From time to time he looked over his shoulder at the road undulating behind him, and at last he did see the bus way back there, barreling along the two-lane road, coming fast. Frank turned to face it, holding the warm-up bag prominently in front of himself with his left hand — I’m a traveler, see? — while he waved the right hand back and forth above his head. He was visible, God knows, the tallest thing in the vicinity, the only thing moving, but the bus roared right on by, didn’t even slow, left him awash in a wake of blown dust and diesel fumes.
Cocksucker. Frank watched the bus shrink, imagined the blowout, the driver losing control, the bus jouncing off the road, straight into a tree — one of the few trees around, but a perfect hit anyway — the driver flailing through the big windshield, sliced to shit by all that glass, screaming, mouth wide open, glass in his tongue...
Frank kept walking. It was greener up ahead, more trees — shade from this sun, finally — and now the road began to climb. I have two hours to find the bus stop, Frank told himself. The fucking thing has to stop somewhere.
A farmhouse with outbuildings, on his right. And a dog, who stood barking loudly on the driveway, too cowardly to come forward for his kick. No human beings came out to find out what the dog’s problem was. Frank kept walking, and the dog quit. Like to come back at night with a .22, plink him on the edges, shoot off a paw, an ear, chunk of the tail. Take a good long time at it. Why don’t you bark now, you son of a bitch?
Cars went by, from time to time, but Frank knew better than to try to hitch a ride. People looked at Frank, they figured first impressions were enough, they didn’t need to know any more. So he just kept walking. Sooner or later, there’d be a crossroads, a village, a V.A. hospital, an army base, some goddamn excuse for the bus to stop. There he would wait.
The white Saab with the bumper stickers — I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS; NO NUKES IS GOOD NUKES — passed Frank, going the same direction as him but a lot faster, and zipped a little farther down the road when all at once its right front tire blew (Frank didn’t think about his bus blowout fantasy, had long forgotten that.) The car was just a ways ahead of him, maybe the length of a football field — what’s that? a hundred yards? — and then the bang, like a large handgun going off, and the Saab veered left and right and jolted itself all over the road, its brake lights slapping on, then off, then on, off, on...
He was a good driver. He was lucky, too, in that there wasn’t any traffic coming, but he was also a hell of a good driver, he kept control, he didn’t let the Saab get away from him and run for the trees. He didn’t lock onto the brakes but pumped them, used them, kept control, slowed the big vehicle down, and at last it wobbled off onto the shoulder and came to a stop. Frank kept walking, toward the car, watching the thin strung-out cloud of tan dust move away over the fields to the right, like the banners of a ghost army. He continued to walk, and as he did so he began to think maybe he could work a deal with this guy, help him replace the tire and in return get a lift to the next bus stop. Or all the way to the city, why not? Think big; why not?
For a minute or two after the Saab came to a stop, as Frank went on walking toward it, nothing more happened. The driver’s door didn’t open, the driver didn’t get out. He’s in there shitting his pants, Frank thought. Reaction after it’s over. The way I feel when the lights come on and the cop says, “Don’t move.” The danger is over and the new chapter has begun.
If it was a football field Frank had to cover, he was at about the Saab’s twenty-yard line when the driver’s door at last did open and the driver tottered uncertainly out, and the driver was a woman. Shit, thought Frank, disgusted. A woman isn’t gonna give me the time of day. I can’t negotiate with a woman.
She didn’t see Frank at first, or wasn’t concerned about him. She closed the driver’s door and walked around the front of the Saab and stood looking down at the blown tire. She looked to be about thirty-five, tall and slender, with straight brown hair. She was dressed like the women in television commercials who carry briefcases and are business equals with the men but still spend a lot of time worried about personal hygiene. Smart and self-assured, in other words; but not now.
Frank kept walking, beaming thoughts at the woman, even though it wouldn’t do any good. I’m nonviolent, he thought at her, that’s my M.O., that’s why I’m out on parole, that’s why I did less than two of a nickel. It’s all in my record, you could look in my record, never a touch of violence, I don’t even go in a house is there somebody there. Never carry heat, never a weapon on me, not a knife, nothing. A peaceful burglar, that’s me, wouldn’t hurt a woman. Wouldn’t hurt anybody.
The woman looked up as Frank neared the car, and he saw it in her face, saw it in her eyes, right away. That recognition. Not a word yet, and already she knew everything about him. Wrong, but everything.
A strip of the blown tire lay curled beside the road like a giant blackened onion ring. Frank looked at it, as a relief from looking at the woman’s frightened eyes, but then he was past it, and the white Saab was just beside him as he walked, and the woman was straight ahead, ten feet away, beyond the car. Frank took a deep breath, still walking, and looked at the woman again, and said, “You handled that real good. Like a pro.”
The woman blinked, slowly. Whatever she’d expected, it hadn’t been a compliment, or a critique on her driving. “Thank you,” she said, her voice very low “It was so fast, I didn’t know what I was doing. There wasn’t time to think.”
“Well, you did it right,” Frank told her, and then he either had to stop or keep walking right on past her, so he stopped. He saw the little apostrophes of fear bracketing her mouth, and he plunged into his story: “Look. I’m walking trying to find a bus stop. There’s a bus on the road, to the city. You want, I’ll put the spare on here for you, then you give me a lift to the bus stop. You don’t want, that’s okay, I’ll keep walking.”
She said, “The state capital, you mean?”
Funny part of the proposition to fasten on, but okay. “I guess so,” Frank said. “Omaha. Where I had my trial, anyway, so I guess that’s the capital.”
She frowned at him. “Trial?”
Might as well get it all out, from the get-go. “You passed the prison back there,” he said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. “I just took parole.” Not that he intended to visit any parole officers, not this time around.
“There’s a bus stop there,” she pointed out. “Right there at the prison.”
“I didn’t like that one.”
She smiled, like she understood the reasoning. “I’m going to Omaha,” she said. “If you really want to help...”
A lift all the way. Frank couldn’t help it, he grinned like a kid, wide open, both sides of his mouth. “A miracle,” he said.
Her answering smile was ironic: “The miracle is, I wasn’t killed.”
“There’s a miracle in it somewhere,” Frank said, “I know that much. You got the key to open the trunk?”
Changing a tire was hard work, particularly for somebody with hands like Frank’s. They were delicate hands, they used small tools delicately, they caressed combination locks, they stroked alarm wires, they gathered in cash and jewelry. Soft pudgy fingers got bruised against lug wrenches, got scraped against tires. But Frank did the job and kept his reactions off his face.