Joe wakes up fresh as a daisy, he says. He leans out the door of the boxcar and takes a sniff and goes, “Wyoming! I can smell Wyoming just around the bend! Better than perfume! Smells like dry dirt and tumbleweeds!”

He says he’s been through this way before but he never gets tired of it. “I love this wide open country,” he says. “I bet you can see a hundred miles at least. See that mountain over there, against the dark patch of sky? Seems so close you could hit it with a rock, don’t it? Just you try! You could walk all day for a week and still you wouldn’t be close. What it is about the West, the real West, the scale is different. The sky is higher up and wider open and that makes everything bigger. Makes a man look to himself because there’s nobody else can see him! Yessir!”

So we roll on into Wyoming and Joe says the train is probably making sixty miles an hour. Just humming along, running straight into the horizon, and nothing around but a few scrubby pine trees and these far-off mountains that look like somebody painted them against the sky.

Every now and then the train stops, and Joe always knows where we are and why we stopped, and if we should change boxcars. “They got to fuel up those diesel engines,” he’ll say. Or, “They’re pickin’ up a ten-car hitch out of Casper.”

Pretty much every time we stop, Joe disappears for a little while and then comes back with some kind of food. He never says exactly where he finds it, but when you’re hungry and riding the rails you don’t ask too many questions.

He’ll heave up this big sack of oranges and go, “Nobody’ll miss these little beauties. Got to get our vitamins!”

Maybe he’ll bring back a box of stale crackers and a big restaurant tin of honey and give it over to Worm and say, “Nothin’ wrong with these crackers a little honey won’t fix!”

Thanks to our skinny friend, we never get so hungry we can’t stand it. Not that the Worm eats much, but Joe bets I could win one of those flapjack-eating contests where a bunch of lumberjacks eat until they bust. “It ain’t just a hollow leg with you,” he says, “it’s a hollow everything. Which means you’re still growing! Pardon me, son, but if you get any bigger you’re gonna need your own time zone!”

For some reason I don’t mind it when Joe kids me about being big. Maybe because he’s so small and scrawny. Maybe because he doesn’t have much of anything, but he always shares it without making you feel like he’s doing you a favor. And he never asks what me and Worm are doing on our own, or tries to give us a bunch of advice about what we should do and why.

Most important, any time Worm looks a little sad or unhappy, Joe is right there working to cheer her up. “Look over there,” he says, getting her attention. “No, farther out. You see that thing moving up and down? Looks like a big tipped-over swing set? That’s an oil pump. That’s right, they’re raising oil out of a deep well. They’ll put a pump like that wherever they find oil. Once I seen one right in a churchyard! Talk about an answer to your prayers!”

Worm stares out at the horizon. “They look like giant birds pecking at the dirt,” she says.

When Joe hears that, he doesn’t make fun of her, he just nods to himself and goes, “I never thought of it that way. Giant birds, huh?”

We’re heading out through the wide-open spaces for hours and hours. Pretty soon we’ll cross over into Montana, Joe says, where the last of the cowboys live, and the mountains reach all the way to the moon, and that’s where we change trains to Chivalry.

Joe says we’re on the right track, yessir, and it feels good.

The way night happens out West, the sun kind of disappears all at once and suddenly the stars are shining and the air feels thin and cool. Worm has got herself real comfortable on this pile of hay Joe fluffed up, reading with her miner’s light, and before long her chin starts to droop and then she’s fast asleep. I shut off the light to save the battery and Joe brings out this old wool blanket and covers her.

Me and Joe are both shivering a little, but it feels good watching Worm sleep so calm and peaceful under that warm blanket.

“I guess you know she’s pretty special,” Joe says.

I don’t say anything because I hate gooey talk like that, but it makes me think about how sometimes you meet someone who really messes up your life but you’d rather have a messed-up life than not know them.

Anyhow, everything will be okay if we can just find her father. And because we got lucky and bumped into Joe, now we’re headed in the right direction.

I never do fall asleep. There’s something wide-awake inside my head that makes me think of Grim and Gram and how much I miss them, and how rotten it was for me to run off without telling them why, or even saying good-bye. I keep thinking how much they’ve done for me and how I never did anything much for them, except a couple of lame presents at Christmas or whatever.

When the sun finally comes up, I’m still thinking about home, and how there’s no place I’d rather be but hanging out in the down under and reading my comic books for the umpteenth time.

So I’m already feeling pretty low down and sorry for myself when Joe tells me the bad news.

“We’re almost there,” he says, out of the blue.

I go, “Huh?”

“You kids want to get to Chivalry, right? Well, I got you on the right train. All you gotta do is ride it to the end and you’ll be there.”

“But what about you?” I ask. “You’re coming, too, right?”

Joe shakes his head. “I got business elsewhere,” he says. “I got to keep moving, I can’t stay still.”

Which shows you what a doughnut brain I can be, because I’d been thinking somehow we’d stay on the train forever and just keep riding through the wide-open spaces, and Joe would always be there to tell us where we were, and what was going to happen next.

The train starts slowing down, and gets so slow you could walk beside it.

“There’s apples and that tin of American cheese,” Joe says, getting ready to go. “I left a big can of beans, too.”

“What about your blanket?” I say, looking at where Worm is still curled up and sound asleep.

“Better keep it,” he says. Before he hops down from the boxcar he says, “Here’s the deal. In about a hundred miles this train dead-ends in Chivalry. Hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Then he slips over the side and he’s gone. The last thing I hear is his voice sounding far away already.

“Yessir!” he calls out. “Don’t forget them beans! They got vitamins!”