NIGHT CRUISING by Billie Sue Mosiman

toll stationary sitting and
driving took on his muscles. The strain showed in his face shadowed
with the day-old beard. His blue eyes were dim as swamp water, his
mouth set between twin age lines cut deep into the flesh. Haggard
wouldn't even get near to describing the way he was beginning to
look.
    Once on the road again,
he sped toward the steel-gray horizon. How in hell did he think he
could find her? The blue Chrysler could easily be in New Mexico by
now. For all he knew her ride, the guy with the long hair and beard,
could have taken her another route and done anything to her,
anything. He could have murdered her and left her body for the
buzzards and the sandstorms.
    This thought so
frightened him he edged the speedometer needle past seventy to
eighty, eighty-five, racing toward nowhere, lost in West Texas, sure
he was now on a mission doomed to failure. First he'd overslept, then
lost time on the exits, and now the flat made him lose more precious
time.
    "Molly, God,
Molly, where are you?" he mumbled into the thickening clot of
darkness overtaking the car's interior.
    Got to find her ,
he thought, a fierceness entering into his attitude that hadn't been
there before. Clamping his hands tight on the steering wheel, he
drove furiously, bypassing even the speeding truckers who had less
reason to reach a destination than he.
    A line of traffic
trailed him and eventually disappeared into the murk of night as
headlights began to sprinkle the oncoming lanes. It was crazy, what
he was doing, he admitted that much earlier in the trip. He was
always so obsessed with results, and this time he might not have any.
He could drive straight into the far Pacific Ocean and still never
reach his goal.
    But that wouldn't stop
him.
    Nothing could stop him
short of finding his girl.
    #

    Cruise drove at a
steady fifty-five miles an hour west across the Texas desert. He
periodically dipped a big hand into a bag of Cheetos, munching them
as he told Molly a story. He had eaten the huevos rancheros in
the White Elephant, but still felt hungry as a bear cub fed on
berries for a month.
    "I had a buddy in
Vietnam once," he said, "we called Boots. He had these big
goddamned feet, size sixteen or something. He said he'd been called
that ever since he was a kid and he got lost in North Michigan, up in
the thumb--that's a spit of land that heads up toward the Canadian
border--anyway, he was up there with his old man ice fishing one
winter."
    "Yeah? Bet that
was cold. I've never been up north."
    Cruise, a good
storyteller who added facial expressions, sounds, and gestures,
shivered and shook himself all over.
    "Cold wasn't the
word for it, Boots said. He was sent to look for firewood and a
blizzard came up. He was lost, couldn't find the camp, and he was
trying to follow his footprints--had big feet even back then. But the
snow blew so hard, it was wiping out the trail. He was just lucky to
stumble back in his old man's arms to miss freezing to death. From
then on his family called him Boots.
    "So me and Boots,
we get caught in the middle of an enemy attack in 'Nam. Our whole
platoon gets scattered. Guys were falling all around us. We took off
together in one direction and we outsmart the Cong, but we lose our
platoon leader."
    "Geez."
    Cruise paused to eat a
handful of Cheetos. The sound of the crunching coming through his
jaws to his ears reminded him of walking on little sticks, trying to
be quiet. "It was real bad. All we had were our rifles and side
arms. We didn't have any food or a radio, not even a map or a
compass. But we knew there was going to be a chopper rescue lift
forty miles to the west in four days. We started heading that way. It
was the only choice we had. No way could we ever find the base, far
as we'd been out on maneuvers."
    "Did you have to
go four days without food?"
    "More or less. We
ate roots and shit, but we threw up most of it, just couldn't keep it
down. We had to drink from stagnant ponds, rice paddies, muddy