Chapter Six
As it turned out, I had to spend more than two weeks in Sulphur Springs. The rest of that Tuesday and most of the rest of the time I was there I spent working my tail off to make some money. There weren’t nearly so many yards that needed raking as there had been in Fort Smith, but I mowed some grass, and picked up trash, and swept parking lots, and did some other odd jobs like that.
People will usually let a kid do something for them, if you ask them the right way. I learned that from my dog. He wasn’t supposed to eat food off the table, but he could look at you with such pitiful eyes that you’d give in sooner or later and let him have a little bit. I figured if it worked on me, then it ought to work on other people. So I made sure to look extra pitiful whenever I went up to anybody’s house. It wasn’t such a hard thing to do, under the circumstances.
I had to be careful not to look too pathetic, though, because then people start asking questions about where you live and stuff like that. Things I definitely didn’t want to answer.
I did have one little piece of luck early on, though. Some people paid me thirty bucks on Tuesday afternoon to clean out their garage, and they told me I could keep anything I found in there that I wanted. There was a bunch of things I might have wanted if I’d had anywhere to put the stuff, but the only things I ended up taking were some clothes that fit me, a little box of assorted tools, a few books, and an old BMX bicycle.
The bike was the real prize. It had two flat tires and a rusty chain, and it was beat up and scratched and ugly as sin. Somebody had tried to paint it black with a spray can, and then they’d painted the words The Beast on the crossbar with what looked like red fingernail polish. They even put little drippy things under the letters to make them look like blood. I thought that was sorta cool.
It didn’t look like much, to be sure, but everything worked okay. The bearings were tight and except for the chain it didn’t have much rust on it. I had to get new tubes for the tires and a new chain, but that stuff didn’t cost much. I had the old beast fixed up in less than an hour, and then I had a lot faster way to get around town than walking. You’d be amazed how much difference it made. The little tool kit had everything in it that I needed.
I found two pairs of jeans and three black t-shirts that were a little too big for me. They looked like concert t-shirts, because they had Poison and Metallica and Def Leppard on them. They were old and musty and a little holey, but not so much that I couldn’t still get some use out of them for a while. There was a black jacket so big it hung down almost to my knees, but I took that too. Those people really liked black stuff, as much as they had of it.
I didn’t dare keep sleeping in the bus station anymore, so I bought me a sleeping bag at Wal-Mart for ten bucks at the same time I got the tubes and chain for The Beast, and then I started sleeping in that. It was warm enough to keep me from freezing outside.
That night I slept under a little bridge where the highway crossed a dry creek bed at the edge of town. But I didn’t like that very much. It didn’t stop the wind from blowing right in my face, and the sound of cars passing by over your head isn’t a very nice thing to listen to all night long. Worst of all, anybody who looked very close could see that I was there. I decided after just one night that that would never do, and Wednesday morning I started out to look for something better if I could find anything.
I was riding The Beast over on the north side of town when I passed a big vacant lot, all grown up in trees and thickets and heavy grass. I looked it over a bit and thought it might have some thick bushes I could crawl up under that would probably be a better place to sleep than under the bridge. It would at least block the wind and be a lot more private.
I wormed my way in there and found the remains of an old burnt down house. That didn’t interest me too much, but when I elbowed my way into the back yard I struck pure gold. There was a big home-made dog house back there, almost hidden amongst the weeds. It was maybe eight foot square and four feet high, with a wooden floor up off the ground and a shingled roof. I’m betting it was for a Rottweiler or a Mastiff or some other bigger kinda dog like that. Whatever it used to be for, it suited me just fine.
It had been empty for a long time, so it wasn’t nasty or anything. I could still smell dog a little bit when I crawled inside, and there was some old musty dirty straw that I had to throw out. But once I did that, I had a place to sleep that was warm and dry where nobody would ever think to find me, and at that point that’s all I cared about.
I took to leaving my sleeping bag and my backpack inside the dog house every day, so I wouldn’t have to carry them while I was raking leaves and working.
I fixed the place up pretty nice as time went by. One of the first things I did was to get a piece of plywood for a door. I went to the lumber yard and got them to give me a piece of scrap wood for that, and they even cut it the right size for me. They weren’t too busy on a Wednesday afternoon and I guess they probably thought I was building a tree house or something like that, so they were willing to be nice about it. They didn’t even charge me for it.
I rummaged around in the burnt out house till I found some screws and hinges, and I bought a cheap hasp and padlock set so I could keep the place locked up. I put it on with the screwdriver from my tool kit, and then I had a door. I got a little thing of cherry air freshener to kill the musty dog smell, and I hauled some fresh hay in there to make me a softer place to sleep. I even found a little oil lamp for fifty cents at a yard sale so I had lights after dark if I wanted to read. It wasn’t half bad.
It sounds weird, I guess, but I was really proud of myself for having my own little house, if you want to call it that. It wasn’t much, but at least it was mine and it was more than some people had. It was much nicer than a tent, and I’d never minded living in one of those for a week or two when I went camping in the summer.
Maybe that just shows how poor and pitiful I really was by then, but like I said, I don’t think it was that terrible. I came home every evening about dark, lit my lamp for a little while and read one of my books till I got sleepy, then I blew out the light and got up again in the morning and went roaming on The Beast looking for another odd job to do. Sometimes I found one and sometimes I didn’t.
I brought water home from the car wash down the street in an empty milk jug I snatched from a trash can, and I tried to at least wash the parts of me that showed, if not every night then at least every other night. I would have dearly loved a shower, but you do what you have to do.
It rained on Friday, so I had to stay inside all day long that day. There wasn’t much to do besides read my books and listen to the sound of rain hitting the roof. It didn’t leak, and the walls shut off the wind. Other than being a little cold I really couldn’t complain, and I just wrapped up in my sleeping bag and snuggled a little deeper into the hay. I was reading A Wrinkle in Time, which was one of the books I found in that garage I cleaned out.
I listened to my radio for a little bit at lunch time, mostly to hear the weather. I had a box of crackers and a spray can of Easy Cheese there in the dog house that I kept for emergencies like that, so I didn’t have to go out in the rain to find anything to eat. I wouldn’t have wanted to leave fresh tracks in the mud anyway.
I had to be careful that I didn’t beat a trail through the weeds even on dry days, so I always went in a different way each time to keep from leaving any signs I was there. I might be fairly comfortable now, but I didn’t dare forget I was still hiding.
Things were fairly tolerable for the time being, but when I stopped to think about it I knew I was just frittering away time and not getting much done except just barely surviving. It’s easy to forget that, when you’re so busy trying to live from day to day, but when I laid awake at night on my straw tick, I had plenty of time to think.
I was having to spend almost all the money I made just to buy food. I ate greasy fried chicken and corn dogs and tater logs out of those hot boxes at convenience stores. I h
ad a lot of those nasty bean burritos at Taco Bell, and whatever I could find on the dollar menu anywhere else. You can survive on less than ten bucks a day if you really have to, but sometimes I didn’t make that much. Leaf raking season was pretty much over and done with, and jobs were starting to get scarce.
Worse than that, I knew sooner or later somebody would notice that I wasn’t in school when I was supposed to be, or they’d see me slipping in and out of the thicket where my shed was. It was only a matter of time before something like that happened.
I wasn’t too much afraid of anybody trying to hurt me, cause I think I can hold my own in a fight if I had to. I was more afraid of busybodies. There are all kinds of people out there who think they’re doing you a favor by meddling in your business. People like that wouldn’t see how much I’d done. They’d see a twelve year old boy in dirty clothes living in a dog house all alone in the winter and raking yards so he could have money to eat, and they’d feel like it was their duty to “help” me by sending me home. They wouldn’t care a bit that they might be sending me back to something worse than where I was at, and they wouldn’t believe me if I told them why. Those were the kind of people I had to stay away from no matter what happened.
I was having a hard time deciding which of those places I found on the Internet that I should check first, because I knew a wrong choice could put me in a really bad situation. I’d just now managed to arrange things so I was barely getting along by the skin of my teeth. What if I got to New Boston, or Daingerfield, or Wolfe City, and it turned out that wasn’t where the right Justin lived? How would I get the money or have the time to check the other ones? Or even to get back to Sulphur Springs?
To make things worse, winter was coming on fast, and I promise you it can get bitter cold at night, even in Texas. Right now I was at least sheltered and safe to sleep at night, I had a locked door and a home of some kind, and if I left Sulphur Springs I’d be right back to being homeless and on the mercy of the world. I didn’t like that feeling at all, and in a lot of ways it just seemed safer to sit tight where I was, even though I knew I couldn’t do that forever, or even for much longer. Pretty soon there wouldn’t be any more yards to rake, and then what would I do?
If you want the honest truth, I was afraid, and I had pretty good reason to be. I was afraid to leave and I was afraid not to.
Nobody ever taught me how to pray. It wasn’t something we ever did at home. But I’d always heard there was a God, and I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask Him to show me the right way to go. I sure didn’t have anybody else to ask at the time. So that’s what I did, right there in my little shed in Sulphur Springs, on Sunday night two weeks after I first rolled into town. I didn’t know if He heard me or not.
When I woke up the next morning, I decided to head for Wolfe City. Partly because it was closest, and partly because, oh, I don’t know, it just seemed like the right choice to make. Maybe it was God answering my prayer, or maybe it was something else. Sometimes you do things without really knowing why.
I locked up the shed and kept my key, just in case I ever needed to come back, and I hid The Beast under some burnt wood and trash from the old house. Then I walked down to the carwash and started chatting with anybody that looked friendly. It’s the best way to get a ride. People don’t always like to stop for you on the side of the road, but if they’re washing their car they don’t have any choice but to listen to you. If you seem friendly enough then sometimes they’ll do you a favor.
I ended up hitching a ride with a high school kid who took me as far as Cumby. That was only ten miles or so, but it was the best I could do. I had to pay him ten bucks to take me, but other than that he was nice enough. I didn’t gripe about it, even though my cash was running really low again. There are times when you just don’t have a choice, and I probably stank enough that he deserved ten bucks for putting up with me.
You never notice things like that yourself, but it had been two and a half weeks since I had a real shower and it wouldn’t have surprised me that I was getting pretty ripe.
He dropped me off at a convenience store downtown, if you could call it that. Cumby was too small to have much of a downtown.
Anyway, I had a map, and since I didn’t have any other way to get where I was going, I decided I’d just have to walk the rest of the way unless somebody was nice enough to pick me up. If it took me two or three days, it wouldn’t matter much. I was used to sleeping in uncomfortable places by then, and I had my sleeping bag to keep me warm.
Mama used to say the job you never start is the one that takes the longest to finish, so I took a deep breath and got started. I walked north up the main street for a little while, then turned left by a big house for a few blocks and then right again at the First Baptist Church. After that it wasn’t long till I was out of town. Like I said, Cumby isn’t a very big place.
It was the first time I’d actually been out in the country since I left home, because you couldn’t count while I was inside the septic tank or on the bus. There wasn’t really much to say about the countryside as I went along, just a bunch of rolling pasture land with some clumps of little trees here and there and along the fence rows. It wasn’t like Tennessee, but it was pretty in its own way.
Just being back out in the country cheered me up a lot, and for the first time in days I wished I had somebody to talk to. It was just me and bunches of cows, though, and they don’t talk much. Oh, and lots of big round hay bales, too, but they talk even less than the cows.
I walked all day to get to Commerce, and my good mood gradually wore off. I was a little disgusted that nobody stopped to give me a ride. It was eleven miles from Cumby to Commerce, and I was bone tired by the time I made it into town late that afternoon. My feet were numb from walking, and where they weren’t numb they ached. I wasn’t used to doing that much leg work in such a short space of time.
I wished I could have brought The Beast with me. It would have made things a whole lot easier. But I hadn’t, and eleven miles on foot is a lot farther than you think it is, I promise you. So I wasn’t in the best mood I’ve ever been in, to say the least.
I saw a gas station coming up not far down the road, and when I got there I turned into the parking lot and went inside. I paid for a coke and sat down on one of the benches in the front of the store by the sliding glass doors. I closed my eyes and laid my head back against the cinder block wall, too tired to even move. It felt so good to get off my feet.
I think I must have dozed off for a while, because when I opened my eyes it was getting to be dusky outside. I was mad at myself for wasting time like that, but I was just so, so tired. I hadn’t even opened my coke from earlier, so I twisted off the cap now and drank about half of it in several big gulps. I was still tired even after sleeping, and my muscles were stiff and sore, but I thought I could move on now for at least a little while. I’d have to find somewhere to spend the night before long. I missed my shed, just like I knew I would.
I trudged a little farther down the street, and before long I came in sight of some buildings that looked like a college campus. I figured that sounded like a promising place to go, cause there are always lots of kids in places like that and there tend to be people around pretty much all the time. After a little hunting I found the library, and it was a monster; five stories tall.
I breezed in like I owned the place and didn’t even glance at the girl behind the circulation desk, just headed right on past her down the hall to the left. There were stairs that led to the upper levels, but I was hoping to find an elevator. I’d had about as much as my legs could take for a day.
I found the elevators before long and went all the way up to the fifth floor. It was quiet up there, with no students in sight. Just a lot of shelves of dusty books and some plastic couches and coffee tables. I always wondered why they put those in libraries, since I’m sure you’re not supposed to drink anything in there. It seems like tables and chairs would work better for studying.
&n
bsp; The only other features were a computerized card catalog station, and a water fountain that hummed quietly to itself by the elevators.
Almost the entire fifth floor was one big room, and there were these huge windows all around where you could look outside. I walked up to the closest one and looked out to the east, and it seemed like you could see forever. Texas looks dadgummed flat from that high up, I have to say. I didn’t see a single hill, and for a second I was homesick for Tennessee. But I knew if I thought about that too much I’d drive myself batty.
Instead, I went over to the other bank of windows that looked west, to see if I could figure out where Wolfe City might be. I still had my map, so I knew about where it should be. I knew it was somewhere off to the northwest. I just wanted to see it with my own two eyes.
I looked down and found the main highway that ran through Commerce, and followed it with my eyes till it joined another big highway next to a McDonald’s and a football stadium. The stadium was marked on my map, so I knew I had the right place. I followed the highway northwest for a while, as far as I could.
It got all hazy and blurry from the distance before long, and I couldn’t have said for sure whether I was looking at Wolfe City or not. I knew it wasn’t a very big town, and there were houses and things scattered pretty evenly all over the place. It was hard to tell if they were clumped up a little thicker in one place. I thought so, but I couldn’t be sure. But then again it was fourteen miles away, so I might have been imagining things.
I turned away from the window, disappointed. I guess I hadn’t realized how bad I wanted to see the place. You might think I was putting way too much hope in this one spot when Justin might not even live there. And maybe I was. But I’d been running for what felt like forever, even though I knew it wasn’t even three weeks yet, and I’d already decided I didn’t like it at all. I was ready to have it all be over.