Stepdog

by Nicole Galland

  “Please, mister, can’t I just get out and say hi to my dad?” Cody asked.

  Oh, Jesus, for a moment I really thought she’d said that. Her eyes were glued to Jay and her tail was wagging tentatively.

  “Fuck off,” I said to her.

  She looked at me, tail still wagging, hoping maybe she would get a treat with that.

  With an aggravated sigh I turned away from her, out the driver-seat window, right at Jay, who was bending over to peer in. His expression had changed from plaintive to stern. “Do you understand how cruel you’re being?” he asked in a warning tone. “Cruel and foolish. You’re going to ruin everything for all of us. That’s unforgivably foolish. You should change your mind, or be prepared to live with regret.”

  I rolled up my window.

  “I’ll see you in Alburquerque,” Jay said, overenunciating to make sure I understood him with the window closed. And a final warning: “Change your mind.”

  I ignored him. Took a deep breath. Found, from Sara’s well-supplied pack, the hand lotion, and used it on my face. Drank water, but not too much. Refilled Cody’s water dish. I gave her another bully stick, which she accepted but then tossed down onto her bed in the backseat, climbing back there herself to look wistfully out the back window at Jay, who had moved round to the Lexus. He waved to her again. She looked excitedly at me, still hoping for permission to get back out of the car. I couldn’t even remember when she’d last had exercise. Oh, wait . . . it was early this morning. Back in Memphis. No, it was actually after Memphis, right? It was all blurring together. I pulled my seat belt back into position. Jay, seeing the movement, got into the SUV. The wanker was going to tail me all the way to Cali-fucking-fornia. Classic example of the dangers of early retirement.

  I wanted to burn rubber and tear out of there, but there was no point in racing away from him into the night. There was only one road. I’m impulsive (as we’ve seen) and a bit hotheaded (ditto), and I wanted to mess with him—drive in spirals to make him accidentally smash into a wall or something. But the MINI actually had a pretty crap turning radius; its main asset was that it was cute. Frankly, it was imbecilic to be driving it cross-country. We really should have just flown, together, and put the dog in cargo. If Sara had just been willing to do what most pet owners did regularly whenever they traveled, none of this would be happening right now. All of this should have been avoidable. It all came down to Sara coddling the dog. Which she would soon be doing more than ever.

  I let out a loud growling sigh of frustration, which brought Cody to the front seat, offering to lick my face. I pushed her away and called Sara even though it was probably midnight where she was.

  “Hello?” She sounded as if I’d woken her from a deep slumber.

  “Sorry, love, it’s me,” I said.

  “What time is it?” she muttered, then before I could answer, “It’s three thirty A.M. here. What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, crap, sorry, I get confused about the time. I wouldn’t be calling except I don’t think I should stop in Albuquerque, I want to push on to whatever’s next. Flagstaff?”

  “What?” she said. “Rory, you’ve been driving nonstop since Memphis.”

  “I stopped in Tulsa.”

  “Long enough to squabble with Jay. You’ve been on the road for nearly twenty hours. Where are you now?”

  “Tucumcari,” I said, “I think that’s finally New Mexico. I stopped for a nap back in Oklahoma. Texas is fucking huge. I should have known this would be a bad idea when Connecticut seemed so big.”

  She sighed. “Just stay in Albuquerque. Please? Get some sleep. Sleep all day and all night before you drive to Flagstaff. You need the rest.”

  “He’s still tailing me,” I said. “I’m at a gas station and he’s behind me. Five feet away, like. He’s not giving up.”

  “Oh,” she said unhappily. “Oh, boy.”

  “If I stop in Albuquerque, he’ll just get a room in the same hotel, and I won’t be able to relax because I’ll be so pissed off about his being there.”

  “How will Flagstaff be any better?”

  “You’re meeting me there, remember? We’re going to the Grand Canyon together. I want to be back with you as soon as possible. And so does Cody. I think we three should have some quality time together.” For fuck’s sake, that sounded so forced and pathetic I expected her to guess what Jay had just been doing to my head.

  “Oh,” she said affectionately, touched. “But, sweetie, if you’re going to be in Flagstaff by the middle of the day, I can’t get myself there in time.”

  “Please just text me the address of a Flagstaff hotel in case I feel up to making the drive.”

  A pause. “All right. But if you’re driving that far, try to find a way to give Cody some exercise.”

  “Do you not understand what I’m saying?” I said. “He’s literally right behind me. I have to keep going. I need exercise as badly as the dog does, but neither of us is getting it. She’ll just have to deal with it. Jesus.”

  “You sound like you need to eat,” she said. “You’re a little cranky.”

  “Sara!” I never shouted at her, and I shocked myself. “This isn’t a game. He’s serious. He’s dead set on getting her. It’s like convoying with Ahab.”

  “There’s nothing he can do as long you have her,” Sara said. “He won’t do anything violent, he would consider that beneath him. I’ll send you the address and let’s just keep each other in the loop, okay? Love you.”

  I finally drove out of the station. Jay followed me. Cody was staring out the window at the dark plains, exactly the same way she’d be staring at them if she were now in Jay’s car headed back east. I hated myself for wondering if I’d made the wrong decision here, but to be honest, I wondered briefly—but with great intensity—if I’d made the wrong decision.

  Chapter 30

  I drove on into the night. Behind me, tragic and irritating, and gazed at by the fucking dog out the back window, was Jay. No sense trying to outrun him; that would just make him feel important.

  I ate the Snickers bars as I drove and immediately felt even more disgusted with myself. Even Cadbury’s—for all the awful childhood associations I had with it—was better than this shite. Drove on for miles and miles more, Jay on my arse, through unchanging, vast, moonlit expanses. The highway went dead straight, and I was on a bit of a height, so I could see it bang on to the horizon, toward the massive full moon. For miles ahead there was nothing at all along Interstate 40. Eventually, a flurry of billboards announced the Flying C Ranch (whatever that was), which, when we finally passed it, looked like a giant gas station. It was surrounded by such a density of juniper bushes that the flat-topped hills beyond seemed forested.

  The grey light of dawn was creeping up my backside as relentlessly as Jay, making the world uglier and colorless. We passed Clines Corners (whatever that was), then back to high plains and junipers. My arse was killing me—had been for a while, but I’d been too stressed and distracted to notice the discomfort. Cody sighed, and spent about an hour moving back and forth between the front seat and the back, forever staring at my face for hints about what might come next. I found it a terrible irritant. If she were currently in Jay’s car, his whole fucking soul would have welled with love for her while she did that.

  CLOSER TO ALBUQUERQUE, Interstate 40 spilled down over one final vast, pale plain. Far ahead rose a lumpy line of mountains, like the worked side of a key. It was a cloudy dawn, but the light kissed the eastern slopes and they were . . . gorgeous. It was the first time anything had looked gorgeous in days. I rolled the window down to let in cold fresh air. Cody leapt to her feet and stuck her nose toward the window, no matter that meant blocking my view. I pushed her away and raised the window again. She sneezed all over me. It was disgusting, as dog sneezes go. Except for the pause in Tulsa and the service-road catnap, I had driven nonstop for a thousand miles, and eaten nothing but three Snickers bars. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so wretched in my life—which is s
aying something, given my old party days.

  Here at last was Albuquerque. Behind me was Jay.

  I couldn’t stop here. I couldn’t risk listening to him anymore. I had to keep going literally into Sara’s arms.

  Somewhere, the sunlight had changed. It was probably Arkansas or Oklahoma, but who can say, Arkansas had been rainy and I’d driven Oklahoma in the dark. It was a searing light now, the kind of light that triggered the instinct to seek shade, even though it wasn’t hot yet.

  We skirted Albuquerque. There were no tall buildings, and the mountains rose up around it regally, so that the city was insignificant compared to the landscape, and that was comforting.

  Then everything grew flat again. Dullsville.

  Sara sent a text with a hotel address, but it wasn’t in Flagstaff. Tusayan, she wrote. Closer to GC. Enjoy it for the both of us xx. I pouted. What was the point of the Grand Canyon if I was going by myself? Or worse yet, saddled with Sara’s dog. Especially while Jay trailed along behind us, sighing tragically.

  After a good long while of nothing else, I passed the Route 66 Casino, rising up to the south of the highway, random and gratuitous and causing the obvious song to start percolating in my brain stem. Cody was getting more uncomfortable, stressed and bored. She was very dusty from the stop with the burs. She put her nose down by my elbow on the armrest, and covered it with both of her paws trying to scratch her own face, looking as if she were playing peekaboo with some invisible creature under the dash. Sara had included Benadryl in the overly thorough Cody-As-Surrogate-Child bag, complete with half a page worth of instructions (these boiled down to: Give Cody 2 Benadryl) but I hadn’t thought to give it to her. Jay would have, of course.

  We drove on. Then suddenly—and really, it was sudden, or else maybe I’d fallen asleep at the wheel—as suddenly as Tulsa had sprung up earlier, there were mesas and buttes and canyons and valleys and cliffs and arroyos and lots of other things I didn’t know the names of. As if some John Wayne movie had erupted in Technicolor out of the earth and exploded all over. There were little adobe huts and abandoned old shacks and houses all along the way, too. They were, even by the standards of the rurals in Ireland, very picturesque. This was the Old West I had envisioned! For a moment I was alert and completely charmed, sloughing off Jay and even Cody, as my Inner Child and Inner Émigré cavorted together through a wonderland of weirdness.

  However, as delightful as it was to encounter, I was now so fried and so hungry, and the Old West went on for so long, I got tired of it. So did Cody, who had occasionally raised herself to look around, and finding nothing but more of the same sights and smells (mainly dried earth, secondly dried manure), would sigh, or yawn, then stare at me beseechingly.

  “Stop staring at me,” I said, which come to think of it was something I had said to her at least once a day from almost the very beginning of our relationship.

  The car claimed the temperature was only fifty-nine, hard to believe given the bleaching intensity of the sunlight. A slow-moving freight train stretched on for so long, I lost sight of it behind an enormous trailer park, which had appeared almost as suddenly as the interesting landscape—thousands of homes that evolved, farther west, into dingy tract housing.

  Whatever township that had been, we were out of it again quickly and into the same open, empty, cooked-salmon rock that now lined the roadway. My phone rang. Danny, this time. God how I wished he was in the seat beside me, or better yet, that I was meeting him in person at the Plough.

  “Ach! Big man! The stories I’m hearing from your man Alto!” he said. “You’re in the Wild West, yeah? Oklahoma, is it? Is it like cowboys and Indians?”

  “I’m done with Oklahoma,” I said. “I’m in . . . Arizona or New Mexico, I always get those two mixed up. New Mexico.”

  “How’s it?”

  “It’s big and dry and empty and dusty.”

  “Sounds great. Except for the dusty part. How’s Sara? How’s the wee dog?”

  “Sara’s in Los Angeles and the dog is dusty but fine.”

  “You missed a great game, man, they killed Liverpool.”

  “I’m shattered, Danny. I haven’t really slept since I can’t remember when.”

  Danny chuckled. “It’s crazy, like. That man’s mental. Where is he now?”

  “Oh,” I said, making sure to sound offhand. “He’s in my rearview mirror.”

  “He’s not!” gasped Danny. “He’s following you?”

  “He is,” I said.

  “That’s fucking mad! He’s chasing you over a wee dog now?”

  “He is.”

  “It’s like your own reality show for the telly!”

  “I’ve already got a show for the telly,” I said. That almost felt like a lie.

  “Yeah, fuck that, this one’s more interesting,” said Danny.

  “Piss off,” I said. As much as I wanted his company, I didn’t have the energy to even hold a conversation. “I’ve gotta go drive off a cliff now in my Batmobile. Later.”

  There were billboards for a place advertising opals and agates and gold. Also, moccasins, casinos, Dairy Queens, hotels, and fast food. Soon, increasingly urgent billboards for turquoise. Plus there were now rows of cliff faces to the right, a series of them too indistinct to count, like waves, smaller swells backed by larger ones. I rounded a slight bend in the road to see that they continued on out of sight in the haze.

  The sun rose higher, shrinking the car’s shadow. The temperature was still cool outside despite the bright blaring sun. This made more sense when we passed a sign announcing the Continental Divide, meaning we were higher than I’d realized. The landscape to the north got pretty impressive. “This is it! We’re in Grand Canyon territory!” I announced triumphantly to Cody.

  A few miles later, it all got dull again.

  But finally, as we approached the small city of Flagstaff, there was respite from the oppressive openness: for the first time in at least twelve hours of driving, there were real trees. Pine trees. Not like those great ol’ North Carolina pines, but still, their presence changed everything. Seeing familiar bits of nature lifted my spirits, and Cody, smelling the shift away from pure open plains, yawned and rested her chin on my shoulder, nestling her head against mine. Jesus, it was good to know the end was nearly in sight.

  The GPS steered me away from the city, onto a two-lane road through a massive ponderosa-pine forest, and then up onto high plains. It looked almost exactly like what I’d been driving through for many hours—sage, scrub, junipers, baked red earth. But it felt different, because I knew I was nearing the end. And of course, I knew I was nearing the Graceland of the natural world: the Grand Canyon. This time, I’d actually get to see something. A straight shot up 64 took us into Tusuyan. The hotel was smack off the road.

  Jay was still right behind me. If he followed me into the hotel, no good would come of it—I’d either give him the dog or give him a bruising. I began to pull into the hotel car park when suddenly a squeal of tires made me jump. I looked back into my rearview mirror.

  Jay was suddenly pulling past me. That damn Lexus SUV sped off up the road and out of sight. Disappeared.

  Jay was gone. Gone!

  What?

  Victory! The wanker had finally called it off!

  But why?

  Chapter 31

  For the first time since I’d got the dog back, I wasn’t looking over my shoulder for the man who’d stolen her, and a thousand little muscles in my body all relaxed at once. I took an enormous breath, and let it out, and felt wobbly. I doubted he had really given up, but at least he’d left us alone in peace for now, and that was a relief.

  Too tired almost to function, I drove into the hotel parking lot. Then I put Cody on the lead and brought her into the lobby with me so that I could deposit her in the room before I did anything else.

  It was a large, tacky, pseudo-western-ranch sort of a place, but infinitely nicer than the other hotels where I had stopped. Not beige, for starters; more
salmon-orange, like the soil. There was a uniformed bloke who offered to help me with the luggage, an offer I accepted once I’d locked Cody in the room.

  It was midday. I was once again filthy, hungry, and exhausted; Cody was filthy, hungry, and restless. An awful combo. I took her out to a designated yard to poo, then put her back in the room, grabbed an actual meal in the hotel’s restaurant (awful decor, but the food was deadly, especially the fried potatoes, and God, what those southwesterners can do with cheese), came back up to the room, closed the curtain, and passed out on the bed, which was firm, clean, and not a driver’s seat. No amount of Cody’s attempts to get my attention was going to work this time. I was out like a light.

  IN THE HARD, dense, foggy sleep I’d fallen into, I heard my phone make occasional noises. Couldn’t tell if these were part of a dream or not. Then a horrible alarmlike noise that was definitely a dream, and I struggled like a drowning man back toward wakefulness to avoid it, but drowned again before I could get there.

  FOR A WHILE there was dreamless silence and dark.

  Then a new dream began, so indistinguishable from reality I thought maybe it was real. Sara’s voice murmured in my ear, and I felt her fingers on my face. I blinked my eyes open and saw, in the light seeping around the edges of the heavy hotel curtain, those beautiful green eyes gazing into mine. Her hand brushed through my mess of hair.

  “Hi, love,” she said, with the gentle encouragement of a nurse to a patient coming out of a coma. “How are you?”

  In this dream, I threw my arms around her and grabbed her in a bear hug. I was instantly revived, instantly erect, and she was naked and full of lust. So I’ll skip the details of the rest of the dream because I am a gentleman, but trust me, it was the most satisfying erotic somnolence of the past century. We were both sweaty, exhausted, delighted, and enthralled with each other by the end of it.

  For a while there was more dreamless silence and dark.

  Then another dream began, again so indistinguishable from reality I thought it was real. Sara’s voice murmured in my ear again, and I felt her fingers on my face. I blinked my eyes open and saw, in the light seeping around the edges of the heavy hotel curtain, those beautiful green eyes gazing into mine. Her hand brushed through my mess of hair.