It's called The Hitchhiker's Tale.
It was just my luck that my car broke down on a deserted
rural road in the middle of the night. Moreover, my cell phone was absolutely
drained, preventing me from calling a cab. Fortunately it was a warm night, but
that didn’t change the fact that I was squarely in between Danville, where my
plane had landed, and Littlestown, where the mythology conference was. I was to
present a paper on the symbolism behind Loki’s imprisonment the next morning,
and I could not be late.
That
was what prompted me to stick my thumb out when the headlights snaked down the
road ten minutes later. Inadvisable, I know, but I was desperate. It was almost
thirty miles to Littlestown.
The
headlights turned out not to belong to a car, but a pickup truck. It pulled
over and the driver, a ginger-haired boy in maybe his late teens or early
twenties, leaned out of the window. “Hey, you want a ride?” he called amiably.
“Thanks.”
I got into the front seat, settling my briefcase under my knees. The car was, I
had noticed, badly dented and scraped in several places.
“Where
are you headed?” asked the boy, pulling back onto the road and glancing at me
curiously. I must have been quite an atypical hitchhiker: a thin man with
academic glasses and a briefcase, wandering the empty roads at midnight.
“Littlestown,”
I told him. “I’m on my way to an academic conference on mythology. I specialize
in the Prose Edda, you know.”
“Oh
yeah? I haven’t heard of that,” said the boy, a smile tugging on the corner of
his mouth. “I don’t get out much, though.”
“What
about you?” I asked. “What brings you to this stretch of road so late at
night?”
“Me?”
He shrugged. “I just like driving.”
A
thought struck me and I chuckled. “This is like something out of an urban
legend. When I get to Littlestown and describe you, someone will tell me that
you died ten years ago and still keep driving around picking up hitchhikers.”
“Twenty-three,
actually,” said the boy, turning the wheel slightly as the road curved.
I
frowned. “Twenty-three what?”
“It
was twenty-three years ago,” he explained, “not ten.” He glanced at me,
deadpan.
I
laughed and after a moment his mouth quirked upwards and he laughed with me.
“Nah, I kid,” he said, checking the rearview mirror. “So tell me—what do you do
for fun?”
The
drive took less than half an hour, and the boy, who introduced himself as Asa
Baker, let me out beside the hotel. I walked into the lobby and called in my
reservation, planning to rescue my car the next day (or rather, that
afternoon—it was one-forty-five a.m. when I got to the hotel).
After
I presented my paper, I got a ride from one of my colleagues, a woman who
taught creative writing at Littlestown University and had presented a paper on
story tropes. When I told her where my car was, she stared at me in confusion
and said, “How on earth did you get all the way here in time for the
conference?”
I
told her that a young man called Asa Baker had picked me up and brought me to
the hotel, and she looked at me with half-lowered eyelids.
“My
students put you up to this, didn’t they,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“What
do you mean?”
“Asa
Baker. He’s one of the more popular urban legends around here. He was a
nineteen-year-old farm worker who died in a freak road accident
twenty-something years ago. People say he drives around in his pickup truck and
offers hitchhikers rides. My students are always joking about meeting him on a
dark road in the middle of the night.”
I
stared at her. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So how’d you really get here?”
“But…”
I shook my head. “My God, he wasn’t joking. He actually wasn’t joking.”
“Who
wasn’t joking?”
“Asa
Baker. It really was twenty-three years!”
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