Running Loose

by Chris Crutcher

  Anyway, I’ve got a gun rack in my Chevy, too, but I don’t carry a gun in it. Guns scare me. I carry a huge pepperoni I got down at Smoky Joe’s just outside Boise. Had it custom-made. If I’m ever caught in a blizzard, I may freeze to death, but I sure as hell won’t starve. It would take me three years to eat that thing. I’ve had it almost eight months, and though it’s getting pretty hard, it’s still good. Smoky Joe said it would live longer than I would.

  Once it almost got me beat up. Guess who. Right. Boomer asked me why I had it, and when I explained it was my survival kit, he said bullshit, it was because I was too yellow to carry a gun, that I was always doing stupid things to cover up what a wussy I was. When I told him the sheriff made me check my shootin’ iron at the jail when I came into this tinhorn town, he came after me. Did I say the guy’s got no sense of humor? Luckily Carter was around.

  Later Carter told me we might have to load up my pepperoni one of these days and hunt that bastard down like a dirty dog. There’ve been times when that didn’t sound like such a bad idea, but it’s so big I’d be afraid to shoot it.

  Life was pretty uneventful for me through the rest of football season and into the winter. The hardest part was not going to the games. I really wanted to watch Carter and some of the other guys—they were tearing up the league—but I just couldn’t stand to be there and not get in on it. So I’d deliver stove oil for Norm or let myself into the Buckhorn to shoot pool and feel sorry for myself. As much pool as I played, you’d think I’d have gotten better.

  The season ended just as predicted. Trout won the league, with Salmon River finishing second, and went on to win one more state championship. Washington came back in a couple of weeks, like Sally said, and ran up some pretty fair statistics. There were still times when I wished he’d been put out for the season, to make what I’d done seem worth it, but mostly I was glad he was okay. Oh, yeah, and they named the gym after Lednecky. We’re the only school in the league whose gymnasium has a name. They even put some of those gold letters above the entrance. Somehow some of them keep mysteriously disappearing, so it says EDNECK or LED ECK or something weird. They just can’t seem to keep them up there. Must be using the wrong kind of glue.

  I couldn’t turn out for basketball, which was fine with me. Jasper went ahead and told everybody that I’d been suspended from further interscholastic activities—fairly quietly, I noticed—and I didn’t say anything to Norm about it because I didn’t want to raise another stink. I play basketball a lot like I play pool and turned out before only because everyone else did and it was a way to keep in shape. Lednecky’s the head basketball coach, too, so even if I had fought the ruling, I’d never have played a minute in a game. Not being allowed to turn out just took the pressure off.

  My relationship with Becky grew more and more amazing. We got closer and closer, and the underlying fear that she was suddenly going to come to her senses and drop me like a hot rock disappeared. After one of the record dances at the school we almost had sex, and it was pretty clear to both of us that it was going to happen. In fact, I did have sex after that dance, but only my undershorts knew for sure. Becky said she wasn’t up for making love in the front seat of a pickup in the company of a giant pepperoni. Seemed like pretty heavy competition to me, too.

  But it was moving right along.

  Carter and I still found time for each other, too. I don’t know what I’d have done without him. He kept me feeling okay about myself without the help of sports. That’s hard to do. It was like having Clint Eastwood or Kojak or somebody like you. I didn’t have to prove anything to him.

  Still, I wasn’t a favorite among the masses, and there weren’t many teachers I’d have felt comfortable asking for a letter of recommendation from. Unless I wanted to go to college in El Salvador or Iran or someplace.

  Snow came early this year, like the Farmer’s Almanac said it would. Sometimes you don’t get it until right around Christmas, but this year the trick-or-treaters were decked out in their snow boots, trudging through two or three inches of it and killing each other with snowballs. It was a long, hard winter, weather-wise.

  I started cross-country skiing in early November, mostly by accident. I was cleaning out my grandmother’s barn when I ran across this really long pair of wooden skis with nothing but toe straps for bindings. They looked ripe for firewood until my grandmother told me what they were. She said my granddad used to go out for three or four days at a time on them when he was still alive. Survival trips, he called them, and they must have been just that, from what she told me. He came to Trout when it was being settled, and when there got to be about five hundred people, he felt it was getting too big. So he’d head for the hills and try to live like the Indians did in their time. ’Course they didn’t have cross-country skis, but then he didn’t have as much time to spend in the woods as they did. He’d take a little food just in case; but he hunted with a bow and slept in lean-tos made of branches, and Grandma said she never remembered him having to eat any of the food he took. He never killed more than he could eat, and he had a lot of respect for the country and the animals that lived there, and she wished he’d lived until I was older—long enough to pass that on to me.

  I promised her I’d never kill more than I could eat.

  Anyway, the skis intrigued me, so I decided to give them a try. They were every bit as unmanageable as they looked, especially with only the leather toe strap to keep your foot in. Dakota informed me, however, that if I’d bother to look around me—at the cross-country skiing boom—I’d see a lot of advances had been made since 1915, so I drove down to Boise to get something a little more modern. I’d saved plenty of money, so I had no trouble setting myself up with all the finest gear.

  There really isn’t much to it once you get the hang of making it up the steep hills, and by the middle of November I was spending most of the time I wasn’t working or with Becky whipping through the hills around Trout.

  Naturally it proved to Boomer that I was as big a wussy as he’d always said I was because if I had a hair anywhere on my body, I’d be learning to jump, like he would be if basketball practice hadn’t already started.

  Carter rented some stuff and went out with me once, but it didn’t take long for us to figure out it wasn’t the sport for him. Man was meant to move his athletics indoors when the snow flies, he said. The Good Lord couldn’t respect a man who would deliberately go out and freeze his butt when he could be in by a warm fire. The Good Lord appreciated intelligence.

  Becky went out with me a few times after school, and she liked it a lot. She didn’t have as much time to play around with it, though, because she had music to play and grades to get and more damn irons in the fire than you’d need to brand every cow in your herd with a different brand each. She was always taking a test for some kind of scholarship or some highfallutin summer program being offered to high school geniuses by some highfallutin university like Stanford, which is down in California, close to San Francisco, I think.

  It was because of cross-country skiing and because part of the roof of Lednecky Gym caved in from the weight of the snow that Becky and I finally got a chance to be really alone together. Actually it was because we were both horny, but those things got us to the right place and time.

  After the first couple of times we’d gone skiing, Becky decided that when the snow got really deep, we should ski out to their cabin, which is a summer place a few miles off the Warm Lake road that you can’t get to by car in the winter because the county doesn’t plow it out. We could drive to the turnoff and ski the last five or six miles. Imagine the number of trips to the bathroom I made thinking about that.

  Luckily no one was in the gym when it caved in or they’d have gotten several tons of snow and wood down on them. It just happened there were no PE classes scheduled for that period. Most of the seniors were in the study hall practicing a skit for the Junior-Senior Variety Show that was supposed to be the next night. We heard this big boom and all went hauling out
to see what had happened. Mark Robeson took one look and said, “Who’d have thought the Russians would pick Trout High School to demonstrate their first strike capability?” That’s about what it looked like. I was standing right under “LEDNECKY” and looked up and said, “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer gym,” only to turn around and see the Legend after which it was named standing right behind me. I want to tell you there was a pretty uneasy silence there for a minute.

  Anyway, by the time last period had started, we were informed that the basketball game that night and the variety show the next night would be postponed indefinitely, so the weekend was free for both of us. Becky caught up with me at the lockers after school and jabbed me in the ribs. “Hey, big boy,” she said in her best Mae West, “want some candy?”

  “Huh?”

  “Wanna come out to my place this weekend?”

  “The cabin?”

  “The cabin.”

  She didn’t have any trouble getting permission; she’d already told her dad she was considering going out, though she didn’t say I’d be coming along. He didn’t ask, but I’m sure he knew. He figured she could take care of herself, which was good thinking. I wasn’t so sure Norm and Brenda would be ready to let me hike out into the wilderness to lose my innocence, but I figured if I started with Norm, it might not have to go any farther.

  I walked into his office, palms sweating, and asked for the weekend off.

  “Sure,” he said. “I think I ought to be able to handle it. What’ve you got in mind?”

  “Skiing out to Becky’s summer place,” I said.

  “Alone?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You’re either alone or you’re not alone,” he said. “You’re not ‘not exactly’ alone. Is Becky going?”

  I nodded.

  “Does her dad know?”

  “He knows she’s going,” I said.

  He nodded and thought for a minute. “You know what you’re doing?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, I think so.” I didn’t have a clue.

  He kind of relaxed and leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on the desk. “What’re you going to tell your mother?”

  I flinched a little. It wouldn’t be as easy with her as it was with Norm. Not even close. “I thought we might say I was going down to Boise to get those parts for the meter on the truck,” I said. “And staying overnight.”

  “You mean lie?”

  I thought for a second. “Yeah, lie,” I said.

  “And you want to drag me into it?”

  “It would sure make it a whole lot easier.”

  He made a tent with his fingers below his chin and stared at me.

  “Besides,” I said, sort of smiling, “why would we want to drag her into this sordid mess? She’d only be mad—or disappointed.”

  “You’ve got a point there,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “Christ, my kid’s got me lying to my wife. It’s starting. Your grandmother always warned me I’d have kids of my own someday.”

  I couldn’t believe he was really going to do it. But we talked awhile longer, and he decided there was no reason to make a big deal out of it. Even though it was the biggest deal of my life, to date, I agreed. We worked it out so he would say he was sending me for parts. Then I would call from there and say I had to wait till early Sunday morning to get them. Of course, he would get the call.

  I left early Saturday morning to pick up Becky—before Brenda was up to see me headed for Boise, where there was no snow, with my skis. We stopped at the Chief and had a stack of pancakes with some of the old codgers who get up that early and listened to them talk about the Russians and whether the mill would lay off any more men and who the idiot was that didn’t have the snow shoveled off the roof of the gym. Then we headed out.

  I was pretty quiet most of the way to the turnoff, really having a hard time thinking of what to say. Becky didn’t say much either, just sat close with her hand on my knee.

  Finally, just before we got to the turnoff, I said, “Are you sure about this?”

  She punched me in the ribs. “What’s the matter? Chicken?”

  I nodded. “Yup. I’d say that’s a good description of what I am.”

  She squeezed my knee and said, “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Right.”

  She asked how I’d gotten permission.

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” I said. “Norm’s crazy. He acts like he’s sending me out on a dangerous mission. He’s keeping it quiet, though.” I told her about the proposed trip to Boise.

  “Maybe he is sending you out on a dangerous mission,” she said. “Ever think of that?”

  “Maybe he is. Hope I come back with the goods.”

  There was a little silence. “Actually the only danger is to Norm,” I said. “If Brenda finds out he lied to her, his life ain’t worth a plugged nickel.”

  When we got to the turnoff, I turned the pickup around and got it as close in to the edge of the road as I could and unloaded the skis and packs. We threw everything over the snowbank, which was about as high as the cab, and put on our skis sitting on top of it. As we got away from the road, the weekend took a turn for the amazing. The sky was overcast, but it was only spitting snow. The top of the pickup was just a dot peeking over the snowbank behind us and the trees started to swallow us up, and it seemed more and more like we were going where we ought to be. When we were about a mile and a half from the cabin, the snow started coming down heavier; but there wasn’t much wind, and we were dressed for it. The only sound was the skis cutting through the powder and the poles punching in beside them, and the snowflakes hitting the snow, which you can’t really hear, but it seems like you can.

  We came to the one long slope between the road and the cabin. A soft wind had come up, and we stopped to look over the shallow valley and listen. It sounded like a long sigh that never runs out. When I was six, just before he died, my granddad told me that if the spirits of the Bannock and Shoshone and Northern Paiute did hang out in these hills, that wind was how they got around.

  Becky looked down the slope. “That’s a little steep for me,” she said. “How do you slow down?”

  “Two ways,” I said. “You can snowplow”—and I fixed my skis, toes in—to show her—“or you can fall down. Actually there are three ways. You slow down when you get to the bottom.”

  “Pretty glib for a fella that’s about to leave his virginity in the woods,” she said, and took off. She fell three times.

  “You learn quick,” I yelled when she got down. I didn’t fall at all, until I got to the bottom and she pushed me over.

  When we got to the cabin, snow was piled up about three-quarters of the way up the door, so the first thing we did was go through the window of the shed for the shovel. It took ten or fifteen minutes of hard work to get the place open, with Becky cheering me all the way. Then I shoveled out the door to the shed because that’s where the wood was. I brought some in while Becky took the protective covering off the furniture and the bed, and I panicked and went back outside and shoveled a path from the cabin to the shed. I probably would have shoveled a path back out to the road if she hadn’t stopped me.

  Becky stuck her head out the door. “Come in here, we’ll have some lunch.”

  That sounded safe enough. “Be in in just a sec,” I said, and leaned the shovel up against the shed. Boy, this was scary stuff. The closest I’d come to having sex before was when I was a sophomore and reached inside this girl’s blouse after a dance up at the school. I won’t tell you her name; but it got going too fast, and I ended up getting scared and jumping out of her car. She called me some pretty bad names. With that kind of blotchy record, I had to be a little tentative.

  Becky had a fire in the woodstove and one in the fireplace when I came in. She was warming up some bean and bacon soup on the stove and making sandwiches on the breadboard. When I got my coat off, she came over and gave me a long wet kiss and then just stood there looking at me, smiling.
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  “We probably should eat first,” I said, looking over at the half-made sandwiches and the soup starting to boil on the stove.

  She nodded. “Probably we should,” she said. “Woman does not live on love alone.” She smiled and looked at me again for a second. “Are you nervous?”

  “No, why?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I am. A little.”

  “Okay, well, yeah. I guess a little. A lot.”

  She put her hand on my cheek. “We can go as slow as we want. It’ll work out just fine. If it doesn’t we’ll try again.”

  “Ah.” I nodded. “The trial-and-error method. I’ve heard of it.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said, “let’s try to go light on the errors.”

  We ate and talked about other things, like where the basketball team would play their games and school and plans after graduation. Becky was set up to go to a small college down south of San Francisco. She’d already been accepted. I hadn’t even applied anywhere yet. All I knew was I was getting out of Trout. What I really wanted to do was find out if there was a Podunk college anywhere south of San Francisco that would take an out-of-stater with a 2.46 grade point average, but I was being cool about that. I didn’t want Becky to think I’d be following her all over the country. That is, unless she wanted me to.

  My war with Jasper and Lednecky seemed over. Both of them were plenty willing to let it die, and I was all for that. Neither of them spoke to me unless they had to, and I gave them no trouble. My fears that Lednecky would flunk me in U.S. government turned out to be just fears. He didn’t want me back. I was getting my C.

  And Washington was tearing up the league in basketball. We’d already played them once, and he was awesome. They used a man-to-man defense, and he stalked Boomer all over the court. He blocked four of Boomer’s shots and just stood there after each one, waiting for Boomer to blow. He’s smaller than Boomer, but built like crazy, and Boomer wasn’t about to get into it. At least not from the front. Boomer’s not afraid of getting hurt, but he’s terrified of getting humiliated. He averages about fourteen points a game, and Washington held him to three. I had to get a good hold on myself to keep from jumping up and screaming every time he put a move on Boomer or knocked the ball back in his face. At halftime down in the locker room, when Boomer was abusing him in the safety of those four walls, Carter told him to show Washington up on the court or shut his damn mouth. Boomer had a bad second half.