My Abandonment (16 page)

Mammals have developed effective ways of living. Some mammals can hibernate. Such adaptations have made mammals dominant today. Among mammals are animals that man considers the most important animals alive today. Mammals add greatly to the interest of forest, field, and desert. Man is the most adaptable of mammals.

The cabin is all covered in snow so it's hard to see. It is an A frame which means it is the shape of an
A,
tall and pointy.

"This is it?" I say. "Your friends' house?"

"Let's see," Father says.

The door is locked. Father twists the knob and leans with his other hand and his shoulder and it cracks and splinters a little as it swings open.

"Take off your shoes, Caroline," he says. "Be careful not to track anything in."

It is darker and the kitchen is just inside the door. The refrigerator's cord is unplugged and it's open. Father turns on the faucet and nothing comes out. He kicks the small rug aside then and pulls on a ring in the floor he knows is there and then he pulls open a trapdoor and with the headlamp on he goes down there.

"Just have to turn everything on," he says with his face looking up. "It's all turned off so it won't freeze."

There's a photograph stuck to the refrigerator. A woman with red hair wears a bikini and a little girl has a thick orange life preserver strapped around her. A fat man with a mustache is the father. They stand on a dock next to a white boat and they are all smiling and squinting against the sun.

"What are their names?" I say.

"Who?" Father says.

"Your friends."

"Roy and Sylvia," he says.

"And they have a little girl?" I say.

"Probably," he says. "I haven't seen them in a while."

There is a black metal woodstove and firewood which we do not burn since we don't want to make any smoke. If we had to we would but there is a round plastic thermostat on the walls and electric baseboard heaters along the walls. Our frozen clothes are thawing and dripping so we put them in the bathtub and find blankets. There are smart secret drawers everywhere. The washer and dryer fit in the closet and are stacked on top of each other. Up a ladder is a bedroom with one big bed and one small bed. There's a clock with blinking red numbers that say 12:00 and a shelf full of books. Even if the electricity is on we don't turn on the lights. We keep the curtains closed and light candles. It is all right that we are here but we don't want to have to explain it to someone who might not understand. We keep all our things close to the door in case we have to leave quickly.

I am just happy to be getting warm with my damp socks, my feet pressed against the smooth metal of the baseboard heaters. I look up at the sharp angle of the roof that is blocking out all the snow and wind.

Father spreads maps he's found across the table. "The thing is," he says, "I know this country pretty well. I've been around here before."

"Which is why you have friends here," I say.

"Right."

"Are we still going to Bend?" I say.

"No," Father says. He laughs. "Actually we were never going to Bend. I just bought those tickets to throw the people off."

"Which people?"

"The followers," he says.

"But we weren't planning to come here," I say.

"Not exactly," he says. "We're close, though. Tomorrow."

There's pea soup in the cupboard and also saltine crackers that are not too stale. This we eat and also macaroni and cheese even though we don't have milk or butter. Upstairs the dark green sheets are flannel and the down comforter is so warm and the bed is soft. I can't even think about last night and this is better than the hotel too which is probably all gone and in rubble now, demolished. This is better than our house on the farm since Mr. Walters isn't close and watching us and better than the forest park since no one expects us to be here.

"I wish we could stay," I say.

"Not even the people who own this place can live here all the time," Father says.

Still my toes go numb and back and forth but they are not exactly cold. Father snores and I poke him until he rolls over. We are so tired.

Father fixes the doorknob in the morning. He puts a new rubber washer in the sink's faucet. There are many ways to pay someone back and be a good friend.

When he goes down under the house to split the logs in the woodpile I have our clothes and the sheets in the washer. I'm vacuuming upstairs to make the lines in the carpet like they were.

The girl's name is Melody. It is painted, her name on the small wooden bed and also written in some of her books which are some coloring books and then some others that I recognize. They are
Golden Nature Guides: Fishes, Flowers, Birds, Whales and Other Marine Animals, Mammals.
I had all these and also
Insects
and
Fossils,
a long time ago in my bedroom in the house with my foster parents. That is a very long time ago. I carried these books around. I liked nature then but I didn't know anything about it.

I remember the
Mammals
book especially, the drawing of the animals exactly like they were before. My favorites are the ones who can change colors with the seasons so they can hide better. The snowshoe hare is white in the winter and brown in the summer. In the spring and fall it is somewhere in between.

On a piece of my scrap paper I write Thank you, Melody, and carefully trace the picture of the snowshoe hare and all his different disguises. I fold this paper and slide it between the other books where she will find it.

When the laundry is dry we make up the big bed again. My socks and underwear are still warm from the dryer. I can feel them in my pack, between my shoulders.

We are only borrowing the orange plastic sled and the snow-shoes and besides all the firewood is split and the house inside is cleaner than before. Father's snowshoes are wooden and have crosses of sinew and mine are red plastic and are actually Melody's.

We walk and walk and walk. The snowshoes are kind of heavy but they make it easier and Father isn't falling through the crust anymore. He pulls his pack and a jug of water on the orange sled which smoothes the snow behind it.

"What are these orange poles?" I say. Thin, they are sticking up through the white snow.

"This is a road," Father says, "but it's closed. They don't plow it. The road is six feet beneath us and these orange poles show where it is."

Later in the afternoon we come to a long slope. Father is in back and I'm in front between his legs on the orange plastic sled. Slow at first we push with our hands and then slide racing down. The wind is cold in my face and the white snow kicks out as we shout just missing the trees at the bottom and not stopping, leaning hard and still going with the sled skidding across icy stretches.

None of the buildings in the town of Sisters are really more than one story tall. Slush splashes up from the tires of cars and pickup trucks. Standing at the post office you can see in every direction, to the four edges of the town. I stand there next to Father who is delighted since there's two checks in the post office box he set up before we left Portland. Everything is working like he planned it to work. He deposits the checks in the Wells Fargo ATM but doesn't withdraw any money since he has plenty already.

"I'm delighted," he says. "How about we find a restaurant and eat something?"

The sun is out and the sky above is blue but there's clouds resting all along the mountains. In the window next to me stand cowboy boots with flowers painted on their sides.

"Are you limping?" Father says.

"No," I say. "I'm just used to wearing those snowshoes. Do you think we should walk together? I could cross the street."

"Let's not worry about that," he says. "Not today. I'd like to walk with you."

He takes my hand. Our snowshoes and the sled and Father's big pack are all hidden at the edge of town. All we have is my small pack so we look like regular people walking down the street. No one hardly looks at us.

It's the middle of the afternoon so not many people are eating at Bronco Billy's. Some of the furniture looks like wagon wheels and the menu says it has the best hamburger in the state of Oregon. I have a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. Father has a garden burger. We share a chocolate milkshake.

"I can't believe I'm warm enough to eat this," I say.

Father's got those same maps spread out on the table while we eat. His finger traces along a crease.

"Are we staying here?" I say.

"Close by," he says.

"You still have a lot of friends here?"

"Some, maybe," he says. "People move around all the time and that was years ago."

"Before I was with you."

"Exactly," he says. "And now I feel like things are really finally changing."

"Better or worse?" I say.

"Better," Father says. "Like we could get lucky for a while. I haven't felt that way in I don't know."

"Are you still mad at me about the bus?"

"I wasn't mad, Caroline. Everything is working again," he says. "Now we just need to find a place to stay for a little while."

"Inside or outside?" I say.

"Oh, my girl," he says. "My heart."

Grocery shopping always makes me feel that something in the future days is promised or settled, that there will be the time and a place to eat the food we buy. At Ray's IGA in Sisters we get bread and peanut butter and packets of oatmeal. Matches and candles. Raisins. Apples and carrots.

We eat the bananas as we walk across the parking lot since it's hard to carry them without crushing them. The sun is down. It's fun to sneak out of town, separate from Father but keeping him in sight. We watch for headlights, hide behind trees.

When we get back to where we hid our things it's all still there. Our packs are on top of the snowshoes to stay dry and the sled is on top of it all with two branches from a pine tree pulled over it by Father to hide the orange color. No one has found it. We switch the food from the plastic grocery bags into Father's red frame pack and then we buckle on our snowshoes and start up the slope.

The day was so sunny and the sky blue but already the storm is coming when we don't need it. Neither one of us says anything about the snow as it starts out and this time it doesn't start slowly.

"We could just walk back down and hide our things again," I say. "We could get a motel room at that place near the grocery store."

"We can't afford it," Father says.

"You have all the money," I say. "And we just got those two checks from the post office."

"I mean the exposure," he says, "not the expense."

"You could get a room for yourself," I say, "and I could sneak in later."

Father stops for a moment and looks back toward the lights of town that we can still see down below.

"No," he says. "This is better. This will be better. Trust me."

The snow blows down hard and sideways and slanting. It's cold in my eyes.

"Walk behind me," Father says. "You'll get a little cover, that way."

He's pulling the sled though so I can't walk too close and the toe of my snowshoes keeps kicking it.

"Caroline," he says.

"I'm not used to how long they are," I say.

I can tell Father is checking all the houses we see in case they're empty but there's lights in the windows so far.

"It's the weekend," he says. "That's why they're out here."

"Why?"

"These are just their vacation houses," he says.

Smoke twists out of chimneys and inside people are probably sitting watching the orange fire and its sparks crackling.

"Those people don't care if anyone sees their smoke," I say.

"Yes, Caroline," Father says. "That's right."

"That would be nice," I say, and he doesn't say anything back.

We keep walking past big houses and log cabins and A-frames like the one we slept in last night even if that seems longer ago.
I know Father won't let us go back there even if we could find it. It's a long way away. Even if it was close it wouldn't matter since we couldn't see or find it.

A dog barks somewhere, the sound mostly lost in the snow. After a while I can't tell if we're walking up or downhill. The snow swirls around from every direction and blows straight up from the ground.

For a while there's the thin posts like orange fishing poles sticking up through the white snow, a curving line that we can follow one at a time since that's as far as we can see.

"Is this the same road as before?" I say.

"No," Father says. "I don't know. We'll find someplace. Don't worry. Right up ahead somewhere."

"When we left the city," I say, "you told me you would take me someplace that wasn't so cold."

My snowshoes seem heavier than his. They look like they're heavier. Even if we could hibernate I don't know where we'd go. All we have left to follow now is the poles for the electrical and telephone lines that could be stretching to a city a hundred miles away. The sled keeps dumping the packs off and I have to put them back on top.

"Are we walking in circles?" I say. "I haven't even seen the road posts for a long time. Those orange ones."

"I don't know," Father says. "I'm trying to guess where the moon should be."

We can't even follow our tracks back to where we knew where we were since they are all filled in. The snow is only falling thicker. It's later and it's darker.

"Over there," I say. "Look."

"What is it?" Father says.

The little shack is almost buried in the snow. Its outside curves, rounded. Two windows glow only a little like there's something inside but not enough light to really see anything. We stand there. The snow piles up on our heads and shoulders since we aren't moving.

We walk closer next to black cords of wire that snake down off the telephone pole and down low, just above the snow to the tiny round building.

Father knocks on the wooden door three times and nothing happens. He knocks again louder. He pushes the door and it scrapes open. Snow shifts down from the roof above.

"In anybody inside?" Father says.

There is a faint glow and a buzzing sound at first.