Thorn

and that would have to do for food until tomorrow. Pat was used to not eating a lot. Though it was still early in the evening he fell asleep almost at once, stretched out on the bare floor.

At first he knew that he was asleep, and shivering a little. Then he began to dream of Annie. In Pat's dream, she was asleep, stretched out also upon boards, but her boards looked like the floor of an attic somewhere. She was wearing a nondescript pullover shirt and jeans. Then Annie in the dream opened her eyes and looked at Pat, and smiled at him, and he knew beyond any doubt that in a moment she would reach out her arms to him and they would make love. Instead all that happened was that he woke up, uncomfortable on the boards after having got used to a hospital bed again, and shaking a little more with cold than he had been before. Well, life was usually like that.

Late next morning, when he had got as far as Oklahoma, Pat began to have serious doubts about California as his real destination, though he continued to use it as an answer whenever he was asked. Everyone more or less expected that a young drifter would be headed for the Coast. Whereas if he had said that he was bound for somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico, that would be an interesting answer; people would wonder why he was going there, and ask more questions, and think about him some more. Or so it seemed to Pat. As a general rule, the less other people wondered and thought and talked about him, the happier he was.

As the day went on a little, he began also to have a feeling that he didn't want to go to Arizona. He wasn't sure why. But he certainly hoped it would turn out that Annie wasn't there.

A few of the people who gave him rides asked him what he meant to do when he reached California. He answered that he meant to get a job there making films. Whenever he said this, his questioner looked at him again, and chuckled to himself or herself in one tone or another, and immediately became patronizing. Because they could see he wasn't joking. But in fact his answer was quite sane and realistic. He would have got a job making films if he had been going to California. Not Hollywood movies, no, which the people assumed he meant. But there were a number of people in other towns out there making a lot of other movies of one kind and another, and during the past few years Pat had already been connected with several of them. In matters having anything to do with movie-making he was an authentic genius, though totally unpublicized, usually unemployed, and practically unpaid.

Sometimes the people who gave him rides asked him how old he was. They were beginning to have plans for him, at least tentative plans, of one kind or another, when they asked that. Pat's answer would vary, depending. If he thought the tentative plan was to hand over poor young Pat to the juvenile authorities somewhere, for his own good, he could answer with the truth. To the best of his own belief he was actually twenty-two, though he had to overcome a certain inner reluctance to admit to himself that he was that old. And he could document that age with a driver's license that bore his photograph, if the discussion ever got that far.

In cases where the plan did not involve turning him over to the cops, he often varied his answer downward. No one as far back as he could remember had ever doubted him if he said he was sixteen. If he said he was seventeen, they sometimes still doubted, believing him to be certainly younger than that.

To the truck driver he was riding with when he reached Albuquerque, Pat had said he was sixteen. The truck driver had then responded with: 'First time away from home, huh?'

'Yeah.'

'I got a long drive ahead. We'll keep going all night,' said the driver, and squeezed Pat's thigh, and smiled.

It was still early afternoon. Pat smiled back and made no protest about the hand on his leg. The driver was surprised and chagrined when just a little later, at a truck stop near the junction of Interstates 40 and 25 Pat announced that he was getting out, for good.

'Hey. What the hell. I thought ya wanted to go to California.'

Still smiling, Pat slid down from the cab to stand on the sunstroked pavement. He stretched. Mountains whose name he had never learned, though he had come through this way going east or west so many times, rose barrenly a few miles to the east. He had chosen a good place for his announcement; a truck stop surrounded by a city, with a fair number of people about. The jilted trucker was not going to be able to do anything, or even to argue very much.

'Hey. Kid.'

Pat did not even turn, but simply walked away. His feeling for Annie had altered suddenly. West was no longer the right direction. Now she had to be somewhere to his right, somewhere to the north of here. He could tell that she was out of walking distance still, but now she was no longer anything like a full day's drive away.

Interstate 25 going north out of Albuquerque was a new route to Pat. But one highway was not all that different from another; he was really at home on them all. Hiking the shoulder now, going up an entry ramp toward the northward traffic flow, Pat felt a certain relief. Not only at leaving that particular trucker behind—sadistic tendencies there, experienced instinct whispered—but at not having to go on to Arizona, which was the next state west.

There had been a bad scene out there in Phoenix, once. Real bad. Pat couldn't remember it consciously. But the stink of it still came up to conscious memory, like something dead and too shallowly buried. A warning: Don't dig here.

Pat topped the entrance ramp and kept on moving, hiking, looking over his left shoulder at a burst of speeding cars that passed him. Like an accomplished athlete or an old actor going into an old routine, he only needed to use half his attention in trying to flag a ride. Meanwhile he could use the other half on the question of what he ought to do when he reached Annie.

He could tell where she was, in a general way that seemed to get more particular the closer he got to her. But he couldn't tell what she was doing. For all he knew, she might be home, reconciled with her parents; or maybe in some other situation that she wouldn't be anxious to leave, just to hit the road again with Pat. So he ought to have some kind of hopeful proposition ready for her, something really attractive to suggest.

He would talk about—what else?—getting her into movies of some kind. Every girl liked that idea, and Annie was quite good-looking enough to make it credible. In fact, now that he thought of it . . .

Now that he thought about it, making movies with Annie was suddenly the one thing Pat wanted desperately to do.

Sure. Of course. There would be some way. Why not? Almost forgetting to work at picking up a ride, Pat hiked excitedly along the shoulder. The mountains to his right were forgotten, as was the intermittent roar of traffic at his left elbow. He would find Annie, and they would go off somewhere and make films, and everything in his whole screwed-up life might fall into the right place for once . . .

He remembered now how he had been talking with her in Chicago once, and she had been fascinated by some of the stories of movie-making that he'd had to tell. She seemed to understand that he was telling her the truth . . . or maybe it wasn't in Chicago. Somewhere. She had been with him somewhere else, before Chicago, now that he came to think of it. Or was it after?

Somewhere else. A place he didn't want to think about right now. But she had liked him, and it had been so good, that special way that they'd made love . . .

A movie with Annie in it was certainly a great idea, and if he wasn't crazy he would have thought of it before now. Could he really do it? Could he really at last straighten out his own life that much? The idea, when put in those terms, scared him a little.

He knew he could handle the movie itself, if he ever got the chance. He would pick up Annie, and they would go somewhere where he could get a job with some filmmaker. Maybe even right here in New Mexico. There were bound to be people here somewhere making films, and some of them had probably heard about Pat from people out on the Coast. When you were good, word got around.

Porn was by far the easiest kind of work to find, for Pat at least. Particularly when they found out that he was ready, willing, and able to double as an actor. He did well in front of the camera as well as behind it, though acting or performing of any kind wasn't really what he liked to do. His androgynous good looks were in demand, for straight, gay, or free-style porn. There was only one kind of thing he'd never touched, and never would. So he took part in the filmed sex smiling like the madman he sometimes was, faking the sex as much as possible, meanwhile continuing to keep himself happy by thinking how he would do the lights and the camera work and time everything differently if he were put in charge. Of course there was a dreary sameness in all porn, or almost all. But there were an infinite number of ways to disguise the sameness, if you knew what you were doing. Pat never doubted that he did.