‘Don’t you dare lay a finger on me.’
It was little more than a whisper. But it stopped him or maybe it was all the eyes upon him that did it. Whatever it was, he lowered his hand.
‘Get your ass home, you little Indian whore. I’ll see to you later.’
‘The only whores in here are the two you came in with.’
He made a lunge for her but she ducked out of his reach and ran for the door. Over her shoulder she saw that his friend and the waiter had grabbed his arms to stop him coming after her. She burst into the night and started to run.
The air hung hot and humid and she could feel the tears running on her cheeks and it made her almost choke with anger that she should be so weak as to let that bastard make her cry. A freight train was going by and she ran alongside, watching the lights beyond it strobe between the wagons. There were lights on her side of the rails too, strung on a wire above her, each with its own frenzied aura of insects. The train seemed many miles long and from afar, already out of town, she heard the mournful wail of the engine like a verdict on the sorry place through which it had passed. Had it been traveling more slowly she would have climbed on board and let it bear her wherever in the world it was headed.
She ran and ran like she always ran. And it didn’t matter where because wherever it was couldn’t be worse than where she was and where she had been. She’d run away first when she was five and done it many times since. And it always got her into trouble but, what the hell, what kind of trouble was there that she hadn’t seen already?
She ran now until her smoke-seared lungs could take no more, and as she stopped, the train’s last wagon went by and she stood slumped with her hands on her knees, gasping and watching its taillights grow smaller and smaller until the night swallowed them as if they never had been. Somewhere way off in the darkness a dog was barking and a man yelled for it to cease but it paid no heed.
‘Never mind. You can catch the next one.’
The voice startled her. It was male and close at hand. Skye scanned the darkness around her. She was in what appeared to be an abandoned lumberyard. She couldn’t see him.
‘Over here.’
He was sitting on the ground, leaning against a stack of rotting fence posts overgrown with weeds and he looked as if he might almost have melted out of it for his hair was long and tangled and so was his beard. He was a white boy, older than Skye. Eighteen or nineteen maybe and very thin. He was wearing torn jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with a roaring Chinese dragon. A dust-covered duffel bag lay on the ground beside him. He was rolling a joint.
‘Why are you crying?’
‘I’m not. What the fuck is it to you anyhow?’
He shrugged. For a while neither of them spoke. Skye turned away as if she had other things to do or think about. She wiped the wet off her cheeks, trying not to let him see. She knew she should probably walk away. All kinds of freaks and psychos hung out down here by the railroad. But something within her, some hapless craving for comfort or company, made her stay. She looked at him again. He licked the cigarette paper and sealed the joint, then lit it and took a long draw. He held it out to her.
‘Here.’
‘I don’t do drugs.’
‘Sure.’
The car they stole belonged to somebody with small kids. There were little seats fitted in the back and the floor was littered with toys and picture books and candy wrappers. The boy knew what he was doing, for it took him only a couple of minutes to pop the door lock and get the engine going. They stopped after a few miles so he could switch the plates with another car.
He said his name was Sean and she told him hers and that was all they knew about each other except for some common hurt or longing that didn’t need uttering. Nothing else seemed to matter, not where they were going nor why.
They drove north until they hit the interstate then headed west with a river to one side and the dawn rearing in a widening red scar over the endless plains behind them. Neither of them spoke for a long time and Skye sat turned in her seat looking back and waiting for the sun to show itself and when finally it did it set the land aflame with crimson and purple and gold and flung long shadows from the cottonwoods and rocks and from the black cattle that grazed beside the river and Skye thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her whole life.
On the floor she found a picture book that she remembered from elementary school. It was about a little boy called Bernard whose parents always ignore him. One day a monster appears in the backyard and Bernard runs inside to tell them but still they just ignore him. The monster eats him and goes into the house and roars at the parents but they think it’s Bernard fooling around and ignore him. And because they’re not scared, the monster loses all his confidence. Skye turned to the last page which always used to make her feel sad. The poor old monster has been sent to bed and is sitting all alone and forlorn in the dark, feeling a total failure.
They pulled off the interstate to get gas. There was a diner there that was just opening and they bought coffee and muffins and settled themselves to eat at a table by the window while an old woman mopped the floor around them. While they ate he asked her how old she was and she lied and told him she was seventeen. She said she’d been born in South Dakota and was half Oglala Sioux, on her mother’s side, and he said that was cool but she told him that she didn’t think it was and anyhow she didn’t know anything about that people or their history except that it was full of pain and misery and she already had enough of both to be getting along with, thanks very much.
He told her he came from Detroit and that his parents and his older brother were all in jail though he didn’t say for what and Skye didn’t ask. When he was fourteen he had taken off and for the last three years had been traveling all over. He said he had been down to Mexico and Nicaragua and Salvador and said he’d seen things he never could have imagined or believed.
‘Like what?’
‘Magic. Shamans. People walking through fire and not even being marked by it. People dying on account of being cursed. I saw a dead woman brought back to life.’
Skye asked him about it but he didn’t want to tell her. She asked why he had come to Montana and he said it was because he wanted to meet a grizzly bear in the wild. He said he had learned in Mexico that it was his spirit animal and that he had been a bear in another life. She laughed because this skinny kid was about as unlike a bear as a person could get. A stick insect maybe or a giraffe or something, but a grizzly bear? No way. He looked hurt and went all quiet on her and so she apologized and, finding it hard to keep a straight face, asked him how he planned to go about finding a grizzly. He conceded that it wasn’t going to be easy but figured they should head for Glacier Park, which he’d been told was a good place to start looking.
Skye nodded, trying to look serious.
‘Right,’ she said.
‘You got a better idea?’
She could think of about a hundred.
‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘I don’t give a shit.’
They drove the rest of the day while the sun swung over them, heading like them for the snow-capped mountains that loomed ever larger before them. In the afternoon it got so hot they pulled off the interstate and meandered along narrow roads through a forest humming with insects. They found a creek with a swirling pool and swam naked and unashamed in the cold clear water then lay in a meadow full of wildflowers and dried themselves in the sun while butterflies danced around them. He said she looked pretty and she thought he might want to touch her and half wanted him to but he only stared at the sky and smoked another joint and seemed hardly to know she was there.
By the time they got back on the interstate the western sky was filling with great gray thunderheads among which the sun crazed fitfully, pale and cold and metallic, while lightning flickered from their roiled bellies to the mountain mass below.
She saw the police car before he did. Something made her look back and as she did so the cop turned on his f
lashing red and blue lights. Sean looked in the rearview mirror and said nothing. He didn’t look scared or even worried, just stoned.
The Smoke Jumper
by Nicholas Evans
Available from August 2006
£6.99
ISBN-10: 0-7515-3938-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-7515-3938-7
Nicholas Evans, The Loop
(Series: # )
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