Strays (33 page)

He pressed his shattered nose as close as he dared against the window and spoke to his old friend.  “No,” he whispered.  “Where do we go?”

Jack’s earthy chuckled pinballed about in his head. 
You will know,
he said. 
Trust your senses.  Get the girl.

Rhino nodded, his sweaty forehead streaking on the glass.  “I will,” he said. 

Listen. 
Jack’s voice was louder now, teasing the edge of rage. 
Get the girl.  At all costs, get the girl. 

And somewhere in the crisp morning air, Jack began to whistle his melancholy tune.

“Yes,” Rhino said, no longer whispering.  “Oh yes.”

“Who you taking to?”

“Huh?”

“You were talking just now,” said Big Buddy.  “You going
loco
, boy?”

“Hmm.  I don’t know.” 

“I don’t need you going
loco
,” Big Buddy snarled.  “Just try to keep that crap in check, you hear, boy?”

“It’s in check,” Rhino grumbled.  “Don’t you worry about that, mister.”  He pressed his lips together and shielded his eyes against the sun and decided that these next three hours could not go by quickly enough.

*   *   *   *

The interstate followed the Columbia River on the Oregon side, winding and turning for mile upon mile.  They passed through a stretch of state parks—Ainsworth, Cascade Locks, Viento—and they crossed Hood River.  They passed through Memaloose State Park and The Dalles, and the road meandered in concert with the Columbia, making the sun roll from the right to the left across the blazing sky before them.  

The hours stretched, and they did not talk, and Rhino wished he could jump out of the truck and roll on the pavement, breaking himself into pieces.  This was worse than any pain he had endured at the hands of that thing that attacked him in the woods.  This was hell, real hell, the endless boredom of a long drive without company save that of a boorish ogre.  Rhino did not know much about this Big Buddy, but he had begun to loathe the man the previous day, back in that tiny tavern in Centralia.  Big Buddy was rude and he was arrogant, and he could not see anything beyond his own immediate wants, like a hungry bear tearing through someone’s campsite. 

The morning crawled.  The sun hovered in their eyes.  The drive seemed as vast as the photographs of outer space Rhino had seen in books, and for a time he closed his eyes and imagined himself as fading, a pale light in a sea of millions of others, lost to everyone save the tar-smelling ogre in the truck.  Somewhere in the darkness, he heard the whistling, that eerie tune Jack had been chirping in the bathroom, and his eyes snapped open.

“What?” Big Buddy said.

“The whistling.  I hear it.”

“So?”

“We need to pull off next exit.  I think we’re here.”

Big Buddy slowed for the next exit, SE 3rd Street and Highway 11 into Pendleton.  He put his left blinker to turn north into town, but Rhino could hear the whistling coming from the south. 

“Turn right,” he said.

“What for?” Big Buddy asked.  “Nothing there but a bunch of gas stations.”

“We need to stop here.”

Big Buddy turned right, and at Rhino’s urging, he turned right again.  There was a row of gas stations and a couple of hotels.  Rhino leaned forward in his seat, almost pressing his broken nose against the glass.  The whistling was so loud now, and he squinted his eyes against it, making his temples hurt, but he knew they were there.  They were close.

“There,” he said, pointing at a Shell station off to the right.  “Pull in there.”

Big Buddy grumbled but pulled into the station, gliding the Datsun up to the dock. 

“Now what?”

Rhino strained, and the whistling seemed fainter now, farther away … and then it grew and grew, coming back to him, like a child he was playing catch with who had run to pick up a ball that had slipped through his hands.  Rhino turned in his seat and looked at the gas pumps just as an old Impala, something from the early 1970s, rolled in and came to a stop.  Rhino blinked, and the whistling in his ears stopped as sharply as the Impala had. 

It was here. 

He studied the Impala.  Out-of-state plates.  He rolled down the window of the Datsun and leaned out to get a better look at them.  From Kansas it appeared.  Someone was a long way from home.  Rhino fought the urge to get out and tell the driver that he wasn’t in Kansas anymore, perhaps adding the word
Toto
to punctuate the joke, and this made him laugh out loud.

“What’s your problem?” Big Buddy asked.

“I need some air,” Rhino said. 

He opened the door and stepped out into the warm August morning, and the driver of the Impala was doing the same.  Rhino watched the driver, a tall, angular kid, as he walked around to the back, flipping up those Kansas plates to reveal the entry to the gas tank beneath.  Something about that kid.  Something off, something wrong.  Rhino wondered if maybe he was retarded.

As the kid unscrewed the gas cap, the passenger side of the car opened, and the finest looking woman Rhino had ever seen stepped out, stretching her arms above her head to make her perky little breasts poke against her t-shirt.  Rhino watched her stride up to the store, nice dark jeans massaging her lovely backside as she moved.

He glanced over at the driver, tall and awkward and fumbling with the cap.

“Geez,” Rhino muttered.  “What’s this loser doing with such a hot-looking woman?”

“Why don’t you go ask him?” Big Buddy barked from inside the truck. 

Rhino considered this and nodded.  “All right.  I will.”  It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do at the moment.  Deep in the back of his brain, the whistling began to kick into gear again.

He shut the door of the Datsun and walked up to the Impala.  The whistling continued, that soft melody like a lullaby.  The gangly loser from the Impala was taking the gas nozzle off the pump and inserting it into the tank.

“Nice morning,” Rhino said.  He could hear the whistle diminishing, perhaps being sucked away into the current of a distant eddy of dust.

“Hey,” said the gangly kid.  He squeezed the pump and slid the little catch so it would pump its fuel, and then he stood up and frowned.  “Whoa, what happened to your nose?”

Rhino forced a chuckle that sounded effeminate through the splint.  “You think this looks bad, you should see the other guy.  Where you headed?”

“I don’t know,” the kid admitted.  “I think here.  I think.”

“What’s that on your shirt?”

The kid looked down at the front of his t-shirt, white torso with a Henley collar, and printed on the chest was the logo
K-SOUTH
. 

“It’s a college,” the kid said.

“K-South.  Never heard of it.”

“Kirby Southern.  A little fine arts school in the middle of Kansas.  My Dad teaches there.  He bought this for me last Christmas.” 

The whistling began in earnest, just behind Rhino’s left ear.  He gave his head a sharp jerk, as if a fly was buzzing about his head.

“Something wrong?” the goofy kid asked.

Rhino opened his mouth to speak, but just then the nozzle of the gas pump clicked as it released the catch, announcing that the car was full.  The kid turned away from Rhino, reaching for the nozzle to top off the tank.  Rhino opened his mouth to speak, but already his feet were shuffling him back to the little Datsun, that eerie whistling echoing in his mind. 

When he got to the Datsun, he opened the door and sat down.

“That kid’s a freak,”  Big Buddy had not made an effort to mask his impatience the entire trip, and it didn’t seem that he was about to start now.  “What’s his story?”

“I don’t care,” Rhino said.  “Follow him.”

“Why?  You think he knows something about my girl?”

“I don’t know what he knows,” said Rhino.  “Just follow him.  I think he’ll take us to where we need to be.”

Kyle, Sarah, and Everyone They Know

Big Buddy had no trouble keeping up with the Impala.  The kid had not driven fast even though he had seemed a bit jittery back at the Shell station, and Buddy enjoyed the chase, like a hunter reading tracks in the woods.  The last mile or so, he had hidden his Datsun in the dust plume that the old whale of a car had spit upon the dirt road.

Half an hour after they had first met the kid at the station, Big Buddy and Rhino sat on a hill just west of Trudy’s farm, the farm where the Impala had turned in, and waited.  Rhino had tried to have a discussion about what they should do, stating he was ready to march right up, knock on the door and get it over with.  Big Buddy, on the other hand, was having a moment of atypical restraint.

“For all we know,” he said, “those two kids drove out here to see their grandma or something.  Until I know my girl’s there, I’m not making a move.”

And so they sat, parked at the side of the gravel road near the end of a row of trees, gazing down at the farm with squinted eyes.  They had a clear shot of the porch and anyone who walked out on it, and there had been a crowd of two or three people when the Impala first arrived, but they had all gone into the house by the time the dust settled.  Big Buddy could not tell if his girl was there, but at that moment, he was content to wait, to watch.

Had Trudy or Tom or any of them stepped out on the porch and looked to the west, they might have seen that patch of the Datsun’s dusky blue paint through the grass, at the edge of the shelterbelt on the hill.  They might even have seen the dervish of a dust devil that hovered and danced at the edge of the road, just beyond the Datsun, teasing the edge of the opposite field, but even then only if they were looking for it.  At that moment, no one was in the yard to look to the west save a small congregation of cats.

And they were too busy watching the house to notice.

*   *   *   *

“Twenty-four hours or more,” Kyle said as he sat at the kitchen table, legs crossed and sipping a cup of fresh-brewed coffee.  “Been on the road at least that long, would you say, Molly?”

“More,” Molly said.  “You crossed two time zones.”

“Yeah, two time zones,” Kyle muttered.  “How about that?”  He looked about the table at his welcoming committee—the woman in the oversized sweater named Trudy with the weary eyes; the striking blonde they called Strawberry in the oversized work shirt (Molly had made sure to take a place between her and Kyle, and he was quietly pleased that she was jealous); the freckled red-head named Tom who stared at Kyle and did not smile; and next to Tom, of course, was the girl, the one they called Sarah, who had touched his chest in the yard and somehow managed to show Kyle the sense of it all without saying a single word.

“Never done anything like that before,” Kyle said.  “Going all night like that.  I shouldn’t be drinking this.”  He held up his coffee and showed it to everyone before taking a sip.  He had never had coffee before, and it was rugged going down, but he kind of enjoyed its harshness all the same.  Wasn’t coffee a man’s drink, and wasn’t he now a man? 

“I’m pretty wired,” he continued.  “I should probably try to sleep but I don’t think I could.  Man, just wired, you wouldn’t believe.”

“You talk a lot,” said Tom, the red-headed one.  “Don’t you?”

“I’m sorry?” said Kyle, forcing a smile.  “I say something wrong?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“I don’t know, maybe the fact that you look like you’re about to come across the table.”

“Just tired of hearing you talk,” Tom said.  “You do anything else?  Besides talk?”

“Drop the attitude, Tommy-boy.”  It was Molly who spoke, and Kyle was glad.  He had wanted to smart off a bit himself, but something inside, some niggling voice that never formed words but always left a sense that someone had just spoken, was telling him to play it cool.

“Don’t call me that,” Tom said.  “It’s a simple question.  Ever since this clown got here, all he’s done is talk.  I just wanted to know if he had any other skills.  Skills we could use, you know what I’m saying?”

Kyle felt his face burn as if slapped.  He felt Molly’s hand under the table, settling gently on his thigh to calm him.  He didn’t want to be calm, but at that moment calm was required of him.  He reached down and touched Molly’s hand, then offered Tom his friendliest smile.

“No other skills that I’m aware of,” he said.  “Just a talker.  That’s about it.”

“I’m sure that comes in
real
handy,” Tom quipped.  He looked about the table for support, but the women were staying out of it, letting the two men go at it on their own.  Only Molly seemed interested in participating in this fight.

“It came in handy a few years ago,” she said.  “Kyle took on three big guys.  One of them was swinging me by the tail, and he got them to back down by
talking
.”

“That it?” asked Tom.

“That’s it.”

“What did he say?” Tom grumbled, looking at Kyle.

“Not much,” Kyle admitted.  “Just made up a story.”

“Must have been one hell of a story.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” said Molly.  “If Kyle hadn’t been there …”  She let the thought hang there and dissipate.

“So that’s what we’re putting our faith in here?” Tom asked.  “A guy who tells stories?”

Kyle set his coffee on the table, spread his arms in surrender, and grinned.  “That’s it,” he said.  “Looks like we’re doomed.” 

This brought a chuckle from the blonde one, Strawberry, and Kyle winked at her.  It was not lost on Molly, whose hand arched and dug its nails into his leg.

“So tell me,” Kyle said, turning to Molly and ignoring her claws, “any of those cats out there like you?”

Molly shook her head.  “Not sure.”

“How about around this table then?”  He let his gaze pass among his hosts.

“I am,” said Tom.  “So’s Strawberry.”

“That right?”  He looked at Strawberry, and at Molly, who had now positioned herself to be forever in his field of vision when he did so.  “Not surprised by that, for some reason.”  He slapped the table with his hands and addressed the group.  “The only question left then is what
I’m
doing here.”