Thick enough to spread...

 
There's something surreal about traveling at night on the freeway. The bubble of light around you, the white lights come toward you and red lights convoy alongside. The multicolor lights of cities and towns pass quickly with the hot yellow roadlights of exits and overpasses standing like sentries.

Away from the city it is only more intense. The desert night can be very black and the small hours of morning can bring fog so dense you're tempted to drive by Braille, hitting the raised-dot lane markers you can't see anymore with a satisfying tunk-tunk-tunk.

Turn off the radio, you need to concentrate. Dial down the interior lights to cut the interior glare. Peer into the darkness. Somewhere, you see a white glow in the blanket of fog, a big rig approaching on the otherside of the median strip.

Pea soup fog in the Bay Area, tule fog in the Central Valley, peanut butter fog in the Mojave, thick as a Dagwood sandwich; why are you driving in it? If you pull over and turn off your lights, you'll be alone in a darkness so complete you'll feel like a cave fish. Pull over and leave the lights on and you take the risk of someone rear-ending you, thinking you're moving. Even leaving your emergency blinkers on won't be safe; you've passed two cars doing that already and you didn't see them till the very last minute.

So you keep driving, slowing down, trying not to overdrive your lights. Then someone blows by you in a quad-cab dualie, doing at least sixty, seventy, maybe one hundred ten, you can't tell. How fast are you going? You can't tell that, either, you've got the dashlights turned off. Speed up a bit. If you hit the right speed, you won't see anyone at all because you'll all be going the same speed.

The fog is so thick, you don't even see the cotton candy lights of traffic on the other half of the road. You roll down the windows. The fog is cold, blowing in the window like frigid steam but it keeps you awake and you can hear the traffic on the other side of the road, when there is any. You can hear the dots on the pavement better, too.

Tunk-tunk-tunk.

You turn the dashlights back on to check your speed. At forty-five miles an hour, it will take you three hours to reach the towns along the Colorado. Three hours of cold desert wind coming in the window, wet with fog. Three hours of peering into the darkness, wondering if there's a car stopped in the road with its lights off, or a deer crossing the highway or someone trying to wave you down 'cause they have car trouble.

Going slower would be intolerable, going faster would be insane. You memorize the sound of your current speed, the rhythm of the dots, and turn the dashlights back off.

That was an exit. What did it say? Eagle Mountain? You've never heard of Eagle Mountain. There are no mountains here, just flat desert. Is it a town? Would they have coffee? Too late now, you've passed the exit. You make a mental list of who you would kill for a cup of coffee. The list gets longer.

Tumbleweeds appear out of the fog, like golden chandelier-spiders in your headlights, scuttling across the road. Alien-looking, it's a Steven Spielberg sort of thought.

Tunk-tunk. Tunk. One of the dots must have been missing.

Lights up ahead. Is the fog lifting? You can't be coming to a town yet, there are no towns on this freeway for another fifty miles. Someone with road flares? An accident or just a breakdown. You slow down and steer off the dots, not wanting anyone to see you doing that.

The fog lifts suddenly, the immense desert opens up around you under hard bright diamonds in a jeweler's showcase black velvet sky. The tension flows out of your neck and wrists and the open window is suddenly much too cold. You roll it back up.

A road sign says, Blythe 70 miles. Less than an hour away and you won't have to kill anyone for coffee, there's a Denny's there. Talk about surreal.

But the lights in the road ahead of you, maybe you shouldn't have been thinking of Steven Spielberg.

* * *

Maybe I dreamed it.

I wake up with the taste of stale peanut butter in my mouth. I can feel grit under my butt and something hard and cold against my back. I open my eyes, it's darker than the inside of a refrigerator with the door closed but I can see fine. The desert. One of those freaky, alien-looking Joshua trees. Rocks, sand, sagebrush, cactus, tumbleweeds, the outline of a dog stenciled on the sky, black on black.

Not a dog. When I move, the coyote jumps as if he hadn't known I was alive. He sniffs without getting closer then he whines and I think I see his tail waggle, an indecisive little wave before he trots away.

I'm almost sorry to see him go.

I must have fallen asleep and driven off the road, got thrown from the car. I'm sitting against a rock in almost the same position I would have been in the car. But where's the car?

My legs are stretched out in front of me, my feet on imaginary pedals? But where are my shoes? My pants? My.... Something else is missing a lot more important than shoes. I search frantically for it, feeling around my crotch, finding only a damp slit and a sensitive little button. I get up to search around on the ground, realizing as I'm doing this that I must be dreaming, again.

Like the dreams about the aliens who smell like peanut butter and look like wet dishrags and sound like they're inside your head.

My breasts jiggle as I stand. My. Breasts. I close my eyes and will myself to wake up. This always works in real dreams, but it doesn't work now. When I open my eyes and look down, not only are the breasts still there but enough long hair falls in my face that I almost have hysterics.

I'm naked. I'm a naked woman. I'm a naked woman, lost and alone on the desert in the middle of a moonless, starless night. I feel myself, I look around. Yes, I'm naked and alone in the middle of the desert.

But I'm not a woman, I remember that. I think. I remember being a man, having what a man has between his legs, doing with it what a man does with one of those things. I remember that, so either I'm dreaming or I'm crazy.

I can't remember much else, though. Like where I was going, or what I looked like, or even what my name was. The next thing I know, I'm running through the desert, crying and wringing my hands. I'm barefoot and there are rocks and thorns but I don't seem to notice them.

I try to get control of myself but when I realize that I'm running toward the noise of a freeway, there's no stopping me. I run, breasts jiggling, hair flapping; I run for some time until I can see the glow of roadlights and traffic, much closer than I expected as I top a small rise.

Despite wispy fog and overcast skies, I can see the scene clearly; an empty freeway with lights spaced rather far apart. A single vehicle approaches on the closer set of lanes and then I'm there, running along the edge of the freeway, screaming and waving my arms as the big truck slows and rolls to a stop some distance past me.

A large man carrying a wrench and a flashlight climbs down from the side of the vehicle, leaving the door open behind him. "She's naked all right!" he shouts back toward the cab as he shines the light on me.

The pronoun seems so very strange to hear applied to me but I run toward the man. I think I'm babbling something about the fog and the peanut-butter-smelling aliens but he just says, "Jeez, miss! Ain't you cold?"

And suddenly, I am cold. My teeth chatter and all the energy I had while running across the desert leaves me and I collapse just before he reaches me.

* * *

I could hear them talking about me. They'd wrapped me in some sort of blanket and loaded me into the bed in the tiny living area behind the cab. I wasn't really asleep but I wasn't really awake either but they don't know that.

"I sure didn't see any other cars or nothing out there, John," said the one who had climbed down to help me.

"Me either," agreed the driver, or John, since that seemed to be his name.

"Weirdest thing," said the other. "Naked girl running along the highway. She's a looker, too. Stacked, as they say."

John laughed. "You thinking of changing teams, Dar?"

Dar? Teams? I wondered what he meant.

Dar, if that was his name, laughed. "Not hardly, but you can't deny she's a pretty little thing, even if you ain't swinging at the pitch."

"Yeah," John agreed. "How did she get out here, though? We're half an hour from Baker and nearly that far on to Barstow. She say something that made any sense?"

"Nah," said Dar. "It was all about peanut butter dogs and dishrag fog. I wonder if someone gave her some acid and left her out here. Have to be a pretty mean bastard to do something like that."

"Shit," said John. "She don't look old enough to have someone that mad at her."

"I dunno. She's kind of built for just a kid, which is what she looks in the face."

I looked that young? And neither of them had any doubt about my sex, they just weren't turned on. Gay truck drivers? Why not? Lucky for me. I tried to think about if someone had given me any drugs, but other than flashes of driving through fog, my knowledge seemed to begin with waking up in the desert. I tried to think of my age, my name, my hometown. I sort of knew I'd been driving from L.A. toward Blythe and less surely, I felt that neither Baker nor Barstow were on that road. But I couldn't think of the name of any other town.

"What are we going to do with her?" asked Dar.

"I already called the Sheriff, they're going to have a patrol car meet us at Harvard Road."

I knew I'd never heard of Harvard Road, either; Harvard sounded sort of like I'd heard of it before, not a city, though. I heard them moving up front and Dar's voice was much louder as he said, "I'd better find her something to wear."

"One of your t-shirts would probably make a decent enough dress for her," said John.

"Uh huh. You awake, sugar?"

Sugar? "I dunno," I said. I guess I still didn't want to admit I wasn't dreaming. My voice sounded very odd.

He chuckled.

I opened my eyes and started to sit up but he waved at me to stay down. "Watch your head," he warned. "But there, beside the bed, there's a drawer, bottom drawer. You can find a couple of t-shirts to wear. Put on two of them, it's cold out and, uh, they, um, you don't want someone to be able to see through just one of them."

"Okay," I said. What else could I do? Wearing a man's t-shirt as a dress wouldn't be at all odd with what else had been going on. And my voice sounded so very strange, it almost startled me when I said something.

He pulled his head back out and spoke to John, "She's going to get dressed."

When Dar pulled the curtain closed again, I sat up, being careful because there were things sticking out from the walls and ceiling in the small space. I opened the drawer and pulled out two t-shirts, one yellow and one white. They looked huge. I sat with my feet dangling over the edge of the bed into the narrow walking space and pulled the t-shirts over my head, the softer white one first then the yellow one with the green drawing of some sort on it.

A mirror on one of the doors showed me what I looked like. Very silly with the big t-shirts; also, tiny, young and, and, well, cute. Lots of dark blonde hair and big blue eyes, button nose, round little chin, and my mouth was open, like someone had scared me. I look scared because I felt scared.

And what scared me most was I had no real idea what I had looked like before.

* * *

I must have gone back to sleep, though I didn't remember doing so. Someone called me, Dar probably. "Wake up, dolly. Wakey-wakey."

I woke up to find myself cradled in Dar's arms and being put into the back of a police car. "Wanna sit up front," I said. Even though Dar was a huge guy, it felt weird to be carried in his arms.

"I think she may be in shock," John said to someone.

"We'll take her to see some doctors," said someone else, a woman.

"You can sleep in the back seat," Dar said. He sat me on the edge of the back seat with the door still open while I blinked and wiped my face. It hadn't been very long because it was still really dark but there were truck lights and I could see pretty well.

A black woman in a green shirt leaned forward with one hand on her knee and the other holding a big flashlight. "Hi, I'm Deputy Win Clark. What's your name?" she asked. She shined the light in my face and then down my body.

"I dunno." I tried hard not to cry. I must have blinked at just the right moment because even after she shined the light in my face, I could still see.

"Who put this t-shirt on her?" asked Win over her shoulder.

I heard John say, "She picked it out herself." Someone laughed and I wondered why.

Dar added. "It's my shirt, both of them, she can have them."

"What's wrong with my shirt?" I asked.

"Nothing, honey. Look, I'm going to call you 'Honey,' since you can't tell me your name. Is that okay with you? Your hair is sort of honey color."

"I guess," I said. I heard John and Dar talking with someone else and leaned to look around Deputy Win. Another deputy, a big white guy was asking them questions. He kept glancing back at me, though, and he had a grin I didn't really like. I kind of thought I knew why a guy would grin like that at a girl and he was grinning at me.

"That's my partner, Deputy Nick Jordan. He's going to drive and there won't be room for all three of us up front. Can you sit in back by yourself? You can lie down and take a nap if you want to."

I nodded, knowing that she was talking to me like I was a kid or stupid or something. She handed me a folded blanket to use as a pillow and I crawled on into the back seat to lie down. My voice still sounded funny to me and I didn't feel like talking anyway.

"I'll leave the door open 'til we're ready to leave, okay, Honey?" Deputy Win said.

"Okay, thank you," I said. I might as well try to be polite, she didn't mean to make me feel stupid. I knew my name hadn't been 'Honey' before but I thought it felt kind of good to have some sort of name.

I may have dozed a bit but I could hear every word they said. The deputies asked questions and John and Dar told how I had run out of the darkness and waved them down. "Nothing in sight for miles and miles but miles and miles," said John.

"We'll have a car check out the area," said Deputy Nick. "Maybe her boyfriend just dumped her on the freeway after a fight."

"This is the road to Vegas," Deputy Win said. "Do you think she's a showgirl?"

"Nah," said Dar. "She's too short."

Short? No wonder the guys looked so big. Well, I could stretch out almost full-length in the back seat, so yeah, I must be pretty short.

"Maybe a stripper?" suggested Deputy Nick. "Maybe she was doing her act and got carried away."

They laughed and I was glad I was nearly asleep so I didn't have to feel like crying again.

Deputy Nick added something about my picking the yellow t-shirt and the guys laughed again but I could tell that Deputy Win hadn't. What was there about the t-shirt that was funny? I didn't like Deputy Nick very much, right then, for sure.

I sort of woke up again when the two deputies got in and closed the doors. Deputy Win asked, "You okay back there, Honey?"

"Um," I said without opening my eyes or mouth.

"I swear she looks like Little Annie Fanny," I heard Deputy Nick say, very quiet, like he didn't want me to hear. I knew the name but couldn't think of who she might be. Someone famous?

"Just drive," Deputy Win told him.

"Can you believe those two fruits giving her a Kern County Melon Fest t-shirt to wear?"

"I don't think she noticed. There's something very odd about her."

"Ya think?"

Melon Fest? No wonder Deputy Nick kept grinning at me.

How long it would take to get to the hospital? Would someone there be able to tell what went on in the desert, why I didn't know things I should know and why I felt sure I used to be a guy? What would happen to me next? And then I fell asleep.