THE STRANGER SAT ON TOP OF THE BIG RIG EATING A sandwich and watching the highway burn. Of course, it wasn’t the highway itself that was on fire, merely a hundred or so cars and trucks piled on top of each other like a king-size game of Jenga.
Only with a lot more dead people and insurance headaches.
He’d heard the term pileup many times, but he’d never seen one with his own eyes and he wondered if it would meet his demanding tastes in both the fantastic and the disastrous. As the black smoke from the burning engines and tire fires curled into the sky, the stranger finished his sandwich and applauded. For a brief moment, he thought about an encore, maybe a meteor strike or an attack of killer bees on the survivors, but finally decided against it since it would have been, as they said, gilding the lily.
The stranger was on Highway 101 near Ukiah, California. Before the—as he now thought of it—car-tastrophe, he’d been riding in the now smashed-up big rig after the driver offered to give him a ride from a truck stop near Willows. He said his name was Bill. Just for fun, the stranger said his name was also Bill.
“Where are you headed?” Bill asked.
“Just south for now,” said the stranger.
“Going down to San Diego or something? ’Cause I don’t go that far.”
“Not that far. And I’ll be making a stop along the way.”
Bill nodded sagely. “Oh, San Francisco. That’s where everybody wants to go.”
The stranger looked at him. “Really? Not, say, the City of Angels?”
Bill made a sour face. “L.A.’s too far. And it’s full of nitwits and creeps. You know, TV people.”
“It sounds awful.”
“It is. Smog thick enough to slice into a sandwich. Traffic like the end of the world. Weird women who sometimes aren’t women, if you get my drift.”
The stranger didn’t, but the way the driver said it, he didn’t want to inquire further. However, the end-of-the-world comment made him laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
He looked out the window. “Everything. It’s a funny world, don’t you think?”
“How so?”
The stranger turned to Bill. “The things people believe. The things they want.”
Bill shook his head. “You talk sideways a lot of the time, don’t you?”
“I suppose I do. I’m not from around here.”
Bill brightened. “That’s it. I thought you might be a foreigner.”
The stranger grinned. “A foreigner. That’s it exactly.”
“Well, wherever you’re from, your English is pretty good.”
“Thanks. I try my best.”
Bill shifted gears and the truck picked up speed. “I wondered why you didn’t talk too much. Most hitchers I pick up won’t stop flapping their gums. But I had a feeling you’d be different.”
“Thank you. I try not to intrude on people. Even when I do a bit of redecorating.”
Bill was quiet for a minute. “So you’re a decorator? Huh. I wouldn’t have taken you for one of those kind of people. Not that there’s anything wrong with them. I just didn’t take you for one.”
The stranger looked at the speedometer. They were doing just under seventy. “Looks can be deceiving, I suppose.”
“Oh boy, do I know about that. Like I said, some of those Hollywood women. There was this one time some buddies and me were partying with some gals back at the hotel, only it turns out . . . Goddammit,” grunted Bill.
“What’s wrong?” said the stranger, glad Bill had stopped his story. It was taking a dark turn and was on the verge of ruining his good mood.
Bill pointed to bright red lines on a GPS device mounted on the dashboard. “Looks like there’s an accident ahead. And look at the traffic. Miles of the shit. We’ll be here all day.”
The stranger shifted in his seat to get a better look at the GPS. “An accident? Traffic?”
And that’s when it came to him.
The stranger looked out the window at the clear blue vacation-billboard Northern California sky. It was quite beautiful, but no, it wouldn’t do. Not at all.
They were still a few miles from the accident, still speeding along at close to seventy, surrounded by other cars and trucks doing the same, when the fog started rolling in. Just a fine mist at first, but it quickly grew thicker and darker. Bill turned on his windshield wipers.
“And now this shit.”
“Are you going to slow down?”
“Not yet,” said Bill. “And don’t tell me my job or you can get out and walk.”
“Sorry. I was just asking.”
The stranger looked out the window. They were still surrounded by an armada of vehicles, visible through the fog by their headlights. He looked at the driver’s GPS device. It blinked once and went out.
“Oh dear,” he said.
Bill looked at it in frustration. “Now what the hell? I swear this thing is brand new.”
“Maybe if you hit it.”
Bill did, taking his eyes off the road for a few seconds with each whack. While Bill abused his device, the stranger’s feet touched something in the corner of the floor on his side of the cab.
“What’s that?”
“That’s my lunch. There’s sandwiches in there.”
“Can I have one?”
“What? No,” said Bill between slaps on the GPS. “I’m giving you a damned ride. Isn’t that enough?”
The stranger reached down and opened the cooler as Bill squinted like a mole through the windshield. He turned when he heard the stranger open the cooler.
“Goddammit. I said those are mine.”
“I don’t think you’ll need them.”
“What? Why?”
They heard the first cars plowing into the stalled traffic a few seconds before the big rig rear-ended a VW Bug that loomed out of the fog directly in front of them. Bill hit the brakes. The freight container behind them swung around, knocking cars and motorcycles off the road. But it was too late for the truck to stop. Too late for any of them, the stranger thought. He took a sandwich from the cooler and closed his eyes.
When they hit the back of the pileup, the stranger was jettisoned like a chicken from a cannon through the windshield and into the back of another big rig that had turned over directly in front of them. He hit hard enough that it should have killed him. But it didn’t.
And best of all, he never dropped his sandwich.
As the fog began to dissipate he could hear a few cars in the distance still plowing into the back end of the stalled traffic. The stranger shook the windshield glass from his coat and hair. He climbed over the piles of smoldering metal back to the big rig. He didn’t bother checking on Bill. He knew what he’d find. He just clambered over the top of the cab and onto the freight container. It was surprisingly quiet up there, he thought. Just some blaring car horns and the occasional scream. There weren’t any more cars to add to the pileup, which was a little disappointing. He should have gotten on the roof while they were still moving. Now that would have been a show. Still, he couldn’t complain about the climax of his little play. And best of all, the sandwich was good. Chicken salad, and not the awful kind with mustard.
When the ambulances and TV news crews began to arrive, the stranger knew that the fun part of the show was over. He wadded up the sandwich paper and tossed it over his shoulder. When he climbed to the ground, he found a water bottle on the shoulder of the road. Ah, he thought, the play had climaxed while I was on the truck. But this, this is the denouement.
He opened the bottle and drank from it as he started south again.