Swept Away

By the time I got to the River Park, Jurosz was gone. An hour or so earlier I’d encountered a couple of tweaked out ranch hands at the Taco John’s in town, with Jurosz’s beat-to-shit little trailer attached to the hitch of a pick-up truck.

There was no mistaking the trailer, with its corroded aluminum and faded punk rock stickers. The tweakers told me they’d been hanging out down by the river and had bought the thing from a guy for two hundred bucks. The guy, they said, had a big fire going, and was burning everything he could get his hands on, like he was in a hurry.

I knew that Jurosz had never been a guy with the ability to get his hands on much or to hold on to whatever he did manage to get his hands on, but these two characters said they’d seen him toss armloads of clothing, books, and cassette tapes into the bonfire. They said the guy looked pretty wasted.

That guy, I told them, was a good friend of mine. I proceeded to dial Junosz’s cell phone number, at which point one of the tweakers said, “Dude threw his phone in the river.” The other guy gestured to the dog in the bed of the truck and said, “Boomer there went right in and tried to retrieve the phone, but he was shit out of luck.”

The fire was still smoldering when I arrived. There were a couple of Mexicans who had a trailer just around the bend from Jurosz’s site. I walked down there and asked them if they had any ideas what had become of him and they both shrugged.

There was an envelope containing two hundred dollars and a photo of Jurosz’s old girlfriend Deena –she hadn’t been around at this point for at least five years– nailed to a tree right next to where the trailer had been, but otherwise there was no sign of Jurosz.

A couple days after a group of rafters discovered his body washed up on some rocks downriver I received a postcard from the guy who had been one of my oldest friends, and whose struggles had brought me west in the first place. “I had a soul once,” the message on the card read in Jurosz’s almost obsessively neat and microscopic handwriting. “I didn’t sell it or give it away. I didn’t exactly lose it, either. One night, I guess, it just up and left me for a better, more handsome man who didn’t spend so much time alone.”

I packed my bags, loaded up my truck, shoved a Buddy Guy tape in the deck, and headed back east.

Just like that I wasn’t in Montana anymore.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly a man can change direction, how easily he can erase entire portions of his life and who he once was. People he allowed himself to love. Moments and nights that at the time must surely have seemed like magic and wholly unforgettable.

I’m also always astonished by how much room there is in this country to run. All a guy really needs is the assurance of more nights, reliable darkness, and a road atlas lousy with places to hide.

Seriously, it never ceases to amaze me.