Over Yonder, page 16
“Tennessee’s the other way,” he said.
No reaction.
“Okay. So now you’re not going to talk to me?”
Caroline’s shoes made loud flopping sounds on the pavement. They edged on another few feet. Woody following. Traffic passing them by.
“I’m an inconvenience,” said Caroline. “This isn’t working.”
“You aren’t even close to an inconvenience.”
“Then you really need to talk to Elizabeth.”
He threw the truck in Park and stepped onto the sidewalk to follow her. “Elizabeth’s problem is me. Believe me, you have nothing to do with this. Where are you going?”
Caroline stopped walking. “Actually, I don’t know.”
“Then how will you know when you get there?”
“All I know is that I don’t belong here.”
“This is precisely where you belong.”
She shook her head. “I just don’t think it’s going to work out.”
Caroline resumed walking, adjusting the cat against her shoulder.
Woody resumed following, but he was out of breath. “You have to understand Elizabeth. She’s just . . . Well. She’s Elizabeth.”
“Right.”
“There was a lot of bad blood between her and your mother.”
“My mother had bad blood with everyone.”
His truck was a long way behind them now, parked in the road. Traffic angrily weaved around it. Motorists were giving him dirty looks as they passed.
Caroline met his eyes. “Did you really go to prison?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
His chest was heaving. “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want to scare you away. People don’t exactly invite ex-convicts to barbecues.”
“You killed a woman?”
He said nothing. The roar of traffic punctuated their conversation.
“What happened?”
“It was an accident.”
She turned onto an intersecting sidewalk. “You can quit following me now.”
“No, I’m not going to quit. We need to talk. You don’t know what you’re doing. Your life is in danger, in more ways than I think you understand. Your mom was hanging around with some bad people, and I think you’re wrapped up in it.”
Caroline was not fazed by the information. She just kept walking.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I heard you.”
A semitruck rolled past, shifting gears loudly. The booming draft blew her hair sideways across her face. She came to an intersection and stopped to look both ways. He fell in beside her, panting. She reached into her pocket and withdrew her phone in a pink case. Caroline handed the device to him.
“What’s this?” he said.
“It’s yours. You bought it.”
“I don’t want it.”
Woody tucked the iPhone into the pocket on her backpack. “This is yours. Don’t you get it? I care about you. And I want to help keep you safe. I’m still the same guy I was when you met me. I haven’t changed.”
“But see, that’s just it. You haven’t changed. To me, you’re still just a random person. Someone who didn’t want anything to do with his own kid. A donor.”
“That might be the meanest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Then you’ve led a pretty charmed life.”
Caroline looked both ways and crossed the street.
He trotted beside her. “So are you going back to your boyfriend now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let me at least give you some cash.”
“I don’t want anything from you, least of all money.”
Caroline turned left and followed another sidewalk, which headed northward. This time he watched her leave without following. Namely, because he didn’t have the stamina to walk another step. His heart was racing, he was salivating, and his ears were ringing. The spirit was willing, but the cardiac tissue was weak.
“I’ll just keep following you,” he called out. “I’ll find you, Caroline.”
“No, you won’t,” she said. “You’re going to let me walk away.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you let my mother walk away too.”
* * *
The clerk at the Gulf Beach Greyhound station counter took Caroline’s cash, mashed a few buttons on the register, then slid change back to her. Caroline placed the handful of quarters and the ticket receipt into her pocket, then headed for the restroom. When she exited there was an old man waiting for her at the door. He was leaning on his cane, wearing a thick canvas jacket and cowboy boots.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“It’s a free country.” His eyes went to the cat in her arms. “He don’t look happy.”
Caroline readjusted the cat against herself.
“Your dad called me.”
“He’s not my dad.”
“Would’ve been pretty hard to be born without him.”
Amos draped an arm around her, then guided her to the waiting area, where they sat on plastic bucket seats. He eased into a chair beside her, moaning upon his descent. “Let’s talk.”
“How did you know I’d be here?”
“Welcome to the age of cell phones.”
Amos took the ticket from her hand. He looked at it, nodded, then handed it back to her.
“What’s in Georgia?”
“You can’t stop me. I’m sorry. I’ve already made up my mind. I know it’s not safe. I know someone is after me. But you saw what was on that flash drive. I think we’re the only ones who know where it might be.”
Amos was quiet. Contemplative. Staring at the clock on the wall almost as though he were looking through it.
“I think we’ve had a misunderstanding. I’m not going to stop you.”
Chapter 32
The first usage of gold can be pinpointed to the fifth millennium BC. The Paleolithic era, back when humans were still hunting in the nude. Gold was the first metal to be manipulated. Before iron. Before bronze. Before anything. The first metal to be valued. The first metal to be used in religion. Gold shows up everywhere throughout religious epics in human history. The gospel story of the magi. In Hinduism, with offerings to deities for healing. In Islam, the five thousand golden plates that adorn the Dome of the Rock.
Gold is as close to everlasting as a physical object can get. Theoretically, eternal. It does not react to oxygen or water; neither will it corrode, rust, or tarnish. Fire cannot harm it, so it cannot be destroyed. If you want to get technical about it, the only way to get rid of gold is to dissolve it. And even then, this doesn’t destroy the element. Fact: The world’s oceans contain twenty million tons of dissolved gold.
For centuries, gold had no utility. You couldn’t do much with it. Too malleable for weapons. Too soft for tools or tableware. So somewhere along the way gold became currency. And ever since, human civilization has been paying the price. Both literally and emblematically. All the wars in recorded history—modern and ancient—have been financed, centralized around, and waged over gold-backed currency.
Amos was thinking about all this when Caroline fell asleep in the Greyhound passenger seat beside him. A library book was resting in her lap, with her index finger marking the chapter on gold.
The old man found himself watching his granddaughter with deep affection. It was hard not to find this child so magnificent that it made his insides ache. He reached out to touch her violent red hair. Just to know what it felt like. It was smooth. Like silk.
The Greyhound plunged through the night carrying ten passengers. The lights were dimmed for sleeping. Outside the scenery darted past the windows, swallowed by the sea of inky darkness. The drone of the diesels was hypnotic, an oddly comforting sound. Most passengers wore earbuds, watching videos, tapping away on laptops, staring at screens, endlessly scrolling the opiate realm of social media, seeing the entire world from only six inches before their nose, using only their thumbs to guide them. Behold your God, America. The Almighty Phone. The future of the human race. Amos Barker had seen firsthand what this glowing device could do to a family. It could tear the whole thing apart.
He looked out the window and wondered what Woody would do when he found out that his eighty-seven-year-old father (almost eighty-eight) had left Fairview under the cover of darkness without alerting anyone but his widow neighbor, Jill, who was feeding his cats.
Woody would not realize Amos was missing for a few days. He was too busy with Rachel right now to notice a missing old man. Because it was a Friday; Woody babysat on Fridays and Saturdays.
Amos watched the hinterlands of rural Alabama roll by. Little towns. Complete with water towers, high schools, football fields, baseball diamonds, YMCAs, and VFWs. Happy places. Places where people lived real lives with real families. He could almost remember what a real family felt like before his wife died, before his only son was locked away in a federal prison.
He closed his eyes and thought about the pages he’d seen in the library. The collection of letters was not exhaustive. There were only ten or eleven of them. And it was evident from references in Davis’s correspondence that there were letters missing from the anthology. One of the final letters in the collection was a geographical drawing, with symbols littered across the pre-Reconstruction area in the Southeast. Amos had printed it out at the library along with the rest of the letters. The geographical drawing wasn’t a map by any stretch; it was too cryptic.
He pulled the printout from Caroline’s backpack. The drawing had been surprisingly well done. Jefferson Davis must’ve been a skilled draftsman. The symbols, however, didn’t make any sense unless you were Varina “Winnie” Davis. They were seemingly unrelated to any information contained in the letters.
This was all probably a waste of time, of course. A fable. The gold had likely been discovered decades earlier—if there truly had been any gold to begin with. This could have been an elaborate hoax, designed to mislead and thoroughly waste the time of hell-bound Yankees.
Then again, the threat to Caroline’s life was real. The Major had been around long enough to know that there were only two things mankind considered worth killing for on this planet. And this didn’t have anything to do with romance.
He unfurled the pages he’d printed at the library. Davis’s final letter to his wife. The only noncryptic letter in the collection. Amos slid on his reading glasses.
Dearest Winnie,
On this day my heart untravelled turns most longingly to you. Many years and very many sorrows lie between this day and that which made you mine in law but did not make you more mine or me more yours than before the ceremony was performed of exchanging before witnesses the vows we had exchanged before God and which were registered where neither destroying elements or thieving Yankees could obliterate or remove the record. What would I not give for one kind embrace from my beloved Wife?
I will not now enter on recitals which may wait for to-morrow. On Saturday I hope the steamer will be in and bring me a letter from you. None has arrived since you left New Orleans and you need not be told that my anxiety is great to know how you are.
I fear my traveling company is about to be captured by surrounding forces making this perhaps a final letter from your beloved husband. If I shall not be seen by you again I pray you memorize the advices I have sent and foremostly I pray you guard yourself against the forces of evil which desire to thieve, kill and destroy. May your life be protected in the name of God.
—Jeffn Davis
The bus began to slow. Beneath his haunches, Amos felt the diesel pusher downshift. The vehicle decelerated rapidly, causing passengers to lean forward in their seats. Everyone on the bus became agitated. Their speed dropped to a crawl on the interstate. Soon they were easing toward the shoulder with the hiss of hydraulic brakes.
“Why are we stopping?” asked one passenger across the aisle.
Another passenger stood in her seat. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“Sit down,” said the bus driver.
And the interior of the bus filled with red and blue lights.
Chapter 33
Woody was doing ninety on I-20. He kept glancing at the iPhone in his mounted dashboard holder. The GPS tracking app showed a blue dot on the map. Caroline’s dot. Her dot had been moving along I-20 East, averaging sixty-five miles per hour.
Rachel sat cross-legged beside him, eating a turkey sandwich, sitting on her “height adjustment apparatus,” a device Woody was prohibited from calling a “booster seat” because such implements were for babies. She liked riding in Woody’s truck because there was no back seat. Rachel had been asleep for the first leg of the journey but awoke with new vigor, empowered by the knowledge that she was up way past her bedtime.
Rachel was watching the double yellow line streak past the windshield. “Where is Caroline going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are we following her?”
“Because I don’t have anything better to do.”
He unlatched the phone from the holder and passed it to Rachel. “Tell me what her blue dot is doing. I can’t watch and drive at the same time.”
Woody had been following the blue dot through the darkness, pushing the RPMs of all four cylinders into the red zone. He was slowly closing in on her, which was a good thing, except that he hated speeding and hated it even worse with a child in the car.
“Is she still going sixty-five?” said Woody.
“That’s what the app says.”
The blue dot, and the bus she was likely on, was heading for Georgia. What was she going to Georgia for? Did it have anything to do with that suspicious FBI guy? He wondered just who exactly was keeping tabs on Caroline.
The nine-year-old pinch-zoomed on the screen and brought up Caroline’s location. She held the phone directly to her face like she was solving the Riemann hypothesis.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“It stopped.”
Woody decelerated. “What stopped?”
Woody leaned over to look at the phone. The dot was still on I-20, several miles outside Douglasville, Georgia. Sitting right in the middle of the interstate. But it wasn’t moving.
“Says zero miles per hour,” said Rachel.
Woody jammed the accelerator to the floor. His speed crept up to ninety-five. Then ninety-eight. His little truck sounded like it was going to explode. They were forty miles from Douglasville.
* * *
Three FBI agents boarded the bus. Another guy was waiting outside. They were wearing windbreaker jackets with big yellow letters, body armor, and badges dangling from neck chains. They were all guys. Clean-cut. A few of them had tattoos on forearms and on necks poking from beneath collars and tactical vests. Two of the men moved through the aisles reminding bus passengers to remain calm.
One officer was speaking with the driver. The driver was upset about the delay, and the officer was trying to calm him down as they questioned him. But the driver was not calming down. The driver was getting agitated, communicating with his interrogator using sentences made up entirely of expletives. Amos quietly hobbled to his feet, then made his way to the bathroom at the rear of the bus.
One of the officers was addressing the passengers. He instructed everyone to get their IDs out and be ready to show them. Everyone began digging for their wallets, and the agents, stoic-faced, resting hands on the hilts of their weapons, watched the audience of drones follow instructions.
Amos exited the bathroom, still drying his hands on a paper towel.
“What in heaven is this about?” whispered Caroline as Amos slid into the seat beside her again.
“Don’t play ignorant,” said Amos. “It doesn’t suit you.”
They looked at each other. A cold wave rolled down her spine.
“What do we do?”
“I’m working on it.”
The officers began walking through the aisles, checking IDs against the faces who owned them. The passengers on the bus were looking around, floating eyes from passenger to passenger, trying to find the villain. It was as though everyone on the bus were playing Where’s Waldo.
“Can someone tell us what’s going on here?” shouted one passenger.
An agent barked at him, “Sir, please sit down.”
“We have rights,” said the passenger. “I don’t have to consent to a search of my stuff.”
“We’re not searching anyone,” said the agent. “If everyone will just calm down, this will be over soon, and you can be on your way. IDs out, please.”
The agent was already making his way to Amos and Caroline, zeroing in on the girl.
“Evening, ma’am,” the agent said. “ID?”
The cat in Amos’s lap was becoming restless, emitting a low growl. The agent’s eyes were fixed on the cat.
“He’s nervous,” said Amos, stroking the cat’s head.
The agent did not move a facial muscle. The man held his hand outward. “IDs, please.”
Caroline and Amos both handed the guy their IDs. The agent glanced at the IDs, then to Amos and Caroline.
“I know,” Caroline said. “It’s a terrible picture. My hair was awful.”
The man gave a polite smile. “What year were you born, sir?”
“I’m not trying to buy liquor.”
“Year, please?”
“I was born under the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937, the year of our Lord.”
The agent looked at the ID for a few beats longer.
“What about you, miss?” the agent said.
Caroline recited her birthday. The agent gave a slight nod. Then the agent summoned his coworkers. The other officers soon joined him in the aisle, until all the agents were standing before Caroline. The agent was still scrutinizing Caroline’s ID.
“Miss Boyer, we’d like to ask you to come with us, please.”
The other passengers were gawking at Caroline now.
