Red Fox Road

by Frances Greenslade

  “You know far more about engines than I do. Where should we start?”

  “There’s a thing called a decision tree. Dad told me about it. You go through these steps, one by one. One thing leads to another. I forget what you start with. Maybe battery.”

  One afternoon when he was working on the truck, Dad had drawn me a quick diagram with a pencil on a scrap of cardboard he’d been kneeling on in the driveway. I tried to picture it now and I could see it, the little box he’d drawn with two posts sticking up and a question mark over it. Does the battery have charge? I thought there was a step before that, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

  “We know we’ve got a good battery because the lights come on and they’re bright. And the horn works,” I told Mom.

  Most of the time, a no-start engine has to do with battery, Dad said. He’d drawn a circle around his battery picture and scribbled in a bunch of arrows pointing at it.

  “People start getting all complicated right away and overlook the obvious. Nine times out of ten, it’s just a loose connection on the post. If it makes a clink,” he told me, “or no sound at all, there’s a pretty good chance it’s either a dead battery or a poor connection, and that’s good, because if it’s the battery, it’s cheap and easy to fix.”

  Was I overlooking something obvious? Would the lights come on if there were a poor connection? I didn’t think so. They’d be dim at least, or flickering. It couldn’t be the battery.

  Mom swung her legs back and forth over the edge of the tailgate. “So if it’s not the battery, what comes next?”

  “The next thing, I think, is the starter. But…” I was thinking that it was probably nothing like that, since we knew the oil had leaked out. That was the obvious thing. But I didn’t want to disappoint Mom. I knew she wanted to try something.

  “But?…But what?”

  We had seen the dark pool of oil under the truck. As much as I wanted to think my way out of this, I knew that there was little chance of getting the truck going out here.

  “But—” I began again.

  “But, but! But me no buts, Francie!” She threw up her hands. “If there ever was a time to be clear it’s now.”

  Do you ever have the feeling that whatever you’re about to say is going to be the wrong thing? I don’t know why, but I get this feeling pretty often, and when I do, it’s like whatever is on the tip of my tongue just gets caught and won’t roll off. I don’t know exactly when this started, but I don’t remember it when Phoebe was alive.

  There’s a boy at school named Jack. I call him Jack the Jerk, though not to his face. Sometimes I go to speak in class and can’t, and then Jack the Jerk says, “Frozen Francie is at it again.” I give him my most furious, dagger-dripping look, because I think it’s what Phoebe would have done. Phoebe always had more answers than I do, but I can’t always guess what they’d be anymore. Anyway, it doesn’t stop him, but it does make me feel better.

  You would think that since Mom is a school counselor and she’s supposed to be so easy to talk to, I would have told her about Jack the Jerk by now. But I never have. The truth is, Mom also gets pretty frustrated with me sometimes when I freeze up.

  Now I tried to keep my voice steady. “I was going to say I’m not sure I remember how to check it,” I lied. It was true I didn’t remember, but that wasn’t what I had been about to say. I was going to say it wouldn’t help.

  “Well, think,” she said, softer this time. “Have a look at the manual. Maybe it’ll jog your memory.” She stared ahead at the road and I could tell she was sorry she’d been short with me. She was silent a few more minutes as I leafed through the pages of the manual, not really seeing them.

  “Why don’t you make us some of that fir needle tea? It’s starting to grow on me. And we should eat the bread and cheese. It’s going to go bad otherwise.”

  I turned the page on the advice that said, If a light fails to illuminate, have the vehicle serviced. An owner’s manual, I knew, was not going to give any step-by-step instructions for how to fix your own vehicle. I set it aside and went to get out the stove.

  “People aren’t supposed to be able to fix their own vehicles anymore,” Dad had told me more than once. “Not even the basics. Not even changing the oil. It’s a status thing. You’re supposed to be too busy to get out in your driveway or your back lane and slide under a vehicle and get your clothes and hands all dirty. You’re supposed to just pick up the phone and make an appointment, pay someone else to do all that. But people are missing out on the pleasure of it. If you can fix your own vehicle, you’ve got some control over your life. That’s why I want you to know how, Francie.”

  Mom jumped up into the back of the truck.

  “Francie?”

  I looked up from where I was digging out the stove.

  “You were smart to suggest we save the other granola bar yesterday. I’m sorry I was impatient. I’m hungry and I’ve barely slept. You know I’m proud of you, don’t you?”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.” She gave me a funny smile. “You always have.”

  Some families hug a lot and I guess they say things like Mom just said all the time. But our family isn’t like that. We tend to keep our feelings to ourselves and hope for the best. We hope that the other person just knows, and I think it usually works out all right. But it felt good when Mom said that. In the first moment, at least. In the second moment, I wondered why she’d said it at all and it scared me a little, because it was like one of those things someone says on their deathbed in movies.

  I once heard Mom tell a friend that she thought she hadn’t hugged Phoebe enough. She said she didn’t grow up with a lot of hugging in her family, so she supposed it wasn’t a habit she was in, but now she regretted it. You might think that she would then make sure she hugged me a lot more, but that didn’t happen. Not that I cared. I got it—it would have been weird to suddenly start hugging all the time like she was afraid that any minute I might die, too. It would have been a bit creepy. Just like now, when the thing that was meant to make me feel better actually made me feel worried. If that makes any sense. If there’s one thing I’ve figured out, it’s that stuff in families never does make a lot of sense and you might as well give up trying to be logical about it.

  The stove was lit. We had enough water for two small cups of tea now and a small cup of water each later. The bread had some mold spots on it, but I would toast it over the burner and it would be okay.

  “What’s this?” Mom said, holding up a small yellow box with some gauges on it that she’d dug out of the toolbox.

  “That’s a battery charger with a tire compressor on it.”

  “Okay, so not useful?”

  “It might be if we had a dead battery. And if it was charged.”

  “Or if we had a flat. But we don’t.”

  I nodded.

  We sat on the tailgate and drank our tea and ate our toasted, slightly burnt bread slowly and silently. It was a warmer day, only a few white fluffy clouds in that blue sky that was the color that had no name.

  I thought about the pool of oil that had soaked into the soil and stained the rocks under the truck and I thought about the clunking noise the engine made as it tried and failed to turn over. If there had been any chance of getting it going again, Dad would have tried it. He was good with engines, good with anything to do with vehicles. Sometimes he helped our neighbor across the back lane, a teenager named Duncan, who had an old Ford F-150.

  If Duncan had a problem with his truck, he’d knock on the back door, a signature knock he had like a code, and say, “Is Mr. F-F-F-Fox home?” He was tall and skinny with eyes the color of Okanagan Lake in the fall, a little startled, like the eyes of deer I’d catch in the flashlight beam in the backyard some nights, and he had a mass of dark curls that gave him a slightly wild look. He had a stutter, s
o when he asked for Dad it sometimes took a while for the words to come out. I knew what that felt like, and sometimes I wanted to tell him he didn’t need to bother; I knew who he wanted.

  Dad said Duncan panicked whenever something went wrong with his truck, because he had a weekend job at a deli in Okanagan Falls, a twenty-minute drive south of us, and he was afraid a big repair would mean he’d have to take his truck off the road and he’d lose his job. I heard Dad tell him, “Don’t worry. There’s not much on this old truck you can’t fix yourself. Nice and easy to work on.”

  I watched Dad help Duncan do the brakes on the Ford, replace the leaking radiator, install a new alternator, and I decided I liked Duncan, because he liked Dad and he always called him Mr. Fox, even though Dad said he could call him Leonard or even Len.

  * * *

  Although I hadn’t thought it would help me to look at the owner’s manual, I was getting to the end of it when I came across the diagrams of fuses and switches and then I remembered something.

  “Let’s pop the hood,” I said to Mom.

  “What are we doing?”

  “I know how to test the starter.”

  I have to admit I had a moment of crazy hope. I could picture the engine roaring to life and us bumping back down the road the way we’d come with me at the wheel.

  If we actually got the truck running, I knew that Mom would be driving, not me, but since it was my fantasy, I put myself in the driver’s seat, and while I was at it, I had Dad walking up the road toward us carrying two mugs of hot chocolate when he suddenly sees us coming. I don’t know why he would be walking, but I suppose it would make me even more of a hero to have to pick him up, too, and we’d all drive out to civilization and maybe I’d be on the news.

  Once the hood was open, I checked the battery cables just to be sure they were tight and that there was no corrosion on the posts. Then, following the diagram in the manual, I pulled out the fuse for the starter relay. It was a 5A, so I pulled out the one for the power mirrors, which was also 5A, and I popped it into the relay spot. I crossed my fingers.

  “Okay, Mom. You can try to start it.”

  The key in the ignition chimed as she turned it and my heart did a little flip, but then there was the same flat dead clunk. Mom dropped her head and arms to the steering wheel. I was so disappointed, tears sprang to my eyes and I tried to fight them back. It was stupid of me, since I knew in the first place it wasn’t going to work. But somehow I’d hoped for a miracle.

  For the next couple of hours, we ran through the other things I could remember from Dad’s decision tree, although I don’t think I did them in a logical order. I tapped on the starter with a screwdriver, swapped out some more fuses, and took off each spark plug cap and checked it, even though I didn’t really know what I should be looking for, and each time we tried to start it, there was that wild hope that faded a little with each failure.

  Eventually, Mom sighed and looked under the truck herself.

  “That’s a pretty big puddle of oil,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Goddamn it! Goddamn it!” She slammed her fists on the hood of the truck. I could tell she wanted to say more, but she stopped herself. She took a deep breath and looked at me. “We better go find some water before it gets too late in the day.”

  * * *

  We had two problems. How to find a source of water, and how not to get lost while we looked for it in the bush.

  “Let’s go.” Mom marched across the ditch toward the woods.

  “Mom, wait!” I called, then worried that I had said “Mom” in that way she hated. “I’m going to bring my compass and some kind of flag.”

  “We won’t go far. We’ll keep the road in sight.”

  “I know. I just think—I just want to keep track. Just in case.”

  “Hurry up, then.”

  I had a fluorescent orange T-shirt that would work as a flag. I dug it out of my backpack, along with the compass, a piece of paper and a pencil. I also strapped on my watch. I knew that it was easy to get lost even when you thought you were walking in a straight line. But also, if you have a compass, it’s pretty easy to keep track of where you’re going, so you can retrace your steps if you get disoriented.

  Mom and I got lost two years ago, walking the trails on Cypress Mountain in North Vancouver, which seems crazy since you’re practically in the city in that park. Maybe that’s why we didn’t pay that much attention to where we were going. Technically, we weren’t exactly lost, since we were still on the trail. But when it started to cool off and we were getting hungry, we suddenly kind of woke up and realized we didn’t know which way to go to get back to the car. Mom was mad at herself most of all. She said, “I’m the adult and I should have been paying better attention. But I just kind of zoned out for a while there.” We ended up walking for another hour and a half before we blundered onto the road by accident. We didn’t know if we were parked uphill or downhill from where we came out, but we picked downhill and we were right. We found the car after about half a mile of walking.

  Mom had said, “That was lucky.” And she was right. We had really only guessed about which way to go on the trails. We could have guessed wrong and ended up wandering out there all night.

  Zoning out is easy to do when you’re hiking. Ms. Fineday taught us that it’s important to be aware of your surroundings. Are there any features like a big rock, a hill or a strange stump or tree? Horizontal things are especially easy to notice in a forest, where most things are vertical: a fallen tree that’s caught in the crook of another tree, for instance. You make note of that so that you can look for it on your way back.

  Even better, you draw it on a little map so you don’t forget. And you can put a mark on the tree or rock for “home” side and “away” side. Another thing she taught us is to look behind ourselves as we walk. The forest looks completely different when you turn around and look at it from the other direction, the way you’ll look at it when you’re heading back. But most people forget that basic thing. Then, when they turn around to head home, nothing looks familiar. And that’s when the doubt and the panic start to set in.

  Mom and I looked out into the woods on both sides of the road to see if anything seemed like it promised water—a creek or a place where snow could still be. I knew a creek would probably have more greenery around it, more deciduous trees like cottonwood or willow. But we scanned the woods and didn’t see anything like that.

  “Let’s go north. We can keep the road in view,” Mom said. “At least we’ll be heading toward anybody coming in.”

  I had a strange bubbly feeling in my chest as we stepped off the road into the trees. It was fear, but also something like excitement. I knew that it was my responsibility not to let us get lost, and I knew that even if she wasn’t saying so, Mom knew this too.

  We needed water, or would soon, and it would be out here somewhere. But how far would we have to go to find it? Some crows squawked in the branches. A chipmunk chattered at us, then rushed up a tree and sat on a branch, scolding us. We walked in a little ways. The straight, thin trunks of trees surrounded us, with their scaly gray bark, black branches and beards of dry lichen. Already, at that distance, it was hard to make out the gap in the forest that the road made. You hear about lost people’s bones being found within a few steps of a road. If you don’t know the road is there, it’s invisible. It just looks like you’re surrounded by miles and miles of trees.

  I took a compass reading, pointing at a rise of land in the distance, then marked it and the return reading on my map, where I’d drawn in the road. I wrote down the time.

  Mom turned. “Stay close to me,” she said.

  The rich piney smell of forest wrapped us as we walked. I remembered rocking in a hammock, sun on the lake, waves lapping the shore and the sound of Grandma rattling dishes as she set the picnic table for lunch.

  Pay atte
ntion, I reminded myself. But one tree looked like the next and the next—straight and skinny, pale lichen hanging from the branches like torn rags, like the ones by Grandma’s cabin. I found the rise of land again and checked the compass.

  At the cabin at dusk, the deer would step quietly from nowhere and their tawny shapes moved down to the lake. We would watch them from the screened-in porch as they bent and drank. Their ears would flicker, and they would turn to stare at us. I shook my head to clear the memory.

  “Let’s cross the road and make our way back up the other side,” Mom said.

  I wrote down the time again, took another compass reading and we walked toward the road. We were closer than we’d thought.

  We got back to the truck without finding any water. Mom took a little sip from what we had left and passed it to me. Now that we were almost out, I found myself thirstier than ever. I wanted a big glass of cold water from the tap, full to the brim. I wanted cold iced tea, with ice cubes in it.

  “Francie, there’s something we need to consider,” Mom said as she put the cap back on what was left of the water. She took a deep breath. “It’s possible that there may not be…” She paused. “…that we may need to find our own way out of here. I still think someone will find us. But it may take a while and—”

  “You said ‘someone,’ ” I said. My eyes filled with tears. “Why did you say ‘someone’?”

  Mom looked into my eyes and went to speak, but I turned away from her and took off running down the road, south, the way that Dad had gone. I sprinted over rocks and branches and downed logs, dove into the thick woods and kept going. I could hear Mom calling me back. I ran until I couldn’t hear her voice anymore, then I stopped. Blood pounded in my ears. Sun slanted through the feathery branches and splashed the forest floor with spots. I sat down in its light with my back against a tree. My breathing slowed and the tears stopped coming. Where was the road? I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Dad had walked through here, following what was left of the road. But there was no more road. There was just a dense jumble of trees, deadfall, rocks and hillocks.