The Grand Tour

by E. Catherine Tobler

  “How far are we?”

  The question came from Rum. She pulled herself up from the leaves and came to sit by my side. The dog padded alongside her, flanking me. It looked at our staked marshmallows and then back to Rum.

  Trudy palmed her hair out of her eyes. “Not too far, few more miles up the river to the bridge—”

  “The rail bridge?” Norma asked. “We can’t cross there—that’s for trains.”

  “Might as well cross there—no sense in walking five more miles.” Trudy twirled her marshmallow in the flames until it was a dripping black mess, then brought it to her mouth.

  Norma hunched her shoulders in her coat and let her marshmallow catch fire; it dripped into the sticks, long strands of white instantly blackened.

  “And what about this stupid dog?” Rum tried her best to sound angry about it, but somehow didn’t. She also didn’t sound scared. I think I would have been scared, having no good idea about the dog or the wound it had inflicted.

  “It doesn’t seem in a hurry to leave.” Trudy lobbed a stone toward the dog’s paws; it landed short and the dog didn’t even spook.

  Even as we smothered the fire and packed our bags, the dog stayed with us, and once back on the trail, it loped slightly ahead, as if leading the way. I tried not to think too hard on that, worried about Rum. She didn’t look any worse, and was walking as normal as anyone, but I couldn’t forget the blood on her arm last night or the muddy color to her cheeks this morning.

  “Well, did he put his arm around you?”

  Ahead of me and Rum, Trudy and Norma walked with shoulders nearly together, but at this question, Norma took a step away.

  “He did not,” Norma said. “Once you let a boy put his arm around you, he knows exactly how far he may go. He wanted to, but ... no. He did not.”

  Trudy pressed. “Did you want him to?”

  Trudy was forever wanting to know about boys, about dancing and holding hands and arms scooped around shoulders. She dreamed of kissing, no matter that everyone told her if she turned her gorgeous fall of copper curls into a pompadour, she would never be kissed by a boy ever. She didn’t seem too upset, only wanted to know about kissing. The news that Norma had been within touching distance of a boy who wanted to put his arm around her was special indeed. I hadn’t been kissed. Trudy hadn’t been kissed. Rum said she never wanted a thing to do with boys, which led Trudy to believe she had been kissed and often. That our rule-following Catholic Norma had been so close to a boy was revolutionary.

  Norma didn’t answer Trudy and Trudy laughed. Laughed so loud she startled birds from the wet trees. Norma shoved her and walked a little faster down the trail, arms clasped around herself.

  “That wasn’t very nice, Tru,” I murmured, but Trudy only laughed more.

  “No, it wasn’t,” she agreed.

  “Bum, bum, bum,” Rum sang, but no one joined in just then.

  We walked in silence and eventually Rum’s hand slipped into mine. She was tiring and cold from the rain that never quite fell. The sky was a sheet of gray beyond the trees that were half-empty of leaves. It seemed we should have been to the bridge hours ago, the woods stretching out impossibly far. I questioned how far we had actually gone and glanced back only to see endless woods on that side of us, too. The birds had gone strangely quiet and so had the river, as if we were farther from it and the bridge than we ever had been. Where had Audrey left us? A shiver slid down my spine and when the dog barked, I nearly jumped out of my skin. My hand tightened around Rum’s.

  Above us, high above the canopy of trees, a dark shadow circled. This had caught the dog’s attention, setting him to barking and capering farther down the sodden trail. I couldn’t tell if it was excitement or annoyance, but he didn’t stop barking as he tore off the path and into the trees. I stopped walking and Rum, still clinging to my hand (or did I cling to her?), stopped, too. We looked up and watched this strange shape trace paths in the sky.

  It was too big to be a bird—unless it was a vulture, but even at that, I had never seen vultures here and it was bigger beyond that. But it moved like a bird, wings dipping down to propel itself higher against the gray sky.

  “What is that, Lu?” Rum whispered. “Another fairy?”

  I squeezed her hand and started walking again. “Absolutely. You saw how the dog reacted.” I looked ahead for the dog, but saw no sign of him. Still, I heard him barking. “Clearly they’re related. Maybe she’s come to pull the fairy out and put things proper.” Maybe she could look at your arm, I wanted to add, but didn’t, because again, that meant allowing we had problems and there were no problems here, nope.

  Proving me right about our utter lack of problems was the revelation of the river and the shadow of the looming rail bridge ahead. I felt more than a little relieved at the sight of both; even Norma and Trudy looked comforted by the bridge’s old, black bulk.

  Beyond the tangle of half-bare trees and gray-stick shrubs that clung to the riverbank, the bridge stood stark against the gloomy sky, latticed iron bracing the longer girders. It looked drawn onto the sky with watercolors that were beginning to run to the color of rust, of time. The iron was supported by columns reaching into the water where they were encased in old stones; even from this distance, I could see they were colored with moss, lined with grit where the water had constantly licked past. Down the bridge’s center, the railroad tracks which would guide us to the Philadelphia side.

  “There’s something ...” Trudy bravely picked her way closer to the river. She lost her footing part way through, and grabbed a low tree branch to keep herself up right and out of the cold mud. “People? There are people down there. Wait.”

  We didn’t exactly wait. We came to Trudy’s side, stepping through leaves and mud to look ahead at what she had found. Trudy shushed us, but we had already fallen silent.

  Down the riverbank, where the stones and pylon anchored the bridge into the ground, there huddled a group of people. At first glance, they looked like an extension of the wood’s underbrush, half-dressed in leaves and half-bare to the uncaring sky. But as my eyes grew accustomed to their shapes, individuals made themselves known. A twig was an arm; a trunk was a torso. I counted a dozen different forms, or maybe there were fewer; it remained strangely hard to tell, but the important thing remained true: they were gathered around another form that floated in the river.

  It was too big. Big and small in the same instant, deflated and drained of everything. A discarded Halloween costume, I thought, that’s all it was, but none of us could resist in getting a closer look, not even Norma who proved true to her Catholic roots when it came to her fascination with the dead and all that accompanied them. Eyes on a plate, thorns around a disembodied heart, carry on.

  I was certain it hadn’t ever been human, but the way it spread in the water, it recalled a thing that had been human and no longer was. Its fingers were too long, trailing out nearly like tentacles, some curled around the dried weeds of the riverbank. If it ever wore clothes, they were long gone; the body pooled pale and utterly flat on the river’s surface. It shouldn’t have been flat; it should have bloated up, with water, with disease, with something, but it was like a sheet of plastic that a person could peel off and shake dry.

  The worst thing was the face. Being that flat, you think of nothing like a face, until you start to look at it the way maybe Picasso would, with disgorged eyes and malformed mouths. It still had its teeth in its mouth (mouths, oh god, there was more than one), but these were also somehow flat, screams pressed into a book for safe-keeping. The memory of a nose, colorless eyes. Male or female, I couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter; whatever shape might have given it form was just gone. Deflated.

  Among the mourners that ringed the body sat the dog that had accompanied us. He tipped his head back, howled, and then bolted out of the water, scattering mud and water up the bank.

  Rum swayed and I wrapped an arm around her to keep her upright. Norma clutched Trudy’s sleeve, and we all four hov
ered there, not daring to breathe or do anything that might bring that dog back to us. We didn’t want them to see us, no matter the cold water that seeped its way into my loafers, creeping ever up my socks.

  They lifted the body from the water and it came up like plastic wrap from the molded gelatin salads our gran liked to bring over. The body made a sucking sound and resisted, like it didn’t want to peel away. Suction from the edges—where it clung most desperately to the water—made ripples course through the skin, if it was skin. These ripples smoothed out the more the people pulled, the body going so thin I could see the water through it. Norma’s shoulders pulled tight, inching toward her ears until I thought she might swallow herself.

  “Enough.”

  At this single word from a man in the group, the others let the body go. It slipped back to the river with a sigh. Norma nearly deflated, too; the breath she let go sounded like a sob. She buckled to her knees and we all reached for her.

  “Norma—”

  “She shouldn’t have gotten up,” Norma sobbed. Blindly, she clutched at us, tears streaming down her red cheeks as she kneeled in the cold river mud. “She s-shouldn’t have ... She should have stayed d-down, let it hap—happen and pass the w-way the r-river ...”

  We all knew—people talked, but not us. We never questioned, never wondered aloud, it was a known fact. It wasn’t our place, but it could be. Norma was like any of us, raised in a household with siblings, with a mother, with a father. There were rules; every person had their place and lines were not to be crossed. Dogs didn’t go into space—women didn’t overstep their boundaries. The hard part was knowing where those lines were; understanding the boundary of water and earth was easy, other things less so when they changed at a man’s whim.

  I wanted to touch Norma’s shoulder, to let her know it was all right, that though her mother had been torn and flattened by her husband’s hands, it didn’t have to be that way. But touching Norma was crossing the boundary erected around her by father, by brothers.

  The shadow in the sky returned, but this time skimmed low to the water. It was a bird, I saw, but also a woman, and I felt something inside me stir at the sight of her. She flew across the river, filling her mouth with water until at last she alone could scoop the body from its wet mooring. The body came away effortlessly, cradled in the water of the bird’s mouth as she lifted into the sky. She dipped under the shadow of the bridge, then up and up into the clouded sky with a hundred smaller birds in her wake. It was then the clouds broke, rain streaming coldly down.

  The figures left the river and we withdrew, too, to the meager shelter of a thin tree where we settled Norma and let her cry herself empty. We wiped her knees clean of mud and pressed a root beer into her hands and without a word resumed our walk to the bridge. The circus wasn’t far now.

  The dog waited for us at the mouth of the bridge, paws wet and muddy. He shook himself once, then vanished onto the bridge, as if trusting us to follow. Maybe it was a fairy trapped inside, I thought, because what else could explain such a strange creature? Maybe, maybe, maybe it was Laika after all, eager to see what the circus had to offer before she took to the stars.

  “What’s today?” Rum asked as we set foot on the railroad ties where the rain beaded.

  “Saturday,” Trudy said. She rummaged through her bag to pull out her radio. “Saturday and the whole of a circus before us.”

  Saturday, and Laika goes tomorrow. Tomorrow.

  “I hope they have c-cotton candy.” This from Norma, Norma who had never voiced a hope before, only the cold facts she’d been raised with.

  She had never tasted cotton candy, I was certain, and made equally certain to be sure that if she wanted, Norma could eat her weight in spun sugar before we left the circus grounds.

  * * *

  3. Idle

  The bridge was old, built so long before any of us had been born it seemed to me a relic that should have been at the bottom of a sea somewhere, gathering moss and turning into a coral reef. It was sturdy as anything, but that didn’t keep the wood from creaking under our feet as we made our way through. Latticed iron arced above us and provided just enough of a roof to make the Everly Brothers that crackled from Trudy’s radio echo all around us.

  Trudy sang along, following behind the dog, who followed Norma and Rum. I brought up the rear, suddenly hating “Wake Up Little Susie,” because it made me think of Audrey waking up in a place she shouldn’t be waking up, of her dark profile in the Rambler and the way she never lit that cigarette. Joel wasn’t supposed to ... he was supposed to be there, supposed to take me, Lucy.

  Joel had been a part of our lives as long as I could remember, a grade or two ahead. He lived five minutes away from our house if you took the back way to get there, over fences and across lawns to bypass the dead ends and cul-de-sacs. Audrey took the back way a lot, sneaking out after we had been tucked in, swearing me to secrecy. I followed her twice. The first time, she’d met him in the park and spent an hour making out with him under a tree. The second time, they had taken off in the Ford Fairlane his father had bought him, sleek and black like oil running down the road. The car came back with windows fogged.

  Sometimes we liked him, sometimes we didn’t; he was popular, got good grades, pleased his parents at every turn, and had a headful of golden hair like any Greek god might. What wasn’t to like, Audrey often asked. Usually, I couldn’t be fussed to remember when we were supposed to like him and when we were supposed to hate him, but I was sure I wouldn’t ever forget the first time he made Audrey cry, or the way she eventually stopped crying and just held that cigarette between her lips. Waiting for something that never came.

  It was a regular part of life, waiting for things. Waiting for school to start, waiting for school to stop, waiting for the new Elvis song, waiting for the weekend and the cocktail parties our parents would often take us to, waiting for breasts to come in like they were something on order from the department store, waiting for cheekbones to pop out, or blood to flow so that we might actually Become Women, or ...

  He was supposed to be there, supposed to take me, Lucy.

  We all knew what it could mean, if you waited for a thing and it didn’t show up. School always came, whether you were ready or not, but blood wasn’t quite so constant. We had been told what it could mean, if the blood didn’t come.

  “... when they say ooo la la ...”

  Either thing held its own amount of terror, bleeding or not. Audrey held my hand the first time, told me how things were supposed to go. I thought of her profile in the Rambler and wished I had held her hand, because I was beginning to think a thing I didn’t want to think at all. The nights she snuck out to be with Joel, the nights she didn’t come home till early in the mornings. I couldn’t remember when they started going steady, Joel had just always been there. Until he wasn’t.

  “Maybe they were circus people,” Rum said from the head of the line when that awful song finally finished. The dog barked as if it agreed with her. “Was just like a piece of wet paper, wasn’t it? Didn’t fall apart though. Maybe plastic.”

  Plastic, that body in the water. I swallowed hard, thinking about bodies and blood and the way that body hadn’t seemed to have a drop left inside it.

  “Maybe,” Trudy said. “Here.”

  She had turned around, to walk backward while she extended a pack of cigarettes toward Rum and Norma. Norma’s first inclination was to shake her off—the pack moved toward Rum, who took one, and then Norma, to everyone’s surprise, reached for one, too. Trudy’s mouth quirked up in a grin and she tossed one back to me. I caught it before it could hit the narrow shoulder we walked on.

  We had to stop to light them and the dog walked in impatient circles around us as we did. The tobacco was dry and it crackled under the sudden warmth of the lighter flame. Norma took a hard pull on hers and doubled over coughing. Trudy slapped her on the back and then we were off again. I didn’t actually smoke my cigarette; the smoke made my nose wrinkle. Rum lip
ped the end of hers like it might bite her, and spit out tobacco flakes, while Trudy attempted to show Norma exactly how to smoke without choking. Mostly, it seemed like an excuse to get close to Norma and watch her mouth around the cigarette butt.

  Eventually, I flicked mine through the bridge lattice and into the river below. It vanished into the water without a sound.

  “Does that happen to bodies? Often?” Rum asked. She picked tobacco from her tongue and made a face that set Trudy to laughing.

  “Wasn’t natural, what happened to that body,” Norma said and Rum’s eyes flicked to me, silently questioning.

  I nodded in agreement, though maybe it was just a kind of nature we didn’t yet know. Who’s to say? Much like the Russians, there was plenty about nature we didn’t know.

  Coming out of the bridge on the other side, the Pennsylvania side, it seemed like everything should have been different, but it wasn’t much. Another tangle of woods, though this time we moved away from the river and train tracks, setting up camp a short way in so that we could have lunch. There was bread and Kraft Singles and a fire set up to combine into toasted, melted perfection.

  The problem with walking so long in the woods was having to eventually pee in the woods. Being that we were all girls, it wasn’t so strange to wander off a ways, so as camp was set up, I wandered. Our canine companion had also wandered off and so did Rum. I watched her vanish safely behind a bush, then turned to find my own.

  My own was already occupied, by a tall, hairy man.

  But for the filthy hair, he seemed naked, naked and peeing in a bush, and I opened my mouth to say something stupid like “excuse me,” but nothing came out, nothing at all. Despite that, he heard me, maybe my feet in the leaves or the way I sucked in a breath and made to choke like I was still holding a cigarette. He looked over his shoulder—his eyes were brown and kind and startled—and his cheeks flooded with color and before either of us could say a word, he was just gone. He ran and I let him go, standing there, still needing to pee very much.