THat Hitchhiker by Jeff Harvey
My best friend Sam and I usually drove his Pinto when we went out, but he hadn’t paid his insurance, so Momma let me borrow her Buick if I promised to have it back by midnight. Our hometown theater wouldn’t screen The Exorcist after all the churches threatened a boycott, so we drove the hour to Memphis to watch it at the Graceland Drive-In.
Amid the static and crackle of the speakers, the blood-soaked, possessed girl shrieked, as she brandished a crucifix. I grabbed Sam’s hand, and he pushed me aside and said, no fucking way, I don’t like fem guys. I blinked back a tear and couldn’t look at Sam for the rest of the film.
After leaving the drive-in Sam wanted burgers at Sonic, but I drove straight past, hands tight on the wheel. Sam had moved to town two years earlier after his dad disappeared and his valium-addicted mom left him with his aunt. We connected in band, both playing clarinet, and I protected him from the bullies, kids I grew up with and knew all too well.
We saw a hitchhiker, and Sam insisted we give him a lift because he looked like Peter Frampton with his long, feathered hair, and I couldn’t refuse because Frampton was my idol. Once he climbed in, Sam crawled into the backseat with him, grinned, and whispered in the guy’s ear, and I looked in the rearview mirror and saw him elbow Sam in the stomach. The hitchhiker yelled for me to stop the car, and when I did, he bolted and disappeared into the dark.
I dropped off Sam at his aunt’s trailer and asked him for some gas money. He flipped me off and slammed the car door. I sat in the Buick and watched as he took the key from under a pot of geraniums and went inside. I pulled Sam’s senior picture from my wallet, set it afire, and threw it on his driveway.
On my drive home, I spotted the hitchhiker’s wallet in the backseat and inside were a half a joint, his driver’s license, and a silver cross. I drove to his home, parked under a magnolia tree, and lit up. The full moon exposed the hitchhiker in an upstairs window, naked and jerking off. His body was right out of a Hollywood beach movie, and I couldn’t stop watching as he shot his load, then vanished.
I stopped at Sonic to buy a Coke then headed to Sam’s where I found his car door unlocked, and I placed the cross on the dashboard, poured the Coke into the gas tank, then took off for home, two hours late.
Jeff Harvey lives in Madrid. His recent work appears in Ghost Parachute, trampset, and Bull.
