The Fragile World (12 page)

curtis

After her drive on the salt flats, Olivia was giddy, putting her feet up on the dashboard, even removing her seat belt for the quickest of moments to struggle out of the cocoon of her sweatshirt. One fear down. How many millions to go?

When we stopped for lunch and gassed the Explorer, she went inside the Quik Mart by herself and came out lugging a twenty-pound bag of charcoal, grinning. We stopped not far from the Metaphor Tree sculpture and made our own monument on the flat canvas of salt, while cars and tanker trucks whizzed by on I-80. First we wrote THE KAUFMANS, and then I stepped back to take some pictures while Olivia continued, adding each new piece of charcoal with studied precision. HERE IN SPIRIT, it said—“for Mom and Daniel,” she explained.

I turned away, tears smarting in my eyes.
Remember this,
I wanted to tell her. Remember the way the lake reflects the mountains, a perfect doubling of the world. Remember everything good, so you can balance out the bad.

We spent the afternoon wandering around Salt Lake City and the evening in front of the TV with a cheese and extra pepperoni pizza. Olivia fell into a fully zonked-out, open-mouthed sleep, but I stayed awake for a long time, thinking of the gun and Robert Saenz.

In the morning we drove on, Salt Lake City disappearing in the rearview mirror. Olivia pronounced the barren landscape “vastly less interesting than yesterday” and retreated into the world of her black hoodie. As we crested a hill, the engine on the Explorer revved suddenly, the needle on the rpms shooting from 2 to 5 and sinking down again.

“Whoa,” Olivia said, shucking off her headphones. “Is that supposed to happen?”

“I don’t think so.” I considered pulling over, but the Explorer kept right on churning along, ribbons of highway vanishing beneath our wheels and disappearing in the rearview mirror. I shrugged. “Seems to be fine.”

Olivia fished between the seats and pulled out the atlas. “Where are we stopping tonight?”

“Cheyenne.”

I watched as she creased the pages open at Wyoming and traced her finger along the red line of the interstate. “So, we’re only two away right now, and tomorrow we’ll only be one away.”

“Days, you mean?”

“I mean states. We’re two away.”

“By that logic, we’re only three away from Canada, and seven or eight away from the East Coast.”

“Why don’t we go there afterward?” Olivia asked. “We could stop in Omaha for a while, and then keep going to somewhere, like, I don’t know, Atlantic City. Or one of those tiny little islands off the coast of Maine.”

“Right,” I said, anything more frozen in my throat. When we reached Omaha, I would be leaving without her, sneaking off late after she and Kathleen had settled in or early, while they were still asleep, when Kathleen’s breath was coming out in her soft, sighing snore, when Olivia’s face was buried between two pillows. When they woke, I would be gone.

We were only two away from Kathleen now, which meant that I was only four or five, at the most, away from Robert Saenz. The mile markers along I-80 had been slowly ticking off our progress, one tiny green rectangle after another. Two more nights in hotels, maybe six more stops for gas and bathroom and prepackaged convenience fare: packets of chili-lime peanuts, giant cinnamon-sugar-covered muffins, sodas in Styrofoam cups. Two more continental breakfasts, two more fast-food lunches, two more dinners at diners, unless we made good time to Omaha and ate that last meal at Kathleen’s.

It was going too slow and going incredibly fast, both at once.

And then, like a practical application of Murphy’s Law, the Explorer did this weird chugging kind of thing and lurched forward, then choked, then lurched again.

Olivia said, “Um...”

We were going up a hill, if you could call it that. It was more like a gentle rise, not a serious climb like the one just outside Salt Lake City, but for some reason the Explorer staggered forward, as if out of gas, or maybe out of breath. I steered to the side of the road and came to a stop. The car was still running, but nothing happened when I put my foot on the gas. After a moment, I turned off the ignition.

We were quiet for a stunned moment, and then Olivia chirped, “Now we just have to wait for that nice gentleman from the Motor Club to show up.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“
Groundhog Day,
remember? We must have watched that a dozen times together.”

I chuckled, and then, letting the absurdity of the situation sink in, I threw back my head and laughed.

We were in the middle of nowhere. Traffic whizzed past on the freeway, going far too fast to stop. Mostly these were trucks, speeding onward, needing to make good time on the road. When people talked about population explosions and a lack of available land, etc., they were clearly discounting eastern Utah and western Wyoming. It was miles of nothing, as far as the eye could see.

“Okay,” I announced. “I’m just letting the engine relax for a minute, and then I’ll start her up again.”

“Is that a proven mechanic’s technique, letting the engine ‘relax’?”

“I know very little about proven mechanic techniques.” In fact, there were exactly four things I knew how to do to a car: replace the battery, fix a flat, jump-start an engine and change the oil. Somehow, I suspected this was a more complicated problem.

Olivia nodded gravely. “Sounds like a good enough technique to me, though.”

“Here goes. One, two...” On three, I turned the key in the ignition, the engine started, and I turned to grin at Olivia. “See? It just needed to relax.” I grasped the gearshift, shifting from Park to Drive, and gave the car a little gas. Nothing. I tried again. Nothing.

“I can’t help but notice that we’re not moving,” Olivia commented.

I turned off the engine, turned it on, went nowhere and repeated the process once again. “Well, kiddo,” I said. “Time for Plan B.”

Olivia reached into her backpack, rustled around and came up with her Fear Journal.

“What are you going to write? ‘Breaking down in the middle of nowhere’?”

She didn’t look up. “That and getting picked up by a seemingly normal rancher who turns out to be a psychotic killer who hangs his victims upside down in his basement until the blood drains completely out of their bodies.”

I wanted to say something funny like
That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,
but Olivia was actually writing this down, her brows narrowing with focus. “Geez, Liv,” I said and, releasing my seat belt, stepped out of the car. It was sunny, but the air was crisp. I pulled out my cell phone. No bars. Twenty paces ahead, at the crest of the hill, I finally got some reception. After some consideration, I dialed 9-1-1. It didn’t seem like an emergency, exactly, but I wasn’t sure what else to do. If Kathleen were here, she would have located our AAA card by now. Of course, Kathleen would also have renewed the membership when it expired, and I hadn’t bothered.

“Dad?” Olivia was standing behind me, her arms tucked into the body of her sweatshirt, the sleeves flapping loose. I held up a finger to quiet her while I talked to the dispatcher.

When I finished, I slipped my phone back into my pocket and repeated the news. “Someone’s coming to tow us to Lyman,” I said.

“What’s Lyman?”

“Nearest town, I guess.”

Olivia frowned. “I haven’t seen any signs for Lyman.”

“That’s because psychotic killers who hang their victims upside down prefer to keep their locations anonymous.”

“Dad!”

We waited on the side of the road for about forty-five minutes, me pacing in front of the car and Olivia sitting inside it, probably thinking of more ways this could turn out badly. She didn’t even know the worst of it, that there was a revolver wrapped in one of my T-shirts and wedged tightly into the spare tire compartment, where I had been planning to keep it until Oberlin. This problem with the Explorer, whatever it was, threw a wrench into my plan. I didn’t have a holster; I hadn’t exactly been planning to walk around with a revolver tucked into my waistband. Could I leave the gun in the car, and leave the car in someone else’s hands?

“How long has it been?” Olivia called. “Maybe they’ve forgotten about us.”

Just then a car passed us slowly and pulled over to offer help. It was an older couple; whatever they could offer probably wasn’t going to get the Explorer back on the road. I urged them on with a friendly wave.

“You were our last hope!” Olivia yelled after them mournfully through the open window.

“You know,” I told her, “It could be worse.”

“Of course it could. We could be in the middle of the Mojave when it was a hundred-and-thirty degrees.”

“Or a massive snowstorm.”

“Tornado.”

“Wildfire.”

“And I could have finished my Big Gulp already.”

“And the gas station could have been out of apple-cinnamon muffins,” I added.

“And no cell service. That was the problem with the Donner Party right there, wasn’t it? They took their trip about a hundred and fifty years too early.”

“If only they could have held out for a bit longer,” I said, and Olivia doubled over in her seat, cracking up.

I laughed, too, in tight little barks. The more we waited, the more nervous I became. What was I going to do with the gun? If the car was towed away, someone else might find it, steal it, use it. One phone call to law enforcement and my plan to arrive in Oberlin would be an unequivocal failure. I walked around to the back of the Explorer, popping the latch and staring into our mess. Only two days on the road, and somehow the zipper tab on my suitcase had disappeared. Yesterday’s clothes were now balled-up in a mesh laundry bag. My lone tennis shoe, its mate out of sight, probably accounted for the tumbling sound I heard whenever we took a corner. Olivia’s textbooks, all untouched, littered the floor.

“You think you can fix it from back there?” Liv called over her shoulder.

“Very funny. Just trying to straighten up a bit.” When I was sure she was looking the other way, I pulled up the floorboard and peeked into the spare tire well. Zach Gaffaney had handed the gun to me, loaded; I’d removed the cartridges, figuring if I was found with an unloaded weapon it would be better than being found with a loaded weapon. I’d stowed the cartridges carefully, out of Olivia’s sight, and promised myself not to touch the gun until I was in Oberlin. Even unloaded and wrapped in my T-shirt, the gun managed to terrify me—it was unregistered, illegal, recently transported across state lines. But could I leave my unregistered, illegal handgun in the hands of a mechanic, even if there was no need to poke around in my spare tire well? Desperate, I entertained the idea of ditching the gun along the side of the road now and somehow doubling back to get it later.

“Dad?”

I stood up too quickly, cracking the top of my head against the roof of the car and followed her trembling, pointed finger. A tow truck had passed us, was slowly backing up on the side of the road. Leave it to Liv to be terrified of the one person who could actually rescue us. “Get your stuff ready,” I called to her, unwrapping the Colt and wedging it inexpertly in my waistband, where I hoped it was hidden by the untucked hem of my shirt.

The tow truck driver was huge—six-five easily, with a stomach that hung over his belt. “Raymond Ellis,” he boomed, stepping out of the truck. “What have we got here?”

“I’m Curtis Kaufman,” I said, coming around from the back of the car. I’d figured the Colt would be small enough to conceal, but now I wondered if I’d only been kidding myself. Was it obvious I was carrying a weapon? Did it stick out like a sore thumb? I cleared my throat. “Well, the engine starts up fine, but then that’s it.”

“Could be a lot of things. Radiator, transmission...”

I described our sudden acceleration just outside of Salt Lake City, more than an hour ago now.

Raymond whistled. It wasn’t warm, but he was sweating, the way big guys did. “Could be the transmission, then. Anyway, looks like you’ll be needing a tow. Someone’s going to have to look at her.”

Olivia had come up behind me, silent as a thief. I felt, rather than heard or saw, her presence. She was probably assessing Raymond Ellis’s height and weight, trying to figure out the level of threat he posed, or how the two of us might be able to overpower him, if needed.

“What are my options?” I asked. I was doing some calculations of my own—“transmission” had a frighteningly expensive ring to it.

Raymond shook his head a bit. “Well, back to Salt Lake City might be best. Course, that’s a ways in the other direction. You’ve got Cheyenne about three, four hours east. Closest option would be Lyman, maybe ten minutes down the road.”

“There’s a mechanic in Lyman? And services? Because we would probably have to spend the night.”

Raymond considered. “Sure—it’s got all the services you would need. Motel, restaurant, the works. Best mechanic in all of Wyoming is in Lyman.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Is that right?”

Raymond grinned. “Well, I oughta know. He’s my brother.”

A few minutes later, Raymond had the front end of the Explorer off the ground, and Olivia and I were wedged into the front seat of the tow truck, with Olivia’s knees angled sharply toward mine and away from the driver’s seat.

“This is the time for you to say I told you so,” I prompted, but Olivia only shook her head. She wasn’t one to gloat, especially in the worst of circumstances. In fact, she looked more than slightly miserable, her face tucked deep into the recesses of her black hoodie.

Raymond, finished with whatever SUV-wrangling needed to be done, hopped back into the cab and fastened his seat belt. “Next stop Lyman, Wyoming,” he announced, and the truck lurched forward.

olivia

Lyman, Wyoming, might be the last place on earth that anyone would want to get stranded. At least that’s what I was thinking—but as we passed the trailers on the outskirts of town and houses and businesses along the main drag, I realized that some people had chosen to be stranded here, and I ordered myself not to be such a snob.

Dad had assumed a false, nervous cheerfulness, as if he were thrilled by this
new experience.
It was the same sort of fake cheerfulness I’d received from the school secretary when I started my period in the sixth grade, right in the middle of a math test. She’d been absurdly excited for me, producing an alarming array of feminine products from her bottom desk drawer, as if the arrival of my period were the
best thing ever.
Anyway, that’s how Dad was talking about Lyman, as if we’d stumbled on one of America’s best-kept secrets: the small town in the middle of nowhere.

“Look, they’ve even got a bank,” Dad said, pointing out the window at a tiny storefront.

“Last bank until you hit Green River,” Raymond acknowledged proudly.

“And I’ve seen at least two restaurants,” Dad said.

I’d seen them, too. A pizza parlor and a Taco Time, as well as a few other places boasting “Restaurant” and “Saloon” and “Diner”—no other explanation needed. We passed the fire department, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Uinta County Library.

“Up ahead a bit’s another diner,” Raymond said. “Closed Sundays, though.”

“Is today Sunday?” I asked, incredulous. Our trip had a timeless quality to it, as if we were driving and time was passing, but everything around us was standing still. Or maybe it was the opposite—we were standing still, but everything else was advancing into the future. Either way, the sync was definitely off.

But then Dad said, “It’s Wednesday,” and I felt relieved.

“There’s the hotel,” Raymond gestured, slowing for a turn.

I blinked. He must have meant
motel—
The Drift Inn was a single-story structure, with its few rooms laid out in a short row. There were only three cars in the parking lot. It looked cheerful enough, with bright blue trim and white siding, but I had to fight down the urge to grab for my Fear Journal and scribble down
Bates Motel knockoff.
If I had gone insane and was going to store my dead mother somewhere indefinitely, this might be just the place. Our brightly lit, national chain lodgings in Winnemucca and Salt Lake City seemed like a distant dream.

“I’m sure that will be fine,” Dad said, rather optimistically, I thought. It was as if he’d lost the use of advanced vocabulary and could no longer summon appropriate adjectives. Not
fine,
I thought. Not even adequate or sufficient or acceptable.

We pulled into a gravel lot that faced a building with a faded sign: J & E Automotive. There were a few other cars in the lot, rusted-out and in various stages of disrepair. It was like car purgatory—where cars that had been less than perfect during their lives went when they died.

Dad hopped out of the truck, and I slid out, and then Raymond Ellis maneuvered our Explorer into one of three empty garage bays.
Stop being scared,
I ordered myself, even though this was a strategy that never worked.
It doesn’t matter that you’re in the literal middle of nowhere without any transportation—you’re going to be fine.

Dad disappeared into the tiny front office of J & E Automotive, the glass door swinging shut behind him.

“Fine! I’ll wait outside!” I called, to the listening ears of no one.

The auto shop was just off Lyman’s main street, but I saw few signs of life. In one direction was a neat row of homes, each with a massive satellite dish in the front yard, or peeking out from the backyard, or mounted to the roof. Lyman took its TV-watching very seriously. It wasn’t even noon, but the whole place was
Twilight-Zone
quiet. I half expected a tumbleweed to come rolling down the road in a cloud of dust. Instead, a compact car drove by, slowing while its single occupant stared at me, and speeding up again to head out of town.

“Hey,” someone called, the voice too nearby for comfort.

I whirled around, trying to remember my self-defense training—the single useful thing that came out of my two botched attempts at P.E.
SING—Solar plexus, Instep, Nose, Groin.
It was a very useful acronym, although I’d forgotten how to put it into practice. What was a solar plexus again?

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” The guy who was suddenly standing next to me was about my height—which is to say, sort of short for a guy—with shaggy blond hair that covered most of his face. He was wearing an oversize black T-shirt with a picture of a bone and the words “I Found This Humerus.”

“Where did you come from?” I demanded. I looked toward the office of J & E Automotive, wondering if my dad was watching me.
He should be,
I thought. He should be watching right now, ready to charge toward me if this guy made so much as a single move. But of course, he wouldn’t be. He would be facing the other direction entirely, talking to someone behind a counter or signing a form in triplicate. It was amazing how oblivious he was to obvious dangers.

“Over there,” the guy said, pointing. Just beyond the parking lot, I spotted a tiny roadside stand, which was basically a couple of folding tables and a metal chair beneath a faded beach umbrella.

“Oh,” I said, glancing back to the office of J & E Automotive.

He tossed his hair away from his face. “You want to see what I’m selling?”

I looked at him just long enough to notice that his eyes were a greenish-blue, like seawater. “Sorry, I don’t have any money.” That was a lie, though—I had the change from our last convenience-store purchase in my jeans pocket, and it burned there like a shameful secret.

“You don’t have to buy anything. I just wanted to show you.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, “but I’m waiting for my dad. He’s probably going to come out any second now.”

“I doubt that.” He laughed. “That’s my stepdad’s shop. He likes to get all the facts about the cars he works on, kind of like a medical history.”

I hesitated.

“It’s like, literally, fifty feet away,” he said.

“Um...” I felt like telling him that I hate it when people say
literally.
They never actually mean literally. In this case, it was at least a hundred feet away, so literally
not
fifty feet away, and out of view of the office entirely.

“I don’t bite,” he said, sounding hurt.

I gave a last glance in the direction of my absentee father and surrendered with a shrug. We walked side by side, falling into the same pace, the way you can with someone who is exactly your height.

“So you’re from California,” he said, and I looked up, alarmed.

“How do you know that?”

“It’s on your license plate. Shit. Are you always so jumpy?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“What do you think I’m going to do to you?”

I had a thousand smart-ass answers running through my mind, the vocabulary of someone who knows that bad things can happen at any moment, at any time, to any person.
Thank you, Daniel, for this, the most important lesson of my childhood.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you,” I said finally.

“Well, I’m Sam, for starters. Sam Ellis.” He was grinning, and I let myself relax a bit. It seemed unlikely that his grin—part sheepish, part amused—was going to precede any overt violence.

“So, what are you selling?” I asked, even though we were standing right in front of the folding tables at this point, and the answer should have been obvious. One table was strewn with a hodgepodge of secondhand objects, your typical garage-sale fare: paperbacks with cracked spines, mismatched glassware, a VHS copy of
The Breakfast Club,
a sparkly evening clutch that was missing a number of beads. I picked up one of the books—
The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair—flipped through a few pages, and set it down, feeling very glad that I’d lied about having any money.

“Oh, this and that. These are just things I’ve found,” he said, proudly emphasizing the word. “Things that still have some use in them, but people have just thrown out. It’s amazing the things people throw out. You wouldn’t believe.”

I ran a finger over the beaded evening clutch. I could imagine someone throwing it out, actually, since it seemed beyond repair. Worse, it was too brittle—another bead rolled away when it came in contact with my finger. The next table held a dozen or so snow globes, the kind that usually made an appearance in department stores around Christmas, with happy little scenes of European villages or little towns in Vermont under a gentle snowfall. I leaned down for a closer look. “What are these?”

He beamed. “That’s what I wanted you to see. This is what I do. This is my art.”

I bent down, getting a closer look. “You made these?”

“Yep. I’m working on another one right now. Well, the idea for it, I mean. That’s half the trouble, getting the concept right.”

My nose about level with the table, I could see that each of the snow globes held delicate figures, tiny people and buildings and plant life, each intricately assembled out of minuscule scraps of wood, fabric and leaves. I picked one up, holding it closer to my eye.

He toggled back and forth from one foot to another, like a nervous toddler. “Can you guess what that one is?”

“What do you mean, what it is?”

“Well, what do you see?”

I looked closely. Tiny blue-clad figures, about a quarter of an inch tall, were facing a large rock castle. A red flag waved from the battlement. “I’m not sure.”

He looked disappointed. “It’s the storming of the Bastille. You know, the French Revolution?”

“Oh, sure. Now that you say it...” I tilted the snow globe, letting a few flakes tumble, then tipped it all the way over, so that a light, glittery dusting of snow fell over the French Revolution. It was strangely beautiful. “This is really great,” I told him, honestly. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

He pointed down the row of snow globes, identifying them for me. “These are the historical ones—I have the bombing of Hiroshima, the Valentine’s Day Massacre, the Christmas Day tsunami...”

I shivered. His designs were beautiful, but awful, too, full of the kinds of things I saw on the History Channel and then wrote down in my Fear Journal, things that were almost too horrible to name, let alone visualize. I squinted at another globe, which had some tiny figures lying on the ground next to empty half-bushels. “What’s this?”

“Forced famine in Ukraine.”

“Oh.” I felt a bit sick. “Do you sell a lot of these?”

“Well, I’ve only sold one so far, although I’ve had a few people interested. The trouble is, sometimes people want to buy one, and all of a sudden I realize that I can’t possibly sell it. I start to worry that, like, it won’t go to a good home, to someone who would really appreciate it. You know?”

“Sure.” Even considering the limited population that could appreciate a miniature tableau of an unspeakable tragedy, the purchase would be problematic. Where exactly could it be displayed—on a mantel or a nightstand, on top of a media console, next to the flat-screen TV? “Maybe they’re more like museum pieces,” I offered. “I mean, isn’t
Guernica
one of the most famous paintings in the world? But not many people would want it in their homes.”

“I see your point. I do see your point.” Sam was nodding seriously, as if my opinion held incredible value. Then he brightened. “But if there was something you wanted, something not so bleak maybe, I could make it for you. I could do that on a special request.”

I smiled, trying to diffuse his eagerness gently. “I don’t think I’m going to be here very long, though.”

As if on cue, I heard my dad holler, “Olivia!”

“That’s my dad.” I gestured back toward the storefront. “I’d better go. Um, thanks for showing me...”

“That’s your name? Olivia?”

“Yeah.”

He smiled, hair flopping again in front of his eyes. “Olivia. I like that.”

I turned away, but I could feel him watching me. It was an uncomfortable feeling, but not necessarily uncomfortable in a bad way.

“And I’m Sam,” he called after me. “In case you forgot. I’m Sam Ellis.”