by J. D. Palmer
I don’t know how to respond so I look at the floor while she holds my hand. I’m touched. And… Heartened. Validated in the smallest of ways.
“You want to know if you can do anything? Just remember this place. Keep it in your heart.”
“Oh, of course, I could never—”
“No. I’m not talking about that. I’m saying… You need balance in your life. Remember that it’s winter for others out there, too. Whether that means giving death, or giving life, it’s up to your heart. But live with it. Don’t let it poison you.”
An odd procession takes shape. A line of horses carrying our gear. Sam at the head with Josey, both riding. To lead and to scout. Felicia and Cristen with guns. Felicia is nothing but scowls, though I can tell she’s pleased to be escorting us away from her home. Pike is fretful with all the packing, sensing a change from his days of comfort. Or just distressed at the pile of bones and antlers he’s leaving behind.
Momma Kay, Wren, Jacqueline, and Brody stand on the hill. They raise hands in farewell as we go by, Brody waving his little toy man at me. I doff my spectacles in return. We share one last smile. Jane stands at a window, only waving when we’re almost out of sight. Wren told me that Jane had wanted to come with us, but she had talked her out of it. Wren seemed to think we would be coming back, anyways.
Maybe.
A six mile walk down a road that’s showing asphalt. Mostly. Stubborn ice and snow make it a patchwork of whites and blacks and dirty brown. The horses hate it and Sam makes sure we go slow.
Gods, this is hard.
Suddenly released, it’s hard to move at a snail pace. Hard not to race ahead. Hard not to rue the day going by so quickly as we move so slowly.
Six miles. That’s it. But already late afternoon. Six fucking miles. All it takes until we enter a small farmstead and find a truck. A black extended cab that is fairly new beneath all the grime. It doesn’t start. But Sam opens his pack and pulls out a bottle. “Additives. You’ll still be lucky.”
It doesn’t start after he’s poured the bottle into the tank and he wordlessly pops the hood and begins to examine the battery. “Gonna be a bit.”
His way of telling us not to hover. We walk towards the farmhouse. My eyes scan the windows, the curtains. The door that’s slightly ajar. It’s not hard to tell that no one wintered here. A lack of tracks to match the lack of firewood. No smoke. The windows covered in mud and grime. A million small, tell-tale signs that the place is deserted.
But my gun is up. Sheila stalks next to me. And I don’t need to turn to see Theo and Beryl circling around back.
Old habits die hard. Or, old habits make it hard to die. I don’t know if I’m relieved that we have snapped back into our old caution, or that it’s lamentable that we will always be this wary. Always fearful.
We don’t need anything from the home. Our bags are packed with more than enough food, some canned, some homemade. We have water. We have good clothes. But still we loiter after we clear the house. Sheila, especially, seems to find a certain satisfaction in trying to find the story of the former inhabitants. I think I do, too. Maybe it feels like giving comfort, in a way, to acknowledge to these ghosts that their passing did not go unremarked.
I think I would want someone to know that I had once lived, even if it was a stranger.
A table is set, complete with place settings and napkins, as if they had begun setting up for a dinner party. Or always wanted to be ready to entertain. Dusty china next to the knives and spoons now tarnished. The windows are open, the screens ripped and torn partially away, the remaining parts covered in mud and bird shit. The floor is wet and moldy and stale. There are small pellets of rodent poop and the droppings of something bigger. But I can imagine this room as it was in the summer time of years past, and it feels like a nice home. If some places are haunted by times of horror, of murder, or fear and injustice, so too must houses hold onto love and kindness. There is a warmth in this room that is untouched by the decay.
Lines are drawn by the door, making me pause on my way out. The classic measuring stick of children, marked every year on Christmas Eve. Todd and Julie, inscribed with a mother’s patient hand but for one year, when Todd was six and I’m not sure about Julie, when they wrote the date and names themselves. I shouldn’t, but I look at the first notches. The year when they were first measured at age one. Todd was shorter than his sister. Both so incredibly small.
Beryl comes and takes my hand and stands with me. Patient. Waiting just as I did when she would retreat into her mind. The storm doesn’t go away, but sometimes all you need is a tree to lean on.
BERYL | 35
I AM THE best kind of liar.
At least I used to be. And I don’t know if that is a skill that one loses. Or gains. Lying. Like acting. I can’t imagine that a well established dramatist would one day be unable to summon a mask of any kind. Or that a master poker player would suddenly turn into an open book.
Like riding a bike.
But knowledge changes things. Time changes things. Monsters change things.
I am the best kind of liar because… Well, the best liar, the very best, the most talented of all liars in the whole world, they become this because they have deceived the person that is the most difficult in the universe.
Themselves.
As a liar to other people I think I was fairly commonplace. I’d lie and think I got away with it, but they knew, and didn’t care. Or didn’t want to embarrass me. Or it simply wasn’t a lie that was worth their time.
Or I’d lie and get caught and blame someone else for giving me away. Not my story. Not my face.
Not my words.
But I was good at lying to myself. From why I hadn’t been adopted to why I was put in foster care in the first place. An amalgamation of too much imagination mixed with despair. The only way to make sense of my world, without succumbing to the sheer harshness of it, was to deceive myself about it.
I don’t know what was true. What was my emotional smokescreen and my imagined distress, and what were the actual events…
I’d like to think that my memories, like most stories, have a kernel of truth. I remember hating Ruth, my case manager. For her name, and her demeanor, and her ruthlessness which was always what I thought of when I heard her name. But I think she actually wanted the best for me. Even after the window incident. And the late night phone calls from distressed foster parents. And the six times that I ran away.
I remember stealing from a family. Because I wanted to get caught. To be grounded. To establish the permanence that was family. And I remember screaming at Ruth when I was branded a thief. And unfit. And too disengaged. Too distant.
I think…
Or did she yell at me?
Like I said, I was an excellent liar.
Stuart changed that. For a long time I held onto the lies. And when I recognized the truth of my situation, I almost died.
But it was better to see the truth. So I don’t lie to myself anymore.
Now I just lie to Harlan.
And if I’m honest with myself, as I always am now… I hate it.
But I can’t stop.
“Har, everything is… it’s going to be fine.”
More than an hour of Sam tinkering under the hood. Bottles emptied into the gas tank. Steel wool cleaning the corroded heads of the battery… The truck starts, but the revving is uneasy, almost unnatural. A guttural wheezing of a disgruntled creature.
“She ain’t gonna last.” Sam slams the hood shut and wipes his fingers on his handkerchief. “Bad gas. Don’t push her.”
“Bad gas?” Har asks. Theo giggles and Sam casts him a deadpan look.
“Starts to go bad once exposed to air. Batteries head south too, especially with…” He trails off, giving a heavy sigh. “You’ll be lucky to get another one.”
A moment of silence as we consider his words. The realization that this might be the last car we drive… Ever. To think of just how different our world will contin
ue to be. Another nail in the coffin of a bygone time.
“Take care of yourselves.” And with a tip of his hat Sam turns around and starts to head back. A nice gesture from a man such as him. Knowing that more words would be a waste.
Felicia and Sheila look like they want to have parting words. Slowly strolling past each other, waiting to be provoked. Both seem disappointed when nothing happens. Theo offers Felicia a handshake, one that she reluctantly returns. But she doesn’t look at Har. And only the briefest of glances at me, an unreadable look in her eyes.
Cristen hugs all of us, and I have to smile at Sheila’s scowl as she suffers through the embrace. Then it’s saying goodbye to Josey, something that feels far too brief before he climbs up on his horse, serenading us with the song about his toe as he clops back the way we came.
Harlan jumps in the driver’s seat and I join him up front after coaxing Pike into the back. Theo and Sheila settle in behind us, and then we all pause, wait for Har to put it in drive.
“Thank you,” he says, to no on in particular, and the moment hangs for a second before he eases the truck out of the drive and onto the road.
We have to maneuver around two cars stopped in the road, and then ease the truck over a stubborn snow drift. But after that the road ahead of us has been found by the sun. And for awhile we open the windows and watch the countryside go by.
Not that we make much speed. Har tries to get it up to forty miles per hour, but has to settle for going somewhere around thirty. The truck bucks through every shift of gears, and a clicking turns into a clank before turning into a silence that precedes its death.
Harlan lets out a long exhale and rests his forehead on the steering wheel.
“Are we close?” Theo asks. As if he hasn’t been shown the map. As if we had somehow driven for more than an hour.
“No. No Theo, we are not close.” Harlan’s voice is resigned. Tired. But then, slowly, I see a smile twitch his cheek. He laughs. “Y’all ready to walk?”
HARLAN | 36
IT MAKES SENSE. Nothing can be trusted. Nothing, this whole time, made sense, or helped, or moved me along this path towards home. Nothing but my own feet. My own will. And Beryl.
And Theo.
And Sheila.
And Josey.
Fitting, then, to have to walk the last hundred miles. If the universe wanted to strip me naked and make me crawl, well, I would not be surprised.
I know I’ll make it.
“Why are you smiling?” Beryl asks. My hand snakes around her waist, pulling her close as we walk. Then I remember where we are walking to, and I almost let her go. I know she sees it, feels it. But I’m glad she doesn’t say anything.
“I’m smiling?”
“Yes.”
We walk along for another few minutes. The winter has made alterations to the road. A small rockslide has scattered stones and detritus across a bend. A cluster of pine trees blown down across the right lane. Small drifts of snow and ice hiding in the shadows of hills and cliffs.
And there are mountains to the left and right. Rolling green hills. A bright sun flickering through every different type of cloud in the sky.
“I was thinking about… Just how far we’ve come.”
She nods, as if that makes sense. I guess I don’t need to elaborate, not with her. Pike snaps at a butterfly, then races ahead down the road, as if embarrassed that he couldn’t take down this flitting, fleeting creature.
As if I haven’t spent the last three months snarling at everything good around me, too.
Just a walk. The pacing of feet. The scuff of shoes and the scattering of pebbles. We stride down the center of the road. A creak of straps, sighs and sneezes, slurps from water bottles. And the chirp of birds, also coming home.
Hard not to be happy. Wary, at the same time. Wary of what the curve in the road holds, and wary of just being happy. Sun and a horizon and no gunshots. Food and water and company. But for me, a time for bracing as well. I know we’ve gone past the point of no return. I will make it home. Any chance of me bailing on this journey is long gone. Even knowing the heartbreak that might await me. Us. We are a hundred miles away but too close by far.
As if I’d ever abandon it.
I am stubborn, if I am anything.
When we stop to rest, I lie down in the middle of road. In between two of the long dashes that signify a passing lane on a long stretch of open highway. It’s a heady feeling for me. The center of the road has always seemingly been off limits. You don’t walk the center, if you even walk the road. Millions of people traveling this path, zooming north or south, but no one has ever felt the grain of this asphalt. The small rocks, the rough texture of something that has carried you, like a river, from so many places, all your fucking life. I feel like I’ve finally noticed what a doorknob looks like. Or how a key feels in the palm of a hand.
I love this feeling, these thoughts, because of what they signify. My own changing path. A mind set that is more wholesome. A movement towards something new. Dammit it has to be new.
I’m procrastinating.
“Let’s go.”
I force them to pick up the pace. I’ll be the asshole who makes them march down the road, because to not would be to give in to my uncertainty. Because the closer I get, the more of a coward I become.
That they let me get away with being a demanding prick is not something I’m unaware of. And part of me hastens towards this end so that I can stop being a monster. Then maybe I can let Theo, or Sheila, or Beryl, lead the way for a bit. To finally know the ending of my own story so that I can float along in the wake of someone else’s turbulence.
That would be a comfort, I think.
I think.
“Har?” Theo’s voice is low, the voice he uses when he’s asking something that might be intrusive.
“Yeah?”
“How do we know she’s at your house? Jessica, I mean. You said her dad had a ranch…?”
I find myself smiling, unperturbed by the question, knowing I would have been a month ago. As much as it scares me, acceptance has made a home in my heart. For better or worse.
“She’ll be there, or she’ll have left a damn big sign.” I look out over the lake, keeping the smile on my face. “It’s where the crib is.”
Pike chases a deer and returns to us with head down, exhausted. He tips over in the shade of a tree, panting. He cannot go further. It’s his own damn fault, and I know that he expects us to move on without him. A dog as athletic as him can follow our scent and overtake us in no time. But everyone else is dog-tired as well. So we stop, and drink water, and watch rain clouds gather over the mountains. And lie down in the middle of the road and think about all the travelers that came before, and will come after. We stop when Pike stops. Because though I’ll push this group to their limits, I’ll listen to what this dog says. So as not to lose them all.
BERYL | 37
I AM USED to feeling powerless. Not something that I… Like. Not something I’ve accepted. Just used to it. I blame confusion. Fear. It’s not hard to feel stripped of everything when you don’t really know what you have. It’s easy to feel naked when everyone else knows what you don’t.
“Do you want to play any sports?”
What?
I didn’t know how to respond to that when my therapist asked me. I was outside of that. I was still far too behind to get to do that, right? I had to be permanent somewhere, didn’t I?
I asked her that very question, and she took on the sad look that I knew she didn’t know was sad. Her calm face, or so she thought.
“No, dear one. No.”
Then she thought for awhile, or at least it seemed like awhile, before saying, “People mistake the purpose of sports. It’s not to measure oneself against another… It’s to measure one’s self in a moment of time.”
I didn’t understand. I had never been asked before. Months of therapy and that was the question that broke me down. Change it to, “would you like to belong for a
moment?”
Fuck. Yes.
Easier said than done.
But now I do belong. And we are a team as we hike long days. Long, long days in which we reacquaint our legs with walking. In which we say hello to the road, again. And I understand, or at least I think I do, measuring one’s self in a moment of time. Because we push ourselves past the time we want to lay down. To quit. To cede the day its victory over us.
A measurement of one’s self in a moment of time. Because I stay by his side, step for step, to win the game or lose it.
We do not talk much, along the way. Occasional questions about places. Sometimes a voiced need to stop for food, or to piss, or because of a sound heard. Sometimes we stop because Harlan just wants to check and see if a car will start.
It never does.
We pass through a city called Missoula. Two brooding hills, both just barely missing the cut to be mountains, loom tall over the town. A large, white letter M marks Missoula as a college town. Harlan says the two “hills” are called Jumbo and Sentinel. He says that they mark the way into Hell Gate Canyon. I’m glad we aren’t going that way.
Theo finds a baseball cap, maroon with a bear on it, that he seems to like. And we all find hats and sunglasses, anything to shield our eyes from the sun that, though lacking warmth, seems intent on blinding us.
Missoula seems… clean. Not in terms of trash or detritus. But we don’t see many leathery mummies thawing out from the cold to finish their decay. There doesn’t seem to be many cars left in the road, either.
Bikes are everywhere, and we even make the effort to air up the tires, one for each of us. But the road is far too littered with remnants of ice and debris, and our large packs make us too ungainly to enjoy the experience. Harlan says a hill called Evaro would have been too much for us anyways, and we can find more bikes later.