Mr. Splitfoot

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HIGHWAYS ARE BAD PLACES TO HIDE, but I didn’t know we were hiding until Ruth started running. “Who is he?” Like a kind of torture, I keep asking her the same question. Ruth readjusts her headphones. I would think a person who doesn’t know what’s she’s running from can’t really be on the run, but that’s not true. Here I am.

A cop car coasts to a stop a few feet behind us. We keep walking. They turn on their lights so we stop. They sit in their car. We wait for them to get out, but the cops don’t get out, so I tell Ruth, “Fuck it. Let’s keep walking.” Then they hit us with the siren, which, that close, is a bolt of electricity from below, spine-clearing. It exits through my brain. They use their bullhorn. “Hold your position.”

When I worked in an office, it was the same thing, people using phrases that made no sense. “Action item,” they’d say, because our job was so dull we used mysterious phrases to make it seem more exciting, as if we were spies dealing with top-secret, pass-coded information. Only there was no way to break the code because none of the phrases meant anything: Bring it to the table. Deliverables. Go live. Leverage. With that said. Moving forward. Offline. Branded brain dump.

“What’d they say?” I ask Ruth. We lean against the guardrail and wait.

The cops finally climb out of their patrol car.

“Your car break down?” he asks me, as if Ruth’s become invisible. That’s fucked up but that’s what happens to women. We grow up into ghosts. No one wants to screw Ruth anymore so she’s invisible.

“Yeah. Her car.”

“Whose?”

“My aunt Ruth’s.”

“ID, please.”

“You want to see our driver’s licenses?”

“Correct.”

“But we’re not driving.”

“You’re trespassing. There’s no walking allowed on the highway.”

I look at them blankly. “Walking is against the law?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The cops give us a lift to the next exit, another town where the houses have lights in each window. Homesickness raises questions like, Why don’t I live in a house? Why am I punishing El? I don’t know the answers, but walking can untangle knots, spread things out, so at least I can see the strands: walking, mothering.

We pass Walmart, Walgreens, Starbucks. Everything is new in this town, even the trash barrels. A man mowing his lawn watches us as if he’s on patrol. The town playground has forts, tunnels, platforms, and a padded surface. A father and daughter are heading home for supper. The sun is sinking behind the trees. Three teenagers, a girl and two boys, are on the swings, pivoting on pointed toes. Each of them wears headphones. Each of their faces is illuminated by the glow of a smartphone.

El told me that she worries about kids today, about me. She said we’re screwed because we’ve never known life without the Internet. And then she told me a story about the first time she heard Linda Thompson sing, “I hand you my ball and chain.” “You know Linda Thompson?” she asked me. “Of course,” I said, because I know everything now, that’s my job, to know one drop of shallow information about every single thing. El told me how she was driving home from work years ago, before the Internet, and how the radio station broadcast that Linda Thompson song and, like a tractor beam, it took her over, prickled her skin, lifted her up. Her body felt every signal the Earth was issuing, every twitch of spring coming in the winter air was palpable on her forearms because that song’s so good and it spoke to her. And Thompson’s voice. El pulled over just to listen. She waited through three more songs, frozen with a shred of paper she’d picked up off the floor, the receipt from an oil change. She waited with a pen in hand, like her life was depending on hearing that fast moment when the DJ would rattle off the name of the lady who sang that song. Hear it now or lose that beauty forever. The DJ said the name. El wrote it down. She drove twenty miles to a record store, ordered a CD the guy working there had never heard of, waited two weeks for that guy to call, drove twenty minutes back to the store, and left with Richard and Linda Thompson’s CD in her hands, holding it above her head like some Jesus cross umbrella, a relic of protection against death because she had found it and it had found her, and the chances of that encounter were so very slim.

El said that kids today never sit still long enough to see how the river changes. What, she wondered, was going to happen to people who think they know everything? What’s going to happen without chance? Good question.

My back aches. I’d like to stretch out on my side on the bench, but a janitor is securing a padlock on the trash dumpster out back. They lock their garbage here. Even the teenagers eye us suspiciously. We stay upright until the janitor and the teenagers are gone. Ruth and I climb to the highest platform on the “Play Structure.” We’re hidden. Ruth takes everything out of our bags. She even pulls out my broken phone. I look at its dead screen but not for long. It’s not like it’s going to come back to life again. She distributes blankets and extra clothes around my body, tucking them behind my back, between my knees as needed. Ruth knows how to make a bed. She takes nothing soft for herself but lies flat on her back looking up at the sky. She rests one light hand on the baby.

I’ve come to think of Ruth as the father of my kid. She takes care of us in a way I’d hope a father would. Ruth will smile the day this child is born. No one will smile more because the baby is hers too now.

“You remember your mom, Ruth?”

She shakes her head no.

“I do.”

She stares at me, wanting to hear more, but it takes a moment to think of anything nice about her mother. It’s actually hard to come up with even one good thing. Finally I get, “She had long, pretty hair like yours.”

Her eyes open wider, so ready for information her mouth gapes. Ruth is one big ear.

“I lived with her when I was a kid. It was a bad idea. Your mom was nasty. She’d tell El, ‘You’re fat. You’re lazy. Should’ve burned your face instead. Would have improved your chances for finding a man.’” I’m giving shape to a dark room in Ruth’s head. “Your mom was a drunk but we stayed. A house, a yard. I went to a good school, ate good clean food. El never left me alone with her, not when I was young.”

Ruth plies a bit of hair from the corner of her mouth.

“Your mom seemed to think that being cruel to El equaled being nice to you. She was twisted by guilt, and I’m sorry she was your mom, but I’m glad you exist, Ruth. I’m glad she had you.”

Ruth turns to keep me from saying anything too nice to her. But fuck it. I can be as nice as I want to Ruth. Why shouldn’t I? Someone ought to. I can even say I love her if I want. What’s she going to do? Tell me to shut up? “I love you, Ruth.” I hope El gets the message too somehow. “Thanks for coming to get me. Whatever this turns out to be.”

Night comes down and her breath deepens. Millions of stars overhead make the violence of the Big Bang clear. So much force that matter is still sprinting away from the center. I feel the velocity of space pinning me to this platform. I’m tiny but I’m going to be someone’s mom, someone’s everything. I touch the baby. None of this is easy to believe. The stars leave streaks, we’re moving so fast. Ruth breathes heavily. One small scintillation above — a gossamer thread of light — gathers oceans, every word ever spoken on the radio, each calorie of sunlight ever captured and stored in a kernel of corn. You know. Things like that. And the star beside it: the tongues of every lizard, spider, leopard. If spiders have tongues. One day the sun will suck us in. I’m not too angry about that. Lying in these stars, despite them, somehow I can imagine my child seat-belted in a minivan while I stress the importance of sharing chocolate Easter eggs or stuffed toy pandas or bags of corn chips with the other children. And I’ll mean that being alive matters, even being alive in the smallest, smallest way. And aren’t you lucky to be here.

We’ve been walking forever. The weather is growing colder. The leaves are turning. Some ancient program is switching on in my hormonal body saying winter is nearer than it was yesterday. Take shelter. Wolves, coyotes, and bears will become hungry, and a child, to them, will taste so sweet.

Ruth could tell me so much. When we sleep like this, I imagine all she knows, flowing into me, into the baby, a transfusion of history, stories, and maybe even some simple sketch, a rough outline, of what the hell is going on.