by J. L. Esplin
When I reach the back of the truck, I pound once on the rear wheel cover with my fist—I don’t know why, I guess just letting out some pent-up anger. I can only hope it comes off as a desperate move, even though it angers the man inside. I hear his muffled shout of, “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” right before I collapse against the open passenger window.
“Sorry,” I say, out of breath, leaning in, clinging to the hot metal frame. “Thanks for stopping.”
“Get the hell out of my truck!” the guy says—the driver. And scooted all the way next to him is a woman. A very pregnant woman.
In the space of one second, I’m taken back. Back to Mrs. Yardley on that porch swing, holding her stomach because she’s laughing so hard, then an image of the last time I saw her, pulling away from me, smiling through the tears in her eyes—
“I said get the hell out of my truck.”
I blink, let go of the window frame, and hold my hands up, the empty canteen clutched in one. Still trying to catch my breath. “We’re out of water—”
“We don’t have anything for you, kid,” the man interrupts.
Then why did you stop? I want to challenge.
He’s a freaking bodybuilder—head shaved, a sleeve of colorful tattoos up one arm. His upper torso is twisted toward me, his thick, tattooed forearm leaning against the steering wheel, his cold blue eyes narrowed at me in annoyance.
The pregnant woman, on the other hand … She won’t even look at me. I figure that’s a bad sign.
“Please. Sir,” I start again in a stronger voice. “We need water. If you could just fill this canteen.” I hold it out to him through the open window, and the woman cringes away from me.
“Get that out of her face!” he yells, leaning around her belly to shove my hand back. “Ever heard of personal space?”
I clench down on my back teeth to keep from mentioning our gas can in the bed of his truck. Then I open my mouth to plead again, but something catches my attention. A red parking permit with an Ely Granite Company logo, swaying from the rearview mirror. Not my dad’s parking permit, but one just like it.
My dad’s name coming from their mouths. Strangers to us, but not to my dad. They knew he was away on a job for the Ely Granite Company. They knew it was just Stew and I on our own—
“What are you doing out here, kid?” the man says, and my eyes jump to his, thrown off by the question.
He stares at me with this expression that I can’t read, and my pulse kicks up, a fast staccato beating in my ears. I blurt out the only thing I can think to say. “W-we need help.”
“Yeah, you said that already.”
Sweat gathers at my hairline, rolling slowly down my jaw, and I wipe at it nervously.
“You’re headed south, aren’t you?” he asks, but it’s not really a question. “Why would you go south for help? Makes more sense to head north to Ely.”
I swallow the dryness at the back of my throat, confused by his apparent irritation with our direction of travel. Why does he care? And why is it any of his business?
I rack my brain for some explanation that makes sense, without mentioning Brighton Ranch. Because there is no way I’m leading this jerk and his wife to the Brightons’ place.
The problem is, he’s kind of right. If we didn’t have Brighton Ranch to go to, it would definitely make sense to head north to Ely. Even though we’d have to pass through a mountainous stretch of terrain, Ely is still closer than any town to the south.
Going south, just past Brighton Ranch, is Hiko, but it’s actually more of a ghost town—no services there, just a small farming and ranching community. After that, there’s Alamo. Alamo actually has a couple of gas stations, a small grocery store.
“Well,” I finally come up with, “we have family in Alamo.”
“You ought to turn around, kid,” he says, dismissing my lie.
I don’t blame him. I don’t lie well under pressure.
“Wherever it is you think you’re going,” he adds, “it’s a bad idea.”
I feel my eyes start to narrow, and quickly nod to hide my suspicion. My body is firing off warning signals, but I don’t need them to know that something is very wrong here.
“Thanks for the advice,” I say, and his stare hardens. I should just agree that he’s right, fake like we’re turning around, and let this guy drive away and forget he ever stopped. But even though I know I can’t trust him, I feel compelled to ask one more question. For my brother. Even if it’s risky, even if I’m only inviting trouble.
I lean in through the open window again. “But if we decide to head south, do you think you could give us a ride?”
The woman turns to him sharply. Her hand, resting on his leg, tightens, her knuckles turning white. “I told you not to stop,” she says through gritting teeth. But the guy doesn’t take his eyes off me. For a second, I think he might reach past the woman, grip my shirt in his fist, pull me into the cab, and pound my face in.
“What do you have?” he snaps, his pregnant wife groaning, sinking lower in her seat. “A tarp? What else?”
I recognize the subtle threat, but play it off like he’s actually proposing a trade—we give him something, he gives us a ride. Yeah, right.
I wipe away the sweat trailing down the back of my neck. “I have a hunting knife,” I say. I don’t want him to think we’re completely defenseless—even if it is back in my pack. “It’s a good one. It’s yours for a thirty-mile drive down the highway.”
“What else?” he says, unfazed by my mention of a knife.
I’m not sure what he’s looking for, and I don’t want to accidentally tell him we have something that he wants. My eyes go to the bed of his truck, as if I can pick out what he’s missing from their hoard of stuff in a single glance.
“Well,” I say, lowering my voice, “if the knife doesn’t interest you, I also have a gun.”
He doesn’t even flinch at my lie. Before I know what he’s doing, he leans back, reaching behind his sun-faded bench, and swings around a .30–30 Winchester rifle.
The woman yelps, shrinks back against the seat.
My hands immediately shoot up and I take a step back, all pretenses of a fair trade gone. Then his eyes go to the canteen in my hand, and I’m filled with dread.
“How about that?” he says, nudging the butt of his rifle at the canteen.
“Please, I need this. My brother—”
“Kid, your brother, someone else’s mom, someone else’s dog … I can’t save every person on the planet.”
He seems genuinely annoyed by my neediness. As if I asked for any of this to happen. As if I have control over even half the things that have led me to this moment.
I grit my teeth, my arms still up where he can see them. “I’m not asking you to save every person on the planet. And a dog isn’t technically a person.” This earns me a glare, and I quickly say, “We’ll turn around, find help in Ely, just let me keep the canteen—”
His chin goes up. “Drop it on the seat,” he says, motioning with his rifle.
I give a brief thought to my options, which are pretty much nonexistent, and then toss the canteen into the cab of the truck. It rolls and comes to rest against the woman’s bare leg, and she pushes it onto the floor like it’s nothing.
“Now turn around and head to Ely,” he says, setting the rifle across the woman’s lap.
She cringes.
I rush back to the open window. “We won’t make it either direction without water. We need that canteen.”
The guy smirks, his brow going up. “You’re ten, eleven miles from Lund. I’m sure you can borrow a canteen from one of your friendly neighbors, once you turn around.” Without waiting for me to step away, he puts the truck in gear and adds, “You better hope I don’t see you again.”
He accelerates before I can say the same thing back to him. I say it anyway. “You better hope I don’t see you either!” I yell, watching that bright red gas can until I can’t see it anymore. Then I
holler out a few more choice words at the top of my lungs, because I know I’ve just screwed up colossally.
I didn’t need a freaking prop to convince that guy we had nothing worth taking. He hadn’t stopped because he saw a couple of kids on the side of the road worth robbing.
He’d stopped because he saw a couple of kids headed south. Headed in the direction of Brighton Ranch.
8
STEW, CLEVERLY, AND Will are all standing together on the shoulder of the road, shading their eyes and watching me walk back to them. Stew calls out something, his hands cupped around his mouth, but I don’t catch it. I figure it’s something sarcastic, something about me coming back empty-handed, because Cleverly shoves his shoulder, and then they all go back to the tarp and start taking it down. Or at least they try to.
I take my time walking back, mostly because my adrenaline has worn off and my feet suddenly feel like they weigh twenty pounds each, but partly because I’m thinking, deciding what I’m going to tell them and what I’m going to keep to myself.
Some jerk threatening me with a rifle isn’t going to stop me from doing what I have to do. We’re not turning around. If anything, his threat makes me more determined than ever to get to Brighton Ranch.
That guy has no idea what it took to get Stewart as far as I have. He has no idea it took me two days to convince my stubborn brother to even leave our house after we were robbed. Two days.
During the robbery, I kept thinking that all I had to do was survive the night. Just kneel there on my family room rug with a gun pressed to my head, and survive the night.
We still had those emergency packs in the hallway crawl space. We still had a chance to go for help. And that was the only thing that stopped me from doing something stupid that night. Like jumping up and trying to wrestle my dad’s gun out of Presley’s grip.
I’m not usually one to hold a grudge, but I hope that guy chokes on a grotesquely large chunk of canned chicken and dies.
When it was over, I went straight to the hall closet. I had to get the packs ready, lay everything out, see what we had. Purge stuff we didn’t need, move food and things we could use from my dad’s pack into ours.
Then I gathered my nerve and went to face my brother. The sky was just starting to lighten with the promise of morning, and Stewart was still in the front room on the couch, blank eyes staring out the window.
“We have enough food and water to get us to Brighton Ranch,” I told him, which was a bit of a stretch. But I figured the fewer details I gave him, the better. “I don’t think I can sleep, but if you want to rest first—”
“I’m not going.”
“Stewart—”
“Go without me.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I snapped. “I’m not going without you.”
He didn’t say anything, eyes still glued to that window.
“Look, I know this sucks,” I said, “but we don’t have any other option. This is it. We walk to Brighton Ranch, and the sooner we leave, the better.”
“It’s too far,” he said, like he’d already made up his mind about that.
“It’s not too far. I promise you, we can walk there in three days.”
“Even if that were true, you think I’d show up on the Brightons’ doorstep like a beggar?”
“A beggar? Are you kidding me, Stew? We were just robbed! The Brightons would want to help us, Jess especially. You know she would want us to go to them for help.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s too far. And I’d rather die at home than out there in the desert somewhere.”
He was calm when he said it. Completely calm. He’d already thought it through and he’d made a decision for himself. Even though it was a stupid decision.
I tried to tell him that. I tried to tell him he was stupid, but I couldn’t get the words out. It suddenly felt like every muscle in my chest was constricting. I couldn’t take in a good breath. I couldn’t breathe at all in that room. It was hot, stuffy without the fan, and my brother was sitting on the couch, talking about where he’d rather die.
I left him, went back to my room, put my pillow over my head. Stopped thinking about it, stopped thinking about my stupid brother. Until I could finally breathe. Until I finally fell asleep.
When I woke up, I had the worst idea ever.
I found Stew asleep on the couch. Nudged him awake. “If your plan is to just go ahead and die, then fine. I guess I’ll get the whole dying thing over with too.” I dropped the food pouch from my pack on the couch beside him. “I don’t need this. If we aren’t going to Brighton Ranch, then you can have my food and water. No way am I going to risk you dying before me and then get stuck burying your rotting corpse.”
Stew called my bluff.
It was the longest I’d ever gone without eating or drinking anything. Almost two full days. The worst headache of my life, nausea, the pain in my stomach as it folded in on itself like a piece of origami. That unquenchable dry spot at the back of my throat.
All of that was easier to focus on than thinking about my stupid brother giving up. It wasn’t like him. It wasn’t like Stewart to give up when things got hard.
The second day, I mostly felt tired and weak. Which meant I couldn’t defend myself very well when Stew finally caved.
“Fine!” he screamed, his voice cracking, pounding me with a couch cushion. “Fine, John! I’ll do it, you stupid jerk!”
I drank five cups of water with Stew, slowly. I ate a half-melted chocolate bar, some trail mix, a stick of beef jerky, and an entire sleeve of saltine crackers. But before I did any of that, I had a deal with Stewart. I’d eat, he’d walk to Brighton Ranch with me, and neither one of us would bring up dying again.
“If we’re going to make it, you have to trust me,” I added. “No more negative thoughts. We don’t need to talk about it, we don’t even need to think about it. Let me make the decisions, and I promise you, I’ll get us to Brighton Ranch in three days. Is that a deal?”
Flat and emotionless, he repeated, “Don’t talk about it, don’t think about it, you make the decisions.”
Knowing Stew, I don’t think he ever really intended to do all that. Especially the part about me making all the decisions.
And knowing my decisions lately, I don’t exactly blame him for that.
* * *
When I reach them, the packs are untied, the tarp is lying flat on the ground, and Stew is looking at me like he expects something—arms crossed, eyebrows raised.
“I hope they at least thanked you,” he says.
“For what?” I say before thinking.
“For running my canteen out to them.”
I give him a hard look. As if I don’t feel stupid enough about losing the canteen. “The guy had a rifle aimed at me, Stew. What did you want me to do?”
“I don’t know, how about not taking my canteen with you in the first place?”
Cleverly comes between us, holding out my hatchet. “We can’t get the stakes out of the ground.”
I take it and kneel down at the corner of the tarp.
Stew sighs heavily behind me.
“Whatever,” he says as I work the stake out of the packed dirt. “I don’t care anymore.”
I think he knows that him not caring will bother me more than his anger ever would.
“Will’s gotta go,” he says. “I told him I’d help him find a spot.”
“Fine.” I drop the first stake on the tarp and move on to the next one, resisting the urge to ask Stew if he’s gotta go again too. I swear he’s been peeing out more fluid than he takes in. Then I notice Will looking around nervously as they head out, like he expects some masked gunman to jump out of the brush and attack us.
Maybe I shouldn’t have blurted out that stuff about the rifle.
“Hey, Will,” I call, “don’t pee into the wind, okay?”
“Okay,” he says, but looks confused. Stew grabs his hand and I hear him say, “It’s just some stupid thing my dad always say
s.…”
The wind has actually calmed down quite a bit, dying down to something just annoying now, rather than completely unbearable. When I have all the stakes out, Cleverly helps me fold the tarp tight, matching corners and bringing our ends together.
“I’m sorry about the canteen,” I finally say.
“People don’t usually apologize for being robbed.”
“I’m not apologizing for being robbed.” We bring our corners together one more time, and I take the rectangle that’s left from her, hugging it to my chest and pushing out the trapped air. “I’m apologizing for generally screwing everything up.”
She doesn’t correct me this time, just says, “What did they say? Why did they take the canteen? And why didn’t they come back here and take anything else?”
“It was a man and a pregnant woman,” I say. “They wanted to know where we were headed. And they apparently wanted our canteen.”
“That’s weird,” she says. “A pregnant lady? Don’t you think that’s weird? I mean, I’d think a pregnant lady would want to help kids.”
“I thought so too,” I say, thinking of Mrs. Yardley. “She wouldn’t even look at me, though. And then I remembered Spike and Killer. Not every pregnant lady is the same.”
“Spike and Killer?” she asks skeptically. “Are those a couple of pregnant ladies you know?”
“They’re ducks. My grandparents up in Idaho, they have ducks that live on their property, a male and female, and Stew and I used to play with them when we were younger. Until the female had her first round of ducklings. Then she became so protective of her babies that she turned into a freaking assassin. Attacking our ankles and flapping her wings and squawking like a madwoman. So we started calling her Killer.”
“Wow. I didn’t realize ducks could be so vicious. And Spike was her husband?”
I laugh because she’d said it with a straight face. “I don’t think they were married.”
She looks thoughtful.
