A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  “Snow’s coming!” she called, “I hope you’re ready!”

  Lucas kicked the door shut. The duffel bag had been turned over on the bed, my clothes strewn across the mattress, a corner of Penny’s bright yellow folder sticking out from underneath a pair of jeans. I looked around the room, frantic, hoping Lucas had somehow missed Fischer’s gun.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Lucas said quietly, “but I will.”

  77

  I cut a piece of clay from the hunk and hold the wet weight in my palm, liquid trickling down my wrist. In the first moments of squeezing and stressing the clay, digging my fingers into the testy mass, all manner of possibilities are still available. Even after I throw the clay on the wheel, offering it the shelter of my palms, when I begin to beg something of its nature with fingers and knuckles and thumbs, there is still room to change, to go back, to erase, to begin again. Inevitably there comes a time when the object must begin to take shape and a decision must be made—to guide it long and lean or short and fat—to make, in short, a bowl or a cup or a spoon or a vase, to author it out of the myriad of viable shapes into one solitary article.

  In the moments before the kiln, even if I could still take this cup or spoon or bowl and reduce it again, it would already be too late. The clay has been formed, it has memory; it has been made into a shape with all the promise and intention in the world. No matter how I try to reduce the mass to its original form, it will never be nothing again.

  69

  Lucas relaxed his grip over my mouth but kept his hand close, ready the minute I tried to scream. What had he said earlier, at the bar? You’re safe enough. A person, proclaiming themselves a harbor. He took a step back and I punched him in the chest, hard enough for him to suck air. He looked surprised, even before I rammed my heel down on his foot. In an instant his hand was around my throat. He slammed my head back into the door, making my teeth click. It didn’t hurt as much as it could have. It hurt just enough.

  He rubbed his chest with his free hand. “You want to get that nice old woman involved in this?”

  I tried, unsuccessfully, to shake my head. He dropped his grip on my neck. For all of it, he appeared only mildly annoyed. He wasn’t taking me seriously, still confident he had the upper hand. With his size and strength and his willingness to use them, he did. Only now I was beginning to understand why Lucas surprised me in the movie theater in the first place—because he had yet to learn where I was staying. Not until I was stupid enough to lead him here myself.

  “I’ll take the photos and be gone,” he said. He kept his voice low.

  “They’re in the folder.”

  “I found those. I want all the copies.”

  “Those are all the copies.” I stepped away from him, sinking onto the bottom bunk to sort through my strewn possessions, the tank tops and underwear, the yellow folder already emptied of its contents. Penny’s tube of lipstick rolled around on the coverlet. I turned over the empty duffel bag, yanking the pillows from the bed.

  “Looking for this?” Lucas lifted his shirt to reveal his tight, trim stomach, the butt of Fischer’s gun sticking up from his belt. He pulled it out, palming it from one hand to the other. I had no sense of how much noise we were making, whether Martha was already on her way down the hall. I lowered my own voice, conscious of what Lucas might do to anyone who tried to enter the room.

  “You don’t want that. It belongs to a cop.”

  “Funny.”

  “It belongs to a police officer, and it’s empty now. Check the magazine.”

  I could feel him hesitating. But he already had what he came for. He pointed the gun and pulled out the magazine. Whistled.

  “Why would a cop give you his gun?”

  “Why would you give Penny the money in your wallet?”

  We stared at each other. Lucas was beginning to look troubled. He set the gun carefully on the top of the bureau near the door. Still within his reach, though it wouldn’t do either one of us any good.

  “You really are crazy,” he said. “Both of you.”

  “Are we?” I asked. “Tell me what happened. Really.” The words popped out; I was already embarrassed by them. What was truth, to a man like him? “Did you hurt her?”

  He shook his head, his hand on the door. “They’ll never believe me.” He adjusted his strange mouth. “What did you say she does for work?”

  “We were waitresses together.”

  “Try that.”

  “You mean to find her?” I could have laughed. “You think Penny’s going to waitress now? When she can get more than a day’s tips from a guy’s wallet?”

  The grimace again. “People don’t change that fast.”

  “Do you know something?”

  “I told you, she was wandering around the tables, looking lost. Before that, I saw her pull up outside the Leaspoke. She got out of a guy’s truck and he drove off. I asked her about it before we went upstairs. The last thing I need, some angry boyfriend showing up.”

  “She didn’t have a boyfriend.” Even I was impressed by the conviction in my tone, as if I still believed I was an authority on anything Penny might say or do. As if I ever was.

  “That’s what she said. Said he was just her ride.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “Not really. White kid. She said he worked construction back home. Nice truck.”

  Lucas opened the door carefully, holding it ajar. The sound of Martha’s television filtered down the hall. I wanted to tell him to go quickly out the back, to leave Martha absorbed by her nightly news and crossword puzzles, her small, devout pleasures. But he knew, better than any of us, how to disappear. I watched him go, thinking of the first time Penny showed me her place, the mud-spattered Timberlands by her front door. I spoke to his shadow already slipping down the hall, to Penny, wherever she was.

  “His name is Eric,” I said.

  70

  The café at the Golden Bear was cheaper than the restaurant, so more people went. After checking out of the Prickly Pine, I loaded my duffel bag in the back seat and drove there for one last meal: a way to allocate time, to break up the day into manageable chunks. I was already too late for both breakfast and lunch, but it meant the crowds were gone, that I was free to linger over a cup of coffee for as long as I liked. I had become the old vet I used to wonder about, who showed up at Jake’s every week and ordered scrambled eggs only to sit and stare out the window. A person as calendar, marking time.

  I took my usual seat by the window, facing the parking lot. The desire remained to watch the hopeful way people walked into restaurants, as if the right meal could solve all their problems, or at least temporarily alleviate them. The waitress was one I knew from earlier visits, Bea, a Virginia City native and old town historian, as adept at reading people as the three-card tarot spreads she laid across the back counter after her shift: past, present, future; mind, body, spirit. It lessened the sting of her scrupulous appraisal.

  She came by with a fresh pot and started pouring me a warmup, then stopped, the pot aloft. I followed her gaze to the television screen mounted above the counter. The tall, grim newscaster was rigid right up to his immovably gelled hair. He was not the same man Martha and I had watched the night before, but he, too, was solemn as he reported under Reno’s arch, its bright lights dimmed for the day. After the night’s rains, the sky had softened to oyster. The camera cut to a shot of a big red truck in a familiar casino parking lot, the area cordoned off with yellow tape. At the sight of it, a sour taste filled my mouth. Eric’s greatest wish, a real cherry red screamer.

  Across the aisle, a small child stood up in her booth, all plump cheeks and squat limbs. She began jumping up and down on the seat, her ringlets bouncing. When I glanced back at the TV, the truck’s glossy paint seemed to shimmer.

  “Do you hate children,” Bea murmured, resuming her pour, “or is it just
me?”

  Across the table, Penny’s double materialized again, patiently awaiting acknowledgment. Like an old married couple with all conversation spent between us, I didn’t bother asking why she was there. She pulled a marker from the air and drew four flat black lines on the Formica tabletop, then a space, then two, then five, followed by a long skinny pole.

  Bea returned with a plate of eggs and two slices of toast. I shook the ketchup bottle and asked for hot. Two men entered the café and took seats by the door. Across the aisle, the little girl’s mother reached for a fork and stabbed it into her bowl of chili fries. The girl stopped jumping and opened her cupid’s mouth to let out a bloodcurdling scream. Here was a spoiled child, reckless, she had been given things; she was yet unaware of loss, accommodation, the way people in the world would hollow her out.

  “K,” I said.

  Imaginary Penny smiled. She uncapped the marker and began to draw a skull.

  Bea brought the hot sauce but lingered by the table. A black sedan was pulling into the parking lot, and the sight of it spiked the anxiety already tingling down my spine. We watched the driver’s-side door open and a man unfold himself from the car. Fischer’s tall gait was instantly familiar, his brown hair ruffling in the breeze. But I had imagined Penny; I could be imagining him, too.

  “P,” I said.

  Penny began to fill in a long, hefty torso, the hangman’s solid core. I still hadn’t solved Penny’s first riddle from that summer afternoon when we traded sandwiches in Pomoc’s abandoned, burnt-out house, and I had a feeling my game hadn’t much improved. We had abandoned that game halfway through, the house grown too hot, and drove down the street to the ice cream parlor for cones. We stood in the sun licking lemon and black cherry scoops, milky pink rivers running down our wrists.

  “E,” I said.

  Penny bent her head to fill in the letters. One on the top row, one on the last.

  Bea distributed menus to the two men at the table by the door. They looked to have casual business between them; easygoing men who didn’t demand favorite tables or memorized orders, who asked for nothing beyond a hot plate. Bea kept looking from the television to the window, as if something about the black sedan was nagging her, too, or she had been expecting its return. I tried to recall how many times I had come here in recent days; how presumptive my visits had become. It was Fischer walking toward the café. He had a determined stride and a firm set to his jaw, as if he had precise news to deliver, something I would never be able to unhear. I watched him until he disappeared around a corner, heading for the entrance.

  On the other side of the table, phantom Penny was growing visibly more distraught, tapping the hangman’s blank lines with her marker cap, the way she used to click her nails on the passenger window to tell me when to turn. It didn’t really matter where we went or how far we drove, we were always going to end up here. There was a clatter from the men’s table, a coffee cup knocked over, a river of hot black liquid puddling onto the floor. The men grabbed napkins to stem the flow, the little girl at the nearby booth began to cry. Bea stood unmoved, her attention fixed on the television screen and the new white ribbon of text ticking across the bottom of the screen.

  POLICE INVESTIGATION: UNIDENTIFIED BODY FOUND.

  Pick a letter, Penny said. That way she had of speaking without even moving her mouth, the sinuous conventions of her illusory world. She tapped the hangman on the table again, insistent. If Fischer had his way, he would take us both back to Pomoc, where for different reasons we had really never, but somehow always, belonged.

  We have to go back, Penny had said.

  Solve for Penny, she said now. Solve for Cale.

  I stood up too quickly, knocking over my chair, and ran into the café’s kitchen toward the rear exit I knew I’d find there, past the surprised shouts of servers and fry cooks who instinctively moved out of my way, wanting no part of the trouble I couldn’t shake.

  72

  I drove down C Street, past the Comstock-era saloons and the restored Washoe Club, the old hotels leveled by fire and rebuilt again, their displaced ghosts left to rendezvous in parking lots like wasps flirting in the glare of old-fashioned streetlamps. I glanced at the passenger seat, but there was no Penny sitting beside, imaginary or otherwise; no phantom hiding behind the slim storage space where the tire iron still lay safely tucked. I bore east past the buildings that petered out, past the high metal fence lettered BLESSED ARE THE DEAD, bordering the cemetery of buried miners and assorted other dreamers, chasing gold and a better life. I picked up speed until the last of the downtown lights extinguished in the rearview and I was in the desert again. With no one chasing behind and seemingly nothing ahead, I pressed on until the first glimmer appeared like a comic trick of light, the giant horseshoe taking shape out of nothingness, glowing phosphorescent in the dark.

  I eased up on the gas a few yards out, coasting toward a squat, square building with a covered awning, a white swing gate blocking the entry. There were several cars parked in a neat row in the dirt while others had been abandoned at wild angles, as if their drivers had leapt from their seats with their motors still running. I parked alongside an SUV several yards from the entrance and cut the engine. The eerie light of the horseshoe flooded the truck’s interior, making me feel as if I was caught inside a spaceship. I wrapped my small hands around the wheel. They were numb no longer. I traced the center of the steering wheel where the smudge of blood that had appeared that night and had long since been worn away. At the time I was certain it belonged to the sandman, but it could have just as easily been mine. After dropping Penny off that night, the shock wore off on the drive home, the right side of my face waking into a throbbing constellation of agony, my nose beginning to bleed again. I found the blood everywhere later; crusted around my nostrils like cuprite, smeared on my chin and the backs of my hands, on my shirt, smudged across the thighs of my jeans. Penny had to have known, even as she hosed down the wheels on the truck, how impossible it would be to remove all trace of our crime. Some things could never be washed away.

  Outside, a car door slammed. A few minutes later a cluster of girls wobbled past the windshield, their arms linked, all three of them in short skirts and heels. One wore a cowboy hat over her dark hair; another was slim and indistinct, the third blond and buxom, an all-American wet dream. I watched them clicking toward the awning in their high heels, holding each other up. As they approached the entrance a mountainous shadow stepped aside, waving the girls through. I opened the door and climbed out into the sharp nip. I walked toward the Golden Horseshoe under light so bright it seemed to erase the lines of my body so that I was only glow, a charged electrical field. The enormous shape moved behind the gate, but when I came upon him I saw it was only a man, taller than any had a right to be, broad across the chest, dressed sharply in a black suit and a black shirt that melted into the night, his patent shoes winking in step.

  I could hear the thrum of music and raucous laughter inside, purple strobe lights blinking against the glass. I was reaching for Penny’s purse when I heard a low, distinctive growl. The man uncrossed his arms in warning, turning to look. “Quit,” he said, and only then did I sense movement, the dog splayed off to the side of the entrance, his leash tied to a post, the silver glint of a water bowl. The dog’s fur was as black as the man’s suit, indecipherable as silhouette. I tried to angle for a better look past the man’s sizable girth, venturing two steps before the man shot a firm arm across my chest. Unyielding, but not unkind.

  “Nope. He ain’t for petting.”

  “I just want to see him,” I said, straining my neck. The dog seemed to sense our conflict and climbed to his feet, his growl deepening. He’d grown a little taller, a little longer; he had gained some weight, too. One ear now stood upright of its own accord. But his fur was still sticking up all around him like adolescent down, his paws still too big for him yet.

  “Hi you,” I said
to the dog, trying in vain to push past the man. He looked at me askance, straining against his arm, as if I had recently misplaced my mind.

  “I know him!” I finally said. “I know Penny, too.”

  “Who?” he said, but he relaxed his arm a little, close enough to block me if needed. “Dog’s mine now.” He was studying me up close, his eyes moving curiously over my face and hair.

  “What about the girl who gave him to you?”

  “She worked here. For a split second.”

  I nodded, trying to ignore the flood of disappointment that threatened to drown me. Must Penny always be smarter, faster, one step ahead? I took another step toward the dog, who let loose with a couple of barks. The man reached for my hip to keep me back. I covered his giant hand with my own. He allowed me to gently pull it free.

  “If he bites you,” he said, “don’t blame me.”

  I stopped a foot away and squatted in the dirt. I didn’t disbelieve either of them, especially not the dog, growling still. But I held out my hand, keeping a wide distance between us. The dog retreated, holding himself tense against the gate. He looked away, beginning to whine.

  “What’s his name?”

  “No name,” the man said.

  A mismatched couple approached the gate, seeking entry. An older man in a collared shirt, the top three buttons undone to reveal a shaved, sunburned chest. The leggy showgirl in a jean skirt, hair teased to Texas. The older man passed the bouncer a handful of bills, and he waved them inside.