HOLT: This is Special Agent Jacob Holt with the FBI, resuming our interview with Ruby Heckler, day two.
HECKLER: Well, I had a good notion to jump in the river and drown last night, but I’m back today. And I guess the FBI really wants to hear my story because they’ve been being nicer to me this morning and gave me a huge stack of pancakes and everything. I like pancakes, and I like people who bring me pancakes, generally. So, I’m giving them another shot, and I’m back talking into this thing.
A couple of them are okay—the cops, that is—if you made me say it. There’s an old-timer named Marshall Walden, or Dick to me, that cracks me up and is always making jokes at Jake, who is the one running the whole circus. Marshall Walden is always calling Jake Junior Agent—making special note of the Junior—and he talks about his soft hands.
What?
Well, he does.
Junior Jake there is asking me to get on with.
All right. All right.
Where were we anyway?
The warehouse in Hoboken. Right.
I could’ve gone for some pancakes when I was sitting there in that warehouse with Geno and Gilbert. They didn’t have anything to eat apart from the soda, and we couldn’t go anywhere to get anything on account of the cops. Geno said he had some money and knew some people, and when we got to Pittsburgh, he’d get us all some good breakfast, which sounded good. So, we sat there, and Geno got to telling stories, and, boy, could that guy tell a story. He’d been everywhere there was in the world and had a whopper of a tale for all of it.
Eventually, after an hour or so, Geno stopped at the end of one of his stories and looked at me. “Okay, Ruby,” he said. “Good for you about all this— but— I don’t know. I think— maybe— Let’s just get you somewhere to someone who can look after you. Okay?”
“You try it!” I said and jumped up, and I meant it. I knew I could out-run the two of them put together, even though I didn’t know right then that Geno was a springy old fella when he needed to be.
“I was worried you would say that,” Geno said. “I was just asking.”
“Aw, hell, Geno,” I said, like that. “You couldn’t catch me even if you tried, you old geezer. And you said you’d get me a witch and all of us breakfast in Pittsburgh, and if you don’t do that then you’re a liar.”
Geno just looked at me with his face scrunched-up and his crooked mouth even more crooked than normal. Then he shook his head and chuckled. “Well then, Ruby,” he said, “I guess it’s time to teach you to jump a grainer.”
I screeched and clapped, and Geno grunted and said he thought the cops would be cleared out by then, and we could catch the morning junker and be into Pittsburgh before dawn. You had to get there before dawn or you were a dummy, he said.
So, we packed up and crawled back out the window under the loading dock.
Outside, Geno checked that the coast was clear then walked up to a tree and peed and said, “Don’t gotta water that one, Ruby,” pointing to the tree. “I got it.” He was funny like that.
Gilbert was peeing, too. So, I found a tree and peed and said, “Don’t gotta water that one, Geno,” and we all laughed.
It was a nice time of morning, that time when it’s still night but it’s starting to feel a little like morning, too, like some of the stars have disappeared, and it’s still really quiet, but the birds and a few other critters are starting to move around, and the sky is more dark-blue than black. It made a good time to pee outside.
We moseyed back out to the street and up the alley, and after Geno went ahead to check for cops and then gave the thumbs up, me and Gilbert made our way across the other street and back into the bushes and the sewed up hole in the fence by the train station.
Geno un-sewed the hole, and we went through. Then he sewed it back up, and we were right back where I started when I got woke up by the giant green monster and his scorpion robot.
“You know,” I said as I stood there looking around at the railyard that had been full of cops just a couple of hours before. “The world is funny sometimes.”
“It sure is, Ruby,” Geno said and looked over at me with his scrunched up face. “Best to just live and not try to figure it too much—in my opinion.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking around. The train cars were black spots in the morning, and the sky, and the rest of the world, was a deep blue with the orange street lights buzzing behind us and red and green traffic lights bobbing around in the distance. A giant billboard across the train station stood above it all with a blonde lady on a balcony with red letters across the top that read, Luxury for a Bargain, Studio Apartments Starting Under One Million.
I studied the sign for a minute, then turned to Geno. “What’s the least you’ve ever worked for?” I asked him.
“What?” he said. “Like, pay?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. Why?”
I shrugged my shoulders “Forget about it,” I said, and turned back to him and clapped my hands. “So, are we jumping a train or what?”
Geno looked at me for a minute like he was figuring. “Jumping a train is all about patience,” he said, pausing for a long time to let that settle in. “Patience and cunning. Jumping a train—and holding it down—is a battle, boy, a battle between you, the noble hobo,” he poked me in the chest, “and the railroad bull—the brakeman—the evil henchman of The Man.”
“Okay,” I said. We were crouched by the fence, staying in the moon shadows, like you do when you’re playing ghost-in-the-graveyard at night.
“Just follow along and do everything I tell you exactly when I tell you without hesitation,” Geno said, being serious. “Understand?”
“Yup,” I said.
“If a bull comes at you—a cop—you run like hell, get somewhere and hide. They can’t get too far from the train while it’s moving. If you can wait them out, you’ll be okay.”
“Great,” I said and smiled.
Geno just scrunched up his face again and looked at me, bobbing his cigarette a few times. “Don’t let those bastards get you,” he said, even more serious. “They won’t be kind.”
Well, hell! I might just be a full blown pirate king by the end of all of this—and all before my thirteenth birthday! I’d be famous! A hero! I couldn’t wait to tell Quinn and the guys about it. I could just picture it! I’d ride on top of a monster truck at the lead of the Fourth of Jul—
“I don’t like that look you got,” Geno said, interrupting my thinking. I guess I was looking off into space.
“When do we start?” I said. All this waiting was driving me crazy.
“This is a bad idea,” Geno said and kept looking at me that way.
Gilbert grunted and looked worried, too.
“What?” I said.
“This isn’t a game.”
I nodded and smiled, and Geno and Gilbert both looked worried.
But eventually Geno just shook his head and stood up to check that the coast was clear. “Let’s go,” he said.
We made our way through the shadows of the train cars lined up on all the different tracks, hopping over the buckles that held them together and making our way across the rows like bandits. At one track, Geno turned and started walking down beside a freight train.
“We’ll be catching out on a junker,” Geno said when we got up to the end of the freight cars. “They carry stuff that ain’t worth as much, so they can go slower. We’ll try to find a grainer if we can.”
“What’s a grainer?” I said.
“A grainer is a grain car. There’s a platform on the back you can ride on without too much trouble. And if there ain’t a grainer, we’ll try for a reefer hole.”
“A reefer hole?” I said. “Like pot?”
Geno chuckled at that. “How do you know about that?” he said.
“Quinn’s dad,” I said.
Geno chuckled and flicked his cigarette. “A reefer is a refrigerator car. There’s a little cubby for the cooling motor that you can tuck into if you can find it. It’s noisy in there, but out of the wind, and warmer.”
I could just imagine it. “This is great!” I said.
“This is a bad idea,” he said again.
I tried not to look too excited—because he didn’t seem to like that—but it was hard.
“Holding down a train ain’t easy, boy,” he went on, like that. “And it’s dangerous. You hear? You shouldn’t be doing it. And you should definitely—” yadda-yadda, on and on, “—and you shouldn’t be so damn happy about it, dammit!” he said at the end.
I guess I was still smiling.
“I thought you said riding the grainer was safe?” I said.
“It’s about the best you can hope for, if you’ve gotta do it,” he said. “A damn sight better than when we used to go on the rods, but holding down a train is dangerous, boy, no matter.”
“What’s going on the rods?” I asked.
He stopped and bobbed his cigarette and waved me over to him. “You see that there,” he said, pointing under a train car. There were two rods running front to back under the car, right by the wheels.
“Those are the rods,” he said. “They didn’t used to have that cover, and at times in the past, if it was all you had, you could lay right down on them there and ride pretty comfortable—if you had the guts. You can’t do it nowadays.”
“Wow,” I said and looked at them.
“You need a whole lot of guts,” he said. “And if you dozed off for one second under there, they’d be pressure-washing those guts off the wheels the next day at the shop—if they even happened to notice your mess down there, that is. They’d probably just think they splashed through some Kentucky mud and forget all about it—and that’d be your guts.”
Well, I liked Geno a lot. He was a good guy, but I wished like hell he didn’t put that rotten picture in my head, thinking about my guts— good or otherwise—being sprayed all over the underside of a freight train running all around the country.
“You sure you want to do this,” he said, eyeing me.
I wouldn’t let him win like that. “I sure am,” I said and smiled as big as I could.
He shook his head. “We’ll find a grainer then,” he said.
Jumping the train wasn’t nearly as exciting as I thought it would be. We waited around a bit, and a passenger train went by, and then the coast was clear and we moved across the main track to the other tracks on the other side, and when we got to the fourth track, Geno said that was the Pittsburgh junker and started moving up the train. Then he found the grainer he was looking for, and it was yellow and metal. And that was it, for that part. We just walked right up and stepped on and sat down. I was sure disappointed.
Turns out, jumping a train is easy. But holding down a train is a whole different animal.
First, we waited there forever for them to “call for power,” as Geno said. It was boring waiting like that, and cold, and uncomfortable. Another passenger train came and went while we were waiting, and I could see people through the windows, all lit up and warm. It was kind of weird to see people there like that, from outside in the dark when you just came from an abandoned warehouse by the railroad tracks and you’re chilly and hungry and hiding from the cops and sitting on a cold metal grate on the outside of a grainer with your mind wandering to the cupboard at Miss Jane’s and sitting on the couch at home on a Saturday morning, maybe in the fall when the woodstove is running hot and Miss Jane is cutting kindling and the leaves are different colors, piled into leaf piles outside, and maybe you spend the whole day after cartoons and pancakes outside in the woods and Quinn’s yard, playing football and cops and robbers, and you have a warm bed to sleep in when the day is over and your belly is full up to your eyeballs.
Then, after you think about that, you think about junker trains, and that cold yellow grainer, and the metal grate, and old Geno and Gilbert, and all the other people sleeping outside that night around the world and all the people inside that passenger train who just went right by you but are living in a different universe. They had probably all eaten big fat breakfasts of pancakes and bacon and maple syrup and orange juice and were as happy as lambs, going off on whatever warm, fun thing they would do that day, all cozy and warm and cleaned up nice, too, like when you actually wanted to take a bath and afterwards you feel like you’re ready to conquer the world and you have a warm blanket ready and a movie about the wilderness to watch that you’ve never seen before, with it dark and rainy outside but toasty warm inside by the fire, and you not having school the next day. That was how they all looked on that train. And we sat there on our grainer, and it was cold and the metal grate could have been made a lot more comfortable for hobos like us.
Eventually, they called for power and the train shook a little, and then it shook again, and then a few minutes later it shook a third time and started to crawl along. It was still chilly, but since we were moving, I felt a little better. Our track rounded in and connected with the main track, and then we were crawling out of the yard on the main line.
“How long is the ride?” I asked Geno.
We were all sitting on the platform against the back of the grainer and Geno was facing me and Gilbert had his head out looking forward around the corner of the car.
“Just shush for a minute,” Geno said, like that.
I didn’t much like being shushed, and I’ve never much liked being shushed, and I would have told him so if Gilbert didn’t suddenly jump back and make a signal with his fingers to Geno.
I forgot all about being shushed once hand signals were involved. Geno hopped up from his seat and went over by Gilbert and stood above him and peeked his head around the side to get a look.
I didn’t know quite what was going on, but it sure beat the hell out of sitting on a cold metal grate thinking about food.
Geno shuffled to the other side of the train—the way he does with his wobbly legs—and poked his head around that corner. Then he darted his head back as fast as a cat and cursed. I don’t think I should say what he said here. Geno was practically a pirate, and was a hobo besides, so he said things—and they were funny—but I can’t say them here. He was a smart guy no matter what kind of talk he used, though. But this time he used some bad talk, and it was all I could do to keep from falling over laughing. I couldn’t wait to tell Quinn some of the curses he used.
He looked plenty serious, so I was trying like the devil to keep from laughing, but it was like someone had fishhooks in my cheeks, pulling my smile up even though I didn’t want to. And the fish hooks pulled and pulled, and I didn’t have a chance against them.
Well, Geno gave me a look that said he didn’t care for my grinning, but he had bigger fish to fry at the time.
“What is it?” I asked, real quiet and whispery. It was just like a movie. I could hardly stop from jumping out of my seat.
Geno just shook his head at me. “I knew this was a bad idea,” he said.
“What?”
“Must be because of you,” he said to me.
I didn’t much like that, blaming it on me. “What is it?”
“Six bulls,” he said. “Three on each side. Four trucks.”
“Cops?” I said.
Geno didn’t say anything, but his look said yes.
I started to giggle again, and then laugh, and I tried like ten devils to stop it, but it wasn’t any use—and, man, did that turn Geno sideways. But, I got it together as best I could and asked Geno what we should do.
“Run,” he said.
And that was it. No kidding. We just jumped down and ran hell-fire out into the woods, like that.
The bulls were in white trucks and were right on top of us when we jumped. They started yelling and the two trucks on our side gunned it for us, and the bulls on the other side hopped right through where we had been sitting and were after us, too.
Well, like I was saying, Geno was a springy old fella when he had to be, and he took off like a whip, and Gilbert, too—who wasn’t too slow himself, but ran kind of like his boots were ten sizes too big, his legs swinging in circles like a cartoon, thundering along like he might fall over at any second, but moving along pretty good.
I started out behind them, but I was past them in no time, and the woods we took off into were just like mini Adirondack woods, and I tore along, and before I even knew it, I put Gilbert, Geno and the whole gang of bulls in my dust and was just ripping along through the little trees and dirt piles of that forest having the time of my life, running from the law!
I was running to beat the stream and jumping over stumps and tires, and I felt like I could go for a hundred miles through an Adirondack forest. But, the thing was, I was in Hoboken right then, as you know, not in an Adirondack forest—and Hoboken was different. Pretty soon, while I was running in what I thought was an Adirondack forest: BAM! I ran full steam into a chain-link fence right there in the middle of the woods. God damn fences!
I never even saw that fence coming in the dark. And boy, did it lay a licking on me. I was on the ground, knocked half-silly and rolling around, moaning, before I even knew what the hell happened. It was just like when Lump Douglas got it in Hackers Loon.
That day we were all riding our bikes, going to Kings Pond on Severance Road, and we were going by the telephone poles, when Lump—who was still called Jared at that point—hit a dirt berm by one of the telephone poles as a jump, trying to show off for the rest of us, and he jumped that thing pretty good and probably would have landed it fine on the other side, except the telephone pole was held up by a cable that goes from the top down to the ground that they called a guy-line.
Lump’s jump started out good, I’ll give him that, but then he just stopped in mid-air. When I saw it, I thought he hit an invisible spaceship or something. It was the most unnatural thing you’ve ever seen. He took that guy-line right in the face and he made a noise like stepping on a frog, and he went swinging by the face, and his bike kept going and so did most of his body, but his face didn’t, which sent his feet skyward, and he did about ten flips before he finally returned to earth and landed in a raspberry patch—which helped break the fall and would have been great for old Lump Douglas if raspberries didn’t have prickers.
As it was, Lump got it pretty good from the prickers, too, and was crying like a baby from all of it, and we all jumped down and set to dragging Lump out of those prickers, taking turns carrying and dragging him by his arms and legs till we dragged him back up to the road and most of the way to Route 9, all of us yelling the whole time, and Lump crying, and a welt growing on the side of his face with blood and prickers and scratches everywhere.
That cable caught Lump right under the ear, and they said afterwards he was lucky it didn’t just pop his head right off or something like that, and they turned it into a reason to lecture us, of course, which we knew they would.
And that’s how Lump Douglas got his name—and also kind of how this whole mess got started, really, since we watched The Curse of the Waller Dog and all those other scary curse movies up at Lump’s house when he was healing up from that. So you could say this whole thing is all Lump’s fault, really, if you wanted to, for trying to show off on his bike in the first place.
Anyway, I knew how Lump felt after I hit that fence. It rang my bell pretty good, and I didn’t have any friends there to drag me out of the prickers or anything else either. There weren’t any prickers, which was good—but I only had myself anyway.
I didn’t even cry. I could have, because when you’re running along in what you think is a forest and you’re doing just fine, and then you run smack-dab into a stupid fence, you’ve got a right to cry if you want to.
But I didn’t cry. I just sat there for a while. I couldn’t hear the bulls or Geno or Gilbert anymore, but I could still hear the train picking up speed. I never found out if they made it.
As for me, to tell you the truth, right then, by that fence, I just wanted to be home in my bed hearing Miss Jane carrying on outside my door, doing her tidying and looking at her picture albums and her gardening things. I wanted to be home.
Miss Jane gives me an almighty hard time, as you know, always making me do things that she says are for my own good, but are never fort-building or axe-throwing, or anything else fun. But as I was sitting there by the fence with my bell rung, I started missing Miss Jane pretty good. And then, I started thinking about what she might be doing right then.
She would probably be looking at her photo albums, I figured. That was what she did a lot of the time when she wasn’t tidying or cooking or pacing around kind of pretending to be tidying or cooking, like she did when she’d tidied the skin off of the place ten times over and couldn’t tidy anymore, and when she’d already checked on the cabins and walked through her garden and hummed to the plants and watered them down and ran her fingers along their leaves and plucked and pet and tended to each and every one—and me, too, three times over. That was when the photo albums would come out.
Unless Missus Tendrowski was around, of course.
Raymond and Gail, or Mister and Missus Tendrowski to those of us too young for first names, are the old couple that got in the tangle with the Algonquins dressed up like zombies, and they also come over to our place sometimes and bring casseroles or other food things, and we all have dinner. I have to get cleaned up for them then, which is a pain, but even with the bother, I kind of like those dinners. Mister and Missus Tendrowski are nice, kind of, and I think they see Miss Jane as a daughter of sorts, and they tend to her like that. Usually, after dinner, Mister Tendrowski will ask me if I want to go out and have a see-gar, and Miss Jane and Missus Tendrowski scoff at him in their way, and he chuckles, and I chuckle, and the ladies wave their hands at us, and we go outside, and they stay inside and say things to each other about us men and then laugh. Then they might just stay in there all night and talk for hours, laughing and talking and crying, and me and Mister Tendrowski will hang out outside on the porch, and he smokes his cigar, and I run around, and if I’m lucky, he tells me stories about the wars or Muhammad Ali. I like those times out there. He says that it’s good for Miss Jane, too, and for Missus Tendrowski, just the same—but he calls her Gail. He says Miss Jane and Gail have a lot in common, sad things, and they help each other through them.
At dinner, Mister Tendrowski always asks Miss Jane if she’s found any decent young men to help take care of the place. Missus Tendrowski always swats at him when he says that, but I think she’s just as interested in the answer. She sometimes mentions in a roundabout-not-so-roundabout way when unmarried guys move to town—which is rare.
Miss Jane was almost married once, from what Mister Tendrowski tells me. He talks about it outside when he’s having his cigar sometimes, and he always gets real whispery like he’s telling a secret. He says she would make somebody a hell of a woman, but she can’t get over it. And sometimes he says her clock is ticking, in an even more whispery voice, and he’s talking about babies. She’s thirty-six, which is old. But people always say she looks younger than that when she tells them. She has a nice way about her that I guess you could say is pretty, if you made me say it. More than that though, I think, is that she makes you feel like she cares about you when she looks at you—and when she isn’t giving you the hardest time about stupid things like the no-critters-in-the-house rule—which is never. Mister Tendrowski says Miss Jane had a guy she was head over heels for once. “They were like kids,” he says, meaning it in a good way. And then he says, “They were kids,” and gets sad.
According to him, they were in love to the moon and back and they were supposed to get married the second he got back from the war. He was a soldier. His name was Sergeant First Class Daniel Radford. But he got killed in the war, and she never married him. I never bring it up, because it makes Miss Jane cry, but the few times she’s said anything about it to me on her own, she’s said she wished she could have at least married him, so she could have his name to remember him, at least. She told me she thought about just changing her name once, but when she said that, she got teary-eyed and said it was stupid and then went back to tidying, and I skedaddled, because that stuff makes me uncomfortable.
Those are the albums she’s always looking at: pictures of the two of them, her and Sergeant Daniel Radford. Missus Tendrowski always notices the albums when Miss Jane leaves them out, and she doesn’t approve. She doesn’t approve of much, if you think about it, Missus Tendrowski, but she’s okay in her own way, I guess. She was the elementary school principal when I was there, so I have good reason to fear her. She saw plenty of me during my time there, and she called in Miss Jane plenty, too, and gave us both lectures. I always felt pretty rotten when I was the reason Miss Jane got hollered at by Missus Tendrowski. It was never my fault, of course—most of the time—but I still felt bad.
Missus Tendrowski took an interest in Miss Jane and me early on because her son had been killed fighting in another war in back in the day, so she kind of knew how Miss Jane felt, I guess. That was Missus Tendrowski’s only son and he was from a marriage she had before she met Mister Tendrowski. Mister Tendrowski said that Missus Tendrowski and her first husband split after their son died in that war. He was only eighteen and I guess Missus Tendrowski thought he’d only joined the army to impress his dad. Mister Tendrowski said that Missus Tendrowski thinks us men are just savages, always beating our chest and running off to get killed or make fools of ourselves just to show everybody how big our balls are. She was tough like that.
Mister Tendrowski says that even though she’s a tough lady, under her shell Missus Tendrowski is the best woman he’s ever met, and he’s damn lucky she decided to let him hang around her in their old age. She’s nice, I guess. But if you asked me, that shell must be a doozy if that’s what’s under it. You don’t get much soft with Missus Tendrowski, just hardscrabble discipline and stern, straight talk, which she says is for your own good—and it is, sometimes, I guess, if I was honest. But me and Quinn have been on to the whole for-your-own-good racket for years now, and I don’t always believe it.
Anyway, Missus Tendrowski and Miss Jane both had somebody die in wars, and I guess that’s where I come in. I don’t give a whole lot of thought to my parents, other than wondering where the hell they came up with the name Ruby. But Miss Jane shows me pictures sometimes of her Sergeant with my dad and their Army unit. My dad’s name was Private Richie Heckler and he was in the vehicle with Miss Jane’s sergeant when it got blown up. Miss Jane’s sergeant was his childhood friend and commander of their unit and ordered them down the road that had the bomb on it. I guess it was pretty sad. Miss Jane doesn’t talk about it, like I was saying.
My mom, whose name I guess was Polly, died right after that, too—which I guess was also right after I was born. They never tell me how she died, and everybody who knew her back then gets real sad if I bring it up, so I don’t bring it up—but she died right after they all found out about my dad and the other people getting killed by that bomb. For my part, I had just been born and saddled with the name Ruby—and then my mom and dad both died, and I’d never have parents again.
Mister Tendrowski says that Miss Jane was really bad for almost a year after all that, doing bad things and having a tough time dealing with her sergeant and everyone dying. But he says she eventually got into churching. And he thinks it saved her life and helped her get her soul fixed up. And then she tracked me down in what he calls the system to see what had become of me, and when she found me—me being just a little guy, not even a year old then, and needing a place and some folks—she took me in and has been giving me the damnedest time ever since.
While I was sitting by that fence in the woods outside of Hoboken, I thought for the first time about how Miss Jane’s sergeant died way back then, getting blown up, and then how Miss Jane thought I was dead by being blown up, too—and well, to be honest, I felt pretty doggone bad about it when I thought about it like that. Then I thought about what Miss Jane might be doing right then, and she was probably looking at her photo albums and crying—and they were probably those awful albums she kept of me.
I guess I decided right then and there that I needed to let Miss Jane know I wasn’t dead and blown up, no matter what came of it.
And that put me in a pickle.
Well, if the tears of a woman ain’t stumped about a million cowboys from the beginning of time, then the sky ain’t blue. Cowboys are always sitting around a campfire at night singing sad songs about women’s tears and always running headlong into a mess to stop the tears from falling—and always causing about a hundred more messes in the process. It’s just part of being a cowboy. It never made any sense until that moment. And then it made sense, and I got to thinking that what I was doing right then was a hell of a lot like all them cowboys, and when I thought about it that way I suddenly felt doubly tough and was pretty sure I had just become a cowboy, or at least pretty close to one, right there on the spot.
But, that didn’t make the pickle any easier to figure.
I knew that if I called her, she would probably overreact. She’d probably overreact no matter what. She was a woman, after all. And besides, there’s no good way to just kind of slide it in there that you’re actually not dead when someone who loves you thinks you’re dead. That was the pickle, and no matter how many ways I looked at it, it was still a pickle.
After figuring on it, I decided that there was one person I could tell that wouldn’t ever tell anyone. But it was still night, and a twelve-year-old poking around at night draws some attention, I’d found. And there still might be bulls. And I was pretty well hid there, besides. And I was tired. And after sitting in that spot for a bit, it started to feel kind of comfortable. So I took a nap till daylight.
I expected to wake up by that fence with a demon on me or a backhoe set to run me over or something awful like that, judging on how it had been going up to that point. But nothing like that happened. I woke up kind of like you do when you don’t have school or anything else and can just wake up whenever you want. I woke up like that and had a nice pillow made out of my arm and some roots and pine-needles, and the ground was pretty soft right by the fence. I just yawned and rolled onto my back and put my hands behind my head and laid there, looking up at the trees moving above me and listening to the birds chirping away. It was a nice morning, and I felt pretty good, considering.
After waking up, the first thing I had to do was get out of that awful railyard, which meant getting over a couple of fences. Once I sat up and saw it in daylight, Hoboken was just as bad as New York City. I was in a vacant lot in the railyard, and beyond it were just buildings as far as you could see. It definitely wasn’t a forest.
I hopped over the fence and then ran over to the fence at the edge of the yard by the road, and I didn’t feel much like trying to find the hole Geno made or any other one, so I just climbed over onto the street, using a tree branch that hung over. People were walking on the street right there, but nobody paid any attention. That’s one good thing about cities: there’s a million people, but none of them gives a damn what you’re doing.
I started walking and thinking, and eventually, I came to two huge buildings with a basketball court at the bottom. I stopped and looked around. There were a lot of people out there—and they were mostly all black. I hadn’t been around a lot of black people in my life, on account of only one black family lives in Hackers Loon: the Parsons, and they’re just regular folks. And I sure hadn’t ever been the only white person in any place that I could remember. Which is kind of what Hackers Loon is like for the Parsons, if you think about it.
A few of them looked at me funny, but most of them didn’t pay me any attention until a big lady—who seemed to be the grandmother to everybody—came over and looked down at me.
“What you need, baby?” she said.
Well, I normally wouldn’t stand for being called something like that, and I always tell Miss Jane she can’t call me things like Ru-bee-doolee-ooski-bop and things like that. But for some reason, I didn’t mind with this lady. “Nothing,” I said.
“You from the Jewish school, child?” she asked. She said child, like chial.
I didn’t know what she meant, so I told her I try to avoid schools altogether—of any kind.
She thought that was funny. “I ain’t prying,” she said. “Just asking.” She looked at me for a second. “Are you lost then?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“You live around here?”
“No.”
She studied me for a long minute. “Is there someone you want to call—for a ride or something?” she said. “We’ve got a free payphone.”
I stopped and looked at her for a long second. It was almost like she knew I had to call Quinn. “Actually,” I said. “I do need to call someone.”
“Okay,” she said and chuckled, looking at me funny. “Phone’s inside.” She signaled with her hand to a guy that was leaning against the fence. He kind of rolled his eyes and started walking over to us.
“Follow the sourpuss,” she said to me, and I chuckled at that. Then she turned to the sourpuss and said, “Show him to the phone.”
I followed the sourpuss over to one of the big tower buildings and through a door. Inside, it was old and run down. If Quinn’s dad had looked at that place, he would have said it was shoddy construction and jerry-rigged and would have said something about half-assed and FUBAR. Quinn’s dad is always saying stuff like that when he sees a building that isn’t done right. There ain’t no shoddy work on his job sites, he always says. But I know some of his guys, and I’d bet there’s a little, especially on Mondays.
But, that building in Hoboken was shoddy work through and through and even I could see it: all run down and smelling like a wet dog with the paint and plaster peeling off the walls. Do you know they call those buildings the Hoboken Housing Authority? Now, I don’t pay much attention in school, on principle—and don’t have much use for words otherwise—but I’d bet about as many feathers as I had that authority meant that something was better or maybe even the best at something, at least the top of the heap. And if that place was saying it was the best at housing, then they were pulling wool, because even I could see the whole building was shoddy.
When we got inside, the sourpuss pointed to a pay phone in the hallway, but this wasn’t like other pay phones. This one was about as beat up as you’ve ever seen, and wasn’t really a pay phone at all because somebody had taken the front off of it and the guts out of it, and then spliced the wires together, and now you didn’t have to pay anything to make a call on it. It was pretty handy.
I pulled off the handle and took a deep breath—then dialed Quinn’s number.
It rang a few times—and his dad picked up.
Well, I’d been thinking a great deal about calling Quinn, and about what would happen when I did. But I just didn’t once think that anyone other than Quinn might answer that phone when I called. It was dumb when I thought about it after, because Quinn’s dad almost always answers the phone at their place. He always sounds real mad and out of breath about it, too, like it’s causing him some great amount of effort, even though the phone is right beside his easy-chair and isn’t hard to answer at all.
Either way, I just sat there, not saying anything. Then I snapped to and hung up the phone.
I tried that a few times in a row, but I just got Quinn’s dad each time, and the only difference each time was that Quinn’s dad just got madder and madder, until eventually he was pretty steaming hot and laid out some almighty curses and murderous oaths that I’d never even heard before. On the next call, he threatened to eat my babies, and as you can imagine, that one got my attention and put a hell of a sight in my mind, and it was all I could do to not laugh. I was really hoping Quinn was there to see it, so I could ask him about it later.
I waited a bit—and I couldn’t come up with anything better to do but to just keep trying. So, I did, again and again.
By the tenth call, Quinn’s dad was pretty rip-roaring, and I thought there might actually be a way for him to come through that phone and kill me.
But on the eleventh call, finally, Quinn answered.
Well, I was just as thrown off by Quinn answering on the eleventh try as I was when his dad answered on the first one. It took me a second to realize, and I froze, and then I just said, “Hey, Quinn.”
“I knew you weren’t dead!” Quinn said, just like that.
“Shush, Quinn!” I said.
Then I heard him telling his dad that it was just a wrong number. “Call Mookie’s in fifteen minutes,” he said real fast and whispery. “His folks are up at June Bug’s.” Then he hung up the phone.
I was all turned around by then. The whole phone call operation didn’t go anything like it was supposed to. But I waited, and fifteen minutes later, I called Mookie’s place.
Quinn answered on the first ring—and then I could hear him yelling to Mookie something about how he’d let him back in in just a few minutes. I could hear pounding in the background, and I just knew it must be Mookie Nelson out there banging on his own back door, hollering for Quinn to let him in. I wished I could have been there to see that. Just hearing it over the phone was pretty funny.
“I knew you weren’t dead!” Quinn said.
“No you didn’t.”
“Your neck, I didn’t,” he said.
“How could you?”
“Easy, and you would have known yourself if you weren’t such a moron.”
“Well, hell, Quinn, I did know,” I said. “I’m the one that’s not dead.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“How did you know then?”
“It was easy. I knew it right away.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Yes I did.”
“How then?”
“They said you’d been blown straight to smithereens.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I was. So?”
“So?” he said, like that. “So? Really? Are you that numb-headed? Have you not been paying attention for your whole damn life? They said they didn’t find a body.”
“Hmmm,” I said. I knew where he was going.
“Yeah, you dummy. When they don’t find a body, it always means the person’s not really dead and they’re coming back later in the movie. I knew it. And I was right.”
“I guess,” I said. It was a good point.
“I didn’t tell on you, though.”
“Everybody else still thinks I’m dead?”
“Hell, you should see it.”
“Really?”
“You’d think people actually gave a damn about you, Rubenstein.”
“Shut up.”
“I got three free milkshakes so far from Ollie’s just because I pretend to be sad every time I go in there. I knew you weren’t dead! So, what have you been doing, Ruby, you old son of a barrel? Did you see any lions? Are you in China? Do they really know our future?”
Well, I didn’t know what to say. It was good to hear from Quinn, and he was just like Quinn always is—but I was thrown off.
“Ruby?”
“What?”
“Did they cut your tongue out? Spill it, Rube.”
“Well, hell, Quinn, I don’t even know where to start.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “You sure got people all stirred up here. You better not be wasting this.”
“How is Miss Jane?”
“She thinks you’re blown up. How do you think?”
“Shit.”
“So where the hell are you?”
“Hoboken.”
“Sounds great! What is it?”
“It’s a place. There aren’t any woods.”
“Are there pirates or bank robbers or anything else there?”
“Kind of— Hobos— and basketball. I don’t know—” I trailed off.
“You better not be screwing this up!”
“Well, hell, Quinn, I’ve been doing the best I can.”
“I bet you haven’t had one good adventure yet.”
“I have!”
“I bet you haven’t. Why haven’t you told me about them then?”
“Well, hell, Quinn, I’m trying! You keep blabbering your big mouth.”
“My big mouth? My big mouth? If I had a big mouth you’d be arrested and thrown in school right now! I knew you weren’t blown up and I didn’t say anything. How’s that for a big mouth?”
“Well, I know,” I said. “And I appreciate it, I guess. But right now—”
“Don’t tell me about right now! Tell me about the goddamn adventures!”
“Well, hell, Quinn, I will, but first I’m in a pickle, and I need to figure it out.”
“You are? A bad one?”
“Yeah, it’s a bad one.”
“What do you need? Who is it? Is it the terrorists? Do they have guns? Do their carpets really fly?” he said, like that.
“Not that much of a pickle,” I said.
“I knew you were screwing this up.”
“Well, I don’t know, Quinn,” I said. “I’ve been doing what I can. And I’ve been in a hell of a few adventures. And I’ve been cursed since Crane Swamp, and getting clobbered by it good, and I’ll tell you all about it all later—but that’s not my current pickle right now, and I need to get to my current pickle first, Quinn, and you need to just pay attention.”
“Go ahead and tell it then, if you’re gonna get uptight about it.”
“All right,” I said and gathered myself for a second, then told him about feeling bad about Miss Jane.
First, he laughed. But after a bit of convincing, he agreed that it wouldn’t do having her thinking I was blown up like her sergeant. And he said she was taking it hard besides.
“What do you think I should do?” I asked him.
“Well, hell, Ruby, how the hell am I supposed to come up with anything if that’s all you give me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“Well—” I said.
“Tell it.”
“Well, give me a second then.”
“We don’t have a second!” he shouted. “Mookie’s banging on the back door!”
Well, I didn’t have much choice. So I told him as best I could. I didn’t really spice it up too much because I was telling it on the spot and hadn’t really thought a lot about how to tell it right. But I told him about the Timber Value guys, and the explosion, and the luggage compartment on the Chinese bus, and Marsie and Ted, and dumping water on old Cal Gennelich, and the New York City bus, and the real-life murderer, and the cops in the Bronx, and the grumpy bum-witch, and the ninja robot, and Geno and Gilbert, and the Hoboken warehouse, and jumping a grainer, and running from the bulls, and everything else. And I told it as best I could, I guess, considering.
“Well,” Quinn said. “I’ll do it different, of course.”
“Well hell, Quinn,” I said, “I tried. It’s not so easy you know.”
“I know,” he said. “How many days you been gone?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “fifteen or so.”
“No, you moron. The explosion was just the night before last.”
“Well, then, if you know, why the hell are you asking me?”
“I should be able to do it in just one,” he said. “With more adventure, too, naturally.”
“Do what?” I said.
“The explosion part will be tough,” he said, not paying any attention to me. “So Timber Value did that, huh? That’s crazy. I knew it wasn’t terrorists. I don’t know what mine can be. I need it though—and some remains this time.” He was mumbling.
“What?” I said again.
“I gotta go.”
“Wait!” I hollered. “What are you talking about?”
“You wanted my help, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you went and bungled this whole thing up by going off without me in the first place, and now I gotta get my bearings and work us out of this pickle you got us in.”
“What do you mean us? I’m the one in the pickle. You’re not in a pickle.”
“Well, hell, Ruby,” he said. “I am now, ain’t I?”
And I guess he was right.
“You can’t stick me in the middle of a pickle without knowing what the beginning was about,” he said. “You ever start a movie in the middle, you knuckleskull?”
“Well, I guess not,” I said, and I guess I hadn’t.
“Of course you haven’t. Why would you? What are you, stupid?”
“I wouldn’t!”
“Exactly! And now you’ve really tied me up, haven’t you?”
“I have?”
“Now it’ll take hell trying to do this thing the boring way you did it, without any flair for adventure or anything. If I’d been there at the start, I would have done it right and we wouldn’t be in this pickle. We’d be pirate kings.”
“I almost was a pirate king,” I said, but it wasn’t true, and he knew it.
“It’s okay, Rube,” he said. “You did okay for a dummy without a lick of adventure in your whole body. You did okay for that.”
He was right.
“Well, there’s no way around it,” he said. “Don’t move. I’ll be there in a day. Where is the Bronx? Forget it. I’ll find it. Don’t move.”
And then he hung up and was gone.
I wasn’t quite sure what had happened, and I tried to call back, but the phone just rang and rang, and I hung up and didn’t try again. The only person that might answer at that point was Mookie, and I’d only planned to tell one person, and I’d already told Quinn, and Mookie was probably sore anyway, on account of being locked out.
I walked back out where all the people were playing basketball and tried to think about what was happening. I didn’t know if I was better off or not. Quinn was right about not watching movies from the middle, but I didn’t have any place to stay and there weren’t any good woods to sleep in for miles that I could tell.
Outside, I went back over to the big lady that had sent me to the phone. Her name was Momma Kay, I found out, and she was the grandmother of a bunch of the kids, and the mother of one lady there and two sons that were at work and another daughter that was in Las Vegas. The people at the basketball court that Momma Kay didn’t raise herself, she knew well.
When I walked over, she looked at me and said she could tell I was worried, and I said I couldn’t tell her what I was worried about, only that it was cowboy stuff, and about a woman, and really important.
Well, you know how people always pry even if they know you don’t want them to pry? Quinn’s dad says it’s because people can’t carry pistols anymore, so nobody has to be polite. Which I think is funny because Quinn’s dad isn’t very polite at all, if you go by most people’s standards. He picks his nose and stuff, right out in the open, and he swears a lot. But I guess he also holds the door for old people whenever there’s a door that needed holding, which is part of it, too. And he goes out in the rain to check on things when it’s raining and Quinn’s mom needs something checked outside. He doesn’t fart at dinner, I don’t think, and doesn’t swear around old ladies. He usually smells pretty bad. I guess he’s in the middle. But he says that’s why people pry even when they know you don’t want them to: pistols.
But not Momma Kay. She didn’t pry at all. “Okay, baby,” she said instead, in the funny way she talked. She was Jamaican, which is a way people talk. “You don’t want to talk about it?”
“I can’t talk about it.
“Just answer me this then, baby,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, otherwise.”
“Okay, baby,” she said, “then you don’t have to talk about it.”
I told you, she called me baby like that about a million times, and if anybody else ever called me baby like that I would have kicked them in the shins, but with her it was okay, for some reason. I even kind of liked it.
She patted my shoulder and said, “Okay, baby,” again, and went back to talking and carrying on with all the other folks.
I sat on one of the wooden benches and mulled it all over for a bit, kicking at the ground. There were ants running around down there, and I watched the ants and wrinkled my face, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure a thing past sitting right there on that bench, watching those ants.
I carried on like that for a while, stewing on it and mulling it over, and eventually, I got up and went over to Momma Kay.
“Which way to the closest woods?” I asked her.
“Woods?” she said. “There’s no woods around here, boy.”
“What? What do you mean?” I said. “How do you go out in the woods then?”
“What world do you live in, child?”
“What?”
“We don’t go out in the woods.”
“Why not?”
“Because there ain’t woods near here, boy.”
“You don’t like the woods?”
“Well, hell, child, I love the woods,” she said. “I grew up in Nine Mile, Jamaica, trees all around.”
“Why don’t you go to the woods then?”
“‘Cause there ain’t woods around here.”
“Why don’t you drive to them, then.”
“Do I look like I have a car?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, because she did, I guess.
“Well, I don’t, child.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m poor, child,” she said, laughing. “Rich folks get cars and forests. We get this,” she said, pointing at the blacktop basketball court.
“There’s a lot of poor folks in Hackers Loon, too,” I said. “You should go there. We go out in the woods all the time. And we have a basketball court, too.”
She curled her eyebrows at me and squinted down at me. “Even if I had a car, child, we ain’t exactly welcome in most woods, as you call it, especially not after sundown.”
“Not after sundown? What do you mean? Why?”
“You got a lot to learn, boy. And I ain’t your momma.”
“I don’t have a mom,” I said.
She looked at me for a long time. “Hackers Loon?” she said. “Is that home?”
Well, I knew I screwed up. I think she could tell, too. But she just let it slide with a squint of her eyes. She was nice like that.
“What do you want with the woods, boy?” she said after a second, looking at me directly.
“A place to wait,” I said. “And to sleep.”
She kind of straightened her head back at that and got taller and looked down at me out of one eye, like she was studying me. “No, boy,” she said eventually. “If you need a place to sleep, you stay here, with me.”
Momma Kay fed me and let me stay at her place, which was done up nice and kind of reminded me of Quinn’s parents’ house oddly enough, with about a million kids running around. She didn’t ask me too many questions, but I could tell she was getting worried by the next day, when I still hadn’t told her what I was doing.
After lunch that day, when all the other kids went back outside, she stopped me and asked me to sit down. I knew there’d be questions.
“What are you doing here?” she started off with.
“I can’t really say.”
“Just tell me something, child.”
I thought about it for a minute and didn’t know what to say. “You know the Timber Value company?” I said.
She squinted her eyes. “Yeah?”
“You think they’re dangerous?”
“Dangerous?”
“Yeah, like gangsters.”
“Boy, listen here: those men are worse than gangsters. Those monsters are the PhDs of gangsters. They make gangsters look like saints.”
“What’s a PhD?”
“What do you have to do with Timber Value?”
“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
She gave me a stern eye and studied me for a long time, but didn’t say anything more.
That night, Momma Kay made us all spaghetti and meatballs. After dinner, the adults were jabbering, and me and Nate, who was somebody’s kid and was ten, were eating chocolate mints and throwing the foil wrappers to Momma Kay’s cat who would chase them down and bring them back in her mouth, like a dog playing fetch. Her name was Mildred, and she was a fat cat, and a good cat, and she’d get wheezing around the foil balls after a few throws, and eventually she’d just flop down and lay there for a bit, looking back at you from time to time, just being a cat.
I was in the middle of throwing one of those foil balls to Mildred when I heard a bird sound from the window.
As soon as I heard it, I knew Quinn was there. It was a long time coming, and I was worried he was dead or arrested or off on a pirate ship or something.
But I knew that bird call, and that was Quinn Randall Hennessey the Third—finally.
I guess I was pretty happy Quinn wasn’t dead, and that he was there in Hoboken besides, because I didn’t say anything to anybody but just skedaddled out of that place in a whirl, and in all the commotion of Momma Kay’s apartment at the time, I don’t think anybody other than that kid Nate and maybe Mildred the cat even knew I left.
I got downstairs and outside, and sure as fire, there was Quinn Hennessey just standing there along a fence in Hoboken, grinning like a jackass.
“Well, you lousy son of a cricket!” I said.
“And you slippery son of a snake!”
I gave him big hug. It was pretty great to see him.
“Holy smokes, Quinn, you look like hell!” I said when I got a good look at him. He was ragged and worn out, and probably the dirtiest I’ve ever seen a human being.
But he was smiling from ear to ear.
“I don’t think I can go back!” he said.
“It’s pretty great, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
We kind of just stood there for a minute, looking at the place we were at. It was kind of funny: us there in the dark by the basketball courts at the Hoboken Housing Authority, which is in New Jersey, a whole different state.
“What do you want to do now?” I said, after a bit.
He bugged his eyes. “Nebraska.”
“What? What about Miss Jane?”
“I got that figured, too, no problem,” he said. “But for now, let’s go. Nebraska is waiting.”
“I’ve been staying with this lady called Momma Kay. She’s got a nice place, and she feeds everybody. She’ll feed you, too, I bet.”
“Can’t do that, Ruby. Nebraska is waiting. You shouldn’t even be talking to people.”
“What?” I said.
“Trust me. And Neil said so, too. You can’t say anything to anybody.”
“Neil?”
“Neil’s our ride to Nebraska. He’s waiting. Let’s go.” Quinn grabbed my arm, and we ran around the corner, and that was when I met Neil.
Quinn jumped into an old grey car, and I jumped in after him because he jumped in, and then Neil, who was in the driver’s seat, kind of snapped to and squealed away like they do in the movies.
And just like that, we were driving to Nebraska with Neil. We drove forever, and when we’d stop for gas, Neil would go in and get whatever we needed, so we wouldn’t be seen. And he’d always make us all go to the bathroom together when we needed to do that, and he’d lock the bathroom doors to be sure no one saw us. He was a little weird at those times, but it was fun, I guess, and we felt a little like bank robbers, and I don’t think anyone saw us or even thought twice about anything we were doing.
Mostly, though, we just drove. We went through a bunch of states, and finally we crossed into Nebraska in the middle of the next night, and Neil said we were getting close, and he was getting pretty excited about it and saying that maybe we should take our shirts off and “Drive the open road!”
I suddenly got a really bad feeling about Neil right about then. He was always a little weird, like I was saying, looking at us funny, especially in the bathrooms, and kind of taking too long to say anything back when we’d say something to him. And now, my belly was kind of telling me to snap-to a bit, and I knew Quinn got the same feeling, because no sooner had I even thought that than Quinn walloped that guy in the back of the head with a big, heavy flashlight he found in the backseat—which knocked Neil out cold. I didn’t even know Quinn was awake in the backseat before he gave it to Neil with the flashlight.
Well, I was pretty surprised—even though I was thinking about doing the same thing—and it was one of those good and bad times at the same time, because I was glad Quinn gave it to him with the flashlight, but it was also kind of bad timing because Neil was driving at the time, and then he was knocked out cold and was still driving—if it still counts as driving if you’re knocked out cold. Either way, whatever he was doing, he didn’t do it for long, because right after Quinn walloped him with the flashlight, that car went flying off the road and into a corn field, crashing through at about a million miles an hour. I thought we were dead for sure. But eventually we launched over a ditch and got hung up, and even though Neil’s foot was still on the gas, the tires were just spinning.
Quinn jumped out and was hooting and hollering and pumping his fist, and I guess I was doing the same thing, too, because crashing through a cornfield in a car with a knocked-out driver really gets the blood pumping.
We carried on like that for a while. There was a long strip the car made through that corn field, and the car was nose down in the ditch with the tires spinning, and Neil was still knocked out cold, leaning against the steering wheel.
Quinn opened the door and took Neil’s foot off the gas and turned the car off and took out the keys and threw them out into the field so they could never be found. Then it was quiet and the headlights were out and it was dark and the stars were shining in a way I hadn’t seen them shine since I left Hackers Loon.
“What should we do now?” Quinn asked.
“He’s a perv, right?” I said.
“I’d bet ten punches on it,” he said.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“He’ll probably wake up soon,” Quinn said, looking at Neil. “Let’s tie him up.”
“We don’t have rope.”
“There’s some in the trunk,” Quinn said. “I saw it when we stopped.”
Sure enough, there in the trunk was rope, and we tied Neil to the steering wheel and then tied him up all over, too, because we had the rope, and why not. Quinn’s dad taught us knots and stuff at different times, so we gave it some practice.
After we finished tying Neil up, Quinn wrote on his head, starting at the back where his bald spot ended and going forward down to his eyebrows, like a bald spot scroll. He used a Sharpie marker from the dash and wrote, Cops, This guy is a perv and tried to kidnap us. Rung his bell with a flashlight. Don’t try to find us. We’re ghosts. Yours truly, Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday
“Why’d you put the part about the ghosts?” I said.
“To make us seem hard to track, I guess. Why?”
“That’s bad medicine.”
“Well, hell, Ruby, I already wrote it.”
“You can cross it out.”
“That’d ruin the whole thing!”
“I think it should say we’re cowboys.”
“It’s already wrote!”
“Or at least hobos.”
“Hobos?— Well, hell,” Quinn said and scratched his head. “Maybe it would be better if it said cowboys, but it already says ghosts.”
“You don’t have enough bad medicine on you? You want to pile on more?”
Quinn scrunched up his face, thinking about it. “I guess you’re right, maybe. Do you think it’ll be bad?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Can’t be good.”
“Ah, hell.”
“It’s fresh, maybe we can scrub it off so it doesn’t screw it up too much.”
“Got anything to scrub it with?” he said.
“No.”
Quinn looked around and there wasn’t a whole lot to work with, just corn and corn stalks. But there was a lot of that, so he grabbed a bunch of corn leaves and tried them. They didn’t work though, and just cut Neil’s face up pretty good.
“Let’s just cross it out,” Quinn said, finally, since the corn shucks didn’t work.
“We’ll put cowboys,” I said.
I could tell he didn’t like it, but it was our only option. And that was what we did, and we crossed it out good and wrote cowboys. Then we wrote some more and drew on Neil’s face, because you don’t get to write on somebody’s face with a Sharpie marker very often—especially not someone who really deserves it.
When we were done, we figured we’d better get out of there before somebody showed up and started asking questions.
“Come on,” Quinn said, waving me toward the highway. “I’ve got a plan.”
At the road, we hid and waited. While we waited, Quinn fished through a Burger King bag he’d taken out of the backseat of Neil’s car.
“Perfect,” he said, when he found what he was looking for inside the bag.
And then we did his plan.
It was late at night and the highway was pretty quiet and only two cars had gone by in the whole time we were sitting there. But, eventually we saw what we were looking for. Over the rise came the bright orange cab lights of an eighteen-wheeler—and then its headlights and the whole thing.
Quinn hollered, “Let’s go,” and we ran up like we planned. I laid down, and Quinn knelt down next to me, and we got ready to play our parts.
Quinn waved his hands at the truck and yelled and acted altogether frantic, and it worked. The trucker pulled his truck over and stopped right there beside us.
“It’s game time,” Quinn said, and we both got to acting like we had planned and kind of shuffled over to the door.
Quinn took a deep breath and swung open the door to face the trucker and say his line, and he got half of his line out before he stopped in his tracks because it wasn’t a trucker at all in that truck.
It was a lady. She was a lady with a trucker hat on and a Carhartt jacket and three little tattoos on her hand and kind of undone blond hair. On one hand, she didn’t look a whole lot older than Quinn’s sister, and I couldn’t believe she was driving a big truck like that, but at the same time she also looked older, and definitely tired.
Quinn kind of just stared for a second, dumbstruck. “You’re a girl!” he said, instead of his line.
“I’m a woman, you little pissant” she said, testy right off the bat.
“Why are you driving this truck?” he said.
She got sideways at that. “Women can’t drive trucks?” she said. Then she looked over at me, and I was still playing my part, and she got confused. “What the hell is going on?” she said.
That snapped Quinn out of it, and he got back to the plan.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “He’s been shot!”
“What?” she said.
I laid it on pretty thick right then and made her to believe I was gut-shot in the belly. I had ketchup all on my shirt and even a hole in the shirt where the bullet would have gone through, and I moaned pretty good and did my best to act shot.
Well, when she heard about me being shot and then saw me howling and bloody and whatnot, she changed her tune pretty quick and started worrying, like we were hoping, and telling us to get in.
We did, and she had me lay in the back, where there was a bed with sheets and everything.
“What the hell is going on?” she said.
“He’s gut-shot!” Quinn said. “Drive!”
“I’ll call for an ambulance,” she said and reached for her radio.
Well, we hadn’t thought about the radio, which was dumb. And that was why we had to start the second part of our plan right away.
“Don’t do that,” Quinn said, grabbing her arm. She didn’t like that, and she looked at Quinn kind of funny.
While she was doing that, I took the socket wrench Quinn had given me out of Neil’s trunk and stuck it to the back of her head.
“Hold ’em up!” I said, just like that.
“What the hell?” she said and stuck her hands up.
“Put yer hands up!” Quinn yelled.
And she put them up higher.
“Now drive,” Quinn said.
“My hands are up.”
“Put them on the wheel and drive!” Quinn shouted.
She looked in her mirror at me, and it was dark, and I did my best to make the wrench look like a gun, but she took one look in her mirror and said, “I know guns, you little turds, and that’s a socket wrench.”
She was right.
“What the hell is going on?” she said. “Are you two on meth?”
“Well, hell,” I said, and dropped the socket wrench.
“He’s not shot either,” Quinn said.
“No kidding,” she said back.
That lady—Nicole, was her name—was sure understanding considering that we’d just lied to her about as much as you can lie to someone and made her think we were holding her up and gut-shot besides. Turns out, she did some pretty crazy stuff when she was younger, too, so she went easy on us.
She had some questions, though, before she would go any further, and she let loose with them. But we dodged them pretty good, and got introduced and whatnot, without actually telling her our names. She said the truckers all had trucker names that they went by when they were on the road anyway, and she said we could make up our own road names if we wanted to, without any worry about bad medicine.
That was good news, and I chose Danger McCoy, of course, and Quinn chose Iroquois Trampscallion, which was a ripper of a name, too.
Nicole called herself Road Kitty which was a pretty good name, I guess, and she got on the radio and said, “Break one-nine, break one-niner, this is Road Kitty in the yellow freight shaker dragging west on the big slab, riding shotgun is Danger McCoy and Iroquois Trampscallion. What’d y’all leave behind you coming east? Over.”
It was pretty great talk. And a trucker radioed right back.
“Coming in loud and proud, Road Kitty,” he said. “Good to hear a kitty on line. This is Lieutenant Scram, in the bob-tail dragging east, got it in Georgia overdrive, heading home-twenty. Smooth over my shoulder, brake check at yard twenty, four-wheeler greasy side up, and a full grown bear in the air shooting you in the back around Cheyenne, but a clean shot to Laramie after that, over.”
“Ten-four, Lieutenant Scram. Over.”
“Got bear-bait shaking the bushes ahead of you, too, up a stick. You can stand on it, if you want, up to the chicken coop, over.”
“Ten-four,” she said. “Coops cold west? Over.”
“Coops cold, for now, little kitty, over,” he said.
“Ten-four. Clean shot east for you, Lieutenant Scram. Catch you on the flip flop. Backing out.”
“Ten-four. Backing out.”
Well, I didn’t know what to make of that.
“What was that?” Quinn asked Nicole.
“That’s trucker talk,” she said and smiled.
“That was crazy,” I said. “What were you guys saying?”
“He said he was in a truck without a trailer coasting down out of the hills east to his home, and there’s a car flipped over at mile-marker twenty, and a police helicopter—bear in the air—using radar over Cheyenne, and no cops after that to Laramie. He also said that there’s a car ahead of us that is speeding, bear bait, that will clear out any police, so we can speed up if we want. And the weigh stations are closed westbound.”
“Why didn’t he just say that?” I said.
“He did,” she said.
After we put a few miles behind us and got to know each other a little bit, Nicole looked over at us and squinted her eye. “Being as we’re in end-all Nebraska,” Nicole said. “And since I like you two for some reason, I’ll take you along for a bit. Okay? Just until we can get you to somebody that knows better what to do with you. Okay?”
“Okay,” we both said.
“I’ve got a couple of pallets going to a ranch in Wyoming. You can—”
“Wyoming?” Quinn asked.
Nicole stopped and squinted at him. “I don’t like the look you got,” Nicole said.
“What look?” Quinn said.
“That look,” she said, but I couldn’t see any look on him or me either.
“I’ll stop in whatever town you want,” she said after a minute, still eying us funny. “But when we get there, I’m taking you to a church or something—and you have to go in, and you have to get whatever help you need. Do you promise that?”
“Yes,” we both said and smiled.
“With no crossed-fingers or anything else,” she said. She told us later she used to have a son, so she was on to most of our tricks from the start, without even trying.
“What do you mean?” Quinn said, and Nicole looked over at me.
I couldn’t really help myself. “It don’t feel right, Quinn,” I said. “We’ve got enough bad medicine on us to last us to Mars and back, and I don’t feel like having more. And she’s been nice to us.” I turned to Nicole. “I don’t think we’ll go in, Nicole,” I said, flat out. “Wherever you bring us, we’ll probably just put the slip on you right before we get to wherever you’re taking us, and get into some woods or something.”
Quinn elbowed me in the ribs to get me to shut my trap and Nicole looked at me and cocked her head.
“I’m just saying,” I said. “Because you’re not mad at us about the gut-shot thing and the whole stick-up thing, I guess.”
“Who said I’m not mad,” she said, and Quinn and me both sat up a little, thinking she was serious. But then she smiled. “Thank you for your very lame confession,” she said. “But two things: first, I could track you or anything else through any woods you want, so don’t bet your shorts on that, pipsqueak. And second, why don’t you want to go to a nice place and get cleaned up and looked after a little?”
“I’m pretty clean,” I said, “apart from the ketchup.” And I was. Momma Kay made me take a bath while I was there. Quinn was pretty dirty—I’ll give her that. “We’re in a bit of a pickle,” I said.
“I can see that. And can I ask you one thing and get an honest answer?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Has someone hurt you?”
“No,” Quinn said.
“No,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, looking at us out of the corner of her eye. “Really?
“Really.”
“Do your parents know where you are?”
“My parents are dead,” I said.
“Oh, God,” she said and covered her mouth with her hand the way women do. “You poor thing.”
“Stop,” I said.
“What?”
“Don’t say that: poor thing. I don’t like it.”
Well, she started to get a little teary-eyed looking at me then, and it was kind of weird with the rest of her, which was in a big Carhartt jacket that was about ten sizes too big, and a dirty trucker hat and blue jeans with oil and grease on them. She was pretty small under all those tough jackets and everything. It was kind of funny. Especially when she started tearing up about my folks.
Nicole was okay, I guess, as far as women go. She didn’t mind being dirty or cursing a lot. She said women like her actually like that stuff, too, like we do, which is funny. And she said she’d heard ten times worse talk out of women in her day than any man, and that they were dirtier than you could imagine, too. Which was kind of gross. But she said it like it was a good thing, and I guess it was, when you think about it. She said we’re all animals—men, women, and children alike—and nowadays we’re lazy and have a lot of stuff and don’t have to fight people for it, but if you take a mother and put her child in danger, or hungry, that mother will fight like hell and could probably lift that truck by the bumper if she had to.
I don’t know about lifting trucks by the bumper, but I know she was right about mothers doing crazy things. I saw that myself when Jimmy Ringer got caught up in the Loon River when it was flooding in the spring a few years ago. That was the craziest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Ever. Hands down. Not even close.
Jimmy Ringer is one of our friends, and he has Down syndrome, which is a thing that makes you talk funny, and look a little different, and act nicer, and be more honest and kind. And sometimes Down syndrome makes you freeze up when you’re scared or otherwise, and it makes you kind of dumber about dumb things like school but smarter about things that actually matter, like catching frogs. It does some other things, too, I think. I don’t know. But I know it makes you really good at catching frogs. And that was what Jimmy Ringer was doing when he got swept into the Loon River.
Jimmy said he could talk to the frogs, so he knew where they would be. I don’t think he really could, but he sure knew how to catch them, one way or another, even if he always wanted to put them back after he caught them and would get ripping mad at us when we tried to use them for bait.
Anyway, Missus Ringer, Jimmy’s mom, was just pulling down to the bridge to pick Jimmy up when it all happened. He looked up and saw her and kind of spazzed-out like he does sometimes and slipped on a rock and toppled into the river.
When he went in, he kind of froze up, and then he was just washing down that river in the flood with trees and branches and picnic tables and Jimmy Ringer all mixed up into it, bobbing around and bouncing off of things.
Jimmy’s mom didn’t say anything or make any signal but just punched the gas in that old pickup truck and spun it to the right and launched right off the road and through Mister Fosterson’s fence and started tearing along his field beside that river bank in her old pickup truck, trying to catch up to Jimmy who was going about as fast as the truck down that muddy river.
Jimmy’s mom didn’t even slow down or take her foot off the gas till she was jumping out of that truck halfway across the field with the truck still going off on its own and no one driving.
Missus Ringer kept her feet for about two or three steps out the door, which was impressive, but then she pitched forward and rolled because she was going way too fast. But she rolled like the army guys do in the movies and almost like she planned it that way. It didn’t even slow her down a bit. She was locked in on Jimmy and didn’t care about rolling or anything else as long as she was going toward him.
Well, she rolled a few times and came up running, and then she just leaped, flying off the top of the river bank about twenty feet above the flooding river below, not even thinking or anything. There was an old oak tree there on the river bank, and she caught a branch about ten feet into her leap, and she swung on that branch like a monkey and let go at just the right time to go flying through the air with her arms and legs spread out in front of her like a lion pouncing on a deer, locked in on Jimmy.
She landed like that in the water right next to Jimmy. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, hands down, never to be challenged by anything, ever. Not even close. And Jimmy, well, he looked about more surprised to see his mother flying through the trees than you could be surprised by anything in this world, I imagine. I’m sure he was right then thinking he would die in that river, and then he saw his mother flying out of the sky. It must have been some sight for old Jimmy Ringer, dumb or not.
Well, Jimmy’s mom latched onto him in the water there, and she got to kicking, and all of us were running down the other river bank as fast as we could run, trying to catch up and hollering the whole time because we were sure Jimmy would die and probably his mom now, too.
But that river was moving to beat any of us kids, and none of us thought to jump on our bikes to make it any faster. Or so I thought.
We were all running along, losing ground on foot, when Quinn went tearing by on his bike. He jumped on his bike when Jimmy went in, knowing, because he’s smart, that we wouldn’t be catching him on foot. Pretty soon, him and Jimmy and Jimmy’s mom were all out of sight around the bend.
Quinn took the fishing trail that cuts out the next bend in the river, and we followed and kept running and caught up to them right before the old Jensen railroad bridge—which was about as old as anything and made of solid steel. It was a terrifying bridge on the best of sunny days when you were just floating under it in your tube or walking over it on a dare. But on that day, the river was running right up to it, and the top of the muddy old water was smashing against the bottom of that bridge, and the bridge looked like it was just hungry for some head to come along to chop off with its giant steel girders.
We were running, and we came around the bend, and we all stopped in our tracks when we saw what we saw next. There in the water, right above that head-chopping bridge, Jimmy’s mom was out in the current, holding onto the very top of a huge fallen birch tree with one hand and onto the very top of Jimmy Ringer’s hair with the other. It looked like it took a monstrous amount of effort, and was probably painful as all hell for poor Jimmy, who wasn’t frozen anymore but was howling and crying between gulping for breath and dangling out into the water by his hair. Right downstream from them, the river was crashing into that old railroad bridge and making a terrible racket, reminding us all—as if we needed it—that if they got swept away that thing would kill them dead in no time flat.
When we got there, Quinn was already shimmying his way out that birch tree, and it looked plenty dangerous, and Jimmy’s mom was even yelling at him to be careful. But he kept shimmying, and I didn’t know what to do, so when I came running up, I shimmied out behind Quinn, and when he got out there, he reached out and grabbed onto Jimmy by the shirt, and I grabbed Quinn by the sneakers, and Mookie Nelson had me by my knees, and like that we kind of inched back a little at a time: Jimmy’s mom kicking and pushing on her end, and then us on the other end in a chain inching back until Jimmy could grab some branches and we could get him up on the tree, and then his mom, too, and then everybody back to land without dying.
Jimmy was kind of blubbering and crying still when we got to dry ground, but he was also smiling a lot and hugging his mom and all of us. Missus Ringer was hugging him back, and all of us, too, and telling Jimmy she loved him and whatnot, and he was saying thanks for jumping out of the trees like Tarzan to come and rescue him, and it was pretty funny because of the way he talked and just because we were all pretty wound up about not being dead and laughing.
None of us ever looked at Jimmy’s mom the same after that, and we always did what she told us when we were over there, without any backtalk, either. She was some lady, Missus Ringer, and I guess Nicole was right: women can be tough as nails, sometimes, and probably even tougher than men when there’s good reason for it. I can’t picture any of the dads in Hackers Loon swinging out of the trees like Missus Ringer did. I can’t really picture Miss Jane or any of the other moms doing it either, though, I guess, or any other human being. Not like that at least. After it was all over, though—and after a whole lot of lectures about a million things we shouldn’t be doing and everything else—Miss Jane told me that she’d jump out of a truck into a raging river to save me, and tried to give me a hug. I told her to stop and ran outside when she said it. But later on, when I was going to bed that night, I thought about it, and it made me feel pretty good anyway, I guess, because I believed her, even though I didn’t really think she could actually do the whole jump-from-a-riverbank, tree-swinging kind of thing.
I never found out about swinging out of trees, but I did find out that Miss Jane was one tough lady, and that she sure would come to my rescue if I needed it, and I’ll get to that in a minute.
“I ain’t trying to pity you, you little bastard,” Nicole said, back in the truck, pushing a tear back into her eye with one finger. “It’s just sad. I’m sorry.” She paused and looked out at the road. “I’m just sad.” She was still working on that one tear with her finger, but about five others had already fallen out, and she was talking in that kind of rough way women talk when they’re sad about something but wish they weren’t and are mad because they’re sad, and getting madder with the sadder they get, then mad and sad and nice all at the same time. It was hard to follow.
She made a groaning sound and pressed her forehead back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been driving for almost twenty-four hours straight, and my mind is playing tricks on me, and I’m not even one hundred percent sure you two are even real right now. I’ve had a rough month. A rough year—or life, really—and I’m not sure about anything right now.”
I didn’t know what to say. “We’re real,” I said and looked at her.
Nicole smiled and I smiled back and we drove for a bit.
Then she sat up and pointed out the windshield. Out where she pointed, the sky was just starting to get a little brighter, in a gray kind of way, and we could finally see beyond the front of the truck’s headlights, out in that gray muck, and there in the middle of rolling land, were three real-life cowboys on horses, with hats and everything, just moseying along through that early morning fog, pushing a sea of cows in front of them like they weren’t even real. Me and Quinn watched with our faces pressed against that truck’s window.
Nicole laughed.
“It’s amazing,” I said.
“You’ll see plenty more of that out here,” she said, chuckling. “But first, it’s time to eat.”
I was starving once she mentioned it, and she pulled off the next exit.
No Direction Home, was spray-painted in black paint on the wall outside the truck stop we parked at. There was a lot of other stuff on that wall, too. Nothing I remember, though. But I do remember that: No Direction Home.
“Ain’t that something?” Nicole said, smoking a cigarette and fiddling with her jacket. We were waiting for Quinn to get done in the bathroom.
I was staring at the wall and those letters. “It sure is,” I said, thinking she was talking about the No Direction Home written on the wall. But she was staring off the other way, talking about the sunrise, and she was standing still, her one hand shoved into the pocket of her Carhartt jacket and the other up to her face with her two little fingers and her thumb just touching her chin and the other two fingers holding a burning cigarette to her lips like she forgot it was there. The smoke from her cigarette and steam from her breath were both drifting up in front of her eyes as she stared off at that sunrise, not blinking or thinking or anything. She was kind of pretty then, I guess, under all that tough. She just looked like a lonely little girl in big clothes, and she stayed there, looking out at the sunrise for a while, till Quinn came out of the crapper. She was a good lady—Nicole. And that sunrise was real nice, too.
Nicole said later that day, that when you’re on the road or just in life in general, you have to stop and appreciate the special moments, because they only happen that way once, and if you stop to enjoy them, they can keep you going through other rough stuff. She was talking about things like that sunrise, I think. You could see everything from there: the trucks waking up at the giant truck stop plopped there in the middle of the endless nothing, and the diner all lit up with signs, serving pancakes the size of your head, and behind it all the most never-ending wild west you’ve ever seen, all starting to light up in rolling grass fields and black shadows like you could just ride a horse out into it forever. That was what she was talking about, I think—Nicole. And she was right.
When Quinn came out of the bathroom, he took a look, too, and we walked back toward Nicole’s truck.
“How much further to your delivery?” Quinn asked as we were walking.
“It’s still a ways. We should be there this afternoon.”
“You said there’s mountains that way?”
“You’ll love them.”
As we were walking, I noticed the giant Timber Value logo on an eighteen-wheeler parked a few rows down from Nicole’s truck.
I nudged Quinn. “You see that?”
Quinn looked and nodded. “They’re everywhere,” he said.
“What are you two pointing at,” Nicole said. She was smiling, but when she looked where we were pointing, she suddenly turned white.
I thought it was the Timber Value truck she got scared by, and it seemed odd because you see them everywhere. But she wasn’t looking at the Timber Value truck. Parked behind the Timber Value truck, odd because it was parked in with the eighteen-wheelers, was a big black SUV.
“Let’s go,” Nicole said when she saw it, pushing us along toward her truck.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Just go,” she said, pressing us forward.
She didn’t say another word as she shoved us into the truck and jumped in behind us.
I didn’t think eighteen-wheelers could peel out of anywhere, but I swear, she peeled that thing out that day. She hadn’t hardly turned the key before she was punching the gas out of that parking spot, the truck lurching and jumping as she shifted gears.
She didn’t calm down for miles. Even once we got back on the highway, she was looking in the mirrors every two seconds, driving like a maniac.
But eventually she slowed down and sat back.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
She took a deep breath and wiped the sweat off her forehead. “The guy we’re delivering this load to is a very serious person,” she said eventually. “And I just saw four of his guys back there in that black SUV.”
“Are they bad guys?” Quinn asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You’re sure it was who you think it was?” I asked, my attention perking up with her nervousness.
“I know the driver for sure,” she said. “I’ve seen him at the ranch we’re going to.”
“At the ranch?”
“Why the hell were they there?” she said to herself, checking the mirror for the millionth time.
Eventually, she kept not seeing what she was hoping to not see in the mirror, and she relaxed a little, and we drove for a while and got to know each other pretty good, and pretty soon she calmed down entirely, and we forgot about it and were old friends, singing to the radio and arguing about a million things from Scooby Doo to the color of shark’s teeth.
We talked about cowboying a lot, too, and Nicole told us some history stuff about Wyoming and grizzers and a guy named Jim Bridger. A grizzer is a grizzly bear, and Nicole said Wyoming had about a million of them, and they make the black bears we tussle with in Hackers Loon seem like puppies.
At one point she said, “You boys heard of Molly Hatchet?” Which sounded weird. Then she reached up to her radio and switched it on and a guy—not a lady—came on the radio and screamed “Heeelllll Yeahhhhh!” and then the rest of the band came blasting through those speakers, rattling our brains.
Nicole cranked it up as loud as it went, and it went loud, and the guy was hollering about outlaws on the loose with another guy ripping around on his guitar and just making the most fearsome racket ever, all of it ringing around that truck cab like fireworks.
We were having a ripper of a time, and I didn’t think it could get any better, when all of a sudden, right then, off in those greenish-brown hills of grass, we saw this one little light, and then pretty soon, the one light turned into three, and then a whole freight train came into view, running out of that Wyoming prairie, right there in the morning, the train about as long as anything you’ve ever seen in your life.
Well, that Molly Hatchet was cranked up, and that train was chugging along and winding its way out of those hills toward the highway, and we were going along at about eighty-five miles-an-hour, and the train was coming in from its direction at about the same, like a race, like the world had timed that train up just right to give us a run for something that morning—for the West! We banged our heads and listened to that music blasting through the radio and watched that train come tearing out of the desert and run alongside us broadside, us able to see right into the engineer in his window. I might have fallen down dead from the beauty of it all, and I knew right then and there that the world the way the teachers and TV commercials drew it up wasn’t the way I wanted it at all—not a bit. They could all take it and be happy with it, or grumpy, or whatever else they wanted to be. But for me, I wanted to be fake gut-shot and outlaws on the loose in a big rig rambling down the highway cranking Molly Hatchet and racing a train for everything in the West on a grey pirate morning with a lady trucker driving and me being practically a cowboy besides—and Quinn, too. Running from the noose! Crank it up to eleven, Molly Hatchet!
Well, by the look on Quinn’s face, he felt about the same as I did right then, and Nicole was smiling pretty nice behind her sunglasses, too, driving that big rig and banging her head. Nicole liked to crank tunes.
Well, anyway, that train was something, but what I saw later when we turned off the big highway was even better. Nicole called them the Winds, and man, were they something, really something. They were mountains like you wouldn’t believe existed in the real world. But they were real, really real, with real snow on top and clouds having to go up and around and everything.
From when we first saw them, we drove and drove and the Winds got bigger and bigger until I couldn’t believe they could get any bigger—and then they did—and then they did again—and again—until we reached a town called Pinedale, which was right next to them. They were crazy.
From Pinedale, we kept going over some mountains and down the other side and into a valley that looked like heaven and had snow-capped mountains all around that was called Bondurant.
Bondurant was a funny name to say, and when I heard it, I liked it, so I turned to Nicole and said, “I want change my trucker name to Bondurant. Can I do that?”
And she just said, “It’s done, Bondurant.” Like that. “Want a last name to go with it?”
I thought about it. “Not now,” I said. “Just Bondurant.”
“Good then, Bondurant,” she said and smiled.
I looked at Quinn and he shrugged his shoulders. That was what I liked about Nicole, and about the road in general: on the road, if you want to change your road name to Bondurant, then it’s done, without a lot of fuss about it.
Nicole drove past Bondurant and out of the valley, and she cranked up more tunes, and we banged our heads and hooted and hollered, and eventually, I fell asleep.
I woke up when the truck bounced over a pothole on a dirt road deep in the woods. “Whoa!” I said when I saw the forest, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. “Where are we?”
“Shush,” Nicole said, kind of testy.
“What’s the matter,” I said, whispering. Now she really had my attention.
“Just sit back there and shut up,” she said. She wasn’t cranking the tunes anymore.
I looked over at Quinn, and he was just waking up, too. He shrugged his shoulders.
We drove further down that dirt road for a bit and then down some other dirt roads and through a few turns and a whole lot of trees that looked like birch trees but were called aspen trees. We eventually got to some wooden gates that said Lazy Pine Ranch above them, and when we pulled up, the gates opened, and there were two big guys with guns standing there. They didn’t smile or wave or anything. They just opened the gates.
“Who are they?” I whispered from my hiding spot. We were hiding in the back of the cab but peeking around the seats.
“Just stay back there and stay hidden,” Nicole said to us, kind of nervous. “I should have hid you down the road,” she muttered to herself as she waved and smiled to the guys opening the gate. When she was mulling it over earlier, she thought about dropping us off in the woods outside this ranch, but she decided we’d split if she did that, and cause more trouble. She was worried about the owner, a guy named Lodgepole, and what he may or may not be angry about. She said he was kind of a weird guy that didn’t let outsiders onto the ranch, and before they would let her on the first time she had to be cleared, which was a hell of a process. All day she was worried about why she saw Lodgepole’s guys in that truck stop. She said she’d been delivering to him for five years and never had a problem, and she couldn’t figure out why his guys might be following her—other than us.
The dirt road past the gates wound through a forest area and over a little river and up a hill and down the other side. When we came down the other side, we drove out of the forest into an open field and laid our eyes on just the all-mightiest view of the grandest mountains you’ve ever seen in your life, right there on top of you, like you had to tilt your hat back just to see the tops of them. They were bigger than the Winds, and right there.
But we didn’t look at those mountains for long, because across the open field that ran up to more forest at the base of the mountains, was a giant herd of cattle and six cowboys pushing them across the field. There was one cowboy in front, one on each side, and three in the back, and the guys in the back had their bandanas on and were waving their cowboy hats from time to time, hollering at any cows that were lingering. Quinn’s jaw was on the floor, and I guess mine was too, and we just watched.
There were two guys on four-wheelers driving across the field, too, one in front of the herd, going fast, and the other behind, just puttering along. They were opening and closing the gates in the fields as the cattle went through.
Nicole pulled the truck up to a dirt roundabout in front of a barn and some buildings and parked. There were a bunch of guys waiting there for her.
She sighed and looked out the windshield. She looked sick. “I’ve got to open the back so they can get the pallets out,” she whispered, turning back to us. “Stay in the truck and don’t move a muscle.”
We nodded and pulled a blanket over us, and she got out of the truck.
It was kind of dumb on her part, really. Not that I’m making excuses. But I’d already come right out and told her that we’d probably put the slip on her eventually. And it was a cattle ranch, after all, with cowboys and the whole bit. We just wanted to see the place. And who could blame us?
Anyway, while we were still in the truck, Quinn started convincing me that we could get out and look around the place and hop right back into the truck before Nicole even got back, and she wouldn’t ever know we got out. I put up a little argument for show, but if I was being honest, I wanted to get out of that truck so bad I felt like my hair was on fire. I made him promise that we’d be gone for no more than two minutes, though, and he agreed—and we slid out of the truck while they were at the back unloading.
We snuck out and around the side of the truck to a barn and around the back of that to where we could see the cowboys bringing in the cattle. Most of the herd was already in the new field by then, munching, and the cowboys were mostly just sitting there watching the final ones file in at the gate, counting them. It was a hell of a sight.
But eventually, I started getting nervous that we had to get back to that truck or we’d be in a heap. “We better get back, Quinn,” I whispered as we were sneaking down the side of another building to get a better look.
“Let’s just check around the side of that barn,” he said, pointing.
“It’s been more than two minutes.”
“Thirty seconds more,” he said and started running over to the barn.
I didn’t have much choice but to run after him, and when we came around the corner, Quinn slammed on the brakes, and I almost hit him, because right there, with his back to us, was a real-life cowboy, in a full-length coat and cowboy hat and boots—with spurs and everything. He was tinkering with his saddle, and his horse looked right over at us—over the cowboy’s shoulder—and that horse bobbed his head and looked at us like he was deciding whether to tell his cowboy about us or not.
I stopped dead and turned back toward the other building, which is where we should have gone, but Quinn saw a door there in the barn and dove for it, like an idiot.
Well, if Quinn hadn’t opened that door, that one door, we probably would have been back to the truck and just driven out of there with Nicole, unharmed. And I almost definitely wouldn’t be sitting here right now, having to tell this rotten story. That one door. If Quinn hadn’t opened that stupid door we’d probably still be free as birds, too. Maybe not. I don’t know. Either way, he opened that door. He opened it, and once he opened it, it was over, there wasn’t any other way it could go.
Inside the door was a big barn, and in the middle of the barn was a guy in a fancy suit, duct taped to a chair.
I’d never seen that before.
The guy had duct tape on his mouth, too, and he was facing the opposite way from us. He must have sensed us or something, though, because he kept trying to turn toward the door we came in. But we were hiding behind some hay bales by then.
“What the hell is that?” I said to Quinn as we slid in against the hay.
Quinn was smiling from ear to ear. “It’s a guy duct-taped to a chair!” he squealed, trying to be quiet.
The guy in the chair kind of grunted a bit like he was trying to yell something, but he had duct tape on his mouth.
“We need to get out of here,” I said.
“We need to find out what this place is,” Quinn said, of course.
“No, we don’t, Quinn.”
“Yeah, we do.”
“No, we don’t!”
“How the hell do you expect to be a pirate king if you keep folding up anytime you get a chance to do something?”
“I don’t!”
“How do you expect to be a pirate if you never take a little risk?”
“I do!” I said.
“How do you expect be a pirate if you—?”
“Maybe I don’t want to be a pirate!” I shouted, louder than a whisper.
Well, if that didn’t just turn Quinn sideways. He looked right at me and didn’t say a thing, but I could see that I hurt him bad.
“I’m sorry, Quinn,” I said.
The guy taped to the chair must have heard me, too, because he started hollering under his duct tape, like he was saying hello.
“I didn’t mean it,” I said.
“Yes you did,” Quinn said. “And that’s fine. I guess you don’t want to be a pirate anymore then.”
“Yes I do, Quinn. I didn’t mean it.”
“Nope, no, you meant it. A pirate’s life it will not be for young Ruby,” he said, like that, turning up his nose.
I looked at him, and he looked off. “Maybe you’re right,” I said and slumped my shoulders.
“What the hell do you mean?” he shouted, and the guy in the chair definitely heard him that time and started squirming.
“What do you mean, what do I mean?” I whispered back. “You said so yourself.”
“I didn’t really believe it!” he said. “My God, Ruby! You really don’t want to be a pirate?”
“I do!”
“Well, what the hell are you talking about then?”
“You were the one that said it. I just want to go back to the truck.”
“Sometimes you don’t make any damn sense, Ruby.”
“Well, hell, Quinn,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You sure are.”
Then we both heard Nicole’s truck start up outside.
I cursed pretty good then, and we both ran for the door, but the cowboy and his horse had moved and were standing right dead in front of the door.
“Shit!” I said.
I ran over the other direction, where there was a window behind the hay, and I scurried up to the window and tried to pry it open. But even if the window was a giant open doorway, it wouldn’t have mattered, because right below the window was that guy, Lodgepole, and five of his gang, seeing off Nicole.
I expect Nicole wasn’t too happy when she got back to her truck and saw we weren’t there. When we got to the window in the barn, she was still in the truck and had just started it up. She got back out and waved and smiled at Lodgepole and then kind of looked around a bit like she was checking the truck tires, and she worked her way around, searching for us and looking kind of like Miss Jane did when she saw cabin eight with all the holes in the plaster.
I felt pretty bad.
After a minute, I could see she was getting nervous and Lodgepole was starting to walk over to her to ask her what she was doing, and she didn’t have much she could say, so she smiled and waved at Lodgepole. Lodgepole was right between her and us, which made it look like she was waving to us when she waved at Lodgepole. Then she kind of fixed her dirty trucker hat and took a deep breath and waved again at Lodgepole and opened the door of her truck and got in. Then the truck jumped forward and pulled around the driveway and down the dirt road and off the ranch in a cloud of dust.
I watched her till she disappeared over the hill in the forest.
“Damn,” I said, looking out the window.