“Yeah,” Franny says. “Competent and cute.”
“Maybe you should be the one who knows how to fix a car,” Jane says.
“But I don’t,” Franny points out reasonably. “I mean maybe, someday, I could learn. But right now, I don’t.”
“Maybe you’ll meet someone in Canada,” Nate says. “Canadian guys are supposed to be able to do things like fix a car or fish or hunt moose.”
“Canadian guys are different than American guys?” Franny asks.
“Yeah,” Nate says. “You know, all flannel shirts and Canadian beer and stuff.”
“You wear a flannel shirt.”
“I’d really like a Canadian beer about now,” Nate says. “But I’m not Canadian.”
Off the road to the right is a gas station/convenience store. They almost always check them. There’s not much likelihood of finding anything in the place because the wire fence that borders the highway has been trampled here so people can get over it which suggests that the place has long been looted. But you never know what someone might have left behind. Nate lopes off across the high grass.
“Mom,” Franny says, “carry my backpack, okay?” She shrugs it off and runs. Amazing that she has the energy to run. Jane picks up Franny’s backpack, irritated, and follows. Nate and Franny disappear into the darkness inside.
She follows them in. “Franny, I’m not hauling your pack anymore.”
There are some guys already in the place and there is something about them, hard and well fed, that signals they are different. Or maybe it is just the instincts of a prey animal in the presence of predators.
“So what’s in that pack?” one of them asks. He’s sitting on the counter at the cash register window, smoking a cigarette. She hasn’t had a cigarette in weeks. Her whole body simultaneously leans towards the cigarette and yet magnifies everything in the room. A room full of men, all of them staring.
She just keeps acting like nothing is wrong because she doesn’t know what else to do. “Dirty blankets, mostly,” she says. “I have to carry most of the crap.”
One of the men is wearing a grimy hoodie. Hispanic yard workers do that sometimes. It must help in the sun. These men are all Anglos and there are fewer of them than she first thought. Five. Two of them are sitting on their floor, their backs against an empty dead ice cream cooler, their legs stretched out in front of them. Everyone on the road is dirty but they are dirty and hard. Physical. A couple of them grin, feral flickers passed between them like glances. There is understanding in the room, shared purpose. She has the sense that she cannot let on that she senses anything, because the only thing holding them off is the pretense that everything is normal. “Not that we really need blankets in this weather,” she says. “I would kill for a functioning Holiday Inn.”
“Hah,” the one by the cash register says. A bark. Amused.
Nate is carefully still. He is searching, eyes going from man to man. Franny looks as if she is about to cry.
It is only a matter of time. They will be on her. Should she play up to the man at the cash register? If she tries to flirt, will it release the rising tension in the room, allow them to spring on all of them? Will they kill Nate? What will they do to Franny? Or can she use her sex as currency. Go willingly. She does not feel as if they care if she goes willingly or not. They know there is nothing to stop them.
“There’s no beer here, is there,” she says. She can hear her voice failing.
“Nope,” says the man sitting at the cash register.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
It’s the wrong thing to say. He slides off the counter. Most of the men are smiling.
Nate says, “Stav?”
One of the guys on the floor looks up. His eyes narrow.
Nate says, “Hey Stav.”
“Hi,” the guy says cautiously.
“You remember me,” Nate says. “Nick. From the Blue Moon Inn.”
Nothing. Stav’s face is blank. But another guy, the one in the hoodie, says, “Speedy Nick!”
Stav grins. “Speedy Nick! Fuck! Your hair’s not blond anymore!”
Nate says, “Yeah, well, you know, upkeep is tough on the road.” He jerks a thumb at Janey. “This is my sister, Janey. My niece, Franny. I’m taking ’em up to Toronto. There’s supposed to be a place up there.”
“I heard about that,” the guy in the hoodie says. “Some kind of camp.”
“Ben, right?” Nate says.
“Yeah,” the guy says.
The guy who was sitting on the counter is standing now, cigarette still smoldering. He wants it, doesn’t want everybody to get all friendly. But the moment is shifting away from him.
“We found some distilled water,” Stav says. “Tastes like shit but you can have it if you want.”
Janey doesn’t ask him why he told her his name was Nate. For all she knows, ‘Nate’ is his name and ‘Nick’ is the lie.
They walk each day. Each night she goes to his bedroll. She owes him. Part of her wonders is maybe he’s gay? Maybe he has to lie there and fantasize she’s a guy or something. She doesn’t know.
They are passing water. They have some so there is no reason to stop. There’s an egret standing in the water, white as anything she has seen since this started, immaculately clean. Oblivious to their passing. Oblivious to the passing of everything. This is all good for the egrets. Jane hasn’t had a drink since they started for Canada. She can’t think of a time since she was sixteen or so that she went so long without one. She wants to get dressed up and go out someplace and have a good time and not think about anything because the bad thing about not having a drink is that she thinks all the time and fuck, there’s nothing in her life right now she really wants to think about. Especially not Canada, which she is deeply but silently certain is only a rumor. Not the country, she doesn’t think it doesn’t exist, but the camp. It is a mirage. A shimmer on the horizon. Something to go towards but which isn’t really there.
Or maybe they’re the rumors. The three of them. Rumors of things gone wrong.
At a rest stop in the middle of nowhere they come across an encampment. A huge number of people, camped under tarps, pieces of plastic and tatters and astonishingly, a convoy of military trucks and jeeps include a couple of fuel trucks and a couple of water trucks. The two groups are clearly separate. The military men have control of all the asphalt and one end of the picnic area. They stand around or lounge at picnic tables. They look so equipped, from hats to combat boots. They look so clean. So much like the world Jane has put mostly out of her mind. They awake in her the longing that she has put down. The longing to be clean. To have walls. Electric lights. Plumbing. To have order.
The rest look like refugees, the word she denied on the sidewalks outside the condo. Dirty people in T-shirts with bundles and plastic grocery bags and even a couple of suitcases. She has seen people like this as they walked. Walked past them sitting by the side of the road. Sat by the side of the road as others walked past them. But to see them all together like this… this is what it will be like in Canada? A camp full of people with bags of wretched clothes waiting for someone to give them something to eat?
She rejects it. Rejects it all so viscerally that she stops and for a moment can’t walk to the people in the rest stop. She doesn’t know if she would have walked past, or if she would have turned around or if she would have struck off across the country. It doesn’t matter what she would have done because Nate and Franny walk right on up the exit ramp. Franny’s tank top is bright insistent pink under its filth and her shorts have a tear in them and her legs are brown and skinny and she could be a child on a news channel after a hurricane or an earthquake, clad in the loud synthetic colors so at odds with the dirt or ash that coats her. Plastic and synthetics are the indestructibles left to the survivors.
Jane is ashamed. She wants to explain that she’s not like this. She wants to say, she’s an American. By which she means she belongs to the military side although she has never been interested in the military, never particularly liked soldiers.
If she could call her parents in Pennsylvania. Get a phone from one of the soldiers. Surrender. You were right, Mom. I should have straightened up and flown right. I should have worried more about school. I should have done it your way. I’m sorry. Can we come home?
