by Chris Fabry
She cracked a few eggs into a bowl as the pretty people on the pretty set in New York laughed about something that had happened before they went to the weather. Watching people smile with all those white teeth always made her feel like she was on the outside of the joke.
She sprayed PAM in the old skillet and set the stove to high to warm it. At that point the laughter died, and the lead anchor on the set turned somber. Funny how she could make such an abrupt turn to the serious.
“A stunning development in a missing child case from seven years ago in a small West Virginia town. Four days ago a car was found, submerged in a reservoir near Dogwood, West Virginia, and the contents of that car have opened some old wounds for the residents.”
The anchor looked to her left, and video ran of an old, rusted vehicle being pulled from the water.
The reporter’s voice-over began as the screen showed a police officer looking inside. “Authorities feared they would discover a body in the back of this car that has spent the last seven years at the bottom of a lake. What they found has raised more questions.”
A picture flashed on the screen. A toddler smiling. Something about it unnerved Sheila.
“Natalie Anne Edwards was reported missing by her mother, Dana Edwards, on a summer night seven years ago. The girl had been abducted. An unknown assailant had ambushed Dana and taken her car. The little girl was simply gone without a trace.”
There was stock footage of grainy video taken in a police station with wood paneling. A young mother, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, stared at the camera with red eyes.
“I just want my baby back,” she said, her chin quivering. “Whoever has her, please let her go. She never hurt nobody.”
“But the trail went cold,” the reporter said over shots of police officers with bloodhounds searching fields and tree-lined gullies. “Natalie Anne simply vanished. However, this woman, Natalie’s grandmother, would not give up hope.”
An older woman with graying hair and a sagging face spoke from her kitchen table. A cuckoo clock ticked in the background, and an empty cake holder sat on a cluttered desk in the corner. The words Mae Edwards, Grandmother popped on the screen. “I know in my heart she’s out there. And I’m not giving up.”
“Mae Edwards went to several agencies that try to find missing children. One took Natalie Anne’s picture and age progressed it to what she would look like today.”
An egg dropped on the floor and splattered at Sheila’s feet. She reached out a hand for the sink to steady herself. It felt like the room was spinning, like she couldn’t focus on anything. Then a siren—had the police come already? Had they pieced it together that quickly?
No, it was the smoke alarm. The pan was billowing, and she pulled it off the stove and burned her hand. She stuck it under the water, the tears coming. Half from the pain of the burn, half from learning the truth.
But what was the truth?
She grabbed some ice from the freezer and stuck it in a Ziploc bag and turned off the stove.
The report was over, and they were back with the pretty anchor in New York with the pretty dress and the white teeth and perfect hair. A police officer, looking uncomfortable in the swath of white light, stood with the reservoir in the background. He swatted at a swarm of mosquitoes and tried to answer the questions of the pretty anchor.
Hand throbbing, Sheila studied the age-progressed photo when it appeared again. There was no mistake. There was no doubt in her mind. That was June Bug. Natalie Anne was sleeping in her bedroom upstairs, and her father, her abductor, or whoever he was, had left in the middle of the night.
She raced upstairs and opened the door without caution this time. Surely June Bug had heard the smoke alarm. She thought she might even find her cowering in the corner, scared at the sound. She’d probably never heard a smoke alarm in her life.
But when Sheila opened the door, June Bug was still there, a lump under the covers. She shook the girl’s shoulder and whispered her name. But it wasn’t a shoulder she touched under the covers. It was a pillow, folded to appear like a shoulder. And another pillow folded under that one. Sheila threw back the covers.
The girl—June Bug, Natalie Anne, whatever her name was—was gone.
9
Air brakes from a semi awakened him. Johnson yawned and stretched, sitting up on the bed, remembering where he’d parked. A sliver of sunlight shone through the broken shade and hit him full in the face. An older woman with a white dog walked through the parking lot of the truck stop, headed for a patch of grass beyond the asphalt. The dog walked stiffly, like its arthritis was just as bad as hers.
He had stayed dressed, except for his shoes, and now he put them on and clambered into the truck stop’s café and found the restroom. It was eight thirty already, and he didn’t want to waste time. He bought two Honey Buns and a plastic bottle filled with something orange and downed it as he headed toward the RV. He preferred the coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, so he hoofed it across the street rather than driving the RV.
When he returned, one of the Honey Buns was missing. He looked under the seat, thinking it might have slid to the floor, but it wasn’t there. He looked around, wondering who would steal one Honey Bun. “Hope it was somebody really hungry,” he muttered.
He returned to the road, flipping the radio past talk shows and morning farm reports. He and June Bug loved listening to local stations with low wattage and a small footprint. Teenage guys trying to sound older and more sophisticated. Older men caught in small backwater towns where careers stalled. Sunday morning preaching shows with singers camped around single microphones playing out-of-tune guitars. And the fiery preachers who followed.
He and June Bug had laughed at one preacher with a crackling whiskey voice, who almost sounded like a frog croaking well-memorized passages of Scripture. His wife would speak in the breaths and pauses of his rants, calling out encouragement. As the pastor’s momentum built, so did his wife’s, and they would speak together, roiling like a pot of boiling water, fomenting and running toward a climax of verses and positive thinking and you-cando-anything-you-set-your-mind-to theology.
They’d been so captivated by the two that they found the church in a shabby part of a little town surrounded by boarded-up businesses. They parked across the street and waited hours, eating lunch together, watching, wondering if the approaching car would be them. When a shiny Lexus pulled up, two people got out. The “teacher” was a thin man and exited the passenger side in a nice suit, waving his arm and saying something to his wife. She shook her head and her finger at him and managed to pry herself out from behind the steering wheel, the car dipping with her weight, then rising after she stood.
“That’s them?” June Bug had said. “That’s not how I thought they’d look.”
“It’s always a little disappointing,” he had said. “People on the radio never look like you think they do. You can bank on that.”
Johnson thought about the couple as he continued down the interstate, the hot coffee energizing him. And then his thoughts turned to June Bug, what she was doing, if Sheila had planned out their day. They had to be up and getting started. Since the night everything had changed for both June Bug and him, they had spent every day together, almost every waking moment, and moments asleep were spent about ten feet apart. It was weird not hearing her voice, not listening to her soft falsetto as they crossed bridges.
It was nearing lunch when he crossed the Oklahoma state line. His stomach growling, legs cramping. It had been a few weeks since he’d done any hard driving, and he decided to push a little more. At each exit he’d survey the offering of gas stations and drive-throughs and decide to wait one more exit, push a little farther. He could use the bathroom in the back, but it wasn’t flushing properly, so that was just for emergencies.
He got caught between exits, and he asked himself what he was trying to prove. When he noticed a particularly wide spot near an overpass, he pulled over, ran back to the tiny bathroom, and lifted th
e lid. The bowl was half-full, and that didn’t make sense because he hadn’t used this bathroom for weeks. He pondered this while he relieved himself, then wished he’d fixed the mechanism while sitting at Walmart.
Johnson was back on the road, checking the gas gauge, looking for a Long John Silver’s, when he absentmindedly called out the name of the river they were crossing. He chuckled because he could almost hear June Bug’s voice singing “I’ll Fly Away” above. She would sing the song again and again, usually just a phrase or the first verse, until they passed over. When they’d approach a bridge, he’d try to distract her, talk to her about something else, but invariably she would see it. She saw everything.
One day after a long drive, they hit Memphis and the sight of the long bridge over the Mississippi sent her over the edge.
He pulled over and knelt in front of her. “Listen, honey, Jesus is going to take care of you, understand?”
Tears welled and her chin puckered.
He pushed a clump of hair from her face and cupped his hand around her chin. “I want you to sing a song with me, okay?”
June Bug sat there, staring. Finally she said, “What song?”
He shoved in the tape and let it play through the first verse, singing along in his guttural bass until she caught the tune. “Good, now let’s try it again.” He hit Rewind and she began to mouth the words as he climbed back in the driver’s seat.
“Just close your eyes and sing, and pretty soon we’ll be on the other side,” he said.
She closed her eyes so tightly he thought she was going to burst a blood vessel. Her little chin tucked down, lips moving, arms shaking. He turned the volume up and it enveloped them.
When the song finished, she kept her eyes closed. “Can I open them now?”
“Take a look,” he said.
Slowly June Bug looked out the window. Then she unbuckled and jumped on his bed and lifted the shades.
“We made it! It worked!” She ran back to the front. “It really worked.”
“Works about every time,” he said. “When you see a bridge coming up, just close your eyes and sing through the whole song and you’ll be out the other side before you finish.”
From then on, anytime they’d come to so much as a viaduct, she’d call from wherever she was in the RV, “Tape! Put on the tape!” It had its own special place above the visor. After each play, he rewound it to the right spot where he could use it next time.
One day when he pressed the Rewind button, the machine made a screeching noise and just sat there. He hit Eject, but nothing happened. Later that night, with a screwdriver and a flashlight, he pried the cassette from the player, the tape spilling onto the dash. He made a valiant try to repack the spool, but it was no use.
The next day he found a thrift store and frantically searched through the bins. Then he broke the news to her.
“I want the tape,” June Bug said, her teeth clenched, face tight.
“Honey, I don’t have it. It broke.”
“I want the tape.”
“We’ll find another. Let’s just sing together at the next bridge.”
She shook her head. “I want the tape. Get the tape.”
He explained it all again until her little face scrunched up in a red ball. She put her hands over her eyes, and the tears escaped and ran down her arms in dirty streams.
“June Bug, listen to me—”
“It won’t work,” she sobbed. “We have to have the song.”
Johnson held her in his arms. “What is it, sweetie? What are you afraid of?”
He knew why she was scared. Knew it too well. Her fears were a mirror of his own—the past, the dreams, the flashbacks, the night terrors. He had spent his share of nights listening to her cries, staying awake so he wouldn’t have to face his own memories.
“Every time we go over a bridge, I think we’re going to fall,” June Bug said. “I’m afraid we’ll go down there, and I don’t want to go under the water. We won’t get out.”
He held her close and felt the sobs racking her body. “That’s not ever going to happen. These bridges are strong. They can hold up big trucks and all the cars you can put on them.”
“It feels shaky when we go across.”
Johnson nodded. “There’s a little give to it, but that’s normal. It doesn’t mean it’s going to collapse. People have been going across these bridges for years. You don’t have to worry.”
“But it still feels like we’re going to fall,” June Bug said, as if pleading for something he couldn’t give. “I don’t care if it’s the strongest thing in the world, it still feels like it. I don’t want to fall in. I don’t want to get trapped.”
The nightmares came and went. Cold sweats. Nights when she’d cry in her sleep, thrashing her legs until her covers were twisted in a tangle. That’s when he bought the sleeping bag. Those first few months, probably a year after they came together, he’d hold her on his lap, with her all snuggled into the Sleeping Beauty sleeping bag until she fell asleep. He’d read stories, watching her eyes follow the words across the page until the eyelids became heavy. Then she’d surge again and he’d read some more. When she finally drifted off, he’d place her on the mattress above the cab and fit the safety bar so she couldn’t roll out.
Her screams were like sirens. They tore at his heart. All the fear in the world was wrapped in those tiny lungs just waiting. He’d stay awake, trying to sense when she’d have a bad one. The worst nights came at the most unpredictable moments. He’d sit outside the door in a five-dollar lawn chair with a Coors Light in the holder on the armrest and a lit Marlboro, watching the stars come out or some dogs pick at the trash. Just when his body told him it was time to crawl into bed, when there was no way she’d awaken, he’d hear the telltale whimpers.
One night it was so loud that people in the camping area thought someone had been killed. A few of them ran over, banging on the door until he assured them it was only a nightmare.
“You sure you didn’t hurt her?” a woman said, craning her neck to see the girl who was draped around his neck like a dime store Velcro monkey.
“I’d never lay a finger on this little thing,” he said, and he must have convinced her because she and the others walked away. June Bug just held on tight.
The next day he had vowed not to park so close to other RVs and that they’d find lonely spots in campgrounds or avoid them altogether. When the generator finally went out, he decided to just use Walmart parking lots while they were on the road, moving from town to town.
The terrors continued for two years, subsiding at times but always remaining a possibility, like a golfer with a bad slice who never knew when a shot might wind up in the trees. Johnson found it difficult to sleep, waiting for the next round of wailing, and allowed her to curl up in her sleeping bag next to him. It was easier to calm her that way.
At times he could hear her singing in her sleep, the song that got her over the bridges, over the troubled waters and the falling. He thought about finding a child’s sleeping pill, but then he thought better of it. No reason to mess her life up more than it already was.
In his mind now, he heard her soft, muffled voice singing into the pillow, like a familiar sound of the ocean lapping against the shore or shopping carts being collected by some teenager outside in the parking lot. This was part of the soundtrack of their lives, and try as he might he couldn’t shake it.
The words to “I’ll Fly Away” kept coming back, the ones he had first heard in his uncle’s woodshop. It was a tin building with just enough room to fit the Ford F-150 on one side and all the tools and saws and a workbench on the other. His uncle had a nasally, tinny voice that rose and fell like the swell of a mountain stream that pushes against its banks.
There were times when he’d sit on a stump by the chinaberry tree and listen to the voices and laughter inside, the sound of an incorrectly tuned banjo mixing with his uncle’s Martin D-28 he had won in a bet with a fellow who worked for a natural gas company
who stumbled onto their weekly game of poker. His uncle kept it in a velvet-lined case right by his gun rack, and it came out only on special occasions.
Some glad morning when this life is o’er,
I’ll fly away;
To a home on God’s celestial shore,
I’ll fly away.
I’ll fly away, Oh Glory
I’ll fly away; (in the morning)
When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,
I’ll fly away.
To some, that was escapism, trying to slip the surly bonds and avoid the pain and reality of life. But there was so much more to it than that. More to it than you could ever read in a book or get from a newspaper interview. This was the national anthem of his life, the lament that ran through every fiber. The unknown soldiers and shadows of his youth, the indescribable loneliness of seeing the best and worst life had to offer, were all wrapped up in those words.
When the shadows of this life have gone,
I’ll fly away;
Like a bird from prison bars has flown,
I’ll fly away.
His uncle’s garage smelled of stale beer and sawdust. There was laughter of genuine men. Fishing lures on the wall. A picture of soldiers in Korea. Metal stools dug into the earthen floor. And a cross. A warmth Johnson had never felt possible. He couldn’t help feeling this was the pinnacle, to have friends and know them, for them to know him, to express in music what could not be expressed in mere words.
Just a few more weary days and then,
I’ll fly away;
To a land where joys shall never end,
I’ll fly away.
He shook his head at the memories and grabbed another cassette and shoved it into the player. His stash included bluegrass and country—tapes he’d found at garage sales and thrift stores, weathered by the sun and dusty from their travels. Everything from Willie Nelson to Trisha Yearwood to Glen Campbell. He turned up the volume and rolled down the window all the way until the wind rushed through so loud he could barely hear the warbling voices. He pushed the accelerator to the floor to make it up one of the last Oklahoma hills as he rolled toward Arkansas.
