by Alison Stine
I had seen barges on the Ohio: coal topped with snow, little mountains returning to mountains. Were they stuck there, wedged in bergs and flows? Would that coal ever heat anything? Was it all for nothing?
“I fucking recycled,” Jamey said. “I collected all the empties in that damn place. We only ate meat we killed or raised. I wasn’t old enough to vote before. How is any of this my fault?”
The men were silent for a moment. The fire popped, sending a flare into the sky.
“Well,” Grayson said. “You have a kid.”
“That,” Jamey said, “ain’t my fault, either.” She stood up, the blanket crumpling to the ground.
“Overpopulation,” Dance said.
“Leave it, guys,” I said.
Jamey dumped the rest of her mug into the fire. It was careless. We needed the heat. But the blaze only sizzled and kept on burning, and she walked away, mumbling something about checking on Starla.
“What’s the matter with her?” Grayson asked when she had gone.
“She’s fucking fifteen,” I said.
“Jesus.”
Silence again, heavier this time. Nobody wanted to break it. We watched the fire fizzle and snap.
I used to love a campfire. It used to be a treat, hot dogs roasting in the lower field. Or a bonfire: an excuse to burn the autumn cuttings and cast-offs—the telltale evidence, branches and leaves that had to be disposed of somehow. I thought of camping trips with Lisbeth’s youth group, the boys fighting over who would strike the flint, all of them getting the kindling wrong, freezing, waiting for s’mores, finally eating the chocolate bars raw. The boys teased Lisbeth when the fumes drifted over to her lawn chair: Smoke follows beauty... They never teased me. And never, ever let me strike the flint.
I wondered if Lisbeth was allowed to build the fires where she was now, if the cold had gotten dire enough yet that women could do work that mattered, work that men valued. When would that be?
“She’s coming with us,” I said. “All the way. Jamey and Starla. To California, if they want to.”
“Of course,” Grayson said.
“You’re the boss,” Dance said. “Boss lady.”
The fire spit and swore at us. I looked up at the sky. Some of the stars were coming down. No, it was snowing again. “We should go to bed,” I said. “Who wants first watch?”
Dance put another branch on the fire. “I’ll do it.”
“I’ll take second,” Grayson said.
“I’m on third watch, then.”
We didn’t trust Jamey to stand watch alone. I dumped the dregs of my cup to the side of the log and stood. We gathered our blankets, Grayson and I, and crept inside the house. Jamey and Starla slept on the pullout, the baby’s arms thrown over her mama as though she was protecting her.
The stove in the tiny house crackled. I thought the smell of wood smoke was comforting, rich and dark, familiar—but it wasn’t good for a child to breathe in. What choice did we have?
I gave Grayson the blankets and found a cushion for him to sleep on the floor. Then I crawled up the ladder to the loft, my loft. Grayson couldn’t make it up there with his foot, and it wasn’t safe for the baby. But I felt guilty being alone in the loft. A bed to myself. A real bed, quilts smelling of home. I was guilty—and safe. If the cold deepened, soon we were all going to have to squeeze in the house together somehow, all night, and keep watch at the door.
Grayson fell asleep right away, as he usually did. Through the triangle-shaped window at the end of the loft, the night sky looked lighter than it should have, tinged with gray. I could barely see the glow of our little fire, the ring where Dance sat awake, stretched out on the log. His back was to the trees. He watched the road we had come in on, the only road into or out of the park. If a stranger came in, they would come that way. Smoke drifted across my window.
* * *
When I woke up the world seemed wrong. Too light and quiet. And cold.
The fire in the house had gone out.
I sat up. Through the window, I could see only white, no sign of the campfire, or grill, or log. I crawled over the quilt to look closer. Cold drafts pulsed from the glass. White coated the camp, a deep layer of new snow. Everything looked clean or gone.
The white of the new snow hurt my eyes, so blinding it almost zigzagged. Was this the way the world ended? I would wake up to everything just over. Was this the event The Church had prayed for, the reset that would send them straight into heaven?
How long had I slept?
Too long. The white sun was high. I swung my legs over the loft ladder. Grayson, Jamey, and Starla slept on below me.
No one had woken me for watch.
I climbed down to the woodstove and shoved a ball of newspaper in. The crinkling sound stirred Grayson. He rose from the floor and looked at me, his hair sticking straight up like a bird.
“Put kindling in this,” I told him.
He nodded.
“Did we sleep all night?”
“No,” he whispered, his voice gummy from sleep. “I took second shift, but Dance didn’t want to wake you up. He took another shift after me. He thought you needed the rest.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“He must have fallen asleep.”
“Wait. Dance is outside?”
This was a dangerous, potentially deadly mistake. I saw in his eyes that he knew it, too.
Starla mumbled and rolled over, flinging out her arms like a starfish. Her mama didn’t move. I pointed to the open mouth of the stove—feed it—and Grayson nodded again. I had slept in my clothes. We all did these nights. I had my coat on already, the heaviness in my pocket. I just pulled on my boots at the door, my fingers stiff and clumsy with cold. I stumbled out into the white.
Cuffing, numbing white. The stubborn, useless sun that would do nothing except blind me. It wasn’t melting or warming anything. What was the point of it?
Off the little back porch of my house, my leg disappeared to the calf. This was the heaviest snowfall in months, then. I trudged to where the campfire had been last night and saw a white mound, streaked with plaid.
It was Dance. Snow gathered in the crevices of his blankets like the white-capped coal on a barge. He was also wrapped in a sleeping bag. His eyes were shut. I was afraid to touch him. But I had to. I reached out my hand and shook him. Snow rolled off his shoulder, powdered and gritty. He blinked.
I breathed deeply in relief. “You fell asleep in the cold. Are you okay?”
Snow spackled his beard. I repeated myself. Dance’s voice, when he finally spoke, sounded like a gravel road. “It’s not that cold.”
“You could have frozen to death. Damn it.”
Then he saw all the snow and slid up. “It wasn’t sticking like that this morning.”
“Grayson’s getting the woodstove going. Go warm up in the house. You should rub your hands and feet. You don’t want to get frostbite.”
“It’s not that bad,” he insisted.
He stood with a groan. I tried to assist him, but he waved away my hands. He was standing at least. Tears leaked from his eyes and he shook the snow from his beard. I looked toward the woods to see how wet everything was, if we could find any dry kindling for the fire, and I saw them. Footprints led from our campsite into the trees. Deep and black, like bullet holes in the snow.
“Did you go into the woods?” I asked Dance.
He was beating snow from his blankets. “No.”
“Maybe you heard something, you went to check on something?”
“No, I didn’t. It was quiet the whole time.”
He saw where I was looking. The footprints were heavy. They were human.
The person or people had trudged through a lot of snow, maybe all of it, after it had stopped falling. No new snow filled the prints. They led from the woods to the edge of the
campfire, right behind the log where Dance had fallen asleep, then they circled back to the tiny house.
I looked at Dance. He dropped the blankets and we ran as fast as we could through the heavy, dragging snow, following the tracks. The footprints ran alongside the house, close to the walls. They had lingered there, the stranger, outside the kitchen window where we washed dishes, where we had scanned the road and had not seen anyone. We had not been looking the right way; we had not known they would come from the woods.
There was a stamping pattern on the ground, the prints smudged from standing around, shifting, and waiting.
“They watched us while we slept,” I said.
The footprints continued to where the trailer hitched up to the truck—no lingering there, just a line, straight to the truck’s gate. In the bed of the truck, our tarps had been disturbed, the bungee cords holding down our supplies not just unclipped, but cut with a knife. The stranger had been in a hurry. Our stuff was gone.
“Jake?” Jamey stood on the porch of the house in the furry, impractical boots she had taken from a truck stop a few miles back, no coat. Her face was creased from sleeping, her nose runny and pink. “Was it Jake?” She folded her arms, stamped to keep warm on the narrow step.
“You should go inside,” I said. “It’s freezing out here.”
“Was it him?”
“No,” Dance said, without even consulting me. “We don’t think so. Just some rando.”
I gave him a look, but then I, too, found myself turning to Jamey and saying things I didn’t know I believed. “He wouldn’t follow us just to steal from us. He couldn’t come this far. He wouldn’t find us.”
“Yes,” Jamey said. She hugged her arms closer to her chest. “He would.”
* * *
Lisbeth would come as far as Crossroads.
But one day—the last day—she came farther, up to the mailbox at the end of our driveway near the road. I heard the crunch of tires over the gravel, then an engine shutting off. In my tiny house, I pulled on boots and another sweater. I don’t know who I thought I’d face in the driveway, but not her. Not that day. Then I saw the grille of her truck parked on the other side of the gate, like a horse looking over a fence.
I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. “You’re here. You came out here. Finally! I have so much to show you.” I bent to unlock the gate.
“I can’t stay,” she said. “Don’t bother. It’s tomorrow.”
“What is?”
“We’re leaving. Tomorrow’s the day.”
I let the chain with the padlock fall. I put my boot on the gate and looked at her over it. “Don’t go.”
“Come with me.”
“I can’t just leave. Where are you even going?”
She didn’t know. No one knew. Away. Something better was away. A place with safer roads, schools that were open. Jobs and heat. How would we get there? How would they have room for us?
“I’m not sure you can outrun this thing,” I said.
“But we can’t just stay here, Wil. I’m sick of staying here. Doing nothing. There’s no work. I don’t even have my own money.”
“That’s not going to change as long as you’re with your folks.”
Or The Church. They would always take those things from her. They would always make up her mind for her, what to wear, how long to grow and tie back her hair, what she could watch and listen to, who she would marry—which would have to be a man, there was no question. A man from The Church. He loomed over us, a shadow, inevitable as a ghost. He was tall. He was silent. He would want her to be a good kisser, to know how to do the things we had tried. So she could be pure but also good. Worldly, but inexperienced in how it counted.
It would never count, any way I might have tried to get her to stay. Reaching through the gate to pull her close. Pulling the key out of the ignition. In the crackling trees, a bird called, the bubbling song of a winter wren.
Lisbeth didn’t even turn toward its music. She had a scarf wound high around her neck like a bandage, hiding her hair. She didn’t take her mittens off. Her truck door hung agape, letting in the cold air, and letting me know she was leaving soon. This was a short stop, a last stop. Nothing I could say would change her mind.
I still tried. “Whatever happens, maybe we should make a go of it here,” I said.
Lisbeth wrinkled her face. “Out here?”
“There’s land, a water supply. I can get solar hooked up like Mama always talked about. We can grow vegetables in the basement under the grow lights. It doesn’t have to be weed. It won’t be anymore. It won’t be,” I repeated.
“You want the world to end for you here? In Ohio?”
Lisbeth had only lived in Ohio, like I had, like we all had. It had always been fine for her before, enough to tide her over.
I realized—it came to me like the cruelest breeze—the cold was an excuse to get away. Her tunnel, dug with spoons; her ladder, knotted after many nights, so many nights of planning and waiting and hoping, never daring to think she would really get out. Why did she want to leave so bad? To leave without really leaving the stranglehold of how she had been raised? There would still be a dress code wherever she went, expectations, dinners to cook, a curfew.
But there might be other people in a new place. She might meet someone.
It was him I felt, standing in the driveway with her, the gate between us. Everyone in the holler she already knew, tired as a bedsheet. But the presence of a stranger, his potential, fell over us as suddenly as the sun, if there had been sun, would disappear behind a cloud. In another place there would be other people.
It wasn’t going to happen between us, I saw, a last kiss through the fence, a last chance. Nothing was ever going to happen.
Lisbeth said, “What’s here, anyway? What’s so special about this town? There’s nothing here.”
“I’m here. I’m still here.”
“Why is that?” she said.
* * *
They had taken food. They had taken canned goods. They had taken hand warmers and socks and blankets. And we might have been okay. We might have let it go. We had knives, deer meat, and potatoes stored in the tiny house kitchen. We had the heaviness in my pocket. Dance had a bow and arrows. I had cash. We had a way to hunt and keep warm with the woodstove and the house. We were fine, we were safe, we were warm, as long as we still had the house.
But they had taken the grow lights, too.
I felt for the seeds in their pouch around my neck. I had been meaning to start something. To get seedlings going in the little kitchen. Who knew how long we would be on the road, maybe long enough for something to sprout. But now we were down lights, plastic sheeting, fertilizer. We couldn’t afford to lose even these basic items. How would we replace them?
“They must have made multiple trips,” Grayson said. “To carry that much.”
“Or there was more than one of them,” Dance said.
We studied the tracks. A clear line in and a clear line out. The tracks returned the way they had come, from the woods.
I looked up at the sky. Our phones didn’t work. None of us had watches. The dashboard clock in the truck had been broken for years, since Lobo had punched it in a fit of rage. Early on, Grayson had switched on the truck radio, trying to find news, weather, anything—but we heard only static. Station after station, the same dull buzz.
I wanted the radio silence to be because Lobo had broken the radio, too, and not because no one was broadcasting, no one was out there, the towers had frozen. We had no idea what time it was anymore. But the sun wasn’t too high. It was still only morning, I thought.
“Are you going to include me in this?” Jamey called from the house. She had put on her coat at least, and held Starla, wrapped fat as a snowman.
“No,” we all said.
“This involves me.”
&
nbsp; “No, it doesn’t,” I said.
“If he did this, then it does.”
“Okay. Here’s what’s going to happen,” I said. “Dance and I are going to get our stuff back. You and Grayson, be ready to go. Pack up the camp. When we come out of the woods, you’ve got to be ready to get us out of here as fast as you can.”
Jamey blinked in the sun and hefted Starla.
Grayson couldn’t come with us because of his boot, and Jamey because of the baby, but I saw them both cast looks at me as Dance and I wrapped up in warm clothes. It was not a look of anger or of longing to go, but a long glance with dark, furrowed brows. I saw the questions in their eyes. Would we come back to them? How long should they wait? Would this be when they lost us?
Into the woods I went with Dance, the one who had fallen asleep on watch, the one who had not noticed as thieves or Jake made off with half our stuff, stepping purposefully and silently over the ground. If Dance had been a woman he wouldn’t have been allowed to just sleep; the thieves might have robbed him of his body, too.
I knew this, but said nothing about it to him. There was no point. I couldn’t make him understand the fear that ran through me and Jamey and Lisbeth. It would run through Starla, too, soon enough: a low hum, like a power line always above her. The world didn’t want us to just walk through it.
Dance and I stepped alongside the footprints. The snow made a map for us, a dotted line that led, almost certainly, to danger. “If we find these guys,” Dance said, “what are we going to say?”
“Why do we have to say anything?”
“I know you have the gun.”
I stopped walking.
“It’s obvious. You’re always touching it.”
“I don’t have any ammo for it. And the gun—” I paused “—it’s been buried. It was in the ground. I don’t even know if it works.”
“Then why did you bring it?”
I looked at the tracks. They led up a hill. My breath jogged out before me like a wedding veil. “To scare men,” I said.