The water and food lifted some of the fog that had settled around me. I looked across the span of sand and sky. Mountains rose in the west, and to the east a few outcroppings of cacti reached up toward the sun. I studied their curves and the tan horizon behind.
The roadblock had forced Grey to drop us early so I could only guess where we were. I was sure that Bride Creek was still to our northwest, but how far was impossible to say. As close as sixty miles? As far as a hundred? More? And all of that through solid desert. The closest city was almost certainly Salt Lake City. In all likelihood it was just out of sight to our east, possibly as few as thirty or forty miles distant. Of course, being close didn’t change the fact that landing in a Path jail meant my death just as surely as starving in the desert.
But what if I’m smart? I wondered. Move at night, fast and quiet. Could I slip through the cracks and cross the border?
Bear squirmed onto his back, rubbing himself against the torn reeds with his feet in the air. I could still hear his bark as it echoed through the back of Grey’s truck. How was I supposed to sneak through the stronghold of Salt Lake City with him by my side?
And there’s more too, I thought, recalling the voice on Grey’s radio as we waited at the roadblock. They’re looking for a kid. A kid and a dog.
Bear had settled down to a nap by the side of the pond. He huffed and mumbled in his sleep, one paw twitching as he dreamed. I moved closer, laying my hand along his side. His fur was warm and smooth. His ears, velvety. I drew my hand along the lines of his ribs as he breathed gently in and out.
I knew what I had to do. The night before, I was half mad and blundering through the dark. If I was careful and if I moved fast, he wouldn’t find me this time. I’d be miles away before he even realized I was gone. Thinking of it, my breath went short, but the idea that Bear could make it all the way to New York with me was a little kid’s fantasy. He had survived on his own in a desert before he came across me and could do it again. The fact that he had found this oasis proved that.
I stroked his back and he shifted in his sleep. “Maybe you’ll find somebody better.”
I drew my hand away and stood over him, fixing my eyes on the eastern horizon. Out beyond Salt Lake City, beyond deserts and mountains, Ithaca lay waiting.
But before I could move, my thoughts drifted back to Grey, the memory of him like the edge of a bruise. I saw him standing on the side of the road, then flinched when I heard the clap of the shot. Why had he done it? That was the question that clung to me. He could have saved himself so easily. A single word and he would have been the one headed home instead of me. Instead he chose to die for someone he barely knew. Why? I didn’t think I’d ever understand, but the fact of it was there, stark as the desert around me.
I looked down at Bear, suddenly seeing him as clearly in the future as I saw Grey in the past. Hours from now he would shake off sleep to find himself alone, wondering why I had abandoned him when he had never abandoned me. And where would I be then? Across the border and safe in Wyoming? Would Bear’s memory sting as keenly as the memory of Grey?
I knelt down beside Bear and gently nudged him awake. His eyes opened with a great yawn and he batted at me with his paw. I placed my hand on his side and looked west.
“Come on,” I said. “It’s time to go.”
13
We staggered into Bride Creek just after sundown five days later, half starved and aching from the road. The town itself was nothing but a few weathered buildings set back from a road that wound up into the hills. Still, it felt like there were a thousand eyes on us, watching every step. I kept us off the road, creeping through a drainage ditch, freezing at every sound.
The post office was a white box at the end of a dirt road. A gravel driveway led away from it to a ranch house not much bigger than the office. Its windows were dark and a gate hung open in front of it, turning lazily with a squeak that seemed massive out in the emptiness.
I wanted to go up and start pounding on the door, but we had to be careful. Knock on the wrong door at the wrong time and we were through.
There was a field of knee-high brush on the other side of the road from the house. I patted Bear’s side and he followed, head low from exhaustion, limping on his right paw.
Bear crept off into the brush to hunt while I struggled to stay awake and watch the house. Every joint in my body felt like it was filled with rust. I pulled a handful of sandy grass from my jacket pocket and chewed on it. It was gritty and bitter, but days of constant hunger helped me force it down.
For the last five days, Bear and I had rested through the heat of the day and walked at night. Two nights through the desert. Two nights more along a razor-straight and abandoned rail line. We spent the final night climbing a single-lane road into the mountains. When Bear managed to find more pockets of marshy water, we drank all we could and then devoured reeds and grasses and tiny translucent things that scuttled through the muck. At first my stomach growled incessantly, but eventually that muted to an empty gnawing.
I walked in a kind of mindless trudge, memories and old songs floating through my head, there and then gone again. It was as if some long-buried clockwork forced my legs to keep pumping. Whenever I felt certain I was about to fall, I would reach out for Bear, holding him close until some bit of resolve passed between us and we would set off again. In the last miles, I kept Ithaca at the front of my mind every second, like a lantern I was striving to grasp. How Bear kept going and where he found the strength in that tiny half-starved body, I’ll never know.
I was about to nod off when a pair of headlights appeared up the road. A small pickup truck emerged from the dark and turned into the driveway. It was covered in dents and rusty bruises. POSTAL SERVICE was clearly emblazoned down one side.
The lights winked out and there was a squeak of hinges. A tall man with shaggy hair emerged. He stuffed his keys into his jeans pocket, then reached into the back of the truck for a pair of turkeys and what looked like a 20 gauge shotgun. He hung the shotgun from his shoulder and then made his way across the yard and to the house, game in hand. Once inside, lantern light illuminated the thin white curtains. The man’s silhouette moved back and forth in a front room.
Bear returned with a field mouse in his teeth and settled down to eat it. He paid me no mind as I moved out of the grass and into a ditch, watching for any movement on the road.
A light came on at the side of the house. I dropped low and circled the house until I stood alongside it and peeked in. The man was sitting at a table in a small candlelit kitchen, looking down at a yellow mug. His face was deeply lined and thin, framed in long gray hair and a scraggly beard. He spooned some sugar into his mug, then stirred and sipped. In the center of the table was a plain-looking cake dusted with sugar and cinnamon. My stomach growled, urging me to the front door, but I stopped when a girl appeared in the hallway.
She was maybe ten years old with curly auburn hair, wearing a blue top with red swallows embroidered at the neck. She wiped the sleep out of her eyes, and the man snatched her up under her arms and lifted her into the air. Even through the closed window I could hear the trill of her laugh. He pulled her close and nuzzled her neck, eliciting even more laughs, and then dropped her down into a chair at the table.