Road Out of Winter

by Alison Stine

  “You sure about this?”

  “I’m just going to that ridge. You shouldn’t walk more than you have to. If anyone comes...” I thought of the gun back home in the ground.

  “I’ll be fine,” Grayson said. “Stainless-steel boot, remember?”

  I glanced around the bottom of the rise one more time, then climbed to the ridge.

  The instinct for trouble: I searched for a broken branch that meant a man had run through this way, the trampled snow of footprints, a bit of fabric snagged on a twig.

  I saw something large and bright on the next hill across the valley. A pumpkin.

  But it wasn’t on the ground; it was too high.

  The pumpkin sat crookedly on a neck.

  It was the head of a scarecrow. Plaid shirt stuffed with something, boots and jeans. Why would someone make a scarecrow in the middle of the woods and leave it on a hill? Go to all that trouble—and waste what looked to be warm clothes?

  I climbed up the rise to where the scarecrow had been planted. Behind it, I saw the Pumpkin King’s trailer. This scarecrow wasn’t guarding any crops. Nothing had been planted in a while. The fields on the hilltop looked empty and black, furrows filled with snow. The trailer seemed abandoned, the siding ripped and shot with mold. The wheels weren’t just parked like my own trailer. These tires were flat—rotted.

  But I knew he lived there.

  I saw green ferns inside the trailer windows. The birdfeeder in the plane tree was full. I approached the cinder-block step and knocked quickly at the door. The birdfeeder, cut from an empty milk jug, wagged in the wind, heavy with seeds. I glanced over the seed that had spilled: red millet.

  I picked up a handful from the snow. It might sprout someday, if it hadn’t been baked. A wind chime clattered: something else hanging in the tree, made from spoons.

  I didn’t want to leave Grayson alone for too long. What if the Pumpkin King came back to that spot and I wasn’t there? I couldn’t remember exactly what he had said, where to meet. He wouldn’t know Grayson, wouldn’t trust him. I put the millet seed in my pocket—I would ask the Pumpkin King if the millet might grow; surely he wouldn’t begrudge me some birdseed, especially if I was giving him a grow light—then knocked again.

  Through the door, its window curtained with a dish rag, I could see a slice of room. The Pumpkin King was messy. Dirty dishes in the sink, the stack teetering higher than the faucet. The curtains on the other side of the room had been torn down.

  It was too messy.

  There were broken dishes on the floor. Plants had been overturned, dirt speckled with fertilizer, mixing with the plate shards. Something was wrong.

  I should text the Pumpkin King. I should have done that first.

  I would have to find a spot with some reception. I turned from the door and left the trailer. Still no bars in the upper corner of my phone. I passed the scarecrow on the hill, hurrying now. What were the scarecrow’s hands made from? Not gloves. They were tan and red, blotchy. Like skin.

  That was no scarecrow.

  It was a man, a dead man, with a pumpkin’s head.

  “Grayson!” I screamed.

  The pumpkin had been carved into a jack-o’-lantern: triangle nose, grin, two holes for eyes. And in the eyeholes, someone had pushed into the body below—they must have screwed them into the flesh to get them to stay—two seeds.

  The Pumpkin King’s last two seeds, the ones he was saving for himself.

  He was in there, what was left of him. I knew his face was ruined, whatever remained of it. I knew there was a bullet in his head or chest, or a knife in his belly. He was strung on a pole, his sagging body forced upright.

  Grayson came stumbling over the hill. He had left the light. He had run, dragging his hurt foot. “Is he—?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  The body was too still. It emitted stillness. It pulsed with it, like a light.

  “What happened? What do we do?” Grayson said.

  I stepped closer to the body.

  “Wil! Don’t touch it. Goddamn it.”

  Someone had taken the trouble to find the seeds, someone who knew—who must have known—what they might be worth, if spring never came back. But they had used the seeds, anyway, wasted them. To make a point? To punish him? What else had the Pumpkin King sold—the thing that made his limbs whittle away to nothing, that made his movements jerky, the thing that eased his pain? What had they taken from the trailer—or had tossed the trailer for and not been able to find?

  “Wil, we gotta get out of here.”

  I bent to the Pumpkin King. In the holes that had been cut in the jack-o’-lantern, I could see his body: his human body. It had never been so human. His skin shone silver and green. I saw streaks of black. He wouldn’t want me to waste anything, not when there was a chance, a chance a seed might grow, not this farmer.

  “Wil!”

  I pulled out the leather pouch from beneath my shirt and opened it. Gently, I picked the seeds from his eyes. We had all the seeds now. I added the red millet from my pocket. I wiped my hands of blood and drew the drawstrings closed.

  6

  We heard shouting when we reached the parking lot. The duffel bag with the light swung between us, Grayson hurrying and carrying it without complaint. There was no question of calling anyone about the body. Who would we call, what would we say? The sheriff would only make trouble, find an excuse to open my bag, search me, seek out the smell in my truck. It wouldn’t help the Pumpkin King, anyway, calling anyone, telling anyone about him. He was gone. He had no people, I bet. The men who had killed him were gone, too, their message lost like pills in the river. The law would never work hard for him. A skinny junkie, they would say, who lived in a trailer: an addict who fed the birds.

  At the sound of the shouting, Grayson stopped. The lights over by the gas station looked different. Brighter somehow. We both noticed. “What the hell is happening?” Grayson said.

  “Just keep going.”

  In the time we had been in the woods, sleet had kept falling. A coat of ice lay over the parking lot, clear and rippled with air. I slowed my pace even further so Grayson wouldn’t fall. Somehow we made it to the truck. Grayson helped me heft the duffel bag into the bed. We got into the cab and I started the engine.

  I thought of the body.

  Would fruits burst from his eyes, eventually, if spring ever came back? Or would his body just freeze, wasted, not even a gift to the ground? Was this what they did to growers now—killed us and strung us up like dolls?

  I put the truck into gear and drove, almost immediately skidding, sliding over the lot.

  Grayson shouted, “Stop!”

  I hit the brakes. The truck fishtailed and I steered into the skid. We wobbled to a halt, and a black shape ran past us.

  “What was that?” he said.

  Another shadow came running.

  More and more shadows streamed from around the darkened strip mall. A stampede of them. People were running away from something.

  Whatever it was, we needed to run, too.

  I put the truck back into gear. We drove until we saw what the light in the distance was.

  The gas station was on fire. Smoke poured around the overhang. I heard the crack of glass as the windows of the store shattered. People ran in front of our truck without seeing us, without seeing anything. There were dozens of people. Some were shouting. Some seemed to be bleeding. A fist pounded on the hood of the truck, and Grayson gave a yell.

  I saw a person on the ground. He lay half in the parking lot, half on the bank of the bordering woods, on his back. Someone seemed to step on his hand and he didn’t even budge. I jolted the truck into Park and unbuckled my seat belt.

  “What are you doing?” Grayson said.

  “There’s somebody on the ground.”r />
  “We’ll be on the ground if we don’t get out of here.”

  “Take the wheel, Grayson.”

  “There’s a mob!”

  “Just do it. Come around and pick me up.” Before he could protest again, I had opened the door. Grayson scooted over the seats to the driver’s side and grabbed the wheel as I ran to the man on the ground.

  He was alive: a young man with wire glasses, broken. I recognized him from the holler, vaguely, but I couldn’t place him. Not a customer. Not a man who would spill from a truck in front of the farmhouse, coated in driveway dust, wanting weed. This man was out, blankness coating his face. He looked peaceful, not knowing the chaos around him.

  I reached under his arms and hoisted him up. Smoke bleared my eyes. My truck had disappeared into it. Where the hell was Grayson going? The man coughed at being moved. At least he was breathing.

  I saw two yellow beams through the smoke. Headlights. Grayson passed us, then backed up and braked. I realized he was driving on his left foot—his cast, his hurt right foot, must have stretched into the passenger side. I dragged the man to the back of the truck and pounded the gate with my fist. The gate stuck. Hitting it was the only way to get it open, and sometimes, even a blow didn’t work. The man still didn’t wake up. I hit it again, and the gate swung down. I hefted the man’s upper body onto the gate.

  This was what we did now, I guessed: we found strangers, we saved them. He was heavy, but I was strong. I was grateful for those years lugging bags of fertilizer, rotating heavy plants. I climbed in, then dragged the man the rest of the way.

  “Go!” I said to Grayson.

  He slammed on the accelerator, and I nearly fell over. I grabbed the man and pulled us closer to the cab. The gate clattered open, bouncing as we drove, but I didn’t have the energy left to reach over and yank it shut. I inched backward, dragging the man like a bag of seed. Only when my back touched the cab, the stranger almost in my lap, did I look up at the scene we were fleeing.

  We were leaving the roller rink and the parking lot behind, leaving the body in the woods, the gas station in flames. A cloud of greasy-looking smoke grew smaller down the road as we fled. But out of the smoke came people, still running.

  I turned to shout through the open window of the cab, “Why are they chasing us?”

  Grayson kept his eyes on the road. “I don’t know!”

  Whatever fight had broken out, whatever had caused the fire, they couldn’t get away fast enough from it. Whatever it was they had seen.

  “Water.” The man in my lap shuddered and tried to sit up. His eyes opened, small and unfocused.

  I tried to place his face, to remember his name. “You passed out, I guess. Don’t get up.” I supported his head on a tarp I found in a corner of the truck bed.

  The man coughed again. “We were waiting for water.”

  Most men looked the same, most men looked like boys I had gone to high school with, boys who would corner me in the hallway and ask for weed, who would be surprised when I didn’t want to go to their parties at the trailers of their deadbeat dads, at the bikers’ bar in town which never carded.

  This man wasn’t one of those boys. I could recognize him now. He was someone who never talked to me, someone who went to school with animal shit on his boots—that kept you away from a social scene. He was from one of the farm communes where kids went to school late, if at all; where they were dragged out early, ostensibly to help with the sheep or the hogs or to follow the walnuts or blueberries, but really, just to keep the kids safe from the Man. The Machine. The ideas that were spread through the public schools.

  I remembered he had dropped out forever at sixteen, or whenever we could. I had refused to drop out of school myself, still believing that I was meant for something else, something out of here. Believing that I would have to prepare, to be ready. I remembered when we were just kids, a woman had picked this boy up from school, from the class we were in together. She wore long skirts, wafting a scent that by then I already knew.

  “The water truck was late,” the man said. He had sun-damaged skin—that aged you fast. His beard reminded me of the scruff on the side of the highway. “People were getting mad. Then the truck just turned around. The driver saw the crowd, how big and wild it was, and he just...backed up and left.”

  “Nobody got any water?”

  “Nobody.”

  I rummaged around the bed of the truck—Lobo’s shit was still everywhere—until I found my stainless-steel water bottle. I unscrewed the top and raised the bottle to his lips. He drank, looking at me over the rim. He still wore his glasses. One lens was cracked; the other, missing.

  “I’m Wylodine. Wil. Do you remember me?”

  He finished drinking. His hand passing the bottle to me shook a little, but he said, “I do. I’m Dance. My folks were hippies.”

  “I remember.”

  “Wil?” Grayson said. “Hey, Wil? Where I am going?”

  * * *

  We drove out of the smoke and into the darkness. The chill closed around us. I felt the wind in every inch of exposed skin: the back of my neck between my hat and collar, the bit of wrist laid bare by my sleeves. I told Grayson where to go. When we arrived at the driveway, he left the truck running and we hopped out to deal with the gate.

  I met Grayson in front of the truck, the headlights spotlighting us like burglars. I yanked open the padlock and Grayson unwrapped the chain. In years before, this part of the driveway would be rutted in mud. I would step out of the truck and straight into a puddle.

  But the mud was frozen, hardened lava. Ice made the driveway shine. As we worked, snow began to patter us.

  Grayson set the chain down and together we lifted the gate. “Who is that guy?” Grayson whispered. “Do you know him?”

  “A hippie. He was in my grade at school. He dropped out.”

  Grayson glanced back at the truck. “What about the dead guy? Why did someone kill him? For seeds?”

  “They left the seeds.” We had pushed the gate wide enough that the truck could enter. I let go and wiped my gloves on my coveralls. Frost clung to the fabric, prickly as thistles. Nothing was melting. “Maybe they killed him for money,” I said. “Or drugs. I’m pretty sure he was on something. Pain pills, maybe.”

  “Should we tell somebody?”

  I thought of the gas station burning. I thought of the hospital, the nurse standing on a chair to shout at the crowd. I thought of the snow—how it was now, after the freezing rain, the smallest of pinpricks, almost invisible, but insistent: white needles.

  The small flakes were a bad sign. They meant colder temperatures. The smaller the flake, the colder the air. I thought of the Pumpkin King, covered in white flowers.

  “Who’s there to tell?” I said.

  I let Grayson stay behind the wheel. He seemed to want be useful. He managed the driveway fine, pulling the truck right up to the farmhouse. Only after he had turned off the engine did I open the duffel bag in the back, did I even remember it. I heard a strange sound when I reached for the bag: a crunching. I tried not to worry, but I knew. I unzipped the bag.

  The grow light lay in pieces.

  Dance leaned over my shoulder, giving a low whistle at the broken light. He knew what it was. If he was surprised, he wasn’t showing it. “Those things are valuable now,” he said.

  Grayson got out of the truck, readjusting his cast. The engine ticked as it rested. Somewhere in the woods, far off on one of the ridges, a coyote howled.

  What I had loved most about the farm—what was my comfort, my solace, my companions this last year alone—had been the stars in the big sky.

  I had seen eclipses, a comet, too many shooting stars to count. I went outside whenever I had had a fight with Mama, or Lobo had gotten violent again. Whenever I had grown tired of the lies: the smell on my clothes; having to check my hair for stems; havi
ng to keep my coat in a sealed garbage bag outside the front door to try to keep the scent off; the money buried in the yard, everything in cash, always in cash, cash only—and where did it all go? Not to me and Mama. To plants and fertilizer and soil and pest sprays. To guns. To breaking even. To drinks and other drugs. To Lobo. We had money buried in the yard like squirrels, and yet, my coat was safety-pinned together. I had reduced lunch at school until I graduated.

  Whenever I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, like this secret life was strangling me, I went outside, even in the dead of winter—or what we called winter then. I went to the back porch Lobo had built out of railroad ties and wood he never treated, wood that was going to rot, and I looked up. I breathed in the sky. I felt my lungs opening in the air. I stared.

  So many more stars than I could see in town. They steadied me, even as I saw that they were not steady. If I sat out on the porch long enough, I had learned, I would see a shooting star. It was only a matter of timing, of luck. Stars fell all the time. I don’t remember what my wishes were. Just for my life to be different, to be my own.

  And now it was.

  I saw no stars from the bed of the truck. Only white. White skies coming down. White skies endlessly. The snow clouds blocked everything, all the stars, even the moon’s dull beat.

  I looked back at the men. They were watching, waiting for me. It was the first time I realized they would do this. They would do this a lot. “We’re leaving,” I told them. “We’re leaving as soon as possible.”

  “We?” Grayson said. He looked hopeful and worried, his body hunched as he stood by the bed of the truck, favoring his good leg.

  I didn’t want to drive to California alone. I had been alone for so long.

  “Why do you want to go to California with me?” I asked him.

  “Wil,” he said. “Why not?”

  Dance looked at Grayson, then at me. “Where are you going?”

  “California. Arcata. Wherever that is. My mama is there. I can drop you off at home, or at the hospital, if you think you need to go there and get checked out.”