– 2-

She set the guitar case on the pavement and stuck out her thumb. The minivan shrieked by. She turned her head, watched it go-no brakelights. The disappointment blossomed hot and sharp in her gut, like a shot of iced Stoli. Despite the midmorning brilliance of the rising sun, she could feel the cold gnawing through the tips of her gloved fingers, the earflaps of her black woolen hat.

According to her Internet research, 491 (previously 666) ranked as the third least traveled highway in the Lower-Forty-Eight, with an average of four cars passing a fixed point any given hour. Less of course at night. The downside of hitchhiking these little-known thoroughfares was the waiting, but the upside paid generous dividends in privacy.

She exhaled a steaming breath and looked around. Painfully blue sky. Treeless high desert. Mountains thirty miles east. A further range to the northwest. They stood blanketed in snow, and on some level she understood that others would find them dramatic and beautiful, and she wondered what it felt like to be moved by nature.

Two hours later, she lifted her guitar case and walked up the shoulder toward the idling Subaru Outback, heard the front passenger window humming down. She mustered a faint smile as she reached the door. Two young men in the front seats stared at her. They seemed roughly her age and friendly enough, if a little hungover. Open cans of Bud in the center console drink holders had perfumed the interior with the sour stench of beer-a good omen, she thought. Might make things easier.

"Where you headed?" the driver asked. He had sandy hair and an elaborate goatee. Impressive cords of bicep strained the cotton fibers of his muscle shirt. The passenger looked native-dark hair and eyes, brown skin, a thin, implausible mustache.

" Salt Lake," she said.

"We're going to Tahoe. We could take you at least to I-15."

She surveyed the rear storage compartment-crammed with two snowboards and the requisite boots, parkas, snow pants, goggles, and…she suppressed the jolt of pleasure-helmets. She hadn't thought of that before.

A duffle bag took up the left side of the backseat. A little tight, but then she stood just five feet in her pink crocs. She could manage.

"Comfortable back there?" the driver asked.

"Yes."

Their eyes met in the rearview mirror.

"What's your name?"

"Lucy."

"Lucy, I'm Matt. This is Kenny. We were just about to have us a morning toke before we picked you up. Would it bother you if we did?"

"Not at all."

"Pack that pipe, bro."

They got high as they crossed into Utah and became talkative and philosophically confident. They offered her some pot, but she declined. It grew hot in the car and she removed her hat and unbuttoned her black trench coat, breathing the fresh air coming in through the crack at the top of the window.

"So where you going?" the Indian asked her.

" Salt Lake."

"I already asked her that, bro."

"No, I mean what for?"

"See some family."

"We're going to Tahoe. Do some snowboarding at Heavenly."

"Already told her that, bro."

The two men broke up into laughter.

"So you play guitar, huh?" Kenny said.

"Yes."

"Wanna strum something for us?"

"Not just yet."

They stopped at a filling station in Moab. Matt pumped gas and Kenny went inside the convenience store to procure the substantial list of snacks they'd been obsessing on for the last hour. When Matt walked inside to pay, she opened the guitar case and took out the syringe. The smell wafted out-not overpowering by any means, but she wondered if the boys would notice. She hadn't had a chance to properly clean everything in awhile. Lucy reached up between the seats and tested the weight of the two Budweisers in the drink holders: each about half-full. She eyed the entrance to the store-no one coming-and shot a squirt from the syringe into the mouth of each can.

Kenny cracked a can of Bud and said, "Dude, was that shit laced?"

"What are you talking about?"

They sped through a country of red rock and buttes and waterless arroyos.

"What we smoked."

"I don't think so."

"Man, I don't feel right. Where'd you get it?"

"From Tim. Same as always."

Lucy leaned forward and studied the double yellow line through the windshield. After Matt drifted across for a third time, she said, "Would you pull over please?"

"What's wrong?"

"I'm going to be sick."

"Oh God, don't puke on our shit."

Matt pulled over onto the shoulder and Lucy opened her door and stumbled out. As she worked her way down a gentle embankment making fake retching sounds, she heard Matt saying, "Dude? Dude? Come on, dude! Wake up, dude!"

She waited in the bed of the arroyo for ten minutes and then started back up the hill toward the car. Matt had slumped across the center console into Kenny's lap. The man probably weighed two hundred pounds, and it took Lucy ten minutes to shove him, millimeter by millimeter, into the passenger seat on top of Kenny. She climbed in behind the wheel and slid the seat all the way forward and cranked the engine.

She turned off of I-70 onto 24. According to her map, this stretch of highway ran forty-four miles to a nothing town called Hanksville. From her experience, it didn't get much quieter than this barren, lifeless waste of countryside.

Ten miles south, she veered onto a dirt road and followed it the length of several football fields, until the highway was almost lost to sight. She killed the engine, stepped out. Late afternoon. Windless. Soundless. The boys would be waking soon, and she was already starting to glow. She opened the guitar case and retrieved the syringe, gave Kenny and Matt another healthy dose.

By the time she'd wrangled them out of the car into the desert, dusk had fallen and she'd drenched herself in sweat. She rolled the men onto their backs and splayed out their arms and legs so they appeared to be making snow angels in the dirt.

Lucy removed their shoes and socks. The pair of scissors was the kind used to cut raw chicken, with thick, serrated blades. She trimmed off their shirts and cut away their pants and underwear.

Kenny and Matt had returned to full, roaring consciousness by 1:15 a.m. Naked. Ankles and wrists tightly bound with deeply scuffed handcuffs, heads helmeted, staring at the small, plain hitchhiker who squatted down facing them at the back of the car, blinding them with a hand held spotlight.

"I didn't think you were ever going to wake up," Lucy said.

"What the hell are you doing?" Matt looked angry.

Kenny said, "These cuffs hurt. Get them off."

She held a locking carabiner attached to a chain that ran underneath the Subaru. She clipped it onto another pair of carabiners. A rope fed through each one, and the ends of the ropes had been tied to the handcuffs on the boys' ankles.

"Oh my God, she's crazy, dude."

"Lucy, please. Don't. We'll give you anything you want. We won't tell anyone."

She smiled. "That's really sweet of you, Matt, but this is what I want. Kind of have my heart set on it."

She stepped over the tangle of chain and rope and moved toward the driver's door as the boys hollered after her.

She left the hatch open so she could hear them. Kept looking back as she drove slowly, so slowly, along the dirt road. They were still begging her, and occasionally yelling when they dragged over a rock or a cactus, but she got them to the shoulder of Highway 24 with only minor injuries.

The moon was up and nearly full. She could see five miles of the road in either direction, so perfectly empty and black, and she wondered if the way it touched her in this moment felt anything like how the beauty of the those mountains she'd seen this morning touched normal people.