Kids Like This

He had to be smart about this. These were the hours that mattered most.

  
After the pickup sped past, the boy crawled up out of the weeds and cheatgrass and started again down the slope of the mountain road, paperboard guitar case in hand, green canvas backpack jouncing about his ears and shoulders, the cold afternoon light hazed with roaddust. He was moving fast, breathing hard. He could taste it, the dust.

At the one-lane river bridge, he looked both ways up and down the long wing of gravel. No one coming, not as far as he could see. He hugged the battered guitar case to his chest and took off at a near run, the knock of the instrument inside making a kind of music. The rusted struts of the old bridge rose above him and slid over him, and the thick, cross-hatching shadows darkened his vision in time as he breathed, as he ran. When he was halfway across, a fishing boat bobbed around the upriver bend, fly lines curling through the air and lighting on the deep green water. The man at the oars spotted the boy and lifted his chin in acknowledgment.

Fuck. Here he was, a kid—16 but so skinny and small people often mistook him for younger—with an Army surplus backpack and a guitar running across a nowhere bridge on a nowhere road in the middle of the afternoon. Anyone who saw him would be sure to remember him.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He slowed, waved back. Tried to pretend everything was okay, was as it should be. He’d gotten good at pretending. Across the bridge and out of sight, he ran again. His heart sounded hard in his ears. A mile on, the gravel road opened onto a blacktop highway, the tight green-dark corridor of forest opening as well, and now he crouched down and considered.

He was only a few miles east of Nye and figured he couldn’t hitchhike just yet. Someone from town might recognize him. He’d ridden the school bus with his little cousins and the few other Nye kids all the way to Absarokee, had picked up the mail at the post office any number of times for his aunt, had been hauled on beer runs to the Trading Post with his uncle Heck. That was before Heck had stopped letting him go to school, go anywhere for that matter. Before it got bad.

Huddled in the grass and pine saplings at the edge of the road, the boy dug his hands into dead needles and gritty, fungal-smelling soil. Don’t think about Heck, about Heck’s astonished face. The weight of the splitting maul.

His heart a hot, mad animal in him, the boy rocked and leaped up and ran along the blacktop, his footfalls loud, the impossibly large strides of his shadow somehow matching his own—and then he held up, cursed himself for being so dumb, and crashed down through the ditch and into the woods.

He leaned against a pine and caught his breath. He had to be smart about this. These were the hours that mattered most. The road would be faster, but he couldn’t risk being spotted. And if he tried to run in the woods, he’d trip over a root or rock and break his ankle. He decided to split the difference and parallel the road just inside the forest. He moved slowly, carefully, watching his every step.

The slope of the land was steep and uneven. The runoff creeks coursed with meltwater. Barbwire fences sliced along property lines. Wherever there’d been logging in the last decades—Heck had at least taught him the woods—the pines grew dog-hair tight, the forest dark and dusty, with sharp dead stobs below the canopy. The boy thrashed through as best he could, though he tore his flannel and scratched his arms where he’d rolled his sleeves up. He was worried the guitar case wouldn’t hold, or that his shoes, ratty Chucks with slick soles, would blow out. Half an hour on, maybe 40 minutes—fuck it—he made for the road.

The hand of the sun at his back, he came up the berm and kicked through the beer cans and deer bones in the verge. The first couple of times he heard a vehicle, he again threw himself back into the bar ditch. Eventually, though, he realized he wouldn’t be able to tell who was a local and who wasn’t, not until he’d seen the gun rack or fly rods in the back window. Not until they were long gone.

The sun dipped behind the blue shoulders of the Beartooths, and the boy shivered. He hoped maybe the fishermen were calling it a day and heading back to their lodges or fancy hotels or wherever they stayed. At his back came the far grind of an engine. He resisted the urge to flatten himself in the weeds and stepped just off the blacktop, stuck out his thumb.

From the vast blackness of the backlit mountains, a vehicle emerged. The wind of its passing pulled at the tails of the boy’s flannel and flipped his long, dishwater hair across his face. A truck stopped some yards beyond, and the boy finger-combed his hair from his eyes, spied a bristle of fly rods through the Bronco’s dusty window. The whole of him unclenched, a hard knot of held breath draining from his lungs.

—Where to?

One of the fishermen, gray waders rolled down around his waist, silver can of beer in hand, was already out and leaning the seat forward, so the boy could climb in.

—The interstate, if you’re going that far.

The boy lifted his guitar in first, then hauled himself into the backseat. He had to clear away plastic boxes of bright, feathery flies and fast-food wrappers and beer cans and crumpled sweatshirts and a couple of grungy ball caps to make room.

—It’s a mess back there.

The driver wore dark glasses, despite the fading light, and lifted a can of beer to his lips, sipped.

The boy flinched. The driver, with his short red-brown hair and neatly trimmed goatee, didn’t look a thing like his Uncle Heck. But the dark glasses, the way he draped his hand over the wheel, wedged the can of beer in his crotch—it was all too familiar.

—No worries, the driver said, his voice deep and steady. We take turns when we go fishing. Driver only gets one beer on the river, one beer on the road.

The other man, lanky, patchy blond stubble stippling his jaw, folded himself into the cab and slammed the door. He grinned at the boy over the back of the bench seat.

—But the passenger, he said, laughing, gets to get shitcanned if he feels like it!

The driver checked his mirrors and eased the Bronco back onto the highway. The passenger, still laughing at his own joke, cracked another Coors Light.

—I’m Zach, he said. That ugly bastard behind the wheel is Cal.

—Kurt, the boy said, though his name was Justin.

—All right, Kurt. The interstate it is. Or, hell, if you want, we can take you all the way into Billings?

Billings was where Uncle Heck had picked him up last fall. Justin remembered the dirty marble floors and the high, intricately patterned ceilings of the old Greyhound station—and when they’d stepped out onto the street, right in front of them was a dancing man with three pink plastic clamshell hairclips in his beard.

Fucking bums, Heck had said. Degenerates. Whole city has gone to shit.

Justin wasn’t sure how far east Billings was—he’d thought to hitchhike straight west once he hit the interstate—but his uncle was right. Billings had almost been like a real city. He could likely busk his way into a little money there, maybe enough for a bus ticket. It’d be safer on the bus. And he could sleep more easily.

Pine shadows striated the highway. The evening began to pool and deepen in the road ditches, in the mountain valleys below and beyond. Now that he was sitting, Justin felt a bone-deep tiredness ripple through him. How long ago had he woke weary and sick in the pre-dawn forest? He tried to tally the hours between then and now, but stopped short of the moment he ran hell-bent from barn with the maul held hard in his hands—the moment he brought the maul down on the soft place where Heck’s thick neck jointed into his chest.

—Billings’d be great, Justin said, swallowing against the bile rising in his throat, the fear and fury and gut-hollowing shame. Thanks.

—No sweat. Zach took a long drink, smacked his lips, and went on. Good day on the river. Rainbows are running. Cal landed a 20-incher. At this he punched the driver lightly on the shoulder. Lucky bastard.

Justin’s mind flashed to the creek back of the trailer park in Bremerton and the astonishing colors of the spent salmon, their dark, mottled bodies drifting in the shallows.

—Yeah, man, Zach sighed, good action all around. Always a good day on the river.

Zach drank again and dropped the empty to the floorboards, where it tinged and rolled. Then, he hooked his elbow over the bench seat and turned to look right at Justin. Really took him in. Green canvas backpack. Beat-up guitar case. Long blond hair. Silver studs in his ears. Sharp face and small, almost girlish ears and nose. Knob of chin.

Zach studied the boy a moment longer and as if deciding, turned to the tape deck.

—You got a guitar there. You like music, Kurt? How about Springsteen? The Boss, right?

Before Justin could answer, the speakers crackled and came alive, and they drove on for a time, no one saying anything but the Boss, who was long gone, who was on fire, who was going down, down, down. The blacktop slid beneath them, the mountains faded into the deepening evening, and Justin leaned into the dusty plastic mesh of the speaker, into the noise, and slept.

—He’s scrawny, but he could be dangerous. I mean, what the hell was he doing hitchhiking out on the Nye Road?

When he woke, the details of the evening about him made no fucking sense whatsoever—glowing white fluorescents, a bank of gas pumps, tinny music. Big-rigs idling in a wide gravel lot. The smeary reds of running lights. A man in cowboy boots and a blue corduroy ball cap walking stiff-legged toward the glass door of a gas station.

Justin sucked at the air and sat straight up, the story of this last day flooding into him—and now here he was at a truck stop, in the backseat of a Bronco, fly rods bent above him.

But where were the fishermen? Where in the world was this truck stop?

He had the sense they’d been parked a while, as it wasn’t the cessation of motion that had woke him. It was something else.

Maybe they knew? Maybe they’d stopped to get the cops?

He should go, go now. He slid his left arm through the strap on his pack and took hold of the handle of the guitar case. He fumbled and found the latch to lean the front seat up. Just as he was about to run—he heard Cal and Zach’s voices drifting through the open driver’s side window. They were off to the side of the gas station, near the ice cooler. Justin eased himself back into the bench seat.

Zach was gesturing with his grocery sack, saying something about his girlfriend, who was a teacher, who knew kids like this. Homeless. Strung-out. They’ll steal anything not nailed down.

—He’s scrawny, but he could be dangerous. I mean, what the hell was he doing hitchhiking out on the Nye Road?

Cal shook his head and spit. He said something that Justin couldn’t quite make out. The two men stood there, leaning toward one another, and Cal went on, his voice so low in timbre it was only a far rumble. Justin closed his eyes and scooted that much closer to the window. Even if he couldn’t make sense of it, he liked the sound of Cal’s voice, how slow and even it was. The rumble ceased. Justin opened his eyes.

Both men had started toward the Bronco.

Fuck. He should have gone. That was maybe his only chance. Justin kept hold of his guitar case, but loosely, the strap of his pack at his elbow, and hunkered down. He laid his head back up against the speaker and closed his eyes, as if he’d been sleeping the whole time.

The doors opened and slammed shut. The engine turned and caught. The Bronco began to move. After a time he could tell Zach was looking at him, reaching over the bench seat.

Oh, fuck. Justin let one eyelid flutter open and watched this tall, long-faced man lift the flap of his green canvas pack and stuff in a big plastic bottle of orange juice, a sack of peanuts, and a fistful of beef jerky sticks.

The Bronco picked up speed as they merged onto the interstate, and Justin couldn’t help but imagine the grease of jerky sticks, the sour and salt of orange juice and peanuts. He didn’t want to trust it. Not yet. For a long time, he held himself curled and still.

He pulled the sleeves of his flannel up and studied the bruises on his arms, the blues and blacks carrying the shape of a hard grip, the press of fingers, a pattern like wings.

Both men silent, the music off, no sound now but tires and interstate, Justin finally sat up. Even for the deepening night, he could see they’d come out of the mountains and into a wide valley. Pine-studded ridges, a dark scribble of river sliding bridge to bridge beneath the freeway. Now banks of lights cut the sky, and a phalanx of smokestacks belched blue, orange, and yellow flames, the oily blooms somehow blacker than the night. Pumpjacks nodded in the dark distance.

—The Cenex oil refinery, Zach said, popping another beer. They say that smoke doesn’t do anything to you. That the air is fine. I don’t know.

The smoke faded, as did the lights.

They came up a high hill, then settled once again into the valley. The moon lifted over the southern horizon and slicked the dark river. As the moon drifted and grew, Justin couldn’t help but turn his hands in that sideways spill of brightness. He grinned to see the play of shadows on the back of the seat in front of him—a rabbit, a bird, the devil sign, a double fuck-you. He pulled the sleeves of his flannel up and studied the bruises on his arms, the blues and blacks carrying the shape of a hard grip, the press of fingers, a pattern like wings. He could feel, too, the wings of a bruise at the small of his back. And in the pit of him a deeper bruising. Justin swallowed against the choke in his throat, his hot tears. He was glad of the dark, the highway sounds.

The lights of farms and ranches soon competed with the moon, then clumps of lights—trailer parks, maybe, or small towns on the verge of being swallowed—and now regular rows of streetlights along frontage roads and gas stations, warehouses and strip malls.

They were in the city.

Off to the north loomed the dark prow of the Rimrocks, the high, sandstone cliffs that cut through Billings. All those months ago, mid-October, Justin stepped off the Greyhound and got into his uncle’s truck, and for some reason, Heck had pointed the Rimrocks out to him. The only other thing Justin could remember Heck mentioning was his hair. How long it was, how he looked, his uncle said, halfway like a goddamn girl.

The Rimrocks were dark now, and close.

—You got a place to go?

Zach’s voice startled him. Before he could answer, Cal’s low baritone cut in.

—We got a room in the basement. Even got its own door. My wife and I don’t really do anything with it. There’s not any furniture. Except a TV and a VCR. My wife does her aerobics down there. Anyway, we could loan you a sleeping bag and a pillow. It’d be dry, warm.

Justin looked from one man to the other, the dark backs of their heads. They were both clean cut, fit, maybe late 20s or early 30s, the kind of guys who were used to figuring things out, getting things done. Doing things their way.

—We grilled burgers last night, Cal went on. There’s still some in the fridge. Potato salad too. Some Pepsi, Mountain Dew.

Zach leaned over the seat, the drape of his big, long arm.

—Listen, Kurt, you don’t have to tell us anything. It’s just, you know, you’re a kid. We can’t put you out in the middle of the city at night. You want more help tomorrow, just let Cal know. Whatever it is, he’ll help. We’ll help.

Justin could taste the potato salad, the pop and fizz of a cold Pepsi. But he was too close to the mountain yet to trust anyone, too close to the trailer—to what he’d done.

Heck lying there in a puddle of blood.

—Okay, Justin said, his heart squeezed in a vise. Thanks.