Still, I felt a wave of hope and excitement wash over me. After nearly nine months of being enslaved, I had shown that I was more than a bystander in my own life, more than just a puppet in his hands.
After months of grueling training and conditioning, I felt like I had finally kicked a goal.
35.
A Walk Through the Desert
Surprisingly, it only took us three days to get ready to hitchhike back to SLC. We spent the first couple of days sorting through all of our belongings, throwing some stuff away and deciding what things we would take with us on our journey. I was surprised at how much junk we had accumulated, most of it dug out of Dumpsters or from other homeless camps. We sorted and decided, trying to keep our sacks light, a goal in which we failed miserably. But it was no easy thing for three people to do, hitchhike for eight hundred miles while dragging along literally everything we owned.
After we had organized our things, Mitchell spent a little time ministering in the city to get some money. I never knew how much he collected—he certainly never shared that kind of information with Barzee or me—but I knew it wasn’t much.
That afternoon, he sat and stared at me. “We need to cut your hair,” he said. “Cut it really short and dye it too. That’s the only way no one is going to recognize you.”
I shook my head defiantly. I wasn’t going to let him. He’d have to hold me down to cut my hair.
“Yeah, we’re going to have to cut and dye it,” he went on. “And you know what else?” He ran his fingers through his own hair. “I might have to dye my hair as well.”
That didn’t make any sense. He wasn’t a fugitive. He hadn’t had his picture pasted all over the country. No one was going to recognize him. But it made him feel important to think that someone might be looking for him too.
He turned and smiled at me. “Shearjashub, how do you think I would look as a blond?”
That one was easy. He’d look like an old man with dyed hair. He already looked like a cross between Rasputin and Osama bin Laden and I didn’t think a little blond hair was going to change that.
Barzee jumped in. “I don’t think you should make her cut her hair,” she said.
I looked at her in surprise. In the nine months since she and her husband had kidnapped me, this was the only time she had ever interjected to protect me.
“A woman’s hair is her crown,” she went on. “It wouldn’t be right to make her cut it. You need to find another way.”
Looking at her stringy gray hair, I realized that all of this talk about cutting and dyeing our hair had bothered her. At the end of the day, she’d be left with a head of gray hair and she didn’t want to be left out. Still, I was glad that she had said what she did.
Mitchell thought for a couple of minutes, unwilling to announce his decision. Then his face lit up like a lightbulb. “I’ve got it! We won’t dye or cut her hair. We’ll make her wear a wig instead.” Relieved to keep my hair, I nodded eagerly. But it wasn’t as if it was a stroke of genius. Wasn’t getting me a wig an obvious answer anyway?
The next day, Mitchell took Barzee and me into El Cajon. We walked to one of the local strip malls and went into the dollar store. Of course! I thought sarcastically. The perfect place to buy a quality wig!
I stood quietly beside Mitchell while he and Barzee tried to find the right hairpiece, a decision that soon devolved into an argument. Looking at the selection, I had to cringe. The best way to describe them was “old-lady gray hair bubble.” I rummaged around the rack, looking for one that was just a little less gray than all the others, finally picking out one that seemed to have a few more strands of brown. Turning it over, I read the style name: Tiger Lily. The irony was rich.
We selected that wig, then spent a whopping $1.29 on an equally stylish pair of sunglasses and walked out of the store.
After we had made our way back to camp, Mitchell made me put on my disguise. Then he looked at me and smiled. He was as proud as he could be. It was like, voilà! I didn’t look like me anymore. But I knew the truth. I looked ridiculous. The shoddy wig hardly fit me and I constantly had to adjust it to keep from showing tufts of blond hair at the front of my head. The sunglasses were tinted green. We had found my pants alongside the road and my shirt had been taken from a homeless camp.
I looked down at my clothes and adjusted my wig, shaking my head in disbelief. Really! I thought. I was a fifteen-year-old girl in a gray wig and sunglasses so cheap they didn’t even sit straight on my face. Do you really think this is going to work? Who in their right mind is going to think it’s normal for a young girl to be wearing a gray wig? Not to mention the fact that it was already falling apart. If it couldn’t even make it through a day, how was it going to look in a week?