Bound

by Antonya Nelson

  “It’s not that scenic, in the dark,” he finally acknowledged. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to wait until it gets light, and then I’m gonna start walking toward Seymour. You’re gonna wait here with the bitch.” He would find somebody to sell him tires. That same somebody would give him a ride back to the car. Cattie would be fine. There were provisions (chips, dog chow, brown bananas soft as baby food). She could switch on the car heater every now and then; she could listen to the radio; she could take comfort in the presence of the dogs.

  Cattie stretched out along the front bench while Randall took the back, with the animals. In the absolutely silent dark and cold of their night half-on, half-off the road, Randall said, “I don’t like it when I feel responsible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I worry when I’m in charge.”

  Cattie blinked, knowing from a long history with a reticent person that you had only to wait silently. You would learn. And so, eventually, Randall told her about his friend at boot camp.

  “I woke up, and he was dead,” he said into the black interior of the car. “I never been so scared in all my life.”

  Cattie listened, feeling suspended in time. Randall and his friend had been celebrating a twenty-first birthday; the friend had drunk every drink anyone had bought him, one after another. They’d somehow wound up back in their quarters, one waking in the morning, one not.

  Some other person might have asked him to compare the experience of war casualties with the experience of a single death, but Cattie wasn’t that person. And Randall was grateful not to have to lie and pretend. “I don’t feel like I react the way other people do,” he confessed to her. “I never have.”

  “Me either,” she said.

  “That’ll cost you,” he said. She let these last words run through her head, over and over, without responding. They must have slept, Cattie later realized, because it surprised her to see the world outside the window when she woke, Randall already up and out there with it, his back to her as he peed. Steam rose in a delicate plume.

  She wished it was possible to stand behind him and lay her head between his shoulder blades. She wanted to touch him without forcing him to respond.

  And then he was gone, walking down the road like an advertisement for the army, his fatigues still shipshape, his stride purposeful, the ground sparkling with reflected light on ice. His back said to her he was embarrassed to have revealed his secret grief, his confusion about his friend. The sunlight warmed the car’s interior, and Cattie studied the U.S. Atlas. Seymour, he had said. He guessed they were between ten and twenty miles from it. He believed it’d be no more than eight hours before he would be back, with tire or tires, depending. He’d taken two hundred of her remaining four-hundred-some dollars for the purpose. He instructed her to lock the doors and to be glad that Bitch would bark her head off if anyone approached.

  “I’m sorry,” he said gruffly.

  “It’s not your fault the tire blew.”

  By nightfall, she was wondering if his apology had to do with abandoning her. Now she regretted having passed up the two offers of help that had come her way during the long day. The two boys on their ATVs; the farmer in his pickup. From the radio she’d learned it was Friday. From the atlas she’d discovered she was still a long way from Houston. When she studied the car, standing in the ear-aching wind, she saw that it wasn’t one but two tires that were no longer functional, the car’s front end slanted decidedly downward as if disappointed or exhausted, resting on its chin. The day had alternated between sunny and cloudy, and her mood had shifted as dramatically as the clouds above. Optimism, despair. A funny story for Ito, later, or the beginning of a terrible nightmare, as yet to unfold. She’d walked a few hundred yards in both directions on the road, testing her cell phone reception. The boys on the ATVs had smirked in a very familiar, debilitating way, and that had sent her back to the locked car. “Sic ’em,” she practiced on Bitch, whom she discovered she could goad into growling.

  The car was redolent of dog.

  In the dark she grew angry. What sort of fools made a road that only two or three or four or five people drove on in a twenty-four-hour period? How goddamn useful was a road like that? Was it even officially a road if nobody fucking drove on it? Where was asshole Randall? Had he gotten lost? Or had he just decided to hell with her, and taken off with her money?

  No, she realized, all of a sudden, interrupting her own inner rant. He wouldn’t leave the dogs. He might have left Cattie in this mess, Cattie and the embarrassed confession he’d made to her, but he wouldn’t have intentionally abandoned Bitch and the puppies. It felt comforting, to Cattie, to know something so surely. With the passenger-side door open, she oversaw yet another series of peeing with the slight animals, slighter still in the enormous plain and its relentless weather, one at a time in the hard ruts of the frozen roadway shoulder, their hindquarters shivering, their slitty little eyes squeezing out tiny beads of tears.

  The same farmer drove up in the same truck the next morning and blew his horn. This time he had a woman in the front seat beside him. “I called the highway patrol,” he told Cattie when she stepped out of the car. “They’re backed up with the jackknifed big rigs on the interstate, so I brought my wife.”

  He was lifting tires from the bed of his truck. The woman sat inside the truck, not looking at Cattie. It seemed it might have been better for the farmer to have come alone. “She’s shy,” he explained, dropping the first tire onto the ground beside Ito’s car. It spun for a long while before settling flat. “You go on and get in the cab. I’ll be done in a jiff.”

  “I can help,” Cattie said.

  He looked her over, then toward his truck. “She doesn’t bite. That’s just her natural expression.”

  This turned out to be true. The wife scowled. She moved her jaw as if shifting something from one side of her mouth to the other, an object her molars worked at. She reminded Cattie of the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil, barrelish and monosyllabic. Her hairline seemed very low.

  “My boyfriend walked to Seymour,” Cattie told the woman.

  “Yeah,” said the woman, as if somebody had already fed her this ridiculous line.

  “He’s in the army,” Cattie went on, “just back from Iraq.” Once more the molars went round, grinding, the woman staring out at her husband, whose arm was seesawing away at a jack, lifting Ito’s car.

  It was a relief when he finished, bringing with him the frozen outer air, and the sound of recognizable words. “You drive this, Mama,” he said. To Cattie, he said, “I’ll make sure your alignment isn’t catty-wampus.”

  “There’s dogs in the back,” Cattie told him, wishing she could ride with him instead. “Sometimes the puppies crawl under the pedals.” Catty-wampus indeed, she thought. Wampus might be her middle name.

  They rode not far on the empty blacktop, turning in at the mailbox that said “Kinderknechts” on it. A trailer sat all alone in the middle of a large flat piece of fenced land. What did the fence hold in? Or out? There were tires on the trailer’s roof, which may have been where the ones on the car came from, and a large American flag whipping bravely in the cold wind over the front door. In the time it took to drive to the Kinderknechts’ home, Cattie realized she would have to claim to know how to operate a motor vehicle. She was going to have to drive away from Missouri in Ito’s car. The last time she’d tried to drive had been in a cemetery in Houston, her mother’s logic being that everybody there was already dead. That had been last summer, on a Saturday so hot and demoralizing that the two of them had designed six different activities in air conditioning. Driving lessons came in between an action movie downtown and dinner at the café around the block from their house.

  Cattie tried to imagine driving Ito’s car into the Houston driveway. That didn’t seem impossible. But her imagination refused to accommodate the patchwork of states she was fairly sure existed between Missouri and Texas, never mind the very intimidatin
g knotted network of freeways that made Houston, on the map, look like something strangled by a bundle of multicolored wires.

  “Let’s put those pups in the lav,” said Mr. Kinderknecht, watching as Cattie led Bitch from the car. “We’ve raised us a couple litters in a bathtub, haven’t we, Mama?”

  The Tasmanian Devil snorted.

  The farmer studied Cattie’s face. Now that he’d solved the most obvious, first, problems, what came next? “Let’s all get out of the cold. And then I’ll park your car out by the road. That way your soldier boy’ll see it when he comes back.” Like his wife, the farmer didn’t seem to believe Cattie’s story about this alleged driver who’d left her in the ditch. Maybe she wouldn’t have believed it, either.

  Without Randall there, Cattie thought it best to put Bitch on a leash.

  Their home was warm, cluttered, close. The ceiling seemed too low, the furniture too large, the heat too high. Cattie sank into a leather couch and accepted a hot microwaved plate of leftovers from Mama the Tasmanian Devil. It was a huge serving, enough for two or three people, yet Cattie found herself eating everything. She could hardly keep her eyes open when she finished; what if they’d drugged her, laced the gravy with whatever …“Just lay down,” said the Devil, taking the empty plate. Her voice was deep, like a man’s, and slow. She provided a brightly colored afghan, “Go on, lay down. I’m giving your dogs some scraps.”

  Randall would have objected, Cattie thought blearily; beef, he’d said, was not good for dogs.

  She woke only because someone had sat down on the other end of the couch, sending up a poof beneath her. She’d slept all day with her feet on the floor, her top half folded over on the sofa. Just as if she were still in Ito’s car, and Randall was driving.

  But it was Mama Devil on the end of the couch, in the driver’s seat. The evening news was playing. Her hosts were arranged on either side of her, Mrs. on the couch, Mr. in the oversize leather chair that had been jammed into this too-small space.

  Just before a commercial break, there was a story about the serial killer next door in the state of Kansas. The killer had been sending messages for nearly a year now; his most recent some kind of word game, the one before a package in a Wichita park. “My mother lived next door to his first victims,” Cattie said, sitting up, rubbing at a crease in her face from the couch. Her hosts turned—like salt and pepper shakers, Cattie thought, opposites that fit together. The package contained the driver’s license of one of his victims, something stolen from the crime scene. It also held a doll. On the screen appeared a naked dark-haired Barbie, hands and feet secured with panty hose, a plastic bag tied over its head.

  “Lord have mercy,” murmured Mr. Kinderknecht. His wife said, “Hmm,” in a skeptical tone, as if she’d seen worse treatment of toys.

  Just then, the house of the first victims appeared on the screen. A simple structure, not unlike the houses Cattie had drawn in the first grade: two rectangles resting against each other, one upright, one lying down. The slats of siding, the sloped roof, windows with curtains tied back, a chimney, a single tree centered in front. Her mother’s home hadn’t actually been next door but three doors down. Still, same floor plan. Same basic first-grade assurance of lines and planes and angles and slope. Smoke wafting from that chimney. At first, every man in the neighborhood had been a suspect, her mother once told Cattie. A community suddenly suspicious of itself, turned inward with doubt and watchfulness. “Especially the deadbeats at my grandma’s. I come from a long line of bad seeds, baby. Be thankful you never knew them.” For a while, whenever anyone returned home to the grandmother’s house, they’d first pick up the baseball bat just inside the door, then the telephone receiver to be assured of a buzzing connection. The killer had cut the lines at the house down the block.

  Cattie and the Kinderknechts stared at the small white house on the screen. Despite the fact that the house next door was not her mother’s, Cattie found herself tilting her head as if to look beyond the photo on the screen, to see that place nearby, the unremarkable structure where her mother had grown up.

  CHAPTER 12

  CATHERINE HAD CHOSEN to sleep in the girl’s bedroom instead of the woman’s. Misty’s bedroom oppressed her, its tidiness, its hotel-room esthetic, the needle-stitched motto overhanging the bed about God granting serenity, and the bed itself—overloaded with small tasseled pillows, ornamental flammable spread, navy blue silk throw carefully draped at its foot. The effort it took to make and maintain this every morning, this stuff that then had to be tossed onto the floor, come night. Catherine felt the same enervating regret she had when she faced Misty’s photograph online: that something neutralizing and ultimately disappointing had happened to the girl she’d known. It wasn’t as if Misty’s life had seemed ideal, back in high school; it had been, in fact, a frightening specter, grubby and violent. A life Catherine had been allowed to visit, and then leave, like a privileged tourist dunked briefly into the third world but in possession of a round-trip ticket out. Misty did not have that luxury. She’d been a native to the place, suffered its hardships, carried its scars. For instance, as a toddler she’d fallen from an open car window and cracked her skull. The great-uncle who was in charge had neglected to either strap her in or take her with him inside the liquor store. Onto the pavement she’d tumbled; the uncle later complained of the inconvenience of having to haul her to the ER. You wouldn’t wish such a thing upon a child; would Catherine really have preferred discovering that Misty was still living like that?

  No. Yet it seemed that that life, and the girl who lived it, had been real. Misty had had a personality unlike anyone else’s, peculiar and earned, her own. This bedroom, these recent professional photographs, had the feel of borrowed identity—that wasn’t an actual bridge they were standing on, it traversed only the floor of a photographer’s studio. The sky behind was made of paper. Throughout the house, there seemed to be a great deal of useless adornment—seashells gathered around the sink spigot and toilet bowl lid. Random hardback books—sold by the yard! Catherine knew, having seen ads in decorating journals—placed on shelves, the various pairs of bookends—statues, geodes, snow globes—on either side the true focal point. Business garments hung in dry-cleaning bags, matching low-heeled pumps the colors of sherbet lined up below.

  She had shoved aside those plastic bags and shiny shoes, plowing through Misty’s closet for any sign of a current secret life, some hidden message from the past one. But Misty either didn’t possess such a thing as a secret life, or knew better than to hide its evidence at home. She lived, after all, with that most persistent and gifted detecting snoop, a teenage girl.

  And that teenage girl’s room was a welcome mess, in Catherine’s opinion. Here she found the detritus of a recognizable person—messy, but genuine. A person who’d made her bedroom into her proclamation of self, that riot of likes and dislikes and righteous opinions and laughable lapses, the walls festooned with bumper stickers and pins and posters and graffiti, the shelves and drawers and closet overspilling with many seasons’ worth of beloved trinkets and gear, disguises and embellishments. On the ceiling, an unfinished mural starring red skeletons apparently at a party for the dead: smoking cigarettes, clutching bottles, throwing back their skulls and dropping open their jaws in laughter, a couple in the corner with their various leg and arms bones entwined in what might become skeleton sex. Misty’s daughter, she and her friends, had painted those characters. Stood on chairs and desk, brushes in hand, faces tilted up using paint the color of blood. Misty had allowed it, and that cheered Catherine.

  Or maybe this had been done without permission, girls stoned and nihilistic, and there’d been an argument later, and lingering resentment, smoldering ill will. My house! the mother would roar; My room! the girl would counter. Catherine could remember being sustained by feelings like that toward her mother, the fuel of injustice simmering, ever-ready to erupt.

  Catherine laundered the bedsheets she found beneath the skeletons. She slept in t
his girl’s crowded den. The room was so full of what was there, under the red, nimbly dead figures on the ceiling, that its missing objects didn’t immediately strike her. But there were no photographs—not of friends or pets or relatives, not of young Catherine herself. And no mirrors. No opportunity, in here, to examine and loathe the always imperfect adolescent face and body. Catherine ran her eyes over the exclamations on the walls, contradiction everywhere—gleeful cheer next to fatalistic gloom—the piles of books and DVDs and stuffed toys on the floor, this warehouse of excess and life being constantly, desperately revised, layered upon. A life coming clear to Catherine, or at least growing more specific, intriguing. And also heartbreaking for its feverish casting about: Boy bands! Political causes! Three different high school pennants! I heart mutts. Buck Fush! Gaze long into an abyss, and the abyss will gaze back into you. Catherine was old enough to be this girl’s mother, yet the sensation the bedroom brought up in her felt distinctly un-adult. Maybe a person never ceased seeking her niche. In here, books meant for reading rather than decorating. Books about damaged children and their heroic helpers. Books about true crime. Books assigned in English classes that some students, some girls, this girl, would keep forever.

  Attending the skeleton party overhead, one dog guest. Sitting at the foot of a lone figure in the corner. The person’s skull was tilted, one hand’s many bones stretched toward the dog’s up-tipped skeleton snout.

  That red figure was Cattie, Catherine understood. Spectator. And most likely she had painted the ceiling by herself. Not with friends. Maybe with her mother.