that I didn’t have to be afraid, I could tell him the truth, and there was nothing the man in the other room, whether he was my dad or not, could do.
Apparently, the permission letter from my mom wasn’t cutting it with the border police. I knew that I could put an end to the whole summer-with-the old-man gig right then and there. All I had to do was say something like there I was drinking a slurpee and minding my own business and that nasty man in the other room came up to me and told me my cat had been run over by a car so I got in the pickup that he hadn’t even bothered to wash and the next thing I knew here we were at the border and please save me Officer Granfield. That’s all it would have taken, and I’d be spending the rest of my summer reading Catch-22 and drinking milk shakes and quite possibly doing amazing things to Jen Wertz’s body.
I didn’t do that. Partly because I figured even somebody as stupid as Granfield, who didn’t smell real good, especially in a room that wasn’t all that big and had like zero air flow, would eventually figure out I was lying. And also it wouldn’t have been fair. The last thing I wanted to be doing with the next few weeks of my life was going to freaking Saigon with the old man. But he’d been fair about it. He’d phoned Mom, and he’d obviously put out some serious money to pay for the trip, and he was even trying to make it okay for me. So I couldn’t really do something as dirty as rat him out at the border for something he hadn’t done.
Instead, I said to Granfield, “Why don’t you just phone my mom, and she’ll tell you if the letter is the real deal.”
I could see Granfield was pissed. He’d been all excited about the possibility of a big international case and saving some poor kidnapped child, and I’d just burst his bubble. We were out of there about five minutes later.
Back on the endless highway. The old man didn’t talk much, but I noticed he wasn’t twirling the hair anymore, and he was bopping to the music again.
We stopped at a diner in a place called Thief River Falls. There was a poster on the outside of the door advertising a PBR Bull Riding at the arena that night. I’d seen a couple of bull riding events and thought they were pretty cool. But I knew we wouldn’t be going to this one because we had to get our asses to Minneapolis so we could carry on to Saigon. Sweet.
“Have anything you want. I’m buyin’,” the old man said as we sat down. “They charge for airplane food except for the pretzels, and the food’s crap anyway. So let’s load up here.”
I ordered an open-faced western sandwich and the old man ordered a double order of veal cutlets. I figured anybody who ate double orders of stuff would have to be part of the North American Obesity Problem you read about all the time, but one thing I could say for the old man — he was as far from obese as you can get.
That didn’t stop him from tucking away the whole veal cutlet extravaganza. He ate fast at first, then slowed down and talked between pretty well every bite. Didn’t say a lot, but he was doing more talking now than at first.
“I’ve crossed the border dozens of times, and I still don’t like it. A lot of the border guards are pretty good guys, but every once in a while you get somebody who thinks he’s Dirty Harry — and the women can be just as bad.”
I didn’t know who Dirty Harry was, and I didn’t get a chance to ask.
“How was your guy?”
“Granfield? Fat. Stupid.”
The old man nodded. “A lot of ’em carry guns now.”
Granfield with a gun. Scary.
“He wanted me to say you’d kidnapped me. I think he would have liked to make a big arrest. Get some headlines.”
The old man nodded. “Dirty Harry.”
“Why are we going to Saigon?”
“We won’t be in Saigon the whole time.”
I’d noticed that I didn’t get a lot of direct answers to my questions. “Where to after that?”
“The countryside.”
“The countryside where?”
“Vietnam … that’s where Saigon is.” He cranked his head around. There was a mark on his neck, a scar or something. “Can we get a little more coffee, please?”
The waitress brought the coffee pot and topped up the old man’s cup.
He looked at me over what was left of the cutlets and mashed potatoes. “How about pie, you want some pie?”
I shook my head.
“No, thanks,” he said.
“No, thanks,” I repeated. Great, now he was starting to act like a father.
He looked up at the waitress. “What kind of pie do you have?”
“Coconut cream and cherry.”
“We’ll have two pieces of coconut cream.”
She looked at me, shrugged, and walked away.
“How is it that she gets that I didn’t want pie, and you don’t?”
“I’ll eat it if you don’t.”
“Why don’t you weigh four hundred pounds?”
“Metabolism.”
The pie came, and I ate one bite. I’d never had coconut cream pie before and based on that bite didn’t plan to ever have it again. I pushed it away. The old man dusted both pieces, but I noticed that he hadn’t finished the carrots that came with the veal cutlets, so the man was probably starving.
We sat for a while. He ate and I watched him eat and looked around the diner. There were pictures on the walls, all of them of people fishing. Some were guys standing in streams fly-fishing and the rest were pictures of people with the fish they’d caught. Some of the pictures were pretty old, like black and white old, so maybe they were famous people who’d caught fish nearby.
“Grab me that paper, will you?” The old man nodded at a mess of newspaper pages on a table across the diner.
I got up and went over there and tried to organize the thing so it looked like a real paper. When it was more or less sorted out, I brought it back to our table.
He read and I read. I sat, sipped on my chocolate milk and looked at the back pages of the paper as he flipped through the sections. Sometimes he’d fold the paper over, and I’d get to look at more than just the back pages.
56 Die in Wave of Iraq Suicide Bombings
California Wildfires Threaten Thousands of Homes
Yankees Romp Over Red Sox — Win Streak at Eight
J.K. Rowling Pens Adult Novel
Global Economic Recovery Slower Than Expected
Aryan Supremacy Group Stages Rally in Idaho Town
Unlikely Songstress the Toast of Britain
Man Expresses Remorse After Beating Three-Year-Old
Education Budget Slashed
I wasn’t one to read the paper much. Sometimes we’d look at what was going on in the world in social studies class, but it wasn’t like I paid a lot of attention to current events. I mean I wasn’t stupid — I knew about Afghanistan and 9/11 and I could name the prime minister of Canada and the president of the United States, which was more than some of the kids in my school could do, but I wasn’t into the news.
Out of what I was reading that morning sitting across from the old man, I was most interested in the J.K. Rowling thing. I’d read the Harry Potter books and thought they were amazing, and I’d also read somewhere that the author was now mega-rich. Maybe I’d ask her to marry me. Right after I got back from my lovely Saigon vacation.
Then it was back in the truck and Steve Earle singing “Copperhead Road.” There’s a line in