Lean on Pete (24 page)

“It’s a moody old fucking truck,” he said when he was done. “And she’s pissed at me ’cause I’ve been going fourteen hours straight. You ready?”

I nodded and he shut the hood and we both got in the cab and he drove onto the highway. There was a case of Coke sitting between us and a half dozen empties on the floor in front of my seat. On the dash sat a dental bridge with four front teeth. The windows were rolled down and the truck shook and rattled as we went down the road. The sun came up and it got warmer and the farther we got from Boise the more I relaxed. We were an hour out of Boise when I fell asleep.

Lean on Pete came to me when I did. He was in a city. He was lost and the buildings went straight up into the sky, and he couldn’t tell which way to go. He couldn’t find a way out. He had to dodge cars and trucks and people, but the farther he ran the more cars and people there were. He went up one street and down another and ran block after block, but nothing ever changed. His black coat grew shiny with sweat. He became frantic. His hooves cracked and began to fall apart. Then blood began leaking out of his nose and legs. He was in horrible pain. Finally, in exhaustion, he fell. He forced himself to get up again, but then he fell a second time and couldn’t get up. Speeding cars missed him by inches. He began moaning in pain, crying so loud that it was deafening, crying so loud I woke up.

When I opened my eyes I knew I was crying. My heart pounded, it was really hot out and I was sweating. Even the wind blowing through the truck was hot. Lonnie was driving and smoking a cigarette.

“You have a bad dream?”

I wiped my face. “Yeah.”

“I could hear you whimpering. You sounded like my dog when he gets a nightmare.”

“It’s really hot now,” I said.

“That’s what probably did it. You’re getting hit by the sun. You’re on the wrong side of the truck. I always get nightmares when you fall asleep in the heat. Take a Coke. Sorry they ain’t cold, but I forgot to bring my cooler. Coffee never keeps me awake. I can drink a pot of coffee and go right to sleep, but Coke keeps me up if I keep drinking it.”

I took a can and opened it.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Three or four hours,” he said. “That must have been a shit-ass nightmare.”

“It was,” I said.

“What are you doing out on the road by yourself?”

“I’m trying to find my aunt.”

“In Wyoming?”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you just take a bus?”

“I don’t have any money,” I said.

“I know how that is. I had to borrow five hundred bucks just to make this trip.”

“Why are you going to Grand Junction?”

“My brother works out there on a construction crew and yesterday he fell off a scaffold and broke his neck.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Fuck, me too,” he said. “He’s a good guy and he’s got a kid and a wife.”

“Where do you live?”

“I work on a ranch way out in bumfuck Nevada. Before that I worked on a ranch in Montana.”

“Is it hard working on a ranch?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “It just depends. You don’t get paid shit.”

“But you don’t have to have finished high school?”

“Fuck no. I mean, I graduated from high school but it hasn’t helped. As long as you can read and count.”

He took another cigarette, lit it, then grabbed a can of Coke and opened it. He ran his fingers through his hair and kept driving.

We stopped at a truck stop outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. Lonnie put in his front teeth and we both went inside and used the toilet. Afterwards he gave me five dollars and we went to Taco Bell, ordered food to go, and then we gassed up the truck and left.

He drank nearly a whole twelve pack of soda through the day and into the night. He told me about a girl named Linda who broke up with him and about him riding in a rodeo and getting his teeth knocked out. He said the owner of the ranch was losing his mind and that once he went to a whorehouse and saw the boss walking around in women’s clothes.

He talked all night long and I tried to stay awake. He told me about his brother and how they were raised Mormon, and how they both got excommunicated and now they couldn’t even go home because both of their parents disowned them, and how the only contact they have with their family is a sister in Kansas City.

He told me about his brother and him living in Mexico for a couple months and them working on a ranch in Utah for a summer. He talked about his brother meeting a girl and getting her pregnant. He told me how he once worked for a guy who couldn’t pay him so he gave him a beat-up Pontiac Lemans instead of a paycheck and how he and his brother fixed it up and sold it to a drug dealer. He told me about a time when he saw a guy hang-gliding and the glider caught an updraft and flipped over and crashed into the side of a mountain and another time when he was at a bar and saw a guy hit a good-looking girl right in the face. Her jaw broke and she fell unconscious. He said it was the weirdest thing he’d ever seen. Her disconnected jaw just hung off to the side of her face.

Once I had to ask him to stop so I could take a leak and when I did he admitted he had to go so bad he didn’t think he could stand but that he was scared to slow the truck, thinking it might finally give up and quit.

We went over a bunch of mountains and you could tell the old truck had a hard time. I fell asleep sometime in the night and when I woke the next morning Lonnie was still smoking and drinking Cokes. When we finally got outside Grand Junction he pulled off at a truck stop and gassed up.

“I guess this is it. Probably have an easier time catching a ride out here than in town. If you ever need a job, I could probably get you one.”

“Really?” I said.

“He’s so weird he has a hard time keeping people,” Lonnie said.

“Thanks for the ride. I wish I had money I could give you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I hope your brother’s alright,” I said.

“Me too,” he said.

“I guess I’ll see you, then.”

“Maybe,” he said and put in his teeth.

He gave me five more dollars and wrote his number on a scrap of paper and I put it in my pocket. I shook his hand, grabbed my blanket, and got out.

Chapter 26

I went into the truck stop and got a pre-made sandwich and a gallon of water and waited out on the sidewalk. Every once in a while I’d ask someone who looked alright for a ride, but I didn’t have any luck. It wasn’t until around three o’clock in the afternoon that I saw four long-haired guys pull up in a small red compact car. They were all dressed in black pants and black T-shirts. They told me they were going to Denver. I asked them if I could get a ride there and they told me I could. They went into the store and I waited by their car.

When they came out they were each carrying a bottle of Mountain Dew. I got in the backseat and we left. They were in high school and were going to see a concert. They smoked clove cigarettes and drank soda and ate candy bars and beef jerky and played the stereo so loud that they blew one of the speakers and then two of the guys almost got in a fight about it.

They didn’t talk to me so I didn’t talk to them and mostly I just looked out the window. My thoughts raced and for a while I couldn’t stop thinking about Pete. Then I began falling asleep, but I was so scared I would dream about him that I stayed awake.

We drove into Denver and they parked their car across the street from a place called the Bluebird Theater on Colfax Avenue. I told them thanks and started walking down the street. It was night and I came to a closed store and hid my blanket behind a dumpster in their back lot and went looking for food. But every mini-mart I came to looked like the one where I got caught and my nerves wouldn’t let me go in.

It wasn’t a good part of town. There were liquor stores and bars and dirty magazine places. I saw a drunk black man pushing an empty baby stroller and I saw a guy whose face was deformed and a woman who yelled at a man and said horrible things to him and chased him around a Walgreens parking lot.

I came to a Carrow’s Restaurant and went in. There was a lady who sat people and she came up to me and I told her I was waiting for my parents and she told me I could sit on the couch by the entrance. I stayed there until a group of people got up from a booth near where the restrooms were. One of them left most of a hamburger and fries. They went to the counter to pay and I got up and went to the table and took the burger and as many fries as I could. I went into the bathroom, found a stall and sat down on the seat. There was a guy next to me using the toilet and it smelled horrible and he kept coughing and grunting. The walls had things written on them. There were drawings of naked women, there was a swastika and phone numbers, and dirty things written. I ate the food, but it was hard.

When I made it back out onto the street and really saw where I was I got really down. I didn’t mind Skip and Charlene’s. They would have let me go to school, they probably would have let me play football. I didn’t mind being called Del Montgomery and I liked the bed and the sheets and the food and I liked having people around.

As I walked down Colfax Avenue I got more and more worried. What if my aunt lived in Florida or in Maine? What if she had died? What if she wouldn’t want me? What if she had never really liked me in the first place? I was only eleven years old the last time I saw her. I didn’t know anything back then. I got my blanket from behind the dumpster and kept walking until I saw an office building that had a bunch of bushes alongside it. I crawled inside them until I found an alright place to lie down. I put the blanket over me and waited until morning.

The next day I met a man who called himself Silver and he lived in the back of his camper. He was tall and heavy-set with a thick beard that was gray and black. His truck had broken down and he was parked on a side street in front of an apartment building. He told me he had to move it at least once a week but that his battery was dead and if I helped him steal one he’d let me spend the night in there with him.

I told him I’d think about it, then he asked me if I was hungry and I told him I was and we walked to the Denver Rescue Mission and ate lunch there. They served a bowl of split-pea soup, a cheese sandwich, a carton of milk, and a couple cookies. Silver hardly ate anything and he gave me what he didn’t eat. After that we separated and I spent the day in the park watching people play soccer and another bunch of people play touch football. When night came I went back to the mission and had dinner there. They had stew and bread and salad and milk and pound cake for dessert.

When I left I went up and down Colfax again. I saw two men get in a fight and I saw a girl that had a tattoo on her face and a man and a woman having sex in a car. Then I ran into Silver as he was walking with a skinny blonde woman who, I found out, was called Martha. They said I could come with them to Silver’s camper. We walked for a long time until we reached a neighborhood where it was parked. The camper was big and white and had a huge dent on the side of it. It sat on a pickup truck. Inside there was a table, a bed, a booth to sit at, a stove, and an ice box. The windows were taped over with black garbage bags so you couldn’t see in or out. It wasn’t in as bad a shape as you’d think. He kept it alright. Both he and Martha drank off a bottle of vodka and we all watched a small battery-powered TV.

There was a big bag of potato chips on the table and they said I could have some and so I just sat there and ate them and watched a police detective show on TV. They smoked cigarettes and drank the whole bottle. Later on they moved up to the bed. I asked Silver if I could stay the night and he said it was okay so I slept on the bench seat.

A couple hours later I woke to him standing above me. The TV was still on but there wasn’t any program playing. It was just static. I could see that he was naked. He began punching me in the stomach and in the face.

“You nigger faggot,” he yelled. “You cock-sucking faggot.”

Martha woke up and shined a flashlight down and yelled at him. I tried to sit up but couldn’t. He was too strong.

I begged him not to hit me, but he wouldn’t stop. I tried to cover my face but there wasn’t enough room to move.

“Goddamnit, Silver, stop!” Martha screamed at him. “He ain’t who you think he is.”

She got down out of the bunk and pushed him and he fell into the back of the camper against the door. He didn’t get up and she turned on the light. She stood there naked. Her body was old. It was like the skin on her was falling towards the ground. Silver was on the floor mumbling and Martha turned to me.

“You better get out of here,” she said.

I sat up and could feel blood leaking down from my nose. I was having a hard time breathing.

“He’s blocking the door,” I told her.

“Stand on the bench seat and stay in the corner. I’ll get him up on to the bed and then you leave, alright?”

I nodded and she went to Silver and talked to him for a bit, then helped him up. His leg was bleeding. He’d cut it when he fell. He leaned on her and was talking but I couldn’t understand anything he said. As she tried to get him up onto the bed I got down off the bench seat, unlocked the camper door, and jumped out.

Chapter 27

I walked down the road but it hurt every time I breathed. I kept looking back even though I knew he wasn’t going to follow me. It was late and everything was shut down. I went to the bushes by the office building. When I got there I lay down and wrapped the blanket around me and fell asleep.

When I woke the next morning my head was pounding and my ribs hurt so bad I could barely sit up. I just lay there most of the day and tried to sleep. By late afternoon I got up and walked to the parking lot and looked at my reflection in a car mirror. There was dried blood everywhere and my nose was swollen and hurt pretty bad. I knew I had to find a place and clean up. I passed a bar called the Lion’s Lair. The door was open and I looked inside and there were nothing but a few old people sitting around the bar drinking. I couldn’t see the bartender so I walked in and found the men’s room and shut the door and locked it. I spent a long time washing my face and cleaning myself up. I washed my hair in the sink using a bar of soap. I took off my shirt and looked at my chest but I couldn’t see anything wrong except bruises. I put my shirt back on and combed my hair with my hands. I looked alright. My nose didn’t look too bad. My coat was covered in dried blood though. I tried to wash it in the sink but I couldn’t get any of it out so I left it in the trash can. My shirt looked fine though and I tucked it into my pants and left.