by Lucy Treloar
His mood was lighter after that and we were all lighter because of it. They were nearly there, nearly there. They assumed I was coming with them and I couldn’t bring myself to tell them I could not. I thought they would try to fight it and things might go worse for them. The pretending was not so bad. Picking a scabbed wound leaves stinging tenderness in its wake. There was no time or room for us to heal free of each other in this place. I thought it easier to do that on my own, and they had each other. I saw the way they held together, and it seemed as if each day I was seeing them from a greater distance. I packed my bags when they did. I put my gun in my pocket. I was ready.
On the day of their leaving, when people were gathering themselves, I told them. I don’t remember the words, only that Alejandra became again the tiny shell of a creature she’d been the day we met. She buried her face in my front, and her words came out in growling sobs. ‘Kitty. Kitty. You have to come.’ She butted her head against me like a battering ram. ‘Come with us, Kitty. Please, Kitty, please.’
I squatted and held her. ‘I can’t. They won’t let me. They say I have a home here; I’m not in danger. I’ve got a home and you’re going to a new home. Cat and Luis will find one. Plenty of people don’t have that. That makes us the lucky ones.’
‘No, you don’t have a home. That island’s all broke.’
‘Maybe it is. I’ll find that out and let you know. I’ve got friends in town. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay. Except I’ll miss you, I will.’ I stroked her hair. ‘My heart will just break. But you’ll be fine without me.’
‘I won’t. I need you to come with us, Kitty.’
‘I wish I could, sweetheart.’ I brushed her hair back and pushed it free of the tears on her face and held her face, a hand to each cheek so I could look into her eyes. ‘Listen to me now. I want you to do something. It’s important, a big job, okay?’
She nodded.
I smoothed the tears on her cheek with my thumbs. ‘I want you to take Niña, have her for your dog, you know? Take good care of her. Will you do that?’
‘Niña?’
‘Yes. She’s your dog; you named her. That person’s the one who has to have her. It’s like a rule. No one knows her like you.’ I took Niña from her travel basket and handed her to Alejandra, who held the ball of fluff in her arms. I touched the pup’s forehead and her nose, and she bumped around with her tiny wolf head. ‘She’ll be hungry again soon. You’ve got her things? You know what to do? Better take the basket so she doesn’t scare people on the bus.’
Alejandra nodded. A keening sound came out of her again, her mouth stretched wide. ‘Kitty. Kitty.’
‘Careful now. Don’t want to squash her, don’t want to frighten her with your wolf mama howling.’
Alejandra made a snuffling sound. I stroked her hair again, which I’d brushed smooth that morning.
‘I promise I will come visit if I can. I promise that. And when you’re older you can come visit me. Nothing can stop you if you want to do that.’ I hoped that would be true when the time came.
Cat had been waiting with a look of judgement, as if I was after all what her mother had warned her about: a person who would fail you. I’m not saying she was wrong. Treasure, in her arms, looked around imperiously.
‘I should have told you before.’
‘Yes, you should.’
‘I’m sorry. I thought it was the right thing.’
‘We can fight this, Kitty. Why?’
‘Because you shouldn’t wait. You have to take this chance: Alejandra and Luis do, anyway. They’re not safe here.’
‘I have to go with them.’
‘I know, so go. Don’t make them wait. They’ll do it if you ask, and they shouldn’t. Don’t put them in danger, I’m saying. You don’t know if things will close up. Anything could be coming up the road behind us.’ I took her by the arm and pulled her closer and spoke quiet enough that no one would overhear. ‘What if Josh told his father about Luis?’
‘I don’t know what you know.’
‘Don’t talk about it. There’s what you and Josh were doing too.’
‘The fires were Josh.’
‘He might say different . . .’ I glanced at Luis.
‘Why didn’t you say before?’
‘Because acting normal is the best thing you can do. Easier to do that if you’re not jumping at everything. Your chance is here now and you’ve got to take it. Only a fool would let it go.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’ll go to Doree’s.’ I gripped her arm tighter. ‘It’s not the end. We’ll see each other again. If you need me, ring Doree, or write, whatever, the minute you’ve got a base. I’ve got money put by – I’d like to help you out, make sure you’ve got a home. We’re not lost to each other. This is just now. Now is just something to get through. I could die of pride looking at you.’
‘Kitty.’ She stared into my face as if she was trying to decipher the words of another language. ‘How are you even going to get back?’
‘Same way we came. I’ll pick up the Silverado and drive. Easiest thing.’
She nodded as if now she understood something or we had agreed to a plan.
We went outside with the others to the bus in the lot. There was a jittery buzz around – people smiling and talking and children running around and being called back – of hope and the prospect of safety and some fear too. Niña wriggled and was hard to hold. She nuzzled Alejandra’s ear and her face and briefly made her giggle. We put her in her travel basket and she peeped out from there. A dog and a person is a family on its own. I’ve always said that. I hugged them, and then suddenly I didn’t belong with them in the line and wished I’d put it off a minute more so there was still something good to come. I stood over to one side, not far away.
Luis stood with Cat looking very serious, and she very serious at his side, as solemn as the day they arrived on Wolfe. They were husband and wife in the ways that meant anything, despite being so young, and it suited them. Luis glanced across and gave me one of his faint smiles, this one tinged with dry humour and awareness at the strange turn their lives had taken. Here they were again, he seemed to be saying, but at least they were together and in the end did anything else matter? (I felt he understood me in that moment; my life had changed trajectory too, and I couldn’t make sense of it.) I smiled back, trying to convey my many feelings. Alejandra looked at me too, expressionlessly. She was wound so tight.
Every other leave-taking of my life was behind this moment like cards to be shuffled through: Tobe staring from the skiff with imploring eyes, Hart all anger and pleading at the Blackwater docks, Claudie simmering with resentment and rage on Wolfe, even Josh in his sinking boat, and the prisoner farewelling me at the edge of his foundering life. My parents too. And now this. I had let them in, the quiet in me was gone, and I would have to learn to live again on my own. I dreaded that.
Sometimes after returning to Wolfe from a visit to the main my spirit had sickened; even the island could not save me. I felt empty at such times. The island seemed to die a little in my absence and it was hard bringing it to life again.
I’d shut the curtains and trawled the world online. I didn’t like what I saw but I couldn’t look away for the strangeness of it. I looked at people who scraped mud at the sides of tidal rivers for ancient treasures, people who stalked remnant birds through wasted landscapes, people who gardened and cooked, people who sold houses or adorned them, people who made things to fill houses, people who grew vegetables and flowers, people who embroidered pictures of those things, people who danced in shanty towns and had only their own arms for pillows, people who cooked and ate in shanty towns or cities, people who took pictures of themselves in many places, people who dressed tribal to get in touch with their roots, people who climbed buildings and sometimes fell to their deaths, people who climbed mountains or dove in the sea, pe
ople who cut fabrics and made clothes or knitted yarns, people who refashioned junk into art or food scraps into feasts, people animated by the call of some hunting past who shot lithe animals they’d never eat, people who cut off dogs’ ears and laughed, people with earless dogs who hated women, thin people with painted faces who lay on sandy ground, people who wanted to be thin people lying on sandy ground, bears moaning out their caged and painful lives, sad people who watched sunsets and moons and planets, staring as far away from the world as they could get. Sometimes all I could see was the ugliness of the world.
People kept their distance from me later on that night in Freedom after the bus had left. I stayed out in the darkness. It was a clear, cold night. The stars were faint pinpricks, dulled by the city lights. The cold pressed into me and I waited for the epiphany it might bring to make sense of it all, the way I had when I was a child. But the cold was just cold and loss was loss. I could not soften one with the other.
Chapter 21
Winter
I got a ride south the next afternoon. The driver’s hands are the only bit of her I remember: her manicured nails, her big diamond ring on the leather steering wheel. She was a rich volunteer at the centre and she could have bought the car the day before, it smelled so clean. My tattered pack rested on my lap. The travel stink of it, the smoke and grime and filthy clothes worn deep into its pores, swelled and lifted richly in the warmth and filled the car, and the memories of the miles we’d walked were all through me. Girl was there for a moment and gone anew. The woman didn’t flinch from my tears or the new stains on my clothes, and if she saw them she didn’t pry. She would have heard things I suppose. One hand was loose on the wheel, and the only sign of disquiet I caught in her might have been a fingertip of her free hand softly scraping her knee, and the pause in her conversation, but the pleasantness of her voice when she resumed talking about the weather and her children didn’t fail.
We crossed the flagged line between the counties, which hadn’t changed to speak of, except for the two men sitting in their truck on the roadside beneath the sagging balloons. They waved us through with lazy hands. We hardly slowed and it wasn’t long before we reached the turn-off which I remembered from a fancy white pavilion in a farmhouse yard. It was hard to credit the days it had taken to cover that distance through back ways and woods. The lady offered to take me further in to help find the truck, but I told her I’d walk it, that I wanted to stretch my legs and clear my mind. The truth was I didn’t want her to see what I would be travelling in and to know it. I knew she wouldn’t forget. The old unease was creeping back, as if it mattered whether I lived or died. What if she was one of them, or knew someone, or had beliefs that she concealed? What if she wanted to know how I, a known sympathiser, was travelling and where I might go?
I walked away from the highway and pushed the gate of an abandoned house and went in and drifted around the ghost garden to pass the time until I was sure she wasn’t going to drive in after me. Out back were two rows of fruit trees in need of pruning, a chicken house with its wire sidings staved in, vegetable gardens gone to seed and abandoned, allium flowers leaning stiffly in the breeze, bean frames grown over and the plants died, and several tall, stricken sunflowers, their enormous heads facing every which way, as hopeless as forgotten children. I took out my notebook and did a sketch, and pulled three leaves – they had more give in them than I thought – and a few seeds from the sunflower plants, wrapped them carefully in a t-shirt and put the parcel in my pack. It would have been lovely once, green and insect-filled, humming with life, the scattered chickens pecking and fluffing their feathers in the sun and the dust. That’s how it lived in my mind, whatever it was like now in the cold of winter, all faded browns and withered leaves and still.
I sat on the back steps regarding this world, trying not to think too far ahead or to recall what I’d left behind. After a while I returned to the gate and looked out to make sure the road was clear, and went along the roadside until I came to a curl of woods cupping a field and a corrugated tin barn scraggled with dead vines. The truck should be beyond, but before I rounded the barn to cross the ploughed furrows I spied a burned patch, and a little further on saw the blackened truck down on its haunches, windows blown out, tyres burned to nothing, a black circle in the dead field around it, and patterns of burn all around where fragments had blown off and spot fires had lit. A summer fire would have gone for miles; it might have finished those woods, so there was some mercy there. Maybe it was the Silverado that had set gunmen in pursuit through those same woods. I thought of those runners in the droop-fronted house thinking themselves safe, and the way that blunt danger had hit them, not us, and how we’d envied them their shelter for a few hours. I hoped we’d had no part to play in those events.
I approached the Silverado as if there might be an unspent explosion there yet. Every bit of the car resisted me. The door handles had melted down the car’s sides lazy as candlewax. I tried for a while to prise one off, but it had become part of the other metal, a solid join that I had to respect. The doors declined to open, but wanting something I could take back to Hart, and looking for distractions, I found a rock by the roadside and used it to bash out the remaining glass from the driver’s window, scraping it back and forth to be sure there was nothing jagged there. I wrapped my coat tight and doubled across my front and leaned in until the window cavity took my weight, and reached in to the black space and its vile wet burned smell. The stick shift snapped off so I tried for the indicator arm, but the charred knob crumbled and the arm broke off short. There was nothing there but seat frames and springs. I pulled one and it came out, an ossified snake thing with its skin all roughened and ruined. It would destroy every other thing it came up against. I pulled a few more springs out and lined them up and beneath them found a square chunk of metal – the seat belt clasp; still, somehow I couldn’t leave. It was good to be busy. It stopped me thinking so much.
I went back to the farmhouse and pulled chicken wire from one side of the chicken house, and looked around for some other things – timbers, big spent cans of herbicides and pesticides and fertilisers, a broom head, three rolls of wire of different gauges hanging by the back door for convenience – and dragged them back using the chicken wire as a sort of stretcher. I hated myself for not moving on and built something anyway, a creature to mark this place, a wild thing with poison inside that I affixed to the roof of the car so it could survey this world and tell something about it. It was the first making of the journey south. I felt less jagged afterwards, and poked around for a while collecting more things I might use.
I thought about retribution and atonement and whether the world intervened in such matters. On the whole, I thought not. I was still alive and that made no sense at all. Still, I wasn’t surprised at the car. Of course, I thought. It seemed almost right after everything that had happened as if I might be able to walk out the wrongness of my actions and the badness of the world, which I didn’t believe possible. I’d worry about what to tell Hart later, and I would try not to think of the bus driving away.
My clothes were warm, and I had a little water still. Not enough for the three days advised in the nuclear flyer or the longer time I knew it would take, but enough to keep me going for now. I’d walk back to the highway and hitch one ride and another, keep going, just move along in the little patch of world that was always around me, and not think ahead or behind. What choice did I have? Even then, despite everything, I proceeded. I was alive and I tried to start walking.
I put on my pack, and looked along the road to the highway and the cars flashing past. I couldn’t take the first step. There was no leaving behind what had happened in Freedom. I had to write it all first, and then see if I could go on. Time rots down. What happens today or last week or a month ago in one way is nothing but fallen leaves building up in layers, soon to become mud and muck and silt. It would take a long time for the events of Freedom to feel like that.
I hadn’t been paying attention at the bus stop in Freedom. No one had. The worst of their worries – life and death, I mean – were over. Girl would have felt it. Her hackles would have prickled and her body throbbed with disquiet. I was watching Niña poking her tiny wolf head from the basket and Alejandra wiping her face with her arm, Cat holding Treasure and keeping Alejandra close around her shoulders, and Luis with several bags, looking ahead, almost buoyant now, straight and true. I was hoping people would be kind and they’d find seats together. A small crowd of volunteers and workers at the centre and a few townspeople gathered waiting were calling out: ‘Good luck, guys’, ‘We’re going to miss you’, ‘You think it’s cold here!’ – things like that to lighten the moment, which, despite the promises to phone and write, did seem final. Crossing the border: the words were in my mind. I was waiting for it to be over.
Someone called out, ‘Hey, Hugo Galves! Hey, Hugo! That you, man?’ The accent was heavy.
Luis turned fast, his eyes darting around, and tried to still himself before his reflex was seen. No, I thought immediately. I understood it so fast. I saw an arm lift, and a flash, and Luis drop. Then he was a crumpled thing. I don’t know if I saw or imagined in him a glimmer of surprise, if that was the last thing. He was on the ground before Cat had even turned. ‘Mariana,’ the man called, but when Alejandra looked, which she couldn’t help, though Cat held her tight, he hesitated. She was so young. Even a person who will kill like that has something inside that will make him hesitate. Nonetheless he lifted his gun. ‘Step away,’ he called to Cat. ‘It’s not you I want.’
Cat turned away from him, shielding Treasure, who was screaming, and Alejandra, who was gasping for air, shielding them both as best she could. I pulled my own gun – people were screaming and running by then – and shot from the hip and returned the gun to my pocket. I don’t remember the sound of gunshot, but the man fell hard. His head bounced on the sidewalk.