Lucky Turtle, page 8
I slept.
The door opened and in the light, I saw Lucky. Of course I knew it wasn’t true, but he held me. It was Lucky, it was really him.
“Hurry,” he said.
He emptied the water bucket and took it along. He stuffed the washcloth in his pocket. These were my belongings.
“What day is it?” I said.
“It’s night,” he said. “You’ve been down here three. I’m sorry, the key was hard to get.”
Lucky locked the door to Vault behind us. That would make a mystery for Andy and his Bible to solve. And we slipped out of there and into the blessed night and hurried in moonlight down through the woods to the road and across it. He knew a place we could cross the creek, and we did, way down the property near the gate, no one in the guardhouse. I dropped into the water, washed the dust off my clothes, out of my hair, took everything off, washed myself clean of all the preceding days as Lucky wrung my camp pants for me, my camp shirt. On the bank, shivering, I damply dressed, a new person, free.
We walked in the woods, then, that soft pine duff—so good on my cramped legs—my body warm again in Lucky’s jacket, his arm around me, his hand on my elbow. We clambered over a huge cracked rock, edge of the cliff. Lucky beneath me, a hand on my butt, we inched down a story or more, only the crack to wedge our feet and hands in, then crawl through where it widened, and into a hidden cavern. He had a candle in there and lit it to reveal piles of blankets and multitudes of Camp Challenge sleeping bags all arranged on a great, flat rock like a bed. We fell into them and he wrapped me warmly, nice old blankets and sleeping bags with hunting scenes, fed me bread and American cheese he’d lifted at lunch from the mess.
“Our nest,” he said. He was tender and sat close, sweet, warm hand on my back.
We slept.
Chapter Twenty
Morning, and Lucky didn’t care about the likely manhunt going on above us. He didn’t have a thought about food or of time. He seemed to think we were on our honeymoon. I kept saying, “I have to get out of here.” And he didn’t say much in reply, except that if we emerged we’d be caught, that we had to wait. He was right, of course, but going from solitary to his cave started to feel freaky, like he was part of the whole monstrous thing, had known every minute for three days exactly where I was and done nothing, nothing, made an excuse out of the key, that it had been hard to find. In the night while he slept (he was as quiet in sleep as in waking), I edged off the mountain of blankets and sleeping bags and old pillows and crept to the queer crevice that was the only exit and saw the fat, waxing moon high in the sky, a million acres lit silver, a million acres you could walk across to the single visible light far across the valley, fifty miles, likely, and my escape.
I climbed out the way we’d climbed in, balanced with a foot on a knob of rock, that steady Montana wind in my face, fingers jammed in a crack in the cliff. No way: Camp Challenge above, pile of rocks far below. And so I watched the valley out there, watched the vastness, let the wind breathe me, that one light winking out like a signal, felt the vastness of the plains open inside me, decided in a rush of feeling that Lucky was vast, too, his heart opening inside mine. I started to slip, but he was there and caught me by the arm and drew me inside our lodge so quietly, let me guide him by the hand back to our bed, and then, despite what future therapists might have to say, we made love, barely awkward at all—we’d missed each other, what syndrome explained that?
“Wife,” Lucky said, deep in the night.
And for the first time I said it: “Husband.”
And we woke hours later, safe in our nuptial apartment, which was a room in a castle of feeling, the two of us buried in old blankets on that perfectly flat rock, the only level place, safe above the deeply slanting floor, which fell back to a trickle of purest water, plenty of water to keep us alive. Lucky had more camp bread and American cheese, a stack of slices. Standing at our diagonal threshold, almost a sill to lean on, we looked out over our world and fed each other, a sacrament.
But I was starving. “More,” I said.
And he gave me more.
“More,” I said again.
“My aunt Maria said you’d come to her under a full moon.”
“I won’t be going to anybody if I starve.”
“Food is easy,” Lucky said. He seemed to think that was funny. He was naked. I’d never seen anything like him. So narrow, one width from ankles to hips to shoulders. There was more to me than that, though I’d lost some weight. I made a robe of an old sleeping bag, ducks and hunters. I left him there, padded back to the water and drank, moved down to the corner and washed, moved back to the farthest reach and peed. There was a place even farther back for the rest of it, a squat in the dark over the noisy exit of the water. I took my time.
Lucky still stood at our window, so much out there to see.
“Wife,” he said.
“Prove it,” I said.
And so he did, most carefully.
Chapter Twenty-One
Through our fragment of eastward window, we saw moonlight on the distant snow peaks that evening, then the moon itself, bigger than the night before. Second night, the fears of Vault—the girls had spoken of being put in Vault, and now I knew I’d experienced it—returned like a shadow, my father lost to me, poor Franciella, too. And my belly empty, really hungry. My confidence in Lucky’s plan, whatever it might be, was fading.
I said, “Did your aunt forget to tell you to bring enough food with you for more than a day?”
No particular reaction. The moonlight on the plain out there absorbed him fully. And then late that night, an hour of terror when I woke to find him gone, then an hour of remorse: Why was I so mean? An hour of recrimination when he got back, an hour of forgiveness: he’d brought loaves of bread he’d liberated from the camp kitchen, another stack of American cheese, also a slightly limp cabbage and a huge bar of baking chocolate, all he’d been able to get his hands on with the one larder key he had. We started right in, cheese and bread, the chocolate after, so bitter it made us wince but tolerable on the bread, exquisite on Lucky’s lips, where I did find his name.
Come dawn, we heard a search party shouting, maybe back up on the road, no danger, but then really close, directly over us, an unknown male’s voice calling orders.
“Montana State Highway Patrol,” Lucky said, just an observation, no fear, no judgment, his ethereal calm: “No trackers them.”
Later, we felt the rumble of large vehicles passing on the camp road, not good, as they brought in more searchers. And then the baying of hounds.
“That’s why we walked down the road so far,” Lucky said.
“And walked back in the river.”
“In the river,” he said, “yes.”
We hadn’t discussed it. But I saw his deep planning suddenly. “And why we leapt from rock to rock,” I said.
“Yes, and why we leapt from rock to rock. The high points. Dogs search low.”
I had started to like how he repeated me, offered variations on my themes, his quiet way to say he heard you and understood you.
The hounds got louder, then much louder, then quieter, sniffing the ground between the boulders up there, then nothing but the violent pounding of my heart: as a runaway from camp, having violated the terms of my agreement, I faced prison, real prison, real time, like Dag, like his brother, Billy.
Lucky said, “The rock face up there fools the men, but it doesn’t fool the dogs. The men call the dogs off, see. And so the dogs learn we are not the quarry.”
His small grin calmed me.
We ate a little more chocolate and bread and kissed unending, no sense of time passing, but night came again, and the moon, so close to full. I told Lucky stories of my family, and finally of Dag and all that had led me to Camp Challenge. He listened carefully, his expression unchanging, occasional observations about the conduct of others in his quiet, gravelly voice: “Unfair.” “That wasn’t right.” “Cruel.” I told him what had happened with Dr. Gilbert. He’d heard some small piece of it from Dora, he said, that the doctor had tried to kiss me, that’s all, and that I’d falsely accused him of worse, which Lucky knew not to believe, and so he’d come to me in the night.
So I told him the whole thing start to finish, from my perfidy right through to my betrayal by Leslie.
He waited a long while, gathering his thoughts, said, “He had it coming.”
Late, we started in eating the cabbage, which we both had claimed to hate—but it surprised us with its layers, not many before you came to crisp spiciness, best thing we’d ever eaten, and soon it, too, had to be rationed. We slept almost accidentally, woke in the night, lay like indolent gods, asked each other probing questions, lost in time. Sex was good exercise for the cave bound, good exercise at the vurry least.
The fourth day was surreal conversation and long kisses, half hallucinating. The fourth night was the full moon, and hearing no dogs, we emerged from the nest. The planet beyond the cliff seemed to roll away from us in liquid moonlight. We made two light bedrolls from our favorites of Lucky’s blankets, tied them with rope, and dropped them down the cliff along with a Camp Challenge towel Lucky had soaked in the pure water of the cave and tucked into a canvas stuff-sack to make a kind of canteen.
Climbing down was easy enough for Lucky, a terror for me, over a hundred feet, but good footholds and handholds all the way in dry rock, a route Lucky knew well and that no one else had ever known, careful instruction and an occasional strong hand to help me from below. At the bottom we slipped our arms under the ropes on the bedrolls to make knapsacks. Lucky had made the climb in his cowboy boots but took them off now. I tied my Camp Challenge clogs into my bedroll. Neither of us had socks. He carried his boots. The moon was fat and full and climbed the sky.
Lucky said, “We will hurry real slow.”
I knew what he meant.
The prairie floor, lightly furred with sweetgrass, was a loose matrix of sand and cinders and coarse gravel, tough on the feet, here and there a pile of antelope pellets or a lone cow pie in moonlight, and if we ambled across it all like wild things, he said, our tracks would soften in the constant wind and be no different from a cow’s or a coyote’s. We put our shoes on after a few hundred yards, and I walked in his footsteps as best I could. We made large, purposeful ellipticals, always tending east and north, guided by a certain distant peak limned by a million-million stars, no path but Lucky’s knowledge, and through the night.
He knew a place he called Halfway Spring, and we slept there an hour or two at dawn among stunted trees in strong wind. Turtle Butte was a night’s walk behind us but still seemed close, looked just like its namesake, a friendly looming. I guessed we’d walked ten crooked miles to go forward six. Lucky shrugged at that: those kind of numbers weren’t real; we’d walked what we’d walked. And now the challenge was different. Ahead was nothing but bare chaparral whereon we might be easily seen in daylight.
So we stayed put. Sat in the spring pool naked, freezing water, hot sun.
“Wife,” he said.
“Husband,” I said.
He climbed out of the water, found a stick, scratched a circle around the whole spring pool, and we sat and lay together within its safety.
“Our wedding lodge,” Lucky said.
Our wedding lodge. I was not even seventeen, and drunk with our marriage. Even in the moment I knew it, too drunk to worry about sunburn, too drunk to be afraid.
At noon Lucky heard an airplane, five minutes before I heard it. But that gave us time to erase our circle. We dressed and rolled our bedrolls and stuffed them under a creosote bush. I lay down and covered my face while he kicked dust on me for camouflage, and then I climbed under a bush, curled up tight, became a stone among the millions. Of course they’d take a close look at the one spring for miles.
Lucky crouched inside a stunted and cow-coppiced cottonwood tree, made himself one of the twelve trunks of the thing. I could barely see him from ten feet away.
The plane, a blue Cessna, passed over twice, then passed over again a half hour later super low, then, satisfied (even I could read that plane’s attitude), flew back to Turtle Butte, flew around it a dozen times at least, distant growl and whine of its engine.
“It’s Dick Darnell flying,” Lucky said. “He’s making a grid. He’s vurry smart.”
“But you are smarter.”
“No, he’s a tracker, too. We have to surprise even ourselves with our route.”
We ventured out of hiding and ate cabbage and the last piece of bread and kept chipping at the bitter, bitter chocolate, which had become delicious beyond reason, a kind of solidified elixir, sat in the spring pool under a blazing sun, kissing chocolate off each other and sucking prickly pear cactus to sweeten it.
Come night, we waited on the moon, and it looked nearly as full as it had the night before, tiniest decline, clearest sky.
“How much farther,” I said.
“About as far as we have to go,” he said. “We’ll walk most all of the night the way the wind comes, and no resting.”
My feet were sore to go with everything else. Lucky chewed a leaf he knew and made a poultice, heavenly, cool and smooth inside my camp clogs, which left about nothing for footprints, but not to Lucky’s liking: “You’ll have to walk on the heels some.” He soaked our canteen towel at the last second before we left. And we walked, me on my heels, a relief to my toes.
After an hour we came to a rough road, crossed it, came up against a formidable wire fence. “Offset,” Lucky said.
He’d brought us blind exactly to a wildlife passage, an opening coyote and jackrabbit alike could pass through—just not cattle. We fit fine, crossed onto the next vast ranch. Of course, nothing about the landscape looked different. Lucky picked up the pace. The sky pinkened. I suckled at the towel, which had stayed remarkably damp. Lucky barely touched it.
I thought of my father, couldn’t help it. “I’m scared,” I said.
“Scared of what?” Lucky said. He scanned the horizon, thinking he’d missed something, not one for abstractions.
Abstractions were my job: “I’m walking away from my family.”
He thought about that, said, “Nup. You are walking toward. Count your steps, that will help.”
I did, I counted my steps. And counting was calming, he was right, a hundred steps, a thousand. I counted until I didn’t, then fresh worries roamed my head: What if Francie’s city was found? What would happen to her because they were looking for me?
Shortly there was a glint, dawn sun shining off a car mirror—just an old hulk of a car rotting into the earth, nothing to fear. And then an old washing machine complete with wringer standing forlorn beside a midden of applesauce bottles, all the same brand, thousands of them, it seemed, faded labels, a shock when I finally looked up and saw the vertical planes of a mobile home where for a day and two nights there’d been only distance ahead. The trailer was ancient, curved lines sagging, likely one of the first ever sold, dragged out here at the end of its usefulness, twisted oddly on its axis by a life of accidents, set up high on an outcropping of rock, tall stairway descending from a dented door, seemingly abandoned, and in the midst of what looked to be a junkyard.
We’d come in from the backside, made our way through sere sagebrush and serviceberry around to the front, where everything was suddenly green, a fenced garden, a venerable stand of cottonwood trees, shrubs twisting this way and that: this was another oasis, a hidden spring. The dooryard was cluttered with artistic precision, derelict cars and pickup trucks, an old electric stove, cable spools, a large trampoline frame on its side, about a million shot-up cans. A dusty two-track road snaked out past stacks of old metal roofing and twisted piles of discarded steel gutter. The cottonwood trees abated the constant wind, and trees meant water. A dappled horse was loosely tethered to a post like the one good idea in a faulty argument. At sight of Lucky, it nickered, danced.
“That’s Chickadee,” he said. The horse, he meant. A tall derrick windmill creaked as it rotated, livestock trough beneath receiving a bare trickle of water from the effort, but somehow full. A series of automotive tubes and hoses carried the overflow to a vegetable garden beautifully maintained.
I hurried to the trough, plunged my hands in, nice and cold, washed my face, cupped my hands to drink.
“Nup,” Lucky said, surprised I didn’t know better. “The animals have been in that water.”
But in among the legs of the windmill there was a tap over an old porcelain tub, and that’s where we could drink. I thought I’d never stop. I felt myself bloom like the random daffodils I suddenly noticed, licks of bright yellow in the dust. Lucky went to the horse, communed with it face-to-face as I splashed. He seemed to notice nothing else, neither clutter nor beauty, only the horse, left me waiting just the exact few minutes I could handle being apart.
“You’ll get to know Chickadee,” he said, returning.
The horse didn’t like being left behind any more than I had, snorted and stamped.
But Lucky took my hand and led me to the trailer looming on its outcropping, helped me up the tall homemade steps. Inside, it was homey, the floors tilted from whatever misfortune had torqued the trailer but carpeted with stacks of bright weavings and furnished with chairs and an expensive-looking couch and matching coffee table, paintings on the walls, a real living room, redolent of high plains dust and sage smoke, recent cooking. On a shelf squared to reality rather than the ceiling line were a dozen bowling trophies, a bowling bag on the floor below, newest thing in the room.
“She’ll be sleeping,” Lucky said, not a home you whispered in.
“Your mother?” I said, apprehensive. I wasn’t good with older women, and that was a fact.
No answer.
“Lucky, talk to me. Are we on the Reservation?”
“What? The Res? No. This is the Junk Ranch, people call it.”
“So it’s not, like, your house?”
He clammed up.
