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14
1985
THEY DROVE. IF THERE WAS a purpose, a destination, Elizabeth could not pinpoint it. They had dipped down into Virginia, this much was clear from the highway signs, and they sometimes crossed the Shenandoahs into West Virginia. Walter found odd jobs to make cash-chopping wood, for example, to help people with vacation homes prepare for the winter ahead, which Walter said would be a bad one, as bad as last winter, which had seen one of the worst snowstorms in the area’s history. “I feel it in my bones,” he said, and he was being literal. He chopped wood, he did yard work, he fixed things. Elizabeth was surprised by the ease with which he found work, how people looked past her, never questioning why she was with Walter and, after Labor Day passed, not in school. Perhaps they thought she was simpleminded, as simple as Le
She could, of course, have left the room or the tent, wrapped in nothing but a sheet. Her feet were free. She could have called for help when he stopped gagging her. But it was too embarrassing. She could not get past imagining those first few minutes, when she would be the girl in the sheet, when people would point and laugh and maybe worse. There was the very fact of the…un-loveliness of her body, the potbelly, which was more pronounced from their fast-food, on-the-go diet. She could not imagine walking around in a sheet, worrying about what might be glimpsed, or how it might come untied.
The real problem was that she couldn’t imagine escaping at all. He would kill her. Kill her family. She dreamed of rescue, hoped for it, prayed, but she believed it would have to be something that happened to her, not because of her.
SOMETIMES SHE WOULD TRY to pinpoint where she would be, back home, at a particular time of day. At, say, 10:15 A.M., she would picture the mind-numbing lull of late morning in school, those early periods when the day’s promise has already burned off, but the end still seems impossibly distant. At 4 P.M., she would see herself lying on the sofa, watching television while doing her homework, the height of her rebelliousness. Her parents always said they didn’t mind if she watched television before or after homework, only never during. But there would be no one to rat her out, since Vo
In the truck, driving the mind-numbingly familiar roads, Walter said: “Tell me a story. Tell me about that man and his dog.”
She did. The problem was-she hadn’t actually read Travels with Charley. She had started it but found it dull, not at all the work she was expecting after reading Of Mice and Men and Ca
“Tell me another story,” Walter repeated. It was a gray, indeterminate day, out of season. Too cool to be summer, which it still was on the calendar, but lacking the crispness of autumn. The air was muggy, as damp and unrewarding as a sponge bath.
“Well, there’s a time when they went to… Tulsa.”
“ Tulsa? After Milwaukee?”
“I’m not telling it in order, just as I remember it.”
“Where did they start again?”
“ New York.”
“And where do they end up?”
“I can’t tell you that. It gives too much away.” She couldn’t tell him, in part, because she was making it up as she went along, but also because she was scared to find out what happened should Mr. Steinbeck and his poodle ever stop moving. If they didn’t reach the end, Walter wouldn’t tire of her, dig a hole in some forest and leave her there.
“Okay. What happened in Tulsa?”
“They found a necklace, lying on the sidewalk. That is, Charley found it, while they were out on their walk. It had purple stones-”
“They call those amethysts.”
“Yes, I know.” She did know, but she hadn’t thought Walter would. He surprised her, sometimes, with the facts he had at his disposal. More surprising, though, were the things he didn’t know, common bits of everyday living that even little kids understood. “Amethysts, in an old-fashioned setting, big square gold frames, clearly an antique. But there was no one around and it was a block of fu
“Aw, he made that part up. A dog couldn’t do that.”
She felt a need to defend Steinbeck and Charley, although the story was hers. “He has poetic license.”
“What’s that?”
She wasn’t sure she could define it. “If you’re a poet-or a writer-you’re entitled to certain details, even if they’re not exactly real. Like you could say there was an eclipse of the sun on a day there wasn’t, if you needed to. I think.”
“And do they charge you for that?”
“What?”
“I mean, like a driver’s license or a hunting license. Is it something you go down and buy?”
She yearned to lie to him. That was the kind of thing Vo
“So the license to make stuff up is made up?”
“Yes. Sort of. I guess. But that’s not the point. The point is, Charley found this necklace. And it was valuable, and they wanted to find the real owner. But how would they do that? I mean, if you go door-to-door, and show it to people, there will always be a dishonest person who says, ‘Yes, that’s mine.’”
“What you do,” Walter said, “is ask if anyone has lost a necklace, then get them to describe it. Or, better yet, they could have gone to the police station and asked if there had been a burglary in the neighborhood, then worked backward, right?”