After the End (9 page)
WE DRIVE MORE THAN AN HOUR, DOWN WINDING mountain roads and past sprawling barns topped with so much moss you can’t tell what color their roofs were originally. Mountains fold in the distance like puffy mounds of rising dough. We pass rusted-out buses and trailers grouped for eternity—or until someone cares enough to tow them away—around a burned-out campfire.
The landscape is both magical and menacing. For every abandoned grocery store advertising beer and wine, fishing tackle, and “Xmas tree permits,” we pass a crystal lake that looks like it has sat unspoiled by man since the dawn of time. As we drive along white-capped rivers, logging trucks roar by, stacked high with enormous stripped trees.
I am reminded of Denali, and my heart aches for what once was. For my life shrouded in a fiction. Why did I feel safer in a postapocalyptic world than in this functioning, civilized world?
Because I knew what to expect,
I answer. I don’t know this place where friends are the bad guys and even this boy sitting next to me can’t be trusted. The rules are different. I have faced bears, wolves, snakes, and ice storms.
And for the first time in my life, I’m truly scared,
I admit.
Survival. That’s all that’s important. My own survival, and that of my father and clan. I will do anything to guarantee it.
And I will use whoever I need to achieve it,
I think, glancing at Miles, who is concentrating on the sharp turns. I formulate plans in my mind, but most fall one way or another into the “not allowed by Whit” category. I remember him driving off with those army-looking guys and feel my heart turn to stone. To hell with his rules. I’ll make my own rules now.
Miles slows down as we approach an old, battered building with a Coke sign hanging out front.
MAMA’S DINER AND GROCERY
is stenciled in black letters in the space beneath the red swirls. Besides some empty forest ranger stations, this is the first place that’s had its lights on since we came down from our mountain camp.
“Do you think it’s open?” I ask.
“There’s a truck parked around back,” Miles says, pointing to a rusted-out pickup truck with a paint job matching the decrepit state of the store. We step out of the car. Miles hesitates before shutting his door. “Is the bird staying in the car?” he asks.
I lean down to peer in the window. The raven looks pretty content with the pile of dirty clothes it is nestled in. “It should stay with us until we’re farther away,” I respond.
Miles shuts his door softly, as if the raven is a baby he’s trying not to wake. He clears his throat and looks uncomfortable. “Did it tell you that?”
I stop walking and stare at him. “Did the bird . . . tell me . . . it wanted to stay?” I clarify, watching him carefully.
He nods sheepishly. “It’s just that I saw you talking to it this morning, and . . .” He trails off.
“I don’t know what things are like in L.A.,” I say slowly, “but where I’m from, birds don’t talk.” I walk away from him, shaking my head. I can’t figure this boy out.
The uneven planks creak loudly as I step up onto the porch. I open a dirty screen with a big rip in the netting and give a little shove to the wooden door inside. It swings open, ringing a bell that hangs on a hook above the lintel.
The brightly lit space is spotlessly clean, with groceries stacked on shelves against one wall and one lone table with four chairs in the middle of the room. A woman wearing a red-checked apron matching the tablecloth and napkins bustles in through a door in the back.
“I’m Mama,” she announces, wiping her hands on a towel that she folds neatly and places on the counter beside an antique cash register. Beside the register sits a large handwritten sign:
NO MORE CHARGING GROCERIES UNTIL YOUR TAB IS PAID
.
Planting a fist on one hip, the woman cocks her head to one side and stares curiously at my eyes. Miles steps through the door behind me. She turns to him and says, “You kids are up bright and early this morning.”
Mama looks exactly like an illustration of Mrs. Santa in one of the books in our library: plump body, rosy cheeks, and snowy hair piled up on top of her head. From the outside of the shop and the pickup truck, I was expecting the owner to be a mountain man with no teeth, but seeing Mama, the cozy interior makes sense.
As if reading my mind, she chirps, “My mother always told me it’s the inside that counts. Plus, if we do up the front of the store, we’ll attract more undesirables.”
I lift an eyebrow.
“Tourists, I mean,” she says with a laugh. “Now, what can I get for you?”
“Breakfast to go. And a map,” I say.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay and eat?” she asks, nodding toward the lone table.
“We’re in a hurry,” I explain.
“I have some fresh blueberry muffins. Picked the blueberries myself out back,” she says proudly.
“That sounds great,” Miles pipes in. “And some coffee?”
While the woman gets our breakfast together, I slide a United States atlas out of the magazine rack and flip to the page showing the Pacific Northwest. Studying it, I find a major road that heads southeast all the way to Utah, and wave Miles over. “We should get on that,” I say, tracing the red line with my finger.
“Or we could go due south,” he says, drawing a line down the coast to California, “and then head west to hook up with Route 66.”
“I don’t want to go to California,” I say, giving him a look that I hope will shut him up. “California isn’t southeast, and we’re going southeast.”
Miles puts his hands up in an “I surrender” gesture. “Fine,” he says, and leans in to look closer. “Highway 82,” he says. “We have to go through a town called Yakima.”
“You’re about a half hour from Yakima,” the woman says, emerging from the back room with two paper bags. Placing them on the counter, she says, “You taking that atlas?” I nod. She presses a couple of buttons on the cash register, and it springs open with a
cha-ching
. “That’ll be eighteen ninety-five.”
Miles is staring at me and I am wondering why, and then I jump as I emerge from this kind of lapse-of-memory daze and remember that I am no longer living in a share-everything extended family, but in a currency-based society where we have to actually pay for what we take.
Before I can do anything, Miles shakes his head and, digging in his pocket, spills a handful of bills and change on the counter. Sorting through them, he gives some to the woman, shoves the rest into his jeans, and mumbles something about not only having to chauffeur me across the state but foot the bill as well.
Thanking Mama, we head outside. “You know, your friends were driving in the other direction,” the woman says with a mischievous glint in her eye.
I freeze halfway out the door. “What friends?” I ask. My words come out in a rasp, since my throat feels like someone has grabbed it and is squeezing hard.
“The men who stopped by here about a half hour ago. Two in combat fatigues. The third with black sticky-uppy hair. Last guy asked me to call him if his friend with the star-shaped contact lens stopped by. Said you kept missing each other.” She holds up a piece of paper with a phone number on it.
“Please don’t call him,” I gasp.
She smiles and, crumpling the piece of paper, tosses it in a white wicker trash can with a red bow on the front. “They didn’t look terribly friendly, to be honest,” she says, crossing her arms. “And besides, who am I to stand in the way of young love?” And with that, she picks up a cloth and begins wiping down the already spotless counter.
In a flash, we’re back in the car, slamming the doors behind us and pulling on seat belts. As Miles turns the key, he looks at me with the weirdest expression on his face.
“What?” I ask.
“There
are
people after you,” he says.
My eyes narrow. “Did you think I was making it all up?”
He suddenly looks defensive. There’s a strange glint in his eye. A scared glint.
“You think I’m crazy,” I say, unable to stop a grin from spreading across my lips. Miles looks away. “Ha!” I laugh and shake my head in wonder. Tell people the truth and they’ll think you’re crazy.
Maybe, with my story, that’s actually better than him believing every word I say,
I think.
Miles thinks I’m laughing at him and in a heartbeat goes from scared to pissed off. Red-faced, he steps on the accelerator and spins out into the road. I am tempted to hold on to the dashboard but know he will go even faster if I do, so I brace my legs and focus on keeping our coffees from spilling.
We’re heading at top speed toward Yakima, and I’m hand-feeding the bird crumbs of my blueberry muffin. Miles hasn’t touched his food, although he gulped down the coffee in a couple of swigs. I take a few sips of mine and then, grimacing, stow it under the seat. I’m used to chicory—this drink is too flavorless for me.
“The guys who are following you . . . are they dangerous?” Miles asks finally.
“Well, normally I would say that Whit wouldn’t hurt a flea. But from what Poe here told me—”
“Poe?” Miles interrupts.
“The raven,” I say.
“You named the bird?” Miles asks, his voice tinged with a note of hysteria.
Yet another reason for him to think I’m crazy,
I think, and wonder again if that’s not actually a good thing. “Back in Alaska, we named all our animals after literary figures. It was something our teacher Dennis started, so I was thinking that with Edgar Allan Poe’s poem about the raven—”
“Yes, thank you . . . I got the reference!” he snaps. His face is flushed red, but he does this deep-breathing thing and calms down a little. “Okay, first of all, we’re not keeping the bird. So don’t name it. I am not driving you to wherever it is we’re going with a wild animal in my backseat.”
“He’s not wild,” I protest.
“Has it shit on my shirt yet?” Miles asks, his nose wrinkling like he doesn’t really want to know the answer.
“Birds don’t shit while they’re sitting down. They would be sitting in their excrement, and if you haven’t noticed—which of course you haven’t, you”—I can’t think of an insult that fits the bill—“city boy, birds are clean.” I don’t know why I’m getting all defensive about Poe, but I can’t help correcting Miles’s glaring misconception.
“Secondly,” Miles continues, ignoring my argument, “a little while ago, you confirmed my long-held belief that birds don’t talk. Yet you just said that Poe”—he pauses—“I can’t believe I just called it that . . . this bird told you something.”
“I shouldn’t have said ‘told.’ I should have said ‘showed.’”
“Because that makes a difference?”
I just sit there for a moment, steaming from Miles’s sarcasm and regretting having followed Frankie’s advice and telling Miles the truth. But the moment passes when he says, “And thirdly, who is Whit?”
I have to tell him. Oracles are never wrong—only our interpretations of their prophecies, I remember Whit saying.
“Whittier Graves is my mentor. And I know that he is after me with these thugs, or whatever they are, because Whit sent me a note tied to Poe’s leg, and I”—how to explain it?—“tapped into Poe’s memory to see what he saw. But this is not Narnia. No talking animals. Poe isn’t sitting back there listening to everything we say and mulling it over in his little raven brain. However, if he flies back to Whit, which he might do if Whit calls him, Whit could use the same technique I did to see where we are.”
Miles is quiet for a whole three minutes, pressing his lips tightly together and tapping nervously on the steering wheel. “Okay, I get a few things out of what you just told me,” he says finally. “The least troubling of which is that the bird stays with us.”
“Until we’re farther away from Whit,” I reassure him.
“Not that that’s not troubling,” Miles corrects himself. “It’s just the least troubling. Because the next item on my list of concerns is that you claim this Whit guy, who was once your mentor but is now chasing you, can control where the bird goes.”
I nod. “Yes.”
“Okay,” Miles says. “So the raven’s like one of those homing pigeons? I assume it’s Whit’s trained messenger and not some wild bird he snatched out of the woods.”
“Actually, Whit—”
Miles holds up his hand to stop me. “But the most troubling thing you said was that you tapped into the memory of the bird to see something. Now, I was not raised in a hippie commune in backwoods Alaska. But most people I know would have a hard time believing that you weren’t . . . I don’t know . . . crazy.”
He presses his index finger to his temple and opens his eyes wide.
Now I’ve done it,
I think. He’s scared. “Or on drugs,” he continues. “Wait, no . . . I have another theory. You were brainwashed by your hippie cult into thinking you have magical powers. In your head you’re like a cross between . . . I don’t know . . . Superpower-Flower-Child and Harry Potter.” That’s it. I’m not sure what he’s talking about exactly, but it’s clear he has shifted into sarcasm overdrive.
I won’t let this boy get to me. Why do I care what he thinks? “So I’m crazy, a druggie, or a cult member?” I ask as we crest a hill to see a sparkling city spread like a starry blanket beneath us in the broad valley below. “Well, you’re free to just drop me off here in Yakima.”
This shakes Miles out of his rant. He’s silent as we drive into the city center. I have obviously made my point. I’ve reminded him that he needs me as much as I need him, like Crazy Frankie said. But I still have no idea why.
I HAVE TO GET TO A PHONE. TO CALL MY DAD. Have him take her off my hands. I can’t stand this much longer. I’m in way over my head. It’s one thing playing driver for a schizo teen who thinks she’s being chased by dangerous people. It’s a whole other thing when said dangerous people are actually chasing said teen and, by proxy, me.
But I can’t get away from her. She had me pull up to a woman pushing a baby carriage so she could ask where a supermarket was. (She called it a “food shop,” but whatever.) And once we had walked into Walmart Supercenter, she insisted that I accompany her every step of the way while she crammed a cart with food: canned stew, beans, and vegetables; liters of water; a sack of potatoes, a sack of apples; and, yes, a small pouch of birdseed.
She went all out on the flashlights, buying three jumbo ones along with a mountain of batteries. “I saw batteries in Seattle,” she whispered to me as if they were a state secret. I wonder what they would have thought of her pack of size-D Duracells back in hippie camp.
It looked like she was preparing for a monthlong wilderness survival trip from all the staples she was stocking up on. But that was just the beginning. Then we hit the junk food aisles.
She transformed from a middle-aged nature mom into an eight-year-old girl with a serious sugar deficiency in the time it took to fill the rest of the cart with Pop-Tarts, Cap’n Crunch, and cheese puffs. This was followed by a meltdown in the chocolate aisle. The hippies obviously didn’t grow their own cocoa beans back in Alaska, because I’ve never seen anyone load up on so many candy bars in my life.
At the checkout, Juneau digs in her bag and pulls out a leather pouch with money in it. Seriously—a leather pouch tied together with a cord. Like Grizzly Adams, but with major cash. I’m talking a fat wad of bills. She pulls it out and starts counting really slowly in front of the checkout lady, turning each bill over a couple of times and squinting at them like they’re Japanese yen.
The clerk stares at the money kind of scared, like she’s afraid Juneau’s running a teenage counterfeiting operation. And then she looks at Juneau’s face and catches a glimpse of that weird contact lens, and her eyes get a little wider. Finally I grab the cash and slap down enough for the total, jam the rest back into the pouch, and push Juneau out of the store in front of me.
“What’s wrong with you?” I hiss as soon as we’re outside. “You freaked that woman out so much she might call the manager.”
“What are you talking about?” Juneau asks, as innocent as a kindergartner.
“Flashing all that money around. Where’d you get it anyway?”
“That’s none of your business,” she says, frowning.
“Can’t you just try to act normal?” I ask.
“What is your definition of normal?” she asks seriously.
I’m about to say,
Well, it wouldn’t be pulling a fat wad of cash out of a leather pouch at Walmart and then staring with your freaky contact lens at the bills as if you’re hoping the green’s not going to rub off
, but I opt for, “Nothing,” and beeline to the car. I pile the bags into the trunk and return the shopping cart to its corral. By the time I get back, Juneau’s feeding the birdseed to the raven, who’s eating it out of her hand like they’ve been best buds for their entire lives.
I get ready to start the car and then pause. “You have to take out that weird-ass contact lens. Not only did it freak out the checkout lady, but the woman in the breakfast place said that your mentor and his thugs are using it to hunt you down.”
She sits there looking like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Then, putting her finger under her right eye, she says, “You mean my starburst?”
“If that’s what you call it, then yes.”
“I can’t take it out,” she says simply.
“What do you mean?”
Blank stare.
“You’re not telling me you have a gold iris shaped like a star . . . naturally?” I don’t bother to downplay my sarcasm.
“Yes, actually,” she replies. “All the children in my village do. It comes from being close to the Yara.”
I nod, unwilling to bite if she’s luring me into asking what the hell she’s talking about. “So you can’t take it out?”
She shakes her head and the sun glints off the gold flecks in her mutant eye, and for a second it strikes me that it’s actually not that weird-looking once you’re used to it, maybe because her other eye is kind of a nice honey color and doesn’t contrast too much.
“Can you wink with that eye?” I ask. She winks. “Can you hold it shut whenever we’re in public?” I prod, and she looks at me strangely, and then her eyes narrow and her face closes down like it does when she’s mad at me, which seems to be more and more often since she found the raven and realized her mentor is playing for the Dark Side of the Force. Like it’s my fault she trusted him.
“Is it essential that we waste time talking about my eye, or can we go now?” she says stiffly.
I try to speak like she does. “Considering the fact that we’re being trailed by a dangerous hippie bird hypnotist and two thugs, I don’t mind continuing the eye conversation later.” Turning the key in the ignition, I head out of the parking lot and toward signs for Highway 47.
As we leave town, I have an idea and pull over in front of a drugstore. “Stay here,” I order, and duck out so fast she doesn’t have a chance to stop me. Two minutes later I’m back in the car. Juneau’s sitting there staring quizzically at me as I pull onto the road and drive toward the edge of town. I let her stare, and we sit in silence until we’re way out in the country, driving past a sea of yellow flowers toward a horizon of low purple mountains.
Juneau’s fidgeting like crazy, and the longer she tries to fight the urge to ask me what I bought, the happier it makes me feel. She’s been freaking me out so much for the last eighteen hours or so, it’s kind of nice to finally be getting under her skin. I glance at the clock. Almost an hour passes in complete silence. I’m kicking myself for not thinking to ask to use the phone in the drugstore. But the thought of people chasing us has driven almost everything else from my mind, including the reason I’m driving her. Also, it’s so much fun watching Juneau squirm, I don’t mind putting off contacting my father a little longer.
Finally I reach forward to turn on the radio. Before I can touch the button, she blurts out, “What’d you get?”
“Well, Juneau, I’m glad you asked,” I say in my Dad voice. I hand her the small plastic bag from the floor in front of my seat. She opens it and pulls out a pair of black sunglasses. She stares at them, confused for a moment.
“It’s to help you look like a normal person,” I say.
“Thanks a lot,” she replies, but she cracks a little pleased smile.
“No problem.” I grin. “You have to peel this label off before you put them on,” I say, and reach toward the glasses. My hand brushes hers, and something electric passes between us. Juneau looks at me, surprised. I return my hand to the steering wheel and focus on the road and try to ignore the tingling in my fingers.