by Alison Stine
Jamey and I had parked for the night at a county fairgrounds, up on a hill by the horse barn. The barn was large enough to hide us, even the house, but we could see anyone approaching from below. The animals were long gone, of course, and the buildings probably cleared of anything useful. Snow layered the roof of the barn like old paint. The gutters held sprays of ice and frozen spouts.
I took the first watch; I took most of the watches.
When Jamey came to relieve me a little after midnight, I had found the demolition derby track and was sitting in the stands overlooking the snowy dirt circle. A car rusted in the center of the circle—what was left of a car: a banged-up shell that reminded me of Skate State. I tried to imagine the stands around me filled with a cheering crowd, drinking beer and eating popcorn and flushed with the warmth of summer. Where had all those people gone? How many had made it?
Jamey plopped down onto the bench beside me. “This place is huge. I looked fucking everywhere for you.” She scanned the bleachers. A banner, half-ripped or rotting off the grandstand, read: PEP... “Anything useful here?”
“Nothing works,” I said.
She pulled something from her pocket. It was a small pepper, a jalapeño, dried to a husk. “I found it in the barn,” she said. “It’s still got seeds.” She shook the tiny pepper, and it rattled like a baby’s toy. “Thought you could use them, for your collection.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Her breath puffed out. “Thinking about that boy?”
“What boy?”
“Exactly!” Jamey laughed, stretching her legs across the bleachers and crossing her feet at the ankles. The metal stands groaned and shifted, reminding me of high school for a minute, enduring pep rallies and assemblies with Lisbeth. Kids smoked under the stands. I could tell from the scent whether it was Lobo’s weed or not.
“What’s the thing you miss most about spring?” Jamey asked.
It was such a short season. It always had been: a blip that meant more work.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I miss mud.” She laughed again, uncrossing and kicking her heels. The bleachers gave little answering thwacks. “In the thaw, it got everywhere. It was kinda funny, you know, how everybody just gave in to it. Kinda like now, just giving in to the cold. We’re all just dealing. Of course, I liked mud before I moved out to State. Out there, mud just meant more laundry, more shit I had to do.”
I didn’t ask where Jamey’s home was before Skate State. There were only so many places it could be. I knew her parents had kicked her out. She had probably come from one of the villages by the river. Tar paper houses, toys on porches. More stuff in the yard than in the home. Wood smoke and weed smoke, the occasional bitter wind from one of the chemical plants or coal refineries.
She had probably been born there. Jake had probably dealt drugs to the kids at her middle school. I bet that was how she had met him, on the blacktop after school. I could picture him, leaning on a chain-link fence, blowing smoke rings to get her attention.
“What’s the first thing you want to do when we get to California?” Jamey asked. She had shoved her fists in the pockets of her coat and was propped on her elbows, leaning back to look at the stars. When I didn’t answer, she said, “I want to swim in the ocean.”
I pushed my hands deep into my own pockets. I felt the heaviness there. “It might be too cold to swim, Jamey.”
“Well, I want to see the ocean. I want Starla to see it. She’s already seen more than I ever thought I would.” Violence, hunger, depravity, I thought, but Jamey said, “West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee,” ticking off the state names like we were on vacation.
“I want to find my mama. I want to get her free from her boyfriend.”
“You and everybody else.” She didn’t look at me. “What do you think is gonna happen when we get out there?”
“I think I’m gonna find her and that we should strike out on our own. We can make it work—the four of us women. We have shelter, wheels, a way to keep warm. We just need to hunt and chop wood. We can do that anywhere.”
“Well, not anywhere. The beach don’t have trees. Well, palm trees.”
“We can grow them ourselves. Mama is the fastest trimmer. We can grow vegetables for food. Sell or trade the extra. I can grow anything. Lobo taught me. And—” I paused “—I’m better at it than him.”
“I know you are,” she said. “Why do you think Jake kept you around? Tried to keep you all there? He didn’t want your damn house. He didn’t want you to dance. No offense, but there are plenty of girls to dance, better dancers than you, I bet. Jake wanted a grower.”
Jake knew my secret.
At any other time, I might have been upset: my family’s identity spilled open on the floor. But secrets seemed not to matter anymore. A lot seemed not to matter.
Of course he knew. How would he not know. We had grow lights in the back, weed ground into the seams of the truck, crushed into powder on the floor mats. I was sure I smelled of it still. I would smell of weed forever: my winter gear, my boots, my skin. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t smoked, that none of us had on the trip. It was in me.
Jake could have found out a million different ways. Our farm was so close to West Virginia, just across the river. The boy with the station wagon could have sold to Jake. A kid, a girl, could have smoked something good at Skate State, brought something to a party, something that attracted attention, something strong and sweet. Maybe she was asked where it came from. Maybe she was still there and recognized me when I pulled into the compound with a truck, two boys, and a tiny house.
Maybe Jake himself had bought from Lobo. Maybe he had been one of the men at the farmhouse who smoked at the table, who laughed at my mama. Had he seen me there?
“How did Skate State make its money?” I asked Jamey. “How did you eat?”
“Stealing, shows, and drugs. Same as everybody else,” she said. “I guess that’s not gonna work now.”
“I guess not.” I had been sitting in the cold stands for too long. I stood and my knees and back felt stiff, the bleachers groaning. The sky was too white for stars.
Jamey was still looking down at the track. “Do you know I saw a girl win once?”
“Derby night?”
“Yeah. Only we didn’t know it was a girl at first. She had a helmet on. Black car, some shit sponsor like the pet store. She got pushed into a corner at the beginning, but then she reared out of it. Came out swinging, striking everybody. She got hers, pinning them into the corners, every car that ganged up on her in the beginning. By the end we were all rooting for her. And she won. They called it for her. Jake was on his feet, fists pumping like crazy. Then she crawled out of the window and threw her helmet down. She had pigtails, little purple bows. She was a girl. Jake was so mad.” She shook her head. “Her name was Starla. I just thought that was a real pretty name.”
“I should go back to the house. You okay to keep watch for an hour or two? I should get some sleep, check on Starla.”
Jamey didn’t look at me. “Starla’s fine.”
15
It always felt right to leave in the morning, like we were headed off to something good. There was always the chance that we’d find an open gas station. Maybe they’d have a carton of ice cream, frosted over and forgotten in the back of the freezer. Maybe we’d run across a flock of fat turkeys. Maybe we’d hit a stretch of clean, straight road.
In the morning, nothing had turned desperate yet. The frost sparkled, looking like a bright pretty thing, not like a killer. Maybe today the sun would break through. You never knew. Maybe this day would finally be warmer than the last.
We brushed the snow off the truck with our gloves and a straw broom, and we put away the boughs we had used for hiding, kicked snow into our cooking fire. Jamey took the first turn at the wheel. I was grateful that we had been teaching her to driv
e before Dance and Grayson left; I wouldn’t have had the patience to do it myself. She bumped down the fairground path and lurched onto the main road without looking. I glanced in the back seat, but Starla, full of milk, slept on.
“I did some looking but I didn’t find any food at the fairgrounds,” Jamey said. “Other than that old pepper.”
“I wouldn’t think that you would.”
“But I did find...” She turned from the wheel to look at me, her eyes flashing like a gremlin, and I had to restrain myself from redirecting her attention to the road. “A bag of powdered sugar! I broke into the funnel cake shack, and there was a big bag of powdered sugar just sitting there.”
“You broke into the—”
“Unopened. Nobody had touched it. No bugs or anything.”
“The bugs are all dead, Jamey. And that’s all Starla needs, a big bag of sugar.”
“You say that now. But one of these cold nights, you gonna be glad I took it.”
“Did you at least pay for it?”
“Money doesn’t matter anymore.”
I wondered if that was true.
“French fries,” Jamey said, thinking aloud. She slapped the wheel. “I wish I had found some of those. I loved funnel cake, but I really loved French fries, didn’t you? The best part of the fair. Second best, after derby night. A big cup of thin, greasy fair fries. Eat ’em as you walked around.”
I remembered. It seemed like a funny thing to have to remember: cheap junk food that you could have found anywhere once. “You had to eat fast because the vinegar made them all soggy.”
“Gross. No vinegar. Just salt and ketchup, baby.”
Jamey talked about cotton candy and caramel corn and cigarettes. More and more of the gas stations we stopped at had been ransacked. Not just abandoned, but trashed: windows broken, locks jimmied long before us. We stepped around glass shards to enter, empty chip bags scattered about the floor. We dealt with smashed bottles and sour smells, the smell of unplugged coolers, of things left to rot. Sometimes the gas pumps would be destroyed, consoles shattered or hoses ripped off, not that that did any good, not that it would bring fuel out of the ground. It made me nervous to go inside these places, after the man at the Taco Bell, but we had to try. We had no other choice.
There was never any unspoiled milk, and fewer and fewer cigarettes. Not the brand Jamey wanted. “People steal the good stuff,” she said. We would pass the cash register with its drawer hanging open, empty as a mouth, but I still left a little money, folded on the counter, to pay for the things we took, though Jamey said I was being dumb.
* * *
We saw our first dead body at a rest stop.
We had parked the truck and gotten out while Starla napped in the back, just leaving the baby for a moment in order to see if the vending machines right by the parking lot were full.
But they had been looted, of course, smashed and emptied. Jamey was picking up a few snack bags dumped on the ground and shaking them when I saw the shoe sticking out of the snowbank.
I left the little vending machine alcove to look closer. The shoe was attached to a foot, a leg, unmoving as something unnatural—or the most natural thing of all. The dead body looked like a branch, a rock, part of the wild like it had always been there. A bone going home, back to ground.
“Don’t look,” I said to Jamey.
But she was already at my elbow. “Is he—?”
“Yes. There’s no point even in checking.”
We thought the semi truck parked to the side of the rest stop, the only other vehicle we could see, must have been the man’s. The dead man’s. We couldn’t get into the back, the lock was jammed—probably it was trashed back there, anyway, Jamey said—but she managed to break into the cab. She scavenged a thick pair of mittens, some instant coffee. A crate of oranges sat on the front passenger seat. The oranges were all greenish-white and solid, but we took them into the tiny house kitchen, anyway, in case they were only frozen and not rotten. I was thinking of what the man at the flea market had said about scurvy.
Then Jamey took the empty, wooden orange crate and shoved a blanket down inside it. “For Starla. She’s supposed to have a car seat,” she explained to me, as if I wouldn’t have known.
We looked down at the little seat she had made. It was a good idea. There was a faded illustration on the side of the crate: leafy trees, plump glistening oranges.
“If we don’t get to California, that would be okay,” Jamey said. “I mean, if something happens, it would be okay to stop somewhere for the rest of the winter. Try again for California in the spring, maybe.”
I think we both knew there wasn’t going to be a spring. I think we both knew that if we stopped, we were going to stay.
“The first good place?” I asked.
“The first good place,” Jamey said.
* * *
We fought after I took over driving.
We had gone through a train tunnel. The tracks had rusted and been torn up years ago, long before the first lost spring. But the old brick tunnel remained. It might be here forever, I thought, through a hundred winters, bearing the snow on its humped back. At the top of the entrance was a little keystone, with a date I drove under too fast to read. There were things in the tunnel, junk in the shadows lining both sides, between the walls and the road. I saw an old van parked along my side. Other objects flashed out of the dimness: what looked like chicken wire, trash.
Jamey said she saw a big cord of firewood. She thought we should go back for it.
“It’s somebody’s wood, Jamey,” I said.
“I didn’t see anybody in that tunnel. Did you?”
“Well, they’re obviously storing it there.”
“What if they don’t need the wood?”
“How could they not need it?” I said. “It’s freezing.”
“Maybe they died.”
I ignored her.
“What if we take it and leave money for it?”
“I thought you said money didn’t have value?” I didn’t want to start taking if we didn’t have to. She had stolen the sugar. We had stolen—though paid for—gas and snacks. We were going to have to start taking a lot more. We were out of deer and potatoes. “We’re completely capable of chopping our own wood,” I said. “What if somebody’s sick and they can’t?”
We were through the tunnel. Wooded hills rose up on either side of the road, and through the branches I thought I glimpsed something winking in the dull sun. A sparkle, like light on glass. I thought I could see a little house.
“Jamey,” I said. “Can you see what’s on that hill?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“I can’t look because I’m driving. Is there a greenhouse up there?”
“Looks like it,” she said.
Was it possible all its windows weren’t broken?
“Looks like a camp on the hill. Another group.” She fell silent for a moment, then she said: “It looks nice, Wil. Real nice.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Like a good place.”
I shot a look at her. Her head was firmly turned away from me, staring through the glass.
“You can’t tell that from here,” I said.
“Well, I don’t hear screaming. Or gunshots. That’s a good sign.”
“Jamey, it’s too soon to stop.” I wasn’t ready to give up, not yet.
“But what if this is the last good place?”
“The truck is driving fine,” I said. “We have those oranges now. And we still have food from The Church. Canned spaghetti, meat. I saw some peaches in there. In syrup.”
I realized Jamey had stopped arguing. I glanced in the rearview, but Starla slept on. “What’s wrong?” I looked at the side mirror.
“Po po,” Jamey said.
And when I still didn’t
get it.
“It’s the sheriff, Wil.”
I snapped my attention back to the road. We had returned to the highway well before the tunnel. The back roads were too bad, and hardly anybody was driving even on the main routes anymore.
But here were flashing lights. So strange in the white air, in the drab loneliness of the landscape. Here was the law, waiting in a dip of the road, in the middle of the path before us, blocking our way.
It was a sedan—older, dented, but what car wasn’t dented anymore—startling in its gray paint, its red sheriff star. The lights on top still worked. They swept bright across the colorless road, blue and red over the snow.
The law. What were they doing, why had they stopped us? And where had they been all this time, through all these broken windows and burned houses and looted gas stations? And a dead man? I slowed down.
I felt ordinary fear, fear from before the lost spring. It took me a moment to recognize what it was, to remember it. Such a jolt. It took me back. Flashing lights meant trouble. Meant stop. Meant don’t get caught, don’t give anything away, don’t say your real name.
Sarah. You’re Sarah.
Maybe they’ll take your stepdaddy.
A man stood outside the sheriff’s car. He held a rifle behind his head like a lamb. That didn’t seem right. Then he set the rifle to the side, leaning it against the car, to throw something onto the road. It unrolled before us—a magician’s trick—becoming a carpet, silver and barbed.
A spike strip, glinting in the snow.
I slid the truck into Park. We weren’t going anywhere. At least not forward. One move and I would shred the tires. The man picked up the gun again.
“What the hell?” I asked.
“That ain’t no cop,” Jamey said.
The man with the rifle began to walk toward us. I kept my hands clearly visible on the wheel. I had the heaviness in my pocket.
Jamey was staring through the windshield. “That’s Jake’s man. He’s got somebody in the car with him.” Her voice had turned to ice water. I felt it flood through my own body. “It’s him. I can see him. It’s Jake in the car.”