55
Fischer’s bedroom was dark, with just enough moonlight filtering in from the curtains to make out the shape of a bed, a nightstand, and the back of a chair. I shut the door and fumbled with the bedside lamp, dropping the duffel on the chair. From the front of the house came the faint sound of a refrigerator door opening and closing, the discordant crackling of ice cubes breaking apart in a tray.
I took a seat on Fischer’s mattress and eased open the top drawer of the nightstand, disturbing a worn paperback thriller and a handheld flashlight, an inexplicable number of rubber bands, a pack of matches. I shut the drawer and went over to his closet, rolling the hollow door back on its track as quietly as possible. A row of collared shirts hung from evenly spaced wooden hangers. On the shelves his sweaters were folded into perfect squares, stacked neatly at their crease. A pair of broken-in bag gloves dangled from a coat hook. I stripped in the lamplight and pulled a T-shirt down from the shelf, slipping it over my head. It smelled like laundry detergent and faintly, in the collar, of Fischer. I crouched to examine his shoe rack and recognized the slim black case stacked between boxes. I slid it out carefully, straining for any sound of Fischer approaching, flipping the latches to reveal a short, neat Smith & Wesson. I had assumed that Fischer, like most townies, kept his guns in a locked display case or tucked away in the garage. For some reason this gun had been set aside; a spare forgotten or recently used, not yet returned to its proper place. It could have been Ava’s, though I hadn’t seen any other evidence of her in the house. I took the gun out of the case. It fit comfortably in my hand. Even Ava wouldn’t have a problem handling a gun this simple. Despite all the years since Cesar’s last shooting lesson, neither would I.
I checked the safety before replacing the empty case between the shoeboxes. I grabbed a pair of sweatpants off the shelf and rolled the gun inside, crossing the room to shove both in my duffel bag. I stood still in the middle of Fischer’s bedroom, listening. The sounds from the kitchen had quieted, Fischer fallen asleep on the couch or returning to work on his files.
Fischer’s bed was twice the size of my narrow twin at home, and when I climbed in, the sheets smelled of him, too. I turned off the lights and closed my eyes, hoping to override the ache in my chest and the strangeness of the room: the missing weight of a dog at the foot of the bed and Lamb’s intermittent snore rattling faintly across the hall. The dogs, at least, would be fine. They would have eaten together, played together; they would lean into Jackson’s home, confident in each other’s company for a while yet. They trusted I would return to them. I rolled onto my side, reaching underneath the pillow for the kitchen knife that wasn’t there. The moonlight through the curtains wasn’t quite the same.
4
After several days of hard rain, the elementary school’s field flooded. Every day that week we stared out classroom windows gray and dreary, gloomily receiving the morning’s lesson. At third period, the fourth and fifth graders trekked to the locker rooms and lined up outside, shivering in our gym shorts in the February chill. The phys ed teacher, a sinewy, impatient woman with long, crimped hair that flew every which way in the wind, shuffled us to the stuffy auditorium, where we threw flattening dodgeballs at one another with growing ill will. By Friday, the bleak weather had lost all novelty, and the phys ed teacher had grown sick of our whining. She sent us to walk laps around the edge of the oblong field, still boggy from the rains. The moisture had unearthed the peaty smell of fertilizer in the air, and on the south end of the field where patches of yellow crabgrass sprouted, the stalks bent under the weight of stagnant water. The ground was still too sodden, with stretches of mud that sucked the bottoms of our sneakers, for anyone to attempt a jog.
We arranged ourselves in a single-file line and began to walk. I hung toward the back of the procession, an ideal position to keep watch on the other students. As we neared the end of our first lap, the line curved along the south bend so that as we moved the line it met up behind the head, forming a closed loop of students moving along the periphery like a bike chain turning around rusty gears. We completed three dutiful laps before the restless among us began looking around for Ms. Price. She was spotted at the edge of the blacktop, deep in conversation with the football coach, clutching his bare, hairy arms. Both of their expressions partially obscured by sunglasses.
Farther up the line, a boy broke out in laughter, the sound distilled in the cold. Some of the older students broke formation, sneaking up to join their friends. After a little while other students followed suit, skipping forward or falling behind until the line disintegrated and the two grades walked freely in pairs and clusters of their choosing. I spied Penny several yards ahead, flanked by Luz and Lourdes, three dark ponytails swinging in step. Luz kicked a rock, darting out of line to find where it landed before punting it back to their route. After another lap around the field, Penny began to fall behind the other girls. She slowed way down, letting other students pass her. After a few moments, she was closer than before, and she hung back again, until she was walking only a few feet ahead of me. One of the most riotous boys, a fifth grader, was telling an animated story to a group of girls nearby, pitching his voice shrill and fractured. Every time he spoke I turned to look at him, as if expecting to find a stranger in his place—someone new—as if we hadn’t all known for years that there would only be each other.
Penny walked more slowly now. She was close enough that if I hurried ahead, I could reach out and tap her shoulder. There were only a couple other students, and an entire world, between us. Far ahead, Lourdes stepped out of line, turning back as if only just noticing Penny was gone. Spotting her, she started walking back through the crowd in our direction.
The sky was still cloudy; there was a clammy feeling in the air, signaling more rain. The traction from all our sneakers made a slick in the mud. To avoid it, some of the students began taking a shorter, circumscribed loop around the field. We were approaching the south bend, the early mist from another drizzle just beginning to form. After a while the puddles quivered under the first drops of real rain. How many more years would we circle this same invariable field? Finally Lourdes reached Penny and fell in step beside her. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Penny make a sudden, strong gesture, like sweeping crumbs off a tablecloth, or drawing aside a curtain. Someone let out a sharp gasp. I turned in time to see Lourdes landing with a hard, wet plop in a puddle of mud, muck splattering her face and hair. We stopped short behind her, a number of students nearly toppling into one another. All eyes were on Lourdes, who sat blinking in the puddle, looking stunned, her shorts growing more waterlogged by the minute. The chill of the water must have reached her, because her lower lip began to tremble. The riotous fifth grader stepped out from behind and offered her a hand, helping to pull her up. From somewhere in the growing huddle, a girl began to titter. Another joined in, and soon several students were laughing openly at the sight of Lourdes soggy and mud splattered, covering her face with her hands.
I searched for Penny in the crowd but couldn’t find her. When we had all stopped short, Penny kept walking. I finally spotted her across the field, her long ponytail swinging as she passed students who were only just beginning to notice there was a the commotion behind them and turning back to look. She passed the students at the front of the procession who had yet to realize anything had happened at all. Watching her, it was almost possible to believe she was one of them—that she had never noticed Lourdes fall. But there was a rigid determination to her stride as she passed Luz, who didn’t even seem to notice, and as the head of the procession began looping around the far bend, Penny walked straight off the field altogether, onto the blacktop. She passed Ms. Price and the football coach, who seemed to know better than to stop her. I watched Penny cut across the asphalt in the direction of the locker rooms and our classrooms beyond, not bothering to slow down. It was almost as if she had decided to keep walking forever, as if she had decided just that minute, that she’d sh
e had enough of this school and everything in it, and she had to begin taking matters into her own hands. As if she already knew exactly where she was headed, and it didn’t matter who or what she needed to leave behind.
56
I woke in the haze of morning light. Fischer stood by the bed in a pair of white shorts, his skin pale as tusk, his dark hair disheveled. In his left hand he rolled an empty glass along his fingertips; first this way, then that, as if it were a crystal or a rune, something with which to portend. This Fischer was otherworldly, different from other Fischers I had known. His face lacked accusation. I pulled myself up on his bed. The curtains covering his window stirred as if by an invisible hand. When you wake up in the morning, we’re going to drive down to the station and you’re going to tell me, very carefully, very clearly, whatever the hell you’re trying to say now. But it was still too early, and that internal chord of alarm—struck first that night in the desert—was thrumming now. The chill in the room turned my bare arms to gooseflesh. Without noticing when or how it happened, summer was gone.
“Is something wrong?” I asked. Time rolled over and showed her belly, polished a fang. I pulled the bedsheets higher on my chest.
“You didn’t lock the door,” Fischer said.
He set the glass on the nightstand and turned down the covers on the opposite side of the bed. He climbed in, infinitely casual, as if we shared a familiar routine that spanned continuums. I felt his warm, muscled thigh come to press against my own. Across the room I spied my duffel bag slouched on the chair, his gun inside, unmolested.
“Wait—”
Fischer rolled over me in bed, tucking the length of my body under his. The heat and the weight of him, shockingly new.
“Fischer—” His name caught somewhere in my throat.
He lowered his mouth onto mine and kissed me, manipulating my chin with his hand at the base of my throat, showing me how to reciprocate. Was I pliable? I was. His mouth tasted sweet. I felt his wide, warm hands slipping up my thighs, under the T-shirt I had stolen, pulling down my underwear. I tucked my nose in the crook of his neck and tried to recall a line from Milton, the sound of Wolf’s snuffle midsleep, any fragment from a life I would no longer inhabit. My underwear tangled around one ankle. He parted my legs with his hands and pushed himself inside. I cried out as he began to move. He pressed his hot, moist mouth against my ear.
“Tell me what you like.” His fingers digging into my hips.
“I don’t know.” My breath belonged to someone drowning at sea. “This?”
I closed my eyes, opening them in time to catch a fleeting emotion cross his features; bewilderment, fear. He thrust himself deeper inside. I tilted my hips and watched his worry, and the last drops of my girlhood, disappear.
64
I sat in the truck in the parking lot of the Leaspoke, staring at the duffel bag with Fischer’s gun in the next seat, the white paper bag of muffins bleeding clear spots of grease through the paper. If Penny left the Leaspoke alive, where would she go next? This was another game of hangman, a test of friendship that relied as much on my knowledge of the things Penny would do as the things she wouldn’t. I remembered her as she was on the mountain, sitting on that flat boulder, her long, dark braid thick as a child’s fist.
Are you sure you know what you’re doing?
Not at all.
I started the truck. If Penny left the Leaspoke through the restaurant, she would need to hitch a ride. I backed out of the lot and pulled around the side entrance. There were several cars in the parking lot, and a spattering of semis. The closest road led to the freeway on-ramps, a gas station, and the Grindhouse Drive-In, the last chance for food or fuel for thirty miles. I drove to the gas station first. A handful of big rigs were parked along a wide pullout behind the diesel pumps. Their cabs were empty, their owners filling up on shakes and fries across the street.
Inside the gas station, the cashier looked up from behind the counter, tugging a long, skinny black goatee sectioned off with green rubber bands. The only customer was a middle-aged man in a bright knit poncho, his attention fixated on the hot dogs rolling on the grill, cradling a split bun in the center of his palm.
“Dude’s waiting for a lucky one,” the attendant said, following my gaze. “You filling up?”
“Twenty on three, please.” I selected a map from the carousel by the register, a bag of red licorice. I pulled out the glossy page I’d torn from our senior yearbook before leaving Pomoc and unfolded it on the counter. Four rows of blithe and tender faces, Penny’s ample grin.
“Can you tell me if you’ve seen this girl?”
He grabbed the bag of licorice, squinting at the page. “Nah. Cute though. Friend of yours?”
“You’re sure?”
“I mean, would I put money on it? We get a lot of people passing through.”
I hesitated before reaching into my purse for the mugshot I’d stolen from Fischer’s file.
We flattened it on the countertop together, considering Lucas Driscoll in black and white. The mugshot was several years old, predating his city haircut. His hair was shaggy and he sported a thick beard, his eyes clear but no less black. His convictions were listed in ascending order: breaking and entering, resisting arrest, simple battery, domestic violence. What made one type of battery simple? The cashier tugged on his goatee.
“How about him?” I asked.
“Nah. I’d remember him.”
“I need to make some copies. You know where I can find a copy machine around here?”
“There’s one in the back. I can do it for you if you want to wait. Five cents each.”
“That would be great. Could you blow hers up a little?” I counted the bills in my wallet. “I could get fifty each.”
“Give me a minute. I gotta ring this guy up first.”
I stepped back to wait for the man to select his hot dog and spread open my map on the flat surface of the ice cream cooler, tracing the highways with my fingertip, the varied paths they cut through the state. The options, as I saw them, were few. If Penny was looking to hitch a ride to Pomoc, she would head back on the highway the way I came. But Fischer, or any of the local precincts that received her photograph, should be watching those truck stops, and would hopefully spot her along the way. The other options were to head south to Vegas, or west to Reno, hitting smaller casinos on the way. Lastly, truckers from the Midwest hauling freight to California would take local freeways to the 80 before connecting to the I-5, taking the Grapevine that looped south, into California’s gullet. If Penny was serious about Hollywood, I should follow her there, where even if her luck turned sour, she could push farther south to a cluster of Indian casinos a hundred miles from the border. Alvaro’s words echoed in my mind, even though I wanted Penny to prove him wrong. Where could she go? Not far.
The clerk rang up the man’s hot dog and disappeared in the back. I folded the map. There was a second, smaller rotary stand by the register bearing postcards with casino nightscapes; the Leaspoke’s spread of electric feathers, the churning waterwheels of East River Mills, an aerial shot of the new, glittering Vegas, her sleek, modern lines lit up brighter than a nuclear test site. I grabbed one for Cesar and slipped it into Penny’s purse. When the attendant returned I borrowed a marker and wrote Fischer’s number across the top of one of the yearbook copies, sliding it back over.
“In case you see her,” I said.
I watched him tape the flyer to the cash register. Penny’s profuse grin would be the last thing customers would see when they checked out. It was a face I knew they wouldn’t forget. I stopped myself from giving him a copy of Driscoll’s mug shot to tape up alongside, as if by keeping their photos far apart, I might spare Penny his company in real life, too.
“Good luck,” the cashier said.
57
Leaving Fischer’s house, I took Main Street to the freeway, watching Po
moc grow smaller and smaller in the rearview until it finally disappeared. From here, anywhere was possible: Washoe, Tehacama, Reno, Carson, Carr. The freeways between these places were black and hungry, split open like rattlesnakes drying in the sun. With one hand on the wheel, I unzipped the duffel and shoved Penny’s yellow folder inside. The radio was still set to her favorite oldies station; I forced myself to sing along. When I looked over, I could see Penny in the passenger seat, twisting a strand of dark hair around a finger, examining the exquisite angles of her face in the side mirror. Rubbing strawberry lip gloss on her fat bottom lip.
After an hour of driving, I took the detour through a series of old mountain roads, corkscrewing up one of the dry gravel faces, flattening down the opposite side into rock-strewn sand. After ten minutes the radio gave out, dwindling into buzz. I moved cautiously up another long, sharp bend, but when the road began to dip and level on the other side, I stepped on it to make up time, speeding too fast to avoid the great cloud of dust picking up a couple yards in the distance, coalescing into a funnel. There was no time to shut the windows before it swept down the road, heading directly for the truck. A cacophony of sand and rock hit at once, pinging off the windshield and doors, pelting the exposed flesh of my face and arms, obscuring every mirror. I braked hard, a dry, earthy taste filled my nose and mouth. This was what it felt like to be buried alive.
A few moments later, the noise began to drop away and the spray eased. I opened my eyes to a mist of sand particles drifting past the windshield, catching in the light. My hands were shaking, not from the dust cloud, but from the truck’s dead spin two weeks earlier, the sandman parked just a little off the road to the right. I could already feel how much of my life would be spent trying to recover a feeling of carelessness I hadn’t known to treasure.
A Prayer for Travelers Page 22
