Michael tied Tabor to the bench on the wraparound porch outside the store. “Anything you need?” he asked Kyle, who flopped down on the bench.
“Water.”
“Anything you want?”
“Water.”
Michael went inside, while Kyle waited on the porch with Tabor. Michael was glad to have a traveling companion, someone to help keep an eye on Tabor. Usually when he went into a store, he’d run through the aisles anxiously and get antsy at the checkout, afraid someone would take the cat. He also couldn’t leave Tabor for too long or she would start caterwauling and crying like a baby until he came back, which could attract unwanted attention.
Michael filled their water bottles in the bathroom and took them outside to Kyle, then ran back inside the store to get provisions. He bought beer and tobacco, Skippy peanut butter, a block of orange plastic cheese, a loaf of Wonder Bread, and one lottery scratch card—what Crazy Joe called trailer-trash essentials.
“That was quick,” Kyle said, in a better mood now that they had food and water.
“I don’t mess around,” Michael answered. They ate lunch on the porch, and then Michael put Tabor in her mobile home to escape the sun. They walked for a few hours, making it to the outskirts of Boise. Following some train tracks south, they stumbled into another dead mining town, even more haunted and forgotten than the one with the country store. An abandoned strip mall held a few gutted buildings, the skeletal frame of a gas station, and a couple of dusty boarded-up hotels covered in graffiti. In the barren landscape, scattered among the sagebrush, were a dried-up old boot, blown tires, and broken bits of green and brown glass that glittered in the sand. Windblown bags hung from cacti and drifted around like plastic tumbleweed.
“Guess this is where plastic bags go to die,” Kyle said.
“Or hitchhikers who can’t get a ride out of here,” Michael said, pointing at a little homemade wooden cross set into a heap of stones, with some dead flowers and a pair of crumbling sneakers on top.
They eventually hitched a ride into Boise and got left off at Boise Stage Stop, a fancy truck stop set in a Tudor revival building with an old stagecoach parked out front. The temperature was creeping into the 90s.
Dazed and sunburned, they slid in the turquoise-vinyl-upholstered booths in the farthest corner of the brightly lit cafeteria-style diner. A food-and-fuel pit stop for truckers, the diner was full of good old boys in denim, Stetsons, and scuffed cowboy boots—men who spent much of their lives outdoors, with weathered faces and callused hands cured in the sun like saddle leather.
The two drifters and the cat languished in the air-conditioning, over iced water and watery iced coffees, while waiting for their phones to recharge. After cooling down, Kyle and Michael, with Tabor riding on his backpack, headed back outside. Michael knew it was pointless hanging around—as a rule, truckers rarely ever picked up hitchhikers anymore because it was against their company insurance policy. They walked down the road to a busy junction near an off-ramp of I-84, a multilane highway, and sat on the roadside with their sign for Montana, while Tabor, who was attached to his bag, stretched out beneath sagebrush. Michael picked a few sage leaves, rubbing them between his hands and breathing in the refreshing green scent, and then started eating a cheese sandwich.
A battered old black Chevy Avalanche pickup truck that was hurtling down the road screeched to a halt in front of them with a spray of dust and loose gravel.
The cowboy behind the wheel leaned out the window. “Where you folks headin’?” he asked in a slow, syrupy drawl.
Simultaneously Michael said, “Anywhere,” and Kyle said, “Montana.”
“Can’t take you that far, but I can getcha going,” the cowboy said, and jumped out to help with their gear. Standing just shy of six feet tall in baggy blue jeans, he was a broad and ruggedly handsome mountain man, with hair like corn silk and a trim beard and mustache.
“Can we hang on a sec?” Michael said, hurriedly finishing his last bites and grabbing Tabor’s leash.
“No rush,” said the cowboy, leaning against the truck to light himself a cigarette, who, with his bright fire-blue eyes blazing beneath his weather-beaten Stetson, looked like the Marlboro Man.
Kyle climbed into the backseat, and Michael handed him their backpacks. But when he turned around to get Tabor, she refused to get in the pickup. She looked up at Michael, her eyes full of defiance, and tugged at the leash to try to make a getaway. He thought he had a firm grip on her lead, but when he bent down to pick her up, she broke away and bolted along the busy feeder road, her leash trailing after her.
“Oh, God, not now,” Michael said, pursuing the cat as cars flashed past them. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see wary drivers slowing down and swerving away from the cat.
“Tabor, no!” he shouted. “Tabor, come back!”
She raced away from him as if she knew he was taking her somewhere she didn’t want to go, or for her own inexplicable reasons.
“Don’t do this,” Michael pleaded, walking after her quickly. He knew never to chase or corner a scared cat, as it only makes them more stressed and anxious. Big rigs roared past, blasting them with a rush of air. Tabor slowed to a trot along the white line. Then she stopped, turned, and looked at him with a fearful, anguished expression.
Michael stopped, too, and slowly edged closer to his scared, helpless cat, his heart pounding wildly. He talked to her in a low, calming tone, “It’s okay, Tabor. . . . It’s okay.”
Tabor looked him straight in the eye and meowed.
After a tense minute, Michael was able to walk up to her slowly and scoop her into his arms.
“Bad girl, Tabor, bad,” he scolded her as he held her close.
The cat flinched and flattened her ears but leaned into his chest.
“How could you do this?” he asked as he jogged back to the truck. Kyle and the cowboy had been watching them from inside the cabin.
“She’s some wildcat, ain’t she? Got the devil in her heart,” the cowboy said to Michael as he climbed into the passenger seat, still keeping a tight hold on Tabor. “Thought for sure she was a goner.”
“She frightened the life out of me,” Michael said. He was so shaken his hands were trembling as he stroked her head. “I can’t ever let anything happen to this cat. She’s like a princess in my bag.”
The cowboy flashed a wide smile, and they rolled out the ramp onto the highway, the hot midday sun piercing the windshield. He was a rancher. He’d also been a felon and just got out of prison. He glanced over at Michael, smiling, his fire-blue eyes blazing in the sunlight, and asked, “What’s with the cat?”
After Michael told him the whole saga of finding Tabor and traveling down and up the West Coast with her, he broke into a deep, hearty laugh. “Boy, that’s one helluva crazy story.”
The cowboy turned off the highway to make a quick stop at his house. Cigarette between his fingers, he ripped along the bumpy rural roads, past patchy fields and tiny quaint towns with Western storefronts, crunching gears all the way. The air was thick with the smell of horses, wood smoke, and wildflowers. Hardscrabble ranches and grassy pastures dotted with cows and horses flicked past.
Leaving Michael, Kyle, and Tabor in the truck, he returned moments later, with bags full of food and some barbecue charcoal and lighter fluid for them. Then he dropped them near the Indian Creek Reservoir, a gorgeous wetlands area on the way to Montana with miles of hiking trails and meadows.
As he helped them get their gear out of the truck, the cowboy asked, “Do you smoke weed?”
“Yeah,” Michael replied.
As a parting gift, he gave them a big jar of weed, along with rolling papers and a plastic lighter.
In the park ahead of them, the sun-bleached buffalo grasses stretched into the horizon and rippled in the wind, making waves in all directions like a stormy sea. Tabor streaked ahead on her twenty-foot lead, dragging Michael behind her, in a mood to explore. She slowed to sniff wild roses that were blooming
along the path, which made Michael wonder whether she was maybe homesick for Portland and the roses that grew throughout the city there.
The guys decided to stay in the park for the night to catch up on sleep before getting back on the road again. They stopped, removing their packs, to sit and rest a bit in a field of swaying grasses, and Michael tied Tabor’s long lead to his bag. She immediately started skulking around the tall grass, flushing out mice and shrews, while Michael and Kyle sprawled out on the ground. She sidled up to Michael with a cute, big-eyed deer mouse in her mouth, who was squeaking its little furry head off. She looked up at Michael and gently dropped it at his feet to show off her hunting skills.
“Oh, Tabor,” he said, watching the deer mouse scuttle off and disappear back into the long grasses. “You scared that poor little mouse half to death.”
They pulled up the tether, picked up their packs, and walked up an isolated, pine-fringed slope to pitch camp. They watched the sun melt into the lake. Red-necked loons and gray moorhens swooped down on the shores, and dusky grouse chattered from the fir trees. As they looked out across the fields, Michael identified all the waterbirds for Tabor and Kyle as they flew in to roost among the reeds along the shore for the night.
When it grew dark, Michael lit a fire and cooked the food the cowboy had given them: salmon that he’d caught himself, straw mushrooms, new potatoes, and warmed up a homemade peach cobbler.
As he cooked, Michael told Kyle how he got his first kitchen job. It had been on one of his runaway trips in 1979 when he was fourteen and sleeping along the railway tracks in his hometown. “I’d eaten hash browns and toast at Webster Bar and Grill,” he recounted. “I opened the old screen door and was gonna dine and ditch, thinking there’s no way the fat lady behind the grill can catch me. But there she was right at the door. ‘Where you going?’ she asked, blocking me. ‘You planning to skip out on the check?’ I was like, ‘Yes.’ And she asked, ‘You got any money?’ I told her ‘I got nothing,’ and she said, ‘You wanna wash some dishes or you want me to call the cops?’ I decided to wash dishes to pay off my debt.
“The lady happened to be the owner. I was good at doing dishes, and maybe she felt sorry for me. She ended up hiring me that day. I washed dishes for a while, and then she moved me up to line cook, flipping eggs and making biscuits and gravy from scratch. That’s how I got into the restaurant business. I always wanted to become a chef as a kid. I knew how to make grilled-cheese sandwiches and peach cobbler when I was eight.”
“It smells good,” Kyle said as Michael handed him his dish.
“Oh, man, we’re gonna eat really good tonight.”
Tabor was ravenous, too. Before starting on his own plate, Michael filled up her bowl with Fancy Feast, but she ignored it and went straight for his salmon. Even though he liked to keep her on the same food to maintain her routine, he gave her half the filet, which she gorged herself on. Then she slipped into a shallow sleep, her fluffy little head resting on her folded paws, whiskers twitching.
Watching Tabor passed out after her big meal, he thought that life could be so lonely and monotonous, but finding someone to help you through it made it worthwhile.
Michael and Kyle stayed up late talking and smoking weed until the mosquitoes became too much. Michael put Tabor in her mobile home and took her and his half-burned sleeping bag to a small rise under a big pine, which would absorb the morning dew and keep them dry as they slept.
Michael woke up the next day at first light and released Tabor from her carrier. After giving her breakfast and brewing coffee for himself and Kyle, he packed up camp. They smoked more of the weed and left the rest of the jar in a bush for someone else to find. It was a prison time’s worth of weed—you could get two years or more just for possession in Idaho.
When they got back to the main road, they started hitching, trying to look friendly and nonthreatening to passing drivers. Idaho was hostile not only to hitchhikers but panhandlers, too. Some rural, red-state towns had particularly scary and surly guys who would put a hole in you if you looked at them the wrong way, and probably skin the cat, too. After almost a full day of not scoring a lift, they walked back into the park for the jar of weed, ate the rest of their food, and crashed out at dusk beneath a cluster of trees off the road.
At the crack of dawn, they set off again and walked a whole day to reach Mountain Home. Wedged between the desert and the mountains, the town had an air force base, a few dozen churches, a rodeo, and an annual country music festival. Consistently ranked among the worst places to live in Idaho, it had extremely hot, dry summers, constant wildfires and a high unemployment rate, but also plenty of traffic passing through.
Michael and Kyle swung by several gas stations to try to wrangle a ride. That way drivers saw them on the way in and had time to consider giving them a lift as they paid for gas. They would fill up their water bottles, charge their phones, and sit outside with their sign and Tabor on her leash, playing cards to pass the time, until it got too hot to wait by the road. They could only hitchhike in two-hour stretches very early in the morning and late in the evening, because they had to spare Tabor from the searing heat. They were drinking too much, eating too little, being bitten by bugs, and crashing under trees in empty lots. Five days passed—and they were still waiting for a ride out of Mountain Home, where everything looked dusty and colorless, bleached out by the hot, relentless desert sun.
On the sixth day, as they sat outside a gas station in the morning sunlight, drinking burnt gas-station coffee and breathing in diesel fumes, Michael felt depleted. Of all the cross-country hitchhiking trips he’d taken over the years, he couldn’t remember a harder one.
When it got too hot for Tabor, they moved over to a nearby strip mall, which had more shade and foot traffic. In a shady spot in the parking lot near a Walmart, they rested and charged up their phones. Kyle checked for any responses to their post on Craigslist Rideshare and updated their location.
Michael grabbed a piece of cardboard that he’d slept on the night before and used Kyle’s Sharpie and his colored markers and made a new sign that read: FATHER, SON & CAT NEED RIDE TO MONTANA.
Tabor didn’t seem too bothered about being stranded—she mostly slept through it all. Lying on her back contentedly, she turned her fluffy face like a sunflower toward the sun. Her eyes shut, her front paws curled, she looked so cute that Kyle snapped a picture and posted it on Facebook: Tabor in Mountain Home, Idaho. And as an afterthought, he wrote: Fuck you Mountain Home. Been here for six days with no rides.
For the rest of the afternoon, they sat, smoking and sharing small talk with the people who stopped to swoon over Tabor. As the heat mellowed, Tabor woke up in a feisty mood.
She looked up at Kyle playfully, with her intense green eyes, flecked with big-cat yellow, and she plunged her front paws into his open bag again and again, with a kittenish trill. Kyle stuck his hand in the bag and then pulled it out, waving it at her, letting Tabor know they could play. She slunk down, looking fierce, and focused on his hand as if it were a cornered mouse. She sprang up and started nipping at his hands and wrists, play-wrestling with him.
“Ow . . . ow . . . owww, Tabor, that hurts,” Kyle said, trying to pull his hand away from her tiny needle-sharp incisors. “Tabor, let go.”
“I told you she’ll cut you open. She doesn’t know the difference between bite and scratch,” Michael said. Kyle tended his bleeding puncture wounds. “She’s been traumatized. That’s probably why she’s tough and stood up to that bear. If it weren’t for Tabor, that bear could’ve come over and eaten Stinson.”
Michael rolled a cigarette, sprinkling tobacco along the paper and sealing it with his tongue.
“We should just start walking,” he said, rising to his feet. “Don’t want to spend the rest of my life here.” The light was fading fast, and he wanted to find some shelter.
“I think we should hop on a freight train somewhere,” Kyle said.
“Sure, I’ll rustle one up with my magic wan
d,” Michael said, assembling his pack, getting ready to leave.
Just as the last sun raked the parking lot, a stranger approached them. His head was shaved, he wore silver skull rings on his fingers, and he was dressed in short shorts and what appeared to be a white burlap sack. Tattooed blue serpents swirled up his meaty legs. A gun belt was slung around his waist with a six-shooter on each hip, a nine-millimeter was strapped to his thigh, and an intimidating blue-gray pit bull walked by his side.
“You the guys on the Internet?” he asked.
Thinking he must’ve recognized them from the photos he’d put on Craigslist, Kyle hesitated and said, “Um, yeah . . . that’s us.”
“Well, my name’s Jesus Christ, and today’s your lucky day. Got a ride for you,” he said, and then walked off.
As soon as he was safely out of earshot, they both keeled over laughing. “What was that?” Kyle asked.
“Dunno,” Michael said, “but wasn’t that scary?”
“I’ve never been more afraid in my life.”
Michael wasn’t sure whether the guy was trying to be ironic or was some sort of armed roadside evangelist. In any case, he was wary of religious people after attending Catholic schools crawling with predatory priests. But, about ten minutes later, as they were packing away the last of their stuff, a blue four-door Corolla pulled up in front of them.
Jesus Christ leaned out the passenger window. “Here’s your ride,” he said, nodding at the disheveled, hollow-cheeked driver with dirty, lank hair. “He’s going to Dillon, Montana, tonight.”
“Man, that’d be great,” Michael said. His twin, JP, the only sibling Michael erratically stayed in touch with, lived in Dillon, which was only a couple of hours’ drive from Walter’s house.
Kyle was a little reluctant, but after a moment, grabbed his pack and followed Michael and Tabor up to the car.
Michael thought Jesus’s disciple looked like an old dopehead, and Jesus himself looked like he was getting ready to murder someone, but he figured, What the hell . . . anything to get out of Idaho.
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