Over Yonder, page 11
“Won’t your boyfriend miss you?”
She gave a small, almost nonexistent shrug.
“He the one who did that to your face?”
“I told you, I fell.”
“Down a cliff?”
Caroline turned a page.
“I don’t mean to harp on it, but you can usually tell whether someone has fallen or not. Your palms are almost always scraped after a serious fall. Especially one that’s bad enough to show on your face. It’s an evolutionary thing. Your brain gets your hands involved.”
“Thanks. I like Wikipedia too.”
Woody smiled.
The girl began reading again, holding the book close.
“You’re going to strain your eyes.”
“Eye,” she said. “I’m 80 percent blind in this eye.”
“How’d that happen?”
She turned a page. “I was a crack baby.”
He looked at her. “Are you serious?”
“The more PC term is drug-addicted infant.”
Woody stared out the windshield. He thought about infants he’d seen in the NICU when he was a hospital chaplain in Maryland. He remembered especially the infants suffering from maternal drug-use withdrawal. Neonatal abstinence babies, they called them. The babies had seizures; they cried all the time, using a different pitch than other babies.
She put the book down. “I wouldn’t steal your truck, by the way.”
“You’re too kind.”
“No, I mean I’m a horrible driver. I mean, I have my driver’s license, but I don’t drive much. My boyfriend doesn’t like it. I just thought you should know.”
“Well, now I know.”
“I also have heart issues,” she said.
Woody flicked his blinker and changed lanes. “Issues?”
“It’s aortic. I had a prosthetic valve replacement to fix it about seven years ago. It’s called a congenital condition. That’s just medical speak; congenital just means I was born with it.”
“I’m familiar.”
They passed a highway sign with a geographical outline of the sixteenth state that read “Now Leaving Tennessee.”
“Anything else I should know?” he said.
Caroline reached into her backpack. She removed a black Glock 9 mm pistol and placed the firearm on the bench seat between them. The safety was on.
“You can have this,” she said. “It’s not mine. I stole it.”
Amos spoke without opening his eyes. “Well, aren’t we all just one big happy family.”
* * *
Buc-ee’s country store and gas station in Athens, Alabama, was about the size of a residential school district. There were acres of gas pumps. There must have been two hundred cars and ten times as many people beneath the overhang, pumping gas, eating ice cream, wearing beaver hats, posing for selfies. The man at the pump in front of them was applying a bumper sticker that read “I Heart Buc-ee’s Bathrooms.”
Woody jammed the parking brake and killed the engine.
“Welcome to heaven,” said Amos.
“I’ve never seen a gas station this big,” she said.
“I envy you,” said Amos. “Wish I could relive my first time.”
Woody jumped out and slammed his door. “The Major likes it here, in case you can’t tell.”
“It’s like being on a cruise ship, except they have beef jerky.”
Woody said, “I’ve got to go pay the water bill. Meet you both back here in ten minutes. Caroline, you have my number in case you need to text me?”
“I don’t text,” she said.
Woody just looked at her. “You have a religious objection to phones?”
Caroline shook her head. “No, I just don’t have one.”
“No phone?” said Amos. “Even homeless people have phones.”
“Okay,” Woody said, “then just shoot your pistol into the air if you need me.”
“And let’s try not to get lost inside,” said Amos. “There’s a lot to see. Now get this cat out of my lap and help me out of this seat. My legs are stoved up.”
Caroline was not prepared for the full-frontal Buc-ee’s experience. Walking into a Buc-ee’s was a lot like attending a Tim McGraw concert, only with less teeth. Caroline escorted the eighty-seven-year-old across the store, taking it all in. Buc-ee’s was a veritable wonderland of commercial retail space, fast food, and general consumer effluvia that you find at gas stations, only more of it. There were customers from all walks. Rich and poor. Old and young. Wearing anything from Mennonite skirts to thong bikinis.
She and Amos parted ways when they got to the restrooms.
Woody was just emerging from the men’s room. “I’ll help the Major navigate back through the gauntlet. We’ll meet you at the truck.”
“Try the fudge,” said Amos. “It will change your life.”
The restroom was even larger than the sales floor. There were enough stalls to accommodate the urinary needs of the People’s Liberation Army of China. And the facilities were so clean you could almost see your reflection in the floor.
She walked up to the sinks. She removed an empty Hellmann’s jar from her pack, unscrewed the lid, and filled it with water. She emptied a packet of aquarium pH powder into the water to neutralize the chlorine and fluoride, then gently swirled the water with her finger. After a few minutes, the new water was ready. She scooped Gary from the old jar and plopped him into the new one.
Caroline stared in the mirror. Her gruesome face caught her off guard. The bruise on her eye was darker than it had been this morning. Her hair reeked of bitter wine. Her lips were even more swollen. She touched her face and felt a wave of humiliation engulf her.
She stared at the redheaded fool. How had this happened in her life? How had she given someone the permission to degrade her like this?
She placed Gary back into her backpack and used one of the restroom stalls. She washed her hands, then used the hand dryer, which was powerful enough to remove skin. She exited the bathroom and wandered through the store, clutching her backpack straps, weaving through clots of customers, hoping nobody would look at her battered face.
When she got to the doors, a bald guy with a thick horseshoe-shaped mustache who was walking inside rushed to hold open the door for her. She walked through the open door and gave him a sincere thank-you.
He gave a dark smile at her as she passed.
“I like your necklace,” he said.
Chapter 19
Their hotel rooms were at separate ends of a long hallway with a patterned carpet so hideous it was almost a violation of human rights. Despite that, it was decent hotel. Much nicer than the Super 8 where Caroline worked, where most rooms bore traces of bodily fluid stains on the walls, furniture, and ceilings.
They all got off the elevator and stood in the hall, everyone holding their luggage. Amos was cradling the cat against his chest, stroking its head. Woody had paid fifty bucks extra for the animal.
“Good night to all,” said Amos.
“Good night, Dad.”
Before Amos headed to his room, he kissed Caroline on the forehead. Caroline didn’t really know what to say. Amos shuffled down the hall, still carrying the cat and talking to it.
“Are you sharing a room with him?” she asked.
“Are you insane?”
They stared at each other for a beat.
“He took my cat,” she said.
“Yeah, sorry. That’s not your cat anymore. Dad owns every cat in South Alabama.”
They said good night and parted ways awkwardly but politely.
Her room was nice. Two queens. Both beds facing a window that was overlooking the distant skyline of Birmingham. There was a flatscreen television with a welcome screen that said, “Hi, Caroline!”
She clicked on the bathroom light. The vanity counters were slabs of white granite. The shower looked like a glass-enclosed time machine. You could have fit a Brazilian water polo team in the tub.
She spent a full forty-five minutes beneath the scalding showerhead, letting the torrent of water wash the trauma off her skin. It had been almost a week since she’d used a real shower. Then she donned a complimentary robe and watched television with Gary. SpongeBob SquarePants was playing. It was perhaps the greatest show of the twentieth century, created by Stephen Hillenburg, a marine biologist who demanded the show end after its third season, claiming the show had run its course, but Nickelodeon refused, so Hillenburg left the show and SpongeBob turned into crap. The first three seasons, however, were nothing short of flawless.
The things you learn in books.
When SpongeBob was finished, she scrolled television channels, trying to turn her brain off and forget everything that had happened within the last week. Trying to forget how far away from home she was. She had never left the state of Tennessee before. She had never ventured any farther south than Lenoir City.
She hadn’t realized she had fallen asleep until a knock at her door awoke her. It was a heavy knocking. With some authority behind it. Her eyes lazily opened.
Knock, knock!
Caroline forced herself off the bed and lumbered to the door, tightening the belt on her bathrobe.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“America’s favorite TV dad.”
When she opened the door, she found Woody Barker standing there holding big plastic shopping bags.
“I see you’re settling in,” he said. Woody extended a plastic bag that bore the name Carrabba’s on it. “I didn’t know what you liked to eat, so I ordered you a little of everything. Hope you like chicken marsala.” He also presented her with several Walmart bags.
“What’s all this?” she asked.
“Just a few things you might need.”
She looked at the bags in her hands.
“You didn’t have to do all this. I’m not comfortable accepting charity.”
“You’re going to be uncomfortable a lot then.”
He flashed a low-wattage smile. “Just try not to stay up too late. Big drive tomorrow. There’s an ice pack in there. Use it on your face to keep the swelling down.”
Woody started to walk away, but she called after him.
He stopped and turned to face her.
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You’ll never have to.”
* * *
Caroline ate on the bed, with bath towels spread beneath herself to catch spillage. To be polite, she forced herself to eat her salad. The dessert was tiramisu; no politeness was required to eat that.
After supper, she dumped the contents of the Walmart bags onto the bed and rifled through them. Inside were clothes. Shirts, pants, and maternity wear. Blouses, jumpers, even a pair of jeans with an elastic waistband. Until now, she had not owned a single pair of maternity panties. Now she had four. She didn’t know there were males walking the earth who even knew about such things as maternity underwear.
Also inside the bag were shoes. Tennis shoes: white, with pink designs. Amazingly, they were her size. There were socks: three different colors in a multipack. There was an all-in-one toiletry kit, complete with nail clippers, nail file, and two colors of nail polish. There was deodorant, bodywash, and shampoo. And in the bottom of the Walmart bag was another plastic bag, marked AT&T. Inside this bag was a small white cardboard box about the size of a brick and almost as heavy. She removed the box and noticed the Apple logo on the front. Her mouth gaped open when she saw the image of an iPhone printed on the package. She dropped the box. She covered her face with both hands like she was praying. And hot tears fell down her cheeks.
* * *
The next morning Caroline found the guest laundry services. It was just past the fitness room, where obsessive-compulsives were already on their hamster wheels, doing penance for eating carbs. The laundry room door didn’t have a card-key lock, so she walked right in. There were two washing machines and one dryer.
She set the plastic bag on the floor, opened the machine’s hatch, and removed the tags from her Walmart clothes with her new nail clippers. She wadded the clothes into a heap and punched them inside the machine, then selected the largest load setting. Caroline placed quarters into the slots and pressed the button. Laundry soap was two dollars, but thankfully someone had left a jug of Tide sitting on the shelf. Small blessings.
She started the washer, then hoisted herself onto the vibrating machine and swung her feet while she played Bejeweled Blitz on her phone.
The smells of the complimentary hotel breakfast were fanning through the hotel. She heard voices passing by the laundry room. Old voices. Young voices. Happy voices. Tired voices. Chatty guests on their way to breakfast. Usually she was the one pushing the maid’s cart, greeting these guests, asking whether they were checking out.
Her stomach gurgled at the thought of food. She finally withdrew herself from the rapture of her game, clicked off her phone, and decided to go to the lobby. Caroline leapt off the washing machine, tucked her phone into her back pocket, and checked the washing machine. But she never made it out the door because a smooth-scalped man with a horseshoe mustache was entering at the same time she was exiting.
Chapter 20
Woody Barker was filling his fourth cup of coffee when he saw Caroline wander into the laundry room at the end of the hall. She was already wearing the new rust-colored maternity jumper he’d bought from Walmart. The color went well with her red hair. Woody’s mother would never let him wear anything rust colored when he was a boy; she said it clashed with his hair. But Woody disagreed. He felt rust belonged as the fourth member of the trifecta of appointed redheaded apparel colors: green, white, and blue.
Caroline had been too busy staring at her phone to notice him. Which both warmed him and scared him.
Woody knew that phones were the downfall of modern civilization. Not only because of what phones were doing to our brains (an average American checks their phone three hundred fifty times per day) but because of what smartphones were doing to our mortality rate. Phones were dangerous. Upward of 1.6 million automotive crashes per year were caused by phones. And last year texting while walking resulted in eleven thousand injuries and five thousand deaths in the US alone, with 70 percent of those injured being women under age twenty-five. Not to mention what they do to your focus and attention span. You become so accustomed to switching between tasks that during normal activities, your lizard brain says to you, out of a blue sky, You need to check your phone.
But here’s the thing. You needed a phone to function in this world. You need a phone to do everything from paying your power bill to scheduling a hair appointment. And you can’t pull over and buy a map at a gas station anymore because they don’t sell maps. Everyone uses GPS.
He topped off his cup. The coffee had already started to sour his stomach. He’d spent half the morning vomiting in the toilet because of the new meds to stabilize him in hopes of a transplant. He was reading a complimentary copy of USA Today when a man wandered past him, heading down the hall. The man had a thick cowboy mustache. A Saint Louis Cardinals T-shirt. Ostrich skin boots. Woody noticed the man’s determined gait before noticing anything else. Like he had somewhere to be. It wasn’t a hotel walk. The man’s walk was an airport walk. A subway station walk. Quick and purposeful.
Woody put down the paper and watched.
You learn to identify troublemakers when you live with them in a giant concrete box. You learn to see them before they see you. It’s self-preservation. You learned how to stay away from troublemakers. Their swagger was unmistakable. A limber gait. Torso erect. Hands and arms loose. An invisible chip on the shoulder. Woody also noticed the irregular bulge in the man’s lower back, beneath his shirt, just above the waistband.
The man reached the end of the hall and entered the laundry facility.
Woody took a sip of his scalding coffee. It was so hot it burned the roof of his mouth, but he managed to swallow it. It felt good going down and actually seemed to be settling his stomach.
Woody found it odd that the man had not been carrying a laundry bag. No dirty clothes either. No laundry soap. Also the man had pulled the door shut. Which was also unusual. Most people let a hydraulic door close behind them on its own.
Woody waited for someone to reemerge. It was basic human behavior.
A seventeen-year-old girl would not have wanted to share such a tiny room with a middle-aged guy. Too awkward. Too weird. She would have exited first. Unless, of course, the guy was just picking up his clean laundry. In which case, the guy would have taken a total of thirty seconds to grab his clean clothes and come out. Guys were not big folders.
And even if he had been a folder, Caroline would not have stayed to watch him fold; that would have been double creepy.
Someone should be coming out of the small room.
But nobody did.
Woody checked his watch. One hundred and twenty-three seconds had gone by, and Saint Louis Cardinals guy was still in there.
Woody stood up and made his way toward the laundromat.
* * *
Woody quietly unlatched the laundromat door and found Cardinals Shirt Guy had Caroline pinned against the wall with his elbow compressing her throat. The man had nearly lifted her off her feet and only her toes were touching the ground. “Where is it?” he growled at her. “Tell me.”
Woody whistled at him. Like calling a horse. The man turned, but only for a split second. It was all the time Woody needed.
“Howdy, Tex,” said Woody.
The guy turned to look at Woody just in time to see a wall of blistering coffee flying into his open eyes. The coffee hissed against the man’s skin as he screamed. The guy released Caroline and clutched his face and let out a deafening roar.
Woody boxed the man’s ears, then used the butt of his palm to deliver a shot to the larynx. It was dirty fighting, but it was the only fighting style Woody had learned.
