by Alison Stine
“This mask smells,” Jamey said.
There was a boom as a door was kicked open.
It was the door to the drive-through. An old man stood there. He wore heavy black boots, a coat yellowed with dribbling tobacco stains. He had a face of rough white stubble. And he had a shotgun.
“Get out,” he said.
I raised my hands. “We didn’t know anybody was here.”
“Get out. This is my place.”
I looked behind him. I could see, in the little alcove of the drive-through window, canned goods, boxes of mac and cheese, tins of tuna, and stacks of plastic-wrapped taco shells. He had bricked the room with supplies. He was making his stand there, in the drive-through.
“How long have you been in there?” I asked.
“Wil,” Grayson said.
“Get out,” the man repeated. “And drop what you took.”
“We didn’t take anything, sir,” Dance said.
The man nodded his head at Jamey. “Drop that.”
“The mask? Are you serious?” Jamey tore it off with one hand. Her face underneath looked red and sweaty. Starla was whimpering a little.
“Careful,” the man said. “Slow now.”
Jamey dropped the mask on the ground and kicked it across the floor to the man. He was behind the counter, but that shotgun—if it was loaded—could blow a hole through anything.
“Take it,” Jamey said. “I was gonna pay for it.”
What good was the gun in my pocket? What good was I?
“Do you have any fuel?” I asked the man.
Now it was Dance’s turn to hiss, “Wil!”
But the man looked at me. His eyes held the wild, swollen redness of exhaustion. They were runny, his face shiny. “No,” he said. “They cleaned me out. They robbed me.”
“Who did?” I asked.
“A lot of people. Before I wised up. They unlocked the pumps. They brought a tanker.”
Dance’s eyes widened.
“How are you staying warm?” I said.
“Warm? What the hell is warm? Who knows that anymore? Now get the fuck out.”
He was holing himself up in the drive-through alone. He would die in there.
We began to back up. All of us held our hands up, except for Jamey, who held Starla.
“Dog,” Starla said. “Doggy. Want doggy.” She was looking at the rubber mask, puddled on the floor.
“Wait,” the man said. “Wait one fucking minute.” He reached one hand back into the drive-through. The other hand held the shotgun steady on us.
What would he pull out, what would he want from us, what would he take?
He pulled out a can of sweetened condensed milk. Still clutching the gun, he stretched over the counter, and rolled it across the floor. “For the baby.”
* * *
We couldn’t drive the speed limit. Asphalt, gravel—it made no difference. The roads could not be saved. They had turned white, a crumbling, chemical white, as if they had had a shock. The last stab at ice control, at melting the winter that would not be melted, had stained them.
It got over everything, salt and whatever it was: the brine on the roads. I had streaks of it on my coveralls. It sharpened the ends of my hair. When I touched my face I tasted it. The truck was encased like a salt-bake. Starla looked like a beach baby, her hair knotted, her clothes hemmed with grit, as if she had rolled in it. Salt got into all our food, bitter on our tongues.
Where towns had stopped plowing, other trucks and cars would stamp down the snow, making a wild trail, dangerous as glass. And some of the rural roads had seen no travelers for days. We crept through them, an icebreaker making our way. When we stopped, we had to knock the snow in chunks from the undercarriage of the truck and trailer.
Once we saw a stopped station wagon. At the last moment, right before we passed the car, a woman with long brown hair stepped out from behind the front bumper, her arms raised and open as if expecting a package.
Dance swerved to avoid hitting her. We didn’t slow. We didn’t go back to see what she wanted. We didn’t talk about it, as we didn’t talk about the man in the Taco Bell.
I thought the woman may have wanted what the man with the sheepskin and skeleton tattoo had wanted: to die, to take us along. To not be alone in death. I remembered hearing that freezing to death was like burning. You felt warm; you wanted to throw off your clothes. You wanted to bury yourself in the snow. You suddenly felt good in the cold—and that was a very bad sign.
We saw hitchhikers, mostly men with the beards and tattered clothes that showed they had been on the road for some time, packs bulging from their shoulders. They leaned against guardrails. The duct tape patching their coats shone. Their boots were split. Their faces began to blur, and I stopped even noticing whether or not they held out a thumb.
“We ain’t stopping for no man,” Jamey said.
Nobody argued with her.
* * *
The first time we saw a town on fire, it was around sunset. The horizon was a smeared pink line, and above the pink rested darkness. A gray cloud, which just sat there like a front, widening as we came closer. I waited for the scattershot of snow or sleet as we drove on through.
But it wasn’t snow that waited in that sky. It was a great cloud of smoke, as wide as a storm. The town ahead was burning.
I could see smoke poured from the highest windows: a church. Flames bloomed below a steeple, which would surely fall. The smoke traveled diagonally up from the fires—five, seven, maybe more structures burning in the town: gray above and red below. Why were such terrible things so beautiful? The fires made color in our winter world.
Dance hit the recirculate button on the dashboard, which didn’t even work, and Grayson, who was driving, made a turn off the road, avoiding the town. The others pressed their faces against the windows and craned their necks to see the fires, but I didn’t.
After the first fire, we began noticing the aftermath of others. Houses crisped to the ground. Trailer bones still smoking. The abandoned cars piled up, another church van. Once the wrecks were snow-covered, they seemed like they could be anything: a burial mound, the entrance to an ice cave. We passed deserted semis tilting in ditches, their trailers torn open, loads long gone. Already the trucks looked strange to me: too big, part of an ancient, earlier world, a world we no longer knew. There was never anything on the radio.
We passed houses that were little more than foundations, a twisted arm of metal or a stovepipe sticking out of the rubble like a surrender flag.
Up ahead was a charred farmhouse where only the chimney remained, a column of bricks blotched with black: a monument to the struggle of the people who had lived there, maybe died there. Maybe they had just moved on. Jamey said, “Every winter somebody goes and blows their house up trying to get a propane heater or a kerosene lamp to work.”
But this wasn’t every winter.
“I don’t know why we went back for that fucking grow light,” Dance said. “There’s no power anymore. There’s no way to plug it in.”
We had not been speaking much, Dance and I, since we ran away from the man with the sheepskin, since we had left those people there. His anger hung over me. I could sometimes sense it, sometimes not—but I knew it was there. Smoke from a distant fire.
I knew, from living with Lobo, not to meet Dance’s eyes, not to draw the burning arrow of his anger. I looked out the window when I said: “There will be power somewhere. We’ll use the light there.”
“Sure. In that magical place.”
He blamed me, but for what exactly? For leaving those people to die, though they wanted to. For the lost food and supplies—though he was the one who had fallen asleep; he was the one who had not wanted to wake me for watch. Was his anger really blaming himself? Or was he mad at me for bringing Jamey and Starla, but no others. For abandoning O
hio.
“California will have power,” I said.
“The coldest night of winter,” Jamey said. “That’s when it happens.” She, too, had lived with an angry man. She knew to soothe him, distract. “That’s when the house burns down, every time.”
Grayson was driving by the burned farm. Some of the trees around the house had survived, older trees with wide trunks and sheltering branches. I saw an old brick barn and a chicken coop. It was a quiet place, protected by the trees.
“Let stop here for the night,” I said. “There’s nobody around. We can rest. Scope out what’s left of the farm, see if there’s anything we can use.”
“So we steal now?” Dance said.
“I guess we do,” I said to the window.
* * *
But the barn was empty, even of hay. The people who had lived on the farm must have burned the hay to try to stay warm; maybe that had caused the fire. What they had left behind was junk, broken tools. Everything smelled of mice and pigeons, and that which was not iced over was coated in a thick layer of gray. Dust and ash. I could taste it on the back of my throat.
I worked in the barn alone, examining the metal parts and trying to think how they might be useful. The others set up camp and started dinner. Soon a shadow fell over me from the open door. Dance stood in the wide barn doorway, switching a flashlight on and off to get my attention. He held the flashlight high like the sheriff. Then he handed it to me.
“Thanks.” I turned away from him, but he didn’t move. “Are you staying?”
“No. I mean, I’ll stay to help you clean out the barn if you want. I’ll stay tonight.”
I turned back, throwing the flashlight into his eyes. “Sorry.” I lowered it. Dance came into focus, thin and purple. “You’ll stay tonight?” I said. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not moving on with the group, I decided. I think I should go.”
I thought of our long silences, our run up the hill with the duffel bag. Why had I saved a grow light, risked our lives for it? Risked his life?
“When did you decide that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t I think belong here right now.”
“Is this about those people in white?”
“No, it’s not about...Snowflake Charles Manson.”
“You think we should have tried to save them?”
“No. I think some people are beyond saving.” The words sounded so final and true they surprised us both, as hard as the metal parts in my hands. Dance said, “I think we have to try to save ourselves. I want to go out on my own. If the world’s different, I want to do something different. I don’t think I want to go to California.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know. Maybe look for my mama? My daddy has other kin. Maybe go look for them. It doesn’t seem like we’re going to get back to Ohio.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
“Not unless the snow melts.”
The roads going down the mountains were treacherous now. What would they be like in a few more snowy months, going up?
I thought of the locked gate that led to the farm. I thought of the lower field, the poverty grass waving in the wind, in the kind of warm breeze I was starting to forget, heat so heavy it was almost visible, pressing down on my shoulders, waving up from the road, a greasy ghost.
I remembered the thaw, when the creeks would rise. I remembered mud season. I remembered a moment from years ago: spring drips racing off the farmhouse roof. I sat in the kitchen, my phone on the table beside me, and I saw on my phone screen the reflection of the sky from the window, the sun blazing, and the drips, the ice drips, as bright and fast as gold. I couldn’t stop watching them. I remember a plane zipped across the sky. I saw its contrail through the window, but I couldn’t see that on the phone screen. It was too faint—just the liquid gold pouring as the icicles on the roof dissolved.
I had been waiting for Lisbeth to call. Lobo had come in and yelled at me for wasting work time, zoning out.
It was when I had first got my phone, when we would fall asleep talking, the speaker at my ear. In the loft, there was enough reception; a phone would work. It made me not afraid to be out there, alone, listening until she was only breath. It made me wonder what it might be like to have that in real life, a presence there, breathing beside me, a hard shoulder, warm skin, the beating heart next to me of someone who loved me.
* * *
I didn’t even know for sure where my phone was now. This thing once so important, so essential, a part of my hand—it had run out of charge. It had picked up nothing for a long time, no service, no signals, and drained itself dead trying.
In the barn, there was an old jelly jar on a musty shelf. I picked up the jar and rattled it, unscrewed the top, and peered in. Corn. A few knocking, dry kernels. I put the corn in my seed pouch.
Dance kicked his boot in the dirt. “You don’t need me, Wil,” he said. “You’ve got Grayson.”
“Grayson is injured.”
“And Jamey.”
“Jamey is literally a teenage girl.”
“You don’t need anyone. You really don’t.”
He was right. I knew it. But a few feet away from us, Grayson and Jamey were working at keeping everything lit and warm in the tiny house. They were playing at being parents, and had no idea one of us was leaving. The group was breaking up. All groups did, I thought. No family lasted.
“Are you really going out there alone?” I asked. It didn’t seem right, to let him just go off.
But then he got excited. “Check this out. Look what I found.” He reached for something against the outside wall of the barn, rolling it into the light. A bicycle: ancient, strung with dust and cobwebs. “It was in the chicken coop.”
“Sure. That’s where I’d keep my bike.”
“I bet we can get this rolling again.”
“But in the cold, Dance? Are you going to ride up those roads in the snow?”
He looked at the bike, not at me. “I guess I’m going to have to figure it out.”
* * *
We spent the night at the burned farm. We would have slept well, protected by the chimney and the broken-down barn. They, along with the chicken coop and trees, formed turret walls around us in the tiny house. It did not feel dangerous. It felt sad. In a different time, this might have been a good place to settle. As Jamey said, the bad thing—the fire—had already happened here.
But Dance’s looming departure kept me awake. It felt like we were doing something wrong, to lose someone willingly. Grayson and Jamey had taken it well, barely arguing or attempting to persuade him to stay. Were we that broken down that a person’s absence didn’t faze us? Were we that used to losing things?
In the morning, Jamey made a breakfast of oatmeal and dried fruit, while Grayson watched Starla, showing her the bike. Dance and I stood alone by the truck. He checked and rechecked the straps on his pack. We’d given him what food we could spare—we had lost much of it when we had been robbed—and Dance could only pack what he could carry on his back. No heavy canned goods. Some of the deer meat and powdered milk.
I pulled the gun out. I extended it to Dance, handle first.
Lobo’s anger radiated from the gun. It smelled like a grave. I wondered if the gun would always hold the memory of how long it had been buried and why. Maybe that was why I thought I could get rid of it.
“No way,” Dance said.
“You’re on a bike. You need protection.”
“I have a knife.”
“We all have knives.”
“You should keep the gun. It’s all about appearances, right? Hopefully you won’t ever have to use it. But a gun’s not like a knife. Just the sight of a gun might scare somebody off. A knife, when you use it, you have to get close.”
“I
know that,” I said.
But he kept on talking. “If you pull out a knife in a fight, everybody gets cut, including you. You’re going to get hurt, too.”
* * *
We watched him go. We let him get a start on us. Then we packed up and drove. Too soon we passed him on the snow-freckled road, waving to him out of the open windows. Wind rushed into the cab, and we hurried to roll the windows back up, shivering in relief.
I watched through the rearview as long as I could for Dance: a slender figure, a tear in the gray air. A scavenger, gone off to find something to use, something to unearth again.
We were never going to get out of Appalachia.
I felt it in my bones as we slogged over the hills. Roads that should have taken minutes took hours. Starla fussed. We had to stop, then stop again. It seemed like there was always going to be, just around the next hill or the next, a gas station that was open, neon lights shining over the parking lot. A supermarket selling fuel, selling anything—chips stale in their bright bags, crumbled old chocolate. Even an enterprising stranger by the side of the road, sitting in a lawn chair, wrapped in fur, with gas cans and a cardboard sign: $100 bucks a gallon.
We could pay it. We still had cash. What use was cash? There was nothing to buy.
I missed strangers. Just the ordinariness of seeing a face I didn’t know. All the faces I saw now were familiar, dirty, and becoming harder. Jamey’s cheeks had lost their baby fat. I know I was imagining things but I felt Starla’s had, as well, that she was shedding some of the glow she had, her hair dulling to a color like dust. I had never seen a child so quiet, so compliant.
Maybe, even worse than always being on guard like me, like Jamey, Starla never would be. She had not learned to flinch and to listen, to trust her gut, to be alert, to brace a door. She went with Jake. She went with Mica, with Grayson, or with me. Grateful for any arms, even a stranger’s, able to sleep in any of them. I worried about what that meant.