by Ninie Hammon
“You’s probably so drunk you’s seeing double’s all. A mirror in the road is … That’s the craziest thing I ever—”
“It’s no crazier than suddenly being here when none of us intended to be.” Malachi was respectful to his mother, but she didn’t cow him like she did the others. He looked around. “Anybody else see a mirror?”
When nobody said they had, Fish pointed out that he was the only one among them who had not been driving when he saw the— he called it the “shimmer of the Jabberwock.”
“If there’d been a mirror, the others might not have noticed it,” Pete said. “From what I’m hearing, the only thing the whole lot of you’s got in common is the county line. You’s all crossing it — right?”
“So where’s my truck?” Viola demanded. “I’s driving it. It ain’t here. So where’s it at?”
“Must be parked out there somewhere beside my cruiser,” said the deputy, who now had some color returning to his face and the pleat of pain planted between his eyebrows was softening.
Into the momentary silence that followed his words, a small, hoarse voice asked, “What’s happenin’?”
It was the young blonde woman who’d been sobbing. She was sitting up now, with Sam steadying her shoulders, and her eyes looked like a baby owl’s.
“I got to go get my Cody. How’d I get here?”
She sounded so pitiful, so lost and confused and frightened that it hammered home to the rest of them how bizarre and horrifying their situation was.
Charlie turned to E.J. “You got a truck? A van? Something we could all fit into?”
“Well, yeah, it’s parked out back—”
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I want to take a trip out to the county line.”
“Onliest thing I want is my truck,” said the small voice of the blonde woman. “I gotta go get my baby.”
Chapter Seventeen
Dr. Elijah Hamilton, D.V.M., didn’t know whether to wind his watch or take third base. The day had begun as ordinary as any other, didn’t go off the rails until Sam brought Charlie Ryan … no, it was McClintock now … into his office with her little girl who had a small gash in her forehead above her left eye.
E.J. didn’t ask for specifics. Clearly, Sam was handling it, just needed some sterile supplies to clean the wound and had been nearby so she’d stopped at the clinic. There’d been a wreck or something. Some kind of accident. He had volunteered to take over the surgical duties, assuring Charlie that he could sew up the child’s head so it wouldn’t look like he’d been trying to construct a Frankenstein out of spare body parts in his garage.
He didn’t think she would have agreed if she’d been in possession of all her faculties, but she was mildly disoriented and majorly confused, and while he tended to the child, she told Sam the most amazing story that began when the little girl had cut her head in the driveway of Charlie’s mother’s house, had tripped over a tree limb that’d been deposited by last night’s freak storm.
E.J.’d offered his condolences, when he’d had the chance, said he’d heard about Charlie’s mother’s death and he was sorry for her loss. Didn’t say he’d been told the old woman had washed overboard in the ocean off the Florida coast and they never recovered the body — a story that seemed to be verified by the fact that Charlie had been at her mother’s house and he’d heard nothing about a funeral or even a memorial service.
Not like there was a family plot or anything, though, the grave of her husband to lay her out beside. E.J. remembered when he’d first heard Charlie’s father was a prisoner of war. They were in the third grade — he was in Mrs. Green’s room, as was Sam, and Charlie was in Mrs. Baker’s. There were only two third-grade classes, but there had been enough students among the county’s dwindling population for three second-grade classes the year before and he’d been in the same room with Charlie that year. That was the year he’d fallen in love with her, and why his ears had perked up when he’d heard the teachers mention her name as he’d passed a group of them standing together in the hallway, talking.
“… poor little thing, Charlene probably doesn’t even remember her father,” Mrs. Baker says, with what E.J. recognizes as fake sympathy, like when his grandmother says, ‘oh, bless her heart” about somebody when she’s really glad some bad thing has happened to them.
“What must it be like to be Sylvia Ryan … with Bobby Joe just ‘missing in action?’” said fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Pitt. All the kids were scared of her.
“Four years now,” said Mrs. Green.
“And you know he’s got to be a prisoner of war and they’re just not saying,” says Mrs. Pitt. “You know the North Vietnamese have him somewhere in some squalid prison, torturing him.”
E.J. doesn’t know what missing-in-action means, though he can guess. And he knows that he heard Walter Cronkite say on the news a couple of months ago that President Nixon was bringing American soldiers home from Vietnam. Now, he knows that Charlie not only doesn’t have a father — he already knew that part, everybody did — but he’s in prison somewhere or missing somewhere and nobody can find him. Both of those things sound so awful he wants to cry, but he’s almost ten years old and almost-ten-year-old boys do not cry.
That’s when he gets the idea to do something to make Charlie feel better. It’s springtime and the tulips and roses are blooming in his neighbor’s garden and he takes rose clippers and goes out right after sunrise and cuts a bunch of them for a bouquet. Charlie has a piano lesson every Saturday morning in the basement of the Methodist church and he waits behind Mr. Bohanan’s garage for her to pass by on her way there, hiding so no one will ask him what he’s doing with a handful of wilting roses and tulip stems — most of the tulip petals fell off right after he picked them.
He spots her, steps out and walks toward her as she comes down the sidewalk. When they’re about to pass, he shoves the flowers out in front of him.
“These are for you.” He had other stuff he intended to say, but now he can’t think what it is.
“What for?”
“To make you feel better.”
“Why? I’m not sick.”
“No, but your father’s lost and nobody can find him, or maybe he’s in prison and—”
He surely would have said other equally comforting things like, “they’re probably torturing him,” something sensitive like that, but he hadn’t had the chance because she’d yanked the flowers out of his hands so forcefully one of the thorns on the roses stabbed into his thumb and it started to bleed.
“I don’t want your stupid flowers!” She’d thrown the flowers on the sidewalk and actually stomped on them. But she didn’t run away crying. She’d walked away, back straight, head up.
He’d loved her even more after that.
It’d been unrequited love all through elementary school and junior high school, but he’d gotten a girlfriend — Patty Sheedy — when he was a freshman and he’d forgotten about Charlie altogether.
Until today, he hadn’t seen her since she’d walked across the gym floor to get her diploma the night they graduated. He’d left Nowhere County and gone to college, vet school, and endured a terribly volatile but blessedly brief marriage, before returning to set up practice here — because his father had built the strip mall and owned all the buildings and E.J. wouldn’t have to pay rent. His clinic was one of, if not the only thriving business in a county that was dead, long dead, they just hadn’t gotten around to having a funeral.
Will the last person leaving Nowhere County, Kentucky, please turn out the lights.
And when he saw Charlie today, he was stabbed with the awareness that maybe one of the worst mistakes of his life was giving up on a relationship with her all those years ago. She was even more beautiful now than she’d been then, her short dark hair shifting in silky strands in the breeze. When she’d first started telling that fantastic story to Sam about the black light and the static, he’d really thought she was joking.
She hadn’t been
joking. And now here he was with a van full of the oddest assortment of people he could possibly have assembled. On their way down Danville Pike to the county line, a little more than ten miles away. Since the Middle of Nowhere was … duh… in the middle of the county, it was an equal distance from the county line in all directions. At least as the crow flies. But the roads through the mountains meandered and switched back. The most direct route was the one they were taking, through the little town of Twig and out to the back side of the Welcome to Nowhere County sign to see if there was a mirror in the road there.
Pete watched the van load of people pull out onto Route 17, his eyes following it until it had vanished around the bend. Then all the air kind of whooshed out of him, and he was tempted to go over and sit down on the bench in the shelter. But even though he’d washed away all the mess, there was a lingering odor. He couldn’t smell it, hadn’t smelled much of nothing in a right smart while, but he couldn’t help imagining it and that didn’t sit well with the current state of his stomach, the contents of which were black coffee and dry toast with no butter. Had to watch his cholesterol — you know, so he could live ‘til Christmas.
He did need to sit down, though, so he opted to ease his old bones down on an upturned can that’d been left beside the Dollar Store when somebody cleaned out their truck. It’d likely held drywall mud. He reached down and scratched Dog under the chin and the old dog would have sat there between his knees getting his chin scratched until the Second Coming if Pete’d keep scratchin’. He told the dog to sit. It didn’t. It lay down at his feet, though, which was just as good and he couldn’t rightly expect the dog to obey commands when he hadn’t never bothered to train him. But why should an old dog train another old dog to do new tricks? Seemed like a waste of time all around.
“You want to tell me now what’s going on here?” he asked the dog, who looked up hopefully when he spoke, but didn’t bother to get to its feet when it didn’t appear a chin scratching was forthcoming. “‘Cause I sure as Jackson don’t know.”
Sitting still like this, thinking, the events of the morning got even more bizarre in his head, and instead of puzzling out what might have happened, he found himself getting all tied in knots inside over the impossibility of any reasonable explanation.
He hadn’t opted to go hauling butt out to the county line with the rest of them for a couple reasons. Oh, there was enough room in the van, but he couldn’t have took Dog along. He’d only taken the dog riding in a vehicle once and he got car sick. He couldn’t leave him tied up at the Dollar General Store, either, because he suspected the dog only submitted to the collar and lead to be polite, that the animal could escape either or both at will.
Mostly, he’d stayed because he had that uneasy feeling that whatever was happening here, it wasn’t over. Best guess was, it was just startin’. And if that was the case, somebody else was likely to show up in that bus shelter out of nowhere and Pete had hung back here because it wouldn’t be a good idea for somebody to show up without nobody around to see to them.
Oh, he couldn’t minister to them like Sam could, and he wouldn’t try — because he had neither the skill nor the inclination. He was grateful he couldn’t smell the stink. Still, the retching sounds had forced him to clamp an iron grip on his own diaphragm so it wouldn’t involuntarily join in the fun and games.
But he could be here, could use the water hose if he needed, could maybe make whoever it was understand that they wasn’t crazy.
Chapter Eighteen
Nobody said anything. Not a word. As E.J. piloted the van down the winding mountain roads, it was as silent as a tomb inside. And after a little while, the silence was so solid it would have taken tremendous effort to break it. You’d have to hack into it with an ice pick and Sam didn’t have the energy. Apparently, nobody else did either.
Charlie sat up front, riding shotgun with Merrie in her lap.
Sam sat in the seat behind them with Abby curled up against her, crying softly. She had never stopped crying. Just like Liam’s nose had never quite quit bleeding. He was sitting on the other side of Abby and he kept swiping at the slow dribble down his lip with his shirt sleeve.
Chai and his mother and Fish sat behind them. Fish was humming some song with a haunting melody, not loud enough to be obnoxious and his voice was a deep melodious baritone so it wasn’t unpleasant. But the melody eluded Sam and trying to place what the song was had begun to get on her nerves. Like there was so much going on in her mind and her emotions, just that one little extra thing—
“Put a sock in it,” Viola told Fish and he stopped singing, quietly whispering the words to the Jabberwock poem instead. Its nonsense syllables became white noise that was somehow soothing.
“… brillig … gyre and gimble … vorpal sword went snicker-snack …”
Maybe the others were taking this time of communal solitude to order their thoughts, to examine sequentially what had happened in the past two hours, to begin formulating explanations or at the very least eliminating possibilities as they tried to puzzle it all out.
Not Sam. She just sat there, holding Abby against her like a lost child. Trying very hard not to think anything at all.
She’d spent a fairly pleasant minute or two floating on a barge down Denial River, imagining that she was going to wake up in her bed to the sound of Rusty banging around in the kitchen, ostensibly because he was going to fix his own breakfast but in reality trying to wake her up so she’d get up and do it for him. Saturday mornings were off days for them both. They always slept in as late as they could — her twelve-year-old had definitely inherited his mother’s adoration of the human state of slumber. Theirs was a comfortable mother-son relationship where she didn’t descend to the level of being his pal. He had plenty of friends and only one mother. But she always hung a little low on the branch of authority and he was such a good kid he’d never taken advantage of it. They were close, tight. If the lack of a father figure had affected him detrimentally, she couldn’t see it.
But denial was hard to maintain with Abby sobbing beside her and the weight of silence from the others heavy in the air.
Of course, this couldn’t possibly be happening. But it was. Her coal miner father had raised all his children to be realists. It was what it was. Worse than useless, it was counterproductive to try to force reality into the shape of your own presuppositions about the way the world operated.
She coughed to cover up a bleat of inappropriate laughter. Maybe if she’d been one of them, one of the people who had suffered varying degrees of physical trauma, it would be easier to accept the unacceptable. But being merely a bystander to the carnage, no matter how closely she had observed impossible events occur, she still got stung every now and then with an urge to laugh at the absurdity of it.
People don’t just appear out of nowhere.
Right. And you know that how?
Because it’s never happened before.
And that’s a valid argument — it’s not happening now because it’s never happened before?
What did that do to your interpretation of reality, your view of how the world operated and the functioning of the universe?
She realized that she was doing what she’d said she absolutely wasn’t going to do — try to puzzle it out. But the human mind was like a dog with a bone when it came to conundrums. Somewhere in human hardwiring there existed the need to know — a compulsion to know — to understand, to figure out.
Where was Charlie’s car?
Where was Liam’s cruiser and Viola’s truck?
Those were physical objects that objectively existed … somewhere. What was it her grandmother responded when she couldn’t find what she was looking for: everything has to be somewhere. Simplistic as that sounded, it was a ground zero statement of the nature of the universe. Everything had to be somewhere. So where were their cars? Where was Abby’s beat-up old truck? And the onesies she’d bought in the Dollar General Store. She’s mumbled that they’d been on the fro
nt seat beside her. What happened to them? And the diapers she’d gotten at her sister’s. And Charlie’s purse? Did Malachi show up with his rifle because he’d had it in his hand when he hit the Jabberwock?
And was it just people who got channeled, transported, whatever-ed? If Viola’d taken her cat for a joyride, or Charlie’d brought along her pet monkey? Would those have remained with the missing vehicles? Or would they have shown up in the bus shelter in the Middle of Nowhere?
The Middle of Nowhere.
A chill went down Sam’s spine. You get used to a word or a name, and no matter how silly it is in the beginning, if you use it often enough, eventually it sounds normal. You forget that the words themselves have meaning. What if … What if the reason the people had appeared in that particular spot — among all the ba-jillions of places they could have appeared — was because the spot was “the middle of nowhere.” Literally, the middle of nowhere?
E.J. eased the van over onto the side of the road about fifty yards before the Welcome to Nowhere sign. Everyone sat where they were for a moment longer than was normal, perhaps a group reluctance to see what they were about to see and to know what they were about to know.
“Get the lead out,” Viola said to Fish and Sam heard her slap him — on the shoulder or back … maybe on the butt. “I want you to show me this here mirror of yours.”
Chapter Nineteen
Hayley Norman got into the car, reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror, then felt around on the bottom of the seat for the handle, pulled it and let the seat slide forward.
She shouldn’t have done that!
She shouldn’t have moved them.
But she couldn’t drive the car if she couldn’t reach the accelerator and the brake. She’d just have to remember to put them back the way they were. Hayley had made a list of all the things like that she had to remember but she hadn’t thought to put the thing about the mirror and the seat position on the list.
