by Daniel Lowe
He could feel the blindfold was damp because of his effort at telling the story. Josephine was listening noiselessly.
“Apparently, Lynne didn’t try to explain anything right away, and Claire fell asleep in the car on the way back to Beth’s hotel. She woke up when Lynne parked in front of the lobby and Beth opened the door to the backseat of the car to give Claire a hug. As they pulled out of the lot, Lynne looked at Claire in the rearview mirror. She seemed to be watching the storefronts they were driving by. So she said, ‘Claire. Do you understand what happened back at the pond?’ ‘Yeah,’ Claire said. ‘Beth can’t have any babies.’ Lynne was so surprised at this that she stared at her in the rearview for a moment too long, and had to hit the brakes hard to avoid hitting the car in front of her. Claire lurched forward in her car seat, but was okay. ‘What about the dog and the goose?’ Lynne asked once she was moving forward again. ‘The dog was chasing the goose,’ Claire said. So Lynne said, ‘That’s right. It was.’
“And she left it at that. She thought that was as much as Claire had understood. So Lynne went on driving, Claire watching out the window as she turned the corner into our neighborhood, and onto our street. And just before she pulled into the drive, Claire said, ‘Mama. Someday I’m gonna die, aren’t I?’”
He heard the last words resonate off the walls, and swallowed down hard again, and felt his skin prickle at Josephine’s observation of him, and then a flush of anger at his helplessness.
“I can’t keep talking this way. Hog-tied and blindfolded like this.”
“I’m sorry, Marc.”
He pulled hard at the knots.
“Don’t be angry,” she said.
He threw his head back and laughed. “Don’t be angry? Are you fucking kidding me? I feel like I’m in a zoo. Like I’m a lab specimen.”
“We’re only talking.”
At this he strained hard at the ropes, his feet set against the floor for ballast, and his muscles taut. He let out a low cry at the effort, but he felt something inside coming loose, and he was afraid of it, so he stopped. He was breathing heavily.
“I’d give anything to get out of here right now. Sell the house, the car. The whole fucking Pepsi corporation. You can have it. Use the money for rocket launchers.”
His wrists burned from the ropes. He felt defeated, and then laughed, as if there were any other way to feel since the moment he was captured.
“Something funny?”
“Oh, yes. There’s a ton that’s funny. This zoo. You as my zookeeper. Training me to jump through hoops. You could sell tickets. Pathetic little penny-ante carnival.”
“You need to settle down. Saabir will be back soon.”
“Maybe he’ll do me the favor of lopping off my head.”
Josephine stood up then, and walked around behind him. He heard her kneel to the floor, and she unknotted the ropes so that, for a brief instant, he could have pulled away, and then she re-knotted them again tight against his wrists.
“It won’t do for others to see that you were fighting against these restraints,” she said. She stood up again, but instead of sitting back down, she put her hand on his shoulder and her mouth near his ear.
“You chose that story to tell, Marc. Don’t be angry with me for making that choice.”
“Don’t be angry?” he said again. “For Christ’s sake, Josephine, look at me. You just retied my arms behind my back while I sit here blindfolded. I’m your fucking hostage.”
Someone knocked at the door, and after she opened it, she said something to probably Saabir in Urdu. He recognized Azhar’s name in a sentence, and after the door latched, Saabir untied the ropes and removed the blindfold, and Marc saw Azhar standing in front of him. Saabir held the blindfold up by a corner; it was nearly soaked through, and he said something to Azhar while grinning. In the narrow light of the room still lit by a lantern, Azhar’s face looked grim, and he seemed to favor the shoulder that wasn’t bearing the weight of his rifle.
“Walk,” Azhar said weakly, almost at a whisper. Saabir gestured with his hand, as if Marc should get up and join Azhar. Marc’s chest tightened.
The night was clear, with no moon, but the lights from the city dimmed the stars. In the air there was still the persistent smell of smoke, and more distantly sewage, but also a coolness that seemed familiar. He tried not to think of Claire. Of Lynne. Azhar led him once around the perimeter, and this time, when they passed the window of the house next door with the tables and chairs, it, too, was lit by a lantern, and a young, thin man with a beard was sitting over a cup of tea. He didn’t raise his head as they passed.
A quarter of the way back around, Azhar put his hand on Marc’s shoulder, but when Marc started to turn to face him, Azhar stopped him. Marc heard the click of the safety being released on the rifle. A few seconds passed as he listened to Azhar breathing with some difficulty as he shifted his weight, and then Marc felt the end of the barrel of the gun at the base of his neck. His feet and hands tingled with the rush of adrenaline, and after this first flush he turned cold.
“Azhar,” he said quietly.
The gun barrel was steady on his spine, though Azhar seemed to be holding it up with effort. He said something to him in Urdu. Then he said. “Sorry. You want live? You want?”
Azhar pulled the gun away from Marc’s head, and he heard him latch the safety. He grabbed Marc’s shoulder, and turned him around. Marc was sweating hard under his arms and along his inner thighs. The gun was back on Azhar’s shoulder, and with Azhar’s back to the night sky, Marc could barely make out his face. But he looked like he was in pain.
Azhar raised his hand palm down as he had before to indicate his children.
“They kill,” he said. “You live? They kill.” Then something in Urdu. He turned Marc around again, and walked him the rest of the way around the perimeter. By the time they reached the window, the man in it was gone and the light turned out.
When they went back into the room, he saw that Saabir had laid out Marc’s bedroll, and he used his gun to indicate to Marc that he should lie down. At the gesture, Azhar turned and left, though Saabir uttered a few words in his direction before he closed the door. Marc lay with his back to Saabir, as he’d been instructed each night for reasons he never understood, since once the light was out he was free to roll over.
He tried to imagine Azhar walking through the dark streets along the outskirts of Karachi, and what his wife must have thought when he came home shaken, the gun slung over his shoulder. Marc was beginning to understand how his own life was putting innocents at risk.
Unlike most nights, Saabir wasn’t going to sleep at the same time Marc was. He heard him sit down in his chair.
“Saabir,” Marc said. “Did something happen to one of Azhar’s children?”
He didn’t answer right away, and Marc had no idea if he’d understood the question.
“Hmmmm,” Saabir said. “Children.” He did his best to pronounce the word. “No.”
Saabir shifted his feet, tapped them once, and then stood up and picked up the broom, and Marc listened to his sweeping, in a slow and deliberate rhythm that allowed Marc to close his eyes. He remembered the feel of the gun at his head, how his body had gone cold, but how indifferent he’d felt to Azhar possibly pulling the trigger. He wondered if Josephine had instructed him to make the threat. He could still feel the spot where the barrel had rested, and he dreamed lightly there was an insect crawling along his hairline. When someone knocked on the door, he reached back to push it away.
He knew it was the woman even though she didn’t speak to Saabir. She’d pulled the chair over almost to the edge of Marc’s bedroll. Saabir picked up his broom and began sweeping again.
“Josephine, did something happen to Azhar’s children?”
“His children are fine,” she said. “Azhar’s gone home.”
“When we were out walking, he—” But he stopped himself.
“He what?”
“He seemed afraid of s
omething.”
“I know. He has a family. He is afraid. I don’t have to tell you not to turn around, do I?”
“No.”
Saabir’s strokes with the broom grew longer, slower. Marc couldn’t imagine there was anything left to sweep. He heard Josephine take a long breath, and then release it.
9
In the time that she and Jack had owned the battered little truck, Claire had never slept in its bed. Jack had done so several times, when he’d traveled some distance to pick up supplies for the motel. “Not too bad,” he’d said after the first time he’d tried it. “Back was a little sore in the morning. It’d be awfully snug for two people.” And now she was lying on her own back, shoulder to shoulder with Genevieve, the ridges in the truck’s bottom pushing into the mattress along her rib cage. The bed smelled vaguely of rust, dirt, and mildew.
“Sorry about the accommodations,” Claire said.
They had driven to the outskirts of the city, near the Great Salt Lake itself, and in the last light of the day found a primitive campground that was mostly abandoned. A small camper was parked in one spot, and someone had managed to pitch a tent in the dry, hard ground, but no car was near it.
“Are you kidding?” Genevieve said. “Without you, I might be sleeping in a truck stop a few hundred miles farther from Chicago. I’ve slept in worse places.”
“It’s funny,” Claire said. “Did I tell you that Jack and I run a motel back in California?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Well, we do. It’s a pretty run-down little place. We’ve fixed it up some. Lucy knows every nook and cranny of every room. But one of those motel rooms would look pretty good right now.”
“This is fine,” Genevieve said. “I’m used to sleeping under the stars.”
Both of them were looking at the sky.
“Look,” Genevieve said. “You can kind of see the Milky Way.”
Before they’d climbed into the truck bed, the air was so cool that Claire had put on a sweater, but now she was hot under the blanket, and she sat up and pulled the sweater over her head, and as she did her pajama top came up off her shoulder. She flung the sweater at her feet and pulled the pajama top back down. Before she lay back, she felt Genevieve touch a spot on her left shoulder, and she jumped.
“Sorry,” Genevieve said. “But what’s that?”
“A scar,” Claire said.
“I know it’s a scar. But I could see it even in the starlight. It doesn’t look like—well, it doesn’t look like it was made by a scalpel.”
“It wasn’t. It’s a long story, Genevieve.”
After waiting a few seconds, Genevieve said, “When someone has a scar like that, I don’t think there would be many short stories.”
As they’d crossed into Utah, Genevieve seemed to lose interest in telling the tale of Claire’s father. Maybe it was because once they’d left Nevada, they were closer to their first destination. Claire had taken plenty of road trips, and knew that when people talked while traveling, if they talked at all, once they were on the verge of arrival, they started thinking of their homes, or began to imagine the ocean, or the embrace of a brother or sister, so they would often fall silent. But the story of her father. She knew that had she seen him throughout the course of these years, had she come at Christmas and once over the summer, as other grown children did, Genevieve’s vision of who her father had become would have seemed bizarre and even laughable. But the void of years made most anything imaginable, and it struck her how through that time she had dreamed so little for him. The metronomic quality of his days that Genevieve had described, of his rising in the morning to a little boat on a lake, of his lying down at night with lights winking across the glassy surface, and the quiet anticipation of the slow shift of the seasons that’s magnified over a body of water—to imagine her father this way, less troubled by her disappearance, was, oddly, a deeper comfort than she would have guessed.
Claire settled back into the truck bed and looked into the sky. She didn’t want to take up Genevieve’s comment about her scar. She was missing Lucy. Tonight, outside the diner, she’d talked to her briefly on the phone. “We miss you, Mama, but we been so busy!” Maybe a line Jack or his mother had told her to say.
Now, Claire closed her eyes; they ached from the hours of driving in the sun, and she thought she might let Genevieve take a turn at the wheel tomorrow.
“It was a long time ago,” she said finally. “I was someone completely different.”
“People say that, but I don’t know how often they mean it,” Genevieve said. Anytime either of them moved on the mattress, the truck bed amplified the sound.
Claire shifted to her side and propped herself up on her elbow. Genevieve was lying with her eyes closed, her skin tinted blue, her high cheekbones catching a bit more of the light from the sky. Claire thought that Genevieve, like most people, looked ageless away from the light of day. She had picked her up fewer than twelve hours earlier, but a quality in her face tugged at something planted deeply into Claire’s memory.
“I always liked it when I knew someone was watching me when I was trying to fall asleep,” Genevieve said.
“Sorry,” Claire said. “I didn’t mean to stare.”
“No, I’m serious. I know it creeps out some people. That someone would be looking at their unconscious face. That maybe they’d be drooling or snoring. But I always liked it. It felt like someone was protecting me. Watching over me.”
“The boyfriend from Chicago—the one you’re moving in with. Is that what he did?”
Genevieve smiled. “You asked that question because that’s the kind of question I’ve been asking you.”
“Gives you a little jolt, doesn’t it?”
“I guess,” she said. She was still smiling. “But yeah, he did. I remember one time. We were renting this little two-room shack out in the country. It was December, and a front had gone through the night before, the first strong one of that winter, and we got like ten inches of wet snow. And even half-asleep, you know that’s happened, and you wrap yourself tighter in the blankets and try to sleep further into the morning. When I finally opened my eyes, he was sitting up in bed, looking down on me. And I don’t know what it was about the way the sun was shining through the clouds, but it was still snowing, and when the light came through the window I could see the shadows of the heavy flakes falling over his face and bare chest.”
Claire could see her eyelashes fluttering, and a crescent of white beneath them.
“He was just a boy then, really.”
Claire lay back down. Genevieve seemed to have a capacity to create a kind of longing in any story she told. After they were quiet for a while, Claire heard in the distance a scratching or sniffing in the dirt, an animal out in the desert.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
“Yeah. It’s probably just a coyote, or something like that.”
But then she thought she heard footsteps, and the sniffing and scratching came closer, and by the time she raised her head, her heart pounding, she saw a dog pissing on the tire of the truck and a large man standing behind it.
“Can I help you?” she asked, which she immediately regretted, because her politeness had been a reflex from encountering strangers at the motel. Genevieve, who was nearest to him, had sat up in the truck bed.
“Well, you can start by paying for the campsite you’re sitting on.” His face was difficult to make out in the darkness, but Claire could tell he was looking them over.
“This is a campground you have to pay for? Sorry, when no one was here, we thought it was free.”
“Well, we have a tent over here. And my camper. It’s posted right outside the pull-through, along with envelopes to drop your money in. Plain as day.”
Claire was beginning to feel angry that the man had emerged after nightfall.
“So you train your dog to piss on the cars that haven’t paid?” Genevieve asked.
“Sorry ’bout that. He doesn’t know
any better. It’s just your tire.” He rested his hand on the truck bed, and Genevieve reached out and took hold of his wrist and pushed it back toward his side.
“Whoa!” he said. “Excuse me!”
“This might be your campground,” Genevieve said. “But it’s not your truck. Keep your hands off.”
“Look, I’m not trying to cause problems here.”
“Then why didn’t you wait till morning?” Claire asked.
“People drive off without paying. They get up at the crack of dawn, and drive off. Usually I take down people’s license plates just in case.”
The dog whimpered once at his heels, and offered a single bark, and the man said, “Settle.”
Claire was in her pajamas, and had locked her wallet in the cab of the truck, and she started to climb out of the truck to retrieve it, but Genevieve said, “I got this.” She had slept in the clothes she’d been riding in all day, and she reached into one of her pockets and pulled out the twenties that she’d stolen from the gas station.
“It’s fifteen, not twenty,” the man said after she handed him the bill.
“Then give us our change,” Genevieve said. He smiled, and reached into his back pocket and pulled out a small clip of bills and peeled off one and handed it to Genevieve.
“Tell you what,” he said. “It’s unusual for people to pull into a campground and sleep in an open-air truck bed. Could have pulled off most anywhere under a nice, bright light and saved yourself the trouble.”