East of Albuquerque the interstate switchbacked up the Santia Heights out of the Rio Grande Valley. The summer lost its heat, as the rusted pick-up climbed toward the pass and the cooler temperature revitalized AK and me.

Late-August temperatures were murder on longhaired hitchhikers crossing the Far West. Rides were few and distances were far.

This driver of the Ford 150 was heading to Amarillo, Texas, which was a little under 300 miles between the two cities, neither of which was anywhere we wanted to be.

The hippie farmer belonged to a Jesus Freak commune in the Panhandle. He refrained from any preaching, but at a pit stop along the Pecos River his young wife asked us, “Do you believe in God?”

The brunette was the epitome of a trailer park beauty and she smelled of patchouli

“I’m half-Jewish,” AK answered with a Long Island accent. I had never seen AK say a prayer in the three years that we knew each other. “The other half is agnostic.”

“That’s okay, Jesus loves everyone.” The teenager’s blue eyes were dazed by the bliss of divine love.

If she was Jesus, then I would have worshiped at her feet, but she was simply a girl on the cusp of womanhood.

“Everyone will be welcome at his table. Even sinners, if they repent at the last moment.” She touched my hand with a promise of more at the commune.

The big man with the busy red beard wiped the windows clean of insects. Her husband seemed the type to get jealous real quick and I gently pulled away my hand.

“Doesn’t look like I need to repent this very moment.”

“And why not?

“Because it’s a beautiful day.” The sky was cloudless. I had $85 in my pocket. AK had at least $150.

“Praise the Lord for that.” The burly driver pushed his long hair under a straw cowboy hat. “But Jesus never predicted the day of deliverance. Could be five hours from now or three seconds.”

I counted out that latter span of time aloud.

“Guess we’ll have to wait a little longer.” We had survived the failure of the Second Coming.

“It’ll come one day.” The driver motioned for us to get in the back and raised his eyes to the searing sun. “Praise the Lord. You’ll get a little taste of hell this afternoon.”

The flatbed of the Ford 150 offered no shelter from the sun. The wind whistling over the truck killed any conversation. Within an hour we were baked to a crisp. The ragged mountains gave way to eroding buttes and endless ranchlands.

AK and I pointed out wind devils scouring the desert plains.

There was not enough moisture in the air to strengthen them into tornadoes.

The driver maintained the speed limit.

55.

The sunset scorched the featureless terrain of the northern Chihuahuan Desert with a splash of rabid red. The night sky soon shone with a billion stars. AK and I sweated in the blowtorch humidity. Our water was down to a few drops, when the driver stopped for gas in Amarillo.

“I’m heading north from here. A small town near the Rita Blanca Grasslands.”

His girlfriend stayed in the pick-up. She looked at AK with yearning. Her gaze betrayed that the high plains were a lonely place anytime of the year and the commune needed new blood.

“You sure you don’t want to join us. The girls at the commune are friendly to strangers new to the Lord. We believe that the moment of orgasm is a gift from God. You don’t have to convert. All you have to do is listen.”

It was a friendly pitch and at this time of night sharing a bed with a hippie Jesus freak girl was an enticing temptation.

“They can wait and the girls at the commune would like to see new faces.”

“Thanks, but I have a girlfriend back in Boston.” AK had Pam too. The blonde nursing student had stolen his heart this summer. She roomed with my ex-girlfriend, but I hadn’t thought about Jackie since meeting Floe.

“What about you?” The hippie was staring with the belief of visual persuasion. He was no hypnotist.

The truck stop lights painted the parking lot a cruel yellow. The semi-trailers rumbled V8 threats.

“We have to meet friends in Tulsa.” I had met the Spear sisters the previous summer. Vicky was a detective with the Police and her sister was a freshman at Oral Roberts University. It was a dry town, but the sisters knew where to have fun. “Then it’s back east.”

“To what? A life of sin?” He shifted his weight like he thought about hitting me.

“Something like that.” I had graduated from college without honors. No bank would hire me and even the CIA had rejected my service. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Thank the lord. He provides for all.”

The hippie Jesus freak surrender with a pitying smile. Our souls were lost to the devil. He got in the pickup and his wife waved goodbye from the passenger window. They disappeared into the night and we walked into the air-conditioned truck stop.

Getting out of the heat was a relief, however the long-haulers glared at our dust-coated long hair and clothing was stained from sitting in the back of pick-ups. In their eyes we were dirty hippies.

They weren’t wrong and we ignored them, since mean looks populated the West.

“How about burgers?” AK dropped his bag near the counter. “My treat.”

“Milkshake too.”

The burgers tasted good and after AK slurped down the last of his chocolate soda, he asked, “If we weren’t going anywhere, would you have gone to that commune?”

“Not a chance.”

“It’s not like you have anywhere to go.”

“I have Boston.”

“Boston with no job, no girlfriend, no place to live but your parents. 22 and no future.”

“Thanks for the bummer.”

“I’m painting the truth, but if you went up to that commune to communicate with God through the Holy Orgasm with Jesus Freak girls and you’d be speaking in tongues by dawn.

“Not a chance. I’ve lost too many friends to bible-thumpers and I ‘ve been done with God since the age of eight. I even unbaptized myself in Lake Sebago at the age of 10.

“What happened then?” AK had never heard this story.

“I don’t’ talk about it too much.” It hurt, although not as much as Floe’s leaving me in San Diego.

“I had a best friend in Maine. Chaney and I used to raid the strawberry fields in the farm behind our houses. We’d crawl on our backs eating strawberries from the plants. We watched the YOUNG RASCALS together. His family and mine were good friends. We went swimming at Lake Sebago every weekend. I thought we were going to be together forever, but my father was transferred to Boston. Chaney, and I promised never to go swimming unless we were together.”

“Not an easy thing if you’re living in Boston and he’s in Maine.” AK signaled for the check.

The waitress signaled that we could wash up in the men’s room. We must have smelled a sight. AK tipped her a dollar on a $6 bill.

“No, but I kept my end of the bargain.” An 8 year-old boy wasn’t allowed to leave his neighborhood and my South Shore town had no beaches, only the Quincy Quarries, which were off-limits for any one other than juvenile delinquents.

AK and I entered the men’s room.

“And come June my parents were taking us up to my grandmother’s camp on the lake outside of Portland.”

“A reunion of friends.” AK washed at the sink. The water rinsed off his face was gray. Mine was closer to black.

“A week before our departure I’m watching TV with my brothers and sisters. We were already out of school and could watch it, if we had done all our chores. My mother came downstairs to the den.” Our family lived in a suburban split-level ranch house. The house was painted pink, although my mother called the color ‘teaberry’. “She told me to go sit in our station wagon. Not everyone just me.”

“What had you done?” AK took off his shirt. He wet a paper towel and wiped at his skin.

I did the same.

“Nothing, but I obeyed her, since that was what eight year-old boys were supposed to do, if they knew what was good for them.” My words transported me back to a late-June day in 1961.

The family car was a Ford. My father only bought Fords. His first car in college had been a Model Ford. The interior was steel, glass, and plastic. I was wearing shorts. My legs stuck to the seat. It was a hot day.

“My mother came out to the car. She opened the door and said that Chaney had drowned. Her explanation was that he had been swimming in Sebago, while everyone else was water-skiing. He wanted to test a diving mask and snorkels which he had received for his borthday.”

“That must have been when SEA HUNT was on TV.” The popular series had run from 1957 to 1961 and featured Lloyd Bridges as free-lance scuba diver Mike Nelson.

“Guess so, but anyway Chaney was left with his grandmother. She was a refugee from Czechoslovakia.” I put on my last clean shirt. “She escaped out of Prague riding on top of a train.”

“She must have been Jewish.” AK’s father had liberated a death camp outside of Munich. He refused to buy anything German. It was an easy boycott after the war. The Eighth Air Force had bombed the Nazis into the Stone Age.

“No, she was a communist, but that has nothing to do with this story, except she couldn’t swim.”

“Why? Because godless commies can’t swim.” AK and I left the bathroom.

“Commies can swim. The East Germans win gold medals at the Olympics.”

We exited from the restaurant. The gas station was empty of cars. The clock on the truck stop’s billboard said the time was 11:45.

“Those women are no women.”

We walked to the Interstate.

“And swimming has nothing to do with whether you believe in god.”

A sign on the on-ramp bore a warning against picking up hitchhikers. We ignored this edict. There was no other way out of here than by the thumb.

“Anyway Chaney was swimming, but went out over his head and started to drown.”

“What about the snorkel?”

“He panicked and started hyperventilating. His grandmother tried to rescue him, but he was out too far.
When help finally came, it was too late. My mother told me that story in less than a hundred words and then left me in the station wagon to watch the sun set over Big Blue Hill. I prayed to God to bring Chaney back to life.”

“And Chaney stayed dead?”

“Yes, and since then I haven’t believed in God.”

“You don’t ever doubt his existence.” AK pointed to the cosmos over our heads.

“The universe always was, always is, and always will be. I wrote a thesis in my math class that E = MC squared meant that eternity lasted forever in all direction and there never was a god. Going to a Catholic college, that theorem earned me an F.”

That grade had cost my scholarship.

“My godlessness broke my mother’s heart. She had wanted me to become a priest, but then a God who let my friend drown was no god of mine.”

“Sad story.”

AK sat on his bag.

“I know, so there was never any danger of my joining a Jesus Freak commune.”

“Even if the girls were cute?”

“Even then. I was hoping to meet Floe again one day. No God could make that happen. Only fate and I stuck out my thumb.

No one stopped for us.

It didn’t really matter.

Tulsa was several hundred east.

Sooner or later someone would stop for two dirty hippies.

It was written in the stars.

Only the when was missing from their prediction.