As prison inmates are being transported in Northern California, a car forces their bus to crash. The vehicle’s driver, Billy, holds the guard at gunpoint, and demands he release the prisoners, which includes his friend, Sam. Once freed, Sam takes the wheel of Billy’s car, but as they flee, Billy is shot by the guard. Before dying, he proudly tells Sam that he made good on his word to break him out of prison. Sam buries Billy in a field, and hides in the woods. At night, he sneaks to a nearby farmhouse, where he watches a pretty mother with her children. After they go to sleep, Sam enters to take some table salt, and is seen by the young son, Mookie Anderson. In the morning, Mookie asks his mother, Clydie, for some salt, then exclaims that he saw “E.T.” take it. When the house shudders from a dynamite explosion set off by a land developer, Clydie loses her temper with Mookie. The boy runs to the barn and looks through a box of mementos he keeps to remind him of his dead father. In the woods, Sam finds money and a tape recording left for him in Billy’s car, and pushes the vehicle into a nearby lake. Elsewhere, developer Franklin Hale introduces his new head of security, Mr. Dunston, to Lonnie, a local police officer. Hale asks Lonnie if he has made any headway convincing his “girl friend,” Clydie Anderson, to sell her land. Later, Sam returns to the Anderson home and overhears Lonnie warn Clydie that Franklin Hale may try to strong-arm her, because he needs her property for his development. Mookie sees Sam and follows him back to his tent. When Sam draws his gun, Mookie asks if he is a bad guy, and Sam puts his gun away and introduces himself. The boy returns the next day, followed by his little sister, Bree, and offers to help Sam light a campfire. Before sending them home, Sam learns that the children’s father is dead. Later, as Clydie and her children return to the farm from town, she sees that one of her calves has been killed. Hale’s thugs appear and smash the window of her pickup truck, but Sam arrives and fights them off. Clydie is surprised when Mookie declares that Sam is his friend. She invites Sam inside, and he tells her he is a lawyer from Quebec, Canada, camping nearby. Before Mookie goes to bed, he hugs Sam, and Clydie offers to let him sleep in her barn for a few nights. In the morning, she gives him some of her husband’s clothes. When Lonnie finds Sam showering in Clydie’s home, he holds him at gunpoint, until Clydie claims Sam is her cousin. She invites Sam to have dinner with the family, and agrees to sell him the broken-down motorcycle in her barn. Later, when Clydie turns down Franklin Hale’s offer to buy her property, he threatens that she may lose it anyway, because his bank will foreclose because of late mortgage payments. Hale holds a town meeting in hopes of convincing residents to allow his real estate development to move forward, and Clydie’s neighbor, Tom Lewis, protests Hale’s plans to cut down their forest. That night, Mookie awakens Sam when Tom Lewis’s barn catches fire, and Sam rescues Tom from the blaze. Later, Clydie invites Sam to join her and the children as they watch home movies. Watching her late husband, Sam tells Clydie he was also married before, and Clydie invites Sam to sleep in her room. He politely declines her invitation. As Sam and Clydie speak on the porch, Lonnie watches from a distance, growing increasingly jealous. Later, Clydie refuses Lonnie’s attempt to become intimate, and he leaves upset. When he returns and finds Sam in the barn, Lonnie handcuffs him and beats him with a nightstick. As Clydie nurses Sam back to health, she kisses him and they make love. One day, Hale’s security man, Mr. Dunston, arrives with Bree in tow, claiming he found the girl wandering around. Sam confronts Dunston, warning him to stop the threats. In time, Lonnie lets Sam know he has discovered his true identity, and asks him to leave quietly before anyone gets hurt. Sam confesses to Clydie that he was involved in a bank robbery, during which his partner, Billy, killed a guard. Clydie is angry that Sam led her on, and he agrees to leave on the motorcycle. Meanwhile, Lonnie reveals Sam’s identity to Hale and Dunston, and claims he let Sam go because he did not want the state police arriving in town while they are conducting illegal activities. Elsewhere, Sam attracts the attention of a state trooper at a roadside diner, and the officer takes down his license plate number. As Sam hides in the woods, he is surrounded by police, but evades them by riding his motorcycle along a ridgeline. Worried about Clydie, Sam returns to the farm, where Dunston and his men have broken into the house and held her at gunpoint. As Mookie escapes out the window, he runs into Sam. Dunston knocks Lonnie unconscious, and beats Clydie until she signs Franklin Hale’s contract. Hale instructs a henchman to set fire to her house before they leave. However, Sam enters, puts out the fire, and kills Dunston in a fight. As Hale exits the house holding a gun to Clydie’s head, state troopers arrive and arrest him. Clydie begs Sam to flee, but he tells her and Mookie that he committed a crime, and must return to prison. He promises Clydie he will return, and as they embrace and profess their love, she vows to wait for him. When Lonnie handcuffs Sam and escorts him outside, Mookie hugs Sam goodbye.