I am nervous, of course. It started with the safe apprehension of someone that still had time to change their mind, the giddiness that sits where all nervous sits, in the stomach, but does so lightly. Perched like a bird and fluttering. As I changed buses and took people up on their offers of rides, the bird died. It’s a dead canary, weighing heavier than it should against my bladder and the nearer I come to meeting the stranger, the heavier it becomes.
It’s never been a good idea to meet with the Stranger, I’ve learned that much in hindsight. His intentions, his motivations, are all opaque to the point of nonsense. Opaque except they have been pointedly selfish, I think. At best, he’s used me as I use these people that pick me up when I’m hitchhiking: consensually, if not for mutual benefit. And certainly not with ulterior motives. I try to leave any car better than I find it. I try to listen when the driver wants to talk. I try to stay silent when they only want to drive. I don’t have the means to pay these people back. Not with money or love or any of that. All I have is time, really, and I make that clear before I ever get into a car.
The Stranger is the hitchhiker with the hidden knife. The one that steals. The one that disappears without a thank you. That disappears, sometimes, instantly and other times slowly, as though he’s fading smoke.
I wonder if he thinks it’s stupid to meet me. He hasn’t turned off the tracker. I can see him making his way toward me, even as I write. There is still time, I suppose, but the bird gets heavier and I stay where I am.
‘There is no such thing as neutral ground. This is true for the Wayside just as it’s true everywhere else. Spaces that advertise as neutral, where sworn enemies gather for tense conversations about mutual threats: they don’t exist. Generally, not at all, and absolutely not for long. ‘Neutral ground’ is conceptual and temporary and very, very fragile, because this is a capitalist society and there is inevitably someone that’s unwilling to buy in and there’s always someone in a position to pay.
‘Thrifty Gear’ is the closest possible thing to neutral ground that a person might find off the highway. It makes no promises of safety and its apathetic security force is hardly capable of identifying and reprimanding shoplifters let alone discerning between members of warring factions and enforcing any sort of peace. ‘Thrifty Gear’ is just a big, quiet, used gear outlet that doesn’t make for particularly good killing. Its customers are loyal and ornery enough to remember repeat offenders and to make their lives miserable on the road. It would be like killing someone in one’s local library. It can be done, sure. It might even be easy. But aren’t there better places? Of course there are.
That’s what this book is about.’
I’ve been to ‘Thrifty Gear’ a few times before but they’re always changing the layout and the layout has always been chaotic at best. Packs and jackets take up the racks. Old gas lanterns intermingle with flashlights in half a dozen crates. I find a flashlight that’s like mine but newer and pay for it right away so that I can just put it in my bag. I find some new blankets for Hector’s kennel in the rag fabric they sell by the pound in the back. I check my phone so often that the battery runs low and then I see that the Stranger’s icon overlaps mine.
He’s here somewhere.
I look around and don’t see him. I wander through the store and peer out into the parking lot, where my motorcycle is ticking in the cold. It looks dirty. Its tires need air. I have a spare key. For these reasons alone I should take the bike and drive away but that would risk ducking out between the cars and provoking an ambush and somehow it seems like the sort of thing the Stranger would do. I’m no stranger.
So, I do what the Stranger would want: I wander the inside of ‘Thrifty Gear,’ taking as many blind corners as I can so that he can suddenly appear as though he were the one that’s been waiting for me to arrive. And it works, sort of, because after a couple dozen turns I come upon him but he’s facing the opposite direction, standing straight but not so straight as to be formal, and his silky black rabbit is perched on his shoulder, fur draped down over him like a living cape. Neither seem to notice me until Hector snuffles in his kennel and then they both jump.
“Dammit,” the Stranger turns and pats his chest, making such a show of faking exasperation that I can see he’s really exasperated underneath. “You can’t sneak up on a man like that.”
“I used to couldn’t sneak up on you at all.”
“Well that’s your noisy-as-hell bike, I suppose. Deaf in both ears, now, and tracked like an animal.” He tosses me my GPS tracker, still sticky with adhesive. He throws another my way. “Thought I wouldn’t find both?”
I only had the one on the bike and I pause, considering whether to tell the Stranger this and whether he’d believe me or if this is all some ploy to make me paranoid. Who would be tracking me anyway? By the time I’ve pocketed the devices my silence has been received as anger.
“No hard feelings,” he says, and that’s the first thing that makes me legitimately angry.
“Where’d you get that?” I ask, pointing at his rabbit-thing.
“Rich folk have something like our Wayside. All handbags made of human leather and illegal surgeries. This guy’s like a rottweiler you wear. Pretty and pretty mean.”
“If it’s for rich people, how’d you get in?”
“Snuck.” The Stranger yawns, showing off his thick tongue, his teeth like a decrepit fence.
“You wanted to talk?”
“Just to settle things once and for all. You know I’dve killed you if I wanted back at the arches and I’d have killed you a few more times before that but I’m learning it pays to have a lookalike out here with me, doing the same things only a little nicer where I’m a little… rough.”
“We don’t look anything alike.”
The Stranger shrugs and strokes his rabbit until it nips at him. He drops the hand and drips blood on the linoleum. “I’ve done you wrong a few times, I’ll admit it, so what I propose now is a simple truce. You keep to your business and I keep to mine and we talk before fighting when those businesses happen to overlap.”
He holds out his hand and I swallow all the reasons this doesn’t quite seem fair. I take his hand and he smears blood on the inside of my wrist.
“Sorry about that,” he says, and he licks another finger to wipe it away. Once he’s finished, he stands straight again and sighs. “I sure feel better, now. Don’t you? Here’s to going our separate ways.”
He tosses me the key to the motorcycle and I wait for him to do his trick- to disappear into the coats or vanish as the lights flicker. Instead, he walks across the store to the checkout line and buys a couple old water bottles, struggling to find a twenty hidden in his back pocket.
“I don’t feel better about this at all,” I tell Hector, but he’s still in his kennel, lulled to sleep by the sounds of shopping.
-traveler
