Mr. Splitfoot

~ ~ ~

SHE AND I FOLLOW A PATH through a field single file. We are trespassing. Yellow grass reaches as high as my waist. If someone came along, we could duck into this grass and be hidden. So far this morning we’ve seen no one.

The path gives way onto the road. Ruth turns left as if she knows where she’s going. Mostly it seems we’re following the Erie Canal. We’ll lose it for an afternoon sometimes but wind up not too far from the canal later on. We step over a garter snake hard-packed back to two dimensions. She walks and I follow. She hangs a left down someone’s driveway so I think we’ve arrived, but she passes behind the house and out into another empty field. I tuck my neck into my clothes in case someone’s home. Trespassing in upstate New York where gun shops litter the back roads. I pick freeloading burrs from my jeans as if they are spies.

Ruth bobs her head in time to the music playing on her Walkman. I didn’t know they still made Walkmans. “No one’s got cassettes anymore, Ruth.” But cassettes are what she has, three or four homemade ones, flip and repeat, flip and repeat. We see a sign for a sauerkraut festival. We pass a man mowing a lawn that doesn’t need it.

“When are we going to get there?”

But Ruth doesn’t answer because Ruth doesn’t talk.

That afternoon, when we don’t arrive wherever we’re going, we check into an awful motel. I dial El on my cell. She’s called me five times already in two days. I haven’t answered yet. The insurance company has called only twice. But I’ve walked far enough now. I’ve had a good adventure, and it’s time to go home. When I’m back home, I’ll post something about the crazy walk I took with my strange aunt. That will be cool. I snap a selfie in the motel. Ruth is sitting on the curb outside, bobbing her head to the music on her earphones. I snap a picture of her too, but the sunlight reflecting off the window turns her into a blur of light.

The motel room stinks of mildew as if it’s under water. There’s something wrong with Ruth. Where are we going? Nothing. How long will it take us to get there? Not a word.

I lift my phone to my ear.

El answers, “Cora? Thank God. I was so worried.”

When I was little, El would hold me, curl my body over one breast, a crescent light around the moon. We’d shower together, and before diving under the spray, she’d yell, “Don’t let go!” I’d claw into her, pretending we were Annie Edson Taylor, who, at sixty-three, became the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel. El knows everything about Niagara Falls. She’s worked as a groundskeeper there since I was little, using skills she picked up at the terrible group home where she once lived. The man who ran the home taught them to farm and to fear anyone outside the home. He was deranged. He named the home Love of Christ! — exclamation mark included like screaming a curse every time you say it.

The short history of El is she lived with my grandma until a few months after Ruth was born, then five years at Love of Christ! then a short stint on the streets of Troy, where she picked me up.

“Who’s my dad?” I asked her once.

“Well.” She thought on it. “You know how girl dogs can accommodate more than one father per litter?”

“No. I didn’t know that.”

“It’s true. So you could get siblings who are, say, half collie, half chow.”

“I don’t have any siblings.”

“No. You don’t.”

“You don’t know who my dad is.”

“Not really.”

“Someone in Troy?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

El shakes her head. “I was eighteen and homeless. I slept around to find beds. Until no one wanted a pregnant girl in bed.”

“Then what?”

“Then you were born, and I went to the library, started with Albany, Allegany. I checked the phone books until I found my mom in Erie. I had nowhere else to go.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, I’m not.”

El saw a man attempt Niagara Falls in a kayak. She saw him coming from above, though no one else had yet noticed. She started up a whoop. “Look!” She whipped her arms over her head like a cowgirl, drawing attention to his ride. A few tourists saw it happen, and El was filled by the excitement, the slim chance she’d see such an attempt, but then the man went over the Falls, got pinned underwater, and died. El was pissed. “Goddamn waste.” She couldn’t forgive such carelessness when she’d worked so hard, waded through so much shit, just to stay alive.

“Cora?” El says again. She gave me such a nice name. But then Ruth turns, looking at me through the glass, frozen eyes.

“Hello?” El says. “Are you there?”

I am here, listening to my poor mother worry, twisting up inside because the last thing I want is to hurt El. But I’m also here still stuck with all the ways I’ve always wanted to be like Ruth — wise, cool, and tough. Even if I imagined her, even if I don’t really know Ruth, there are things I still want to be, want to see. There’s a courageous way of living I want my own baby to know about.

“Cora?”

So it comes down to this, stop asking questions and walk with Ruth, or stay home, be an ass for Lord, get rid of this thing, hold on to my insurance job for dear life, surf the awful Internet forever.

“Hello? Cora?”

“I’m fine, Mom. Please, don’t worry. I’m fine.” Then I hang up.

Early the next morning, I leave a message for my boss. “I’m sick,” I say. “Really, really sick.” Ruth and I start walking again, another day, me following her, Ruth saying nothing at all. On a road beside a cornfield, my mom calls again, the fourth time since I hung up last night. I hold my phone out for Ruth. “El. Again.” Ruth takes the phone, looking at the device sideways, a species of glowing insect she’s just now discovering. After a number of rings, the phone quiets. Ruth passes it back to me just as the voicemail signal vibrates, a hiss that startles her. Ruth drops the phone onto the pavement. It lands with a celebratory smack. That’s how that world slips away. We inspect the ruined phone. Its dark and cracked screen displays nothing except the tiniest bit of reflected blue sky. I pick up the carcass and shove it into my bag. We keep walking.

The first two days without a phone, my insides are jumpy and nauseated, a true withdrawal. My veins ache for information from the Internet, distractions from thought. I’m lonely. My neck, lungs, blood hurt like I’m getting a cold. The world happens without me because I’m exiled with no Wi-Fi. I wonder if my shoes have arrived yet. Maybe Lord is trying to reach me with news of his divorce. I have a parade of grotesque urges. I want to push little buttons quickly. I want information immediately. I want to post pictures of Ruth and me smiling into the sun. I want people to like me, like me, like me. I want to buy things without trying them on. I want to look at photos of drunk kids I knew back in high school. And I want it all in my hand. But my cyborg parts have been ripped out. What’s the temperature? I don’t know. What’s the capital of Hawaii? I don’t know anything. I don’t even know the automated systems in my body anymore. I don’t know how to be hungry, how to sleep, to breathe.

We keep walking. “Talk to me, Ruth.” I’m fraying.

Ruth says nothing.

What’s her problem? “What’s your problem, Ruth? If you don’t tell me, I’m going to think something awful. I’m going think you got gang-raped or something.”

Ruth keeps walking.

Another day goes by. I’m losing count. Does that make five days? I never imagined we’d walk this far, but Ruth is a strong magnet, a used-car-lot magnet pulling me behind her as she goes. “Please talk.” She looks like a concerned relative at a hospital bedside, pained by my pain but not pained enough to make the pain stop. She says nothing.

I pick berries growing at the side of the road. They look like blackberries, but I don’t really know about stuff like that. I eat them anyway. They might not be blackberries at all. Maybe they are poisonous. Ruth watches me chew. She doesn’t say anything. The berries don’t kill me. We keep walking.

I hear swoosh and whoosh. Words like “burlap” get stuck in my head on the road. Burlap. Burlap. Burlap, the sound of our footsteps. Songs stick in my head too. “White Christmas.” “Sentimental Lady.” “Star-Spangled Banner.” I hear TV shows and greasy burps, things that were once inside me coming back through on their way out. After only a week on the road, I am changed. It’s hard for me to stay too long at a diner or coffee shop. I hear so much now. The air conditioners, dishwashers, coffee machines, and restroom hand dryers rage like an angry electric army. We eat quickly. I steal foil packets of butter to rub on my aching feet.

I should go home and I would, except that I keep thinking we are bound to get there soon. We have to.

People stare at us while we walk, human females traveling alone. We must want to die or else we must be criminals, because we are two full-grown women walking together, single file, not talking, on busy roads, on back roads. No one would mistake us for exercising housewives. Certainly not any of the men who leer and jeer and ask creepy questions like, “Where you heading tonight?” Ruth’s scar could creep out the creepiest creeps, so she leads, bearing her mark ahead of us as a shield of protection.

We walk through places no one ever walks. Places with piles of trash at the side of the road. I read a few words from yellowed newspapers. There are plastic water bottles full of pee. Road salts and Styrofoam to-go containers whose insides are coated with the remnants of sloppy joe.

U-Pick signs dot the landscape. Modular homes are for sale. Billboards advertise cluster fly spraying services and “The Power of Cheese.” Outside an Oneida casino, a handmade signs says NO SOVEREIGN NATION. NO RESERVATION and then KARAOKE WITH ROGER AND ARLENE. Silos, flags, tractor sales, and cabins. Aging Christmas decorations, yard sales, summer camps, rifle ranges, meth heads in trucks, and gray people behind screen doors who look out as we pass. A large bird, Lord would know what kind, perches on one foot in an irrigation ditch. Cloud shadows on fields and a father, smoking a cigarette, hauling his kids down the road’s shoulder in a trailer hitched to his lawn mower. Thunder and lightning. Up and down. Up and down. Sometimes I think about sex.

We never travel far in one day. We might spend two hours walking. We might go as long as four. “Where are we going?” I ask. Then, “Are we even here?”

My feet ache, my whole body. In one small town, there are no motels, so we find an abandoned car behind a service station. We lock the doors. When I wake in the night to pee, one streetlight casts long shadows. Stones look like fierce animals; trees look like dangerous men in leather jackets. I get back in the car and lock the doors.

When I wake, Ruth is looking at me because my shirt’s ridden up in the night. She sees my belly. The bump is becoming obvious. I hadn’t told her. I scratch blood to my scalp. “I’m going to have a baby.”

Her face is hard. She lifts my shirt again, resting her dry hand on my stomach, lump of dough. Ruth palpates a few spots until she finds one she likes. She keeps it there. The conspiracy of cells dividing underneath my skin makes Ruth smile. I like it when Ruth smiles. It’s almost like speaking.

I buy a cup of coffee at a gas station. A nurse in turquoise scrubs coming off a night shift tells the cashier, “I’m heading home to eat hot wings with blue cheese.” For the first time since we started, I don’t miss the comforts of home.

A large group of walking women dressed in bright pink pass us by. Some are in crazy costumes, pink wigs and tutus. Some carry stuffed flamingos. Some carry pictures of dead women. I stop one. “What’s going on?”

She’s pretty, healthy. Her cheeks are cherried with exertion. “We’re on a walk,” she says.

I nod.

“For breast cancer. A five-K.”

She catches up with her buddies, switching her tush as she passes.

“Five-K?” I say to Ruth. “Amateurs.”

Ruth smiles again.

“Man, we should have found a sponsor. We’d be raking it in.”

Men honk. Teenagers play chicken with our bodies and their cars. A nasty dog charges. I pick up a stone aiming for its flank, but—crack—it lands in a soft spot on his forehead. The dog stops. I raise my arms overhead. It’s a small victory for the pedestrian. I don’t even feel bad. It’s really hard to be a walker these days, a pregnant walker. Drivers scream from their windows like we’re the selfish ones, decadently traveling on foot. Time moving luxuriously slow for us alone.

Well, take that right between the eyes.

The first time I feel the baby move, I think it’s my phone on vibrate until I remember I don’t have a phone anymore.

Someone’s left a plush gray sofa and a busted recliner on the shoulder of a side road, curb furniture. We sit in them for a rest. They smell like pond scum and air freshener. Birds make a fuss in the tree behind us.

We come to a lake with a beach. There’s a small wooden walkway and an empty lifeguard’s chair. The day’s warm. There’s a dock and a line of red floats in the water marking a safe boundary. It’s late afternoon. Children are splashing. Families are gathered on the beach. The fathers wear white shirts and black pants. The mothers wear thick hose and long dresses. Their heads are covered with scarves. Orthodox Jews. A group of teenagers wears matching sweatshirts and black jersey skirts so long, they swipe the ground.

I remove my shoes to feel the sand. “Hello.” But we’re intruders here. Ruth and I find a spot on the beach and shrug off our bags. When I sit, bent in the middle, my already-unbuttoned jeans cut into my belly. The beach gets quiet but eventually the boys return to splashing, ignoring us. Some wear prayer shawls. All of them, even those deep enough to breaststroke, cover their heads with yarmulkes. There are no girls swimming.

The children shriek. The mothers scold. The teenage campers are watchful.

Ruth loses her pants first, then her tops. People are not going to like this. She stands in her modest bra and underwear — a plain white brassiere and pale blue briefs that rise to her navel — loud as a siren, but the boys keep swimming. Her body is ghastly white and trim. She has the physique of an elementary school gym coach, not cut, but strong, flat, fit, just fine. Everyone ignores her. Maybe they think she’s a boy.

She walks to the water’s edge. “Ruth?” But she keeps going, looking to the low green foothills on the other side. The cold water doesn’t stop her. She walks straight in, out past the boys to where she can begin to swim. Her arms paddle through the brown, cool lake.

I stand to wiggle out of my jeans, disrobing down to my T-shirt and undies. Immediately people take notice. The other beachgoers freeze, stunned. One father realizes what’s about to occur. Pregnant female flesh is set to corrupt the oasis where his son has come to bathe. The father sets off an alarm, panic flushes his forehead. He stands, arms waving. Sweat pastes his silver hair to his doughy skin. “Boys! Boys!” he yells. “Everyone out of the water!”

The boys stop their frolic. Ruth’s long brown hair floats on the surface. She waves to me to join her. More panic at the shoreline, arms paddle swiftly, rushed with surprise and embarrassment. The boys sprint to dry land as if pursued by a great white.

If Ruth notices their revulsion, she doesn’t show it.

Spits of “Feh!” as I make my way to the shoreline. I’ve never caused such a reaction. But Ruth’s arms swish, gentle as wings. I borrow her courage. The coolness of the lake, our buoyancy. Underwater I lift my shirt for my messed-up baby without sin.

We float for a long time. Fireflies appear, stars beaming their light all the way from far-off outer space. Ruth is walking me away from the world I know into one I don’t.

We spend a day in a motel waiting out hard rain, watching daytime TV under the covers of a double bed. Ruth wields the remote. We spend the next morning walking through the drizzle to escape the horror of daytime TV.

After lunch the sun comes back out. Ruth smiles. I pinch her rear and shuffle my feet, a boxer in the fresh air. She opens her arms, steps to one side, then the other, some old Latin dance move. Ruth can still dance. She laughs. It’s not talking, but it’s sound coming out of her. She kicks some pebbles in our path. In one hour I’ll forget what her laugh sounded like, but right now I play it on rewind over and over again.

I don’t know anything. Lord’s wife might be dead. Nuclear bombs might have destroyed New York City. It could be Tuesday, the day I go to the gym after work. I don’t know when the equinox will come or if it already came. I don’t know a thing about the bones in my feet. I don’t even really know skin. Parts of my feet resemble corned beef hash, a mash of chunky pulp smelling just as foul. Blisters lanced and drained, swollen ankles.

We fall asleep like corpses, end of the film, but Ruth really is a horror movie villain. You think she’s dead, done, conquered. The audience, including me, breathes easy for a moment. Phew. I can go home now, have a snack, take a bath, but then Ruth bolts upright, her head rigid, ready to walk again. Unkillable. Unstoppable. Undead all over again. It’s alive. It’s alive.

“Where are we heading?”

She points down the road, someplace I can’t see, but each morning I say to myself, Today we’ll arrive. We have to. We’ve been walking so long. And each night we don’t. “Where?” I yell at her, dedicated drama queen. “Talk to me!”

I smell burning plastic and Chinese food. We walk past the entrance to a Walmart. “Can we go in?” It’s not home, but it’s familiar. Ruth rolls her eyes but allows the excursion.

Across the huge expanse of parking lot, the magic doors sense our presence. An empty cube of frigid air escapes as we enter. We are greeted by an older woman in a smock. HELLO, her badge says, I’M RITA. “Can I help you find something?” Rita, full of welcome, smiles at filthy, undeserving me, aware that most likely we’ll buy absolutely nothing. We might even leave some grease behind or shoplift. Rita keeps on smiling. People do that near Ruth’s scar, like kissing the ring of an evil queen or keeping a mad dog calm. “No thanks. Come on.” I lead Ruth first through the accessory division. Here, I am the guide. Watches, wallets, and leather driving gloves bleed into a scented bounty, rows of body lotions, bubble baths, multivitamins, and cream rinses. I move slowly through these items. The jewel-toned surplus reaches up to the ceiling. People select their identity from hundreds of shampoos, supplements, and suppositories. Dove + Garnier Fructis + Finesse + Crest + Secret. We head into homewares. Shams and sheets. I stop to feel a comforter, testing its thickness. I relax in the linen department. Ruth and I test a model bed, resting in the calm pleasure of things. We wash up in Walmart’s bathroom. I let the warm water rush over my hands, wrists, elbows. Ruth scrubs her hairy pits. No one cares.

I find a pair of jeans with a flexible panel. I need these. But I also want to buy something I don’t need for the luxury of spending money. After trips through sporting goods, craft supplies, stationery, and lingerie, I choose a bracket of wooden beads. Looks like an abacus. Supposed to be used as a foot massager. Ruth shrugs. “I’ll carry it.” She selects a blue tarp. The tarp worries me.

“What’s that for?”

Ruth doesn’t answer.

“To sleep on?”

She nods back at me while she’s walking away and winds up banging straight into an older man neither of us saw.

“Well, look at you,” the man says to Ruth, smiling, standing from a crouch. He’d been comparing a couple of empty plastic storage containers, huge Tupperware. “How’s it going for you?” he asks Ruth.

She nods, doesn’t answer him, of course.

“I see,” he says. “Cat got your tongue. Yup. That happens sometimes.” But he’s indifferent to her silence, keeps right on talking. “How are you finding the canal?”

“What?” I step in.

“The Erie,” he says. “That’s why you’re here, right? I love it but find it requires something a bit more waterproof.” He gestures toward the plastic containers, looks at Ruth. “You need one of these?” he asks her.

She crouches to examine the containers better. Pats the plastic lid of one, then shakes her head no.

She moves into the shoe department.

“How much farther is it, Ruth?” She chooses new sneakers for me, so there’s my answer. Ruth doesn’t need replacement shoes yet, a further embarrassment of pregnancy.

Along this strip mall street, a forgotten, unclaimed house remains. A family that held out against the inevitable and was surrounded before they could sell out. Target, Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, Jo-Ann Fabric, Stop & Shop, Staples, and their family home. A real estate sign large as a living room advertises the parcel. The house is white. Honeysuckle unhitches its jaw over the front porch. In a car it would be easy to miss. On foot it is impossible. Ruth jerks her chin toward the house.

My bag is heavier, rubbing a new spot raw on my shoulder. I already regret the stupid wooden beads.

Inside, the noise from the road is buffered a bit. It looks like someone’s still living here, someone who hates to dust. Every surface is coated with greasy grit from vehicle emissions, but besides the dust, there’s little sign that the humans ever moved out. The kitchen table is still draped with a cherry-printed tablecloth. There are some drippy brown spots on the fabric. There’s a bowl, a glass, and spoon in the sink as if someone ate breakfast and disappeared. The Rapture happened after orange juice. Or like the way I left home without telling my mom I was going.

I don’t dare look in the refrigerator.

On one wall there’s a collection of phone numbers scrawled in lead, four digits each. The phone has a rotary dial. I lift the receiver. Nothing.

“You want to stay here tonight?”

Ruth nods. She fingers a kitchen counter covered with forget-me-not contact paper as if it’s human.

“Cool.”

There’s a couch in the living room. On a low coffee table, there’s an old TV Guide with Loni Anderson on the cover. Her hair preserved forever. Beside it there’s a handwritten note. “Ezra, Don’t forget to water my damn ficus.—P.” The TV is gone. The ficus is dead. What happened to Ezra and P.?

Ruth runs out to the gas station mini-mart for some bottled water, potato chips, and sandwiches that we unseal from triangular wedges of packaging. I rest my feet on the coffee table the way P. & Ezra probably did before. Without electricity I watch the lights of the cars pass by. The traffic never stops, waves on an eroding beach, creeping closer to the house each night, eating the quiet fields, the neighbors, stars in the night sky.

Upstairs there are two bedrooms. We split up because we can. Before sleep, the smallness of the house, the tidy afghans on the beds, the dormer windows, make me think of El. She’s probably watching TV. She’s probably thinking about me, same way I think about her, same way I think about the baby every night, wondering and wondering and worrying across the distance.

In the morning the sunlight in the room makes me wish we could stay here and play house. Buy a broom for the kitchen. Clear out the dust and cook dinner. Get that phone working again and call El.

The house is so still, for a minute I worry that Ruth went on without me, but just as I think it, she appears at my door. Time to go. I remove the foot massager from my bag. I use it once before stowing it underneath the bed so that whoever lands here next can give it a try before falling off to sleep.

We pass a field of electric monsters, high-voltage transformers marching across a marshland. Each day some things beautiful and some things ugly. We pass a house held up by the pure junk hoarded inside and out. Tractors, cars, refrigerators, old metal beds. We come to a town where the men wear camo. Two teenage boys have tattoos on their necks, instantly halving the alienation they’d hoped to achieve. A sign outside a church speaks to God. LORD, it asks, GRANT US G—, but the last letters are gone. I fill in: groceries, gumballs, gorillas, good, clean fun. We pass a trailer park called Presidential Estates, an unbuilt development that exists only as a sign: MADISON FARMS. There’s another basement gun shop, ugly new homes, falling-down old ones, and a street called No Lake Avenue.

That night we eat dinner at a dairy bar. We sleep in an apple orchard and wake to find the honeybees hard at work above us.

A pickup truck pulls over. The truck is just a shell of a vehicle, seems hard to believe it can still be used as transportation. A man with a blue baseball cap waves. He looks friendly. He wears his hair in a long braid down his back. I like that. You’d have to have done some thinking to be a man in braids. We haven’t yet hitchhiked. What kind of maniacs hitchhike? Those who want to get chopped to bits. But here’s a man offering us a ride. He doesn’t even look scary. I’m tired and Ruth is scarier than anyone.

“Yes. Thank you.”

He steps around to the passenger side door and opens it for us. There’s a plastic tab on the back of his jeans fake-branded to read PABLO CORTEZ, AUTHENTIC LEGWEAR.

Ruth climbs in first. He helps me into the cab. “Thank you.” His radio choices, wrappers from snacks his body got rid of weeks ago, years ago — it’s weird stepping into the intimate space of a stranger. Ruth removes her earphones. She wants to hear the conversation, or maybe she thinks it’s rude to listen to music other people can’t hear. Other people besides me.

The truck’s been used harshly. The door panels and console are gone. It’s like we are riding inside the old bones of a horse, the old empty bones of a dinosaur.

“Where are you headed?”

Ruth studies him, looking like a wild animal ready to bite. So far she’s not done anything like that.

“I’m Sequoya,” the man says. “You know what I’m named for?”

“No.”

“You know those trees out in California? The tall ones.”

“Redwoods.”

“Kind of. Sequoias. Like redwoods.”

“You’re named after a tree.”

“Nope. I’m named after the man they named the trees for, Chief Sequoya. He invented the Cherokee alphabet.”

That’s not his name, and he’s got a thimbleful of native blood in his left toe. Same as me, same as everyone in North America. I say nothing, but he seems to intuit exactly what I’m thinking.

“You don’t believe me?”

“You’re Cherokee?” I ask.

“Muh-heck Heek Ing.”

“What’s that?”

“Mahican.”

Last of, I can’t help but think it. They must hate that book. “A full-blooded Indian?”

“No.”

I knew it.

“Mbuy, wtayaatamun ndah.”

“Pardon?”

“He requires my heart.”

“Who?”

“The water.”

I shift, uncomfortable a moment.

The man smiles. “What are your names?”

“I’m Cora and she’s Ruth.”

He draws his chin back to get a look at us. “Yes,” he says. “She don’t talk much.”

“No. She doesn’t.” I smile as if Ruth’s silence is just the friendliest thing.

“She forgot how?”

The engine chugs and an old cassette player suited to this dried-up truck chews through the end of a tape, then clicks and spits, flipping over. Classic rock. Pine trees line one side of the road. The Erie, looking just like a river, skirts the other side.

“Forty thousand men and women every day. Forty thousand men and women every day,” the old radio sings.

Sequoya peps up. “You’ve been traveling awhile?”

I think he means we stink. “Yes, bu—”

Suddenly the other side of the road in the windshield. Squealing, a crunch of bone and metal. Two minutes into this drive and we nearly wrecked. Sequoya lifts his foot off the clutch. The truck jerks and stalls. “Mother! Did you see that?” A buck with four points had jumped up out of the canal and in front of the truck. It looks around, making sure he’s got all his parts. His back left leg dangles from the halfway mark. The deer takes off into the woods, even with a bum leg. Sequoya reaches behind the seat for a rifle. “Excuse me.” He leaves us parked, sprawled across both lanes, key in the ignition. The buck runs as fast as he can. The fake-Indian boy gives chase into the pines at the edge of the road. The woods are thick, and in a few steps he’s disappeared into them.

Ruth moves slowly. She rubs the spot where her head hit the rearview, then closes his door. Together we ratchet the bench seat forward. She turns the key, and the music switches back on. “Come on, baby.”

We don’t get more than a mile away before she stops the truck. She opens the glove box. Ruth find his registration card. Clifford Sequoya Shue. It’s out-of-date but, still, that’s his real name. She finds a bottle of water and a small box of tissues that seem the most tender thing a man could have in his glove box. What awful job did Clifford Sequoya hold down in order to purchase this sorry vehicle? How long has he been driving it? Ruth turns the truck around, and in another mile he’ll never know we almost stole it. She parks on the shoulder. She clears a couple of pieces of hard plastic — what was once Clifford’s headlight — from the road as penance for our attempted larceny. I use one of his tissues to wipe spit from the corners of my lips.

Eventually Sequoya reappears, lugging the deer over his back. The beast is taller than he is. Its hooves drag a wake of forest debris. Ruth opens the truck’s bed and lifts the hind legs from Sequoya’s back like lifting a bridal veil off a bloody bride. The deer’s chin hangs over his neck. He uses the antlers as handles. Blood spots the ground. The body trembles the bed when it lands. I see its brown eyes, its loose, lifeless tongue. Sequoya fetches the water from the glove box. He pours a drink of it over the dead deer’s tongue. “There,” he tells the deer. “You won’t remember any of that.” He turns to Ruth. “I’m out of season.” She produces our blue tarp, and he hides the animal underneath it. A bit of my stomach brew burns the back of my throat. I don’t feel so good. I hold on to the baby. Ruth squeezes me into the middle of the bench. Blood has dripped down Clifford’s authentic legwear.

“You all need a place to sleep tonight?”

“Yes.”

So Sequoya drives us back to his trailer. It’s on his grandparents’ property, a small plot with access to the canal. “Good boy,” his grandfather says. Together they string the deer up by its hind legs, binding it to a tree limb behind the house. Split open from chin to tail, the deer drips blood into a rusted pan. I’ve never been so close to a dead thing, at least not that I know of.

Sequoya invites us in. His trailer is covered with posters of metal bands, their names lifted from mythology: Karybdis. Clotho. Lethe. “These are old.” As if he’s embarrassed by the posters. He’s got a record player in his small living room, and he selects some music presumed more appealing to females.

“You ladies like a glass of water?” He sets two glasses of water on the table before us. He takes a seat. Then jumps up quickly again, thinking to wash the deer off his hands. Ruth looks down into her water. Neither of us drinks it.

“You still got a long ways to go?”

I nod my head though I don’t know.

“How come you decided to walk?”

“Well.” I pretend to think hard, as if I can’t remember. We sit there awhile listening to the music. When side A reaches its end, Sequoya doesn’t get up to flip the record. He just lets the automatic arm reset itself. Side A plays again.

Later he makes a bed on the floor of his living room. A couple sheets and a blanket. Ruth climbs in, but I decide to follow Sequoya back to his room.

“You want me to take off my clothes?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “I’d like that.”

I would too, someone to scrub away the traces of Lord. I take the band out of his hair and smooth it over his shoulders. I get myself undressed. Sequoya does the same, leaving his shirt for last. When he finally lifts it, his torso is covered with pockmarks, old scars like gray polka dots on his brown skin.

“What’s that about?” I ask, touching a few of them.

“I had smallpox a long time ago. Don’t worry.” He laughs. “You can’t catch it.” He reaches out to touch the curve of my belly. He stares into my navel, a lighthouse in the night. “I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”

When I kiss him, his mouth tastes like carrots or potatoes or maybe it’s just dirt. Sex with Sequoya is a bit awkward at first. I suppose it is always a bit awkward with a stranger. Sequoya’s inside me and usually that’s a warm thing, but he feels cooler inside than out, an empty box. Maybe the box used to hold ice and the ice has melted. Or maybe the box has always been empty. A box that’s forgotten how to hold things. Sequoya, I think while we’re doing it, and how I haven’t considered any names yet and how, unlike him, I have no idea what Cora even means. I don’t know if my baby’s a boy or a girl or something else entirely, a messed-up conch-shell sort of deformity that won’t live long enough to hear me speak its name.

Sequoya’s body goes rigid, but I pull myself off him quickly before he comes inside me, still thinking about that empty box, still thinking about my baby. Sequoya tries to make me come with his hand, but it doesn’t work because his neck and hair smell like the paraffin wax my mom uses for canning jelly. I can’t come when I’m thinking about my mom.

Sequoya falls asleep just fine, and I’m left alone, thinking of El, parsing through the confusion of motherhood and sex and wondering what shape she’s in right now.

When Ruth wakes me in the morning, I’m confused for only a moment. Then I remember the road, and I’m happy to leave like I have the best job ever, walking across the state of New York with my mute aunt. We slip away before the sun’s up. Sequoya’s grandfather watches us go. Inside his kitchen he’s listening to a religious broadcast. The man on the radio is reminding listeners how years ago a 7.0 earthquake struck an island nation because the island had made a pact with the devil. Sequoya’s grandfather, while surprised by this news, believes it because people will believe just about anything.

We see mountains in the distance. “‘The hills are alive,’” I sing with some idea that Ruth won’t be able to resist joining in the song. She resists.

That night I find a pay phone that still works.

“Momma.”

“Cora?”

“Hi.”

“Oh,” like a heart attack.

“You OK? What are you doing?”

“Watching a movie.”

“Do you want me to call back?”

“No! I’m just telling you what I’m doing. Where are you?”

“With Ruth.”

“Ruth? Ruth who?”

“Your sister.”

“What? How’d you find her?”

“She found me. She came to our house.”

“What? Cora, what does she want with you? Let me talk to her.”

“Mom, it’s fine.”

“Where are you? You’re OK? What’s Ruth up to? When are you coming home?”

“Eventually.”

“Eventually. Eventually.” She says it twice because she’s trying not to yell. “Cora, I need — Can I talk to her? Honey, I was so worried.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Let me talk to Ruth.”

“She’s not talking.”

“What?”

“She doesn’t talk.”

“Where are you? What’s she telling you? Don’t listen. What has she said about me?”

“She really doesn’t talk. Not a word.”

“What? Where are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m coming. Where are you?”

“I really don’t know where we are exactly. New York.”

“The city?”

“No. Farmland.”

“Where?”

“Mom, I’m OK. I’m OK on my own.”

“Where are you?” She screams it this time, and it’s going so badly that I decide it would be best to just hang up. I don’t want to hear her this upset.

Ruth sits on the curb waiting for me.

“I called El.”

She lifts her face to hear more.

“She’s pretty mad. That makes sense. Probably more scared than mad.”

Ruth nods.

“You’re not doing this to get back at her? Right?”

Ruth bites her lip. She hadn’t considered that. No, she shakes her head.

“Because you don’t have to. It wasn’t ever easy for El either.”

Ruth nods again.

We start walking and after an hour she motions, don’t I want to stop?

“Not yet.” We walk farther than we’ve ever gone in one day, following the course of the old canal, unknotting knots, untying a belly button. Every tree we see reminds me of El. There’s sacrifice, antagonism, rebellion, obsession, and adoration, but no properly complex word for what’s between a mother and a daughter, roots so twisted, a relationship so deep, people suffocated it in kitsch and comfort words to pretend it’s easy. I look to the trees. I hold my stomach tightly but I'm not strong enough to stop mothers and daughters from splitting apart.

I see forests and subdivisions. Rednecks slow as they pass, their tongues darting between their pointer and middle fingers. Packs of wild teenage girls and flat, open places where UFOs could land. “Livin’ on a Prayer” becomes “Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart).” We see more men, more lawn mowers mowing lawns that don’t need it. We see a brother and sister tearing around in their grandpa’s electric wheelchair up and down their driveway as if it were a go-kart. Ahead of me, Ruth flips the cassette in her Walkman, and the song she’s listening to, whatever it might be, starts playing again from the start.