by Joseph Fink
chanterelle, miss you. go home.
A nickname that no one knew except her and one other person. This was the final piece of the message. She had misunderstood. The billboards weren’t a threat, but a warning.
Alice had had the same idea as Keisha when she had seen all these vacant billboards. Shout at passing cars long enough, and maybe the person the message was for would hear. She had put them up to show Keisha what was after her. Keisha dropped into a squat because she couldn’t find it in herself to stay standing. She shook with new grief and with rage.
Go home, why? Because she wasn’t safe? Because Alice thought she could keep Keisha safe? Because Alice thought safety was an option that had ever been available to Keisha? She hadn’t been safe since she was born into this country, this angry, seething, stupid, could-be-so-much-more-than-it-is country. And Alice wanted her to turn and run?
Through the tears, she saw movement a hundred feet down the shoulder. A pile of clothes under the billboard stirred and rose into a human shape. Keisha sprang up, not sure if she was happy or furious. Alice had waited for her by the sign. Finally Keisha would meet her wife in person, would touch her. But the shape didn’t move like Alice. If it wasn’t Alice, then it was the Thistle Man, come to take her after weeks of promises and threats.
She reached for the handle of the door. Would she have time to get the truck back on the road before he reached her? Like hell she would. She tried to comfort herself that even the Thistle Man wouldn’t be so brazen as to take her from the side of a busy highway, but she had trouble believing her own reassurance.
The figure moved toward her. She needed to go. She needed to run. But she didn’t. Because what if she was wrong, and it was Alice after all? She couldn’t let that possibility pass her by. The figure was close now. It was slight, and short, more like a child than a grown man. Keisha saw the scared, thin face of a teenage girl. What was a girl doing by the side of a highway like this? There were far worse things than men circling these roads.
The figure reached out her hand.
“I know what you’ve seen,” the girl said, “and I need your help.”
7
Keisha’s first impression was frailty, and so she mistook the girl for maybe fourteen. But there was a hard and adult aspect about the girl’s face, and on reconsideration Keisha decided she was probably sixteen or even seventeen.
The girl considered back, giving Keisha a hard up and down, and then, apparently satisfied with what she saw, brushed by her and hopped up into the passenger seat.
“Excuse me?” said Keisha, unsure of what was happening. The girl was already tossing a backpack behind the seat and feeling around for controls to move it into a more comfortable position.
“What do you know?” the girl asked.
Keisha put her hands on her hips. “I know you’re a kid and you shouldn’t be on the side of the road like that, so I guess if we’re making a list we could start there.”
“You stopped and looked at one of those billboards. The new ones. You were looking at one of them and crying. Do you know who put them up?”
Keisha felt the weak and tired part of herself falter, but she wasn’t about to let the kid see it, so instead she hopped up into the truck, too, and pushed past the kid’s legs.
“Am I driving you somewhere?” Keisha said. The girl shut the truck door, which Keisha took as a yes and so she pulled back into traffic. Neither of them spoke. A few miles of silence. The girl smelled overpowering. Not like she needed a shower. Instead as though she had taken too many showers, over and over, until any natural human smell was replaced by perfumed soap. She smelled like a walk through a park condensed into a single, overpowering whiff. In small doses maybe the smell would have been pleasant, but Keisha found her stomach turning again and rolled open the window.
“Ok, maybe you don’t know anything,” the girl said. “Fine, I don’t know anything either.”
She kicked Keisha’s book pile out of the way to make room for her feet. Brat.
“What’s your name?”
“Sylvia. Sylvia Parker.”
Keisha glanced at her. “I’ve heard that name somewhere.”
“Common name, I guess.”
“Where are you going?” said Keisha.
“Swansea, South Carolina.”
“Bad luck. I’m on the way to Atlanta to exchange shipments and then I’m heading west. Where can I drop you off?”
Sylvia didn’t look at her, instead watched the blur of billboards. “Swansea,” she said again.
Keisha sighed. Fine. She was almost to Atlanta anyway. She’d get the girl to leave there, and until then maybe it was nice to have friendly, or at least nonhostile, company for the first time in months, even if the smell was a lot to handle. Sylvia’s face softened and she turned her body back to face Keisha.
“No offense, I have to know if I can trust you,” Sylvia said.
“I have no idea if you can,” Keisha said. Sylvia nodded as though that were the right answer.
“You’ve seen it too,” the girl said. “Visions out on the highway. The road takes weird turns for you, same as it does for me.”
“What have you seen?”
“What have you seen?” Sylvia said, and smiled.
That was a good question. A lot that was impossible and terrifying. Keisha couldn’t find the shape of the tongue needed to name them. She shrugged.
“Exactly,” said Sylvia. Another half hour of silence, and then, as they entered the traffic that marked Atlanta long before the skyline was visible, she spoke again.
“Don’t you wish sometimes that you could forget? That you could have your memory wiped, and then you wouldn’t be a person wandering but a person who was almost somewhere, a person about to arrive, and when you arrived you could just stay?”
“Yes,” said Keisha.
“Yeah. God, yeah, me too.”
When they got to the distribution center, Sylvia clicked off her belt and hid in the back. Keisha didn’t know if that was necessary, but also didn’t know how to explain to her supervisors why she had a runaway child in her truck and so decided that it was probably for the best. Pallets of cereal were unloaded from the truck and replaced with pallets of travel-sized deodorant. When packaged, the two looked much the same. Brown boxes covered in plastic wrap. Only the logos were different. As Keisha waited for them to finish loading, a hand came out of the curtained back with a book. Sylvia was holding up The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., the second volume from that comic series, which Keisha had just finished reading.
“Is this any good?” she asked.
“Hell yeah, it is.”
“Ok,” she said, considering the cover for a moment before tossing it back by her feet.
Once the new cargo was in place and all the paperwork had been signed off, they were back on the highway and heading west. Sylvia had made no move to leave, and Keisha hadn’t found a way to ask her to. Sylvia hopped back up to the front.
“My mom and I, we used to travel a lot for work,” she said, as though it were part of a conversation they had been having for a while. “And on breaks from school I would come with her. Lot of time spent in cars. We started to see what other people were missing. Between the rest stops and the Taco Bells. There’s danger out there. There’s a crack somewhere, and a terrible force is seeping through.”
Keisha nodded slowly, not sure how to respond.
“Do you know what that terrible force is?” she asked.
“Mm,” Sylvia said. “I need to get to Swansea, South Carolina, and I can’t tell you why. Can you take me there?”
“South Carolina’s the complete opposite direction from where I’m going. I have to get to a supermarket in—”
“You’re the first person I’ve talked to, like really talked to, in, I don’t know, weeks? Months? I need you to take me to Swansea. It has to do with, you know.” Her hand spiraled out to indicate all the things neither of them was willing or able to specify.
Ke
isha snorted.
“Sylvia, I’m an adult. I’m an adult woman with a job. And that job says I have to deliver deodorant to a supermarket, not drive a teenager hundreds of miles to a town I’ve never heard of for reasons that kid won’t tell me. I’m a responsible goddamn adult.”
8
Swansea was not a bustling town. Nice, but also empty. Life had left this town. There was less of it than there once was. Sylvia directed them to an E-Z Stop on the highway, across from a farm stand that was closed, and two different car washes, both closed.
Keisha shut off the engine. “So what now?” she asked.
“We wait,” Sylvia said. She picked up The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. and started reading.
“Alright then, I’m getting some jerky. You want anything?” Sylvia didn’t look up. “Suit yourself.”
As Keisha walked toward the E-Z Stop she kept asking herself what she was doing. A runaway child and a delivery that would be at least a day late. She probably wouldn’t have a job soon, and then how would she look for Alice? And all because someone had spoken to her as a fellow human being for the first time in a long time and she had responded like a stray dog finally fed. She had risked it all so that she could keep this little bit of company going, as fucked up and weird as the company was. Or maybe, though she wanted to deny this, she felt that the kid could lead her to some new revelation or piece of evidence. Maybe she was using this runaway teenager to help her search. Maybe that’s the kind of person she was. Or maybe she had found a teenage runaway and didn’t want to abandon her. Maybe there was some instinct of protection in her that made her want to keep Sylvia close. Most likely some mixed-up combination of them all.
The drive to Swansea was only a few hours, but it had been late and so they had spent the night at a stop east of Atlanta. Keisha had tried to insist on giving Sylvia the cot, but Sylvia curled up in the passenger seat and either fell right asleep or feigned sleep well enough that Keisha gave up and slept in the back, feeling guilty right until she nodded off.
The guy at the E-Z Stop counter was withdrawn. Didn’t comment on the truck, or the jerky. Didn’t comment on anything. Laid-back. Or shell-shocked. Probably surprised to see a customer in a town this dead.
By the time Keisha got back to the truck, she had rediscovered some semblance of adult composure. Sylvia didn’t acknowledge her, and so Keisha ate her jerky and waited. The sky changed shade, and then color. Sylvia fidgeted in her seat.
“He was supposed to be here already,” she said.
“Who was?”
Sylvia rocked back and forth, and she seemed the youngest she had been since Keisha first saw her, slight and childlike, rising from the shoulder of the highway. Sylvia ran her hands through her hair, shook her head, and then reluctantly said, “You know about the Hungry Man?”
This violated their tacit agreement of not specifying their fears and experiences, and Keisha wasn’t sure what to do with it. Finally, she nodded.
“The Hungry Man killed my mother,” said Sylvia. “At a gas station a couple hours north of New York.”
Sylvia and her mom saw the Thistle Man. Or, as she knew him, the Hungry Man. They saw him commit a horrible act. Sylvia wouldn’t elaborate what it was, but Keisha could guess. And her mother did what Keisha could not. She tried to intervene.
After that, Sylvia didn’t have a mother. She went back to Georgia, was moved from home to home. No one would believe her story. Or no one would admit that they believed her.
There was one policeman, Officer Campbell, who took a special interest in her. Something close to kindness. He warned her that she needed to stop describing what had really happened, needed to stop trying to get people to believe her. That it would be easier if she let that go.
But letting go wasn’t an option for her. Keisha could understand that. If Keisha knew how to let go, she would have been thousands of miles away, living her life, pretending that she had never seen her dead wife on the television.
Sylvia ran away from the last of those foster homes, two days after moving in, and went looking for what scared her most.
“You want to find the Thistle . . . the Hungry Man?” Keisha could feel the arm against her throat, the must of his breath. “He’s dangerous.”
“Oh, is he? I must not know that. I must be stupid.”
“Not what I meant.”
“Yeah, it was.”
Arm against throat. The policeman’s glance of comradeship at the monster. The smirk on peeling, sagging lips.
“It’s not what I meant,” Keisha said with finality.
Sylvia snorted.
A few months before, Sylvia was sleeping in a city library. There was a window that didn’t lock in one of the reading rooms, and she would slip in after closing, and, thanks to her inability to reach deep sleep since the death of her mother, slip out as the front doors were being unlocked. She checked her in-box on one of the public computers to find an email from Officer Campbell. He said that since she clearly was never going to let this go, he wanted to help her. But it had to be secret. No one could ever know. He told her to meet him, at this date and time, in the parking lot of the E-Z Stop in Swansea. And he would give her the information he had been able to find, all of it.
“I think he hoped that somehow I could put a stop to it, or at least tell the world. I don’t think he knew what he had signed up for when he signed up for it.”
“Ok,” Keisha said. “Maybe the guy inside saw him.”
They went in and asked the guy behind the counter if he had seen a cop car in his parking lot recently. A cop car from Georgia. The guy’s eyes widened, but he shook his head. Keisha revised her impression of him. He wasn’t laid-back. He had seen something. Something of the terror that she and Sylvia had seen. And he wanted desperately to forget.
She leaned in, gentled her voice.
“Man, hey, now look at me, I’m gonna need you to look me in the eyes. I know what you’ve seen tonight. I’ve seen terrible things too; so has this girl, and as long as we’re all quiet, nothing’s going to change. Those terrible things are going to keep on happening.”
The guy didn’t meet her eyes, tapped his hand on the counter.
“Do you want to live in a world where what you saw is possible, or do you want to let us try to change that?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. Sylvia pulled at Keisha’s arm, wanting to leave. Keisha’s anxiety was a vibration in her limbs and chest.
“Ok, how about this,” Keisha said, leaning forward and letting him see on her face every mile she had driven in search of the person she loved. “Whatever scared you, my man, know that I can be so, so much scarier than that.”
His mouth twitched downward and his fingers fidgeted. “I’m sorry. I’d like to help but I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He pointed, past the back wall of the store, to the thick trees behind it.
“There we go,” she whispered, and she patted his hand. “There we go, man.” Sylvia and Keisha went out back, where he had pointed. They looked down into the embankment lined with trees and Keisha spotted a side mirror sticking out of the leaves.
There was no blood, no body. But the windows of Officer Campbell’s cruiser had been broken, all of them, systematically, and every seat had been slashed over and over. Not a trace of Officer Campbell. Keisha suspected that there would never again be a trace of Officer Campbell.
Sylvia groaned, an animal sound of despair, and she collapsed onto the hood of the car, a car that had belonged to the man who she thought would save her, a man who, as is often the case, couldn’t even save himself.
9
The cruiser had nothing useful left. No notes or documents. The computer destroyed. No sign of what he had been planning to tell or show Sylvia. Keisha searched quickly because she felt that it wouldn’t be safe for them to be in this town much longer. She finished up, slammed the door, wiping with her shirt any surface she might have touched.
“Ok,” Sylvia said, her face hard, already on to
the next plan. “He was based out of a precinct in Savannah. We’ll go there, see if he left anything that could tell me what he wanted me to know.”
“I’m not helping you break into a police station, Sylvia. You’ve dragged me far out of my way, but you’re not landing me in jail. I have my own search to get back to.”
“Alright, take me to Savannah, drop me off. I’ll be fine on my own. Been fine on my own for a while.”
“I can’t just—” Keisha started but Sylvia waved it off.
“Of course you can. You already want to. I’m giving you permission. Take me to Savannah, leave me near that police station, drive away. You don’t ever have to hear about this again.”
“Ok. Yeah. Ok. I’ll take you to Savannah.”
“Thank you.”
Sylvia didn’t sound annoyed or angry at the possibility of being alone again. She sounded relieved. As they drove out of town, she asked: “What is it you’re looking for anyway? What did you lose to end up circling these roads like me?”
“Ha.” Keisha did not laugh, but said the word to indicate the possibility of laughter. And then she did her best to tell the story, as far as she understood it.
A year and a half before, Keisha had seen her dead wife on the news. After that first sighting, Keisha decided she couldn’t afford to miss a minute. Multiple channels of twenty-four-hour news, and she did her best to cover them all, fast-forwarding, rewinding, searching for proof that she had seen what she had seen.
A fire outside of Tacoma. A landslide in Thousand Oaks. A hostage situation in St. Joseph. Earnest folks speaking earnestly, describing only the bad parts of the world. And among the concerned faces that the news cameras used as a backdrop, Alice. A fleeting face, sometimes, other times a long, head-on stare. Alice over and over. Keisha scrawled down in a notebook in which the first fifteen pages had been grocery lists, a list of every place Alice appeared, and that list became a map of America.