They spent the day keeping themselves busy about the cabin. The heat outside kept them in. Jack found it hard to sit still, his mind racing through the scene from the night before, trying to make sense of the scattered clues and words.
Laura was a quick nurse with Molly. The girl cleaned herself up and was walking around by midafternoon. She talked quietly as if worried to disturb the stillness of the cabin, and Laura did her best to coax some background out of her. She was a scared girl, like one lost in a busy store, searching for her mother. She was bruised up, to say the least, but did not look to have been violated in the worst way imaginable.
Her dark hair hung over her face as protection and accented her darker eyes. With a little white powder, she could have passed for any emo girl in any high school, but her features were natural.
“So why did you leave home?” Laura asked.
“Just felt like the right thing to do.”
“Was it bad there?”
“Not really. Just bored, I guess.”
Home was just outside of Columbus, Ohio. Molly suffered the fate of the typical teenage suburbanite. No matter how domesticated a young heart is, it still seeks a harder edge, not realizing how sharp that edge actually cuts. Usually realization comes after the carotid artery is nicked and there is little strength left to switch paths. For Molly, it appeared that she may have just missed that episode.
With slow recall, she began to recite the ordeal of the diner, the man in the black pickup truck, the cave. The utter hopelessness of the cave. She had no idea how many days it had been. She cried and Laura held her, and then she stopped and continued on, remembering the man coming into the dark with some food. How many times? She lost track.
She told of the madness in his eyes when she thought he was going to strangle her, how she prayed for her mother to come, prayed for anything to save her. Laura wiped the tears from Molly’s face and listened quietly, her heart breaking for this child who had stepped out into a world she was not ready for. Laura would hold her when Molly needed it, and let her sit on her own when her strength returned.
For hours they shared the burden of the girl’s misery until the weight of it no longer crushed her—the trick women have for surviving. Molly sat close to Laura through the morning and seemed to soak in the motherly attention she was receiving.
“I never thought it would end like this. I just wanted to get to LA, you know, see the big lights. Have a little fun. I just got tired of being a nobody in a nothing city.”
“You made it a long way.”
“I made it to the middle of nowhere, huh?”
Laura smiled back, secretly admiring the young girl’s fearlessness in chasing a dream. “That’s more than most people do. It took a lot of guts to come out this far. But you need to match it with a little smarts too. Does your mother know where you are?”
“I called her in Salt Lake City. She cried a lot on the phone. She was scared at first, then she was mad.”
“Sounds about right.”
“She told me to stay in Salt Lake and that she would come get me. I wish I would have done that.”
“Well, there is nothing you can do about that now. Only thing that matters is what you are going to do next.”
“I want to go home,” Molly said, looking up at Jack, who had stopped pacing and seemed to have taken interest in the conversation. “I don’t want this.”
“That might be a good idea,” Laura said, taking the girl’s hand in hers.
“Yeah, assuming Boots lets you out of this shack of his,” Jack blurted.
“Jack!”
“Just saying.”
Molly pulled her hand back and stared at Laura, giving her that Is he going to be all right? look. “Yeah, I think that will be the best thing. Go back home.”
“Good. We’ll get this straightened out, I’m sure,” Laura said.
The door opened and Boots walked in with lunch hanging from his fist. Some animal that had been kicking not more than an hour ago, now stripped of its skin and ready for the fire.
“Ah, good to see you gettin’ around,” he said, eyeing the girl. “I’s goin’ to gets this fixed and get some food in yous.”
Boots made short work of the meal and the cabin filled with the aroma of wild game, panfried in a bit of oil. The three visitors could feel the grease hang in the air and coat them like a pungent lotion but did not complain, the hunger pangs in their stomach overriding any sense of ungratefulness. Soon the group sat down for a Spartan dinner of meat served with an unrecognizable side dish of unearthly greens.
Molly devoured her plate as if she had not eaten in weeks, and Laura generously offered some of her share, which the girl took without reservation. They ate in silence, each to their own thoughts.
After lunch Boots took leave out on the front porch to sit in his chair and chew. Jack followed after him stealthily, the memory of last night’s scolding still weighing heavy on his mind. The image of the nighttime mystery man didn’t sit too well on his heart either. A sense of impending doom lurked behind every thought. He needed to get out of there. To get home. To get back to normal 9-to-5 life, away from all this confusion and meaninglessness.
“So you think we will be able to leave soon?”
“You in such a hurry, huh? What’s the matter, Jack? Getting sick of rabbit already?”
“Look, Boots, I’m grateful for what you’ve done for us—”
“Really?”
“—but we need to get back to our lives. I can’t afford to stay out here longer than I have to.”
“That’s a funny way of putting it, Jack. How long could you have afforded to stay on that highway? Looked to me like you were getting ready to sit out there for a while.”
Always with the guilt, Jack thought. Would he ever be able to live that down? Would he have to bear that mistake for the rest of his life? He could imagine himself back home in the grocery store with Laura, and her asking him what kind of cereal he wanted. He would say corn flakes, and she would respond with “Are you sure that’s what you want? It would be a pity if you were dying on a highway and you suddenly wanted shredded wheat.”
Any mistake Laura ever made would be a free pass. She could pay a bill late, stay out with friends all night, even have an affair with an old high school flame, and all she would have to say was “At least I didn’t almost kill you!”
He would always have this burden. Even though he was sure Laura would not use it to beat him into a lap dog, he could not let it go. He was convinced that Boots sensed this and was using it to get under his skin.
“You got to loosen up, Jack. You’ll get home soon enough. You think I enjoy you being here acting all uppity?”
“I guess not.”
“You got that right. Why don’t you go inside and leave me in peace. Unless you want to be civil.”
“All right, Boots. Let’s be civil.”
“Why do you live out here?”
“I told you, I’m just not into what people are into these days. Better to live out here in the open.”
“Kind of sounds like running away or hiding, if you ask me.”
“Is that being civil where you come from, Jack?” Boots spit. “You call it what you want, ain’t no bother to me. People live reckless. Always after something they don’t know they don’t need. People get all crazy over not having. You can keep all that. Out here, you got to live smart.”
Jack sat quietly, waiting to pounce on any weakness he could find.
“Let me tell you a story, Jack. I was up around Reno a few years back. Living okay, back before the world went crazy. I walked to the store one day and I see this man just whipping his boy on the sidewalk. Merciless. That boy must’ve broke in and tortured an old woman by the way that man was beating him. I was across the street watching him and saw people, just like you, Jack, walk by and not say a word. Just kept on walking, minding their own business.
“So I crossed the street and asked him ‘What are you beating that boy for?’ You know what he says to me? ‘Ain’t no worry of yours, mind your business.’ Well, where I come from, grown man beatin’ a child is my business. So I grab his hand and push him against the wall. The kid got up and just stared at me, not knowing what to do. I looked at his old man and what I saw wasn’t right. There was blackness in his eyes, soulless. That man had nothingness swimming around his skull. The look would strip the fear off a rattlesnake’s tail.
“Then you know what happened? That same kid starts kicking me in the leg. Starts screaming at me to let his pops go! I mean the same kid who was getting a mouthful of fist from his old man now starts trying to beat on me. I looked down and saw that same blackness in the kid’s eyes. Same nothingness.
“So I let the old man go and kept walking down the street. The man throws the kid into a truck and they drive off.
“I never could understand. You go out of your way to help a soul, pull it up from the mud, and clean it off, then that same soul just spits back in your face. Ungrateful lot they are. Ain’t no use even bothering sometimes.
“So what you make of that, Jack? Ain’t nothing to be done for them, is what I reckon. A kind thing ain’t mean nothing no more, does it?
“The Good Book says we are the salt of the earth. You know what salt does, Jack? It keeps a carcass from rotting. Problem is . . . it’s already dead. So I figure, let ’em have each other. Ain’t no use. Let ’em rot.”
Jack stirred in his seat. He couldn’t make out whether Boots was a coward or not. Was he a man of conviction making a silent protest, or was he a recluse who was overwhelmed by the real world? Was he a weak man intimidated by the toughness of life?
The things we hate in others are the things we hate about ourselves, Jack thought. He looked in the door and saw Laura chatting with Molly, and for a brief moment his heart softened and he saw Boots beyond his veil of cynicism.
“Well, it looks like you were able to help that kid in there.”
“Yeah, but she’ll go back to whatever she was doing before. She’s got that wandering look about her . . .” Boots trailed off in thought, glancing off to the mountain and spitting slowly off the front porch. “Naw, girl like that need something a little more to push her back on the straight line.”
“Boots, she was abducted and almost murdered!”
“Yeah, but she’s fine now. Hopefully that’ll scare her straight. I’ll take her back to town in the morning . . . and she’ll probably be back here before nightfall.”
“Wait . . . you’ll take her back tomorrow? Tomorrow?”
“What of it, Jack? You want to take her place? You want to leave your missus here and let me takes you instead?”
Jack stewed in his own silent rage, like a four-hundred-pound man who watched a little kid jump the line at an all-you-can-eat buffet. “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”
“It’s what you’re thinking though, huh? Like I said, Jack, you’ll get home soon enough, but that girl in there needs to get back mores than you do. Don’t she?”
The people on Jack’s list of hate just increased by one as he thought of the hapless Molly who sat at the table talking to his wife. He knew it was wrong. This girl was alone and needed to get back home more than he did. But he couldn’t help despising her. He looked at her as yet another thing that thwarted him from getting back to life. His resentment sprang forth from the same spring as his feelings for others who got in his way.
When he had first started out after school, he was stuck in line for promotion behind an old fart with seniority. The guy just wouldn’t move, a manager who wouldn’t retire and planned on working until he was a hundred years old. One day Jack went to work and found out the guy had a heart attack at dinner the night before and died. He mourned over the death for the obligatory five minutes and then started packing his desk as he prepared to move into the now-vacant office and his new promotion. He didn’t attend the funeral, even though the company had provided time off for the employees to pay their respect to the firm’s dinosaur.
And now he looked at Molly much the same way. The girl he had just sympathized with now filled him with simmering contempt. Here was a little vagabond who chose to run away from home, taking his spot on the next train to freedom land. What justice could there be in this world?
His stomach knotted again on the emotional roller coaster.
Jack went to walk inside but stopped in the doorframe. He turned to Boots. “Why don’t you ride off and get help? If you don’t want to take us, fine, but at least go get us someone who’ll help us.”
Boots stood, pulled the plug out of his cheek, threw it on the ground, and stretched his back. Once he was all adjusted, he looked Jack in the eye.
“You got to start understanding, Jack. Ain’t nobody comes out here no more. And I ain’t in the business of going off and dragging ’em in. You’re here because you almost drop dead on my front door. Ain’t no one come looking for you, did they? Naw, you were left on your own to rot. That is, until I’s found you. So you leave when you want, Jack. Front door is always wide open. Just open it up and walk out, if you think you know best.” Boots reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his tobacco. He stuffed it into his cheek, then spit on the ground. “If you don’t want to do that, then you’ll get out of here when I think you’re ready to go.”
The old man stepped off the porch and sauntered into the front yard as if admiring the day without a care in the world.
Jack walked into the trailer slow, dejected, and furious.