10
The truck, a long-bed blue Chevy, moved down the interstate under a low moon and the fading vault of stars. No crew cab, three years old, in good shape. No bumper stickers or decals. No gun rack. It held cruise control steady at 77 mph, two miles over, all its bulbs alight and nothing out of the ordinary but the out-of-state plate. The driver was heading north and if there was another passenger or any kind of luggage or possessions in the cab with him, these were stowed out of sight. Ten miles from the upcoming town on a steep grade, the Chevy swung into the left lane to pass a flatbed hauling a tremendous black stone, a monument of some kind, and then it swung back into the right lane again, and the silver SUV that had been following did the same and bloomed with flashing lights, red and blue, red and blue, strobing soundlessly in the dark predawn.
The officer sat back there running the plates. In the truck, the boy squinted at the headlights in the rearview and pushed the mirror out of true.
Out over the desert the moon had struck a black edge of sky, the flat of a mesa, and sat flat-sided itself in a field of stars. Tossed, unknown stars; a strange heaven. With his head half out the window he looked and looked, disbelieving, almost dizzy, until at last there was Pegasus, and from there the others: Cepheus, Cassiopeia, and Andromeda, the king’s daughter, chained to her rock. Naked, forsaken, watching the sea. He was not a great student but he had learned the stars. The idea that they’d been there, in their places, long before their names, long before the first eyes saw them.
The officer, walking up, put his light on the boy’s face, and then into the passenger’s seat, lighting up a red roll of sleeping bag and a green duffel, the duffel incompletely zipped on a gray nest of tubesocks. Below the duffel on the floorboards sat a canvas carpenter’s bag with leather grips and a brass buckle fastened across the mouth. It looked full and heavy.
The officer lowered his light and stood in the frame of the window, half lit like a moon in the beams of the cruiser. Under the hatbrim he was black-eyed and smooth-faced and he wore a black shiv of mustache. His jacket bore the insignia of the sheriff’s department but he was too young to be sheriff. He asked for the boy’s license and registration. He put his light on one document and then the other and then flicked it to the boy’s face again, throwing white pain into his eyes.
“This your license, sir?” In his voice was that lilt of another land, another people, older than anything.
“Yes.”
“This says you’re seventeen.”
The boy waited.
“That correct?”
“Yes.”
“How long you been sucking on those cancer sticks?”
The boy glanced at the cigarette between his knuckles. “Sorry?”
“You the oldest seventeen I ever saw.”
The boy waited. “How come you pulled me over?”
“Failure to signal when you passed that flatbed. Who is Grant Courtland?”
“My father.”
“This his truck?”
“Yes.”
“He know you got it, way out here?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean what do I mean? Does your Wisconsin daddy know you are driving his truck in New Mexico.”
“He knows I’ve got it.”
“But he don’t know where you’re at?”
“No.”
The deputy watched him. “What did you do back there?”
“Back where?”
“Wisconsin.”
“Nothing,” said the boy.
“You did something.”
“No, sir.”
“Yes you did. You left.”
The boy kept looking at the deputy. No sound but the cruiser’s idling engine. After a minute the deputy leaned a little closer and lifted his face in a peculiar way. As if to take the boy’s scent.
“Where you coming from, bro?”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s twice you asked me that. I mean where you been at, before you come through here?”
“I was in California for a while.”
“California.”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“Sorry?”
“What were you in California for.”
“To see the ocean.”
The deputy stared at him. “These are some poor answers, bro.”
The boy waited.
“You steal this truck from your daddy?”
“Was it reported stolen?”
“I asked you a question.”
“No, sir. I borrowed it.”
“You borrowed it.”
“Yes, sir.”