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Show RIVER highway near Iron Point. In the morning I got a ride with a cowboy named Buck who was starting a horse ranch in the Ruby Valley. He offered me a job, which was tempting, but I was lovesick for Rosie. Buck let me off near some highway construction. The road narrowed to a single lane where the tourists and the diesels howled by like so many tornadoes. I stood for several hours beside the road in the Ruby Valley. It was only a few hours' ride to Salt Lake where I had kin, but it was starting to look like I might never make it. Finally, a beige Corvair blazed by, stopped about a mile down the road and came back and picked me up. There were three guys in the car and they gave Thor and me the passenger's seat in the front. As I climbed in I could tell that these guys were weird, even by my standards. The driver got the car back up to a cruising speed of about one hundred miles per hour and I began to appreciate exactly how weird they were. The driver, Sam, was in his early twenties, a Texan, and he'd just gotten booted out of the Navy for being homosexual. He wasn't happy about it and he took all his aggression out on the accelerator. Except for his odd companions, I'd never have assumed that he was gay. The two guys in the back were a different matter. Boris, short and dark, radiated depravity. Leslie, his companion, was a real charmer. Overweight and underage, his face was covered with blotched makeup and eyeliner. The three of them had bad experiences in San Francisco and they were going to Denver to sponge off Leslie's grandma. Boris and Sam didn't say much, but Leslie kept up a constant patter, talking mostly about his career as a female impersonator. He'd hoped to make a big splash with an act involving a boa constrictor, but the snake had died of constipation. "I didn't know snakes got constipated," I said. -130- |