It suddenly slowed, and a spotlight shot out the passenger's window. A gruff voice called, "You trying to get run over?"
Bron spotted the bubble lights on top of the car. He pulled to a stop. There were extra lights in the cab for the radio, but Bron couldn't see anything: the cop had his spotlight aimed right in Bron's eyes. Bron raised a hand.
"No, sir, I'm not trying to get hit."
"It's three o'clock in the morning!" the policeman growled. "What in hell's name do you think you're doing out here? What are you runnin' from?"
"I woke and went to watch the meteor shower," Bron explained, "and then I couldn't sleep, so I thought that maybe a run would help. I... was on the cross-country team last year. I... was hoping to take state this year."
Taking state was far beyond Bron's capabilities, but he hoped that it might garner some sympathy. The cop waved the light at various corners of Bron's clothing, as if a handgun might fall out of his shirt at any moment.
"You're waking people up," the cop said. "Got a call that some kid was running through town, maybe a vandal or a thief. This is a quiet neighborhood. Folks here don't run—at least they don't run in the night."
"I'm not from around here," Bron said. "I just moved in yesterday ... with Mike and Olivia Hernandez."
"You that social services kid?" the cop asked. He flipped off his light, but Bron still couldn't see much. It would take minutes for his eyes to adjust.
"You heard about me, so soon?"
"Olivia bought dinner at the restaurant. The whole town knows about you, and they got nothing better to talk about."
Bron smiled. "Wow, sounds like I'm famous." He could see the cop now—maybe fifty, with a buzz cut and glasses. His face was wide at the mouth, like a bullfrog's, but it was his eyes that bothered Bron.
The officer didn't have much use for "social service" kids, obviously.
"There's a statewide curfew, you know," the officer said, "from eleven to five. I could give you a ticket, you know."
He looked down to a little yellow pad resting on the passenger's seat, as if trying to decide whether to write out a ticket. Bron didn't think that a judge would bother fining him for taking a late-night jog, and apparently the officer reached the same conclusion.
"I'm going to give you a ride home," the officer said. "No need to set no more dogs to yappin'. Get in!"
Bron opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat. "I'm real sorry if I disturbed anyone," he said. "I used to go running before sunrise every morning up north."
"Well," the officer said gruffly as he accelerated onto the road. "You aren't up north. You're down in Little Dixie. Things are going to have to change. I don't know what kind of trouble you bring with you, but I don't want any of it around here."
Bron knew the suspicions that some folks harbored about foster kids. The truth was that he'd made the common mistakes that kids do. He'd gotten caught at the age of eight stealing a candy bar from the local 7-Eleven. He'd once cussed out a foster sister. He'd gotten in wrestling matches with his brothers.
He'd learned that the rules for foster kids were different from those of normal folks. The things that people tolerated in most children—the things that they laughed about and considered rites of passage for their own kids—were unforgivable in a foster child.
"I've never been in any trouble," Bron said.
"You got thrown out of your old house," the officer suggested, as if that were evidence of some crime. "By tomorrow I'm going to know everything about you. I don't want no trouble in these parts."
The officer fell silent, and Bron wondered what kind of trouble he might be in. Pine Valley seemed too small to have a police force. The closest thing that he'd seen earlier to a lawman was the park ranger out in his little shack. Bron glanced at the officer's uniform. He was from the Washington County Sheriffs Office. A pin on his shirt said that his last name was Walton.
They drove through town, and when they reached the driveway, the officer made a point of hitting his flashing lights. He dropped Bron off at the front door. Mike and Olivia staggered out of the house in their bathrobes, and Mike shot Bron a distrustful look.
Bron went to his room. He threw himself on the bed and waited for Mike to come yell at him or something.
Instead, Olivia came to the door. She wore a satin nightgown in a soft shade of peach that accentuated her curves, and Bron gritted his teeth, waiting for her to chew him out.
"Please," she said softly, "in the future, don't go running in the night. There are worse things than Officer Walton out there."
To tell the truth, Bron had worried about that a little. "Like cougars? Or bears?"
"Worse than that," she said as she slipped out the door.
Saturday Bron woke feeling so exhausted that he was reminded of a book that he'd once read about potato farmers in Idaho who turned unsuspecting townsfolk into zombies and made them dig potatoes from dusk till dawn. Bron's muscles ached, and his thoughts were cloudy, filled with dreams of guitars. It was the crack of dawn.
Bron got up, glanced out his open window. Morning stole quietly over Pine Valley. The wildfires in California were heating up, sending soot and ash into the heavens, so that a red haze enveloped the vale, bloodying the land. Had someone said that dragons were setting the skies afire, Bron would have believed.
He wandered to the kitchen, got a drink of water. Olivia came in from her bedroom.
"Bron," she said, "Mike's out in the barn. He's going to make his morning rounds to check on the cattle. I thought that you might like to go."
She didn't have to say more. There was a pleading tone to her voice. This was supposed to be a father-and-son outing, a chance for them to bond. Bron had been through the routine often enough.
"Sure," he said.
Mike took him out on an ATV to show him his land—eight hundred acres of grassland and forest here in the bowl of the valley, climbing up into the mountains. Mike explained that most of his cattle were still up in the hills, grazing on public lands. The government let him run his cattle in the mountains for a small fee, but Mike always kept the younger calves near the house. Tourists often came by in the summer, and Mike charged the kids $5 to feed the calves a bale of alfalfa. It offset the cost of his feed.
They drove up a dirt track into hills where gray hoodoos rose up along the hills, like ancient towers of ash.
"Wow," Bron said when he saw them, "I didn't expect to see these back here."
"Seventy-five million years ago," Mike said, "this land was all covered in dunes, three and four thousand feet high. These cliffs are all that is left of them. There are still a lot of petrified dunes around here that you can climb on. You remember the little volcano just north of the park?"
"Yeah," Bron said. It wasn't tall, but it had a perfect cone on top.
"Just across the highway is White Rock trailhead. It's just a short hike to a little natural amphitheater that climbs up a thousand feet on each side. Olivia likes to go there in the mornings sometimes, to play her songs to rabbits that live by this pool."
"If people knew that all of this cool stuff was here," Bron said, "they'd be crawling all over these rocks."
Mike shrugged. "There's so much beautiful country around here, people turn up their noses at this. Personally, I'm happy to have the tourists leave it alone. A few miles from here," Mike said, "the sand dunes dropped down into an ancient sea. At the edge of it, dinosaurs roamed. The dinosaur run at Johnson's Farm is one of the best in the world. You can see where allosaurs used to sun in the mud and swim in the lake. But there are dinosaur tracks everywhere around here. Home builders will hide them so that the building inspectors can't see, afraid that the government will turn their home lots into archaeological sites.