“Now, please.”
She walked to the far side of the car, and Shadow took a few steps closer to the field, unzipped his jeans, and pissed against a fence post for a very long time. He walked back to the car. The last of the gloaming had become night.
“You still there?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time.”
“Thank you. Do you want something?”
“Well, I wanted to see if you were okay. I mean, if you were dead or something I would have called the cops. But the windows were kind of fogged up so I thought, well, he’s probably still alive.”
“You live around here?”
“Nope. Hitchhiking down from Madison.”
“That’s not safe.”
“I’ve done it five times a year for three years now. I’m still alive. Where are you headed?”
“I’m going as far as Cairo.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m going to El Paso. Staying with my aunt for the holidays.”
“I can’t take you all the way,” said Shadow.
“Not El Paso, Texas. The other one, in Illinois. It’s a few hours south. You know where you are now?”
“No,” said Shadow. “I have no idea. Somewhere on Highway Fifty-two?”
“The next town’s Peru,” said Sam. “Not the one in Peru. The one in Illinois. Let me smell you. Bend down.” Shadow bent down, and the girl sniffed his face. “Okay. I don’t smell booze. You can drive. Let’s go.”
“What makes you think I’m giving you a ride?”
“Because I’m a damsel in distress,” she said. “And you are a knight in whatever. A really dirty car. You know someone wrote ‘Wash me!’ on your rear window?” Shadow got into the car and opened the passenger door. The light that goes on in cars when the front door is opened did not go on in this car.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t.”
She climbed in. “It was me,” she said. “I wrote it. While there was still enough light to see.”
Shadow started the car, turned on the headlights, and headed back onto the road. “Left,”,said Sam helpfully. Shadow turned left, and he drove. After several minutes the heater started to work, and blessed warnttlf filled the car.
“You haven’t said anything yet,” said Sam. “Say something.”
“Are you human?” asked Shadoitf. “An honest-to-goodness, born-of-man-and-woman, living, breathing human being?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Okay. Just checking. So what would you like me to say?”
“Something to reassure me, at this point. I suddenly have that ‘oh shit I’m in the wrong car with a crazy man’ feeling.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve had that one. What would you find reassuring?”
“Just tell me you’re not an escaped convict or a mass murderer or something.”
He thought for a moment. “You know, I’m really not.”
“You had to think about it though, didn’t you?”
“Done my time. Never killed anybody.”
“Oh.”
They entered a small town, lit up by streetlights and blinking Christmas decorations, and Shadow glancedtto his right. The girl had a tangle of short dark hair and a face that was both attractive and, he decided, faintly mannish: her features might have been chiseled out of rock. She was looking at him.
“What were you in prison for?”
“I hurt a couple of people real bad. I got angry.”
“Did they deserve it?”
Shadow thought for a moment. “I thought so at the time.”
“Would you do it again?”
“Hell, no. I lost three years of my life in there.”
“Mm. You got Indian blood in you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You looked like it, was all.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“S’okay. You hungry?”
Shadow nodded. “I could eat,” he said.
“There’s a good place just past the next set of lights. Good food. Cheap, too.”
Shadow pulled up in the parking lot. They got out of the car. He didn’t bother to lock it, although he pocketed the keys. He pulled out some coins to buy a newspaper. “Can you afford to eat here?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, raising her chin. “I can pay for myself.”
Shadow nodded. ‘Tell you what. I’ll toss you for it,” he said. “Heads you pay for my dinner, tails, I pay for yours.”
“Let me see the coin first,” she said, suspiciously. “I had an uncle had a double-headed quarter.”
She inspected it, satisfied herself there was nothing strange about the quarter. Shadow placed the coin head up on his thumb and cheated the toss, so it wobbled and looked like it was spinning, then he caught it and flipped it over onto the back of his left hand, and uncovered it with his right, in front of her.
‘Tails,” she said, happily. “Dinner’s on you.”