2373
We saw a small fire ahead. It seemed only a hundred yards away but when we walked that far it seemed another hundred yards off. It ended up taking us fifteen minutes to reach it. It was higher in the dark than the road seemed to be.
Just before we came real close to it, we stumbled onto a dirt road branching off the paved road we were on. The fire was on the far bank of the dirt road.
It was a campfire all right. We could see yellow light reflecting off shapes around it now.
Three faces squinted into the dark at us. We crashed up the bank from the dirt road through some underbrush and into the light of the fire where they could see us.
Three young guys with long hair. One had a red beret with a yellow star, like in those posters of guerrillas. He was smiling to himself, staring at the flame, ignoring us.
One of the others said, “Wanna share the warm?”
Just like that. In the middle of the mountains, dropped off we didn’t know where, and there’s a welcoming campfire waiting for us. It gave me that feeling again of something going on all over that I was part of now.
So we sat with them. Their fire was starting to die down, a few embers flaring up here and there. The guy who’d invited us pulled a box of tobacco from the darkness behind him. “Help yourself.”
We spent the next five minutes fiddling with the papers and tobacco, trying to roll decent cigarettes.
We spent the next five minutes fiddling with the papers and tobacco, trying to roll decent cigarettes.
“Where you heading, man?” the talkative one said to Gus who was next to him.
“Vancouver. We just got dumped on the road here.”
“Bummer. You keep on that road and you end up in Van. Where we’re going too. But it’s a long way that way and we know this shortcut. Then we’re hitching down the coast to California. Then through Mexico to South America. Me and him.” He jerked his thumb at the guy on the other side of him. They both wore headbands.
I could make out other people in sleeping bags now behind them in the dark. A woman with the bag pulled up to her neck was sorta cupped around the quiet guy with a headband. Other bodies stretched out dead to the world. I had a moment thinking, shit, they’re dead bodies, and a flash of my parents’ warnings.
“Chicks too. All of us are going. As far as each of us wants to go. Except me and him. We’ll do it all the way for sure. We’re brothers.”
“Real brothers?” I said.
“I mean we’re brothers, man. Daniel over there, he’s like our commissar.” He nodded at the guy in the red beret. He said the name like Danielle but it was a guy.
“Your what?”
“He’s the one tells us if what we’re doing is right or wrong. Usually wrong. Political type. Not like us.” He wagged his thumb between himself and his friend in the headband. “We’re more the intuitive type. We just enjoy the life.”
Daniel or Danielle didn’t take his eyes off the fire.
Our talkative friend laughed. “He doesn’t like us calling him that. We do it to bug him cause he thinks he’s a revolutionary.”
The guy in the red beret said, “I’m not commissar of anyone.” He had a French accent.
“Nah, we’d never listen to him anyways.”
We watched the last flames flicker out. The embers were orange jewels on black velvet.
Gus said, “Want me to look for more wood?”
The woman in the sleeping bag whispered to the guy she was curled behind. They pulled back from the fire and started laying out something on the ground.
“I guess we’ll let it go for tonight,” said the guy. “Anyone wanna smoke up before we crash? Good weed.”
The guy in the beret shook his head slightly without looking up.
“We’re moving along,” I said. “So what’s that shortcut you were talking bout?”
He said the dirt road here cut through the mountains for eighty miles or so and came out two hundred miles further down the main road. It was made for lumber trucks but lots of cars took it cause drivers around here knew it was faster.
He said the dirt road here cut through the mountains for eighty miles or so and came out two hundred miles further down the main road. It was made for lumber trucks but lots of cars took it cause drivers around here knew it was faster.
“But we’re first in line to hitch from this corner in the morning, man.”
“We’ll be gone by then,” I told him. We’d go down the road a piece, so if we didn’t find a ride tonight they’d still get first crack at the traffic from the corner in the morning.
We left the fire and twenty paces down the dirt road we were surrounded by total dark. We’d thought it was dark before but this was black. I looked back at the tiny glow of the campsite just as it was smothered.