How has anyone mistaken him for the living? How has anyone kept him in the car for the ten miles it takes to get to the Lowren's Bridge, where he inevitably grabs the wheel and takes both car and driver into the river? Most likely they were creeped out by his clothes and his voice, and by the smell of bones-that smell they seem to know even though they've probably never smelled it. Not quite rotten but definitely mossy, hanging around him like a fog. "Yeah, man, yeah," he says and, for the hundredth time since I picked him up five miles ago, I wonder how anyone could possibly not know that he's dead. "She must be pretty nice," I say without much interest. It was something the hitchhiker would go for-something worth the trouble of crawling out of the ground. But thank god he did, because without it I would have been sunk. I can't believe he let me take it, yard work or no. Drives smooth as silk and growls around curves. It's a dusk blue 1969 Camaro Rally Sport, mint condition. To tell the truth, knowing what I was going to use the car for, I felt a little guilty. Instead I cleared shrubs and tilled an eight-by-ten plot for new rosebushes while he watched me with a surly eye, making sure his baby would be safe with this seventeen-year-old kid in an old Rolling Stones t-shirt and his mother's gardening gloves. If I had more time, I could've spent a summer listening to interesting stories about Vietnam. For a seventy-year-old man he's got the straightest back I've ever seen. Dean, the retired army colonel who lives down the block, just so I could borrow it. And I've suffered through eight weeks of lawn work for Mr. He taps the lighter hard on the dash, twice, and I glance over to make sure he hasn't left a ding in the panel. "My gal, she's waiting for me," he says now in an excited voice, like he's going to see her the minute we crest the next hill. Unsuspecting drivers probably pick him up out of boredom, thinking he's just some college kid who reads too much Kerouac.
The hitchhiker haunts a stretch of winding North Carolina road, bordered by unpainted split-rail fences and a whole lot of nothing. I know what to look for, because I've seen just about every variety of spook and specter you can imagine.
Then again, I have an eye for these things. He belongs in a chorus line of dancing Jets and Sharks. And the way he keeps nodding and flicking his Zippo open and closed in rhythm with his head. So is the loose and faded leather coat, though not as much that as the sideburns. CHAPTER ONE The grease-slicked hair is a dead giveaway-no pun intended.
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