Walk Me Home (32 page)

“How do I keep going west, then?”

“Hitch a ride. The main drag of Needles is right next to the train yard. Broadway, I think they call it. It’s a business loop on the I-40. So hitch a ride right there on the street. Just about everybody going down that street’ll be merging onto the interstate.”

“Dad, come on,” Davis says. “We have to go.”

“Don’t hitch on the highway shoulder,” the dad says. “Because cars can’t stop there anyway. Hitch on Broadway.”

“Thanks,” she says.

But she’s not even sure if he heard. He’s already over to the wide-open door of the car, timing his jump. Trailing a huge backpackers’ multiday pack from the end of his right hand.

Davis disappears. Davis’s dad throws the pack after him. Then the dad disappears.

Carly runs to the open doorway, but the train is on a curved section of track, and she can’t even see where they’ve gone.

They’re just gone.

Carly wakes to the loud banging noises of boxcar doors being slammed open.

She jumps to her feet and looks out the door she came in. The side of the train that almost killed her. The door is still only open a couple of feet. She peers out toward the engine and sees the security man. Fortunately, he’s still way up at the front of the train. He has a long way to go to get back here.

She grabs her pack and leaps out the other side, forgetting how battered and tired her muscles are. She ends up on her face in heavy gravel, scraping her chin and her already-scraped hands and further bruising the front of just about everything else. She has to regroup a moment before pulling to her feet. She can still hear the banging of the doors as they slam open.

She manages to trot across the yard, looking both ways as she stumbles over a series of tracks. There’s a shiny silver Amtrak train waiting at a station a few hundred yards down. Facing west. Carly wishes like hell she had enough money in her pockets to board it.

She forces her attention back to crossing the yard.

She stops, considers briefly. Decides to head toward the Amtrak station.

“Hey! You!” a big male voice yells.

Carly turns and looks behind her, across the yard. The security man is looking right through an open box car at her.

She takes off running. Problem is, she keeps running into trains. There are so many trains stopped here, on parallel tracks. It’s like running in a maze. When she finally gets to the end of the last train blocking her from the street, she heads for freedom. But between her the main street of town is a fence. A chain link fence. About six to eight feet high. Topped with barbed wire.

Davis’s dad forgot to mention that.

For a moment, she has that feeling again. Like the one she had as she began to fall under the wheels of the train. That feeling of, After all I’ve been through, it’s just going to end like this.

“No,” she says out loud. No. This is not how it ends.

She sprints around a building, puffing with the exertion, and comes out into a parking lot, in view of an open gate. She blasts through to freedom. Runs all the way to a corner on the main drag of town.

There she stops and looks back. And sees that the train station is not fenced in any way. Somehow she had boxed herself into some private, adjacent area. Somehow she had found the only fence around. It seems too much like a symbol of the way her life is flowing these days.

She also sees that the security man apparently didn’t care enough to follow.

It’s hot. Needles is in the Mojave Desert, she seems to recall.

She walks stiffly down the street, headed for the first gas station. A lighted display on a bank she passes says it’s 9:23 a.m. and ninety-six degrees.

She still doesn’t have a hat. She never thought to bring Delores’s old gardening hat. If she’d thought of it, she still wouldn’t have. Because that would have been stealing. But she never thought of it.

She hobbles into the gas station and uses their ladies’ room. It’s unlocked. And filthy. But it doesn’t really matter. She washes her hands and face at the sink. Looks up into the mirror. Her chin is scraped and bloody from that header she took into the gravel. The soap stings her chin and the heels of her hands when she washes them. She has fresh blood on her shirt. Dried blood on the knees of her jeans.

She takes some toilet paper and paper towels and stuffs them into her backpack. Holds one paper towel to her chin to try to stop the bleeding.

She leans into the sink and drinks water from the tap until she can’t possibly hold another ounce.

Then she walks around to the convenience store and buys a chocolate bar and a packet of peanuts. She adds it up in her head. It’s about 20 percent of her life savings. Then again, she might be nearly halfway there. Maybe. Or maybe only a third, but she hates to think that. She wants to stay with the half.

The woman at the counter rings her up with the tips of long pink fingernails.

“West,” Carly says, still holding the paper towel to her chin. “That way?”

She points.

The woman nods. Like talking is too much trouble.

She walks back out into the oven of the Mojave. Throws the paper towel in the trash on her way by.

She wants to eat the peanuts first, but then she remembers that the chocolate will melt in her pocket or pack. So she walks to the street. Peels the paper back on the candy. Looks carefully for cops or the highway patrol. Takes one bite of candy and sticks her thumb out just as a huge old bus of a motor home roars by. It stops a few yards up ahead. It’s teal and white, two horizontal stripes of each. Twenty years old maybe. The covered spare tire says Lazy Daze. It has a ladder on the back, a sickening reminder of the worst of last night.

She hasn’t even been hitchhiking long enough to chew and swallow one bite of chocolate, and she already has a ride.

As she jogs up to the big, silly vehicle, she thinks about this wind she’s had at her back the whole trip. The truck is there, the train is there, the motor home is there. Just exactly when she needs them.

Then she remembers she almost died jumping that train.

Then she remembers Davis grabbing her wrists and pulling her on. She decides she has to count her near-death experience as wind at her back, too.

Before she can reach the motor home, it moves forward a few yards.

Damn, she thinks. I was wrong. They’re not stopping for me.

It stops again.

An older woman leans her head out the window.

“Come on, honey,” she yells to Carly.

Carly runs again.

The motor home jerks forward a few more yards.

This isn’t funny, Carly thinks, stopping in her tracks on the sweltering sidewalk. She can feel the sun baking down on her scalp at the part of her hair.

The engine of the big motor home shuts down, giving way to silence. A moment later, the side door opens, and the woman leans out, a ring of keys jingling in her hand.

“Come on, honey,” she says. “I’m sorry about my husband. If I don’t take the keys from him, he just keeps on driving.”

Carly takes a few steps. Not sure if any of this is for real.

“My goodness,” the woman says. “You’re so young. Don’t you know it’s dangerous to hitchhike when you’re so young? And what did you do to your chin? You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.”

It causes Carly’s hackles to rise. But she moves a few steps closer. She can feel coolness pouring out the door of the rig. She doesn’t want to miss this chance. If it’s really a chance. If it’s real.

“Did you just stop to tell me that?” she asks the woman.

The woman is white-haired, maybe in her seventies. Bright-blue eyes with laugh lines at the corners. Like Teddy’s laugh lines, only more so. Only a couple of decades later.

“No, honey, we’re giving you a ride. Come on.”

The woman backs up the three inside steps, into the living space of the motor home. Carly follows her in. It’s gloriously cool.

“It’s nice in here,” Carly says. “Thanks for the ride.”

“We never pick up hitchhikers, honey, but you’re so young. I was worried about you. You can sit down here on the couch if you want. Or even lie down and take a nap. You look tired.”

“I am.”

“You thirsty?”

“No, ma’am. I just had a drink. Thank you, anyway.”

“OK, then.”

Like that’s all the business they could possibly have with each other.

The woman carefully closes and locks the side door. Carly looks at the husband, behind the wheel. He hasn’t even turned around to see who’s joined them. He’s just staring forward, through the windshield. As if anxious to keep going.

When Carly’s hostess is fully settled into the passenger seat and has her safety belt fastened, she hands the ring of keys back to the driver.

“OK, Malcolm,” she says. “
Now
you can drive.”

Just as Carly is dropping off to sleep on the surprisingly comfortable couch, the woman’s voice jolts her awake again.

“Before you take your nap, hon, better tell us where you’re headed.”

Carly sits up. Her head feels thick and muddled, as if she’s been sleeping for twelve hours.

“Far west as you’ll take me. Where are
you
headed?”

“We go west and then north.”

“Me, too!” Carly says, excited now.

Wind. At her back. Right?

“Where exactly?”

“Trinidad.”

“Trinidad?” the woman asks. “Trinidad? Where’s that? Never heard of it.”

Malcolm, the driver, mumbles something too quietly for Carly to hear.

His wife leans over and swats him on the arm.

“Malcolm, sometimes you just piss me off something royal. You know that?”

“What’d I do?” Malcolm asks, a little louder.

He still hasn’t taken his eyes off the road. Carly still hasn’t seen his face.

“One day in three I have to wake up in the morning and remind you my name is Lois after forty-nine years, but you remember the name of some little pissant town nobody’s ever heard of up by Crescent City. Damn you.”

“Eureka,” Carly says.

“Eureka what, dear?” Lois replies.

“It’s near Eureka.”

“Oh. I thought you meant you had an idea or something.”

Malcolm mumbles again.

“He says it’s in between,” Lois says. “North of Eureka, south of Crescent City. Damn it, it pisses me off that you know that. You don’t even know my name.”

“Lois!” he proclaims proudly.

“Well, sure. Now that I tipped you.” Then she turns around in her seat to address Carly again. “You go ahead and take your nap, dear. If you’re still asleep, we’ll wake you up when we get home to Fresno. We ought to be there by dinner.”

Fresno. By dinner.

Carly stretches out on the couch and tries to remember the details of how long she’s been on the road. She left last night…no wait, the night before. No. It really was just last night. It only seems longer. And by dinner she’ll be in Fresno, California.

Now that’s a tailwind.

If Malcolm doesn’t forget how to find Fresno, things are working out better than she could ever have imagined.

Carly wakes up, blinks. Sits up on the couch in the big old motor home. It’s afternoon. Maybe late afternoon. She’s been asleep a long time. Her stomach is growling. Her bladder is straining with all that water she drank this morning.

The motor home is not moving.

Lois and Malcolm are sitting at the dinette table, eating sandwiches. It’s the first time she’s gotten a look at him. He’s as old as Lois, or older, seventies at least, but he seems big and almost handsome. His hair is full and dark except for a little gray at the sideburns. He looks like he was a strong man for most of his life. But his eyes are faraway. He never bothers to look at
Carly. Maybe he’s been watching her sleep and has gotten his fill. But somehow she doesn’t think so. She thinks probably he just doesn’t care.

Carly can see and smell what they’re eating. Tuna fish on wheat bread. It smells great. Her stomach cramps painfully. But at least she has that pack of peanuts.

Lois looks over, sees that Carly’s awake, and immediately jumps to her feet. Still chewing, she bustles over to the little refrigerator. She extracts another sandwich, already made, on a stiff paper plate and garnished with pickle spears and potato chips.

She sets it on the dinette table.

“For me?” Carly asks, hardly willing to believe such a thing could be true.

“Well, of course for you,” Lois says. “You think we’re going to eat in front of you while you starve? If you don’t like tuna fish, Malcolm will eat that and I’ll make you peanut butter and grape jelly.”

“I like tuna fish. A lot. Thank you. That was very nice of you.”

“You want some lemonade?”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you. Think I could use your bathroom before I eat?”

Lois points. Though, really, there’s only one little boxed-off area in the motor home that could possibly be a miniature bathroom.

Carly stumbles over and opens the door. It actually looks big to her because she got used to the one in Delores’s trailer.

She sits down gingerly on the toilet—every muscle and bruise still aches—her knees nearly brushing the door. Wondering how Malcolm fits. There’s a mirror on the inside of the door, and it makes her uncomfortable. The scrapes on her chin look almost black. The sunburn blisters on her forehead and nose are peeling. Her hair looks as though it hasn’t been brushed in weeks.

I look homeless, she thinks. Then it hits her. She is.

She flushes the toilet with a pedal on the floor and washes her hands in the sink. There’s a shower in here. She wonders whether her hosts would allow her to use it. A shower sure would feel good. Delores only had a bathtub in her house, and Carly only used it once. They had to fill it with buckets of water from the pump at the well. They had to heat two of the buckets on the propane stove. Most of the time they took sponge baths in the trailer.

She sits down at the table with Lois and Malcolm. Lois smiles at her. Malcolm doesn’t look up.

She sips the lemonade first. It delivers a blast of flavor she was not expecting.

“This is homemade,” she says.

“Well, of course. You think I’d serve you that powder out of a jar?”