It was the first time a woman had been a part of the mix. She was young, eighteen at best, and accompanied by an older man wearing what looked to Nadine like pajamas. He was nearly bald, with only a light downy patch circling around the back from ear to ear. The girl spoke to him in whispers and tiny gestures, huddling against him as he nodded and smiled a gentle crescent moon. After a few moments, he patted her on the shoulder and she moved a step or two away from him, and the two of them stood with hands on the porch railing, gazing out over the expanse of the cluttered land. The old man said something, then tottered down the steps to pace around the property with his hands clasped in front of his body, studying the piles of rusted junk that Lester had dropped everywhere. He looked over them as if they were discovered treasures, ancient artifacts from some long-dead civilization.
In time, the girl turned her attentions to Nadine, keeping to her like a horsefly, pointing out things and chittering at her in what sounded like some secret code, a tumbling nonsense, the girl occasionally laughing at her own words. What could Nadine do with that? So she took up a one-sided conversation of her own, spilling complaints about Lester and the house, of the winter that would clench those very hills in just a few short months. The place needed more work than one person could possibly do, but Nadine supposed that was just the way it was going to be as long as she stuck around.
“I don’t know how he ever survived on his own up here,” Nadine said as she and the girl crowded into the henhouse, the air tinged with grit and fluff and fans of incoming sunlight. Nadine handed over the basket, and the girl went right over to the nesting boxes at the far end and started plucking eggs from the straw like it was her daily chore.
The girl looked at Nadine and held up a single egg. A lone, downy feather had lit on the side of her head, a white starburst against the inky black of her hair.
“Egg,” Nadine said.
“Egg,” the girl repeated, and then she grinned and said, “Les-ter Fan-ning,” as if she were picking the syllables from a jumbled pile of words.
“Lester Fanning,” Nadine said, and then she moved her hand in an outward movement from her body, as if she were smoothing it over a distended gut. The girl laughed at this, curling her hand to her mouth and turning away from Nadine.
Nadine started doing this with everything. At first it was fun, in a Miracle Worker kind of way. Nadine the teacher, the girl trapped in a world in which she could not communicate. They wandered the circumference of the house, and Nadine would point out things. Tree. Squirrel. Mushroom. As exhausting as the charade quickly became, Nadine was glad for the hard barrier of understanding between them. She couldn’t even explain to herself the reasons for sticking around, much less to another person. For every moment she found herself ready to descend that mountain and climb into the first truck she could throw herself in front of, there was another moment that grabbed hold of her. A voice telling her it wasn’t worth it, that it was her problem, not his. After all, hadn’t she decided long ago that while there was probably no such thing as a truly good man, the world was at least likely made up of a number of halfway-decent ones? That all she had to do was stand ready until they showed her there wasn’t enough decency to make it all worth the effort? For all his swagger and self-centeredness, and the occasional ridiculous ultimatums, Lester was no better or worse than any man she’d ever been with—or would ever be with.
Jimmy had hovered around decent for some time, long enough for him to have promised to maybe marry her, someday, to have spent a bit of his paycheck on the little pawn shop ring which he gave to her over hamburgers at that little diner in Yakima. He hadn’t hit her or anything like that, even when she made him so mad he pulled the car off the road and stomped fifty paces off into the rows of someone’s apple orchard. But he could hurt her with words; that was for damned sure. Comments and assumptions about her education, or lack of, touting his community college degree as if it was a fucking PhD. “You wouldn’t last in college,” he’d say to her. “You got to be willing to think.”
He would say that kind of nonsense to her while he used that precious education of his to sell carpet remnants for his uncle. That and peddle dime bags and single joints between the dumpsters that crowded the alley behind the shop. They drove around in a ten-year-old station wagon and lived out of an old widow’s basement, but it all would have been just fine with Nadine if he hadn’t pushed her as far as he did.
“I told Lester that Jimmy and I had been on our way to Itasca,” she said to the girl, taking a broom from the corner near the henhouse door. The girl set the egg basket on the shelf and reached out to take the broom. Nadine balked, but the girl took it from her anyway and began raking it along the floor slowly, keeping the dust to a low cloud. Nadine went to the feed bin, and sank the scoop into the meal. “But the real story was that we were heading to some dealer he knew in Idaho Falls.” She went to the far end of the house and poured the feed into the tray. Instantly, her legs were swarmed by a dozen chickens, warbling and pecking at the floor around her. “He had probably a couple thousand dollars’ worth of grass in the trunk. Plus at least one pistol that I knew of.”
The girl moved from one end of the house to the other, gently moving the broom in and among the hens without so much as raising a single feather from them. It was getting warm in here now, but Nadine didn’t want to open up the door just yet. She liked the intimacy of the space, of the two of them in there talking, without the men hovering over them. Whatever they might be saying to one another, it was for their ears only.
“The part about the Mexican music was true,” she said. “And the headache. Both of those I could have dealt with, but then he yelled at me from his window all the way across the parking lot.” Nadine moved out of the girl’s way as the broom found its way to her. “I can’t remember if I told Lester that part, but yeah. He yelled at me that I was a fucking idiot, right there in front of everyone at the Rexall. And that was it.”
Nadine then opened the door to the outside and the rush that forced its way in was a blessing. A couple more hens scurried in, wings beating at the air. Down the hillside, the old man was poking around an aging pickup truck that was half-covered in blackberry brambles.
“I called the cops on him,” Nadine said. And the joy that came with simply saying that aloud swelled in her throat like a balloon. “I grabbed that phone inside the door to the drugstore where he couldn’t see me, and I dialed those numbers and told the woman on the other end that there was a drug dealer in the parking lot and that he had a gun on him, and they’d better hurry because he was about to leave and do some serious shit.”
She laughed at that, and took the broom from the girl and swatted the pile out the door in a giant plume of dust. “And then I went out the side door to the access road out the back and stuck out my thumb, and as fate would have it, Lester Fanning just happened to be driving by at that very moment.”
They walked back to the house together, the girl holding the basket of eggs like it was a baby. Lester was waiting for them on the porch, a dewy beer in his hand.
“They’re leaving tonight.” He turned to the girl. “You’re leaving tonight!” he shouted, as if the barrier in the language was merely volume. “Go help her pack so she understands,” he said to Nadine.
Nadine had an almost painful curiosity about these people who turned up from places she knew little about, and would never see. What were they running from that was so bad they had to separate themselves by an entire ocean? What was it that was so bad that Lester Fanning and his palace of wild rabbits, split firewood, and rusted cars was their savior?
She picked blouses from the clothesline and handed them to the girl, and she cobbled a story in her head that would explain her, and the old man. They were chased from their village for a crime they didn’t commit. No, she thought. Maybe they knew too much for their own good, and they were staying one step ahead of assassination. It was something she eventually did with each set of visitors. Imagine that they were something they certainly were not. Deposed royalty, or spies perhaps, who secretly understood every single word she said, yet locked them tightly away with all of the other secrets they had collected over the thousands of miles they’d traveled.
“Thank you,” the girl said. It was like the words of a small child, the repetition of a set of memorized sounds followed with a smile and the expectation of reward.
“You’re welcome,” Nadine said. And when the girl said, You’re welcome, Nadine said it again. “You’re welcome.”
“You’re welcome,” the girl replied back, and then she said, “Bu-ke-qi. Shee-Shee. Thank you. Bu-ke-qi. You’re welcome.”
“Shee-Shee,” Nadine said. “Bu-ke-qi. You’re welcome.”