Quinn was sitting down on the hay bale below the window.
I watched the dust from Nicole’s truck swirl over the ranch road in the distance. “We’re sure in it now,” I said as I dropped down from the window.
Quinn looked at me and grinned. But I know Quinn. And right then, Quinn thought we were in it. And when Quinn thinks you’re in it, you better be worried, because I’ve only seen that look on Quinn’s face a few times before, and each and every one of those times, we were sure in it.
“Oh, man,” I said and kind of scratched at my head. I was suddenly really itchy. “Aw hell, Quinn. We’re sure in it now, ain’t we?”
He thought about it. “Maybe, Rube,” he said, but he was still smiling.
“What should we do?”
“Well, as long as we’re here, we shoul—
And right then, suddenly out of nowhere, the giant barn doors at the end of the barn crashed open and daylight burst through.
“Your time to repent is here!” a voice boomed into the barn and echoed off the walls. It had been so quiet and dark before that it seemed like the voice rang on forever and ever, like it was echoing around the world.
Me and Quinn both jumped up and then dove down behind the bales of hay, thinking we were about to die. The guy in the fancy suit and duct tape in the middle of the room started to blubber under his duct tape, too, probably thinking the same, and he was doing something with the chair that made quite a racket. We couldn’t see him at that point, on account of hiding.
Luckily, the voice wasn’t coming for us, and after a second, Quinn shimmied up a bit to try to see. I yanked him back down, but he shoved me off and shimmied up again and got to a spot he could see between the hay bales. Then he gave me an I-told-you-so look and waved me up, and I shimmied up, too.
There were five guys that came in. One of them was Lodgepole, and he went up and pulled the duct tape off the guy in the fancy suit’s mouth.
The guy in the fancy suit howled about the duct tape sting for a second, then he looked up at Lodgepole. “Oh, God!” he said.
Lodgepole was a fearsome guy: tough, with a black beard and a crazy look in his eyes. He was wearing a dirty hat and a brown leather vest over a denim shirt and grey jeans. We found out later that his real name was Douglas Pine, as you know, but everyone called him Lodgepole. Right then, like always, he had the biggest handgun I’d ever seen on his hip, and he was thumbing the button on the leather holster. “If you call on God, you better be ready for the answer, Trevor,” Lodgepole said to the guy in the fancy suit duct-taped to the chair.
“I didn’t do anything!” Trevor blubbered.
“That’s a lie, Trevor.”
“What do you mean? Why am I here?”
Lodgepole punched him so fast I barely saw it.
The guy in the fancy suit cried out and took a minute to un-ring his bell, and then, finally, he refocused on Lodgepole and immediately started crying.
“Don’t cry at me, you lousy cockroach,” Lodgepole said. “Now is your chance to repent.”
“I repent!” the guy in the fancy suit cried out.
Lodgepole leaned back and smiled. “Then today is your lucky day.”
Quinn and a few of Lodgepole’s cronies got a chuckle out of that one.
“You have a chance right now,” Lodgepole said. “Today—this holy day for Trevor—this day of reckoning. You understand?”
“Yes,” Trevor said. “I mean, no— I don’t know. What do you mean? I’ll give you anything you want, just please, God, don’t hurt me.”
“He hears you,” Lodgepole said. “He hears you all the time. You can bet on that. He’s probably preparing something special for you right now.” Lodgepole pulled out the gun and pointed it between Trevor’s eyes.
Trevor screamed.
“You have a chance, Trevor,” Lodgepole said, the gun touching Trevor’s forehead. “How far leveraged is your soul?”
“Oh God, I’m sorry!”
“You repent then?”
“I repent! I’m a sinner! I won’t ever sin again. I’m sorry!”
“Interesting, Trevor,” Lodgepole said, dropping the gun for a second. “That’s big of you. But I’m still a little hung up.”
“What do you want from me?”
“What do you do when you have an infestation of snakes, Trevor?” Lodgepole said, walking behind Trevor and looking up to the rafters.
“Wh— What?”
“You get an exterminator.”
“What?”
“You hire a snake hunter, Trevor.”
“Okay—,”
“Timber Value, you, the Gennelich family: You’re snakes. Snakes that slithered around for too long and have now found me: the snake hunter.”
“Wh— what does that mean?”
I turned to Quinn, squinting my eyes. “Gennelich family?”
He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.
“Right now, Trevor,” Lodgepole shouted. “That means I am the goddamn spear of God!” He held the gun to Trevor’s face. “I am the smite! And I will smite thee!”
“Jesus!” Trevor cried.
“You said it, Trevor!”
“What do you want from me?” Trevor blubbered.
“I want what you want.”
“What?
“You want to atone for your sins. Right?”
“I repent!” the guy said.
“And you’ll go and sin no more?”
“Yes!”
“Lovely. When is the meeting?”
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb with me.”
“I don’t know what you—,”
“I’ll shoot you right now, Trevor, and you won’t like it.”
“I don’t—,”
Boom!
Lodgepole shot him, just like he said he would. He only grazed him in the shoulder, but it was loud, and a surprise to me. I’d never seen someone get shot before, and I didn’t like it a bit, to be honest, and neither did Trevor, as you can imagine, just like Lodgepole said. Trevor’s chair toppled over and he got to squirming around on the ground, howling pretty good and trying to come to terms with his shoulder being shot.
“Shut up,” Lodgepole said. “I only grazed you.”
“Don’t shoot me again!”
“When?” Lodgepole said, leaning over him.
“The twenty-third,” Trevor said through clenched teeth. “Oh, God. The twenty-third. They’ll all be out here then. Please stop.”
I stopped watching at that point because there was a lot of blood, and Trevor’s shoulder was shot, and I suddenly got a little light-headed and had to sit down behind the hay and breathe a little. Quinn kept watching, but he was a little pale, too.
“Clean his wound,” I heard Lodgepole order his guys, and I heard him walking toward the front door, and then the light burst into the barn again as he opened the door. “Blessed are the meek, Trevor,” Lodgepole called back as he walked out. “Remember that? Make yourself humble, boy—and do it fast.” The door closed behind him.
Well, with all the blood and howling and Trevor Gennelich writhing around on the ground, and then a whole lot of church talk about God and Jesus and repenting and damning and the whole bit, well, I started to feel like I was gonna puke.
I made a run for the door like that, trying to hold back some upchuck while crawling on all fours to keep from getting shot, which is a hard thing to do, if you’ve ever tried it. I’d say I was about half successful in that task. I didn’t get shot, after all, but I didn’t really hold the puke in the whole way either, and I think I made some racket getting through the door, too.
After I got outside and puked a little and breathed in some fresh air and looked up at the mountains, I felt a little better. But I didn’t get to enjoy it for long before Quinn came ducking out the door, too.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he said, like that, whispering. Then before I could answer, he grabbed my arm and tugged me up to my feet. “We gotta go!”
He seemed pretty sure we had to run, so I followed him.
Quinn was already out ahead of me, and he ran to the other building and down the side of it. At the back, he stopped and peeked around the corner, then turned to me and nodded his head and disappeared around the corner.
When I reached the back of the building and took the corner, Quinn was in full stride and moving like a deer along the back. I ran after him, and eventually, up ahead, he reached the end and stopped and looked. When I was just about to him, he turned and waved me along and took off across the opening to the first of five little white houses, all in a row, spaced out by small trees and bushes and little wooden walkways.
We made it to the first house and snuck around behind it. I finally caught up to him on the other side, and I started to ask him what happened, but he shushed me.
“We need to get to the woods,” he said really quiet. Then he used hand signals to say we should go behind the other four little houses in the row, and then make for the woods beyond, by a big pine tree.
I nodded and gave a thumbs up.
Without saying anything, we made our way past the second house with no problem, and then the third and the fourth. But just as we were about to make a break for the woods on the other side of the fifth little house, we heard a car pull up and park in front of it.
We didn’t have much time to think and even fewer places to take cover, so we had to make do with what we had, which was a tiny little area under a platform for the propane tank. It was closed in by some of that crisscrossed wooden lattice that people hang under their porches to keep the critters out. There was a little gap in one of the corners where the lathe wasn’t nailed, and at first it looked big enough for us to squeeze through. It wasn’t, of course—not by a long shot—and in trying, we broke it in half. And breaking that piece didn’t somehow make any other hiding places suddenly appear, so we were stuck making do with that little space and only some broken lattice to hide us.
We squeezed in and got the fencing up as best we could and did a good bit of shushing and pushing, all the while hoping to high heaven that whoever was out front wouldn’t come to the back and see us.
A second later, we heard somebody open the front door of the house and go inside and start moving around. At first the footsteps were faint, but then they got closer, and pretty soon it sounded like they were right over us. They moved around right above us for a while, walking here, walking there, and opening and closing things. Then the footsteps stopped going back and forth and made their way to our left.
Then we heard the sound we were dreading: the back door latch opening. All we could do was hold the broken fencing up and hope they wouldn’t notice us.
The door opened. Then the storm door. Then steps on the stairs.
But when the figure made it past the storm door, which was between us and them, we saw that it was just a little old lady, an old Mexican lady, and she was little, really little, shorter than either of us—and about a hundred years old.
She was humming to herself and putting on gardening gloves as the screen door swung closed behind her. Quinn nudged me and put his fingers to his lips like I was making noise, but I wasn’t.
Then the little old lady walked the opposite direction from us and over to the second of three gardens behind the cottages. The gardens were giant boxes raised up on the ground and made with timber. They were about twenty feet by ten feet and were loaded with plants and vegetables. The lady knelt down with her back to us and started humming and picking weeds out of the garden, poking the tomatoes and peppers.
With an open field between us and the woods, and this lady at her garden, we didn’t really have much choice but to sit there like a couple of caged chickens.
I don’t know if it was because I hadn’t slept a lot or because I was hungry or cooped up—or maybe because I’d just watched a man get shot—but for one reason or another, I started feeling pretty funny. For the first fifteen minutes or so, we just watched the lady kneel there and hum and tend to her garden, and I managed. But my heart was pounding, and the cramped space was working on my body and even worse on my head, and all the while I was having itches that were popping up on every surface of my body.
Fifteen minutes in that cage felt like fifteen hours, and I felt itchy, and the lady was kneeling there, looking like the most peaceful thing you’d ever seen in your life, bending down to the plants all calm and slow, like she was praying or something, and then there was me, with my head about to explode from trying to sit still and hide.
Ten minutes later, the lady was in the garden right in front of us, and I was feeling downright weird. The sun was just dropping behind the mountains, and the grass in the little back yard was cut low and green around the house, but the field around it was left to grow up full. The wind was blowing from the front of the house, so none got to us, but all the long grass behind the old lady was blowing and swirling in the wind. I was all wrapped-up with my knees in my chin, not breathing real well and kind of zoning in and out, wishing for a little breeze in our coop, but instead, all I could do was look off at the grass in the fields swirling around in the wind and the trees swaying back and forth behind it. I was sweating and my body was squeezing up, and pretty soon I started to feel like there was a lake in my head, and like it was sloshing back and forth with the swaying of the trees. Then I realized I was kind of swaying back and forth myself, and my eyes felt like somebody had them on strings, yanking them inward and outward and making them not work. I was having a hell of a time just trying to stay upright, and the next thing I knew I felt like I was choking and drowning and dying all at the same time, and I didn’t have any choice but to get out of that cage as fast as I could—or die. At least that was how it felt.
Well, I did exactly that.
And I probably don’t have to tell you, but me coming out of that crawl space like a crazy zombie with my eyes swimming and me grunting and staggering and shouting gibberish and almost puking didn’t go over too well with that little old Mexican lady tending to her garden. I hadn’t much more than taken one step out before that lady just gasped and looked at me and toppled right over onto her side by the garden without making a sound—dead.
At that moment, I was pretty occupied with getting my eyeballs working again, and wasn’t all too concerned with anything else going on around me, but Quinn, on the other hand, was trying to figure out the situation. He said later that we should’ve made a go for the woods right then and we probably could have made it.
But, when I came-to after my fit and saw that I had killed that nice lady, I felt pretty bad about it because I hadn’t ever killed anybody before, and I always thought that if I ever did, it would probably be a bad guy or at least a pirate or something. But there I was, and I’d just killed a nice old Mexican lady who I didn’t even know and who’d never done me a wrong turn. I was sure I’d burn in hell for it.
Quinn was trying to get me to go, but I kind of slumped down on the stairs and started wondering if that lady had family or anything, and how they’d feel about it. Then that got me thinking about people dying and funerals, and about this Mexican lady and her family, and how they’d be crying and upset and trying to comfort each other about her dying. And I could just see all the food and expense and people who wished they had one more chance to say something to her. And it wouldn’t be that she’d just died from old age or something like that. She died from me jumping out like a wild baboon, scaring her to death.
I felt pretty low at that time, maybe the lowest ever. And I didn’t really know how this would factor into my immortal soul or anything else in the future. It couldn’t be good. I knew that.
I was mulling that over when I heard the sound of the back door latch opening again.
Well, I don’t have to tell you that I wasn’t happy to hear that back door opening right then. I jumped up off the steps and spun around, and there, for the first time up close, I laid eyes on Crisanto Romero Monticello Rodriguez the Fourth, all four-foot-eleven of him. He had four names in a row like that and they were all pretty good, and he would have been worth five more if the world were fair in handing out its names. He probably would have been taller, too, if the world were fair about that. But it wasn’t, so he was only five feet tall in cowboy boots, and when he opened that door and found me and Quinn out there in his back yard with his wife of sixty years laying there dead on the ground, you can imagine he wished he was six feet tall, or at least had a hammer.
I was glad he didn’t, though—have a hammer. All he had was his lunch box. And despite Crisanto normally being really kind and never having a cross word to say about anybody in any language, right then, at that moment, with his wife lying dead beside her garden, he let loose with that lunch box and cracked me a good shot right in the elbow, and I probably deserved it and would have let him keep going if he’d wanted to, but he just took the one swing and ran past me to his wife.
It was the fastest by ten times that I ever saw Crisanto move. He never moved by foot or by four-wheeler faster than a turtle crawled. But this one time—the first time we met him—he sure moved. He ran, and he plopped down by his wife’s side and took her up in his arms, and I’ll be struck dead by lightning if she didn’t just open her eyes and look into Crisanto’s eyes and smile, right then.
I’ve never been more relieved in my life—and I’ve done a lot of stupid things and gotten away with most of them. At that moment when she opened her eyes and reached up and touched her husband on the cheek, I felt about as good as I’ve ever felt in my life. I would have happily taken punishment for all my other sins combined just to have that moment happen the way it did with that lady not being dead.
Well, I was happy, but only for a second, because we still had to figure the pickle we were in, which was even harder than normal because Cristanto and his wife—who we later knew as Abuelita Rosa—didn’t speak anything but gibberish.
We tried to explain ourselves, but they didn’t understand, and they spoke gibberish and we didn’t understand, and eventually we were all four just standing there looking at each other in their backyard, not one of us topping five feet tall.
Crisanto looked at his wife and said some gibberish, and she said some gibberish back, and they both kind of shrugged at each other and then looked at us and waved us into their little house.
Neither me or Quinn knew quite what to make of anything.
“Do you think they’re turning us in?” Quinn said in a whisper when we turned to go inside.
“I don’t know.”
“I think we can take them,” Quinn said.
“What?”
“If you want.”
“I don’t think they are.”
“Now would be the time.”
“I think they’re just mixed up” I said. “We almost killed the lady.”
“We?”
“Well, you know.”
“Why’d you jump out like that anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and we just looked at each other.
“Sometimes you don’t make any sense, Ruby.”
“I know,” I said and dropped my head.
Then Crisanto said something in gibberish to us, but we didn’t know what he was saying. He sounded like he was asking a question, we could get that, but I couldn’t tell anything else.
They brought us into the little kitchen and pointed for us to sit at the table, and we did.
Then they just stood there and stared at us, trying to figure us, and we sat there and stared back, trying to figure them.
“Do you understand us?” Quinn asked.
“No speak,” Crisanto said, and then let loose a line of gibberish.
“Farts,” Quinn said, and they didn’t do anything.
“Poop sandwich!” I said, and they didn’t even flinch.
Crisanto let loose with some gibberish then, but we just looked at him. He turned to his wife, and they both scratched their heads and looked at us in a worried way.
“Booger pirate!” Quinn said, and they didn’t say anything.
“Snot jogger!” I said, and we laughed, and Crisanto and Rosa just looked at us, and eventually we were all just staring at each other again.
“What should we do?” I asked Quinn.
“It’s almost dark,” he said.
“So?”
“We should make a run for it while we still can.”
“And go where?”
“The woods.”
“What do we do with them?” I said, pointing to Crisanto and Abuelita Rosa.
“I don’t know.”
“They’ll know where we are and probably tell.”
“It’ll be dark.”
“Still.”
Well, we didn’t have many options, and we could tell the situation was going from the litter box to the outhouse. So we decided to make a run for it.
Our timing was bad.
Crisanto and Abuelita Rosa were standing there staring at us, and it was quiet, and Quinn looked at me and nodded, and I knew what that meant. I nodded back, and we jumped up at the same time, and I flipped the table over for distraction and we juked to the back door and then ran for the front door instead. The juke and the commotion worked, but just as we got to the front door, Crisanto and Rosa’s son, Victor, got there, too, and he grabbed the door handle from the outside as we were grabbing it from the inside.
Victor, who is normally a calm and quiet guy we found out later, jumped back and screamed like a girl and cursed a number of times in a number of different languages and dropped all the stuff he was carrying on the ground as he got a face full of Quinn and me running hell-fire and heaven-bent for our freedom. His cursing was hilarious on account of his accent, and it was all I could do to not start laughing right there as I was running for my life.
Quinn was first out the door, and I was right on his heels, and we made our way across the field like lightning. We didn’t turn back till we hit the trees.
“Nuts,” Quinn said, looking back as we reached the trees, and I agreed.
Crisanto, Abuelita Rosa, and Victor were all just standing in their doorway under the one light, staring out at us with all the stuff Victor had been carrying at their feet.
We didn’t wait around. We turned and took off into the forest and tried to run like we were before, but it was hard to run in the forest, and pretty spooky, too, and before long, Quinn caught a root and went tumbling through the forest onto his face.
I stopped as I caught up to him. “You okay,” I asked, reaching down to help him up.
Quinn rolled over, rubbing his elbow and cursing under his breath. “I’m okay,” he said.
“We’re in it, ain’t we?” I asked, looking back the way we came, trying to catch my breath. It was suddenly hard to breathe.
“Did you see my skinned elbow?” Quinn said.
“Is it bad?”
Quinn bent his arm back to get a better look it then pinched at the scrape, and it bled a little. “I don’t think so,” he said. “What do you think? It stings.”
“We’re in it.”
Quinn looked back in the direction of the camp as he rubbed his elbow. He looked all around us in the dark forest. “There’s got to be a road or a trail eventually.”
I looked around, and it looked a lot like our woods, but I didn’t know, so I just shrugged and we kept moving deeper into the forest.
We walked for a long time. But we didn’t find a trail or a road, just more trees.
Then, suddenly, after what felt like hours, a blinding light came on in the middle of the forest, and a voice yelled, “Don’t move a muscle!”
We both froze when we heard the voice.
“Don’t move a muscle,” the voice said again, even though we hadn’t moved.
I heard a scuffle and saw movement from behind us, and then a gunshot rang out, and Quinn went down.
It all happened so fast. The shot was still echoing, and Quinn was dead. I had my hands up and my eyes closed, and I was waiting for the shot that would take me down, too. But when I let myself look, I could see that Quinn was alive and fine and only laying on the ground because a ten-ton grizzly bear was laying dead across his back. Quinn’s head was poking out from under the fur.
Turns out, the voice from out in the forest was Lodgepole’s, and so was the shot.
Lodgepole’s guys, who all had night vision goggles, said later that the bear stepped out of the trees and took a swipe that would have knocked Quinn’s head clean off his neck if Lodgepole hadn’t nailed him right in the eye and killed him dead with that one shot. He had some fearsome chompers on him—the bear—and it gave me the creeps to think he was stalking behind us in the forest, thinking about dinner.
“What the hell are you doing?” Lodgepole yelled at us from the darkness after the shot.
Quinn wiggled out from under the bear, and I was still mostly frozen and didn’t know what the hell was going on.
“Wow!” Quinn yelled once he got out, jumping up and down and pointing at the bear. “Wow!”
“Who the hell are you two, and what are you doing?” Lodgepole said, appearing out of the black forest and marching up to us
“Is that a bear?” I said, even though anyone could tell it was a bear. I looked down at the bear and it was still warm and big as a bus with claws the size of daggers.
The other five guys with Lodgepole appeared out of the darkness. They all looked pretty mean.
“A grizzer,” Lodgepole said to one of his guys, stepping past us and studying the bear, shaking his head. “It’ll be a hell of time getting rid of this.”
The guy—who was big and I think black, or maybe mixed with something, and who we later got to know as Hem and as one of Lodgepole’s top guys, and who we could tell right off the bat was tough and smart in a quiet but maybe dangerous kind of way—scrunched up his face and shook his head, looking at Lodgepole then at us and then at the bear. Victor, Crisanto’s son, was there, too, and three other guys who looked like army guys with big guns and night vision goggles.
“What the hell are you two doing here?” Lodgepole said again, turning back to us.
“Are those night vision goggles?” Quinn asked.
“What are you doing here, I said?” Lodgepole repeated.
Quinn kind of started to answer, but he kept looking at the goggles. “Can I try them on?” he said.
Well, Lodgepole wasn’t much for disobedience, we found out, and he pretty much expected you to answer him right off the bat when he asked you a question, and he’d asked that one three times already, so he hauled off and walloped Quinn, right upside the head.
I was half looking at the bear and half looking at Hem and the night vision goggles when Lodgepole let Quinn have it. I only heard the smack, and then Quinn was leaning over rubbing his cheek and looking plenty disinterested in any other arguments with Lodgepole.
I shaped up pretty good at that point, too, and pretty soon, we told Hem and Lodgepole what they wanted to know, more or less. While we were doing that, the other guys rigged up a sled-pulley kind of thing out of logs and rope and hefted the bear up onto it and then got to tugging on it. They dragged that bear down the slope till we got to a dirt track in the forest where Lodgepole said they could get to it later with the tractor.
“You two were in the barn earlier,” Lodgepole said when we got the bear down to the trail.
“No,” Quinn said.
“No,” I said, too.
Lodgepole smacked us both: Quinn with a back right, me with a front left, all in one motion—and it stung.
“I knew I heard something rustling around back there,” Lodgepole said as we were rubbing our heads. He wasn’t asking, he just knew—probably by our lies. He was like that. He could smell a lie. It was a rotten nuisance when you were trying to dodge something.
“Ruby lost his lunch when you shot the guy,” Quinn said.
“You shouldn’t have been in there,” Lodgepole said, cold as ice.
That was obvious, and we just looked back at him.
Lodgepole squinted his eyes and looked down at us, chewing on something. He was big, and he’d give you a look that made you plenty uneasy. “Why the hell are you prowling around my ranch?”
“We were just hitchhiking,” Quinn said.
“Hitchhiking?” he said and looked at both of us.
We both nodded, but I couldn’t tell if he believed us.
He and Hem looked at each other and shook their heads.
“Don’t kill us,” I said, tossing in my two cents because it seemed like the right time to do it.
“We didn’t see anything,” Quinn said.
But Lodgepole turned to us and shut us up with a look. “Next one of you speaks gets shot. Hear?”
We nodded, and he looked down at the ground and figured for a bit.
One of the army guys stepped up to Lodgepole and Hem, kind of quietly. “Maybe the bear actually got them,” he said and tilted his head, raising his eyebrows.
Lodgepole looked at him and then down at the bear.
I didn’t catch on at first. But Quinn did, and he got antsy by me, still not saying anything, and I felt him grab my arm, and I looked over, and he yanked me, and then we were running through the woods again.
We surprised them, and made a good break. But they had guns, and night vision goggles, and the first shot hit a tree right between us and stopped us dead in our tracks.
“You move an inch and my decision will be easy.”
“You can’t kill kids,” Quinn yelled back, without moving. It was a valid point—in most cases.
“Try me,” Lodgepole said.
We believed him—and gave up.
“Well,” he said, as we walked back up to them. He was looking at us and shaking his head. “I’ve gotta do something with you two.”
“Why?” Quinn said.
“What does that mean?” I said.
“Some kind of punishment.”
We both stopped. That didn’t sound good.
“Punishment?” Quinn said, and I said, “What do you mean by that?” picturing Trevor Gennelich shot in the shoulder and in his fancy suit duct-taped to a chair.
“For now, you stay here and do what I say,” he said. “That’s all. Understand? Pretend you’re prisoners.”
“Pretend?” Quinn said.
“What the hell are we supposed do with them?” Hem said to Lodgepole.
Lodgepole looked down and us and smiled—not in a nice way. “We’ll put them to work.”
“What?” I said.
“We’ll show you exactly how hard you can work,” Lodgepole said, still grinning. “And we’ll show you the many false limits to that end. Hear?”
“What the hell are you—!” Quinn started to shout. But before he could finish, Lodgepole smacked him, and Quinn shut up.
When we got back to the main area, Lodgepole brought us into the barn. Trevor Gennelich wasn’t there anymore. But his blood stain was. And Lodgepole put us in a barn stall right across from it. Then he told us if we moved before morning, he’d skin us alive.
That didn’t help us sleep, and being a prisoner in a barn stall was downright humiliating. He didn’t lock the door or anything, but it didn’t matter. We weren’t going to risk our skin testing him the first night.
The next morning, Lodgepole came in ungodly early, before the sun was even up, and tossed a tin pail into our stall to wake us up.
“Put some oats in that for the horses,” he said and kept walking. “In the corner.”
It was a rotten way to wake up in the morning: finding yourself in a horse stall on a sheet over hay with a tin pail crashing in and a giant man yelling orders at you. I gave half a thought to just pulling the little blanket they gave me back over my head and getting some more sleep. Of course, I’d only known Lodgepole for a few hours at that point but I knew I couldn’t do that. And I knew whining wouldn’t do me much good either.
Outside, the cowboys showed up from their bunkhouse across the field, and they got their horses and drove them into the corral, then picked the ones they’d be using for the day and walked them into the barn where we’d been sleeping. Lodgepole showed us how to fill the horses’ oat buckets, and we did, and the last one we got to was Lodgepole’s horse, Jimmy, who was about a foot bigger than all the other horses. He stood straight like a statue and looked down at us, and I could tell he was curious by his eyes, but he just looked at us and then dropped his head and put his forehead into Lodgepole’s forehead. They said hi like that every morning—and at other times.
It was a peaceful picture, and the last bit of peace we’d see until Lodgepole turned us in after sundown that night. You even had to go back to work after dinner there at Lazy Pine Ranch. Can you believe that? Have you ever had the notion to finish off your lasagna and then go heft some haybales and wrestle with pigs and bags of mineral feed in the black of night?
I thought I might die after that first day. Lodgepole worked us like a hammer, and he worked right alongside us, too, and he was hefting ten bags of mineral for every one that we did, and he would give us a look every now and then when we were thinking about whining—like he could tell— and we knew we’d better just shut trap and heave to. So we did, for the most part, and when we didn’t, he’d smack us in the back of the head—and then we would.
The only good parts of the day were when we had to drive out into the field for one thing or another and got to ride in the back of the old pickup truck Lodgepole used when he wasn’t on Jimmy or one of his other horses or the ATV he used. Riding on the truck was fun and a good break, and we always had to drive through creeks and ditches and over bridges to get to the places we were going. But of course, when we’d get there, we’d have to get right to work. Lodgepole didn’t take any breaks at all. He figured that you were either traveling to the place you were working, or you were working. There wasn’t any lollygagging once your boots hit the ground—or sneakers, in our case. And everything on a ranch weighed about a million pounds and was sharp and tangly, too.
It was rough, and I gave good thought to just dying on the spot many times. But in the end, we kept at it. And eventually, the sun went down and we stopped working.
I hurt like hell, but after dinner, I looked out over the ranch and all the places we worked that day, and I felt something I hadn’t ever felt before, kind of like that ranch was there doing what it was doing because of what I had done that day: There were the hay bales in the loft that we put there, and the barn stalls were mucked, and cows were eating the mineral feed in the fields, and a new weld was on the gate, and a mended fence was up, and a culvert was unclogged, and a steer that we helped the cowboys yank out of the boggy area at the back of Field Nine was now walking around mooing and eating grass without anything worse than a little mud on his legs.
I felt pretty good right then, actually, looking out at the ranch. And a good thing about Lazy Pine Ranch, despite everything else, was that Abuelita Rosa cooked for everyone and every meal was delicious, and even though you had to go back to work after every meal, even dinner, Abuelita Rosa made dessert, and when you were done with your after-dinner work, you could come back in and get dessert.
But not at first. Not us. We finished all the after-dinner work that first night and were standing there looking out at the ranch and all our work, when we heard Abuelita Rosa ring her dessert bell, and everybody started hooting and hollering, making their way back to the dining room for Abuelita Rosa’s pies.
We started to go back in, too, but Lodgepole stopped us.
“Not you two,” he said. “Off to bed.”
That was a punch in the gut. I could actually smell the pies that Abuelita Rosa was cooking, and they smelled delicious.
“And if you move—” Lodgepole started.
“Yeah, yeah,” Quinn said. “You’ll skin us alive.”
I was sore about being a prisoner, and sore about not getting dessert, and sore in my whole body besides. Quinn was feeling the same, and we were both kind of grumbling, sitting there on the straw in our barn stall.
“I’m tired,” I said to Quinn.
“He sure worked us,” Quinn said.
I nodded and kicked at the straw. “We gotta get out of here.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“And we gotta get in touch with Miss Jane, Quinn. There ain’t no way around it.”
“I’m thinking about that, too.”
I stopped and looked at him. “You said you had a plan.”
“I do, kind of. I’m working on it.”
“What does that mean?”
“She’s gonna flip out no matter what.”
“I know,” I said. “But still.”
“She would get over it eventually,” Quinn said, kind of raising an eyebrow in a hopeful way.
“Get over what?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“You.”
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if— just if— I’m just saying— if we didn’t tell her—”
I looked at him. “No, Quinn,” I said, plenty firm. “We talked about this. I don’t like it any more than you do, but—”
But right then we heard the door to the barn creak open.
It was full dark by then, and we only had our little lantern light and a couple of flashlights with us. The barn was spooky no matter what, and you heard odd noises all the time. But we could tell that this was the barn door opening this time, without a doubt.
Quinn jumped up quick and grabbed the lantern and turned it off, and then his flashlight, too. I did the same because he was doing it and seemed to have a good reason.
With the lights out, it was plenty spooky, and you couldn’t see a thing at first, and even after a minute I could only see the outline of the stall door. We were backed into the corner and had the dark blue blanket Quinn was using pulled up around us so we could just see over it.
“What is it?” I whispered to Quinn.
“Something came in,” he whispered back.
“I heard it, too.”
Then we heard some movement across the barn, and I remembered that giant grizzly bear out in the woods and thought maybe it was his brother coming to settle the score. I didn’t like the idea of being stuck in that barn stall with a grizzer or anything else sniffing around, but we didn’t have much choice, so we sat and tried to stay quiet.
We could hear movement across the barn.
Then we saw something in the darkness through the open stall door. It was just a shadow, and it went out of sight right away, but we could hear it moving closer.
It was suddenly hard to breathe.
Then the monster stepped into the doorway of our barn stall, and we lost our minds. Quinn screamed and tossed the blanket and jumped up out of the corner and clicked on his flashlight, and I did the same.
But, once our lights were on, it wasn’t a beast or grizzer or anything else deadly. Instead it was just a scared witless Abuelita Rosa with a plate full of two slices of the best apple pie you’ve ever eaten in your life.
Abuelita Rosa wasn’t keen on all the sudden screaming commotion, as you can imagine, and I was worried she might just faint dead again like she did before in the garden. And this time she was holding pie, which smelled something delicious and probably wouldn’t be worth much if it fell on the floor of that dirty old barn stall. Luckily, though, Abuelita Rosa didn’t faint or die or otherwise drop the pie. She was plenty spooked, though, and she said some hard-edged gibberish under her breath before she set the plates down on the stool in the corner and shuffled out, shaking her head.
Well, getting a slice of apple pie instead of being eaten by a grizzly bear was a nice surprise, even if Abuelita Rosa did scare the running hell out of us by lurking into the barn like that. But, Abuelita Rosa is the best cook I’ve ever met, hands down, like I was saying, and her pies are better than all the rest of her cooking put together, too. I think Lodgepole knew that and that was why he didn’t let us have the pie. He was awful hard on us, and I had plenty of complaints from our time there, but keeping us from Abuelita Rosa’s pie was one of the lowest things he ever did—and it cost us hell later on, too. Which I’ll get into.
The second and third days were the same as the first. All the work and sleeping on hay in a cold barn was wearing on me. My muscles were tore to bits. And Lodgepole still didn’t let us have any pie again. And Abuelita Rosa didn’t sneak us in any those days, either. She was a little unsure of us for the rest of our time there.
The work during the days was awful, and if we said anything or complained at all, Lodgepole would smack us and just tell us he could shoot us dead and send us up with the grizzer to a guy named Ibo to get skinned and stuffed into little whiner-boy hunting decoys if we preferred. That was how he talked. And then he’d make us work harder. I don’t know if he was serious about shooting and stuffing us, but he definitely had a way of saying things with a straight face, so you were left guessing. Either way, we didn’t complain much, even though we were hurting to high-heaven.
The third night, we sat in our barn stall prison cell after dinner and we could hear them over there in the dining hall, hamming it up and eating dessert and pie.
“We gotta get out of here,” Quinn said at one point, shaking his head.
I rubbed my shoulder. I was exhausted. “I don’t know how we can.”
“What do you think he’s planning with us?”
“I can’t tell what this place is,” I said.
“Me neither.” Quinn shook his head, thinking about it. “Maybe this is just what ranches in Wyoming are like?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. But I don’t think so. Something weird’s going on here.”
“They shot a freaking Gennelich duct-taped to a chair,” Quinn said. “We saw that.”
“What do you think happened to him?” I asked.
Quinn shook his head.
“You think they killed him?”
Quinn shrugged. “He only winged him when he shot him.”
“I know, but—” I shook my head. “This shit ain’t normal, Quinn. Even in Wyoming. I know that.”
He thought about it and kicked it back and forth. “Probably true,” he said.
“And what were those buildings out in the forest behind the ranch yesterday?” I said.
“I saw them too,” Quinn said, raising his eyebrows. “I think I heard someone at dinner call it the Lower End.”
“And who are all those other people at dinner? And the people that look like soldiers? And the guns?”
“It’s a ranch,” Quinn said, sitting against the wall of the barn stall, trying to think.
“What the hell kind of ranch?”
“Think they’re planning to murder us?” Quinn asked.
“What?”
“They could be cannibals.”
“Jesus, Quinn.”
“I’m just saying. I think I’ve heard about that. Why the hell else would they be holding us here?”
“I don’t know,” I said and shrugged my shoulders. “So what do we do then?”
“We escape,” he said, sure about it. “We got no choice. It’s a jailbreak, cowboy.”
“And how the hell do you think we’re gonna do that?”
“I think we’ll wait till later tonight and just walk out through the woods if we want to. There’s a lot of woods, and he can’t watch them all. We just won’t leave through the gate. That’s the only place he has guards.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“I don’t know. They were the only ones I saw when we came in.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re the only ones.”
He just shrugged. “Either way, I think there’s a town not far back through the woods.
“You think there’s a town?”
“I wasn’t all the way asleep when we drove in with Nicole. I think I can find our way back there.”
“Not all the way asleep? Really? What if Lodgepole has a fence around the place?”
He rolled his eyes at me. “We’ll get through.”
“We’re way out in the woods. I know that.”
“Do you want to be a pirate or not, Ruby? Look at the door,” he said, standing up and pointing to the open stall door. “There’s no guard outside. We’re letting them keep us prisoners. And here we are, supposed to be free as birds out here on the road, living like pirates and cowboys and riding the open plains and exploring the ocean and forests and making camp wherever we want, and if we want to stop and skip stones, we stop and skip stones, and if we want to climb mountains, we climb mountains, and if we want to eat some goddamn pie, we eat some goddamn pie! We can’t be prisoners! Not here. Not anywhere. Not for a minute longer!”
Well, that was a pretty good speech, and he was right, and it kind of got us fired up. We were as free as birds, after all, and had been blown to smithereens to get there, and we wouldn’t be told otherwise.
Later that night, when everyone had gone to sleep, we began our escape.
I tiptoed up to our partially open barn stall door and pushed it the rest of the way open. It screeched and clunked against the wall.
“Ruby!” Quinn whispered, punching my shoulder.
“Sorry,” I whispered back, and we crept out of the stall into the main barn.
We snuck up to the giant sliding barn door to the outside, and it wasn’t locked, so we slid it open just a crack. No guard. No nothing. We crept out and crawled down the front of the barn on all fours, then ran around the side of the barn to the back and stopped. Everything was quiet.
We checked every direction twice, then crept across the mowed lawn at the back of the barns, and shimmied through the fence to the field beyond. The road was a little ways over to our left as we reached the back of the second field, and there were two fields between us and the woods. We kept our heads down as we ran across both.
The woods were just beyond, and Quinn leapt right up on the slats of the wooden fence and was swinging his leg over one of the posts when he paused for a second to turn back to say something to me—and the post disintegrated below him.
It just suddenly exploded and disappeared from under him into a million pieces.
We both screamed and didn’t know what the hell happened for a long second before the sound of the gunshot reached us.
Then, before we could even come to terms with that, the fence post on the other side of us exploded too, just like the first one, like it was popping from within, and the sound of the shot followed far behind.
I froze in my tracks, and Quinn rolled off the fence and landed on the ground and froze, too. We didn’t know exactly where the shots were coming from, so we just crouched and held our hands up and our heads down, trying to look around.
Then everything was quiet and still. It was like nothing had happened, just a dark, sleepy night.
Then Quinn nudged me and pointed back toward the row of five little, white houses at the ranch headquarters, across the two fields. Lodgepole lived in the first one, and right then, that porch light came on and flashed twice, then went off, then flashed twice again, and went off.
We didn’t have to know any more. All we could do was walk back across the fields with our hands up, caught red handed. We were a pitiful sight there, walking back to the barn prison cell with our tails between our legs. And Lodgepole didn’t even come over and say anything when we got back. Nobody did. It was just as quiet as Christmas Eve out there, and we just walked back into the barn and into our stall and laid down on the shit and hay and went to sleep, and the next morning came before I even knew I closed my eyes.
I was as hurt and run down as I’ve ever been in my life that next morning, and Lodgepole came in early to throw the oat bucket into the stall. It wasn’t even dawn yet, and it was as cold as ice, too, with frost on the grass and the stars and moon still out and the horses not wanting to wake up, either.
That day was worse than the first three combined. Lodgepole didn’t say anything about the night before. He just worked us like the devil. And the first thing we did was fix those two fence posts that had been shot out, digging the old post stumps and setting new posts in their place. The sun was blazing hot once it came up, after a freezing morning, and I was half-delirious by eleven o’clock and don’t remember much of the day from there. We did an ungodly amount of work, all over the ranch. I know that. And I just remember Lodgepole yelling at us all day to get up off our backs and keep working. I remember my shovel. Good God. And sweat. And I remember my chest hurting. Lodgepole didn’t care if we were delirious. I remember that. Not as long as we could still lift a shovel.
I thought we would die from that amount of work. But we didn’t, I guess. And we didn’t get pie again that night either, and didn’t even think about escaping—or anything but sleep.
On the fifth morning, instead of waking up to the oat bucket before sunrise, we woke up to Victor gently tapping on the wall of our stall at almost eight.
“Time to get up, amigos,” he said, quiet like that.
“Huh?” Quinn said, rubbing his eyes.
“You get good sleep?”
“Where’s Lodgepole,” I said, sitting up and yawning.
“We let you sleep in. You looked like you needed it. Today, you work with us.”
Crisanto was standing behind Victor, and he was smiling and nodding his head at us, which was his way of saying Good Morning. He was happy all the time. The only time I ever saw him not smiling was when he thought we’d done for his wife, and that was understandable.
“Do you work like Lodgepole?” Quinn asked as he was rubbing his eyes awake.
I was wondering the same thing.
Victor chuckled and said something in gibberish to Crisanto, and Crisanto started laughing and rocked back and forth in his little boots and smiled and shook his head. “No, amigos,” Crisanto said, smiling. “No work too fast. Me, no work too fast.” He pointed at us. “You, no work too fast. Victor...” he said and made a so-so motion with his hand, and then we all laughed.
Crisanto was funny even though he only spoke gibberish. He could say, “No work too fast,” in American, and “me” and “you.” He’d say, “No work too fast,” whenever me and Quinn would get to running around with the tarps or racing each other to the head-gates. He’d say it when we’d ask him to go faster on his four-wheeler, too. He’d just smile and nod his head and keep going the same speed, saying, “No work too fast.” He was old as a rock and could barely see over the handle bars of that four-wheeler, but he worked out in the field just like all the guys, and he was always smiling, always. And he had gold built right into his two front teeth, too, so when he smiled, his gold teeth would show, and it was way better than just a regular smile.
Crisanto may be the best person I’ve ever met in my life—or at least close. We spoke different languages, and couldn’t really understand each other, but Victor would pass along a meaning when it was important enough, and I think we understood each other pretty good anyway. Either way, working with Crisanto and Victor was way better than working with Lodgepole. They took care of the irrigation for the whole ranch, which would have been a monstrous task for ten people, but they did it with just two, one of them about eighty years old and less than five feet tall. But somehow, they still managed to do it all without ever going too fast or getting too uptight about things. It was crazy. I liked it because they laughed a lot and liked to look up at the mountains or the trees when we had a minute to rest as we watched a dam fill up or something.
The irrigation dams were tarps, about five-by-five, that had a fence post sewed into the long side like a curtain rod so you could lay the post across the ditch and unroll the tarp down into the water. As the water caught and pooled-up, it got heavier and pushed the edges of the tarp tight against the sides of the ditch, and with the pole across the top, it made a hell of a dam. The ditch downstream stayed empty, mostly, and the ditch upstream filled up behind the dam, and when there was no more ditch left to fill, it would spill out over the sides and flood out into the fields beside it. And that was how they watered their grass. Crazy, huh? I guess they never heard of sprinklers.
To work out there, Crisanto gave us each a pair of his old rubber hip-waders—or fishing boots—because the whole point of irrigation was to flood water out onto the field, which meant you had to walk through it, which was a lot of fun. And even though there was a guy with binoculars checking on us all day to make sure we didn’t run—popping up in random places on his four-wheeler—it was peaceful out there. It was quiet. The water was everywhere, making its noises, and the breeze coming down off the mountains was nice, and the sunshine was good, and hefting the tarps and splashing in the water and setting and releasing the dams was actually really nice, too. It was a hell of a lot of work, but there was something about it. You got really dirty moving the dams around, too, which was a bonus. And Victor and Crisanto sang a lot. Crisanto had a really good singing voice, even though he was old and only sang in gibberish. And he was funny. He’d finish a song and look at you with his smile: first, you could just see the tips of his gold teeth up front, and then he’d kind of lean back in his boots like the edges of his mouth were pulling back on strings, further and further, like the smile was pulling the whole top-half of his body back. He’d smile like that until me and Quinn would laugh and clap at his song, and then we’d all laugh, not for any particular reason, just because.
Crisanto seemed to really get a kick out of that, and I guess we did, too, and it didn’t seem like nearly as long till the sun was getting close to the mountains and we were puttering back into headquarters on the back of Crisanto’s four-wheeler for dinner.
I normally didn’t like Crisanto’s slow driving on that thing. But there was something about puttering along at the end of the day, crawling over the land of the ranch, looking back at the sunset, that just got me in the right spot. It was kind of like we were rolling on a boat, where the movement relaxed us, floating through the three inches of water in the field, our wake pushing the tall grass back and forth with our muscles about as tired as ever and the sun still hot but turning orangish, dropping lower and lower as Crisanto sang an old Mexican love song that we could just hear over the sound of the engine and the tires through the water and then the grass and then over the gravel of ranch road when we got to that.
If my hunger wasn’t aching as much as the rest of my body, I probably would have gone straight to bed after that, barn stall or otherwise; it was damn peaceful, and I was nodding off and fighting to just stay on the back of that four-wheeler by the time we got back. But I was starving, too, and that woke me up. Working makes you hungry, no matter what, and when we got back to headquarters, we could see Abuelita Rosa out behind the kitchen at the giant smoker grill, and the blue smoke was billowing, and we could smell the meat, and that perked us right up.
After Crisanto parked the four-wheeler in the shop, he walked over to his wife by the smoker, his lunchbox in one hand and his jacket hung over his other arm. He took off his big, flat, straw, cowboy hat and gave her a kiss, and she patted his chest and smiled at him, and then they looked over at us and waved, and we waved back, and we were glad she wasn’t mad at us anymore. Crisanto smiled like he always does and then went back to his cottage to get cleaned up before dinner, whistling as he went.
Me and Quinn washed up at the spigot. There was a tough old bar of soap there, and we scrubbed with that. And that was all they required as far as cleaning goes at Lazy Pine Ranch. All Lodgepole ever said about it was, “There’s a spigot over there,” before dinner the first day we worked with him. Cleaning at an outdoor spigot with a tough old bar of soap is always the best way to get ready for dinner. You can eat twice as much as when you wash with a flowery soap in a kitchen or bathroom with warm water and towels and lights. It was nice, either way, nobody pestering you about cleaning up too much. And we didn’t drop dead from it, if you can believe that.
The old wooden dining room at the Lazy Pine Ranch was left over from a failed mining camp in the Wild West days. Every night, when Abulita Rosa rang her bell, people appeared out of nowhere and poured into the two doors of that giant dining hall, filling it up.
There were Victor and Crisanto, and the eight cowboys that lived on the ranch. Then there were the ranch welders: Castille and Cousteau, and the British horse wrangler, a boy named Trenton, and then the caretakers and handy folks, Joe and Corina and some other folks like that. They all worked for the ranch.
But then there were these people that came from that southern section of the ranch, the area we saw through the woods when we were working: what everyone called the Lower End. That part was out the back of the ranch and over a creek, mostly hidden from the front. We saw it from the back of the last field, but couldn’t see it full. From what we saw, the buildings were mostly made of old stone and glass and new angly stuff. It was all set around a wooded center area with walkways and ponds. The people that worked over there were a mixed bunch, all with different languages and ways of dressing: from plain white science coats all the way to wacky things like buffalo robes and a bunch of just regular folks that I couldn’t really figure what they did from what they were wearing. They never allowed us down to the Lower End.
Then, if you went past the turn for the Lower End on the ranch road, you’d go through some woods and up a little rise and down into what they called Dove Valley, which was where all the big tough guys and gals in the military get-ups lived and did their stuff. We really, really weren’t allowed down there, and only a handful of that group came up to eat with us at night. But they were a loud bunch—the Dove Valley folks—despite their numbers, and Lodgepole sat at the head of their table for meals, and everybody knew what that meant. But he’d quiet them down when they needed it, just like Momma Kay would with all her kids back in Hoboken.
At dinner the first night, I didn’t know what to make of all these different kinds of people showing up out of nowhere.
But then, they all just sat down and grabbed platters from the giant window Abuelita Rosa and the other kitchen folks were shoving the platters out of—like the fishing camp Quinn’s grandpa took us to every fall—and once those platters hit the tables, we all dug in and everybody got to stuffing their faces, and chatting, and laughing, and the ladies from the robotics building joked with the cowboys, and the artists joked with Victor and Crisanto in four different languages, and the tinkerers joked with the soldiers, and me and Quinn joked with everybody, and Lodgepole got joked with the most, and he sat there smiling, mostly, eating his food and laughing at all the jokes and all the chatter, picking pieces of rice out of his beard. That seemed like the only time Lodgepole wasn’t god-awful serious. He liked those dinners Abuelita Rosa made. And so did we, for that matter.
“Who are all these people?” I asked Hem that night at dinner. Hem knew what was going on, and with time he seemed like a nice enough guy, and was sitting across from us, eating his steak and corn. I don’t know what he did, exactly, but he was one of Lodgepole’s top guys. He went between a lot of the different groups. We got to know him a little bit at those dinners, but we didn’t see him much during the day, except for a time or two when he came out to the field to talk to Lodgepole.
“Lazy Pine Ranch,” Hem answered—which didn’t tell us anything.
“What does that mean?” I said.
Hem paused and scratched his chin. “You came in here at a very interesting time,” he said.
“Who are all these people?” Quinn asked. “What are they all doing here?”
“They just work here,” Hem said, looking around at everyone. “Kind of.”
Then, Wally—a guy who was sitting next to Hem—leaned over with a half-smile-half-scowl on his face. “Why don’t you just tell them the truth?” he said and laughed, and some of his food spit out on Hem’s arm. Wally wasn’t the cleanest person you’ve ever met, and he was a good guy in other ways, too. He was probably thirty years old, and was tall and skinny and rough. He looked like his skin had been pulled a little too tight across all of him, and he was tanned brown from the sun, and his big, long, reddish beard stuck out in a point from his chin, and his eyes were wide and wild and crazy, and his head was shaved bald to the scalp. He helped out around the ranch doing all sorts of stuff—mostly getting dirty as all hell all the time, and usually laughing real crazy while he was doing it. “Just tell them,” he said to Hem and smiled and brushed the potatoes off Hem’s arm.
Hem looked at Wally for a long second then down at his arm, and Wally smiled and sat back, bugging his eyes at him.
“I did tell them,” Hem said and turned to us. “It’s a cattle ranch, mostly—and a think-tank, you might say, of sorts.”
“A what?” I said.
“No you didn’t,” Wally said and bugged his eyes wider.
“You want to tell them, then?” Hem said, waving at Wally.
“No, no, that’s way above my pay grade. You know that,” Wally said, and laughed.
“It’s a mixed-use ranch with an art and science institute,” Hem said, raising his eyebrows at Wally. “How’s that?”
“Bull,” Wally said, spitting out potatoes and smiling crazy.
Just then, a really pretty lady sitting next to Hem who hadn’t been paying much attention to our conversation leaned in. “What should be first, though,” she said, glancing over at Wally and Hem, “is who are you two,” she said and pointed at us.
“Vagrants,” Hem said.
“Pirates, actually,” Quinn said, kind of quick, scowling at Hem.
“Pirates?” the girl said back. She was plenty pretty, like I said, and had long curly brown hair pulled back and blue eyes and was wearing bib overalls with a tank top underneath. She was probably twenty something. “Runaways?”
“No. Who are you, then?” Quinn asked, wiping some spaghetti off his chin.
“I’m Irish,” she said.
“I’m Irish, too,” Quinn said. “That’s what my folks say.”
She smiled at him. “No, that’s my name: Irish Dunaway, pleased to meet you.”
“That’s your name?” I asked.
“Yup, and you two?”
“I’m Quinn,” Quinn said. “And he’s Ruby.”
“Ruby?” she said.
“Yeah, why?” I said, a little testy.
“Nothing at all.”
“What do you guys really do here?” Quinn asked Irish.
“We raise cattle, like any ranch,” Hem said, leaning in. “Like I told you.”
“Well, I’m a carpenter, for one,” Irish said.
“A carpenter?” Quinn said. “But you’re— well—” He didn’t really know how to finish it. He was trying to say she was monstrous pretty, I think, without saying it.
“Are you really a carpenter?” I said, because she really didn’t look like any carpenters I knew. Not like the ones in Hackers Loon, at least. Not the ones that worked for Quinn’s dad, that’s for sure, or any of the rest of them. She looked more like a movie star.
“I am, in fact, a carpenter,” she said, smiling.
“What the hell is this place?” Quinn said to her. “And who are they?” He pointing over at the Dove Valley people in their camo and gear.
“Don’t worry about them,” Irish said, glancing at Hem and Wally.
“What do you mean?” I said, sensing something fishy.
“This ranch is just a place Lodgepole has set up,” she said. “He keeps it running and leases some space to some folks to come work on some things. Some for him, some not. That’s all. Just some folks doing stuff.”
“Some folks?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Doing stuff?” Quinn said.
Irish just shrugged and turned up her palms.
“Is everyone prisoners?” Quinn said.
“What?” Irish said, then turned a cold eye to Hem, who just smiled at her nervously.
“How did you all end up here?” I said.
“I think he finds you, mostly,” Irish said. “In my case, I donated a cedar-strip canoe to a local fund-raiser for kids with cancer, and when I tried to deliver it to the address they gave me, I found the shop I’ve been working in for four years now, totally stocked and with nothing but a note telling me to keep up the Good Work, capitalized. Beside it was some paperwork for an incredible lease on the shop, offered if I wanted to take it.”
“A shop?” I said.
“Yup,” she said. “For woodworking. I’d done a lot of free work on the Gulf before that, helping people rebuild after storms and stuff.” She shrugged her shoulders.
“The shop is here?” I asked.
“No,” she said and laughed like it was funny to ask. “No, my shop is outside Austin, Texas. That’s where I live most of the time. I was only invited to visit here about a year and a half ago, almost three years after he set me up in that shop. I didn’t even meet Lodgepole or know who he was for that whole time.”
“Really?”
She smiled. “Yup. My family thought I was crazy, too. But they’ve always thought that. And then, one day, Lodgepole just walked into the shop and introduced himself and told me about this place. I’ve been coming up every few months ever since.”
“To here?”
“Yeah. It’s an interesting place,” she said, looking around the room. “A lot of good work gets done here, a lot of important work.”
“I don’t believe it,” Quinn said.
“She’s speaking the truth,” Hem said, nodding his head.
“I was different,” Wally said, popping in with a crazy smile. “I knew him before I knew him, if you know what I mean. I met him when I was bumming in LA.”
“Bumming in LA?” I said.
Wally nodded and grinned. “I was returning some cans at the recycling center, and Lodgepole came in with a bunch of rich kids from the area doing the same thing. It was the weirdest thing: a bunch of little rich kids picking up trash and bottles on the side of the road in Long Beach with their rich parents from Malibu and Beverly Hills. It was pretty funny.”
I cocked my head, and Irish and Hem both chuckled.
“I guess Lodgepole has some kind of sway over the parents,” Wally continued, laughing. “Through business interests or something.” He looked over at Hem. “Or something. But I guess sometimes he makes those rich folks take their kids around to pick up trash and collect bottles and cans in the worst areas of LA. I don’t know exactly why he does it—Hem might—but that day, Lodgepole and those parents and kids came pouring into the recycling center with all the bottles and cans they found. The kids told me they were doing a drive for hunger, and it was an odd sight: the rich kids and their parents, who didn’t look too happy, with Lodgepole directing them all. Either way, it seemed like a good cause to me, and since I was bumming and figuring on karma, without much thought I gave them the bottle return ticket and all the cans I had left. They didn’t even ask for it. I might have done it just to get out of there, since they were running around, laughing and screaming. I don’t know. But I gave it to them and took off without even thinking anything more about it. I still had a few dollars in cash without the ticket, anyway.”
“So, what?” Quinn said.
Wally smiled and shoveled in some potatoes. “Well,” he said. “A few days later, a mean-looking bastard pulled up next to me in a black SUV in the park where I was sleeping. He got out and walked right at me. I saw him coming and thought I was in trouble, but when he got to me, he was actually really nice, and he squatted down and handed me a thousand dollars in an envelope and said, Keep up the good work, Wally, and walked away.”
“No way,” Quinn said. “A thousand dollars?”
“Yup,” Wally said, pushing some loose potatoes back into his mouth with his finger. “I was surprised, too. I just woke up, and I didn’t know what he meant. And it was a lot of money. I thought about bringing it to the cops—but, that would be dumb. And after a minute of thinking about it, I rolled up my sleeping bag and shoved the money into my pack and started walking. I didn’t know where the money came from, but the guy meant to give it to me. I knew that. He even used my name. So, I didn’t see any harm in using it. I went to Goodwill and bought a nice new pair of boots for myself and a bunch of McDonald’s cheeseburgers for some of the other folks in the park, and then I went downtown and I found the lady I first thought of when I got the money. She was young, and scared. She was under the bridge with her one-year-old son when I met them two days before. She was new to it—the street. I looked around for them all afternoon, and finally found them sitting at a bench outside the supermarket. They just looked like a normal mother and kid, sitting on a bench. She had them cleaned up nice, and she was sitting with her back straight. But they were looking out at that market with blank stares, watching all the people shopping and eating and laughing.” Wally paused and shoveled in another spoonful of potatoes. “I’m nervous around people,” he said. “I don’t like talking to them. Don’t even really like looking at them, usually. So, while that lady and her kid were sitting there, I snuck up behind them and slid six hundred dollars into the lady’s bag without saying anything and without her knowing. I kept two hundred for myself.”
“You didn’t tell her,” I said.
“Only two hundred for yourself?” Quinn said.
Wally held up his finger. “A week later, I was walking up the coast toward Big Sur and that same mean looking dude in the SUV pulled over on Highway One and offered me either five thousand dollars in cash or a job here, my choice—and I’ve been working here ever since. And the guy is sitting right over there.” He pointed to one of the Dove Valley guys at Lodgepole’s table. He was the guy we saw in the SUV at the truckstop with Nicole. “It’s been five years. I love it. The bottle ticket I gave those kids was only worth seven-seventy-five.”
“No way,” I said.
“Yes, way,” Wally said and flicked a piece of corn off his arm and laughed.
“Is that how he picks people?” I asked. “Bottle drives?”
Wally laughed at that. “It was for me.”
“Nobody really knows,” Irish said. She looked at Wally and Hem. Wally shrugged his shoulders, and Hem looked like he might know, but wouldn’t tell.
“Why then?” I asked. “Why all of it?”
“Good question, kid,” Irish said. “Lots of people have tried to figure that one out.” She looked at Hem. “Lodgepole doesn’t fully explain everything to everybody, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“There ain’t good people anymore, is the problem,” Wally butt in, spitting out a new spoonful of mashed potatoes as he said it. “To stop and help people out. Maybe there never were. It’s as simple as that.” He looked over at Irish and grinned. “Humans are the worst. That’s why we all get pets: we can’t stand the company of our own damn species.”
“That’s Wally for you,” Irish said, rolling her eyes.
“Truth is a terrifying reality most people want no part of,” Wally said, looking right at us. “They want to hear what they want to hear and be happy with their illusion for as long as possible before the hammer falls and the illusion ends and it’s Goodnight, Irene.”
“I don’t think that,” Irish said, waving her hand. “And what the hell does that even have to do with this?”
“Who’s Irene?” I said.
“It has everything to do with this,” Wally said to Irish. “Humans are incapable of peace. We ain’t designed for it. Humans reap violence, no matter what we sow, no matter what some people want to believe. It is in our blood. We crave it. Our power of death over life. We can’t resist the itch to pull the trigger. To find out. Peace only makes for a more passive form of aggression and heightened degrees of pettiness, always with the lingering hope in that pit deep within our intestines that true violence might spring up somewhere—to look at, at least, or be appalled by. Let me smell some goddamn blood, people, one way or another!”
“That’s Wally for you,” Irish said.
“Damn right,” Wally said.
“Everybody can be good, and everybody can be bad,” Irish said at Wally, half-joking. “We have the capacity for both.”
“Nope,” Wally said and shoveling in more mashed potatoes. “People are assholes, and they only do good when you hold something they fear over them.”
“You just told your story of doing good for no reason,” she said.
“Aw, hell, that was me, though,” Wally said, grinning at her. “Who knows why I do what I do? And maybe I was just afraid of Karma, or God and His Hell.”
“Pessimist,” Irish said, shaking her head but smiling at Wally.
“Realist,” Wally said. “If there suddenly weren’t cops, do you think people wouldn’t speed, and wouldn’t steal? Wouldn’t kill?”
“But there are cops,” Irish said, “because people are generally good and decided they wanted peaceful lives and needed some form of law and order.”
“Law and order,” Wally said and bugged his eyes, jokingly, looking around. “Don’t say that too loud.”
“Like the TV show?” I chimed in.
“HA! Yes!” Wally said, pointing at me. “The illusion of it. Exactly. And, no, my dear Irish, you’re wrong, people desire law and order only because they fear their own inability to protect themselves in a lawless land, not because they love being told what they can and can’t do. People seek law and order for others, and freedom for themselves.
“My dear Wally,” Irish said, grinning—but also serious. “Talk down to me again and I’ll break your arm,”
“I’m right, though,” Wally said. “Am I wrong?”
“What do you think, Irish?” I said.
“What do I think?” She looked over at Wally, and he smiled, and she shook her head. “I think that in my woodshop in Austin, there is a window that faces east.” She stopped for a second and looked at us.
“What?” I said, wrinkling my forehead.
“In the morning the sun shines through,” she said. “And when I’m making a cut on the saw or sanding something, you can see all the tiny little fibers of wood dust in the air, floating around in the sunlight.”
I didn’t know where she was going. “Okay,” I said.
“I have a dust collection system,” she continued. “But no matter how hard I try to keep the dust down, every morning that sun shines through, and all I can see or think about are all the tiny little dust particles in the air and how they’re getting in my lungs and probably killing me.”
“What is this about dust?” Quinn said.
“But then,” she said, holding up a finger. “At about nine-thirty or ten o’clock every day, the sun doesn’t shine in that window anymore, and suddenly, the place seems nice and clean—I have a dust collection system, after all—and I don’t really think about the dust for the rest of the day.”
I scratched my elbow and looked over at Quinn, and he didn’t get it either.
“That’s what happens,” Irish said. “People care about things when they see them clearly, but when you have to look harder or can’t see them at all, people tend to move on and forget, even if the thing is bad. We all have busy lives, and it’s easy to not notice the dust in the air if the sun isn’t shining through. And that’s where Lodgepole comes in,” she said and looked at Hem. Hem shrugged his shoulders.
“What does Lodgepole do, then?” I asked.
“He collects the dust in the air,” Irish said seriously.
“Huh?” I said.
“He helps people, mostly.”
“Ain’t helping us,” Quinn said.
“But, who is he?” I asked Irish.
But just as I said that, Lodgepole appeared at our table, towering over us. He smiled at Hem and Wally and Irish, and then looked at me and Quinn. I wondered if I looked the same way Quinn did, because I haven’t ever seen Quinn quite shut-trap and stand at attention like he did when Lodgepole was around.
“Time to say goodnight, boys,” Lodgepole said, like that. “Finish moving that hay by the barn and then go to bed.”
“Do we at least get pie tonight?” Quinn said.
“Yeah,” I said, because I wanted pie, too.
“No,” Lodgepole said. “Finish your chores and get to bed.”
“It ain’t even a bed,” Quinn whined.
“A little word to the wise,” Lodgepole said and leaned down toward us. Which meant: pay attention and you’re not going to like what you’re about to hear. “I don’t want any more bullshit. You hear? The other night I was just playing around. Now, I am not. Can I make myself more clear?” That was another phrase that usually meant bad news.
I looked over at Quinn and he was nodding, just like I was.
“Now go to bed,” Lodgepole said and pointed us outside.
Since our escape attempt a few nights before, Lodgepole had been having his guys lock the main barn doors and our barn stall every night, so we were locked in like animals. It was humiliating.
“We can’t keep doing this,” Quinn said, after we sat in the barn stall stewing on it for a while.
“Don’t talk about it,” I said.
“We can’t keep doing this.”
“Well, hell, Quinn, I know, but you heard him.”
“Bull.”
“You wouldn’t say that to his face.”
“Neither would you.”
“I know I wouldn’t, and neither would you. That’s my point.”
“So what?”
“What do you mean, so what?”
“We gotta get out of here,” Quinn said. “That’s all I know. He’s gonna kill us. I know it.”
I looked down at my dirty shoes. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Listen, Ruby. I got a plan.”
“A plan?”
He pointed up.
I looked up where he was pointing—and it was just rafters. “What?”
“We can get out.”
I looked, and it would take some climbing, but it might be possible. “They locked the outside door, too, though,” I said. “And he might have a guard out there.”
“We can burrow under a spot I found in one of the stalls in the back corner of the barn. I don’t think they know about it. From back there, we can sneak around the barns to the back of the dining hall without anyone seeing us, then go into the woods from there, circling around to the road. He’s watching the front, and he won’t even know.”
I thought about it. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“Why? It’s dark back there.”
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking, kicking the straw. It was pretty dark back there. “Maybe,” I said, after a minute.
“We have to try. We can’t stay here.”
I thought about it for a while, then nodded. He was right.
Quinn pumped his fist. “Yes! Now we just need a plan.”
I stopped. “I thought you had plan.”
“I do. I mean—mostly. I’m getting some pie as we go by.”
“You’re what?”
“Some pie.”
“How?”
“The kitchen is right on the way. And we need other stuff to eat after we escape, too—you know, provisions.”
He had a point. “What kind of pie is it?”
“What kind of pie is it? I don’t know, Ruby. Why you gotta ask so many damn questions?”
“I don’t know,” I said, kind of testy. I wasn’t asking any more than he was.
I thought about it for a while, kicking it back and forth, and eventually, I agreed.
Once we got ready, we waited till it was quiet, then we started climbing up out of the barn stall. It wasn’t much different than climbing around on the framing at Quinn’s dad’s jobsites, but by the time we got up to the rafters, we were plenty high.
We climbed down into the main barn, then ran back to the stall in the back corner Quinn mentioned. When we got in there, he dove down in the back corner and wiggled a board and it came loose, which opened up a space just big enough for us to slip through.
Outside, we ran down the back of the barn, and at the end of it, we stopped to see the coast was clear. Quinn looked around the corner and nodded back at me, and we ran for our lives across the opening, diving behind the dining hall when we got there. We checked to be sure no one saw us then ran along the back of the dining hall and stopped at the kitchen window at the end. It was all working great, and I was about to boost Quinn up into the window, when Duke, Lodgepole’s dog, came sniffing around the corner out of the darkness and looked up at us.
Most of the time, Duke was a good dog. He could understand just about everything you were saying and could find a gopher a foot down into a field and snatch it up and have it for dinner before you could say jackrabbit.
I liked Duke. I liked him a lot—right up until we saw him that night.
“Good boy,” Quinn said, shooing him away. “Good boy. Now go back to your house.”
Duke just looked at Quinn and kind of raised his ears and tilted his head and wagged his tail.
“Good boy. Go on back,” Quinn whispered again.
Well, Duke just stood there, and Quinn asked him to go back to his house a few more times, and he didn’t go. Then I tried, and he didn’t listen to me either but just stood there looking at us like he was smiling, wagging his tail.
He wasn’t going anywhere, and after a minute, Quinn said, “Maybe he wants some pie, too?”
Well, that made sense. “You want some pie?” I said to Duke, and Duke wagged his tail harder. It seemed like that dog understood everything you said sometimes.
“I think he’s saying yes,” Quinn said.
“Either way.” I nodded to the window.
“Boost me up,” Quinn said.
I boosted him up, and he opened the window, and Duke didn’t say anything, and Quinn looked at Duke and then back at me and shrugged and crawled in.
I kept watch, and Duke wagged his tail, and we could both hear Quinn rummaging around inside. “Hurry up,” I whispered after a minute.
“Shut up,” Quinn whispered back. It sounded like he was across the room.
A few seconds later, I heard some scuffling inside and Quinn stuck his head out of the window, and he had three big slices of blueberry pie and a paper bag full of other food.
“Take this and help me out,” Quinn said.
I grabbed the bag and pie and put my shoulder against the wall so he could use it as a step to shimmy down.
“Yes!” I said and danced a little once he got down. I handed Quinn his slice of pie and took the other slice over to Duke and tossed it to him, and he caught it like he caught the gophers and swallowed it down whole, licking the blueberries off his face, happy as can be.
Then, just as I was reaching my slice of pie up to my mouth, a spotlight came on from our left—close.
“You dumb little bastards,” we heard Lodgepole say from behind the spotlight as he came walking up.
I nearly crapped my pants right there on the spot. And I almost dropped the pie, too.
Quinn looked like he might have crapped, too.
Duke just wagged his tail and stood in the same spot, looking at us in the same way, licking the blueberry pie off his lips.
“You two are idiots,” Lodgepole said.
Well, we were cooked. There wasn’t any doubt about that.
“Give me the pie,” Lodgepole said, and started walking toward us.
Quinn didn’t wait another step but instead just shoved that slice of pie—as much as he could—into his mouth and got to chomping down and moaning a little because it was really good.
I figured I was dead anyway, and probably even deader now, the same as Quinn, because Quinn ate the pie, and I was standing there with a slice of blueberry pie in my hands, so what was I supposed to do? I went for it. And it was delicious. And at the time, I would have said it was worth anything that Lodgepole would do to us.
I was wrong about that, of course.
You know how after digging a giant hole in the middle of the night, you can’t really remember how great the slice of blueberry pie you stole was, or why you thought you could escape from Lodgepole’s ranch in the first place? Well, that was how that night was.
Lodgepole didn’t really get mad at us, I guess.
“Go grab two shovels,” he said. “From the barn. Run!”
So, we ran and grabbed two shovels, and when we got back, he was standing in the middle of the yard in front of the dining hall.
“Dig a hole,” he said, and pointed to the ground.
“What?” we both said, looking at it.
“As deep and as wide as you are tall,” he said.
I didn’t like the sound of that, but Lodgepole didn’t listen to anything we had to say. He just turned and walked back to his cottage.
And then it was just a dark, quiet night again, and we were looking at the ground, plenty concerned.
“What are we doing?” I said to Quinn.
Quinn looked at the two shovels. “Digging our own graves. That’s obvious.”
I stopped. I was thinking the same thing. “You think so?”
“We could just run.”
“Yeah, right. That’s worked well so far.”
“So, what do you want to do?” he said, stopping and looking at me.
Things were looking bleak, and I’m not ashamed to say, I started tearing up a little bit right then—just a little bit. “We should have called Miss Jane, Quinn,” I said, kind of blubbering, trying not to sound like I was crying. “We should have called her when we could. And now we’re in a heap.”
“All right, all right,” Quinn said, annoyed, but talking a little softer. “We’ll be fine.”
“They’re gonna kill us,” I blubbered.
“No they ain’t,” Quinn said.
“Why not?”
“Why would they?”
“You said they would.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“Are you sure?” I said, wanting to believe.
“Of course,” he said, like he was certain. “Just start digging, will you?” He jammed his shovel down into the ground and pulled up a scoop of dirt, and then another.
I could tell he wasn’t sure either, but we didn’t have much choice, so I started digging, too. I can’t say my life flashed before my eyes as we dug that grave and waited to find out if Lodgepole was planning to bury us in it—I was too tired from digging for all that—but I definitely thought about Miss Jane a lot. I wanted to see her again—to hug her. I wanted to sleep in my own bed. I didn’t want to die.
We finished the hole around two in the morning, and Lodgepole strolled out, nodding his head. “Now climb up out of there.”
We did, with some effort.
Lodgepole looked down at us once we were standing in front of him, and then down at the hole. He had a way of looking at you without any expression that made you plenty uneasy. “I know you don’t understand why you’re here.”
“Are you burying us in this hole?” Quinn asked. It was the only question to ask.
“If you keep running your mouth.”
“Oh, God,” I said, and almost fainted into the grave.
“Bullshit,” Quinn said.
“What do you want out of us?” I said, once I gathered my legs.
Lodgepole thought about it for a second. “I can’t tell you.”
“Are you gonna kill us?” I said.
He made us wait for a minute, then said, “No. At least not right now.”
That was a monstrous relief to hear.
“Are you gonna do weird shit to us?” Quinn asked, and that didn’t put any good thoughts in my mind.
“Why do I keep getting the urge to kick your little ass, boy?” Lodgepole said, looking down at Quinn, and I nudged Quinn to tell him to shut up. But he didn’t.
“They warned us in school that child slavery is still a thing. And people sell organs. I know that.”
“Quinn!” I said and felt wobbly again.
“Is that what you’re doing?” Quinn said to Lodgepole. “Don’t bullshit us.” He was trying to act as tough as he could, given the circumstances, but he was scared, just like me.
“Boy, you ain’t worth the food you’re eating,” Lodgepole said. “You’re no slave—of any kind.” He looked Quinn in the eye. “And we can’t harvest your organs until you’re older.”
I almost fell over.
“You’re more like pet monkeys,” Lodgepole said. “Up to your elbows in cat shit all the time.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Quinn said.
“What are you doing here on this ranch?” I asked. “And what does it have to do with us? Why can’t we just go home? And please don’t take our organs. They’re probably no good anyway.”
Lodgepole looked down at the hole and sighed, pausing for a while, like he might just answer or say something important. But then he just said, “Now fill it back in.”
“What?” Quinn said.
“Have it done by four o’clock,” Lodgepole said and walked back to his cottage.
It was a low-down thing to have us do—and it was still the middle of the night, and there were grizzers out there—but, it was better than being shot and buried in the hole.
“This guy is crazy,” Quinn said after Lodgepole was gone.
“What the hell is he doing with us?” I said, looking off at the ranch and the moon and the night sky. Then I started thinking about Miss Jane again. Maybe she was looking at the same moon, the same sky—somewhere else. I could practically smell her. “We should have called Miss—”
“Stop!” Quinn snapped. “Just stop!”
I just looked at him, trying like the devil to not let any tears well up. It took a couple of breaths, but I kept them down.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Quinn said, starting to shovel the dirt back into the hole. “We just have to get off this ranch alive. That’s the first step in contacting Miss Jane or anything else, and your whining ain’t helping. We need to focus.”
“I ain’t whining,” I said. But he was right, and we didn’t have a choice. So we shoveled, and we kept shoveling, and we filled in the hole.
At four o’clock, Lodgepole came back out to the hole that wasn’t a hole anymore and studied it for a while, then looked at both of us and nodded.
“Are you done?” Quinn said, holding himself up by his shovel.
Lodgepole looked at him for a long time, the way he does. “Suppose you two weren’t just a couple of lazy dipshits in a half-assed escape attempt, stealing blueberry pie and marshmallows for your little rainbow ride to freedom.”
“We didn’t steal any marshmallows,” Quinn said.
“Suppose you were starving in the desert. And you were a father. And your child was starving. And you were a son. And your mother was starving. And a man sat at a giant table with more food than he could eat in ten lifetimes cooked and plated in front of him. Would you steal some of his food?”
We both looked at him, not sure how to answer.
“Naturally, if you tried, this man would resist your larceny. Would you accost this man to steal his food in this desert? What if he was a formidable foe and didn’t easily give in? Would you kill this man to save yourself and your mother and your child?”
We didn’t know what to say.
After he made us squirm like that for a bit, he pointed down at the dirt.
“Now dig it back out to your chests,” he said and started walking back to his house.
“No way!” Quinn said, throwing down the shovel.
“After that, you can go to bed,” Lodgepole said without even turning, ignoring Quinn.
Quinn turned to me.
I shrugged. “He said he won’t kill us, at least,” I said.
It didn’t help much, and Quinn snarled and kicked at the ground, but eventually he picked up his shovel, and we started digging—again.
It was almost sunup by the time we had that hole dug back out to our chests, and we were still alive—not shot or worked to death. Which was the only good news in all of it. We threw the shovels down and spit on them. We didn’t have the energy to do much more than that.
They didn’t need locks on our stall that morning. I was asleep before my head even hit the straw. I’ve never been so tired in my life.
It seemed like I hadn’t more than shut my eyes before that feed pail came crashing into our stall.
“Feed the horses then come out front,” Lodgepole said, walking by our stall door.
It was barely lighter than it was when we went to bed. The sun still wasn’t up.
We rubbed the sleep out of our eyes, and it didn’t work. The sleep wouldn’t go away.
“Let’s just make a run for it,” Quinn mumbled.
“Okay,” I said, yawning and trying like hell to open my eyes. They just wouldn’t open.
Eventually, I peeled one eye open to check if Quinn had started running. He hadn’t. He was patting down around the sheet and his blanket like a dog finding a spot to lay down.
“Are we running for it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, but he kept patting down around that blanket, and I don’t think either of his eyes were open.
In the little light that was making its way into our stall, we were a sorry sight. Quinn was covered head to toe in dirt. The only place that wasn’t covered were his eyeballs themselves and they were blood red—when he could even peel them open. And what I could see of myself didn’t look much better.
“Maybe we can make a run for it at lunch,” Quinn said.
“And find a place to take a nap on the way,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“In the sun,” I said.
“Yeah.”
We sat there for a minute with our eyes closed, wobbling back and forth like those weeble-wobble things.
“We’ve gotta feed the horses,” I said.
“Oats,” Quinn muttered, half-asleep. “Feed the horses oats.”
“Get your asses up!” Lodgepole hollered from the other side of the barn, and we did, with great effort, and we fed the horses and went outside, where Lodgepole was waiting for us by his old ranch truck.
“Better move faster than that,” Lodgepole hollered at us when we came out of the barn. We were still mostly asleep. “Get in,” he said, pointing to the back of the truck. “And grab your shovels.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. And just the sight of the hole from the night before made my stomach turn. But we didn’t have much choice, did we? So we grabbed the shovels and got into the truck.
Lodgepole drove out a dirt track into the forest and kept going and going. Eventually, he stopped and got out and pointed to a tree and told us to start digging. And he meant it. It was a giant tree, and he had us dig down until we hit a root, and then he swung his giant ax down and chopped that root, and then we’d dig more and he’d chop and we’d dig and he’d chop, and we did that all the way around the tree, a few feet out from the trunk.
Eventually, we chopped and dug enough that the tree let loose of the ground and was just swinging in its hole free.
Then Lodgepole laid out some burlap, and we yanked that thing out of the ground, and wrapped its roots in the burlap.
Lodgepole said we had to move fast now that it was out of the ground, which confused me because we’d been moving pretty damn fast the whole time. But either way, we got that thing wrapped up and hefted it up into the back of Lodgepole’s truck, and he jumped into the driver’s seat, and we jumped into the back with the tree, and off we went back to headquarters and our hole.
When we got back, Crisanto was standing by our hole with the hose on, filling it up with water and some kind of plant mix, which he had in two bags beside him. He smiled and waved when we pulled up. Then he pointed at the tree and gave us an A-OK sign. I hadn’t really looked at the tree in those terms yet, and when I did, I saw it was a nice tree, and big.
Crisanto shoveled more plant stuff into the hole, then added more water and swished the soup around a bit and smiled at us. Then he came over to the tree and the four of us hefted that tree around and rolled it out of the truck and into the hole.
Lodgepole stepped back once it was in the hole, and Crisanto pushed the top around until Lodgepole gave him a thumbs up to tell him it was straight up and down and looked good otherwise.
Once that tree was in, and the hole was filled back in, and after Crisanto went and got wood mulch and put it around the bottom, we stepped back, and there was a tree, right there in that hole that we spent all night digging and re-digging in the middle of the yard.
“Work with Victor and Crisanto today,” Lodgepole said and got in the truck and drove off.
After Lodgepole was gone, Crisanto nodded and smiled and patted us on the back and pointed at the tree. He knew we had been out digging all night. Then he waved us to hop on the back of his four-wheeler, and we did.
He puttered out across two fields, and then along the river for a while, and then down a narrow little cut in the woods and into an opening beyond. He parked the four-wheeler and then pointed to a nice big tree with wide branches and some soft grass below it and made a motion with his hands to tell us we could take a nap. He held up two fingers.
“Two hour,” he said—which is another thing I heard him say that wasn’t gibberish. Then he smiled and climbed back onto his four-wheeler and puttered back out of the woods, whistling into the wind. That was how Crisanto was: he cared about other folks, and he’d do his friends’ chores to let them rest if they were in a tight spot.
That night at dinner, everybody liked our tree and said it looked really good there, which felt nice, and then after dinner, and after we’d done our after-dinner chores, when the dessert bell rang and Lodgepole would normally tell us to skedaddle, he didn’t. He just kept joking and talking with the other folks and didn’t pay us any attention when we walked back into the dining hall for dessert.
Crisanto smiled and gave us thumbs up when he saw we made it inside for pie. He liked his wife’s pie as much as we did, and we all three just sat there stuffing our faces and not saying anything but just smiling a lot and giving thumbs up and not bothering with wiping the cherry filling and dirt off our faces.
As we were eating the pie, Hem moseyed over to our table and sat down across from us.
“Nice tree,” he said, smiling as he sat down.
I eyed him to see if he was making fun of us, but he didn’t seem to be. “Thanks,” I said.
He sat there looking at us for a long minute, and then leaned in close, so no one else could hear. “Listen,” he said, waving us in.
We both leaned in closer.
“Lodgepole’s not a bad person,” he said.
“Your ass,” Quinn said.
Hem gave him an annoyed look, but then continued. “I know you don’t know why you’re here,” he said. “But just wait a little bit. Okay? Trust me. It’ll be over soon enough. And until then, just try to make the best of it. It’s a beautiful ranch.” He waved his hand out like he was presenting the ranch as a prize, then he paused and leaned in closer, his face turning serious. “Because you really don’t have a choice.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, and neither did Quinn—but he was right. We were prisoners.
And he was right about the ranch being a beautiful place, too. And Lodgepole was weird, and he was keeping us against our will, but overall, there was just something about him. We wanted to see what the hell he was doing there, really. We could tell it was big, whatever it was. And the secrecy of it all really sucked us in. And then Lodgepole had this thing with God going on, and that was weird, too. But I wondered more than once if maybe God really was talking to him or something. He was weird like that. And then there are all those bible stories Miss Jane and the church folks are always bringing up. Why wouldn’t God still have few folks on the line?
Lodgepole wasn’t like most religious people, though. Not ones in Hackers Loon, at least. His thing with God was kind of crazy, and pretty intense, like he was really willing to take some pain for it all, and like he was really willing to fight for it, looking to fight for it. He was weird like that: talking about God while he also seemed to hate everything religious—or at least most things. He hated fancy churches. I know that. He said Jesus wasn’t into fancy things either, and he talked about Jesus turning over tables in the temple. And I’d heard about that before, too.
Irish told us later that when he was younger, Lodgepole had practiced to become something called a Jesuit priest. She said he went to some pretty rough places and saw some ugly stuff and some people doing really bad things during those years, on both sides of God’s line. That’s why he gave up the church, she said, in that sense. One time, out in the field, Lodgepole told us he’d seen evil up close many times over the years. He said he prayed to God in a temple of hungry dogs, was how he put it. He said he’d seen it all, and yet the worst form of evil, the ugliest and nastiest and rottenest evil that he’d ever experienced, by far, was the silence of supposedly good people in the presence of evil. In those cases, he said, evil is just doing what evil does naturally, and it’s the Good that ain’t doing its job, ain’t holding up its end of the balance. He said that especially here and now people get to believing they’re plenty good without actually going out and doing good, and that makes them liars, and lazy—just the way the Devil likes them—and leads to their continued silence in the face of evil—and ten-million-dollar vacation homes being built above homeless children in the street.
He was intense like that when he got talking, but he was a true believer, I’ll give him that. And from what we could tell, if someone was being treated wrong and Lodgepole knew about it, it was trouble for whoever was doing the wronging. That was the gist of what he was doing there on the ranch, we came to find out. And, isn’t that what people are always teaching us kids: to stand up to bad people? Even if they never do it themselves.
A few days later, without anything crazy happening in between, Lodgepole came into the barn before sunrise and threw the oat bucket into our stall along with two old cowboy hats and two pairs of old cowboy boots. From down the barn he told us to put those on and fill up the oat bucket and grab two headstalls off the wall. We put the hats and boot on and asked what a headstall was, and he told us, and we grabbed two off the wall. They were the things for the horses’ heads.
After we got the oats and the headstalls, Lodgepole took us out to the horse pen and brought us up to two horses and told us to get to know them. They were huge, and they looked right at you, but we pet them on their noses, and they nudged the cowboy hats off our heads and liked us, generally.
After we got to know each other, Lodgepole showed us how to lead them into the barn and tie them up a special way and brush their backs. Then, after the horses ate their oats, he had us toss saddles over their backs. Once they got used to them, we cinched the saddles up under their bellies, slowly, while we pet them on the rump, and then, once the horses were calm, he had us offer them the bit.
And, just like that, we had horses ready to ride, farting out the oats we just fed them. We brought the horses outside, and the sun was just coming up, and we got up on those horses and they started walking, and all the cowboys were there on their horses, too, and Victor and Crisanto were on their four-wheelers, and we all rode out, chatting and joking, to a field that felt like it was a world away, hidden in the morning mist. That horse rolled along underneath me, and I was as tall as a tree, and a little terrified, but I looked around at it all and couldn’t stop laughing.
The field was full of cattle when we got there. Victor rode his four-wheeler over to the gate on the other side—we could just see him though the mist—and Lodgepole rode his horse around the fence and out in front of the cows and started calling out to them in the funniest way, singing funny songs and stuff. It was a riot to hear, and Lodgepole laughed. Lodgepole had a lot of important stuff on his mind, but he sure got a kick out of singing to those steers at times like that. And like a bunch of dirty, grunting dogs, all the cattle lifted their heads as soon as they heard him, and they all started mooing and singing and grunting along with Lodgepole. Lodgepole laughed and turned and started plodding along toward the open gate, singing his funny songs, with the cattle mooing and walking behind him in one big herd.
Me and Quinn were in a group of four, riding our horses behind the cattle, hoorahing and heehawing to spirit them along, and I looked over at Quinn, and he looked at me, and behind him were the mountains shining red in the sunrise, rising over the mist that covered most of the open fields, and at least for that one morning, we were cowboys, real-deal, no-baloney cowboys: horses, ropes, hats, boots, saddles, and all!
Well, I nearly died on the spot. And at that time, sitting on top of that horse, hoorahing at those cattle, I thought maybe we might just stay there with Lodgepole and be cowboys for the rest of our lives, devil be damned.
But it was the next day we found out who Lodgepole really was—and what he was really doing on the ranch.
That next day, we woke up on our own in the barn stall with the sun shining in. The sun was all the way up and we could hear a big commotion outside. Cars and trucks were coming and going, and people were running around on four-wheelers and horses and walking and talking like they all had somewhere important to be.
We climbed up to the rafters to get out of the stall, then out our hole in the back barn stall. We didn’t see Lodgepole anywhere, and Victor and Crisanto were standing there outside Crisanto’s cottage, wide-eyed.
“What’s going on,” Quinn yelled across to them, and they just shrugged their shoulders and shook their heads. We looked around the headquarters and didn’t find any good answers, and most of the activity was headed toward Dove Valley—so we snuck down that way to see what was going on.
Nobody was paying any attention to us, and we ran through the fields and through the woods past the Lower End and up and over the rise in the forest to Dove Valley.
When we saw Dove Valley, it stopped us in our tracks. It was huge, running up between two mountains with buildings and barns and roads and all sorts of stuff. Lodgepole’s soldiers had the doors open on a giant hangar-type barn and were hefting out guns and ammo and all sorts of other stuff by the truck load. People were going everywhere, and in front of them all, Lodgepole was yelling and directing.
“Holy shit, Quinn,” I said as we saw it. I couldn’t believe it. “This place is huge.”
“He’s got a whole army,” Quinn said. He was looking out at it all and his eyes were the size of saucers. “I think I saw a bazooka. Do you see this? Do you see this, Ruby?”
“I do,” I said, and we snuck up closer.
But just as we got close to all the action, Irish Dunaway came stomping across the field and stepped right up into Lodgepole’s face and started yelling at him.
We couldn’t hear her at first, and Lodgepole tried to walk away, but she was fired right up and not letting up about it, staying in his face as they moved closer to our hiding spot in the woods.
We snuck closer to hear better, right to the edge of the trees, and she was really giving it to him, in places that hurt, too, calling him a lying piece of you-know-what and saying he had little balls and stuff. When she said he was a war-something-or-other just like all the other little boys he was supposed to be fighting, Lodgepole stopped and turned to her and told her that if she wanted to grab a gun and come along for a real fight, then to get in line, and if she didn’t, to get the hell off the ranch, for good.
Well, that wasn’t very nice, and I bet it didn’t feel good for Irish, but she didn’t even flinch and just lit right back into him. It was kind of funny in a way, and Lodgepole kind of shrunk a little, and she let him have it that time and got plenty personal, and then kicked some dirt on his boots and poked him in the chest. It was quite a sight, her shaking her fist and giving him the business like that.
Everybody was watching by then. The soldiers had stopped loading their guns, and the drivers were hanging out of their trucks, and Trenton, the little British horse wrangler, was struggling to stop one of the horses from darting between Lodgepole and Irish. Trenton and the horse were about the only things moving at that time, and Trenton was having a tough go at it with that horse. He was clutching at one of the stirrups and was kind of hanging on by that alone like he was waterskiing, all the while squeaking at the horse in his funny British voice, saying, “Oy! Oy, you dogmeat bullockchops! HO!” and stuff like that.
Apart from Trenton and the horse, you could hear a pin drop.
“This is not how we should do this,” Irish shouted at Lodgepole after Trenton and the horse went by. “We are the good guys, you dumb son of a bitch! We don’t resort to this. And if we do, we lose. You know that. We can’t beat them like this.”
“We lose by standing by.”
“We win,” she said, “with non-violence, with love and empathy. We win by showing and proving to our fellow humans that we can be better, as people, than we used to be, that we can care for each other, that all are welcome in our tent. Hate and violence are not needed.”
“All are welcome, huh?” Lodgepole said and spat on the ground. “You people and your slogans, Irish.”
“Talk down to me all you want, Lodgepole. It’s the only way we win.”
“What about Nazis?”
“What about Nazis, Lodgepole?”
“What about Nazis, Irish? Are they welcome in your tent? Are pedophiles? Are rapists? Are the hateful? The violent?”
Irish just looked back at him and squinted her eyes.
“Maybe not all then,” Lodgepole said, not smiling anymore. “Maybe only those you like or agree with are welcome. Maybe most are welcome in your tent, is what you mean. Right, Irish?”
“Bullshit.”
“That’s fine. Most are welcome. But that still leaves the Nazis and rapists out here for people like me to deal with—before they find the back door of your little all-are-welcome tent. Don’t bitch about our tactics because you want to believe that evil doesn’t exist in this world and your love will keep you safe.”
“Bullshit,” Irish said and spit on the ground. “Don’t talk to me about evil. And don’t assume to know what I think—and what I’ve seen. You’re not the only person with a past, Lodgepole.”
“Then stand up, Irish,” Lodgepole said. “Evil sows its seed whether you want to believe in it or not, whether you’re scared of it or not.
“Scared?” she said and spat again. “Bullshit. I just know it won’t work, you spineless bastard. Read some history.”
“History tells us that eventually you have to decide what is right and fight for it. Bad guys don’t give up on their own. They are defeated—often at great cost.” Lodgepole turned to all the others. “This is our time, people,” he shouted. “We have been lulled into laziness for too long. We have lost sight of the growing darkness. Liberty takes sacrifice. Justice takes sacrifice. Good takes sacrifice. If we are the Good, if we claim to be the Good, then there is no one else to take up the call, no one else to shed their blood for Good. We must be willing to fight for Good, for ourselves and our neighbors—for the weakest among us. For, who else will?”
“This is craziness!” Irish snapped at him and stomped off, cursing and shouting at people as she went.
It was quite a sight.
We didn’t really mean to stow away, as Lodgepole called it. It all happened pretty fast. We were just trying to get closer to hear what Irish and Lodgepole were saying, and we snuck over behind Lodgepole’s pickup truck—his nice one, with a cap on the back—and, well, Quinn nodded to it, and the next thing I knew, we were climbing up in. It made a good hiding spot, for a time, and that was all we really meant it for, I think. But of course, the thing about hiding in a truck is somebody can get in that truck and start driving. And that’s what happened.
We were just getting situated when Irish stormed off and Lodgepole told everyone to get back to work and get their locations and wait for the signal. Then we heard the people moving around again, then footsteps, then the driver’s door open and close, and then the truck start. And just like that, we were stowaways.
Lodgepole drove for what seemed like a really long time, and then he stopped on the side of the road.
We still hadn’t figured a good way to tell him we were in the truck when he got out and came around the back and opened the latch. Without anything better to do, we just smiled, trying to put on the nicest faces we could.
But he wasn’t even surprised. “You two are like a bad itch, scratching my ass,” he said before he even fully opened the back of the topper.
“How did you know we were in here?” Quinn said when Lodgepole had the lid open.
“Out,” Lodgepole said.
We got out, and he looked at us.
“So, what’s the plan?” Lodgepole said.
“What?”
“What are you two doing?”
We both looked at him and didn’t say much, and he looked at us and didn’t say anything. We stood like that for a while, till Lodgepole cracked Quinn upside the head.
“Oww,” Quinn said.
“What are you two doing?” Lodgepole asked again.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“We were just hiding, and then you started driving,” Quinn said. “Are you going somewhere? What are you doing? What’s with all the guns and stuff? Can we come with you?”
I looked up at Lodgepole, hoping he wouldn’t shoot Quinn.
“You know,” Lodgepole said. “I’ve stopped short of corporal punishment with you two.”
We didn’t know what that meant, so we just looked at him.
“It means I haven’t beat you,” he said.
I didn’t know if Quinn quite agreed with that. But I sure didn’t.
Even so, Lodgepole had at least beat us enough to know not to correct him when he said he hadn’t beat us. So, we just kept our mouths shut, and he kept looking at us.
“You know what,” he said. “You want in on this?”
“In on wha—?” I started to ask.
“We sure do!” Quinn said.
I was still figuring on what exactly this was, and I didn’t like the look Lodgepole had, or Quinn, really.
“A couple of dead kids will really sway public opinion,” Lodgepole said and looked at us and scratched his beard like he was thinking.
He was talking about us, and I didn’t like the sounds of it, but Quinn was smiling from ear to ear.
“Can we come, pleeeaaasssee?” Quinn said, and he really drew out the please.
Lodgepole wasn’t buying anything Quinn was selling, but he looked at his watch and frowned. “You think you’ve got the guts for real change?” Lodgepole said.
“The guts for anything!” Quinn said.
“You ever even shot a gun?” Lodgepole asked.
“Haw!” Quinn said. “Of course we have!”
And we had, I guess. But only just the once, and it got us in this mess in the first place, so I wouldn’t really brag about it. But it was Quinn, and he was bragging.
Lodgepole wasn’t a fool, though, and he gave Quinn a look. But then he looked at us like he was thinking the way he does. “Then let’s go,” he said, and we got in the truck and went.
I stood there and thought about what a weird world it is.
I was looking at an old man squirming in front of me. He was trying to talk, but his mouth was gagged, and he was bleeding pretty good from a knock on his head.
It was a few hours after we had stopped at the side of the road, and four Gennelichs: Ed, Cal, Caleb, and Trevor—from the barn—along with a few others, were tied up on the floor of their own living room in their giant ranch house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, getting blood on their own plush white rug. The same ranch, if you remember, where Ed Gennelich was under house arrest for his part in giving a bunch of people like Marsie cancer and poisoning the Henson River.
It was an odd sight, and the Gennelichs and their friends weren’t too thrilled to be there, as you can imagine. And that old snake Cal Gennelich was sure surprised to see me when I came in with Lodgepole and the Dove Valley soldiers. I guess he was pretty surprised already by the soldiers and the guns and being tied up and taken hostage, but when he saw me, it really threw him for a loop.
Now, he was kneeling on the floor with his sons, and I was standing there looking at him, trying to put it all together. He was squirming pretty good, trying to talk to me, so I pulled off his gag.
“Are you that kid that—?” he said, taking a breath and scrunching his forehead and looking at me, trying to remember where he knew me from.
“Damn right!” I said. I was just as surprised to see him, but I didn’t let him know that. “This is for Marsie, too, you old snake,” I said. “And all the others.”
Old Cal Gennelich looked back at me like I was made out of worms.
Lodgepole saw me talking to him and stepped over, raising an eyebrow.
I saw him eyeing me, and I looked up at him. “I dumped water on this guy way back at the New York State Capitol.”
That set Lodgepole back.
“I dumped water on him, for this bum lawyer lady named Marsie.” I turned to old Cal and stuck out my tongue. Then I stepped over in front of Caleb Gennelich and pulled out his gag. “And this idiot is pretty much the reason we’re even out here in the first place,” I said to Lodgepole. Then I turned back to Caleb. “I know it was you that blew up that church in Hackers Loon,” I said. “I saw you do it. I heard you planning it.”
“Huh?” Caleb said, still trying to play dumb. Then he recognized me. “Wait. You’re that kid— You’re dead.”
“Your stupid little bomb couldn’t kill me,” I said.
Lodgepole looked at me and chuckled, raising an eyebrow.
Caleb cocked his head, eyeing me and Lodgepole. “What the hell are you doing in Wyoming with this—?” he started to say. But Lodgepole had heard enough by then and shut Caleb up with just a look, then put his gag back in, to be doubly sure.
Then Lodgepole turned to me, lifting his head once to say, “Explain.”
“I know these guys,” I said. “Kind of. Caleb faked a terrorist attack in me and Quinn’s hometown: Hackers Loon, New York.”
“Hackers Loon?” Lodgepole said, squinting his eyes.
“I died in that explosion,” I said.
Lodgepole studied me for a long second. Then he nodded and chuckled and turned back to Hem, who was standing there, ordering people around. “Now it makes sense.”
Hem shrugged and kept doing what he was doing.
“If you told us what you were doing in the first place, we probably could have helped,” I said to Lodgepole.
He looked at me and Quinn and the Gennelichs and shook his head like he couldn’t believe it all. Then he pointed me and Quinn to the side of the room. “For now, you two just go over there and stay put,” he said. Then he turned around and yelled toward the front door, “Let the cameras in.”
There was some movement at the front door and Lodgepole’s soldiers let in some camera-people and reporters, who all looked scared stiff.
Lodgepole didn’t waste much time once they got in there. As soon as they set up the cameras and got all the hostages in their shots, Lodgepole checked with a guy on a computer in the corner, who gave him a thumbs up, and then Lodgepole cleared his throat and nodded at the cameraman, who counted down, three, two, one with his fingers.
Then Lodgepole started talking into the cameras—in his serious voice.
He was like, “People of America,” or something like that, “we are Helical Unfolded, and we are here for justice!” And then, on he went. He was wound right up and talking about a lot of the same things he harped on us about while he was trying to kill us with work on the ranch. I guess that’s what he called his group, Helical Unfolded, and they were everywhere, digging up dirt on companies like Timber Value and people like the Gennelichs—who were all squirming pretty good the longer Lodgepole went on. He had a US Congressman held hostage there, too, which turned the whole thing up a notch. I guess the congressman helped the Gennelichs in their scheme to rip off the American People and poison the Henson River and kill a bunch of good folks and good catching-fish.
Lodgepole stayed on the justice for all topic for a while, and what that meant. He was pretty sure that our country was being eaten up by something he called unfettered conglomerates, and he got talking about greed and corruption and people in prison for pot while the Gennelichs get house arrest on their ranch for murder, and a few other things I forget. Disparity was a subject he kept harping on. I didn’t know exactly what disparity meant, but it sure sounded lousy, and Lodgepole made it seem like it was in everything around us, like a bad smell.
He didn’t talk for long, as far as time goes, but he got a lot in, going from Old Abe Lincoln and Gettysburg to what it says in the Declaration of Independence and what it means to call yourself one of the Good. God and repenting was a major theme of the whole thing, too, as you can imagine. It was Lodgepole through and through, and it was intense.
“You will atone, or you will be exposed and wiped clean,” he said toward the end, slamming his fist. Then he lit into a line about the Founders and Divine Providence and something about how he and all the Helical Unfolded folks had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, and so on. That last part was a mighty string of talking and got all of Lodgepole’s people fired right up—and me, too, if I was being honest.
At the end, Lodgepole said he would be taking the Gennelichs and the Congressman up to the mountains “to determine their own fate,” as he put it. Then he squared right up to the camera and said, “In the hope of all people and for all of time, we must never allow this grand idea of America to be swallowed up by a twenty first-century version of the same tyrants, thieves, and murderers that our forebears fought against and cast out. I implore you to join our cause. And may God help us all.”
And with that, he twirled his finger in the air and the camera was cut and his people started moving. The Gennelichs didn’t seem too overjoyed about their situation or having to obey orders, but Lodgepole’s guys pretty quickly coaxed them into two vans waiting in their driveway anyway, their rifles doing most of the bargaining.
Well, we were pretty fired up and ready to head back to the ranch and start doing all the stuff Lodgepole was talking about, now that we knew what he was up to. But about half-an-hour after we left the Gennelich ranch with the Gennelichs and other hostages in the back of one of the trucks, Lodgepole stopped our truck at a strip mall and pulled into the back of an appliance store.
“This is the end of the line for you two,” Lodgepole said when we stopped.
“What?” Quinn said, just as surprised as I was.
But right then, a box truck with McMillan Appliances painted in red, white and blue letters on the side pulled into the parking lot. Lodgepole told us to get out, and we did, and we walked over to the box truck, and they opened the back door, and there were a bunch of Mexican folks back there, hiding behind the boxes, and Lodgepole told us to get in, and we did, and then he started talking in gibberish to a Mexican guy named Santiago, who was in charge of the truck.
When he was done, Lodgepole came up and looked at us in his serious way.
“Why can’t we come with you?” Quinn asked.
“I like you two,” he said, ignoring Quinn. “You’ve got fight. I like that. You can do plenty with just that. And I believe in the hand of Providence, and I believe our paths crossed for a reason. I don’t know why. But over the years, I’ve learned to go with it. So, I have.” He paused and looked at us. “This is why I held you for these two weeks. You understand now?”
“And now you’re not gonna take us,” Quinn said, disappointed.
Lodgepole grinned. “You gave me a run for it, that’s for sure. But you were good sports, and I appreciate it, and I won’t forget it.”
“I guess,” Quinn said.
Then Lodgepole stood up tall and looked down at us for a long second. “Well, I guess this is it, gentlemen,” he said, finally. Then he pulled out two one hundred dollar bills and ripped them both in half. He took one half of each bill and stuck them in his pocket, and on the other halves, he wrote the Helical Unfolded symbol and handed one to each of us.
“Shit,” Quinn said, looking at the ripped half-bill.
“Can we tape them?” I said, matching mine up with his, but they were both the same side.
“There’s a storm coming, boys,” Lodgepole said, snapping his fingers to get our attention. “If you get caught up in it, or if you ever need help—in a bad way—a real bad way—find that symbol—it’s around when you look for it—and show the people that.” He pointed to the symbol on the ripped bills. “You’ll be helped. You understand? Otherwise, I’ll see you when I see you.”
“Got any that ain’t ripped,” Quinn said, frowning down at his ripped hundred.
Lodgepole stopped and looked at him, and I was sure he was about to give him a smack, but instead, he just smiled at him and pulled out two other stacks of hundreds and gave us one stack each, with ten hundred dollars in it, and then we were immediately as rich as kings. “Your wages,” he said. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
“Holy shit!” I shouted. I’d never had a hundred dollars before, let alone ten. And I had the ripped one, too, which had to be worth something.
“Santiago will take you from here,” Lodgepole said to us. “Good luck, and Godspeed, soldiers. Take care of yourselves.” And then he pulled down the back gate of the appliance truck, and we drove away and left.
There were eleven other people in the back of the box truck including Santiago. Santiago was in charge of it all, but he rode in the back with the other folks. Benny and Jess were up front driving. Santiago said he hired them to drive because they looked like a well-bred, white couple, whatever that is, and well-bred, white couples don’t get pulled over by the cops in this part of the country—or most other places either.
Then we just drove and drove and drove on forever, and did nothing. It was awful. They had a little light back there and pillows and blankets, and the rest of the people talked their gibberish for most of the way, and we didn’t understand any of it, and people slept, and played cards, and we mostly just tried to sit still and wait. It was hard. Santiago and some of the younger ones spoke our language and we talked a little. They said they were all trying to get to different places for different reasons, mostly to meet or find family members—or to work. Mexicans seem to have a hard time wrangling their families, and they have to travel a lot for work.
Them carrying on about their family members made me think of Miss Jane, and I was missing her pretty good right then. I could tell Quinn didn’t want to talk about it, and the others didn’t speak my language, mostly, so I kept it to myself. But I was feeling pretty low at times, riding back there in the dark.
We only stopped once along the drive. At first, when they opened the back door, I was just relieved to see daylight, but when I saw the rest of what was out there, I thought they’d taken us to a different planet.
“How’d you do that?” I asked Santiago when I saw it. “What the hell is this?”
“What?”
I looked at him and looked around.
“This is Nevada,” Santiago said, giving me an eye.
“It’s a state, you idiot,” Quinn said and punched me in the arm as he jumped out of the truck.
“You’re a state,” I said to him. “What is it?” I said to Santiago.
“Nevada,” Santiago said.
“I know, but why is it like this?”
“Just a desert,” Santiago said.
All around us was nothing—just nothing—just sand and little scrubby plants and baked rocks and the wind and the sun, and off in the distance, past the flat sand and white stuff that looked like snow but was just more sand stretching off as far as you could see, in the middle of the endless nothing, there were about twenty dust tornados just dancing and twirling around the desert like they were alive and juking and jiving around each other. They were as tall as the tallest buildings in New York City, and they moved back and forth, sweeping around, and they jumped and dove and spun to the ground and twirled and darted around, dodging and twisting and stretching up and down and all around, each keeping its own space on what looked like a giant desert dance floor stretching down that giant valley to the horizon.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Whirling dervishes,” Santiago said when he saw me looking at them.
“What?”
“Whirling dervishes,” he said again and pointed.
“That’s what Quinn’s grandmother calls us when we go to her house,” I said. “Is that what she’s talking about?” I asked Santiago.
“Yup.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I always thought she meant devils and was just being mumbly like she gets.”
Santiago smiled, but he was looking off into the distance. He was distracted, worried about cops and stuff. He runs the show there in those trucks: arranging the vehicles and scouting the routes for all those people. They can’t ride planes because they’re Mexican, so they ride with Santiago. Santiago said he met Lodgepole years ago, after hearing his name from people that Lodgepole had helped, too. I guess Lodgepole helps folks like them and gives them doctor and lawyer help if they ever want it, and places to stay and stuff. I don’t know if they had any use for lawyers, those folks, by looking at them—they were mostly just fruit pickers—but maybe doctors: some were plenty old, and lots of them had aching knees and backs and stuff, no matter their age. They kept quiet about it, though, as far as I could tell.
Anyway, I guess Lodgepole showed up one day to meet Santiago, and he gave Santiago a good grilling about his intentions and all that, but chose to help him in the end, and now they help each other, and that’s why Lodgepole called Santiago to get rid of us, and why we were climbing back into an appliance truck in the middle of the desert of Nevada with the whirling dervishes dancing and juking around each other like a giant game of whirling dervish football.
I was dreaming of Miss Jane. We were on a boat on the lake, and it was sunny, and we were fishing, and the boat was rolling nicely, and she was smiling. But then Santiago was shaking me awake in the back of a truck with a bunch of Mexicans. The back gate of the truck was open, and we were in a garage, underground.
“Where are we?” I asked, yawning.
“San Francisco,” Santiago said, smiling. “Wake up. I’ll show you around.”
“The police didn’t get us?” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“No they didn’t.”
“The white people worked?”
“They did.”
“Why don’t white people get pulled over?”
“They just don’t.”
“Like a superpower?” I said, yawning.
“Not really.”
“Why do you Mexicans have to hide anyway?” I said.
“I’m Bolivian,” he said.
I just looked at him. I didn’t know what he meant.
“We have to hide because we’re undocumented,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“Means we weren’t born here.”
“Where?”
“In America.”
“Oh,” I said. “So?”
“So we had to sneak in.”
“Oh,” I said. “Was it fun?”
“Was what fun?”
“Sneaking in.”
“No. No, it wasn’t fun.”
“Why did you sneak in then?”
“For a better life, kid.”
“Why didn’t you just drive here though?”
“What?”
“Do you have roads where you come from?”
“Roads?”
“Is that why you come here?” I asked, yawning. “Roads?”
He stopped and shook his head like I was prying on him. “Just pray to God you never know why we come here,” he said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess.” It didn’t make much sense to me. “So, why didn’t you drive here, then, anyway?”
“You ask too many damn questions,” he said, shaking his head.
“Sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Miss Jane says I do that when I first wake up. It drives her crazy.”
“I can see why,” he said. “Why don’t I show you guys around San Francisco for a little bit, and we’ll leave the heavy talk for later. Deal?”
San Francisco sounded exciting, so I nodded and kept quiet, and pretty soon we went up a flight of stairs and opened a door and were smack dab in the middle of the city of San Francisco. There were buildings and cars and noises and smells and a million things going on right there above that parking garage.
We came out and looked around and it was pretty big and just as dirty as New York City, and there were clouds drifting through the buildings, and railroad cars going every which way, and busses connected to wires like a leash. It was crazy. And the whole place smelled like pee, just like New York City.
We gave it a good look as we walked, and at one point, as we were going up a hill, a guy came dancing down the hill, and he had about five pairs of pants on and three jackets and no shirt on under any of it, and he was kind of spinning and talking to himself and kind of yelling every now and then at people who went by. He was walking right down the middle of the street.
He kept spinning down the hill, and we kept walking up the hill, and at the next street we turned and crossed the street and started walking that way. There were a lot of Chinese people, and the signs all had Chinese scribbling on them, with regular words, too.
“Why are there so many Chinese people?” I asked Santiago.
“We’re in Chinatown,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s just a place.”
“Is it in China?” I said, looking around. “Or just close?”
But before Santiago could answer, we saw the same crazy guy that just went spinning and shouting down the hill on the street behind us, come sprinting up the hill on the street in front of us. He was running to beat the band and laughing the whole time, his legs spinning and arms pumping and his skinny little chest stuck out bare from under his three jackets that were waving off behind him as he ran.
About two seconds later, a cop went running after him in his full uniform, and then a lady cop came running like the dickens, too, then three cop cars and another five cops on foot all went by, the car lights all flashing and sirens going, making the most fearsome racket. By then, both me and Quinn were running after all of them to see what was going on.
I guess I heard Santiago holler at us to stop, but it didn’t register.
We got to the street and started following the commotion. But just as we did, an old fat cop that was panting and struggling up the hill right in front of us, reached out and grabbed Quinn by the collar as he went by. He was probably just looking for an excuse to stop running up the hill himself because he was fat, but either way, he grabbed Quinn and snapped him around.
Quinn getting grabbed up by that cop sure reminded us that we were supposed to be avoiding the police as much as possible.
Santiago knew that, and he was walking down the other street below us, making it look like he wasn’t looking up at us out of the corner of his eye as he crossed the street and kept walking.
Luckily, the cop that grabbed Quinn was too out of breath to pay us much attention, other than as an excuse to stop running. He just told us, between panting, that it was dangerous and we couldn’t go any further, and Quinn pretty quick just told him sorry, and gave him a whole good-kid line, and the cop just tried to breathe, and me and Quinn walked back down the street real casual.
A bunch of Chinese people and three scraggly-looking hippie-type guys had gathered and were standing on the street corner watching all the commotion, too. The Chinese folks were talking to themselves in gibberish and making motions with their hands and faces, trying to figure out what happened, and the three hippies were standing there watching the whole fiasco as befuddled as everybody else.
They were a funny looking trio—the hippies. One was wearing an old-timey hat, and one was wearing what looked like a giant burlap bag and had a long beard and sandals, and one had tight, black pants that a lady would normally wear, and big, pointy, snakeskin cowboy boots.
“What the hell was that?” the one in the hat said to us as we walked down the hill to the corner.
“I don’t know,” Quinn said, looking back up at the commotion.
I was looking down the side street trying to see where Santiago went, but he was gone.
“What the hell are you doing?” I heard Quinn say behind me. He was looking at the three hippies.
They were all carrying huge hunks of meat in vacuum-wrapped plastic on their shoulders, even the guy in the lady pants. It was definitely odd, once I got a second to notice it.
“Music festival,” the guy in the hat said, grinning.
The guy in the bag and sandals opened the back door of a big van that was painted with a bunch of funky designs and portraits, when a Chinese lady came out of a store waving at the guys.
“No, no. We bring,” she said, pointing to the meat they were carrying. “We bring. You rest.”
The hippies nodded—and the one in the sandals bowed to her—and they tossed the meat into the back of their painted van and then started joking and horsing around with each other, making their way back inside the store. We followed them in because we were curious and didn’t have any better place to go since Santiago was gone. But the inside of the store was the craziest place you’ve ever seen. There wasn’t a single regular package on the shelves, and the people working there all had on white aprons covered in blood and were shouting at each other in Chinese. One guy was pushing a huge pig on a hook out from a giant refrigerator with plastic flaps hanging down instead of a door, and he pushed it right out into the store where he had a big cutting table and knives and hoses and a giant band saw—like the one the lumber mill uses to cut logs—but he didn’t use this band saw to cut logs and boards, he used it to cut up whole pigs. It was the craziest thing ever.
He started shouting back to the lady in the front of the store while he pushed around the hanging pig, and she asked the hippie in the hat some questions, and he answered, and she yelled back to the guy with the pig in Chinese, and he shouted back and set to hacking that pig up with the giant band saw, cutting it into chunks. It was crazy, and the hippies were excited, too, talking about barbequing at their thing in the woods.
We were watching all that when I saw Santiago go walking by outside on the street, kind of looking for us.
Quinn saw him too. “We gotta go,” Quinn said to the hippies real quick. “See you later.”
“See you,” I said, and we ran out.
We caught up to Santiago right by the hippies’ painted van.
“You two are idiots,” he said when we came running up.
We both nodded and shook our heads.
“I’ll leave you for good if you do something stupid like that again. You hear me? You can’t do stupid things if you want to not get caught, and I do not want to get caught.”
Quinn was nodding and trying to look sorry, just like me, but he was also smiling with that look that usually got us in trouble. There was an awful lot of excitement going on—with the crazy guy and the cops and the hippies and Chinese meat shops and all the rest of San Francisco. I could tell Quinn was primed for adventuring.
“Let me tell you two an address,” Santiago said, eyeing Quinn, too. “In case we get disconnected again.”
“Okay,” I said.
“First, remember the number, Eight-one-eight. Okay? Next, remember the street, Greenwich Street. Got it? It sounds like Grenn-Itch, but it’s spelled like Green-witch. Eight-one-eight.”
“Got it,” I said.
Quinn was looking off up the hill.
“Repeat it to me,” Santiago said, poking Quinn.
And we repeated it, and Santiago was happy enough, and he told us to go there if we got separated again.
“In the meantime,” Santiago said, still giving us a look. “There’s a lot going on in this city. You can’t just run off, okay?”
We both nodded.
“Just stick with me for a little bit,” he said. “I’ll show you a few places you should know about before you get yourselves killed, okay?”
We said okay, and he started walking. There were a ton of sights, and pretty soon, the signs changed from Chinese gibberish to what kind of look liked Mikey G’s Pizza and other spaghetti places.
“This is North Beach,” Santiago said when we got there.
I looked around, but I didn’t see it anywhere. There were just buildings and streets everywhere.
“Where is it?” I said.
“Where is what?”
“The beach?”
“Well—” Santiago thought about it. “There’s a beach at Fort Mason, I guess, and Ghirardelli.”
He wasn’t making any sense. “Where are we then?” I asked.
“North Beach,” he said.
I looked at him, and he was serious. I kind of kept studying him and was trying to figure him out and not really sure if maybe he was crazy after all.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said.
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
I just kept looking at him, and Quinn was eyeballing him, too.
He shook his head at us, like that. “Come on,” he said and waved us to cross the street.
We went with him.
“This is where all the good restaurants are,” Santiago said when we got to the other side. “It’s San Francisco’s Little Italy. It’s where Kerouac and beatniks did their thing, too.”
“Beatnik? What the hell is a Beatnik?” Quinn asked.
“What’s a Care-a-whack?” I asked.
“Kerouac is a name,” he said.
“A name?” I said. “Really? Care-a-whack. What a great name! I care a whack. Hell, I care a whale, even. I like it.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I changed my road name from Danger McCoy to Bondurant before. I’ve been in the market for a last name since.”
He just looked at me.
“Care-a-whack,” I said. “It’s a good one. Care-a-whack. I like Care-a-whale, better, though: Bondurant Kerouale. What do you think?”
By the way he was looking at me, I thought he still didn’t understand, but then he nodded and said he liked it.
We kept walking and pretty soon the smell of about a million restaurants was drifting around us, and I was getting hungry. Santiago must have known what I was thinking because no sooner did I think it than he was asking us if we wanted anything to eat.
“You bet!” I said, and Quinn jumped about as quick as I did.
Santiago smiled and asked us if we liked sandwiches, and we told him that everybody likes sandwiches, and he told us he had a perfect place. And he did.
We walked to the top of a little hill and then started down the other side and stopped at this place called the Petite Deli, which was a French way of saying the little deli. And they were right: that place wasn’t any bigger than a closet and was funny shaped, besides. When you went in, there was a tiny counter-cooler with meats and salads and things in it, and then the wall. It wasn’t any bigger than that.
We squeezed in there and looked at the meats and stuff in the cooler, and while we were peering over the counter from our side, the littlest old Chinese lady was peering over the counter at us from her side. She was tiny, and we could barely see her, but she was smiling at us and saying, “Hello, boys,” in a funny way.
Santiago told us later that she was actually Vietnamese, which is different from Chinese and that actually all the people that we thought were Chinese were actually a whole bunch of different people from a lot of different countries and only some of them actually from China. This lady was Vietnamese, and she had a deli with a French name, the Petite Deli. She was a friend of Santiago’s, and she was really nice. She kept saying things like, “Big strong boys,” while she was making our sandwiches. “Look so hungry. Need big sandwiches. Need to grow big. Big sandwiches.” Then she’d turn around and say, “You take mac salad, too. From me, free. Need to grow big muscles.” And she’d peek over the counter from time to time and make muscles with her tiny little arms and smile at us. She made you smile—and she made you giant sandwiches, too.
That lady owned and ran that place, and you’d eat her sandwiches and the salads and some fizzy juice, and you’d feel about like she actually managed to get some of her kindness right there into those sandwiches somehow, and you’d eat at the one little table she had out on the street and fill yourself right to the top and watch people go by, and when you were done, you’d walk away feeling like a million bucks and like you did way more than just eat a sandwich.
That was how it should have worked, at least. But, while we were sitting at that lady’s table, eating those kindness sandwiches, the whole thing with Miss Jane was kind of hanging there on my shoulder, poking me in the neck, and I tried my best to just forget about it, but I couldn’t. I knew by then that Quinn didn’t really have any plan to tell Miss Jane anything, and I knew San Francisco was even farther from New York than Wyoming, and I knew I’d done Miss Jane wrong, overall, and it ate at me, and I stewed on it.
I had to tell Miss Jane one way or another. And I couldn’t just tell her I was staying out on the road. I knew that. She would want me to go to school. And Quinn’s folks, too. There wasn’t any way around it, and the stress ruined most of that sandwich. I guess I missed her, too—Miss Jane—if I was being honest. I didn’t like her thinking I was dead. I knew that.
Well, you know how sometimes you’re stewing on something, and it kind of eats at you, and you’re figuring on it and chewing it up pretty good, and you think your friends and family know you’ve been stewing on it, even though you haven’t really said a whole lot about it out loud, and you kind of dwell on it and get more and more sour about it the longer it goes? That was kind of how this was. I’d been stewing on that whole thing with Miss Jane for a while, getting more and more worried that I might have really boiled the egg with this whole thing, and I guess I just figured Quinn felt the same way, or at least that he was thinking about it a lot, too.
At the end of the sandwich the little lady came out and said goodbye and smiled and made muscles at us and hugged Santiago, and we walked away.
As we were walking, I nudged Quinn. “We gotta call Miss Jane,” I said to him, quiet so Santiago couldn’t hear.
“We will,” he said. “Don’t worry.” But he was looking off in front of us and had that look that I knew meant he wasn’t really paying any attention.
“Well, hell, Quinn, you’ve been saying that since a million miles ago,” I said, kind of testy.
“We’ll do it,” he said, turning to me. “Now, shush.”
“No shush,” I said. “We’re free from Lodgepole now. We’ve got to.”
“Ruby, I heard you. Shut up.” He nudged me away.
“No,” I said, louder, and nudged him back.
Santiago heard this time and turned his head.
“There you go,” Quinn said. “Get us caught.”
“What?” Santiago said.
“I called you for help!” I said to Quinn.
“What do you think I’m doing?” he said. “Look at where we are.”
“What does that have to do with it?” I said. “I should say, look where we are, for my point. I should be the one saying that.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
“Yes it does,” I said. “I called you for help.”
“And I am helping.”
“No, you’re not. You’re just doing what you want to do.”
“No, I’m not,” he said. “It’s stupid anyway!”
“You’re stupid!”
“She’s not even your mom!” he shouted right in my face.
I could tell right away he felt bad about it, and I knew he didn’t mean it, but to be honest, I just started crying right there on the spot, and they were both looking at me, and I ran away like a baby. It was awful.
I ran and ran, by a playground with a bunch of basketball courts and jungle gyms and then past a bunch of buildings and laundry-mats and coffee shops and parking garages and then all of a sudden, there was a giant spider the size of a house and a Frankenstein and a rocketship coming out of a building and about a million people all going a million different directions, eating hot dogs and laughing and pointing at all the crazy stuff. It was a stupid place called Fisherman’s Wharf, that didn’t seem to have any fisherman—and who knows what a wharf is, anyway—and it was just a bunch of stupid people.
I frowned at all the people and jammed my hands in my pockets and walked along and wiped my boogers and tears on my shirt and didn’t look at any of the cool stuff. There was a lot to look at, I’ll give them that, but I didn’t look. I just walked and frowned. I kept on like that for a while through all the stupid people, and I stewed a bit, but it wasn’t long before I noticed something big out in the fog: the ocean. The ocean! I stopped in my tracks and looked out, and there it was, walruses and all. And you could smell it.
I was still pretty sad, but it was awful nice to see the ocean, and it lifted my spirits quite a bit.
You couldn’t look far out in it, on account of the fog that morning, but I didn’t mind. You could see the water, and some fish, and the boats. I walked for a while, looking out at it all, and eventually there was a giant bridge that went out into the ocean, disappearing into the fog.
I couldn’t really figure that out, and I stopped on a bench on a dock to study it. It looked like a bridge to another world out in the sea. I thought maybe people lived out there under the ocean off the coast of San Francisco, in giant tunnels and tubes, looking out their windows at fish instead of birds, and seaweed instead of landscape bushes. It made me wonder if you had to worry about sharks breaking into your garage if you lived under the ocean, like you do with the bears in Hackers Loon.
I sat on that dock for a long time, watching the boats and thinking about that kind of stuff, and I started to wish Quinn was there to talk about the sharks breaking into underwater garages with me.
I knew Quinn didn’t mean what he said when I thought about it. And I didn’t mean the stuff I said either, I guess. I could have called Miss Jane anytime I wanted to up until Lodgepole got us. Nicole practically begged us to call someone when we were with her. I felt bad about it all when I thought about it, and I stewed on it and kicked the concrete and eventually decided to go back and find Quinn.
I started back, and I walked for a while, and there were a lot of streets there in San Francisco, and most didn’t go like they should, and a lot looked the same as others, and I couldn’t really remember exactly what the street was that we were on before or really what it looked like either, so I walked and walked, and I took the turns I thought I should, and a few that seemed right, too, but I didn’t find Quinn or Santiago anywhere. Then I tried to remember the address Santiago gave us, too, figuring they went there, and I knew it had a color and some numbers, but I couldn’t remember much past that.
Well, I walked for hours and hours and didn’t find them. And then I kept walking, and eventually, I was standing at a bus station with busses going every which way, and it was after noon, and I was discouraged. I sat on a bench and stared off into nothing and didn’t know what to do. I felt pretty low then. I missed Quinn. And I missed Miss Jane. I missed everybody then, I guess. I would’ve taken Quinn’s dad right then.
I stewed like that for a while before I noticed a guy standing there, and he was pretty dirty and wearing jeans and a jean jacket, and he was looking off into the clouds in a dumb way—just like I was.
“Hey, what are you looking at?” I asked him, because we were looking into the clouds in the same direction, but I wasn’t really actually looking at anything.
“Do you hear that?” he said.
“Hear what?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I looked where he was looking, and listened hard, but I didn’t hear or see anything really, other than clouds and a city and all its honking and clanking.
That guy’s name was Josiah, and he was from Indiana, which is a state, and he was crazy. But even so, once I got him talking, he said he was there to see the Pacific Ocean, so I liked him. I told him I’d just been to the ocean and where it was and that there were bridges running out into it and people living under it in tunnels—but he said I was wrong. I told him I’d seen it with my own eyes—but he said I hadn’t—which I took offense to.
In the end, though, he was right. I was on the bay, which is connected to the ocean, but isn’t really the ocean officially—and the bridges I saw just went to land on the other side, not out to underwater houses in the ocean. The ocean was the other way. Pretty far. He showed me on a map. He said he was taking a bus there and I could go too, if I wanted. I made him show me on the map again, and sure enough, the ocean was the other way.
“Damn,” I said. “Why’d you have to tell me that?”
The guy just shrugged and looked off at the clouds.
He knew which bus was the right one to the ocean, the real ocean, which was worthy information because there were about a million busses. I thought about it while he sat there having a conversation with himself, and I had the ten hundred dollars Lodgepole gave me, which was a fortune, and I could buy a million tickets if I wanted, and I wasn’t finding Quinn anywhere and didn’t have any leads, and it was the ocean, after all. I didn’t know what else to do. So, when the right bus came, we got on and started riding through San Francisco to the ocean. San Francisco was huge and loaded with people everywhere you looked, and I was trying to look for Quinn and Santiago, but it was hard with all the people. And then Josiah tapped on my shoulder.
“Wanna see something?”
“See what?” I said.
“Watch,” he said. Then he turned and squared-up in front of me and started looking at me right in the eyes, real crazy and intense. He was sitting across the aisle from me, but was turned right at me.
“Here we go,” he said.
“What?”
“Are you the truth?” he said.
“What?” I said.
“Snatch that demon!” he yelled.
“What?” I said.
“Snatch that demon! I kill you! Die, demon! DIIIEEEE!”
He was shouting right in my face.
“I don’t get it!” I yelled.
“Snatch that demon!” he shouted. “I kill you! DIIEEEE!” he yelled really loud, hovering right over me.
Everyone on the bus was looking at us now.
Then he suddenly sat back. “Did you feel it?” he said, leaning back, smiling crazy.
“Did I feel what?” I said.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“For what?”
“I got it?”
“Got what?”
“The demon.”
“The demon?”
“Yeah.”
“What demon?”
“Thousands of them, inside you.”
“Inside me? What are you talking about?”
“In all of us. They come up, good or bad. I kill the bad ones.”
“What do you mean? Like curses?”
His face snapped back to mean-crazy. “Snatch that demon!” he shouted again right in my face. “Die, demon! DIIIEEEE!”
Then he sat back, happy-crazy.
“Did you feel it?” he asked again.
“Listen, buddy,” I said, because I wasn’t following. “I don’t know what all this stuff—”
“Snatch that demon!” he shouted again, snarling right in my face. “DIIEEEE! Did you feel it?”
“Jesus!” I said.
“YES!” he shouted and smiled and leaned back like he was exhausted.
I smiled back, because he wasn’t shouting right then, and figured I’d better leave it be. I looked out the window for Quinn and Santiago to pass the time, but I didn’t see them, and the buildings got smaller and not as crowded as we drove.
A few minutes later, Josiah tapped my shoulder and nodded at me to lean in. I eyeballed him, but leaned a little closer.
“How much do you think Jesus’s bus ticket would be worth?” Josiah whispered, grinning at me.
“What?” I said.
“Snatch that demon,” Josiah whispered and started laughing hysterically, looking at his bus ticket. Then he leaned toward the bus driver who’d been glancing back our way when Josiah was yelling before. “Driver, driver,” Josiah hollered. “How much do you think Jesus’s bus ticket would be worth?” He laughed again when he said it.
“Whatever you say, buddy,” the driver said. He wasn’t amused.
Josiah sure thought it was funny though, and he kept looking over at me and nodding like I knew, too, like I was in on his joke, even though I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
He was pretty hell-bent that he was Jesus—and he was really caught up on what Jesus’s used bus ticket would be worth. It made for a weird ride, and a long one. Josiah really got a kick out of it all, though. He thought it was pretty funny that everybody was just going about their day, passing him by without even knowing that they were passing by Jesus. And he kept pulling his bus ticket out of his pocket, looking at it and laughing, asking people what it was worth—and snatching their demons when he didn’t like their answers. It was odd.
After that weird ride, the bus dropped us off a block from the ocean. You could smell it. We walked the last block, and then there was a beach. And this wasn’t like that North Beach place. This was an actual beach. And splashing up onto it was the Pacific Ocean itself, the real one, which was huge and full of water and didn’t have an other side. The fog was mostly cleared out by then, but it was still a little cloudy, and the water was dark, and the surf was rolling in, and just up to our right, the beach ended, and the biggest, jagged cliffs and rocks you’ve ever seen in your life shot up out of the ocean with the waves smashing against them, making the water white and foamy and sloshing around. I could practically see the ghosts of old pirates sailing around those rocks.
The beach was something, too. It was huge and long and wide and there were fire rings in the sand with people having fires in them. Other people were throwing frisbees and walking dogs and just sitting there, looking at the ocean. Between the beach and the road, there was a giant concrete wall with spray-paintings all over it, and people walked along the sidewalk along the top—where the road was—and other people sat on it, looking out at the water.
We sat there on the wall for a while, so Josiah could yell at people about Jesus’s bus ticket as they walked by. It was fun, I guess—watching him. Or at least funny. And nobody paid us much attention.
Josiah didn’t get one single person to answer him until a little old black lady with a really friendly smile and an old-fashioned flowery dress walked by.
She smiled at me before Josiah got to her, and when he asked her about Jesus’s bus ticket, she stopped in her tracks and looked at him. “Why, that’d be worth the world, child,” she said.
I think she even surprised Josiah by answering, and he just looked at her.
“What would you say it’s worth, child?” the old lady said.
Josiah just stood there staring at the lady.
“What’s your answer, man?” I asked him. “You’ve been asking people all day!”
The lady just smiled at me and looked at us both, then she said, “How about this: Would you take a hundred dollars each for it right now, and two Snickers bars?”
Josiah wasn’t expecting that, and neither was I. But she reached into her purse and produced two hundred-dollar bills and two Snickers bars and offered one of each to each of us.
Josiah just stared at her with his mouth gaping, but he handed her his worthless ticket. “God bless you,” he said as he looked at his hundred and his Snickers.
“And bless you, children,” she said and she smiled at both of us in her slow way, taking an extra-long second on me. Then she turned and kept walking down the sidewalk.
Josiah looked like he’d been struck by lightning. “Who are you?” he yelled after her.
I felt a little lighter myself, to be honest. There was something about that lady.
She turned just a bit. “Just me, love,” she said.
“What can I call you in my prayers,” he said.
“You already do,” she said.
“I love you,” he shouted after her.
“Me, too,” I said, because it seemed right.
“I love you, too, children,” she said back and waved her hand and kept strolling along.
Josiah slumped right down there along the concrete and closed his eyes and started crying.
It was kind of a weird time to start crying. I felt pretty good, for my part. I was rich for the third time, and maybe even uncursed oddly enough—depending on who that lady was—and I had a Snickers bar, and we were at the ocean. But I gave Josiah his space to cry, and when he was done, he said he was sorry and that sometimes he just gets overcome. I told him it wasn’t any big deal. I cry sometimes, too.
I plopped down next to him on the wall and unwrapped my Snickers bar, and we sat there with our legs hanging over, looking out at the beach and the people and the sun shining off the ocean. You could just barely hear the waves crashing down at the shore, and out in the water, there were surfers in full black suits paddling around with the sharks, not doing much of anything and frustrating the bugger out of anyone trying to watch them actually surf. But every now and then, one of those surfers would use his board for what it was made for, and that was a cool sight, them riding down a wave like that.
After a while, Josiah just stood up and wiped his tears and snot and walked away, just like that. He didn’t even say anything. But he seemed okay, and I stayed at the wall and kept looking at the sun and the beach and the surfers and the bums and the big, jagged rocks sticking up out of the ocean at the end of the beach.
After a while, I went down the steps and walked toward the water. The beach was wide, and there were a lot of people out. And then, there it was: the ocean. The real thing. It was quite a sight once I got close, and I stood there and took it in. Then, not having any swim trunks, I dropped down to my skivvies and bundled my clothes onto my sneakers on the beach. Being down to just my undies didn’t make anything warmer, but I’d learned over the years that it was best to just get it over with, so I ran as fast as I could and hit the water and dove right into a wave—and nearly died dead right there on the spot.
That water was freezing, and it shocked the hell out of me and rang my bell. But, even so, after the first dunk, and then another, and then another after that, I danced around and howled enough to get used to the cold, and then I was having a blast playing in the waves. Ocean waves. Big ocean waves. They’d come rolling in, and I’d roar at them and tell them to give me their worst, and then they’d get close and start to grow up and get tall and look down on me, and I’d get a little unsure about roaring at them and get jumpy in the stomach, and then just before they’d hit me, I’d dive right in and come out the other side clean, shaking off the water and roaring, and then I’d roar at the next wave and tell it to give me its worst.
I did that for a while, for a long time, I guess, and I was pounding my chest and roaring at a wave at one point when I suddenly heard a splash behind me.
First thing I thought was shark.
But then I heard, “Ruby Finn Heckler the First, Conqueror of Oceans, Land and Space—and anything else that gets in the way!”
I turned around when I heard it, and it was Quinn Randall Hennessey the Third, standing there in his skivvies, smiling like he always does.
“Quinn!” I shouted. I was really happy to see him, and I started sloshing over toward him. “How did you find me?”
He pointed out at the ocean.
I thought he was answering my question—which made sense—and I started to ask another, but he was actually pointing behind me, to the wave I was roaring at just a second before. Him showing up like that had distracted me from what I was doing, and that wave walloped me from behind and knocked me right head-over-teakettle.
I had forgotten about that wave for a second when Quinn first showed up, but I was definitely paying attention to it now. But at that point, my attention wasn’t doing me much good. I was caught right up in it and rolling around and didn’t really know which way was up until my face hit the sand bottom. And then I knew which way was bottom. But right away I lost it again after the wave twirled me around a bit more. I was running pretty low on oxygen by then, and I was plenty nervous, particularly there at the end when I didn’t have any breath to speak of.
But, right as I was thinking that that wave would just go on forever and eat me up and swallow me whole and carry my dead carcass out to sea, I felt a hand grab my arm.
It was Quinn Randall Hennessey the Third, and him grabbing my arm helped me figure out which way was up, and between the two of us, we thrashed and paddled and made it up out of that wave and back to air.
When we got to air, we laughed a bit and spit out some boogers and salt water, and we helped each other to our feet and hugged and said Hi and stood there in our skivvies, looking out at the ocean and all the waves. Then we started beating our chests and howling, and we ran back out into the waves, and when the next one came, we roared at it and beat our chests, and it reared up, and we roared, and it got bigger, and we roared louder, and we beat our chests harder, and it got huge, and we screamed for our lives, and it crashed down on top of us, and we dove through it to the other side and came out splashing and gasping and shaking our heads. Then we laughed and spit out our boogers and roared and shouted and beat our chests and waited for the next wave to come.
After swimming for a while, me and Quinn went back to the beach. By then, there was a crowd of people all standing there watching us like we were crazy. Then I realized that three of the people watching us were the three hippie guys we saw at the Chinese butcher shop. They were with a bunch of other folks, too, and they were about the funniest looking pack of people you’ve ever seen in your life. They all had wild clothes and colorful hair and weird hats and scarves and everything else. Some were guys, and some were girls, and some were guys dressed like girls and the other way around. It was hard to follow, if you were trying. Some of the ladies—the real ones—were plenty pretty, too, which was funny, seeing the guys, who were about as ragged as you can imagine. It was some sight, seeing all of them there in a bunch on the beach.
Me and Quinn went up to the beach, and as we got close, all the folks up there started clapping and whistling to us. First it was just a few, and then they all joined in and started cheering and clapping and shouting and pounding and drumming and howling and going, ay-yai-yaiii, and, waaa-hoooo, and things like that. They were mostly all rock-n-roll musicians, we found out later, so they could raise up quite a racket.
Well, we started hamming it up right there on the spot, as you can imagine, and we hammed it up the whole way through the shallows. At the time, I didn’t know who the hell they all were, or why they were there, or why they were cheering. But when people are cheering you, you ham it up, right? So we hammed it up.
“What’s all this?” I asked Quinn as we were dancing out of the shallows.
“After you took off, I ran after you, but you were already gone, and I lost Santiago and then got turned around and couldn’t find him or you or remember the address he gave us.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“I looked for you for hours” he said, looking over at me. “But I didn’t find anything but these hippies. I noticed their painted van from before, parked on the street. This time they were loading up drums and instruments at this music studio called Gulch Alley. I figured it was the best chance I had, so I asked them if they’d help me find you.”
“And they said yes?”
“Eventually.”
I looked at Quinn, grinning there, and up at all the people, and they were still cheering us.
Quinn stopped and put his hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “They’ve got phones, too, Rube. And they’ve got a place we can wait for Miss Jane after we call her.”
I looked at him for a long second. “You mean it, Quinn?”
He patted my shoulder. “Been a hell of a thing,” he said. “Not the least bit of adventure in it, I’m sad to say, but we did the best we could, for half-wits, I guess. This is the Pacific Ocean, you know that? That’s on the whole other side.”
“It won’t be the end of it, though—will it?” I said.
“Come on, Rube,” Quinn said, grinning. “Who do you think we are?”
“We’re pirates,” I said and shook my fist.
“Pirate kings!” he said.
“Pirate kings!” I said.
Then we looked up at the hippies on the beach cheering and screaming and whistling, and we waved to them.
“Something, ain’t it?” he said.
“I’d say,” I said. “Where’s their place?”
“The festival?”
“What?”
He smiled and ran up the last bit of the beach to all the people.
I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But we were calling Miss Jane, either way, and she would know I wasn’t dead soon, and that was all that mattered. I went up and said hi to everyone and they were actually really nice and asked us a lot of questions, and we answered what we could, and then we all went up to the road where they had three vans and two pickup trucks and two big box trucks parked. One of the vans was the painted one all full of meats and food that we saw earlier, and the rest were all full of people and snacks and camping packs and guitars and all sorts of stuff.
We piled into one of the vans and drove away.
“You ready?” I asked Quinn and looked at the cell phone. It was a couple hours later and the van had stopped on the side of a road so everyone could pee out in the woods, and it seemed like the right time to call.
Quinn kind of grinned at me like he might say no. “Yeah, I’m ready,” he said instead.
I took a deep breath and punched in the last number and walked to the road. Quinn followed, and I got ready to explain myself to Miss Jane.
But Miss Jane didn’t answer.
So, I tried again—and she still didn’t answer.
And I tried again—and nothing. Then I tried the house and the cabins and the business line.
No answer.
Finally, one time when I called the house, I got Mister Tendrowski. And he was sure relieved to hear from us. But he told us Miss Jane was out looking for us, and she’d been gone for over a week and nobody had heard from her or been able to get in touch with her in the past three days and they all thought she was dead.
I almost dropped the phone when I heard that. I guess after Quinn went missing in an explosion the same as me, Miss Jane got pretty well convinced that he wasn’t actually dead, and maybe I wasn’t either. Either way, she got determined like she does and took off across America, looking for us. Mister Tendrowski said everybody in Hackers Loon thought she was dead now, and I told him I couldn’t get in touch with her either.
He was all disoriented and said he wished Missus Tendrowski was there because she would know what to do, so I told him he could go find her and I’d call him back in a little bit if he wanted. He wasn’t sure and sounded plenty frazzled, like he’d seen a ghost—which I guess he had, kind of, thinking I was dead and blown up beforehand. But I told him we were in good hands where we were, with a good place to stay and folks that could take care of us for the time being. Which was mostly true. And eventually, he just said okay, and I said okay and hung up.
I told Quinn about Miss Jane, and he was worried, too, but we couldn’t really do anything about it right then, so we got back in the van with the hippies.
They drove some paved roads for a while and then some dirt roads, and eventually, we turned down another dirt road that was kind of hidden. We went through the woods and around a couple of turns and past a pond and then came up to a terrifying heap of broken down trucks and tractors and about a million crazy metal sculptures of the worst stuff poking out of everywhere, all made with pieces of old car parts and lawn mowers and mannequins, all screwed and welded together in the most terrifying poses. And that was just the start.
A giant pig ran across the road and there were chickens and goats running everywhere, and then suddenly there was a crazy man standing there in the middle of the road with a shotgun in one hand and a dirty bottle of wine in the other.
I thought we were dead for sure, but all the folks we were with started hollering and saying hello to this crazy guy. His name was Montego, and he was crazy, no doubt about it.
They finished saying hello, and Montego said to follow him, and he jumped into an old car that looked like it had crashed and rolled down a hill a hundred times. The roof of that old car was smushed right down flat, till the car just ran from front to back at the same height. Montego had then taken a torch or hacksaw to the smushed roof and cut out a portion so he could sit right there on the seat with his head and shoulders sticking up out of the hole and drive that car anyway.
It was a hell of a sight. As Montego jumped into the car, he whistled and shouted, “Stools! Clucker! Let’s go! We don’t got all day! Down to the water!” And when he shouted like that, a dog and a human came running out of the scariest barn you’ve ever seen in your life.
The dog, Stools, and the human, Clucker, jumped up onto the smushed-in roof and held on for dear life, and Montego spun the tires on that old car and tore off through the junk and down the slope, firing off five rounds in a row with his shotgun and screaming at the top of his lungs. Clucker—who was as thin as a rail and wearing the most ragged pants you’ve ever seen and no shirt—was clutching onto that car for everything he was worth as they disappeared around the corner into the trees.
We followed in our van and went through the junk, and it was terrifying, and we went into the woods, and pretty soon, we started down a hill. Montego was two turns down the hill, tearing along. The slope was almost straight down and the dirt road was terrible, like we could roll off the cliff at any time and end up like the car Montego was driving.
After a frightening twenty minutes, we got to the bottom of the canyon, down by the river, and the bottom was not what you would have expected. There was a whole music festival set up and about a thousand people all hanging out and playing in the shallow river with pool toys and frisbees. And across the river was a giant music stage with lights and banners and people playing guitars out of giant speakers. People were floating in tubes in the river right in front of the stage, and on our side of the river there were tents and people everywhere, and there was a ragtag kitchen built right there into the riverbank out of old two-by-fours and scraps of metal and river debris. The kitchen had a sink and water pipe running to it and three huge smoker grills beside it, all pieced together with a bunch of different metal parts and stood up on mannequin legs. The smokers were all blowing smoke when we got there, and when we pulled up, the folks tending to the smokers cheered and came running to get the meat out of the painted van we first saw the hippies in. Then all those hippies and chefs started a line of people carrying giant hunks of meat and other provisions over to those giant smokers and dropping them on the table beside them where a bug-eyed chef with his face painted like a tiger started carving up the meat and ordering people around.
It was crazy, and the people were wearing the craziest outfits and hats and bathing suits, and I saw two full sets of boobs in the first five minutes we were there, and I’d never seen a real boob before. I just stood there staring at it all for a long time, catching flies.
“Clucker! On top!” Montego yelled next to me, snapping me out of it. Montego jumped into the driving space cut out of his smushed roof and revved the engine of that car and howled up into the trees. Clucker dropped the trash bag he was carrying and waddled over and jumped up onto the car roof and got ready to ride.
Once Stools the dog jumped up too, Montego took a long drink out of his wine bottle and then shouted and shot off his shotgun. “Gotta take the Clucker and Stools up for food,” he shouted and then punched the gas and went tearing up the road in a cloud of dust, him screaming for joy and Clucker and Stools screaming—and barking—for fear.
Then we were down there at the bottom listening to the music, and it settled down, and there were a lot of people there, and they were having a ripper of a time. They seemed to get a kick out of us. One group of four or five guys came up, and one of them had little round glasses and a pointy beard like a pirate, and all of them were pretty scruffy, and they were a band, and they’d eaten a pizza or something with mushrooms on it, and it didn’t sit right with them, and they stood there kind of dumb, trying to figure us, and we stood there ourselves, trying to figure them, and not one of us talked for a good long while. Then the one with the pointy pirate beard who had been smiling in a funny way the whole time suddenly started laughing and couldn’t stop, and then two of the other guys also started laughing and were trying to stop but couldn’t. They were finding something really funny, but the rest of us didn’t know what. I laughed a little, anyway, though, because it’s always funny to watch someone really laugh about something, even if you don’t know exactly what they’re laughing about. It’s like getting an inch of snow, it’s still nice, and it looks nice, enough to make you glad you got snow, but not really enough to do much with, and not enough to close school.
Anyway, the three guys from the butcher’s shop said that we should set up our camp and gave us a tarp and sleeping bags and showed us where a good spot was. There were tents and tarps and sleeping bags everywhere you looked. They said to watch for snakes and poison oak, and not to drink anything other than sealed bottled water. They made a big point about that. We said okay and took the tarp and sleeping bags they gave us and found a spot and laid them out.
Once we set up camp, I tried Miss Jane’s phone again and still didn’t get any answer, so I called Mister Tendrowski, like I said I would, and that phone didn’t ring more than half a second before Missus Tendrowski grabbed it up—and, boy, was she stirred right up. She was going about a million miles an hour right off the bat, talking about what an idiot Mister Tendrowski was for not keeping us on the line when we first called and how much of a fright we gave everyone and what numbskulls we were, and how Miss Jane was probably dead now, too.
That worried me plenty, and Missus Tendrowski was pretty worked up, too, and she said she was sending God and the U.S. Army to come rescue us and to find Miss Jane, too.
Then she got to hollering pretty good, and she yelled, “Tell me where the hell you are! Right now!” And she said hell and everything, and then she mumbled something about Mister Tendrowski, and I could hear him in the background kind of defending himself but not putting up much of a fight. She was tough, Missus Tendrowski.
Well, I was about to tell her where we were and the whole story, but just then at that very instant, I saw a sight that made me drop that phone on the ground, right along with my jaw.
It was Montego, and he was screaming and flying straight down the canyon slope above us on a four-wheeler—but not on the road. He was bouncing and crashing down through the brush and trees along the slope at full speed, holding onto one handle-bar with one hand and his wine bottle in the other. “She’s CRAZY!” he shouted at the top of his lungs in the last second before the front wheel of his four-wheeler caught a tree, and the tree hooked him and sent him and the four-wheeler both rolling and flipping and crashing down the last fifty feet of slope to the bottom of the canyon, bouncing and tumbling and somehow not hitting any other trees.
Montego hit the ground and jumped up almost as fast as he crashed down and pointed his finger up the slope and shouted, “She’s CRAZY!” as his four wheeler kept rolling and crashed into the river in mid-flip behind him, sending water splashing and steam rising and all the people that were listening to music scrambling for their lives.
Then, right at that very moment, we all saw Montego’s smushed up car come skidding around a corner and into view through a cloud of dust on the narrow dirt road above us. The smushed up car was going about a hundred miles an hour and bouncing over the rocks and ruts in the road, kicking up a monster of dust. The car skidded around another turn and disappeared behind some rocks and trees and then shot out the other side like a bullet and tore full-bore down the hill and straight toward the cliff and the worst of the hair-pin turns.
Everybody was watching with their mouths on the ground, and they all gasped as the car gunned it toward the corner. One lady behind me screamed as the smushed-up car slammed on its brakes and skidded through the turn, the back right wheel going all the way off the edge before the other wheels caught and pulled the car the other way, further down the road.
It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and you might have thought Evel Knievel was driving that car. But who was actually driving that car would surprise you even more than that. Yes indeed, Santa Claus himself could have been flying down that mountain in Montego’s smushed-up car and I would have been less surprised to see him than I was to see who was really driving. I could have seen a plain alien and been less surprised, green legs and all. You wouldn’t believe it, but as that smushed-up car came around that corner—one wheel off the cliff—I could see, clear as day, that it was Miss Jane’s head sticking up out of that hacksawed hole in Montego’s car roof.
I about died.
She was concentrating something fierce on that road, and I don’t think she got a chance to look down and see us or anybody else at the bottom, but it didn’t take her long to make it down the rest of the way, anyway, and when she did, I could tell she was fired right up.
She came blasting into the bottom area at about a hundred miles an hour and she didn’t care who or what she hit. She slammed on the brakes and slid in the dirt like they do in the movies and smashed into the side of the two-by-four kitchen, sending the metal sinks flying and knocking over one of the smokers—which upset the chef.
The car wasn’t even all the way stopped before she was jumping out with a crowbar, swinging it at all the hippies who were gathering around to see what was happening. “Where are they?” she shouted, swinging that crowbar.
Even though she was hollering and acting a lot different and tougher than I’d ever seen her, and even though I knew I was in a heap, it was sure good to see her—Miss Jane—and to hear her voice. It was really good.
I also knew that the they she was talking about was me and Quinn, and if I didn’t hop-to, she might just lay one of those hippies out with that crowbar, and then probably turn it on me afterward. One crazy little guy with wild curly hair and dangly earrings was already starting to do funny karate moves in front of her, making crazy noises and moving his arms like he was getting ready to make a go for her.
I didn’t think that little guy would have done well against Miss Jane and her crowbar, and I didn’t want to find out, so I pushed through the people as fast as I could. “I’m sorry,” I shouted when I broke through the last of them. “I’m sorry.”
I was sure she would finally lay that beating on me she was always talking about, and maybe she’d turn loose that crowbar on me, too, or at least take out a belt and start laying into me with that. But, even after all the lousy stuff I’d put her through, even after all of it, the first thing she did when I pushed though those people was drop that crowbar and drop to her knees and start crying right there on the spot—happy crying—grabbing me and Quinn and pulling us both in and crying and laughing and kissing us plenty and thanking God and Jesus a million times over.
Seeing Miss Jane again—and how she showed up, too—was a monster of a surprise to me, and the next thing I know, I was just crying right along with her, right there in front of all those hippies. And I didn’t even mind.
It turns out Miss Jane was right on our trail most of the way, and she got close more than once, but we stayed ahead of her each time, without even trying. She said someday she’d think it was funny. But not right then. I guess she did some crazy stuff along the way, and Junior Jake out there had to take care of it as part of the deal for me to tell this story. Which is funny.
Anyway, at the time, we didn’t know all that, and I guess right before she came tearing down in Montego’s smushed-up car, Montego had shot out the engine of the her car as she snuck onto his property looking for us. I guess after Montego shot out her engine, she got out of her car and went right for him with the crowbar and whacked him and broke his shotgun, and Clucker ran for his life, of course, and Stools, too, and Montego dove for his four-wheeler to get away, and Miss Jane jumped into Montego’s smushed-up car and chased him down to the canyon bottom, looking for us.
Montego was just standing there at the bottom then, kind of trying to figure out what was going on. His four-wheeler was still in the river, on all fours, but with steam billowing up off the engine.
The band on the stage across the river never even slowed down through the whole fiasco, and they kicked in with a pretty good tune right then, and everybody was happy for us—me, Quinn, and Miss Jane—finding each other and all. The commotion livened people up, too, so they were smiling and laughing a lot, talking about what they saw. And pretty soon, everybody was just hanging out listening to music again and some guys were putting the kitchen back together, and everybody was having a good time.
We sat with Miss Jane, and she wasn’t mad at us. She was just happy we weren’t dead. She looked like she hadn’t slept in about a week, and I guess she hadn’t, but she was still really happy. She sat on the ground right there by a tree, and she looked like every little bit of energy just suddenly let loose of her and she slumped against the trunk of the tree and pulled me and Quinn into her on each side and leaned back. It was good to smell her smell, and she took a deep breath and let it out and pulled us in a little closer, and we sat there and listened to the music as the last of the daylight dimmed away.
It got dark, and the people were all swaying and listening to the music, and some of the hippies brought us over some of the barbequed meat that survived Miss Jane’s driving, and it was pretty good, and then we just sat for a while with full bellies, watching all the wacky people dancing in the dark, with the moon shimmering off the river, and the smells of the woods and the barbeque, and the sights of the stage and the band and one lady dancing on top of that half-sunk four-wheeler in the river with all the bright lights shining behind her.
We watched, and I leaned into Miss Jane closer. She’s an almighty lady, Miss Jane. She’s looked after me forever. Right since I was a baby—as you know. I’ve never had a mom otherwise, and when I did, she gave me this awful name, Ruby, but since then, Miss Jane’s been pretty much doing the job. Not that it’s been hard, of course. I’m a good kid just about all the time. But, still, she’s done it.
Anyway, I leaned in a little closer there at that music festival in the woods, and Miss Jane kissed the top of my head, and I didn’t mind. I liked it. And for some reason, while I was sitting there leaning against Miss Jane, I got to wondering what Momma Kay and her family was up to back in Hoboken. They’d probably like California. Then I thought about Nicole and her big rig, and what she was doing right then. I hoped she was happy, wherever she was. She was a good lady, Nicole—her and Momma Kay—and Marsie, too, even if she did like her vodky. I knew Miss Jane would be thankful to those ladies for looking after me, and I figured we should probably let them know me and Quinn weren’t dead now, one way or another. I wondered where Cecil the murderer was right then, too, and I hoped he was looking in a mirror, maybe. Maybe even smiling. Eventually, while I was thinking about all of those people—and Crisanto and Irish and everyone else I’d met—I fell asleep, leaning against the all-mightiest of them all: Miss Jane—my mom.
Well, I’d become a cowboy during all this—and a pirate and bank robber, too, if you think about it—and my story, this story, was sure a cowboy story, through and through, with tears and all. But this cowboy story doesn’t end like all the other cowboy stories: riding off into the sunset or dying in a gunfight or something. It ends with Miss Jane carrying me to the spot we put our sleeping bags earlier, and with me waking up the next morning as the sunlight came shining through the trees and a breeze drifted around the river bottom and a guy with a guitar got up on stage across the river and started singing a song about being released.
That’s how this cowboy story ends. And that’s just fine with me.
Miss Jane was sitting beside me on our borrowed sleeping bag then, in the morning sun, and I smiled up at her, and she smiled down at me and pet my head and bent down and kissed me on the cheek, and then Quinn hollered from off in the woods behind us about a rattlesnake he found, and I went to see.
And then I met all you people, and you know the rest.
What?
Yeah, that’s it.
That’s not my fault.
Oh, man. Jake’s pissed. He wants to know more about Lodgepole.
He’s coming into the booth. He’s pulling the plug.
I told him this was stupid.
There it is. He’s got it.
See you lat—
THE END