Naked (17 page)

It killed me that T. W. actually believed I was a doctor. Once we arrived in Kent, I’d probably have him drop me off in front
of the infirmary and walk the few blocks to the dorm. I hoped that between now and then we wouldn’t witness any roadside accidents,
but if we did, I’d just tell him I wasn’t licensed to practice in this state.

It was dusk when T. W. entered the bar. I watched the sun fade behind the surrounding mountains, waiting one hour, two hours,
three, until it had grown too dark for me to collect my bag and leave on my own. I had no idea where I was, and few cars passed
along this road. There were no streetlights, and I could hear dogs barking off in the distance. When it started to rain I
took my pack from the bed of the truck and carried it up front, rooting around for an extra sweater and a pair of socks I
could wear on my hands. A car pulled into the parking lot, and I watched as the driver emptied his dash-board ashtray onto
the gravel before entering the bar. It seemed a fitting gesture for this sort of place. Staring at the lights of the tavern,
I wondered who might choose to live in such a dinky, do-nothing town. From what I’d seen, it was nothing more than a collection
of tract houses built around a convenience store. The landscape was pretty enough; you might pass through and admire the mountains,
but wouldn’t a person then move on to someplace more important? Travel was supposed to broaden your mind, but without Veronica’s
company, it had a way of depressing me. The more places I went, the more I realized I didn’t matter to anyone except the family
I’d left behind — and who knew them besides their friends and neighbors in a town just as pointless as this one? Raleigh would
be granted a larger dot on the map, but when seen as a whole, the multitude of strange towns and cities conspired to nullify
my shaky myth of self-importance. It brought me down to think about it, so I turned on the transistor radio and listened to
a call-in show, the evening’s topics ranging from an upcoming tractor pull to the hidden dangers of untended space heaters.
Heat. It was like reading a restaurant menu to a fasting prisoner. I listened to the callers and imagined their snug, cozy
homes, watching as icy clouds huffed forth from my mouth, dissipating in the frigid air.

T. W. staggered out of the bar about ten o’clock, nearly six hours after he’d entered. He had his arms around a jubilant,
long-faced man and an obese woman who held her pocket-book over her head as protection against the rain.

She said something, and the men doubled over laughing, practically vomiting with merriment. I was in a foul mood but knew
that I would have to swallow it, the way I always did when I was relying on someone else to do me a favor. Whatever its merits,
hitchhiking robbed you of your God-given right to complain. I would have to pretend I hadn’t noticed the time or temperature.
“That was fast,” I’d say. “No, I’m perfectly comfortable, just rubbing my hands together because I’m excited. What’s up?”
One look at him and anyone could tell that T. W. was drunk. He waved good-bye to his companions and proceeded to activate
the truck’s engine, jabbing the key here and there as though the ignition might have moved during his long absence and now
might be anywhere.

“Those people are my friends,” he said. “I’ve been knowing them all my life and they’re good,
fun
people, you got that?” His face had lost all traces of innocence and had become hard and dogmatic. “Friends. Personal,
private, god-damn friends
. They’re my friends, my
own
fucking friends.” He repeated the word several more times, pounding his chest for emphasis. “Friends. They
like
me. I like them. We go back.”

Something told me we wouldn’t be driving to Ohio anytime soon. We reached the interstate, brightly lit and teeming with traffic.
I offered to get out, but T. W. wouldn’t hear of it. “Oh no,” he said. “You’re coming home with me. Home to
my
house with
me.
I’ve got the place fixed up nice with rugs and TVs and all kinds of shit like that. No way are you going out alone on a night
like this. Forget that crap about school and college, those people don’t matter for shit.”

I imagined his house with its crummy paint job and dung-colored carpets, hoping it might be located on a well-traveled road.
Once there, I could probably make a run for it; in the meantime, I’d just have to humor him.

“Big brain doctor, are you? You like to stick your fat little fingers in other people’s skulls and tinker around? Is that
what you like to do? I’ll give you something to tinker with, hot shot.”

I was looking out at the road and didn’t see it coming. He grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head down onto the seat, holding
me there with one hand while he reached into his jacket pocket with the other. The truck swerved and skidded onto the gravel
shoulder before he took the wheel and regained control. There was something cold and blunt pressed hard against my jaw, and
even before I saw it clearly, I understood it was a gun. Its physical presence inspired an urgency lacking in any of the movies
or television dramas in which it plays such a key role. “You like that, do you?”

Only a professional maniac could ask such an inane question. I pictured his home with the same paint job and carpet, only
now it was stacked with bodies, as this seemed the exact place where something like this might happen. Maybe he’d used his
job skills and built a refrigeration chamber to prevent decay, or perhaps he’d bury me beneath some tool shed and the authorities
would have to identity me through dental records. Dental records, my God. When was the last time I’d been to a dentist and
why wasn’t I there now, my mother smoking in the waiting room and ripping recipes from the ladies’ magazines when the receptionist
wasn’t looking. Requested to hand over his files, my dentist would probably say that I was asking for it by taking rides from
strangers. They all would. My people would hang their heads, shamed by my stupidity, while T. W.’s friends and neighbors would
appear on television to say, “He was such a nice man, we had no idea.”

I felt the truck slow down and take a turn. We were off the interstate now, probably on an exit ramp. He raised the gun to
steady the wheel, and I scrambled across the seat, flung open the door, and jumped, thinking all the while of the many television
detectives who seemed to do this on a weekly basis. My mother and older sister had sat with their faces pressed against the
screen while I jeered and mocked their enthusiasm.
Jump and roll,
I thought. Wasn’t that what my mother had said as her hero leaped off a train with the enemy’s stolen blueprints?
Jump and roll, jump and roll.
I hit the gravel shoulder and tumbled into a muddy ditch filled with trash and brambles. My pack had landed a few yards away,
so I snatched it up and ran, wondering what it carried and why. Behind me I heard the truck pull off the road, the door slam,
and someone racing through the thicket. It was him, coming after me. I meant that much to him, and now I would have to work
even harder to live because this man, he was determined. I thought maybe I should climb a tree, but that’s what you did when
pursued by bears, wasn’t it? Maybe only the small bears climbed trees — the lighter ones — but still, how could I climb with
socks on my hands? With the larger bears maybe you were supposed to lie down and play dead, but this was a man, so what was
the point in even thinking about bears? He had a gun and now he would shoot me in the back or maybe in the head, bits of my
skull scattered across the forest floor like the remnants of a melon. In the leg, maybe he’d take me there or in the shoulder,
blow my arm off at the elbow and I’d consider myself lucky to massage my stump and dial the phone with the fingers of my left
hand. What I needed was a weapon. Other people, hitch-hikers, told me they always carried a little something, a knife or a
can of Mace, and I’d laughed, thinking there was no greater weapon than the human mind.
You idiot.
A can opener. Maybe somewhere in the bottom of my pack there was a can opener I could tie to a stick. Make a spear, that’s
it, a spear! I’d seen them in the souvenir shops, decorated with beads and feathers. The Indians made spears, didn’t they,
or no, maybe I was thinking of tomahawks, they made tomahawks, but how did they do it? Didn’t it take days or maybe even weeks?
A broken bottle, a lance, one of those spiked cannonballs the knights used to swing around on a chain: I needed something
in my hands, in my arms. I needed my mother; she’d put a stop to this.
You leave my son alone!
Where was she now and what was she doing?
I’m sorry.
I wanted her to know that and kept mouthing the word.
Sorry, so sorry.
Turning my head to look behind me, I fell into a knot of thorny bushes, thinking I should get up and run, but he was too close
now. I could see him through the trees, silhouetted against the headlights. “Hey, you, Doctor Kildare or whoever you are,
get back here.” He looked off to my right, and I realized he couldn’t see me. “I’m not going to hurt you. Come on now, get
back in the truck. I was only joking. It’s not even loaded, look.” He pulled the trigger and the gun made a puny, clicking
noise. “I was only playing with you, honest. Can’t you take a joke?” He slowly returned to his truck, bending to rifle through
the brush. “Hey, shithead. That’s right, I’m talking to
you.
Get your ass back here. I’m through playing around.” He lit a cigarette and tapped on the horn, behaving as though I’d just
stepped out to urinate and had lost my way back. “You want to sleep in the woods under a wet log? Is that what you want?”
He rolled down the window and drove off slowly, the door ajar and the cab lights shining, whistling, as if for a lost dog.

I worried that this might be a trick. Maybe he’d parked his truck up the road, planning to take me by surprise once I made
a run for it. What if he were to circle back around? On the other hand, while I was hiding, he could be loading his gun or
phoning the fellow members of his cult or posse, who would search the forest with clubs and a burlap bag in which to store
my body. I stood up and crouched back down. Stood and crouched, again and again until, as if I’d been priming a pump, I shot
out of the woods, down the hill, and into the center of the interstate, waving my arms and begging for someone to stop. The
first two cars just missed hitting me, but the third pulled over. They were three college students headed home to Akron for
the weekend. I told them what had happened, my voice breathy and high-pitched. “And then I jumped out of the truck and ran
into the woods and he came after me with a gun and…”

“I don’t mean to pry,” the driver said, “but are you by any chance a faggot?”

His buddies covered their mouths and laughed into their cupped hands. This was not the sympathetic reaction I’d been hoping
for. They’d picked me up hoping I might have some dope, and they were right. We smoked a few joints, and the driver popped
in an eight-track of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. That was my punishment. My reward was that they never spoke another word
until dropping me off on the road to Kent.

I continued to hitchhike for the next few years, but after the incident with T. W., something seemed to have changed. It felt
as though I’d been marked somehow. I had always counted upon people to trust me, but now I no longer trusted them. A driver
would introduce himself as Tony, and I’d wonder why he’d chosen that name. They were liars, every last one of them. My suspicion
was a beacon, attracting the very people I’d hoped to avoid. Drivers began picking me up with the idea I had more to offer
than my gratitude. Drugs were the easy part; I carried them as a courtesy and offered them whenever asked. What threw me were
the sexual advances. How much did they expect to accomplish at fifty miles per hour, and why choose me, a perfect stranger?
When I thought of sex, I pictured someone standing before me crying, “I love you so much that… I don’t even know who I am
anymore.” My imaginary boyfriend was of no particular age or race, all that mattered was that he was crazy about me. Our first
encounter would take place under bizarre circumstances: at the christening of a warship, or maybe a hurricane might bring
us together in a crowded storm shelter. I thought about our courtship and the subsequent anniversaries, when our adopted children
would gather at our feet saying, “Tell us again about your first date.” I suppose we could have met in a car or van but not
while I was hitchhiking; it would have to be more complicated than that. Maybe the driver of my vehicle would suffer a heart
attack, and he would be one of the medics. The important thing was that I wouldn’t be looking for it; that’s what would make
it so romantic.

“You fool around much when you hitchhike?” The most overt were the men with the wedding rings and the child safety seats,
whose secret double lives demanded quick, anonymous partnerships. I had an unpleasant experience with a married couple outside
Atlanta. Two o’clock in the morning and they were driving their Cadillac nude from the waist down. They invited me to spend
the night in their home, the husband casually masturbating as his wife styled her hair. “We’ll fix you something to eat,”
she offered. “I’m a damned good cook, you can ask anyone.”

A few days later in Fayetteville I was driven down a dark dirt road by a man who offered to crush my skull like a peanut.
Cowering in the bushes had become something of a hobby, and I knew it was time to ask myself some serious questions. I walked
the eight miles back to town, boarded a bus, and never hitchhiked again.

I still haven’t learned to drive a car. Once I was vacationing with a boyfriend who pulled into the deserted parking lot of
a hamburger restaurant and demanded that I at least give it a try. After he pointed out the subtle difference between the
gas and brake, we swapped seats, him howling in protest as I swerved out onto the two-lane road. It was a Sunday and there
wasn’t any traffic to speak of. I passed a boy on a bicycle and an elderly woman pushing a wheelbarrow. Their close proximity
made me nervous, so I moved toward the center of the road, where it felt safer. I sped up, pretending that I was rushing a
pregnant woman to the hospital and then I slowed down and wandered onto the gravel shoulder, making believe I’d fallen asleep
at the wheel. We came upon a ranch house painted the color of a pencil eraser. A man stood in the front yard. He wore an apron
and attended a smoking grill. I tapped the horn and waved, expecting him to drop his tongs and run for cover, reacting as
though he had seen a chimp behind the wheel. Rather than diving into the shrubbery, the man raised his mitted hand in salute
before returning to his business. It was thrilling that someone might mistake me for a driver, that I might for one brief
moment appear responsible and self-reliant. I enjoyed my outing but knew I’d never make a habit of it. Driving is too dangerous,
and besides that, I’m just not the type to fill out insurance forms. I moved to cities with decent public transportation systems,
Chicago and then on to New York, which is even better because there are more taxis. You hold out your hand for a ride but
retire your thumb, folding it against your palm. The drivers don’t speak much English, but that’s partly what you’re paying
for: the quiet.