by Will Weaver
Miles and his mother watch the pair head downstream. The man paddles, and the woman bends closer around her baby. It cries once more with the same little wail; the mother glances over her shoulder as the canoe slides out of sight around a bend.
“Where did they come from?” Natalie says to Miles.
“Upriver. Clanging their paddles and talking loud all the way.”
“Sorry,” his mother says. “I had the towel over my ears.”
Miles shrugs. “What if they’d been squatters?”
His mother shrugs and takes his arm. “I’ve got a scary-looking son in the woods with a gun,” she says.
“I can’t be around all the time.”
“I know,” she answers. “But they weren’t squatters or bad guys, were they? Just a nice young family.”
Miles glances behind. “The fewer people who know we’re here, the better.”
“You’re starting to sound like Mr. Kurz,” his mother teases.
“And look what happened to him,” Miles mutters. “One trip to the big city for his sister’s funeral and his family slaps him in an old folks’ home.”
“Hey—where are we going?” his mother says as Miles steers her off the trail.
“Let’s not use the same path all the time. The more we use it, the more obvious it becomes.”
“Yes, Mr. Kurz,” his mother says.
When the cabin is in sight, he pauses. “I’m gonna head back to the woods for a while.”
“Be careful,” his mother says automatically.
When she is out of sight, Miles hurries down a deer trail along the river. There was something slightly off about that little family of three. Something weird that he can’t put his finger on.
It takes a few minutes before he catches a glimpse of the canoe through the riverbank brush, but in another minute he’s ahead of it and crouched behind a fallen tree only a few yards from the water where they will pass.
“—be camping way out here?” the woman asks.
“They’re not camping,” the man says harshly. “I told you—they gotta be living there. They’re probably Travelers. Or squatters.”
“So?” the woman says.
“We should threaten to turn them in,” the guy says. “I’ll bet they’ve got food stashed for winter—and they’d give us some.”
“That scary-looking kid had a gun,” the woman says.
The man is silent.
“And anyway, we’ve got something better than a gun,” the woman says. She reaches down. The baby cries again—the same perfect little wail.
Miles swallows a grunt of recognition: He remembers that sound. It’s from a doll, a You & Me brand, fourteen-inch, battery-operated crying doll; Miles knows, because Sarah used to have one—and the stupid thing drove him nuts.
“Baby’s got to eat,” the woman says. “They love you at the grocery store, too, don’t they?” she says, faking baby talk.
The guy ignores her. He swings the canoe sideways in order to look upstream. “I still say we should go back and case the place. Sneak up and see what they got.”
“But who would watch the baby?” the woman asks; it’s supposed to be a joke, but it’s clear that she wants no part of this.
The man doesn’t answer; he paddles backward so that the canoe holds steady in the current.
“Please, Jeremy,” she says. “We’re not, like, thieves.”
He sets his jaw. “Yeah, well, the world is different now.” With a couple of hard thrusts of his paddle, he turns the canoe toward shore and beaches it on the sand with a scraping sound.
“I’m not going with you!” the woman says.
“Fine!” the guy says. “Stay here.”
“Jeremy—you don’t know who they are or what’s out there!” the woman says.
The man ignores her and puts one leg over the side of the canoe. Which is when Miles fires—a warning shot—into the river beside him. Water sprays the couple, and the woman sucks in a shriek as the man topples backward into the canoe. Miles steps into the open and trains the gun on them. His .410 holds only one shell, but he would have plenty of time to reload.
“She’s right!” Miles says. “You just don’t know who’s out there.”
“Please! Don’t shoot us!” the woman whimpers.
Miles is silent.
The man’s Adam’s apple bobs up and down like a crazy yo-yo. He’s lying on his back in the canoe like an upturned turtle.
“Show me some ID,” Miles says.
“ID?” the man asks. His voice is thin and quaky.
“For God’s sakes, give him your wallet,” the woman breathes.
The man digs into a rear pocket, then tosses the wallet to Miles; keeping one eye on the canoeists, he crouches on the bank, fishes out the guy’s driver’s license, looks at it. Then he tosses back the wallet.
“Aren’t you going to rob us?” the woman says weakly.
“Please—just shut up,” the man whispers at her.
“No. Just want to see where you live,” Miles says. “So I know where to come. You know, in case—”
“Hey, we were just blowing smoke!” the man says. “We won’t turn you in or cause you any trouble.”
“We’ll forget we ever saw you!” the woman adds in a rush of words.
Miles pauses. “Promise?”
“Yes!” the couple say at the same time.
“Cross your heart and hope not to die?” He looks once more at the address on the license. “Jeremy Barchers?”
The two are white-faced now and can only nod up and down.
He pockets the driver’s license—keeps it.
“Okay. Works for me,” Miles says. Gun in hand, with his left boot he pushes their canoe sharply off the sand and into the current. “Have a nice day.”
The couple’s canoe paddles clang and bang rapidly as they head downstream.
“And take good care of your baby!” he calls after them.
When the canoe goes around the bend and out of sight, Miles lets out a long breath. His hands are shaky. He puts down the gun and sits on the riverbank. It takes a few minutes before he’s ready to head home.
Back at the cabin, his father is out by the sawmill, actually working. He and Nat are sorting boards per Miles’s instruction. They look up as Miles comes out of the woods. “I heard you shoot,” his father says. “Did you get anything?”
Miles pauses. “No,” he says with a glance toward his mother. “I missed.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
SARAH
THE BUS RIDE HOME HAS less coughing because several kids have stayed for after-school activities. The ones who remain look shabby and geeky and would definitely not fit in with Mackenzie’s crowd. Some of them look like farm kids; the boys wear sweat-stained seed caps as well as NASCAR, Caterpillar, and Ducks Unlimited T-shirts. She sits up front as far away from them as she can.
“No sports or after-school stuff for you, honey?” the woman driver says, startling Sarah.
“Nope.” She has been staring out the window at the minivans. At the Blue Star families. Families who don’t hide out in the woods.
“Not the sports type?” the driver asks, stomping a pedal and shifting gears with a quick yank of her forearm.
“Not really. Plus I sorta have to help out at home,” Sarah says. She thinks about Emily for the first time all day.
“Not enough kids do that nowadays. They think life is all about them, but I guess I was that way, too,” the driver says.
Sarah is silent.
“My kids are grown now. Two grandbabies. I wish they lived closer, because we can’t go see them now.” She sneezes. “That’s the worst part of this damn dust—the travel restrictions.”
Sarah is silent.
“But they say the worst is over,” the woman continues; she leans forward to look at the sky through her smudged windshield.
“I hope so,” Sarah murmurs.
“I really miss seeing my grandkids,” the driver continues. “Family is all
any of us really have.”
After forty-five minutes and several brake-squeaking stops, Sarah sits up suddenly; she must have dozed briefly—and she wonders if the bus driver will remember her stop. It’s not as if they have a big driveway and mailbox.
“There’s your brother,” the driver says, squinting ahead.
Sarah is filled with a rush of relief—which quickly fades as she sees Miles standing shirtless with a canteen hanging off his shoulder. Gun over his shoulder, bandana across his nose because of the highway dust, and holding a tall, knobby walking stick, he looks like an extra from one of those old Mad Max movies.
“Regular school wouldn’t hurt that boy,” observes the driver as she brakes the bus.
“No kidding,” Sarah says.
“But he watches out for you—that’s a good thing nowadays,” the driver says.
“Thanks for the ride,” Sarah says, and steps down.
“Hey, Goat Girl, how was your first day at school?” Miles says, pulling down his bandana. His face is streaked with dust and sweat, and he’s stinkier than ever.
“Okay,” Sarah says with a shrug.
“There’s still time for you, son,” the driver calls down to Miles through the open door. “You’re only one day behind.”
“No thanks,” Miles says.
The driver laughs, then closes the door and drives on.
“Is Emily all right?” Sarah asks; she covers her mouth briefly from dust kicked up by the bus.
“She’s fine,” Miles says.
“Did you feed her like I said?”
“Yes. She’s fine!” Miles says. “Come on, let’s go. We don’t need to stand around on the highway all day.”
He heads down the ditch to the woods trail. Sarah knows to step in his tracks—so it appears like a single set of footprints—until they’re safely into the woods. There, it’s a twenty-minute walk through the late-summer woods. The aspens have yellow leaves, and a few scarlet maples stand out against dusty green pines. Forests used to scare her.
“How are we going to do this in winter?” Sarah asks. “Get to the highway, I mean.”
“On snowshoes or skis,” Miles says.
“Great,” Sarah mutters.
“Or maybe by snowmobile,” Miles adds.
“We’re getting a snowmobile?” Sarah asks.
Miles shrugs. “I hope.”
As soon Sarah comes in sight above the cabin, Emily starts to “Baaaack, baaack!” She jumps up and down as if she’s on springs. Emily goes crazy on her rope, and races around in tight circles until she winds herself against her tree. Then she reverses directions and unwinds herself like a runaway top. Sarah laughs and grabs her as she races by. They tumble onto the grass in a heap of girl arms and goat legs.
“Did Miles feed you?” Sarah murmurs. She feels Emily’s udders, which are tight with milk.
“Yes, I fed her,” Miles says with annoyance, and heads over to the sawmill shed.
She holds Emily by her long ears and looks into her pretty yellow eyes with their little dark bars for pupils. People have round pupils; goats have rectangular ones. Miles was the first to notice that (which was annoying), but Miles doesn’t know where she likes to be scratched (right behind her stubby little horns), or what all of her little head butting and hopping gestures really mean.
“Sarah! You’re home,” her mother says. She comes around the corner of the cabin. From the dust, her black hair is streaked with gray, and Sarah has a sudden, scary image of her mother as an old woman.
“Yeah?” Sarah says.
“You survived day one of school!” her mother says.
“Barely,” Sarah mutters.
“Hey, how was school?” Artie asks, appearing beside Nat and draping an arm around her. He, too, is covered in dust and looks twenty years older.
“Sorta like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory but without the chocolate,” Sarah says, looking away.
“Welcome to the Machine,” Miles calls out. He loves old Pink Floyd music.
“Did you meet anybody?” Nat inquires.
Sarah thinks first of Ray, then of Mackenzie and her gang. “Not really,” she says. She thinks of the thin girl with dark eyes. “I have to milk Emily, and then she and I are heading down to the river for a swim,” Sarah says. “A little privacy, all right?”
“Sure. And when you’re done, Miles could use some help in the saw shack,” her father says.
Sarah mumbles something she’s lucky no one hears and goes to the cabin for the little milk pail. Miles has made a small wooden stanchion and platform inside the corral; and when Sarah returns, Emily is standing on the boards, head between the two vertical boards, ready to be milked.
“What a good Emily!” Sarah gives her a treat—a handful of grass—and then loops the short rope around the stanchion’s top. The vertical boards squeeze—but do not pinch—Emily’s neck and ensure that she doesn’t jerk or jump and race off while Sarah is milking her. Sarah kneels and, with a wet cloth, washes Emily’s two little teats; after that, in a downward pull, she strokes a squirt of milk from each one. That first squirt is to the side, to the ground; it’s to remove any bacteria on the teat end or in the teat itself. Once that’s done, Sarah hangs the little stainless steel pail on her left wrist and milks with her right hand. She always leans her forehead into the little valley between Emily’s rib cage and her hip bone, a soft indentation, and closes her eyes as she works. Emily’s chewing makes a faint, faraway rocking motion, and Sarah falls into the rhythm of milking: stroke, tingy-ting, stroke, tingy-ting.
Gradually the tingy-ting of milk hitting the bottom of the pail softens to tungy-shush, tungy-shush, and soon it’s shush-shush, shush-shush, shush-shush.
Milking takes only five minutes. Soon they are done. Holding the pail handle tightly, she releases Emily—who hops away and races playfully about the corral.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Sarah says. “I’ll be right back—hang on.”
She goes to the river and to Miles’s homemade refrigerator, a wire cage weighed down by two stones, that sits in the cool water. Floating inside are two glass jars—former peanut butter jars—full of milk; for now Emily has more milk than they can drink in a day. Sarah pours the milk from the pail into two more clean jars and slips the warm ones into the cold river water and the cage. She makes sure to arrange the jars in order of freshness. They all drink goat’s milk, which at first made her gag; it is yellower, heavier, and way thicker than regular milk. Now she is not sure she could drink cow’s milk from a store.
After her chores are complete, she goes to get Emily for her daily outing. On the short leash, Emily hops and jumps—which always makes Sarah laugh—and they head to the river, Emily nipping off bites of thin grass along the way.
The warmth of the day has collected along the riverbank, and though it’s now the first week of September, the water is still warm from the summer. She goes just around the bend, peeking back at the cabin to make sure no one can see, then hangs her towel on a branch. In her little changing stall she slips off her clothes. Skinny-dipping is something she could never do back in the suburbs; maybe it’s one reward for living like the Swiss Family Robinson. Though when it gets cold, she might have to join a sports team so she can shower at school.
With Emily grazing along the bank, Sarah wades into the water until it’s knee-deep, then lies down in the cool flow. Using a bar of soap, she washes the school cooties off her—soapy water curls away and disappears—then holds wide her arms and floats on her back. She closes her eyes as the river takes her a few yards, then she swims back upstream and does it again. Each time she floats downstream, she keeps her eyes closed a little longer, making a game of guessing which big tree she’ll see when she opens them.
Emily grazes along, following her downstream. Soon they are out of sight of the cabin. There’s a bend in the river, and a deeper pool where Miles catches fish; he doesn’t like her swimming here because she scares them away, he says. She does it anyway.
&nb
sp; The pool, about twenty feet wide and eight feet deep, is very cold at the bottom. As she paddles down, she opens her eyes. Several shadows—fish—dart away; she stays down as long as she can, inspecting the bottom, the smooth stones, a couple of crayfish with their whiskery noses and oversize pincers.
She surfaces, quietly, pretending she’s a rare freshwater mermaid whom no human has ever seen, and then sinks down again. Stays under longer this time. She hears faint chirping noises, like faraway birds or maybe minnows calling to each other, warning about the mermaid. As she heads back to the glassy ceiling, the noises are louder. Emily! Emily bleating and splashing in the water, tangled in her rope. Onshore, creeping along toward Emily, is the old dog.
“Shoo! Go away!” Sarah shouts, bursting naked out of the water. The dog freezes. Then in a swirl of gray, he runs away, kicking up dust on the bank, taking long, limping strides. One of his hind legs is either short or broken. The dog is the same color as the brush into which he disappears.
Still wet, Sarah pulls on her clothes just as the whole family comes running down to the river.
“What happened?” Miles shouts, leading the way. He has his gun.
“I saw the dog on the bank,” she says, untangling Emily’s tether rope. “I thought he was going toward Emily, but he wasn’t.”
“How do you know?” Miles presses.
“You sure it wasn’t a wolf or something?” Nat asks.
“No. Just an old dog. He had a bad leg. He limped.”
Miles kneels down to examine the dog’s tracks. “It’s been hanging around here.”
Artie and Nat glance at each other. “Don’t go so far downstream, all right?” Natalie says.
“So I’m supposed to take a bath where everybody can watch me?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. Just stay a little closer, that’s all.”
After her parents and Miles are gone, she dries her hair. Emily is still trembling.
“He was just an old dog,” Sarah says. “You’re fine.” Holding tightly to Emily’s rope, she heads back to the cabin.
Emerging from the bushes, she pauses to stare at the shabby log cabin. The square little room that Miles is adding. The dusty path. The tumbledown sawmill shed. She drops to her knees and hugs Emily. Then her eyes catch sight of Miles’s shotgun leaning against the cabin wall. She walks over, picks it up; it’s heavier than she imagined, and the curve of its stock feels good. She hoists it; it sits awkwardly on her arm at first, then settles comfortably against her shoulder.
