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synopsis for

The Road Princess & Eternity

a short novel by Clyde Collins alias Rawclyde!

(for submission to publishers)

Ruthie Root Beer, the best go‑go dancer in America, hitchhikes across the blazing deserts of 1973 with nothing but a pirate chest of outfits and a belly the sun has claimed as its own. Sleep‑deprived and wandering the Sonoran highways, she dreams of an older brother who died before she was born — a ghost who appears only on a long dirt road she has never walked in waking life.

A fortune teller named Madam Time picks her up and reads Ruthie’s future from the smooth hill and dale of her exposed stomach. The prophecy is simple and terrifying: Ruthie is going to heaven. Hours later, a violent encounter with two long‑hairs in a van ends with a shotgun blast that throws her into the dust — a symbolic death that sends her stumbling onto the very dirt road from her childhood visions.

Stumbling along, suffering a full-fledged nervous breakdown, Ruthie is greeted by El Vaquero spurring by on a mule of mist, and then a dusty outlaw who calls himself Eternity shows up. He is a bank robber on the run, a liar, a man trying to disappear — but to Ruthie, in her visionary state, he seems like a spirit sent to guide her. They travel together to Camp Verde, where Ruthie, in a shabby motel room, literally goes to heaven. When she describes the experience to Eternity in the town’s only restaurant, she levitates before his eyes.

Moments later, Ruthie calls home and learns her father is dying in Kansas. Eternity tries to slip away, but Ruthie tracks him down and pries out his real name: Slim Chance. From that moment on, Slim becomes her unwilling companion — her servant, her shadow, her “slave of love” — bound not by force, but by the miracle he witnessed.

Together they set out toward Kansas, hitching rides through the red‑rock country of Arizona. In the epilogue, Ruthie stands once more on the roadside — the Road Princess of America — her belly glowing like a choir of miracles as she and Slim Chance climb into the back of a pickup full of hitchhikers. As the truck careens down old Route 66, Slim falls asleep with his lips pressed to the warm valley above her jeans, and Ruthie gazes at a blood‑red sky where El Vaquero rides hard.

The Road Princess & Eternity is a mystical American odyssey — part road novel, part spiritual vision, part outlaw romance — told with humor, danger, tenderness, and a mythic pulse that never lets go.

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