Chapter 6: Afternoon on the Trailer Steps
The sun was directly overhead by the time I walked down the shoulder of Route 66 toward the Sunnyside Trailer Park. True to Clara's warning, I'd left the Harley parked behind a boarded-up fruit stand half a mile back, hidden behind a stack of rotting wooden crates. Walking without the heavy vibration of the engine felt weird—my boots made a dry, crunching sound on the gravelly asphalt, and the empty space around me felt too wide, too exposed to the vast, pitiless blue of the Arizona sky.
When I turned into the dirt drive of Trailer #14, the heat radiating off the baked earth was enough to make the air shimmer a few inches off the ground. The place looked even more forlorn in the glaring midday light than it had in the dusk. A rusted tricycle with one missing pedal lay on its side in the patchy dirt patch they called a yard, and a plastic clothesline strung between two rusted iron poles held a single pair of small blue jeans and a woman's faded yellow shirt dancing stiffly in the dry wind.
The screen door was propped open with a brick, and inside, sitting on the narrow wooden floorboards just inside the threshold, was Leo.
He looked up the second my shadow fell across the doorway. He wasn't holding the photograph today. Instead, he had a stubby yellow pencil in one hand and a lined spiral notebook spread out across his knees. His messy light brown hair was sticking up in a wild tuft on the left side of his head, and his big hazel eyes locked onto mine with that same unsettling, unblinking intensity I'd seen in the diner.
"You came back," he said. His voice was small, almost fragile, like he expected me to vanish if he spoke too loud.
"I said I would," I replied, stepping up onto the porch. The old wood groaned under my boots, a familiar, complaining sound. I didn't go inside; I just sat down on the edge of the top step, resting my forearms on my knees, about three feet away from him.
From down the hallway, I could hear the faint hum of a small box fan and the sound of water running in the kitchen sink. Clara was in there, moving quietly, her presence felt rather than seen. She wasn't about to come out and hold my hand through this, and I was damn glad for it. This was between me and the kid.
Leo looked down at his notebook, then back up at me, his small fingers nervously twisting the yellow pencil around. "Mom said you used to ride all over the country with a big gang. She said you had a jacket with snakes on the back."
"Dragons," I corrected automatically, then caught myself. I let out a dry, humorless huff of a laugh. "Well, eagles and skulls mostly. Not snakes."
"Did you ever go to California?"
"Yeah. Saw the ocean once. Looked like a big gray parking lot with waves."
Leo’s eyes widened a fraction. "Mom never took me to the ocean. She said it cost too much for gas."
"Gas is expensive," I agreed, staring out at the empty gravel lot where a stray dog was sniffing halfheartedly at a rusted tin can. The simplicity of the statement hung between us, heavy with all the years of missed rent checks, cheap meals, and quiet desperation that Clara had carried while I was sitting around campfires in the desert drinking warm beer and talking about freedom.
The boy shifted closer, bringing with him the clean, soapy smell of laundry detergent and dust. Without a word, he reached into the pocket of his oversized shirt and pulled out the small folded piece of paper—the same one he’d brought to the diner counter yesterday. He held it out toward me on the flat of his palm, his hand steady even though his lower lip gave a tiny, almost imperceptible quiver.
"Mom didn't want me to show you this," he whispered, lowering his voice so it wouldn't carry down the narrow hallway toward the kitchen. "She found it in the bottom of her cedar chest behind the winter coats. She said it was yours from before I was born."
May you like
I reached out, my large, calloused fingers—stained with years of grease and scarred from knuckle-fights—closing gently over the small slip of paper. It was an old piece of lined notebook paper, yellowed at the edges and folded into a tight square so many times the creases were practically worn through.
My throat felt suddenly dry, like I'd swallowed a mouthful of desert sand. I took a slow breath, my chest rising and falling beneath the heavy leather vest, and unfolded it with trembling fingers.
