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6.

I’M ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD IN SALT LAKE CITY, IT’S snowing and I don’t own a decent jacket. I’m a California boy, barefoot and shirtless eight months of the year. I spent the entirety of my youth upon the ocean. I don’t even own a hat. I wish I knew how to fold this Book of Mormon into a hat. What am I going to do with this book? I’ve been taught that you don’t throw books away or make them into hats, not even Love Story. I read everything in my dad’s library when I was a kid, Irwin Shaw, Updike, Ayn Rand, Huxley, McCluhan, Thomas Wolfe, a four-volume compendium of the world’s great thinkers, and yes, Love Story. I even read the Bible, one of the bloodiest, horniest, and simultaneously most boring books of all time. But my father taught me that all books are sacred. Looking back, trying to remember the “good times,” all I can think of is books. I realize now that I should’ve just stayed in school and become a librarian or maybe switched my major from psych to English Lit, graduated, and opened up a used bookstore.

But it’s too late for that, isn’t it? There is no turning back. I made sure of that. The past is a bridge of cinders. Here in the tenuous present I stand on the highway again, shivering, waiting for a ride, and thumb through the pages of the Mormon Bible. The King James Bible, wicked and carnal as it may be, feels true, especially the parts where Christ speaks, but this Mormon doctrine seems a stretch.

Jesus, but I am far from home. And it’s cold. And I keep thinking of Troy Katchpole, who confessed his story to me late one night while half-drunk at a keg party. At first I thought he was making it up or getting intimate with me in some weird way, but then his face turned gray and he had to stop talking. I felt like I might have been the first one he’d confided in. He told me much about that night. Except for the missing arm, however, he never described the driver, and so over the years I’ve come to imagine him as a gaunt Merle Haggard just out of federal prison, a black cowboy hat on his head, shifting gears with his prosthesis and turning an occasional beam of approval on my sixteen-year-old friend. He must’ve been strong to overpower Troy, a football player and a wrestler. Or maybe he was charming or fatherly or seemed harmless with only the one arm. I imagine the motel room, the wall heater, the two beds, the mirror above the dresser, the humiliating image in that mirror. Maybe he got Troy while he was asleep. I wonder if he threatened him, perhaps with a knife or a gun. I wonder if the old pervert insisted on kissing. I can’t decide what happened the following day, if the creep brought him breakfast or a box of chocolates or promised to write or left him bleeding on the mattress.

The snow is so dry in Utah you can brush it from your clothes like confetti. It should not be blowing like this early in October, and I know soon it will let up and the sun will break. I have enough money to get a motel room if necessary, but I’d prefer to save it for something more urgent.

Up ahead a black semi shimmers out of the snow. The driver —I can’t see him through the windshield—is grabbing gears, downshifting fast, as if he’s suddenly changed his mind. Soon there is a hiss of brakes, and then the black body of the truck slides right up next to me. Quaint. How quaint. The passenger door swings open. It’s ridiculous to be superstitious, worse yet to refuse a ride in the middle of a snowstorm. I swallow a dry lump of dread, climb the steps, and swing myself up into the cab.

Uncannily the driver looks like a gaunt Merle Haggard just out of prison. He wears a scrappy beard over inflamed, pimply cheeks and a black cowboy hat angles down across his brow. This would be the first time I’ve ever been clairvoyant, though I note with relief that he has two good hands. “Convoy,” the C.W. McCall hit from a few years back, is playing softly on the radio.

“Haddy,” says Merle, staring at me with black expressionless eyes.

“Howdy,” I say, pulling the door closed after me. “Thanks for picking me up.”

“Thought you were a girl,” he says.

I nod and adjust myself in the seat, which is hard as a board. “Must be hard to see in all this snow,” I offer.

He digs around for a gear and we ease back out on the road. “Where you headed?” he says.

“East.”

“Any place in particular east?”

“Far east as you’re going,” I say.

“Ain’t going far east,” he says. “I’m going to Cheyenne.”

“Perfect,” I say, staring straight ahead, almost wishing I had converted to Mormonism.

He fishes for gears and we gradually pick up speed. A V W 411 puttering in front of us looks as if it may be crushed under our wheels but Merle swerves out and passes it with a loathsome glance down. His CB begins to crackle. “Snake eyes, this is Jawl Boy, I’m still trollin’, any luck yourself, come on back.”

Merle ignores the chatter, finds another gear. Tom T. Hall is singing about how cold it is in Des Moines and I’m glad I’m not going to Des Moines, but it may be colder here, I tell Merle, who only offers me that dazzling black-eyed glare and I shut up.

I figure Cheyenne must be four hundred miles, and I’ll be happy to have this leg of the trip behind me. Fifty miles pass amid the whirling, ghostlike snowflakes. I take a stab at the silence. “What are you hauling?”

“Oranges,” he says, snapping the brim of his black Stetson.

“You coming from California?” (Why is my voice so high?).

“Yup. Haul steel out, bring oranges back. Goddamn fifty-five mile an hour.”

I hate to think of California. Really, I never dreamed I’d leave. Not like this anyway.

We travel in stilted elevator silence for another fifty miles, the snow fluttering earnestly by, both of us looking down on the cars we pass. As we crawl up into Wyoming, I keep thinking of Mountain and wishing he’d decided to come. And for the thousandth time I wonder why Troy didn’t fight the one-armed man.

Just before Green River, Wyoming, the snow starts tumbling out of the sky as if someone has slit the belly of a feather mattress with a knife. The truck splits the torrent before us, but I can see nothing ahead for more than a few feet and the snow is building on the road. We pass a dozen cars that have slid off into the ditch.

“Keeps snowing like this,” Merle says, “we’ll have to pull off.”

My eyes are wide open now. I sit up straight and light another cigarette. To think that I could be in a warm dorm room now listening to records and eating a logger burger and studying my hokeypokey psychology and waiting for some girl to wiggle by. Did I leave that life of leisure voluntarily?

“I need to keep going,” I say. “If you want, you can let me off at the next stop.”

“Next stop is a motel,” he says, gritting his teeth and shifting down as another car in front of us slides off the road. “Down here about three miles. We’ll get us some beers and wait out the storm.”