“I tried pretending nothing was happening, but he kept doing it. I fell and skinned my knee. Dusty wouldn’t stop, and Allan Grimes was standing behind Dusty—”
“Oh,” Penny said.
“They stomped me pretty good.” I took my right hand off the steering wheel and held it up. The ring finger twisted at the first phalange, the pinky finger bent at the tip. She glanced away quickly, back to the road. For a while neither of us said anything, just watched the town roll by. It was the most I’d said to anyone in a long time, even Lamb. So maybe I’d made the same mistake as him then—as Cesar and Trixie, too—I’d shifted so far away from myself in defense of one problem, not realizing how I might harden, creating another.
“If I can’t get a ride I usually walk,” Penny said finally, breaking the silence. “Hitch a ride. I figure it out.”
“I thought you had a car in school?”
“Everyone needs to total a car once in their life. Pull up over there, will you?” Penny gestured to the convenience store approaching on our right. I pulled into the lot and idled while Penny jumped out and disappeared inside. An empty maroon sedan was parked off to the side, a season of dust accumulated on the windows. Yet for all the times I’d stopped here, I could swear I’d never seen it before. These days everything felt singular: the strained silence at home; the long afternoons at the diner; the strange sensation of driving with someone in the next seat who wasn’t Trixie, who panted loudly, refusing to stick her head out the window like other dogs.
A few minutes later Penny emerged from the store carrying a six-pack of beer and a bag of licorice. She climbed in and set the cans between her legs. I pulled onto the road slowly, hoping to prompt Penny into offering directions, since I’d never been to Rena’s house before. But Penny sat up on her knees, twisting around in her seat to reach the storage space behind the bench, a string of red licorice hanging from her teeth, investigating the finds: a gallon of water, a tire iron, Lamb’s heavy winter gloves, Trixie’s favorite warm blanket, which she pulled back over the seat to show me, brushing uselessly at the short, golden hairs stuck in the weave.
“You have a dog,” Penny said.
* * *
—
Rena lived on the opposite side of town, in flat land. Penny pointed out a sequence of directions that circumvented the shortcut through the palo. I got the sense she wanted to avoid it altogether, maybe in the same way I did when Lamb and I took long drives out to Tehacama or Washoe, any place far enough away that Pomoc began to feel like the tiniest pebble in a boot I had walked on for miles, irksome but forgettable. Since the development of the palo businesses ten years before, the dusty roads skirting the perimeter of town had fallen into disrepair. The brittlebrush grew over into the lane, the sharp, woody stems snapping at our tires. Had it really been a decade since I drove by the abandoned burnt-out house behind the road, that mythic signpost from our childhood? The legend, passed around every Halloween since the first grade, was of a lover’s quarrel: a man so angry about his wife’s affair that he poured gasoline on her nightgown, lit a match, and watched her burn. Our neighbor Jackson had a car repair by the old lumberyard, and Lamb brought us out this way several times a year. Every time we drove by the blackened frame, I laid a child’s palm flat against the glass, a mournful greeting to the spirit trapped inside. Only now did I see how unlikely the story was to be true, how strange it was that I never asked Lamb about the house or the rumors behind it. I felt Penny tracking my attention on the house in the rearview, but she didn’t say a word. Maybe she had nothing to add. We had grown up alongside each other all these years, separate, but in proximate reach; we heard all the same stories, had the same townie markers and points of reference. Yet how different our lives were. How much, ultimately, was still the same.
After several miles the road ran out near the aging water tower and I cut speed. Penny gestured up another dirt road, clicking her long nails against the glass when she meant for me to turn. We bumped up a small hill and turned into a stretch of gravel ending in a cluster of homes set close enough together that a neighbor could hear every word a person spoke to a dog or child outside, and half of any argument carrying on inside. The sun was beginning its vermilion stretch into the horizon, the air just beginning to cool.
I parked in front of the plain single-story home, a slatback rocking chair and pallet rack of firewood crowding the porch. Rena emerged from the screen door, a hand shading her eyes from the sun. She squinted at us in the truck, struggling to make us out in the glare. I unbuckled my seat belt, hesitating.
“You did tell her we were coming, didn’t you?”
Penny pulled the beer into her lap. The look she gave me, largely unconcerned.
“Kind of,” she said.
38
I didn’t want to go to the waiting room, but I didn’t know where else to go, either. The fourth floor of the hospital was ice cold, the long hall between the elevator and the oncology department a beige plank under fluorescent light. Somewhere in this hospital Catherine had died, and with her a part of Lamb I could only imagine: a hazy silhouette cobbled together from old photographs and Cesar’s anecdotes of their past exploits; the soft, faraway expression Lamb wore late summer evenings before bed. Those nights it was as if, though his body remained in the house with me, something less substantial slipped away, deserting our life together for a realm of happier memories.
At the end of the hall I ducked into the women’s restroom, avoiding the mirrors. I bent over a sink and turned on the tap, splashing my face, letting the water drip in the sink. Impossible, in this place, not to see my own reflection and wonder how closely it resembled Catherine’s and her daughter’s, not to feel an eerie pull toward the fifth floor where both women had been born, or the first, where Catherine’s daughter had returned just long enough to deposit something unwanted. I cupped my hands under the tap and drank from it, tasting metals.
I stopped outside the bathrooms at the pay phones. I had left my wallet in Lamb’s room, but I patted my pockets and came up with two quarters, a nickel and Sheriff Fischer’s card folded in half. I picked up the phone and tucked the receiver in my chin to smoothe out the card, dialing the first number printed. Fischer’s voice came over the line.
“It’s you,” I said, pleasantly surprised. The mechanized telephone operator interrupted us, drowning his response. I had only five minutes to speak.
“Who?” Fischer asked.
“It’s Cale Lambert. I came in yesterday.”
“Cale. How can I help you?”
“I’m calling to see if there’s any news about Penny?”
“Your friend, right? An officer called one of the names you wrote down, Christina Cruz.”
“Flaca.”
“Right. Hasn’t seen your friend and has no idea where she might be. If she doesn’t turn up in a couple days, we’ll put out some feelers.”
“Feelers! What about—”
The door to the men’s bathroom swung open and two young boys went streaking down the hall, shrieking in play. An older man followed a moment later, looking sheepish.
“Where are you, a circus?”
“The hospital in Tehacama. I’m on a pay phone. I don’t have much time.”
“You get into another fight?”
“No, nothing like that.” I laid my head against the wall, closing my eyes. Please don’t let Flaca be right. Why did I think Fischer would be any help? Because I used to split ham sandwiches with his daughter in grade school? Because if Ava ever went missing, I thought he’d do more than put out feelers? I didn’t know the first thing about him. But I recalled the feeling of his hand on mine, the pressure of his thumb circling my knuckle.
“She’s already been gone for three days.”
“Feel free to check in anytime.”
I looked down the hall at the sad, scuffed floor, the stark blank walls. In the corridor
was some desperate feeling obscured in normal life. Bodies laid on gurneys on floor after floor, all human mystery stripped away.
“Listen,” I heard myself say, “there’s something I didn’t tell you. When I was in her house, I saw something in the kitchen. It could have been blood. Also, last week—it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. She mentioned she was afraid of someone.”
I waited, hearing only silence. I wondered if we’d already been cut off.
“Cale.” Fischer returned to the line, my name now a curt syllable. “I don’t think you want to start making things up.”
“Some guy had been into the diner a few days in a row,” I continued, “someone she’d never seen before. She told me he was giving her the creeps.” I squeezed my eyes shut. How easily the lie came, how naturally it was made. The way it could, in so many ways, be true. Hadn’t Penny voiced similar fears herself, of trespass, of danger? Someone got broken into the other day.
“I have a hard time believing you wouldn’t have shared that when you were sitting in my office.”
“I was upset. I’ve been having trouble—”
“You told me she took her purse with her.”
“No, I said she only carried a purse sometimes.”
“Did she describe this imaginary man to you?”
“Why would she leave her house without her phone?”
I could hear his breathing, the exasperation in it.
“Lying to me would be the worst thing you could do.”
“You don’t know what Penny really looks like. When guys see her . . .” But I was starting to hear what I was actually saying, to imagine it. I pressed my back flat against the hospital wall, my entire body flushing warm, the metallic taste of the sink water returning to my mouth. My lungs felt like a paper bag someone was crumpling in their palm, a man pushing his knee between my ribs. Did Fischer know the worst thing a person could do? I let go of the phone and bent over, hands on my knees, another wave of nausea rolling. I could still hear Fischer’s voice emanating from the receiver, dangling on its cord, but I didn’t retrieve it. Let Fischer consider the kinds of men who might take an interest in a beautiful girl, the kinds of things they might do to get her. Let Fischer speak into the dead space, waiting for a reply that never comes.
13
I still couldn’t tell if Rena wanted to see us, even after we were all standing together on the porch. If Penny and I shared a psychic catalog of Pomoc’s minor landmarks—the burned-out house, the old rail station, the western sloping mountain—we also carried a directory of its most familiar faces, Rena’s chief among them. The longest-working waitress at Jake’s, she was linked eternally in our minds with Charlie, her high school sweetheart, a darkly bearded, bifocaled trucker. Together since high school, they had produced two rangy sons who could have been twins, but weren’t. Just now it seemed Rena was the double, an impostor of herself out of context from the diner. Her denim clam diggers and baggy T-shirt lacked the definition of a tightly wound apron at her waist; her limp, unwashed hair translated none of the swift efficiency of her high waitress ponytail cleaved by a No. 2 pencil, the pull tightening the southward trickle of her jowls, a face puddling together in middle age. Up close, her eyes were pink, rubbed raw. When she saw the beer, she held open the screen door.
We passed through a hallway decorated with family portraits, the centerpiece a sixteen-by-twenty inch frame of her husband in a fluorescent trucker’s hat and camouflage hunting jacket, the sons in matching pants and vests, Rena a petite anchor at the end. The hall opened into a large, comfortable living room, a tattered couch I imagined Rena’s sons throwing themselves on after school still in their sneakers. It was a house any of the boys’ friends would be welcome to stay in for a night, or a week. Rena expected all young people to genuinely like her, if only for the beer she bought them. Just now the house felt conspicuously empty; the boys bailing to a friend’s house, the movies, anything to eject themselves from the pall.
In the kitchen, a chair had been pulled out from the rear of the large oak table, a half-drunk cup of coffee and a crumpled pack of Winstons next to a saucer full of crushed butts. Without needing to be asked, Penny set the six-pack down on the table, twisting off cans for me and Rena, then another for herself. I popped the tab, the aluminum still cool to the touch. Rena brushed past us to resume her seat by the window. She reached inside her baggy shirt and pulled an orange prescription bottle from her bra. She shook it, several pills rattling around in the plastic, before setting it down on the table.
“We need more of these,” she said.
Penny picked it up, squinting at the label. “Oxy? What else did they give him?”
“Not much. Said to have him come back next week. How am I even supposed to get him to the hospital? The casts are as big as he is.”
“I’ll get them for you. What else?”
I took a sip of my watery beer, nearly flat already, and set the can down on the table amid a growing sense of unease.
Rena reached for her cigarettes, lit one with a shaky hand. “I don’t know.”
“Are you sleeping? You need something to help?”
Why don’t you just bring her a menu? But Rena didn’t seem to be picking up on Penny’s suggestion. She uncapped the prescription bottle and shook three remaining pills into her palm, tucking one inside her cheek. For several moments the conversation stalled, Rena dissolving into her own mind.
“When can you bring them?” she asked suddenly.
“Tomorrow,” Penny said. “I’ll come back.”
Rena looked up at me across the table, as if only just noticing I was there. “How’s the job?”
I felt like I was lagging a beat behind the both of them, trying to sort through the vagaries of their conversation, how I managed to find myself mired in it.
“Good,” I said. “It’s nice to have something else to think about. Learning the small things.”
“Like what?” Penny asked, a little dry. “Cleaning the shake maker, or talking to humans?”
“I had that job for twenty-three years. Longer than either of you have been alive.” Rena paused, took a drink of her beer. She set down the can and tucked another pill inside her cheek. We waited. “Are you even twenty-one?”
“Eighteen soon,” I said.
“Penny? What are you? Twenty-one, twenty-two?”
“Ew,” Penny said.
“You’re not careful, trouble’ll age you. Sucks the meat clean off the bone.”
I shook my beer, surprised to find it nearly empty. Penny twisted off another can from the six-pack and handed it over without a word. Ever the artful supplier.
“I loved that job,” Rena said and set the last pill on the table next to the empty prescription bottle. “You know that? Got me out of here.” She looped a finger alongside her head. “People come in, tell you their problems. They asked for me.”
“I asked for you,” I said. Penny kicked me under the table. “I’m sure Jake will take you back when you’re ready.”
“How am I going to do that? I’ve got a busted-up man in there. No. I’m done-done. Stick a fork in me. Isn’t that what the kids say?” She crushed her cigarette in the saucer and turned to Penny. “How long?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll bring something to help you sleep. Okay?”
Rena nodded, and after a while her mood seemed to be level, or the pills in her cheek had begun to dissolve. She stood up and grabbed the crumpled pack of cigarettes off the table. “Come on. Cale, you’ve never met him.”
“Oh,” I said, because I had actually run into Rena’s husband plenty, in the way that places home to only a few hundred bodies seemed to promote encounter. He was one of several hulking figures around town in whose direction I’d vaguely smiled, waiting patiently behind his long diesel cabs blocked the pumps. It was definitely Charlie I’d seen at the gas station a few months earlier,
piling a mound of Slim Jims and chocolate bars on the counter for the clerk to ring up, then adding several bottles of poppers at the last minute, glancing around the gas station to meet my eyes.
Rena was already moving toward the hall, expecting us to follow. Penny stood, too, and started after her. I wanted to excuse myself and sneak out, but for what? To hurry home to another prolonged evening with Lamb, the two of us steeped in our silent resentments with only the dogs to keep score? I forced myself to follow Penny across the living room and down another hallway to a bedroom door Rena threw open, flipping on the lights.
The room was painted a milky beige and the blinds were drawn, the space above a sturdy dresser embellished by an assemblage of decorative wooden archery targets. On a bed that took up half the room, Charlie’s immense body recalled the sleeping giant in Lamb’s readings of Jack and the Beanstalk. He was fast asleep in a kink of sheets, his mouth agape, emitting a low puff and wheeze. Either Charlie was bigger than I remembered, or it was his round gut, exposed by the T-shirt riding up his chest, that made him appear more substantial. He wore the tight white briefs of a little boy, and I looked away from their obvious bulge to the tops of his soft, pale thighs visible above two solid casts enclosing both legs. His left arm lay crooked across his chest in a sling; a pattern of berry-colored contusions stippled his other fleshy arm. Penny was studying him with clinical remove.
Rena came forward and began to pull at the sheets twisted around his casts. I was afraid the movement would disturb him, that he would wake startled and find us gawking, but he snored on. When she finished, Rena sank down on the corner of the mattress by his plastered heel and lit another cigarette. She was looking at him as if he were a Christmas tree or a wheelbarrow, something familiar but inexplicably out of place. On the other side of the bed, a club chair had been arranged with several pillows and a blanket. On the nightstand was a tumbler of water, another prescription bottle.
“The doctors say he’ll never drive a rig again.” Rena flicked her ash onto the carpet.
A Prayer for Travelers Page 6
