Wild

The men got into the truck again and I rode in the back for a couple of miles by myself, until we reached the spot where Walter had parked his truck. He and Carlos drove off in it and left me alone with Frank, who had another hour of work to do.

I sat in the cab of the yellow truck watching Frank go back and forth on a tractor, grading the road. Each time he passed, he waved to me, and as he rode away I surreptitiously explored the contents of his truck. In the glove compartment there was a silver flask of whiskey. I took a shallow swig, and quickly put it back, my lips on fire. I reached under the seat and pulled out a slim black case and opened it up and saw a gun as silver as the whiskey flask and shut it again and shoved it beneath the seat. The keys to the truck dangled from the ignition, and I thought idly about what would happen if I started it up and drove away. I took off my boots and massaged my feet. The little bruise on my ankle that I’d gotten from shooting heroin in Portland was still there, but faded to a faint morose yellow now. I ran my finger over it, over the bump of the tiny track mark still detectable at its core, amazed at my own ludicrousness, and then put my socks back on so I wouldn’t have to see it anymore.

“What kind of woman are you?” Frank asked when he was done with his work and he’d climbed into the truck beside me.

“What kind?” I asked. Our eyes locked and something in his unveiled itself, and I looked away.

“Are you like Jane? Like the kind of woman Tarzan would like?”

“I guess so,” I said, and laughed, though I felt a creeping anxiety, wishing that Frank would start the truck and drive. He was a big man, rangy and chiseled and tan. A miner who looked to me like a cowboy. His hands reminded me of all the hands of the men I’d known growing up, men who worked their bodies for a living, men whose hands would never get clean no matter how hard they scrubbed. As I sat there with him, I felt the way I always do when alone in certain circumstances with certain men—that anything could happen. That he could go about his business, mannerly and kind, or he could grab me and change the course of things entirely in an instant. With Frank in his truck, I watched his hands, his every move, each cell in my body on high alert, though I appeared as relaxed as if I’d just woken from a nap.

“I’ve got a little something for us,” he said, reaching into the glove compartment to remove the flask of whiskey. “It’s my reward for a hard day’s work.” He unscrewed the cap and handed it to me. “Ladies first.”

I took it from him and held it to my lips and let the whiskey wash into my mouth.

“Yep. That’s the kind of woman you are. That’s what I’m going to call you: Jane.” He took the flask from me and had a long drink.

“You know I’m not actually out here completely alone,” I blurted, making up the lie as I spoke. “My husband—his name is Paul—he’s also hiking. He started at Kennedy Meadows. Do you know where that is? We each wanted the experience of hiking alone, so he’s hiking south and I’m hiking north and we’re meeting in the middle, and then we’ll go the rest of the summer together.”

Frank nodded and took another sip from the flask. “Well, then he’s crazier than you,” he said, after thinking about it for a while. “It’s one thing to be a woman crazy enough to do what you’re doing. Another thing to be a man letting his own wife go off and do this.”

“Yeah,” I said, as if I agreed with him. “So anyway. We’ll be reunited in a few days.” I said it with such conviction that I felt convinced of it myself—that Paul that very minute was making his way toward me. That in fact we hadn’t filed for divorce two months before, on a snowy day in April. That he was coming for me. Or that he would know if I didn’t make it any further down the trail. That my disappearance would be noted in a matter of days.

But the opposite was true. The people in my life were like the Band-Aids that had blown away in the desert wind that first day on the trail. They scattered and then they were gone. No one expected me to even so much as call when I reached my first stop. Or the second or third.

Frank leaned back against his seat and adjusted his big metal belt buckle. “There’s something else I like to reward myself with after a hard day’s work,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked, with a tentative smile, my heart hammering in my chest. My hands on my lap felt tingly. I was acutely aware of my backpack, too far away in the bed of the truck. In a flash, I decided I’d leave it behind if I had to push the truck door open and run.

Frank reached under the seat, where the gun resided in its little black case.

He came up with a clear plastic bag. Inside, there were long thin ropes of red licorice, each bunch wound like a lasso. He held the bag out to me and asked, “You want some, Miss Jane?”

6 A BULL IN BOTH DIRECTIONS