text: A car was approaching. I stood beside the road with my thumb out and turned my head as the car rolled past me and pulled over about 50 yards away. My belongings, such as they were, I kept in a small trunk of rough pine I had stolen from a barn some weeks past. I picked up my trunk and hobbled over to the car. It was a very old car with not one part of its surface free from rust. I placed my trunk down and stood upon it to see into the car. A naked man with a great beard that pooled into his lap and a cape of hair that went further sat at the wheel. A dog slept on a large mattress where the back seats used to be. “How old is your dog?” I asked. “Not mine. Where you tryin’ to get?” “North and or west.” The man said nothing but leaned across and opened the passenger door. “Where shall I put my trunk?” “On the mattress, but don’t wake Javier. He needs his rest.” I very carefully placed the trunk behind my seat and sat back as the man pulled back onto the road. There was a messy pile of empty plastic bottles beneath my feet and the air smelled sourly of sweat and a nameless mixture of odours no doubt relating to the dog’s presence. “Where is Javier’s master?” I asked. “He ain’t got no master nor never will.” “How come he to be named Javier?” “That were his name when the others introduced him.” No-one spoke for a long while. I decided to cough. “I don’t want any sickness,” the man said. “Oh, I assure you I am very healthy. There was a lot of dust.” “I can’t help the way the dust works. Don’t you have a mask? A cloth of some kind?” “Would that I had a beard like yours to protect me!” The man said nothing and shut his eyes and frowned. He shook his head in brief bursts for a while, still frowning. The beard slithered like some mystic python. I flushed in shame at my apparent faux pas, cursing myself inwardly. I could not afford to make such errors, not a man like me, not in this neck of the woods. “God damn beautiful country isn’t it?” I said. The man sighed a long sigh. Could I do nothing right? “A blasphemer...” he said. “Forgive me,” I said. We drove on in silence for perhaps half an hour. We had entered one of the world’s great arboreal regions that continued unabated past the hilly horizon. The dog slept on, snoring heavily. Finally, I mustered the courage to say: “I apologise about my reference to your beard, I assure you it was of a wholly complimentary intention. And I assure you also, I avow that I have the fear of God within me or let Him smite me down in this vehicle.” “There’s no good in apologising. Just a waste of words. What is said is said.” I noted his hypocrisy silently. I wished to write of it in my notebook, which I fetched from my trunk. I fumbled through the various objects and found the notepad under my copy of Survivalism in the Nuclear Age, on top of which sat my sustenance, an apple. The dog, Javier, stirred with a great snort and the man groaned weakly and squinted. I raised a conciliatory hand and the man nodded once, seemingly appeased. I pulled my pencil from my ear and very faintly noted the man’s hypocrisy in the notebook in a loose cursive scribble, almost, even certainly, unreadable, but serving as a memory trigger for this most abominable social lapse. My memory often fails me, you understand, so I must have some technique to augment it, if only in the form of scratchings and marks. A disturbance in the white of the paper that will allow me to re-live, or at least, re-feel the experience for which it stood. “You’re not one of them filth-sketchers are you?” the man asked. “Come again?” The man sighed and gave me a dismissive wave. “I am no sketcher. Alas, I was born with few talents. I merely like to scribble. The feel of it calms me,” I said. “What’s there to be not calm about?” “Many things. But sometimes it is what is not there which is dis-calming,” I said. “I suppose my scribbles fill that gap.” The man nodded. We drove on through the trees. Javier snored breathily. “If my nakedness dis-calms you, why did you get in the car?” I had forgotten that the man was naked. I don’t think it would be correct to describe him as naked, for his immense beard and hair covered him better than many of today’s garments. Truthfully though, when I thought of it, his nakedness did disturb me somewhat, but I was in no position to be denying rides at that time. “I hadn’t even noticed,” I said, “Why, you’re veritably jacketed-” I winced. The man squeezed his face tightly. He exhaled in a long wheeze. Again he shook his head. “Pass one of them bottles at your feet.” They were beyond my reach. “One moment,” I said. I turned around to my trunk and carefully slid free a children’s toy gripping claw that I had found in a garbage dump at another time in my life. It was very useful to a man like me, and quite possibly my most treasured possession. I held the claw out over a bottle and gripped the lever to clamp the bottle and raised it up and grabbed it with my free hand. “Sorry, I forgot-” the man said. “No, it is fine,” I said as I passed him the bottle. I carefully returned my claw to the trunk and fetched back my notebook to etch into my memory this second case of hypocrisy. The man took the bottle and plunged it deep into his beard and urinated for a long time. I sat frozen and stared straight ahead. Let him do his filthy business, I cannot afford to be left behind, I thought. “I’m gonna need a second bottle.” he said. He began winding the window down with one hand, holding the bottle in place with the other hand and the steering wheel with his knees. “Quickly,” he croaked. I turned back to the trunk and snatched the claw and in doing so hit Javier on the snout. The man appeared not to notice and I pincered a bottle and passed it over to him using the claw. He plunged the new bottle into his beard to continue his improper deed and at the same time poured the other bottle out the window, the foul liquid spraying in the wind onto the side of the car, spattering on the rear window. He passed the empty bottle back to me which I took with the claw and then he poured the second bottle out and returned it too. “I usually need three bottles. All this talk is dehydrating. There should be a bottle of liquids down there. Pass that.” I picked through the pile of bottles with the claw and found one at the bottom that was full of water, presumably, and holding my tool with two hands transferred the liquid over to the man. He glugged it all in one attempt and threw it down aimlessly into the pile. We drove on in silence. “Lemme see that claw,” said the man. I turned around to my trunk and saw the yellow eyes of a dog looking at me. Javier was awake and lay with his head down. “Um,” I said. “Come on now.” I turned back and reluctantly handed the man my claw and he examined it with what I am sure was feigned indifference. He pulled the lever twice. “Huh, is that so,” he said. He reached over with the claw into my footwell and clamped a bottle and brought it up and then released it. “That’ll do,” he said. He laid the claw down on the centre console between us. When I took it back I hid my concern and anxiety behind a face of stoic resolve. “I could use that there claw,” the man said. “It is very useful, especially for a man like me.” “Save me riskin’ mine and Javier’s life” “I’m sorry?” “Keep my eyes on the road better with that there claw” I turned to place the claw back in my trunk but the man put his hand on it. “Let’s keep it out here just in case.” The sounds of clattering objects and moist eating filled the air from behind. “What’s he doing? Did you wake him?” said the man. “He doesn’t wake this early, ever. What did you do to Javier?” “Um...” The eating sounds turned to a gagging, gasping sound. “Help him God damn it!” yelled the man. I am an avowed animal lover, a trait you might find strange for a man like me, and as such I am embarrassed to admit that my first thought in this moment of action was not of animal rescue but of this accursed man’s continued hypocrisy and then secondly my regret at having to delay its recording to lay my hands upon a foul beast. I turned around and saw Javier with his head in my trunk, which in a moment of rushed urinary assistance I had forgotten to close. My apple! How dare that vile hound sink his slobbering fangs into my lunch! In a moment of rage I lunged at Javier and pulled him from the trunk. The two of us tumbled over the mattress intertwined like lovers as I pulled at his jaws, not to free his air passages but rather to get back my apple. A man could go days in those parts without seeing a town so if I had to eat regurgitated apple I would. “What the hell are you doing to him?” cried the man, stealing glances behind him as he drove. I worked my hands into Javier’s slobbering mouth, pulling bits of apple out as he choked and snorted. His tonge was soft and slick like raw chicken and his breath smelled worse and was hot on my face. Suddenly Javier went limp and the choking noises stopped. The man braked hard and pulled over. “Javier?” cried the man. “Javier? Is he alright?” I turned back to the man with a look of unconcealable shock, my face and hands covered in dog saliva and bits of apple. The man looked past me to Javier’s stillness. “I don’t-” I said, not sure of what to say. I stepped towards my trunk and reached for it but felt myself yanked backwards. I just managed to grab one handle of the trunk and held onto it as I was pulled through the car by the man and tossed through his urine sprayed window and landed on the road, my trunk clattering after me spilling my possessions. I could hear the man howling from the car before he sped off down the road at an unconscionable speed. I gathered my belongings and limped from the road. After gathering my breath, I noticed that I was in fact very hungry. I looked about me so as to appear to any observers that my next act was not performed without seeking alternatives. I was very hungry. I pulled the two pieces of slobbery apple from my face and put them in my mouth and chewed. It is important to release the juices, see, it improves nutrient absorption. I read that in Survivalism in the Nuclear Age and it hasn’t failed me. No less than two hours would have passed without a single vehicle passing. My stomach was pining for sustenance and I was growing weak. I figured I would spend the remains of the day to seek out some food, perhaps some fruit or if He so gifted me, some fresh roadkill. But of course, there must be cars to kill the animals for me. I walked for a time up the road dragging my trunk behind me. I did not wish to stray far from the road but I spied a small pond through the trees nearby. Water leads to life, and so on. I reached the pond and looked about, spying atop a rock formation what seemed like a fruit tree. When I reached the rocks, I saw above me my salvation! A cherry shrub, bursting with hundreds of sweet red balls. I bent down to open my trunk to fetch my- “Noooooo!” I cried. That filthy naked man had stolen my claw. How had I not taken it with me? I was sure if I had seen it, I would have grabbed it. I last saw it on the centre console but when I was dragged out it was gone. Where could it have-? I realised then that the man had hidden my precious claw in his accursed beard as his dog choked to death.