Leaving Jamie Behind

The road was long and winding. Off in the distance, to my right, were large, rising plateaus. Everywhere else, as far as I could see, were rolling hills of flowers, Joshua trees and cactus. Springtime granted life to an otherwise desolate desert. Where normally there were only the spiked and withered dry-weather plants, gentle rains had coaxed dormant seeds into bursting forth out of the dirt. Blossoms bloomed frantically and colorfully, desperate to pollinate before they shriveled and turned to dust once more. Spring was the only time of year that I enjoyed driving down I-5. Cars were few, and far between. Gas stations were only a faint glimmer of hope. You better tank up at each chance you get, otherwise the desert might swallow you whole.

Miles passed in blurs, each one the same as the last. Lustra’s engine roared beneath me, musical and fierce. She was my pride and joy. It would have been much easier to drive up and down the western coast in a modern car, but Lustra and I were a pair. She belonged to me, and my soul belonged to her.

A dark shape on the side of the road ahead of me caught my eye. I slowed, following the dark shape until I was right next to it. A man stood there, duffel bag slung over his shoulder, shielding his eyes from the noon sun. My instinct was to hit the gas pedal and floor it, but a nagging sense of morality held me back. It had been at least 20 miles since the last gas station and the next one was far off. I had no idea how this man had ended up out here in the middle of nowhere, but his odds weren’t great if he tried to walk anywhere.

“This is a stupid idea,” I muttered to myself as I slowed Lustra down with a purr from her engine. I watched in the rear-view mirror as the guy approached my car, limping slowly. “I’m totally about to get car-jacked or murdered. Who even hitchhikes nowadays,” I continued to talk to myself. I gripped Lustra’s steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. The slow ambling gait of the man finally led him to my passenger window. It was rolled down, so he peaked his head inside.

“Hi there, mister,” he began in a soft, wary voice. “Is there any chance you could help me out? I need a ride north.” 

I eyed him as he spoke. He looked older than I thought at first. He was at least well into his 50’s, thin and worn. He had all his teeth, so he didn’t look like a drug addict. I knew all too well that life could give us a serious kick in the behind, and sometimes all it took to get out of it was a helping hand. I sighed and rubbed my face with my hand, exasperated with myself.

“Alright, yeah, sure,” I grumbled. “Hop in. I’m driving to northern California, so I can take you as far as that.”

The man’s face split into a grin and he popped the door open, tossed his duffel bag into the back seat of my car, and settled in.

“Thank you, mister! I’ve been out here since last night, slowly making my way. No one wants to pick up a hitchhiker anymore and these legs don’t work as good as they used to, so the walking is slow.” His voice had an excited hint to it now, like he couldn’t believe his good fortune at having found a ride. I began to feel a little bad for thinking the guy was going to murder me.

“You’re welcome,” I told him. “We’ve all needed a little assistance at one point or another.”

The stranger nodded thoughtfully to that, his right hand stroking Lustra’s leather interior lovingly.

“You’ve got yourself a beautiful car. Real nice. Looks like you take good care of her. What year is it, a ‘69?”

Surprised, I glanced over to him as I sped up down the highway.

“Yeah, that’s right. You know your cars?” 

The man nodded again. 

“Used to work on them, back in the day. Back when cars like this were more common.” 

“That must have been fun,” I said. Beside me, the stranger tapped a sewn patch on Lustra’s dash.

“Lustra”, he read aloud. “That what you named her?” When he glanced at me, I saw a face full of sunbaked wrinkles, but eyes as clear as glass.

“My dad named her when he gave her to me, and it stuck. It fits her, I think.”

“Good name. Cars oughta have names. Modern cars just don’t have the same personality these old ones did.” We chatted for a while about cars, and the desert spring. We swapped stories about camping in Joshua Tree Park. The more we talked the more relaxed we both felt. The highway curved behind us. At the next major gas station, I stopped to buy a pack of smokes, and tank up. The man rustled around in his bag and pulled out a thin 10 dollar bill. I waved him away.

“No worries, man, I got this,” I reassured him. “You just hang tight, and I’ll be back in a minute.”

He was still sitting in my car when I returned, staring blankly out the front window. I tossed some snacks onto his lap when I got back into the driver’s seat, and a bottle of water. He tried to hand me the money again, but I shook my head.

“Keep it. I was making this trip anyways. Your company is well worth a few bucks in snacks and water.” 

Gently, the man put a hand on my shoulder.

“Thank you,” he whispered. I could tell he felt emotional, so I just shrugged and laughed it off. “I just realized I never introduced myself,” he cleared his throat. “My name is Beck. Well, Beckett actually, but I don’t look like a Beckett,” he laughed. I took my right hand off the steering wheel and reached over awkwardly to shake his hand.

“Nice to meet you Beck. I’m Jamie,” I told him. By then we were well down the central valley, and within an hour I would be cutting across to the coastline. From there I would follow it up, surrounded by ocean on my left and magnificent redwoods and mountains on my right.

“I knew a Jamie once,” Beck said thoughtfully. “A girl Jamie though. Not a boy.”

“Eh, that’s pretty common,” I laughed.

“She was a real nice girl. Worked in the office at the mechanic shop I was at,” something in his voice made me look over at him. His eyes were unfocused, staring back into some distant memory. A moment later he chuckled, ran his fingers through his hair, and shook his head. “Ah, sorry. Got carried away there for a moment.”

“No, go on,” I encouraged him. “She sounds like she was a great girl. What happened to her?”

Beck paused, leaned back in his seat. He stared at me for a while, as if appraising who I was for the first time on that drive. After a long moment of silence, he sighed and closed his eyes.

“Alright, why not? Jamie was a good girl. Real sweet. Hard worker. And beautiful. Had a bosom out to here,” he laughed faintly, indicating a large chest with his hands. My eyebrows shot up into my forehead, but he didn’t see it. “I was 19 and she was 20. I was fresh out of school and loved cars more’n anything. My big brother got me the job at the mechanic shop that summer. He had been working there a few years already.” 

Outside, the evening sun settled low onto the horizon, sending out bursts of golden and pink light that reflected off the clouds. Night would be over us soon. My plan was to drive late until we got to Seaside or Marina, and then I would find a cheap motel, tucked into the sand dunes, to sleep in.

“Jamie started working there right after I did. All the young men at that place fell in love with her. Including my big brother. But she wasn’t interested in any of them. Maybe I’m being bold here, but I’m pretty sure she only had eyes for me.” There was a big smile on Beck’s face as he talked about girl Jamie. I could tell he was downplaying how much they had liked each other.

“She and I would spend time together on my lunch break, and on her lunch break. Sometimes I would walk her home. I even convinced her to let me give her a ride now and then in my old beater truck.” The smile faded from Beck’s face. “But my brother got jealous. He didn’t know why she wanted to spend time with me and not with him. He had always been a ladies’ man and wasn’t used to be turned down. That and he was older than me by a few years. Figured he could give her what a kid like me couldn’t.”

We had made it to the coast, so I pulled over again to fill up Lustra’s voracious tank and grabbed a few more snacks. When I settled back in for the drive, Beck took a few minutes to scarf down a gas station burrito before he started talking again. The way he talked about that girl, I had a sinking feeling the story wouldn’t end well for him. Curiosity pushed me to listen to the rest of the story, but my stupid decency told me not to pry for the sake of my own nosiness.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to Beck,” I told him over Lustra’s roar as we sped up again. 

“Nah,” he sighed. “It’s good to tell the story. I haven’t talked about her in decades.” He gathered himself for a moment before continuing. “My brother, Brandon, got angrier about it the longer it went on. He always had a temper but… well, he started harassing her at work. Grabbing her arms when she wouldn’t talk to him, following us around when we tried to have lunch together. She became scared of him. I got real angry. One day his behavior made her cry. She came to me sobbing after work and I held her when she told me about what he said. He’d called her a whore, shook her, said she was only good enough to be used and thrown away.”

My heart hurt for Beck. The story was turning out to be so much worse than I had imagined. 

“Well that just didn’t sit well with me. So of course, I confronted him that night. Yelled at him, called him names. I even took a swing at him. Well that was real funny to him. He started pushing me around, said I wasn’t man enough to have a woman to myself, and I would always get his leftovers. That pissed me off even more. We started brawling. I’m not proud of it. I whooped him real bad. Then I told him I was going to leave with Jamie, and we would get married and he would never see us again. I left that night and called up a high school buddy of mine who had moved to Oklahoma. Asked if he had any jobs out there. I was planning on leaving with Jamie the next day after work.”

Signs for Monterey flew by in the darkness. We were getting close to where I wanted to stop. I began to keep my eyes out for the exit I usually took into the towns by the sea.

“The next morning came, and Jamie didn’t show up at work. I figured she was still too shaken by what my brother had done to her, so I told myself I would drive to her house after work and check on her. The end of the day came, and I hopped in my old truck. Got to her house and no one answered.”

A gnawing darkness built in my gut. I kept glancing over at Beck, trying to read his face as he spoke. But his features were slack, his eyes distant. The only thing that betrayed his emotion was the slight shaking in his voice.

“I spent all evening looking for her. I couldn’t find my brother either. Finally, a few hours later, out of desperation I drove over to the police station. That’s where I saw her parents. They were in the lobby, crying and talking to some officers,” Beck drew a shaking breath. “I ran into that office, my heart pounding. I begged them to tell me what was happening. That’s when I found out Jamie was missing. She had gone out for a milkshake with a friend the previous night and never came home.”

I released a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Beck’s words put me there, over 40 years ago, trying to piece together what had happened to the woman he loved. It took a lot of focus to pull into the motel parking lot in Marina. I turned off Lustra, hand gripping the gear shift. The artificial yellow light of the streetlamp illuminated us both in the car. It aged Beck, turned his skin sallow. Or maybe that was the memories he was reliving that did it.

“I stayed there all that night with Jamie’s parents. I was so caught up in my own fear that I couldn’t help them through theirs. Eventually, early the next morning, they found her. Well… they found her body. She was out in a field, discarded among the artichokes. Left to the insects, alone.” Beck’s voice was soft, tired. Even though we were parked, I held on to my car like it was the only thing keeping me from drifting away.

“As soon as they found her, I knew. I knew who did it.” He grabbed my arm, desperate to tell someone the awful truth he was consumed by, all these years later. “I told the police who it was. It took them a week to find him but eventually, they caught up to my brother. He had run to Stockton, to hide from his crimes. Not from his shame… he had none of that. Just fear of being caught.”

Tears threatened my eyes and I choked back a muffled scream.

“Jealousy. Rage. Possession. They drove him to kill her. If he couldn’t have her, neither would I. It nearly broke me. My own flesh and blood had done this. Did it to Jamie, did it to me, did it to her family and friends.” The streetlamp flickered off and on. Bugs flew desperately towards its light. Outside, the motel was quiet. There were only a few cars there in the middle of a weeknight.

“The trial was shorter back then. There weren’t so many extensions and no one in my family would post bail for Brandon, so he just sat in jail the whole time. He wasn’t the smartest. He didn’t do a good job covering his tracks. All the evidence proved what I knew was true. After he was locked away, I left. Called up that buddy in Oklahoma and drove out there. Drove right through the night, didn’t stop.”

“Beck… you don’t need to tell me this,” I interrupted. I didn’t know where the story would lead. If Beck had anything to incriminate himself, I didn’t want to know it.

“No, I need to tell you. I’ve told you this much. I need to tell you what I did with myself afterwards… need to tell you that I’m not like HIM.”

“Ok,” I said softly. I rested my head against the window, watching the bugs fly into the lamp over and over.

“I went to Oklahoma, and I worked. Any job I could find, it didn’t matter. I worked until my hands bled and exhaustion overtook me. I spent a few years out there. Then I moved to El Paso. I wandered. No place could keep me for long. Every night I dreamed of her until one day I woke up and realized I couldn’t remember what her face looked like, or what she smelled like. That’s when I decided it was time to go home…” Beck looked at me; tears rolled down his cheeks. A broken man sat next to me. But there was also relief in his eyes. 

“Where’s home?” I asked, hesitantly. Beck chuckled quietly.

“Salinas actually. Salinas is the place I ran from so many decades ago.” We sat there together in silence. I don’t know how much time passed, both of us lost in thought. Eventually, I opened my door.

“Come on buddy, let’s get a couple rooms and sleep. I’ll drive you to Salinas in the morning.”

Beck looked old, exhausted, as he got out of Lustra.

The next morning, I woke up early. I threw my backpack together and went next door to wake up Beck. I knocked on the motel door for 10 minutes before giving up. Maybe he was a heavy sleeper. I figured I would toss my bag into the car, grab breakfast, and then try to wake him again. As I approached Lustra, I saw a note on the passenger seat.

“Thank you. I can never repay you for what you did for me.

-Bek”

Below the note was his crumpled and worn 10 dollar bill. I gripped it, looking around me for any sign of the hitchhiker I had picked up one day earlier. But he was gone. If it hadn’t been for the note, I would have thought I had dreamed the whole thing. As it was, I wasn’t sure if he had been real or a ghost.

I started up Lustra and pulled back onto the highway, leaving behind the story of Jamie.