Is this going to be the ritual every morning? Me getting up early and sitting around waiting while Hunter spends an extra couple hours filling the tent with his rancid breaths? We could be fifty miles from here by now, fifty miles away from crazy Chesapeake and Mountain, fifty miles closer to San Francisco, but I have to wait out his drunken hibernation. I wonder if he dreams during these sleeps. Or does the alcohol turn everything off? Maybe that’s the solution; maybe Hunter is on to something—maybe alcohol is the magic potion for keeping ghosts away. For three nights in a row, I haven’t dreamed; for three nights, I’ve slept beside Hunter. It’s like something about him protects me from my own brain. I hate to give him that credit, but I don’t know what else it could be. I hear rustling. Like a repeat of yesterday, Hunter stumbles out of the tent and immediately pukes. Is this how he starts every day? I don’t even want to think about the state of his torn-up stomach, his poisoned liver, his eroded esophagus.
