Finding Somewhere

by Joseph Monninger

  “What do we have? Two more days, maybe?”

  I shrugged. Taking the back roads meant a longer trip.

  “Here goes,” she said, flipping open her phone and putting it to her ear.

  “Messages,” she whispered.

  She listened for a while. At one point she leaned forward and turned off the radio. She flicked at something on her foot, keeping it away from her toes. She nodded. Then she touched my arm and nodded again.

  “That’s awkward,” she said, flipping the phone closed.

  “What is?”

  “One message was from Paulette, going mental. Her sister Regina is pregnant and her whole family is going nuts. She wants to come out and join us. She said she could fly and meet us somewhere.”

  “That’s not happening,” I said.

  Delores shook her head.

  “Your mom called, too,” she said. “Just the usual stuff. She’s worried and wanted an update.”

  “What else?”

  “My dad notified the police. It’s turned into a big freaking showdown between my mom and him. I’m eighteen, though, so it’s not clear what they can do to us. You’re sixteen. That’s the problem. And my cousin Richard is being a dink about the horse trailer. Suddenly he needs it. He called and said he didn’t want to press charges, but he was thinking about it. What a bunch of ridiculous people.”

  “Maybe we should just get to South Dakota,” I said.

  “I have pretty toes,” Delores said, pointing to her feet. “No one can stop me.”

  “Do you think your dad really notified the police, or is it just a trick to get us to turn around?”

  “Hard saying, not knowing,” Delores said. “But here’s what I don’t get. No one cares when we’re around, but the minute we leave, we’re everyone’s top priority. It’s weird.”

  “You want the thing you don’t have.”

  “That’s for certain. I mean,” she said, shifting again to set her toes in the sun, “it’s not like we stole anything of value. Speed was heading to the glue factory. The stupid trailer was sitting behind Richard’s house with grass growing up through the floor. It’s all about power. Who can bully who.”

  “They don’t like seeing us free,” I said, understanding something for the first time.

  “That’s right. If one person wears a ball and chain, they want everyone to wear one. You know what I should do? I should call my dad and say, ‘Gee, you’re right, could you send me a couple thousand dollars and I’ll jump on a plane and come live with you?’ Then we’d see how important it all is to him.”

  “They wouldn’t care if we were boys. If we were boys, they’d say we were boys being boys. But girls are supposed to be home sitting around. I hate that.”

  “The history of Western society is one long attempt to control the sexual and reproductive autonomy of women,” Delores said. She looked at me and puffed out her cheeks and crossed her eyes. We both laughed hard.

  “Where in the world did you come up with that one?” I asked her.

  “It’s the only thing I remember from school. The only thing! Ms. Blankley. You remember. She was right out of college and she spouted all this feminist junk, and everyone hated her. I did, too. But when you kind of stopped and listened, you realized she made sense about eighty percent of the time. And she said that. In fact, it was on the top of most of her handouts. We used to have these crazy arguments in her class about men and women and gender roles. You know, women as property, the whole white dress thing at weddings. We had about three fundamentalist Christians in the class, and they went cowabunga every time she got wound up. The school let her go that spring.”

  “What class?”

  “This kind of lit/sociology class called The Outsiders. Who was outside of whom. You know, groups within groups. It was interesting, sort of. We read a couple good books.”

  The phone rang.

  “I forgot to turn it off,” Delores said. “Should we answer?”

  “Who is it?”

  She looked at the phone cover.

  “I don’t recognize the number. It might be my dad.”

  “Your call,” I said. “No pun intended.”

  “I haven’t talked to him in forever. And now he probably wants to yell at me.”

  She reached forward and lowered the volume on the radio.

  “Hello?” she asked, flicking open her phone.

  Someone said something.

  “Oh, hello, Dad,” she said, making her eyes big for my benefit. “How have you been?”

  She listened.

  “Well,” she said after a little while, “that’s one way to see it. I don’t think that’s the only way. Mom has been fine.”

  She listened some more.

  Then, without saying anything else, she closed the phone. It rang again almost immediately.

  “That was bad Daddy,” she said. “The angry idiot Daddy who doesn’t listen.”

  “You hung up on him?”

  “You can’t hang up a cell phone.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  She opened the phone again.

  “Listen,” she said when he apparently paused. “If you just want to call and yell, I’m going to hang up.… Yes. That’s right. I expect to discuss things rationally. You speak, then I speak. We come to a middle ground or something. I’m eighteen, as you just pointed out. I don’t want to be …”

  She turned to me and raised her eyebrows in question.

  “Berated?” I whispered.

  “Berated,” she said into the phone.

  Then she listened. He went on for a long time, but at least he didn’t seem to be yelling.

  “I don’t see how calling the police will help anyone,” she said after a few minutes. “It’s not going to improve the situation to have us arrested somewhere. If you think that will teach us a big lesson or something, I guess you can do it. But I’m here to tell you that it won’t be a lesson. It will just make things more difficult for everyone. And if Richard needs the trailer, you can tell him to rent one and I will reimburse him for any costs. I’ve got waitressing money left over.”

  I heard his voice come loudly and abruptly over the phone.

  “Then what is the point? Is it that this trailer is so incredibly valuable? He can take a horse from here to there in a rented trailer. It will probably be a nicer trailer if he rents one. You’re grabbing at something to make it into an issue, and it really isn’t an issue. You’re just trying to find some kind of leverage.”

  Then he yelled again. She snapped the phone closed.

  “You were amazing,” I said.

  “If you stay real calm with people, you can usually poke holes through whatever they’re doing to you.”

  “Still,” I said.

  “He’s just threatening. I don’t know, maybe he’ll go ahead and do it, but he hasn’t yet. Alerted the police, I mean. But it’s going to sound pretty flimsy. He’s being a big freaking buzz kill.”

  “Is your mom freaking?”

  “Just because he’s involved,” Delores said. “She digs the attention. Are you kidding? Mom is an attention sponge, especially from men.”

  “Father issues,” I said, and we both laughed.

  “The long and the short of it is,” Delores said, “they can’t stand not having us under their power. They can’t stand that we’re doing something spur-of-the-moment. They don’t say a word about Speed anymore. They stopped playing that card.”

  “Speed’s the whole reason for the trip.”

  “Speed’s part of the reason,” Delores said. “We’ve got to be honest about that. There’s other stuff, and we both know it.”

  “True. I’ll give you that.”

  “Just stuff. Just yearning.”

  “We’re in Minnesota,” I said. “That’s got to count for something.”

  Chapter 5

  “WAKE UP,” DELORES SAID, SHAKING MY KNEE. “YOU HAVE to see this.”

  I woke slowly. Rain hit against the win
dshield. I couldn’t tell how long I had been asleep. It felt like late afternoon. We had stopped too much and made herky-jerky time. I rubbed my face and tilted the rearview mirror to see my reflection. I looked swollen and squinty at the same time. “Ugh,” I said, and dug out a brush from the space between the seat cushions. I ran the brush through my hair until I didn’t have nap head. Then I drank a big gulp of cherry water. When I finished, I put my head back against the seat and tried to wake up. But my brain buzzed, and the windshield wipers hypnotized me.

  “We’re taking a little break,” Delores said. “We’re going to have a cultural experience.”

  “Oh?” I said, not really getting into it.

  She veered off the highway. She tilted the rearview mirror back to where she could use it.

  “We’ve got to get Speed out for a while, anyway. And we have to see this.”

  “See what?”

  “You’ll see. Kiss my hand in gratitude,” she said, holding out her right hand like a princess.

  “You’re nuts.”

  “You will when you see what I’ve found. You will.”

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “Oh, I’ll take care of that, too,” she said.

  “You’ve done all this while I was sleeping?”

  “You moaned in your sleep. I think you were having a sex dream.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “What, you never have sex dreams?”

  “Oh, Lord, don’t start on your sex chats.”

  “Hold on,” she said. “I have to see where I’m going.”

  I saw the sign when she did.

  SPAM MUSEUM

  “You’re kidding me,” I said.

  “Did I say you would want to kiss my hand?” she asked, holding it out again.

  “The SPAM factory?”

  “It’s got to be.”

  I sat up.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “I’m going.”

  “What time is it? Will it be open?”

  “It’s like four-fifteen. I figure it’s open until five at least.”

  We followed the signs. The parking lot was nearly empty. Delores parked as close to the door as she could. I jumped out, checked on Speed, told him we weren’t delivering him to the SPAM factory, then grabbed Delores’s hand and sprinted with her to the entrance.

  A slender young black guy in a red jacket took our money. He told us we only had thirty minutes, but if we wanted to buy anything from the shop, they would let us browse awhile longer. We thanked him and ran through the enormous SPAM can that served as the front door. The lobby had a wall of SPAM cans stacked to the ceiling. Delores took out her cell phone and made me stand in front of it while she took three pictures. Then I took three of her. The ticket guy saw we wanted a picture together and came out from behind his booth window and snapped two for us.

  “That’s a SPAM dandy shot,” Delores said, looking at the picture when he handed back the phone.

  “You better move it along,” he said, heading back to his booth.

  “SPAM you very much,” Delores said.

  I grabbed her hand and yanked her into the museum. We had trouble slowing down. Each new display was more delicious. We stayed awhile in front of an exhibit on the history of Hormel meats. We read about Slammin’ Spammy, a bomb-throwing pig from World War II, and Hormel Dog Dessert in a tube, and Wimpy’s eight-ounce hamburger in a can. We watched a clip of the Hormel Girls, a group of young women who traveled the country singing and dancing and promoting SPAM, and read a few pages of Squeal, the Hormel meatpacking magazine. Delores sighed and said she wished she could be a Hormel Girl, dancing around the country in a crazy outfit. Then we moved faster, because the single docent—a large, bright red woman who cleared her throat a couple times and began moving a chair to where it apparently spent the night—seemed to be readying to close. We read a quick article about a SPAM-carving contest in Seattle and watched a three-minute Monty Python skit about SPAM in Britain.

  “I want a T-shirt,” Delores said.

  “It’s not in our budget.”

  “To heck with the budget. This is the SPAM Museum, for goodness’ sakes, Hattie.”

  We shopped. The shop had coffee cups, postcards, stationery, calendars, alarm clocks, and wastebaskets—everything SPAM themed. We spent a long time searching through the T-shirts. Delores debated between a pale yellow shirt that said SPAM-Fabulous over a faded picture of a SPAM can, and a second shirt that said SPAM Saved the Russian Army, Nikita Khrushchev. The Russian army marched clockwise around the shirt.

  I bought a straight navy T-shirt with a bright yellow can of SPAM across the chest.

  “Which?” Delores said, pointing to the shirts.

  “I like the Russian army one,” I said.

  “I do, too, but I like the other one better.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The Russian shirt feels like it’s trying too hard,” Delores said. “I can just picture guys reading the shirt and staring at my boobs. ‘SPAM-Fabulous’ is easy.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Buy it.”

  She bought both. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to buy us hats, too, but I told her no way. She pitched a mini-fit, but she couldn’t help laughing as she paid. When the clock in the shop hit five, it let out five oinks.

  “You all find everything?” the ticket guy asked.

  “You bet your SPAM we did,” Delores said, crazy, the way she can be at times.

  “Is that your truck?” he asked. “Because there was a cop looking at it a second ago.”

  “We’re fugitives from the law,” Delores said. “We’re women going west.”

  “Exciting,” the ticket guy said.

  “Where’s the cop now?” I asked.

  “He went over near the other side of the parking lot. Be cool going out, not all spazzy. That’s my advice.”

  “SPAM you again,” Delores said.

  The ticket guy shook his head and smiled down at his hands.

  The rain hadn’t let up. We stood for a minute under the archway of the SPAM can.

  “Where are we, anyway?” I asked.

  “Austin, Minnesota. We haven’t come that far across Minnesota yet.”

  “What’s the next state?” I asked, crooking my head forward a little to look out for the cop car. I saw it down where the SPAM guy had said it would be. It idled quietly, its lights dimmed, the cop impossible to see through the window.

  “South Dakota,” Delores said.

  “We should change the plates back,” I said.

  “I’m thinking so, too.”

  “Let’s find a place where Speed can feed and we can get out of the rain. We can figure the rest out later.”

  “Where, though?”

  “No idea,” I said. “Let’s just follow the service road and see where it takes us. It’s not like it’s all city around here.”

  “That’s a plan.”

  We put the T-shirt bags over our heads and ran back to the truck. We knew better than to look at the cop car. Delores jumped in behind the wheel, and I slid in on the other side. She started the truck and got it going smoothly. She drove pretty smart, actually. She looped a little toward the cop car, no worries, then steered her way out of the parking lot.

  “Is he coming?” she asked, not looking in the mirror. “Pretend you need something behind you and turn and look.”

  I did.

  “Nope, he’s not coming.”

  “We are so freaking ninja.”

  She gassed the truck onto the service road. We headed west.

  “I get to wear your T-shirt half the time,” I said.

  “Which one?”

  “Whichever one I want.”

  “We’re not sleeping out tonight,” she said, looking at the rain.

  “We can get a motel,” I said. “That’s in the budget, but not the T-shirts.”

  “Two nights in a motel,” she said. “Right?”

  “Whatever,” I said. “We�
�ll see.”

  “We need a sweet setup with Speed.”

  “He needs to take a break soon.”

  I got up on my knees and looked back through the rear window at Speed. Now and then I glimpsed him swaying between his two halter leads. His big, lanky head swung into view for a second. He looked asleep.

  “I hate putting him out in the rain,” I said. “Even with a blanket, I don’t like it.”

  “He’ll be okay. We’ve had good luck so far. Besides, if he’s going to be living in the wild, he better get used to a few things.”

  For a while after that we didn’t talk. I’m not sure what Delores thought about, but I felt a little homesick and lonely. I couldn’t say why. Part of it came from the isolation of being in a truck, on a road, in a state we didn’t know. Part of it came from wondering if we were doing right by Speed after all. Maybe it had been selfish to take him, just as the Fergusons had said. We sort of used him as an excuse to leave, it felt like, and that put a block of ice in my guts. But then I reminded myself that I loved Speed, truly loved him, and what came from love had a chance of being right. I wouldn’t hurt him for the world.

  We passed two motels, one skeezier than the next. Each tried to outdo the other with catchy names. Bide-a-While, and Empty Tank Motel. You had to wonder about the owners, the first time they opened for business, the whole crew standing out in the front yard of the cruddy-looking place and seeing that sign and thinking, That will really bring them in. The image seemed so crazy, I had to rub my hands into my eyes.

  “Let’s get Speed out,” I said. “He’s been cooped up too long.”

  “Okay, Hattie,” Delores said, taking a turn up one of the side roads. “There’s bound to be a meadow around here.”

  A mile or two up, Delores bounced the truck up a dirt road that went through two meadows. The land stretched out flat and quiet and dark. The rain had stopped for the most part, but the clouds had covered any chance of a moon, and Delores turned on her lights to see ahead of us.

  “Look at that,” I said. “Did you see?”

  Just over the next small rise we saw a pack of horses. They had collected next to the road under a large pin oak. In the gloaming light, with the clouds low over the horizon, the horses looked out of a painting.

  “Pull over,” I said, but Delores was already doing it.