We drove out of Hot Springs straight into the afternoon sun. “Sunset Boulevard—Here! We! Come!” The Catfish’d slap the steering wheel and laugh, then say it again a few miles down the road. Mother glanced over her shoulder at the sleeping pig and smiled at me. After a while we rode in peaceful silence. Then Mother’s head leaned to one side and she slept. She needed her sleep, I knew. It had been a long day for both of us, but I didn’t like her going to sleep and leaving me alone with the Catfish.
Right on cue, at her first soft snore, the Catfish cut his eyes up in the rearview mirror. Those eyes, those floating eyes, gave me the willies. “What you going to call that pig?” he said.
I looked down at the pig’s upturned snout, little round nostrils like hole punches.
“Bunny,” I said. That was the name of my best friend back home, and I missed her so much it hurt my teeth, especially since she would be looking for me on my birthday. I worried who would tell her what had become of me.
“Bunny!” Catfish complained. “That’s a stupid name for a boy pig—a famous car-driving pig! Call him Dale Earnhardt.”
I held firm. “He’s a Bunny,” I said, thinking, So what if it’s a girl-boy name. I could be a Ruby or a Clyde whenever I wanted. If nothing else, I believed a pig named Bunny would keep me from being homesick. Suddenly my stomach filled with rocks. I wanted to go home. I’d even be glad to see Mr. Upchuck, the eyeless wonder.
The Catfish muttered and turned on the radio, changed stations a hundred times, then switched it off. A piece of sunlight cut across my mother’s hair.
“Carl,” I said. I never called him Catfish to his face.
“Yu-huh?” He raised his eyes into the rearview mirror again.
“When are we going back home?”
“Not till I’ve got something to show for it.”
“There’s nothing for us in Hollywood.”
“Well, aren’t you the smarty-pants Queen of the World?”
“I just want to be home and go to my own school. I’m missing the end-of-school party.”
“School shmool. Who needs school? I never learned nuthin’ in school.”
Well, that was obvious, but I didn’t say so. I folded the piglet’s ear between my fingers.
We whizzed past a tall skinny guy standing on the side of the road. His curly hair pyramided out to his shoulders. He had a guitar hung over one shoulder and held a hand-painted sign saying NEW MEXICO.
“What’s that guy doing?” I asked.
“That is a hitchhiker. He wants somebody to give him a ride where he’s going.”
“A stranger’s going to pick him up?”
“What do you think, Ruby Clyde? You think he knows everybody driving along this road?”
“But people do that? Stop and pick him up and drive him where he’s going?”
“Sure, people hitchhike all the time, but they don’t always take you where you are going. They just take you as far as they’re going, then they boot you out and you have to catch another ride.”
That was good news: I could hitchhike home.
“So put me out, Carl. I’ll hitchhike.” I’d get out on the road like that New Mexico person, only my sign would say HOME.
“I should do that.” He laughed. “I should do that while your mother is still asleep.”
“Okay,” I lifted my chin. “Just pull over, anywhere along the shoulder is fine.”
“You can’t do that, Ruby Clyde. Where would you live? What would you eat?”
“Somewhere, something,” I said.
“How about money, where you going to get that?”
“Same place everybody else does—I’ll get a job.”
“A job! That’s a laugh. You think jobs are just out there waiting to be had?”
“No, it’s not a laugh. I could be a nurse.” I straightened Bunny’s tail, then let it curl around my finger.
“A nurse! Whoo-hoo mercy!”
“I could too be a nurse, everybody says so. I help out all the time in the school infirmary.”
“You’re not at the school infirmary anymore.”
I don’t know why I wasted my breath on the Catfish. He was too stupid to be a nurse, but I wasn’t. Sometimes he just went out of his way to make me feel bad about myself.
He kept on, saying things he wouldn’t say if Mother were awake. “Do you know what happens to children without adults? Do you? If they’re not killed and eaten by maniacs, the police pick them up and put them in an orphanage.”
“What!”
“Yes, an orphanage.”
“What if I don’t want to go to an orphanage?”
“Too bad. You don’t get a vote. They lock you in an orphanage until you’re eighteen years old. Haven’t you ever read Oliver Copperfield? He was an orphan who grew up to be a magician, but not before he got taught a lot of tricks by this cool dude, Fagin.”
“That’s stupid,” I said, and quit talking. He got the title wrong, and the story. I’d read Oliver Twist at school. Okay, it was only the short version; it’s called abridged when they make a long story short, like chopping out parts and building a bridge so you still get the main story. He was right about Oliver being an orphan. I tried not to believe the Catfish, about me being put in an orphanage, but I couldn’t help it, the damage was done. Holy moly. I was going to be thinking about getting caught and being put in an orphanage for the rest of my life. Stupid Catfish. Why did he put that in my brain? Talk about the unearned willies.
Catfish drove up on the tail of a big hauling truck. That truck was chock-full of cows, just like children in an orphanage. I could see bony tails swatting at their hind legs. Big wobbly eyes stared at me through the slats. Ears rotated on their heads. Poor orphan cows smashed into the dark truck.
When we got past the cow truck, we sped up.
There was nothing to do but block the Catfish out of my mind, all his talk about orphanages—I was stuck in the car, but my brain could go anywhere.
I pulled out my workbooks. Some hangman puzzles fell out; my friend Bunny and I used to play those. I had stumped her with P_IG_T. The word was plight. She guessed six times—got a head, body, arm, arm, leg, and leg and then hung. Plight was a good word; people forget about the G-H-T. I flipped the pages, visiting words like old friends. Porcine, piggish, hoggish. (Just a vocabulary word last year, now I was a Pig Owner, myself.) Perturb, irksome—two of my favorite words. When my mean grandmother would use them to describe me I’d shout out “Wordly Wizard” like the teacher taught us to do when we heard one of our words out in the world. That always confused my grandmother just before it made her mad. She liked everything to be orderly and biblical—her version only. She’s the reason I have the whole book memorized, practically, at least the parts she liked, with the definitions she liked. Once I read the real definition of faith to her: the firm belief in something for which there is no tangible proof. “Blasphemy,” she cried. “What are you doing reading books by wizards?”
The wind was whistling all around the car. Along comes this monster pickup truck, it pulled up alongside us, and I saw that New Mexico hitchhiker sitting in the flatbed holding his hair like it might blow away. I pressed up against my window and waved; he waved back. I pulled Bunny up and waved his little hoof and New Mexico laughed. The pickup driver took off like a rocket, blasting past us, like he owned the world. It’s weird all the people you see in this world that you will never see again. All those cars, sidewalks, buildings just full of people and you go right past them, then you never ever see them again. What is the point of so many people everywhere?
As the truck pulled away I wished New Mexico would be my friend and take me home. I didn’t even care if I had to sit outside like that.