by Joseph Fink
Her side of the bargain would be providing an excuse to take care of enemies and troublemakers. Their side of the bargain was to merely stand aside and offer no obstacle as she sowed the kind of freedom she hungered for.
Keisha just wanted to make it to the next dry place. Lakes formed suddenly. Soon all of the land on either side of the road was water, waves lapping at an asphalt shore. Keisha’s truck made it through this and up the mountains into a narrow pass. The rain was worse. The only way out was through.
A few miles from the flatlands, Keisha eased around a precarious corner and had a moment of, What is that in the road?, and then a bang and the bottom of her cab was dragging. A huge rock. She pulled the truck to a stop. There was nowhere to move it on a road so narrow, so she only had to hope her lights would prevent collisions.
She got on her stomach and crawled under the cab. She was downhill of the wheels of her truck, and she thought, Ok, so this is how I die. The rock was jammed into the bottom of the cab. She tried pulling on it, but it didn’t budge. A car whipped around the corner and swerved to miss her. Mud all down her body. She turned her head and felt her heart skip as she saw a pair of legs standing by the driver’s-side door.
“Hello,” she shouted and crawled out, banging her head on the front bumper. “Did you stop to help?” as though anyone had ever done that for her. But no one was there. She got back in her cab and started driving, the rock scraping on the road, sounding like the cab itself was coming apart. And then one last terrible ripping sound and the rock fell away. She stopped at Stovepipe Wells, a motel dressed up as a western village. There was a terrible smell, like burning rubber. And she thought, Oh, my engine is fucked. But even away from her truck, the smell persisted. The wind was saturated with it. The next morning she realized that she was smelling mesquite trees.
Almost. The officer wiped a little mud off her shoe. That was almost it. Smell the sage and the mesquite. It could be peaceful as you went. She smiled fondly at Keisha in the distance. Another time, then. The officer was in no hurry.
1983. Olive, Montana. Elizabeth Harris, one of the last children to grow up in a town that would soon fade from existence except as a name on a map. She was playing in a field near her house when she came across a deep hole she had never seen before. Peering into the hole she saw at the bottom a small, frail woman. The woman’s face was covered in blood, and her eyes were looking back up at Elizabeth. The woman began to sing, in a sweet, high voice. “O, martyrs,” she sang. “O, soldiers of a lower cause.” Elizabeth turned and ran. She would not put together until later that evening, but subsequently would be unable to forget, that as the woman sang she had been slowly floating up out of the hole toward the surface. Elizabeth moved away from Olive as soon as she was old enough and dreamed of that woman’s song and the whites of her eyes floating slowly upward at least once a month for the rest of her life.
28
Keisha spent weeks watching the commander’s routing in the Bay and Creek system, but none of it was out of the ordinary. The only way forward was the tedium of comparing the routing in the system to the commander’s actual physical movements. This time Keisha didn’t bother switching to a car, just did her best to be inconspicuous in a truck, which on crowded highways was not difficult. After all, the sky is pretty big but people still go whole days without noticing it.
Soon she realized that, sure enough, often the commander’s route strayed from what was set out for her in the efficient routings of the system. Not by much, but little detours that made no sense, that definitely slowed down delivery. Any point where these detours happened was a point worth investigating, but Keisha only had one body and one life and so she chose a stretch of farm road in Georgia that the commander often took even though the highway would save her over an hour.
Keisha researched the properties along that farm road. There weren’t that many to research, as the acreage of each was sprawling. Most were old family farms that had been bought out by a larger company that merged with another company and then was bought again and so were the property of the agricultural division of a corporation with a main business of manufacturing hard drives for laptops, or other similar corporate clusterfucks.
But one farm was different. It was owned by a company that was owned by another company, which also did business under the name of a third company that was owned by the original company. A perfect, impenetrable ring of shell ownership, the source leading back to itself without giving away anything true. Keisha had seen this before. That farm belonged to Bay and Creek.
On her next off-week, she went to the farm, bumping over the drive that had reverted to a groove in the tall grass. It didn’t look like a tire had touched this ground in many years. The house itself was half reclaimed by plants, a tree growing through into the second floor, windows gone or boarded up, walls shrugging themselves back into the ground. The front door had fallen down and the frame itself was buckling. Please don’t collapse on me, she thought.
Inside, everything was covered in dust and pollen. A few cans in the kitchen, corn and beans, and a half-empty Yoo-hoo container. In the bedroom, a mattress, mostly rotted away, leaned on the wall. She was afraid to climb the stairs. She wouldn’t trust them to hold. She sat on a faded green couch in the living room, hoping that nothing was living inside of it. Here was only abandonment. A family who staked their lives on the health of the fields only to be undone by age or disease or bad loans. Or, more probably, never a family. Every broken plank of wood, every sagging wall, a reconstruction, a fake.
And if it was a fake, then it was a fake for a reason. It was a hiding place. She got up and went back over the debris, carefully looking for any sign of disturbance in the heavy layers of dust. But there was nothing. She went through the unbroken grime of the kitchen with her flashlight. This time, she noticed that the dust covering the stove looked different from the rest. She ran her finger along it, and her finger came back clean. She leaned close, saw the lack of depth to the dust, and felt the slow dawning. The dust was painted on. The rest of the dust in the kitchen was real, but on the stove it was painted. And also on the floor, she realized, in front of the stove. Fake dust. Fake grime. She examined the stove inch by inch. On one of the dials, over the painted dust, she found a fingerprint. She felt such fear then. All she wanted to do was go away from this place, to run back to the truck and drive until the state line was behind her. But instead she put forward her shaking hand and turned the dial. There was a click and the stove swung toward her. Behind was a staircase.
The staircase had a switch at the top. She flicked it and a series of fluorescents popped on. It was a clean, industrial staircase, with a blind turn at the landing. She made her way down, ready at any moment for a shout, or a gunshot, or some strange creature of the roads to come up from the depths and meet her. But when she turned the corner of the landing, she saw one last flight and then a large metal door. She descended to it and tried the handle, but it was sealed shut and looked impervious to any force she would be able to muster. There was no way in for her. But she knew one of Bay and Creek’s secrets. And she would hold on to that secret until she could understand how it could be useful for her.
29
They were married long before they were married, which is a common enough story. For straight people, too, these days, Keisha guessed, but that’s a choice on their parts. There was a bit of triumphant defiance in calling Alice her “wife” without the official paperwork. We don’t need your say-so to be enshrined in love. We only need our own. Still, the rights of two women together are fragile enough. Without the auspices of marriage, who knew what would happen if one of them ended up dead or in the hospital. It was easier and clearer to set everything into the lawbooks.
And she found that even though she hadn’t given much thought to the wedding, as she went through the process it did end up meaning something to her. They were married in their living room, by Margaret, who would one day be the last of their friends to stick around for K
eisha after the rest had been driven away. Looking back, Keisha didn’t know if Alice had been planning her disappearance even then.
They honeymooned in Hawaii, spending more money on the honeymoon than the wedding. Which were they more likely to remember, after all? A big dinner party where they were stressed out and tired, or a trip that was the two of them exploring a place they had never been? They lay out by the adults-only pool of the resort and were given complimentary alcoholic popsicles by the pool staff and rode horses together, which Alice loved and Keisha most definitely did not. Riding horses was just like walking, she decided, only to go anywhere you first had to persuade a gigantic toddler that they wanted to go there too.
This was still a happy memory for Keisha, despite the pain that came after. Happiness is not negated by subsequent pain. But it does make the possibility for future happiness seem dimmer. Every good moment is shadowed by the question of that moment’s longevity.
Keisha hadn’t heard from Sylvia since making sure she had escaped from the Extended Stay, and it seemed a good time to get in touch and compare what they had found. She looked through the information Sylvia had left her. A patchwork of, not friends, but friendly faces of people she sometimes crashed with. Gutter punks and squatter houses, leftist co-ops and college students with old rental houses in neighborhoods near the campuses. Keisha emailed and phoned, but most of the contact information was out of date and she came up again and again against mailer daemons and sympathetic recorded voices, explaining to her that she had gotten something wrong and so kindly fuck off.
Then she got through to Tanya, who ran an anarchist study group in Chattanooga. He (Tanya was a man, but he liked his birth name. His mother had named him before she died, and he didn’t see why societal expectations of gendered names should make him change it) was suspicious and said that even if he knew where Sylvia was, he couldn’t tell a caller he didn’t know. “That girl has some dangerous elements after her,” he said. “Boy, don’t I know it,” said Keisha. “Then you understand,” he said. He did offer to pass on Keisha’s name and current contact information.
“Not directly, you understand,” Tanya said. “Don’t get any ideas that I have a line on her. But I can ask around to the right people.”
“Thank you so much,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. His voice changed, became softer, and a little worried. “I don’t know who you are, what you’re doing. But if you’re on the same path as Sylvia, please be careful. We need every one of us.”
“I’ll try. Best I can do.”
“Best any of us ever can. Ok, Keisha. Good-bye now.”
That night Keisha got on the CB radio again, for the first time since Victorville. It had made her sick, knowing that Thistle had heard her. But she liked talking into it more than she cared if Thistle was listening.
“There’s a sense of family,” she said, “that forms between people who have to travel a lot for work, no matter what that work is. Corporate suits flying to sales meetings twice a week. A drummer who sits in the back of a van eight months out of the year. People like me, driving our trucks.”
She leaned back in her seat, looking up at the stars. The volume on the radio was all the way down. She didn’t want a conversation, especially now that she knew who was listening. She just wanted a place to put her thoughts.
“You can recognize the look in the other’s eyes, this feeling of having seen too many miles in too short a time. You can compare stories about Cleveland and about Ann Arbor and Birmingham and Fort Lauderdale. They know the romance and they know the despair and so you don’t have to talk about either. You can ask them how the Hampton Inn is in Madison, Wisconsin, and they’ll know exactly what you mean.”
She turned the radio off, went to bed. Sylvia called three days later.
“I’m in Upstate New York,” Sylvia said, jumping past any how have you beens, are things going oks. “I need you to get up here.”
“What’s there?” asked Keisha.
“An answer, maybe. I want to find out who really killed my mother.” Sylvia hung up. Five minutes later, she texted Keisha an address. Keisha tried calling back, but it went to voice mail.
30
Sylvia saw it first that night. A man twitching near the dumpster. She thought he had been injured or was a drug addict. Her stomach bottomed out as she realized it was a crouching man, thrashing at a person below him. Sylvia saw but could not comprehend that the man was eating the other person.
“Mom,” she had whispered. “Mom.” And her mom turned, and, bless her forever, she did not run like Keisha once did. She set her jaw, said, “Sylvia, honey, you get inside the station and find somewhere to hide.” And she pulled out her phone to call the police.
Sylvia told Keisha all this in a motel room in Saugerties, about forty minutes from the gas station, which was still open, although it had recently changed brand names. Keisha found her there, waiting on her bed, door cracked open. The motel was only one floor, a line of doors with a parking space in front of each. The room smelled like furniture polish and wet leaves. When Keisha stepped into the room, Sylvia cried out and launched herself from the bed. It had only been four months, but they had been a long four months for them both. They hugged and Keisha felt again how small the girl was. It wasn’t fair, her having to go against the whole world like this.
“But it wasn’t only the Thistle Man,” she said. “There was a second person there. I want to know who they were. I want to know who killed her.”
Her luggage was a trash bag full of a mix of clean and dirty clothes. A mostly empty bottle of heather oil. She had a toothbrush but had run out of toothpaste a couple days ago and hadn’t had a chance to buy more. A copy of Penny Century by Jaime Hernandez.
“Thanks for introducing me to Love and Rockets, by the way,” Sylvia said, nodding at the book. “Need stories like that when you don’t have people around you.”
“Sylvia, have you been taking care of yourself?” Keisha knew that she sounded like a mother, but maybe that’s what Sylvia needed. Sylvia looked like she couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed and instead smiled gratefully.
“I’m alive, aren’t I? We’re both alive, and that’s no small achievement.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t.”
“I don’t even know what taking care of myself would look like at this point.” She shrugged at her bag of things. “Probably not this, I guess. But I don’t have more, so it has to be enough.”
Keisha sat down in the armchair by the window and immediately wished she hadn’t. It smelled like a mouse had recently died on it. She got up.
“The two of us have done a lot of settling,” Sylvia said.
“Our lives are a compromise,” Keisha agreed.
“But maybe someday, they won’t have to be.”
Sylvia looked so earnestly hopeful that it broke Keisha’s heart.
“Yeah,” she said, with the most hope she could muster, “maybe.”
The Taconic State Parkway is beautiful, a road that meanders. It feels like taking a walk in the woods. But taking a walk in the woods is something best done slowly, on foot, not speeding in a car. It is a dangerous road. No streetlights. Sharp turns. Long stretches with no shoulder, just a rock face on one side and a thin barrier on the other. If life is a balancing act between beauty and danger, then the Taconic is paved right down the middle.
The Sunoco station where her mother had been killed was off the Taconic. Sylvia walked around the station, putting on a show of careful investigation, but with shaking fists clenched tight at her sides. This place, for her, was a wound.
“We’re not going to find anything here,” she said.
“No,” said Keisha.
“It’s been years. There wouldn’t be any physical evidence left.”
“No.”
She nodded, put her hands on her hips.
“Her name was Sylvia too. My mom. People got so confused about her making me Sylvia Junior. Women aren’t supposed to do
that. They’d think they misheard. There was like six months when I was fourteen that I hated it and insisted on being called Ace, but I got over it.”
She turned away from the crime scene that was a few years too late to give up its answers.
“Well, shit,” she said.
Sylvia had come back out when her mother started shouting. The lights had dimmed on that side of the station. There was no sound of police coming, of anyone coming, of any help at all.
“You wanted to see,” the Thistle Man said, in a voice that oozed out of his throat. He dragged one leg forward, the rest of his body leaning backward. “Now you will see.”
Sylvia stepped toward them, but her mother caught her eye. And her mother put up one hand. You stay away. You hide.
“And I did, I guess. I don’t remember what next, it’s all sorrow and blood, but I do remember a couple hours later, huddled up in the brush on the other side of the Taconic, hiding. I remember footsteps in the leaves nearby, I guess the Thistle Man looking for me, but he never found me. Still hasn’t.”
But that was not the whole story. Someone else was there with the Thistle Man. Sylvia remembered a person wearing a hoodie, standing next to her mother, right at the end. In the darkness, Sylvia couldn’t pick out any more details. Just the Thistle Man, and the figure in the hoodie, small, faceless, with their arms out toward her mother. Someone helped the Thistle Man kill her mother.