He walked onto the road at eleven A.M., on the first of April. He had three cans of soup, an extra pair of jeans, a tattered copy of The Old Man and the Sea and the Swiss Army knife his grandfather had given him on his twelfth birthday. He’d learned how to make a bow from the limb of a chicken tree, that day, but he and his brother could never perfect a single arrow. They would always careen off target by yards, no matter what kind of wood they’d used, now how they labored to straighten its shaft. This escapade made him doubt very much the stories he’d loved as a child, of hordes of Indian braves raining arrows upon the advancing cavalry.

He planned on walking, but planned on no particular destination. He remembered a scene from a movie he’d seen years ago, but with no whiskey pint close at hand, he snatched an empty Pepsi bottle from the side of the road, and spun it on that thin yellow line that marked the lanes, like a little girl’s sleepover game.

South is where it pointed. South, he thought. South sounds nice. As he took the first step towards the closest thing to a destination he’d had in years, he smiled and tucked his thumbs under the straps of his backpack. He thought about the photos he’d seen of the home in Key West where Ernest Hemingway lived with his army of six-toed cats. He thought about the plantation houses that Walker Percy wrote of, he thought of Camino Real and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Hemingway stuck with him, however. The sour-faced, bearded man that had seen war and death and true human putridity, and wrote words of beauty and faith and hope, even if they were thickly veiled with the dank of human malfeasance. Drinking Cuba Libras and fishing for marlin, much the old man himself, both in love and desperately afraid of the sea from which he’d made his life.

He never thought of himself as a hitchhiker, and never thought he’d bring himself to it, but as the Jeep Wrangler approached, he felt his thumb extending outward and a smile crossing his face as it slowed and stopped. The girl driving was no more than twenty-three, pretty and sandy-blonde. She asked if he needed a ride and giggled at the obviousness of the answer. He opened the canvas passenger door with the wrinkled plastic window, and threw his backpack in the rear seat as he settled into the dusty bucket seat. She yanked the Jeep into first gear and gunned the engine with a jolt, sending them careening down the warm country lane.

The marvelous thing is that’s it’s painless. The first words of The Snows of Kilimanjaro echoed in his head as he heard her speak. She never took her eyes off the road, she rather gazed at it intensely as she described her journey. She had asked his name, but never waited for the answer. She simply went off on a tear about her husband, her best friend, and the duffel bag next to his that comprised all of her worldly possessions. She spoke of sex and deceit, the way Hemingway would have, as if they were inseparable; two sides of a well-worn coin. She apologized and asked where he was going. As far as you’ll take me, he said. She looked in his eyes for the first time and smiled.