"Trucker asks you straight, you tell him straight, or else. Colorado?"

"Colorado!"

"Well, I'll take you as far as Bellefonte, Pennsylvania."

"Awright!" I hollered. "Yeah!"

He looked over, all red - eyed, sleepless, a little drunk maybe, and grinned at my exhilaration. "Well, yeah," he enthused back, flatly. "That's more like it. Take a look at these. Wanna see somethin' nice?" He tapped his finger at two playing cards suspended by a chain from his rearview mirror. They each bore the picture on back of a naked woman posed lasciviously against a velvet curtain.

"I know and have intimately fucked each one of them women. What do you think?"

George and I looked at each other, grinning. He caught that from the corner of his eye, he was sharp and quick, saw everything.

"You making fun of me?

"No, sir!"

"Cuz you funnin' me I'll let you right off here and thank you very much for nuthin, if you prefer so?"

"No, sir, we're not making fun of you," George explained. "We're just happy."

"Huh! Well, then, all right! Happy is where it's at. You boys like women, don't you?"

"You bet!"

"Well here's a pair. Here's two pair. Check out them tits. Them tits have kept me awake for ten thousand miles of road. Have you ever seen, have you ever had, have you ever made love to tits like that? Even in your wildest wanks?"

Truthfully, I never had.

"Not me," I shouted with polite regret in my voice.

George didn't respond. I thought of Alexi's figure, couldn't understand his curious silence.

"Him neither,'' I shouted, nodding at George, and the rigger laughed though George looked unamused.

"Are them not the most beau - tee - fool tits this side of Missoula?"

"They're beautiful! Where are the girls now?"

"Well, Cheri, the redhead, she's in El Paso, and Billy, the brunette, she's up in Reno. Billy's a dancer. Topless!".

"Wow," I enthused. Then he balled the jack and we took off down that highway like some supersonic killer whale, weaving and surging and churning effortlessly, dusting whole schools of insignificant and minnow-sized Chevies, Volkswagens, Falcons, and Toyotas, and shot past lots of little no-count suburbs and towns, and the driver howled "Lets get us some poon!" George looked at me with raised eyebrows as if to say "Huh?" and next thing we know we'd fallen in behind an attractive blonde in a red GTO, tailgating dangerously close, and if she slows even for an instant we'd roll clear over her, crushing her flat, and you could see her irritated then scared glances in the rearview as she tried without success to shake him, left, right, accclerating, all without success, and it felt terrible to be part of this, a kind of road rape or highway gang-bang on wheels, but unfazed the driver kept it up until, literally, she had dropped to the right over four lanes and got off at the first exit she could and he howled: "Hoooooooowweeeeee! That was fuuunnn with a capital fuckin' capital a-right! Want some more pussy?"

And we both shouted back "No, sir!!" and he nodded grimly and shouted: "Open up that glove compartment!" which I did. The door fell open, and inside it was dark, stuffed with things, including a gun, and he said, "Pull that whiskey bottle out there!" which I did - a pint of Wild Turkey.

"Take a pull and pass that down!"

Which I did and passed it down the line, and all the way to Harrisburg he kept it passing back and forth, and when it ran out he had me crawl in back to where he slept and he had a shotgun back in there. I brought out a fifth of Johnny Walker that he kept going among us and he howled, "You boys smoke pot?"

"Take a pull and pass that down!"

Which I did and passed it down the line, and all the way to Harrisburg he kept it passing back and forth, and when it ran out he had me crawl in back to where he slept and he had a shotgun back in there. I brought out a fifth of Johnny Walker that he kept going among us and he howled, "You boys smoke pot?"

"Yes, sir! "

"Well, I don't. I'm a whiskey man!" and this avowed as we hurtled on a bridge over the Susquehanna River.

"Pot's good for you," shouted Gcorge. "But wiskey'll kill you!"

"Truth's the 'xact opposite!" he screeched. "Whiskey's good for ya! Weed'll turn you into a vegetable. My son Josh smokes dope. He's a do-nuthin, brainless, non-workin', incapable of fucking, unproducing vegetable!"

Night boiled the car shapes into pure red taillights swimming and weaving on the big windshield, and overhead, with thrilling frequency, big green-and-white billboards announced turnoffs for Nanticoke and Hazleton, Bloomsburg, Milton, the highway crazy, a big throat, endless and on either side nothing to be seen but one after another truck stops, diners, gas pumps, like interplanetary stations where the transports pulled in to fuel up, then charge out into the alien space road, and I couldn't imagine how the driver managed to stay awake gaping at this big electric-lit hallucination days on end, or had the energy to shout: "And so I told Josh, I said I tell you what, I tell you what!! I'll make you a bet, I'll bet you I can smoke all the pot you throw at me but your little puny skiny-assed punk shit of a body can't hold all the whiskey I'll give you to drink. And I'm buying the whole fucking thing, booze and weed! And he took me up on it...."

"Did you get high?" George shouted, laughing.

The driver's indignant head rose in the shrill, neck-tensing pose of a fighting cock: "Hell, high no! That grass weed shit didn't touch me at all! Not at all! I smoked that bag of stuff and said gimme another and smoked that bag too and in the meantime that boy of mine was vomiting sick and green on his knees like the little pussy that he is and I said, 'Your body is a worm, shithead, scrawny motherfucking little no-account snail from all that weed you suck 'stead of picking up some weights and women like your daddy do and drinkin' whiskey and be a real man, goddammit! A real man! I - am - real!'" and fell over laughing on the wheel, the huge truck sliding left to the shoulder and him all psychotically shook with mirth but George and I too scared to say a word, and then he shot straight up grim-faced, urged the wheel to the right and, correcting his coarse again, balled the jack, sent us flying through interstellar nighttime America and left us off at Bellefonte, just as he'd sworn to; pulled into a truck stop, alongside another rig, and shouted at the trucker in the cab; "Hey, champ, you westbound?" and the driver nodded and our guy said, "Take these boys down a piece, will ya?" and he waved us to "C'mon," and we thanked our driver, gushing gratitude, and jumped in with our new host, who was a quiet man, did not say three words the whole way through the rest of Pennsylvania: we passed DuBois and Brookville, got almost to Grove City itself, bypassed the turnoff to Pittsburgh, but there were still big mournful steel mills in the night visible from the roadside, huge chimneys pouring smoke that reminded me of something I shuddered at and erased from memory - determined to not so much as even think thoughts about that out here, and he dropped us off at Sharon, just short of the Ohio border, and roared away down the road.

We slid on an embankment, found a patch of grass where we lay under the stars for a few minutes, to catch our breath and savor the thrill of being this far from home. George leaned up on his elbow, looked west. "Ohio's right over there," he said.

But I just lay there brimming up at the stars, overflowing with it all, my freedom, a floating sense of high yet everything so sharp and clear, each grass blade, the buzzing gnats, and yellow light needles poked from the flowerhead of a giant overhead Freon lamp. I was all of these and no one, nothing - didn't need to be. It was fine to just lie here, smell the fresh night breeze. First time in my entire life I felt that way, too, my nerves all unbunched, no agenda. No one to save, nothing to be, no persecutions to detect or escape. I could feel myself spinning, hidden from the road, wanted some great hand to lift me up, hurl me up at the sky, send me farther and farther to some nameless place where history did not exist, even my memory of it erased, even my memory of me.

"This is pretty great, isn't it," said George.

"God! Yeah. How long you figure to Denver?"

"Triple-A said thirty-two hours if you drive nonstop."

"Let's do it!" l said. "I can't wait to get there. Let's just hitch straight through."

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