The Big Wander

by Will Hobbs

  He would be safe if he barely shuffled his feet. He would get by. He thought he’d gone to heaven she was so pretty.

  Clay rested his cheek in her hair. Tropical flowers. He’d never forget that scent. “I want to get your address,” he whispered. “I’d like to write you about our trip.”

  “Sure,” she said. “It would be fun to get a postcard from one of those places you mentioned.”

  Halfway through the song he brought her in closer and she held him tight in return. As the music was fading he glanced up and noticed, under the light by the door, her brother waiting and his brother smiling.

  5

  In Chama, New Mexico, in Durango, Colorado, and in Monticello, Utah, Mike phoned Sheila. Always he talked for a long time. Other towns along the way he’d tried, but he didn’t always catch her at home. Clay was worried. How could Mike concentrate on a Big Wander in between phone calls? What was going on with Sheila? And another thing—how long would his brother’s money hold out the way he was dishing out quarters? It felt like Mike was way out on a big rubber band that was about to snap him back maybe all the way to Seattle.

  Finally the Studebaker backfired its way down into Moab, an oasis of bright green cottonwoods along the Colorado River. Clay’s heart leaped at a glimpse of a man with whiskers and a straw hat leading a packed burro down the side of the wide main street. “Man with a burro!” Clay shouted. “It’s him!”

  Mike took a better look. “Too old. Uncle Clay’s in his early forties, and that guy has to be in his sixties.”

  “But he might know him,” Clay declared, and so they stopped to find out.

  “Never heard of him but I can find him for you,” the man said. “Got a nose for what’s lost, me and Pal both, that’s the name of my friend here.”

  Clay was running a knuckle down the burro’s gray muzzle from just below its eyes, ringed with white, to its nose, all white like the burro had stuck its face into a bag of flour. “Pal,” Clay repeated.

  “Likes you, I’d say,” the old-timer said. “Try the insides of her ears.”

  Clay extended his forefinger and the burro’s closest ear swiveled to meet it. “She sure has long ears.”

  “About three times as long as a horse’s. Of course she can hear a lot better too. Her eyes, you’ll notice, are set more to the side of her head—she can see all four feet as she’s walking. The name’s Hubcap Willie, what’s yours?”

  “Clay Lancaster, and this is my big brother Mike.”

  They shook hands, and Clay went to scratching Pal’s other ear.

  “You collect hubcaps,” Mike said, indicating several that were sticking out of the pack, along with pots and pans.

  “Sure do. Find ’em, sell ’em, anything I can get my hands on. ”

  “You make a living doing that?” Mike looked skeptical.

  “After a fashion. Hubcap Willie’s been a lot of things in his life, and he’s only gettin’ started. Fought in the First War, owned a sheep ranch in Australia, flew for the Mexican Air Force, run cows, run whiskey, run a dude ranch, skinned cat, married seven times, owns a gold mine.”

  “How come he isn’t mining it?” Clay asked.

  “You mean, me?”

  This was getting confusing. “You said ‘he.’”

  “Never said ‘he.’ Don’t try to confuse me, boy. For one thing, his mine’s in Mexico.”

  “There, you said it. You said ‘his.’”

  The old-timer scratched his head, then proceeded slowly. “Mined originally by the Indians, then by the Spanish with the Indians doing the dirty work, then by me.”

  “That’s better,” Clay said. “Now I know who we’re talking about.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mike smirking.

  “Anyway, his third wife’s people ran him off and it wouldn’t be too healthy to go back.”

  You just did it again, Clay thought, but I won’t mention it. “What’s ‘skinned cat’?”

  “Drove a Caterpillar tractor in the woods—loggin’ work. Don’t know much, do you? Now, you boys would appreciate finding your uncle who is lost?”

  “We didn’t say he was lost,” Mike said. “We just don’t know where he is. He’s the kind of guy who’s always moved around a lot.”

  “What kind of work’s he do?”

  Mike shrugged. “Maybe prospecting, but who knows.”

  “Anything he does he’s good at,” Clay explained. “Uncle Clay could’ve been anything, that’s what my mom says and she’s his sister. He left home during the Great Depression when he was fourteen, the same age as me, and he did all kinds of jobs. Mostly ranch work. He always sent money home too. When he came back to Washington he worked on a salmon boat for a couple of years. He fought in the South Pacific near the end of the war, and after that he started following the rodeo circuit. Got to be a star—Clay Jenkins.”

  “Never heard of him. Learned rodeo in the army?” Willie asked with a grin, “or was it on the salmon boat?”

  Clay liked this old guy. “He and my mom grew up on a ranch in eastern Washington—a little town called Starbuck.”

  “Never been there.”

  Clay handed the old-timer the most recent photograph, the one with the burro. “Last we know of him he was prospecting for uranium.”

  Hubcap Willie studied the photograph a long time. “One of the Men Who Don’t Fit In,” he pronounced finally.

  “We knew that,” Mike said.

  Now Hubcap Willie studied Mike awhile. “And you’re a college boy.”

  Clay thought the old man was pretty sharp. “Mike’s a whiz at math and science,” he said proudly. “He’s going to the California Institute of Technology in September. He might even be an astronaut.”

  Mike laughed, embarrassed to have his dream talked about.

  “Wouldn’t let them send me up in one of them tin cans,” Hubcap Willie said gravely. “You know the first one to go up was a monkey.”

  The burro started braying.

  “Monkey, Pal, not donkey.”

  “I thought you said she was a burro,” Clay said.

  Hubcap Willie eyed him suspiciously, as if he were confusing things again. “Same thing, burros and donkeys. Desert canaries. All the same animal.”

  “I’d go,” Clay said.

  “Go where?”

  “Up in a rocket. To the moon.”

  “What for?”

  “I dunno, just to go. To beat the Russians.”

  “Beat ’em to what?”

  “I dunno,” Clay said with a shrug. “Just so they don’t get there first.”

  “So you haven’t seen this man,” Mike said, taking back the photograph.

  “Not yet, but there’s plenty of uranium prospectors in this country. Somebody will have seen him. Seek and ye shall find, College Boy.”

  “We’ve got all summer,” Clay said.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Mike corrected him.

  Clay couldn’t believe what Mike had just said. It was supposed to be until they found Uncle Clay or their money ran out, whichever came first. And Mike had agreed they could work along the way to keep the money coming in, the way Uncle Clay had always done.

  “Big brother here isn’t as hot onto the project as little brother. Well, searches can take a considerable time. Hubcap Willie himself searched six years for his mine before he found it. But we’ll see what we can do.”

  As Mike fired up the Studebaker, he said, “We don’t need him.”

  “I kind of like him—and his burro.”

  “I think our friend’s got a pound of shrapnel in his head, probably from the combat he saw in the Mexican Air Force.”

  At the Moab uranium mill across the muddy Colorado, a brawny fellow with a handlebar mustache remembered Uncle Clay. With a hearty laugh he said, “Uranium prospector? Not hardly. I remember a card game where he staked his Geiger counter and lost it, then said he didn’t care to be digging around anyway for something that might end up in a bomb. He wasn’t in town for any more than two or three
weeks as I recall, before he took off.”

  “Took off for where?” Clay asked.

  “I just can’t tell you,” the foreman said. “But word was he was seen in Mexican Hat a month later, leading his burro down the road.”

  Clay’s heart jumped. He’d told Marilyn his uncle could be in Mexican Hat, and he was only making it up! “But what happened to his truck?” he asked the foreman. “He had a fancy truck with a bucking Brahma bull painted on the side.”

  “Funny thing—he practically gave it away here in Moab. Sold it for maybe half of what it was worth. Sold it to a kid in town who was a local hotshot in rodeo and was just starting to compete on the circuit. I’ll tell you, that was one happy kid. I remember your uncle saying he was so tired of the road, he’d be happy to stick to where a burro would take him. Imagine how many hundreds of thousands of miles that man drove and how many towns he passed through in his life. I guess I’d be sick of the road too.”

  “Thanks,” Clay said. “Thanks a lot. We’ll try Mexican Hat.”

  “Uncle Clay could be out of the country by now,” Mike said as they climbed back into the Studebaker. “He could be in Canada for all we know.”

  They drove up into Arches National Monument to take a look around. Mike said he needed to do some thinking and wandered off by himself. Clay took off in another direction. He’d always wanted to find some petrified wood and so he started watching the ground closely. He liked this redrock country. Everywhere you looked, domes and arches and buttes and fins and canyons, with the Colorado River cutting right through it all. It reminded him of Monument Valley, where some of his favorite Westerns were filmed. He didn’t know where Monument Valley was but he sure wanted to go there some day.

  A distinctive triangular shape caught his eye, lying on the sandy soil held by the occasional scrubby trees, piñon pines and junipers. Not an arrowhead. He knew a shark’s tooth when he saw one and this was a shark’s tooth, only it was made of a stone.

  Back at the truck, Mike admired the shark’s tooth only a moment. He was too preoccupied to appreciate it properly. As they drove back to Moab to look for a campground Mike didn’t even speak.

  The only place to camp turned out to be right next to Hubcap Willie. Mike circled the whole campground but every other spot was taken. “That’s all right,” Clay said. “He won’t bother us.”

  “That desert canary better not start singing in the middle of the night.”

  In the evening Clay wandered over and showed Hubcap Willie what he’d found.

  “Sure enough shark’s tooth,” Hubcap Willie agreed. “Petrified. Trade you for it.”

  Clay wondered how much it might be worth. There was no telling. “Like what?”

  “A fifty-six Chevy and a fifty-four Buick.”

  The tooth was rarer than he’d thought. Lucky day! Two cars for one fossil. He and Mike could sell both of the cars, or keep one and sell one and the truck….

  The old-timer fetched two hubcaps from his collection. “They’re beauties.”

  “Oh,” Clay said quietly. “No, thanks, I don’t think I’ll trade.” He took to scratching the burro’s ears. The burro sure was on the pudgy side, he noticed. Must be a big eater.

  “I’ll go three, but that’s the best I can do.”

  “I kinda want to keep it.” He was already thinking of who he wanted to give it to.

  “Say, Pal takes a shine to you, I can see that. Of course she’d run with anybody that’d scratch the insides of her ears.”

  Clay fed the burro a peppermint off his palm. “Pretty good,” laughed Hubcap Willie, displaying the stub of a finger on his own left hand. Clay liked the burro’s huge brown eyes, the fat white belly and legs, and the thin, dark stripe that led all the way down her spine from the bristly mane to the paintbrush of a tail. “Kind of a funny marking,” he said aloud.

  “Sure enough. Every donkey’s got it, all the way back to the one that carried Mary into Bethlehem, or so the story goes. The cross of Bethlehem, they call it. Shows up really good on a gray burro like Pal. Long piece down the spine, cross member across the shoulders.”

  “I might like to have a burro some day. Like my uncle.”

  “Your uncle’s no fool. A burro can carry as heavy or heavier’n a horse, did you know that?”

  “Really?”

  “No question. More endurance, more alert to danger, more surefooted even than a mule, and only a camel can tolerate thirst better than the burro.”

  “Is it hard to pack her?”

  “Not once you know how. There’s an art to packing right, that’s for sure. You don’t want an animal to be rubbed raw, even if a burro does have a tougher hide than a horse, which is why the flies don’t bother ’em nearly as bad. And the load has to be perfectly balanced.”

  “We’re going to Mexican Hat tomorrow—where my uncle went.”

  “In that case, I wonder if you and your brother wouldn’t mind giving us a lift down there tomorrow.”

  “We don’t have a trailer.”

  “Don’t matter. Done it plenty of times with a pickup.”

  6

  “The air’s so dry out here, my fingertips are cracking open,” Mike was saying. “Never seen anything like it.”

  “Mine aren’t,” Clay said.

  “I guess that makes you a desert rat. You like the heat too, I guess.”

  “I don’t mind it. That’s what deserts are supposed to have. The good part is how it cools off every night. Every morning you’re starting over.”

  “Yeah, the nights are okay.”

  Mike’s nose was peeling pretty bad too, but Clay wasn’t going to point it out. His brother sure burned easily with his sandy hair and fair skin. And new freckles were showing up on his forearms.

  Clay took a look over his shoulder through the cab window into the bed of the pickup. Every time he glanced back it still seemed strange to see somebody there, but Hubcap Willie and the burro sure made a picture. The burro’s knees were folded underneath and those long ears were standing straight up and alert. Her huge eyes, those delicate eyelashes, and that expression around her mouth and whiskers seemed to say, “I sure put up with a lot.” That brushy switch of a tail was beating a rhythm almost like Pal was counting the time of this latest trial in her life.

  It hadn’t been as easy to get the burro into the truck as Hubcap Willie had indicated, and Mike hadn’t made it any easier saying with his eyes “I told you so” a half-dozen times at least, and then saying it out of the corner of his mouth for good measure. But now that they were rolling, if “rolling” could describe the motion of their bucking horse of a truck, you’d have to agree that hauling a load this colorful sure seemed like the kind of thing to be doing on a Big Wander. Well, Mike wouldn’t agree, but that’s because he was just being disagreeable this morning.

  They asked around about his uncle in Mexican Hat, a tiny town perched by a suspension bridge over the San Juan River where it narrowed and entered a canyon. Upstream, lots of cottonwoods; downstream, all slickrock. At the store, the café, the gas station, nobody had ever laid eyes on the man in the photograph with the chipped tooth and the three-day beard.

  Nobody here wore sombreros after all, Clay noticed. They wore cowboy hats, some straw and some felt like the Stetson his uncle favored. He’d like to get one of those himself, black with that deep middle crease.

  Mexican Hat, it turned out, was named after a formation balanced high above the river on a skinny rock pedestal. He’d seen it himself on the way into town but had thought it looked exactly like a flying saucer. He hadn’t mentioned the resemblance to Mike because Mike was stewing, and Mike kind of let you know when he wasn’t in the mood to be jollied up with commentary like “Flying Saucer, Utah, would have made an even better postmark.” Clay had seen plenty of weird town names as he scoured the map for Restaurant Hay. Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, struck him as one of the weirdest.

  They were back on the road and still carrying that unusual pair of hitchhikers
in the back. It was awful quiet in the cab. Back at Mexican Hat, the old-timer said he’d be pleased to ride with them just a little farther. Mike couldn’t refuse him, but now he was even grouchier than before. Mike finally broke the silence, grumbling, “He said all he wanted was a ride to Mexican Hat.”

  A flat tire fit right into the way things were going. As Mike leaned all his weight into the tire iron, Clay reported, “We’re almost back into Arizona.” Mike didn’t have a hat on. His forehead was burning up and dropping sweat into his eyes. “Lemme help,” Clay suggested.

  “Lug nuts are too tight,” his brother grunted, meaning “too tight for you, but not for me,” which may have been the case, but maybe not. Clay was tall, nearly as tall as Mike, and almost as strong. He could see drops of blood squeezing out of a couple of Mike’s dried-out fingers. Mentioning it wouldn’t change anything. Sometimes Mike just liked to suffer. Feeling worse made him feel better.

  “Lucky you’ve gotten this far with this truck,” Willie chimed in from the back of the pickup as he hovered over Pal, ready to keep the burro from standing up.

  For once Mike saw things the old-timer’s way. “We’ve got a dead dog for a motor. We might have a better chance of getting back home with your burro.”

  “Want to swap?” Clay suggested playfully. Then, looking around at the tall buttes and slender towers of red sandstone showing up in the desert ahead, he mused, “It feels like I’ve been here before.”

  He surveyed again the expanses of red desert studded with stranded buttes and mesas, pinnacles, towers of solid rock. “I know I’ve been here before,” Clay said aloud, “but that can’t be.”

  “Nope,” Mike grunted, lifting the spare onto the bolts, “can’t be.”

  “Monument Valley!” Clay declared. “It’s Monument Valley.”

  “Last time anybody checked,” Hubcap Willie agreed.

  “Oh, man! Stagecoach, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers … John Wayne country!”