by Alison Stine
“Horses!” Starla said, clapping her hand against the window.
“Close,” Jamey said.
I made Dance switch places with me and I drove. After the cows had disappeared, I followed the footfalls they had left, and eased the truck back onto the road. I felt relief to drive on the road again, the certainty of pavement. Paved roads meant a town ahead, somewhere. Paved roads meant people, maybe gas or food, though this pavement was holey and slick, black with ice. We moved as swiftly as we could. The house bumped along behind.
We passed a car crashed into a ditch. The car had been there awhile, long enough to get covered in snow. I felt the emptiness of it. Only blackness beneath the snowy windows: everyone had gone. Later, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a church van, abandoned off to the side of the road. I felt like I could drive for a long time, and I did. The others slept, even Dance, his chin jerking back, mouth open. Grayson was right: he did snore.
What did I know about Dance? What did I know about any of them? We were all orphans, in a way. Adult orphans. Dance’s daddy was drunk, and his mama: gone. Grayson’s folks were off with The Church. Jamey’s family...where was her family?
Where was mine?
We had had a lonely, ordinary life in town. My mama had made money—not enough—cleaning offices. There was a bus stop where I waited for a big yellow bus. I cried myself to sleep most nights in a bedroom with thin walls, a roof, a white bed. Glow in the dark stars my daddy had stuck on the ceiling stared down at me. I didn’t remember him doing that, caring about me like that, or being in my room. The stars’ glow didn’t last. Through the walls, I heard my mama weep.
Our life in the country, our life with Lobo, had been different: wild and difficult and gritty and magic. I had seen a comet. I heard coyotes every night. It was also a lonely life, and an uncertain one. I don’t think I ever slept soundly, even as a child, especially when the weed was drying in the house: our secret exposed like an exoskeleton. Every crunch of gravel in the driveway woke me, every tread of a raccoon or deer; every rattle of the door meant danger.
The tiny house had been parked well before the big one, in the lower field. If the sheriff—or robbers or men—came up the drive, they would come to me first. Me, who had no dead bolt on the door. Me, who barely had a door. They would see my light burning all night.
I looked at the back seat and realized Jamey was awake.
She met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed over Starla’s head.
“Not your fault,” I said. “Besides, I was getting sick of all the dudes around here.”
Jamey smiled, leaned her forehead against the window, and closed her eyes. Soon, Grayson woke and took over driving for me, stretching his injured leg with the boot out into the passenger side, near Dance, who didn’t move. Grayson drove even slower than the rest of us, partially because of his cast and partially because he was just Grayson: cautious, tapping the brakes every few minutes, checking his mirrors, not speaking except to crack unfunny jokes about carpool lanes and commuting. I scrunched into the back seat with Jamey and Starla.
* * *
I woke up when the truck rolled to a slow stop. I stirred, sat up. “What now?” I asked.
Grayson’s eyes flickered to the dashboard. The gas gauge.
I pulled myself close to his seat. “How much do we have?”
“I don’t know. Your truck eats fuel like a monster.”
“Did we pass a gas station? We could go back.”
“Yeah, but nothing was open. I don’t know whether they’re running short, or running away, or what.”
Grayson had pulled off to the gravel on the side of the road, though I saw no other traffic. More and more of the cars we had started passing were abandoned, dead. They had run out of gas or run into snowbanks, stuck in the drifts like burrowing bugs.
Our way had grown curvier, the turns sharper as we had driven deeper into West Virginia. The roads were jagged parts in the mountains, thin and filling with white. Ice beards dribbled off the cliffs. Grayson said Interstate 77 had been closed; we had passed it while I slept. There were chained gates down across the on-ramp, so even my truck couldn’t barrel through. No salt was left to treat the roads, or no trucks were driving around to spread it. No deputies were working to control the skidding, spinning traffic.
I thought we would see more law enforcement, not less, as people panicked and fled. But the law had left us, too. I hadn’t seen a sheriff or police car since the West Virginia border, maybe longer. Maybe they knew something we didn’t.
With the interstate lost to us, we had the back roads, streaked with snow: the mountain roads where the next rise might plummet us to anything—an unguarded ridge, a face full of poplars, pirates.
Jamey woke up. “Where are we?”
“Almost out of gas,” Grayson said.
We went back. The gas station Grayson had passed was closed, of course. Even before we pulled into the lot, I could tell from the dark windows of the little store. Stillness had settled around it, a visible mist. Grayson drove in, anyway, the signal hose setting off a bell. We parked. Nobody answered the bell.
“Let’s get out,” Grayson said. “I need to stretch my legs.”
“Leg,” Jamey said.
The gas station and convenience store sat at the bottom of a small rise. Go-carts were lined up at the top, parked and forgotten. A faded, snow-cuffed sign read Boat Trips, Zip Lines, and something else I couldn’t read under the snow. Near the back of the parking lot sat a van with a canoe or kayak carrier hooked to the trailer hitch. The van looked dusty and the boats were all gone. Had they been stolen or moved to storage? Had people floated away before the rivers turned to ice?
“I’m going to look around, see if we can find anybody alive to sell us fuel,” Dance said.
He disappeared around the back of the station. The rest of us got out of the truck. My foot was asleep. Starla fussed, flinging pebbles against the truck tires. The air was so crisp and cold it felt like it might break, like we were cracking through the atmosphere just to walk around.
“Can I take Starla on a zip line?” Grayson asked Jamey.
“Absolutely not.”
“What about if I just put her in a go-cart and push her?”
Jamey looked up at the go-carts. “All right. Wear a helmet, if you can find one.”
Grayson raced Starla up the hill, the baby wobbling on her new legs, Grayson lopsided with his boot.
Jamey turned toward the gas station. “I’m gonna try something,” she said, more to herself than to me. She walked to the door of the store, pulled something from her pocket—her knife, that she had taken back from me—and knelt in front of the lock. In less than a minute, the time it took me to walk over there, she had sprung it open. She pushed through the door to the sound of jingling bells.
“Jamey.” I caught the door, stopping the bells. I glanced up reflexively, looking for cameras.
“Relax. The power’s off. Nobody’s here. I’m just gonna see if I can get the pumps going again.”
I followed her in. A blast of cold air hit me, as cold as the air outside, but stale, like an old freezer. “Jamey, that’s stealing.”
“You have cash, right?”
I didn’t answer. What had she noticed?
“Just leave a wad on the counter for when somebody comes back. If anybody ever comes back. I sure wouldn’t come back here.” She swung her legs over the counter and started fiddling with something behind the register.
“The power’s off,” I said. “The pumps won’t work.”
“Hang on.” Her hands worked at something hidden from view. She gave a tug. I heard a whir, like an engine cranking, then she stood. “Transfer switch. Should be a generator. The pumps should work now.” When I looked at her in surprise, she said, “I used to work at a gas station. Before Skate State.”
> I glanced outside through the grimy door. Dance had returned to the truck. He looked at the pump, looked back at me. I nodded, and he lifted the pump handle. It must have worked; he turned to the truck with the nozzle.
I tried to picture Jamey before Skate State. I doubted it was legal for her to work much, but legal was a flexible term in the foothills. Jamey in a cashier vest, snapping gum. Reading magazines from the rack, bored on her break. It was both easy and impossible to imagine.
She was scanning the wall of cigarettes behind the counter. “How much cash do you have?” she asked.
“You can’t smoke in the truck.”
She pulled a carton from the wall. “I’ll smoke it here, then.”
We sat out on the curb in front of the store. Jamey smoked and I watched Dance pump gas. After the truck was all fueled, he filled our collection of gas cans. On the ridge above us, we could hear whoops and laughter, a go-cart teetering back and forth, as Grayson pushed Starla around.
“That foot ain’t never gonna heal,” Jamey said. She blew out a line of smoke.
“How did you end up at Skate State?” I asked her.
I didn’t know if she would answer, but she spoke right away. It was a simple answer, the simplest answer in the world: “I got pregnant and my folks kicked me out. I didn’t know where to go. They were nice to me at Skate State. I didn’t have to work, be on my feet all day. Jake gave us a roof and fed us.”
I thought of the shack where Kaylee lay on a dirty mattress on the floor. “That wasn’t much of a roof.”
Jamey took another drag on her cigarette. “Things got worse when it got cold.”
I watched her smoke blend with the air and our breath, becoming just another cloud in a low white sky.
“What’s your story?” Jamey asked. “You’ve got a ton of cash, a house, and a gun in your pocket.” She sucked on the cigarette. “Yeah, I know.”
I could feel the heaviness, without even feeling for it, weighing down my coat. Dance and Grayson knew about the gun. Now Jamey knew.
“It was my mama’s boyfriend’s.”
“The gun?”
“The gun, the money. They left it for me. He and my mama.”
“He do something bad?”
“He grew weed.”
Jamey took a drag. “That’s not too bad.”
Dance waved to us. He had replaced the pump, screwed on the cap of the last gas can.
“He’s done,” I said. I stood up from the curb and dusted snow off my coveralls. “We better get Starla and Grayson and get back on the road.”
“Do you really think you’ll make it?” Jamey asked. “All the way to California?”
“Sure. Why not.” I noticed she had said you, not we. I held out my hand to her, to help her off the ground. “Do you want to drive for a while?”
Jamey ground out her cigarette and stood. “I don’t know how. I’m only fifteen.”
12
When the afternoon shadows grew long across the road, and the clouds laced the sky, low, like a storm, we started looking for a place to spend the night.
We passed a chemical plant. The towers and ladders, low buildings and chutes, usually glittered like a city. But this plant was quiet, as still as the snowbanks. I realized why the plant looked strange. The gas flare, which always burned, a tear of orange fire in the darkness, had been extinguished. The stacks of the factory looked as dark and bare as trees, only taller.
We approached a state park, and I made a decision and turned the truck in. Dusk was falling. I expected a gate, a fence we might have to park behind, a lock Jamey could apparently pick. But the tiny gatehouse sat empty, the window shade rolled down. The road into the park was open and clear. It was as though the rangers had left the park for anyone, thrown wide the gate, and ran.
“Where is everybody?” Grayson asked.
“California,” Jamey said.
We were off course, I knew. We were taking too long. Skate State had thrown us off, and now we were twisting down hilly country roads, white and slick, afraid to take too many highways, turned away from some of them by blockades and chains. We had to move slowly, but even then the house couldn’t take the turns. We’d had to back up more than once and turn around, find another way. The truck was burning through fuel, like Grayson had said. We had filled canisters with gas. Taken—and paid for—every bit of fuel we could find, but even that would only last us so long. We would have to find a better road, paved and straight. We would have to find fuel and water.
I drove through the park until we reached a spot near a cinder-block shower house. A campsite, close to the cover of woods. I pulled the truck in, stopping a few feet before the trees. I turned off the engine and sat for a moment, looking through the windshield.
Silver topped the trees and capped the grass. It was more like the memory of grass these days, more white than brown, knitted to the roots in a frost that just didn’t—couldn’t—burn away. The campsite had a fire ring and an old grill. The ring was dented and ashy, the grill cast in frozen grease. Nobody had been here for a long time.
“Do you think we should use the camo?” I asked. “Hide the house?”
“Looks safe to me,” Grayson said. “This place is deserted.”
I looked at Dance but he just shrugged. Jamey was already getting Starla out. “Let’s see if there’s water,” she said cheerfully.
“We could grill tonight,” Grayson said.
“Real meat,” Dance said.
They slammed the doors and busied themselves setting up camp. I stayed in the front seat, listening to the engine tick and the boys take supplies out of the back. More and more, I felt the roads were too empty, the trees too silent. I had the feeling they were waiting—the whole wild world was just waiting—for us to die.
Jamey and Starla ran back from the cinder-block shower house, hand in hand. “Water!” Starla was saying. As excited as a child should have been about candy. “Water!”
“There’s running water in the shower house,” Jamey said. “It’s freezing but on.”
“Beats the river,” Dance said.
As darkness fell in the early afternoon, we ate deer steaks Grayson cooked on the camp grill, easier than my tiny propane stove. We made a fire in the ring and huddled around it, wrapped in blankets. Our hair, wet from showers in the cinder-block house, dried in the smoke. It was so cold my hair almost froze before it dried, crisping around my ears. Starla fell asleep in front of the fire and Jamey carried her into the house.
She returned with something in each hand, shaking the objects in the firelight before us. Whiskey or wine bottles, it might have been, from somebody else. But that wasn’t Jamey.
She held tins of powdered milk and cocoa. “Hot chocolate! Girl,” she said to me, “you’ve been holding out on us.”
Jake had called me girl. The men who came to the farmhouse did, too.
I watched Jamey try to open the tins with her teeth.
“Now wait a minute,” Grayson said, “what if that is the last hot chocolate in the whole world?”
“Then we better enjoy it,” Jamey said.
I would bury my money in the ground, hide it in my shoes or a Pepsi can, carry a heaviness in my pocket even if I never could fire it, just to have the weight there. That was my way, that was what my family had taught me. Jamey would pick locks and scavenge and steal. That was what she had been taught by whatever passed for kin and home for her, that was how she had survived.
Dance found mugs and a saucepan, and the three of them bent over the fire, setting the grate from the grill over the flames and mixing the powered milk with water. I sat back and watched.
When Grayson placed a mug in my hands, the steam enveloped my face and chest like a hood. “You okay, Wil?” he said.
I wrapped my hands around the mug. “Sure.”
He plopped do
wn beside me on a log we had pulled next to the fire, his leg still heavy at his side. Dance began to tell a story, and Jamey scooted up next to the fire ring, wrapped in a plaid blanket, her eyes as big as headlamps. I looked at the three of them: Jamey; Dance, talking with his hands; Grayson, his hand on his boot like an old man. We might have been friends from high school or college, if any of us had gotten to go to college. We might have been on a weekend trip, a reunion, a vacation.
Except Grayson’s boot was starting to smell from rot or infection. He needed someone to look at his foot again; he needed a doctor. Jamey had a scar on her neck. The skin there looked pebbled. I thought it was a burn. A pot handle or a poker or a firecracker had seared her, not long ago. It had not healed right.
We might have been friends, on an escape from our lives, the four of us plus the baby, just camping, except for the stories we told.
“I think it’s Earth,” Dance said. “Rising up.”
“But if spring never comes back, if it just gets colder and colder, won’t Earth die, too?” Grayson said.
Dance shrugged the way he did. I had never known someone to make more noncommittal movements. The firelight made his shadow long and spiderlike. “Maybe it’s time.”
“For everything to die?”
“Maybe. I know we’re being punished.”
“Maybe you are,” Jamey said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You drive a car.”
I spoke up from my mug. “She can’t drive, Dance.”
No one else was in the park. No other fires lit up the darkness. Shadows settled in around us like they were there to stay.
I couldn’t hear dripping from the shower house anymore. Maybe the pipes had finally frozen after giving us one last fill-up of our bottles and jugs, one last good clean. No rushing sound from the creek that surely cut through the woods somewhere. Maybe its bends were clotted and stilled, fish frozen like shirts on a line. I wondered if the rabbits and groundhogs were alive in their burrows. If the black bears, which had been seen crossing the river in seasons past, had made it, noses white from the icy Ohio, holding their faces above the waterline like a bundle of everything they owned.