Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

But it turned out it was Mort after all who thought up how I’d get the money for the bike I wanted so I could have a paper route so I could make some money. I asked the Olds for a bike, but the old man said no, I should earn the money myself, and I said how the hell can I do that with no bike for a route, and the old lady said you’re thirteen years old and you shouldn’t talk like that and I said something else and the old man strapped me. He thinks it still hurts. But after that I knew they’d rather die than get me the bike.

Mort saw as how I wasn’t feeling too good right then and like Mort always does he tried to joke about it and then he started smart-mouthing about how he’d never stand for it and how if I didn’t have him to look out for me I’d have let everybody walk all over me all my life.

He thinks he’s a real bigshot because he beat up Rodney Lawrence who nobody ever beat up before and because he and Darcia Kleinsmidt go up into her dad’s loft every Sunday and make out. He says he’s seen her without any clothes on but I think that’s a bunch of crap for the reason I will tell you when I get to that place in my story. He brags about a lot of things that I don’t think he ever did.

Anyway Mort comes to me on Tuesday after milking, it’s still early in the morning but it’s summer and so there isn’t any school and he says, “Hey, Runt, you still want a bike?”

“Hey shutup,” I said, thinking he’s making fun of me again.

He says, “OK, Runt, if that’s the way you want it. Only I know how you can get the money.”

Well, I thought that sounded pretty good, so I says to him, “Hey, Mort, what is it, Darcia paying you a dollar a smooch?”

“I’d be a millionaire then,” he says, and I think yeah, sure.

But I followed him around behind the barn and he tells me his plan. “See, we just hitch a ride with somebody over on I-15.”

“Somebody’s gonna pay us to hitchhike?” I says, real snotty, because if I get snotty he tells me faster.

“Don’t get snotty with me, Runt,” he says, and then like I figured he told me. “They’re gonna pay us to get out. I read about it in the newspaper.” That means that somebody who reads the newspaper told him. “You get a ride with somebody, and then you pull a gun or a knife and make them pull off onto some lonely place or a rest stop or somewhere there isn’t a lot of cars, and then you take their money and their car and leave ’em there. Or else you leave ’em their car and hitch a ride back with somebody else.”

I thought for a minute and I says, “I bet that’s stealing.”

“Ooooooh,” he says, making faces like an old lady who just heard a bad word. “Ooooooh, I forgot, you always go to Sunday School.”

Which is true. I have to keep going till I’m fourteen. The old man says that till you’re fourteen you can’t decide for yourself. But I always stick gum under the folding chairs.

“Look, Mort,” I says, “all I care about is that if we get caught they’ll stick us in jail.”

“They can’t,” says Mort, “because we’re both minors.”

“I am not,” I says, wondering what the hell being a miner has to do with going to jail.

“You are too and so am I. It means being under eighteen years old. That’s why we can’t buy beer or cigarettes. But it also means they can’t put is in jail.”

“Yeah, but we’d go to the JD place in Fillmore.”

“Jeez,” says Mort, “what a runt, Runt. This’d be the first thing we ever did wrong, they don’t send you to Fillmore till you done a lot of stuff.”

“What about painting Elton Barney’s cow green?”

He just rolled his eyes in his head. “You remember what Sheriff Burton said?” Mort asked me, like I was real dumb. “He said, ‘Boys will be boys.’”

He said that, but I still didn’t know about pulling a knife on somebody.

“Besides,” says Mort, “the guy we hit isn’t gonna know who we are or where we come from.”

“I don’t think I want a bike that bad,” I says, thinking how I really don’t want a paper route if I gotta go to the JD place for it.

“Man, what a knockout,” says Mort. “I find out that my brother’s a chicken, besides being a runt.”

Nobody calls me a chicken.

So there we were out on I-15 thumbing for a ride. Not too many people want to pick up farmers with manure on their boots, so we put on our Sunday clothes and snuck out of the house so the Olds wouldn’t ask us where we was going.

But the cars still wasn’t piling up in line to pick us up. Of course, on a lot of them Mort says, “Not this one.” And then I asked him why, and he says, “Car’s too old, this guy doesn’t have any dough,” and then one time he says, “This guy’s really rich, all he’s gonna have is checks and credit cards.” Credit cards in your pocket isn’t much good on the farm, and anyway nobody’d be fooled, they know me and Mort and they know we never could get a credit card.

So we waited for about two hours getting hotter and sweatier and I was thinking what the hell kind of dumb thing am I doing out here? But then we see this shiny new yellow car coming along and there’s just one person in it, either a girl with short hair or a guy with long hair, and old Mort jumps out in the freeway sticking his thumb out and the car slows down and the girl (this close we could tell she was a girl) flips open the back door. Me, I got in back, but old Mort, he reached through, unlocked the front, and sat down next to her.

Audi, bucket seats, thing looked like it cost a million bucks and when she started off it felt like we wasn’t even moving except the telephone poles flipped by like beanpoles when you’re running.

She was pretty but old, probably twenty or thirty, and if she wasn’t sitting right there I know old Mort would’ve leaned back and said, “Stacked, man, stacked.” Instead he just kept playing with his pocket where he had a knife.

“Where you going?” she asked us, and since we wasn’t going anyplace I didn’t know what to say, but Mort says, “Noplace you’re going, but maybe you’ll come close. Where you headed?” he asks her.

“Las Vegas,” she says, and I wonder if she’s one of them topless dancers.

“You one of them topless dancers?” Mort asks her.

“No,” she says, laughing. Jeez, Mort can be dumb sometimes.

“How old are you?” she asks us.

“I’m fourteen,” I lied. Mort said, “I’m seventeen,” which makes him a bigger liar than me, since I was only one year off, but Mort’s big and hairy and so everybody figures he’s older than he is.

Well, it was still hot but there was clouds coming in from the south and it looked like a dust storm was coming up and then rain, and so I figured we oughta get it over with so we could get back home before we got our Sunday clothes all wet and the old lady chewed us hollow. So I says, “Hey, Mort, what’re you waiting for?”

“What do you mean?” asks the girl.

“Oh, nothing,” says Mort, shooting me a glare like I should drop dead.

“Well?” says I, since I don’t like him glaring at me that way.

So he reached down into his pocket and pulled out his hunting knife and took it out of the sheath and reached over and stuck it right next to her ribs and he gets this mean look on his face and says, “Pull over.”

I gotta say that girl looked surprised and scared, but she didn’t go crazy or anything. She just had kind of a shaky voice when she said, “Right here?”

Mort thought a second and said, “No about a mile up ahead there’s a dirt road off to the right.”

And then her face turned all white and I felt real bad about what we was doing, because I wanted a ten-speed all right, but I didn’t like the way she looked.