The Sunset Route

by Carrot Quinn

  I find a payphone at a corner store and call Willow, in North Carolina.

  “I’m trying to get there,” I say. “I’m so exhausted.”

  “If you can get back on the train,” says Willow, “you can ride it five hours east, to Winona. I’ve got a friend there you can stay with.”

  I hang up the phone and stare at the way the streetlights make patterns on the concrete lot. I’m not floating alone in space. Not really. I have a friend in the world who knows me. This friend has a friend who can be my friend. A train it will be after all, then. I can do this. I walk the three miles through winding industry back to the trainyard and climb atop my thistle-covered bluff. The yard is noisy below me, full of bustling workers and clanging steel, but I’ve watched it enough at this point to know that, in the early morning, the busyness will still, my train will come, and I will go.

  My trip east began with the mail train, Chicago bound, fastest intermodal on the Highline, and now I catch that train again—at six a.m., when the sky is growing pale and the whole yard is asleep. A piggyback, that semi-truck trailer perched on a flatcar, that windy beast of a ride. I haul myself up and under the axle of the truck trailer just moments before the sun rises, the engines attach, and the whole yard comes awake. As the train thunders east along the Mississippi River I lie back and draw my hoodie over my face. I have a heat in my throat as though I’m getting sick, and the weariness that comes after days of travel; a hunger for vinegar and bitter flavors, an aversion to the wind.

  Midday, when the train stops in a tangle of green beneath an overpass, I get off. The train passed a highway sign for Winona, Minnesota, just moments ago. I push my way to the road. At a gas station I call Willow’s friend, whose name is Florence, and buy a banana and some gas station chili. My last meal was yesterday and I’m starving. I’m sitting outside on my pack, eating the banana, when a battered red pickup pulls up.

  Florence is wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and dirty jean shorts, and her hands are rough from work. She wrenches down the tailgate so I can throw my pack in the back of the truck. I am overcome with gratitude. Who is this person, this stranger here to break my solitude? She takes off her glasses and peers at me; her face is a constellation of freckles.

  We drive past rolling green pastures and flame-colored oak trees to Florence’s farm, where we park alongside a little red house. The interior of the house is one tall room, with a woodstove and high windows and sunbeams puddled on the floor. A ladder leads to a loft for sleeping, and Florence points me to the laundry room so I can wash my grimy things.

  I sort my laundry and then discover Florence’s good-smelling peppermint soap, which I use to scrub the diesel exhaust from my face. When I emerge from the bathroom, I find that she’s made us a salad of kale and tomatoes from her garden, with turnips and black pepper. We eat it sitting at the little table looking out at the sprawling land, which is weedy and dry at the end of the season.

  “Do you want to see the boathouse?” asks Florence.

  We drive over a bridge to a small island in the Mississippi River. The island is crowded with ash trees and the air is heavy with the screeching of insects. A soft dirt path takes us to a sandy shore where a wee house rocks gently in the current. The walls are fashioned from oddly shaped pieces of wood, and inside, Florence strikes a match and touches it to the wick of an oil lamp. The gold glow reveals a counter cluttered with purple plums and taper candles stuffed into wine bottles. A row of theater seats is bolted to the wall. Upstairs is a bedroom with a view of the river, and a little closet with a four-gallon bucket full of sawdust.

  “That’s the shitter,” says Florence. “There’s a smaller boathouse too. We call it the raftshack.” She leads me outside and around the worn wooden deck, past some tomato plants in hewn plastic barrels, to where a one-room cabin sits bobbing in the water. The raftshack has its own tiny deck, to which a wooden park bench has been bolted. Florence hops carefully from the boathouse to the raftshack and I follow, feeling its front end dip down into the water. There is a plywood door and screen windows, and inside is a heavy dresser, a futon on a wooden frame, and some shelves.

  “I just got it two days ago,” says Florence. “Some kids built it. They floated it down the Mississippi from Minneapolis. They didn’t want it anymore, and they sold it to me for two hundred bucks.” She runs her hand along the doorframe. “I’ve got to take it apart and shorten it,” she says. “Make it less heavy. And I’ve got to get an engine.”

  There are voices in the distance: Florence’s friends. They’ve built a fire in a clearing in the trees. Florence has an old fiddle and someone else has brought a case of beer. I make a pot of lentils in the kitchen and then stand on the deck, listening to the music and eating the lentils with a wooden spoon. The night grows late and the fire flickers low and my weariness overcomes me; I put myself to bed in the raftshack, fashioning a nightstand from a plastic bucket and setting an oil lamp on it. There’s a sleeping bag and a book of train graffiti to read and I lie on the futon, feeling myself rise and fall with the gentle movements of the water. Later I get up to pee and everything is still; the sky is black, stretching out over the Mississippi, the stars like handfuls of broken glass. I hang my butt off the edge of the porch and pee in the water. I fall asleep and dream that Florence and I are playing in the water like muskrats, that we have bicycles we ride across its surface.

  “Tomorrow is the farmer’s market,” says Florence the next morning as she pilots the truck along the rutted dirt road, a mason jar of coffee clutched between her knees. At the farm, we harvest tomatoes and I battle the yellow jackets in the apple orchard, collecting enough apples for pie. I make ten tiny pies to add to her farmer’s market stand, and Florence puts them in a metal case for display.

  I stay in Winona for four days. I feel as though I have been gutted by the solitude and peril of my journey, and I do not want to leave this happy place where I can eat heirloom tomatoes and help Florence polish vegetables for the market. But I know that Greensboro, North Carolina, is waiting for me, the gentle southern winter, the brick house where Willow lives that will be my home. Florence is busy and I have no purpose here, really. This is a stopping-over place, a place to rest, but not a place where I can belong. I call our friend Bob, who is in Ohio visiting his family. Bob is six feet tall and has a huge copper-colored afro. Just out of college, he travels the country via freight train, whittles wooden spoons, and harvests acorns to make acorn flour. Bob is kind. He never talks down to me or tries to explain things to me that I already know. He says that if I can get to Ohio he will join me; we can attempt to ride trains the rest of the way to North Carolina together.

  The next morning I walk to the roadside, a Tupperware of gifted tomatoes stowed carefully in my pack, and put out my thumb. I think about Florence—the way she frowns when she plays the fiddle, the freckles on her shoulders. In the evenings she told me stories while we sliced vegetables for salad—about Winona, her teen years, her grandparents who started the farm. I like Florence’s world. I like Florence. I wonder if I’ll ever see her again.

  1997

  I step out of the plane into the high Colorado desert. Red dirt, red mesas, the sun coming up over everything. I shade my eyes with my hands. I have never seen light this bright; it feels as though the rays are piercing my skull. And the air is so dry! I peer out from behind my fingers. Frost glitters on the tarmac. Tumbleweeds edge the blacktop. The mesas have a dusting of snow at their rims. The sky is a cold blue.

  Grandma and Grandpa pick me up in a white Oldsmobile. They are just like I remember them: Grandpa in his Wrangler jeans, his shining pate, Grandma with her button-down shirt and her helmet of steely gray hair. They are the same but I am different. I have grown, from a guileless child into an unkempt, feral teenager with an ocean of grief inside me. Grandma smiles tightly and gives me an awkward hug. She smells like dryer sheets and Dove soap.

  “Ther
e are wild horses up there,” says Grandpa, pointing at the tops of the mesas. We’re driving north on an empty road. Fields, both overgrown and cultivated, surround us. We’re in Grand Junction, where the Colorado and the Gunnison Rivers meet. A faded town in the lonely desert thirty minutes from the Utah border. We’ve already passed through downtown, where a meat-rendering plant makes the air smell of roadkill.

  “Peaches,” says Grandma. We’re passing an orchard, and the rows of trees spin like the spokes in a bicycle wheel. “In summer there will be peaches. Do you like peaches?”

  “I’ve only had canned peaches,” I say, trying to imagine summertime. “There aren’t fruit trees in Alaska.” If I ate ripe fruit off a real living tree when I was here before, I don’t remember it.

  The house is true to my memory as well—one story, half brick, surrounded by acres of dead winter corn. We park next to Grandpa’s huge pickup. Two cars, I think. A whole house. This is unimaginable wealth. In the gravel next to the driveway is a much older vehicle, a rusted brown Ford.

  “Jordan’s fixing up that one,” says Grandma.

  Jordan.

  Jordan is in the kitchen, standing at the sink washing his cereal bowl in the light from the window. He’s wearing a crisp white T-shirt with a gold chain necklace and his hair is combed and wet. He’s sixteen now. His jaw has squared and veins cut his ropy forearms.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey.”

  “I gotta go to school,” he says.

  “All right. See ya.”

  He ducks through the doorway without meeting my eyes. I watch as he walks to his truck. My chest is a hot fist of anxiety. I look around the kitchen. The Formica table with its four chairs upholstered in vinyl. The scuffed linoleum floor. The tins of flour and sugar, glinting in the light.

  “You can have the room at the end of the hall,” Grandma is saying. “That was Barbara’s room.” I startle. Barbara’s room? I didn’t sleep last night, on account of the red-eye flight out of Anchorage, and the world feels strange. I carry my suitcase—given to me by Laura’s moms—down the narrow hallway, the wooden floorboards creaking under me. I pass Jordan’s room; the door is ajar and I see that the space is tidy and bare—white bedspread, no decorations, like a hotel room—then there’s Grandma and Grandpa’s room, with a big bed and a wooden armoire cluttered with antique perfume bottles and face creams, two nightstands, a dresser with Grandpa’s handkerchiefs and watches on top. At the end of the hall is my room, next to the cupboard that holds Grandma’s canned goods: dozens of quarts of peaches, salsa, pickled green beans.

  I open the bedroom door and peer inside. There is a window that faces the backyard, with its clothesline full of sheets and pillowcases, and beyond that, the fields. Light from the window pools on the bed, where a handmade quilt is pulled taut. There is a dresser with a mirror. A single chair. On the wooden floor, a rag rug. Grandma slides open the closet door. One half of the closet is filled with cardboard boxes, shoeboxes, clothing.

  “Some of Barbara’s childhood things,” says Grandma. “The rest of the closet is yours.”

  I sit on the bed. I am exhausted and yet my whole body is buzzing. I can see myself in the mirror—tired eyes, brown hair pushed behind my ears.

  “I’ll make some breakfast,” says Grandma. I look up at her, as if for the first time. “You want sausage and eggs?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I say. It’s hard for me to speak.

  * * *

  —

  I am standing in the pantry off the kitchen, running my hands over all the boxes, jars, and cans of food. Soup. Pasta. Pasta sauce. Bread. Bagels. Tuna. Peanut butter and jelly. Macaroni and cheese. Tortilla chips. Salsa. Four different kinds of cereal, including my favorite, Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries. There is also a chest freezer full of meat, frozen vegetables, a gallon tub of ice cream. In my head I tick off what I know is in the fridge, because Grandma and I went grocery shopping earlier—milk, cheese, lunch meat, pudding, cucumber pickles that Grandma canned herself. I heft a loaf of bread in my palm, feeling its weight, and then return it to the shelf. Today was the last day of my first week at the local high school, Central High, and after school Grandma and I went to Costco, where we bought much of this stuff. Grandma raised six kids, shuffling them all through the three bedrooms of this small house, and she knows how to stock a pantry. She also lived through the Great Depression, so she likes to keep a lot of food on hand. And she is careful. She clips coupons, studies receipts, looks for deals. I’ve only ever seen this much food at friends’ houses, never at my own. Is this my house, though? I touch a plastic package of chocolate muffins and think about Central High.

  The high school is different from the alternative school I attended in Anchorage, where the classes were small and the teachers were kind. Central High is a huge school with wide corridors that echo with the cacophony of over a thousand voices. The classes are large, and the teachers seem worn out, their enthusiasm used up. The textbooks are shabby and dog-eared, some of them missing covers, and there aren’t enough to go around. In my science lab there isn’t enough equipment, and a good deal of what we do have is broken. Most of the girls straighten their hair, and many of the boys wear cowboy hats. The parking lot is crowded with dented Camaros and pickup trucks that spit blue exhaust. Most days I hardly speak to anyone. I have decided to become invisible.

  I look at the chocolate muffins again. The phone rings in the living room. It’s Laura, and I take the cordless to my room. I shut the door and lie on the bed in the afternoon light and cry while she tells me how difficult things are now that I’m gone.

  “I’m so sad,” she says. “I want to die.”

  “I want to die too!” I say. “But don’t die. Neither of us can die, okay?”

  I trace my fingers along the stitching of the quilt on my bed. It’s a starburst pattern, and each ray of color is a scrap of fabric from a piece of clothing that Grandma sewed for one of her six children. I imagine all six kids in this small, three-bedroom house. Yelling, fighting. My uncles Dave and Brian, the youngest, shooting prairie dogs in the field with their BB guns. My aunt Pat on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle on the lonely country road. My aunt Cathy, the oldest, and her sister Christy quietly sewing this quilt with Grandma in the living room while Wheel of Fortune played on the wooden swivel TV. And my mom, Barbara. What was she doing? I’ve been told that she played basketball in high school. That she got excellent grades in everything but math. In the faded family photos on the wall in the living room, she smiles widely, showing too much gum. Was she happy here? If she was happy, why did she leave?

  Grandma told me that her grandparents came over on a boat from Northern Ireland in the 1800s. She was one of seven siblings raised in a small log house in Bonne Terre, Missouri. Her father was laid off from the railroad during the Great Depression, and after that, he worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, digging ditches. They had a wood-burning stove and a chopping block out back where they cut the heads off chickens. Grandma’s dad died of a heart attack after the kids were grown, and her mom lived alone. She and a neighbor woman, who also lived alone, would hang their rag rugs over the porch every day to signal that they were okay. One day, the rug wasn’t there, and the neighbor woman called the police. Grandma’s mom had had a stroke and died.

  Grandpa grew up on a farm in Parachute, Colorado. For generations his family had been homesteaders on the Front Range, between the Rocky Mountains and the High Plains. His mother had hallucinations and religious delusions, and disappeared when he was five years old. An older brother found her in an apartment in California. She wasn’t eating. He took her back to Parachute and cared for her for the rest of her life.

  Maybe, in the beginning, Grandma and Grandpa tried to take care of Barbara. But she went to Alaska, and she won’t speak to them. If they still love her now, they don’t say so. They don’t mention her at all—it’s as
though she doesn’t exist.

  No one knows anything about my dad’s family. When I bring him up, the room falls silent. He worked for the railroad, says Grandma. He was into conspiracy theories. They got married. And then Barbara was gone.

  I look more closely at the starburst pattern on the quilt. Tiny, faded flowers. Red and brown stripes. Sky blue. Grandma pushes the door of my room open and stares in at me, lying in the bed curled up on my side, my face puffy from crying, the phone pressed to my cheek.

  “Dinner’s ready,” she says.

  A Pyrex dish of gleaming roast beef. A ceramic bowl of mashed potatoes. Sliced sandwich bread, still in the bag. A head of iceberg lettuce, hacked into chunks. A bottle of Hidden Valley ranch dressing. A glass bowl of sliced cucumbers floating in vinegar and sprinkled with salt. A tub of margarine with a butter knife stuck in it. A gallon of milk. Even after a week, this spread of food still feels unreal to me, and I stare a bit warily at the mashed potatoes on my plate. What did I do to deserve this? If I eat this, will it become a debt that I owe? If so, how will I repay it?

  Grandpa fixes himself a screwdriver—vodka from the bottle under the sink and orange juice from concentrate—and sits at the head of the table spreading margarine on his bread. Grandma fusses with the napkins. I can smell Jordan’s cologne.

  “Elbows off the table,” Grandma snaps at me, and I startle. “Let’s say grace.” She extends her hands. I take one warm palm and close my eyes for the prayer. Grandma and Grandpa are devout Catholics, and they pray before each meal. “And please bless these two and help them to be good,” finishes Grandma, and she drops my hand.

  “How was school this week?” she asks as I cut into my roast beef. Jordan frowns. I look sidelong at him, trying to get a read on his mood. We’ve barely talked; many nights he goes out and doesn’t return home until the wee hours, the sound of his truck tires on the gravel drive shattering the still dark. He is edgy and hostile when I pass him in the hallway, and we don’t laugh together like we did when we were both in Anchorage.