Lamb

When the girl woke the road was running beneath her. Sky painfully brilliant through the windshield. “I thought I was dreaming,” she said suddenly and sat straight up. She was in the yellow sweater and her old sneakers and dirty blue jeans. Outside the truck, before and beside and behind her, an endless span of blond grass and silver bitterbrush and greasewood and sage. All of it vast and unchanging, as though Lamb and the girl were at rest and not rushing west, a diffuse and unmappable destination toward which they sped on an otherwise empty state highway.

“You were dreaming.” Lamb looked over at her, his cheekbone a soft shining purple, blue eyes bright. He was in a clean shirt, face scrubbed, hot coffee and a boiled egg in his belly, and the open road before him. “Boy, did you ever sleep, my pretty little pig. Were they good dreams?”

She looked out the window, then back to him, to the bruise on his face. “No.” She crossed her arms over her chest and looked back outside. “Where are we?”

“North Dakota.”

“I want to go home.”

“No you don’t. Don’t be that way. Here.” He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a giant chocolate chip cookie wrapped in Saran Wrap. “You hungry?” She turned her head, and he put it on her lap. “You have a good internal clock,” he told her. “Anybody ever told you that?”

Nothing.

“Well,” he said, “put it on the list of amazing characteristics of the amazing girl you are.” She kept silent. “Don’t you want to know why I think you have a good internal clock?”

Shrug.

“Because you slept two full days and woke up just in time to see the street sign.” The mouth of a narrow dirt road broke through the shrub without warning, an opening in the brush and scrappy trees that anyone but our guy would have missed. He slowed the truck almost to a stop and turned and pointed: El Rancho Road.

“Two days?”

“I wanted to show you the Royal Gorge. But you wouldn’t wake up.”

“Two days?”

“Then I wanted to show you Rabbit Ears Pass. But you told me go to hell and take my rabbit with me. Did you know you talk in your sleep?”

She started to cry. She pulled the handle of the door again and again. “You said two days on the road.”

“I miscalculated.”

“I want to go home.”

He stopped the truck and put it in Park.

“I did not sleep two days. Unlock the door. Why do you put the child lock on? I’m not a little kid.” Her voice high and fast and tight again. “Open it.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“You fell asleep at the top of that mountain. Do you remember? It was all dark and you said it was scary and I told you to shut your eyes. Just sleep. Do you remember?”

“You’re never going to take me back.”

“Tommie. Tommie Tom Tommie. We can go back right now. Is that what you want to do?”

“I don’t believe you.” She put her face in her hands and talked into them. “I did not sleep for two days.” She looked again at the bruise.

“Well. I don’t know what to say about that. I think you were pretty tired that night at the motel.”

“You think I’m stupid and you treat me like I’m five.” She crossed her arms over her chest, tears still coming. “I don’t need fucking baths.”

“Hey.” He raised his voice. “Watch your language. I know how old you are.”

“Well, why don’t you act like it?”

Lamb took the car out of Park.

“So you’re just going to keep driving anyway?”

“There’s no way to turn around on this narrow road without going to the end where it widens. I’ll take you back. You want to go back? I’ll send you. And so much for all this.” He flung his hands up. “So much for all this.” They wound through a stand of cottonwoods and round bushes with waxy yellow flowers all hunched together over an empty arroyo. The road was pitted and narrow and wash-boarded, dipping and rising again. Long-stemmed spikes of yucca already dried out by cold nights and wind rattled in the breezes. The girl turned away from Lamb and leaned her forehead against the cool glass. She shut her eyes. For five minutes they rolled slowly over the uneven road.

“Talk to me, Tommie. What is it? You’re all finished now? You want to go home really?”

“Like you would really let me.”

“I promised you a plane ticket if you want one and we can go straight from here to the little airport and put you on a propeller plane and good night, Tommie. Is that really what you want to do? Just say. I’ll give you a little purse of money and a bag of snacks and cash for a cab from Midway to Lombard.” The left front wheel dropped five or six inches into a gouge of dirt and they jerked in their seats. He gave her a look. Contrite. “I’m sorry, Tom. I am. I’m not very good at this. I’ve never had a niece, or a sister, or anything like that. To say nothing of a daughter. This is new territory for me, do you understand? That’s part of the beauty of this thing, isn’t it?”

Nothing.

“Can’t you find it in your heart to forgive me?”

She said nothing.

“You can say no, if you want to. That’s how it’s going to be—where we say everything we’re thinking. Especially things that are hard to say. Promise you’ll always tell me those things. And the stupid stuff. Everything. I want to know when you’re homesick. When you’re cold. Or like, when you have diarrhea.”

“Ew.” She made a face.

“Come on,” he said. “You’ve had diarrhea, haven’t you?”

Her mouth was twisted into a crinkled bud. Trying not to laugh.

“Don’t pretend you haven’t. Where it tears up your belly and it feels like someone is slicing your guts with a lawn mower blade, and it’s all messy and it burns your butt and it’s terrible, right?”

“Oh, sick.” But she was smiling now.

“I want to know when you have it next. And I want to know when you need to vomit, so I can hold your hair back and brush your teeth for you, right? We don’t have to be big and bad and tough with each other, do we? It’s not like that, is it? Aren’t we friends? Don’t friends make mistakes and miscalculations and still they’re friends?”

“I guess.”

“You’re embarrassed because I saw you naked. No. I know you are. And I’m sorry. I’d take off all my clothes now too, but I don’t think you want to see it.”

She looked out the window away from him, smiling at the glass.

“Look at this. Would you look at this? Is this the most beautiful place on the planet or what? Look—look—another hawk. Do you see that wingspan?” He tipped his head beside the steering wheel and watched it spiraling up into the blue sky.

“Did I bruise your eye?”

“Why? You want to even them out?”

“Maybe.”

“You think about it. And let me know what you decide.”

“Gary.”

“Tom.”

“You don’t have to turn around.”

“Listen. Don’t make your mind up yet. Jury’s still out on the truck driver, right?”

She watched him. He put the truck in Park and opened his arms. “Will you give me a hug?” She let him enclose her. “Are we making up?” She nodded her head in his shirt. He pushed her away and looked at her. “Favorite girl,” he said and pulled her back in. “Favorite girl favorite girl.”