IIOnce the autumn sun dropped below the clouded horizon, the moonless night smothered the Connecticut Hills with a wolfish gloom challenged only by the funnel of holiday traffic on Interstate. Few travelers would have noticed the motel snuggled into the woods off exit 74. Its neon sign had been out of order since the summer and only one car was in the parking lot. A red GTO with Maine plates in front of room 21.
Inside the motel room a shifting kaleidoscope of TV reds, greens, and blue cascaded over the queen-sized bed. The young man and teenage girl watched THE BIONIC WOMAN with opposite levels of interest. When he tossed the empty beer can into the corner, the skinny brunette in the red dress asked, "When we leaving?"
"After I’m done my beers." Mike Valle wasn’t checking-out of this Eden until noon. The tattooed mechanic lifted a beer can from the cooler. “You want one?”
“No, I don’t drink” Tammi West reached for a cigarette on the night table. She flicked his Zippo lighter and sucked on the filter. The end of the cigarette burned cherry red.
“All the more for me.” Mike popped the top, fantasizing about a night with Lindsey Wagner. The star of the TV show was almost as pretty as Farah Fawcett, who was the BIONIC MAN’s wife. Tammi wasn't like either star. Her shoulder-length hair was brown. Her chest was flat and her legs were sticks. She wore no make-up and he would bet his car that the teenager would never be awarded a calendar like Farah.
"You said we were driving straight to New York." The rising scree of empties signaled this room was their destination for the night. It was only 6:35.
"What’s the rush?” Her fixation with a city filled with Jews, niggers, spics, queers, and weirdos annoyed Mike Vallee. New York City was less than 50% white, but the .38 under his seat of his car would provide ample protection in that hellhole.
"The more miles between me and Maine the better." Smoking was a new habit and she coughed, as the tobacco rasped into her lungs.
"You afraid of your stepmom and the cops?" Mike slipped a hand up Tammi's dress. He had no trouble getting his fingers under the bra and he was disappointed to discover her breasts were mostly bra.
“You crossed three state lines with a sixteen year-old girl. Somewhere that’s against the law.” She squirmed under his hands hoping the danger of transporting a minor might register with Mike.
“Being an outlaw don’t scare me.” None of his fellow workers at the Kittery Navy had ever accused him of being a deep thinker and he bragged, “I been to reform school for breaking and entering. Robbing summer cottages an easy way to get liquor in the winter.”
“I’m not looking to break any laws.” Her face didn’t match the one on the driver’s license that she had stolen from her stepsister, so any stop by the police could send her back to Kittery.
"Wild thing, no one’s looking to break any laws.” The re-run paused for a commercial break and Mike hooked a finger into her hair. It smelled of cigarettes. “We're a team. Anyone say you’re a dead ringer for Faye Dunaway?"
"All the time." She nearly laughed aloud, since the Hollywood blonde dated movie stars and she was a skinny runaway stuck with a loser.
“That’s us. Bonnie and Clyde on the run.” Mike undid the zipper of his jeans. He had driven halfway to New York and his reward would have to be more than light petting. "Ain’t we havin’ fun?"
"A ball.” Semi-trailers’ diesel engines were throttling on the highway. Their rumble recharged her urge for going and she suggested, "If you’re too drunk, I could drive.”
"No teenybopper’s drivin’ my Goat." Mike had paid cash for the muscle car after a winter of working double-shift at the Navy Yard. Cruising around Portsmouth and Kittery was fun. The highway was less so, since the gas gauge hit EMPTY fast pushing more than 70.
"I learned to shift in Driver's Ed." A few more lessons and Tammi might have received her license, not that her stepmother would have permitted her to drive their banged-up Cutlass. No one back home trusted her. Not even with her own skin.
"You learn anything else?" The pipefitter slurred with a hand resting on her belly.
“Yeah, never take a ride with a stranger.” Maybe it was better Mike didn’t drive drunk.
“That’s real funny, because we’re not strangers.”
“I never met you before.”
“This afternoon I saw you walking on Tenney Hill Road.” The car chase on the BIONIC WOMAN was picking up speed. “Black leather jacket, red dress, and high heels. I said Tammi West.”
“You heard of my reputation."
“Who hasn't?" Mike put the half-emptied beer can on the night table.
"No one in New York."
“I knew who you were and I had to stop." Mike yanked down his pants without getting them farther than mid-thigh. His underwear remained around his waist. They were two days old.
“And you asked where I was going. I said, “New York or the highway.” I don’t remember saying a hotel room in the boondocks.”
“This is a pit stop for beer and something else.” Her body was that of a teenager and not Farah Fawcett, but if he shut off the TV, he couldn’t tell the difference in the darkness. “You know what I mean?”
“Men only want one thing from a girl.” Tammi prayed this would be quick. It usually was with drunks.
“Same thing you gave up to the football team after the Saco High game.” Mike smiled upon freeing Tammi from her bra.
“That story is a lie.” She pushed him away with a strength born from a long-held anger. “I went to the Fort McClury with the quarterback, Brad. His friends showed up. I’m lucky a police cruiser entered the parking lot. The football players drove off. I walked home.”
“I heard you did them all. Same at the party at the rich kid’s place. That a lie too?” Mike fondled Tammi’s boyish breasts. People had seen her on the bed in the big beach cottage. Someone counted the boys. The number was more than ten. “You make friendly like that and we’ll be leaving soon."
“So you want to meet that girl?” Tammi couldn’t deny the incident at the mansion in York, but no one listened to her side of the story, which was one more reason she was running away from that town and once she got rid of Mike, she never would have to hear this story again.
“I told you we weren’t strangers.” He rolled her nipple between his thumb and index finger. It wasn't getting hard like it should.
“We do it, you think you can get back in the car and drive like the devil?”
“You put it that way and I’m Satan’s chauffeur.” Mike's thigh shoved her legs apart and Tammi shut her eyes expecting a rough entry, except Mike’s drinking had exorcised his Romeo soul and he passed out with a snore atop her chest. Tammi tapped his face lightly twice and once hard before slipping out of the bed to whisper, “Sorry Clyde, Bonnie’s moving on to better things.”
Cars were on the highway. Half of them were New York-bound. Neither the police nor her stepmother could find her in a city of seven million people. Come the summer she’d take a bus to California, Florida, or New Orleans. Someplace where Tammi West could disappear forever.
The teenager stole into the bathroom and quietly shut the door. She pulled down her stepsister’s red dress and tied back her hair into a ponytail. Lipstick and rouge added a couple of years to the face in the mirror, not that many driver cared about the age of a teenage hitchhiker. She crept into the bedroom and put on her black leather jacket. It had belonged to her father. After picking up her high heels, Tammi rifled $80 from Mike’s wallet, swearing to return the money from the city, then tiptoed to the front door. The click of the lock woke Mike.
"Where you goin’?" he demanded through a firefight of blinks.
"Out for air." Tammi yanked at the door. Not fast enough, for Mike leapt out of the bed to seize her wrists. His jeans fell to his knees, as he shook Tammi. “I didn’t blow off my mom’s turkey for you to split on me."
“I’m not splitting.”
“Then why was your hand in my pants?”
“I was looking for cigarettes.”
“Bullshit. The cigarettes are on the night table.” Mike tightened his grip, so his fingernails broke her skin. “You're little thieving whore, that’s what you are.”
“No, I’m not.” She tried to twist free, but Mike was too strong. “Let me go.”
“Not until you give me back what you took.” The pipefitter slapped Tammi’s face with an open palm.
“Fuck you.” Tammi was no man’s punching bag and she swung the shoes in a whistling arc. The heels cracked into Mike's skull and his eyes fluttered like a slot machine twirling round and round. A second shot dropped him onto the floor.
"You bitch. I'm gonna teach you." Mike lay stunned on his back.
Tammi had already learned his kind of lesson from too many other people and ran from the motel room. It took her five seconds to cross the parking lot into the woods. The underbrush snatched at her legs and she lost her footing. Thrown off balance Tammi skidded down the embankment to the Interstate, losing a shoe in the tumble.
She scrambled to her feet and stared into the oncoming headlights. Her stepmother had cut out scores of newspaper articles about runaway girls mutilated by highway weirdos. The local police had conducted seminars for the high school students about the dangers of hitchhiking. A supercharged V-8 engine roared from the parking lot. Mike was on his way. Someone had to stop and she didn’t care if he was a homicidal maniac as long as she was gone before the GTO got here. Ten seconds later a big white Olds lumbered past her by a hundred feet into the break-down lane. Tammi ran on one shoe to the passenger door and jumped inside.
"Go, mister, go."
“Go?” The long-haired driver was examining her from head to toe. “You want me take you home?”
“Not home. Anywhere. Go.” Tammi figured him for early 20s. He was wearing bell-bottom jeans and a suede jacket. She prayed he wasn’t stoned like most of the heads in her high school. She needed someone who could drive like THE DUKES OF HAZZARD.
“Okay, we’re going.” The hippie checked the mirrors and pulled into traffic at a less than urgent speed. “A girl your age shouldn’t be out here this time of night.”
“I’m 16.” In the dashboard light the driver didn’t look like a pervert, but Tammi moved closer to the door.
“More like 15.”
15, 16, I’m plenty old enough to be here or anywhere else.” Tammi rubbed the bruise on her face. “Where you headed, Mister?"
“New York.”
“New York works for me?”
“You have family there?”
“I have no family there, which is why I’m going there.” Tammi bit her lower lip and glanced over her shoulder. A hundred headlights filled the back window. Only one of them mattered to her. “Shit.”
The red GTO roared up beside them.
“Mister, I swear to God he’ll kill me, if you stop." Tammi begged frantically, “Go faster.”
"You think this piece of shit can outrun a Goat?"
Screams contorted the face of the slick-haired motorhead.
“I can’t read lips, but your boyfriend doesn’t seem too happy.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“He’s no stranger either.”
The hippie was almost caught off-guard by GTO’s swerving within an inch of the Olds.
“This will knock the fight out of him.” The hippie reached under the seat and came up with a tire iron.
“Please don’t stop, mister.” Tammi clamped the dashboard with whitened hands. “He’ll kill me.”
“No one’s killing anyone tonight. This is for just in case.” The hippie juked the steering wheel to the left and the GTO veered away from the Olds 88. “My father always says a car is the most dangerous weapon in America, especially when the driver doesn’t give a shit about his car.”
“Mister, he has a gun.”
“Gun?” The long-haired driver slammed on the brakes and the GTO nosed ahead of the Olds. A flash of fire spurted inside the muscle car. The bullet missed its target. The hippie dropped the tire iron and clenched the steering wheel with the awareness that this was no game.
“What are you going to do?” She locked her fingers together not to God, but to the driver of the 88.
“Not give him a second chance to kill us.” The hippie checked the road ahead and behind of the two cars. The Interstate was strangely empty. “Hold on.”
The Olds swung behind the GTO and the driver stepped on the accelerator. The big car rear-ended the GTO, which fishtailed off the highway through a copse of sapling. Tammi shrieked with delight, as the driver pushed the Olds over 100 mph.
"Keep an eye out for the GTO."
"I don’t see it."
“That doesn’t mean he’s not coming.” A road sign announced an exit a half-mile ahead. The Olds reached the off-ramp in thirty seconds.
"This isn’t the highway to New York." Tammi hated detours.
"We’re taking the back roads to avoid your friend. It’ll add a couple of hours to the trip, but better than having someone shoot at us again. That okay by you, Cinderella?"
"Whatcha mean, Cinderella?" She pulled down her dress. The hippie might not be trouble, but she had already been hit by one man tonight.
"You’re wearing a party dress with one shoe, so I think___"
"Mister, this ain’t no pumpkin truck, I’m no Cinderella, and I only have a drunk stepmother at home,” Tammi snapped, and then apologized, deciding she needed this ride. "Sorry, mister. It's been one of those nights."
"It happens to everyone.”
She wasn’t adding anything extra and rubbed her face, nearly on the verge of tears.
“You have a cigarette, mister?”
"There might be a few by your feet."
“Thanks.” She lit one and smoked in silence.
“When I was your age, I fought with my girlfriend. I never hit her.”
“Then she was lucky. Guys hit girls and worse.”
“This isn’t just about the guy with the GTO. Care to tell me about it?”
“No.” She sighed a cloud of smoke.
“Jack Kerouac wrote in ON THE ROAD that the worst thing about hitchhiking was proving to the driver that he hadn’t made a mistake giving you a ride.”
“Too late for regrets, right?” Tammi shrugged with adolescent apathy.
“Depends on your story.”
"You want a story, listen to this. At the Turkey Day pep rally this jock bragged about fucking me and a cheerleader called me a slut. We fought and I won. The dean of discipline sided with the goody-two-shoes and I ripped off his toupee. How can you trust a counsellor who lies about their baldness?” She wasn’t waiting for an answer. “I got suspended. At home my stepmother and I get into a shouting match. I run away. That guy in the GTO gives me a ride. He was mistaken about me digging a cheap weekend in a dirty hotel and I ran. You stopped. We went.”
“100 words or less. End of story.” The hippie cracked his window to vent the smoke.
“Yeah.” Tammi trembled from reliving some part of this story. She couldn’t figure which one. “Can I ask a favor?"
"Such as?"
"No more questions." Tammi tugged the mini-skirt over her knees. "You mind if I catch some sleep, mister?"
"I’ll wake you in New York."
"Thanks, mister."
She was soon asleep.
The Olds 88 cruised the country back roads at 55 MPH. The driver fiddled with the radio without finding a station unaccompanied by static. It was a little after 6pm and the two-laner was as empty of cars as a dirt road in an atomic bomb test site. The first-floor windows of the occasional house glowed from either the kitchen or living room. Families were eating their dinners. Next on the menu was TV. Most households would be in bed before 11.
The driver shivered with the memory of these endless suburban nights and dialed a radio station from New London to the pop hit BRANDY. He gave the engine more gas and the Olds zoomed into the blackened countryside with its taillights fading from sight. A dog barked in the distance and then silence fell across the shadowless landscape. New York was less than a hundred miles away.
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