At the intersection with the highway, he looked east and west, not sure of where he wanted to go. The past—where he'd come from, in the east—didn't seem to hold any promise for him. So, he turned the toes of his cowboy boots toward the west and started walking down the side of the highway in dusty, desolated northwest Texas.
For the first ten miles of his walk, Rick started at the sound of any approaching vehicle from the direction of the Big C ranch, and in this empty space he could hear an engine noise more than a mile away. When he heard the rare approaching car, he went into the drainage ditch at the side of the road. But nothing driving by appeared to be from the ranch. After a while, Rick decided Easton had been bluffing about coming after him. In a strange way, he was disappointed. Rick couldn't think of anyone—with the possible exception of Phil—who shed a tear or gave a damn about him moving on.
* * * *
Once the sun came up, Rick began to realize what a dumb idea it was just to be walking out on the side of a Texas dual-lane highway under the blazing Texas sun.
He hadn't even brought any water with him. He was still bruised and, he suspected, didn't have everything inside him in its right place from the working over Melvin had given him the week before. He was limping and couldn't even stand up straight as he walked because of a pain in his side that had been there for a week. He had had to service three customers the previous night and all of them had been focused on dipping their own cocks, so he felt worse now than he had Friday morning.
And as he walked, he reviewed his circumstances. And the hotter he became and the more thirsty and the more shuffling rather than walking, the more depressed he became. The fight for life was slowly ebbing away.
Cars passed him—but at high speed. None stopped. And each time one passed, Rick took another, more distant, step from the margin of the highway, trying to escape the choking dust their wheels threw up in his face.
He didn't even realize it when he stopped putting one foot in front of another and simply stood and shuddered for a brief time, before sinking down into the desert sand a good twenty feet from the side of the road.
Sometime later, Rick heard the sound of gravel on tires and lifted his head enough to see an old, rusty sedan from the sixties or seventies pulling over to the side of the road just past where he was lying. He groaned and rolled over onto his side.
"Water . . . please," he whispered through parched lips as three Hispanic men approached him cautiously.
But they didn't offer water or any other form of respite. And if any of them said a word, it was not loud enough for Rick to hear. One of them, with a face of indeterminate age, lined with years of weariness and backbreaking scrabbling for hard-fought existence, crouched down beside him, watching him intently for signs of objection or resistance, while the other two pawed through his duffel bag, taking whatever appealed to them, animated and thrilled when they came upon his stash of cash. The last sound Rick heard as he groaned and drifted off into a haze was the sound of doors slamming and gravel being thrown up by the tires of a departing car.
