2 Minutes. Go! Road Trip Edition

We were on the road to Amsterdam, my girl Susan and I. Actually, we were on the road to Rochester, but I’d never been further west than Amsterdam, so that’s where I drew the line. Beyond that was international waters.

I was driving my my old man’s ’63 Monte Carlo to make a visit to where I was going to go to college. We were zipping along in the morning darkness and listening to the radio, when she turned to me and said, “You’re going to leave me after this, aren’t you?”

“This trip?” I said.

“If not this trip, Kenny, then when you finally get to college. When you finally get out from under your parents’ thumb, get away from high school and from me. Get away from me and have all those older girls out there looking for someone to replace their own college guy. Pluck you right at the first beer blast.”

My cheeks got all hot and I just started blurting, like she caught me actually doing it.

“How can you say that, Suse? You and I have been a couple since you were in ninth grade and me in tenth. I’ve never even looked at another girl that way since then. I’ll be coming back home at the end of September. Write you twice a week. Call you more than that, if you want. I mean, c’mon, what have I ever done to betray your trust?”

She sat way over by the passenger side door, staring out at the trees and the Mohawk as we cruised by. I could see her reflection in the window and she was crying, quietly, but crying.

After another five or so miles, she whispered in a crackly little whisper, a broken pice of china whisper, “You promise?”

“Of course,” I said. “You’re the one for me, Suse. Just like I’m your guy. Now don’t you worry. Why don’t you come on over here by me? We’ve got a couple of hundred more miles to go and I want that to be the only distance I have to worry about today.”

She slid on over and everything was pretty much like it always was again. And when I left home for college, she came along with my folks to move me in. I wrote three letters to her that first week. Called three times, too. And when the first beer blast came, I hung with my guys and never even sniffed at the bait those sweet western New York girls were leaving out for me to bite.

And when the second beer blast came along came along, I took Gail Sajak back to my room and we did what we promised our “others” we’d never do when we left them home. And I didn’t feel the least bit guilty.

That’s because my sweet Suse sent me that letter that said:

“My dear dear Kenny, How are you? Senior year is something else. We’ve had our first game and then a Friday night dance. I don’t know how to tell you this, but… Do you know Tony Musella?”

​“His father’s father was Métis, you know…rode with Riel in ’69. And his father fought with Dumont at Duck Lake and Batoche in ’85,” Sheriff Hank Reynolds said as he pulled the glasses off his nose after reading the arrest report.
​“That may be so, Sheriff, but it doesn’t give Liberté Beaubois license to ride into Montana, hunt protected buffalo and take a couple of shots at my head. Does it?” asked Reynolds’ new deputy, Linus Philkin.
​“Shoot at you and the buffs? No. Ride a free man in a world without stiff collars sniffing his every turn? That used to mean something round here.”
​Reynolds wiped a few drops of coffee off his graying moustache and walked back to the holding cell, where he stared at a buckskin-clad man sleeping on the floor, face to the wall. Even though Beaubois was lying on a mattress he’d pulled off the cot, Reynolds recalled seeing that back wrapped in bedroll across many a campfire, almost too many years before.
​The sheriff rubbed his hand across his bald spot and recalled wind blowing his hair when he, Liberté and some Piegan boys from over Milk River way would ride hell-bent for election from Mounties or chased buffalo that would wander onto his father’s place. That was in the days before the Somme, before Liberté came home with a Victoria Cross and Croix de guerre in exchange for his childhood, an eye and, some said, his mind.
​“I’ll take care of this,” Reynolds said.
​“You going to ride him out of town and give him one of those ‘don’t come back’ talks like you gave those hobos last week?” Philkin asked.
​Reynolds rubbed the sores on his knuckles and nodded.
​“Something like that, yes.”
​Reynolds half-carried, half-pushed his prisoner into his Ford pickup truck. Beaubois leaned against the window, his breath forming a white cloud obscuring his dark face. Reynolds walked Beuabois’ buckskin gelding into the trailer behind his truck, snugging it to the chain next to his own bay.
​“You looking for any more trouble, Liberté?” Reynolds asked he and his charge trailed a tail of dust from Chester up to Hank’s father’s old place outside Whitlash.
​“No, Hank. Just don’t want no more nightmares, no more have-tos, no more cops telling a free man what he can and can’t do. I had enough of that in their schools, their army, their hospitals and in jails from Calgary to your little pokey. And that’s the last place I wanted to be. Honest to God. You know…” Liberte’s voice trailed off.​
​“I know how you feel, bud,” Reynolds said, stopping the truck as it crested a hill. Below them about a dozen buffalo grazed. “I’m tired, too. What say we wake up some ghosts?”
​The two men slid from the truck and limped to the back of the trailer, where they saddled, mounted and pointed their ponies north, kicking them down the rise and toward a place where they knew dreams were made and nightmares were still just scary stories around a campfire. All the while Hank Reynolds and Liberté Beaubois howled like twelve-year-olds, chasing shaggy memories through the Sweet Grass back into more than Alberta.