A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  When the last specks of grit fell away, the innocuous world reappeared; the sun bright, the sky clear. But it was almost too quiet; no rustling brush, not a single bird. I was stopped in the middle of a road. There were no cars behind and none ahead. I unzipped the duffel again, digging deep for Fischer’s gun. I closed my hand around its solid weight and moved it to the truck’s console within easy reach.

  If this desert was a mother, she was the type to eat her young. I didn’t want to be alone when darkness fell and she let out her coyotes, her cats, her men. A few feet ahead, another cyclone of dirt began to lift and spin, taking thin form in the breeze.

  61

  Inside my room at the Leaspoke, I stood in front of the mirror naked and dripping wet, considering the narrow-hipped girl in the mirror, skin still tawny from her mountain hike. I took out Penny’s lipstick from the front pocket of the duffel bag and applied it carefully to my open mouth. It looked like an accident, a gaping wound. The lipstick made it impossible to go unnoticed, but Penny had never wanted to be invisible, just the opposite. I pulled on a short jean skirt, the kind Penny would wear, and a black top. I slipped the hotel keys into Penny’s purse along with a pair of twenties from the coffee can and the glossy page ripped from our high school yearbook, folded into fourths. When I was ready to leave I sat down on the edge of the bed. I could hear others in the hotel just checking in or returning from dinner, their luggage rolling down the hall, the sound of showers turned on and off, the thump of a suitcase dropped on the floor. I took the phone and dialed Fischer’s number. On the second ring, he answered.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Cale? Are you all right?” At the sound of his voice, a liquid warmth suffused my extremities. “Where are you?”

  “Not far.”

  “Where? I’ll pick you up.”

  “I don’t want to be picked up.”

  “I don’t care what you want.”

  “I can describe your bedroom, the mole on your dick. The way you enjoy fucking young girls.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “I want to help you. I drove by your place. I met your neighbor, Jackson?”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s the worst idea you’ve ever had. You shouldn’t have taken that file.”

  “Did you see the dogs?”

  “I can find you in about ten seconds if I want to.”

  “Yes, but only if you want to.” From somewhere in the hall outside came a woman’s laugh, a heavy hotel door slamming shut.

  “I’m too old to play hide and seek, Cale. That’s not what this is.”

  “What is it?” I forced myself, though I didn’t drive all this way just to ask.

  “I owe you an apology,” Fischer said.

  I laughed, a spontaneous, terrifying sound.

  “Listen to me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought you were—that you had—” He tried again. “Listen to me. I made a mistake.”

  Suddenly I couldn’t remember why I’d called. The satisfaction of dialing a long distance number, the idea of connection. I wanted to tell Fischer about the restaurant, the second exit, the muffins made by a baking prodigy in Sparks. It had all seemed so important moments ago, but now nothing felt right. Did it matter whether Penny left from the restaurant, if Penny left at all? Penny was formless, Penny was vapor. Penny was too smart to ever end up on the other end of a phone call like this one. I remembered the women from the talk show all those years ago. What are you punishing yourself for?

  “For Christ sakes. I’m forty-three years old.” Fischer’s voice was caught between degrees of apology, a grasp for authority. He sought to cling to it, recalling his badge, his career, his proficiency fielding questions from needling, concerned townspeople. Your friend disappeared sometime between the hours of then and now. Your friend is nowhere and everywhere at once. I am forty-three years old. You might not have noticed when I was fucking your brains out, but just in case you didn’t, let me tell you again. I am most certainly forty-three years old.

  I closed my eyes. When I opened them I saw Penny in the mirror, leaning back on an elbow on the bed, wrapping a long chunk of black hair around her index finger, rolling her eyes as Fischer prattled on. She was doing the thing she had begun to do in my dreams, speaking without even moving her mouth. Our brains had formed a psychic connection, the vibration between two allied souls.

  Men, she seemed to say. Am I right?

  “So right,” I said.

  Fischer stopped talking. Coughed into the line. “Cale? Is someone else with you?”

  “No one you know.”

  “Listen to me. You’ve had a hard time. I understand. I just don’t want you doing anything rash.”

  “So give me a novel idea.”

  But before he could answer, Penny stood up from the bed. She was giving me a look I had seen before. She took the receiver from my hand and set it down gently on the cradle.

  We don’t even need him, she seemed to say. Do we? There are so many fun things we can do. I’ll show you exactly where to look.

  80

  A PRAYER FOR TRAVELERS

  May those you love be near you in thoughts and dreams.

  May the business that brought you our way prosper.

  May every call you make and every message you receive add to your joy.

  When you leave, may your journey be safe.

  We are all travelers. From birth till death we travel between the eternities.

  27

  We drove in silence, going slowly now, the zombie gone, every bump of tires on the gravel sending a new, uncomfortable awareness between my legs. I kept the brights on as we inched along, the challenge of finding the freeway in the dark made more difficult by a film of tears. I wasn’t sure we were headed in the right direction until we came upon the fork in the road. I slammed the brakes, the truck shuddering, bisecting the lane. We were blocking any traffic that might come by, but let a car come now. Let it come.

  “God, you’re a mess,” Penny said. She bent over in her seat and lifted the puppy from his crate. She held the noiseless animal underneath her chin. Penny, already recovered. Penny, battery-operated, a switch flipped from sanity to fervor and back again.

  Was I hallucinating, or had the black outside our windows become infinitely more dark? We were in a hole. We were nowhere. At any moment we would hear the zombie again, the snare drum of his engine rumbling behind.

  “Do we go left or right?” My voice was hoarse.

  “You know.”

  I looked to the left, past her window, then right. Each seemingly a blank obsidian wall. Nothing revealed, nothing shared.

  “I actually don’t know,” I said.

  “We have to turn around. Go back.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  She averted her face for a moment, replacing the puppy in his crate, before she looked at me. “What if he finds us?”

  “He doesn’t even know our names!”

  “His mother does. We told his mother our names, where we were from.”

  I wiped the snot from my nose onto the leg of my jeans. The denim was still damp across the right thigh where the sandman had lost control of his bladder, the sharp smell permeating the cab’s confined space. Was it him I smelled, or the new dog? I rolled with another wave of nausea. My head was pounding.

  “Cale—”

  “It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Do you want to keep wondering if he’s going to find us? Our whole lives.”

  “You’re talking about killing someone!” I screamed it, slammed the heel of my palm down into the steering wheel, the bleat of the horn echoing out across the desert. The words reverberated off the win
dows. I wrapped my hands around the wheel so tight I thought they might burst. If a car came now, Penny would see it first; it would barrel into my door, crushing us. I wanted the car to come.

  “What do you think he was going to do to us? Walk us home?”

  Without wanting to, I felt his warm hand spreading across my bare stomach, my body clenching in response, trying to shrink itself inside. Already I knew I would keep some part of that feeling forever, flinching at every creak in the floorboards.

  “So his mother knows our names,” I said. “And if he never makes it home, you don’t think she’s going to go looking for him? She isn’t going to give the police our names?”

  “She knows what he is.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Turn the car around.”

  “I am pretty fucking sure I get a say in this! We’re not turning around so you can murder him!”

  She turned her face to the window, but not before I saw her grimace. Penny, unrecovered. Penny, only passing.

  I took my foot off the brake. The fury split me open like a seed at the belly, sprouting a slippery green plumule hungry for light. Because I wanted to turn back, too. I was dying to.

  “It’s probably already too late,” she said.

  62

  There was a bar at the Leaspoke but I knew, even without Penny to tell me, that it wasn’t the bar she would have visited. Penny wanted to go to all the places she had not yet been, to traffic in new and varying kinds of danger that might differ from all manner of danger in which she already excelled. In the lobby, I snagged a laminated map of nearby attractions and headed out the door, bypassing the parking lot to the street. There was a gray, drizzling evening sky like a damp cloth laid over tired eyes. Cars and trucks sped by, a large, white paneled van honked, the blare fading down the road. I touched the corners of my mouth, conscious of the new lipstick spreading.

  Half a mile from the Leaspoke, I stopped at the Lonestar Bar & Casino, passing a dozen mud-spattered Harleys parked outside. The rustic pioneer aesthetic was all too familiar, but the fraying mulberry carpets conveyed warmth, and the unfinished walls reminded me of our floors at home, the feel of bare wood worn smooth underfoot. There was a small crowd gathered inside, mostly men, a handful of couples, their attention absorbed by a flatscreen TV mounted in a high corner, a basketball game playing on low volume. I recognized the favorite jerseys, the leanly muscled sports star and his easy, backward lope across the court. I took a seat near a row of bikers who swelled the length of the bar, leaving only a few empty seats at the far end, the last one occupied by a tall, slim man in a baseball cap who hunched away from them as if guarding his stein of beer, glancing up occasionally to check the score on his screen, fingering the brim of his baseball cap. Imaginary Penny was gone, though I could have used her company, sidling up on a barstool nearby. Why had we never done anything so simple? Could we ever do something simple again?

  The youngest of the bikers was at least five years my senior with thickset shoulders and dirty, shoulder-length hair he tucked behind his ears with studied disregard. He saw me looking and signaled the others before heading off in the opposite direction toward the bathrooms with a long, ropy walk, as if all the time he spent straddling a bike had permanently altered his gait. The farther I traveled this way, the more bikers I would find, buzzing in pocketed formations on the freeways like clouds of black bees, rushing down long mountain passes to split around a slow-moving car, streaming together in the distance to meet the bends. On the road they were mythic, but in the reclaimed setting of the bar they were simply men again: dethroned, unmasked. When the young biker returned from the bathrooms, patting his damp hands against his jeans, he loped over to where I sat, skittering his eyes over my own.

  “Buy you a beer,” he said.

  Among the endless row of glass bottles and draft knobs, Lamb’s brand was missing, the kind he drank his entire life, the one I wanted to taste again like a live memory. The bartender was polishing a rocks glass with a dishtowel, pretending not to notice I had come in and sat down, that I was too young to do either.

  “I’ll have what you’re having,” I said.

  He grinned, revealing a chipped front tooth. I was saying all the right things, or else it was clear I was hopelessly out of depth. He leaned over my crossed legs to the bar to order, his shirt riding up to reveal an inch of his low, pale back, the dryer-eaten waistband of his briefs. I expected we might not be served, but the bartender didn’t ask for ID. He grabbed a pair of pint glasses and filled them without a word, sliding them down the bar. How much easier it would have been if I could have done the same—avoided asking questions when I knew their answers would complicate my life.

  The biker picked up his glass and waited for me to follow suit. I tasted the beer, peatier than Lamb’s brand, more substantial than the watery cans Penny had brought to Rena’s. I took a long drink and imagined I could already begin to feel the effects, a tingling in my hands and feet. And maybe I could. I had forgotten to eat again. My appetite had dwindled and my body was deteriorating right along with it, as if I could secret myself away pound by pound, coyly pursuing Penny into the ether. The biker took a sip of his own beer, preoccupied already, squinting at a spot on my throat. I touched my neck reflexively.

  “What is it?”

  “You have something. A hickey.”

  “Maybe it’s a bug bite,” I said.

  He laughed, appreciative. “Maybe it’s a rash,” he said. “I’m PJ, by the way.”

  “I’m looking for a Lucas Driscoll. A Penny.”

  “You’re too pretty to go looking for anyone, aren’t you? Dudes should come looking for you.”

  I took another sip. “Sometimes they do.”

  “Really, what are you doing here by yourself?”

  “Trying to find a friend.”

  “This guy Lucas?”

  “No, a girl.” I stood up and pulled out the glossy page I had torn out of our yearbook before leaving Pomoc, Penny’s senior photo in a row with other boys and girls, their smooth cheeks and youthful smiles. I watched him unfold the paper on the bar. I had circled Penny’s image with a casino pen again and again, manifesting an inky black orbit around her face. PJ glanced over at the other bikers, but they were paying us no mind. The bartender had already gone back to pretending I didn’t exist. PJ looked at me.

  “How old are you?”

  “It’s an old photograph.”

  He folded the sheet carefully, handing it back. “Haven’t seen her. Sorry.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Most people don’t walk around bars carrying yearbook photos.” He nodded as I put it away. “You want another drink?”

  “No, not yet,” I said, but when I looked back at the bar, my glass was already empty, froth sliding down the side. Behind us, a group of college boys slammed their bottles down on their table, the basketball star sinking a three-pointer. I noticed for the first time how many men were in the room, their incredible, heated focus as the game was beginning to turn. Only the lone, tall figure at the end of the bar seemed unmoved under his baseball cap, reaching up to scratch his stubbled jaw. As if he could feel my stare, he shot a look down the length of the bar. I froze. He froze, too. Slowly, the man returned his attention to the TV, and in the seconds that followed I classified symptoms of a body betrayed: heart pounding, palms damp. I considered excusing myself to find a phone and redialing Fischer’s number. How could I be sure?

  “Are you all right?” The biker clasped my thigh, keeping me from falling off the stool. I felt my face flush hot. I replayed my earlier call with Fischer in my mind, how casually I disconnected. Before I left the hotel room, I aimed his gun at my reflection. But when I imagined pulling the trigger, I hesitated. At the last minute, I had left the gun behind.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Where are you staying?”


  “Just down the street. The Leaspoke.”

  “Let’s go there. I’ll walk you.”

  Too late I realized I shouldn’t have named the casino out loud, squandering my last margin of safety. I would have to remind myself not to smile at men in bars, not to look at them, not to wear skirts or tight jeans, not to accept drinks or refuse them, not to walk alone or alongside them, not to appear rude or too inviting. Tomorrow I’d buy a cell phone and keep it with me at all times. I’d never again drive so fast, and so far into the desert as to render it useless.

  The biker turned away to confer with his friends, but kept hold of my hand. When he was ready, he walked me out through the main lobby of the casino, past the foyer cluttered with antique wooden benches. The front doors were propped open. We heard the rain before we saw it, crashing off the casino awning, pelting the windshields of cars and the gravel outside. Despite its fervor, it wouldn’t last. It might pour through the night, but there would be nothing to keep me from the road in the morning. So I would leave again; so I had made the decision without conscious design. Maybe it had been the same with Penny. One drink with Lucas Driscoll, then another. Lamb’s first lie, an omission, folding into the next.

  I stood at the threshold of the casino’s entrance, the mist dampening my skin, curling the fine strands of hair around my face. The biker came up beside me and bent his head to mine for a kiss. I turned so that his lips grazed my jaw, the marks on my neck. I cupped the back of his head, staring past him down the long hall of the casino where the tall man from the end of the bar was just stepping out onto the frayed carpet, looking first one way and then another, as if searching for the bathrooms, a friend, some mislaid purpose. Had Penny stood in this same spot a few weeks earlier? PJ sensed my distraction and pulled away, the movement catching the stranger’s eye from the hall. The man stared, the distance between us still too far to make out his exact expression, his eyes obscured by the low brim of his hat. But I could sense the tension in his body, the angle of his jaw.