Big Rock Candy Mountain Ch. 01

As a famous actor once said supposedly, "It's not the years, it's the mileage", and boy did I have a lot of very hard mileage.

Naturally, the Kid did have a real job dangling up his sleeve, doing some cooking onboard a grade D or worse cruise ship and I told him to take it and he'd be a damned fool if he didn't. I would get by... I always had somehow.

He gave me a Post Office box address where I could write him here in Florida, and somehow before we parted for good, I promised that I would try and find that small town in South Texas and pay it one last visit to see if the fortune of the old woman would come true. I've seen stranger things happen.

It was a very awkward goodbye. We both knew it would be for the best, here he would be safe and had a decent paying job that he thought he would enjoy. I would 'sneak' the best I could into the mid-west before appearing in a few hobo camps to muddy up our trail. If I could do it right, no one would have the faintest clue where Chris really was. I would leave different stories in every camp about where Chris had left my camp, and keep hundreds of PI's busy all over the country for naught. Perhaps even some day some good might come out of all of this.

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I took the Greyhound bus out of Miami the next day and lived on bus stop ham and cheese sandwiches and stayed well out of sight for nearly a week until I got to Lincoln, Nebraska. Bus stations everywhere are full of middle-age and elderly men and with good clothes on I blended right in. I saw several of Chris's "Missing" bulletins but I didn't pay them much mind. At least they didn't seem to know my name yet.

Changing back into my usual hobo clothes, I pulled my reappearance act at the local hobo camp and was disappointed that no one seemed to be looking for me yet. Even a couple of FTRA thugs paid me no mind. No matter, it was back to 'business as usual', and sooner or later someone would ask me if I was the Sandy traveling with the 'Million Dollar Baby".

Some of the reward amounts I noticed seemed unbelievable. Surely, every bum and hobo had their eyes now peeled looking for the kid. Eventually, a bum in Utah recognized me and asked me where "my friend" was?

"Left me back in Dallas about six weeks ago, the ungrateful bastard." I told him and the hundreds who asked later after him. "We had a bit of a falling out after doing some produce and fruit picking down south. I decided to go west, I think he decided to up northeast, New England, maybe even up to Canada. He mentioned something about a good maple syrup job in a small town somewhere."

I crossed the country back and forth at least five times that year spreading that same bogus story, while being about as obviously visible as I could. Some FTRA-North guys took to following me all summer long, convinced that eventually I would lead them into the promised land of untold riches. I even did my 'normal' winter harvest jobs in Florida but stayed as far away from Miami as possible.

By springtime, I was old news and not even the FTRA folks had any interest in me anymore, but I took no chances and stuck with my full normal migratory work schedule for most of the year.

I was at my friends cranberry bog in Maine working on the autumn harvest when I had a most unusual visitor at my little shack home on the property. I pegged him right away as just another private eye, one of dozens that had tracked me down to question me about Chris, and he got the exact same answers that I'd given all of the rest. This one was smart enough to know that I was lying through my teeth and that tailing me wasn't going to accomplish anything either, but he didn't seem to resent it or take it personally either.

"What if I was to tell you that Chris was never in any danger whatsoever and that his wife just wants him safe at home?" He asked me with a twinkle.

"Ah! But that's just what the evil bastard chasing him wants him to think isn't it?" I replied with a wink of my own, and he laughed before dropping one last bombshell on me before departing.

"By the way, you don't need to mail any more postcards to your friend down in Miami either. Seemed he stopped working at that cruise line job rather suddenly about three weeks ago and didn't leave any forwarding address. The chase goes on, and I bet everyone's sick and tired of it. His wife is in tears again, thinking they were about to be reunited and her lover just feels like even more of a heel. It should be really funny… except it actually isn't. This hasn't been much fun for me either or for you I bet. You did a great job spreading false reports for over a year and if you ever want a job with my agency it's yours for the asking. You trained that kid well – nobody's going to find him unless he screws up bad or someone else gets very, very lucky."

We shook hands goodbye and he left me his business card which I had promised not to tear up. I didn't notice until after I left that he had also left me a couple of hundred dollars sitting on my small dining table.

I'm a very good judge of character and I decided that this PI actually believed what he had told me, and for the first time I began to wonder if Chris hadn't fled half-cocked and very premature from an otherwise mostly innocent situation.

Losing nearly three years of his life to a 'misunderstanding'. It didn't matter now - I had no way of getting a hold of him. Our paths seemed permanently separate now.

I did resolve that at last I would uphold my final promise to him. I would head down south to Texas and make one last search for my Big Rock Candy Mountain.