As Bede listened, he knew it wasn’t just the financial troubles with the family farm, it was that the farm was a place that Galen loved very dearly, though he’d never talked about it like this before.
The feelings he had for the place glowed in his eyes, and the curve of his smile when he talked about his dad, or the lavender, or the time the baby goats got out and went over to the pond in mindless hops and left prints along the muddy bank with their tiny cloven hooves.
The farm was where Galen’s heart was. To lose it would break Galen, that Bede knew with certainty.
It was already killing Galen to imagine getting further behind on the bills, or that he might have to rent it to some other asshat who would not and never could appreciate it the way Galen did.
There was no way Bede was going to let Galen lose what he held most dear, so, as Galen slept a troubled and tight sleep, Bede slipped out of bed, got dressed in utter silence, and laced up his work boots, as they would be most appropriate for this job.
He found Galen’s flashlight and slipped out of the tent, leaving it half-zipped so that if Galen woke up, he might imagine that Bede had made a trip to the facilities and was taking his time coming back. Perhaps Galen wouldn’t wake up till morning, which would be all right by Bede.
Arriving at the parking area, he took a deep breath, opened the door to the nearest truck, and clambered in. The key fob was on the driver’s seat, right there in plain view, in case any thieves wanted to steal the truck.
Well, Bede wasn’t a thief, no sir. He was only going to borrow the truck, and then he was going to bring it right back. And no, he didn’t have a current driver’s license, but what did that matter since he’d return to the valley before dawn?
Luckily, the tank was full of gas, though it would be empty by the time he brought it back. But he knew no one would remark upon it because no one in the valley, at least none of the team leads, would imagine that anything untoward had happened.
One of the silver trucks needs gas,one of them would say. To which another would respond,I’ll take care of it.
All above board and honest. Such was the world Galen lived in.
And such was the world Bede had become accustomed to. At least he’d started to appreciate the open doors and unlocked drawers and the idea that you did not have to carry a gun or look over your shoulder every other minute. And the idea that the work you did was not illegal. A different world than the one Bede had come from.
There was still enough of that old world in Bede for the task that lay before him. He started the truck and drove quietly up the switchbacks and out of the valley. At the top of the treeless hill, a quarter moon sliced its way through a dark and starry sky.
He paused a minute to scan the area around him, and rolled down his window to check if he could hear an engine starting up,which would indicate that someone had discovered the missing truck and was in hot pursuit.
Maybe it was midnight. The world was certainly silent and almost still, with only a constant low breeze that swam through the truck, around Bede’s neck and ears like a scarf of certainty. He was doing the right thing. What he was doing would save Galen’s farm, and bring that sweet, curved smile back to Galen’s face.
Bede drove along Highway 211, the ridge of hills to his right a dark blurry smudge, until he got to I-25. There he turned south, sank back in the seat and, with his hands firmly at the ten and two on the steering wheel, pressed down on the gas.
The speed limit was eighty. Bede went eighty-five all the way to the Wyoming border in dizzying darkness that zipped by his open windows.
At the border, he slowed to seventy-five, which was still pretty fast, passing only a few eighteen-wheelers and getting passed by a few more, which came up behind him and went around, chuffing their engines with impatience.
He saw no cops until he reached the outskirts of Thornton, where the highway curved and widened, and the green-lit clock in the dashboard told him it was just after two in the morning. He had maybe four hours before Galen woke up to discover Bede was not lying in the bed beside him.
Bede knew the way to his Aunt Lorraine’s by heart, and it was easy, eerily so, to take the right exit from I-25 in North Denver, and scoot along the quiet streets to the area where she lived, on Vine Street just across from Russel Square Park.
Her place was a compact brick house that had been gloriously redone on the inside, where Aunt Lorraine sold drugs and conducted her affairs, and it was there in the alley behind the house, where Bede parked the truck. The wooden fence allaround the property was tall to keep out any prying eyes, and the shed and detached garage were securely locked.
Aunt Lorraine liked things tidy for the most part, but the shed, where Aunt Lorraine kept ordinary things like clippers and a weed whacker and gardening gloves, was a space that only the hired gardener entered. He would have been instructed not to pry, so it was there, in a series of stacked plastic bins, that Bede had stowed some of his ill-gotten gains, anything liquid and untraceable, in the bins labeled,Mom’s Trip to Bermudaon strips of masking tape written on with a big fat Sharpie. In plain sight.
Bede jimmied the lock on the shed, moved the German-made rotary mower to one side, and reached out to the top bin. Shining his flashlight, he could see there was a layer of dust and that no one had touched any of the bins, not in years. Five years, to be exact.
Aunt Lorraine had told him when he was grown that his business was his business and she didn’t need to know. Didn’t want to know in case the cops came by. Which, oddly, even knowing that his Aunt Lorraine had raised him, they never had.
Not stopping to make sure of the contents, Bede hauled all three plastic bins to the truck and threw them in. They were heavy enough that he didn’t have to tie them down, and innocent looking, at least enough, so that they would raise no eyebrows from anyone who happened to look in the truck bed. All he had to do was get back to the valley, present the money to Galen, and the farm would be saved.
To make it look more innocent, he shifted stuff around in the shed and turned the lock shut so the gardener would not notice anything out of place.
If the bins were noticed to be missing, the gardener, hired for his circumspection, would not mention it to Aunt Lorraine unless she asked about it. Which she never would because surelyshe knew if the bins were gone, either Bede had taken them, or Bede would find the person who had taken them, follow them, and make them give the bins back, andthenbreak both their legs.
But perhaps Galen wouldn’t need to know that part. Instead, Galen should, Bede decided as he silently started the engine and trundled back to the highway, be prepared to be happy about the money and the fact that the farm would be safe and secure for the next few years.
Bede drove as fast as he could along I-25 to the Wyoming border, stepped on the gas harder, and almost missed the exit to Highway 211, which would take him back to the valley. It felt like he was coming home as he turned off on the small dirt road just outside the town of Farthing and took the smaller dirt road to the switchbacks that led down into the valley.
The sun was just coming up, so Bede parked and had to hustle to haul three bins, rather heavy from all the cans and plastic baggies of coins, into Galen’s tent. When Bede tiptoed up the steps and placed the first bin on the wooden floor inside the tent, Galen was still asleep, curled up, his beautiful hair spread across the pillow.
