by Lucy Treloar
I thought we were done, but at the moment we passed him the man threw out a line to Luis: ‘Hey, son, what’s your name?’
‘Lou Patrick,’ Luis said politely and without a pause. ‘And your name, sir?’
The man didn’t answer.
When the harbour was behind us and we were walking up the sidewalk over a carpet of sodden brown leaves, with water and more leaves showering from branches overhead, I asked Luis, ‘What are you thinking? You need to head north?’
‘First my mother,’ he said. ‘We’ll try to visit her – I know the name of the place. Then there’s another town further north where they help. A staging post. People move on from there.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
Alejandra took his hand and pulled it hard. ‘We’re going to see Mama?’ He looked down. ‘How, Luis? How will we find Mama?’
‘We’ll find a way. We’ll talk to some of the nice people I told you about. We’ll look that place up and start. Okay?’
Luis turned from Alejandra and said, ‘Thank you for all your help, Kitty.’ He nodded at me in that formal way he had.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘You’re saying goodbye?’
But he was looking at Cat by then. ‘Thank you.’ And he looked away with some effort.
Alejandra touched Girl’s shoulder and sank her fingers deep into her fur. Everything seemed to show on her face. She’d lost almost everything, found something good, and it was being taken again. And now all she could do was blink away her tears, as if to say: I’m okay; it doesn’t hurt.
‘What are you saying? Where am I going without you? And if you think you’re going anywhere without me . . .’ Cat said to him. Treasure spluttered and Cat began stroking her back. ‘What are you thinking? We have to stick together.’
Luis shook his head. ‘You stay here. You’ll have a place here, with your grandfather maybe. We’ll be okay.’ His face was still and his voice plain and grave.
Cat handed Treasure to me, a step and she was before Luis; she put her knuckles to his chest and pushed hard, and he had no choice but to brace and take her weight. ‘Don’t be so fucking ridiculous, Luis. All that noble crap. Don’t pretend we’re nothing. What kind of shit is that after all this time? My God, I’m the only one who knows the way. You’d get picked up in two seconds even if you had a car. You haven’t got a paper between you.’ She stopped pushing Luis. ‘I can’t believe you.’
Luis’s face twisted. ‘The main thing is that you’re safe.’
Cat looked disgusted. ‘Oh my God. No, that is not the main thing. The main thing is to get you two to safety before that asshole ruins your lives. Who’s going to hurt me and Kitty? Listen to me. We went roughly the same route on all our runs north. Josh’ll expect me to go the same way. I know where to go – where not to go. We need Kitty to help drive – I hope you will, Kitty – and we need you two to lie low. It’s just another run, only we’ll go the whole way. If you don’t do that, you might as well hand yourselves in now. We’ll get some money from my grandfather.’
‘He won’t be there,’ I said. ‘The evacuation. We need to start being careful. I have some money and an idea.’
‘So you will come?’ Cat said. ‘You would be perfect cover.’
‘There’s something at Hart’s, if he hasn’t sold it.’
‘You have a car?’ Cat said. ‘Thank God. Stealing them is a pain.’
‘I hope so,’ I said.
Town was eerie, almost sinister. The traffic lights changed on empty streets. With all the bags, it was a hard walk to Hart’s. I peeked around the corner onto Talbot, half expecting to see Doree waiting over the way. A boat was upturned on the road, more trees had been torn from the ground, windows were shattered. Finally, the blinking lights and distant blare of emergency vehicles approached in the distance. We veered onto a back way. Torn branches and fallen trees and debris festooned the roads there too. There was a scurrying movement across a window in one house. Looters already.
We reached Hart’s place. The yard was scumbled with fallen leaves, russet and yellow. The hydrangeas still needed pruning. Hart was a person of habit, and the garage key was in its old place; I raised the door, and there was the big Silverado concealed beneath its tarp. The house key was back in its old place, which I took as some sort of sign or overture, as if I might come by one day or night. We visited the inside bathroom. I didn’t see the harm in that. It was cool and dim inside – neat, clean, and a little musty, like the den of an old dog. I wrote Hart a short note expressing the hope that he wouldn’t report the car stolen since so much of his family was involved, best wishes, Kitty. It seemed unfriendly when I reread it, but I couldn’t think what else to say. In the garage we pulled the tarp back from the Silverado. It lay before us like a splendid olden time thing, a medieval charger, or a making bolted together from a half-woke idea. The fuel it must use – well, I had some money put by, and if not for this, then what?
‘What a beast,’ Luis said. I opened the back and we piled our things in and got in the car. I pulled down the visor and the key fell in my lap, and when I turned it, the engine groaned once and roared into life.
Part II
Journeys
Chapter 15
We headed north. Sometimes Cat said, ‘Not this road,’ or, ‘Turn right here.’ That’s how often she’d travelled this way. We looked out for highway patrols, thinking of what happened with Josh. Luis and Alejandra didn’t know where their papers were – maybe at their old family home. They fell asleep behind us, their faces and bodies falling slack, and we went on. Cat sat upright and alert. Sometimes she glanced back.
It was twenty years since I’d driven the Silverado, but it came back to me. I like the dull rhythm of highways and roads. They’re like a heartbeat, like the cars bring the road to life, like that. We travelled a haphazard route, often on unfamiliar roads: barns stood in cold ploughed fields; houses – some almost castles – had fallen on hard times and been left to the bank by the looks. Others floated on the fields as stately as galleons before the dark stain of woods.
Perhaps those people felt as safely becalmed in their worlds as I had in mine, their fenced yards keeping creation at bay. Yesterday I had been walking home from Shipleys; now I was driving a carload of frightened people, half of them runners, and I was acting like it was any other day. That’s how fast my life had turned. My usual turn-off to visit the young prisoner came and went. I resisted the pull of it, only looking along its grey length.
We turned onto another road and passed a church with a signboard that said:
sermon this sunday:
‘on the ridiculousness of it all’
A removal order had been slapped across one corner.
‘There’s a church I could get into,’ Cat said.
All that time Luis had been quiet. Then: ‘My phone,’ he said suddenly.
‘Give it to me,’ Cat said. Swiftly, she dismantled it, throwing parts from the window at intervals into standing water. She asked for my phone and laughed at the sight. ‘That’s a collectible, not a phone, Kitty. Does it even work?’
She disabled it, calm and certain in her judgements. ‘You can keep it, but don’t use it.’ This was her world and she knew how to be resourceful in it.
In the mirror I watched Alejandra rest her hand on Girl’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Girl.’ Girl turned her head to her, panting and showing her big white teeth. Alejandra murmured on then fell into silence and looked out of the windows again at the tattered fields, the wires looping the roadside, the ruined and abandoned buildings, their old skin and thin hair and half-blind eyes.
While we were moving there was no reason for anyone to notice us, but when we stopped later we would need somewhere quiet, a house at dusk and the concealment of wolf light.
We pulled in to a McDonald’s towards the edge of a town, which I will not mention the name of here since people a
re still travelling through that way.
‘Not the drive-through,’ Cat said. ‘They’ll see in.’
I parked the car. Luis slumped in his seat and pulled Alejandra down. They had their hoods on, which I thought would make people notice them the more. I said as much to Cat and she just said it was the way of things now, it’s what people had done for a long time, pulled their hoods up and shut out the world.
We pushed the door and went inside and right away it seemed a mistake. I thought a town this size would let us go unremarked, but it seemed every person turned to look at us. If Cat and I had hackles they would have risen, and if I could not hear a thrumming growl in their throats, I could feel it. The people sucked their straws and pushed the yellow food into themselves, and watched with greedy attention. What kind of person would stop and come in if they did not live hereabouts? Why not drive through? Were we new in town? Say this was their island, their Wolfe, and people just came in and docked and marched up the docks and had a good poke around, how would I feel? I’d have my gun in hand inside my pocket. I’d be watching. And my clothes, my heavy fur-collared leather jacket, my worn-out jeans, marked me out as an eccentric or a strange lady drug dealer.
Cat pointed a thumb at the restroom and we went in – ‘So they think we’re here to pee,’ she whispered. She might get us through despite all.
Afterwards, we crossed the plain between tables and counter to place our order. We passed a half-bearded and scrawny man sitting on a table edge swinging his one flesh leg like a boy, though he would have been forty or a life-blasted thirty, his khakis rolled up to reveal a metal limb, clean as a butcher’s hook. The walker at his side somehow put me in mind of a child’s playground. He was jaunty and menacing, childlike and vicious. He narrowed his eyes and grinned his large armed-service teeth at Cat by way of flirtation. (Tobe’s teeth were wonderful too, much good they did him.) This man was king here and this was his court. He was like Owen Jims at the Fisherman’s Confederation Hut.
Cat gave our order.
‘Something else with that?’ the woman asked.
‘That’ll be it,’ Cat said.
‘And you, ma’am?’ She looked at me directly, so I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t heard.
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
It was like she woke up. She looked at me with all her attention. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Mmm?’ I said.
‘I couldn’t help noticing your accent. If you don’t mind my asking, where you from?’
‘Not here. From south. Sutters.’ I checked her name badge. ‘Silvie.’
‘I knowed you was from somewhere different. Ain’t Sutters gone?’
‘It is. And it’s where I’m from.’ I smiled.
Silvie stared at me, her eyes moving across my face as if I was some sort of apparition. ‘You stopping here?’
‘Passing through.’
‘We get a lot of that.’
‘You do?’
‘Sure. People washed out mainly. You washed out?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s bad luck. How many of you?’
I felt some misgivings about her curiosity, and glanced at Cat to see what she might be thinking. She was frowning.
‘Does it matter?’ Cat said.
‘Two of us,’ I said.
‘A lot of food for two.’
‘Something for the dogs. They love a burger.’
‘Well.’
I got my wallet out. I felt the prickling of people’s gazes at my back, and didn’t turn. It’s a way of making yourself strong.
A supervisor called out, ‘Silvie, some kind of hold-up?’ and she said, ‘No, sir,’ and began to bustle, bagging up our things and letting us go. On the way out a chunky yellow-haired woman sitting at the door-side table said, ‘Don’t mind her.’
‘I wasn’t bothered,’ I said.
‘Just there’s so many these days. Not enough jobs here as it is.’
‘A few empty houses around.’
‘Yep, that’s so.’
‘We’re passing through,’ I said. ‘Not taking anything we’re not paying for.’
‘I hear you. Safe travels.’
We went outside. I couldn’t get that not-belonging stench off me. People smelled it and saw it, and who wants to imagine such a thing could happen to them?
Outside, Girl was yipping her alarm call and her head was out of the window warning a beefy guy standing nearby, staring. Luis tried to pull her back without showing himself. Alejandra’s face loomed at a window like a goldfish. The man’s legs were spread wide and his hands were deep in the torn pockets of his jacket in a way I didn’t care for, having deep pockets of my own. He had the wornest-looking boots I’d ever seen, the sides busting out and the toes almost through. I wondered what it was his job to kick. More scuff than surface, my mother would have said.
I said, ‘Girl, stop that now.’
‘Wolf?’ he said, turning his weathered face.
‘Malamute husky,’ I said before he could start talking about the rights and wrongs of wolfdogs.
‘That so.’
‘It is, and we’ve got to be getting on. Got a way to go yet.’
‘You got some company in there.’
‘Grandchildren,’ I said. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’ I had to pass closer to him than I cared for to get to the car and he had a rank smell close to. He did not have any scars but he was the kind of person in whom that seemed surprising. We got in the car and I locked it. The man stepped closer and through the window I watched his mouth move. He rapped the window.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey, I’m talking to you, ma’am.’
I let the window down two inches. ‘We’re heading, mister.’
‘I want to see their faces.’
‘Whose?’
He jerked his head at the back seat.
‘My grandkids? What for?’
‘Just making sure.’
‘We don’t have to show you anything. Just step back now. Wouldn’t want to hurt you.’
‘They’re not yours.’
Maybe it was Luis or maybe it was Alejandra who lowered the window. Suddenly Girl’s entire head and a good part of her shoulders were outside the car and she was snarling and snapping. The man jerked back.
‘That’s a fucking wolfdog,’ he shouted.
‘Quit it, Girl,’ Luis said.
I pulled out and I did not care too much about his toes, and we were out of there in no time. I saw him in the mirrors shouting and pointing his finger at us. Oh Lord, what a mess it was. But we got away. Girl sat panting, looking like she’d seen him off and was pleased about it.
‘Alejandra,’ Cat said. I glanced around. She was shaking all over and had her hands clapped over her eyes.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘We’re all okay. Girl’s there. Feel Girl next to you? She was looking out for you.’
She nodded and smudged the tears away. When I looked again after rounding the next curve Alejandra and Girl were leaning against each other. Cat passed the food around. The smell of the cooked meat and hot oil and coffee was homey and gradually things began to feel better.
We continued on through a couple more towns and turned off the highway when it began to get dark, and drove down an empty road. The light had turned strange, glowing and filling the space above the road between long stands of tall black pines.
We wanted somewhere not too close to the road, but the places we saw made us think that there might be something better further on and we kept going until we began to see faint stars pricking the sky. Alejandra had curled up to sleep with Girl as her pillow. One good thing: in that light we could not see the houses’ brokenness. The road narrowed and on either side, hard up against the road, wide ditches were filled with standing water and cattails that were tall enough that nothing could be se
en beyond. There could be no turning on the road until we came to a fork or a driveway or a set-in.
A mile or so further and we found it: a short bridge across the ditch, and a gravel drive between long arms of fence. Further along the wooded drive we came to a white house, which loomed in the thickening dark. We felt the cold breath of the trees when we stopped and got out of the car, the doors loud in the enormous quiet. It was like a memory of a home. That was enough for me. It was the first such place we stayed at and it might be that I took more note of it than the other places we stopped in. We climbed the steps to the empty porch.
It was locked. Luis went around the side and prised open a window – there was a screeching of tired wood in its frame – and came through to let us in. All we had was my phone and Cat’s to light the way. It wasn’t so bad inside. There was a hallway with doors to either side and a few leaves that crunched and scuffed at our feet, and a half-damp smell like the outside had come in some way but not taken over entirely, and a whiff of dead animal thrown in too. Wallpaper peeled away in buckling tentacles. The owners on some whim had chosen a meadow design with daisies and fawns nestled in circles of – I raised my phone to see better – dry grass, as if there weren’t enough of that outside. It needed airing but it was too cold to let a breeze through. The light held some of the darkness at bay, though it pressed in softly, close around and between us, separating us from each other. There was a skittering, something small, but enough to make Alejandra squeak and bury her head into my front so she had to walk backwards while I walked forward holding her there. We passed a bathroom with its toilet pulled clear off its base, and a kitchen with its fittings torn out and the ceiling fallen and a tap hanging loose. Without a word we turned back and looked through the other doors and came to a room that smelled drier than the others. It had a fireplace and an old sofa pulled up to the cold stone hearth.
‘Wood,’ Luis said, and headed out again, leaving Alejandra behind. Cat looked after him and back to Alejandra. She gave me Treasure, who was sleeping, and left the room.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is an adventure.’