Hit the Ground Running

by Alison Hughes

  “No spinning, Eddie,” Dee said, noting the revolving seats. “Absolutely no on the spinning, okay? At least while she’s around.”

  Eddie, who was gripping the edge of the counter with both hands, ready to launch, stopped and pretended he was getting in a good stretch. They had a minor scuffle over the menu.

  “You should have milk, Eddie,” Dee said. “For your bones. Okay? Do it for your bones. I’m not even mentioning vegetables.” This must be how mothers sometimes feel, hating having to nag, hating the sound of their own nagging voices…

  Eddie had his heart set on the burger platter, which seemed to come only with soda. They compromised eventually. Dee got a salad and milk with her burger, Eddie got fries and coke with his, and they shared, switching beverages. Better than the handfuls of Corn Pops he’s been living off, she thought. Mental note: toothbrushes. And fruit. She watched Eddie smear ketchup meticulously down the length of each fry. He had dark smudges under his eyes. He was very, very thin. How had she not noticed how thin he’d gotten? Oh God, he’s a little bag of bones. Has he got scurvy or something? She made him eat a cherry tomato.

  “Heading through Butte?” asked the waitress. She sounded almost envious. “Nice day for driving.”

  “Sure is,” agreed Dee. What I mean is, if I never drive another day in my life, it will be too soon. “We’re not going far. Our relatives are just past Butte.” A looong way past Butte. She shot Eddie a warning look. He rolled his eyes. The waitress wasn’t really interested—she was just passing the time.

  They were all done except for the milk. Eddie was fake gulping, overdoing it as usual with very obvious glug, glug, glug sounds.

  “Eddie, if you don’t actually drink that milk,” Dee warned…what? What can I threaten? We’re not getting back in that car? We’re not driving endlessly anymore? We’ll turn that car right back to Arizona, mister?

  He ignored her, grinning, twirling on the stool. Frigging little grinning skeleton.

  “You know what, Eddie? Forget it. I don’t care if you drink the milk. Your bones can crumble to little bits for all I care.”

  Eddie caught at the counter, shot her a worried look, grabbed the glass and drank it back, real swallows convulsing his thin throat. He finished, grimaced and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, like he could wipe away the taste.

  “My bones feel better already,” he said, trying to catch Dee’s eye. She ignored him, stood up, grabbed the check and rummaged in her bag.

  “WAIT!” Eddie said, jumping out of the seat and shoving an arm down into his pocket. “Remember, Dee? I’m paying.” He slapped the crumpled couch-twenty down on the counter. “My treat!”

  “Oh yeah, forgot about that,” she said. “Well, thanks, Mr. Moneybags. It was a great burger.”

  “I’m going to tell her to keep the change,” he said.

  “What? No way—”

  “Dad always says that. ‘Keep the change.’ Why can’t I?”

  Because we may really need that ten bucks.

  “Well, it’s too much for a tip. It’s a nice idea, Eddie, but it’s way too much for a tip. How about I leave the tip, and you keep the ten bucks? You know, to buy something…”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said, warming to the idea. “A souvenir of our vacation.”

  “You kids drive safe, hey?” said the waitress, turning to two other diners coming into the restaurant. Rumpled, stiff-legged highway people, smoothing their hair, pulling up a chair in Switzerland to eat burgers under the watchful dolls. Dee and Eddie walked into the small store to buy two apples and two granola bars.

  Coming out of the washroom, Dee saw a sign that said Parts and Service. A man in coveralls was bending over the open hood of a car. Dee hesitated.

  “Just a sec, Eddie,” she said and ran over to the man.

  “Excuse me, sir, but I’m just wondering if you could take a quick look at our car. The engine’s making a funny noise. It’s probably nothing serious, but if you have a minute, just a second, I’d appreciate it—” Dee stopped. And I’m being all casual because I can’t afford to pay you almost anything or actually get you to fix the car if it is wrecked. So basically, Mr. Official-Looking Mechanic, I just want you to glance at it, laugh and say, “Oh, that. You’ve been worrying about that? That’s nothing. Get out of here, you crazy kids.”

  The mechanic straightened and nodded in the direction of their car.

  “That yours? Heard it come in. Probably transmission.”

  “Is that bad? Is transmission bad?” Dee babbled as she and Eddie trailed after him. He was a tubby, grubby man who walked purposefully, short arms pumping, leading with his stomach.

  He reached in through the window with an oil-blackened hand, popped the hood and disappeared behind it.

  “Start ’er up,” he said.

  Surprisingly, the car started easily, as if taken unawares. Dee left it running and motioned Eddie into the backseat.

  The man straightened and banged the hood shut.

  “Yeah, transmission’s probably shot,” he said with finality, wiping his filthy hands on a filthy rag.

  “So…” Dee said, “is that a fixable thing or what?”

  “Gotta replace it. Can’t do it here.”

  “Why not?” asked Dee with a sinking feeling.

  “Big job. Old car like this, might not be worth it. Yer lookin’ at five, six hunnerd dollars,” he said. Dee felt sweat start to bead on her upper lip. Eddie was sitting very still and silent.

  “How far do you think we can get with the car as it is?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Thirty, forty miles? Maybe less. Maybe a lot less. Just going to get worse. Where you headin’?”

  “Great Falls,” she said, the last city she could remember before the border.

  He shrugged.

  “Good luck,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away.

  What does he know? Dee floored it out of the gas station. Small-town hick mechanic. Doesn’t even do big jobs.

  “Don’t worry,” she said out loud to Eddie. “I’m sure it’s nothing.” She caught his eye in the rearview mirror. “What does he know? Small-town hick mechanic like that? Doesn’t even do big jobs, probably doesn’t know anything about cars…”

  “Yeah,” Eddie agreed. “We’ve had this car forever.” He nodded, staring out the window. “That town looks a little like our town.” It came as a shock to remember that Eddie didn’t know that Santacino had been their town. Past tense.

  That mechanic guy reminds me of somebody back in Santacino, Dee thought. Who? Got it. Charlie Rivera, owner (he would say proprietor) of Charlie Rivera’s Antique Emporium. Not in the way he looked, but in the way he was. Definite. Sure of his business.

  “Sometimes he’s a real pain in the butt,” her dad once said to her after Charlie had rejected a desk he had thought was valuable, “but Charlie sure knows his stuff. He’s always, always right.”

  Dee stared at the highway, tense and listening to the car’s every sound.

  Maybe Charlie Rivera was always right.

  But that guy wasn’t Charlie Rivera. Not really.

  The car died. It happened while they were twisting their way through the mountains, snaking along the river, after they’d laughed at the sign that said Got Cows? We Got Bulls! Dee didn’t even realize the car was dead until she felt their speed slackening. She tried accelerating, but there was no response because the alive part of the car wasn’t there anymore. It was only a metal box on wheels, like a big wagon or a wheelbarrow. The shell of a dead car.

  “Shit! Shit, shit, shit!” Dee wrestled the near-dead car over to the right and coasted slowly off the highway onto the gravel shoulder.

  “Hey, why are we stopping, Dee? You see a bull?” Eddie strained to look out the windshield. There were no bulls. There was nothing. They were in the middle of nowhere.

  “Just…quiet, okay?” Dee sat silently, trying to choke back the panic that clawed inside her chest. With clammy hands, she shoved the gearshift int
o Park, an automatic, useless action. She had an ominous feeling that they were pretty much parked forever.

  Breathe. Just take a deep breath.

  It was quiet on the highway, quiet in the car, Eddie frozen like prey in the backseat. She could feel his tension spiraling up to meet hers.

  She reached out and turned the key. Click. An empty little click, a dead click. No meaning to it. A ride-on-toy-car click. The sound and feel of flicking a dead light switch.

  Click. She tried it again. Click, click, click. Click. Click. Whatever ghost had animated this beat-up car for almost twenty years had gone. Dee slowly lowered her head to the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

  Please, God, please bring this car back to life, just to get us to the border. We need it. Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please…We need to get to Auntie Pat. Help me get Eddie to Auntie Pat.

  She tried it again. Click. Nothing. Click. Click. Clickclickclick. Dee turned the key so hard she thought she’d snap it. It was no use. She stared sightlessly down at her white knuckles gripping the useless steering wheel.

  “Dee?” Eddie’s voice was very little.

  She opened her door, got out, turned and slammed it shut with all her might. Eddie jumped, then scrambled out his side.

  Dee swung around, glared up and down the desolate highway, then turned back to the car. She gave her door a vicious kick. Then another and another. She kicked it again and again and again, crying, ranting in between kicks, “You stu-pid, stu-pid car! You shi-tty, fu-cking car!” She stopped when her foot began to throb.

  Eddie watched her face, his own worried, uncertain.

  Finally, still crying, Dee limped over to the gravel and sat down, right on the ground, her head in her hands. Her right foot was throbbing with pain, as if the kicking had opened up a separate pulse on her big toe.

  Eddie ran around to the backseat, poured water on his still-damp cutoff sweats, then dabbed gingerly at her bleeding big toe. The residual chlorine made it sting.

  “It’s okay, Dee, it’s not cut so bad. I’ve got a Band-Aid at the bottom of my backpack. Stay here, okay?” Eddie put a hand on her shoulder, as though afraid she might bolt into the woods that lined the highway. She nodded, trying to control herself, not trusting her voice.

  When Eddie had bandaged up her toe, Dee poured some of the water from the bottle into her hands and rubbed her face. She couldn’t seem to stop crying.

  “It’s okay, Dee. It’ll be okay.” Eddie crouched beside her. “Somebody’ll help us. You’d help a couple of kids on a highway, right? So would Dad. Somebody’ll stop.” He was talking quickly, eagerly, trying to convince her, trying to convince both of them.

  “Who knows?” he continued. “Maybe even Dad will be coming along on one of those buses to meet up with us, and he’ll see us and we’ll all go to Canada together!” He opened his eyes wide and held out his hands, trying to convince her of this best-case scenario he’d invented on the spot.

  Dee shook her head, her face blotched and red with crying. She ground her dirty palms into her eyes.

  “Oh, Eddie, you don’t understand!” Stop it, stop right now! But she couldn’t stop. “Dad’s not coming, okay? He’s not. I don’t know where he is. I have no idea, okay? It’s just us, Eddie. Just us.” She stared across the highway at the mountains in the distance, gulping and gasping and sobbing. She was appalled that she’d just dumped all this on Eddie.

  Eddie froze.

  “What do you mean? About Dad.”

  Dee didn’t answer.

  “Dee? Do you mean Dad’s…dead?” he asked in a small, uncertain voice.

  “No! Of course not. Probably not. I don’t know.”

  Eddie sat down on the gravel beside her.

  “So we’re not going back home,” Eddie said. A statement, not a question.

  Did he mean home as in the hot shack in the desert? Did he mean the life they’d had before? Or Dad?

  “Not back to Santacino, Eddie. We go back and those government people might put us with another family, and maybe even in different homes. I don’t know for sure, but that’s what could happen.” Dee pressed her fingers hard to her eyes, trying to stop the tears that just kept coming. She gave a long, shaky, watery sigh. I shouldn’t have done this, I should be the adult, I shouldn’t be burdening him with all this, he’s just a little kid...She turned to Eddie and grabbed his hand. She felt it grab back.

  “Sorry, Eddie.” She managed a wobbly half smile. “Just…sorry. Look, we have each other, right?”

  “Right.”

  They sat in silence.

  Finally, when her tears dried up, she glanced at Eddie.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Just thinking.” Silence.

  “Come on, Dee,” said Eddie suddenly, hopping to his feet and hauling at her arm.

  “What?” she said, scrambling awkwardly to her feet. She gasped as a sharp pain seared through her right foot. Serves me right if I broke my toe in my little trash-the-car hissy fit.

  “We should get our backpacks out of the car and start walking. We got to be near someplace,” Eddie said.

  “Well, we can’t be that far from Great Falls.”

  “Yeah! A city! Somebody might even give us a ride there, and then they could tow our car there and fix it!” Eddie looked around as though an obliging tow truck was just hovering around the bend, waiting to be summoned.

  Oh, Eddie, we don’t have enough money to tow this piece of junk or to get it fixed. You heard the man, who turned out to know what he was talking about—it’s not even worth fixing. We probably don’t even have enough money for bus fare for two to the border.

  Dee smiled shakily. “Sounds like a plan.”

  They stuffed their backpacks as tight as they would go. Eddie took the Utah salt and the scorpion shell and walked away from the rest of his collections without a backward glance.

  Dee shoved everything she could fit into her backpack. Water. Money. Passports. Picture of Mom and Dad. She dug the car registration and insurance out of the glove compartment and stuffed them in her pocket. May as well not advertise who they were. She limped around to peer at the license plate. Arizona plate. Unusual up here, and someone could certainly trace the number. She gave it a little pull—bottom, then top. It was welded on solidly by bolts, rust, heat and age. Without tools it would be impossible to get the thing off. The best she could do was scrub some dirt over it so someone would actually have to stop to investigate it.

  Dee straightened and saw Vera, the aloe vera plant, on the back-window ledge. She couldn’t very well carry Vera with them without looking completely deranged, but somehow the image of the plant getting crushed and junked along with the car was too much for Dee.

  “C’mon, Eddie. We have to do something before we start walking.”

  They took Vera down into the scrubby bushes by the fence lining the highway, Dee picking her way slowly on her throbbing foot. They scraped a shallow hole in the dry, rocky dirt with the dull blade of Eddie’s Swiss Army knife, pulled Vera from her pot and planted her, stamping gently around the base of the plant with their feet. Dee showered Vera with the last drops from one of their water bottles. Among the spindly Montana pines, Vera looked squat and exotic.

  “Think Vera’ll make it, Dee?” Eddie asked.

  “Yeah, I do,” said Dee, nodding slowly. “She’s a little survivor, Eddie. She survived us.” Baked, cracked soil, dust coating her fleshy limbs, sitting forgotten on that nothing shelf too high above the kitchen table, Vera had, inexplicably, survived.

  They climbed back up to the highway, Dee closest to the road, Eddie on the shoulder, and started walking north. Dee’s right foot screamed with pain, so she hobbled slowly, relying on the heel of her foot, sparing the toes. Eddie pulled ahead, slowed to let her catch up, then darted forward again, picked up a rock, tossed it aside.

  She didn’t know if they should hitchhike openly, with their thumbs out like those people in the seventies movies her dad watched, or just h
ope that somebody who was not a murderous criminal would take pity on them. Dee thought it might be safer to just walk into Great Falls. Longer, more painful, but less dangerous.

  Before they rounded a bend, Dee looked over her shoulder and caught a last glimpse of their car, listing at an angle on the side of the road. It felt strange abandoning it, walking away from the bit of security it offered. The car had been more than just transport. It had been protection, safety. It had hard sides and doors that locked. It was shelter.

  They kept walking, two small, soft figures out in the wide open.

  An hour of walking brought them to a sign: Great Falls 19.

  Nineteen miles? Nineteen more miles? Dee’s foot was throbbing so badly that she felt light-headed with pain. Another nineteen miles on it was completely, totally impossible. It made her sick to her stomach to think of it.

  “Eddie, I think we have to try to wave some car down. I can’t go much farther. My foot’s killing me.”

  They turned to face the empty highway, raising their thumbs. Eddie had his right arm straight out, straining and extending it as far as it would go at each passing car, like a horizontal version of the eager kid in class who really, really knows the answer. Dee was more self-conscious, lifting an apologetic thumb, slightly shamed by the public appeal. They walked on, turning when they heard the occasional rumble of a car.

  People are too scared to pick up hitchhikers, Dee thought, catching the eye of a startled single woman in a red SUV. No normal people hitchhike anymore. Her parents had hitchhiked around Europe after they were first married. But that was back then. That was Europe.

  Half an hour passed, and only one car sped past.

  “Not too close, Eddie,” Dee warned, pulling him back from a feverish appeal. “You’re doing great, it’s just, you know, we want to be live hitchhikers, okay?”

  A beat-up gray car slowed as it passed them, then pulled over onto the shoulder. Its indicator stayed on, blinking at them.

  “Got one!” Eddie yelled. He grabbed Dee’s hand and pulled her forward. “Hurry, before he changes his mind!”

  When they got to the car, the man leaned over and popped open the passenger-side door. His eyes slid over both of them. “Hop in, kids,” he said with a smile. “Little one in the back. You,” he nodded at Dee, “up here.” He patted the seat beside him.