Jules Hinton's Strange Trip by JCH and Kas  

        Jules Hinton stepped out of the cool shade of the gas station and into the blinding white sunshine.  Average in height and build, he was dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a slightly worn t-shirt.  His longish brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, more to prevent it from flying every which way while he was riding than for asthetics.  He rubbed his unshaven chin absently, squinting into the distance and the blur of oncoming traffic.  Heat waves rose from the blacktop, partially obscuring the road ahead.  In his other hand, he gripped the top of a Gatorade bottle--go-go juice as he used to call it growing up--swinging it lightly as he walked back toward the motorcycle.  Out of the corner of one eye, he watched two girls in a blue car watch him.  A third was pumping gas into the big tank of the 1970s-era guzzler.
         The bike was loaded down with the half dozen packs and bundles that made up his only luggage.  The blue nylon hiking pack was strapped carefully to the guitar, which in turn was linked with bungie cords to the bedroll and the half-full army surplus duffel bag perched somewhat precariously behind his seat.  Covering everything was a fine layer of dust, a week’s worth or more.
         Jules leaned casually but carefully against the machine, popping the top off of the bottle and peeling back its seal.  He watched the big silver machines hum by on the highway not twenty feet away.  When had he last looked at the map?  Days ago, it seemed.  Or longer.  Suppressing an urge to grin, he half-turned to adjust the angle of his lean against the bike, and shot a glance back toward the blue car at the pumps.  The driver was just walking out.  He could see her stuffing a wad of crumpled bills into the front pocket of her shorts, having a difficult time of it, as tight as they were.  Her friends must have said something to her, he thought, noticing her glance toward the highway--coincidentally toward the exact spot where he rested.  This time he couldn’t help but grin.  She met his gaze and held it until she reached the car and got in.  The girl in the backseat turned around and looked at him until the car was well on the road.
         He wondered absently where they might be bound for, the three of them, as the car sped off in the direction he had been headed.  What sort of interesting destination awaited them away through the heat of the afternoon sun?  For that matter, what did the Road have in store for him today?  His thoughts turned to a song that he’d been constructing in his head for the last two days, a slow blues tune perfect for a lone voice and guitar.  He turned to pick up his bug-splattered helmet by its chin-guard and jammed the bottle of Gatorade into one of the pockets of  his backpack.
         Soon the bleached blacktop was sliding by at a great speed just inches beneath his the soles of his shoes and he had settled back into the easy, almost meditative state of just riding and letting his thoughts wander.  Green and brown and silver and shadow streaked past.  His mind took over easily all of the little things he did to steer the bike and allowed the rest of his thoughts to drift off to smaller worlds of interest he kept in reserve to fight off the most monotonous moments.
         Coming through he central part of the States a few days before, he had turned south into Texas, coming in from the North-West.  Amarillo had been interesting.  He had felt a strong pull to play with a band in a bar that he had stopped into one night there.  It got to be as though he would only play now out in the middle of nowhere, something to ease the road weariness after he stretched his legs from the constant riding.  He thought that he might swing East now and head across the big state toward Louisiana, probably to New Orleans, but nothing was certain.  He simply refused to make a plan.
         That made him smile all the more.  Procrastination had shown him some pretty sights and interesting places since he had begun this trip, his epic journey of isolation, as he wryly referred to it in his innermost thoughts.  Playing it by ear and following the road signs.  Sometimes letting himself be pulled in one direction simply because of the way a city’s name sounded to him at the moment.  Or in the opposite direction for the same reason.
         He would have to pick up some new sunglasses soon, Jules thought absently as the day progressed.  The bright sun, especially on these flat Texas highways, was causing him to squint too much and the strain on his eyes was starting to give him a headache.  Come to think of it, his head had been bothering him for the past few days, only now it was becoming a little less bearable.
         He spent that night camped out under the stars as he had the night before and the night before that.  It didn’t matter that much--he could survive by taking a quick bath by the sink at a gas station or restaurant.  His bedroll was in good condition, though not as soft as a regular bed.  But how could you get a view like this under a roof, even with free cable?  The stars stretched out above him in the infinite blackness of the cool night sky.  Jules took the little pan of water off the propane flame and poured it into his coffee mug.
         He’d chosen a spot near the top of one of the hills he’d been riding through for half a day, taking a dirt and gravel road carefully to a flattened point away from the main road.  It looked as though a house had once rested nearby.  He could see the remains of an old chimney and hearth still standing, crumbled boards arrayed haphazardly, and sparse vegetation had sprung up to obscure all other signs of occupation.
         At last he lay back down on the out-flung bedroll and stared up at the pattern of lights in the sky.  Away off to the East there moved the steady blinking light of a plane moving at a snail’s pace.  Tomorrow he would have to look at the map and come to a decision as to where he should be headed -- where his destination might be.  For three months it had been nowhere.  He had been driven by the desire to get out and away, to put as much distance between himself and all that he was intimately familiar with.  The feeling was still there.  He needed the time to think about the future and what form his life would soon take.  And so the extended vacation.  And yet, somehow, he had not experienced the true sense of soul-searching that he had felt lay ahead of him on the Road.  Instead there came the heightened sense of waiting.  For what he was not sure.
         Sleep blurred his thoughts into a much-needed slumber.

         A footstep brought him awake.  He lay motionless, concentrating both on controlling his breathing so that he would still appear to be in a deep sleep, and listening to the sound.  Someone was stealthily approaching from the direction of the road.  Jules heard them pause, and then the almost soundless crunch of the dirt and stones as they continued to circle the bike.  His thoughts raced.  It still felt like night, or near dawn.  Hard to tell without opening an eye.  Knife at his belt; boots still on; a heavy branch nearby which he had moved to make a flat place for the bedroll.  Too quiet to be a cop, who would have said something by now.  Could be some  vagabond or a local, curious enough to come up the hill and take a look, having seen the bike earlier in the evening.  Still, the quiet steps came closer.  He could smell, for a second, when the breeze changed, an unwashed body.  Closer.  He tried to visualize the distance to the branch, wishing now that he had thought to bring a gun along with him on the trip.  His muscles ached with the position he tried to hold himself in, though they’d been comfortable enough to remain that way in sleep.
         The footsteps paused nearby, perhaps to get a better look at him.  Maybe to make sure he wasn’t playing dead.  Whoever it was now stood somewhere off to his right, behind his half-turned back.  His ears strained to hear some sort of sound they were making.  Sniffing?  Another thought occurred to him slowly.  Was he entirely mistaken?  Was it a dog or some other kind of animal?  He didn’t know enough about the local wildlife to hazard a guess.
         A cough, though somewhat muffled, broke the tense air, and a wave of subdued panic spread over him.  His mind suddenly returned to that afternoon at the gas station.  The girls in the convertible.  But that had been long hours ago and he had not seen them since.  He prided himself at being something of an observer, someone who noticed every little detail.  He had to admit that his keen sense of observation had failed him this time.
         His left eye twitched with nervous energy and opened a crack, letting in a scrap of moonlight, enough to tell him it was still somewhere in the middle of the night.  Not enough, however to give him a glimpse of the person standing off beyond him in the reflection of the chrome on his motorcycle.
         He suddenly jerked his head around and his eyes opened.  He was alone.  There was no one standing near his bike, neither man nor animal.  He laughed to himself as he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.  He realized it must have been the coming together of a dream state and his reawakening.  He had been alone the whole time.

         The next  morning, he awoke early feeling remarkably refreshed.  He warmed some water on a fire for his coffee, and was drinking it when he suddenly remembered his dream from the night before.  He looked at his motorcycle sitting twenty feet away from him and had the sudden urge to make sure it was all right.  He laughed the notion off.  Of course it was all right.  He could see it with his own eyes.
         Behind him was the shell of the house.  He glanced at it, but could not tell if the house had burned down or just fell on top of itself.  Whatever happened to it had obviously happened a long time ago, at least thirty years or more.
         Jules tried to imagine what kind of people had lived there then.  Maybe it had been a hippie commune.  Or maybe a farm had once been here years before.  Who knows?  To try to figure out was a useless exercise, of course.  He would never know and could never know.  And why should he care anyway?
         He gathered up his bedroll to take it to his bike.  And froze.
         There.  All around his bike.  Footprints other than his own.  There had been someone there in the night.  It had not been a dream or an overactive imagination.  But nothing had been taken.  As far as he could tell, nothing had been touched.  And the footprints did not come anywhere near the spot where he had been lying.
         He dropped the bedroll to the ground.  Something was not right about the footprints.  The fact that it was so far from what he expected to find had thrown his realization off.  The footprints did not begin until five or ten feet away from the bike.  He was sure of that.  There was nothing but sand and gravel for a hundred yards either way, nothing to obstruct them.  If there had been footprints there last night, they would have been there now.
         After closer inspection, he reasoned that they belonged to a male.  They appeared to be boots.  He was wearing thick steel toed tennis shoes which left a different print than those he was looking at now.  Furthermore, the boot prints were of a foot at least a size larger than his.
         He looked again to see where they began and where they ended.  It appeared that the man had walked off in the direction of where the house had once stood.  But the prints vanished before they reached the house.  Or seemed to at least.
         He looked around him.  There was nothing for as far as he could see except for sparse vegetation on the otherwise barren land.  He suddenly got the feeling he should get as far away from this place as fast as he could.
         Which is what he did.
 

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