They shaved their heads in Virginia. They bought knives from a man named Dog in Kentucky. A tornado twisted through Indiana. Two women offered unconditional love in Missouri.
In Montana, they loaded a truck with square bales and in return slept in an old man’s guest room. A grandfather clock sat in the corner of the room, and so did the old man. He snored in a lime-green lawn chair with a pistol on his lap. In the morning, he made them eggs and kissed them goodbye.
It was just the two of them. They were nineteen years old. Their names were Earl and Joe.
At the edge of Wyoming, they stepped outside their motel room and came upon a baby.
“It’s a baby,” said Earl.
“I see that,” said Joe.
For one reason or another, they decided to keep the baby.
“I’ve always wanted a child,” said Earl.
“I think you’ve mentioned this before,” said Joe.
The baby had thin, brown hair that waved in the breeze. She came with a backpack full of diapers, wipes, and formula. They held her under the light in their motel room and read the note safety-pinned to her chest: YOU SEEM LIKE GOOD BOYS. GOD BLESS.
They did not know where they were going, but they knew they were not going back. Finding this baby seemed to solidify that.
They got farmhand jobs in Southern California. The man they worked for had once been married and had once had a daughter, but it was clear this was a sensitive subject. They ate ham sandwiches and crackers for lunch every day. The old woman who lived beside them watched the baby while they worked. She did it for free, so long as she could take the baby to church.
In the evenings, they sat in the living room and listened to the radio, discussing what they could hang over the fireplace mantle—perhaps a painting of a dog or a miniature replica of a historically important ship. Sometimes they played baseball outside with a stick and a golf ball. Sometimes they sat in the shade of the enormous apple tree and counted the fruit.
Life went on this way for a while. Earl and Joe and the baby.
But one night, a man crawled through the kitchen window. He handled a rifle as if it were light and harmless, and hanging from his shoulder was a small black bag that looked more or less like a purse. He gathered the boys and told them to sit on the couch in the living room.
“What is this?” Joe asked.
“I need a ride,” said the man. “Across.”
“You’re bleeding,” Earl said.
“You’re going to drive me across. Tonight.”
“We have a baby,” Joe said.
The man dug the rifle into the floor and held the other hand on his abdomen. He was dripping onto the thin floorboards, admiring the floral wallpaper. He had always wanted floral wallpaper, and he said so out loud. He seemed not at all intrigued by their situation, that two young men should have the responsibility of a baby.
“Okay,” he said.
The ride was quiet. The man sat in the backseat with the gun pointed at the back of Earl’s head. Joe held the baby in the passenger seat.
“When we get there,” the man said, “I want you to smile but not too much. I want you to tell them you’re visiting relatives. Just do as I say.” But not long after this, as they drove through a series of tunnels, the man stopped talking.
Joe turned around and poked the man’s knee. The gun, which was still pointed at the back of Earl’s head, sat idly in the man’s paint-stained hands. Leaning on his lap like a sad dog was the mysterious black bag with the wide-toothed zipper.
“Is he sleeping?” Earl asked.
“I think he is dead,” said Joe.
They pulled over below a bridge and separated the man from the gun and the bag. They sat him upright on the embankment, as if he had fallen asleep waiting for a ride. There was blood in the backseat but not as much as they thought there should be for him to have died.
The baby cried and Joe fed her a bottle and patted her back to sleep. When she got older, they would tell her this story. Some details would change, of course, until she was old enough to hear them. They would have to relay the story of her life—that was the least they could do—and someday she would tell people she was raised by two young men who had found her outside their motel room. Maybe she would even name a child after one of them or both of them. Earl Joe didn’t sound like such a bad name.
In the distance, a crew of coyotes howled. It was that time of night that made one become existential, and they both openly wondered how in the world they ended up on the side of this road with a baby that was not their own and a dead man they had not killed.
They stood over the man holding the gun and the bag and then they got back in the car.
The drive back smelled of the man’s blood. In the morning, they cleaned the seat and then they cleaned it again. They sanded the spot on the floor where the man had twisted his rifle and then they sanded the entire floor and stained it so that it looked as if no one had ever even walked inside.
Then they counted the money and placed it in a tin box and buried it in the yard.
As for the rifle, they buried it beside the money and then a couple months later, they dug it back up and hung it above the fireplace. If the coyotes got too close, one of them would take it down and shoot the sky.
Dalton Monk lives in Huntington, West Virginia with his wife and two small children. His stories have appeared in New York Tyrant, Joyland, and Meridian, among other places.