“Two more days?”
“Well, now, there’s got to be something around here, Hobbs.” I heard an eager note in Red Grass’s voice, a tremble like a leaf clinging to its tree. “Someplace the little ladies can take a load off, have a burger, something? And you and me, we can do our business.”
“We’d have to redirect to get to someplace like that now,” Hobbs said, “and we shouldn’t if—”
“Yes, we should,” said Jazz.
“We got places to be, people to see,” said Red Grass, patting his wrist as if he was wearing a watch, even though he wasn’t. “Appointments.”
I didn’t know what Red Grass was talking about, what sort of appointments he might have with Hobbs, and it didn’t seem like Hobbs knew what he was talking about, either.
“We don’t have any plans, Red—not a single one. Now settle down,” he said.
“Vittles are fading fast,” said Red Grass, shaking his head. “Got some noodles for dinner, but we’re gonna need something to stick to our ribs. Should I start hunting for rabbits?”
“You have a gun?” Jazz asked.
“Of course, I do,” said Red Grass. “And no, I’m not gonna give it to you, missy, so don’t bother asking.”
Jazz continued to argue. She needed to call our grandmother, check on the bus, have a real meal, for God’s sake—reminding me that she hadn’t eaten more than granola bars and a biscuit with peanut butter over the last day. If there was a way to make it happen, to get us to a restaurant for food and a comfortable break, she wanted Hobbs to see it done.
“Olivia, tell him to do it. Be reasonable,” she said, even though I’d stayed quiet, taking it all in.
“Your call, Wee Bit,” said Hobbs. “But it means going off course.”
I listened to Jazz’s breathing, and thought maybe it was faster than it should’ve been. I didn’t want her to feel again the way she’d felt last night. A chill skittered over my skin like a stone on water when I recalled how bad it had been for her.
I’m dying.
What if it happened again?
You’ll have to choose.
We could go somewhere. Maybe that would be best. Find a restaurant, a phone. A new way to the glades that didn’t involve trekking through the forest.
What do your insides tell you to do?
I still wasn’t sure, but I said, “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to get out of the woods for a while. You’ll stay with us, won’t you?” I asked Hobbs. “After we get there?”
When he answered, it was with a voice that lacked its usual curve. “We’ll see,” he said. “I still got both my feet.”
He led the way after that, leaving my hands as empty as before, but chill and wanting.
By late morning, it had become a boiling-oil day—so hot and murky it made the bird chatter turn to bursts of popcorn in the sky. My shirt stuck to my body. Everyone but Hobbs complained that their feet hurt and they wanted a nap. We stopped twice more for water. Kept going. Eventually we heard highway sounds.
“Civilization?” asked Jazz, her voice bright.
“It’s life,” said Hobbs. “But it’s just a highway.”
“Life,” Red Grass echoed. “And death.”
Beside the road stood a cross, tall and white. Beyond it, cars drove past in a scatter of eraser bits.
We found a long slab of rock sitting in the shade like a lazy dog and leaned against it as we pulled food from our bags. It was finally lunchtime. We ate cold beans and tuna with plastic forks, and used napkins for plates even though they bled through with juice. Maybe it was because that cross hovered nearby that death seemed to be on all our minds.
“Been a long time since I’ve been to see my wife, Elmira, at the cemetery,” said Red Grass, who’d wedged himself between Hobbs and me. “She’d be right annoyed that I forgot to leave flowers for her birthday. It’s easy enough to forget things like that when you’re on a train most of the time, losing track of your days.” His laugh was like a bark. “Track, heh. Get it?”
“Yes, Red. We get it,” said Hobbs.
Red Grass talked about Elmira for a while. Told us how she used to dream of traveling, though not quite the way he was doing now. She never would’ve approved of the turn he’d taken, the way he’d chosen to live life on “a couple of inches of steel.” She was what the train community called a forty-miler, he said—a homebody if ever there was one. She’d joked sometimes with their businessman son that she’d have to live vicariously through him, as he went winging off to Europe or Asia. She didn’t like the idea of airplanes, thought they were dangerous contraptions, and had avoided them for sixty-two years.
“What happened to her?” Jazz asked.
Red Grass waited as two trucks passed on the highway, then said, “Had a heart attack on the way to my grandson’s preschool class for grandparents’ day. Left a pan of brownies all over the sidewalk. They were still warm.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to envision Red Grass in a normal sort of life, attending a preschool function, full on family.
“It was hard, but nothing compared to losing my boy,” he continued.
“What happened to him?” Jazz asked again.
“Someone set fire to his place.” Red Grass’s tumble-rock voice grew coarser still. “There ain’t no mercy in fire, neither. Consumes everything. Leaves nothing but ash, and shattered glass, and busted dreams.”
“Oh, Red.” I found his hand, squeezed.
“Long time ago,” he said. “Though sometimes it seems like just yesterday.” He wiped his face against his sleeve. “But listen, death’s no fit topic for lunch, and you kids are too young for tragedies like this at any rate.”
“I wish,” I said quietly. Our panes of glass might not have been shattered, but they were darkened just the same.
It was Hobbs who clarified the matter. “The girls lost their mother a few months ago, Red. They’re taking this trip with her ashes, as a matter of fact. Looking for some closure.”
“That true, now?” The older man grunted. “Well, that’s a shame. I’m sorry for you girls.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Jazz stayed quiet. Maybe her thoughts, like mine, had drifted to the suitcase at my feet.
“I’ll bet this boy Hobbs ain’t never had any sort of loss,” Red Grass continued.
“Yeah? Why’s that?” said Hobbs, his voice as flat as a double yellow line.
“Statistics,” said Red. “Someone here has to have a whole family. That leaves you.”
Hobbs huffed. “Go on and call the Guinness people, then. There are six crosses behind my old man’s house, not so different from this cross here. Sisters and brothers, born dead all. I saw one once, before it went into the ground. Tiny nose and a bow mouth. Bitty eyes shut like it was sleeping. That one was a boy.”
I tried not to picture the dead baby, and failed.
“That’s too bad for your mother,” said Red Grass. “You, eh, got a father?”
“Guess so. That’s how it happens, right? Man meets woman, they bang, make a kid.”
“You sure know how to paint a romantic picture, boy,” said Red Grass. “Sure your old man would appreciate that.”
“Ain’t nothing romantic about Bill. His wife, Alice, was the only mother I ever had,” said Hobbs. “Those kids behind the house—they were hers. Hers with him. She never did have a kid of her own, and my old man reminded her every chance he got that I wasn’t her blood. And then she left him, and that was that. Must’ve had a real mother at some point, but I don’t know a thing about her. Maybe she left, too, or maybe she’s under one of those crosses behind the house. If there’s one thing Bill learned how to do well, it was build a cross.”
We sat without words for a long time, listening to the highway noise.
“How old is your grandson, Red Grass?” I asked, trying to land on a lighter subject.
He pushed off the stone and walked away without a word.
The fire. Of course. It had taken the whole fa
mily. His son. A daughter-in-law, most likely. And a grandson.
“I don’t like it here,” I said. I wanted to walk, get away from this view and the conversation. “Can we leave?”
“Life sucks no matter where you go,” said Jazz. “You can’t escape it.”
“Life doesn’t suck,” I said.
“Tell that to Red Grass,” said Hobbs. “No wonder he’s a hopper. Wife and son and grandson, all gone. What else was left? That’s how it happens, a lot of the time, how folks end up in this sort of life. They’re just trying to replace something they’ve lost. They never succeed, but they keep on. Anything’s better than facing the void left by all that absence.”
A desperation I could not stop to dissect filled me, as I pushed myself off the rock and faced him.
“You talk like there’s no hope at all, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” I said. “You’re young and smart. Those two feet of yours could walk you to whatever life you want, onto a path that means you don’t have to hop until you’re old and gray like Red Grass.”
“Not everyone can afford to dream as big as you, Wee Bit.”
“Truth,” said Jazz.
I ignored her, focused on Hobbs. “Isn’t there anything out there you can imagine, at the edges or not? Try. Try now,” I said with more force than I should’ve, considering Hobbs’s life was not my life. But I couldn’t quell the ferocity of my need just then—to have him acknowledge another way, make him see that there were two ways of looking at things.
He must’ve picked up on that, because he didn’t brush me off or mock me, just stayed quiet for a while, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe I could try for a new start somewhere. Sell some assets.”
For half a second, a smile broke over my face. And then Jazz opened her mouth.
“The assets you stole, you mean?”
“Jazz!” I started, but Hobbs was already up and walking away with his bag in hand. “Hobbs, wait. I didn’t say anything, I swear I didn’t—”
He disappeared among the trees.
“That’s brilliant,” I told my sister, turning on her. “Now he’s going to think I told you, when you and I both know I didn’t. What if he keeps walking? What if we’re left out here with no direction?”
“He won’t leave,” she said, pushing my hand away when I reached out to give her a pinch. “Not when he’s staring after you the way he has been. Even if he did leave, it wouldn’t be the end of all options. We’re here, right beside a highway. We could hitchhike. I wouldn’t love it, and we’d have to look for a woman to ride with, but we could—”
“It’s not even the point, Jazz. Hobbs has gone out of his way to help me—to help our whole family—and you’ve gone out of your way to be as horrible as possible. You don’t even know him at all as a person. You’re judging him on his tattoos.”
“I’m judging him on thievery,” she said. “Real thievery.”
“Thievery you learned about from who? Red Grass?” I asked her. “Because Hobbs never told Red Grass, and I, for one, believe Hobbs. Why would you trust Red Grass? Do you know something I don’t know about him? Because if you do, now’s the time to fill me in.”
She didn’t answer. “Fine, keep your secrets. But I think I understand now why you want to work in a funeral home. You don’t get on so well with folks who live and breathe.”
“And you say I’m mean.”
She walked away as well. Left me there with the cross and my charred thoughts—of fire and its uncaring ways, warm brownies capsized on the sidewalk, beautiful babies put into the ground, Mama in the kitchen breathing oven gas.
Of the void left by all that absence.
At first, I didn’t set Hobbs straight on the truth due to pure pride on my part, because I didn’t want to have to beg for anybody’s trust when I hadn’t done anything to betray it. Then he gave me another reason not to talk with him.
We found more crosses, a group of three, close to the highway and up a small hill. I’d heard of these clusters of crosses before, but it was Red Grass who explained about Mr. Coffindaffer—how he’d planted crosses all over America because he claimed God had told him to do it. Spent a fortune on his venture, too.
The heat such a thing provoked was beyond sense in my mind, but Hobbs and Red Grass really got into it—Hobbs yelling about the craziness of it all, Red Grass yelling back that one man’s crazy is another man’s salvation. Then Hobbs lost all semblance of cool.
“Salvation is for the fucking stupid, and the fucking lazy—people who think someone’s gonna come and rescue them,” he said with a voice full of nettles. “That’s all bullshit, crutches for the weak. I believe in action, in taking care of myself.”
“Your own two feet,” I said.
“Yeah.” I felt his eyes on me. “My own two feet. Can’t trust no one or nothing but that.”
Part of me wanted to leap on him right then, pinch him, tell him and tell him and tell him until he believed me that I hadn’t shared what he’d told me in confidence. But this was about more than that. This was about him ripping my ideas up in my face and calling it done. He needed to chill and so did I, both of us under the effects of a boiling-oil day, so I said nothing. Instead, I pulled a smooth stone out of my pocket, one I’d found earlier, and turned it over in my hand, worrying it the way Babka sometimes did with her religious beads.
Again, I felt the haze of my dream. I might not be ready for it, might not understand it, but it was coming all the same. A crossroads of one kind or another.
And I would have to choose.
February 1, 2000
Dear Dad,
It’s the year 2000, and I keep wondering what you thought of all the turn-of-the-century insanity! Did you stock up on water and food, just in case? Branik wasn’t worried in the least, though I have to admit to purchasing a ridiculous quantity of peanut butter and bottled water. I had no doubt that if worse came to worst my mother-in-law would still somehow find a way to bake bread, and we would all be well fed.
Things are quieter here at home, under better control. Drahomíra now lives in a house right next door to her store, which she said was meant to be, since it went on the market when she needed it. Olivia has started school, though she doesn’t seem to like it yet. (She has attention issues, according to her teachers.) Jazz keeps to herself a lot of the time, but Branik says I was probably the same way when I was nine years old.
The details of my life with you are fading from memory, and that saddens me sometimes. The other day, I thought about the rug we had in the living room. Random, I know, but I used to trace its pattern with my fingers, lying on my stomach while writing English papers and dreaming of my life as a future novelist. You’d think I would have committed it to memory, but now I’m unsure. Was it swirling, or were the shapes angular? Was it cream with green, or green with cream? It’s not important, I know, but not being able to call up the visual still bothers me.
The nicest part of having a quieter house is having time to write. Yes, I am writing. Are you surprised? Though it’s a far cry from the Macintosh in the study at home, I’m sidling up every day in my kitchen beside an ancient typewriter Branik’s mother gave us. It’s sort of fun to use, and I’ve already written a hundred pages. That’s almost a quarter of a novel, at least according to one of my professors whose class I took so long ago.
You may think I’m crazy for it, but I feel in my gut that if I can do this—when I do this!—this book will be evidence of the highest order that I’m okay. Not ruined at all. Whole and vital, the person you always knew I could be. Maybe this is the key to controlling those tsunamis. I feel better when I write, more centered. Maybe fiction can put life’s unexplainables into perspective for me.
Are you curious over what the story’s about? I don’t want to say much yet, because I don’t want to jinx it, but I’ll give you a hint. It involves a bog and ghost lights, and a lost girl determined to be found. I am quite certain that determined lost girls are the most powerful of all forces.
<
br /> Well, as Sylvia Plath once said, “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.” Time to get to work.
Beth
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Outlanders
JAZZ
Can you try to find your sister? my mother would ask me, all too often, because Olivia had a way of landing in trouble. Like the time she climbed the tallest tree in town during a rainstorm because she said she liked the way it sounded when the drops hit the leaves. Or liked the look of that sound, whatever that meant. I didn’t ask for details, only yelled at her until she got down, then dragged her body home, both of us soaked to the marrow.
Like the time she walked alone clear out of town and into the next just to see, in her words, “some old dogs.” I found her at a tiny house huddled beside a wire-haired white mutt, and talking to some old man who had fewer teeth than fingers. My bark won.
Like the time she used a vacated ladder to reach the top of St. Cyril’s steepled roof and sat up there for hours, saying she was testing it out for our father because it seemed the best place in all the world for a fiddle show. I threatened to tell Mama about her trip to see the dogs all by herself if she breathed a word of that nonsense to our father. I didn’t think he’d dare climb a church roof in front of God and all our neighbors to play his instrument, but I never knew with my family and wouldn’t risk him getting any ideas in his head—or breaking every bone in his body.
Then came the boys. Even the ones who’d long since labeled my sister the town weirdo were willing to ignore that for an afternoon once she turned thirteen, and developed breasts and long, flirtatious lashes. The town weirdo could still steam up a car. Though in truth I only caught her at that once, making out in a truck at the edge of town with Henry, that tall guy from my grade who, despite having a pretty good head for math, seemed destined to work his entire life at the liquor store his father owned. The Henry who’d asked me out once upon a time.
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