Chapter 144

Up the road about a half-mile, sitting on the dusty shoulder of the highway, Rawle Powder saw a shape, crouching, with his arm and thumb stuck out.
The shape waved.
It was Kurtis Missions.
“Thank God.”

Rawle walked up the highway quickly until he caught up with him.
They said hello and chit-chatted, then waited on the highway for cars to come.
Rawle refused to talk about what he had done the night before.
“I just want to get the fuck out of here!” he squawked, impatiently. “I pulled a dine-n-dash at the gas station. Someone’s going to come after me.”
“Someone will come. They always do.”
“So, how was that chick last night? Did you find her?”
“Fuck yeah. I rolled her back to her place.”
“You slept with her?”
“Of course, man. There was another guy there, too. We pounded her guts out, all night.”
“Oh Christ, please, spare me the gory details. I just had breakfast.”
“I told you, man, I ain’t fussy. She even threw up, at one point, right on the bed, but I still rode her anyway.”
Rawle cringed. “Fucking disgusting, man.”
“It was like chopping onions. I’m going to have that smell on my fingers now for three days.”
Rawle shook his head, but couldn’t stop himself from giggling. He started rolling a cigarette. “She was just absolutely hideous, man. I’m sorry.”
Kurtis made a flipping motion with his arms, like turning a surfboard upside down. “They all look the same, when you turn ‘em upside down, Michael.”
Michael was the fake name Rawle had given Kurtis.
“No. They don’t, John.”
John was the fake name Kurtis had given Rawle.
A few cars came by, but no one stopped. Each one that passed without stopping depressed Rawle a little more. It was still well before 10 a.m. but already the highway was steaming hot under the big Okanagan Valley sun.
“You should have come too, man,” Kurtis said. “Roll me one of those, would ya? You could have come. She asked about you. You could have slept in that instead of some ditch. All you had to do was make eyes at her and she was yours.”
“Fock you. I was better off in the ditch,” Rawle laughed. “Jeez! She had more wrinkles in her face than Nick Nolte… She looked like an 80-year-old woman.”
Kurtis grinned. “Did you see her tits? Her tits were big but right perky-” He held up his palms to his chest, miming a pair of breasts.
Rawle shook his head. “I don’t want to picture it.”
“-Her tits were right high up, but as soon as I unbuckled them in back, they sagged down to her stomach, and all the wrinkles came out of her face.”
Rawle began to choke on a bit of saliva. His face went beet red.
They both began to bust a gut laughing. Kurtis spun onto his stomach, slapping the pavement with his hand. They barely noticed the car up ahead, a white Volkswagen Rabbit that blew past them but pulled off to the shoulder about a half-kilometre up.
The stop was some distance away, but still within range.
“Hey,” Kurtis said when he saw it finally. “They stopped!”
“Are they stopped for us?” Rawle said, tears oozing down his cheeks.
Kurtis didn’t say anything but stood up and made a run for it.
When he got to the car window, he took a look inside. “C’mon!”
Rawle ran dizzily up to the car. Kurtis waited til he got there before climbing in.
“It’s two chicks!” he said at the window, grinning with the big gap in his front teeth.

Rawle got in the back.
The driver was an incredibly attractive blonde girl with dreadlock hair.
“Welcome aboard,” she said, with a big smile, pullingback out onto the highway.
Rawle immediatelly felt his heart start to flutter.
The driver introduced herself as Aimee. The passenger’s name was Alex, a girl, but Rawle barely noticed her.
Aimee had reddish white skin and very rosy cheeks, bright green eyes. Rawle and Aimee gabbed happily at eachother for about fiften minutes straight, right off the bat.
Kurtis sat in the back and watched them, uncharacteristically quiet.
The other girl stared at Rawle, grinning ear to ear.
Aimee told the story of how she and her friend, Alex, were driving to Vancouver for the summer from Toronto, where they were both studying graphic design.
They drove through the States instead and recrossed at the Washington-Osoyoos border.
“We’re goingto Vancouver too,” Rawle said, unable to take his eyes of Aimee’s full lips in the rear-view mirror.
He felt his heart already wobbling under the weight of an instant crush, mixed with weird elements of fear, purpose, hatred of Kurtis and the physical effects of the desert-like heat of the Okanagan area.

In the context of normal people, Kurtis really seemed to be nothing more than a simple nutcase. Not so much a fearsome, evil criminal at all. More like an annoying freak.
Kurtis was acting very paranoid, for some reason, around the girls.
He sat in the back seat, fidgeted, and was quiet and snappy whenever anyone tried to talk to him. He had lost all the fearlessness and obnoxious charm he’d displayed in the Okanagan.
Aimee and her friend Alex were perfect slices of the sane world that Rawle had temporarily abandoned and forgot existed as he hitchhiked around like a homeless man.
He had forgotten that he could feel something besides the siege mentality of living like an animal, hunting another human being. Chasing a killer.
“What have you been doing out West?” Aimee asked Rawle in a bubbly, very conversational voice.
Rawle thought carefully about his answer. “Hitchhiking,” he said. “Living in the great outdoors. We met hitchhiking.” He swung his thumb toward Kurtis. “I’m seeing the sights of the world, while I’m still young.”
“Well, you guys look great.” But Aimee was only looking at Rawle when she said that. “You must be having fun. Living on the streets must suit you.”
“I live out here,” Kurtis said, suspiciously, his acid tone making everyone in the car feel awkward. “You asked what we are doing out West, like you think I’m from somewhere else. What if I’m not? What if I’m from here?”
“Okay,” Aimee said, diplomatically.
“I really think it does suit me, as a matter of fact,” Rawle said, bringing the conversation back to a happy place. “I think I’m pretty good at living the hippy life.”
He was thinking a lot about himself and how good he felt, lately. Sleeping outdoors and walking as much as he did, every day, was having a huge effect on him, physically. He never felt sore. He never got headaches anymore. His puffy, cheeseball gut; his dry, pale skin and his terrible computer-desk posture, had all been corrected somehow by life in the great outdoors, no bed, no pillow, no TV, no computer to mollycoddle his body.
Not only that, his heart felt stronger, his beard and hair was long and shiny; his arms and shoulders were straight up and down, strong, loose, bronze.
He had not worn deodorant in weeks and yet somehow his armpits smelled utterly odorless. Normally, he not only needed deodorant, but he needed the gel kind, the penetrating stuff, or his odor was horrifying.
It was as if living like a gypsy had corrected some kind of bad PH balance in the skin of his armpits.

The Rabbit pulled into Vancouver, in bright, sunny afternoon traffic.
Kurtis grew more and more hostile as the vehicle sank deeper into the suburbs of Vancouver, and eventually the spidery heart of the city itself.
At one point, Rawle felt an almost uncontrollable urge to open the door and push Kurtis out onto the speeding highway.
He was sulking and acting antsy.
The girls were talking about their plans. They were organized and had a strict itinerary for their time in Vancouver, people to call on.
Aimee’s sister was an actor working on a local Chris Haddock TV show, living in Port Coquitlam. The girls would be staying with her.
They parked downtown on Hastings Street and everyone said goodbye.
Aimee hugged Rawle close for several moments, glancing over at Kurtis as she did. She gestured at him with her chin and whispered, “Be careful” in Rawle’s ear.
Rawle said he would. They promised to meet up again later. Aimee gave Rawle her sister’s phone number, but said not to give it to “your friend.”
“He’s not my friend,” Rawle said, as he waved goodbye.