Anyway Mort comes to me on Tuesday after milking, it’s still early in the morning but it’s summer and so there isn’t any school and he says, “Hey, Runt, you still want a bike?”

  “Hey shutup,” I said, thinking he’s making fun of me again.

  He says, “OK, Runt, if that’s the way you want it. Only I know how you can get the money.”

  Well, I thought that sounded pretty good, so I says to him, “Hey, Mort, what is it, Darcia paying you a dollar a smooch?”

  “I’d be a millionaire then,” he says, and I think yeah, sure.

  But I followed him around behind the barn and he tells me his plan. “See, we just hitch a ride with somebody over on I-15.”

  “Somebody’s gonna pay us to hitchhike?” I says, real snotty, because if I get snotty he tells me faster.

  “Don’t get snotty with me, Runt,” he says, and then like I figured he told me. “They’re gonna pay us to get out. I read about it in the newspaper.” That means that somebody who reads the newspaper told him. “You get a ride with somebody, and then you pull a gun or a knife and make them pull off onto some lonely place or a rest stop or somewhere there isn’t a lot of cars, and then you take their money and their car and leave ’em there. Or else you leave ’em their car and hitch a ride back with somebody else.”

  I thought for a minute and I says, “I bet that’s stealing.”

  “Ooooooh,” he says, making faces like an old lady who just heard a bad word. “Ooooooh, I forgot, you always go to Sunday School.”

  Which is true. I have to keep going till I’m fourteen. The old man says that till you’re fourteen you can’t decide for yourself. But I always stick gum under the folding chairs.

  “Look, Mort,” I says, “all I care about is that if we get caught they’ll stick us in jail.”

  “They can’t,” says Mort, “because we’re both minors.”

  “I am not,” I says, wondering what the hell being a miner has to do with going to jail.

  “You are too and so am I. It means being under eighteen years old. That’s why we can’t buy beer or cigarettes. But it also means they can’t put is in jail.”

  “Yeah, but we’d go to the JD place in Fillmore.”

  “Jeez,” says Mort, “what a runt, Runt. This’d be the first thing we ever did wrong, they don’t send you to Fillmore till you done a lot of stuff.”

  “What about painting Elton Barney’s cow green?”

  He just rolled his eyes in his head. “You remember what Sheriff Burton said?” Mort asked me, like I was real dumb. “He said, ‘Boys will be boys.’ ”

  He said that, but I still didn’t know about pulling a knife on somebody.

  “Besides,” says Mort, “the guy we hit isn’t gonna know who we are or where we come from.”

  “I don’t think I want a bike that bad,” I says, thinking how I really don’t want a paper route if I gotta go to the JD place for it.

  “Man, what a knockout,” says Mort. “I find out that my brother’s a chicken, besides being a runt.”

  Nobody calls me a chicken.

  So there we were out on I-15 thumbing for a ride. Not too many people want to pick up farmers with manure on their boots, so we put on our Sunday clothes and snuck out of the house so the Olds wouldn’t ask us where we was going.

  But the cars still wasn’t piling up in line to pick us up. Of course, on a lot of them Mort says, “Not this one.” And then I asked him why, and he says, “Car’s too old, this guy doesn’t have any dough,” and then one time he says, “This guy’s really rich, all he’s gonna have is checks and credit cards.” Credit cards in your pocket isn’t much good on the farm, and anyway nobody’d be fooled, they know me and Mort and they know we never could get a credit card.

  So we waited for about two hours getting hotter and sweatier and I was thinking what the hell kind of dumb thing am I doing out here? But then we see this shiny new yellow car coming along and there’s just one person in it, either a girl with short hair or a guy with long hair, and old Mort jumps out in the freeway sticking his thumb out and the car slows down and the girl (this close we could tell she was a girl) flips open the back door. Me, I got in back, but old Mort, he reached through, unlocked the front, and sat down next to her.

  Audi, bucket seats, thing looked like it cost a million bucks and when she started off it felt like we wasn’t even moving except the telephone poles flipped by like beanpoles when you’re running.

  She was pretty but old, probably twenty or thirty, and if she wasn’t sitting right there I know old Mort would’ve leaned back and said, “Stacked, man, stacked.” Instead he just kept playing with his pocket where he had a knife.

  “Where you going?” she asked us, and since we wasn’t going anyplace I didn’t know what to say, but Mort says, “Noplace you’re going, but maybe you’ll come close. Where you headed?” he asks her.

  “Las Vegas,” she says, and I wonder if she’s one of them topless dancers.

  “You one of them topless dancers?” Mort asks her.

  “No,” she says, laughing. Jeez, Mort can be dumb sometimes.

  “How old are you?” she asks us.

  “I’m fourteen,” I lied. Mort said, “I’m seventeen,” which makes him a bigger liar than me, since I was only one year off, but Mort’s big and hairy and so everybody figures he’s older than he is.

  Well, it was still hot but there was clouds coming in from the south and it looked like a dust storm was coming up and then rain, and so I figured we oughta get it over with so we could get back home before we got our Sunday clothes all wet and the old lady chewed us hollow. So I says, “Hey, Mort, what’re you waiting for?”

  “What do you mean?” asks the girl.

  “Oh, nothing,” says Mort, shooting me a glare like I should drop dead.

  “Well?” says I, since I don’t like him glaring at me that way.

  So he reached down into his pocket and pulled out his hunting knife and took it out of the sheath and reached over and stuck it right next to her ribs and he gets this mean look on his face and says, “Pull over.”

  I gotta say that girl looked surprised and scared, but she didn’t go crazy or anything. She just had kind of a shaky voice when she said, “Right here?”

  Mort thought a second and said, “No about a mile up ahead there’s a dirt road off to the right.”

  And then her face turned all white and I felt real bad about what we was doing, because I wanted a ten-speed all right, but I didn’t like the way she looked.

  She sped up to about seventy-five.

  “There’s the road, right there, after that rock,” says Mort.

  She sped up to eighty-five.

  “What the hell’re you doing?” Mort says. “I said to pull over.” And his face got real mean looking, like it does when he’s trying to scare some sucker into backing down without a fight.

  “I know your kind,” she says, her voice all shaky. “You’ll get me off there and take my money and my car and you’ll rape me and kill me.”

  “No we won’t,” I says.

  “I’ll kill you right here,” says Mort, really getting upset, I could tell because his ears was getting red.

  “Go ahead,” she says. “At the speed I’m going if you kill me we’d smash up before you had a chance to get the car under control. Besides, I don’t think you know how to drive.”

  Course we both did, we’d been driving a tractor since we was eight. But I sure didn’t want to crash at ninety miles an hour, and tell you the truth, I didn’t like it how her hands was shaking taking those turns.

  “You’ll run out of gas pretty soon,” says Mort.

  “I get fifty miles to the gallon,” she says, and her gas gauge was up above half. “I’ll get to Las Vegas first.”

  “Slow down,” I says, because she wasn’t keeping in the lanes too good.

  She sped up to a hundred and I needed to go to the bathroom.

  “Please,” I says, “this isn’t safe.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “At this speed we’re bound to pass a highway patrolman and he’ll pull us over and I’ll tell him what you were trying to do.”

  She was right. We was over a barrel, like they say, and Mort knew it too.

  “Jeez,” he says, “I could cut you up into little pieces.”

  He always says that when he’s mad but doesn’t want to fight.

  She just shook harder and took a turn a little sharper and the car screeched a lot going around the turn. The wind had come up now cause we was driving into the storm, and I thought we’d get blown off the road in a minute.

  “Hey, please Mort, let’s quit, OK?” I says.

  Mort clicked his tongue and then he says, “Man, you got a chicken for a brother nothing goes right.” Then he put the knife back into the sheath. I didn’t even mind him calling me a chicken, just so the car slowed down.

  But she didn’t slow down and the car was up around 105, probably as fast as it could go with a headwind.

  “Hey, I put the knife away, slow down,” says Mort, and suddenly I figured out he was as scared as I was. In the old man’s Plymouth you never got much above 65, and we always went 55 if the old lady was in the car.

  “If I slow down you’ll just pull the knife out and kill me,” she says.

  “Mort’ll throw it out the window,” I says. “That way he can’t pull it out again. And then you can just let us out anywhere along here, we’ll walk.”

  Mort glares at me again, but then we took another turn that slammed us over against the doors and Mort rolled down his window and threw out his knife. That knife cost him, too, and I knew he felt bad throwing it like that, even though I knew we’d hunt for it for a month before he’d ever give up finding it.

  “OK, the knife’s gone, now pull over and let us out,” Mort says, and now his voice is shaky.

  “Uh-uh,” says the girl, and then she says, “How do I know you don’t have something else hidden in your clothes.”

  “Cause I said so,” says Mort.

  “I’m supposed to believe you?” says the girl.

  “I never told a lie in my life,” says Mort, though I figure that was about his ten millionth lie this year.

  “You just go around pulling knives on people.”

  “Hey, look,” says Mort, “we’re sorry.”

  “Yeah, we’re sorry,” I says.

  “Shutup, Runt,” he says.

  “I’ll just wait until the highway patrol stops us,” she says.

  And I noticed that her voice wasn’t shaky anymore.

  “Please,” I says. “We’ll never do it again. We just wanted the money so I could get a ten-speed bike. We wasn’t gonna kill anybody.”

  “Sure,” she says, and a gust of wind tossed us from the lefthand lane into the righthand lane, and I sure was glad we wasn’t driving in the righthand lane in the first place. “You’ve got a knife hidden somewhere else.”

  “Honest, I don’t,” he says.

  “Prove it,” she says.

  “How?” he says.

  “Take off your clothes and throw them out the window,” she says.

  “The hell I will,” says Mort.

  “That’s the only way I’ll know I’m safe,” she says. “But I’d rather wait till we pass a highway patrolman anyway.”

  “We’ll be dead before that,” I says, because right then the dust storm hit, and you couldn’t see thirty feet ahead. And this was the windingest part of I-15.

  “Take off your clothes and throw them out the window,” she says, and believe me, I just whipped off my shirt and my pants and my shoes and my socks and tossed them right out, even though when I opened the window the car filled up with dust. And after a minute Mort gritted his teeth and did the same. And there we sat in our jockey shorts, 5 for three dollars through the catalog.

  “OK,” Mort says, “now let us out.”

  “I said take off all your clothes,” she says, and I looked at her and figured out she wasn’t scared any more at all, she was just getting even for how we got her scared before. But it didn’t make no difference nohow, like the old man says, cause I’d have drunk straight 10/40 motor oil just to get out of that car in that dust storm. So I took off my shorts and tossed ’em out the window and then I leaned forward and kind of covered myself with my arms, which I folded in my lap like a little kid in Sunday School.

  But Mort didn’t make a move to take off his shorts, and by then I was so scared I started yelling at him to take off his damn shorts and then I started to cry and so he did it and threw them out the window. But he leaned forward just like I did, and covered himself, and he turned red, and just looked at the floor, and I sure as hell knew right then that he hadn’t ever seen Darcia Kleinsmidt with all her clothes off or he wouldn’t be blushing like a bad sunburn right now.

  And I stopped crying right then and for the first time in my life I felt sorry for old Mort and felt like I oughta help him. So I says, “OK, lady, you had your joke, now stop this car and let us get the hell out and get our clothes and go home.” I was madder’n hell and I glared her down as mean as I ever did the old lady when she made me help with the dishes, and she kind of looked sick and slowed down the car and stopped. It felt so good not to be going a hundred miles an hour that we just sat there for a second before she said, “Get the hell out of my car!” and then Mort and I opened the doors, even if it meant using one of our hands that was covering ourself, and we got out into the dust storm and she took off fast and there we were, stark naked on the freeway in a dust storm about fifteen miles from home and a mile from the nearest clothes.

  And then, of course, the dust storm stopped and it started to rain like crazy and Mort says, “Damn damn damn damn damn,” and I says, “I wanta find my clothes.”

  So we walked along the freeway until we saw a car coming and then we dove down off into the dirt and brush beside the road so they wouldn’t see us without any clothes on, only the dirt was mud from the rain and we was covered with it. “Damn damn damn,” says Mort, and I says, “Come on, Mort,” and he says, “You and your damn ten-speed bike.” We walked on to where we threw our underwear out the window only the wind had blown it away and we couldn’t see it anywheres and we was soaking wet.

  But we figured as how our shoes and pants wouldn’t blow as far as our shorts, so we went on, dodging down into the mud whenever a car came, which wasn’t all that often around here. When we got out of the mud then the rain would wash it off until the next time.

  Finally I found both my socks hung up on the bobwire fence along the edge of the freeway only thirty feet back and my shoes was right nearby, and Mort found one of his socks and both his shoes and finally I found my shirt hung up on the bobwire, too. I put it on, even though it was cold and wet, and I didn’t feel so naked cause it was my Sunday shirt with the long tails, but poor Mort was still stark naked with mud on his feet, carrying two shoes and one sock, and when he saw me standing there in my shirt he started yelling about how I’d screwed up the whole thing and if it hadn’t been for me and my ten-speed he’d be up in the barn with Darcia Kleinsmidt right now and what the hell did he have to have such a dumb little brother for and he wished he was an only child and it was all my fault and after this went on for a while I started to cry, because I felt like it was all true and I felt bad and anyway, I’d had a bad scare, I don’t want you to think I cry alot but I think that was about the worst time in my whole life, but after a while Mort’s calling me dumb made me mad and I took off running.

  It was then that I saw both our pants out in the median strip hung up on some big sagebrush and I cut across the freeway without looking and so did Mort and just as we reached our pants we heard a car squeal to a stop and there was Sheriff Burton looking like he seen a ghost.

  We just kind of stood there holding our pants while he crossed the road.

  “Well, if it ain’t Morton and Ernest Olson,” he says, when he got over to us. “What the hell’re you doin’ stark naked in the middle of the freeway?”

  We didn’t know exactly how to explain. But I was still mad at Mort and so I played dumb, seeing as how he always said I was. “Gee, Mr. Burton,” I says in my Sunday School voice, “I don’t know. Mort here is always telling me how I’m dumb, but he told me it’d be real fun to play around like this in the freeway.”

  You shoulda seen the look on Mort’s face. But you really shoulda seen the look on Sheriff Burton’s face! He just grabbed Mort by the hair and said, “You better put those pants on fast and get in my car, boy.”

  Mort started to tell him something but the sheriff just looked at him real mad and said, “I don’t wanna hear one word, boy. Your pa’s gonna have plenty to say to you when I tell him how you been playing with your little brother.”

  So we put on our pants and carried our shoes and socks and got into Sheriff Burton’s car. The sheriff made me sit in front and he shoved Mort into the backseat and when he did I heard the sheriff say, “Fairy,” like the word was sour milk.

  Well, when we got home the old man went off to talk with the sheriff while the old lady yelled bloody murder and made us take off our clothes and have a bath, saying all the time how much clothes cost and if us kids ever had to pay for our own clothes we wouldn’t go off playing in the rain in our Sunday best.

  Then while I was in the tub with the old lady washing me like she hasn’t done in years since I was a kid, the old man came in with a real bad look on his face and said, “What happened,” and I thought of lying and then I figured that there wasn’t no way to explain how we got where we was except the truth, so I told him the whole thing, about the ten-speed and the girl in the Audi.

  When I was done, the old man said, “That true?” and I said, “Swear to God,” and the old lady said, “Don’t take the name of the Lord,” and the old man said, “Thank God, Sheriff Burton said my boy Morton was a fairy,” and the old lady said, “Now, Bill, how can I teach these boys proper with you taking the Lord’s name and saying fairy in front of them?” but the old man was out of the bathroom and off to talk to the sheriff.