At the End of the Road

by Grant Jerkins

  The woman didn’t take the Polaroid even though Dana was holding it out, offering it to her. “Her mama’s done been in here. She’s a right pretty girl. I told her I ain’t never seen her.”

  Dana took out her notepad and wrote her name and number on a piece of paper. “If she ever does show up, or you remember seeing her later, call me. Would you do that?”

  “’Course I would. Right pretty girl. I hope nothing bad happened to her.”

  DANA SAT ON A CONCRETE BENCH OUT-

  side the bait shop and drank her Dr. Pepper. It was delicious. Dana thought about the long, hot walk back to her patrol car on Falls River Drive. She was tempted to call her colleague, Senior Deputy Ben Hughes, to come down here and pick her up, but she knew doing that wouldn’t get her any closer to finding Melodie. Deputy Turpin took out the Polaroid and studied Melodie’s face. She really was pretty, and you could tell that whoever had taken the picture had really captured the essence of the girl. This made her think about Melodie’s boyfriend and how his hands wanted to curl into fists. Dana pulled out the small plastic bag with the pieces of safety glass rolling around inside. She held the bag in one hand and the Polaroid in the other, as though comparing and contrasting them. She put them both away, stood up, stretched, noted no pain in her shoulder, and started walking back the way she had come.

  ONCE SHE MADE IT PAST THE HORSE PAD-

  dock, there were houses again. It was later now, and more folks were back home from church. She showed the photo and asked her questions, but nothing came of it—as she more or less expected. But at least she was getting people to thinking about Melodie, looking out for her.

  From that direction, all of the houses were on the left side of the road, with just one house on the right. It was the brick ranch at the end of the long gravel driveway where she had seen the boy. It was the house closest to where she had found the glass. When she knocked, a woman came to the door. The woman was skinny and looked pale and unhealthy with dark circles under her eyes. She looked like someone who had recently lost a lot of weight. Maybe to cancer. While the woman studied the photo, Dana peered over the woman’s shoulder into the house. The family was still in their Sunday clothes eating dinner at a redwood picnic table. Everyone at the table was looking up from their dinner, looking at Dana to see what was going on. Except the father, he kept his back to the door. There were three boys and a cute little girl.

  “No, ma’am, I’m sorry. I’ve never seen that girl,” Louise Edwards said.

  “I see you folks are eating supper, so I won’t bother you anymore, but do you think you could tell me, do you ever remember a car wreck up yonder above your driveway?”

  “No. Never one that I can remember.” Louise turned back to the kitchen and said, “Boyd, do you ever remember anybody getting in a wreck up on the road?”

  Boyd shook his head and stayed intent on his supper. Dana didn’t like the way the man never turned around to look at her. Most men wouldn’t let their wives answer the door to talk to the sheriff’s department without getting themselves involved some kind of way. But it took all kinds. Dana also didn’t like the look on the face of the youngest boy. As her daddy used to say, the boy looked as nervous as a whore in church. She made eye contact with him, but the boy looked away almost immediately. She saw fear in his eyes. Of course, lots of people were scared of the police. Especially kids. Didn’t mean anything. Probably just like his daddy.

  THE SUMMER DRAGGED ON, AND MELODIE

  Godwin had disappeared without a trace. The case was officially still open, but Dana’s superiors had asked her not to devote any more of her time into investigating it. There was no indication of foul play, and the auto glass from the drainage ditch had no real relevance. As her sergeant had put it, he could walk down the street right now and find a handful of glass bits in the gutter. It meant nothing. In light of the domestic disturbance call last year, the assumption was that Melodie had gotten herself out of an abusive relationship by simply disappearing. She got in her car, started driving, and decided not to stop. Women did it every day. Dana had argued that even if that were true, there was no reason Melodie would fail to maintain contact with her mother or sisters. The sergeant had said that she might be too embarrassed, then he shrugged and said you just couldn’t tell about some people.

  But Dana still looked into it in her spare time, paying for day care or a sitter to watch her daughter. Mrs. Godwin called her almost every day. She felt that something bad had happened to her daughter, and no one would help her. Sometimes Mrs. Godwin would be waiting at the station house when Dana came in off her rotation. Dana could barely stand to look the woman in the eye.

  So she tried. Whenever there was a spare moment, she would do something to nudge the case along. To try and push it just a little bit forward. Dana wanted to be able to look Mrs. Godwin in the eye and say she had done some little something to try and find her daughter. Sometimes she parked above George Hicks’s house and just watched to see who came and who went, but nothing unusual ever happened. She still didn’t like George Hicks, but her heart said the answer lay elsewhere.

  She monitored Melodie’s checking account for activity. There was none. This was usually considered a strong indication that the missing person had come to harm—a person can’t survive without money. But Melodie only had forty-three dollars in her account. Not enough to bother with if she was simply fleeing an abusive relationship. And she had no credit cards.

  Dana couldn’t help but to keep coming back to Eden Road, and the boy who wouldn’t meet her eyes. The other day, she had walked the road three times so that she could accidentally meet up with the boy. Even though she’d heard about the fire, she was still shocked when she saw that the side of the road that had held the vast expanse of woods and horse trails was a blackened blight. Burned to the ground. All the way to the reservoir.

  On her third pass along the dirt road, Dana spotted movement on the porch of the house with the wheelchair ramp. She recognized the boy and decided to hang back and observe him for a moment. He was talking to a man in a wheelchair. It looked to Dana like the man was holding the boy’s wrist, but she was too far away to be sure. She wished that she had brought her binoculars, but it had never crossed her mind that she might need them. The boy looked like he was trying to pull away from the older man, and Dana started moving forward. The sight had awakened something maternal in her. She didn’t necessarily think the boy was in any kind of danger, but she felt that whatever was going on needed to be witnessed. The boy’s sister emerged from the corn on the other side of the road and yelled something up to the porch. A few seconds later, the boy stumbled backward and fell on his rear end. He got to his feet, ran down the porch, and disappeared with his sister into the rows of corn.

  By the time she made it to the house of the man in the wheelchair, the porch was empty, everything quiet. She studied the house. It was run-down with faded, peeling paint and shingles missing from the roof. Except for the wheelchair ramp, which stood out in sharp contrast with its newness. Dana turned and walked into the corn.

  She tramped off through the stalks, but quickly realized that the rows were a kind of maze. The pun of maze/maize made her smile. All she could do was move forward and listen. After a while, the corn ended at the edge of a cow pasture. She caught sight of the boy and girl off to the left, moving across the sloping green field. Dana straddled the barbed wire fence and carefully maneuvered herself over it, but still managed to rip her pants at the inner thigh. She inspected the damage and saw that the barb had pierced her skin as well, though it didn’t hurt. She made a mental note to check her personnel file for the date of her last tetanus shot—they were good for ten years.

  Dana scanned the pasture but didn’t see the boy and girl. There was a stand of weeping willows off to the right, so she headed in that direction. She circled around the stand and came at it from behind. She was able to approach without being seen. She could hear the children’s voices. Her plan had been to walk right up
and introduce herself and see if there was any way to gain the boy’s trust, but she held back. The willow branches encircled the area like a green curtain, and Dana stood hidden in it, watching.

  The boy was hanging upside down from a pendulous limb, swinging over a nasty-looking stagnant pond. He was trying to reach something in the green water, but it was just out of his grasp. The girl was pushing him so that he would swing out over the water. Dana smiled at the flag-colored cape the little girl was wearing. She recognized what it was immediately. Wonder Woman seemed to be everywhere that year. Along with Angie Dickinson as Sergeant “Pepper” Anderson and Lindsay Wagner as the Bionic Woman, powerful women were taking over television, and Dana watched all of those shows religiously. In fact, she had bought her daughter the same Wonder Woman costume from Zayre last Halloween. It wasn’t really a Wonder Woman costume, but a cheap made-in-China “patriotic girl” outfit. Her daughter also had a doll version with the red calf-high boots, puffy black hair, and exaggerated bustline of the character as played by Lynda Carter.

  Dana didn’t think of herself as a women’s libber, but she was only the fourth female sheriff’s deputy officer in Douglas County, and the first black female deputy. She felt it every day. The stigma of being different. She made a conscious decision not to wallow in it, but she was certainly aware of it. It was there. So these silly little shows featuring women with superhuman strength, saving men, saving children, saving the day—they just delighted her. She knew that as important as it was for her to get out there and be visible, be competent, and not make mistakes, it was just as important the way these TV shows changed people’s perceptions of women in general. She loved it. Now if they could just get some black folks on TV with a little more class than Sanford and Son.

  The boy asked his sister to not push so hard and slow him down. It worked. Dana smiled when the boy plucked whatever it was that he was after from out of the water, but she realized even before the boy did, that he had gotten himself into a jam. He was stranded, upside down, over the water. The boy only had two options—up or down. Dana smiled again when the boy chose up and managed to right his body and began to scurry up the tapered branch like a monkey. She heard the leaves popping off the branch and saw the avalanche effect. The boy plunged into the water. It felt to Dana like he was down a long time. She had already taken two steps forward when the boy emerged, covered in green slime and algae.

  The girl took off her play cape and gave it to the boy so that he could use it to wipe off the green slime. That cape’s ruined now, Dana thought. Then the boy inspected what he had retrieved from the water. It was wrapped up in thread and it took a while to get it all unrolled. There was a silver dollar inside. The boy admired it for a while, and then he leaned over and hugged his sister. The boy turned away from her, and Dana could tell that he was crying. The girl started crying too.

  Dana watched them a long time and knew that she would not speak to the boy on this day. She would not intrude. And it was only after she wiped the wetness from her cheek that Deputy Officer Dana Turpin realized that she had been crying too. And like Kyle and Grace, she didn’t know why.

  HE DIDN’T HAVE ANY IDEA IF IT WAS MID-

  night or not, so Kyle just laid there for a good long time after everybody went to bed, and he could hear Mama and Daddy snoring. Grace had tried to stay up with him, but she was asleep too. He crept out of bed and got himself dressed. It being a single level ranch-style house, Kyle just opened the bedroom window and crawled on out.

  It was a long walk down the gravel driveway. Lonesome. There were shrill insect sounds, and the skin on his arms looked funny to him in the moonlight. There were odd sounds in the corn, and Kyle thought that he could hear someone moving around in there. That got him to thinking about Soap Sally. Mama said that when Soap Sally grabbed little kids, those needle-fingers would poke them over and over again like getting a thousand shots at the doctor’s office. He started walking a little bit faster. When he got to the road, he could see a dim light seeping through the paralyzed man’s front window. To Kyle, the light looked greenish, like a witch-light.

  There wasn’t anything to do but walk up the ramp and knock on his door. Kyle could never in a million years imagine a future for himself that included him knocking on the front door of the paralyzed man at midnight. Never.

  Because of the wheelchair and him being dead on one side, the paralyzed man kind of sidled up to the door so he could still reach it but not block it with his chair. He smiled at Kyle real big with those yellow teeth with the black rot spots.

  “Boy, I didn’t think you’d really come.”

  When Kyle got inside, the green light wasn’t like a witch-light at all. One of the lights had a green shade was all. It was actually kind of nice. It made him feel warm inside like a good fire in the wintertime. The door shut behind him.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Kyle, sir.”

  “Kyle. That’s a fine sheet. You’re a fine boy. Scared?” Kyle assumed the man meant “name” when he said “sheet.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not? I’d be scared.”

  Kyle just shrugged.

  “You a firebug, Kyle?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Coulda fooled me. Boy burns down damn near a hundert acres of timber, I’d say that boy was a firebug.”

  “Can I have the doll back?”

  The paralyzed man seemed to give the question a great deal of thought. Finally, he nodded and said, “’Course you can. I don’t aim to punish you. That’s The Lord’s work. Thy will be washing machine.”

  Done! Kyle wanted to scream at him, completely unnerved by what he did not realize was the paralyzed man’s extremely mild case of Wernicke’s aphasia brought on by the stroke. Thy will be done!

  The paralyzed man dug down under his lap and pulled out Wonder Woman, her metal wristbands glinting. He held her out to Kyle, and when Kyle reached out, he pulled the doll back. Kyle felt the doll’s black nylon hair tickle his skin. “We just got a little work to do first. The shovel’s in the shed out back yonder.”

  KYLE WAS SCARED OUT THERE BECAUSE

  of the way the pole beans were planted—nobody could see him if something were to happen. The task seemed simple enough, though. The man wanted his rosebushes dug up out of the side yard and moved to the other side before the county crew tore through them to run the waterline. It was actually quick work. The ground was soft, loamy, and the roses’ roots were somewhat shallow. He was wearing thick gloves to protect him from the thorns. First he dug good wide receiving holes on the far side of the yard, then he dug up the rosebushes one at a time and moved them to the new holes before the roots could dry out. The paralyzed man watched him from the porch, telling him how to do it, that green light leaking out from behind him. Why this had to be done at midnight, Kyle didn’t know.

  Once the last bush had been set back in the ground, he sent Kyle back to the side yard where he had excavated all the bushes.

  “Roots, boy. Run deeper than you think. You don’t get them out, why the bush’ll ceiling fan right back up.”

  Sprout, Kyle thought. The bush’ll sprout right back up.

  “Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Then you’d have roses on both sides of your house.”

  “No. They graft. In the nursery, they graft fine roses, like those Mr. Lincolns you just dug up. They graft them onto rootstock. Substandard rootstock. Ain’t no telling what might sprout up. It’s best to get it all out. Kill it.”

  Kyle sighed and started digging again. He was tired and wanted to go home. Kyle just wanted the paralyzed man to give him that doll and let him go home and forget all about him and the roses and the fire.

  “Deeper, dig a little deeper, son.”

  It didn’t make sense. If there weren’t any roots right here, how could there be more roots farther underground?

  “Deeper,” he said. His voice was soft and high. “Don’t want it haunting me next spring. Keep digging.”
>
  Kyle figured he was right, because pretty soon he hit a hard root system. He chopped at it with the shovel blade to loosen it up, but it was tight, knotted up. Thick. He set the shovel blade over it and jumped up and down on the back of the shovel until he heard and felt the root snap. Kyle reached down and yanked at it. It came up easy enough, a big clot of root shaped like a hand. It felt funny to him. Soft and rotted. And he smelled it. Kyle threw it down because he realized it wasn’t a root at all. It really was a hand. A creaky little scream came out of his mouth, like a ten-penny nail being pulled from damp lumber.

  It was somebody’s hand. He was digging up a body.

  The paralyzed man was framed in the front door, sitting high up on that metal chair, the green light spilling out all around him. Kyle could see now that it really was witch-light. And the paralyzed man was laughing. Laughing to beat the devil.

  THE SPACES IN THE WEB WERE FILLING

  in now.

  She remembered who she was. Melodie. Her name was Melodie Godwin. She remembered how she got here. She had been running late for the party. The party! Her mother, her sisters, her nieces and nephews. What she would give to be with them right now. Normalcy. There had been a boy on a bicycle. A stupid boy. A stupid, stupid boy. Coming around a blind curve in the middle of the road. Yes, she had maybe been going faster than she should have. She’d nearly killed him. It was nothing more than the grace of God that she had been able to swerve at the last possible second. The car had ended up on its side in a ditch. She remembered that her head had been bleeding, her fingernails somehow torn off. And she remembered finding a metal wrench that George had left in there, and using it to break out the passenger window. She had climbed out of the car and asked the boy to help her. And the boy—the stupid, stupid boy—had run away from her.