Homecoming (30 page)

They came to a wooded section, mostly pines, and walked at its edge, as far from the
traffic as they could get. In the midst of this section, a driveway went off. Like
the other driveways they’d passed, this was a dirt road. But this road had a name,
Overview Circle, and a bunch of mailboxes clustered at its beginning.

Dicey peered down the highway and saw a small store ahead, with a gas pump out front.

“You all wait here,” she said, putting down her bag. “I’m going up to the store to
get some food, and we’ll see if there’s a place to camp down this driveway. I figure,
these are big estates, and probably on the riverfront. Okay?”

“It’s not dark yet,” James objected.

“It’s getting late and we’ve got to find a place. This looks like there might be lots
of privacy,” Dicey explained.

“Okay, if you say so,” James said.

“And if I’m wrong there’ll still be time to find another place,” Dicey said.

They sat down within the first row of trees. Dicey walked on, scuffing her feet, to
the store.

Dicey entered the store through the screen door. She saw mostly cans and dried foods.
There was one small icebox that held milk, butter, eggs and cold cuts in plastic packaging.
She picked out a can of chicken noodle soup, a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, a bar
of soap, a box of safety matches and four tomatoes from a bushel basket. It cost two
dollars and ten cents.

The storekeeper stood beside her while she made all these selections, watching her
carefully. He didn’t say a word. He was a bony man, with short grizzled hair and long,
nervous fingers. When Dicey had piled everything on the counter, he said, “That be
it?” and rang up her purchases on an ancient cash register.

Something about his voice was familiar, but Dicey couldn’t put her finger on it.

Outside Dicey recognized what had been familiar in the man’s voice. He had Momma’s
way with the sounds of letters. They sounded, just a little, like Momma. Dicey smiled
and rejoined her family.

The dirt driveway led off the road straight for a quarter of a mile before it began
winding among the trees. At the turns, driveways entered. Dicey walked down one and
saw a large house, white shingled, and water beyond it. Dogs barked at her, so she
turned back.

The third house was silent, although a car waited in the long garage. The Tillermans
skirted the trees at the edge of the property and cut down to the water when they
saw it. They found a
marshy beach, nestled back against the piney woods. It was not ideal, but it was private
and, except for birds and frogs, quiet.

Dicey built a small fire and opened the soup can with her jackknife can opener. It
was hard work, but it did the job. She mixed a can of milk into the condensed soup
in the pan. Then she told everybody to strip and put on clean underwear. James stood
in the muddy water and washed out their underwear, using the cake of soap. He brought
it back for Dicey to inspect. “I dunno,” she said.

“The water’s muddy, not like a laundromat.”

Maybeth spread the wet clothing over some bushes. They sat around the small fire and
took turns drinking soup from the pan, soaking it up with flabby slices of bread.
They passed the milk container around, and Dicey halved the tomatoes. They ate these
eagerly, even Sammy who didn’t ordinarily like tomatoes. They were red, firm, juicy.
They tasted fresher than anything Dicey had ever eaten before.

After supper, Dicey put out the fire (“We don’t want to attract attention.”) and set
Sammy fishing in the quiet river. After a while, James joined Sammy, holding his own
line and hook.

The sun set quietly, flaming in the water. The boys caught five small fish, which
they killed and then left lying in the water, so they’d be fresh for breakfast.

When the sun was only a band of burning red seen through the trees, Dicey took out
the ponchos and spread them on the ground, rolling on them to crush the undergrowth
beneath. Nobody wanted to go to sleep, however. They sat with their knees pulled up
under their chins. Maybeth began to sing, and they joined in without thinking. They
kept their voices down, just in case, but they sang eagerly. When darkness had fallen
over everything, and the stars burned bright in a moonless sky, they went to sleep.

T
hey slept late the next morning and were awakened by the roar of a racing motorboat
as it headed down the river to the bay. They were all, even Sammy, shoved out of sleep
into the hot morning, like falling out of bed.

Dicey raised her face from the poncho. Her cheek was damp with sweat. Her thighs stuck
to the rubber. She rubbed at her eyes.

The woods rested behind them. The water and the opposite shore lay before them. Between
these wandered the narrow river. The sun was high in the sky, high and hot.

They all peed in the woods and then gathered fuel for a small fire. Dicey pulled the
five fish out of the water. With the jackknife, she gutted them and scraped off some
of their scales. Then she and James threaded them onto supple branches. Nobody spoke.

They ate the fish and finished the milk and bread. James experimented with toasting
the bread on a stick. He got a patchwork piece of toast, splotches of white, splotches
of black and various shades of brown. Dicey gathered the underwear, almost dry, from
the bushes where they had been hanging all night. James taught Sammy how to put out
a fire properly; how to cover it with dirt and then stamp on it and wait, to be sure
no telltale smoke rose from the ashes.

Maybeth helped Dicey fold up the ponchos and pack them into her bag. They gathered
all their garbage into the brown grocery bag.

Dicey knew it was time to go, but she didn’t want to start, not yet. She pulled out
her map and studied it. They would go through Easton and then loop west. Dicey would
have preferred to stick to the water’s edge, to follow the shoreline down, but this
countryside had too many fists and fingers of land that reached out into the water.
If they followed the shoreline, they would travel many miles more than they had to,
winding in and out along the points of land.

At the sound of another motor, they all froze. A small boat, really just a rowboat
with an outboard, chugged downriver. Three boys were in it, all about James’s age.
They were tanned by the sun; all wore cutoffs, T-shirts and sneakers. Their hair looked
shaggy, as if it hadn’t been cut all summer. They trailed lazy hands in the water
as they moved slowly, aimlessly, down the river and out of sight.

“You know,” Dicey said, “they look like us. Don’t they? James?”

He nodded. His eyes followed the wake the little boat left behind.

“Do you think we’re like most of the kids over here, in the way we look?” Dicey asked.

“Natural camouflage,” James said.

Dicey looked at them. They were all tan, and her day in the sun yesterday had caught
her up in brownness for what she’d lost during hours inside at Bridgeport. Their hair
was scruffy, and Maybeth’s curls looked tangled. But they didn’t look out of place,
or unusual. They looked like kids running a little wild during the summer.

They returned to the road, hurrying down the dirt driveway. James carried the bag
of trash and dumped it into a garbage can
near the little store Dicey had shopped in the afternoon before. The clock within
the store read ten. Late.

The children walked on beside the highway. This was Route 33, heading east. In Easton,
they would change roads to go south. Traffic was light on this hot summer morning.
They walked two by two on the shoulder of the road. Fields of corn hedged them in.
Insects buzzed among the rows. Dicey wondered if they could take a few ears for supper.
Her pan wasn’t big enough to hold a whole ear of corn, but you could scrape off the
kernels. Her curiosity was aroused by these fields, so unprotected from the road.
Anybody could go in and steal the corn. There were no fences to stop them. Maybe that
was why she didn’t want to do it.

As they neared the town of Easton, they began to pass shopping centers and development
houses, little, low one-story ranchers with sprigs of new grass and one or two puny
trees. At one of the large markets, Dicey bought a pie on sale and four bananas. They
cost ninety-two cents. She told her family that they would stop to eat after they
had passed through Easton.

Sammy wanted to stop before the town. “It takes all day to get through a place.”

“Not a little one like this,” Dicey said.

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure,” Dicey said. “Wanna bet?”

They wagered an hour’s fishing time. If it took too long to get through Easton, Dicey
would have to fish for an hour, while Sammy had free time. If it didn’t, then Sammy
would have to fish an extra hour. Sammy liked this. Either way, he won. He walked
eagerly on.

Dicey won the wager, of course. As she said to herself, if she couldn’t read a map
by now, she’d be a pretty sore fool. The streets of Easton, even the main arteries
that they walked on,
were sleepy, treelined roads. The tallest buildings reached only four stories. Stop
signs outnumbered traffic lights.

Their roads took them around the town rather than through its center. They passed
by a long pond that ran behind the YMCA and then down across abandoned railroad tracks
to where a big highway joined up with 322.

Here, Dicey took out her map again: Route 50—a four lane highway with a grass divider.
Trucks, cars, campers, buses, vans, pickups, motorcycles, all thundered down the highway,
hard on one another’s heels, traveling fast. Dicey wanted to get off this road for
two reasons. First, it was too heavily traveled, and the air was thick with fumes
and noise. Second, Route 50 went due south, to Cambridge, before bearing east to Salisbury.
It would be quicker to take a road that followed the third side of the triangle formed
by Easton, Cambridge and Salisbury. A river lay across that route, the Choptank. It
was broad down by Cambridge, but narrower up above, and would be easy to cross she
guessed, remembering the little river they’d camped by. She decided to turn off the
main highway and cut cross-country.

A quarter of a mile south of Easton, she took a turn onto River Road. That had the
right sound to it. They crossed the highway at a run. They raced across the southbound
lanes, then had to wait several minutes before they could dash safely across the northbound
traffic. Dicey saw fields ahead, and a few houses. Twenty yards from the highway,
they were back in open countryside.

It was James who sighted the circus ahead, set up on a fallow field. He saw the ferris
wheel. “Let’s go there and eat,” he said.

“We can’t spend any money,” Dicey said.

“That’s okay, I like to look,” James answered.

They ate the bananas as they approached the circus. They came to it from the rear,
from behind a big tent. A short midway
with a ferris wheel and carousel and a dozen booths for games and food stands led
away from the tent entrance. People were hurrying around, setting up games, carrying
boxes marked with the names of soft drinks; a man tinkered with the engine that drove
the ferris wheel. Dicey stopped by a trash can. She broke the pie into four pieces
and handed them out. They dropped their garbage into the metal barrel. They stared
for a while at the activity on the midway and then drifted back to the tent from which
music and voices issued.

“Do you think they have elephants?” Sammy asked Dicey.

“It doesn’t look big enough,” she said. “I don’t see any place where they’d keep animals,
do you, James? It doesn’t look like much of a circus.”

James peered into the tent, standing in the doorway. “There’s a tightrope,” he reported.

“Out,” ordered a sharp voice from the dimness within the tent. The Tillermans backed
away. “You heard me.” A woman stepped out into the hot sunlight.

She had bright red hair and wore a man’s shirt over tight blue jeans. She wore sandals
with very high heels. She carried a whip. Three terriers, like little white mobilized
mops, swirled around her feet in eager circles. Somehow, she managed not to step on
them or trip over them.

“What’re you kids doing here?” she demanded. She sounded angry, angry at them.

“Nothing,” Dicey said.

“Tell that to the Marines,” the woman said. “You know we don’t open until six.”

“No, we didn’t,” Dicey said.

“You do now,” she answered. She put her hands on her hips and glared at them. The
whip dangled down, and one of the little dogs, the one with a pink ribbon on its head,
jumped up to
grab it out of her hand. The woman rocked on her heels and the dogs ran off in a row,
the other two chasing the one carrying the whip.

Dicey started to smile.

“You heard me,” the woman said. “Or should I call the police?”

“I don’t think so.” A slow, thick man’s voice spoke from behind the Tillermans. Dicey
turned to face this new person. He was a tall black man, with eyes so dark brown they
looked almost black beneath thick eyebrows. He was clothed entirely in black, a black
shirt and black pants and high black leather boots. His tightly curling hair was cut
short, and he had a narrow, short beard along his jawbone. His face looked relaxed,
as if nothing could upset him.

Maybeth moved closer to Dicey. James stood where he was, his mouth open. Sammy was
poised to run.

The man spoke again. “Relax, kids, she won’t hurt you. Claire? What is this?”

“They were snooping around,” the woman told him. “This one,” she indicated Dicey,
“he said they didn’t know we’re closed until six.”

“You go back to work,” the man told her. “I’ll take care of this.” They waited while
she whistled for the dogs and then stalked off, back into the tent.

“We are off-limits until the show opens,” the man told the Tillermans.

“We really didn’t know,” Dicey said.

“Then you’re strangers around here.” His eyes studied her.

Dicey nodded. Looking at his calm face, with its studying eyes, she said what she
was thinking: “Strangers about everywhere.”