by Isla Morley
Adam nods.
Not just vegetation. Chemicals, perhaps. Chlorine?
No car is in sight. There are no lights anywhere, not even in the distance where a freeway ought to be. “Lock your door,” I tell Adam between coughing spasms. This is all we need now, me to cough myself loopy.
“Here you go.” Adam hands me a canteen of water from the backseat.
“What else does he have back there? Any chance of a chain saw?”
It’s meant as a joke, but Adam gives me a sober look. “You can’t expect it to be how you remember it.”
I can’t think of anything to say. In fact, I’ve completely drawn a blank on how to treat him. A few minutes ago, he had the enthusiasm of a young boy, not an iota of caution; now, he is this almost-grown-up telling me not to take my memory so seriously.
When the cough subsides, I put the car back into gear and drive. “People are going to be asking me a lot of questions. You, too.”
“Okay.” Future tense. His eyes glaze over.
“They’re going to ask about what happened to Mister.” I don’t dare take my eyes off the road. “I might have to go someplace and straighten everything out.”
“It’s not a crime what you did.”
“No, it isn’t.” Even to my own ears, this has the muffled tone of uncertainty. I don’t know any more what a crime is or isn’t. It’s hard to think of crime the way it is written in books when I’ve lived so many years with rules instead of laws.
“I won’t let them lock you up. I’ll tell them I did it.”
I shake my head. “Nobody’s going to get locked up.”
Up ahead is a sign. I stop twenty yards in front of it. Through the vines, I make out, TONGANOXIE, 15 MI. To get to Lawrence, we should be going in the opposite direction. Who knows, perhaps Tonganoxie is no longer the one-horse town it used to be. Maybe it is now the hub of Douglas County, with a state-of-the-art emergency room.
After a while, the jarring and bumping of the uneven road gives way to a smooth, almost pleasing drone. Adam, though, has drawn his legs up to his chest and knotted his arms around them. Without realizing it, he has started to hum. He has hums for different moods—when he’s content or bored or lost in thought. High-pitched hums come when he’s wound up. The more worried he is, the lower the pitch tends to be. This one has so much bass it can mean only one thing: he is in a full-blown panic. To distract him from his thoughts, I suggest he look through the glove box. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, so I point to the little lever. He pulls it and springs back in his seat when the compartment drops like a big gaping jaw. I’ve never seen him this jumpy.
“Got a lot of junk in there, doesn’t he?” I comment.
Adam rifles through Dobbs’s things, holding up each find for me to see: an odd collection of tokens; registration papers so old they are taped together along the folds; something called a Disposal Zone Pass.
“What else does he have in the box back there?”
Adam brings it to the front seat. It is a soup-to-nuts survival kit, complete with army rations, a folding shovel, and a compass. After examining all the items, he puts them back and conducts a search for other secret compartments in the car. He is thrilled to find a map under the visor. He opens it, holds it up to the overhead light, and announces in a trembling voice that Dobbs has crossed out many of the routes.
“Let me see that.” I push the brakes and let the car idle where it stops.
Not only has Dobbs scratched out some of the roads, he has penciled in squiggly trails connecting the missile complex to various locations. None of his notations are legible. For some reason, Lawrence has a big X through it.
“What does that mean?”
“Who knows?” I answer. “Put it away; we don’t need it.” I grip the steering wheel and keep driving.
“He’s circled Oskaloosa. Is that a town? Maybe we should go there.”
“Put it away, Adam.”
“I found where we are.” He thrusts the map at me. I jam on the brakes again. We follow Adam’s finger until it comes to hash marks. “What do you suppose he means by these?”
I snatch the map and toss it over my shoulder. “Nothing. It’s one of his crazy ideas, is all. You checked under the seats yet?”
Adam bends down and runs his hand beneath him. He comes up with a cassette tape. “What’s this?”
“Watch.” I shove the cassette tape into the machine, and Patsy Cline starts singing. With Dobbs, it’s always country music.
“I don’t want to think about him.” Adam pushes buttons until the tape ejects.
“Just wait till you hear all the different kinds of music. You’re going to love classical music. Mozart, Bach—”
He cuts me short. “How could you stand it?”
I want to talk about things from before my captivity, and Adam wants a reconfiguration of everything that happened after it. It doesn’t matter how far back in time we go; we are both dragging the deadweight of the past into our fresh new start.
“How could you stand what he did to you? Why didn’t you try to escape?”
“Oh, Adam. I tried to get away. I drove myself crazy trying to get out. And then when you came along, I was so scared he’d take you away from me if I tried anything.” I tell him about the baby and living without Charlie and the ventilation shaft where I used to scream for help and busting my foot against the door. Instead of a beginning, middle, and end, the story comes out haphazard and makes about as much sense as a riddle told backward.
“Why didn’t anyone come for us?” Adam’s tone has turned accusatory.
“I’m sure they tried. I’m sure they looked just about everywhere they could think to look.”
“Maybe they’re all dead.”
It’s my turn to get short. “Don’t you say things like that. If you want to blame someone, blame Mister. Blame me. But you are not to blame them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he asks after a while. He knows of my deceit, but he still cannot grasp the why of it.
Because I was thinking like a mother—not a narrator. A mother has to find the kinder story. “I’m sorry, son.” I am always going to be sorry. Even something as big as being free can’t change that.
He gives me that inscrutable look and then stares ahead into the night. “I’d have killed him a long time ago.”
* * *
We approach another sign too overgrown with vines to be of any use, but I feel my spirits lift. An intersection will be up ahead. If I read the map right, I can make a right and go a few miles till we hit County Road 1057 and then double back toward Lawrence.
“Do you think there are people living in space by now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because there sure aren’t any people around here.”
“There will be. Another few miles and there’ll be so many people you won’t know what to do with yourself.”
No sooner do I make this proclamation than I notice what’s wrong with this end of the road: utility poles lying on the ground. None of them have any wires attached to them.
“Do I look like them?” Adam continues.
“Of course you look like them.” But if the utility poles aren’t up, there can’t be any electricity in this area.
“What if your parents don’t like me?”
“Adam, don’t talk like that.” I begin tallying all his many wonderful features because I’d just as soon as not point out the growing list of things wrong with this route.
And then there is no way around it.
I slow down in plenty of time; even lit up by one headlight, it makes no sense. Stranded at the railway crossing is a freight train. Dobbs’s hash marks.
“Wow,” Adam whispers.
It’s immediately apparent the train has been parked here a long time. The containers are rusty and in some places missing their sides altogether. One of the containers has toppled over.
“Can we go look?”
“Stay where you are, Adam.”
> “It’s so huge. Please, Mom, can we just—”
I scream as someone raps on the passenger window. A bearded, dirty face scowls at us and raves some incoherent protest.
Adam lurches toward me as the man bangs against the window so hard it’s a wonder it doesn’t shatter.
“What does he want?” Adam asks.
I throw the car into gear and hit the gas. “We’re not going to find out.” I steer the Oldsmobile sharply to the left onto the gravel utility road running beside the tracks. “Hang on!”
There are other shapes emerging from the containers now, some with torches. One of the ragged figures marches straight into our path and I dare not swerve for the ditch beside us. I don’t know how to drive this fast. “Get out of the way!” I pummel the center of the steering wheel and the horn blares loudly, but the man continues to advance until his body careens off the hood, and goes flying into the darkness.
“Oh God, oh God.”
The back window cracks, and something solid hits the side of the car hard enough to jostle it.
“They’re throwing stuff at us!”
“Get down, Adam!”
We are nearing the front of the train, where a blockade is forming across the access road. Men are pushing barrels and shopping carts into a big pile, and they are chanting.
“Mom, what’s going on?”
“It’s okay, my boy. Everything’s going to be okay. Just stay down.”
I tighten my grip on the wheel and then jam the accelerator all the way to the floorboard. The tires churn up stones which pelt the undercarriage like machine-gun fire. The barricade is no match for the Oldsmobile. Boxes and carts go flying every which way, and I can’t be sure whether the burlap-covered objects we hit are sandbags or bodies.
We go a good ten miles farther before I slow down and check on Adam. He gets back onto the seat, and leans away from the window.
The tightness in my chest returns and between coughing jags, I ask, “Are you okay?”
Adam is bent at the waist, but he gives me a winning smile, which can only mean he’s faking.
“Is that what people are like?” His chin is trembling.
Checking the rearview mirror, I tell him it’s a homeless camp because that’s what my mind would have it be. Never mind this is Douglas County, Kansas, land of miles and miles of nothing. I don’t tell him that I am in a lot of trouble now. Folks may let the Dobbs thing go, but a hit-and-run?
No turning back now. We carry along the dirt road until we must be well on our way to Kansas City. Somewhere along the line we are bound to hit a major thoroughfare, a gas station, or a farmhouse.
“Are all roads this long?”
“Oh, son, they’re much, much longer than this.”
“But where do they end?” He says it like all roads should meet at a wall or a ledge or a dead end. He’s been aboveground less than an hour, and already I am forgetting that for him the world fits neatly on textbook-size pages, that countries are confined to diagrams.
“Take a look at that map again. See if you can make head or tail of it.”
The smell of fumes sticks to my tongue, thick enough almost to chew. Light-headed, I feel my confidence tapering. Adam won’t be fooled by my brave face.
He is poring over the map. His hands are still shaking. “I see the train tracks. He’s got a line here with arrows. That’s got to be good, right?”
“I’ll take another sip of that water, if you don’t mind.”
Adam hands me the bottle. It is slippery. I turn on the overhead light. Blood on the bottle and his hand.
“I’m okay, Mom,” he insists, but the spreading stain on his shirt contradicts him. The stitches must have ruptured. “It’ll quit bleeding in a minute; it’s just because I twisted funny.” He presses his hand to his side and folds over.
Now. I look through the windshield at the moon. Now would be a real good time to help us out a little.
Of its own doing, the car begins to slow. I press the accelerator pedal as far as it will go and then pump it, but the Oldsmobile keeps slowing down and gradually sputters to a complete stop. Several red lights come up on the dashboard. I have no idea what any of them mean. A gust of wind bangs against the car on its way into the pitch of night. I turn over the ignition and pump the gas. Nothing happens.
Adam leans over to look at the control panel. “We’re out of gas,” he announces matter-of-factly.
FOR YEARS I have dreamed of open spaces, but reality is more terrifying than being confined. If only the expanse could parcel itself to us a little bit at a time. Instead, it is a tide that keeps rising. There is no adjusting to the outside; there is only doggy-paddling through the night, trying to keep the terror from dragging me under.
The light of the moon is now like foggy breath on steel. Adam is not used to dampness and shivers right through the blanket, but he has set a rather demanding pace. The hours he has spent walking up and down stairs and running along the silo’s corridors are paying off in every way except one. When we first started out on foot, he marveled at how well shoes work, but now he has started to limp on account of the blisters they’ve caused. I’ve had to rip holes in my old pair to make room for my crooked toes. At first, Adam wanted to stop every few yards to pick up something, a stick or a stone. He’d compare weights. Now, he trudges along without even looking down. Although he won’t admit it, he’s in a lot of pain from the wound. Hunching forward, he refuses to hand me the suitcase, and scans the countryside with the flashlight. I consider telling him to turn it off so we can prolong the battery life, but who’s to say we wouldn’t walk right by a farmhouse, what with all these trees. They’re monstrous, growing outward at queer angles. Each and every one has gnarled, crooked limbs.
I don’t know how long we’ve been walking or how far. I keep trying to place our location. The compass, unable to settle its spinning needle, is of no use. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear we were in some other state. We have yet to come to an open field. The land should tell us what season we’re in. It’s not spring, or there’d be the smell of freshly turned soil, and it’s not summer, because there is not a single corn row. Just acres and acres of deformed trees and an unending tangle of greenbrier.
We’ve got to come across a house. “Anytime now,” I say.
* * *
In my head, I try to rehearse my story. Do I start with the killing or end with it? Do I save Adam for later, or do I put him out front, the one good thing I have to show for myself? Or do I just give them my name and the date I was kidnapped?
Adam keeps his own counsel, and I’ve become so accustomed to his silence that he startles me when he says, “Mom, look.”
I follow the beam of light, and sure enough, between a clearing of trees is a structure. Instead of hurrying toward it, I put my hand across the front of the flashlight till he turns it off.
“Stay here,” I tell him.
“I’m coming with you.”
“No. I’ll call to you once I know it’s safe.” The figures from the train are still fresh in my mind. “I’ll be right back. Go hide in those hedges till I tell you.”
I ball up my handkerchief and press it against my mouth to stifle the cough and proceed.
Something claws my leg and snags my skirt. I rip free of the thorny bush that has overtaken much the driveway.
“Is that a tree house?” whispers Adam from behind me.
“I told you to wait!”
“I don’t think anyone lives there.”
Without a roof, the house at the end of the drive looks scalped. Growing right up out of it is one of those unsightly trees. Mangled branches are coiling out of the windows. The gutters have fallen down, and the front of the house is completely taken over by ivy. There is no point knocking on the front door. “Let’s go.”
Not too much further along, the road turns spongy and damp. Adam hasn’t said anything for a while. Instead of leading the way as before, he now lags behind. I stop and wait for him to catch up.
I feel his forehead—he is burning up. I check the wound. It is red and puffy and beginning to seep pus.
“Let’s stop for a while and rest.”
He shakes his head. He motions for me to move on.
We keep going even when our feet are soaked and frozen.
I’ve been trying hard not to jump the gun, but I keep picturing my reunion with Mama. My biggest worry is what she’ll make of Adam. I want her to see what a sensitive, curious person he is, how focused he can be on certain things, what a lovely companion he is. I want her to love him. I don’t know what I’ll do if she doesn’t.
Suddenly, there is no going forward. One minute, a road, such as it is; the next, a wash. From the smell alone, it’s obvious the water’s been sitting a good long time. I grab the flashlight. No wading to the other side—the waterway is fortified with trees. Instead of having burred, bent trunks like the others, these have massive, barrel-shaped bases and thick, tentacle roots that bulge out of the water. I know them only from pictures—mangrove trees. Impossibly, we are in a swamp.
What a Florida mangrove is doing in the middle of Kansas is not nearly the pressing conundrum that Adam’s failing condition is. I try leading him in a meandering route around the edge of the swamp until I realize there is no circumventing it. We proceed in another direction, traipsing through bushes and brambles so thick wild animals might as well be mauling us. Desperate, I begin hollering for help.
At first, I think it is Adam who is panting from all the exertion. I stop. While he catches his breath, I hear it again—panting, and then a grunt.
“Do you hear that?” Adam whispers.
I press my hand against his mouth. I cock my head to the left and wait.
This time the sound comes from behind us.
If we were in a field, we might outrun it, but in brush as dense as this, we stand no chance. Quietly, I reach for the backpack and pull out the shovel. I hold it like a spear, and beckon for Adam to get behind me. I wait for the threat to give away its location.
The grunting becomes more insistent. It’s getting closer. For a second, everything goes real quiet. And then there is an almighty roar. Branches snap, the ground vibrates. The unmistakable racket of a charging beast.