Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

Damn, he felt good!

He knew the Toronado was going to stop before it had even begun to slow down. It was Wedgwood blue with a white vinyl top, and it was just the sort of car to fit his mood. He wondered sometimes at his ability to anticipate things like the stopping of this particular car. Did he pick up vibrations that gave him a sort of clairvoyance? Or did the force of his own will have something to do with it, communicating itself to the driver and actually inducing him to stop the car? Sometimes a man’s will had that sort of power. He was sure of it. If the man was strong enough, and if he knew how to draw himself together and use himself well.

The window lowered at the touch of a button. The driver wore a black mohair suit and a pearl gray shirt with white collar and cuffs. The knot in his tie was small and precise. He had an open weather-burned face. There were a few lines in the corners of his eyes and a tracing of blue veins at the bridge of his nose. He was maybe forty, maybe forty-five.

He said, “Turning off just this side of Big D, if that’s any help to you.”

It sure is.

Another button unlocked the door. Jimmie John opened it and swung inside, set his flight bag between his feet on the thick blue carpet, drew the door shut. A buzzer sounded.

“Seat belts,” the driver said. “It makes that noise if you don’t fasten them.”

He fastened his belt and the car moved down the ramp and into the stream of traffic on the Interstate. His face and arms held the heat of the sun, and the stream of air-conditioning on his skin was like a slap of after-shave lotion. The Toronado moved out into the left lane and sat there, cruising smooth and silent at eighty miles an hour.

He said, “This is some car.”

“Well, I’ll say it suits me. I walked in on that salesman and told him I wanted it with everything on it. Put it all on, I said, figure it all out, and then we’ll get down to cases. She’s got front-wheel drive, you know. Takes corners like they’re straight. Eight-track tape deck, speakers in the rear. What say we have some music?”

“Great.”

The driver pressed some buttons and something with a lot of strings came on. The driver asked him how he liked the sound. He said it was terrific.

For a time he tuned everything out. He just sat there wrapped in the cool air and the sweet music and the occasional chatter of the driver, sat there comparing this clean new beautiful car with the old Ford. He had ridden in worse than that Ford and hadn’t minded a bit. The truck that picked him up in Mississippi had needed new shocks, and the whole front end was badly sprung, and there was a constant fertilizer smell from the back. But it hadn’t bothered him at all because it had suited him at the time.

The whole trick was one of fitting your scene to your mood. Right now he was ready for a little luxury.

After a while he said, “I’m surprised you’re willing to pick up hitchhikers in a car like this.”

“How’s that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Things you read about all the time. Most of the rides I get are in broken-down wrecks. Not anything like this.”

The man grinned. “Figure I’m taking a chance?”

“Well, maybe not that exactly.”

“Have a look at this. Cuts the chances down some, don’t you think?” He opened his jacket to show the fat butt end of a handgun protruding from a shoulder rig. “The hell, you might say I’m still taking a chance. That there is a .357 Magnum on a .38 frame, and it does stack the odds up on my side a bit, but everything you do in this life is a chance, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Jimmie John said. He was thinking about the gun.

“What’s life if it’s not taking chances? If I never took a chance I’d still be pumping gas for my wife’s daddy to this day, taking home eighty dollars a week and waiting on him to die and leave me half the station. You got to take chances if you figure to amount to anything.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“But what’s that got to do with giving somebody a ride? Well, I’ll tell you. Like anything else, what it amounts to is a question of taking the right chance. Life’s full of chances, some good and some bad. Same token, the road’s full of hitchhikers. Any time you want to take a chance on a man, whether to give him a job or a ride or I don’t care what, you have to know how to size him up. You got to be able to take one quick look at him and learn what it would take a psychologist a couple of years to learn. You see what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Drive along any length of time and you’ll see them thumbing rides by the dozens. Guys and girls and you can’t tell which is which. Hippie types so many weeks away from a bath you’d be weeks getting the smell out of your car. Now anybody stops for one of them and I have to say he deserves whatever he gets. It’s a hell of a thing to say, but I’d have to say it, because a man without the plain sense to take a good look at someone before letting him into his car, he’s asking for trouble.”

“I guess you’re pretty good at sizing people up.”

A big smile. Damn, it was easy to tell people what they wanted to hear!

“And I guess you’d be right to say it. Now I look at you and what do I see? Right off I see a boy who cares about his appearance. Shaved, hair combed, pants pressed, clean shirt, shoes shined. Now that’s the way to make an impression, and it ought to make an impression, because it tells a man right off that here’s somebody who cares what he looks like, who gives a damn about the face he shows the world. And then, looking you over a little closer, what do I see? I see a young fellow who’s not afraid to smile and look a person directly in the eye and speak up when he’s spoken to. Not a kook or a crank, not stoned on drugs, but a decent American boy.”

“Well, thank you, sir.”

“A college boy heading on back after semester break.”

“How did you—”

“Oh, just what I said, a matter of knowing how to take the measure of a man. Anything beyond that is just guessing, but let’s just see where it leads us. I’d be inclined to say a Christian school, and would I be far off guessing TCU in Fort Worth?”

“That’s just absolutely amazing.”

It had always delighted him that it was so easy to give these people what they wanted. Now the conversation turned to the prospects of the TCU football team, and he found it no problem at all to hold up his end of it. He knew little about football and less about Texas Christian University, had not even known it was located in Fort Worth. But at this point the driver was hardly likely to question his credentials, having taken pains to supply him with them in the first place. “Now who’s that little sophomore scatback you fellows have got coming up?” “Oh, right, I know who you mean—” “Denton, I think his name is.” “Right, that’s it, Denton.”

The man was apprehensive enough to strap a gun under his arm, but he couldn’t recognize a load of shit if you dropped it on his head.

From football the conversation turned to an elaborate discussion of how the driver had come from pumping gas for his father-in-law to driving a crisp new Toronado, and at that point Jimmie John dropped out of it entirely and let it turn into a monologue without an audience, slipping in an appreciative murmur whenever an instant of silence arose to demand it. He caught phrases about the reclamation of wastes in the oil-drilling process, but it hardly seemed worthwhile to concentrate on what was being said. It was so pleasant, surrounded by music and cool air and the white noise of this man’s conversation, that he had to force himself to get down to business.

He straightened suddenly in his seat, furrowed his brow in concentration.