She locked the door as she left. She had to keep going, and fast, too. She had only so many hours of daylight and a big plan. And it was cold, though the sun was now warming the planet to a reasonable temperature. She drove away from Dart, down the rutted road that was no longer a road, and the path on which she had walked with the bloody head. She cut fence twice—illegal, she knew—and it conjured up the memory of cutting the fence off the tree back in Colorado. She drove until the road was too rough. The Grey Goose had been bucking like a bronc and could go no more.
Here, then, was her starting point. She stood for a moment, hands on hips, and took in the sprawling landscape, the Grey Goose ticking in the warming sun beside her. Such an enormous expanse of scrub brush and snow, and the snow was important—her footprints would leave a trail, which is what she’d need so as not to get lost. Even if it partially melted during the day, as it would, there would be enough tracks to guide her. This day would push her to her limits. Perhaps what she was doing was of very little use, maybe no use. She knew she was just one woman, a white woman with a limited understanding of the situation, a woman who was foolishly stepping into a situation without fully understanding it. She knew some people would judge her harshly for this, some would cheer her on, some would bring politics into it, and there were a million ways she could be criticized.
But here’s what she also knew:
She had brought Vincent water, and it had not helped.
Human beings were dying of thirst and cold out here, and water and a space blanket would help.
And regardless of its virtue or not, she needed to do it. For forgiveness. Or redemption. So she could get Vincent’s dying face out of her mind. So she could rewrite the story of this place, instead of just remembering her cut head and her fear. She simply needed to do it.
She’d worked it over and over in her mind. Yesterday afternoon, after much of the snow had been cleared or melted, she’d driven into town to the Ace Hardware, a pharmacy, and an Outdoor Adventures store, buying them out of all the necessary items and spending all the cash Rita had given her. She ticked things off her list, emptying a few shelves along the way.
10 plastic bins ($70)
30 gallons of water ($30)
All the cans of beans and soups with pull tops ($50)
All the space blankets that were available ($400)
All materials needed for first aid kits that were actually useful, including water purification tablets ($600)
The cashier had raised her eyebrow and sighed; Ammalie had basically emptied her out of ointments and bandages and related items. She’d spent much of last night making stupid store-bought first aid kits into actually useful ones. Now it was all organized perfectly in Grey Goose. Now was the hard part:
Ten trips.
Ten different directions.
A plastic tub in one hand. A gallon of water in her other hand. And on her back, in her large backpack, two gallons of water, three cans of food, a few space blankets, a first aid kit. It was incredibly heavy. But she’d prepared for that in her mind, which made doing it possible. She’d walk about one mile per drop—some drops would be quite close to the car, but some would be farther, for a total of ten or so miles for the day, which was likely the absolute max. Yes, others could do more but she could not, and so that was that. She was not an athlete, she was a regular person with a goal and one day.
Water is heavy. Very heavy. Each gallon of water weighed eight pounds, so three gallons came to twenty-four. Plus, she had her own half gallon per trip for herself. With the weight of the cans, and the minimal weight of her own necessities, the pack would weigh about twenty-six pounds for each trip. Not nothing. Indeed, her mind began to reconfigure the mileage; she’d probably overestimated what she could do. Well, she’d do what she could. She’d do this one thing, as well as she could.
Her car was the center of the clock; she’d start in three p.m. position and would end up in the nine position, thereby covering the 180 degrees of lands that rested between her and Mexico.
The first three trips were the longest but easiest. She was rested and energetic. Twice, she heard the distant sound of Border Patrol helicopters. She wished she’d brought Lady, who would have been comforting, but she’d have had to explain why and where she was going. When she found a good outcropping or edge of a trail, she left three gallons of water, cans of food, space blankets, and a first aid kit under the large storage bin, put a heavy rock on top, and then she walked back to the car and started again.
The fourth trip, she began to feel her left hip and knee. By the sixth trip, she was talking to herself, or, rather, to an imaginary critic, who warned her not to be presumptuous, not to have a white-woman-savior complex. That what she was doing was limited in scope and it should not be treated as more than it really was—a small drop in a vast bucket. Others were helping in much larger ways, putting more on the line. There were bigger things to be done, such as elect politicians who cared about international trade laws and water conservation and the well-being of those on Planet Earth.
“Yup,” Ammalie said several times in unison with each step. “Yup, it’s true. It’s all true. My privilege and limitations are fucking enormous. But still, I think people need to live more dangerous lives. Dangerous in terms of trying to do real good. Let me do this, even if it’s just for me. Even if it’s selfish. Because doing something is better than doing nothing. Let me leave water where it might actually be useful.”
By the eighth outing, she was making much shorter trips, but that was fine. She’d done her best. The sun was three-fourths its way across the sky, now tilting toward land, and the snow became crunchy instead of mushy. Her jeans and shoes were soaked and coated in mud. Her shoulders hurt. Her nose had started to bleed again, from dryness or exertion or both. Her left hip and knee hurt. She promised herself that she’d stop if she needed to, and simply leave the rest of the supplies at the car. By the ninth trip, which was very short, she was crying, from exhaustion and physical pain, but also just from empathy. From knowing one small part of what it must feel like to walk so far, to be so tired, worn, desperate. She was so sad. So very bone-deep sad for all those who had done this journey, and, somewhere around the world, were doing it for real at that very moment.
She thought of Powell and Apricot, who had gathered for Thanksgiving. Oddly, her sister had agreed, and without much fuss had flown to Chicago and spent a few days in Ammalie’s house and cooked a meal for Powell. When she’d texted the idea, with a Just have some aunt-nephew time, please do this for me, Apricot had simply responded with, Okay, are you alive and okay and what exactly are you doing again?
She thought of Mari, who would be with her own big family, with or without Maximo, she didn’t know. She thought of Levi, who she assumed would be having a meal with his extended family. She thought of Kat in Colorado, and Dan and Lulu winding their way home across the American West. She thought of Rex and his MS and how hard it must be to carry the weight of that disease. She thought of Rita and her beautiful coral lipstick and smile and her dead son. My god, life was not for the faint of heart.
She hiked on through wet-smelling sage, came across the vertebrae of a deer, and a paw of a rabbit, and bushwhacked through some willows. Here she left her final offering, took a photo of the plastic tub with Paz in black marker on the top, then, crying, took the pottery shards from her pocket and set them gingerly on the ground. She looked up at the sky. “Vincent! Come look! I want you to see.” She knelt above them for a moment, sifting some snow on top of them. “This is right,” she said. “Happy birthday tomorrow. I miss you. I wish this wasn’t so. I wish you were alive. I wish your soul well; I wish you peace.”
She touched the pottery shards one last time, pressed them gently into the earth, and used those same fingertips to wipe the tears from her eyes. Then she stood, dusted her hands off, and walked.
—
As she stopped to unlock the Grey Goose, she was startled to see headlights in the early twilight and the glint of a car against the snow-mottled landscape. It was not yet dark, but clouds had made it dark enough to see the orbs of the headlights bobbing up and down on the rutted road. They looked like two flashlights on a roller coaster, beaming this way and that. The Sea Creature swam straight up and lodged in her throat.
Maybe it was Kit’s sister! Maybe it was Kit! But when she put the binos up to her eyes, she could see it was some sort of civilian-style Jeep Cherokee—and oh, god, yes, it was black with a gold streak and some lettering. Fuck, fuck, ducky fuck, a phrase from her teen years, flew into her mind. She moaned as she eased herself into her car and sat. She would just slowly drive away. Say that she was exploring, gone for a hike. That was pretty true. And the biggest charge against her was that she had been trespassing, cutting a fence, littering. She wasn’t even sure who owned this land that bordered Texas Sky Man’s property—was it BLM land, or private land, or state land? Who knew. But surely what she’d done was no huge deal. Whatever fine there was—well, that was fine. A fine fine she heard herself thinking, to which she responded, Shut the hell up and think! Maybe he’d run her plate and realize it was stolen, so she jumped out and took it off and threw it under her seat. If asked, she’d tell them it’d just gone missing. Stolen. That was plausible, wasn’t it? She could also play the Vincent card—that he’d come here as a Dark Sky appreciator, he was dead, she wanted to do a ceremony to say goodbye and return some pottery shards to the area. And that had the benefit of being all true.
Or, maybe, she could just sit here until the deputy left—maybe he hadn’t seen the glint of her car? She glanced in the backseat. She didn’t have Fluffiest Red with her, but she did have her Survival Bucket and space blanket and enough water. But then Rita would worry; she’d probably call the police and reporting a missing woman. And there was no way to text her she was fine.
She didn’t want to look suspicious, but she raised the binos to her face again, briefly. The deputy was now walking toward Dart as if he was just looking around, not casing or stalking the place, though his hand was on his hip on what she presumed was a gun. It’s okay, Kit’s not there, this guy will find nothing.
But that was not true.
Her binos had just caught movement, someone running low to the ground from the back of Dart over to the rock outcrop. She gasped.
Kit was there.
Oh no no no.
What if Kit had seen her leave food? What if she had drawn him to this trouble? Had her water-drop efforts brought the law? Thereby ending Kit’s freedom? By doing one good deed, had she caused a catastrophe?
She whimpered and watched Kit move until he stopped and turned toward her, and then he did exactly what she had just predicted he’d do. Once in the rock outcrop, hidden from the deputy but visible to her, he waved his arms at her in big X’s, and, once sure he had her attention, he then flung one arm, pointing down the road, as if he was traffic-controlling her to leave. To get the law to leave.
“Noooooo,” she heard herself whispering. She wanted to avoid whatever this would bring. But of course, she had to. She had to get the deputy out of there. She had to help a friend.
She turned the ignition. Drove down the rutted dirt road toward Dart, putting on her best smile.
—
