Zoenelle stood by the side of the road with her pack, a circus-striped sleeping bag rolled around a jacket and socks, tethered by a braided leather strap. She wore a vest of visible yellow and white threads knit together, the whiteness of skin adding its hue and tinges of pink emerging where the woven material would eventually yield. Fatigue trousers, Vietnam combat era with thigh-length pockets, draped from her hips to the knotted ties at her ankles. Chunks of polyester belted tire were strapped to her feet with leather thongs, a custom size that fit poorly and fell apart frequently. She had never outgrown the collar-tugging, seam-straining and toe wiggling of clothing; the nakedness of lying in bed kept her there longer than sleep required.
She watched the intermittent cars pass, her thumb tucked into her fist, she did not want a ride too soon. The early morning, damp coolness and the radiating heat of the rising sun touched her simultaneously, creating a dark and light side-of-moon temperature gradient. She spun on her axis, reversing the dark cool, light warm, and struck the peculiar pose: arm radiating at ten minutes to her twelve o’clock face, thumb fully extended. More than transportation, she needed sustenance; it was always time to eat or drink when a driver picked her up, her presence reminding them of the social and biological need for food and human contact.
A four-door sedan, silver, pulled over, braking suddenly in the dirt shoulder. She grabbed her pack strap and slung it on her shoulder, head ducked, watching the clumsy churning of her feet; she always ran to cars, eager to appear eager at the offer of a ride. Reaching the rear fender, she added the license plate to the stack in her mind; a game she played to amuse herself, while she waited for rides, to remember as many of them as possible; she sometimes reached a hundred or more before they would all disappear. The scissored cut-out of green mounds with triangular tips pasted on a white background with white lettered YD-7557 and COLORADO, a red sticker in the corner with the barely legible black numbers 83. She observed two men in the front seat observing her and scrambled into the back seat.
“Hi, thanks for stopping,” she said loudly to the brothers, although they were not her brothers.
“Let’s go talk to the cows!” Boisterous cries emitted from the men as they exited with simultaneous car door slamming.
Was this some euphemism? she wondered, before their beckoning invitation to fence-side of a scattered herd of Herefords and the raucous human MMAAOOH initiated a one-way conversation to the white faces that swung up with curiosity from the scrub grass. Zoenelle followed. She walked slowly among the Aspen, their leaves twitching frenziedly in the slightest breeze. She was in western Colorado now, where the mountains, amazingly high, needed her presence to be real, defying vampire-wise their reflection in lenses. She couldn’t see the mountainous mass she stood on; it seemed a slight rise, claiming seven thousand feet elevation, the altimetry of her bone marrow busily kicked out enucleated red blood cells to compensate her brain’s dizzying demand for oxygen which her lungs could not draw in deeply enough.
****
“Hey, don’t we know you?” Two young women, in a four-door subcompact, the license plate a skier beside the ‘84’ sticker commanding her to ‘Ski Utah!’ 419 DDR ‘Greatest Snow on Earth’, re-crammed belongings to make a space for her.
“There, can you squeeze in now?”
“Yeah, thanks for stopping,” Zoenelle greeted them. She pulled the car door closed, jamming the armrest into the crest of her right pelvic bone.
They nodded and smiled at the arrangement, especially Zoenelle, who constantly signaled to strangers, smiling deferentially with every word and gesture using an inverse ventriloquist’s trick locution. It wasn’t a straining three-hour beauty pageant smile, or an old man’s sympathetic smile or a smug laughing-in-the-face-of-the-world smile. It was a smile that anticipated the punch line of a dirty joke.
“What’s your name?”
“Zoenelle,” Zoenelle slurred it into one syllable so it sounded like the German word for immediacy.
“Like, what is it?”
“Zoe-nelle,” she said. “It means life and girl.”
They were about to cross into Utah; the mountainscape evanescing into the horizon, high desert blood rock seeping into view.
“I’m not going to Utah,” Zoenelle announced.
“Oh?” The driver asked in a concerned tone, “I’m sorry, I thought you were going with us to … Where are you going?”
“Texas. I’m meeting someone. In Texas,” Zoenelle said decidedly.
“Isn’t it, like, dangerous to hitch rides with strangers?” The passenger asked.
“Statistically it’s more dangerous to pick up hitchhikers,” Zoenelle informed the girlfriends. Although they weren’t her girlfriends. They had only pretended to know her.