Chapter 134

The next morning, Rawle and Kurtis hitchhiked straight to the next town down.
Oliver.
The cherries were ripe. Hundreds of hippy kids, Newfies and Caribbean guys were crowded in the park at the centre of town waiting to get work. Rawle felt like he should pick cherries for a day two, at least, to get some spending money. If they kept doing the dine-n-dash thing they were bound to get arrested. But Kurtis kept up such a pace of meeting people and bumming weed that after a couple hours of waiting for work, Rawle was too high to care anymore.
They hit the highway, again, in the early afternoon and hitchhiked another town down.
Osoyoos.
Osoyoos was the last small town in the valley.
It was a tiny, burning-hot, incredibly desert town, right on the U.S. border with Washington State, which kind of made Rawle nervous, for some reason.
Kurtis wanted to leave right away, and go across the border.
“You can’t go across with a record, man!” Rawle said. “I’m not talking about an open warrant… any criminal record.”
“I know. But that’s only if they check me out, which they won’t. And I got fake ID. C’mon, man. We’ll hitchhike to Mexico!”
Rawle was starting to feel sick from too much exposure to the hot, hammering Valley sun. As a lifelong Maritimer, he was just not used to this much sun.
“But I got a record, too,” Rawle protested, thinking fast. “Drug possession. They won’t let me cross the border. I know it.”
They’d been drinking only beer for several days now, no water, and not eating anything but fruit they stole from the side of the road, and the occasional dine-n-dash meal.
Rawle was feeling very low on energy and his head was sun-baked.
Oliver and Osoyoos were the hottest temperature towns he had ever been in, his entire life.
It was sunny and dry all day long, morning til night, with him hitchhiking and walking mile after mile after mile on the dusty hot black highway, with thumbs out like a couple of Maritime prostitutes.
Rawle was feeling nauseous, almost cold, and sweaty and very dizzy.
“I’m going to stay in Osoyoos for a while, and just chill out,” Rawle complained as they walked slowly down Main Street.
“I feel like I’m getting heat stroke or something. We’ve been on her for days. I can’t drink tonight either.”
Kurtis said he guessed he would stay in town, too.
“I’m just going to sleep under a bridge or something, until I feel better,” Rawle said. “You go ahead. I’ll probably catch up to you anyways. I’m going to Van. What are you gonna do?”
“I don’t know. Either Van or across the border.”
Kurtis had flirted with a fat lady who worked at the liquor store earlier in the day and had her phone number written on a cigarette pack. He pulled the pack out and got out a smoke. “Maybe I’ll go call that bitch from the liquor store and try to get some leather,” he said. “In the morning, we’ll decide.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Rawle said.
Rawle was relieved when they finally went their separate ways. He almost wanted Kurtis to cross the border and disappear.
He was sick of him.