“You’ve heard of them.”
“Yeah, I did a report on Native American culture for school. About how important it is to keep it going. Like, the Wakapi are a perfect example. They teach their kids this oral history, but then if the kids leave the reservation, maybe they don’t teach it to their kids. And then what if it just stops? Can you imagine what a loss that would be?”
“I guess. Yeah.”
“You guess? It’s a whole culture. But it’s not just the kids leaving the reservations, it’s us and the way we tried to erase their culture, taking kids from their parents and putting them in boarding schools and changing their names and not letting them speak their language. I have an apple. You want half?”
Carly is surprised by the sudden shift in conversational direction. She was just getting interested in the culture issue. Was Delores teaching Jen the Wakapi oral history? Can Jen pass it on to her kids, even though they’re not Wakapi? Or maybe Jen would say they can be if she wants them to be.
“Um. Sure. If you think that’s fair. I mean…it’s your apple. If you want it all.”
“I don’t mind.”
Carly moves a little closer to watch. Davis opens what looks like a small penknife and cuts the apple into two equal halves. He seems to be working very hard to make them exactly even. In fact, he ends up bringing the knife up through the stem and slicing it vertically in two.
“Here,” he says, extending the gift in her direction.
“Thanks. That’s really nice.”
She takes it from him and takes a bite. It tastes like a Red Delicious. But more to the point, it tastes like the best bite of apple Carly has ever held in her mouth. Ever crunched into with her teeth. And she knows why, too. Because she wasn’t supposed to be alive to taste it.
She looks out at the dawn, and it’s a more beautiful dawn than she ever knew existed. And for the same reason.
It strikes her that this feeling will wear off in time, and she hates knowing that. She wants to hold it. Frame it. Bronze it. Title it “This Is How It Feels to Be in Your Life.” But she’s been in her life all along. She just didn’t see that as anything worth noting.
She takes another bite.
Then she leans back a little and reaches into her pocket for one of her many quarters. Sets it on the floor between her sore hip and Davis.
“Here,” she says.
He looks closely to see what it is. Picks it up and holds it. “You don’t have to pay me for that apple. I gave it to you. For free.”
“I know. I wasn’t. Really. I wasn’t trying to pay you. I just wanted to give you something. Because you gave me something. But I don’t really have anything else but that.”
“Oh,” Davis says. “OK. Thanks.”
He slips it into the breast pocket of his denim jacket.
“Kind of stupid,” she says. “A quarter isn’t much.”
“Well. It’s a lot to you, I bet. You probably don’t have much.”
That’s so true that Carly doesn’t even want to comment on how true it is. So she says nothing at all.
They sit quietly for a time, finishing the apple and watching the world go by in the dark. The sky is taking on a coppery glow off to the east, and Carly can see the lights of some kind of civilization. Like they’re getting close to a town. She pulls her jacket tighter around herself with one arm.
“I’m practically biting right into the core,” Carly says. “Because I don’t want to waste any.”
“I eat the core,” Davis says.
“Really?”
“I eat everything but the stem. The seeds are sort of chewy, but it’s not bad.”
Carly pulls out the severed stem and pops the rest into her mouth. The texture of the core is hard to bite down on, but it still tastes like apple. They launch the stem halves out into the world at the exact same moment, then laugh at how perfectly accidentally timed that was.
“Any idea where this train goes?” she asks him.
“My dad and I are jumping off as soon we see the Colorado River. That’s the state line, you know. Arizona turns into California right at the Colorado River. Right in the middle of the river. I don’t know where the train goes after that. On into California, I guess. My dad would know. We’re going to go see Lake Havasu.”
“Why by freight train?”
“We go most everywhere by freight train. Or we hitchhike. One or the other.”
“Always? All your life?”
“Not always. Just the last couple years. Since my dad lost his job. Since we lost the house. Well, not the whole time since he lost his job. Just since we lost the house. He lost his job, and then for a few months he was trying to get another one, but nobody was hiring in his field. And then he decided if we couldn’t have a house, we should at least see the world. He said he could stand to raise me poor, but not on a street corner or in some shelter. He said at least we could be free and have some real experiences.”
“You like it? Traveling around all the time?”
“It’s OK. We’ve seen some really nice places. It’s just different than having a house. Not as good in some ways. But it’s OK, I guess.”
“What did your dad used to do?”
“Engineer.”
“Train?”
“Aerospace.”
“Oh.”
“How ’bout you?”
“Oh. Yeah. Me.”
Carly takes a minute to decide what to tell him. She starts at the beginning, when they had to leave Teddy. Then the story gets more and more detailed. And by the time she’s told him everything, the sun is up over the mountains, pouring onto their faces.
Davis has shaggy hair and bad skin, but his brown eyes are big and nice.
“I hope you find him,” he says.
“Me, too.”
“You think he did what they say he did?”
Carly opens her mouth to answer and is struck by a complete thought. If he did, that explains everything. Jen’s incomprehensible behavior is completely understandable. If he did.
“Maybe,” she says.
She’s a little stunned to hear herself say it. It’s almost as though her opinion on the subject has changed retroactively. Without bothering to notify her.
Then again, that would mean Teddy really did. And that’s equally incomprehensible. That requires every bit as much explaining.
“Will you stay with him if he did?”
“Oh, no. I don’t think I could do that.”
“What would you do then?”
“No idea.”
They stare out into the dawn in silence for a few minutes. It’s not an uncomfortable silence. Just a moment when nothing needs saying.
Then Carly says, “I don’t even know why I told you all that.”
“I do. It’s because you’ll never see me again. Strangers tell me and my dad stuff all the time. Big stuff. Stuff they don’t even tell their own families. It’s easier with a stranger. They don’t even know who you are, so what could it hurt?”
“I think I’m going to try to sleep some more,” she says. She’s feeling a little off-balance now, and that’s part of why she says it. But she’s also just really tired. She’s probably had two or three hours sleep in the last two days. “Maybe when I wake up, we’ll be in California.”
“Maybe. If you wake up and we’re gone, you’re over the state line.”
“Nice meeting you, if that happens. But it’ll be nice to be back in California.”
But not as nice as it would have been a few minutes ago. Before she figured out that Jen was probably telling the truth.
Carly dozes for a minute or an hour. It’s hard to tell.
Then she sits up, nursing an uncomfortable feeling. A lot of what she’s stored lately is working its way loose. That can’t be good.
Davis is still sitting in the open door of the boxcar, watching the morning go by. Or waiting for the river. Or both.
It’s warmer now. She struggles to her feet. Her whole body is sore, either
from impact or overexertion. In some areas, both. She feels as though she was hit by a speeding car in her sleep.
Davis looks partway over his shoulder as she sits down next to him.
“As long as I’m never going to see you again,” she says, “there’s something else.”
Then she stops a minute. Wondering what the something is. She’s literally about to tell Davis something she hasn’t shared with herself yet.
“OK,” he says.
“I have to think how to say it.” She knows a little about what it is. Because she knows how it feels. But training a collection of words to contain it might prove tricky. “I think however I say it, it’s going to come out wrong.”
“Just say it however you can.”
“Why did he pick her?”
“You mean…not somebody else’s sister?”
“I mean not me.”
In the silence that follows, Carly has a chance to experience just how wrong that really sounds.
Davis says, “You didn’t want him to…”
“No! Of course not. I didn’t mean that at all. If he did that, which I’m not sure now if he did, he shouldn’t have picked anybody. I mean, anybody young. But he picked her. Why her and not me? Oh, crap. That’s not what I mean. What do I mean?”
“Maybe you just wanted him to like you best? Even though…probably you wanted him to like you in a better way than that.”
“Maybe. It sure sounds better than what I said. I bet you think I’m the sickest person on the planet.”
“No. I don’t. Really. You should see some of the stuff people have told us.”
“Don’t tell anybody.”
“I won’t.”
“I’d deny it.”
“Who would I tell? I don’t even know who you are. That was the whole point, remember?”
Then, as Carly is settling back into that more comfortable reality, Davis shouts out suddenly. Loudly.
“There it is! Dad! There it is!”
“Hmm?” his father mumbles.
“The Colorado River! I can see it! Dad! Get up! We have to jump off in a minute.”
And Carly already misses Davis. And maybe even Davis’s father. Even though they’re still on the train.
Silently, and as bravely as possible, she adjusts back to that place of being alone. Her consolation prize is knowing that’s the California state line she can see from here.
Davis’s father leans over her. He’s a big man. Tall. Heavily built.
“The train’ll probably stop in Needles,” he tells her. “There’s a train yard there. If the train stops in the yard, jump off. Fast. Security man’ll go all down the train opening the doors of the boxcars. You don’t want to get caught in here. Look out both doors. See which side he’s on. Jump out the other side. Head for the main drag.”
“How do I keep going west, then?”
“Hitch a ride. The main drag of Needles is right next to the train yard. Broadway, I think they call it. It’s a business loop on the I-40. So hitch a ride right there on the street. Just about everybody going down that street’ll be merging onto the interstate.”
“Dad, come on,” Davis says. “We have to go.”
“Don’t hitch on the highway shoulder,” the dad says. “Because cars can’t stop there anyway. Hitch on Broadway.”
“Thanks,” she says.
But she’s not even sure if he heard. He’s already over to the wide-open door of the car, timing his jump. Trailing a huge backpackers’ multiday pack from the end of his right hand.
Davis disappears. Davis’s dad throws the pack after him. Then the dad disappears.
Carly runs to the open doorway, but the train is on a curved section of track, and she can’t even see where they’ve gone.
They’re just gone.
Carly wakes to the loud banging noises of boxcar doors being slammed open.
She jumps to her feet and looks out the door she came in. The side of the train that almost killed her. The door is still only open a couple of feet. She peers out toward the engine and sees the security man. Fortunately, he’s still way up at the front of the train. He has a long way to go to get back here.
She grabs her pack and leaps out the other side, forgetting how battered and tired her muscles are. She ends up on her face in heavy gravel, scraping her chin and her already-scraped hands and further bruising the front of just about everything else. She has to regroup a moment before pulling to her feet. She can still hear the banging of the doors as they slam open.
She manages to trot across the yard, looking both ways as she stumbles over a series of tracks. There’s a shiny silver Amtrak train waiting at a station a few hundred yards down. Facing west. Carly wishes like hell she had enough money in her pockets to board it.
She forces her attention back to crossing the yard.
She stops, considers briefly. Decides to head toward the Amtrak station.
“Hey! You!” a big male voice yells.
Carly turns and looks behind her, across the yard. The security man is looking right through an open box car at her.
She takes off running. Problem is, she keeps running into trains. There are so many trains stopped here, on parallel tracks. It’s like running in a maze. When she finally gets to the end of the last train blocking her from the street, she heads for freedom. But between her the main street of town is a fence. A chain link fence. About six to eight feet high. Topped with barbed wire.
Davis’s dad forgot to mention that.
For a moment, she has that feeling again. Like the one she had as she began to fall under the wheels of the train. That feeling of, After all I’ve been through, it’s just going to end like this.
“No,” she says out loud. No. This is not how it ends.
She sprints around a building, puffing with the exertion, and comes out into a parking lot, in view of an open gate. She blasts through to freedom. Runs all the way to a corner on the main drag of town.
There she stops and looks back. And sees that the train station is not fenced in any way. Somehow she had boxed herself into some private, adjacent area. Somehow she had found the only fence around. It seems too much like a symbol of the way her life is flowing these days.
She also sees that the security man apparently didn’t care enough to follow.
It’s hot. Needles is in the Mojave Desert, she seems to recall.
She walks stiffly down the street, headed for the first gas station. A lighted display on a bank she passes says it’s 9:23 a.m. and ninety-six degrees.
She still doesn’t have a hat. She never thought to bring Delores’s old gardening hat. If she’d thought of it, she still wouldn’t have. Because that would have been stealing. But she never thought of it.
She hobbles into the gas station and uses their ladies’ room. It’s unlocked. And filthy. But it doesn’t really matter. She washes her hands and face at the sink. Looks up into the mirror. Her chin is scraped and bloody from that header she took into the gravel. The soap stings her chin and the heels of her hands when she washes them. She has fresh blood on her shirt. Dried blood on the knees of her jeans.
She takes some toilet paper and paper towels and stuffs them into her backpack. Holds one paper towel to her chin to try to stop the bleeding.
She leans into the sink and drinks water from the tap until she can’t possibly hold another ounce.
Then she walks around to the convenience store and buys a chocolate bar and a packet of peanuts. She adds it up in her head. It’s about 20 percent of her life savings. Then again, she might be nearly halfway there. Maybe. Or maybe only a third, but she hates to think that. She wants to stay with the half.
The woman at the counter rings her up with the tips of long pink fingernails.
“West,” Carly says, still holding the paper towel to her chin. “That way?”
She points.
The woman nods. Like talking is too much trouble.
She walks back out into the oven of the Mojave. Throws the
paper towel in the trash on her way by.
She wants to eat the peanuts first, but then she remembers that the chocolate will melt in her pocket or pack. So she walks to the street. Peels the paper back on the candy. Looks carefully for cops or the highway patrol. Takes one bite of candy and sticks her thumb out just as a huge old bus of a motor home roars by. It stops a few yards up ahead. It’s teal and white, two horizontal stripes of each. Twenty years old maybe. The covered spare tire says Lazy Daze. It has a ladder on the back, a sickening reminder of the worst of last night.
She hasn’t even been hitchhiking long enough to chew and swallow one bite of chocolate, and she already has a ride.
As she jogs up to the big, silly vehicle, she thinks about this wind she’s had at her back the whole trip. The truck is there, the train is there, the motor home is there. Just exactly when she needs them.
Then she remembers she almost died jumping that train.
Then she remembers Davis grabbing her wrists and pulling her on. She decides she has to count her near-death experience as wind at her back, too.
Before she can reach the motor home, it moves forward a few yards.
Damn, she thinks. I was wrong. They’re not stopping for me.
It stops again.
An older woman leans her head out the window.
“Come on, honey,” she yells to Carly.
Carly runs again.
The motor home jerks forward a few more yards.
This isn’t funny, Carly thinks, stopping in her tracks on the sweltering sidewalk. She can feel the sun baking down on her scalp at the part of her hair.
The engine of the big motor home shuts down, giving way to silence. A moment later, the side door opens, and the woman leans out, a ring of keys jingling in her hand.
“Come on, honey,” she says. “I’m sorry about my husband. If I don’t take the keys from him, he just keeps on driving.”
Carly takes a few steps. Not sure if any of this is for real.
“My goodness,” the woman says. “You’re so young. Don’t you know it’s dangerous to hitchhike when you’re so young? And what did you do to your chin? You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.”
It causes Carly’s hackles to rise. But she moves a few steps closer. She can feel coolness pouring out the door of the rig. She doesn’t want to miss this chance. If it’s really a chance. If it’s real.
Walk Me Home Page 24