Mr. Splitfoot (9 page)

S
HE 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.