The Hitchhiker Knew The Name Of The Dog That Died In 1998

I picked him up because it was starting to rain and because the road out of the park is forty miles of nothing.

He was maybe fifty. Wet. Ordinary. He put a small pack between his boots and said thank you and then said nothing for a long time, which I appreciated.

At about mile twenty he asked if I had grown up around there. I said no. He said, "You did, though," and then he laughed, in a friendly way, like a man correcting himself.

At about mile forty he said, "Beau was a good dog."

I had not said anything about a dog.

Beau died in 1998. I was eleven. He was hit by a car outside our house in a town four hundred miles from where we were driving, and I have not said his name out loud in twenty years, because I am a coward about it.

I did not answer. I remember my hands going stupid on the wheel.

At mile sixty he said, "This is me," and there was nothing there — no house, no track, a gate into a field — and he got out, and he leaned back down into the car, and he used my childhood nickname. Not my name. The nickname my mother used, that my mother has not used since she got ill, that I have never told a soul.

He said, "Thanks for the lift, [nickname]. Slow down at the bridge."

And he shut the door.

There is a bridge four miles further on. It is a single-lane bridge with a bad camber and I have taken it a hundred times.

I slowed down. There was a deer standing in the middle of it.

I have gone back and forth on this for six years. Here is where I have landed: I do not believe he was a ghost, because he was wet, and because he smelled of tobacco, and because the seat was damp after he left, and ghosts do not leave a wet seat.

I believe something used a man to tell me to slow down.

That is a worse thought, and it is the one I have.