Wild

“Hi,” I murmured in his direction as I searched uselessly for the seat belt that was crammed irretrievably into the fold of the seat, my eyes skimming his tattoos: a spiked metal ball on the end of a chain on one arm and the top half of a bare-breasted woman with her head thrown back in either pain or ecstasy on the other; a Latin word I didn’t know the meaning of scrawled across his tan chest. When I gave up on finding the seat belt, the husky leaned over and licked my knee avidly with his soft and strangely cool tongue.

“That dog’s got some motherfucking good taste in women,” said the man. “His name’s Stevie Ray,” he added. Instantly the dog stopped licking me, closed his mouth up tight, and looked at me with his icy black-rimmed eyes, as if he knew he’d been introduced and wanted to be polite. “I’m Spider. You already met Louise—she goes by Lou.”

“Hi!” Lou said, meeting my eyes for a second in the rearview mirror.

“And this here’s my brother Dave,” he said, gesturing to the man in the passenger seat.

“Hi,” I said.

“How about you? You got a name?” Dave turned to ask.

“Oh yeah—sorry. I’m Cheryl.” I smiled, though I felt a blurry uncertainty about having accepted this particular ride. There was nothing to do about it now. We were already on our way, the hot wind blowing my hair. I petted Stevie Ray while assessing Spider in my peripheral vision. “Thanks for picking me up,” I said to conceal my unease.

“Hey, no problem, sister,” Spider said. On his middle finger, he wore a square turquoise ring. “We’ve all been on the road before. We all know what it’s like. I hitched last week and motherfuck if I couldn’t get a ride to save my life, so that’s why when I saw you I told Lou to stop. Mother-fucking karma, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said, reaching up to tuck my hair behind my ears. It felt as coarse and dry as straw.

“What you doing out on the road anyway?” Lou asked from the front.

I went into the whole PCT shebang, explaining about the trail and the record snowpack and the complicated way I had to hitchhike to get to Old Station. They listened with respectful, distant curiosity, all three of them lighting up cigarettes as I spoke.

After I was done talking, Spider said, “I’ve got a story for you, Cheryl. I think it’s along the lines of what you’re talking about. I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it’s not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage! Man, that’s the truth, ain’t it? I can relate to that and I bet you can too, sister.”

“I can,” I said earnestly.

“We can all relate to that, man,” said Dave, and he turned in his seat so he and Spider could do a series of motorcycle blood brother hand jives in the air between them.

“You know something about this dog?” Spider asked me when they were done. “I got him the day Stevie Ray Vaughan died. That’s how he got his motherfucking name.”

“I love Stevie Ray,” I said.

“You like Texas Flood?” Dave asked me.

“Yeah,” I said, swooning at the thought of it.

“I got it right here,” he said, and pulled out a CD and placed it into the boom box that was propped between him and Lou. A moment later, the heaven of Vaughan’s electric guitar filled the car. The music felt like sustenance to me, like food, like all the things I’d once taken for granted that had now become sources of ecstasy for me because I’d been denied them. I watched the trees stream past, lost in the song “Love Struck Baby.”

When it ended, Lou said, “We’re love struck too, me and Dave. We’re getting married next week.”

“Congrats,” I said.

“You wanna marry me, sweetheart?” Spider asked me, momentarily grazing my bare thigh with the back of his hand, his turquoise ring hard against me.

“Just ignore him,” said Lou. “He’s nothing but a horny old bastard.” She laughed and caught my eye in the rearview mirror.

I was a horny old bastard too, I thought, while Stevie Ray the dog licked my knee methodically and the other Stevie Ray launched into a smoking rendition of “Pride and Joy.” The place on my leg where Spider had touched me seemed to pulse. I wished he’d do it again, though I knew that was ludicrous. A laminated card with a cross on it dangled from the stem of the rearview mirror, alongside a faded Christmas-tree-shaped air freshener, and when it spun around I saw that on the other side there was a photograph of a little boy.

“Is that your son?” I asked Lou when the song ended, pointing to the mirror.

“That’s my little Luke,” she said, reaching to tap it.