I could. No matter how many paper towel baths I give myself, there’s just no getting truly clean. Not after weeks of traveling and sleeping outdoors. I sleep in my animal form so that I can burrow down and stay relatively safe, but even so, I look rough. And with only two outfits to trade off, my clothes are wrinkled and they don’t smell the best.
Which is why the gas station attendant kicked my ass out. I was apparently taking too long, since I stripped down and washed both sets of clothes and underwear in the sink before drying them under the hand dryer. I washed my hair too, so at least I got to finish that before he made me leave. My scalp was getting itchy.
The attendant screamed at me, cussing me out and threatening to call the police. Fucking humans are just as brutal to rogues as shifters are. They treat the homeless like some kind of disease. Like it’s something to be shooed away instead of shown some compassion.
The truck driver spotted me during our shout-fest, and he offered to let me hitch a ride before the cops got there, so I jumped at the offer. I passed out in the seat as soon as I finished eating some beef jerky. Now I’m awake, blearily looking out at the landscape of fuck-knows-where, and I’m already hungry again.
“You slept a long time,” the trucker says, his tone friendly as he smiles out the windshield.
I watch him warily out of the corner of my eye, because I don’t care how friendly and happy he seems, at some point, he’s going to be a perverted fucker. It’s just a matter of time.
“Yep,” I answer simply, not wanting to engage in more conversation.
Unfortunately, he’s been a regular Chatty Cathy ever since I opened my eyes. Like he was just bursting at the seams to talk to someone and now’s his time to shine.
“I sleep ’bout four or five hours at a time, myself. S’all I need before I’m recharged and ready to go,” he says with a toothy smile.
I want to roll my eyes at him, but I also want to get as much distance out of this ride as I can, so I don’t want to piss him off. I don’t have any more money to waste on transportation, since I need every cent to go to food.
Otherwise, I’ll be forced to shift and forage for some, and that’s a huge last resort. People don’t like my animal. They see me and they run the other direction.
“Cool,” I reply, keeping my eyes on the pavement in front of us as we lumber down the highway.
“You didn’t tell me where you was headed,” he prompts, and I have to bite back a sigh. I detest small talk.
“I’m headed in whatever direction you’re going right now,” I tell him.
He chuckles. “You’re a regular beatnik nomad, huh? Jack Kerouac would be proud.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“You like to read?” he asks, but he keeps talking before I can tell him that no, I don’t, because Master Kaazu would’ve never allowed us to do something so sedentary. I’m lucky I even learned how. “Well, I like to read. Mostly Westerns. You ever read them cowboy books? See, they usually...”
He drones on, telling me all about his favorite cowboy books, but I’m not paying attention. It’s funny, the further away I get from Troupe Delirium, the more memories resurface—things I haven’t thought about for years.
Kaazu bought Cliff from his family when he was five years old. I was two when that happened, so I don’t remember it, but what I do remember was a few years later, when I was about six. We were in one of the RVs, driving to a new location, and I was watching Cliff in his bed, holding an old newspaper. It was nighttime, so the only light we had was from headlights that flashed through the windows of the RV.
I was in one of the bunk beds built into the back, the one highest up with the curtain pulled back part way so I could see Cliff across from me. I watched him hold up a tiny flashlight on the crumpled, slightly stained paper. It was the comic section, and every so often, he’d smile wide, and it didn’t even seem like he felt the split lip on his mouth or the tug at his swollen cheek that he’d gotten from Kaazu.