away from her.
“You don’t even know what I’ve got in my right back
pocket!” I crouched there, shaking all over, my hands shielding
my face on each side so that I wouldn’t make the mistake of
turning and looking directly at those spiral eyes of hers. “And
even if you did know, why would you even want it?” “It’s mine, that’s why I want it!”
I shook my head, fast and hard. “No, you’re wrong. A
teacher gave it to me just . . . yesterday. It’s only an old coin she
had, sort of a good luck charm, of no value at all beyond that.” The wind began to spiral. The magazines were taken up into
that dark spin and carried far off toward the vanishing point of
the horizon. I watched the bright shreds of them being spit into
the sky in all directions.
She stepped in front of where I huddled. The last thing I
wanted was to look up at her, but my will wasn’t strong enough
to resist her. It ached, like the rest of me.
“Tucker Graysten?” she said quietly. “My coin, if you
please?”
I braced myself and shook my head, trying frantically to
remember what Mrs. Beetlebaum had said about that coin, that
obolus. You put one in the mouth of the newly dead, wasn’t
that it? It was the fare to the underworld, the payment you had
to make to the guy who rowed the boat from the land of the
living to the land of the dead.
I opened my eyes to a slit and carefully looked at her, expecting anything.
She was just herself. “Oh, fine, then.” She pouted, twirling a spike of hair around one finger. “If you’re too selfish to
part with that worthless coin, then let’s get back to playing our
game. Trade me something for this green Bic. . . .” She stopped,
frowning.
I gave a quick, hysterical laugh. “You haven’t got the lighter
now, remember?”
She rolled her eyes. “Cherry Berry likes you,” she grumbled.
She stomped to her pack and began rooting around in it. “And for your information, I’ve got too much work to do to be play
ing stupid games anyhow, Tucker Graysten.”
She maneuvered a huge notebook from the overstuffed
pack’s murky depths, and I caught enough of a look at it to
know it was one of those silly razzle-dazzle three-ring shiny
deals you can buy at any discount store. It had a bright lime
green cover labeled Dream Journal in elaborate glitter script.
There was a unicorn sticker in the corner and in the center was
a holographic picture of some female movie star or singer, some
dark-haired diva that I couldn’t identify and wasn’t the least bit
interested in anyhow.
She unclipped a pen from the spiral and went to sit on the
ground beside Bud’s car, leaning back against a fender. “I gotta
record this pickup,” she called to me in a pouty voice, flipping
impatiently through the pages. “My boss’ll have a fit if I forget.” She found the page she wanted, took the pen from her
teeth, and bent to work.
Her pack was a bit closer to me than to her. I sidled over to
it as quickly and quietly as I could, then sank to my knees beside
it. A glance told me she was wrapped up in whatever it was she
was doing, so I began moving her messy stuff around, searching for the car keys. A baseball-sized knot of grape bubble gum
wrappers was one of many things clogging my view. I pushed
the sticky mess aside and heard a sharp hiss.
A small snake looked angrily up at me from its gum-paper
nest, rattling its tail.
I jumped to my feet and hustled backward. My hands were shaking, so I stuck them under my armpits and tried to act
calm. “Do you . . . do you know you have a . . .”
“There.” She closed her notebook with a satisfied nod and
it takes a while to find the right one. Once I find it, all I have
to do is put a checkmark beside it, but first I have to find it and
that takes—”
I couldn’t bring myself to pretend interest in her imaginary
job. “Do you know that you . . . you have a baby rattlesnake living in the grunge at the bottom of your pack?”
“Actually, it’s a fully grown pygmy rattler.” She stood,
stretched, then slipped her pen back into the spiral of her
tacky Kmart notebook. She sashayed toward me, her notebook
against her chest and her arms crossed over it. “I’m thinking
about collecting pygmy rattlers. To be honest, Tucker Graysten,
even though I know you love my hair this color, I would absolutely adore having hair like hers.”
She shoved the notebook under my nose and pointed to the
diva on the front.
She was one of those Greek goddesses, the really, really
nasty one with snakes for hair who could turn people to stone
with her fierce ugliness. And this picture wasn’t just a hologram, either. The goddess was actually moving, or at least the
snakes growing from her head were moving, writhing and hissing, spitting and coiling. . . .
“Medusa just has the best hair ever,” the hitchhiker girl
breathed, stepping even closer to me so she was right beneath my chin, mere inches away. “Do you think I might be able to
get hair implants or something? I mean, if I had the snakes?” My head was filling with her smell of cold dirt and grape
bubble gum. I could feel an icy chill coming off her, right
through her thick motorcycle jacket. She was nuts, just nuts,
coiled to strike just like that pet snake of hers was coiled in its
gum wrapper nest, and I would not look directly at her spiral
eyes again no matter what.
“Nobody could—could know exactly how many trails there
are in the world,” I stammered, buying time. Bud would surely
get out here any minute and he would get her to hand over
the keys. Nobody played games with Bud. “And even if you
did have some weird job of recording trails, you couldn’t record
701,843 of anything in that cheap little notebook of yours.” She drew in a hurt breath and her hand went to her mouth.
“Cheap?” she whispered.
“You might as well back off,” I told her quietly. “Nothing
you say, nothing you do is going to make me look you in the
eye again.”
For a while, she said nothing. She even backed away from
me a couple of steps. I could think a little better as that wicked
dirt-grape smell emptied from my head.
“Okay, I’m sorry for being such a know-it-all, Tucker,” she
finally said, her voice small and humble.
Out the corner of my right eye, I could see her tapping the
toe of one boot, then scuffing it back and forth in a way that
might possibly be apologetic.
“I was just showing off when I told you there were exactly
701,843 trails. That was silly. Of course no one can know how
many trails there are at any one second. Not when new ones
come into existence all the time.”
I shrugged, keeping my eyes glued to my own feet as I
turned my back to her. “I’m going to the house to try to get Bud
to hustle,” I said gruffly. “Why don’t you give me back the car
keys so I can drive up and he doesn’t have t
o walk so far?” “There are trails over land, but also under every ocean,”
she continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “And there are trails
right through the air, like the one the Mustang blazed when
it sailed off that bluff like a great red flying fish. A sweet trail,
that one, fun while it lasted. Your friends thought so. They were
laughing. Or . . . I could be wrong. Maybe they were actually . . .
screaming?”
My heart slammed, hard, and I felt dizzy with grief and
anger. I wheeled back around and focused all that hot emotion
on her smug face, wishing I could melt her.
She shrugged, innocent as a statue. “Bud’s dying, you
know,” she said in a small, little-girl voice, shifting her weight
from foot to foot. “I give him twenty-nine minutes, thirty-two
seconds, using your human measurements. And when he dies,
that’ll be that, you’ll stay or I’ll take you. But if you stay with
that poison splinter still embedded, I guarantee you’ll be putting out another call to me, pronto. And the next time, I won’t
be so nice. It’ll just be ‘Get into the boat and give me the money.
Too bad you didn’t tell yourself what you needed to know when
I gave you a chance the first time, buster.’”
“Tell me what I need to know?” I shook my head. “You’re
crazy! None of what you’re saying makes sense! Bud’s tough.
He’ll probably outlive us all. And anyhow, nobody jokes about
an old person’s death. That’s just . . . tasteless and cruel!” “What’re we doing here anyhow, Tucker Graysten?” she
asked, this time sadly shaking her head. “You called me with
your infected legs and your game of squatting by the TV to see
what you’d look like without a head and your horrific magazine
picture collection and the threats you made to an innocent ant
that was walking up your window and your out-of-control driving. This is not to mention the paranoid fantasy you’ve taken
up where your best friend visits your dreams with sarcastic comments. So just man up and yank that teensy splinter of nasty
truth from your heart so we can see if you bleed out from it.
There’s a teensy chance you may actually live, so don’t you
think it’s worth the effort? If you find out you can’t live with it,
you save me the trouble of a return trip by taking a seat with
Bud and me when we hit the road in twenty-eight minutes and
five seconds, using your human measurements. And I collect
the coin, of course. And in answer to what you were thinking
before, no, I can’t take it, you have to hand it over.” She rubbed her fingers together greedily, and for just the
space of an eyeblink, she turned into something ancient and
withered. I let out a sharp burst of sound, maybe it was a scream,
and backed farther away from her.
She laughed and crossed her arms. “When I was fairly new to this job, I had a pickup I’ve never forgotten. Old guy, weird name. Socrates. Most people have a few little things to say on the trip, but boy, this guy was a talker. Gab, gab, gab. I forget most of it, but this one thing has stuck in my head all these years. ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ You got the idea he’d said that before to various audiences, and of course he was exaggerating for effect. Still, it’s something to think about, right, Tucker Graysten? To me, and this is my professional take on things, to me it seems pretty likely that the unexamined life
will slip right through your fingers.”
She gave her thumbnail a chew, then wiped it on her skirt. “Take druggies, for instance. Usually they’re asleep when I
come—in a coma, that is. They keep telling me that same thing
you keep telling me, that they didn’t give me a pickup call. Still,
they did, right? By opening that prescription bottle or snorting
that line or filling that syringe? Whoa, those are some of the
loudest calls I get! I mean, the instant you hear any of those
things, you’re on standby to roll! I’m just saying. Bud’s dying,
so you’ve got twenty-seven minutes and twelve seconds left to
do some deeper examining. That is, according to your human
measurement. To me, it’s maybe half a second.”
Her weirdness was enough to break your mind, but something even weirder had started to happen to the landscape
right behind her. The sky had almost instantly gone from being cloudless and blue to being a leaden shade of dark purple,
with lightning clawing through it like skeletal hands. Then over
her shoulder I watched in horror as a huge, green wedge came barreling toward us through the wheat, cutting a swath that must have been a couple of city blocks wide. Within mere seconds it had moved from the distant horizon to so close to us that the roar of its approach drowned out what the weird hitch
hiker girl was saying.
“It’s a flash flood!” I yelled, my voice a shriek of disbelief.
“Quick, give me the keys! If the car gets submerged, we’ll never
get it started again!”
She flopped a hand, dismissing my worries. “Nah, the car’ll
be fine,” she yelled back. “Trail number 11,404 does this all the
time. There was a river right where we’re standing a century and
a half ago, but over the decades it changed course. When your
dimension and ours overlap, trail number 11,404 sometimes
comes unhinged in time. I mean, it gets unpredictable, sometimes wet like it was in 1850, sometimes dry enough to build
a house on like it was in 1910 when Bud’s parents built this
one. This river, the one that once flowed here and is back for a
visit, was actually a point of no return on trail number 11,404.
Interesting, huh, Tucker Graysten? Once you got a wagon filled
with heavy stuff across it, you would so not want to change your
mind and go back.”
“Back?” My ears were ringing.
She rolled her eyes. “Back home, silly. Everybody on every
trail comes from home. They’re going everywhere, but they all
start from the same place. Home.”
While she’d been chatting, the water had swept through
where we were standing. It was up to the top pockets of her motorcycle jacket. With a little grunt, she hefted her pack up
onto her head and used both hands to balance it teetering there. I felt the cold murk reach my own waist and I stuck a protective hand into the water and over my back jeans pocket, the
one holding Mrs. Beetlebaum’s coin. Tucker, put it in your pocket
and keep it there! The weirder this got, the more I wished I’d
asked Mrs. B. more questions, or listened harder, or something. I cupped my mouth with the other hand and swiveled as far
as I could to yell toward the house, “Bud, put on some speed!
There’s been a flood and the water is rising fast! We gotta get
out of here right now!”
When I looked back at her, the crazy hitchhiker was squinting into space, her eyes dreamy. “Tucker Graysten, can you describe to me the taste of chocolate cake with chocolate icing?” I splashed a wave at her, hoping a cold, watery slap in the
face would focus her attention. “We’re about to drown here!” I
yelled at the top of my lungs. “We need a plan, not your spacedout raving about things coming unhinged in time!” For once, she looked alarmed. In fact, she turned a lighter
shade of pale. “Did I say that? That is so classified. Please, please
forget I mentioned it, okay?”
&n
bsp; I tried, unsuccessfully, to pull one boot up from the mud.
“We could die here, can’t you see that? If we’re not out of here
in the next few minutes, I’d say we’re cooked!”
She shrugged. “People die everywhere,” she said. And with that, her voice somehow became the wind. Not
the howling wind that had moved the wheat and not the restless wind that now whistled over the river, but a mysterious breeze that rattled like the dry cedar needles on the gnarled trees in the Clevesdale Cemetery where Trey, and Steve, and Zero had been
buried for almost two complete days now.
People die everywhere. Those three lonely words and the forlorn way she’d said them suddenly made me tired to the bone,
so tired that my weariness felt like sweet relief. What was the
point of this struggle, this tug-of-war with her and the wind
and water?
What difference did anything make, really?
What difference did even drowning make, really? I lifted my eyes, and she met them with those eyes of hers
that were often dizzying spirals. But this time, they were soft
green pools of welcoming liquid shade.
“When your call came into headquarters, Tucker, my boss
happened to take it,” she whispered, sounding very near, nearer
than she was. “He told me it was a double pickup, right at the
edge of Kansas City, at the beginning point of trail number
11,404, better known to you mortals as the Oregon Trail. Bud,
well, I immediately understood his call. He was ready. His time
was here and he knew it. Your call, though, was something else.
You’re young, no lethal habits. I could see when I read you that
you care about your family, you care about your friends. And
then it hit me—because you’ve had so much practice not telling people what you think, you were able to hide your thinking even from yourself when something happened that you
couldn’t stand to know. Listen, that kind of thing always festers and when it does . . .” She drew one index finger across her
throat.
I felt myself circling down through an endless blue tunnel,
as though I’d been sucked right into her eyes. “Trey said I could
be our designated driver,” I heard myself croak.
“Yessss!” she hissed. “See? You did know where that missing sliver of truth was hiding in your story. But you’ve merely
exposed it. You’ve still got to pull it from your heart so you can