by Alison Stine
“What is his obsession with you?” I said. “To track us this far?”
“It ain’t me,” Jamey said. She turned to look at me. Her eyes held a familiar panic. I had seen it before, in my mama’s eyes. My mama telling me to hide, he’s coming. Telling me to be quiet, be still, be good. He’s coming.
“It’s Starla,” Jamey said. “She’s Jake’s daughter.”
I didn’t have time to be surprised, to ask any questions, to ask anything of Jamey at all. “Jamey, there’s a knife in the glove box,” I said. “Another under Starla’s seat.”
“I got my knife,” Jamey said quietly.
The man knocked on the driver’s side window. I looked at Jamey, at Starla sleeping, then rolled it down.
“I’m gonna need you to step out of the truck, miss,” the man said.
I decided to pretend a little longer. “I’m gonna need to see your badge.”
“Out of the truck. Now!”
The man wrenched the door open. I grabbed for the handle, trying to close it, but he yanked hard, like he was tearing off a chicken leg. He forced me out of the truck and onto the ground. I hit pavement, but snow cushioned me, clung to me. I pulled myself up by the door and closed it, prayed that Jamey would lock it. My heart was hammering too loudly to hear.
The man leaned close to me and spat on the ground. “We want the girl.”
“She doesn’t belong to you.”
“Like hell she doesn’t.”
“She’s fifteen!”
The door of the sheriff’s car popped open.
It was him. I knew it would be him, but he was different. Jamey had done something to him. She had hurt him.
He moved strangely, with a slow drag that reminded me of Grayson, though it made me sick to think it. But like Grayson, Jake had a hurt leg. He had to slide his body forward and lean on a cane to walk. Something was wrong with Jake’s eye. He wore an eye patch. There was red behind it, over his forehead. Old, dried blood, or a bruise or burn stretching into his hair.
But the hurt, the injuries, didn’t make him seem weaker, or slower. They made him seem scarier. Less to lose. Less alive.
“Not that girl,” Jake said. His voice had changed, too. It was thicker, deep with clots. It had lost its joking, maniacal joy.
He didn’t move like Grayson, I decided. He moved like a snake.
“You can keep Jamey. That bitch. I want my baby.”
“You stay away from them,” I said.
“And I want the grower.”
Me.
He wanted me.
The man with the rifle, the man pretending to be a deputy, had not told me to put my hands up—he was not pretending very well. I stood with them at my side. The heaviness in my pocket dragged against me like a stone.
“We can’t live on deer meat forever. Apparently!” Jake spat the word. “If this weather don’t get fixed, we’re gonna need somebody who can grow things. That’s you, girl. I remember you from your daddy’s. I know what you can do. Did you know that weed was grown by a girl? they told me. A little bitty thing? Like magic, they said. Like a witch. Well, we’re gonna need a witch now. We’re gonna need to grow things to eat.”
I could barely believe what I was hearing. “You want me to grow...vegetables?”
“Yes. And we’re gonna need weed.”
“I don’t have any weed.”
“You can grow more.”
“I don’t have any clones.”
“I do!” He slunk closer to me, his body wobbling with the effort. “But those idiots I got for help can’t make them grow. They got rot, they got bugs, I don’t know. I got idiots, that’s the problem. What I need...” He tilted his head. The eye patch was like a well, a bottomless empty well—there was nothing in there, but I couldn’t look away from it. “Is you. I need a grower, and I need my baby girl. And then everything—” he wobbled on the cane “—will be right as rain back at Skate State. Don’t you want that? Order returned to the universe?”
I had left the key in the ignition. I prayed that Jamey saw it. I prayed that she started the truck, reversed it, left me, and got her and Starla the hell out of here. I wished she could read my mind. I thought of Lisbeth, holding my hand in the dark: all the things I tried to transmit to her, the love I tried to make her understand.
“Look at you!” Jake said. “You’re a grower. You’re more talented than any girl I ever had! You have the ability to bring happiness to this hellhole of a world we apparently got stuck with.”
“How did you find us?” I asked.
“Bitch, you’re dragging a house. You don’t exactly blend.”
“Let Jamey and Starla go,” I said, “and I’ll go with you. I’ll grow for you. Whatever you want.”
Jake shook his head. “I need my baby with me.”
“That’s never gonna happen. You raped her mother.”
Jamey turned the key. The truck engine started with a roar behind me, and we all turned. The man with the rifle yanked on the handle of the door, but she had locked it.
I shouted at her, “Go! Get out of here!”
Her face through the dashboard looked small and bleached, too little. How could she go, how could she get away, how could she do this? We had just taught her to drive. She didn’t even know how to turn around. She put the truck into Reverse and I heard a high squeal.
She was going to burn rubber all the way back to West Virginia.
Jake started forward, but I stopped him. I felt very slow and calm. I felt it was not me who removed her hand from her pocket, who showed him the gun, who pointed it straight at his head, at his missing eye. It was a perfect black bull’s-eye, meant for a bullet, though I didn’t have a bullet. I had the gun: heavy, so heavy. It seemed to pulse with energy, potential, and heat. And death.
I willed my hand to be straight. “I have a gun,” I said.
“Cute,” he said. “So do I.”
It was already in his hand. How had it gotten there, a dark extension, fitting better in his palm than mine ever could. And then it was popping. I heard firecrackers, popcorn. I heard the sound of breaking glass, then a splintering. I turned to see the truck keep going, backing up. The house started to tilt. Then it hit a tree.
Crashing as the windows of the house broke. The back porch shattered against the trunk. The truck engine was still on, tires spinning. I didn’t see Jamey behind the wheel anymore. There was a spiderweb of broken glass on the windshield, a bullet hole as its eye.
I ran to the truck. I forgot that Jake had a gun, forgot the man with the rifle. I forgot everything except the back door. I had to reach the back door of the truck.
I yanked it open. Starla was screaming. I tried to get her out, then realized my hand wasn’t working; it was too heavy. I had a gun in it.
I shoved the gun back in my pocket. I unclicked the seat belt from around the orange crate, smashed now, grabbed the whole bundle of blankets and baby, and pushed them to my chest. There was a backpack on the floor. I couldn’t remember what was in it. I pushed the straps over my shoulder with the hand that wasn’t holding Starla. I couldn’t reach anything else. There was no time to think, to look for what we might need, no way to carry everything. The money, the food, the grow light.
“Jamey?” I said.
She was slumped over in the front seat, hair hiding her face. There was blood on the hole in the windshield. Blood in Jamey’s hair.
“Jamey?” I shook her. Blood came away in my hand. Jamey didn’t budge, didn’t respond. Her body moved only because I moved it. “Jamey!”
The man with the rifle had reached the truck. He clawed through the door, coming for me. His hand clamped onto my ankle and I let Jamey go, kicking at the man. My boot sent him sprawling against the open door, but he lunged with his other hand. He was stronger than me. I would have to run.
Lobo
had taught me: if they were bigger than me I could not be stronger, I could only be faster. I scrambled across the back seat, over the splintered orange crate. Starla’s hands gripped my neck as hard as iron. I didn’t need to hold her; she wasn’t letting go. I pushed open the other door and shot out of the truck.
Then I was running across the road and into the trees. I leaped over a ditch, running up a hill. The baby and the backpack weighed nothing. I felt nothing. I tore up the hill, then crawled, yanking on saplings, pushing off of leafless trees. I ran and ran. Up the hill, down another one. Branches lashed past me. The forest floor, leaden with snow, weighed me down. I nearly tripped over a hulk of rust.
It was an old washing machine, thrown out in the woods years ago, grown over with vines, rattling now and dead. I got my balance, hauled us around it. Starla pushed her face so hard into my neck it hurt. I don’t know how long we ran through the forest, long past when I realized no one was following us.
Jake and the man weren’t coming.
Only then did I feel the pain: pain from falling, pain from being pulled out of the truck and onto the ground, pain from carrying Starla. Pain in my legs, pain in my back. Shadows were doing things to me, skittering like lizards over the leaves.
I saw a shape perched on the next hill and thought it was another piece of junk abandoned in the woods. But when I came closer, moving numbly, on automatic now, my body slowed by pain and the baby, I saw it was much larger than a washing machine. It was a tarp, half-covering a frame.
A house-shaped frame.
The greenhouse we had seen from the road.
It was real. It was solid. None of the panes of glass that I could see looked broken. Snow had been cleared around the greenhouse, making a path to its little door.
I looked around but didn’t see anyone. No footprints marred the snow except my own—but new snow had recently fallen. New snow was always falling; it could have covered up any tracks. Starla whimpered in my arms.
I whispered, “Starla, somebody’s growing something.”
She lifted her head a tiny bit. Legs trembling with fatigue, I approached the greenhouse and pushed at the tarp. I fell at the little door and it sighed open. The heavy, wet air that greeted us seemed like an embrace.
Home. I had almost forgotten what it was like.
I stepped into the greenhouse, Starla clutching my neck. Inside the glass walls, it felt like another season, one I thought I might never see again, never smell the air like this: earthy, mineral. I was too hot in my coveralls and hat. It felt like spring, like summer. I remembered. I remembered everything.
I saw tables lined with soil-packed flats, little green dots that were seedlings. Maybe carrots? Green shoots packed closer together might be radishes. I saw clay pots, trowels, a coiled hose, a bag of fertilizer. There was a worn, striped recliner in the corner of the greenhouse, a crank radio tied to a beam with twine. A kerosene heater blasted, casting out waves of heat. Its coils glowed red.
Above the rich, peaty scent of the greenhouse, I thought I smelled wood smoke. I peeked my head back out of the door—against my neck, Starla whimpered, to be thrust into the cold, into the world again—parted the tarp, and glanced up beyond the greenhouse.
Smoke from cooking fires drifted down the hill. The wind carried the scent along with the murmur of speech. Lower, deeper voices. There were men on the top of the next rise. Another camp.
This must have been the camp Jamey had spotted from the truck. This must have been their greenhouse, their seeds. At least they knew to start vegetables. I listened, but did not hear shouting. No guns. No crying.
I listened for a long time.
Finally, convinced they were not Jake’s men, they were not coming for us, I ducked back into the greenhouse, closing the door. The tarp settled down around the house. The warm air enveloped us.
All at once, I felt sleepy. We could bed down for the night in the greenhouse, move on very early in the morning. The camp on the top of the hill, whoever they were, would never even have to know we had been here. It was nearly dusk, and I doubted anyone from the group would check on their plants in the dark. We could leave at dawn. I didn’t have to sleep.
I doubted I would be able to for a long time.
I put Starla in the striped recliner, tucking her blankets in around her. The blankets had been in the car seat with her. One corner was sopped in red. Blood.
There was more blood flecked across the blankets—how had I not seen it before? Frantically, I searched Starla, lifting up her hair, pushing up her sweater to stare at her skin, searching for the source. She had fallen asleep in my arms, the stress trying to protect her, shutting her body down, but I jostled her, pitched her nearly out of the chair, looking for her wound.
I couldn’t find a mark on her.
Her cheeks were flushed and streaked with dried, slimy tears. She stayed asleep, despite my rustling. She looked so much like Jamey. It wasn’t the baby’s blood on the blankets, I realized. It was her mama’s.
What would I tell Starla when she woke up?
The backpack had slumped on the floor, where it had fallen from my shoulders when we entered the greenhouse. I bent down and unzipped it. I pulled out a makeup case with a star-shaped glittery key chain tied to the zipper, and a paperback novel, yellow and waterlogged; I didn’t recognize the title. I flipped to the back of the book. There was an inked library stamp. From a junior high school.
The only other thing in the backpack was a bag of powdered sugar.
I looked around the greenhouse. The seeds were tender, the heater blared. The people in the hilltop camp would come back here to check on their plants first thing in the morning. Starla wouldn’t be alone—if it came to that, if I didn’t come back—for long.
“I have to go back for your mama,” I whispered. “I have to try.”
From around my neck, I took the leather pouch of seeds. Seeds from the Pumpkin King, from the flea market, from the burned farm, from Jamey. Pumpkin, millet, corn, apple, pepper. Almost enough for a garden. A new start. The cord was black with dirt, and the pouch reeked of road salt. I laid it at Starla’s feet.
The sun hung low, and as I shut the door on the greenhouse, letting the tarp settle back down after me, it started to snow—the kind of snow that didn’t announce itself with white light. The air didn’t smell sharp; the snow didn’t come from clouds that had gathered, lowing like cows, all day. This snow just appeared in the air like it had been conjured, as sudden as buckshot or tears.
I hoped the snow wouldn’t cover up my tracks. I had to find my way back to the greenhouse. I remembered my mama’s stories of the blizzard, the woman disappearing. I didn’t have a rope to lead me. I didn’t even have a flashlight anymore.
I cast one more look back, and then I ran. Down the hill. I didn’t glance behind me again. I listened but did not hear Starla waking and crying, or anyone coming down from the camp on the hilltop. I passed the washing machine. Another hill. I was close. Snow got into my eyes. My feet felt frozen. There was slush inside my boots.
Then I could hear Jake and his man.
I hadn’t even doubted that I would find the truck again, find Jamey—and there the men were. They had not left the scene.
As suddenly as it had started, the new snow had stopped falling, which stopped muting everything. I slowed, conscious of the crunching sound I made, blundering through snow and leaves. At the edge of the tree line, I froze. Before me, the hill sloped down to the ditch, and then to the road.
I saw my truck, my truck that had crashed against the tree. A little smoke rose from it. Otherwise, it seemed frozen in time. Nothing moved, even the snow on the hood. It looked etched there. The glittering and broken glass had been on the ground forever, part of the road. I didn’t hear the engine anymore. Had it been turned off? Or died? The truck looked as still as the dead. It waited, a part of the woods now.
&
nbsp; Down the road, I heard the men’s voices again. They were arguing.
The man with the rifle had put down his gun. He was examining things they had pulled from my truck and laid out on the road. Our stuff. The man and Jake were debating what was useful, who should get what. I felt a hot surge of shame, seeing our belongings splayed out—my long underwear, Jamey’s fuzzy boots—and I felt anger. We needed those supplies, the warm clothes, the food. We had paid for them, been gifted them. And we had nothing now.
“I don’t see any ammo,” the man with the rifle said. “Or weed. And this knife is shit.”
“Whatever,” Jake said. “It’s a blade. The grower is gonna come back for this stuff. She’s gonna come back for this house. She can’t survive out here. We just gotta wait her out.” He clapped the man’s shoulder. “I gotta piss.”
In the trees, I drew the heaviness from my pocket.
My hand trembled, but maybe it was from the weight of the gun. I stilled my hand against my side, keeping the gun pressed close to me. I crept right behind the trees, parallel to Jake’s path, his dragging, shuffling walk. Snake walk. He headed alongside the ditch, farther down the road.
I shadowed him. When he stopped, I stopped. I put my head down, my heart knocking in my chest. I hardly dared to breathe in case he heard me, turned his face to see me. And I listened.
The woods were still. No birds sang. Had they fled or had we killed them? No deer pulled the bark off trees. Had the deer escaped or been hunted to death? Or wasted away? No other cars came. I listened.
This was my real secret: control. I controlled what I could, which was not much in this world. I had barely been high, beyond contact buzzes from living at the farm, from having to go up to the big house some nights for a battery or flashlight. I avoided the upstairs where smoke hung around the rooms like an extra person; the crackling laughter of my mama and her lover, who would kick me if I came in at the wrong time, who would accuse me, eyes wide as marbles, with the look of fear that everyone wore around now, of taking money, of counting it wrong, of trimming too much or too little, of snipping some buds for myself. I could still feel the grip of Lobo’s hand around me, remember how it burned. I was surprised I had never received a scar like Jamey’s.