Mitch stood behind the counter and talked into the phone, taking pains to keep his voice low, eyes clicking up at Rodney now and then, mostly keeping his back to him. Whoever he was speaking to did not ask to talk to Rodney.
“Someone will be here for you soon,” Mitch said, but then he added that “soon” could mean in a few hours or a day. He wasn’t sure who that someone would be, either, but he hoped it would be a parent. “Your mom and dad will make the trip, don’t you think?”
Rodney thought of the question with his mother and father together, the two of them side by side in the car, and that didn’t seem likely. Not for him.
Mitch set Rodney up in a back room on a well-worn sofa with a stack of old scouting magazines and a twelve-inch color television, a few small bags of chips, and supermarket-fried chicken. The television played continuously as Rodney drifted in and out of sleep, sometimes dreaming of Charlotte Street and the endless warehouse floor, and his mother seated on her stool behind the counter.
Only once did he find himself on the drive leading from Lester’s, though it wasn’t the drive, really. This one was riddled with cactus and snakes, and the steaming vapor of a swamp somewhere off in the distance, and he jumped from boulder to boulder as the sound of tires crackled over gravel behind him, Lester’s voice bellowing into the night.
Rodney opened his eyes to see a man on the television screen standing on the ledge of a tall building, his arms spread out at his sides like Jesus. The man was shouting to someone behind him in the building, maybe, or down below. There were policemen looking up at him and it appeared as though he might jump from the ledge at any moment.
“Well, look at you.”
In the doorway was a man who did not look like the person who had left his family behind months before. His arm stretched upward, hand gripping the jamb like he always did. The hair was shaggy at the ears, though, and the thick mustache he wore was not his. For a good moment it seemed to Rodney that this person who might be his father could not possibly be him. But the smile.
“We’ve been half crazy,” he said. “Your mother and me.” He came over and sat next to Rodney on the sofa, and Rodney lay down over his lap, neither of them saying anything, not about where the other had been all this time or what had happened to them. Or the mustache. It was just the feeling of his father’s body against him as he breathed, his hand moving in little circles over Rodney’s back.
The view was clear and free through the windshield as they made their way out of town, southeast, his father said, in the direction of Montana.
“You got it fixed,” Rodney said, reaching up and running his fingers over the glass.
“It’s against the law to drive with a busted windshield,” his father said. He glanced over at Rodney. “I didn’t need to be reminded of that day.”
Rodney nodded, and traced his fingers over the glass again.
“You know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
They came down from the hills, leaving behind Boone and its tumbles of sage and errant rocks, settling into the expanse of farmland, sheets of green stretching out like one long, deep breath.
“I know about that Otis fellow,” his father said. “About him and your mom.”
Rodney nodded, his stomach rolling, not from hunger.
“I know about what happened to him, too, up there at that place,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to see that.”
Rodney looked over at his father, and his eyes were red and pooling, and he blinked at the roadway as he drove.
“Did he do anything to you?” he asked. And when he looked at Rodney a single bead had dropped from his eye, holding place just above his cheek. “Did he—”
“No,” Rodney said. He thought of the slap, when he had been crying and Otis snapped. But that had been after Kruger’s, and the crack on Otis’s head. Rodney wondered, now, that perhaps Otis hadn’t known better.
“Is Mom coming?” he asked.
“To Missoula?” His father nodded, slowly. “Eventually. That’s the plan. She’s tying things up in Hope, and then we’ll get it taken care of.”
They drove in silence for a bit, Rodney listening to the click of the patched roadway beneath them. Up ahead, a long freight train moved into view, and the crossing arm lowered slowly, red dots winking like Christmas lights. They came to a stop, Rodney’s dad cutting the engine.
“Looks like a long one,” he said, craning his neck and looking past Rodney.
“Yeah.”
“Timing,” he said.
Rodney nodded.
They sat there, his father scratching at a spot on the steering wheel with his thumbnail, as the first of the cars clicked past, flatbeds and livestock cars, mostly, cattle gazing through the slats like bored tourists.
“I know about Mr. Kruger, too,” he said. “About the robbery.”
Rodney wasn’t surprised about this. Of course he’d know about it. He felt his throat tighten, the warmth of his blood rushing to his face. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. He caught a tear with his sleeve before it could fall.
His father put a hand on his knee. “You don’t need to feel guilty, Rod,” he said. “You’re a kid for Christ’s sake. Otis Dell—” He stopped, cleared his throat. “It’s going to be okay.”
Rodney gave a hard shake of his head, biting down on his lip until it stung. It wasn’t okay, he wanted to say. Nothing about what happened was okay.
Rail cars continued to clip by, the rust and paint of boxcars blinking past like an old film. The whole train seemed to stretch from one end of the world to the other, and for a moment Rodney imagined that they could be at that crossing forever.
A single pickup truck, its rounded hood and its old cowboy hat-wearing driver, blinked at them from the opposite side through the gaps of the rail cars.
“But he’s dead,” Rodney choked.
“Otis killed him.”
His father pulled his hand away. “Who’s dead?” he asked. “Who are you talking about?”
“Mr. Kruger.” Rodney was crying now, his sleeve working over his face like a washrag. “Otis killed him.”
“Oh Jesus, Rod. That’s what you’ve been thinking all this time?” He ran his hand over Rodney’s hair, warm and soft against his scalp. “Kruger’s fine,” he said. “Walking around on crutches. A good shiner, I guess. But he’ll be fine. He’s a tough nut to crack, that fellow.”
His father fired up the engine as the last of the cars rolled by, the green caboose trailing off down the line.
“People make mistakes, Rodney,” he said. “If they’re lucky, they get the chance to fix them. If not, well—they do what they can to make up for them.”
The road opened up ahead of them, a black slice through an endless green plane. Rodney counted the cars passing them from the opposite direction, wondering why on Earth any of them would want to go back there.