As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth Read online

  “Come on, you guys, answer your phone,” he said as it rang and rang.

  What was left of the battery was fading from searching so hard for the faint signal, so he turned the phone off. It sang out its good-bye and turned out the lights.

  “Okay,” he said aloud.

  He looked again at the town. He would walk. He would walk along the train tracks. The tracks probably went through the town, or near it. The river was nearby, at least here, so he could take drinks. There would be people in the town, and he would figure out what to do next.

  Unless it’s a ghost town, he thought, which almost made him laugh. But not quite. He was in the West. That could happen here.

  WALKING TO TOWN

  It was not long before Ry felt that the sun and dry air might be baking his brain. He thought he could feel it begin to shrivel and misfire, maybe even vitrify, inside his skull. But when he walked over to the river and waded in and splashed his face and stood in the shade for five minutes, his brain seemed to reconstitute and he could go on.

  He came to a place where a road crossed the tracks, and he had to think, Road or tracks? Road or tracks? Tracks won because they looked straighter. Very, very straight.

  On one of his forays into the river, something brushed against his leg as he stood there. He looked down to see a number of fish, each one about the size of his forearm, all swimming along. He didn’t know what kind they were. He fingered the pocketknife in his pocket and mentally pictured himself sharpening the end of a stick and trying to spear one of the fish. He could picture sharpening the stick, but in his mind’s eye every time he took a stab, he either missed or just knocked the fish off course. How long would it take you, what was the learning curve on fish stabbing? Maybe he should give it a try while he still had strength. Then there would be the whole starting-afire-with-a-stick thing. Unless he ate the fish raw.

  “I think you can go for pretty long without eating,” he said aloud. “As long as you have water to drink.”

  He sat on the bank, putting his boots back on, and a white shape in the weeds caught his eye. He picked it up. It was the skull of a small animal. He laughed softly as a thought struck him. The thought was that he had expected to spend his summer hiking and looking for bones. He had wanted to do it because it seemed like it would be doing something real. And here he was, hiking, and here was a skull. And it all felt pretty real, right?

  The difference was that instead of hiking with a small group of people and a guide who knew where to go, he was utterly alone and not one person in the entire world knew exactly where he was, including himself. And he hadn’t expected his hike to be along a railroad track.

  But although the track didn’t make for the most interesting hike, it was not interestingness he needed most. He just needed to get somewhere.

  Ry turned the skull over and looked at it from various angles. What was it? Looking into its vacant eye sockets he said, “You were probably a large rodent. I’m guessing not that long ago.”

  He held it in one hand as he got to his feet, then slipped it into a side pocket of his shorts. He would find out later what it was. It might be cool to put it on his dresser at home. The truth was that it made him feel a little less alone.

  He took inventory of what else was in his pockets. It was a short list: pocketknife, next-to-useless cell phone, wallet. The list of what he didn’t have at the moment was longer.

  “But at least I have my health,” he said. It was a joke.

  The wallet had eighty-three dollars in it, a hundred bucks less the cost of some Amtrak food. He looked around for a place to spend it. “Where’s the 7-eleven?” he asked. This was a joke, too.

  He said his lame jokes aloud, to keep his spirits up. He didn’t know if he should panic or not. Well—he knew he shouldn’t panic. But he didn’t know how dire his situation was. It was the moment when the elevator drops and you don’t know whether to laugh or get started on the screening of your whole life passing before your eyes. Only a lot longer than that moment. It was that moment stretched into hours.

  Periodically, he felt the urge to text someone.

  Nowhere, he imagined typing.

  Still nowhere.

  Each time, without thinking, he pulled out his phone, looked at its blank face, remembered, and shoved it back down in his pocket.

  “It’s not like I’m the only living thing, though,” he said. “Look. Cows.” Black ones grazed on a hilltop in the distance.

  It was probably a great place to be a cow. Or a pheasant. One of which fluttered up from the grasses at his approach.

  He walked past a field where cylindrical bales of hay were sprinkled like giant corks spilled on a tabletop. A dilapidated long-ago schoolhouse. A conglomeration of rusted buildings. A cluster of newer silvery ones. Ry stared for a long time at a small house painted bright orange with about twenty cars parked behind it, in varying states of decay, along with discarded bathroom fixtures and a windowless bus that seemed to have melted into the ground, faded to an almost greenish yellow, vegetation thriving around it and up through it. He decided to keep walking toward the little town.

  Down here in the bottomlands, Ry couldn’t see it. It had to be just beyond those next hills, though. Should he use his energy to climb up high again? What if night fell before he got there? No. It couldn’t be that far. How often did trains come along, and would a train stop and pick up someone waving their arms? He didn’t think so. Would a train stop if the engineer saw a dead body near the tracks? Maybe the engineer would tell someone. But maybe he would be looking the other way.

  The track split into two tracks now. That could be a good sign.

  His stomach made the sound effect for a cartoon character hurtling through outer space in a spiral trajectory. The bones in his legs were softening into rubber bands. His forearms were covered with tiny scratches that were more painful than they looked.

  Ry felt a sudden trickling from his nose, and then a flowing. He turned his head and lifted his arm to wipe it on the sleeve of his T-shirt and saw that it was blood. His nose was bleeding. Lifting the hem of his T-shirt and pinching his nose shut with it, he plodded along, breathing through his mouth, checking every few minutes to see if the bleeding had stopped.

  The sun was beginning to lower in the sky, shifting its strategy from beating down on his head and shoulders to blinding him. Ry started over to the river again and, without intending to, found himself sitting down halfway there. He loosened the laces on his boots and then, without intending to, found that he was lying flat on his back. A large bird traced a silent circle high above. Was it a vulture, or a hawk? He wondered if he looked edible. He should not fall asleep out in the open. He was tired, though.

  Vultures probably went by the smell. Of something rotting.

  “It’s blood,” he said to the vulture, referring to his T-shirt, “but I’m not dead.” Still, maybe he should roll over closer to that tree. He was too tired to roll. He didn’t want to.

  He pictured seasons going by as he lay there. Autumn leaves, covering him. They would have to blow over from those trees; the wind would have to be just right. Then the snows would cover him. By that time he would be picked clean. A skeleton, like the little creature by the river, now in his pocket. Probably some shreds of clothing would remain, fluttering in the frigid gusts of air. The little skull would lie next to his femur. Rest in peace.

  The air had given up some of its heat. That was nice. A soft breeze floated over Ry’s closed eyelids. He dreamed he was lying on a bed. A huge bed; he couldn’t find the edges of it when he reached with his hands or his toes, but not a very comfortable one. Hard and lumpy. He must be in a motel room, because he became aware that the bed had a vibrating massage feature. Ry had heard about this, but he had never seen one before. There was a metal box with a slot to put quarters in, to make it go. He was surprised at how loud it was, though—the loudness was canceling out most of the relaxingness. There was also a jerkiness to it, a stop-and-start irregularness,
like trying to sleep when your neighbor was cutting up logs with a chain saw. He examined the metal box to see if he could adjust the setting, turn it down, but there were no knobs or dials, just the slot for quarters.

  Then he sat up and opened his eyes.

  A freight train was rolling by. It seemed to be slowing down; the sound of the steel wheels reached him in gently lurching waves as one by one the boxcars and tankers flowed along before him.

  Ry thought he saw two figures, moving shadows, through the open door of a boxcar, and he saw that here was an opportunity for rescue. A way to shortcut his long hike. But the silhouettes gave him the creeps, too. And besides, most of the boxcar doors were shut.

  He was on his feet now. He watched uncertainly for a time. The train seemed to be going slower and slower, slowing down to a complete. Stop.

  Directly before him, a short set of metal steps led up to a metal mesh door in the metal mesh walls of a car carrier. If they hadn’t stopped so directly before him, beckoning him, he probably wouldn’t have climbed on. But there they were. As if under a spell, he walked to them and hauled himself up. He climbed to the top step and tried the door. It was locked, so he turned around and sat down.

  A few minutes later, there was a growing rumbling. When Ry stood up and leaned around, he could see between his car and the next that another train was passing in the opposite direction, on the second track.

  Not long after the rumbling faded, his train began to move again. Slowly at first. Then continuing slowly. And slowly some more. The train never did move faster than very slowly while Ry was on it, because it was making its way onto a siding in a freight yard on the outskirts of the town. He had hopped onto the train just a mile or so out. He could have walked it, though he didn’t know that when he got on. He couldn’t see the town at the beginning of the track’s long, gradual curve. Even when he could see it, he was glad to be riding.

  He rode with his legs stretched out, the backs of his heels resting against a lower step, watching this chunk of the world scroll by. When the train went over the river, on the trestle, Ry pulled his legs and feet up instinctively, uninstinctively forgetting how he had loosened his bootlaces earlier. His left boot caught on the edge of the metal step, his foot slipped out of the boot, and the boot bounced once on the trestle and went sailing through the air, down into the milky coffee of the river water. He saw it reemerge to bob along downstream like a plastic duck in a carnival booth, way, way, way out of reach. He watched it in disbelief, his boot floating off to end up in some distant weedy backwater or at the bottom of the river, not doing anyone any good, while here was his foot in only a sock, his foot that the boot fit perfectly, never again to meet. He pulled the laces tight on the remaining boot and tied them.

  The train slowed further as it pulled past—humans! Sitting in lawn chairs, next to a little house. Concrete grain elevators. A scrapyard full of heaps of curled metal rubbish. And the trainyard. Suddenly there were several tracks, and other trains, and pieces of trains, unidentified industrial objects, buildings. And people working.

  Ry decided to jump off before they saw him sitting there. The train was barely moving. He jumped without incident and limped (on account of the missing boot) hurriedly over behind some rusting piles of industrial detritus. Not seeing an inch-thick rusted steel cable because it was in shadow and coming straight at him, he walked into it. It hit him just above his right eye. He jumped back and let out a yelp and his hand flew up to where the pain was. He clenched his eye shut and hopped up and down in a circle.

  Then he stood still. He moved his hand up just slightly and opened his eye.

  “I can still see,” he said. “That’s good.” He took his hand away and looked at it.

  “No blood,” he said. “That’s lucky.”

  He couldn’t help smiling a little despite the searing pain, because this made him think of the joke about the blind dog with three legs, no tail, and major bald patches.

  “What’s his name?” someone asks.

  “Lucky,” says the dog’s owner.

  He stood there on the rusted, frayed edge of some town in Montana at sunset. He could feel warmth around his eye as the swelling narrowed his eye opening to a slit. But it didn’t swell shut completely. That was lucky.

  “I’m so lucky,” he said to himself. “Lucky, lucky, lucky.”

  Ry had been happy to see the town on the horizon, but now that he was here, what was he supposed to do? Where should he go? Who should he talk to? He pulled out his phone again and turned it on. There were five messages: Jake was bored—how was the train? Amanda just saw that one guy at the mall. Again. From Eric: Dude, you at camp yet? From Nina: Hey, have you talked to Amanda? She won’t talk to me. From Connor: Wanna play b-ball?

  “I don’t live there anymore, remember?” muttered Ry.

  He sent out a mass text: Where am I??!!!??

  No Grandpa, no parents yet. He called them both.

  “Call me,” he said. “I have to turn my phone off, but leave a message.”

  Food, he thought then. I have to eat.

  He did have some money in his wallet.

  Past another phalanx of grain elevators, he found himself in front of a sign with two arrows at the lower end of a bridge that went over the train tracks. The arrow pointing left was next to the words Business District. The arrow pointing to the right was next to the word Canada.

  Ry headed for the business district. It was the old downtown. About half of it was boarded up. Of the other half, what was still open at this time of day was bars. He decided to try the next block over. The movie theater was open. He could even afford it, but it might not be the smartest move. When he came out, it would be night, full on.

  He soon walked into a welcoming neighborhood of tidy houses with trees and bushes and vacu-formed and extruded plastic toys in cheerful, noxious colors sprinkled across the yards. Ry felt he was walking into a club of which he was a member, and he walked down the sidewalk with some confidence that no one glimpsing him through a front window, with the distance of a front yard separating them, would take any notice of him. (He was forgetting a few aspects of his current appearance.)

  It was not the kind of club where he could walk up and knock on someone’s front door, though. Not like in the very olden days when travelers were taken in (and fed) by total strangers.

  He had never before studied a street in terms of the places it provided for shelter. The pickings were slim. Maybe after everyone went to bed, he could sit on someone’s porch. He walked up one street and down another, the streets filled with houses. The houses were filled with people who had lives and families and friends, but he had no connection to any of them.

  The houses had windows that were beginning to glow, golden with lamplight or blue with TV light, as dusk sifted down. Whiffs of dinners, wafts of conversation murmured through the air—good smells, friendly sounds, but he had to keep walking as if he had somewhere to go.

  How good it would feel if one of the houses would take him in. If a door opened and a familiar voice called out, “Ry! Get in here! Where have you been?”

  He decided to go back to the street with the bars. At least he could get a burger or something. But he had turned a few corners and, trying to retrace his steps, he must have missed a turn. Because here was a park, with a gazebo. He was pretty sure he hadn’t passed that before. Or this school. Or this church, with its yellow bricks illuminated by lights hidden in the shrubbery.

  Other than the gazebo park and the school and the church, the rows of houses and trees might as well have been twenty-foot-high hedges in a maze. Ry was the rat, searching for his cheese. Burger. The tired, hungry rat.

  All of the people seemed to have gone inside. For dinner, no doubt. Chicken, maybe, or spaghetti. Up ahead, though, a guy was in his driveway, doing something with a truck and a welding torch. In the fading light, it was hard to make out what he was doing, exactly, but it looked like he had chopped apart a couple of pickup trucks and was welding t
hem together in a new way. The cab of one pickup truck now rested somehow on top of the walls of the box of another pickup. Both pickups had the rounded shape and the aura of automotive ancientness. The guy who was welding had his back toward Ry. As Ry approached in his weakened, famished state, he fell under the spell of the welding torch and he stopped, transfixed by the flame and the sparks flying into the onset of a night that had no place for him. He thought he might watch, just for a minute or two, and he sat down, almost without realizing it, on a small stack of tires that some lobe of his desperate mind had noticed.

  Once he sat down, it seemed unlikely that he would be standing up anytime soon. The streetlights flickered on, and one of them lit Ry up like a lone actor on a stage. But still, he didn’t move. He couldn’t move.

  The welder took his mask off, then. He noticed Ry, and nodded. He worked for a few minutes longer, putting his tools in order. He saw that Ry was still sitting there, and said, “How’s it going?”

  Ry opened his mouth for the word okay to come out. Instead, his lips lost their ability to form that word, or any word. A sound issued from his throat, but it left his mouth unshaped. Tears were forming and welling up in his eyes. He clenched his jaw and fixed his gaze on the odd-looking truck in an effort to stop the tears from spilling out onto his cheeks. He focused on the truck. The two trucks. Seeing, without seeing, the door handles, the bumper, the dull red spots of primer, a sticker on a window.

  “What’re you doing?” he croaked finally. He was embarrassed by his voice, but relieved that he had managed to speak. He cleared his throat and said, “I mean, it looks cool, but can you actually drive it, on regular roads?”

  By the end of the sentence, his voice sounded almost normal. Normal was what he was going for. Forgetting, just briefly, how not ordinary it was to materialize in a total stranger’s driveway at nightfall, filthy and bruised and on the verge of tears, in a torn bloody T-shirt, wearing only one shoe.