John had begun to feel the cold again and was putting on his coat when I returned. “Seemed like you and Trooper Smith were having quite a conversation.”
I ignored his observation and wished I could do the same for my own. John stretched again and cocked his head at an odd angle. “I think I’m spending too much time out here.”
“You think?”
“I’m beginning to hear things.”
This was mildly concerning to me, though truth be told it didn’t surprise me. “Is God speaking to you?”
“No,” he said. “And yes. He speaks to all of us all the time if we’re listening. This time it’s just the wind.”
Eager to be on my way, I asked a question without much interest in hearing the answer. “And what’s the wind saying?”
“Not saying anything, exactly. Just sounds to me like a baby crying.”
John recoiled a half step from the startled expression on my face. I’d forgotten all about my passengers. It was only a few steps to the door of my cab and I covered them in record time. The dog was sitting up and looking at the girl, who was cradling the baby in her arms. She smiled at me and gently rocked Annabelle, which quieted her a bit until she got her next breath and then she let loose with an ear-piercing scream. I caught a whiff of the problem.
John had come up behind me and I felt his presence at my shoulder. “Well, well,” he said, “I think you have a chore ahead of you.”
He seemed content, at least for the moment, to keep any questions he might have to himself. I took Annabelle and motioned for the girl to scoot over onto the driver’s side. She complied. The dog squeezed over the center console and resumed his position at her feet, though his attention was now on me.
Like a carpenter unpacking his toolbox I laid Annabelle on the seat and grabbed the baby bag and dumped its contents on the floor of the cab. She let out another wail while I considered my next move.
I was embarrassed and angry with myself. How could I just forget about them? My excuse was simple. I had spent five days a week for twenty years driving the desert alone. Suddenly having children as passengers was a steep and dangerous learning curve.
As I stood there surveying the new tools of child care, John said, “It’s been a long time, Ben, but I’d appreciate it if you’d let me do this. I used to be good at it.”
“I can do it!” I barked.
He put his big hand on my shoulder and said, “I know you can. I’m just saying this brings to mind such sweet memories. I’d consider it a favor if you let me.”
I always knew John had a story, everyone did, though his dead-ended on a Utah desert road. Whatever his former life, it wasn’t something I thought much about, and it always struck an unsettled nerve in me when he infrequently referred to some ordinary fact as if an ordinary life could somehow land your aging old ass in the middle of nowhere hauling a cross.
“Since you put it that way,” I said. The two of us exchanged places on the running board.
We watched him go to work—by “we” I mean the girl and the dog, and me—first washing his large, callused hands with a wipe before touching the baby. If Annabelle had been imaginary he couldn’t have done a better job. No wasted movement, almost rhythmic the way his hands moved, firm and gentle at the same time. He had her out of her little jumpsuit in a flash even as she squirmed and complained.
I noticed the pink flannel suit was covered with a pattern of green Day-Glo skulls with pacifiers in their bony mouths, surrounded with happy little flying black bats. I idly wondered where in the hell Ginny found all of her grim crap. Maybe there was a Halloween Baby Gap tucked away somewhere in Price. I stopped asking myself the “why” of her fascination months ago. I knew it would be the kind of answer that only made sense to the young. To anyone of serious years the symbols of death meant something a bit more personal than a fashion statement. If I ever saw a nose or lip ring near Annabelle, Ginny and I would have a holy roller come-to-Jesus meeting, or a come-to-Halloween meeting. I didn’t care which it was.
John paused and admired his fresh handiwork while the baby reached for a handful of his white beard. He turned and winked proudly at me. “Praise the Lord. Muscle memory.”
I complimented his work just as Annabelle went all out with a new wail that burst past us in a warm cloud into a quickly cooling breeze. John and I exchanged our clueless masculine befuddlement. We might have puzzled a while longer if not for the girl. She scooted off the seat and lifted one of the full bottles out of the side pocket of the baby bag and offered it to John.
Bottle in hand he dabbed a bit of liquid on his wrist and then confessed he didn’t know if it was warm enough.
“Try it,” I said. “If she doesn’t find it to her liking I’m betting she’ll let us know in short order.”
John wrapped the baby in a blanket and held her close to him, out of the rising wind. It might not have been just right, but it was right enough. There on the side of the road as the sky darkened she took the nipple and drank with the abandon of a man dying of thirst. I didn’t know such a little thing could consume that much liquid so quickly. John lifted her to his shoulder and patted for a minute or two and the ensuing burp brought a bit of laughter from both of us.
John put her down on the passenger seat again, swaddled and full and already drifting, and tipped a corner of the blanket across her face. A breeze blew the blanket back and the girl and John both reached at the same time to replace it. Their hands touched above the baby’s head. From behind John all I could see were the girl’s steady black eyes and their hands, her tiny dirty fingers across his clean, huge wind-burned paw. The seconds ticked into a minute, maybe longer, and neither one removed their hand.
The weather worsened around us. When the first small snowflakes began to skitter across my face I tugged at John’s jacket and their hands separated. Together John and I resettled Annabelle into her car seat and strapped her in and the girl and the dog resumed their positions on the passenger side.
I closed the door. “Seems like you and my other passenger were having quite a conversation yourselves.”
John took his time responding, though it wasn’t really a question that required an answer. He zipped and buttoned his jacket all the way to the top and pulled a threadbare gray scarf from a pocket and wrapped it twice around his head before tying the ends in a bow beneath his long white beard. He extracted a pair of old deerskin work gloves from another pocket, and as he put them on he said, “Ben—” That was as far as he got.
He looked over to the cab and started again. “Ben, that girl…”
“Her father is an acquaintance,” I said by way of unnecessary explanation. “He’s in trouble of some kind and asked me to watch her for the day. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s an immigration thing.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Except that particular conversation was one of the most sorrowful I’ve ever had, man, woman, or child. Satan is always at work.”
Getting a sense that John was sinking into one of his crazy religious holes, and not wanting him to drag me along unless I could bring a snack and something to read, I decided to try one more time to get him to accept a ride into town.
He shook his gray-scarfed head and lifted the cross to his shoulder with a grunt.
“Staying out here is stupid, John. You’re two days from town. I’ll even come back later and get your cross and deliver it right to your door.”
He turned and gave me a raggedy smile. “Thank you, but this cross doesn’t accept rides and neither do I. You just take care of that little girl. Hell’s black water is rising faster all the time.”
With that and a handful of steps he and his cross began to dissolve into a veil of blowing snow. For a few seconds I stared after him as I listened to the squeaking axle of the wheelbarrow tire as it labored under the weight of the cross.
A short time later we were under way again and creeping up to a safe speed of thirty miles an hour. I kept a lookout for John along the shoulder. The snow was thickening while a milky fog seemed to be settling into the spaces between the flakes. The girl was curled in a ball on the seat and the dog was curled on the floor and both were dozing, warm and apparently content. It occurred to me that it might have been a good long while since the girl had eaten. Somewhere behind my seat was a brown paper bag that held a banana and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
The girl? I didn’t think I’d mentioned to John that the child was a girl. Maybe I had. Maybe she had told him in the silent conversation I’d overheard. Within five minutes I knew I had somehow driven past John without seeing him and that made me think again about how dangerous it was for him trudging along the shoulder. There weren’t ever many vehicles on 117, though a few times I had been surprised to come upon the only two cars in five hundred square miles of desert that had managed to collide with each other like estranged lovers in a dark barroom.