North

by Frank Owen

  She worked a shoulder under his armpit, and they began to make their way over there. Like war wounded, thought Felix. The woman smelt of bleach and a heavy floral scent that didn’t hide the sweat.

  He sighed as she slid him into the cracked vinyl of the booth. ‘Thank you.’

  She stood in front of him, hands on her hips, deciding what to make of him. ‘You just stay here, and I’ll see if I can rustle something up for you in the back. And listen. You see a light, you stay the heck away from it. Right?’

  ‘Lady,’ said Felix, and this time his smile was real. ‘I’m too tired to die.’

  The woman snorted and sloshed back behind the counter. When she came back a while later with a tray, it was stocked with a pot of coffee, two cups, paper towels and about a dozen donuts. They probably weren’t fresh, but then neither was he, Felix told himself.

  ‘But what are you going to have?’ he said.

  She twisted her lips and he added, fast, ‘Just kidding. This looks great. More than great. Heaven on earth.’

  She was pouring him a cup. ‘Made fresh with today’s water, and I don’t care how you usually take it. You need the sugar,’ she said, and added three heaped spoonfuls. Then she poured coffee for herself.

  ‘Now you just back up and tell me what’s going on here,’ she said.

  Felix thought: Keep it simple, asshole. Whatever you tell her now has to stand the telling to everyone else who comes after.

  She was staring hard at him. ‘I’m Norma. Where you from, anyway?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know,’ said Felix. He took his first cautious sip, and it was true, that stuff was HOT COFFEE, and goddam if it wasn’t the best thing he’d ever tasted.

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  He drank again, not caring that his mouth cried out in protest, and leant forward to get a donut, wondering if she could be trusted with the truth.

  ‘What if I told you I was from south of the border? That the storm washed me all the way up the North Platte?’

  He selected a donut and took a bite, dusty with sugar and slick with oil, and it made him want to cry. He tried to swallow, coughed, and chased it with more coffee.

  Norma’s eyes had narrowed. ‘Then I’d go into the kitchen and come back with the biggest knife I could find.’ She looked at the tray, then picked up a teaspoon. ‘Wouldn’t even have to go to the kitchen. I could cut you down with this.’ She waved it at him. ‘But then, why dirty a spoon? I reckon a rolled-up paper towel would do it. I could just about beat your brains out with a feather.’

  Felix held up the hand without the donut in it. ‘I get it. I get it.’

  ‘Fuck the South,’ Norma said softly, and the color rose from her throat, a blotchy red that might have been pretty on a thinner woman. ‘Pardon my French, but fuck them for all of this.’ She waved a hand out of the window.

  He chewed and swallowed. ‘Good thing I’m from New York, then.’

  ‘Big city boy, huh?’

  ‘Back in the day. Spent a little time in Des Moines too.’

  ‘So what you doing here, then?’

  ‘Heard about these donuts.’

  For the first time, Norma laughed, her gullet pink and vast. Felix looked away and kept chewing. He concentrated on the empty car park with its littering of sticks and leaves and debris. Far off, way on the other side of the road, he could see an animal moving. He swallowed, the dough dry and catching in his throat. Something out there was walking slowly, loping and tall. He squinted his eyes in disbelief and leant in against the glass.

  ‘What the fuck’s that?’ He let go of his coffee to point.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There.’

  ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘Norma, I think it’s a giraffe.’

  ‘Well, then, mister. Welcome to Saratoga.’

  5

  While Felix had lain half dead in his sapling sling, a vehicle was motoring north along the highway. The two passengers in the back of the pickup were quiet, mostly – shell-shocked – listening as the radio fuzzed in and out of tune and the rain clattered on the roof. Every now and again Dyce kept leaning in to get the words of a song, or the plinking of a riff that he recognized from his long-ago life. Why couldn’t he sleep, the way Vida was trying to do? The pickup was warm and dry, but he was antsy. He slid his hand into his jacket pocket and fingered the machine heads off the old mandolin. They were still there. He turned them over between his fingertips, until they grew warm as blood. How long had they been driving? Forty minutes? An hour? Things seemed different here in the North. He was having a hard time getting his bearings.

  He remembered Ears McCreedy, and unhooked the stuffed squirrel from his belt and set the creature on the seat beside him. Ears stared blankly ahead at the new world, blackened and sodden but as much himself as he had ever been. The water that seeped out of his stuffing and onto the leather seat was stained red by the Colorado dirt packed inside him, but Vida paid him no mind. She was pretty cut up herself, especially around the thighs, any fool could see that: the razor wire at the Wall had done its job. She half lay in the back seat beside him with her eyes closed, and Dyce felt something hurt in his chest as he watched her fighting for sleep. If she hadn’t made it here with him, he would have given up. He owed her his life – and also his love. Vida was all he had left now that Garrett and Bethie were dead. Him and Vida and Ears McCreedy: the Holy Trinity.

  He reached over, feeling for her hand, then knotted his fingers gently with hers. She squeezed him hard and let her hand go slack. Dyce moved closer to her and slid his arm under her back. She nuzzled against him.

  ‘You smell good,’ she said, her voice slow and muffled in his armpit. ‘How come you still smell so good?’

  ‘I told you I was magic.’

  He knew she was smiling, but it was only a moment. She drew her breath in sharply as the pickup jolted. Dyce looked out the window: they were rolling into a gas station.

  ‘Just need some dinosaur juice,’ said Buddy in his high voice. He spoke loudly; overhead, the forecourt roof creaked and groaned, and the wind buffeted the car on its suspension, trying to roll it over onto its back like a beetle.

  The little man adjusted his baseball cap – looked like Buddy still loved his HASH HOUSE HARRIERS – and then pawed through his wallet. ‘I’ll pump if you pay inside. Here’s my card. Get whatever else you need – toothpaste, lady things . . . just not the lobster.’ He sucked his teeth and smiled, and Vida ducked her head in return. ‘That okay with you guys?’

  ‘That’s great. Real kind of you,’ mumbled Dyce. He took the card between his index and middle fingers, like a cigarette, then turned to Vida. ‘You want to come?’ He knew the answer.

  ‘Same as always,’ she told him.

  Dyce waited a moment to gather himself, and then forced open the door against the wild weather. He ducked his head back into the car and Vida scooted over and settled her arm around his shoulders.

  ‘Better you sit tight, little lady,’ offered Buddy, but his words were lost in the wind as the door slammed shut again.

  The shop front was a fluorescent window into the past, and Vida felt her pulse thrumming. It was like that corner store where she had once bought her comics, back when the shelves were full and you could still choose. She felt her head swim, but pulled back in time. There was no going back there. This was the present, and it would be their future too if she had anything to do with it. There was no way she would let Dyce see all that food and warmth and wealth by himself. He’d never come back!

  The shop swam in electric light and it made the South seem long ago and far away, as though the division had happened hundreds of years ago. What was it now? How long had that wall been up? Jesus. Vida didn’t know. It hadn’t been her whole life: that was all the sense she could make of it. But the years didn’t pass the same without the notches to mark them by, did they? People needed celebrations to tell them where they were, to anchor them in the present – Thanksgivings, Christ
mases, New Years; and the other, secret ones her mama celebrated, half defiant, the ones that went all the way back to when humans first wrung ceremony from a hunt or a birth or the dying of someone they loved. Vida had no cowries or flowers or bodies shrouded in springbok skin; ‘as long as I can remember’ was her calendar. That and her monthlies, though they had been sparse and unreliable. The Weatherman – he knew the exact answer: their real history was lodged like dirt in his wrinkles.

  Now Vida and Dyce paused at the doors, which blasted open at their approach, like a rocket ship. They leant there, acclimatizing in the weightlessness of the false stillness while the air freshener spritzed them. Outside in the wind Buddy’s pickup rocked on its suspension.

  And then – the other smells! Vida’s nose wrinkled. How could the pale girl at the counter live with the oily stink of the corndogs and pies, lined in rows under the hot lights? Beside the teller someone had set a plastic bin, and drops from the ceiling plinked into it. She took no notice, perched on her stool at the till. Dyce looked up at the brown stain on the roof and thought: That would be easy to fix. So why don’t they fix it? As they watched, the girl opened another packet of Fritos, and the nitrogen hissed out from the packet, like space rations. She ate at a steady, determined pace, hardly noticing what went into her mouth.

  ‘Help you?’ She was looking at them with interest while her hand did its work. Not suspicious yet, but close. Vida tried to stand with her slashed leg behind the less damaged one. No need to freak anyone out. Yet.

  ‘Jesus.’ Dyce was breathing at the shelves, packed tight and neat with a hundred things he had never thought to see again. ‘Jesus.’ He kept trying to catch himself. Don’t stare, you stupid fuck, he thought. Try not to look like the village idiot here.

  ‘Not exactly Jesus,’ said the girl, and grinned. There were bits of red potato chip lodged between her teeth. Her hand was dipping, hypnotic, into the packet, and then moving to the Styrofoam cup beside her.

  Heaven, thought Vida. One, two, three Fritos, and then a sip of coffee. Her mouth was watering.

  ‘This is Old Testament weather,’ said the girl. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Slurp. ‘And Jay See calmed the storms, didn’t he? Pacifist. That out there is his daddy’s work. When last you see a rainbow?’

  They gawped at her.

  ‘Exactly.’ The disaster was satisfying. She knew she was safe. ‘Hope you folks’ve been taking your vitamins, drinking the tap water and all that. After the storms everyone seems to get sick. Low immune systems, you know?’ She kept on eating as she talked, sucking the spice off the top of every chip, spitting tiny crumbs on the counter. ‘Now how can I help you?’

  ‘We’re good, thanks,’ said Dyce finally. ‘Just looking for a couple of basics.’

  She waved a hand. The tips of her thumb and first two fingers were stained too.

  ‘That’s all we do. Milk, bread, smokes. Just don’t come looking for a combine harvester.’ She laughed at her own joke and Dyce tried a smile. ‘No offence, but your eyes look like shit, dude. If you want to stay baked, I guess now is the time, right? But there’s drops for that round the side aisle, near the mouthwash.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They split up and moved slowly up and down the shelves, Vida making automatically for the sign spelling out FEMININE HYGIENE. She’d thought to do it because of the trickle of blood she’d had to hide from Dyce in the locomotive museum. But standing in front of the shelves with their flowered boxes and rustling pads like decks of cards, she realized that whatever it was, it was gone. One-off. Freak occurrence, like the weather, right? Her mama always said that stress could jam up your insides even if you were regular as clockwork, but she had also said that it only took a moment of pleasure to jog a woman’s ovaries into doing their job. Vida took a pack of maxi pads anyway: they were good for all sorts of things. You never could tell, and besides, Buddy was picking up the tab.

  She made sure she was out of sight and turned to get a good look at her hurt leg under the store lights. There weren’t a lot of slashes but there were a couple of deep ones. She could feel the muscle complaining underneath it, and that was a bad sign. She leant in closer and saw the flesh peeling back in clean strips, like an undone zipper. Fuck. It wasn’t bleeding too badly – the cold of the night air had seen to that, and she was no fool, neither. All that staunching on the drive was doing its work. But still. She needed stitches. How long did she have before the true extent was noticed? She limped behind a Gatorade display to get to Dyce and hurry him up before the counter girl saw the whole sorry mess and called the hospital or the cops.

  He was still studying the cotton swabs and the condoms and the blister packs of antacid, and when he saw her coming he waved something at her. When she got to him, Vida caught his hand so she could see what it was: a traveler’s sewing kit, complete with tiny scissors. Christ, she thought. He was serious about the stitches.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I wasn’t getting in close back there just to hear Billy Ray Cyrus.’ He jerked his head outside, where Buddy had finished pumping gas and was back in the cab, arms folded, staring into space. ‘I was watching how he drove. It’s easy – same as my dad taught me and Garrett. You see any bigger scissors anywhere?’

  Vida felt her heart sink. ‘Scissors? Dyce, what for?’ She tried to keep her voice down. The counter girl would think they were having a fight.

  ‘Looks like you two gonna need a basket,’ called the girl, on cue.

  ‘Thanks,’ Dyce called back. He wandered to the front of the shop and back again with a beat-up wire basket.

  ‘Dyce!’ Vida hissed. ‘What the fuck?’

  He made jabbing motions at her neck with the little packaged sewing scissors, their blades dull under the lights.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘We’re not here on vacation, Vida. It’s Fuck Renard time, remember? We got no business further north. We got to see who came through the border, try to find the others, regroup – and then we need to visit a little Southern justice on these assholes. For that we need a car. And we got one, right here.’

  ‘Are you insane?’ She slapped the thigh of her damaged leg, and instantly regretted it. ‘You’ve seen this, right? You know it’s going to get gangrene or something? And what? You’re just going to slash Buddy? The guy who rescued us? The guy whose card we’re using right now? And then what? Are you planning to take over the whole fucking continent?’

  He stared at her, mute, his eyes black with anger, and her heart jogged with fright. You don’t know all of him, Ruth’s voice said. Watch your step here, baby girl.

  She tried again, calmer this time. ‘Look. How about we start small? Like one decent night’s sleep, for starters? Something to eat? And then plan this . . . this . . . whatever we’re going to do properly.’

  Dyce looked sulky, but closed his hand over the sewing scissors and dropped them into the basket. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay is right, you asshole. What is wrong with you? Now get me out of here before I fall down.’

  Dyce deflated. Her face was an earnest oval in the shop light, the cheeks still childishly chubby. There was an old scar in the middle of her top lip that he’d not noticed before, as though the whole of the South was more dimly lit than this lone fluorescent one-stop.

  ‘You know,’ he said, and the humor crept back into his voice, ‘you’re cute when you’re upset.’

  ‘Really? You want a spade or you just gonna keeping digging with your hands?’

  ‘I’m being serious.’

  ‘Well, it’s a match made in heaven. I’ve been upset twenty-four-seven since I met you.’

  ‘Guess I got my work cut out, then.’

  ‘Guess you do. Now give your arm to the lady.’

  They went, casual and slow, to the counter and mooned over the corndogs.

  ‘I haven’t had one of these in years,’ Vida told the till girl.

  ‘Heart attack on a stick. But you go
ahead and take one. It’s on the house, because I like the look of you.’ Vida grinned and the girl passed her a brown paper bag, her oily reddish fingerprints on it. Dyce paid for the gas and their purchases with the card, scrawling a signature that the girl didn’t check. She kept looking out, suddenly gloomy and resigned.

  ‘You folks do me a favor,’ she said. ‘If this flood comes any higher, I want you to remember there’s a girl at this here gas station, right? Tell them to send a boat. And tell them to be quick, ’cause I’m real pretty.’ She smiled, and they saw that it wasn’t only the potato chips: her teeth were streaked with fine lines from all the coffee she must have drunk over the years she had been sitting behind the till. She was hoping that it was the real-deal, true-blue Hundred-Year Storm, wasn’t she? Because then she wouldn’t have to finish her shift. Vida felt sorry for her.

  The doors sealed behind them again and they stood under the lip of the roof, watching the rain turned into a yellow curtain by the gas-station lights, like they were on stage.

  When they climbed back into the car, Buddy hailed them and gave Dyce a jovial slap on the shoulder. ‘Junior! Where’s my change?’ He took his card back and stowed it in his wallet. ‘Got what you needed?’

  ‘Sure did,’ said Vida, and tried to smile at him. ‘Buddy, you’re an angel.’

  ‘A saint,’ said Dyce. ‘Thanks, man.’

  Buddy grinned and stuck his hand inside the neck of his shirt. When he pulled it out again, he was holding a silver crucifix on a chain. ‘Gotta do what the man said, right? Love your neighbor and all that?’

  Dyce grimaced. There was nothing for free. He shifted forward in his seat again as Buddy put the car into drive and pulled off into the pelting rain, swiveling his neck to talk as the vehicle leapt forward. Vida watched Dyce’s face side-on. He was memorizing every movement Buddy was making – the undersized feet shifting from accelerator to brake; the small hands flicking the indicators and the paddles that dimmed the brights for the lone truck that passed in the opposite direction.