Jaxon With an X

by D. K. Wall

  Thinking out loud more than talking, he mumbled, “Who the hell leaves a little kid alone on a highway? Especially in this weather.”

  “Scum.”

  The two men sat in their respective cars, warm and comfortable but thinking of how cold and lonely it would be walking these mountainous roads.

  3

  I slap my hands on my thighs, willing my frozen muscles to move. As I take a step forward, a scraping sound—metal dragging across pavement—comes from behind me, accompanied by the roar of heavy engines. The rock canyon walls reflect strobing yellow lights. I turn as a pair of snowplows round the bend, their blades scooping snow off the pavement and throwing it in a high arc to the side of the road.

  Never let them see you.

  Especially them.

  Government people. The worst kind of humans. They have all these rules telling people what they can and can’t do, even on their own land. And they’ll take that land if they want to, just like they took his grandpappy’s land and made him poor. Government people can’t be trusted, so never, never, never let government people see you.

  Government people drive those big snowplows roaring down the highway, so I have to hide.

  I turn to the side of the road in a feeble attempt to run for the camouflage of shadows, but my feet, numb from walking in the freezing snow, slip from under me. I slam to the ground on my belly, knocking the air from my lungs. The world goes gray, and the guardrail slips in and out of focus. I suck the frigid air into my lungs, desperate for strength, struggling to push myself up onto my hands and knees. Too cold, hungry, and weak, I collapse onto the ground and gasp for air. The bright lights of the approaching vehicles haven’t reached me, but my shadow is coming into focus on the boulders in front of me. I have to hurry. His command echoes in my brain:

  Never let them see you.

  I wriggle my fingers through the frozen layers of snow and ice to gain purchase on the asphalt below. Inch by inch, I drag my body forward. A nail rips off the middle finger of my left hand. I hold my arm up in the growing light, startled to see fresh blood dripping around the dangling nail. For seconds I feel nothing, my frozen body refusing to acknowledge the loss until a searing pain flashes up my arm. I wince against the agony, but it shocks my body into action and gives me the strength I need.

  Kicking with my feet, I slide on my belly across the ground and under the guardrail. I roll into the weeds and land in a pile of discarded trash. Curling into a small ball and cradling my injured hand, I hide in the shadows and pray that the drivers of those roaring machines didn’t notice my escape.

  The front-mounted plow scrapes across the road and clears a path, allowing the chains on the giant tires to clatter against the newly bare pavement. The sounds echo off the walls around me. The first truck roars past in the far lane, the ground vibrating as its blade rakes across the asphalt, hurling the offending snow into the near lane. It rattles off the metal guardrail with a deafening sound as the ice pings the metal.

  I try to roll away from the falling debris, but my movement must have caught the attention of the driver of the second plow. We lock eyes, and his head swivels to keep me in his sight as he passes. His mouth forms a shocked O, and then I am pummeled with the slush falling around me. Chunks of ice ricochet off of the rocky cliff. A mixture of freezing cold water, ice, snow, and salt hammer my aching body and soak my clothes.

  The truck brakes hard, stopping the small cluster of cars following him in the safety of the freshly exposed pavement. The driver jumps out of the cab and runs alongside the road, shouting and searching, but he can’t see me buried under the piles of snow. He and the driver of the other plow argue, but I can’t hear their words over the roar of the wind.

  One of them grabs an orange cone off the back of his plow and settles it over the guardrail post. He then climbs back into his vehicle. I hear the air brakes and the grind of gears, the plows resuming their clearing of the road.

  As the noise fades, I raise my head, snow sliding down the neck of my shirt, and watch the last of the taillights disappear around the next curve. Shivering, I slide back under the rail and onto the pavement. I stagger to my feet and stand, weaving in the wind. The sky remains pitch-black with no hint of a coming sunrise. I doubt I will live long enough to see it.

  I wrap my arms around my body, my drenched clothing already freezing against my skin, and take another step down the road.

  4

  Patterson’s radio crackled, the warm, soothing voice of the dispatcher muffled by static in the remote location. “A snowplow operator says he saw the boy on the side of the east-bound lanes a quarter mile beyond mile marker three. White male, approximately twelve years old, five-foot-two, one hundred pounds, shaggy dark hair, flannel shirt, blue jeans.”

  The trooper and deputy exchanged glances as Patterson picked up his microphone. “Do they have him?”

  “Negative. He scrambled under the guardrail, toward the river. They looked for him. Couldn’t locate but marked the exact spot with an orange cone.”

  “Bunch of orange cones in the gorge, dispatch.” Construction repairs were a constant hazard, thanks to the numerous mudslides.

  “Yes, but they said they put it on the guardrail support itself. Said it would be obvious.”

  “HP Notified?”

  “Highway Patrol ETA is thirty minutes. Closest is down near Asheville.”

  “Ten-four. Responding.”

  As Patterson shifted his vehicle into gear, the trooper called out, “Snowplow operators. Good sighting.”

  “Best we’ve had since that trucker.”

  “Good luck. Call if you need me.”

  With a nod to the Tennessee trooper, Patterson rolled his window up and maneuvered his cruiser through the accumulating snow back onto the deserted highway and reentered North Carolina. He accelerated and pushed the car as hard as he dared around the sharp curves as the chains on his tires clacked against the pavement. He struggled to keep his car between the lane markers disappearing from view in the drifting snow, but he didn’t want to miss the golden opportunity provided by the best lead of the night.

  Snowplow operators memorized every curve and pothole from their regular sweeps for snow removal. They knew where ice and snow accumulate, where a dip in the road could catch the blade and twist the steering wheel from the impact. If they said just east of mile marker three, that’s where the boy was. Patterson thought the long, cold night might end on a good note yet.

  The deputy’s spirits rose as the mile marker glowed in his headlights, its “3” barely visible under the crusting ice. A few hundred yards later, a reflective orange cone perched atop the guardrail. He scanned the shadows for any movement as his wipers clunked back and forth, shoveling the accumulating powder off the windshield. The boy had to be close.

  He slowed the car to a crawl, rubbed his tired eyes, and cursed the lack of visibility. The defroster ran full blast, pumping warm air but struggling to stay ahead of the encroaching haze building on the inside of the glass. The wipers fought against the accumulating snow outside. He peered along the beam of his headlights and scanned the sides of the road, but the snowflakes swirled in a blinding fury and obscured his view.

  He swiveled his bright searchlight and strained to see anything in the dark gloom. The brilliant beam illuminated the edge of the road, but his spirits sank as he continued to see nothing. The blowing snow erased any signs of footprints. The plows had piled snow several feet deep along the edge of the highway, deep enough to hide the giant boulders. They certainly could have hidden the body of a child.

  5

  I stagger down the side of the road, my arms wrapped around my body, trying to preserve any heat left inside my ice-encrusted clothes. I have been cold before, but never like this. But I haven’t been warm much either.

  Sometimes, back there, I was allowed outside. I would swing the ax, splitting logs, pile firewood, cut brush away from the house with a sling, or dig holes as deep as he demanded, spending ever
y minute under his critical eye as he sat in the shadows, caressing his shotgun, silent except for hurled criticisms.

  Those are the best memories I have. Working, moving my muscles, and taking pride in my accomplishments felt good. His harsh words would ring in my ears—I was too slow or doing it wrong—but they were simply the price I paid to be out in the midst of the hottest summer day. Suffocating humidity cloaked the still air, but the shade and altitude kept the temperatures cool. Beams of sunlight penetrated the thick canopy of leaves wriggling their way to the moist ground and dancing among the detritus from rotting trees and vegetation.

  Detritus. That’s a good one. Loose material such as rock fragments or organic particles that results directly from disintegration. It felt good between my bare toes, a welcome respite to the hard-packed floor of the basement. I savored the time outdoors, as rare as it was.

  Soon enough, though, he tired of watching me work. I stored the tools under his incessant gaze, which prevented me from smuggling even the smallest implement. Then he marched me back inside the gloomy house, where the air sat stuffy and still. The grimy windows filtered the indirect light. No electric lights illuminated the interior, so the house was always cloaked in thick, cool shadows.

  While being outside was a delight, being inside was not. I never wanted to linger, praying under my breath that he wanted nothing else until he extracted his keys, unlocked the padlock, and opened the cellar door. Lest he changed his mind, I moved quickly down the creaky steps and into the dank room below.

  Only a little light slipped through the few small, rectangular windows of broken glass high above our heads. I knew from my time outdoors that the portals were mere inches above ground level, hidden behind the weeds and brush growing against the house, but inside, they were out of our reach, just below the floor joists.

  A hint of sunlight but nothing more leached through to us below. The stone walls and dirt floor kept the temperatures cool through the day. At night, in the darkness, the room chilled, and we shivered in our sleep. Still, the summer was more tolerable than the rest of the year.

  Spring brought torrential rains. Another terrific word: torrent—a violent stream of a liquid.

  Violent was right. The temperature plummeted. Lightning flashed through the sky, briefly illuminating our world below. The crashing of thunder followed, felt through the trembling walls as it rattled the windowpanes. And then the water would fall in waves. It seeped underground and through the walls of the basement, leaving slick, slimy layers of mold on the exposed fieldstone, chilling our bodies if we dared lean against them. We huddled in the center of the dark room, wrapped in threadbare blankets, shivering and hoping to steal body heat from each other. We warmed our hands from a flickering candle or a smoking oil lamp when we were lucky enough to have those, which was only when he forgot and left them behind.

  Despite the frigid nights, at least spring brought the promise of summer. The falling temperatures and shortening days of autumn, however, hinted at the misery of the winter to come. The leaves fell from the trees outside, so more sunlight hit our sparse windows, but that only teased us as the days grew shorter and the nights longer. We would wake most mornings to our own breath forming fog in the air.

  The winters were the worst of all. Fierce winds whipped over the mountain ridges, rattling the denuded tree branches before whistling into our confines through the gaps of those meager windows. Snow trickled through the shattered glass and piled into drifts on the dirt floor, creating yet another obstacle for our bare feet. We wrapped them in the burlap sacks we used as blankets. We weren’t allowed shoes.

  The temperatures dropped so much on the worst days that the moisture accumulating on those stone walls froze into sheets of thin ice, removing even the slight comfort of being able to recline against that support. The chill pooled and extended its icy tentacles throughout our dungeon, making escape from its arctic grip near impossible.

  Upstairs, the logs I had carefully gathered and stacked during the warmer months blazed in the old stone fireplace. Plastic taped over the frosty windows trapped the radiant heat and kept the temperature inside his little den tolerable, though the rest of the drafty house was barely better than being outside.

  The crumbling chimney restricted the escaping smoke, so some of it curled through the room and streaked the walls with soot. The fumes slipped under the cellar door and crept down the steps, taunting us with the scent of heat without giving us any of its comfort.

  But not even the chance to warm ourselves in front of those flames made any trip upstairs worthwhile. There are things worse than being cold. Much worse.

  When he opened the door and stood at the top of those stairs, scanning us as we cowered in the shadows, we always prayed the same thing—Pick someone else. Not me. Please, not me.

  He would indicate his selection with a gesture or a mumbled name. Those of us unchosen would cast our eyes down at the ground, silently whispering our gratitude. The poor boy selected would look to us with wide, begging eyes, knowing in his heart that we were doing what he would have done if one of us had been selected but begging and praying this time would be different.

  It never was.

  We never revolted. None of us except the selectee wanted the man to change his mind and pick someone else instead. I didn’t want to hear my name. No one else did either. The condemned, knowing we were not going to rise up to defend him, would trudge up the stairs, resigned to his fate.

  Hours later, the door would open, and the boy would slink back downstairs, curl in a corner, and cry until exhaustion brought sleep. When he finally awoke, we carried on as if nothing had happened. Some topics were better not discussed. We all knew what went on upstairs.

  We also knew that sometimes the door never reopened to return the chosen one. We never discussed that, either, mostly because we couldn’t decide whether it was better to return or not.

  But now I know the answer. Anywhere, even freezing to death in a snowstorm, was better than there.

  The chilly basement, even with its ice-covered walls and drafty windows, afforded some protection from winter’s assault. Out here, I have nothing to block the howling wind and blowing snow. But I never plan to return, even if the only alternative is that the cold kills me.

  I am here, wherever here is. That’s an improvement.

  Back there, death was certain.

  Out here, it’s only likely.

  6

  Dispirited, Deputy Patterson reached for the microphone to report his lack of success when a shadow a hundred feet up the road stood out from the others. Training his searchlight down the road, he watched a figure stumbling along the edge. He closed the gap with his car, balancing his fear that the boy would bolt over the guardrail against his desire to be as close as possible before getting out on foot. His luck held. The boy didn’t break his stumbling stride.

  As the boy’s shadow took shape, Patterson assessed his target. He was barely over five feet tall and maybe one hundred pounds. His shaggy hair was coated in snow. But it was his clothing that shocked the deputy the most. A tattered flannel shirt flapped in the wind. Baggy jeans were cinched around his waist with a hemp rope threaded through the belt loops and knotted in the front. He didn’t have visible boots or shoes. Instead, what appeared to be burlap seed bags were wrapped around his feet and tied with twine. No coat, hat, or gloves protected him from the storm. With so little protection and the first report hours earlier, he should have been dead under a drift of snow.

  Patterson pulled his patrol car into the breakdown lane a few feet behind the boy and shifted the car into park. He pushed open the driver’s door and stepped into the howling storm. He tried to shout a friendly hello, but the wind whipped across his face and ripped the words away.

  The boy paused, appearing to have heard him, and slowly turned his head. His ice-crusted eyebrows glinted in the lights as he faced the deputy. Patterson held his breath, watching the boy debate his options, knowing he was too far away to stop
him if he decided to scramble over the cliffs. After several agonizing seconds of indecision, the boy shrugged and swayed in the wind.

  Maybe, Patterson thought, he was too exhausted to continue to hide. He pulled his own padded coat tight against his body and stepped around the open door and in front of the idling car. The lights stretched his shadow down the road beyond the approaching boy as he called out, “Son, are you okay?”

  In the bright lights, Patterson could see the boy’s eyes widen in fear. He hesitated for a second as their gazes locked. To the deputy’s surprise, the boy turned and bolted toward the edge of the road.

  The boy’s sudden movement caught Patterson flat-footed. He watched the boy pivot and race toward the guardrail and the boulders beyond. The burlap on the fleeing kid’s feet slipped and slid on the snow-covered road, slowing his escape.

  With the deputy’s heavy shoes gripping the slick ground, he closed the gap between them. He reached out and snagged the kid’s shirt collar. They stumbled together, lost their footing, and crashed hard to the pavement, the boy’s chin plowing through the snow. The deputy planted his hand firmly on the boy’s back, pinning him to the ground. The kid’s quivering body recoiled from the touch, and he struggled wildly to escape. A high-pitched whine escaped his lips. Blood dripped from his scraped chin and dotted the white ground. He pushed his hands into the snow and strained to work his legs underneath him. His attempt to stand failed. The boy was too weak to overcome the deputy’s advantage in size and strength.