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“Thanks,” he said. “Where you boys heading?”

“Seattle,” I said. This guy bugged me.

“Just left Seattle myself,” he said, adding, “bound for Florida. Been out ten days.”

I did some quick mental math. He’d been enjoying tailwinds daily if he’d made that kind of time.

“But this wind,” he said again, “this wind’s about to make me lose it. It just blows and blows and blows.”

“Sort of like some people,” I said.

“Say again?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I muttered.

“You guys thinking about camping here tonight?” he asked. “’Cause if you are, I might join you. Don’t think I feel like going another twenty miles to town with this flag beating on my helmet the whole way,” he half laughed.

“Gee,” I said, “that really sucks.” I could have pointed out that removing the flag might be just crazy enough to work, but that would have been helpful. I’d already fulfilled my road karma with the patch donation.

“Actually, we were just leaving,” Win said, snatching up his helmet and righting his bike.

I nodded. “Yeah, no water, no scamp,” I said, sounding cheerful.

He seemed to deflate a little at this rejection, looking like he could use a patch job himself. Maybe having someone to listen to him bitch about a tailwind all night would have made his
whole day worthwhile. “Nice riding, then,” he said, climbing back onto his bike. He turned his wheels into the stream of the wind and caught the air like a sail. He was a quarter mile away in thirty seconds.

“Idiot,” Win muttered, jamming his foot into the clip.

I laughed. Glad to have my friend doing more than going postal on a natural phenomenon.

“Complete,” I agreed. “Didn’t even occur to him to take that flag off.”

Win pushed down on his pedal, shouted over his shoulder. “I didn’t mean him,” he said in a way that made me know he didn’t mean me, either.

“Follow me,” he said. “Your turn to draft for a while.” I obeyed, still a little stunned by the transformation.

Six mile markers and an hour later we saw the truck. Since balancing at such a slow pace was proving impossible, we’d dismounted three times to push our bikes into the wind.

The beat-up Chevy sat parked beside the road, fifty yards or so from where a man in overalls and a trucker hat was peering into the open engine of a red tractor.

Grateful for a little bit of shelter, we hunkered down behind the pickup.

“This is insane,” I said, wondering if Win hadn’t been right that the wind was less a force of nature and more a form of evil. I still hadn’t shaken his comment or asked him about it.
I’m not going back
.

“We’re not riding anymore today,” he said, leaning his bike against the pickup and walking toward the tractor.

“Where’re you going?” I shouted.

He called back over his shoulder without stopping, “To get us out of here.”

I followed, caught up to him as he pulled level with the farmer.

“Excuse me, sir?” Win said. The man pulled his head from under the canopy and turned to survey us.

“Afternoon, boys,” he said, dropping the wrench into a toolbox at his feet.

“Sir,” Win began, his voice hoarse, “we’re riding our bikes cross-country, and we’ve come all the way from West Virginia. But now we’ve got this wind, and there’s no way we’ll make it to water tonight on our own.”

The man turned, leaning against the giant wheel. He surveyed the way the wheat in the field across the road was bending and thrashing. “Probably not,” he agreed.

“So, if it’s not too much trouble, could you maybe give us a lift to town? We can throw our bikes in the back. We’ll even pay you for gas,” he said. I wondered if this might be the time that Win broke into that stash of bills he had hidden in his pannier.

The farmer frowned. “What’d you say your name was, son?”

“Win … my name’s Winston.”

“And you?” he asked, pointing a greasy hand at me.

“Chris,” I offered.

He smiled. Looked down at his hands, said more to himself than to us, “That was my boy’s name.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Neither did Win, so we just looked at each other and waited for the farmer to speak again.

“I don’t get up to town much,” he said after a long pause. “And
I don’t think I’ll be heading in tonight. Camp at my farm if you like. There’s water, and you can set your tent up in the barn to get out of this wind.”

I looked to Win. This was probably the best offer we could hope for. “Okay,” Win said.

The farmer nodded. “Name’s Morgan.” He offered a hand creased black with oil. I took it and was surprised by the strength of his grip. After shaking Win’s hand, he lifted his toolbox and headed toward the truck. “That thing’s not going to get fixed today,” he said, nodding back at the tractor. “Let’s go.”

He dropped the tailgate, shoved his toolbox shrieking along the beat-up bottom. Win and I lifted our bikes onto the bed and closed the gate.

He climbed into the driver’s seat, reached over, and opened the passenger door. “Sticks from the outside,” he said as we slid in. I straddled the engine well in the middle, my knees inches from my chin.

Morgan started the engine. “You boys rode those bikes all this way?”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“This is the first time we’ve hitched,” Win said.

Morgan seemed to consider this. “Then, I suppose we ought not actually cover any ground,” he said.

I was confused, but I understood what he meant as soon as he turned the wheels off the highway shoulder and aimed for the field. In the distance I could see a yellow two-story farmhouse with a porch hugging its front and sides, a grove of tall oaks jerking and swaying in the wind.

“No such thing as a shortcut on any journey worth making,” he added.

This guy understood. On a level that he didn’t even have to ask about, he got it.

“But the field …,” I began as the pickup bounced along the rows, green plants thrashing at the doors.

He shook his head. “Just peas. Ready to harvest anyway. I’ll be driving through ’em in a few days when I get that tractor mended.”

Win was smiling.

“Ever had fresh peas?” Morgan asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe?”

“If a man don’t know if he’s had fresh peas, he ain’t had fresh peas,” he said, opening the truck door without easing off the accelerator. In the next moment he leaned out, swooped an arm down from the cab, and came back up a second later with a handful of broken plants bearing perfect green pods.

“Well, that’s hardly going to feed one of us,” he said. “Win?”

The smile didn’t change as Win threw open his door and repeated the process two or three times, until I was holding a pile of peas and branches on my lap. I laughed. So did Win. Morgan smiled.

“I love the wind,” Win said.

This time I knew exactly what he meant.

“Folks, we’re making real good time, so I’m gonna pull the bus on over and have a smoke,” the driver mumbled into the speaker. It was two in the morning. I hadn’t been able to sleep, but I was pretty sure the driver was using the smoke breaks to stay awake. The bus stopped, and half a dozen people filed out. I stood, stowed my bag on my seat, and headed up the aisle.

I hadn’t taken up smoking, but peeing under the stars and getting a little fresh air seemed in order.

I had the postcard—the second one from the Unabomber box that my mother had forwarded—in my pocket. And she’d called right before the long weekend began and told me that another one had arrived, same postmark. Win wanted me to find him.

After all he’d put me through, I wasn’t keen to give Win what he wanted. For the last ten years he’d had a knack for getting his way—either by laziness or by manipulation. Now that he was completely screwing up my life, I resented this even more. And it wasn’t just mine. My dad’s job was in peril.

But here I was, even though I had only a general range of where Win could be. Assuming he was still using his bike, he couldn’t be traveling from that far away to mail the cards. Morgan’s farm was somewhere between Virden and Browning. With the hills, I figured the maximum he could do in an out-and-back ride was around ninety miles, if he was still in shape.

Even if he was at the farm, I had no idea how to get there. I’d never figured out if Morgan was a first or last name, and I doubted if I could have instructed anybody on how to get to his place just looking at a map. There must have been two dozen farms stretched across that piece of Route 2 on the way to Glacier, all with the same peeling paint, endless fields, and looming mountains.

But he’d be there. And the truth was, I wanted to find him. Partly because I was so pissed. Pissed that I was pretty sure he knew exactly what he was doing—exactly how his folks would react and what a mess he’d made of my life. That part wanted to find him, beat the crap out of him, and then haul his carcass back to his parents and Abe Ward.

But the other part of me was pulled by something less definitive than anger. Maybe it was just the need to see if he was all right. Maybe it was to find out what the hell he’d been thinking when he ditched me. Maybe just to see if he was the same person.

I descended the last step and walked past the huddle of nicotine
addicts sharing lighters and stories. I went about thirty yards beyond, where their smoke couldn’t pollute the clean, chilled air, and unzipped my fly.

I knew this place. By some freaky, random coincidence, the bus had been forced off the freeway by road construction early last night. Now we were following Route 2, passing spots I remembered from the bike trip.

A few hours ago we’d taken a smoke break half a mile from a trailer where Win and I had stopped for water. Last summer we knocked on the screen door, and three little kids crowded at the mesh as their mother spoke to us from inside. After she pointed out the spigot on the side of the house, the kids cautiously edged out, peeked at our bikes like they were racehorses, and began asking questions. The mother, at first watching us suspiciously from the top stoop, eventually made it all the way to the bottom, where she sat holding her sides and giggling as we told her and her kids a couple of the funnier anecdotes from the trip. She gave us a whole banana cream pie when we left, making us promise not to eat it until we’d had our dinner that night. Win made a show of tying it down carefully across his handlebars, the plastic lid and edges of the aluminum pie tin buckling under the strain of the bungee. We made it about two miles, until we were out of sight, then ducked behind an abandoned gas station and downed the pie faster than I could patch a flat.

And an hour ago I’d seen a billboard advertising the Wonder Hut, a random little museum filled with assorted specimens in jars and bottles. It was sort of a mad scientist’s zoo—a collection of taxidermy and jars of formaldehyde filled with two-headed fetal pigs or
supposed alien remains. After seeing the signs for two hundred miles before we reached it, we were desperate for something more interesting than roadkill, so we forked over the three-dollar admission fee. I got a kick out of it and kept trying to draw Win into making fun of it with me. But something about those animals pinned up on the wall spooked him. He got quiet and ran through it like it was an obstacle course rather than a museum.

Where I stood now was just like the rest of North Dakota: flat and criminally boring. All the same, I convinced myself that it held some significance. This might have been the spot where we began jousting. On these empty stretches with nothing to see, no hills to climb, no lakes to jump into, we’d started wasting water when we should have been saving it. One afternoon I took off in a sprint ahead of Win. He didn’t chase me, didn’t even ask what I was doing. When I was about fifty yards ahead, I wheeled my bike around, slid my water bottle from its cage, and held it aloft. Even from that distance I saw the smile break. Without a word he pulled out his own bottle, uncapped the stopper valve with his teeth, and held it high. We both increased our tempo, charging toward each other. When we were close enough to hear each other’s chains spinning though the freewheels, we lowered our bottles, aimed, and fired. By the time we had three or four more passes like that, we were soaked. And laughing.

The last thirty-six hours on the bus had been filled with memories like this one. And now I was confused. When I thought about all the trouble he was causing, I wanted to find Win and kick his ass. But when I remembered the epic, hilarious, and transcendent moments of the trip, I wanted to find him, get on a bike, and go for another long ride.

The Greyhound’s engine turned over, and I began walking backward, gazing at the stars and the silhouette of the hills for as long as I could before turning. I wasn’t the only one trying to make the break last. An overweight woman wearing an “Austin 3:16” T-shirt was making the most of the tail end of her Virginia Slim.

I stepped aside to let her climb on first. While she hoisted herself up that first step, I took one last look around, drinking in the stillness and the quiet and the memory. I remembered camping in the open with Win on nights like this, with the stars so close they almost frightened me.

But not that close. I squinted and looked back down the road behind the bus. A pinprick of red-orange light flared in the black for just a moment. Firefly?

But then I saw it flare again and burn just a little longer, before the ember fell to the pavement and disappeared.

“Let’s go, kid,” the driver said to me.

I pointed to where I’d seen the light. “But I think there’s somebody back there,” I said.

The driver shook his head. “Nope. Just did a head count. You’re the last one on. Again.”

I took another glance back where I’d seen what I was sure now was a cigarette tip burning, and pulled myself up the steps. The driver was right, nobody appeared to be missing. But if that person wasn’t on our bus, then …

The bus lurched back onto the highway as I fumbled down the aisle to my seat. I was certain I’d seen something. And now I was starting to fear what it meant. Starting to wonder what possible reason somebody might have for pulling over in the middle of
nowhere on a lonely highway a quarter mile behind a bus at two in the morning.