The Safety: But who’d arrest me for breaking in here? What criminal would be wandering around out here?
The Cold: How bad will November be?
The Electricity: Specifically, food preservation.
The Water: How long will it last? Not long. Trips to town required.
The first two items were psychological and wait-and-see situations. The third, fourth, and fifth were biological and practical, and after some time, she’d know the answer about temperature, preserving food, and how fast she was going through water. That was the point of true exploring. Leif Erikson and Vasco da Gama and Robert Scott had to figure all this out too—as did every woman in noncivilized areas, which was a shit-ton of women, and she had a grocery store an hour back! And she could always just leave! It’s not like she was going to perish.
Ammalie scratched Lady’s under-neck. Perhaps there was some sort of KOA campground to stay at once in a while—to shower, fill up water jugs, stock up on ice? Also, she practiced what she’d say if anyone discovered her. Sure, she’d play the sympathy card—her husband had come here alone, had recently died, she was in grief, he’d always wanted to return some pottery shards he’d found here…But also, really, who would find her? She only knew of this place because Vincent’s file folder called Places to Go had a printout of an email sent from the owner long ago: Look for the big tree with a lot of bird feeders next to a white rock at the corner of a barbed-wire fence, head south for ten miles, high clearance such as a Jeep recommended, take left after the fireplace ruins, head south again at the rutted road marked with blue stake and the dead willow…
Well, she had promised herself a true adventure, one that pushed her limits, so here she was. Success! And indeed, when she glanced westward, a gasp swooshed from her lips. The setting sun lit the valley in shafts of light, and the bottoms of the clouds were pink-orange swirls. She held up the binoculars and could see that in the distance were indeed the cliffs of Cave Valley—she recognized them from a photo. A true oasis. She put the binos down and watched as the clouds grew upward in great puffs, their lower halves increasing in color in funky, psychedelic ways. Fucking magic. If she’d been a woo-woo sort of person, it would have seemed they were billowing to welcome her to this home.
—
Hot water. Such a simple delight. And the work of procuring such a basic substance was its own delight. She’d boiled water in three pots on the trailer’s stove, carried the hot water outside, and added it to cool water in a tub she’d placed near the picnic table. All the water came from dusty plastic containers under the trailer, which were heavy and cumbersome and icky on the outside, but she felt strong and capable inside and out. All the hiking at the Colorado cabin had put her in better physical shape than she’d been for a while—and there was something enabling and pure about taking care of a basic need without the help of much technology or conveniences. Or a man.
Inspired by a photo she’d found on a website for broke college students, she’d bought a high-grade, thick plastic storage tub back in Chicago, and she’d even practiced bathing in it in her kitchen, with bubbles and a candle to boot. Sure, she couldn’t sink back like in a real tub, and instead had to sit upright with her knees pulled up, and draining it had been a drag, though here she could just tip it over. On the trip, it had served double duty as her main storage container for nonperishable food—crackers and cans of soup and dried fruit—and so now all those items were stacked on the picnic table so it could function as her bath.
When she stripped naked and stepped into the warm water, the first stars fizzing against the early twilight sky, she knew it had been a brilliant idea. Food storage by day, bathtub at night. She sighed and reached for a gin-and-tonic she’d prepared. Empyreal Heaven. Lady sat beside her, content, occasionally licking beads of water off her arm.
This was living. This was interesting. This was a true and real moment. If only to her, and that’s all who really mattered. She’d remember it forever—and that was not true of many of the nights of her life. How sad that most of them blended together, had been spent in front of a TV. She looked upward at the stars, blazing like nothing she’d ever seen, and whispered the Spanish verse that had been on her Learn Spanish, Niños! audio program:
Mira el cielo,
la primera estrella,
Mira la luna,
tan grande, tan bella!
So she did look at the sky, the stars, the moon, and yes, it was big and beautiful. But more grand even was the feel of her lower back muscles relaxing, her cramps subsiding, her sure knowledge that though far less celebrated, women had always been more competent and tougher explorers than men, given that they were also dealing with menstruation and the idiocy of so much societal fucked-up-ness, such as Isabella Bird hiking the mountains of Colorado in the Victorian skirts and ridiculous shoes of the 1870s. Ammalie considered now that while she was amazing, Isabella still had whiteness on her side, and her story had been told, and she wondered now about all the other women unsung, unnoticed, equally or even more badass. She raised a tipsy toast to the moon, to strong women everywhere across the globe and across time, in all cultures and societies, and felt a kinship, knowing that all, whether rich or poor and regardless of living conditions and race and ethnicity, had craved the experience of a warm bath. That they all deserved one under the stars with some sort of delicious drink because by god, women were fucking amazing.
When the water started to cool in the chill, she stood up in the tub, gingerly stepped out into her flip-flops, pulled her faded beach towel around her, and headed into Dart with her battery-powered lantern. The water she’d left should be boiling by now. When she opened the door, Lady darted past her legs, making her stumble, which caused her to stub her toe on the Dart’s red cooler. Ouch! Instead of moving forward, as an empty cooler would have, her toe made contact with heaviness. Why a heavy cooler? she heard herself think, and when she pulled up the white lid, she heard herself think, Why…ice?
Why ice?
Heavy cooler—why ice?
She stood straight, felt the wave of zapping fear sluice through her, felt her body burn with hot terror at the same time she felt the frigid air. Lady parked herself outside the bathroom door and started barking.
Why barking?
At the same time, that door opened. At the same time, a man stepped out.
Her scream never came. Her mouth only opened in a stunned, terrified, silent O. But inside her head was a noise louder than the one that came when she got the news Vincent had died, a thousand more voltages than when she’d seen the raccoon monkeys, a pure and shattering screech. On the outside, she stood, silent, clutching her towel with one hand and a pot of boiling water with the other.
—
His hands were up, palms out, as if calming a horse. That much she could see by the light of the lantern and the flame of the propane stove. He was not moving toward her, and, if anything, his body language indicated he wanted to back away and run, but there was nothing to back into except the trailer wall, and he could not move forward since she was blocking his exit. He looked about thirty and had a tattoo creeping up the side of his neck and was barefoot. She clutched the towel with one hand and the boiling pot with the other. She took this all in in a second in the dim light, and in the second second, her hand was lifting the pot of boiling water.
“Hey, lady,” he said, simply. “Jesus.” Then, “Jesus, thank you, you’re not the law?” Then, as an afterthought, “Do not throw that water at me…I was hoping you’d leave.” He kept his eyes on her but reached one arm down to gently redirect Lady, who was nosing his crotch.
Ammalie heard an enormous sucking in of air as she tried to fill her lungs. As she did, her eyes darted around the camper, as if the small dim space would reveal yet another human. She put down the pot, turned off the stove, put her hand out as if to indicate stop, and then picked up the pot of hot water again as she backed out of the trailer. “Stay there. Do not move! You…You’ve…been in that bathroom the whole time?” Her voice was a hiss, but she had the sudden image of her sitting in the Colorado closet, waiting for the housekeeper to leave. “I’m going to put on clothes and I want. you. to. stay. where. you. are.” She could not see him now, but she kept backing up, still clutching the towel in one hand, the pot of hot water in the other, and moved in the direction of the picnic table, which held her jacket and clothes. She was shivering terribly and her heart was gallopy and her mind was so slow, and occupied with one great question: Where is the car key?
She scrambled first into her sweatshirt, then her coat, then her hiking pants, then pulled on her shoes without bothering with socks, then put on her winter woolen hat, and it was only then that she allowed herself to look at the trailer door, where he was now sitting on the steps with a lantern, running through Lady’s neck scruff with one hand, resting his head against the palm of his other in the universal sign of exhausted despair. “I was hoping you’d go,” he said, finally. “Whoever you were. Like, check on the place and leave. I thought maybe you were…Who are you, anyway?”
She stood near the table, one hand near the pot of water and the other curled around the pepper spray in her jacket pocket. “Where is your car? Why are you here? Why are you barefoot?” Then she added, still in a hiss, “You have ice.” Ice meant so much: that he’d been to town, that he was hiding a car.
He didn’t answer, didn’t shrug, didn’t do anything except rub his hand over the scruffle on his chin. She touched her pant and jacket pockets—no keys. Glanced at the picnic table—no keys. Keys, keys, keys, where were her keys? Ah, in the front pocket of her backpack, which was on the bed in the trailer behind him.
“Okay, let’s…let’s start again,” she ventured. “My name is…Kat. Kat Wilder.” Her voice sounded ridiculous to her, as if she were trying to converse with a grizzly bear to buy time. “If I can just grab my things behind you, I’ll go.”
He stood, turned to eye her belongings inside, and mumbled something along the lines of “Sure, sure, jesus, lady, you scared me.”
She was struck by how thin he was. Not in a starvation kind of way exactly, though…maybe? He was built lean…all muscle, youngish, and slight of frame, but that wasn’t all. He simply wasn’t eating enough. He was in the vicinity of good-looking, she thought, with slightly crooked teeth and a thin jaw, but mainly looked a bit unhealthy in both body and spirit. She had the idea that she simply had more calories and reserves of energy residing in her body than he did, that she might be able to take him down. Also, he looked, well…frightened, so frightened that he might cry. Also, he smelled bad, and she could now see he was filthy, not only his jeans and pullover but his matted dusty brown hair and the embedded dirt in his skin.
His voice was weary and yet also still full of some existential wonder at having company. “Look, lady. Can I sit down at that picnic table and explain?” At the sound of her name, Lady ran back up to him, tail wagging, and nudged him again in the crotch for a pet.
“I just need my backpack,” she said. “Which is right behind you. And my sleeping bag. Just move aside. Now! I need you to let me by you.”
He walked away from the trailer door and sat at the far end of the picnic table in the dark. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell…” he trailed off and then started rambling top-speed. “You wanna beer? I can tell you one thing right now. I may be a lot of things, but dangerous to you is not one of them. I got a mom and sisters and all that. I’m not that kind of guy. I have never understood that kind of guy. Can’t even wrap my head around it. I understand your fear, I do, but I’m not that guy. So you don’t have to worry about that. You may wonder why I’m here, and that’s legit, but me being a threat to you is off the table. I hope you’re not a threat to me.”
She started to shiver in earnest as she stared at the dark forms of his bare feet resting on the rocky ground. Weren’t they cold? Didn’t they feel the rocks and cactus? But she also breathed a sigh of relief. Surely he couldn’t run fast with bare feet. She ducked into the trailer, got her backpack, unzipped it while keeping her eyes on him, felt for her keys, put them in a pocket of her down jacket. The moon came out from under a cloud and she heard herself whimper, a pent-up noise of fear escaping, and she felt some pee wet her thigh.
“Lady, seriously. I will bring you no harm.”
She walked out of the trailer, fingers curled around the keys, the pepper spray can grazing her knuckles. Now she could take a moment to consider him. He’d pulled up his hood and sat hunched in the cold, so she grabbed one of the many blankets on the bed and tossed it in his direction, then tossed the big pair of wool socks she kept in her backpack at him, and grabbed another blanket for herself, and then the extra lantern. Only then did she really truly breathe, a rattly thing that reminded her of a rattlesnake. “Ah,” she said finally. “You are running from the law. You’re squatting here!” At that, she started to laugh—a release of anxiety more than humor—and then the laugh abruptly ended and was replaced by tears that burned her eyes.
