On Highways to Campton
Anita cut her hair with the scissors on
her utility knife in a gas station restroom in rural New Hampshire. It was one
of those bathrooms that opened only with a key attached to a long wooden
paddle, and as she wiped up with a paper towel, an old man banged impatiently
at the door. In the toilet bowl, her hacked off hair made strange shapes before
Anita set her heel on the metal lever and flushed the whole mess down. In a
matter of minutes, Anita had lost three years’ worth of growth, so that looking
in the mirror, she had a saw-toothed bob to go with her broken nose and
twice-split lip.
She grinned at herself, pulling her
mouth wide before ruffling and smoothing her hair with wet fingers. She was
hardly recognizable. Outside in the parking lot, Anita tread over millions of
tiny dead mayflies, nodding to the middle-aged woman leaning against a rusted
minivan.
In between draws on her cigarette, the
woman called out to Anita as she walked toward the highway, “Where you off to,
darlin’?”
Anita stalled, one foot inside the
station’s ring of yellow light, the other outside it. The woman smiled
with square teeth as she flicked her cigarette onto the concrete, and Anita
noticed the woman’s toes beneath the hem of her jeans.
“The White Mountains,” Anita called out
too loudly, her voice booming in the summer air, “by way of Campton.”
The gas pump thumped to a stop, and the
woman jerked at the nozzle like it was heavy, her stringy muscles standing out
on her thin red arms. Over her shoulder she yelled, “Campton. I know Campton.
Little shithole of a town if you ask me. Far from here though.” She slammed the
gas cover closed, swiping her hands on her thighs. “I don’t mean any trouble,
but it’s a ways from here. You got someone coming for you or something?”
Anita sighed, gazing out into the
blue-black night. She could make out the ridges of a mountain range over the
rattling lights of the highway. “I’ve got someone coming for me alright.”
The woman gave Anita a funny, sideways
look. She smoothed a hand across her dried lips and leaned forward, running her eyes
over Anita. “Did he do that to you?”
Anita sank slowly out of the light,
her worn boot heels clicking on the pavement. She didn’t have time for stories
about Bo, stories for how her face got this way or why she kept losing parts of
herself in gas station restrooms.
“He’s the fuckup, not you, ya know?
Here, I’m Marianne,” the woman said, fumbling around in her fake leather purse.
“Have a coupla cigs. I’m trying for Concord tonight. That’s not so far from
Campton. If that’s where you want to go.”
Marianne held out what was left of her
pack, and even though Anita didn’t smoke, she found herself stepping forward
and taking it. Under the glare of the station bulbs, Marianne’s skin looked
yellow, her wispy hair badly colored from a bottle. She pursed her mouth and
whistled as she got her first good look at Anita.
“Jeez, you’re just a kid. Come on.”
Marianne slammed the minivan with her knee while working the handle, nodding at
the slight pop as the door unstuck from its seal. “The highway’ll still be
there in Concord.”
Bo had told Anita no. Keep your head down, don’t ask for nothing, take handouts from
nobody. Me and you, he’d pulled Anita
right up against him, his nose in her hair, hands skimming low over her waist. We’re only good when we’re in this together.
Me and you, Anita, remember that.
Anita walked around the minivan with its
bald tires and dirty windows, waiting as Marianne leaned across the seats to
unlock the passenger door. She wasn’t seventeen anymore and Bo, skinny and
beautifully brown, wasn’t the only one who knew a thing or two about making it
on the highway. Anita slid in, leaning the familiar weight of her backpack
against her knees. Marianne fiddled with the ignition, swearing as she jiggled
the key and pumped the pedals. Anita stared at her lap, at the dirt under her
nails, at the tattoo on the inside of her wrist. Bo’d bought it for her, just
like she’d got one for him, after their first robbery. If Anita squinted and
fisted her hand, the wings of the tiny black bowtie quivered and jumped, a
fat-bodied fly. She pulled at her fleece until the sleeve
covered all but the corners of it.
With a great mechanical shudder, the
minivan nosed out into the New Hampshire night. Marianne turned onto the
highway ramp as Anita cranked down her window. The wind grabbed at small hairs
she’d missed in her hurried shake out, carrying them into the backseat. Anita
tried to follow one, but her eyes got caught on a battered baby carrier
strapped to the bench. A small, lumpy turtle stared back at her from its perch,
and Anita wondered why anyone would make a kid’s toy look sad.
“You look like a Susan to me. A Susan or
a Jane. That was my sister’s name, ya know?” Marianne clicked her tongue
against the roof of her mouth. “But sometimes people don’t look like their
name. Ever met one of them? Strangest thing, not looking like your name.”
Anita wanted to say something about it,
but all she could think of was her cousin Maxine, whom everyone called Max
until she turned sixteen and became the prettiest girl in the county. Or there
was Bo, who was really Bowdin, although she didn’t know whether that fit or
not. When you got too close to somebody, it wasn’t easy to decide those kinds
of things anymore, when Bo was always Bo.
“What’s in Concord?” Anita asked over
the rush of air.
“You’re a long way from home, aren’t ya?
The way you say things gives it away. What’s that, a Southern drawl?”
Anita didn’t really know about home anymore. There’d been a house in
Louisiana, six sisters, two brothers and a backyard that was never quite big
enough. There’d been motel rooms along highways, Bo, and a pool with beetles,
round and slick like grapes, drifting on the water.
The minivan rumbled noisily over the
broken-up highway pavement, and tsking, Marianne muttered, “I’m so fucking
tired of this road and all these shitty little towns.” Looking at Anita slumped
in the seat beside her, Marianne sighed, “Maybe you’re on to something, heading
for the mountains.” Anita didn’t turn from the window, watching the shifting
shapes on the glass as Marianne shrugged and fumbled with the radio.
After the Concord exit, Marianne pulled
over and Anita got out. Before the minivan could make a run at the road, Anita
leaned in through the window. “For the cigarettes, you know, and the ride and
everything.”
Marianne nodded, her thin hair puffed up
like a bird’s down. “Ya sure you don’t want me to take you into town or
something?”
Anita shook her head, tossing a roll of
twenties onto the floor underneath the glove compartment. She didn’t want
Marianne to have time to count the bills before driving off, not when she would
want to know where they’d all come from.
Anita walked north, tracking the signs for
Campton in the flashing bursts of headlights.
You
gotta remember it like this, Bo said as he traced
felt tip pen over Anita’s hand, 190 into
495 into 93—it’s a straight shot into the mountains. All you gotta do is look
right here, just right here. He waggled her fingers and before Anita could
jerk away, or slap him, or tell him how angry she was for what he’d gotten them
in to, he bit the corner of her mouth and slid his hands roughly over her ribs,
his rings knocking against the dips in her bones. It’ll just be a while, we’ll just be apart for a while, that’s all,
and he tugged at her split-ends. We gotta
be smart about it, about everything, lay low. You know, Anita, you know that
it’s always gonna be me and you.
A brief moment of darkness was broken as
a car crested one of the highway’s ridges, and in the white light, Anita curled
her fingers into her hand, Bo’s pen marks running over her palm like a new life
line.
...
The dog nosed Anita’s ear, gentled its
teeth around the neck of Anita’s fleece, and rested its long-snouted head on
the curve of Anita’s hipbone. Under a picnic table at a truck stop, Anita
frowned. She had been dreaming about the afternoon when she and Bo’d held up a
convenience store in southern Alabama. The place smelled like piss and potato
chips, fly guts gumming up the windows. She’d had a particular feeling that day
when she’d looked at the clerk, a fat kid, nose pierced through the septum like
a bull. He’d had beautifully long eyelashes like her younger sister Delilah. Bo
was screaming and showing off his canines and molars, his face lit up like he
was meant for this. Outside, a little boy was catching bugs on the sidewalk,
small fingers easing over the hard shells and fat bellies of their delicate
bodies. When Bo and Anita walked out three minutes later with a backpack full
of twenties and fists full of lotto tickets, Anita almost turned around and
said I’m sorry. Bo laughed at the
little boy as he scuttled away like a crab from the quick swinging door. A
round caterpillar lay in his open palm, and Bo mussed the boy’s hair as he
passed. Flying down the highway, her knuckles tight over her knees, the wet
summer air and the taste of mayonnaise in her mouth made Anita feel something
like shame. Bo was electric in the seat beside her, excitement in his sweat,
whistling the same two chords like he always did after a robbery. It had taken
years, but he had finally found the one thing he was good at, the way in which
he could be exceptional.
The dog was making some sort of rumbling
sound, a deep humming whine as it pressed its body up against Anita’s back. Had
Anita been more awake or farther from her memories, she would have startled; as
it was, she rolled over and pushed her face against the dog’s black and white
fur as if it were Jag, the mutt she’d left in Louisiana. The dog’s head came up
at the sound of a short bark, ears angled forward over its slim skull.
“Connie! Sister! Hip, girls!”
The dog slunk out from under the table,
stomach low in the grass as she sunk down onto her haunches. Sitting up, Anita
swore as she knocked her head, blearily eyeing boots and a faded pair of jeans.
“Sister, I said hip girl! What’s wrong?
You find something down there?”
Sister yipped, and Anita scooted
backwards as the legs dropped. It was hardly morning, and the man peered at
Anita closely through the slats and wood planks, his dark eyes sharp beneath
the brim of a Stetson.
“Will you look at that,” he said after a
pause. “You’ve found yourself a girl, Sister.”
Anita flushed, dropping the man’s
unhurried gaze as she tossed her bag out from under the table, then quickly
wriggled after it. She was aware of being watched by three sets of curious eyes
and turning around, she tried to look older. The man—about sixty, long gray
hair, big belt buckle, browned arms—considered Anita for a few moments. Sister
slid around the table, knocked up against Anita and nibbled at her hand until
Anita—absently, naturally—smoothed her fingers under the dog’s jaw. Looking
down, Anita thought Sister had a way about her that was hard and ready, like
she was a dog that did work. The other, a big Husky, stood with her feet set
apart, eyes turned back toward her master.
“I used to do a lot of this kind of
stuff when I was young. Wanted to see the whole country from the road.” The man
hesitated and Anita felt as though he were sizing her up, checking her over
like a horse. “Why don’t you let me get you breakfast? Some folks did me a good
turn all those years ago, seems only right.”
There was something about him that Anita
wanted to trust. She didn’t know if it was how he stood, or if it was the
careless way he’d braided back his hair, or if it was the two dogs, both solid
and toothy, glancing at him like Anita had found herself looking at Bo. And
yet, the night in Massachusetts—the young man’s square hands, his wide, quick
smile—was not easily forgotten, not when she was always seeing her busted face
in mirrors or glass windows or the soft metal of paper towel dispensers. Anita
hesitated, considered, felt Sister’s weight against her leg like Jag’s. She did
not think that she believed in cruel men with good dogs.
“Campton, any chance you’re going by
Campton? I mean, it’s close isn’t it?”
“I’ve been seeing signs for a diner in
Campton, claims it’s got the best homemade pies. Can’t be so far from here.”
Anita nodded, brushed her palm across
her pocket for the feel of her jackknife, the one she’d got for herself two
weeks ago, the one she’d got for herself after. She would always remember the
interior of that car perfectly, the smooth leather seats, the smell of a
peppermint air-freshener, the shine of pixelated digits marking time on the
polished dashboard. There was his blonde hair—so removed from Bo’s wild, black
curls—and his left elbow like an anchor sinking into her back. She did not know
how she would begin to go about telling Bo. The man before Anita shifted
slightly, tapped the Husky lightly on her nose.
Anita nodded, said “Yeah, all right
then, if it’s no trouble.”
“Trouble?” He laughed. “Oh, if you’d
known the trouble I know. Hip, Connie! Sister!” Anita watched the dogs run to
the car, heads turning from side to side as their noses pulled at smells. The
man smiled a half smile and held out his hand. “I’m August. You’ve met Sister,
Connie.” He nodded at the dogs as they sniffed around the tires of a pickup
truck.
Anita swallowed, took up August’s
handshake. “I’m, well, I guess I’m Annie, I mean that is”—Anita grinned
nervously—“that’s what my sister’s always liked to call me.”
...
“It’s Saint Francis,” August said with a
nod toward the small, laminated portrait dangling from his rearview mirror,
“protector of animals and, I do believe, stowaways. I’d reckon you two ought to
get along just fine.”
Anita hadn’t asked, but she’d looked for
a good long while. Sister was half on her lap, chin on her paws.
“I know.”
“Do you now?”
“We were Catholic, back home,” Anita
said distantly, her eyes following the folds of the road, “and Mom wanted each
of us to have our own saint. She gave Saint Francis to my older brother,
Milton.” Anita remembered the portraits, like little slips of paper or baseball
cards, and how they all fought over them. When it had ended, she’d found Saint
Clare between her fingers, a prayer—Oh
Lord, protect these sisters whom I cannot protect now—printed in delicate
cursive at the bottom.
Like Sister, August made a low noise in
his throat, which Anita took to be a laugh. “I guess I can’t say anybody gave
me Saint Francis. If anything, I took him for myself. Got ahold of him and
didn’t let go. Found it in a junk store after my best dog died.” He shook his
head, continued, “And I thought, well, Saint Francis and I have got something
in common, and anyway, it’s not so bad having him around to remind me of
Brother.”
Anita looked down at Sister and thought
about Jag. He must have been eight when she last saw him, and that’d been
almost three years ago. It wasn’t unlikely he was dead, or that her father’d
turned him out. August was quiet, left boot propped up on one of the plastic
grooves in the door, right hand settled on Connie’s scruff as he drove. The cab
of his truck was filled with all sorts of things: leashes and muzzles, wool
blankets and biscuits and brown tennis shoes. Maps, the kinds from visitors’
centers, gas stations, and truck stops, found themselves jammed in seat pockets
and leaking from visors.
“Something waiting for you in Campton,
then?”
Anita hesitated, tried to fill it out.
“I’m going to hike the White Mountains.”
August gave Anita a sidelong glance.
“Not like that you’re not.” It was a hard sort of silence. “Look, it isn’t any
of my business,” August said slowly as he signaled right for the exit, “but
those shoes hardly have another mile in them, and if you’d had a tent, well
you’d have been sleeping in it.” August ruffled Connie’s ears and looked at
Anita, but she turned away toward the window, watching the rundown storefronts
off of Campton’s main drag, the fast food joints and the quilt shops and the
family-run grocery store. It was not unlike the town which had caused Anita and
Bo so much trouble—the one where things had gone wrong, the one that had gotten
her here—and she wondered if the bank would look the same, blue and white brick
with its name in dipping gold letters. Sister smelled Anita’s fear and tensed
her lean muscles.
August turned into the parking lot
that a crumbling diner shared with a gas station, “Brother was a stray,” August
said softly. “Sister too. Me even.” Connie’s head came up as August
downshifted, the dog letting out a happy yip. “But you look like a tough kid,
you could be all right. Don’t need an old man telling you how hard it is out
there.” August smiled like he’d thought of something funny, brushed his
knuckles along the top of Connie’s black snout and stepped out of the cab. “I’m
going to get them some water,” he called across the hood to Anita. “Go on and
get us a table. Ask if they’ve got fish tacos.”
Anita could have run. She thought
about it. August was laughing as Connie and Sister pushed up against his legs,
talking to them quietly as he swatted at their backs.
The diner was paneled in cheap wood
with baby-blue upholstery and frilly socks for the waitresses, the kind that
turned down at the ankle. Anita hadn’t been in one of these places since she’d
worked at Marylou’s, and she got so nervous that she blurted out, “Fish tacos!”
halfway through the hostess’s question. The girl looked at her and her dirty
clothes and sighed loudly through bean-shaped nostrils, “That’s not the kind of
food we serve here, ma’am. Now, was that party of one?”
“Two.”
The girl smiled reflexively and
Anita followed her to a booth by the front windows. Sitting, she looked at her
lap, took a deep breath and shivered. The whole thing was Bo, down to the paper
placemats and sticky table sheen. Anita had been clicking her heels together
like Dorothy when Leni had stopped vomiting and stuck her head out of the
toilet long enough to tell Anita to cover her tables at Marylou’s. Leni was
almost thirty, pretty in a white trash sort of way, and pregnant, although no
one knew if this time it would stick. Anita hadn’t argued, she never argued
then. It was why people had liked her so much, or had at least left her alone.
She didn’t see him at first. She’d noticed his father’s military haircut and
the shine of patent shoes under the table and the salt shaker that she’d need
to refill. Anita had stood in front of the booth and fiddled with her pen,
running through the customary verses.
Bo sat across from his father like
something feral, lips tight over his teeth. He was small-boned, large-eyed,
hard-mouthed, and Anita had sensed it, or smelled it on him: the rabid will,
the perverse strength, his belief that he was capable of anything. Standing
there stupidly, she had looked at his angry, wild face and thought here was a
boy who could change her.
“No fish tacos, then?” August asked as
he pushed himself into the narrow booth. “Crying shame. Here.” He set a little
square of paper down beside Anita’s fork, “It’ll do you some good, I imagine.”
Anita picked up the watery portrait
of Saint Francis. The laminate was peeling up around the edges, bubbling like plastic
wrinkles along the corners. On the back he’d written something in blue pen.
“What’s this?”
August looked up from the menu,
frowning. “An old friend of mine lives about thirty miles west of here. She’s
got some acres and a liking for taking in strays. To work, mind you. I bring up
a couple of dogs every few years, the ones getting too old.” He looked out at
his truck, at Connie and Sister. “Thought someday you might want that address.
Then again, maybe not.”
August ordered eggs, tea and toast.
Anita asked for bacon and biscuits, eyeing the payphone in the middle of the
lot.
“Is that where Sister will go?”
August nodded, running his fingers
over his closed eyes. “It’s where she’s going after this summer. I train dogs
to work with livestock. Connie and Sister show what I can’t say sometimes. But
it’s a young dogs’ game.” He laughed. “And Sister could use some of her own
land to run. Jenny lucked out, got herself a place right under those White
Mountains of yours.”
The waitress plunked down their
meals with a red-capped bottle of syrup. August smiled like it was his
birthday, slicing the yellow of his egg in two quick strokes. Anita remembered
that Delilah liked them like that too, that her littlest sister, Tabitha, would
always wail at the sight of the egg, all thick and wobbly on her breakfast
plate. Anita lined up her fingers along her fork, stopped, and stood up,
knocking the tops of her legs against the table and upsetting tea from August’s
mug. “I’ll be back,” she said, holding up a dirt-darkened fist.
There were three stalls in the diner’s
bathroom, all cranberry pink like a tongue. The ceramic of the sink basin was
deep, and Anita scoured her hands with a smear of purplish soap. She looked up,
stared at her face like it was somebody else’s, and saw a blunt-nosed girl,
hard and ready. At Marylou’s, at home, they wouldn’t have recognized her, and
that was Bo’s doing. But she knew she wouldn’t have fooled Jag, her smell being
hers, covered and masked but never different. It wasn’t the same, she realized,
for the things Bo left on her. She passed over the carefully preserved lines on
her palm once, then again. Like the tattoo, this was how Bo marked her.
In the mirror, Anita thought she had dog
eyes. She worked at her hand using her nails, pulling Bo out of her skin,
remembering the slow Louisiana day she’d snuck him into her bedroom. Jag had
lifted the right side of his lip and pushed up a razorback. I’ve shot bigger dogs, Bo’d said, and
Anita had laughed stupidly, not knowing it was true. She’d hauled Jag out by
his collar, ignoring the slide of his claws until they’d stopped and he’d
settled, nose pushed tight into the space below the door.
Bo was wrong to think she’d always
be the Louisiana waitress, following a map on her hand just because he’d drawn
it, just because he’d said so. The changes he’d done to her would go: the
tattoo—a bowtie for Bo—would be sucked out or traced over, the pen marks—Anita
scrubbed unhurriedly, slow and ruthless—would wash down the open drain.
Anita knew that if Bo had been
there, Sister would have laid down her ears and growled.
...
Anita walked out of the diner with wet
hands, picked her way around parked cars, and looked up at Sister when she
barked, her snout pressed through the cab window. She fished change from one of
the small pockets on her bag, took up the payphone and dialed, looking back at
August as he watched her through the diner’s glass.
It rang five times before anybody
answered.
“It’s Anita,” she said, which was
stupid. Delilah would have known her voice from anyone.
“Annie?”
“How are you?” Anita pulled her
sleeve nervously up and over the tattoo. “How’s home? How’s Jag doing these
days?”
Static played along the line, “Jag’s
gone, Annie,” her sister began haltingly. “He ran away two days after you.
We’ve got Kip now. He’s a nice dog.” Anita stared at her ripped shoes, at the
pavement and the places it was cracking up. Her mouth felt sore, her eyes old.
Jag had been her dog. He had been hers. Delilah’s voice hardened, “Annie, where’d
you go? Milton saw this picture of Bo in the newspaper, something about a bank
robbery in Connecticut?”
“I’m not with Bo, Del.”
Sister barked but didn’t quite cover
Delilah’s snort.
“Can you hear that, Del? That’s my dog.”
Anita looked at August hunched over his eggs, down at Saint Francis laying on
her palm. The marks of Bo’s pen were gone, leaving Anita with nothing but a
bundle of her own hand lines. “It’s beautiful here, Del. I can see mountains
over the highway and everything is always this pretty green.”
“Annie,” Delilah said, anger
sharpening her articulation. “Where are you?”
Anita almost grinned. She could see
Delilah in their kitchen, threading her fingers through the telephone cord, Kip
at her feet where Jag used to be.
“I’m in Campton, Del, in New
Hampshire.” Anita turned Saint Francis over, traced August’s clumsy
handwriting. “It’s not much really, but I think you’d like it.”
“You have to come home, Annie.”
Delilah’s voice climbed octaves, “I want you to come home.”
She had thought it would be just the
two of them—Anita and Bo—forever, maybe. She didn’t know when things had
changed, when it had started to feel wrong, when she had closed her eyes,
looked at the oncoming years and realized that she could not keep doing this.
Perhaps it was around the time she started noticing the people at the gas
stations, old men with mismatched shoes, kids with tootsie rolls in their
cheeks, girls about her age with beautiful skin.
“You know I won’t come back,” Anita
said slowly. “But I’ve got plans, Del.” And it was not untrue, not when she
could see it clearly—the perfect shapes of dog legs and dog haunches, the long
stretches of every kind of green. August had said the woman’s name was Jenny.
“I’ve got to go now Del. Tell them all I’m fine, yeah?” And Anita hung up
before Delilah could say anything more, could argue or yell or try to stop her.
Walking towards the diner, Anita stopped
at the sound of Sister’s bark, watching the dog needle her teeth into the air,
her oil eyes slick. “That’s my dog,” she said. And then again, “That’s my dog.”
