Her lips were chapped. Because this was the desert. She was off in a little ditch, by the asphalt road, trying to get a ride while the heat roiled off and blurred everything she saw. Thunderheads were massing at a butte in the distance. They cast thick purple shadows that swallowed the hills and let loose curtains of rain. It just dumped and she could see the cloud slowly making its way to her. She could see for miles across the pastures that seemingly held nothing. By the time the cloud got there, she wanted to be gone. Nonetheless, cars were blowing past her.
At her feet, all over, were red and black grasshoppers, the size of a finger. Their collective hum was awesome, like a thick pulse of electricity filling the world. They were screwing and doing flips, making a dry pop when they snapped off the ground. They'd often land on their heads. Cars would smear them when they blew through, but it was their season out here. Fucking and flipping.
“They sure is seems to be having a good time,” the guy said and laughed. Even his laugh was fucked up. A gargle-y old alcoholic laugh.
To her right was a guy that called himself Tripper Jay. He didn't even have a backpack. He wore a kerchief around his neck and a greasy tie-died shirt with khaki shorts and sandals. It was impossible to determine his age. He talked about some war, one she'd never heard of. He'd been rode hard, for sure and had wrinkles and cuts all over his hands and face. The cuts, he said, were from his old crew. Who had stolen his gear, burned his sleeping bag.
He balled his knotty fists and said “They took my fuckin' dog, too.”
Tripper Jay wouldn't say why they had turned on him. It could have been for grievous things, or really trivial things. Rules were unevenly applied. Traveler drunks can be cruel and stupid and sanctimonious.
She had gotten picked up off the ramp in Raton, had seen him stumbling around at the ramp in the morning and not trying too hard to hitch. A ranch-hand had taken her up to where he was turning and she was very much in a remote place. She had begun walking up the highway and drank all her water, which had been warm. She had met Jay up the road. He'd been picked up later and taken a little further than her. They had played leapfrog like that twice more. Two men who thought she looked presentable enough had picked her up, but refused Jay. Some vestiges of girl were left in her, she guessed and they had minded their manners, but they didn't want some roadkill, this scraggly, wilted, crazy hippie, so she had dishonestly apologized to him, stepping up into their trucks and thought, twice, that this was the time in the universe where they'd part.
But she kept running into him. He had kept getting rides after her and getting dropped off ahead of her. He kept leaving off his stories when she left him and picking them up when they met again. They were long, boring, about the war, about traveling, good acid he had done, women.
They were standing in the midst of the mating grasshoppers, coming off the road like popcorn, and her water ran out. Jay gave her some from a gross-tasting canteen, said it was springwater, but it tasted like shit. She smirked at the thought that she might be dead, in Hell, that they would be repeating this cycle for eternity and Tripper Jay was her own personal tormenter.
“It's like it's a... It's like it's a...,” he stuttered. “A orgy.”
She imagining unclasping her knife and killing him. Could feel it in her pocket against her leg. What she didn't know is that a van was coming for both of them. That they'd make it to a town and part there. That the ride would be two hours. And that the water they shared was swarming with giardia. She saw the thunderhead moving like a drifting battleship towards them, shuddered to imagine them huddling for warmth together in a monsoon. No one was to touch her, as a rule. And it was one people sometimes made the mistake of trying to break. But in his way, he was already inside of her, his infestation, swimming. The van would get them before the rain. She didn't know that for a week, in her aching guts, that they'd be married.
