Walk Me Home (6 page)

Ralph doesn’t think hard.

“Not to me. He didn’t say a thing to me. But let me ask Jud. Teddy was pretty good friends with Jud. Can you hold a minute?”

“I think so. I’m on a pay phone.”

“I’ll be as fast as I can.”

Carly chews on her thumb while she’s waiting. Not her thumbnail, but the whole thumb. She watches Jen, who’s staring in fascination at something in the window of the gas station convenience store. As if she’s reading something written there.

Ralph’s voice makes her jump.

“You there, Carly?”

“Yeah, Ralph. I’m here.”

“Jud says Teddy went up to Trinidad. But that’s all he knows.”

“Trinidad? That sounds like another country or something.”

“Naw, it’s up in Northern California. On the coast. Little town up in the Redwoods. Up by Eureka. Nice up there. You could probably track him down, ’cause I’m thinking there can’t be more than a dozen contractors up in that neck of the woods. But Jud doesn’t know where he settled.”

“Oh,” Carly says.

“You good now?”

She begins to cry again. No. She’s not good. But there’s no point telling Ralph that because Ralph has already given all the help it was ever his to give.

“Yeah, thanks,” she says, trying to keep the crying out of her voice.

Then she hangs up fast because she knows she failed.

She walks back to Jen, who’s still staring at the window. Jen’s looking at a map. There’s a map of northeastern Arizona taped to the inside of the window.

“Smart, huh?” Jen says. “I bet this way they don’t waste so much time giving directions. Operator wouldn’t put you through, would she?”

Jen doesn’t look away from the map and see Carly’s tears, so maybe Carly has an extra minute to wrestle them back in.

“No,” she says, wiping her eyes roughly on her sleeve.

She’ll tell Jen. She will. But right now she has no idea how. She needs time to think.

“S’what I thought. I could’ve told you. Money makes the world go round.” She looks over at Carly. Takes in her condition. “Don’t get all bent about it. It’s no big deal. We’ll get some money soon.”

“Yeah.”

“Now look at this. This’ll kill you. This highway’s been going partly north. West, yeah. But also north. And if anything, we need to go west and south. We’ve already gone probably ten or twenty
miles out of our way. And now look. This’s where we are.” Jen points to a roughly drawn red arrow that marks their location. “And in just a couple miles, it turns and goes even farther north. And then it loops around and goes south again. I don’t want to go all that way out of our way. I think we need to cut through. You know. On these little roads. We need to get off this highway and go this way again.”

The pay phone rings. They both turn and look at it. But neither girl moves. It’s unsettling to Carly. As if the phone knows she’s here. But she forces her attention back to the map.

“But those roads…they’re so…”

They’re small and confusing. They’re such fine lines on the map. They’re probably just little residential dirt roads. Reservation roads. For locals. And not a one goes straight through. Or even straight. It’s a maze.

“So…what?”

“I feel like we’ll get lost.”

The phone is still ringing. It’s on what may be its twelfth ring. But Carly hasn’t been counting.

“We’ll just keep going west,” Jen says. “We’ll watch the sun.”

“Why is that phone ringing?”

“I dunno. Answer it.”

“Come on. Let’s just go.”

But as they’re walking out of the gas station lot, it hits her that maybe Ralph or Jud is calling her back. Maybe they know more after all. Maybe they found out, right after she called, that somebody else knew more.

“I’m gonna get that,” she says.

She grabs it up but doesn’t say hello. It feels too volatile to say hello.

“Are you there?” she hears. “Is somebody there?”

It’s not Ralph. It’s the operator. Her belly ices over with panic.

“Yeah…”

“Did you get the help you needed, honey, or should I call somebody for you?”

“No!” she shouts. Way too loud and defensive. Badly played. She just gave away a lot. “No, we’re fine now. He’s gonna come pick us up.”

But just as she says it, it hits her that maybe the operator stayed on the line the whole time she was talking to Ralph.

“Honey, do you and your sister have someplace safe to go right now?”

Carly slams the phone down.

“Come on,” she tells Jen. “We’re going. Fast.”

“Why? What?”

“The operator’s going to call somebody to come help us. We’re going to do just what you said. First road goes off to the left, we’ll take it. Get as far away from the highway as we can.”

“Maybe—” Jen begins.

Carly doesn’t let her finish. She can’t afford to. She can feel where this is headed. She grabs Jen by the sleeve, and they set off down the road double-time.

“We didn’t come all this way to get picked up by child services,” Carly says as they nearly jog. “If we’re gonna get put in different foster homes or something, we could’ve just sat where we were and waited for them to come and get us. We wouldn’t have had to go through all this. We didn’t go through all this for nothing.”

Jen never answers.

A road appears to their left. They have no idea what road it is or where it goes.

They take it.

By sundown they could be anywhere. They’re headed for the setting sun, but then the road keeps curving. They could be going around in a circle for all they know.

They’re in a different sort of neighborhood now. Reservation residential. A fence made of old discarded tires. Squat stone houses with three or four pickup trucks out front, stone mesas towering behind. Tiny wood or stone shacks with old motor homes or trailers parked nearby, often more than one, like inexpensive housing compounds. And though they don’t see a soul close-up—just plumes of dirt rising from tires on the next road over, or people sitting outside too far away for Carly to confirm her theory in their eyes—she’s nursing the distinct impression that they don’t belong here. They are outsiders in this place. She can feel it.

“Maybe just cut straight through,” Jen says.

They try that. But it’s brushy. Hard going. And Carly keeps getting a bad feeling they’re on private property. “Maybe we could sleep there,” Jen says, pointing.

There’s an old yellow school bus, sitting mostly down in a gulley. No tires. No windshield. No grill.

It’s cold. And they want someplace sheltered to sleep. They haven’t said so out loud. They haven’t needed to. It’s just a thing that’s there.

“Maybe,” Carly says.

Because it’s cold, but also because it’s more important than ever that they sleep somewhere. Because they haven’t eaten in over twenty-four hours. And Carly is running out of steam. The walking is hard with no road. And she’s upset all the way through her insides, and that’s sapped what little strength she had to begin with. But something bothers her about the school bus. It has towels or sheets or something over the back windows.

“I think maybe somebody lives there.”

“How could somebody live there?”

“Same reason we’re willing to sleep there, I guess.”

“Let’s at least go see.”

“But if there’s somebody in there…”

“Let’s just go a little closer.”

Carly tries to angle around toward the front of the bus so they can look through the missing windshield. But it’s hard to see. Especially in the dusky light. They creep a little closer.

“There’s a sheet across it on the inside, too. Somebody must be in there.”

“I’m just going to ask.”

“Don’t, Jen.”

But Jen cups her hands around her mouth and calls out, “Anybody there?”

A dog bursts out of nowhere and charges, teeth bared, barking and snarling at the same time. Filthy white with brown patches and a bib stained rusty red. Not huge but big enough. Carly can see his teeth flash in the fading light.

She turns and tries to run but immediately catches her foot and falls flat, scraping her palms and face on the gravelly dirt. She covers her head with her arms and waits to be savaged, praying Jen got away. But though she can still hear the dog’s fury, it’s not getting any closer.

In time she sits up and sees that Jen is standing her ground, holding one hand out in a stop sign for the dog. Talking to it.

“I’m going,” she says. “You don’t move.” She takes a step backward, never breaking eye contact. The dog moves in a step, snarling and barking. “Ho!” Jen shouts and holds the hand out again. The dog stops moving but does not stop howling with rage and flashing its teeth.

Go help her, Carly thinks, but she’s frozen. She just sits there in the dirt, watching Jen hold the dog at bay as she slowly backs away. To her humiliation, she thinks, Who’s the grown-up now?

A big male voice breaks the dusk. “Chua! Shut up and get in here!”

Silence.

The dog shrinks, turns, slinks back toward the school bus.

They run all the way back to the dirt road.

By the time they manage to get there, it’s nearly full-on dark, and Carly can’t stop crying. Literally can’t stop.

“It’s OK,” Jen says. “It’s fine. I’m OK. We’re both fine.”

But these tears are coming out. There is no reasoning with these tears. There is no logic to which they’ll respond.

Nearly an hour after sundown, picking their way along in the dark, they pass a property they can tell is deserted. Because it would be physically impossible to live there. The house is in pieces, its own roof having caved in on it and brought it down. In the overgrown yard is a turquoise Pontiac from the forties or fifties. A big old boat with flat tires and one cracked window.

“We could sleep in there,” Jen says. “Carly, you can stop crying now. Are you ever going to stop crying?”

“We could look.”

But those are just words. She can’t bring herself to go any closer.

Jen marches over and peers inside, then motions for Carly to come.

“It’s perfect,” Jen says. “Great big bench seats front and back.”

Jen opens the back door, and the metal of the body and door grind together, then snaps free with a report like a gunshot.

Carly jumps the proverbial mile. But then she steadies herself and approaches the car.

Jen is already bedded down on the backseat, the door wide open for Carly.

She tries to open the front door, but it’s locked, or rusted shut, so she climbs over Jen into the front and curls in on herself, shivering and letting go. Crying as if the crying she’s been doing up until now was nothing. A mild intro.

“I’m worried about you,” Jen says.

“I just need some sleep.”

But she thinks she won’t get much. She’s cold, she’s too upset, and she has a spring poking into her side.

She’s wrong. She sleeps.

ARIZONA

May 13

Sun pours through the dusty windshield onto Carly’s face. A door has opened on the car, waking her.

It must be late. The sun is nearly overhead. Still her teeth chatter.

Shooting pangs of emptiness radiate from her stomach. Her mouth is cotton dry. She winces as she opens her eyes.

On the passenger side floor of the old Pontiac, on a surprisingly well-preserved rubber mat protecting the faded carpet, is a coiled rattlesnake, apparently fast asleep.

Carly pulls back in slow motion and eases over the seat and into the back, expecting to land on Jen. But the backseat is empty, the back door wide open. She can feel the cool air of the desert morning. It feels colder inside the car than out.

She bolts out of the car, vaguely aware of the clanging of bells. Tinny bells. She slams the door fast.

She looks back through the window at the rattlesnake. It hasn’t stirred.

“Hey, Carly!” she hears. “Come and look at this.”

Jen is standing in the dirt road, completely surrounded by sheep. White sheep with big woolly bodies and skinny legs and elongated, droopy ears. Well over a hundred of them, moving along the road like a sheep river, parting to flow around Jen Island. About every fifth sheep is wearing a bell around its neck.

Now and then part of the procession leaps or bolts or turns suddenly, and then Carly sees they’re being herded from behind by a dog. A yellow dog with bizarre yellow eyes. She looks around for the person who goes with the sheep, but there’s no person. Only the dog.

When the dog pulls level with them, he stops cold, puts his head down, and barks at them. But not as viciously as the last dog. More bitter complaint and less flat-out assault.

“Why are Navajo dogs so mean?” she asks Jen.

“They’re not. They’re just doing their job.”

The dog looks to his sheep and sees they’re too far ahead. He abandons his complaint with the girls and runs to catch up.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” Jen says. “There were mice in that backseat with me. Three of them. Either that or I saw the same mouse three times.”

“I believe it.”

“Bet you didn’t have a mouse up front with you.”

“That’s true,” Carly says. “I didn’t have a mouse.”

They set off walking down the road together. Carly’s heels hurt, and she feels like she might be about to black out. But she doesn’t say so. She doesn’t even limp.