My Abandonment (10 page)

"Varmints," he says, pulling the empty traps out by their chains and holding them up.

"Empty again?" Mr. Walters says. "Look at these holes in the pasture. They're out here, all right."

"Outsmarted again," Father says.

"Horse's hoof gets caught in a gopher hole," Mr. Walters says with his short arms in the air. He doesn't finish what he's saying. He calls them gophers and prairie dogs and ground squirrels. Things and even people can have different names. All that matters is that someone understands what you're talking about.

Mr. Walters is a friendly person and he is curious about us. Father says he watches us with binoculars. It's true that he likes to check on us where we are working and to ask questions. He can do this since he owns the whole farm and pays Father a wage. On his covered back porch he has a washer and dryer that we can use. He takes a list of groceries to the store and brings them back to us saying that it makes him think he should be a vegetarian once he sees how much his meat costs him.

"I know you are a gardener," Mr. Walters says to me. "I know you used to have a garden."

"Yes," I say. "In the forest park I did."

The packets he hands me read: Kale, Carrots, Beets, Turnips, Cabbage.

Mr. Walters has cleared out a whole area of garden for me. He shows me how to mix in the manure to make the dirt blacker. He stands leaning against the fence watching me as I plant the seeds and read the packets.

"Those are autumn vegetables," he says. "By the time they come up you'll be in school."

I set the worms carefully aside. I break up the clods with my trowel. Father is not so far away. He is building a corner brace for the fence along the road. Three horses stand near watching him. He stops digging and checks the sky. A truck drives past and he turns his face away.

"This life here must seem pretty easy for you, Caroline," Mr. Walters says. "I hope it's not boring for you."

"It's a girl's own fault if she's bored," I say. I pull my hand flat along the side of the little trench I dug and collapse the dirt down to bury the seeds. "These vegetables," I say, "are you going to take them or are they for Father and me?"

"I hadn't thought of that," Mr. Walters says. "I guess I figured they'd be yours, that you could share them if you want."

"We'll see," I say.

"Did you ever want to ride a horse?" he says.

"I don't know," I say. "I don't think so. These turnips are all planted."

"I have so many questions about how you were living," Mr. Walters says. "It's remarkable, but your father doesn't seem to want to talk about it. They only tell so much in the newspaper."

"I have a question for you," I say.

"Shoot," he says.

"How come you're all alone?"

"I just am I guess," he says.

"How come you don't have any dogs?" I say.

"Maybe if this was a sheep ranch," he says. "But horses and dogs, they don't always mix."

"I've never seen a person wear both suspenders and a belt," I say.

Mr. Walters laughs. "I believe it," he says. "Well, it works for me."

Sometimes when you're sleeping someone presses on your chest or the flat of your back with their hand and when you wake up no one is there but you can tell in the dark air in the room that someone has been talking to you.

This afternoon Mr. Walters takes Father to pick up a piece of equipment. There's some things he can't lift by himself that Father probably can. Father asks and I say I'll go but Mr. Walters says I'll just be in the way and I say no but he says it'll be dangerous and also boring.

"That's all right, Caroline," Father says. "He's the boss. You just do some reading and some gardening. Don't leave the property. We'll be back by dinner."

I weed one side of the garden and then I stop and listen and there's nothing. Far away in the sky a plane slides along. I put my trowel and gloves away and drink from the hose, then walk out past the horse barn following the barbed wire that stretches all the way to the end of the farm. There's a path worn down along the inside edge where the horses walk around and around. There's a place where the stream hooks back around and I leap across there. If someone sees me, I'll say I am checking the fence to see if it needs any mending.

The sun is hot on top of my head. I should have worn a hat. I go through a gate and the grass is longer here where the horses haven't been at it. The ground is marshier and the reeds are higher than my head so I have to push them away with my hands to keep going. I hear the boys' voices before I see them.

"Chainsaw!" they are yelling, and then a dog barks like it's being strangled.

I have moved closer, right to the edge of the road without hardly noticing. The house is beaten-up yellow with cardboard over one front window and all the rain gutter broken and dangling and a metal ladder leaning there. The dog is a huge black and tan shepherd dog tied to a chain. Chainsaw. The boys are throwing a rolled up newspaper back and forth over the dog's head and it's jerking from one to the other growling and barking trying to get at them. More newspapers are all around the yard like no one ever picks them up and opens them and reads them.

"A girl!" the taller boy yells. The newspaper hits the ground and they're walking at me.

Both their hair is white blond and thin. Their faces are sunburned. The little boy is thinner and his T-shirt is dirtier. The older boy is as tall as I am.

"What kind of girl are you?" he says.

"What kind of boy are you?" I say.

"Are you a tomboy?" he says.

"I'm a girl," I say.

"What are you doing on our property?"

"I'm not," I say. "I'm on the road."

"Who said you can watch us?" he says.

"Does your dog bite?" I say.

"Chainsaw?" he says and looks back. "I don't know. She might."

"Chainsaw's deaf," the smaller boy says. "She's old, that motherfucker."

"You can't call a girl dog a motherfucker," the other boy says.

"Yes you can."

"I'm Caroline," I say. "Can I play with you?"

These brothers, the older one is named Ben and the little one is Michael and the game we play is where Michael tries to spray us with the hose and then he has a gun with rubber darts and we run around the house screaming with Chainsaw barking and trying to reach us and I can't tell if she's playing. Then Michael's got a slingshot called a wrist rocket and we're climbing up the ladder onto the roof. The shingles are slippery with grit. The hose sprays up that far and gets Ben in the face.

"Asshole!" he says.

It's fun. We're holding on to the chimney and Michael is still on the ground. A chunk of gravel hits me in the leg and it stings.

"Bitch!" I say.

Michael calls up at us. "Let's switch around," he says.

"Only if you can get Chainsaw up here," Ben says.

The dog has her front paws on the ladder and it's sliding like it might fall down. I wonder if we'd be trapped, if Michael would be strong enough to set the ladder back up or if he'd just rather leave us up here. We start throwing down sticks and laughing and shouting when a horn honks and a dented up blue station wagon with plastic wood on only one side skids into the driveway.

The lady who climbs up has wild blond hair and a flowered blouse and jeans on. She holds a brown paper bag against her.

"Boys!" she says. "What did we agree about the roof? You want the police to come again?"

We're halfway down the ladder before she notices me.

"I wish I could blame you for their behavior," she says. "Chainsaw! Back off."

The dog is sniffing at the bag of groceries.

Inside she gives us a glass of milk with strawberry powder which is sweet and good.

"My name's Caroline," I say. "I live right over there."

"I know who you are," she says. "You're the hillbilly girl that lived in the park."

"I'm a regular girl," I say.

"You look like a regular girl," she says, "but I heard about you on the radio, how you slept inside a cave for four years, all the things you did."

The cupboards are all open and she's sliding in one can after another.

"Crazy," she says. "What grade will you be in?"

"Eighth," I say.

"Same school as Ben," she says. "He probably won't talk to you at school, but you shouldn't feel bad about that."

"I won't," I say. "I might not even talk to him."

The two glasses next to me are empty with pink sludge at the bottom. The boys have already gone back outside.

I dream of running barefoot in the forest park where I can feel the leaves slapping around me and no one can keep up or catch me and I kick through the snarls of ivy and kick Father beneath the sheets. Or I kick and wake myself with my foot out over the air next to the bed since he's not in the bed. Father has his own helicopter dreams and now he's seeing them in the day too and when I wake up at night usually his eyes are open or he's standing at the window or he's not in the room at all.

I walk into the hallway and through the bathroom, into my empty room. We make up the bed in Father's room but here we mess up the blankets and leave them that way so it looks like I sleep in my bed even though I have never slept there. Randy glows atop the dresser and I pick him up and whisper my secrets into the hole of his stomach, holding my thumb over the hole in his anus so they won't slip out until they settle.

"I played with boys," I say quietly. "Maybe they will be my friends."

In the front room Father is sitting at the table with the light on and writing in his notebook.

"Did you sleep?" I say.

"Do I look like I need my beauty sleep, Caroline? You better comb your hair now, so they don't see you with that birdnest on your head."

Out the window it's dawn. Father's pointing at the sky like a helicopter might be out there watching but there's nothing I can see in the gray clouds.

"I am trying so hard to figure all these things out," he says. "I want you to know that. I don't want you to think I'm not doing anything about it. There is no place on this farm where we can't be seen except for in this house but then they can watch it and see us come and go so they know when we're in here."

"They can't be watching us all the time," I say.

"In the war they dug tunnels," Father says. "Straight down under the floorboards and then underground, coming up into the air far away where no one was looking."

"That's a long tunnel," I say.

Out the window the horses are biting at each other and shifting around waiting for the sun. They watch me when I practice my running but they don't race along the fence like sometimes they do with cars.

A horse can walk and trot and canter and gallop. These are what are known as gaits.

We are up irrigating when we see the yellow truck coming. It turns in at the farm and instead of turning toward the big house it drives to ours where it stops. The muddy water slips straight around Father's wrists with his hands hidden underwater holding stones to weigh down the plastic dam. I am helping with a slippery piece of sod up on the high bank.

"Those people are taking things out of that truck," I say.

"I guess we better check on what they're doing," he says.

With the wet muddy shovel over his shoulder he leads the way down the slope through the tall grass. I walk in the trail he makes and the grass makes dry slippery sounds around his legs. Next to us the water spills down the slope. It has only reached halfway down seeping in before it slides further, not as fast as us and then it's dry on both sides of us and we're closer, it's easier to see our house. It's hard to walk fast in these black rubber boots.

The yellow truck says
RYDER
on the side. The man in the open back I have never seen before. He holds a box and wears a baseball cap and blue coveralls.

"Hello," he says.

"This is some kind of misunderstanding," Father says, and then Miss Jean Bauer comes around the side of the truck.

"Caroline!" she says. "You look great. A little muddy, but great."

She looks different without her white coat and in her red boots. Not as old. Her voice is the same. The gray stripe in her hair swoops back.

"It's you," Father says.

"We didn't want to go inside," she says. "But we have all these things for you. Come see. The boxes are some new pots and pans, more clothes. These are all things people sent in, things they wanted to give you when they read about you in the newspaper or heard about you on the radio."

"We don't need any more things," Father says. "Do we have to accept them?"

The first thing I see around the other side is the bicycles shining in the sun. The big one is blue and the smaller one is yellow.

"Go ahead," Miss Jean Bauer says. "You can ride it."

"I don't know how," I say.

"You've never ridden a bike?"

"No."

"Your father will teach you," she says.

"You will?" I say.

Father is stabbing at the ground with the sharp blade of the shovel. He doesn't say anything at first but then leans the shovel against the fence and walks over to the blue bicycle.

"All right," he says. "A little later. I just never had a bicycle with so many gears on it. That's what they are, right?" He smiles halfway like he's made a decision and then picks up a box and carries it into the house.

"Have you been reading the books I gave you for school?" Miss Jean Bauer says.

"Yes," I say.

"Are you happy these days?" she says.

"Yes," I say. "Are you?"

"Mostly," she says. "I'm happy to see you doing so well, Caroline. Adjusting. Wait, look here at these." She bends back the flaps of a box and inside I see gold. The books inside are packed tight. "Encyclopedias. Every single letter," Miss Jean Bauer says.

"But these are World Book," I say. "Mine were Britannica."

"They'll be fine," Father says, passing behind me with another box. "We'll figure it out. Say thank you."

"Thank you," I say.

From the front of the truck Miss Jean Bauer brings a paper bag that holds the things she herself has brought for me. The first thing I can tell the shape of it through the bag. It's Randy's stand with the shining metal piece that fits the hole in his stomach so he doesn't have to lie on his side.