Free Finding Somewhere by Joseph Monninger

from something behind us. I thought about Delores’s dad and his threat to call the cops, and I figured he probably had done that, had probably seized the moment to bully his ex-wife. Sometimes people needed to be right no matter who it hurt or how useless it was to take a stand. All that thinking made it hard to sleep, so I poked my head out and saw Speed eating grass near our tent. I listened to him yankingup mouthfuls and slobbering it down, and when he passed by I saw his silhouette blacked out against the white of the meadow and he looked as pretty as a horse could look, and as proud.
    J ULIE GAVE US TWO AGRICULTURAL LICENSE PLATES OFF some old farm equipment stored behind the barn. Delores had told her the situation, and Julie hadn’t batted an eye.
    “I have no idea if these will do you any good,” she said, supervising us as we took off the plates with an old, rusty screwdriver. “In fact, they may land you in more trouble if they’re out of date, but you’re welcome to them. You stick to the back roads and you may do okay. You look like farm girls running errands. Once you get out of Wisconsin, the cops won’t know as much about the plates.”
    “Women going west,” Delores said, chipping rust off the screws that held the plates to the old baler.
    “It’s a grand adventure,” Julie said, “and you aren’t hurting anyone. But mark this address down, though, and if you get in any trouble and need to dump old Speed, we can keep him here for a while.”
    “Thank you,” I said.
    I stood drinking coffee. Julie had brought us coffeeand muffins from town. I had a blueberry nut muffin and a warm cup of coffee. The temperature had dropped, and the meadow looked white and furled. Speed kept his nose buried in the grass. Julie had already been out to him with carrots. That’s when Delores explained our pickle.
    Delores popped the first license plate and handed it to me. She went to work on the second.
    “Do me one favor, though, will you, girls?” Julie asked. “You call home now and then so people don’t worry too much. You’d be surprised how much parents miss you and think about you when you’re gone.”
    “Not my mom,” Delores said, concentrating on the plate.
    “Even your mom,” Julie said, sipping her own coffee. “Even if she doesn’t seem like she would. I don’t know her, but I know moms. She’ll worry, trust me.”
    We didn’t say anything for a while after that. It felt good to be outside early. We turned now and then to watch Speed drift by. Then Julie told us she always thought South Dakota was a good place for horses, and that it was closer than Wyoming or Montana. She talked about prairie grass, which had once spread all over the Midwest and behaved like a sea, actually. A sea of grass going on forever. She said the bison ate the grass, then spread it as manure, and they trampled the ground and aerated it for centuries. The topsoil in the grasslands onceheld the thickness of a chocolate layer cake, dense and sweet, and she thought a horse could get by there nicely.
    “I wish I had a friend in South Dakota,” she said as Delores got the second plate free. “Someone to send you to, you know. I’d feel better if you had a destination.”
    “We’ve got a list of rangelands,” I said.
    Julie nodded.
    I put the plates on our vehicles while Delores and Julie struck the tent and collected our sleeping bags. At one point Jack came out and asked if she intended to open the store, and Julie shushed him away, saying if he wanted the store open he could do it himself. He didn’t seem to like that answer, and went off shaking his head. Julie stuck out her tongue at him. We all laughed.
    She asked if she could bring Speed into the trailer, and we said of course.
    You could tell by the way she handled him that she loved horses. Speed was just one more horse, true, but with her hands and her voice, she talked to every horse she had ever known. She stopped him a couple times to lean into him