The Journey Back Read online

  I dug myself in best I could, hoping that camera couldn’t get a picture of me if I was curled up in a tight little ball beneath the thick bushes. That or else they’d figure I was an animal or something.

  Lying there, making myself as small as possible by hugging my arms and legs, I listened as the chopper noise grew louder and louder, finally passing directly overhead. I lay still, barely breathing, until the helicopter’s sound grew fainter, like a distant heartbeat in the sky.

  I didn’t want to take the chance of getting spotted, so I decided to hide out for a while. Hidden by the bushes, I sat up and took off one boot to shake a stone out. Then I took off the other boot, too, and peeled off both socks so they could dry out a little. Everything was wet and muddy from sloshing through that swamp. I saw big blisters on my feet, but there wasn’t anything I could do for them so after a while I put my damp socks back on in case I had to leave in a hurry.

  About that time, I realized how hungry I was and felt for the box of Cocoroos in my pocket. But I decided I’d better save them for when I was really starving. In my other pocket, I found a balled-up Kleenex and my white card.

  I took the card out and was getting ready to flick it into the water down below, but then I realized that the card could float downstream and become a clue. I held it in my hand and looked at it. They give us that card the first day we signed in at Cliffside. It was about four inches by four inches and laminated so we could keep it in our pocket all the time. We were told to memorize it, all the tiny print, front and back. Like we had to recite the twelve problem areas us boys fall into and the four most common thinking errors we make, plus a whole lot of other stuff so we could change our ways.

  I knew the whole thing. Memorized it the first week just for something to do. With my eyes closed, I could repeat the entire card, starting top left with those twelve problem areas: low self-image, easily angered, inconsiderate to others, aggravates others, authority problem, alcohol or drug problem, stealing, lying, etc.

  Yup. I must have gone over that list a dozen times with Miss Laurie, my mental health counselor. I liked Miss Laurie. She was pretty, with long dark hair she pulled back into a ponytail. She wore pink fingernail polish and interesting earrings, always something dangly. And she smelled good, too. First two days I was in her office I didn’t say a thing, and she didn’t care. She said it was okay to just sit there if I wanted. She offered me candy from her jar and I took a piece, a little Hershey bar. I sat there eating chocolate and watching the angelfish swim around in their tank for a full hour.

  “Anything we talk about in here stays here,” Miss Laurie told me. “I don’t report back to juvenile detention.”

  But still I didn’t talk. She did paperwork while I watched the fish and picked at a hangnail.

  Along about the third or fourth time, Miss Laurie played a game of cards with me and talked about her little boy, Harrison, and how he painted himself with Magic Markers. I couldn’t help it. Her story reminded me of my little brother, Hank, and how he drew pictures all over himself with an ink pen so he’d look like my tattooed uncle Chip. I cracked up remembering that. Guess that’s when I started talking to her some. Mostly about Hank and LeeAnn at first, then my mom and finally, my dad. We also talked about the twelve problem areas.

  My response was always the same. I told Miss Laurie I was only guilty of three of those areas. Easily angered, no question. And I did occasionally aggravate others, but only after they aggravated me. And yes, I told her, I was guilty of misleading others. No question how I led my friend J.T. down the wrong path, which landed both of us in prison. I told J.T. I was sorry and that it wasn’t his fault. I told the judge that, too, in court. I spoke up and said J.T. didn’t do nothing, that I did everything myself. But the judge, she wasn’t even looking at me when I said all that. She was busy writing in her folders. When she was done, she took off her glasses and stared at me. She said J.T. stood guard, which helped me commit the crime, so he was guilty, too.

  There wasn’t anything I could say or do to change her mind. Me and J.T., we were put in this white prison van, just the two of us in the back separated from the driver by a big wire grate. We had these heavy shackles on our feet, and handcuffs on, too. But neither one of us was gonna try to escape or anything. We were like stunned that day we were convicted and rode quiet all the way out to western Maryland in that van.

  It took nearly four hours to get to Cliffside. There wasn’t any music or anything to listen to. The driver had his radio on low, but it was just talk radio, religious stuff, and we couldn’t really hear it anyway except for an occasional “praise the Lord” or “the Bible tells us . . .” Wasn’t a whole lot to look at neither. You couldn’t look straight through that grate between us and the driver or you’d go cross-eyed, so all we could do was look out the side windows. I hadn’t ever been all the way out to western Maryland before and I would have to say, the countryside was nice, especially the hills. There weren’t many hills I knew of on the Eastern Shore.

  A couple hours into the trip, the van climbed up this mountainside so steep my ears popped. Then we passed through this big slice in the top where huge cliffs rose up above on either side of us.

  “Ain’t it something?” the driver called back to us while he drove between those multicolored cliffs. He turned his radio down. “It’s called Sideling Hill.”

  Neither one of us answered, but I did look out the window.

  “See that black layer toward the bottom?”

  Again, we didn’t say anything, but the driver continued: “I heard that black layer has got marine fossils in it, which means this here area was underwater—a huge sea at one time. Yup. From eastern Ohio all the way to western Maryland. Imagine that!”

  I did try to imagine that. Why not? I didn’t have anything else to do. I wondered how come the sea disappeared, and how the floor of it ended up on top of a mountain! I looked at all the multicolored layers in those cliffs and wondered what stories each one had. Kind of wished the driver would say some more, but once we were through that pass and headed down the other side, he went back to chewing his tobacco and turned up his radio.

  I kept glancing at J.T., who was sitting across from me, but he never once looked up. Not even at the cliffs on Sideling Hill. He just stared at the floor the whole time, which was incredibly depressing. I had really ruined his life.

  At one point, a big tractor-trailer full of logs roared past us, and I remember thinking I was just like one of those cut-down trees strapped onto the back of that truck, with no power over my life anymore. Then we came across some guys in bright green neon vests who were picking up trash in the median strip, and I saw a van parked alongside the road that had the words INMATE LABOR on it. I wondered if that was my future. Would that be me one day? Picking up trash by the road while other people drove by and stared? I dropped my head. I sure didn’t want that for a future.

  Suddenly, there wasn’t time to be thinking of my life or that sad trip out to western Maryland because the sound of barking dogs brought me back to the present right quick. Instead of tossing that white card in the bushes, I slipped it back in my pocket and reached for my boots.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  HOT-WIRED

  Plunging my feet, boots and all, into the nearby stream I started running—hopping rocks, splashing between boulders, sometimes sinking in up to my knees. For hours I thrashed through that water. I figured it was my only chance to lose those tracking dogs.

  Finally, I took a break to catch my breath. It was getting dark and I didn’t hear the dogs anymore, just the sound of that stream moving around me and the pounding of my own heart in my ears. I was really whipped so I climbed up out of the water onto the bank. A fallen tree in a hemlock grove overlooking the stream caught my eye. I walked up the hill and practically collapsed under some of the branches. I decided it was a good place to stay overnight
since I could be hidden and yet I could still see things coming my way. In the distance, I caught a glimpse of some traffic moving on a busy road and hoped it was that highway that brung me out to western Maryland.

  After I rested up, I gathered a few loose boughs and wove them in and out between the branches of the fallen tree to make my shelter against the wind thicker. I also threw a few boughs underneath so I’d be a little bit off the ground and hopefully not get so cold.

  When my so-called bed was ready, I unwrapped the sweatshirt from around my waist and pulled it on. It was a bit cool, just right if you ask me, but I knew it would get colder overnight. Out here in the mountains, even on the warmest days, it got downright cold at night. I sat down to take off my boots and, boy, what a stink. My socks weren’t just wet and dirty, but bloody, too, on account of the blisters had popped. There wasn’t time to dry anything, so I shook the socks out and put ’em back on.

  My stomach was rumbling and I probably should’ve held off on the only food I had, but I got weak and gave in. I pulled the Cocoroos out of my pocket, tore open the box, and wolfed down the cereal in three handfuls before thinking anymore about it. Which was another one of my problems. Stop and think first, Mr. R. liked to say. If I do this, then that will happen. The ole if/then thinking. But that cereal was gone. Oh, well. Too late. I shrugged and stuffed the flattened cereal box back in my pocket so I didn’t leave a trail. See? At least I wasn’t completely stupid.

  Boy, I felt like an animal curling up under those evergreen branches to sleep. And yeah, I guess I was a little scared. Not much, mind you, but a little. Noises in the night woke me a couple times. I worried ’cause I didn’t have a weapon or anything. If a bear came along, I wasn’t sure what I’d do. Plus it wasn’t very comfortable. I turned on my side, but my arm didn’t make a very soft pillow. And I got cold, especially my feet, which were still wet.

  When the first soft light of dawn seeped through those hemlock boughs, I was ready to move again, even if I was starving hungry, sore all over from sleeping on those branches, and a little stiff from the cold and dampness in my feet. I rubbed my arms to get warm and trudged on through the woods, keeping that road in sight the whole time. When I saw a bunch of cars and trucks parked, I crept up closer and hid behind some bushes to get a better look. I saw gas pumps and a building and wondered if I’d stumbled across a rest area, or a restaurant of some kind. It was a nasty thought, but I wondered if there might be some garbage to look over.

  When I inched up even closer, and could see down to the far side of the parking lot, I realized it was a truck stop because a whole row of big tractor-trailer rigs was lined up side by side. My brain started buzzin’ then because I knew how to drive those trucks—even better than I could drive any car. We had a big rig parked behind my house for years when I was growing up. My dad hauled a lot of baled hay in it, down to Northern Virginia, up around Baltimore to fancy horse farms. He hauled watermelons and corn in the summer. And every once in a while he hooked up a “reefer”—one of those refrigerated trailers—down to the processing plant in Salisbury and took a bunch of frozen chicken up to Boston.

  I went with my dad on a lot of those trips so I could help him unload. I was only eight, nine, ten years old at the time. It was a lot of work for a little kid, but I never minded a lot of work. I thought it was fun spending the night in the sleeper and chowin’ down diner food—meat loaf and mashed potatoes, big pieces of lemon meringue pie, and something called chicken-fried steak. All of that food was better than anything we had at home ’cause my mother didn’t like to cook much on account of her headaches.

  Meeting other truckers was fun, too. They were pretty nice to me. I met a guy from Oklahoma once at a truck stop. He sat on the front bumper of his rig, leaned over, and whittled a piece of wood with his jackknife. His hands went fast, while the wood shavings fell and made a tiny mound on the ground between his feet. When he finished, he handed me a little hand-carved buffalo that’s still on my bureau at home.

  Mostly, I just liked being out there on the road with my dad. He wasn’t real bad back then. I mean, he slapped me around some, sure. Seems like I could never do right by him. And he drank, too, but then he’d sleep it off before we drove long stretches, and those long stretches were downright pleasant. My dad was like a regular person then. We even told jokes and sang along with the radio. I remember thinking this is the way dads were: one day they’re pissed off and slapping their kids around, the next day they’re buying them root-beer floats and letting them skip school.

  About the time I turned ten my dad taught me how to drive the truck. I was lucky I was tall for my age, ’cause I never would have been able to reach the brakes or push that clutch in. My dad said if he ever got “incapacitated” (which I took to mean drunk) I’d have to be the one to get us home. So I listened up and learned early. And I have to say, it was a ton of fun. I loved driving that big rig.

  Squatting by the edge of the parking lot, I plucked a piece of grass and chewed the end of it. No doubt in my mind, I thought, if I could get inside one of those trucks, I could take it miles down the road and really put some distance between me and Cliffside.

  I threw the grass away and tried to look kind of casual as I walked behind the building and over to the row of trucks. I sat down at a picnic table and—unbelievable—a big old Kenworth came rumbling in and stopped smack in front of me. I knew it was a Kenworth just from the way it looked: the shape of the hood, the windshield, the smokestacks, the location of the lights. But that grille bonnet proved it. Because there it was, big and silver: the Kenworth emblem, which looks like a shield with bars runnin’ up and down and a circle in the middle with a big KW, the K over the W.

  Vocabulary is not my thing, but I tried to think of the word: predestined? preordained? Well, anyway, pre-something! My dad’s rig was a Kenworth and I knew that truck inside and out. I turned my head away and dropped my jaw as in, do you believe this? But I stayed quiet until the trucker climbed down out of the cab. Hiking up his jeans and putting a cell phone to his ear, he started walking toward the restaurant. He limped on one leg, and over the crunch of gravel I heard him say, “I’m stoppin’ to get somethin’ to eat. This little place here off sixty-eight, they make great biscuits and sausage gravy . . .”

  So he wasn’t going in just to use the restroom or get a cup of coffee. He was going to sit down and eat great biscuits and gravy. Man, I would’ve liked to put away some of that breakfast, too. Just thinking about it made me drool, but this was my big chance and I didn’t have a lot of time to waste.

  As soon as that guy disappeared into the building, I walked up to his truck and looked it over. Of course no trucker would leave his keys in the ignition. But starting the truck wasn’t the problem. So long as the truck was a diesel built before 1992—and it looked like it was—I knew I could hot-wire the thing from underneath. See, the old diesels were combustion engines, not electric like the new ones. You couldn’t hot-wire a new truck like you could this one. Getting inside the truck was the challenge for me.

  Okay. I saw right away that just behind the driver’s door was the outside entrance to his sleeping compartment, and that underneath was a smaller door, which was his toolbox. (My dad used to stash a bottle of vodka in his toolbox.) I took a look around but didn’t see a soul, so I opened the toolbox door and reached my arm way up inside and felt around. Sure enough, there was a lever that popped open the door above to the cab’s sleeper. Only reason I knew about that lever was ’cause my dad was always losing his keys or leaving them inside the cab and this was how he broke into his own truck. For a second, I sort of spun halfway around and smiled. I couldn’t believe how easy that was.

  When the door popped open, I moved quickly, stepping up and throwing myself inside, right on the guy’s bed. It was real comfy and had a soft brown blanket and a couple pillows. I was thinking I’d take that blanket with me when I left. Between the sleeper and the
cab there was a little closet and I could see the trucker had two shirts hanging in there, along with a thick gray jacket. I’d take some of them clothes, too, I thought. Maybe, if I had time to rummage around, I’d find some dry socks.

  No time to lose though.

  I crawled through the sleeper into the cab and lowered myself down in the driver’s seat. So far, so good, I thought, as I started throwing things around, trying to find the right tool to start the truck. On the console between the two front seats I found a jackknife and pushed that in my pocket. Found a Snickers bar, too—my favorite!—and tore into it right away, taking a huge bite. Next, I came across three folded dollars and change and stuffed that in my other pocket. All at once, I remembered the toolbox. I’d check that for what I needed, I thought, but suddenly what I needed was right smack in front of me on the console: a screwdriver.

  After grabbing that screwdriver, I reached down to the left of the steering wheel, to pull a T-handle into the override position, which basically opened the fuel valve under the truck. And one more thing: I unlocked the driver’s-side door.

  Screwdriver in one hand, I shoved the rest of that candy bar into my mouth and slid out, partially closing the door so I could get back in fast. I cast another glance around, to be sure no one was watching me, then I bent over and crawled behind the huge front tires, beneath the truck.