AllFreeNovel
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Est. 1974. Pop. 362.
“Hippies,” he groaned.
“What’s wrong with hippies? I love hippies!”
“Everything is wrong with hippies. Just tell me it’s not a nudist colony.”
“It’s not a nudist colony, Grampy Díaz.”
“That’s Papi Díaz to you.”
“Oh my God. Did you just make a joke?”
He kept his face turned away from her, unwilling to let her see him smile, even in the dark.
Which was why, when she began waving her arms around frantically and saying “Here! Turn here turn here turn here!” he didn’t get it at first. He hadn’t noticed the upcoming split in the road. Once he’d finally seen it, he threw on the brakes and spun the wheel right just as she was saying, “It’s too late now, we’ll have to go around because—oh, fuck, Roman, don’t do that!”
He jackknifed the trailer on a little patch of lawn just beyond the fork in the road.
The front door of a house across the way opened. Then another, and another. Like fireflies, porch lights on eight or ten small houses came on, and people began coming outside. There was a low murmur of conversation.
Roman put the truck in reverse.
“You’re not serious,” she said.
He didn’t know why he did it. Some perversion, some deep-seated need not to be stuck in this spot, vulnerable to these commune people in their pajamas. Several of them were smiling, and one of them waved, and Roman couldn’t take it. His brain knew it was stupid, but his will insisted that other suckers couldn’t back their way off a wet patch of grass with a jackknifed trailer, but he possessed a Cadillac with four-wheel drive, and he could.
The tires spun in the mud with a whining noise. He floored the accelerator and felt the rear end drop another few inches, burying the wheels in muck.
When he shifted from reverse into drive, obeying the rogue, insane notion that he might be able to rock the truck out of this predicament, Ashley opened her door and hopped out of the truck to greet an older woman wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of a cat licking between its own legs.
She had so little faith in him, she didn’t even bother closing the door.
All four tires spun, blocking out their conversation, but Roman could see Ashley smiling and laughing as the truck sank lower and she moved farther away to avoid getting splattered. Only when he noticed the heat gauge edging into the red did he lift his foot off the accelerator, and he heard her say, “Oh, that’s Roman.” Then, after a question he couldn’t make out, “Of course we’re staying the night.”
Roman banged his head against the steering wheel several times, accidentally honked the horn, and gave up. He was stuck with her. Literally stuck in the mud, for the night, with Ashley Bowman.
And 362 hippies.
There are no circles of hell lower than this, he thought.
But then the cat-sweatshirt woman said, “Fantastic. You can join our drum circle!” and he realized that, yes, there was at least one.
