by Gary Paulsen
“Nobody chews me out,” Stoney told him, and it was true. Brennan had never seen anybody speak crossly to the old man. Perhaps because he was scarred across his cheeks. A part-time worker also named Romero had told Brennan that it was from a knife fight in prison where Romero killed a man, but the part-time worker also told him that Fig Newton cookies could cure baldness, so Brennan nodded. “I’ll work in closer.”
“As I said.”
Stoney turned away and Brennan started the riding mower and began to mow. He liked the work, liked the way the mower worked in rows and cut even, fresh green lines with each round. Stoney had many lawns to mow for the people he called “the rich ones.”
It wasn’t even that they were all rich, although they did some lawns on houses that were huge old estates where there were statues around the pools and steel gates that had to be opened electrically. Many of the lawns belonged to army families who did not make as much money as Stoney. But they were all “the rich ones” to him, said with a sharpness to it that meant he did not respect them, and Brennan was glad for the work.
He needed the money. His mother had told him she couldn’t afford to help him with his school clothes as much as she’d thought she would because she didn’t get a raise she thought she would get. Brennan had tried to get other jobs but he was too young. They didn’t care if he could do the work or not. He was too young.
And Stoney hadn’t even asked about his age.
“Can you mow a lawn?” he’d asked, taking a deep drag on the small brown cigarette and coughing.
“Yes.”
“You’re hired. I will pay you three dollars an hour in cash at the end of each day and if you do not show up for work you are fired.”
And he had been as good as his word. Usually work was almost impossible to find because of the closeness to Mexico—Juárez was right across the river—and the poverty there which sent thousands north each day to find work.
But Stoney had hired him and he’d worked now for almost all of June and July and Stoney had been as good as his word. Each day he paid Brennan in wrinkled bills and quarters and dimes and nickels, exactly the amount for the hours he had worked and each day Brennan went home and put the money in a jar in the cupboard.
It was adding up, the money.
Because I don’t do anything, he thought, moving the mower in closer to the flower beds as instructed, squinting up at the hot sun and the Franklin Mountains that rose above the city—except work and sleep.
He had no really close friends, no girl—just himself. It was strange but he didn’t seem to make connections with other kids. Last year for most of the year he’d been close to a boy named Carl and he guessed Carl had been his best friend. But Carl didn’t run and Brennan did and after a time they just drifted apart and sort of stopped calling each other and that was that.
Some of the jocks wanted him to join the track team, as did the coach, Mr. Townsend. But they ran for the wrong reasons as far as Brennan was concerned. They ran to win, to be somebody, to get popular, to get girls, to get a letter—not just to run. Brennan ran for the joy of running, and to be with himself, and when he told the coach that, Mr. Townsend had looked at him as if he were crazy.
“You’re good,” the coach had said, “really good. You could help the school, make something of yourself, be popular.…”
But Brennan could not see why it was important to do those things and when the coach saw that he only wanted to run and when the jocks saw that he only wanted to run and the other kids saw that he only wanted to run they left him alone.
To run.
He worked in close around the flowers. Stoney was right, he could get closer. But it was dangerous and if he took out a flower bed, or even cut the edge off one they would probably lose the job. And he might lose his job as well.
So he worked slowly and carefully and the afternoon went slowly. They finished the lawn with the flower beds, then another one which wasn’t too far away and then they loaded into Stoney’s old pickup to drive to a third one, which would be the last for the afternoon.
On the way, out of nowhere, Stoney decided to talk to him.
“Kid.”
Brennan looked at him. Generally, other than giving instructions, Stoney treated Brennan as if he weren’t there. Just sat smoking and scratching or working by himself and left Brennan alone to his own thoughts.
Brennan looked across the truck at him. “What?”
“Ever think how stupid this is?”
“What?”
“This whole thing with the lawns. Here we are in the middle of a desert where nothing grows but mesquite and cactus and some snakes and people spend all their money on water just to get grass to grow so they can spend even more money to get us to cut it for them so they can spend even more money on water to get it to grow again so we can cut it.… Isn’t it stupid?”
“Well, I guess so. But a lawn is nice. A green one.”
“What does your old man do?”
The question came fast, dropped out of nowhere, but Brennan had answered it so many times, the answer was always ready. “Nothing. He died when I was a baby.”
The lie. It came so easy now and he had done it so many times that he almost believed it himself. He died when I was a baby. It was so sad. He died when I was a baby.
The truth was, he had run off with another woman when Brennan was three and Brennan could only just remember a faint image of how he had looked—like an old photograph blurred and faded with age. For a time he had hated his father for leaving, but even that was gone. Now there was nothing.
“Tough.” Stoney coughed and spit out the window. “Having no father …”
“It’s not so bad,” Brennan said quickly, too quickly. “Mom and I get along.”
“Well, hell, it might have been worse the other way. My old man lived and spent all his time sucking on a tequila bottle and beating the snot out of me. There were a few times I wished he would die, come to think of it. Maybe if your old man had lived he would have beat you.”
Brennan didn’t answer, sat looking out the window. The heat coming down from the mountains, the sky, up from the asphalt, was like a blast furnace. It made the metal on the truck door so hot that if he moved his arm to a new place it burned him. But he liked the heat just the same. There was something clean about it, fresh. Yeah, he thought, if he’d lived he probably would have beat me. But even that might have been better than what they had now. Now it was so … so nothing. He and his mother just spent all their time in the house getting along. Just a day and then another day and then another getting along.
And her friends, of course. There were her friends.
Like this guy Bill.
He wondered if that would turn into another relationship. His mother had gone through so many relationships, he had lost count. Dozens. Well, maybe not dozens. But many.
Some of them had moved in and he had played the game with them. Treated them like substitute fathers. But he no longer did that. He was too old for it and it just felt silly. Most of them had been good to him, some very good. One named Frank who showered him with presents and toys and candy and took him places and was almost sticky about it. But even with Frank he had trouble thinking of him as a father. It wasn’t the same as having a real one. Or at least that’s how he thought.
They unloaded the mowers and mowed the last lawn. It was large and they finished in the evening, just before dusk.
“You want a burger?” Stoney asked while he paid Brennan. It sounded like an invitation but Brennan knew that what it meant was that Stoney would take him by a McDonald’s where he could buy his own burger and eat it on the way home in the truck. Brennan shook his head.
“No. I’d better get home. Mom is waiting.” Which wasn’t true but served as well as the truth and Stoney nodded and drove him home in silence.
Brennan saw that his mother’s car was still parked in front of the house, along with another car he had seen earlier that day and when he walked in he saw B
ill sitting at the kitchen table with his mother.
“Oh, Bren,” his mother said, her eyes wide and smiling. “Come on in here. We’ve got great news. We’re going camping with Bill.…”
Oh great, Brennan thought, another relationship.
5
Nightride
The village lay east of the white man’s town of Alamogordo three, four days riding but they did not ride toward that place. Coyote Runs knew there was nothing in that place but dusty little houses and a place where men drank until they fell down and puked. He had been there once when he had been going to the school with the Quaker lady and was sickened by what he had seen.
The raiding party would not go near Alamogordo because they might be seen. Instead they rode straight south over the tops of the wild canyons that fed out into the great desert and the place with the white sand the Mexicans called Jornada del Meurto—the journey of death. It was said that a Spanish warrior in a time long ago before there were even horses except for those he brought rode through that place and lost many men and had to eat some horses but Coyote Runs did not believe all of that.
There were many stories of hard journeys told by old people, some of their own stories and some they’d heard from the Mexicans, but he did not find them all truthful. He had eaten horse himself many times and it was not so special a thing to do; the meat was good and the fat was yellow. If there was fat. But it was a silliness, a stupid thing to do—eating a horse. There were better things to eat and you would not lose your ride.
Coyote Runs shook his head. All this thinking was a waste. It was just that it was truly dark now and Sancta continued the ride, letting the horses pick the trail as they made their way south. There was nothing to see and Coyote Runs rode in silence, as did Magpie in front of him and all the others, and without anything to see or anybody to speak to or listen to his thoughts went a way of their own.
Like thinking of the place of white sands. He had been to it only once though he could see it from the medicine place and thought it looked like the snow that covered the mountains in the winter but when he touched it the sand was hot. White with the sun and hot. Like hot snow. Could there be such a thing, he wondered—such a thing as hot snow?
His pony stumbled and he grabbed its mane to pull it upright. Some horses could see better in the dark than others and he hoped that Sancta’s horse was one of the good ones or they could all ride off a cliff. There were many steep drops to the right and he knew that if he could see it would be possible to see across the desert to the other range of mountains, the jagged-tooth mountains that the white men called the Organ Mountains because it reminded them somehow of the music box the Quaker lady had in her home that required you to pump your feet to make the music come out the pipes. The music had been nice, but naming the mountains after the box made no sense at all to Coyote Runs. That mountains could look like the small box, mountains that reached to the sky with arms of stone, could make the white men think of the small squeaky box in the Quaker lady’s home was a silliness.
He shook his head again. About as much a silliness as riding along in the darkness on his first raiding party thinking small thoughts when he should be thinking of becoming a man.
He must think of that as he rode. Becoming a man. He must ride straight and think of serious things, think of the raid and not being afraid if he was called upon to do battle or if they met the bluebellies.
He straightened and tried to see ahead in the darkness, tried to pay close attention to where he thought Magpie was moving ahead of him.
He must be serious, as serious as a man must be.
6
Brennan looked out the window of the van and worked very hard at not being angry. They were driving north of El Paso on the highway that went through the desert up to Alamogordo and he sat looking sideways out at the huge rock canyons that led up from the desert into the mountains. They were beautiful, colored layers of rock and natural formations that looked painted and yet he was having trouble seeing any of the beauty in them.
He’d somehow gotten cornered on this camping trip thing and he was still trying to figure out how it had happened.
Normally he was really good at avoiding becoming involved in his mother’s business. When she got into aerobics he avoided it and when she did the health food he avoided it and once he’d even avoided it when she was going with a jock who thought he knew all about running and actually spent time running with Brennan, running alongside him when he ran, telling him how to hold his arms and move his legs and how to breathe. That time Brennan had outrun him—just hung a right and headed up toward the drive around Mount Franklin, loping along and letting the guy fall back until he was just a speck.
But sometimes you lose, he thought, looking at the scenery blur by—sometimes no matter what you do you lose.
And this was one of those times.
Two days, no, three days ago he’d been standing in the kitchen and his mother had been smiling and saying:
“We’re going camping with Bill and his youth group.”
And his mind had raced through a thousand excuses, some new, some old. She had started going to this new church and she’d met Bill at a church dinner and Bill was active with a youth group—she had explained it later to Brennan, her cheeks glowing. But he hadn’t known that at the moment, at the second, the instant when he thought of all the excuses. I’m busy, I have to work, Stoney has a lot of new lawns—the cards flipped through in his mind and he opened his mouth to use one of them but there was such a hopeful look in his mother’s eyes, such a childlike hopeful look that the words that came out had nothing to do with what he was thinking:
“Oh? That will be nice.”
Dead, he thought looking out the window of the van. I was dead when I opened my mouth.
And once he’d said that he couldn’t get out of it. Not really. And his mother had wanted it so badly, or seemed to.
And he’d thought, oh well, it won’t be so bad. Overnight out in the desert with Bill and his mother and some kids from Bill’s church youth group. How bad could it be?
He almost smiled now, thinking back on it, would have smiled except that it had turned out so awful. The kids—there were seven of them, all boys, all about eight years old—were monsters. They were all over the van like gremlins, wouldn’t let themselves be buckled in, and with Bill and Brennan’s mother in the front seat and Brennan in the back with the kids—he thought of them as the pack—the main load of work with the children dropped on Brennan.
It was like being in a nest of rats. They climbed on the seats, bit each other, fought, and wouldn’t do anything Brennan told them to do. One of them, a boy named Ralph Beecher, just sat in the corner of the backseat kicking anybody who came within range.
By the time they were out of El Paso, Brennan knew he was in trouble and within twenty miles of the highway heading north he had his hands full. He tried holding them down, pushing them away, scowling, swearing at them—nothing worked and finally he turned away and ignored them, stared out the window and wished he were anywhere else.
Bill was nice enough, and that was the problem, really. He was too nice. He didn’t bother to say anything to the kids and they took that for permission to do anything they wanted to do—which stopped just short of unscrewing each other’s heads.
When they had driven fifty or sixty miles Bill suddenly slowed the van and took a narrow, winding road that led off east into the desert, toward the canyons.
It did not look like they were going toward any kind of campground, Brennan thought, looking over his mother’s shoulder out the front window of the van. The road grew worse and worse and at last they were winding over rocks and sand and through sand dunes on little more than a narrow trail. Eventually even that ended.
“Now,” Bill said, getting out and stretching, “we walk.”
“Walk?”
Brennan couldn’t help himself, his voice had a definite down tone to it and his mother shot him a warning look. Walk—with
these kids? Brennan got out of the van and shook his head, you’d have to have a whip and a chair.
But if Bill heard his voice he gave no indication. He took gear from the rack on top of the van, laughing and talking and pointing.
“See that canyon?”
Over them rose the rock canyons leading up to the mountains. They had driven past several of them on the highway and turned into the fourth or fifth one. Brennan couldn’t tell for sure now that they were so close to the bluff wall.
“It’s called Horse Canyon. I came up here once years ago hiking and found a trail to a spring in the back of it. That’s where we’re going, back up in the canyon and camp by the spring.”
Brennan looked up at the canyon. It seemed to be all rocks and cliffs—he could see no evidence of any kind of trail at all. The bed of the canyon, which lay straight before them, seemed to be an old riverbed filled with enormous boulders. It was impassable. To get “back up in” the canyon it would be necessary to work along the river and Brennan couldn’t see a way to do it.
“I don’t see a trail,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. He still did not want to ruin this for his mother.
“Don’t worry. There’s one there,” Bill said. He gave each boy a sleeping bag to carry and shouldered a pack, motioned Brennan to take another pack and Brennan’s mother to pick up the rolled-up tents. “Really, it’s not hard at all.”
Which was not quite accurate.
It was true that it wasn’t impossible, as Brennan had thought, but it was hard enough so that Brennan had to help some of the smaller children in a few of the places—just to climb over boulders and cuts across the trail—and even Brennan’s mother felt it was a bit much.
“Do we have to go all the way to the rear of the canyon?” she asked at one point.
“Aren’t there some nice places, you know, closer?”
But Bill insisted. They worked their way up on a small trail that led along the dry riverbed filled with boulders and smooth, dishlike bowls made by an ancient river that had roared down the canyon. In some places newer runoff had cut across what little trail there was, carrying it down into the riverbed, and here they had to drop into the cuts and climb out the other side.