Shivers 7 Page 4

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but are you okay?”

  He looked up. He had big, sad eyes, the irises the color of milk chocolate. “Hot,” he said. His voice was soft, a little dull.

  “Sure is that. Why don’t you go inside? Sign there says it’s air-conditioned.”

  “Can’t. Run out of money from my last job.”

  “That’s too bad. You live around here?”

  “No. Just passing.”

  “How about your car? Got enough gas?”

  “Don’t have a car,” he said.

  “How’d you get here, then? Hitchhike?”

  “Walked.”

  “Walked? From where?”

  “Town back there.”

  “All the way from Tucumcari? That’s a lot of hot miles.”

  “Wouldn’t nobody give me a ride.” He added in melancholy tones, “Won’t hardly ever.”

  “Man, you must be exhausted. When did you eat last?”

  “Yesterday sometime.”

  Exhausted and starving. “Lot of people stop here,” I said. “Have you asked any of them? I mean…you know.”

  “Don’t believe in it. Begging.”

  I hesitated, but I just couldn’t walk away from a man in his condition. “How about a helping hand from a fellow traveler?”

  “Huh?”

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ll treat you to a cold drink and a sandwich.”

  He blinked. “Do that for me? Why?”

  “Why not? You’re hungry and so am I.”

  “Nobody ever bought me nothing before.”

  “First time for everything,” I said. “How about it?”

  “Okay.”

  I watched him unfold from the bench. God, he was big—almost twice my size. He towered over me; it was like looking up at a beanstalk giant, only one of the gentle type. We went into the café. The place was crowded, but there was one empty booth at the far wall. Heads turned and faces stared as the giant and I walked over to the booth and sat down. A few of them kept right on staring. He didn’t seem to notice.

  A waitress brought over menus and some ice water. The big guy emptied his glass in one long slurp. She couldn’t help staring, either, her eyes round and her forehead washboarded as if he was some kind of sideshow freak. I didn’t open the menu; neither did he. He waited for me to order—a cheeseburger with fries and a large lemonade—and then said he’d have the same.

  “My name’s Jack,” I said when the waitress moved away. “Jack Tobin. What’s yours?”

  “Breakbone.”

  It was my turn to blink. “How’s that again?”

  “Breakbone. That’s what they call me.”

  “That’s some name.”

  “Not my real one. Kind of a nickname. On account of how big I am. And my hands—they’re real strong.”

  “I believe it. Do me a favor—don’t shake with me.”

  “Okay. Can I have your water?”

  “Help yourself.”

  One long swallow emptied my glass, too.

  “So where are you headed, uh, Breakbone?” I asked him.

  “Nowhere in partic’lar. Moving around, different places.”

  “Looking for work?”

  “Looking,” he said.

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “Don’t matter. Any kind I can get.”

  “Where’s your home, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Ain’t got one.”

  “I mean originally. What part of the country?”

  “Midwest.” He didn’t seem to want to talk about it, so I got off the subject.

  “California’s where I’m going,” I said. “Moving out there from Pennsylvania. I’ve got a good job waiting for me, much better than my old one and lucky to get it. I’m a research chemist.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My girl’s waiting, too. She’s been in L.A. two weeks now, setting up housekeeping for us. We’re getting married as soon as I settle into the new job—September, probably.”

  “I never had a girl,” Breakbone said.

  “That’s too bad. Every guy should have a girl. Unless he’s gay, of course.”

  “I ain’t gay.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that you were,” I said quickly, even though he didn’t sound annoyed or angry. “I’m sorry you never had a girl. One of these days maybe you will.”

  “Naw,” he said. “They don’t like me. I’m too big.”

  “Lot of big girls out there that like big men.”

  “Not me.”

  I let it go. Trying to hold a conversation with him wasn’t easy. His mind seemed to work in a slow and not quite linear fashion. Not that it mattered to me, but I wondered if he was mildly retarded.

  We didn’t have much more to say to each other. The food came and he wolfed his, finishing everything on his plate before mine was half empty. Poor bastard, I thought. Probably the first decent meal, if you could call a greasy burger decent, he’d had in a long time. I was glad I’d decided to treat him to it.

  I paid the bill and we went back out into what was left of the day’s heat. He stood looking past the gas pumps to Interstate 40 with that forlorn expression back on his face.

  “What’re you going to do now?” I asked him.

  “Dunno. Ranches around here ain’t hiring this time of year. Not me, anyways. Got a better chance of finding something in a town.”

  “It’s a long way to the nearest one.”

  “Don’t matter. I’m used to walking, sleeping out.”

  I was still feeling sorry for him. “Well, look, Breakbone, I’ll give you a ride as far as Santa Rosa if you want. I’d stake you to a night’s lodging, too, but I’m short on funds right now. Enough for another meal’s the best I can do.”

  He gave me a long, solemn look. “Do all that for me, too?”

  “The original good Samaritan, that’s me. How about that ride?”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  We got into the Audi. He was so tall that he had to sit scrunched down with his duffel on the floor mat and his knees up against the dashboard, and at that the top of his head scraped the headliner. He didn’t have anything to say once we were underway. That was all right with me. Having to hold a conversation while I’m driving, particularly after an already long day behind the wheel, tends to distract me, even out in the middle of nowhere.

  This was high desert country, pretty desolate, mostly flat with a few rolling hills and mesas in the background. Horse and cattle country, though how cattle could survive on the sparse grass was beyond me. Most of the terrain seemed to be barren except for patches of cactus and yucca and stunted juniper trees.

  Traffic was light. We’d gone about ten miles and were making good time when an interchange appeared ahead. As we neared it, I noticed a guy with a backpack sitting on the grassy verge between the entrance ramp and the highway on this side. Another hitchhiker. It’s against the law to troll for rides on an interstate, but there’s always somebody ready and willing to defy laws and take chances.

  Breakbone was looking out the side window at the hitchhiker as we rolled on past. He said suddenly, “Stop the car.”

  “What? No way. I don’t pick up hitchers—”

  “Stop the car.”

  “—and even if I did, there’s not enough room in back—”

  His body turned and one of his huge hands clamped down in a tight squeeze on my right knee. “Stop the car!”

  It was like being caught in the iron jaws of a scoop shovel. I felt cartilage grind; pain shot all the way up into my groin. Reflex made me jam my left foot down so hard on the brake I nearly lost control of the car. The rear end fishtailed, wobbling, the skidding tires smoked and must have laid fifty feet of rubber before I managed to straighten out and then maneuver the Audi off onto the side of the highway. No other car had been close; if one had been….

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “what’s the idea? You nearly caused an accident.”

  He wasn�
��t listening to me. He had the passenger door open and was looking back, gesturing. In the rearview mirror I saw the hitchhiker running toward us, his backpack clutched against his chest. Young guy, nineteen or twenty; short and thin, with a long mop of blond hair and a heat-blotched face.

  Breakbone got out and opened the rear door. The kid came to an abrupt stop, staring up at him. “Wow,” he said.

  “Get in,” Breakbone said. “There’s enough room.”

  “Hey, thanks, thanks a lot.” The kid squeezed himself into what little space there was on the rear seat, holding the backpack on his lap. “Man, that air-conditioning feels good,” he said. Then, to me through a friendly grin, “Thanks to you, too, mister. I didn’t think anybody was going to stop and I’d have to spent the night out there.”

  “I almost didn’t.”

  “Yeah, I saw. You sure made up your mind in a hurry.”

  “Didn’t I, though.”

  Breakbone was filling up the passenger seat again. He said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

  I wanted to say something more to him in protest; my knee and leg were still smarting. But with the kid already in the car now, it didn’t seem to be worth making an issue of it. Over and done with and no real harm done. I put the car in gear and pulled back onto the highway.

  We went a mile or so in silence. Then the kid said, “All this stuff back here. You guys moving somewhere?”

  “Just me,” I said. “California.”

  “I’m going to Phoenix. Well, Tempe. Arizona State University. I’m a student there. I don’t suppose you could take me that far? Or at least as far as Flagstaff if you’re staying on Forty?”

  “Well….”

  “I understand if you can’t. I’m grateful for any ride I can get, as far as I can get. My name’s Rob, by the way.”

  “Jack.”

  Breakbone didn’t offer his nickname.

  It got quiet again. I could feel an edginess growing in me. It wasn’t the same having Breakbone along now, after that knee-squeezing business. I didn’t want him in the car anymore. Once we got to the outskirts of Santa Rosa, I’d stop and let him out. The kid, Rob, seemed to be all right; I could take him as far as Phoenix because my route plan was to swing down through there and pick up Interstate 10 into L.A. But I didn’t want him with me, either—no more company at all after Santa Rosa. Why had Breakbone forced me to stop for him? Compassion for a fellow traveler, I supposed, like I’d had compassion for him.

  The quiet kept playing on my nerves. I turned on the radio, thinking: Music, news, call-in show—anything. The station I was tuned to was playing a song by Willie Nelson. Breakbone immediately reached over and turned it off.

  “What’d you do that for?”

  “Don’t like the radio playing.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “So do I,” the kid said. “Jazz is my thing, though. None of that country stuff.”

  “Leave it off, Jack,” Breakbone said.

  I didn’t argue with him. I wanted to, it was my car, dammit, but I didn’t.

  There was something about the way he was sitting there, so damn big and Sphinx silent, those massive hands bulked together in his lap.

  The miles piled up, fifteen or so. Dusk had settled; I switched the headlights on. How many more miles to L.A. and Karen? Only about eight-fifty now. And maybe another hundred closer before I called it a day. I could be with her sometime tomorrow night if I got an early start in the morning and drove straight through. I was even more eager to see her now. And it wasn’t just sex. It was her—her smile, her voice, the way she laughed, everything about her. I’d been in love before, but never the way I was in love with Karen….

  Twilight was rapidly fading into darkness, the shadows long and clotted on the empty desert landscape. Night came down fast out here. It’d be full dark in another few minutes.

  Another mile clicked off on the odometer. And then Breakbone put an end to the silence. “That exit up there, Jack,” he said. “Take it.”

  I peered ahead. The exit, according to the sign, was to a secondary road that led to a couple of far-off towns I’d never heard of. There were no services there, just the off-ramp and sign and a crossroad stretching both ways across the desert flats.

  “What for?”

  “Take it.”

  “Now listen—”

  His big hairy paw dropped on my knee again, the stone-hard fingers digging in. Not with any pressure, not yet. “Take it.”

  I slowed and took it.

  “What’s going on?” Rob said from the back seat. He sounded sleepy; he must have been dozing.

  “Turn right,” Breakbone said.

  Don’t do it, I thought. But I didn’t even hesitate at the stop sign, just swung onto the secondary road heading east. “Where is it you want to go?”

  “Keep driving.”

  A mile, two miles. Full dark now, no moon, the black sky pricked with stars that seemed paler and more remote than usual. Up ahead, the headlights picked out the opening to a side road that branched off to the left. We’d almost reached it when Breakbone said, “Turn in that road.”

  I still couldn’t make myself defy him. We rattled over a cattle guard. The narrow track was unpaved, dusty, rutted—some sort of backcountry ranch road. We bounced along at less than twenty through a grove of yucca trees. I didn’t dare go any faster.

  “Hey,” Rob said, “what’s the idea?” He sounded scared, as scared as I was now. “You guys thinking of robbing me or what? You won’t get much, I’m only carrying a few dollars….”

  “Shut up.”

  The kid shut up.

  Pretty soon Breakbone said, “Far enough, Jack. Stop the car.”

  I stopped.

  “Shut off the engine.”

  As soon as I did that, he reached over and yanked the keys out of the ignition.

  “Now the headlights.”

  Everything went black when I clicked the switch, the yucca trees blotting out all but a faint glimmer of starshine. It gave me a sudden feeling of suffocation, as if I’d been trapped inside a box. I heard Rob making moaning noises and fumbling at the door handle, trying to get away. Then the dome light came on, but not because the kid had gotten his door open; it was Breakbone climbing out through the passenger door. He yanked the back one open, hauled the kid out with one of his huge paws. Rob fought him, yelling, but he couldn’t break loose. It was like a small animal trying to fight a behemoth.

  Breakbone picked him up under one arm as if he weighed nothing at all, grabbed the backpack with his other hand. “Stay here, Jack,” he said to me. “Don’t go nowhere.” Then he kicked both doors shut, closing me into the black box again, and went stomping off into the darkness outside.

  I just sat there, numb. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what was going on.

  Things like this didn’t happen in my world, they just didn’t happen—

  Then it got worse, much worse.

  Then the screaming started.

  Horrible screams like nothing I’d ever heard before, shrill with pain and terror, so loud that they penetrated and echoed inside the box. On and on, on and on, as if the night itself was being ripped apart. I jammed the heels of my hands over my ears, but I could still hear them. They were like knifepoints jabbed into my eardrums.

  I couldn’t stand it in there, surrounded by the noise; couldn’t breathe. I flung myself out of the car and stumbled around and away from it, trying to escape the screams. But I lost my bearings among the yuccas and went the wrong way, toward them instead—far enough to hear the other sounds that came before each of the shrieks. Meaty thwacking sounds. Crunching, snapping sounds.

  I swung around, staggered back to the car. I knew I ought to run, hide, but my legs wouldn’t work anymore. All I could do was lean against the front fender with my hands back over my ears.

  It was a long time before the screaming stopped. And then I heard him coming back, shuffling over the parched ground—alone. He was just a giant looming shape until he
reached the car and opened the passenger door and the dome light came on again. Then I saw the blood. It was smeared on his hands and on his pantlegs where he’d wiped them, spattered on forearms and across the front of his shirt. Even more terrible was the way he was grinning. Like a death’s head mask. Like a skull.

  I turned aside and puked up my dinner. When the convulsions stopped I sagged against the fender again, weak, shaking, my knees like pudding. He was watching me. Not grinning any more, his face without expression of any kind.

  “You killed him.” Somebody else’s voice, not mine.

  “Yeah. Busted all his bones.”

  “A kid, a stranger. Why?”

  “I like it. It’s fun.”

  Fun. Jesus!

  “Tell you a secret,” he said. “Nobody give me my nickname, like I told you before. I give it to myself after the first time I done it.”

  I couldn’t look any more at those hands, the scars and gnarled joints that hadn’t come from manual labor, the blood glistening like black worms in the spill from the dome light. I said to the darkness, “You going to kill me now?”

  “Kill you? Naw, I wouldn’t do that. I like you, Jack, you been real nice to me. We’re friends. I never had a friend before.”

  Friends….

  “You got a blanket or something in the car?”

  “What?”

  “So I don’t get blood all over the seat.”

  “Trunk.”

  He went back there, rummaged around, came back with the picnic blanket Karen had bought for us. “Okay,” he said then. “Let’s go.”

  I groped around to the driver’s side. He squeezed in next to me, the blanket wrapped around him, and let me have the keys, but it was a little while before I was steady enough to drive. I still couldn’t think, didn’t want to think. Finally I started the engine, turned the car around, headed back down the road with the headlights boring holes in the night.

  When we neared the intersection with the county road, I heard myself say, “What now?”

  “Find some place I can wash up, change clothes.”

  “Then what?”