Chapter Three: Caroline and the Roadkill Bums

It was only two hours from Johnsville, my hometown, to Boston, so I pushed the gas in with level pressure, drove to the highway and fell into a mesmerizing speed of seventy. I popped a tape into the cassette and as he wailed out of my worn out speakers I laughed to myself and thought back to when Caroline had given me the tape. It had been the summer before our junior year, and she was tearing her way through an eight track phase. For three months she had believed the cassesette to be the pinnacle of musical recording, and in a terrible fit of vodka fueled madness, tossed all of her modern day, “digitified, demonified, demoralized” compact disks and thrown them, discus style, deep into the burning heart of a summer bonfire. They curled and cracked with a popping and then she turned to me and threw her arms around my neck, kissed me, and then led me on a wild, cockeyed dance around the swirling, burning ash and smoke. She came out of her insanity several months later after her tape deck ate one too many recordings of Pete Seeger. She sold that player and the remainder of her tapes to a shady junk dealer for ten dollars. She kept two tapes, a Hank Williams and a Stevie Ray Vaughn. She gave the Hank Williams to me and she ripped the cuts out of the other and tied the stretchy pieces of music to her hair. She looked like a wild woman in some apocalyptic record store, scrimping and scrounging desperately amongst the rubble, searching and searching for forgotten chords and faded notes. I was crying then, my stomach burning in longing for her and for a bit of booze. I pulled over to the shoulder of the road and flicked on my hazards. I was blind and writhing with misery in my seat. I ripped Hank Williams from the player and shoved him deep down inside my pocket to rest between two nickels and a faded photograph of Caroline staring out and smiling at who I used to be.
I sat there in my seat, with the cars blasting by me and my hazard lights blinking in perfect rhythm to the beat of the highway. I realized then, in a moment of miserable, withdrawn lucidity that I was lost. I had no future behind me in Johnsville, and I had no future ahead of me in Boston. I was tempted to give up, to bolt from the car and kneel on the hard asphalt and scream to God and Jesus that I give up, that they can take me and throw me somewhere cold and dark, anywhere as long as it isn’t here, as long as it isn’t now but I didn’t. I gritted my teeth and straight down the road and gunned myself back onto the highway, driven only by gasoline and desperation. I knew I wouldn’t find whatever I was looking for in Boston with Ada, but I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. I tuned the radio to a classic rock station and found a quiet piece of temporary zen.
After about an hour on the highway I came drove by two guys in orange vests waving and waving their arms. I had never picked up hitch hikers before and I felt a wave of paranoia sweep through me as I pulled over to the side of the road. I had heard the stories, of murderers, thieves, rapists and convicts on the run, but I shoved these far from thought and put on a friendly face. They ran up to the truck and one of them threw a burlap sack with something fleshy and heavy into the back of the truck. My stomach dropped as I imagined the horrific contents of the bag and by the time they opened the cab door and crammed themselves inside I was sweating and sick throughout my bones. They smelled terrible, and looked worse for wear. The one nearest to me flashed me a toothless smile, while his partner, a fortyish something hick of a man in a beaten baseball cap spoke up, his voice thick with mountain drawl.
“Well now, thanks a bunch amigo! Names Olly and this tarkative fella is Kenny.”
Kenny laughed low and stupidly.
“Names Jack. Where you guys headed?”
“Oh no where’s too far. Just the next exit ‘sall. Ain’t more than…five mile I’d say.”
I shifted nervously in my seat and pulled out onto the highway. I kept thinking back to the truck bed, back into that horrid sack. It was a mile of silence before I caved in and asked in a voice that dripped with fear: “So fellas…What was in that sack you threw into the back?”
Olly smiled. “Ain’t nothin’ but a couple of road kill bug.”
“Roadkill bugs?”
“Oh yeah, you know. Small bits of road kill…possums and skunk most times,” he snorted and spit out the window, “they ain’t no good to eat, but sometimes we get lucky and find ourselves a deer or a fresh kayote. Those ain’t bugs; those are the cream o’ the crop if they ain’t too rotted through or nothin’.”
I felt an immense pressure fall of my chest and my nervous sweat turned itself off. I chuckled to myself, “Dinner for you fellas huh?” Olly laughed. His laugh was high pitched and crackly, like a witches cackle. “Oh yassir, you got it right. It’s the best way to eat I tell ya. Free as free gets. The cops don’t like us scroungin’ on the highway though, so we stole ourselves these orange work vests to make it seem like the state sent us or somethin’. It works almost every time, but sometimes they stop and ask us what we are doin’ walkin’ the highway with no car or work crew in sight. That don’t happen too often though, lucky fer us. But yep,” he sniffed again and pulled a cigarette butt out from behind his ear. Kenny lit him a match and they started smoking the last flakes of tobacco. “We bums, that’s fer sure, but we ain’t no regular bums. We’re road kill bums, and the best in the whole damn world I tell ya. Ain’t no life better than the one Kenny and I got.” Kenny smiled at me again, glaze eyed and slack jawed. Olly pointed up the road towards an oncoming exit. “There it is amigo! Home sweet home. You just drive down that ramp and let us off on the side if ya don’t mind.”
I did as he said and stopped by the edge of a big green forest. As they climbed out of the cab and Kenny grabbed their sack from the bed, Olly asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner that night. “It’s the bottom half of a Kayote, the best part I tell ya.” Kenny stuck his hand into the sack and held up the mashed up haunches of a recently dead coyote. I politely declined, gave them some money from my jar and drove away. They waved goodbye, and as I pulled back onto the highway I looked back towards the Roadkill Bums as they bumbled off towards the woods with half of a coyote and a crisp five dollar bill.