Road Out of Winter

by Alison Stine

  “I don’t want to go there. I don’t have the cash for a doctor.”

  “That’s really not a problem right now,” Grayson said.

  Dance pushed up his glasses. The broken lens looked like a kaleidoscope, splintering his face. I remembered he had cried when his mama had pulled him out of our grade school classroom. The fall leaves we had carefully cut out of construction paper and the stained-glass crayons melted between wax sheets were tacked on the bulletin board. And my bean seed in the plastic cup on the windowsill had sprouted, but I don’t think other kids’ had. Did he remember all that, any of that?

  “Can I come with you?” he asked.

  Another man. Another mouth. It would mean more work.

  It might also mean less hassle. I pictured getting out of the truck with men beside me, their beards and low voices. I pictured walking beside them.

  “It seems like this place is dying,” Dance said. “People acting like they did at the water giveaway. Rioting. Seems like we should get out now, don’t you think? Somewhere warmer, a bigger city, might have more resources, you know?”

  I couldn’t think. “If you come along, you have to do your share,” I said. “You have to cook, wash dishes, clean up. Do you know how to split wood?”

  “Wil,” Dance said. “I grew up in the Compounds.”

  “Okay.” Grayson was staring at me, but I had to decide. “You and Grayson go through the farmhouse. Take anything you think we might need. Take Lobo’s old clothes if they fit you, I don’t care.”

  “What are you going to do?” Grayson asked.

  The shovel lay on the ground by the porch. I picked it up. It would be hard work, now that the earth had frozen. I should have done it months ago, as soon as Mama and Lobo had left.

  We piled supplies into the bed of the truck. We packed the remaining grow lights in duffel bags, padding them with pillowcases and towels. We did the hard, complicated work of attaching the trailer of my tiny house to the truck hitch—work I had only helped with once before, back when Lobo was in charge. The air was so warm then I remember we had rolled up our shirtsleeves. I remember blue chicory wagged in the breeze. Now the thought of any flower bursting from the earth, any buried seed rising, any bright color breaking up the brown, white, and gray landscape, seemed extraordinary. The fields were white lakes. Snow gathered in the shrugs of trees.

  I was in charge. It was my truck, my home, my idea. If I wasn’t so stunned, so exhausted and overwhelmed, if I wasn’t cycling through the motions of walking, bending, pulling, wrenching, I would have felt annoyed by all the men’s questions.

  We worked all night. While they were in the farmhouse, I dug out three more canisters of money. The earth was so frozen it felt as if I was chipping at bone. Once I broke through the crust of cold ground, I had to perch on my knees and use the shovel like a pick ax. I saw the tops of the canisters, then wrenched them out with my hands. Cold radiated through my gloves. I was exhuming a grave, I thought. Snow quickly filled the holes I had made, as if even this small blackness was not allowed to stay in the new white world.

  Likely, there were even more canisters—Lobo didn’t believe in putting money in banks, and I knew Mama would have left as much as she could for me—but I was worried about time. Would the men who killed the Pumpkin King come at dawn? Would they come tomorrow? Would they come at all?

  Other men would.

  I needed to get to my mama. Her postcard ran through my mind. I had memorized it, it was so short. So much meaning held in the smallest of words. It’s warm here but hard. He’s gotten worse. I wish you had come with us. I love you and I’m sorry.

  Those last two phrases twined together like people said poison ivy and jewelweed did: the toxin and its cure. That was a myth, though. Jewelweed couldn’t root in dry places as poison ivy could, not for long. But with my mama, it was true. She loved and apologized, loved and apologized: the heart and the hurting. They were linked in her. Lobo had a dual nature, too: helping and hurting. He had wailed on me; he had taught me to survive a fight. To survive him.

  I love you and I’m sorry.

  Dawn came. The truck was packed and ready. Grayson and Dance stood at the edge of the yard, waiting around, not wanting to bother me or ask what I was doing. I wouldn’t have told them, anyway. I had shoved the money canisters I had unearthed into a backpack. Then it was time to go back for the gun.

  Midway down the wild backyard, under sedge, dead or dying, I tore through the little patch of jewelweed. The roots crumbled, brittle as wind chimes. Lobo had not replaced the earth well or smoothly when he had buried the gun. It was obvious where it was. He had not cared. He had wanted to be right about the gun, about needing it soon.

  I yanked the handle up, knocking off clumps of dirt.

  “What is that?” Grayson said.

  “Get in the truck,” I said. “We’re going.”

  We turned from the lower field as the sky began to lighten. When would the holler realize I was gone? I would have to tell the boy with the station wagon. I would have to make other arrangements, at last. Would squatters overtake the house? Would nature: cold cracking the windows, snow pooling on the floor, rodents curling up in the holes they’d chew in the mattresses? I didn’t look back at the big house.

  I had said my goodbyes to the farmhouse last night, shut it up, locked what I could. The basement room was dark and would stay dark. There was nothing behind its door now, no mystery. In the field where my house had been parked for years lay a matted shape, the grass pale and dead, dirt showing through, a square cut from snow.

  We drove slowly down the driveway. Grayson and Dance were silent, waiting for me to say something, to give them a clue of how to feel. The tiny house, unfamiliar and huge-seeming, swayed on its trailer. I concentrated on driving, turning onto the empty rural route. This time of morning, not even the farmers were out with their wagons. The main road was paved. The driveway was not—and instantly, I felt a weird loss. I missed the bumpy gravel and mud of the driveway to the farm. I parked the truck, got out by myself, and locked the gate behind us for real, for the last time.

  The padlock cinched with a crack. It thudded against the chain, snow flaking off the gate.

  On one side of town was The Church, where Lisbeth had disappeared every Wednesday night and all day Sundays. But on the other end was the Compounds: the acres beyond the railroad tracks, the marshes and hills that held trailers, patched-together houses. Land was cheap because it was hard to farm, mostly former quarries and crenulated hills. Coal companies had removed the top of the mountains so they were no longer mountains but sharp and fallow ridges, like a furrowed, angry face. Shacks perched on the edges. Abandoned mines meant the earth beneath was hollow, unstable. The creeks ran orange with acid damage.

  Nobody wanted the land because nothing could be done with it—nothing grew except mud, went the joke—so you could buy acres and acres for cheap, have your own compound with a farmhouse, a couple of aluminum-sided sheds, a few dead cars for parts. Friends could live out on your land in a trailer, an arrangement of a few weeks that often turned into years.

  Dance’s family lived in the Compounds. What was left of his folks. His older brother had enlisted a year ago, after the first time we skipped spring, and his daddy, always a drinker, drank more once the weather turned.

  People were abandoning farms and houses—even whole subdivisions, like where Grayson had lived—but I was not expecting the Compounds to be deserted. Not those people. They held on to their land. They had provisions, weapons, animals. They had been ready—or said they were ready—for the war and for the other war, for coal leaving, coal coming back, coal going away again. They would be ready for cold, or think they were.

  The people of the Compounds would not give up easily. Some of them came out from their houses to stand out on their porches and stare at us as we passed. We must have looked a sight: the truck packe
d to the gills, everything battened down with tarps and lashed with rope. That was maybe not so unusual: heavily packed trucks and cars disappeared down the road every day these days. But on the hitch of our truck was a house.

  That was different.

  Some of the people who came out to look at us had guns, shotguns mostly. They came with the guns lowered, but at their sides, holding them as casual and easy as umbrellas.

  Ready, I was meant to understand. They were ready.

  That was acceptable now, that show. Guns had come out of the lockboxes and closets and cellars of the holler; they had been brought into the light, dusted off, oiled, and loaded. They had been dug out of the ground. I had seen holsters on the hips of men in line at the bank, at the pharmacy, their fingers drifting to the leather swells like Lisbeth twirling her hair: an absentminded reassurance. I had seen the lumps of guns under coats, unmistakable even under the bulky layers we wore now.

  I had a heaviness in my own coat pocket. I still didn’t have any ammo, but I had Lobo’s old gun. Just in case.

  I fingered the leather cord around my neck. The pouch felt like a secret, something to guard. Dance sat in the front seat with me. He nodded at these men with their guns—they were all men. He gave a jerk of his chin, fingers flicked in a gesture that was not fully a wave. The men nodded back. We were acceptable. We were in.

  Dance said we were headed to a couple of trailers behind a ridge. A van on cinder blocks rusted in the yard, though the dead grass was burr-short around it. Farming equipment, orange and sinewy with cobwebs, sat under a carport, support posts tilting against the hill. We passed a burn pile and a trash pile, both peaked with snow.

  “My old man took the truck,” Dance explained. “Off on a bender. Weeks ago.”

  “How did you get to the gas station?” Grayson asked.

  “Hitchhiked.”

  He asked Grayson and me to wait while he went inside his place to get his things. I parked and watched him disappear inside the smaller of the two trailers, the one with the wooden step. Snow made the cans and chicken wire of the trash pile look cleaner somehow, newer. It gave it a fresh crown.

  Grayson leaned in from the back seat. “How long should we wait?”

  “I don’t know.” I looked closer at the piles of junk.

  The burn pile didn’t have the usual nest of brush and broken chairs. Instead, there were long, thin strands in the ashes, knotted and coiled. I knew what they were: pipes and wires, pulled from the walls of houses. Dance or his missing daddy had been trying to burn insulated wires, to get at the copper scrap.

  Grayson said, “Is this even a good idea?”

  I craned back to look at him. “None of this is a good idea.”

  * * *

  It was snowing when Dance came back to the truck with a backpack and a sleeping bag. He chucked his stuff in the bed, and got into the front seat with me. He had on a different pair of glasses. The bridge of this pair had been repaired with tape, but the lenses were intact. A gust of wind broke over the ridge, rattling loose a piece of aluminum siding from his trailer.

  “How did you and your daddy live out here?” I asked.

  “Live?” He laughed a little.

  “What did you do for money, I mean?”

  “We were ginseng hunters. Root diggers. There was a buyer in town who paid cash. No questions asked. Ginseng, morel, goldenseal, black cohosh.”

  Seasonal work, then. That explained the copper wire in the burn pile. They had not been able to find and sell roots for a while.

  Snow feathered the windshield. I turned on the wipers, and the flakes drifted away, soft as dogwood blossoms. “So, your work is basically over?” I said.

  “Yes. My life is over.”

  I looked over my shoulder and backed slowly down the ridge. I saw faces pressed to the windows of the houses, ghostly as fish underwater. But no one came out onto their porches again. It was too cold. And they knew where we were going.

  Away.

  Grayson fell asleep in the back seat, after complaining that his foot hurt. “At least this injury is good for something,” he said as he bunched a pillow against the window. “I know when it’s going to snow.”

  “It’s always going to snow,” Dance said. “That’s no gift anymore.”

  I drove. I had to move carefully. Silently, the roads were filling with white. The tiny house on its trailer slowed us as it swayed behind, creaking like an old ship. Getting out of the holler and onto the Appalachian Highway, long and smooth, would shoot us straight to the bridge to West Virginia. It was not far away, but it would mean hills, hairpin turns, narrow roads. This road, out of the Compounds, was barely paved, gorged with potholes.

  Dance told me he had left a note, but he thought his daddy wasn’t coming back.

  “Why would you think that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Some of his things were gone. It’s hard to explain. Just a feeling, I guess.”

  We passed a trailer with sheets of plastic shrouding the front porch. There was a mattress, partially blackened, in the yard. Maybe they had burned it to try to keep warm.

  “I wouldn’t come back,” he said. “There’s nothing here.” He tensed his jaw.

  Lobo did that, but I tried not to connect the two actions. They were different men: one was old; one was young, almost a stranger. There was safety in Dance being a near-stranger. He could turn out to be anyone. He could be just fine.

  “My old man was embarrassed to not be able to support himself,” Dance said. “So he started drinking to cover it. Then he drank because he was embarrassed to be drunk. And then he was just drunk. He just became a drunk.”

  I felt I should tell him: “Our folks both left. Mine and Grayson’s. Our people are gone, too.”

  “But at least your mama wants you to follow her. Right?”

  “I should have followed sooner.”

  “But you’re following now.”

  “I never should have let her go off with him. She doesn’t even have her own phone. At least when we were on the farm I could keep an eye on her.” I trailed off, checked the side mirror. There was my tiny house, a hulk behind us.

  I didn’t know why I was talking so much. It was something about the road, the blank road rolling on. It made me want to go on. And on. The landscape stretched past us, bland. The trees should have been at their brightest at this time of year, exploding with orange and red. Instead, their bare branches rattled together. I never realized, before last year, how dull winter was. How much the same of everything.

  “Is your mama around?” I asked Dance.

  “No. We don’t talk about her. It just makes my old man sad. Or angry, depending on how drunk he is. She named me, though.”

  “Do you remember her at all?” I thought of the memory I had of her: a woman taking Dance out of school, trailing the scent of pot.

  He wouldn’t want to remember that, if he didn’t already.

  “I remember her hair. She had long hair. And bells. Bracelets and anklets with bells on them. She even had bells on her skirts.”

  I hadn’t remembered that part. But thinking back, I thought I did hear something the day Dance left our class, a jingling I had connected to the smell of weed, so much so that I imagined bells sometimes in the basement room when I worked. But I used to imagine a lot of things to make it better.

  “She loved music. That’s why she left.”

  “To be a singer?” I asked.

  “To follow a band.”

  Pink snow light changed the sky. I felt unsteady, driving the house, as if the heavy, extra weight might knock us off the road at any point. The roads weren’t really salted. Maybe the holler was saving its chemicals. Or maybe they had run out.

  The strips of clear pavement grew thinner, narrowing as slush packed the highway. The ditches, fleecy with drifts, overflowed their banks.
I drove over a chunk of snow, which crushed beneath the truck’s tires. We passed a dog, maybe a mastiff, ripping a dead deer into shreds.

  We were going to take a southern route, which would make the trip longer but hopefully safer, with warmer temperatures, better roads. We were passing through West Virginia first, and avoiding cities if we could. I had been on trips before, but most of the states we were going to go through were new to me, and some part of me still felt excited to see them. I wanted to call my mama to tell her I was coming, but I didn’t dare. Lobo would pick up.

  I couldn’t give advance warning, and I didn’t trust myself to speak to him at all. Even if I said nothing about the trip and my plan to take her back with me, he would hear it. He would know.

  He could tell when I lied, he said. He could tell when I was planning something. He would always know, he said, when we hid from him, me and my mama.

  We did hide, in the woods. She had showed me how, how to make myself small, how not to make a sound. We had tried to leave once. I had begged her to try again. But we had nothing of our own. Where would we go, what would we do? We had no jobs, no skills other than growing and trimming. No references. No credit score. No family waiting.

  I had planned the route without really planning it. There was only time for me to plug the address from the postcard into my phone. That had always been enough before. But before the bridge into West Virginia something went wrong. My phone screen flickered and whitened.

  The map disappeared.

  Dance took my phone and peered at it. Grayson had told me he had run out of data weeks ago, and Dance just had a burner.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “It’s lost the signal.”

  “Network overextended? Everybody trying to use their phones at once? The towers could be down.” Dance tapped the window, where fog smeared the glass. His finger made an etching sound. “The towers could have frozen. Stop the truck. I’ll see if I can get a signal somewhere away from the road.”

  It was nearly dark. Night fell early and heavy. It made me want to sleep, even though we were hours from stopping. It made me want to curl up somewhere warm and safe. Where would that be? I pulled off to the side, tires crunching in ice, and turned off the engine to save fuel.