I stand to wiggle out of my jeans, disrobing down to my T-shirt and undies. Immediately people take notice. The other beachgoers freeze, stunned. One father realizes what’s about to occur. Pregnant female flesh is set to corrupt the oasis where his son has come to bathe. The father sets off an alarm, panic flushes his forehead. He stands, arms waving. Sweat pastes his silver hair to his doughy skin. “Boys! Boys!” he yells. “Everyone out of the water!”
The boys stop their frolic. Ruth’s long brown hair floats on the surface. She waves to me to join her. More panic at the shoreline, arms paddle swiftly, rushed with surprise and embarrassment. The boys sprint to dry land as if pursued by a great white.
If Ruth notices their revulsion, she doesn’t show it.
Spits of “Feh!” as I make my way to the shoreline. I’ve never caused such a reaction. But Ruth’s arms swish, gentle as wings. I borrow her courage. The coolness of the lake, our buoyancy. Underwater I lift my shirt for my messed-up baby without sin.
We float for a long time. Fireflies appear, stars beaming their light all the way from far-off outer space. Ruth is walking me away from the world I know into one I don’t.
We spend a day in a motel waiting out hard rain, watching daytime TV under the covers of a double bed. Ruth wields the remote. We spend the next morning walking through the drizzle to escape the horror of daytime TV.
After lunch the sun comes back out. Ruth smiles. I pinch her rear and shuffle my feet, a boxer in the fresh air. She opens her arms, steps to one side, then the other, some old Latin dance move. Ruth can still dance. She laughs. It’s not talking, but it’s sound coming out of her. She kicks some pebbles in our path. In one hour I’ll forget what her laugh sounded like, but right now I play it on rewind over and over again.
I don’t know anything. Lord’s wife might be dead. Nuclear bombs might have destroyed New York City. It could be Tuesday, the day I go to the gym after work. I don’t know when the equinox will come or if it already came. I don’t know a thing about the bones in my feet. I don’t even really know skin. Parts of my feet resemble corned beef hash, a mash of chunky pulp smelling just as foul. Blisters lanced and drained, swollen ankles.
We fall asleep like corpses, end of the film, but Ruth really is a horror movie villain. You think she’s dead, done, conquered. The audience, including me, breathes easy for a moment. Phew. I can go home now, have a snack, take a bath, but then Ruth bolts upright, her head rigid, ready to walk again. Unkillable. Unstoppable. Undead all over again. It’s alive. It’s alive.
“Where are we heading?”
She points down the road, someplace I can’t see, but each morning I say to myself, Today we’ll arrive. We have to. We’ve been walking so long. And each night we don’t. “Where?” I yell at her, dedicated drama queen. “Talk to me!”
I smell burning plastic and Chinese food. We walk past the entrance to a Walmart. “Can we go in?” It’s not home, but it’s familiar. Ruth rolls her eyes but allows the excursion.
Across the huge expanse of parking lot, the magic doors sense our presence. An empty cube of frigid air escapes as we enter. We are greeted by an older woman in a smock. HELLO, her badge says, I’M RITA. “Can I help you find something?” Rita, full of welcome, smiles at filthy, undeserving me, aware that most likely we’ll buy absolutely nothing. We might even leave some grease behind or shoplift. Rita keeps on smiling. People do that near Ruth’s scar, like kissing the ring of an evil queen or keeping a mad dog calm. “No thanks. Come on.” I lead Ruth first through the accessory division. Here, I am the guide. Watches, wallets, and leather driving gloves bleed into a scented bounty, rows of body lotions, bubble baths, multivitamins, and cream rinses. I move slowly through these items. The jewel-toned surplus reaches up to the ceiling. People select their identity from hundreds of shampoos, supplements, and suppositories. Dove + Garnier Fructis + Finesse + Crest + Secret. We head into homewares. Shams and sheets. I stop to feel a comforter, testing its thickness. I relax in the linen department. Ruth and I test a model bed, resting in the calm pleasure of things. We wash up in Walmart’s bathroom. I let the warm water rush over my hands, wrists, elbows. Ruth scrubs her hairy pits. No one cares.
I find a pair of jeans with a flexible panel. I need these. But I also want to buy something I don’t need for the luxury of spending money. After trips through sporting goods, craft supplies, stationery, and lingerie, I choose a bracket of wooden beads. Looks like an abacus. Supposed to be used as a foot massager. Ruth shrugs. “I’ll carry it.” She selects a blue tarp. The tarp worries me.
“What’s that for?”
Ruth doesn’t answer.
“To sleep on?”
She nods back at me while she’s walking away and winds up banging straight into an older man neither of us saw.
“Well, look at you,” the man says to Ruth, smiling, standing from a crouch. He’d been comparing a couple of empty plastic storage containers, huge Tupperware. “How’s it going for you?” he asks Ruth.
She nods, doesn’t answer him, of course.
“I see,” he says. “Cat got your tongue. Yup. That happens sometimes.” But he’s indifferent to her silence, keeps right on talking. “How are you finding the canal?”
“What?” I step in.
“The Erie,” he says. “That’s why you’re here, right? I love it but find it requires something a bit more waterproof.” He gestures toward the plastic containers, looks at Ruth. “You need one of these?” he asks her.
She crouches to examine the containers better. Pats the plastic lid of one, then shakes her head no.
She moves into the shoe department.
“How much farther is it, Ruth?” She chooses new sneakers for me, so there’s my answer. Ruth doesn’t need replacement shoes yet, a further embarrassment of pregnancy.
Along this strip mall street, a forgotten, unclaimed house remains. A family that held out against the inevitable and was surrounded before they could sell out. Target, Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, Jo-Ann Fabric, Stop & Shop, Staples, and their family home. A real estate sign large as a living room advertises the parcel. The house is white. Honeysuckle unhitches its jaw over the front porch. In a car it would be easy to miss. On foot it is impossible. Ruth jerks her chin toward the house.
My bag is heavier, rubbing a new spot raw on my shoulder. I already regret the stupid wooden beads.
Inside, the noise from the road is buffered a bit. It looks like someone’s still living here, someone who hates to dust. Every surface is coated with greasy grit from vehicle emissions, but besides the dust, there’s little sign that the humans ever moved out. The kitchen table is still draped with a cherry-printed tablecloth. There are some drippy brown spots on the fabric. There’s a bowl, a glass, and spoon in the sink as if someone ate breakfast and disappeared. The Rapture happened after orange juice. Or like the way I left home without telling my mom I was going.
I don’t dare look in the refrigerator.
On one wall there’s a collection of phone numbers scrawled in lead, four digits each. The phone has a rotary dial. I lift the receiver. Nothing.
“You want to stay here tonight?”
Ruth nods. She fingers a kitchen counter covered with forget-me-not contact paper as if it’s human.
“Cool.”
There’s a couch in the living room. On a low coffee table, there’s an old TV Guide with Loni Anderson on the cover. Her hair preserved forever. Beside it there’s a handwritten note. “Ezra, Don’t forget to water my damn ficus.—P.” The TV is gone. The ficus is dead. What happened to Ezra and P.?
Ruth runs out to the gas station mini-mart for some bottled water, potato chips, and sandwiches that we unseal from triangular wedges of packaging. I rest my feet on the coffee table the way P. & Ezra probably did before. Without electricity I watch the lights of the cars pass by. The traffic never stops, waves on an eroding beach, creeping closer to the house each night, eating the quiet fields, the neighbors, stars in the night sky.
Upstairs there are two bedrooms. We split up because we can. Before sleep, the smallness of the house, the tidy afghans on the beds, the dormer windows, make me think of El. She’s probably watching TV. She’s probably thinking about me, same way I think about her, same way I think about the baby every night, wondering and wondering and worrying across the distance.
In the morning the sunlight in the room makes me wish we could stay here and play house. Buy a broom for the kitchen. Clear out the dust and cook dinner. Get that phone working again and call El.
The house is so still, for a minute I worry that Ruth went on without me, but just as I think it, she appears at my door. Time to go. I remove the foot massager from my bag. I use it once before stowing it underneath the bed so that whoever lands here next can give it a try before falling off to sleep.
We pass a field of electric monsters, high-voltage transformers marching across a marshland. Each day some things beautiful and some things ugly. We pass a house held up by the pure junk hoarded inside and out. Tractors, cars, refrigerators, old metal beds. We come to a town where the men wear camo. Two teenage boys have tattoos on their necks, instantly halving the alienation they’d hoped to achieve. A sign outside a church speaks to God. LORD, it asks, GRANT US G—, but the last letters are gone. I fill in: groceries, gumballs, gorillas, good, clean fun. We pass a trailer park called Presidential Estates, an unbuilt development that exists only as a sign: MADISON FARMS. There’s another basement gun shop, ugly new homes, falling-down old ones, and a street called No Lake Avenue.
That night we eat dinner at a dairy bar. We sleep in an apple orchard and wake to find the honeybees hard at work above us.
A pickup truck pulls over. The truck is just a shell of a vehicle, seems hard to believe it can still be used as transportation. A man with a blue baseball cap waves. He looks friendly. He wears his hair in a long braid down his back. I like that. You’d have to have done some thinking to be a man in braids. We haven’t yet hitchhiked. What kind of maniacs hitchhike? Those who want to get chopped to bits. But here’s a man offering us a ride. He doesn’t even look scary. I’m tired and Ruth is scarier than anyone.
“Yes. Thank you.”
He steps around to the passenger side door and opens it for us. There’s a plastic tab on the back of his jeans fake-branded to read PABLO CORTEZ, AUTHENTIC LEGWEAR.
Ruth climbs in first. He helps me into the cab. “Thank you.” His radio choices, wrappers from snacks his body got rid of weeks ago, years ago—it’s weird stepping into the intimate space of a stranger. Ruth removes her earphones. She wants to hear the conversation, or maybe she thinks it’s rude to listen to music other people can’t hear. Other people besides me.
The truck’s been used harshly. The door panels and console are gone. It’s like we are riding inside the old bones of a horse, the old empty bones of a dinosaur.
“Where are you headed?”
Ruth studies him, looking like a wild animal ready to bite. So far she’s not done anything like that.
“I’m Sequoya,” the man says. “You know what I’m named for?”
“No.”
“You know those trees out in California? The tall ones.”
“Redwoods.”
“Kind of. Sequoias. Like redwoods.”
“You’re named after a tree.”
“Nope. I’m named after the man they named the trees for, Chief Sequoya. He invented the Cherokee alphabet.”
That’s not his name, and he’s got a thimbleful of native blood in his left toe. Same as me, same as everyone in North America. I say nothing, but he seems to intuit exactly what I’m thinking.
“You don’t believe me?”
“You’re Cherokee?” I ask.
“Muh-heck Heek Ing.”
“What’s that?”
“Mahican.”
Last of, I can’t help but think it. They must hate that book. “A full-blooded Indian?”
“No.”
I knew it.
“Mbuy, wtayaatamun ndah.”
“Pardon?”
“He requires my heart.”
“Who?”
“The water.”
I shift, uncomfortable a moment.
The man smiles. “What are your names?”
“I’m Cora and she’s Ruth.”
He draws his chin back to get a look at us. “Yes,” he says. “She don’t talk much.”
“No. She doesn’t.” I smile as if Ruth’s silence is just the friendliest thing.
“She forgot how?”
The engine chugs and an old cassette player suited to this dried-up truck chews through the end of a tape, then clicks and spits, flipping over. Classic rock. Pine trees line one side of the road. The Erie, looking just like a river, skirts the other side.
“Forty thousand men and women every day. Forty thousand men and women every day,” the old radio sings.
Sequoya peps up. “You’ve been traveling awhile?”
I think he means we stink. “Yes, bu—”
Suddenly the other side of the road in the windshield. Squealing, a crunch of bone and metal. Two minutes into this drive and we nearly wrecked. Sequoya lifts his foot off the clutch. The truck jerks and stalls. “Mother! Did you see that?” A buck with four points had jumped up out of the canal and in front of the truck. It looks around, making sure he’s got all his parts. His back left leg dangles from the halfway mark. The deer takes off into the woods, even with a bum leg. Sequoya reaches behind the seat for a rifle. “Excuse me.” He leaves us parked, sprawled across both lanes, key in the ignition. The buck runs as fast as he can. The fake-Indian boy gives chase into the pines at the edge of the road. The woods are thick, and in a few steps he’s disappeared into them.
Ruth moves slowly. She rubs the spot where her head hit the rearview, then closes his door. Together we ratchet the bench seat forward. She turns the key, and the music switches back on. “Come on, baby.”
We don’t get more than a mile away before she stops the truck. She opens the glove box. Ruth find his registration card. Clifford Sequoya Shue. It’s out-of-date but, still, that’s his real name. She finds a bottle of water and a small box of tissues that seem the most tender thing a man could have in his glove box. What awful job did Clifford Sequoya hold down in order to purchase this sorry vehicle? How long has he been driving it? Ruth turns the truck around, and in another mile he’ll never know we almost stole it. She parks on the shoulder. She clears a couple of pieces of hard plastic—what was once Clifford’s headlight—from the road as penance for our attempted larceny. I use one of his tissues to wipe spit from the corners of my lips.
Eventually Sequoya reappears, lugging the deer over his back. The beast is taller than he is. Its hooves drag a wake of forest debris. Ruth opens the truck’s bed and lifts the hind legs from Sequoya’s back like lifting a bridal veil off a bloody bride. The deer’s chin hangs over his neck. He uses the antlers as handles. Blood spots the ground. The body trembles the bed when it lands. I see its brown eyes, its loose, lifeless tongue. Sequoya fetches the water from the glove box. He pours a drink of it over the dead deer’s tongue. “There,” he tells the deer. “You won’t remember any of that.” He turns to Ruth. “I’m out of season.” She produces our blue tarp, and he hides the animal underneath it. A bit of my stomach brew burns the back of my throat. I don’t feel so good. I hold on to the baby. Ruth squeezes me into the middle of the bench. Blood has dripped down Clifford’s authentic legwear.
“You all need a place to sleep tonight?”
“Yes.”
So Sequoya drives us back to his trailer. It’s on his grandparents’ property, a small plot with access to the canal. “Good boy,” his grandfather says. Together they string the deer up by its hind legs, binding it to a tree limb behind the house. Split open from chin to tail, the deer drips blood into a rusted pan. I’ve never been so close to a dead thing, at least not that I know of.
Sequoya invites us in. His trailer is covered with posters
of metal bands, their names lifted from mythology: Karybdis. Clotho. Lethe. “These are old.” As if he’s embarrassed by the posters. He’s got a record player in his small living room, and he selects some music presumed more appealing to females.
“You ladies like a glass of water?” He sets two glasses of water on the table before us. He takes a seat. Then jumps up quickly again, thinking to wash the deer off his hands. Ruth looks down into her water. Neither of us drinks it.
“You still got a long ways to go?”
I nod my head though I don’t know.
“How come you decided to walk?”
“Well.” I pretend to think hard, as if I can’t remember. We sit there awhile listening to the music. When side A reaches its end, Sequoya doesn’t get up to flip the record. He just lets the automatic arm reset itself. Side A plays again.
Later he makes a bed on the floor of his living room. A couple sheets and a blanket. Ruth climbs in, but I decide to follow Sequoya back to his room.
“You want me to take off my clothes?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says. “I’d like that.”
I would too, someone to scrub away the traces of Lord. I take the band out of his hair and smooth it over his shoulders. I get myself undressed. Sequoya does the same, leaving his shirt for last. When he finally lifts it, his torso is covered with pockmarks, old scars like gray polka dots on his brown skin.
“What’s that about?” I ask, touching a few of them.
“I had smallpox a long time ago. Don’t worry.” He laughs. “You can’t catch it.” He reaches out to touch the curve of my belly. He stares into my navel, a lighthouse in the night. “I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”
When I kiss him, his mouth tastes like carrots or potatoes or maybe it’s just dirt. Sex with Sequoya is a bit awkward at first. I suppose it is always a bit awkward with a stranger. Sequoya’s inside me and usually that’s a warm thing, but he feels cooler inside than out, an empty box. Maybe the box used to hold ice and the ice has melted. Or maybe the box has always been empty. A box that’s forgotten how to hold things. Sequoya, I think while we’re doing it, and how I haven’t considered any names yet and how, unlike him, I have no idea what Cora even means. I don’t know if my baby’s a boy or a girl or something else entirely, a messed-up conch-shell sort of deformity that won’t live long enough to hear me speak its name.
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