Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (2 page)

He looks my way again. His eyes are kind. That makes it a little easier.
We're about to get to know each other real well. "Honey, let me stop you right
there. You're way too young for me. Hell, you're way too young to be out here.
Don't you have a home to go to?"

"Not for a long time."

"I see." Disapproval overtakes the kindness like the sun going down--but it
isn't directed at me, and that makes what has to happen next easier still.
"When's the last time you ate?"

This time I don't have to fake my smile. "Too long ago." It's true. I'm
always hungry--one more consequence of being what I am--and I have to follow
certain rules. If the living choose to feed me while I'm material, the food has
flavor and substance. If I try to feed myself, it's only air and ashes, like
chewing on nothing.

"Can I buy you a burger?"

"Sure."

***

The burger tastes like Heaven on a sesame seed bun with ketchup and raw
onions, and if Larry wonders why I ask him to pass me the condiments before I
put them on, he doesn't say anything. The coffee is even better than the burger,
and the apple pie is so damn good I could weep. The living don't know how lucky
they are.

Larry finishes his food while I'm still demolishing mine. After that, he just
watches, until I'm chasing crumbs with the tip of my index finger and wishing
I'd thought to chew a little slower. He clears his throat. "I was thinking,
Rose..."

"Yeah?"

"I don't think a girl your age should be alone in a place like this. Now, you
don't have a reason to trust me, and I'll understand if you don't think it's a
good idea, but I'm rolling for Detroit tonight. I'd be happy to take you along,
get you to a place where maybe...you could find somewhere to stay."

Oh, Larry. He won't be getting anywhere near Detroit tonight. I know that,
I've known it since I saw him across the diner, but that doesn't matter, because
this is what I wanted; this is what I came here to do. I push my plate away, and
if he sees that my smile is painted on over sorrow, he's polite enough to ignore
it. He's trying to help. Most truckers are essentially good people, living one
of the few vagabond lifestyles that's survived into this new world of electronic
mail and cellular telephones. They help each other when they can, and they like
to be seen as shining knights riding dragons instead of snow-white chargers.

"Thank you." I tug my borrowed coat tighter, smelling old perfume, old sex,
old lies. My lies are some of the oldest of them all, but I tell them for the
best of reasons. "I'd really appreciate a ride." Rides are what I unlive for,
after all.

The waitress who takes Larry's money looks at me a little too hard, a little
too intently. She knows me, she's deep enough into my America to know me, but
she's still in the shallows; she's still too close to the daylight to understand
why she knows, or what, exactly, it is that she's seeing. I flash her a smile
and she steps backward, counts Larry's change wrong twice, and finally--once the
register is closed--flees into the back. She won't be here much longer. She'll
go back to the daylight, leave this blacktop twilight to the people who can
breathe its air and not worry about suffocation. That's good. People like her
should get out while they still can.

Then Larry leads me out of the diner to his rig, and the waitress doesn't
matter anymore.

***

Most truckers have permanent addresses, places they sleep when they're not
rolling down the midnight miles, eating distance and turning it into dreams.
Very few truckers consider those addresses to be anything like home. They live
and breathe for their iron darlings, their eighteen-wheeled wives who carry them
so faithfully and understand what it is to be one half of a marriage that goes
deeper than passion, all the way down into true, undying love. Larry's truck
shines like a beacon through the outside dark, glittering with a light he's
never seen. If I asked him, if I had a way to frame the question, I bet he'd
tell me he's felt it. That he feels it every time he crawls into his little
wandering-man's bedroll and closes his eyes: the arms and the protections of his
lover, soothing him into sleep.

He sees me staring at her, rapt, and reads the message on my face for what it
is, even if he doesn't see the reasons for it. "Isn't she a beauty?" She shivers
when he puts her hand against her door, loving bride welcoming her husband home.
She's missed him so. If only he could see how much she loves him.

"She is," I say solemnly, and he opens the door for me, and I step into the
open arms of his lover.

She knows me, like the waitress knew me, like the routewitches and the
crossroad charmers know me. She knows what's coming as soon as the door closes
behind me, and the question hangs heavy in the cabin air:
Is there another
way?

I press the palm of my cold hand flat against the worn leather of her
dashboard. It's warm, like a beating heart. The heat spreads through me, wiping
out the frost. I'm riding. Even if the truck isn't rolling yet, I'm doing what a
hitchhiker is supposed to do: I'm riding, and I'm wearing a stranger's coat, and
my belly is full of diner food eaten alongside a good man's last supper. That's
enough to bring around the thaw.
No
, I tell her, and she sighs, deep,
shuddering sigh that even Larry feels as he's getting in on the driver's side.

"Now, don't you be that way," he says, and pats the steering wheel. "I just
had your shocks looked at."

"You talk to your truck?" My palm stays warm after I pull it away from the
dash. I try to sound curious and amused at the same time, like the idea strikes
me as funny. All I really manage is wistful.

"Spend more time with her than I do with anybody else," he says, and slides
his key into her ignition. The engine comes alive with a muted roar, lioness
ready to defend her mate from the wilds surrounding them. Larry pats the wheel
again, the gesture seeming to come automatically. "She's a good girl. She's
always done her best by me."

"She always will." I lean back into my seat, pretending not to see the
curious look Larry sends in my direction, keeping my eyes on the road. The
headlights come on, and then we're away, and it's too late for anything beyond
the open road.

***

"So, Rose," says Larry, as he guides his truck around a gentle curve, the
night closing in around us on every side. "What were you doing back there? A
girl like you, in a place like that, well...it's just not safe. Not everyone is
out to help. You're old enough, you should know that."

"I do." The road is unspinning all around us, and the air tastes like lilies
and ashes and miles that burn out like candles. Not long now. We're almost
there. "I just...I'd been hitching a ride, and the guy I was driving with
decided he wanted to go in a different direction. So I thought I'd stop in and
see if I could find anybody who was going my way."

I don't need to see his frown. I can hear it. "You never asked which way I
was going."

"You told me Detroit."

"Yes, but..."

"I left home when I was sixteen. I didn't have a choice." I let the sentence
sit there to be examined, let him fill in all the spaces between the words,
letting him realize that I still look sixteen, even if he doesn't understand
that I always will. The story he tells himself will be terrible, because the
stories we tell ourselves always are, but it won't come anywhere close to the
truth. It never does. Until they finish falling into the ghostside America, they
never start their stories with "how did you die?"

"Oh." His voice is soft. Silence closes in around us, for a while. Not long
enough. "Don't you have any family you could go to?"

Family. There's an interesting thought. Show up on the doorstep of some woman
twice my age with my older brother's eyes, and try to explain who I am, where
I've been, why I went away...I shake my head. "Not really. We were never a very
close family, and there's no one I could go to."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about me." I offer a smile across the darkened cabin. Something
flickers in his expression, something old and sad and scared. We're getting
close to the border; close to the final fall. He's starting to feel the wind
from the onrushing ending, and he still can't see it clear enough to do a damn
thing about it. They never can. "I've been on the road a long time. I can take
care of myself." The truck rattles on beneath us, eating the road, turning
distance into dreams.

I have to try. I always have to try. It might hurt less if I stopped. That's
why I do it.

"Have you ever heard the story of the woman at the diner?" Such an innocent
question. Such a guilty answer.

Larry laughs. "Now we're telling ghost stories? I suppose that's one way to
get me to stop asking personal questions. I've heard of her."

"How does the story go? The way you heard it, I mean. It's different
everywhere you go."

"Road stories always are." He clears his throat. "Uh, the story goes that she
was a cheerleader."

That's a variation I haven't heard before. "A
cheerleader
?"

"Yeah. Went to some middle-of-nowhere school and wanted to get to Hollywood.
So she and her boyfriend saved their pennies, and they hit the road. Only his
car rolled less than three hours out of town, and he was killed. She managed to
pull herself out of the wreck, and went staggering off, looking for help. She
found a truck stop. The truckers, they said they'd help her, put her in the
diner with a cup of coffee while they went down the road to find her boyfriend.
See if maybe she was wrong, and he was still breathing."

"He wasn't, was he." He never is. In the versions where I have a boyfriend in
the car, he's always dead on impact. Guess it would screw up the story if their
little wandering lady wasn't doing her wandering alone.

"No. So they covered his face, said they were sorry, and one of them stayed
to wait for the police while the others went back to the diner. But by the time
they got there, the girl was already dead. Her throat had been slit, and the
cook was gone. Left a note saying their meals were all free, and thanking them
for the tip."

I shudder.

Larry doesn't see, or maybe Larry just thinks it's that delicious fear that
comes with a good ghost story, but either way, he keeps going. "The one trucker
they'd left back on the road, see, he doesn't know she's dead. So when she comes
walking down the road a few minutes after the police take her boy away, he just
thinks she got tired of waiting. Tells her that her boyfriend's dead, and she
cries so hard. Cries like her heart's been broken.  The trucker, he's a good
guy, and he asks if there's anything he can do."

"So she asks him to take her home," I say, in a whisper.

"Yeah." Larry nods. "She's cold, so he gives her his coat, and he drives her
all the way back to where she started from. Lets her off in front of her very
own house. It's not until the next day he realizes that he left his coat, and so
next time he's driving that route, he stops by. Figures he'll see how she's been
doing. Only the police are waiting. The police have been waiting ever since her
body was found, tucked into her own bed, with her throat cut ear to ear, wearing
a stranger's coat."

"God." The ways the story twists and changes never fail to surprise me.
People are nothing if not inventive in their lies.

"He tried to say he was innocent, but nobody believed him. He was executed,
and when they buried him, this pretty little girl came up to wife right next to
the grave, and said she was sorry; said she didn't mean for that to happen. She
just wanted to go home. Then she walked away. The wife realized who she was, and
ran after, but she was already gone, like she'd never been there...except for
the coat. The trucker's coat, hanging on a tombstone."

"That's a new version," I say, if only to break the silence that the story
leaves behind. "I haven't heard that one before."

"Really? There are others?"

"Hundreds." The weariness in voice could be used to veil every star on the
ghostside. The smell of lilies is strong now. Not much longer.

"I guess that little ghost-girl gets around."

"You have no idea."

***

The road signs flicker and blur in the dark outside the cab, headlights
cutting a bright road through the night. Larry chatters about inconsequential
things, all of them mingling and blurring like the signs, until they're nothing
but the final solo in the symphony of a man's life. Would it have gone
differently if I weren't here distracting him? I don't think so. He's tired--it
comes off him in waves, under the lilies and the ashes and the growing scent of
empty rooms--and without me to talk to, he would just have dozed at the wheel. I
don't condemn them. I don't save them, either. All I do is get them home.

The other truck looms out of the darkness like a dragon, whipping around a
blind curve at the sort of speed that's never safe, not even when the sun is up.
Larry swears and grabs the wheel, hauls it hard to the side, fights to dodge and
then fights even harder to keep control of his truck. There's a crash from
behind us, the sound of metal tearing into metal, and all the stars go out
overhead.

Larry doesn't notice. Larry is too busy clinging white-knuckled to the
steering wheel, eyes wide and terrified, breath coming in panting hitches. "That
was...oh, Jesus. Rose, are you all right? Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine, Larry. I'm not hurt." Truth. I'm not the one he should be asking.

"That was--that was way too close. We have to go back. Did you hear that
crash? He may have tipped. We have to go back."

I lean over, put a hand on his arm. The ghostroad is smoother than the real
one, the street signs crisper, brands against the starless night. "We have to
keep going," I say. "We have to get you home."