the side. The truck is hitting every pothole and making a racket because the sliding back door wasn’t secured and is jumping around.
Twice, I say. But I don’t feel like going into detail. He was my hitchhiker, not my priest.
The hitchhiker keeps talking, this time to the boar.
Whenever I pulled the car into the garage, he says, my wife would lower her head and run into the house like a bull.
Why is that? I shout.
The dog fencer.
She didn’t like dogs?
She didn’t like the red blinking light on the dog fencer. She said it looks like the laser on a gun when it’s pointed at you.
Ah! I think. She has history.
She also hated spiders, he says. We had a ton of them on our deck and she would attack them with a broom. Her foster mother used to put tarantulas in her bed.
Some asshole in a Subaru suddenly veers in front of me, and I have to zig and then zag so we are almost driving on two wheels. Melted Rocky Road flashes before my eyes. It took a few minutes for my heart to stop pounding.
The hitchhiker doesn’t miss a beat. He keeps talking, maybe to calm me, maybe to get things off his chest. I am, after all, cheap therapy.
A married blond friend, he says, dropped by one afternoon to visit. Her name was Sheila. My Guatemalan wife looks her up and down. There is no way to explain that Sheila always wears dresses that are too short and makeup that is too much.
You’re not going to chuga-chuga with her? the wife asked after Sheila leaves.
Of course not, the hitchhiker says. Why would you think that?
Never trust, the wife said, retreating into the kitchen. Steam was rising up from pots on the stove. Never trust.
I know a Mobil station is coming up. I signal to move into the right lane. While I’m looking in my mirrors, trying to snake in front of a skinny bitch in a Range Rover, I say casually, so you banged your friend, Sheila?
The hitchhiker is now examining himself in the side view mirror like he’s preening for the Oscar’s. Not just the big vertical mirror, but he’s checking for zits in the round fun-house mirror. At first, he’s not aware that I have enough mirrors in that truck to know what goes on in Ethiopia. Then our eyes meet through a maze of reflections. He stops preening. The bank accounts were emptied, he says. She took one car. I guess her son figured out how to drive the other.
We need gas, I say.
I hit the right blinker and take Exit 9 just before New Haven.
She left a note, he says. It was written with a big Sharpie. The words leaked through the paper onto the kitchen table. Now every morning while drinking my coffee, I have to stare at …
“I’M GOING TO TAKE YOU TO KLEENERS!!!”
I pull into the Mobil station and drive around back to the diesel. When I stop, the hitchhiker looks at me.
Can I borrow five bucks? he asks.
I’m not surprised. I’ve picked up hitchhikers before.
He’s bouncing up and down on the seat now, so I know he’s jonesing to go to the bathroom. I take my time looking for my billfold even though I know it’s in my front pocket. Finally, I give him the five. In the mirror, I watch him climb out of the truck with his knapsack and race to the john.
Want anything? he shouts before slamming the john door.
I’m good, I shout back.
While he’s in the can, I pull away and get on the Interstate before he can write down the phone number on the back of my truck.
I don’t care if he’s Jesus, I say to a tan Prius from North Carolina. It’s one-hundred friggin’ degrees in April, and I have a Dominican supervisor waiting for me in Jersey who thinks he works for the Department of Homeland Security.
The sonofabitch will inspect my cargo, carton after carton, until he can hold up a tub of Mocha Mountain Fudge and taunt me with signs of the tell-tale hoar frost.