Walk Me Home (21 page)

“His dogs’ll eat me.”

“Chester’s dogs wouldn’t bite their own fleas.”

“Wouldn’t know that to listen to them.”

Alvin looks straight into her face. She turns her eyes away.

“You put up a pretty tough front yourself, little girl. But I’m not afraid you’re gonna bite me. I been around long enough to know the difference between a bark and a bite.”

Carly just stares at the wavy horizon. If it’s not what it seems, maybe the rest of this isn’t, either.

Alvin rises to his feet. No hands.

“C’mon,” he says. He kicks the toe of her boot lightly.

“I’m not a little girl.”

“No? How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Uh-huh. Know how old you look? Fourteen.”

“I am not fourteen! No way! I—”

It was about to become the word
I’m
. Halfway through, she puts on the brakes.

“Almost got you there. C’mon. Got to be on duty soon. Let’s get this thing done.”

Slowly, gravely, like following an executioner to the guillotine, she walks behind him. They climb into Delores’s fully loaded truck. Where he can ask her anything he wants. Whatever’s on his mind. Whatever makes him curious about her situation.

If there’s another way, she doesn’t find it in time.

Alvin careens down the road at a blinding twenty miles an hour or so. A couple of weeks ago, it would have seemed slow. But when you spend enough days going places at three miles an hour by foot, or five by car…

Both windows are open to keep the cab from getting too hot. Carly has to hold her hair down so it doesn’t blow into her eyes and mouth. So it doesn’t tangle.

“You know,” Alvin says, “Delores is pretty darn proud of her electric wires, so don’t be making her feel like that’s not much.
She’s a long way from the village to have electric. Only had it four years.”

“What’d she have before that?” Carly asks, only half caring.

“Oh, we built her that wind turbine long time ago. Out of an old truck alternator and a convertor box. That was just like uptown at the time. She still won’t let us take it down. Says she might need it if the power ever goes out. And it does. From time to time. But a phone. Way out where she is. That’s asking a lot.”

Carly only grunts.

“You don’t seem to get what I’m saying. I’m saying power lines and a well is a pretty good thing. She used to just have a cistern, and the water had to be hauled. We got that dug for her, on account of she was getting older. And it might be nice if you didn’t act like it was nothing. Like the one thing she doesn’t have is just purely to inconvenience you.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Carly said. “I’m sorry. I just never met somebody so stuck in the old ways.”

“
Old ways?
Little girl, you don’t know anything about old ways. If Delores was traditional Wakapi, she’d have no power and cook everything over a fire. She’s one of the least traditional elders I know.”

Carly has no idea how to dig her way out of these totally foreign concepts. So all she says is, “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry. It’s just that most people I know have phones.”

They ride a good half the way without talking.

Then Alvin says, “Want to stop by the village store on the way back? Make that call?”

“If I have enough money.”

“Two full loads ought to get you a phone call. I mean, you’re calling California. Right? Not Sri Lanka.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know how many times I’ll have to call information.”

Speaking of information, until the silence falls, Carly has no idea that was too much.

“You don’t know your stepfather’s phone number?”

Carly turns her face away and looks out the window. She just won’t answer. She watches the fence posts of a field of horses go by. Flashing in rhythm.

Then it hits her.

“How did you know it was my stepfather? How did you know he was in California?”

“Just a matter of asking the right questions.”

Now that Carly thinks about it, she told Delores it was her stepfather she needed to call. Did she say he was in California? She doesn’t think she did. Maybe Jen said more than she’s willing to admit.

Suddenly Chester’s dogs are in the road, barking. Alvin plows right through them, and of course they duck aside. He makes a left, not a right, into Chester’s driveway. He came a different way.

He pulls within inches of the barn and shuts off the noisy engine.

She looks over at him. He’s staring at her.

“Level with me, kid. Just how much trouble are you in?”

“I’m not in any trouble at all,” she says. Her heart hammering. Her gut clenched. “Not if I can find my stepfather. He just moved away after my mom took us and left. He just doesn’t know we’re looking for him, that’s all. If he knew, he’d be here as fast as he could drive. He just doesn’t know we need him.”

“OK,” Alvin says.

“OK?”

“Sure. OK. I know you’re not eighteen, but let’s figure for now he’ll take you in. We’ll go that way. That doesn’t work out, we’ll go some other way.”

Before she can even answer, Chester comes wandering out from the barn.

“Shut up!” Chester yells at the dogs, who slink into the barn without further instructions.

Alvin gets down from the truck. Carly sits, frozen.

“I’ll help you unload this,” Alvin tells Chester. “We’ll get ’er done quick.”

“That’s interesting,” Chester says.

“What is?”

“You seem to know that little interloper, too.”

“You mean this lovely young lady?”

“Yeah,” Chester says. “Yeah. That’s what I meant. That’s the one.”

She can hear them saying more to each other as they off-load most of the car parts, then the bedsprings. But with all the banging of metal, she can’t make out anything more for sure.

Carly is silent for most of the ride to the village store. There’s something building up in there, but she wants to keep it in. But then it gets by her, suddenly, like a dog who bursts out through the door when he catches a glimpse of daylight.

“Why do I have to be an interloper? Why can’t I just be someone who’s visiting?”

Alvin chews on the inside of his cheek for a couple of seconds, then says, “Well, an interloper just means—”

“I know what it means,” she says, more harshly than intended. “And he never talks to me. He looks at me like I’m a desk or a lamp. Like I don’t even see him looking. And he never talks to me. First trip he talked to Delores. Second trip he talked to you. He treats me like I’m not even there.”

She doesn’t add that so many people do, she’s begun to wonder if they all know something she doesn’t.

Alvin sighs. “Chester’s just a little notional is all. Little set in his ways.”

Carly turns away. Looks out the window. The sun is on a slant. She doesn’t know how late it is, but she hopes there’s still time to call a business in California. If an answering machine or voice mail picks up, she’ll lose the money she paid for the call. She only has eight dollars in quarters. That might not go far.

“OK, I’ll level with you,” Alvin tells the back of her head. “Chester’s got a little chip on his shoulder around the subject of Anglos.”

She turns to look at him. He looks more humble than he did before.

“I’m not
the subject
of Anglos. I’m a real, living, breathing example of one.”

“That you are. Look, I’m not saying it’s right, but I’m not going to apologize for the man, either. It’s always wrong to judge a person by the actions of their whole people…but…the ones around here who feel the way they do…well, they tend to have their reasons. I’m just saying it’s a story with two sides.”

He steps on the brake, and Carly looks up to see a plain brick box of a store with two other pickup trucks and three motorcycles parked out front. The sign above the door—made with a slab of wood and a wood-burning tool—has a name Carly could never read or pronounce. But it has seven syllables. Seven. She counts. The windows are covered with a fine metal grating. In front and to the left of the place is an old-fashioned phone booth. The kind you can step inside. Close the door behind you. Some of the glass is intact, some broken out. The glass that remains is cloudy with scratches, as if it lived through a sandstorm.

“Be right back,” she says.

She climbs down and walks in the direction of the phone booth. Three big men come out of the store and swing legs over their motorcycles. One of them smiles at her. She smiles back, but she’s not sure it was much of a smile.

She steps inside the phone booth and closes the door, but there’s no glass in the door. So there wasn’t much point.

She knows you need the area code to call long-distance information, and she doesn’t know the area code of Trinity. She starts by dialing the operator.

“I need the area code for Trinity, California,” she says.

But just at that moment, the three motorcycles roar to life. The operator says something, but she can’t hear it.

“Can you wait a minute?” she yells into the phone. “Just wait a minute. OK? Till these motorcycles drive away. So I can hear you.”

She holds her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. Watching the men put their helmets on. Their gloves. Finally they notice that she’s waiting. They click the bikes into gear and roar off down the road. How they can stand all that noise wherever they go Carly can’t imagine.

“Sorry,” Carly tells the operator. “Sorry. Now what was that area code?”

“I have nothing for a Trinity, California.”

Carly just hangs in that moment, not quite knowing what it means.

“Every place has an area code,” she says.

“True. But I’m looking at every city or town in California. There’s no Trinity. There’s a Trinity National Forest ranger station…”

“Oh.” Carly’s throat tightens. “Could you look again?”

“Honey, there’re just no other places to look.”

“OK. Thanks.”

She hangs up the phone. Opens the useless phone booth door and walks toward the truck. And she’s fine. She does everything just fine. She opens the passenger door like everything is just fine. Slides up into the seat. Pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them. She doesn’t fasten her seat belt.

“Get what you needed?” Alvin asks.

She opens her mouth, and that’s when the dam breaks. The tears come, and there’s no stopping them. No amount of resistance will hold them back.

Alvin just sits there in silence and lets her cry.

A few minutes later, he hands her a cloth handkerchief from his jeans pocket.

A minute after that, he says, “I’ll take that as a no.”

The same light tap on her shoulder makes her jump almost as high. Though there isn’t anybody it could be besides Alvin. Her closed eyes have been pressed hard against her knees, and when she looks up, the light makes her wince. Plus there are dark spots floating in front of each eye.

They’re back in Delores’s driveway.

Carly knew the truck had been moving. And she knew it had stopped. But she hadn’t thought it out much more clearly than that. She hadn’t processed those simple bits of sensory input.

Now she feels a little surprised to be here.

Tears are still running on her face, but her hitches and sobs have quieted. Not as though things are better. More as though they got tired of trying. Ran out of steam. She’s careful not to look at Alvin. But out of the corner of her eye, she sees him push something across the seat in her direction. She looks down.

It’s a yellow pad of lined paper, with a pen clipped on.

“Write down your stepfather’s name. And what he does for a living. And the name of that town where he’s supposed to be. In the morning I’ll make a few inquiries. See if I can find out what’s what.”

Carly sniffles hard and wipes her nose on her sleeve. Which she knows is disgusting. And which she doesn’t want to do in front of Alvin. But the drip method strikes her as even worse. Then she
looks down and realizes she’s holding Alvin’s handkerchief. As if she didn’t even know what it was for.

She wants to open her mouth and say something. Like maybe thank you. But it feels too hard. So she just nods.

She takes the pad and writes.

Theodore Thackett. Trinity, California, except the operator says there is no such place. But it’s supposed to be on the coast up by Eureka. Works for contractors, doing construction.

She opens the truck door and slides down, leaving the clean handkerchief on the seat. Takes three steps toward the trailer, then turns and waves.

She wishes she’d never seen the look on his face. Boy, does he ever look sorry for her. It’s a pathetic feeling. She must be utterly pathetic. Not that she didn’t know. More that it’s a shock to have the sheer extent of it mirrored back in his eyes.

He waves back. Even his wave is sad.

She doesn’t go into, or even near, the house. She doesn’t go anywhere near Jen, who’s hanging wash on a clothesline at the far back of the property. She doesn’t get close enough to see if it’s their laundry or something she had to do for Delores. She’s curious whether the old woman has a washing machine, or whether Jen washed things out by hand. Then she remembers Delores only has well water that doesn’t run through a pipe. So that pretty much answers the question.

She opens the trailer door, startled all over again by that loud squeal. She thinks she should be used to it by now. But it got her again.

She sees Delores through the living room window and quickly turns her face away so the old woman can’t see she’s been crying. As
she hurries inside and shuts the door behind her, she remembers. Delores can’t see well enough to tell.

She lies on the little bed, facing the wall. Not actively crying anymore. Not actively anything.

After a while she puts the earbuds back in her ears and turns on Alvin’s music again. Just to fill her head with something. Anything better than what she’s already got. Which would be anything.

After what might be a couple hours of that—Carly doesn’t have much sense of the time, but the music has cycled around and begun to repeat—she feels some movement in the trailer. Like something was bumping into it lightly, repeatedly. She pulls out the earbuds and waits. First nothing. Then another round. Without the music in her ears, it’s obviously someone knocking on the door.