"jude" continues...

about a month and 3 weeks ago...

The sun was going down fast on the small town somewhere in Idaho. It was the time of day when everything is golden. When everything seems to look so much more beautiful than it otherwise might appear. A field that was merely a field at noon, now looks Elysium. Worn down buildings erected in the fifties find their glory restored to them. Heaven touches down and everything is bathed in its glow. And then the sun is gone, and night falls, and all remains hidden until the light breaks forth again, beginning the next day as the last one ended, in a cleansing bath of quiet, fiery streaks of sun…

Jude stood next to his old beat-up Chevy pickup. It had just broken down and he stood with his hands on his waist, looking down on the town from a hill several miles away. Smoke rose up from the propped-open hood of the truck and whipped and curled around in the quiet shifting wind.

He snatched a Polaroid camera from the cab, walked down the shoulder away from the truck, and aimed it at the town. Click. Like a fortune-telling machine at a carnival, the camera produced a white square. Jude pulled it out and fanned in the air, looking out over the scene he had just captured. The tiny buildings and streets wrapped in gold began to materialize in the photograph and Jude walked back to the truck.

It wasn’t starting last night at a truck stop so he had stayed the night in the cab hoping for a better tomorrow. And fortunately it started but now he found himself in a worse predicament. It had died on him as he was driving down the hill and would only concede a clicking noise at the turn of the key. Worse, Jude didn’t know a thing about cars or engines or anything like that. So he stood there prodding at parts, even though he had no idea what they did.

Breaking down didn’t concern Jude; it was what it would cost that worried him. That aside, he saw this trip as an adventure anyways. He was traveling from Texas to Portland, Oregon to move in with his uncle and go to school there. His mother had finally married a man who wasn’t Jude’s father and he found it too strange to stay and much more exciting to move to Oregon.

So there he was. With no idea of what was wrong with his truck or even if there would be a place to fix it there. The way it was all set on fire by the glow of the sun made the town very inviting though, thought Jude. So he slammed the hood shut and reached into the cab for his backpack and a couple of other things and locking the door, more out of habit than need, he began to walk towards the town on the shoulder of the road.

The gravel crunched under Jude’s shoes as he made his way down the curves of the hill. Jude was a fairly tall, thin 19-year old. His dark black hair fell down over his green eyes and he was always brushing it aside so he could see. He wore a pair of old frayed jeans and a maroon, pocketed t-shirt.

As he walked, a white Camaro was coming down the hill, far behind him, and to the driver, Jude was only a silhouette. The Camaro slowly approached the silhouette, pulling to the shoulder of the road, and Jude turned, hearing the hum of a motor in his ear. The car came to a stop next to him and Jude bent down looking into the open passenger side window.