Walk Me Home (retail)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  ‘I think maybe somebody lives there.’

  ‘How could somebody live there?’

  ‘Same reason we’re willing to sleep there, I guess.’

  ‘Let’s at least go see.’

  ‘But if there’s somebody in there …’

  ‘Let’s just go a little closer.’

  Carly tries to angle around toward the front of the bus, so they can look through the missing windshield. But it’s hard to see. Especially in the dusky light. They creep a little closer.

  ‘There’s a sheet across it on the inside, too. Somebody must be in there.’

  ‘I’m just going to ask.’

  ‘Don’t, Jen.’

  But Jen cups her hands around her mouth and calls out, ‘Anybody there?’

  A dog bursts out of nowhere and charges, teeth bared, barking and snarling at the same time. Filthy white with brown patches and a bib stained rusty red. Not huge but big enough. Carly can see his teeth flash in the fading light.

  She turns and tries to run, but immediately catches her foot and falls flat, scraping her palms and face on the gravelly dirt. She covers her head with her arms and waits to be savaged, praying Jen got away. But, though she can still hear the dog’s fury, it’s not getting any closer.

  In time she sits up, and sees that Jen is standing her ground, holding one hand out in a stop sign for the dog. Talking to it.

  ‘I’m going,’ she says. ‘You don’t move.’ She takes a step backwards, never breaking eye contact. The dog moves in a step, snarling and barking. ‘Ho!’ Jen shouts and holds the hand out again. The dog stops moving, but does not stop howling with rage and flashing its teeth.

  Go help her, Carly thinks, but she’s frozen. She just sits there in the dirt, watching Jen hold the dog at bay as she slowly backs away. To her humiliation, she thinks, Who’s the grown-up now?

  A big male voice breaks the dusk. ‘Chua! Shut up and get in here!’

  Silence.

  The dog shrinks, turns, slinks back toward the school bus.

  They run all the way back to the dirt road.

  By the time they manage to get there, it’s nearly full-on dark, and Carly can’t stop crying. Literally can’t stop.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Jen says. ‘It’s fine. I’m OK. We’re both fine.’

  But these tears are coming out. There is no reasoning with these tears. There is no logic to which they’ll respond.

  Nearly an hour after sundown, picking their way along in the dark, they pass a property they can tell is deserted. Because it would be physically impossible to live there. The house is in pieces, its own roof having caved in on it and brought it down. In the overgrown yard is a turquoise Pontiac from the forties or fifties. A big old boat with flat tires and one cracked window.

  ‘We could sleep in there,’ Jen says. ‘Carly, you can stop crying now. Are you ever going to stop crying?’

  ‘We could look.’

  But those are just words. She can’t bring herself to go any closer.

  Jen marches over and peers inside, then motions for Carly to come.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Jen says. ‘Great big bench seats front and back.’

  Jen opens the back door, and the metal of the body and door grind together, then snap free with a report like a gunshot.

  Carly jumps the proverbial mile. But then she steadies herself and approaches the car.

  Jen is already bedded down on the back seat, the door wide open for Carly.

  She tries to open the front door but it’s locked, or rusted shut, so she climbs over Jen into the front and curls in on herself, shivering, and letting go. Crying as if the crying she’s been doing up until now was nothing. A mild intro.

  ‘I’m worried about you,’ Jen says.

  ‘I just need some sleep.’

  But she thinks she won’t get much. She’s cold, she’s too upset, and she has a spring poking into her side.

  She’s wrong. She sleeps.

  Arizona, 13 May

  Sun pours through the dusty windshield on to Carly’s face. A door has opened on the car, waking her.

  It must be late. The sun is nearly overhead. Still her teeth chatter.

  Shooting pangs of emptiness radiate from her stomach. Her mouth is cotton dry. She winces as she opens her eyes.

  On the passenger-side floor of the old Pontiac, on a surprisingly well-preserved rubber mat protecting the faded carpet, is a coiled rattlesnake, apparently fast asleep.

  Carly pulls back in slow motion and eases over the seat and into the back, expecting to land on Jen. But the back seat is empty, the back door wide open. She can feel the cool air of the desert morning. It feels colder inside the car than out.

  She bolts out of the car, vaguely aware of the clanging of bells. Tinny bells. She slams the door fast.

  She looks back through the window at the rattlesnake. It hasn’t stirred.

  ‘Hey, Carly!’ she hears. ‘Come and look at this.’

  Jen is standing in the dirt road, completely surrounded by sheep. White sheep with big wooly bodies and skinny legs and elongated, droopy ears. Well over a hundred of them, moving along the road like a sheep river, parting to flow around Jen Island. About every fifth sheep is wearing a bell around its neck.

  Now and then part of the procession leaps or bolts or turns suddenly, and then Carly sees they’re being herded from behind by a dog. A yellow dog with bizarre yellow eyes. She looks around for the person who goes with the sheep, but there’s no person. Only the dog.

  When the dog pulls level with them, he stops cold, puts his head down, and barks at them. But not as viciously as the last dog. More bitter complaint and less flat-out assault.

  ‘Why are Navajo dogs so mean?’ she asks Jen.

  ‘They’re not. They’re just doing their job.’

  The dog looks to his sheep and sees they’re too far ahead. He abandons his complaint with the girls and runs to catch up.

  ‘You’re not gonna believe this,’ Jen says. ‘There were mice in that back seat with me. Three of them. Either that or I saw the same mouse three times.’

  ‘I believe it.’

  ‘Bet you didn’t have a mouse up front with you.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Carly says. ‘I didn’t have a mouse.’

  They set off walking down the road together. Carly’s heels hurt, and she feels like she might be about to black out. But she doesn’t say so. She doesn’t even limp.

  Jen says, ‘Remember when we were at that gas station yesterday?’

  Carly feels a lurching in her stomach, like something trying to come up. As if there were something in there to lose.

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘Remember that sign on the door?’

  Carly has no idea where this is going.

  The sheep are still clanking along in front of them down the road, and now and then the yellow dog stops, turns, and shoots them a disapproving look.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It said it was May twelfth. But didn’t it also say a day of the week?’

  Carly suspects she knows where this is headed now. And she doesn’t want to go there. More precisely, she doesn’t want Jen to go there.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she says, which is a lie.

  ‘Was it Thursday?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Because if it was Thursday the twelfth, then this is—’

  ‘Right. I know. Friday the thirteenth. But I don’t think it said Thursday. And even if it did, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.’

  ‘Maybe we should go back to that car.’

  ‘No!’ Carly shouts, too harshly, remembering the snake.

  ‘We’d be safer there.’

  ‘Jen. It’s just a dumb superstition.’

  ‘But it can’t hurt to be safe.’

  ‘Can’t hurt? To spend the whole day without food or water?’

  ‘Oh,’ Jen says. ‘Right.’

  Carly notices Jen chewing on her lower lip.

&nbs
p; About half a mile later, Jen says, ‘Where’re we supposed to get food and water out here, anyway?’

  ‘Good question.’

  ‘Isn’t it weird that I didn’t think of that day-of-the-week thing the minute I read the sign?’

  ‘Not really,’ Carly says.

  But it is. It’s very weird. For Jen.

  ‘Normally I’d be all over that, right away.’

  ‘This is not normally, though,’ Carly says.

  Carly’s arms hurt so bad they feel like they might be about to drop off at the shoulders. And maybe that would be better. Maybe that would hurt less.

  They’re walking into the low afternoon sun, holding their spare shirts over their heads – holding them out in front, like the visor of a hat – to keep the sun off their faces.

  Jen has a line of dried blisters across her forehead and over the bridge of her nose, cheekbone to cheekbone. Carly can only imagine what her own face must look like. Her lips are agonizingly chapped and split, and licking them only makes it worse. Last time she opened her mouth to talk it made them bleed.

  But a couple of good things can be said about this walk, down this road, on this afternoon. The road is straight. And it points west. Right into the slanting sun.

  On their left is a rock face, but it doesn’t provide any shade, because it’s on the south side. On their right are some homesteads, maybe four or five to a mile. Off in the distance behind that is a long mesa, the facing side horizontally striped and whittled into what looks like wavy, uneven columns. Thick on the bottom and tapering as they go up.

  Jen stumbles. Catches herself.

  ‘I can’t go much farther,’ she says.

  Carly can’t, either.

  But she says, ‘Just a little, then.’

  Just until they come across some kind of option, though Carly can’t imagine what option that might be.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Jen says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look.’

  ‘What?’ But she thinks she sees.

  ‘This road just ends.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘Yes, it does. Look. It ends right up there.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Carly says.

  But she already knows Jen is right. She just doesn’t want her to be. She wants to fight the truthfulness of that observation. Fight it so vigilantly that it will give up and stop being the truth.

  They reach the end of the road. It’s still true.

  They stand in the wide dirt turn-around, and look west. Going cross-country looks all but impossible. It’s too brushy, and full of long gashes where the earth has cracked open into deep gullies with sheer sides. On a good day it might be only barely navigable. In the shape they’re in, it might as well be a fifty-foot brick wall.

  Jen sways wildly, and Carly catches her before she falls right over on to her face in the dirt.

  ‘Whoa,’ Jen says. ‘Got a little dizzy there.’

  Carly walks them both over to the rock face and clears away pebbles with her boot, making them a spot to sit down. She helps Jen down. They sit with their backs up against stone.

  They’re still in the sun. There’s no way to get out of the sun.

  They drape the spare shirts over the left sides of their heads.

  Across the road from them is a tiny, modest brick house with a few dilapidated outbuildings, and a tall metal wind turbine spinning squeakily in the light breeze. And a pink trailer. An old, bubble-shaped trailer in bright hot pink, with a horizontal white stripe. It seems to have no tires or suspension. The body of it sits right on the dirt. The brightness of the pink looks absurd against the earth tones and man-made drabness all around it.

  There’s an old truck parked under an open corrugated carport. Somebody must be home. Too bad. Otherwise Carly’d look for a hose. Even take a chance on a dog at this point.

  Neither girl speaks for a long time. Maybe half an hour. Maybe only two or three minutes.

  Carly watches chickens scratch around in the yard. A few dozen of them. And there’s a skinny baby goat tormenting a tabby cat. Bouncing around as if trying to entice the cat to play. All it gets him is one of those big Halloween-cat hisses, with the fully arched back and raised hackles.

  ‘You see that?’ she says to Jen.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jen says flatly.

  It rattles Carly, deeply, that reply. Because it means Jen sees, but doesn’t care. Doesn’t find it delightful. Or funny. And that’s a very bad sign.

  They don’t talk for a while longer.

  Then Jen speaks, startling Carly.

  ‘In case we don’t get out of here, there’s something I need to tell you.’

  ‘Stop,’ Carly says, pressing a hand gently over Jen’s mouth. ‘We’re getting out of here. We’re not going to die here.’

  Then she wishes she hadn’t used the word die.

  She takes her hand back.

  ‘Your lip is bleeding,’ Jen says. ‘People die when they don’t eat or drink.’

  ‘But we won’t.’

  ‘How do you figure?’

  ‘If we thought we were gonna die, we’d just knock on the door of that little house and throw ourselves at the people’s mercy, and they’d call the cops to come get us and we’d get locked up into the child protective system. But we wouldn’t die.’

  Long silence.

  Then Jen says, ‘I think maybe it’s time.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ Carly says.

  It’s meant to end the conversation. It doesn’t.

  ‘Maybe we could knock on the door and tell the people the truth and say we’re desperate and we need a glass of water and some food, and maybe we can trust them not to turn us in.’

  ‘I don’t trust anybody,’ Carly says. ‘Except Teddy. I trust Teddy completely.’

  A silence that feels different from all the other silences.

  ‘You shouldn’t trust anybody completely,’ Jen says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re still just people. They can still let you down.’

  ‘Teddy never let me down.’

  ‘I can’t walk any more.’

  ‘I know. We’ll just sleep right here.’

  ‘No. I mean I can’t walk any more.’

  Carly pulls in a few deep breaths and lets them out again. Carefully. Care is so important now.

  ‘You’ll feel better when we’ve had something to eat. I know you feel that way now. But we’re just hungry. We’ll get a second wind.’

  But, oddly, Carly doesn’t feel hungry any more. Empty. Shaky. Scraped out. Less than real. But it’s almost as though she’s moved beyond hunger.

  ‘And where are we supposed to get something to eat?’

  ‘Right there,’ Carly says.

  She doesn’t know it until the exact moment she says it.

  She points across the road.

  ‘What? The chickens?’

  ‘Yeah. The chickens.’

  ‘I’d rather die than kill a chicken and eat it raw.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant. Chickens lay eggs, right?’

  ‘Can’t argue with that.’

  ‘So when it gets dark, I’ll go over and get some of the eggs.’

  ‘Get? You mean steal?’

  ‘We need them.’

  ‘There’s no address, Carly. This road doesn’t have a name. The house doesn’t have a number. And you don’t know what the eggs cost. So it’s over our line. It’s not honest.’

  ‘It’s life or death.’

  ‘How would we cook them?’

  ‘We couldn’t. We’d have to eat them raw.’

  ‘I might vomit.’

  ‘You could just swallow them whole, really fast.’

  ‘Maybe. But—’

  ‘Jen, eggs only cost around three dollars a dozen. That’s only … like …’

  ‘Twenty-five cents each,’ Jen says.

  ‘So if we have two each, that’s o
nly a dollar.’

  ‘Maybe a dollar is a lot to those people.’

  ‘But chickens probably don’t lay the same number of eggs every day anyway. Maybe some days they lay less. So four eggs … it’s just like a day when they laid less. It’s a good plan, Jen. It’ll work. When it’s dark, I’ll go over there.’

  ‘I’m going with you.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘Yes, I do have to. There might be a dog. You’re no good with dogs.’

  ‘OK. Fine. Come with me. We’ll get two eggs each, and swallow them, and then in the morning we’ll walk straight through west and find the highway again. I think it’s close. We’ll find a way to walk around those cracks. Somehow. Or jump over them. And then maybe when we get to the highway and know where we are again, maybe we can find a place to hole up for a few days. You know. Really rest up. And use the phone more. It’s a good plan. It’ll work.’

  ‘Not if it’s Friday the thirteenth, it won’t.’

  ‘It’s not Friday the thirteenth. I think that sign said Tuesday. Tuesday the twelfth.’

  They fall silent again.

  Carly watches the young goat pick his way back to a dozen adult goats grazing on scrubby grass in a corral. He squeezes between the rails and finds his mother. He butts underneath her belly like he wants to nurse. It makes Carly wonder if she could figure out how to milk a goat. If it’s even safe to approach one.

  She lifts the shirt off her face and looks west, trying to judge how long before the sun goes down. Looks like another two hours of light baking at least.

  She leans back again, closing her eyes.

  ‘Jen,’ she says. Quietly. ‘I have to tell you something. I have to tell you I’m really sorry I’ve been extra grumpy with you lately. It’s just that I’ve been so scared.’

  She waits for a time. In case Jen wants to answer. Apparently not.

  ‘And I have to tell you something else, too. I should’ve told you this before, and I’m sorry. Teddy doesn’t live in Tulare any more. He’s up in the redwoods in Northern California. We’re gonna have to find a way to call every construction company anywhere near this little town called Trinity. But we’ll find him. We will.’