The Long Run Read online

  It was late afternoon. Travis walked from the bus station through the town, uncertain what to do. He was hungry, but he had to make his money last. He might need it for an emergency. Then he remembered Will’s advice about food. He waited until late evening and then went to the alley behind a steakhouse after it closed. He slowly opened the green lid of the dumpster. It didn’t make much noise. That was good. Make too much noise and someone might hear. Then they might come and chase you away.

  Travis waited. He didn’t hear anyone coming.

  “Look first before you dive,” Will had said.

  Travis peered into the dumpster. There was a streetlight shining into the alley. He could see inside pretty well. There were cardboard boxes in the bottom of the dumpster. It looked clean. It didn’t smell bad, like old, rotten food.

  “You don’t want one of those dirty dumpsters,” Will had advised.

  Travis waited, listening. Nothing was making any sounds in the dumpster. That meant there were probably no rats or raccoons or anything that might bite him.

  Travis levered himself up. He reached out and grabbed the clear plastic bag on top. He could see the food inside it. It looked good. Even through the bag he could smell it. His mouth watered. He hadn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours.

  He took the bag to a doorway behind the dumpster. There was light there from a streetlamp. He tried to untie the bag. It was knotted too tight. He took out his lock-blade knife and cut the bag open.

  Half a baked potato was the first thing he saw. He picked it up.

  He was about to bite into it. Then he remembered something Grandma Kailin said.

  Always give thanks, nosis.

  “Nosis” meant “grandchild” in their language.

  Travis nodded. He was so hungry. But giving thanks was more important.

  He held the potato up to the light.

  “Creator,” he said, “I thank you for this good food.”

  Then he bit into it. He’d never tasted a better potato. He moved a paper napkin aside. There was a steak bone under the napkin. It still had meat stuck to the bone. There was other food too. Beans, baked carrots, pieces of chicken. There was even a half-full bottle of mineral water to drink.

  After he ate, Travis felt happy. He was happier than he had been in a long time.

  “I can do this,” he said to himself. “I can.”

  He began to walk. He wasn’t sure where he should go. He knew he had to get out of sight. He didn’t want to attract attention from the police. They might stop him and ask him what he was doing. Then what would he do? He wasn’t good at lying.

  A woman pushing a shopping cart was just ahead of him. She hadn’t been shopping. Not unless you could go shopping for junk of all kinds—things that looked like they were picked up from the street. Cans, bottles, tattered magazines, pieces of clothing. He noticed how dark her skin was. It was the skin of someone who lived outdoors. Maybe she was Indian too.

  Travis walked up to her.

  “Grandmother,” he said. “Hello.” He said it with respect in his voice. It was the way he had been taught to speak to older people.

  She turned to look at him. She didn’t look surprised or frightened that he spoke to her. Maybe it was the way he said it.

  “Well,” she said, “well, well, well.” Then she smiled. It was a smile with no teeth. But it was a friendly smile.

  “Grandmother,” Travis said. “I don’t know where to go.”

  The old woman nodded. “Home?” she said.

  Travis shook his head. “No home.”

  “Ah. Ah, ah, ah,” she said. She lifted her right hand and pulled back her sweater from her wrist. She looked at her wrist as if looking at a watch. There was no watch there. Then she looked back at Travis.

  “Shelter?” she said.

  Travis shook his head again. If anyone was looking for him, they might look at a shelter. He was not going to go to a shelter.

  “Outdoors?” he asked.

  The old woman nodded. She reached into her cart. She pulled out an old newspaper. She looked at it. Then she handed it to Travis.

  “Map,” she said. “Follow it.”

  Travis looked at the thick Sunday newspaper. It was two weeks old. It was not a map.

  “Thank you, Grandmother,” he said.

  She said something back to him. He could not understand it. Maybe it was in another language, maybe a Native language like Cheyenne. As she spoke that language, her words were clearer. Her eyes were brighter. Then she pointed with her chin to her right.

  “There,” she said. “River. You go there.”

  He started to go. She grabbed his arm.

  “Watch out for the twins,” she said.

  “Who are the twins?”

  The old woman didn’t answer. She just turned and shuffled away, pushing her cart.

  When Travis got to the river, he saw she was right. There were places to find shelter. But it took a while to find a good spot.

  The first place he tried was in a thick stand of little trees. A well-worn path led in, and Travis quietly followed it. Someone else was already there: a lanky man wearing blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt was curled up inside a piece of yellow foam rubber. He was snoring. Travis backed out without waking him.

  The second place looked promising. It was under a cottonwood tree where the riverbank dropped down. Travis ducked his head under the exposed roots. The smell of urine was so strong that he backed out right away.

  It was dark when he found the third spot near a footbridge that arched over the stream. He walked off the path and down the bank to look at it and the way the rocks and the bridge came together to make a sort of cave where someone could crawl in. He shone his penlight into it. It was a perfect shelter. He was surprised no one else was using it.

  He thought about making a fire. There was a pile of old newspapers and dry brush nearby. The ground was blackened in one place back from the mouth of the cave. There was a faint smell of old smoke in the air, as well as something else. Maybe gasoline or lighter fluid. People who didn’t know the right way to make fires would use those. Travis never did. His grandfather had told him that was a lazy way to do it and it showed no respect for the fire.

  There was a half-moon in the sky and the penlight in his bag would give him enough additional light to find plenty of firewood. But then it was as if he heard his grandfather’s voice speaking inside his head.

  “Be careful,” it said.

  Something felt wrong. Maybe this place was too perfect. He piled some of the brush together at the back of the cave and then covered the brush with some of the newspaper so it looked like a person sleeping. Then he backed out of the cave.

  He looked along the stream. There was a tangle of brush and bushes a few yards farther down the bank about sixty or seventy feet from the cave. Travis made his way down to the spot. It looked as if there was some open space under the low branches that he could crawl into. If it rained, he’d get wet. But this was Montana, not Seattle. The sky looked clear and the air felt dry. He got down on his belly. Pushing his pack ahead of him, he pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head and wormed his way in. Small branches and thorns caught on his shoulders as he made his way forward, but he kept going. He went past a place where the branches opened up overhead and the moon shone down on him. He didn’t stop there. He kept going. Deeper in would be safer.

  Sure enough, when he got to the base of the largest bush, there was a space he could turn around in. The branches were like an umbrella over his head. The space was long enough for him to stretch out. He smoothed the dry earth with his palms, moving aside several round, baseball-sized stones. He spread part of the newspaper on the ground. He took the bag with the space blanket out of his pack. The bag was only the size of his hand, but when the thin blanket in it was unfolded, it covered his whole body.

  Travis put the pack under his head and closed his eyes.

  The sound of a vehicle approaching and then stopping on the near
by road woke him up. He heard the sound of the doors opening, feet crunching down on the gravel.

  “Quiet,” a voice whispered above him. “If somebody’s in there, you’ll wake ’em up.”

  “Hunh,” a harsh second voice whispered back. “What you worried about, Chiv? Those drunk Indians don’t never wake up.”

  “Not till it’s too late, they don’t.”

  Travis heard another sound, like a glass bottle tapped against metal. And the faint smell of gasoline wafted down to him. The hair on the back of his neck stood up.

  “The twins,” he thought. “That’s who I’m hearing.”

  “Watch it, Walt. Don’t spill that on me.”

  “Need some light.”

  A flashlight flicked on. Even though it was cupped by the hands of the person holding it—Walt, most likely—Travis could see the outline of two men standing at the back of a pickup truck. They were less than fifty feet from him on the road slightly above him.

  “You hear something?” the man to the right whispered.

  “Where?” The beam of the flashlight began sweeping in his direction. Travis lowered his head and closed his eyes. A person with closed eyes is harder to see. That was what Grampa Tomah said. He held his breath and began to count.

  One, two, three . . .

  “Hell, Chiv, there’s nobody there. Just your imagination.”

  Travis opened his eyes again. The two men were moving onto the path that led under the bridge to the little cave where he’d been before.

  “I was so right to feel wrong about that place,” he thought.

  He reached down and found two of the baseball-sized stones and then a third one that was slightly larger. He stood up slowly. He could see the twins with their flashlight. They were under the bridge at the mouth of the cave. One of them lifted up something that glinted in the light. A bottle filled with gasoline.

  “Looks like there’s one in there.”

  “Light it up, Chiv.”

  Fire flared up from Chiv’s hand as he flicked on a lighter.

  That was when Travis whipped his arm back and threw the first stone. His only aim was to hit near them, but he did better than that.

  “YEOW!” Chiv yelled as the stone hit his arm and knocked the lighter from his grasp. Travis threw the second stone, and somehow his aim was even better. It hit the bottle of gasoline in Walt’s hand and shattered it, soaking the two men with gasoline. If the lighter had not gone out when it landed, they would have been set on fire.

  “OH MY GOD!” Walt yelled. “They’re after us. Run for it!”

  The two men scrambled up the trail to their truck and roared away, the wheels spraying gravel.

  5

  A Good Ride

  The sun woke Travis up early. There were a few bumps on his face from mosquito bites, but he had slept well. He felt rested and strong. He washed his face in the river and then went to the third place he’d considered as a shelter: the cave near the footbridge. The newspaper he’d been given had come in handy there.

  He put his pack on his back and took a deep breath. Maybe Walt and Chiv would come back during the daylight. They hadn’t seen him, but the sooner he got out of the area the better. He began running. Half an hour later he stopped. He felt he was far enough out of town, so he started hitching. He stood by the entrance to I-90 holding up his sign. He had made it on a thick piece of cardboard he found near the river, using a piece of charcoal to write. The charcoal was from a cold campfire someone had made near the riverbank.

  “EAST?” was what he had written in big black letters. He also had drawn a smiley face on it. Travis had gotten the idea from Will Chan.

  “When you’re hitching,” Will had said, “look friendly.”

  “A smiley face looks friendly,” Travis thought.

  “Brother Hawk,” Will had told him, “the best rides are big rigs. If you get one of them to stop for you, you’re in luck. They might take you five hundred miles.”

  No big rig stopped for him. The first ten he saw blew by him. They were picking up speed as they headed toward the bigger highway.

  “I’m too close to the four-lane,” Travis thought.

  He moved back fifty yards, to be closer to the smaller road.

  He set his feet and held up his sign.

  He heard the gears shift as a blue semi turned and came his way. It wasn’t going to stop. It came so close that Travis had to step back. The truck’s huge tires kicked up so much dust it blinded him. His right foot sank into the rough, loose gravel. He stumbled and fell to one knee. He had to put his hand down to keep from rolling down the slope.

  “Are you okay, partner?”

  Travis looked up. Another truck had stopped. It wasn’t a tractor trailer. This was a big silver Chevrolet pickup. A horse trailer was hooked to it. Words were written on the passenger-side door. He couldn’t make them out at first, so he wiped the dust from his eyes and then read “COWBOY BOB, THE CALF-ROPING CHAMP.”

  “You okay?” the man in the truck said again. His face was hidden under a big hat, but his voice was friendly.

  “I’m—” Travis started to say. Then he had to cough. There was dust in his mouth and in his nose too.

  The man leaned over and opened the passenger-side door.

  “Come on, partner. Get in.”

  Travis picked up his sign. He brushed the dust off his shirt and jeans. He swung his pack off his back and climbed up into the cab.

  He could see the man’s broad face now. It was as brown as an Indian face, but his eyes were blue. The man’s hair was straw colored. His nose looked as if it had been broken more than once. A scar shaped like a lightning bolt ran down his right cheek.

  The man grinned and touched the scar.

  “Good one, huh? That was back from my bull-riding days. Big ol’ Brahma named Satan hooked me there after I beat the buzzer.”

  The man held out his hand. Travis took it. The man didn’t squeeze hard, but his hand was as rough as a cedar branch.

  “Cowboy Bob’s the name. And the rodeo’s my road.”

  Travis nodded. “Thanks for stopping, sir. My name’s Travis.”

  “Travis. Same as the name of one of my favorite singers. Makes it easy to remember. That’s a little trick of mine when I meet someone. Tie their name to somebody famous. Travis.”

  Bob shifted the truck into gear and eased out onto the road. “So Travis, you’re going east. Right? Don’t be surprised I know that.” He nodded at the sign. “I am awful good at picking up clues.”

  Travis smiled. “Thanks again, sir.”

  “Not ‘sir.’ Call me Bob or Cowboy Bob. Okay?

  “Okay.”

  Bob settled back in his seat. He put one arm out the window. “Got me a long ride. Passing through the five B’s: Butte, Belgrade, Bozeman, Billings, and Buffalo, Wyoming. Then on to Gillette. Gillette is where my sister Dolly lives. Same name as Dolly Parton. I plan to roost there till the next rodeo. Having someone along to talk to will help keep me awake. So you are doing me a favor, Travis. Just listen. Say ‘Yup’ every now and then. We got a deal?”

  “Yes, sir. I mean yes, Bob.”

  Bob began to talk. He talked about being a rodeo person. He told Travis how he started when he was only twelve years old. He listed every bone in his body that had been broken. Seventeen altogether. He described every horse he’d owned. Ten of them.

  “Old Jet Blue in the back there, he’s the best of them all. Twelve years old and smart enough to teach fourth grade.”

  Travis did as Bob asked. He said “yes” or “yup” whenever Bob paused for breath. He enjoyed Bob’s stories. He thought he might like a life like Cowboy Bob’s. Maybe not as a cowboy, but a life where he could travel on his own and do what he wanted. That might be better than joining the Marines. The hours sped by. They stopped twice. The first was just past Bozeman to get gas and use the restroom, and the second was at a roadside diner. Travis tried to pay for his meal, but Bob picked up the check.

  “You’r
e doing a fine job keeping me awake, Travis. Consider it your wages.”

  Back in the truck, Bob turned on the radio. “Hey,” he said. “Listen to this song. It’s a friend of mine by the name of Wayne Earl Jones!”

  You don’t need to take a Greyhound bus,

  you just need to take a chance on us.

  Baby, it’s all right,

  Hold on, hold on tight.

  Don’t need no ticket down to San Antone,

  you just need to have me for your own.

  Honey, it’s all right,

  Hold on, hold on tight.

  Some say the road’s the way to travel.

  Some say you need to get away.

  But I’ll tell you, darling, on the level,

  that my love can take you all the way, hey!

  You don’t need to hitch along the I-90.

  You just need to hook on up with me.

  Baby, we got all night,

  So hold on, hold on tight

  Bob sang along with the song. When the song ended, Bob switched off the radio.

  “I’d like to just keep that in my mind for a while. Know what I mean?”

  Travis nodded. The song had been pretty good. But Bob’s voice had been really bad. He was glad when Bob started talking again.

  It got dark, but Bob kept going. The stars were bright and there was no moon.

  “We are passing now through the Crow Indian Reservation,” Bob said. “You’re Indian, right? Are your people from out here?”

  Travis hesitated. He didn’t like to talk about being Indian. He knew how some people felt about Indians. He looked over at Bob. Bob had been friendly. Travis took a deep breath.

  “No. My family is Passamaquoddy. They’re from Maine.”

  Bob nodded. “Heard about them. Always been interested in other Indians. Believe it or not, I got relatives here. My mother’s side is pure Absaroke. Bird people. Crow is just a name that got tacked on ’em.”

  Bob was silent for a while as they drove. They passed through a town called Garryowen. Then he pulled the truck over. There were no other vehicles on the road. Bob turned off the headlights and climbed out. He tilted his head back and stared up at the sky.