‘‘The Fridge-Magnet Safe-Hold’ (or FMSH) is relatively new to the Wayside and was a small, unadvertised venture until 2022 when fictional mob boss Tom Get (of the series, ‘Getmen’) uttered a now signature phrase: ‘sleeping with the fridges.’ This euphemism, seemingly misspoken, resolved itself at a scene filmed on-site at the ‘FMSH,’ in which Tom reveals that the business serves as a convenient way to ‘keep the fuzz from taking hold of ‘em’ (itself, a colloquialism for police investigation, not an allusion to mold). The episode proved popular enough that the ‘FMSH’ tactic for hiding bodies featured several more times- right up until a real body was discovered there.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

‘The Fridge-Magnet Safe-Hold is a fridge dump and magnet-storage solution all in one. It was founded with an understanding that many American families are upgrading to refrigerators that, through shape or material, are unable to hold the magnets that had become sentimental on previous models. For a small fee (discounted with the simultaneous donation of a fridge) a family can rent fridge space in a building that is, in all other ways, your average storage beehive. Units consist of a single fridge behind a clear plexiglass door so that the stored magnets can be viewed but not touched. For five dollars, anyone can walk the halls of the FMSH and admire the collections housed within except on Wednesdays and Saturday, when entry is reserved for unit holders only. This is likely when most people take a moment out of their week to store figurative skeletons in their closets, these fridges being mostly airtight and just inconspicuous enough to allow for the storage of petty secrets. The expectation for these skeletons to be ‘figurative’ is why the dead body felt like such a party foul to those who used the place as intended.’

Hector and I arrive at ‘The FMSH’ on a Thursday- a slow day, I’m told. Those other visitors I see around me tend to slot into a few categories: the true crime enthusiasts, the ‘Getmen’ fans, the fringe art students, and the miscellaneous drop-ins, like myself. The true-crime and Getman folks are crowded around a rather drab looking display in the northeast portion of ‘The FMSH.’ I stand near the back for a while before I understand why: the stench.

Something is rotting in the fridge.

A man, a tour guide I assume, has drawn the attention of the crowd to the plastic letter magnets on display, there, suggesting very generally that theoretical hitmen might (and fictional hitmen certainly would) leave coded messages in letters like these to ensure their fellows in crime might understand the nature of what is inside. The crowd eats this up, some trying to decipher the magnets, others asking if it might be wise to call the police, secretly hoping, I’m sure, to be on-site when a new discovery is made.

The guide deflects the latter suggestion in a way that makes me think whatever group he’s associated with has filled the fridge with meat for effect. The crowd moves on.

A group of children eat lunch at the opposite end of the property, taking advantage of an otherwise empty hallway. I step over and through them and despite my rush, despite my worn-ragged clothes and body, they stop me to ask question about Hector, who eats his fill of sandwich lettuce and baby carrots while the chaperones grimace nearby.

In a lull that threatens to be awkward, I ask about the drawing of a house on one of the nearby fridges and soon find myself on a miniature tour of schoolwork. This hallway has been rented to the school, it seems, and the children post their exemplars here for viewing. They seem proud, and rightfully so, especially given such a strange audience as me and my rabbit. I go and spoil things at the end, though. I suggest, to one of the teachers, that if I were going to hide a body in any fridge, these make a lot more sense than the rest.

-traveler

‘‘The Free Mattress Dump,’ ‘The Spring Brambles,’ or, in some circles, ‘The Tetanus Garden,’ is a thousand mattresses decaying in an otherwise abandoned Connecticut field. The seed of this strange crop was planted when a local farmer, disgusted at the surreptitious furniture dumping of his neighbors, offered a place to toss mattresses right where everyone would see them daily: on his plot of land next to the freeway. This shaming tactic failed spectacularly, the farmer having underestimated the number of old mattresses that were stored in houses for the perceived cost-prohibitiveness or geographical inaccessibility of local dumps. Too stubborn to admit he was wrong, the field has been lost to the mattresses.

Some say there is a treasure in the fields and that the farmer’s mistake was actually a ploy to frustrate would-be thieves and their amateur metal detectors. This is likely half-true by way of the country’s overall saturation with hidden treasure. This is a nation that buries things- valuable and dangerous. This is a country that sometimes forgets which is buried where.’

I don’t have the money to board Hector again so he comes with me into ‘The Spring Brambles’ and, being careful from all his many years of blindness, passes between the rusted springs without much issue. I don’t fare so well, which makes me thankful for the booster shots I sometimes pick up at free clinics and for the haphazard mess of papers in my bag, among which I found proof of a semi-recent tetanus vaccine and a suggestion that, finding myself torn ragged by dump-metal, I would only need to seek out an additional injection to cover my bases.

I am not quite ragged after an hour in ‘The Bramble,’ but the thrift-store leather jacket I bought as armor for this particular outing is missing a few of its unseemly patches and I am lost, despite being able to see the motorcycle and the freeway in the distance. The nature of the mattress springs is that they have a tendency toward entropical shift. Tangled as they are, a single break can release the tension required to reshape the web of metal as far as half a mile away, closing paths that were once safe and opening new, unmarked exits.

I was prepared for this and, as night falls and I experience the disorientation caused by a flashlight beam playing across the old mattresses, I make camp at the first available clearing and resign myself to a lightless evening under the stars with the mad twanging of tense metal as the only sound but for the distant passing of a car on the freeway. It’s said that Ranger visits ‘The Spring Brambles’ on Mondays and Fridays, armed with heavy wire cutters and puncture-resistant armor to help those who find themselves stranded as I do now.

Like most Americans, I have yet to shake my suspicion of rest. But it’s Wednesday which means, barring a clearing collapse, I will have a rare day of peace made mandatory by threat of harm.

Just the way I like it.

-traveler

The top review for ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ states, simply: It was much worse than I imagined. Reading that, I suspected I could adjust my expectations accordingly but I could not. ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is a site that resists seeing- a painful checkmark on any traveler’s list. It starts with the dust.

‘The dust of ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is a known carcinogen. Grayish-black. Powder-thin. It works its way into engines and electronics and clothes, emerging months- sometimes even years- after a visitor leaves the park behind. Law firms sometimes volunteer to press charges on behalf of those affected but there is no one to sue. It is nature at its most cruel.

‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is, realistically, just piles of this dust. Piles tall enough to be considered landscape. Beneath is a field of sharp rocks, the tips of which sometimes break off and work their way up into the dust. Amongst the rocks there are biting insects. Amongst the insects there is disease.

There is a sport people play only in ‘Horrific Wastes’ and that sport is survival. People attempt to stay in the ‘Wastes’ longer than anyone else and then must survive at least 90 days afterward, proving they did not consume too much of the dust too quickly or contract the ‘Horrific Wasting Disease’ from the insects. The record is a week and a half, set by a man who died 91 days after his stint.

A hit and run.’

I board Hector before heading into ‘Horrific Wastes.’ It doesn’t seem worth trying to shove him into the suits they’ve made for hiking dogs, but it does leave me explaining that I am not the one responsible for his hairlessness and the charred complexion of his skin. It leaves me worried I’ll be reported somewhere, even if all signs point to Hector being healthy and well fed in the present. I leave him with sunblock and that seems to help put their concerns to rest. Anybody who buys top shelf infant sunblock for their rabbit must be good to pets.

Right?

I leave my number and tell them I’m going into ‘Horrific Wastes’ for a night. They recite the names of the people they’ve known who have died there and I assure them I’m taking all the normal precautions: renting a safety suit from the Rangers nearby, spending just one night, and fasting the entire time so that I only have to breach the lower portion of the suit while relieving myself. It seems like too much to be telling strangers, but they nod as though it’s business as usual.

The ‘safe zone’ of ‘Horrific Wastes National Park’ is maintained such that the dust is regularly flattened, some, and that there is a hospital nearby. I struggle to set up my tent in the swirling wastes before realizing it won’t make a difference. I lie down in the dust and wait for the evening to pass.

And the dust swirls about me in clouds.

And the insects hover like stars on the bubbled glass of my suit.

And it’s nice, almost, until I have to pee and feel the stinging of the cancerous terrain on the most sensitive portion of my body.

And until the bugs get inside my suit.

It is much worse than I imagined it would be and I only stay a few hours.

-traveler

‘There was no intention to create ‘The Doll Slum’ when ‘The East Coast Doll Museum and Shop’ rolled out its volunteer program for local kids, but here we are, one doll slum richer for those good intentions. It seemed like a good idea on paper: local students were tasked with creating homes and backdrops for dolls that were a little too old- a little too worn- for proper displays within the museum. Those projects were cute, of course. They were kitschy.

Most of all, they were structurally unsound.

More and more dolls poured into the museum and, as the curators for main display specimens became increasingly selective, the vast majority of the new arrivals flooded the children’s display. Dolls were packed tightly into rooms meant for one or two and as the weak, child-made infrastructure failed under their weight, many dolls were forced to pose outside. Despite the obvious flaws in the initial structure, child labor is still the main source of upkeep in ‘The Doll Slum’ and so the cycle of detriment continues. The uneducated and unpaid are exploited for their labor and the needy are left without the space to thrive.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘It is a complex geographical quirk that drives a number of the nation’s time capsules to ‘Time Field’ in Nebraska. Experts have explained it in terms that the layman cannot understand. ‘Tectonic currents.’ ‘Rolling sandstone decay.’ ‘Cataclysmic fracking vacuums.’ These are phrases that they use in their explanations. They mean so much that they hardly mean anything at all.

‘Time Field’ was established as a local phenomenon in the eighties. Old stuff just showed up there, dirty but in good condition. People exhibited a surprising amount of disinterest. Some even reacted with annoyance, as though antique stores had conspired to intermittently dump unsold goods in this one spot.

Before the internet- before the number of people talking about a thing could reach critical mass in seconds- we just took this sort of thing for granted. Things happened, sometimes. Strange things. This was one of them.

In 2003, for the complicated reasons hinted at above, ‘Time Field’ burst like a plump zit, releasing a cache of time capsules that had been building below the surface of the earth for some time. It drains to this day, visitors picking at the surface like a self-conscious teenager with dirty nails.’

Descriptions of ‘Time Field’ are rife with gross, bodily metaphors. Shrapnel being expelled through long-healed flesh. Teeth working their way out of a baby’s skull. The capsules are the foreign bodies and ‘Time Field’ is, somehow, the path of least resistance in regard to the Earth expelling them.

The place is a dump. The eggshell detritus of cracked time capsules lends a jaggedness to the ground. Paper and cloth mix to a pulp, wet with a recent rain. Hector sniffs for anything edible, occasionally stopping to dig up the wrapper of some long-defunct candy line. A man on the other end of the field side-eyes me as I stoop to grab a quarter, wondering if I’ve found something he missed, I imagine, or warning me away from his spot ahead. The quarter was minted last year- probably fell out of somebody’s pocket.

I don’t have the patience to dig.

Instead, and as is increasingly the tradition, Hector and I scout out a place to sit and eat and reflect upon ‘Time Field’ in case it has a message for me- some clue as to whether this is worth it or when it might conclude. Hector pulls the ring off a dead woman’s hand about 15 minutes later. Costume jewelry from a casket carried on the same dark tide that brings everything else here. I throw it back when Hector isn’t looking.

Ashes. Bones. I’d like to find a way to escape, myself, but, given enough time, just about anything will end up back on the Wayside.

-traveler

Much of the advertising for ‘Radical Horse Rides’ features a man standing on a horse surfboard-style while it gallops along a beach. Given that ‘Radical Horse Rides’ is firmly situated in the Midwest and is, therefore, landlocked, I assume that position of the man is as exaggerated as the scenery.

It is not.

There is a man doing exactly that when I arrive and, unlike the model, he looks terrified. The horse looks terrified as well. And uncomfortable. The man is screaming as he nears the edge of the edge of ‘Radical Horse Rides’’ property. He disappears into the forest and his screaming fades. A woman, also on a horse (but sitting), checks her watch and trots after him. She spots me in the parking lot just before she’s out of sight and whistles for the attention of a man near the stables, who looks up from his phone.

These people work here.

‘The people at ‘Radical Horse Rides’ will show you all manner of credentials, each proving that they are licensed to and more than capable of teaching people to ride horses. They will show you certificates that state ‘Radical Horse Rides’ has been deemed humane and hygienic. All of this flies in the face of what you will experience and the author leaves it to you to decide who to believe and where you choose to spend your money.’

“Your basic package consists of an hour of riding and two positions,” the man, Buck, explains. He hands me a menu. “These are the positions we’ve got available.”

The menu consists entirely of various configurations of human and horse silhouettes. Surfboard-style has a little icon indicating it’s a ‘Popular Choice.’ Another popular choice is standing but with each foot on a different horse, charging forward as if to war. Less popular choices seem to include riding backwards, lying down, leaning to the side with a bow and arrow, being dragged behind a horse (from various limbs), and one that seems like it might be a man carrying a horse. The menu is hundreds of pages long. The man ignores me for his phone, giving me the privacy to look over it in full.

“What about just normal riding?”

He steps over and flips through the booklet: forward, forward, back. He points to a picture of a man riding a horse in the normal, seated position.

“Can I bring my rabbit?” I ask.

The man flips back three times. Forward once. He points to a picture of a man riding a horse with a rabbit in his lap.

“That’s the one,” I tell him.

A hundred dollars later, Hector and I circle the clearing on a horse, each of us uncomfortable, but not so far from comfort as to be scared.

-traveler

‘‘Big Bed Private Sanctuary’ has taken a few forms in the years since its inception. Originally a roadside novelty like any other, ‘Biggest Bed Global’ was just that: the world’s biggest bed as certified by the usual Guinness-style record talliers. When a larger bed was constructed in New Zealand for the filming of 1997’s ‘Bedland Bedlam,’ the owners of ‘Big Bed Global’ honored the defeat by striking all claims to the title from their advertising (forgoing, even, ‘Big Bed USA) and sending a formal letter of congratulations to the filmmakers (who did not respond).

‘Big Bed USA’ rebranded, instead, as ‘Big Bed Park’- a sort of kitschy rest stop that featured a cozily-themed play area upon the once sparse, bed-like structure that no longer qualified as the biggest bed. It worked, for a while, establishing itself not only as a sustainable feature of the Wayside (financially speaking), but as a migration point for endangered songbirds and, eventually, for bees, which built nests along the wooden underside and rarely interacted with life on the top.

The birds and the bees were its undoing.

In 2005, ‘Big Bed Park’ was listed as ‘number four’ in the ‘top ten places to have a budget date in South Utah.’ It became a romantic spot, then a hook-up spot, and eventually a place for police to patrol. When, in 2009, a mutilated body was discovered off the ‘foot’ side of the bed, police called it a lover’s quarrel and, though its natural ecosystem continued to thrive, the resultant articles described ‘Big Bed’ in its worst terms. It was ordered to close and that’s when the killing started in earnest.

It turns out something else had found a home beneath the bed- an unseen, but monstrously violent species that previously nested under, and was therefore constrained by, the standard domestic bed. Having grown to size under ‘Big Bed Park,’ these creatures were more than capable of hunting those travelers unfortunate enough to stop near the fence- more than capable of dragging their bodies back to ‘Big Bed’ for reasons that are unclear to this day. A conservationist group stepped in to block the imminent demolition of ‘Big Bed Park,’ rightly pointing out that these creatures were unique to the area and therefore an endangered species. ‘Big Bed Park’ became ‘Big Bed State Sanctuary’ and is now open only to small, scheduled groups of cryptozoologists and very wealthy donors. The creatures seem content with the attention they receive and kill sparingly.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘The owners of ‘America’s Moon: A Simulation,’ hinge a great deal of their advertising on the claim that a genuine moon rock exists somewhere on-site and that the rock makes it the nearest anybody is going to get to the moon with a beer in hand. The connected ‘Over the Moon’ love hotel once took the same tactic and ran with it in a different direction entirely, appealing to, and disappointing, a population of moon-based thrill seekers that were all too excited to shell out money for what was, at best, a roadside motel painstakingly arced over the rest of ‘America’s Moon.’

The colloquially named ‘Fuck Bridge’ initially attracted a number of customers who found humor in ‘mooning’ families that only wanted to drink their slush wines and eat their shaved ice in a vaguely moon-themed roadside park. With several lawsuits pending, ‘America’s Moon’ boarded up ‘Over the Moon’s’ windows, spinning the deep, claustrophobic dark of the motel as ‘intimacy lighting.’ The exhibitionists were driven away and a new customer base took their place: people who thrived in the darkness. The re-branded ‘Dark Side Motel’ casts a thick shadow over ‘America’s Moon,’ eclipsing it year after year- driving away legitimate customers and drawing enough money of its own as to be considered the central business.’

I call ahead to reserve a room at ‘Dark Side Hotel’ and the conversation I have with the woman is as normal as reservations go except for the constant rustling of paper and her apologies:

“Sorry,” she says, “It’s dark here at the moment.”

“Spell that again for me? Ah, wait- I dropped my pen… It’s got to be around here…”

“I’ll just put everything down on this envelope and file it proper when I’m in the light. Just, uh, remind me when you get here.”

I walk Hector through ‘America’s Moon’ before we check in, both because we arrive a little early and in case the ‘Dark Side Hotel’ is the sort of establishment one endures rather than enjoys. The park is in rough shape, its moon sculptures made more authentic by a coating of terrestrial dust. I am seemingly the only visitor, a man and his rabbit, surrounded by pigeons that circle my ten-dollar basket of fries. I tour a museum called ‘The History of the Moon,’ which rather explicitly states the moon belongs to America. A second museum, called ‘The History of America’s Moon,’ covers the theme park itself and, credit where credit’s due, is pretty forward about the recent decline, trailing off into an empty wing that terminates in a no-frills exit. The rides are charming and eerie for the relative abandonment. I find myself enjoying the place and realizing that I wouldn’t like it quite as much in its heyday.

All the more reason to dread my eventual turn to the ‘Dark Side Motel’ which looms over the park like a black cloud.

The lobby is on the ground floor and it’s not dark, as I expected it to be. It isn’t lit, either, at least not traditionally. The walls and some of the supplies glow a pale, radioactive green once the door has closed behind me. It’s enough that I can maneuver to the desk, where a woman hunches over the paper in front of her, trying to read in the dim light.

“I’m the check-in on the envelope,” I tell her and she smiles, gratefully, with mildly luminescent teeth.

“That makes this a lot easier.”

While the woman shuffles through a pile of scrap paper, scrawled over in heavy marker, I glance back at the only other obvious door- one that must lead to a staircase given the shape of the ‘Dark Side Motel.’ There are no sounds from behind that door. No other guests.

“Busy today?” I ask, and the woman laughs.

“No vacancies,” she says, “Now that you’re here.”

“The other guests…”

“You won’t see them. A lot of regulars, come for the dark. We’ve got…” She squints at her watch, “Another hour or so before near black. Another few before pitch black. You’ve stayed here before?”

“No.”

“Ah, so none of this makes sense to you. Hold on.” She takes a pamphlet from the desk and runs it through something that looks like a laminator. “Reactive ink,” she explains. “There’s a light in there.”

The paper is the brightest thing in the room when it comes out the other end. I find myself having to look away from it while my eyes adjust. The woman goes back to checking me in.

When I can read it properly, I see that the pamphlet covers what it calls ‘phases’ of the ‘Dark Side Motel.’ Much of the motel is detailed with glowing paint and the luminescence is activated once daily between twelve and two: white out. Then, all the lights are turned off and the luminescence fades to absolute dark over the course of the day.

“That’s it?” I ask, as the woman hands me a key. “The reviews made it sound like this was, like, a hub for crime. For, uh, dark dealings.”

“Even mafiosos need to see,” she tells me. “They’ve got their own motels.”

I step across the lobby, already finding it easier to navigate in the near dark without the light from the pamphlet distracting me. The woman stops me at the door:

“Don’t underestimate it,” she says. “The dark, I mean. It can be hard for first-timers. And the regulars don’t make it easier.”

The stairs ahead of me, the hallway beyond, stretch in the indeterminate light, appearing short one moment and impossibly long the next.

“Is it safe?” I ask.

“Just don’t shine any lights in the hallway. People come for the dark.”

The rooms are four to a floor, two to the left and right before and staggered by stairs. Mine is room 17, which puts me just below the crest of the arch. On my way I see some of the other patrons, all of them slumped against the walls, wide-eyed and gulping in the darkness. They pay no attention to my passing and I leave them be.

That sort of catatonia takes me a few hours later. The imperceptible fading of the glowing paint lends itself to a trance-like calm. Shapes form and reform in the darkness. Hector’s quiet chewing, his eventual snoring, are the only sounds. I watch from the peephole of my door as shadows seem to hover past in the hallway- the other guests spinning in the darkness as though adrift in space. Each time I think I have seen the ultimate dark, the light fades a little more and the room seems to widen- to extend all around me until I find myself floating in the hallway as well, daring my body to touch something solid and feeling nothing for miles. For eons.

Then, noon rolls around and the lights come on and all of us, scattered and slumped, grasp at our heads and stumble blindly back to our rooms to pack up for check-out, greeting the world with raw, red eyes and having to file through a gift store to reach the parking lot.

-traveler

‘Strewn across the Bentonite Hills like the remains of a dead god, ‘The Slumberjack’ eats dirt and crawls with artists, poets, and recreational drug users. Its hinged jaw is jammed open, gobbling up a stripe of red dirt on one side of the Sleepy Valley. The tips of its boots have sunk into the earth on the side opposite. Its axe has broken, the head lying in the sand nearly a mile south. Nobody knows what felled ‘The Slumberjack.’ Nobody knows why ‘The Slumberjack’ once stood where it stood. Nobody knows who made it. There are no businesses for miles around. There are no trees.’

“Maybe he just got tired,” I say. The woman behind me shrugs. “From, uh, cutting down all the trees.”

“There aren’t any trees here.”

“Exactly.”

The woman shrugs again.

With all of the hitchhiking I’ve been doing, I saw this woman, Eliza, hitching to ‘The Slumberjack’ and thought I’d pay into the pot a little. I’m not sure which of us regrets it more. I’ve fallen out of the habit of making good conversation and have been trying too hard. She smells like sweat and is sweating onto me, shoved up against my back by Hector’s kennel. Given the choice between a few hours walking and the ride, I wonder if she’d ask for a do-over.

‘The Slumberjack’ comes into view again. It’s stripped white like a Greek statue, almost blinding in the sun. A haphazard rope and pulley system towers above it, anchored at the heels. Anchors have been placed along ‘The Slumberjack’s’ back- one faction’s attempt at restoring it to standing. The chains hang loosely, now, rattling in the wind. The neck is split from the weight of the body. A dark spiderweb fracture crawls down the spine. Something moves in that darkness- an arm. It reaches out of the back and tosses a can out into the desert.

“Cool commune,” I tell her.

Eliza sniffs. “People used to care more.”

“There are a lot of cans below that one.”

“Used to as in a long time ago,” she says and then, like I wouldn’t here her, she mumbles: “That’s about to change.”

I pull over.

“What’s going on?” She asks.

“Why’d you just sound like a revolutionary or, like, a disgraced king?”

Eliza blushes beneath the grime. “I just said that was a long time ago.”

Hector shifts uneasily in his kennel.

“Sure you didn’t say anything else?”

Eliza touches the handgun in her jacket. I’d noticed it after I stopped and after it seemed like a good idea to change my mind about picking her up. She thinks better of it. Doesn’t know that I know. Not that it helps me. Killing people is just messy, no matter how you go about it.

“I’ve got a job to finish,” she says, as though the weighty tone makes up for the vague nonsense she’s spouting.

I try to find a reason to get closer to her, in case my survival depends on knocking the gun out of her hands. She backs up as casually as I step forward- not as oblivious as I thought. I circle back to the bike, instead, thinking that at least it will make for a quick getaway. I dig for my travel mug as though running were the last thing on my mind. “You’re one of the ones trying to lift him?”

“I’m the one,” she says. “I was there at the fall.”

‘No, ‘the fall’ rarely refers to whatever happened to ‘The Slumberjack’ that took it from its presumed original position to the face-first dirt nap it holds now. The fall occurred in 2017 when ‘Slumberjack’ residents banded together to right the statue with the enthusiasm and engineering knowledge one might expect from such a group. It rose just far enough from the ground that the eventual buckling of the spine and collapse of the crane caused a great deal of structural damage, leaving ‘The Slumberjack’ in far worse shape than it ever had been and making the idea of raising it even more farfetched. Infighting followed, needless to say, and ‘The Slumberjack’ community slipped neatly from peace and love to the tense, cult-like militarism of late-stage communes. The early expulsion of their leader, a nineteen year-old woman from-’

“Oh, you’re her.” I grimace, remembering the passage now.

Eliza touches her jacket, again, reassuring herself with the presence of the gun. She’s turned halfway to ‘The Slumberjack,’ surveying it like she’s already won it back.

My own gun, the one I took from ‘The Dakota Obelisk,’ the one I soaked in ‘The Shiver Pool,’ sits heavy at the very bottom of my bag. It’s loaded, only because I’m afraid I’d lose the bullets if they weren’t with the gun. It’s clean, because I keep wrapped in plastic, away from all the crumbs that accumulate in my bag. I peel that plastic back, now, making sure to keep it out of sight. Eliza looks over and then turns fully away, her attention on activity around ‘The Slumberjack.’ The sound of the crinkling plastic is reassuring to her. She thinks I’m digging out a sandwich. A granola bar.

The metal is cold. The gun is heavy. I have it in my hands, have it pointed at her back, long enough that my arms get tired. I try to think of a way to get her attention. I wonder if I couldn’t have just driven away but the sound of the engine, the kick into gear- it would have given her plenty of time to draw on me. Too much of a risk.

“Hey.” I say, and she kicks the dirt. Turns. It still hasn’t dawned on her. She thinks I’m ready to go. She freezes when she sees the gun. “Just put your hands in the air and-”

Eliza doesn’t seem to hear me. She ducks into the dirt and covers her head. She begins begging for her life- tells me I can take anything I want. It’s ugly. When I do finally get words through to her she pulls the pistol from her jacket and tosses it away like I ask, dripping snot into the red dust off the side of the highway. I kick it a little ways down the incline and keep my aim on her long enough to get back to the bike.

“I didn’t plan on doing this,” I tell her and she nods. She’s beyond conversation. Bowled over by fear. She agrees to everything I say, unthinkingly, even when I try to apologize. To contextualize. To accuse her of starting this by having a gun as well.

It doesn’t feel good. It makes me feel so bad, in fact, that I stupidly offer to drive her the rest of the way, which starts her weeping, again. Like I might be kidnapping her. It’s hard to say ‘no’ to anything when you’re held at gunpoint. I take the implied ‘no’ and tell her to stay on the ground at least until I’m out of sight.

To her credit, she does.

-traveler

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