Paul Lake
February 2005

Two Hitchhikers


Once driving down a dark stretch of state highway
Through moonless countryside, not far from home,
Our headlights caught, as in a flashbulb’s flare,
A pair of hitchhikers:
                                  One held a crutch
More than he leaned against it, and the other . . .
But the negative dissolved as we swept past.
I felt the car lurch right (my friend was driving)
As the brakes took hold, then they were getting in
To the back seat. Both reeked of beer and whiskey.

"Say, why don’t you boys drive us down to Midway
To get some beer. . . . They kicked us out the bar."

"We’re going the other way," my friend protested.
"We’ll drop you on our way, just tell us where."

That silenced them—that is, until we slowed
At a stop sign at the next dark intersection,
And when they spoke, it was with more than words.
I heard a sudden snickering of steel,
Then saw the knife blade nipping my friend’s ribs
As he clutched the wheel, and sensed near my own chin
The warm unsteady hand poised at my throat
And just the slightest kiss of silvery blade.
"Turn here," the one without the crutch commanded,
So we made a U-turn there and headed south.

That made them cordial. Putting away their knives,
One lounged across the back seat, one leaned forward
To share a joke, all beery fellowship,
And to pass the time, kept up a steady patter
For twenty miles.

                           "Say, you boys must be hippies—
I seen them beards. Well, hell, we’re just like you—
We want some beer so we can go and get dizzy. . . ."
And so on, always ending in the refrain,
"We’re like you boys, we only want to get dizzy.
Yeah, we smoke pot . . . and marijuana, too!"

After twenty miles, they both seemed harmless enough—
Relatively, I mean, with their knives tucked in their coats—
And since we had to, in a funny way,
We warmed up to them till we had to stop.

Then things got complicated. They got confused—
Should they leave us there while they went in to shop?
Of course not—we’d drive off and leave them stranded.
One stay with us, one knife against us two,
While one went in?
                              They didn’t like that either.

At last, they hit upon the expedient:
They’d walk in single file, one behind each,
Hands in their pockets, fingering their knives,
And, after dire threats, so we paraded
Around the store, then through the check-out line.

I’ve told this story a hundred times, I know,
And always left out how we bought that six-pack,
Ashamed of how I’d sheepishly been steered
Out to the car, to get back in again
With our abductors. Because it seemed cowardly
Not to have clutched a magnum of champagne
And clubbed one over the head, crying bloody murder—
Or at least to have leapt a shelf of cut-rate gin
And waited for fireworks. Liquor stores have guns.

Instead, I skip right to the funny ending:
How after we’d retraced the same dark road
To where we’d picked them up, they made us turn
Suddenly off onto a dead end lane
Along which three lights shone from three dark shacks.
We passed the first, the second, approached the third,
And just as we faced the woods where I envisioned
Our last life-and-death struggle or breakneck flight,
A voice said, "Turn in here," and they got out—
It must have been their house—and turning toward us,
Reached in a pocket, pulled out two dollar bills
And muttering, "Here, this is for your gas,"
Turned back around and lurched into the house.
We locked the doors and burned that dirt road up
Getting out of there. . . .

                                     That’s how the tale might end.

But seeing them in the store’s bright parking lot
Confused and half afraid of us, scraggly and scrawny,
One gimp-legged, both "just wanting to get dizzy,"
But without a car to fetch their beer back home,
I guess we thought that it would be less trouble
To trust our lives to their humanity,
Or luck—and, anyway, all made it home.

As we spun out to the hard-topped county road,
My friend reached out and handed me one dollar.
"Here, you’ve earned half of this."
                                                     We couldn’t stop laughing.

That’s how a tale should end—in dizzying laughter,
Though some won’t be arranged to end that way.

From Walking Backwards (Story Line Press, 1999).