Lost Highways (A Valentine Novel) Page 3

  As she stuck a George Strait cassette into the player, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She thought maybe she should have refreshed her lipstick, but then her eyes strayed to the grocery sack of snacks. Digging inside, she pulled out a package of peanuts.

  It was good and dark, and she was on her second George Strait cassette and opening her second Twinkie cake, having polished off the entire package of peanuts, when her headlights flashed on a figure at the edge of the road.

  A man, in a dark sport coat and slacks.

  It happened so fast. She saw the figure illuminated by the headlights, his pale profile turn to her, and then she glimpsed him blow away like a paper silhouette into the darkness.

  Oh, Lord. The awful knowledge that she had not been paying sufficient attention fell all over her.

  Oh, God…ohmyGod, don’t let me have hit him.

  Her headlights beamed on the blacktop ahead, as her mind did an instant replay. She thought that surely she hadn’t hit the man. She hadn’t been that close. She hadn’t felt anything like a whop.

  Maybe there hadn’t been a man. Maybe it had all been her imagination.

  This possibility was as unnerving as thinking she’d run someone down.

  All the while her mind was dealing with this, she was pressing the brakes, mindful of Lulu back in the trailer sucking the flooring with her hooves. Coming to a stop, she tried to see the man in the side-view mirror, but even in the moonlight, it was too dark to make out anything.

  Of course, if he were dead on the side of the road, she wouldn’t see him standing.

  A thump made her just about jump out of her skin.

  It was the puppy with his big paws on the rear window glass.

  She swung the truck and trailer around as quickly as she dared, mindful of Lulu. Texas had really good state and county roads, paid for with all the oil money in the seventies and eighties. They all had wide graveled shoulders. Her tires crunched on the gravel, the right back tires spun slightly, and then she was heading back the way she had come, peering intently out the windshield. She turned off the stereo. She hadn’t realized how loud the stereo had been, and the wind, until now.

  There was no one.

  She peered hard, sticking her head out the window, but there was absolutely no one alongside the road or in it. No one and no car anywhere.

  Getting very nervous now about possibly losing her mind, she retraced her route almost a mile, then once more turned around and came back slowly. She had begun to tremble but would not raise the windows for thinking she should get fresh air to clear her brain.

  Then there he was. She hadn’t been imagining things after all, which came as a flash of relief, quickly surpassed by rising concern as she watched him in the beam of her headlights, bent over, dark sport coat, darker slacks, and loafers, appearing to be getting to his feet.

  Coming to a stop much faster than she should have and probably causing Lulu to scramble for balance, she slammed the truck into park, slipped her daddy’s little Colt .25 from its pocket on the side of the seat and hopped out of the pickup, ready to deal with what had every appearance of a crisis.

  Rainey had a talent for dealing with crises, a point upon which many agreed. Charlene was one to say that crises just seemed to find Rainey. She was always cautious, but not fearful. Her mother used to tell each one of them, “You are a child of God and not given a spirit of fear,” which didn’t speak to stupidity at all but had succeeded in instilling a certain amount of confidence for dealing with demanding situations. Rainey had held her own with green colts, wild college boys and rowdy cowboys, so one slender man in a sport coat and slacks on a road in the middle of nowhere did not overly frighten her.

  “Are you all right? Did I hit you?” she called to him from a position beside her truck fender.

  He lifted his arm against the glare of her headlights. She stepped back to the truck and cut the headlights down to the parking beams, then slowly went forward, the pistol held discreetly, and politely, down at her side.

  Her eyes adjusting quickly, she saw he now stood looking off at the land. The thin moonlight shone on the top of his head, but the rest of him was deeply shadowed and colorless. Her impression was of a tall, thin, youngish man.

  “Are you okay?” she asked again, finding her voice on the lonely road sounded a little startling.

  “I wrecked my car,” he said hoarsely. “It’s down there.”

  She stepped forward a few more feet and saw that the land dropped away sharply some feet past the graveled roadside. The roof and rear end of a car, a sporty type, glowed in the thin moonlight. There came a faint hissing and the smell of stirred dust.

  “It’s not comin’ out of there as easy as it went in,” she said, which was the first thing that came to her mind.

  He said he didn’t think she had hit him.

  “I was just getting up to the road, and your headlights startled me,” he said. “I slipped back down.”

  “I didn’t hit you?”

  “I don’t think so. I think I slipped on the gravel.”

  He seemed a little confused, which she thought would be natural, given the situation, although she did not discard the possibility of him being under the influence of something.

  Nevertheless, she took it as good news that she had not run him down. She felt redeemed. She had not been a totally irresponsible driver after all. Feeling very expansive, she immediately offered to give him a ride, and he accepted.

  The next instant, she wondered if she might have been a little foolhardy, but there really wasn’t anything else she could do. She couldn’t very well leave him there twenty miles from anywhere and vulnerable to any crazy who might come along, such as drunk cowboys looking for mischief or a carload of illegals looking for a good suit of American clothes. And it could very well be all the way to Abilene before she could find help she could send back.

  She also sensed he was no threat, in the way a woman always knows these things. Rather than overcoming her, she felt he was pretty well overcome. She felt responsible to help.

  Not wanting him to get the idea that she herself might be dangerous, she took care to keep the little Colt out of sight as they got inside her truck and told him to just scoot her old boots out of the way on the floorboard.

  In the low glow of the overhead light, her first impressions of him were immediately confirmed. He was young and thin, and, more, he was very handsome. Inside the confines of the cab, he seemed even taller than she had first judged. He sort of folded himself into the seat and sat gingerly and all compressed, like a person does when they’re uncertain of touching the furniture. Or as if not certain what to do with himself.

  His face was a pasty color, she saw just before he closed the door and the light went out. As she shifted into gear and started off, she decided not to replace the gun in its pocket but tucked it beside her thigh, near at hand.

  Then she experienced a little panic, remembering her recent maneuverings and Lulu in the trailer. Stopping more quickly than she had intended, she threw the lever into park and opened the door at the same time. The stranger looked at her with a startled expression.

  “I’ll be right back. I have to check my mare.”

  She had forgotten the puppy, too. He stretched over the side of the truck bed, sniffing eagerly as she passed. She thought that she was picking them up all over the place this night.

  She flipped on the interior trailer lights and saw Lulu’s form through the screen. Stepping on the running board, she looked inside, making certain the mare was on all four strong legs. Lulu gave her what amounted to an accusing look when she did not receive a Twinkie cake.

  Relieved, Rainey returned to the truck, which rumbled softly. She suddenly felt very foolish—why, he might have jumped behind the wheel and driven off, with her truck and her horse.

  Then, when she opened the driver’s door and the overhead light came on, she found herself looking at her daddy’s little Colt resting in the man’s wide palm.


  “I believe this is yours,” he said, stretching it toward her.

  She stared at it.

  He said, “An offhand thought is that you might need to keep your gun out of the hands of the person who is the threat.”

  “Thank you,” she said with inordinate politeness, taking the gun from him as she slipped behind the wheel.

  He nodded and sank back, resting his head on the seat back.

  She replaced the gun in its pocket and shifted into gear, heading on down the highway.

  “Where would you like me to drop you?” she asked.

  “Wherever you’re headed will be fine,” he said.

  The very weariness in his voice caused her to look at his face in the shadow, his head back and his shoulders sagging. She herself had felt such weariness. It was more than of the present moment, but went bone deep and encompassed a weariness of all of life.

  She said slowly, “I’m goin’ up to Childress, but I’m goin’ through Abilene, if you want to go there. It’s probably the first town where anything’s goin’ to be open.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  So there she was, going down the road, with a stranger who appeared to have no better direction than she did. As the big diesel engine wound out and picked up speed, the accelerator suddenly seemed harder to push. The truck acted as if it had taken on an enormous addition of weight and was having a hard time getting going.

  The puppy came up on the back window with a pretty good thud, but the stranger didn’t so much as twitch. He’d folded his arms and slumped down in the seat, his eyes closed.

  She drove on down the highway, peering through the wind-shield as far ahead as the glow of the headlights cut the dark.

  He had fallen fast asleep. Thinking that the wind might be a bit too much on him, she pushed the button, closing his window. He didn’t move.

  A few seconds later she caught a scent—not alcohol, as she had continued to suspect, but some expensive, alluring men’s cologne that made her shift in her seat.

  When she drove through a small sleeping town with a single empty main street, she slowed beneath the pole lamps, trying to get a better look at her passenger. His hair was dark and thick, long on the top and combed straight back from his face.

  She thought him good-looking, but with his eyes closed, he seemed a little refined for her taste, which had the poor tendency to run toward tough-looking men. Robert had been six foot and thick, with a big crooked nose, and Monte had the sort of wild dangerous look to him that made women lose their good sense.

  She judged him to be at least thirty. She made this assumption more from his shoulders, which were those of a man in his prime, than from his face, which could have been as young as twenty-five. It was so hard to tell people’s ages these days.

  She guessed that whatever this stranger did was indoors; his face was smooth, and she suspected he had the type of careful tan a person would get from a golf course or tennis court. Maybe a week in the Bahamas. His shirt beneath his sport coat was the fashionable no-collar type, silk or some fine cotton, and the watch on his wrist looked most definitely expensive. No wedding band, although that didn’t mean he wasn’t married. Robert had broken out from every ring she had given him, and Monte had simply removed his most of the time, using the excuse that wearing a ring in the oil fields was too dangerous.

  A lawyer or stockbroker, she thought. His car would be either a Mercedes or a BMW. On another look she thought that he might be a scientist of some sort. Where this idea came from she couldn’t say, but there was an aura of confused intelligence about him, a professor, perhaps, but since Robert had become a professor, she generally didn’t like to think about them.

  The truck did not ride like a Mercedes, and while crossing a railroad track, her passenger bounced severely, causing his arm to flop out.

  At that point she left off worrying about him being a professor, and her mind sped quickly over how he had seemed spaced out, certainly unsteady, how his face had been pasty, and then he’d fallen almost immediately to sleep.

  She became concerned that he had fallen into a coma, or, worse, possibly died right there in her seat. He had, after all, just come out of a car wreck.

  Alarmed, she glanced repeatedly at his chest. She thought she spied movement, but that would not rule out a coma. She wondered how far away a hospital might be, and how she would explain coming up with a dying or possibly dead stranger in her truck.

  Charlene had often accused her and Mama of being morbid and dwelling far too much on death. They didn’t consider themselves morbid so much as down to earth. Death was a part of life. Rainey didn’t fear it or find it untouchable, while Charlene could hardly bring herself to go to a funeral.

  In fact, her sister had gone to only one funeral in her entire life, and that was Mama’s. Even then she’d had to get up in the middle of the graveside part of the service and go down to the limousine, where she stood bawling and shredding Kleenex.

  Mama and Rainey, on the other hand, dealt with all sick and dying family members, as well as horses, dogs, cats and once a pet parrot. Any animal that needed to be put down, she or Mama were called in to handle it. Mama’d had her own vet supplies, and she would give the animal a shot, while Rainey held its head.

  At twelve, she had helped her mother care for her grandfather, who spent his final six months in bed in their living room. She would sit with him and tell him the color of the sky and the trees, because he’d gone blind by then. The last week of his life, he slipped into a coma, and she sat and told him the color of the sky in detail and the latest report of farm market prices, which had always been his special interest.

  Charlene, who’d still been at home then, would run through the living room as long as their grandfather was there. She threw a fit about Rainey being allowed to sit with him, especially when he had gone into a coma. She maintained that Rainey was too young to endure such a thing. She just about came undone when she found out Rainey had been sitting there holding his hand when he died.

  “Good God, she will be scarred for life, bein’ exposed to all this sickness and death,” Charlene said.

  Rather than being scarred, what Rainey had discovered early was a gift for taking care of people. Her job at Blaine’s Drugstore often required she deliver prescriptions, and along with the bags of medicine she would dispense sympathetic care, too, if needed.

  That was how she met Monte. He was laid up with a leg broken in three places from rolling a motorcycle and was all alone in his studio apartment above Mr. Ryder’s garage behind the auto parts store. When she delivered his pain prescription, she had to go in, get a glass of water and put the pill right in Monte’s hand. He had no one at all to care for him, which was amazing, considering all the women he had after they were married. Maybe she had simply been the first female to walk through the door that afternoon.

  She had stayed to get him something to eat and straighten up his place.

  She had been ripe for Monte. She had begun to think of going back to school to be a nurse, when she married Monte instead. Mama said being married to Monte worked out to be the same thing as being a nurse. She meant nursemaid.

  That was the type of man that she always seemed to find. She looked over at her passenger. He was slumped down more than ever.

  Reaching out, she gave him a tentative push on his arm. He stirred, and although he didn’t awaken, she felt confident that he wasn’t dead. She would find out if he was in a coma when she reached Abilene.

  Continuing on along the lonesome Texas road beneath the stars and the half-moon, with the stranger’s faint scent around her, she wondered about him in the natural way of a woman without a man wonders. How had he come to be stranded along the road? What did he do for a living? Did he have a girlfriend or was he married? What might he be like in bed?

  CHAPTER 3

  Sweet Circumstance

  In Abilene she pulled into a Texaco Star Mart; it was one of those brand-new big ones being built all over the
place. Several cars sat at the fuel islands, and several more were parked in front of the store. Rainey pulled her rig to the side, where it wouldn’t block traffic.

  Thankfully, her stranger’s eyes fluttered when she shook him.

  “Wake up. We’re in Abilene,” she said, giving his arm a rather forceful shake.

  His eyes opened. They were smoky in the fluorescent light that reached them from outside.

  “We’re in Abilene,” she told him again and studied his eyes, worry rising quickly. At first he looked a little confused, and then he looked frantic.

  Giving out a groan, he fumbled to open the door and threw himself out, where he immediately went to vomiting.

  She thought to grab napkins from the glove box, stuffed the pocket Bible back inside, and hurried around to him.

  He was a pitiful sight, bent over by his cramped stomach. The puppy was hanging way over the side of the truck, sniffing. Concerned that the dog would jump down, she stepped over to shove him back. At that particular moment, she got a good look at the stranger’s head in the silvery glow, and her own stomach constricted.

  “Did you know your head is bloody?”

  It was on the right side, which was why she hadn’t seen it in the light of the truck cab. It looked the same as a big grease spot, but she knew it was blood.

  He looked at her with a mixture of confusion and surprise. He felt gingerly around his head and then looked at his fingers.

  She was immensely glad she had picked him up. At least she had done the right thing there.

  Peering harder at the blood spot, she said, “It looks like it’s dryin’.”

  She handed him a napkin to wipe his mouth. He wiped his fingers instead, so she handed him another and suggested he sit on the running board of the trailer, while she got a bottle of water from behind the truck seat.

  “Here.” She handed him the bottle.

  He tilted the bottle upward, swished water in his mouth and spat it out in a forceful stream. She regarded the action as a hopeful sign that he was okay, although the way he dropped his head did not seem altogether positive.