Free Into the Free by Julie Cantrell

used coin around his waist. The wind picks up, and I try to ignore all the warnings swirling around me, but as River leans in for another kiss, the flowers wave their yellow flags and shout, “Caution!”
    “My mother will be worried,” I lie. “I better get home.” I run for the woods while I still have the power to escape his pull.

     
    It’s Saturday morning. River haunted my dreams again. For six years, I have watched this boy come and go each spring, and I have dreamed of running off with his tribe every time they leave town. I don’t know how I had the power to leave him last night. In that field of flowers. I can’t stop thinking about him. But can I trust him?
    I’m going to risk it. I know I’m probably being foolish, but I hurry out of bed and brush my teeth. I’m going back to the camp to find River. I want to know everything about this coin-laced vagabond. Dangerous or not.
    I throw on my favorite dress and kiss Mama good-bye. “Where’re you off to?” she asks, and I hope this means she’s snapping out of her latest bout with the blues.
    “Library,” I say, grabbing a stack of books to cover my trail. I close the door behind me before she has a chance to change my mind.
    I don’t make it off the porch before I see him. “Morning,” he says, leaning against Sweetie’s firm trunk and sending waves of golden heat right through me. We both stand and stare, only a stack of books and sweet spring air between us. I feel him touch me with his eyes.
    “How long have you been here?” I ask.
    “All night,” he grins, and my spine shoots sparks across the sky. “Going to the library?”
    “Yep,” I answer. Words are sticking to my ribs and I sound silly.
    “Here, let me help.” He pulls the stack of books from my arms, and I tremble as his hand brushes my wrist. We walk the worn path from Cabin Two to the library. “You must really like to read,” he says, pretending the stack is too heavy to carry. “Who’s your favorite?”
    “Author?” I ask, half surprised to be having a conversation about books with a gypsy boy I assume to be illiterate. “Hemingway,” I say. “Yours?”
    “Fitzgerald,” he says. “‘They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.’”
    I lose my breath as he quotes from This Side of Paradise .
    “So how does this traveling life work, exactly? Do you just wander around the world telling stories and playing your harmonica? Impressing people with random literary quotes?”
    He laughs, but he is not making fun of me. He sets the stack of books on the ground, pulls out his blues harp, and begins to play me a tune. It’s not the instrument I hear. It’s his spirit, and it is singing.
    “We just move around trying to earn enough money to stay out of people’s way,” he says. “Folks pay us for eggs or chickens or maybe a newborn donkey or goat. The women read palms, tell fortunes. The men play cards, and we all play music. Some of us take on day jobs, you know, like hauling stuff or cleaning things or picking crops. Nothing too hard. Stuff anybody could do. One of the guys used to have a monkey he had trained to dance and collect money in his little cap.”
    “I remember him,” I say. “He used to bite people.”
    “Only if they didn’t pay up,” he laughs.
    “So where do you call home?” I ask.
    “Home is here. Yesterday it was Jefferson. Next, the coast. Might stay there a while. Might not. I just spin around three times and I’m in my place.”
    “Like a coyote,” I tease. “Dangerous!” No matter how much I fight it, I want his place to be with me. I want to go wherever he goes. But I don’t say that. Instead, I ask, “So where were you born?”
    “You’ll never guess,” he says, pulling me to the edge of the pasture and placing a long thread of wheat grass between his lips. The cows watch us with intense curiosity as he pulls me down beside him.
    “Texas?” I ask.
    “Not even close.” He