“You got to loosen up, Jack. You’ll get home soon enough. You think I enjoy you being here acting all uppity?”
“I guess not.”
“You got that right. Why don’t you go inside and leave me in peace. Unless you want to be civil.”
“All right, Boots. Let’s be civil.”
“All right.”
“Why do you live out here?”
“I told you, I’m just not into what people are into these days. Better to live out here in the open.”
“Kind of sounds like running away or hiding, if you ask me.”
“Is that being civil where you come from, Jack?” Boots spit. “You call it what you want, ain’t no bother to me. People live reckless. Always after something they don’t know they don’t need. People get all crazy over not having. You can keep all that. Out here, you got to live smart.”
Jack sat quietly, waiting to pounce on any weakness he could find.
“Let me tell you a story, Jack. I was up around Reno a few years back. Living okay, back before the world went crazy. I walked to the store one day and I see this man just whipping his boy on the sidewalk. Merciless. That boy must’ve broke in and tortured an old woman by the way that man was beating him. I was across the street watching him and saw people, just like you, Jack, walk by and not say a word. Just kept on walking, minding their own business.
“So I crossed the street and asked him ‘What are you beating that boy for?’ You know what he says to me? ‘Ain’t no worry of yours, mind your business.’ Well, where I come from, grown man beatin’ a child is my business. So I grab his hand and push him against the wall. The kid got up and just stared at me, not knowing what to do. I looked at his old man and what I saw wasn’t right. There was blackness in his eyes, soulless. That man had nothingness swimming around his skull. The look would strip the fear off a rattlesnake’s tail.
“Then you know what happened? That same kid starts kicking me in the leg. Starts screaming at me to let his pops go! I mean the same kid who was getting a mouthful of fist from his old man now starts trying to beat on me. I looked down and saw that same blackness in the kid’s eyes. Same nothingness.
“So I let the old man go and kept walking down the street. The man throws the kid into a truck and they drive off.
“I never could understand. You go out of your way to help a soul, pull it up from the mud, and clean it off, then that same soul just spits back in your face. Ungrateful lot they are. Ain’t no use even bothering sometimes.
“So what you make of that, Jack? Ain’t nothing to be done for them, is what I reckon. A kind thing ain’t mean nothing no more, does it?
“The Good Book says we are the salt of the earth. You know what salt does, Jack? It keeps a carcass from rotting. Problem is . . . it’s already dead. So I figure, let ’em have each other. Ain’t no use. Let ’em rot.”
Jack stirred in his seat. He couldn’t make out whether Boots was a coward or not. Was he a man of conviction making a silent protest, or was he a recluse who was overwhelmed by the real world? Was he a weak man intimidated by the toughness of life?
The things we hate in others are the things we hate about ourselves, Jack thought. He looked in the door and saw Laura chatting with Molly, and for a brief moment his heart softened and he saw Boots beyond his veil of cynicism.
“Well, it looks like you were able to help that kid in there.”
“Yeah, but she’ll go back to whatever she was doing before. She’s got that wandering look about her . . .” Boots trailed off in thought, glancing off to the mountain and spitting slowly off the front porch. “Naw, girl like that need something a little more to push her back on the straight line.”
“Boots, she was abducted and almost murdered!”
“Yeah, but she’s fine now. Hopefully that’ll scare her straight. I’ll take her back to town in the morning . . . and she’ll probably be back here before nightfall.”
“Wait . . . you’ll take her back tomorrow? Tomorrow?”
“What of it, Jack? You want to take her place? You want to leave your missus here and let me takes you instead?”
Jack stewed in his own silent rage, like a four-hundred-pound man who watched a little kid jump the line at an all-you-can-eat buffet. “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”
“It’s what you’re thinking though, huh? Like I said, Jack, you’ll get home soon enough, but that girl in there needs to get back mores than you do. Don’t she?”
The people on Jack’s list of hate just increased by one as he thought of the hapless Molly who sat at the table talking to his wife. He knew it was wrong. This girl was alone and needed to get back home more than he did. But he couldn’t help despising her. He looked at her as yet another thing that thwarted him from getting back to life. His resentment sprang forth from the same spring as his feelings for others who got in his way.
When he had first started out after school, he was stuck in line for promotion behind an old fart with seniority. The guy just wouldn’t move, a manager who wouldn’t retire and planned on working until he was a hundred years old. One day Jack went to work and found out the guy had a heart attack at dinner the night before and died. He mourned over the death for the obligatory five minutes and then started packing his desk as he prepared to move into the now-vacant office and his new promotion. He didn’t attend the funeral, even though the company had provided time off for the employees to pay their respect to the firm’s dinosaur.
And now he looked at Molly much the same way. The girl he had just sympathized with now filled him with simmering contempt. Here was a little vagabond who chose to run away from home, taking his spot on the next train to freedom land. What justice could there be in this world?
His stomach knotted again on the emotional roller coaster.
Jack went to walk inside but stopped in the doorframe. He turned to Boots. “Why don’t you ride off and get help? If you don’t want to take us, fine, but at least go get us someone who’ll help us.”
Boots stood, pulled the plug out of his cheek, threw it on the ground, and stretched his back. Once he was all adjusted, he looked Jack in the eye.
“You got to start understanding, Jack. Ain’t nobody comes out here no more. And I ain’t in the business of going off and dragging ’em in. You’re here because you almost drop dead on my front door. Ain’t no one come looking for you, did they? Naw, you were left on your own to rot. That is, until I’s found you. So you leave when you want, Jack. Front door is always wide open. Just open it up and walk out, if you think you know best.” Boots reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his tobacco. He stuffed it into his cheek, then spit on the ground. “If you don’t want to do that, then you’ll get out of here when I think you’re ready to go.”
The old man stepped off the porch and sauntered into the front yard as if admiring the day without a care in the world.
Jack walked into the trailer slow, dejected, and furious.
41
That afternoon he had made up his mind. Through the setting hours, Jack planned out the details in his head. He found a small container in the cabin that he filled with water from the pump. His only reservation was that it would not be cold by the time they would drink it. At dinner, he tucked some food away from the table when, though out of character, he offered to clean up. A prisoner hoarding his rations. Boots had said that the front door was wide open to him, but he was convinced the old man wouldn’t lay out provisions for them, nor would he take kindly to Jack stealing his supplies for their trip.
In the bedroom as they prepared for sleep, he told Laura of his design. “We’re leaving tomorrow.”
“Is Boots taking us out?”
“No.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we are leaving, on our own.”
“No, Jack, we’re not.”
“I’m not staying here another day. We need to get out of here. We need to get home.”
“You have no idea how to get out of
here.”
“Easy, we open the door and walk east.”
Laura folded her arms and stood next to the wall, facing Jack. Her anger was beginning to rise. “No, Jack. We wait here until Boots thinks we can make the walk. He knows what’s best for us right now.”
“He doesn’t know squat, Laura! Listen to yourself! We are stuck in a trailer in the desert with a bearded half-wit who chews tobacco like it’s bubble gum and can’t speak a decent sentence to save his life. Then he finds a girl who was kidnapped by some crazy local and stuck in a cave. Oh . . . oh . . . oh . . . and let’s not forget that he runs out into storms and yells at the wind. I mean, come on! You can’t make this stuff up. It’s like an episode of the Twilight Zone or something! And you just want to stand there and wait for him to magically take us home?” Jack’s sarcasm was flowing full force at Laura.
“Jack, you need to stop right now.”
“I won’t stop. We are leaving.”
“Don’t say ‘we.’”
Jack stood silent, the wind knocked out of him. Laura, the passive wife, standing up to him, was new. He stared at her, a person who was now foreign to him with just one stroke of a brush.
“I’m not leaving. If Boots says we can leave tomorrow, then I’ll go, but until then, I am waiting here until he says so.”
He remained silent and walked out of the room.
She could hear him open the door and step outside, though there was no place for him to go.
Laura got into bed and lay there, thinking about the vacuum of space between her and Jack. This trip that was planned to bridge the gap may have broken them for good. They were alienated from each other like no other time in their history. She pulled the covers over her though it was hot, and cried silently in the dark.
Jack entered the room awhile later and crawled into bed next to her, but they did not touch. A force field surrounded her and was impenetrable. The silence was suffocating, and with a gentle breath, he whispered, “I love you.”
She played at being asleep and did not respond to his unspoken question.
42
Jack got up quietly in the middle of the night. He hadn’t allowed himself to sleep too soundly. He walked softly over to the small four-paned glass window and nudged it open. The heat from outside instantly enveloped his face as he stared out into the night. He crawled through the window and squatted on the desert floor, where he pulled on his shoes.
It seemed an overly elaborate escape plan, but with Molly sleeping on the couch and Boots lurking who knew where, the window was his best option. He had tested it earlier that day and was happy to find that it did not make a sound when opened. Quiet.
He stood up and looked back through the window at Laura sleeping in the bed. He felt a twinge in his heart with the thought of leaving her here, but she had voiced her opinion of his plan loud and clear. They were no longer a team. Whether or not that conclusion would last after he brought back help would have to play itself out. For now, he had to leave, whether she was on board or not.
Looking at the stars, he tried to recall any astronomy lessons he may have slept through and estimated to the best of his knowledge what way might be east. He didn’t know why, but he was sure Vegas was that way. Careful not to make a sound, he stalked around the corner of the house and walked off.
The situation ran through his mind like a grocery store checklist. It has to be around midnight, so six hours until daybreak. You have little water, so you have to make some miles before the heat gets unbearable, he thought. You have no idea where you are going, or how far it might be to see another soul. Awesome odds.
Trotting off into the desert night, Jack established a steady pace. The moon was not full but still illuminated the rock and dust, which gave off an eerie glow of haunting subtlety. In his mind he could envision the rattlesnakes and scorpions watching his progress through the dark and licking their chops at what might possibly be a free lunch by noon. The crunching sounds of his own footfalls were all that he could hear as he progressed to a small rise east of the cabin. He stopped and looked back at the prison trailer.
It wasn’t too late to go back, he thought. He could simply turn around and walk back through the front door, take off his shoes, and get back in bed with Laura. She would wake up and be none the wiser to his jailbreak, to the idea that he had left her.
No. He had made up his mind. Jack was marching home and getting help to save her. He wished that their parting words had been more loving, but if they had been, he would not be trekking off alone. She would be following him right now.
What was going on with her? Ever since their “capture,” for that is how Jack had labeled it, she seemed resigned to staying, almost welcoming the confinement as a relief. Perhaps he didn’t know her at all. He told her that they should go get help; she said that they didn’t need help and that he was being delusional.
The slow breaking had brought him to this moment of staring back, of imagining her sleeping alone in a strange trailer in the middle of nowhere. Small steps of detachment.
Then there was Boots. “He saved us from roasting to death out on that highway,” Laura had said.
“No, he brought us here for some other reason . . . and it ain’t good.”
The idea of the old man brought anger. Jack refused to entertain the belief that Boots knew what he was doing. He was the delusional one, sitting out here in the desert, paranoid of living among civilization. Hiding away in a shack, safe from all the boogeymen a senile mind could think of. What help could he provide? None. Boots didn’t want to help them get out of there, he was looking for fellow cowards who would validate his withdrawal from the world, who would keep him company as he hid.
Jack thought briefly that they all deserved each other, sitting in the tin roof dump. Members of the spineless huddled masses. He was not of that ilk. He was going to make things happen. He was directing his path, and if no one was on board with it, then he was going alone.
He turned back east, took a sip of water from the container, and started walking again.
His thoughts drifted back to the highway . . . where it all started. That seemingly innocent drive out from the strip. The week out here in the desert seemed like a total nightmare. Who could have ever imagined this, he thought. Getting stranded, and then getting held hostage. What he wouldn’t give for the hour-long commute to work, of walking in and sitting in front of his computer. No, he just had to drive into the boondocks for no reason at all. If there had been a wall close by, Jack would have punched it. He kept on walking.
The highway. That long two-lane of nothingness. But there really wasn’t nothingness, was there. The highway. That was where Jack first saw them, dancing and wailing in the convection. Down the road, where the horizon dipped past sight he saw them, hundreds of them, shapes distorted by the distance and the heat, but there nonetheless. He told himself that it was just dehydration playing tricks on him, but something deeper than that gave him a more somber chill, like hundreds of eyes staring at him through the mist.
And then they had appeared again in the dust storm. An endless cloud of malice whipping up a desert maelstrom. He couldn’t blame that on dehydration. No, they had been there, physically, absolutely. Daylight might bring them back again. Though the idea sent a chill up his spine, confronting an evil mist still seemed to be better than sitting idly by.
He scanned the horizon. The night was cloudless. No storms in any direction. Nothing creeping up on him from the skyline. His spine warmed again in the dark heat.
On and on he ran toward what his body told him was east. His watch hadn’t worked for days, but he kept moving through the fatigue and the brush as he tried to calculate the distance he covered . . . always calculating. Ten miles . . . maybe fifteen . . . gotta be close to that . . . gotta be close to something, anything. He crested a small butte and was crushed. The desert stretched on for miles with no signs of life, and on the horizon he could see the first edge of sunlight breaking through like a crack in a
child’s closet door.
Jack marched on as the hours ticked by. His trot turning into a slog as the sweat poured down his face. He hated himself for being out of shape. But he’d never imagined that he would need to train for such an event as this. He would have, he told himself, had he only known. The temperature began to rise as the day fully unfolded.
Knowing that he could not beat the sun, Jack looked for a place to hide. Halfway down a ridge he found a cave with an opening twice his size. He stood at its mouth and peered in. What hungry things lived inside? He could envision snakes and coyotes looking out, whispering prayers of “Oh please just one more step” in the darkness.
That would be quick, the sun would be slow, he thought, playing with death in his mind. He stepped inside and felt a few degrees cooler instantly. His bravery was thinly veiled, and he managed only a few steps before it failed him and he sat down.
Jack was exhausted. His legs were screaming and released slow pinpricks of relief when his weight was removed. How far had he come? A long way, he told himself. A very long way.
He unwrapped a small piece of meat he had hidden away from the dinner table last night and savored it slowly. His water was almost gone, but he drank it without hesitation. Civilization had to be just over the next hill. This was America, no less—how far could you go without seeing a subdivision sprout up before your eyes? Las Vegas had to be close, it just had to be.
After his meal, he slumped back against the rocks and tried to sleep. He could feel imaginary creatures crawling on his clothes, and every time he almost succeeded in drifting off, he would jump with a start, check himself, settle down, and start the cycle over again.
Soon, though, his exhaustion took hold of him and he was gone to the world.
43
Laura sat on the porch, staring in disbelief into the wasteland of the Mojave. Her mind was blank as she was unable to piece together the thousand fragments that swam around inside her head. Molly sat close by but did not talk to her. She seemed to know the times it was best to be quiet, a rare trait for a teenager, and thus she held her tongue. Boots came walking across the front yard, kicking up dust with every step.
Purgatory Road Page 11
