On Highways to Campton

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.”