I go to the Greyhound station and buy another ticket, round trip so people will expect me to come back. Then I ride, back the way I came.
As soon as I'm in Sisters I go to the post office and I can see through the little glass window that there are two checks in our box. I write Father's name and the account number on the back of them and walk over to an ATM and deposit them right into the account. That's how I still do it, every month.
In those early days I make plenty of acquaintances. I never ask or answer too many questions. I rent a room one week at a time and I check the bulletin boards in the post office and the coffee shop to find other possibilities.
I spend a lot of time in the Sisters library which is a nice new building with even a gas fireplace at one end by the magazines with soft chairs around it. The library has a whole section of computers where people come in to use the Internet. There's a special room for children with the little chairs and tables and a few toys. A quilt of the Cat in the Hat. A mural that shows Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and some camels and a bearded father reading a book to a girl.
The head librarian is named Peg. She becomes an acquaintance of mine, and then a kind of friend. She never asks questions about where I came from but only about what I want to do and where I want to go. She's the one who finds the books and explains to me how to get my GED. This takes me one year of studying and tests. Now I am enrolled in library science classes at the community college, riding the bus to Bend twice a week. It's a school where the students are all sorts of ages, so no one worries about me. People thought I was eighteen back when I was fifteen and now almost two more years have passed.
I know the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress, both. I like all the colored spines of the books pressed in their shelves, thick with words. The whispering, the silence, the sound of a page being turned. I started out volunteering, shelving and reading story time for the children, and then Peg hired me as an assistant. I work three or four days a week.
At the end of my shift I take my jacket and backpack out of the office. I check out a few books to myself. I unlock my bicycle from the rack outside.
Riding through town, I pass Bronco Billy's and I pass Ray's IGA and they remind me of the times before. When I am inside them, whenever I shop for groceries I expect Father to still be there walking down the aisle smiling with a jar of peanut butter in his hand, pointing me toward the apples.
Past Ray's I turn along the McKenzie Highway where it passes all the churches: Catholic, LDS, the Community Church, whatever that means. I've never been inside them, never plan to. There's the high school, home of the Outlaws with these kids revving the engines of their pickup trucks who are my age I know even if that feels impossible. A boy yells after me and I don't look back. Even closer to my house is the middle school with its bright metal roof and its octagonal front, its sports fields out back.
I cross over and go left onto Edgington, past where elk graze in someone's field with the metal wheels of the irrigation line. The asphalt beneath me turns to gravel, to mud. I pass the llamas with their woolly necks, hear the wolf dogs start to bark and howl.
Out here there's hardly any houses, just huge white satellite dishes hidden in the trees that tell you there's someone back there. The long snakes my bicycle's tires make are the only marks in the snow for days. It can get too deep over the last half mile and I have to get off and push the rest of the way.
Mr. Hoffman's place on Wildwood Road is a big old log barn turned into a fancy house with a swooping red roof. Deer and elk antlers hang above the doorways, along the walls outside. Mr. Hoffman has never shot anything. He buys the antlers just like he bought the shiny taxidermied salmon that hangs over the fireplace inside.
He is a fat old rich man from Salem who has no wife and two grown children who never come around, which is about as often as he does. The rooms in his house are crowded with puffy leather furniture and dusty bronze statues of cougars and horses. In every room there's a television and I switch them on and walk around with all the voices going in a kind of conversation. I collect his mail which is mostly catalogs. I open the empty drawers and the mothballs roll hard, bouncing inside. I switch on his CB radio and hear distant voices talking in numbers and lost in static. I never push the button to say anything back. Instead I check the water lines, the light switches, I spring his mousetraps with a straightened wire hanger.
I am the caretaker and what I do is up to me. If I wanted to turn on all the electric heaters and live here, he would never notice. I could sleep on one of the soft beds in the guest room, I could cook on his shining stove.
Standing in his kitchen I look out to where the land slopes and fifty yards away in the trees I can just see the roof of my l little yurt, its round window in the top like an eye staring up. Lying flat in bed I can see the stars and sometimes the moon or an airplane, a black bird zipping by. In windstorms the sharp tips of pine trees lean in.