Blood Highway

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  I didn’t answer. Blaine ran to his kitchen. I folded the picture into crisp quarters and slid it in my back pocket. He made one attempt to take my hands and put them around a glass, but I jerked backward, cracking into the shelves. “My dad is outside,” I said.

  “Yeah. Somewhere.”

  “You knew.”

  “Not ’til yesterday. Not ’til after I dropped you off at school.”

  “Are you lying?”

  Blaine put his fingers in a V under his eyes, to draw mine there. “Am I?”

  “What’s going on?”

  He got the file, shuffled paper. He dropped a stack of sheets, and they scattered. “Wednesday night, my precinct got a call from the feds. You following?”

  I made a noise.

  “From the FBI, okay? FBI says to put a unit on your house. The day before your mom— Three days ago. Kunz gave me the assignment. He gives me most of those, he knows I’m not a talker. He tells me I’m watching for this guy.” Blaine held up the bald man’s mug shot. It had a plaque at the bottom: cain, sam, then codes and numbers I didn’t understand. “They didn’t tell me who lived at your house. They didn’t tell me what this guy did. I saw you leave for school. I was sitting there all day, you come home, I get the call, and . . . And you have to believe me—I didn’t know. We didn’t know she’d react that way.”

  “What? What way?”

  “They called her. The bureau called her that morning. They told her he’d escaped.”

  “Prison,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “My dad escaped from prison.”

  “Yes.” The rim of the water glass floated by my chin. “Drink this.”

  My nerveless hands were no help. Blaine tipped it into my mouth like he was bottle-feeding a baby. I got greedy. “Slow down,” Blaine said. “There’s more, take it slow.”

  He went to go get more. I stayed on the floor, surrounded by forms, reports, statements. My eyes landed on another black-and-white photo. A house on dirt. One bony, sick tree in the foreground. A tire swing strung from a thin branch.

  “Here.” He’d added ice. “I get to work yesterday morning, right? Kunz calls me into his office first thing. There’s these two suits who haven’t smiled since fucking Laugh-In, and they want me in interrogation. Kunz tells them, ‘Hell, no.’ Remember how I said nobody’d care if you didn’t check in at the halfway house? Guess not. They’re threatening me with prison time if I dropped you off at a friend’s or paid a late call to CPS. I checked with Child Protection Services right away—remember me saying that? These guys intercepted. They wanted you at that halfway house because it’s got security guards, locks, surveillance. So I’m thinking, ‘Well, this cop thing’s been fun. Probably be a security guard myself next month.’ And I fess up and tell them you were here. Then comes the scary part: they calm right down. They look at each other like, ‘Thank God this uni from Podunk did something smart by accident.’ And they start firing questions at me. Firing them on full automatic: how you seemed, what we talked about, whether you were in a hurry to get out of here. I go, ‘Hold on, hold on. How about I ask a few?’”

  Blaine laughed without humor. “Try that on the FBI sometime—it’s real effective. I know Kunz can be . . . ‘intimidating’ is a good way to put it, but he’s a great man. I’ve known him most of my life; he lives the job. And when he says, ‘Y’know, Blaine, maybe an interrogation room would be best for this,’ I’m ready to shit I’m so surprised. But I’ve played poker with him. I’ve learned the expensive way how to tell he’s got the cards. I spent three hours with those guys. Three hours saying, ‘I got her some food. We drove to my house. She went to sleep. We didn’t talk.’ Meantime, Kunz went through the briefcase one of the agents left behind and copied your dad’s federal file. Him and me took a long lunch, went through it front to back. When we were done, we knew the FBI wasn’t going anywhere. I cooperated. I didn’t have a choice. But even if they hadn’t been standing over my shoulder when you called me, I’d have come after you on my own. Understand? This scamming a night at a hotel, this going it alone—that’s over. You need our protection.”

  He took my empty glass, went and filled it again, came back and gave it to me, and began sweeping papers, knocking stacks together on the coffee table. I sat dumbstruck. I’d learned everything and nothing. “What did he do?”

  “I’m gonna walk you through that. Right now, we need to go. There’s some important people waiting on us. And you got here twenty minutes ago, not two hours. Right?”

  Not a problem. It felt like twenty minutes. Felt like five.

  “You still with me?” he said.

  “I need a cigarette.”

  “There isn’t—”

  “One cigarette.”

  Blaine’s head fell forward. In exasperation, but also in a subtle check of what he was leaving me with. He went downstairs, and I heard the desk drawer. I grabbed the picture of the house. It reminded me of the Depression, what I thought a house in the Depression would look like. Concrete blocks for a foundation, overlapping boards as crooked as bad teeth. There was the end of a clothesline peeking from a backyard that could only be called a “yard” if you forgave it for having no grass.

  Blaine sat beside me, bumped one out of the pack. I lit the cigarette, though the tip and my hands both jiggled.

  “Where is this?”

  “Nebraska.” Blaine opened the window behind us. “That’s the farm where he grew up.”

  I glanced at the collage of images on the floor. I leaned over and picked another. They were on the porch, in two lines—three boys and four girls. The mom wore a done dress, the dad a brimmed hat and coveralls. “When is this?”

  “Late sixties.” Blaine pointed. “That’s him.”

  Sam was a string bean, fair-haired. His face couldn’t have been more different from the smiley photo hidden in my back pocket. The whole clan wore expressions that hinted that this picture-taking business was a chore, but nothing in their lives had ever been anything else.

  Blaine took the photos from me, put them with the rest, and wrapped them in their folder.

  “Why’d you label the file?” I said.

  “Hmm?” He goosed the rubber band around, trying not to snap it.

  “If it was so top secret to copy a federal file, why’d you label it?”

  Blaine stared at the name on the tab. “Habit.”

  “You could take me to the train station.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “You could. You could say I got away from you. I jumped out of the car at a red light. I’m fast, like you said. I’ll vanish. I swear, he won’t find me.”

  Blaine picked up the water glass and gave it to me. I passed it over my lap, placed it on the shelf. “Please?” I said.

  A warm mitten wrapped my left hand. It squeezed. “I’m with you on this. Every step of the way. I promise.” It pulled. “We gotta go. Come on, come with me.”

  I went straight for the garage, thinking: Blaine’s the Pied Piper, and I’m a rat trailing his magic flute to the river.

  He opened the cruiser door for me. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  When the car started, “The Chain” came blasting out of the speakers. Blaine turned it down.

  “Who’s your favorite?” I said.

  “My favorite what?”

  The car slanted into the street. I pointed at the radio.

  “Stevie,” he said. I looked over at him. The van’s lights were off. But it was growing—its grille of twinkly teeth chomping for the driver’s side, where Blaine was saying, “Who else? I thought she was everyone’s—”

  I must have reacted. Blaine floored it, and the cruiser roared backward. My head wrenched and hit a hard pillow. A mix of sounds louder than loud, but “The Chain” cut silent. I checked out for a few seconds, until the pillow went softer and my neck had to hold me up again. The cruiser’s hood was narrower with a high hump in the middle. The windshield had shattered. White balloon in
front of me, deflating to the dash. Another one in Blaine’s steering wheel.

  Airbags. Those are airbags.

  Blaine shook his head and put a hand to the temple I couldn’t see. His fingers came back bloody. He glared in wonderment at the van standing over his TKO’d cop car. A voice speared out from it. “Get in, Kat. Your friend will be just fine.”

  A house would open. Somebody would come. For sure they’d called the police.

  “Run,” Blaine said. His hand was wandering—

  “On the wheel. Both of them.”

  Blaine obeyed.

  “Face the windshield.”

  Blaine didn’t. “Run,” he told me. “Fast as you can.”

  “Kat? I’m counting to ten. Get in. The cop will be fine.”

  Adrenaline isn’t exactly a clear-thinking elixir. Strange, then, that I didn’t consider running. Not for a second. I wasn’t confused enough to miss the insinuation: if you don’t get in the van, the cop will not be fine.

  I could see the slice upside Blaine’s head now—a fang from his window hung from the cut. “Go, Rainy,” he said. “Run, get out of here.”

  The street was so quiet I hardly had to raise my voice. “I’m coming out.” My door made a noise like a belch as I opened it. Blaine grabbed my arm.

  “Let her go, Officer Friendly.” I heard a click, or thought I did.

  Blaine said: “Don’t piss him off.”

  I was still mostly convinced I’d fallen asleep. I was asleep upstairs. I’d wake in the morning to the smell of pancakes, bacon, strong coffee. It would take a valiant exercise of will not to tell him about this freaky dream, but I wouldn’t tell him. Nobody likes hearing about dreams.

  I flattened a foot onto the sidewalk and held on to the cruiser for balance, feeling my way around the back.

  “That’s right. Come on.”

  Never mind. Forget it, I’d cave. I’d say: “I had the strangest dream, Blaine.” And when I got to this part: “I turned and saw you bleeding. That whole side of your head and neck was bright red. You were watching me walk away, and all I could think was that you were fire, you were full of fire. I was scared of you and scared for you. I wasn’t scared for me—it was like I wasn’t there. Because I wasn’t. Because it was all a dream.”

  “Hop in back, honey.”

  I slid open the van’s side door. Inside was too dark to see. I heard very faint lo-fi radio. Guitar getting stomped by a brash, froggy croak that was somehow more sweet than sour. God, how we love the dead girls. How closely we listen once they can only speak in the past tense.

  Freedom’s just another word.

  I stepped inside.

  II

  Kat

  Nine

  When we learned about the sympathetic nervous system during junior year, I thought that was a dumb thing to call it. What did fight or flight have to do with sympathy?

  Answer: If you’re, say, sitting in a dark van, and the reassurance that none of this is happening has finally worn away, and there’s a circus strongman in the passenger seat and another guy driving, and neither of them talk to you for miles and miles as you take one highway after another, pointing the van’s busted pug nose west, its cracked lights cutting into farm country after about a half hour, and your spine is to the seam of the big doors, knobs of vertebrae right in the center, and you’re prepared any second to be murdered, your nervous system’s “sympathy” takes effect and pretty much erases the mental marker-board.

  Mind triage: The music’s good.

  I cleaved to that, to lyrics so familiar my mouth sang silently along without any conscious effort. “Light My Fire,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Layla.” There were no seats where I was sitting. Dark synthetic carpeting was littered with road food wrappers, cigarette butts, partially filled water bottles. Outside, the close, clawed trees alternated with pastureland and glinty barbed wire, snow and snowy mud.

  Inside, the bald man’s chrome dome reflected the dashboard light, his breadth blotting the outline of the seat he sat in. I tried to catch sight of his face in the rearview mirror, but all I could see there was the driver, who I caught staring back at me so often I wondered how we were staying on the road. I didn’t know where we were, which told me a lot. I’d gone most directions out of the Cities by main highways. So I figured we were on a state highway, and I watched for a number. Eventually, enough moon leaked through the trees that a sign shouted its 12 at me. I nodded, for some reason reassured.

  In my favorite hypothetical, the highway patrol stopped us on an APB. They wouldn’t, of course. Not out here. But I had no doubt there was an APB. Blaine had put one out; it’s what he would do. I was sure he was fine. He was giving his vocal cords a workout on everybody whose job it’d been to corral—

  My dad.

  I looked again at the massive shape in front of me. I wanted to think “ogre,” but I kept thinking “butterfly.” A butterfly with its wings spread. Unlike the driver, he didn’t smoke. He worked at a bottle of Dr Pepper for more than an hour, still didn’t finish it. Every so often, he put on a set of headphones with a loopy cord stretching toward the floor and listened, then took them off and muttered to the driver, who did nothing but steer and eat a sunflower seed every couple of hours from a huge bag on the dash.

  “He passed away,” is what Mom had told me, any and every time I asked about my father. The first time I asked I was three, and wanted to know why other kids had daddies and I didn’t. I didn’t understand what “passed away” meant, but Mom walked away after she said it, so I thought it meant my dad walked past us one day and kept going by mistake. I asked her that night why we didn’t talk to some people in the neighborhood, see if they’d seen him, and she sat me on her lap in the rocking chair and explained: “No, ‘passed away’ means ‘dead.’”

  I still didn’t get why she’d used a code. My mom was dead; she didn’t “pass away.” She ventilated her veins and swallowed fifty pills and, somewhere in that shatter-wreck of a head, she knew I’d be the one to find her. And she also knew these guys would come find me.

  “There,” Sam said.

  The van made a sedate right onto frozen mud, with deep tire ruts that the van sloughed through. The church at the end of the road was a lonely holy ghost, white clapboard, completely secluded. I could always run, and there were woods to hide in. But I’d already done the hypothermia bit once tonight.

  The church’s driveway wasn’t plowed, so the driver didn’t attempt it. Instead, he stopped beside a placard with broken glass, got out, and went around the front of the van. He didn’t have a coat. He was bone-skinny. I felt a jolt of pity for him, but it evaporated fast. There was a pale-blue short bus parked flush with the church’s south wall. On its side was a painting of five children, all races and all smiles, with the legend under them in flowery cursive: Let the little children come to me, Matthew 19:14.

  Something hit my shoe, and I jumped back, my legs shooting forward at the same time. My foot kicked a bottle of water, which pinballed to Sam. He put his hands up like, Don’t shoot, Officer.

  He picked up the water. “I thought you might be thirsty. I rolled it to you. I should have said something first. I apologize.”

  The mix of midnight and headlight kept Sam a shape, a big bad shadow. His voice was firm yet gentle, seeming to listen even as it spoke. “Could I roll you another one?” He set an Evian sideways on the floor and pushed it toward me.

  It stopped a yard away. I left it there.

  “We’re not going to hurt you. We need to switch cars.” He turned to the windshield. The driver had the bus’s hood up, his toes on the front fender. His whole wiry torso was inside the engine compartment, and he slid around with purpose. “If only we didn’t have to steal a 2001 Ford Irony, huh?” Sam said.

  Outside, the guy slammed the hood and showed a thumbs-up. Sam returned it. “I didn’t want it to be like this. I didn’t know Harmony would . . .” He put his head in his paw and rubbed.

  It was disturbing, hear
ing my mother referred to by her first name. Nobody called her that. Nobody really called her anything. Except kids—then she was Mrs. Cain.

  Sam moved behind the van’s wheel. It wasn’t easy; his girth made the process a squat-and-shuffle. He put on his seat belt and reversed. We parked at the start of the trees. The bus passed us, stopped, and idled, the red of its brake lights coloring our thin woods. Sam got out, went around, and reached for the van’s side door. He slid it sideways and backed up.

  “It’s going to be fine, Kat.”

  I hurried out, too chicken to look at him, and went toward the bus. The emergency exit at the rear was open. I climbed in and dropped into the farthest-back bench. The door closed behind me.

  Sam got the black box with the headphones and deposited it on the bus’s front bench. He made another trip for a pair of paper grocery bags and chucked them onto the floor by the bus driver’s seat. Then he went back one last time, put the van in neutral, and rolled it down a steep ditch.

  Sam got in and put on his headphones. The driver turned us back on the road, flicked on the bus’s radio, and settled on an oldies station.

  My fear was getting loose, a tight shirt I’d squirmed around in until the material began to stretch. I almost relaxed as minutes stacked into hours, as the roads we were on rolled by farms and tiny hamlets. We merged onto 94, and from Minnesota’s rich variety of water and plants and dips and rises, we crossed the line to Fargo, North Dakota, where God took a hydraulic press, fed a pancake through it, and called it good. The driver took the first exit. I thought our destination might be one of the miserable houses I could see slumped behind tiny yards, but he parked at a curb, got out, and ran to a poorly lit driveway. Sam didn’t say a word. In no time flat, the driver returned from the house, evading streetlamps. In his hand, license plates flashed. Quick with a screwdriver, he got back behind the wheel, dropping our Minnesota plates to the floor. We didn’t pass a single soul as we returned to the highway, leaving Fargo dead-asleep behind us. Sam fell into a doze not long after the interstate became a drab, infinite plain.