Desperation

She opened the door but didn’t get into the cab at first, just looked up at him from across the map-littered seat with wide blue eyes. “Are you a nice person.” she asked.

Steve thought this over, then nodded. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “I like a cigar two or three times a day, but I never kicked a dog that wasn’t bigger’n me, and I send money home to my momma once every six weeks.”

“You’re not going to try to slap the make on me, or anything.”

“Nope,” Steve said, amused. He liked the way her wide blue eyes remained fixed on his face. She looked like a little kid studying the fu

“And you’re not like a crazy serial killer, or anything.”

“No, but Jesus Christ, do you think I’d tell you if I was.”

“I’d prob’ly see it in your eyes,” the ski

Arefrigerator truck roared past, the guy laying on his horn all the way by, even though Steve had squeezed over until the stubby Ryder was mostly on the shoulder, and the road itself was empty in both directions. No big sur-prise about that, though. In Steve’s experience, some guys simply couldn’t keep their hands off their horns or their dicks.

They were always honking one or the other.

“Enough with the questio

“You’ll do, I guess,” she said, hopped up into the cab, and slammed the door shut.

“Well, thank you, cookie,” he said. “I’m touched by your trust.” He checked the rearview mirror, saw nothing but the ass end of Ely, and got back out on the road again.

“Don’t call me that,” she said. “It’s sexist.”

“Cookie is sexist. Oh please.”

In a prim little no-nonsense voice she said: “Don’t call me cookie and I won’t call you cake.”

He burst out laughing. She probably wouldn’t like it, but he couldn’t help it. That was the way laughing was, sort of like farting, sometimes you could hold it in but a lot of times you couldn’t.

He glanced at her and saw that she was laughing a little too—and slipping her backpack off—so maybe that was all right. He put her at about five-six and ski

Bent around his head like a halo were the words NOT GONNA GIVE IT LIP!

“You must like Peter Tosh,” she said. “It can’t be my tits.”

“I worked with Peter Tosh once,” he replied.

“No way!”

“Way,” he said. He glanced in the rearview and saw that Ely was already gone. It was spooky, how fast that happened out here. He supposed that if he were a young female hitchhiker, he might ask a question or two himself before hopping willy-nilly into someone’s car or truck. It might not help, but it sure couldn’t hurt. Because once you were out in the desert, anything could happen to you.

“When did you work with Peter Tosh.”

“1980 or ‘81,” he said. “I can’t remember which. Madi-son Square Garden, then in Forest Hills. Dylan played the encore with him at Forest Hills. ‘Blowin in the Wind,’ if you can believe that.”

She was looking at him with frank amazement, unmixed—so far as he could tell—with doubt. “Whoa, cool! What were you, a roadie.”

“Then, yeah. Later on I was a guitar tech. Now, I’m Yes, that was a good start, but just what was he now. Not a guitar tech, that was for sure. Sort of demoted to roadie again.

Also part-time shrink. Also sort of like Mary Poppins, only with long brown hippie hair that was starting to show some gray along the center part. “Now I’m into something else.

What’s your name.”

“Cynthia Smith,” she said, and held out a hand.

He shook it. Her hand was long, feather-light inside of his, and incredibly fine-boned. It was a little like shaking hands with a bird. “I’m Steve Ames.”

“From Texas.”

“Yeah, Lubbock. Guess you heard the accent before, huh.”

“Once or twice.” Her gamine grin lit up her whole face. “You can take the boy out of Texas, but—”

He joined her for the rest of it and they gri

Cynthia Smith was clearly a flake, but Steve was a veteran flake himself, you couldn’t spend most of your adult life in the music business without succumbing to flakedom, and it didn’t bother him. She told him she had every reason to be careful of guys; one had nearly torn otf her left ear and another had broken her nose not so long ago. “And the one who did the ear was a guy I liked,” she added. “I’m sensitive about the ear. The nose, I think the nose has character, but I’m sensitive about the ear, God knows why.”

He glanced across at her ear. “Well, it’s a little flat on top, I guess, but so what. If you’re really sensitive about it, you could grow your hair out and cover it up, you know.”

“Not happening,” she said firmly, and fluffed her hair leaning briefly to the right so she could get a look at her self in the mirror mounted on her side of the cab. The half on Steve’s side was green; the other half was orange. “My friend Gert says I look like Little Orphan A

“Not go

She smiled, patted the front of her shirt, and lapsed into a passable Jamaican imitation. “I go my own way—just like Peter, mon!”

Cynthia Smith’s way had been to leave home and her parents’ more or less constant disapproval at the age of seventeen. She had spent a little time on the East Coast (“I left when I realized I was gettin to be a mercy-fuck,” she said matter-of-factly), and then had drifted back as far as the Midwest, where she had gotten “sort of clean” and met a good-looking guy at an AA meeting. The good—looking guy had claimed to be entirely clean, but he had lied. Oh boy, had he lied. Cynthia had moved in with him just the same, a mistake (“I’ve never been what you’d call bright about men,” she told Steve in that same matter-of—fact voice). The good-looking guy had come home one night fucked up on crystal meth and had apparently de-cided he wanted Cynthia’s left ear as a bookmark. She had gone to a shelter, gotten a little more than sort of clean, even worked as a counsellor for awhile after the woman in charge had been murdered and it looked as if the place might close. “The guy who murdered A