Clay waited anxiously as Mike read the note from Hubcap Willie. His brother almost seemed relieved when he finished it. Mike looked up and said, “Let’s go home, Clay. Let’s just go home.”
“But Mike,” Clay shot back, “that’s not a legal bill of sale. We can show it to the police. They can stop him and we can get the truck back. Let’s hurry!”
Mike was shaking his head. “It’s about to break down anyway. Let Hubcap Willie buy the oil and keep it running. He says he’s a crack mechanic.”
“But—”
“C’mon, Clay, you said we’d swap him the truck for the burro. It’s a perfect joke on us, it’ll make a great story. Anyway, I’d rather go back on the train. I was thinking, we can take a bus down to Route sixty-six and then catch the train at Flagstaff. Don’t you think that would be great, riding up high in that Vista Cruiser with all the windows? Great views …”
“What about Uncle Clay?”
“We’ve got absolutely nothing to go on.”
“What about our jobs? What about Monument Valley? Mike, it’s only the twenty-second of June! We’ve only been gone a couple of weeks!”
“Two of the longest weeks of my life, I’m afraid….”
Here it comes, Clay thought. Sheila Don’t say it, Mike.
“I miss Sheila something awful, Clay.”
He knew Mike was looking at him, but Clay kept his eyes on the ground. “I thought you broke up with her.”
“You know I’ve been talking to her. We talked again last night, a long time.”
Clay hesitated. “Are you going to get married?”
Mike laughed. “Not anytime soon, I hope. We both want to go to college first. Look, I just need to get home and get back to normal, get my job back at the station or somewhere else, and start seeing her again.”
He couldn’t look at his brother. Probably Mike would get married a lot sooner than he said. It was too awful to think about. The next thing you knew, his brother would have kids and Mike would be somebody else and not very much his brother. It was happening right this moment—his brother was changing and leaving and it had always been the two of them.
Mike took him by the shoulders and said with a little laugh, “It’s going to happen to you someday too, mark my words. Some Marilyn will come along—”
Clay laughed, but he was fighting to keep his eyes dry.
“Tell you what, Clay. Let’s stay around here for a few days at least, so you can see Monument Valley and get your fill of busing dishes.”
But he didn’t get his fill of busing dishes. How could you, with those scenes from the movies all around you as you worked? Indians all lined up on a ridge with their battle lances, a cavalry column marching through Monument Valley, and all the while the eyes of John Wayne following you around the room …
Outdoors on your own time, how could you ever get your fill of Monument Valley itself or get tired of living right under those sheer red walls hundreds and hundreds of feet high? He liked everything about the place: the red soil, the twisted junipers, the prickly pear cactus, hawks sailing, ravens thrashing the air with their ragged wings…. He liked visiting that burro down under the cottonwood, and he liked the way Pal would snort and shake her head with her ears flapping. The ears were always going, like radar dishes swiveling around.
He bought a bale of hay for the burro, carried buckets of clean water. He talked to her and scratched her ears and thought about how strange and a little wonderful it was if even for a few days to have a burro just like his uncle had a burro.
Clay went through the gear Hubcap Willie had left behind. Mike had no interest in it, but Clay liked it because it spoke of the faraway places. Tins with traces of oats, flour, cornmeal, and rice, a couple of two-quart canteens, pots and pans and utensils, a saddle blanket, pack boxes, a tarp, even a harmonica with a fancy engraving of a steam train under the words “The Midnight Flyer.”
He liked to wander among the formations early when it was cool and when the light felt rare and golden. On his third morning walk, he could sense that he was running out of time. Mike was itching to go home.
Clay was walking down a sand dune when it came to him, the inspiration, fully formed and perfect. No reason to go home just because Mike is…. He even tried it aloud. “No reason to go home just because Mike is!”
When he got to the bottom of the dune, he looked back up at it and at the sheer red cliffs behind. A smile came to his face. It had to be the exact spot from the scene in The Searchers! He could almost see Natalie Wood running down the dune toward him with the cruel Comanche named Scar in pursuit. But the thought of taking on Scar didn’t seem as appealing as pulling Marilyn Monroe out of the river.
He walked on, deep in thought. His inspiration grew into an idea and then a plan as he pictured being on his own, out here in this country he’d always dreamed about. There’d be nothing much for him at home, nothing new and different certainly. Mike would be with Sheila all the time anyway. He’d be alone in the house all summer, with Mom gone and all. In the fall Mike would be off to college. It was time he started thinking for himself and finding his own way.
“What do you say we head back tomorrow,” Mike said one evening as soon as he got back from the gas station.
Clay had been preparing himself for this moment. Not like he was telling and not like he was asking either, Clay answered, “I’ve been thinking I’ve got the best summer job I could ever ask for. It’s like a summer job and scout camp combined. I don’t want to leave, Mike.”
Mike was awfully surprised at first. “You mean, just leave you behind all by yourself?”
“That’s right,” Clay answered. “I’ll be okay. I’ll do fine.”
“I’m supposed to be looking out for you,” Mike said. “What would Mom think? I don’t know, Clay….”
“Mom would let me,” Clay answered, trying his best to sound convincing. “I’m going to be fifteen in December. And besides, I’m not out here alone. The people at the trading post will keep an eye on me.”
They talked into the night. Clay could see the tide was turning for him. Mike was beginning to picture it!
Finally Mike said, “I think you’re right. I think there’s at least a good chance Mom would go along with this, if she could see what a good setup you have here, how nice these people are. It’s a great opportunity for you, and she’s always been a soft touch where you’re concerned.”
That cinched it! “Probably you’ll get homesick after a week or two anyway,” Mike added. “Then you can take the bus down to the train, same as I’m doing.”
In the morning, shaking hands with his brother, Clay knew this was the biggest day of his life. He couldn’t keep a few tears out of his eyes. “I know this means a lot to you, Clay,” Mike was saying. “I think it’s going to be a good experience for you to be on your own. But seriously, take care of yourself. Don’t make me regret this.”
“I won’t,” Clay said. “Thanks, Mike. Thanks again.”
“Oh yeah, and when you leave, be sure to trade the burro and the gear for as much cash as you can get.”
Then his brother was getting on the bus, waving, and then sitting by the window waving as the bus pulled out. Clay was waving too and fighting back tears. He swallowed hard and watched the bus until it gradually merged with the desert’s horizon and finally blinked out. His brother was gone.
Those first few days he wasn’t so sure he could make it without Mike, or if he wanted to. At home, days could go by with his brother hardly even being around, but that was different. In the truck they’d been thick as thieves, and now there were thousands of miles between them and not even a trace left behind to show they’d even been on the road together.
He’d never been this far away from home, that was for sure. As he calculated that Mike must be nearing Seattle he could picture himself hopping on a bus and heading back too. Maybe Mike was right, that’s what he’d do. And Guatemala seemed even farther away than it had before. Maybe he would head back home. Even if he wouldn’t see much of Mike, it would be good to have him close by.
But Clay held on into the fourth day and the fifth and the sixth. He kept badgering himself to keep believing he could stay on here by himself. Maybe it was stubbornness that kept him going. He didn’t want his brother to think he couldn’t make it on his own.
When he felt lonely he thought of Uncle Clay leaving home at fourteen. Uncle Clay must have felt lonely too. Even when Uncle Clay got older he still felt lonely—you could see it in his eyes when he’d come to visit now and again. But you could see as well in his grin and in the way those eyes would shine as he spoke of the mountains and the deserts, that he knew life was lived best as an adventure, and he wouldn’t trade his wandering, lonely way of life for any other.
Even in the clatter and commotion of mealtimes, with thirty or forty tourists all chattering at once, he’d keep glancing at the photos on the walls and lose himself in those big empty places. I still think Uncle Clay is out there, he kept telling himself. He’s not in Canada. He’s out there.
Right on Mr. Whitmore’s cash register in the trading post, he posted the photograph of his uncle with the notice underneath: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? IF SO, CONTACT CLAY IN THE DINING ROOM.
A few tourists just wanted to know who the man with the burro was and all, but nobody had seen him.
With each day that he stayed Clay felt himself growing stronger. Maybe he wouldn’t hop on that bus anytime soon. Maybe he could stay the whole summer as he’d thought. Maybe he would, and maybe he should.
He’d always been a hiker. When his days off came he took Pal out on long hikes through Monument Valley. No pack, just the halter and lead rope. He discovered that Pal didn’t take kindly to being led; she’d plant her front feet and make you tow her like a ship on dry land. But if you walked alongside she liked it just fine. She wants to feel like we’re in this together, Clay thought. More of a partner.
Clay wrote letters: to his mother, to Mike, to Marilyn. Marilyn was becoming more important to him all the time.
He found he could tell her things the way he wouldn’t tell them to anyone else. He could let her know his heart, his innermost feelings. Well, not everything, but the way he felt about the desert, the red cliffs, the sunsets. And he was beginning to explain how he felt about her too. “Write me care of Goulding’s Trading Post,” he wrote. “I’m really looking forward to hearing from you and finding out what you thought of that shark’s tooth. I’ve been thinking maybe a jeweler could drill a tiny hole in it and hang it on a delicate gold chain. Then you could wear it around your neck.”
Along about the ninth of July, he got a new offer from Mrs. Whitmore. Would he like to go over and help out at the other, smaller trading post at Oljeto twelve miles to the west, where they needed him even more? For a week at least and maybe longer if he liked it? “It’s around the back side of the mesa,” she explained. “A few tourists wander through now and then, but it’s the real thing, strictly trading with the Navajos. You’ll be doing some of everything as opposed to just working in the dining hall here. You could learn a lot from old Weston, maybe even ride the horses.”
Clay thought about it. He thought hard. It was fun being around the tourists and all the activity, but working at a remote trading post, that would be something to tell Mike about and Marilyn too. “Can I take my burro?” he asked Mrs. Whitmore.
“I don’t see why not.”
She found him an old Navajo man to teach him how to pack Pal right. Clay couldn’t tell if Charlie Dilatsi didn’t speak English or just didn’t talk, but he watched closely as Charlie cinched Pal’s forward and back belly cinches and adjusted the neck strap and the tail strap. When the pack boxes were packed—“panniers,” Hubcap Willie had called them—the Navajo tarped Pal’s load and secured it with a diamond hitch, which Clay more or less remembered from scouts.
When he was all ready he mailed a postcard to Mike, telling him he’d be over at the other trading post where there was no phone and not to worry. He could still send mail. Clay bought himself a new pair of jeans, a long-sleeved plaid shirt, and a black Stetson that he immediately creased down the middle. He looked over the cowboy boots but Mr. Whitmore said he’d probably be more comfortable in his own broken-in hiking boots. “One more thing,” Clay said, and picked himself out a fancy silk neckerchief, a blue one.
“Well, you sure enough favor him,” Mr. Whitmore said, with a nod to indicate the photo on the cash register.
Clay peeled loose his uncle’s photograph and stuck it in his pocket. “I surely hope to,” he said. He paid his money and walked out onto the porch. He felt like a new man.
All that was left to do was fill his canteens and tie his backpack to Pal’s load. When he’d done that he clucked, “C’mon, Pal,” and steered down the dirt road that skirts the cliffs of the big island in the sky that lay between Goulding’s and Oljeto. Clay looked back, hoping there was someone to wave to. Charlie Dilatsi gave him a tiny wave, and now he could see Mrs. Whitmore up there by the dining hall waving vigorously under her blue bandanna.
It seemed as if Pal and he had been together for years. The burro seemed content to take up once more the job she was born for, and Clay spent the day feeling exactly like his uncle and picturing Uncle Clay approaching from the distance, leading his burro. He wouldn’t say anything; he wouldn’t shout, “It’s me, Uncle Clay!” He’d let the realization come slowly into his uncle’s eyes and watch that trademark grin light up his uncle’s face.
A man and his wife who’d wandered away from Goulding’s slowed their sedan, then stopped and asked if they could take his picture. “Don’t mind a bit,” he said cordially, and when they took his picture he realized it was a Polaroid camera they were using. “Could I have one of those pictures?” he asked on the spur of the moment. For Marilyn! was his next thought. This is going to be perfect!
The couple was so pleased to oblige they stopped the car and got out, and as the man tore back the cover sheet Clay was able to see himself and the burro materializing right before his eyes. Just as they took the second picture, he wished he’d been tipping his hat. That would have made it even more perfect. He knew what he’d write for Marilyn on the border at the bottom of the picture: “The Lonesome Trail.”
Crumbling stone buildings gave Oljeto Trading Post the appearance of a ruin. Clay liked how it was tucked against the cliffs and commanded a view out to the west as big as the country. You looked out across the broad flats of Oljeto Wash to buttes and high mesas with open sky between them, and towering over everything, the dark sloping mass of a mountain rising high and alone into the sky like a breaching whale.
Two sheep were browsing among hulks of old cars and trucks, rusted-out cookstoves and heaps of tires. Chickens were pecking along the margin of a little garden fenced with wire, poles, and rusted bedsprings. A few of them were starting into the open gravel in front of the trading post. The leaders paused as if for cover at the base of an old-fashioned gas pump, the kind with the skinny glass top Clay liked because you could actually see the gasoline and the bright-colored balls that swirled around and around with the gas moving through.
Clay paused before walking up closer and looked back across Oljeto Wash once again. At the foot of the mesa, surely, that was one of the Navajos’ homes called hogans. From this distance it looked simply like a mound of red earth.
“If this place isn’t the real thing,” Clay said to himself, “then the real thing doesn’t exist. No billboards and baby rattlers out here, Mike.”
He heard a sudden sound something like a burst of air through a tire valve, and just as quickly those chickens ran flapping and squawking back toward the garden. Clay looked up from one especially indignant hen with a stain of brown juice on her feathers, and saw for the first time an old man rocking back and forth behind the shade line on the porch.