The longer we watched, the slower time moved. I thought of that silly saying of my grandmother: A watched pot never boils. Stupid. It takes the same amount of time for water to a boil whether you watch it or not. However, right at that moment, I started to wonder if Grandma wasn’t onto something. I began to wonder if the group hadn’t stopped for lunch.
After another ten minutes, the group wandered by on the main road. Brit quietly counted the people, fifteen in all. They looked to be younger than me but older than Brit. If I had to guess, I would say they were all twenty-something. They didn’t look particularly menacing, but a number of them carried bats and other forms of hand weapons. The gent in the lead carried some type of rifle.
We waited ten minutes for them to get well past our position. Then, at Brit’s insistence, we waited another five. I could see fear in her eyes. Something told me she wanted to avoid groups of unknown people. I couldn’t blame her given our earlier joint experience. Caution was the rule of the day. We finally came out of our hiding spot and continued down the road.
“Tell me, why didn’t you stay put with Dad? Seems safer now.” I knew I wouldn’t like the answer but I had to ask. Brit snorted at the idea.
“Yeah, right. Hanging out with a drunk is real fun.” I had figured this much. “He gets mean when he drinks. And he’s been drinking hard since this whole thing started. So let’s just say he was plenty mean. And I was plenty sick of all his crap.” She didn’t sound too upset, more matter of fact.
“Okay, so you took off alone on foot?”
She was still looking ahead as I looked to her for more. “Yep. So I took off right after I got up and started down Highway 8. Past Deer Lake and on my way to 46.” She finally looked up at me. “You know where that is?” I nodded. “I saw there were a lot of strange people on the road. I didn’t know what I would find. So every time I saw a group, I made my way into the woods or corn or wherever I could pass without them seeing me. I know how to take care of myself.” She stopped and stared, at me.
“Yeah, that’s pretty obvious, Brit. I guess it’s a good thing Jake and I bumped into you when we did.” She opened her eyes wider. “You’re a cute girl, Brit. Cute girls shouldn’t be out on their own right now. No one should be out alone actually. If they aren’t using your body, they’ll take your food. If it’s not your food, they’ll take your supplies. I don’t even want to think what they’d do to a person who was empty handed.”
She grabbed my left arm to get my attention. “You’re a shrink. Why are people acting like this?”
Good question, Brit. I thought for a moment before I replied. “There’s a certain lawless element out there that thrives during times of crisis. They don’t have many rules to start, so times like these are when they thrive.” She seemed to be following along. “Most decent people’s instincts tell them to hide or hole up when things get bad. These people, road bandits they’re calling them, well they go out and scavenge for whatever they can find. They don’t have a lot to start with, so they need almost everything. Without the normal rules of society, they just take what they want, what they feel they need. To survive. That’s the key, Brit. They seem to know how to survive better than most of the people. And they don’t care what they have to do, survive they will.”
She pouted and reached down to pet Buddy who had finally caught up. She took a small drink of the tepid water and looked at the never-ending expanse of corn all around. “So taking and maybe trading a 14-year-old girl for sex is normal for them?” She certainly was a blunt young lady.
“They don’t see it as an issue, Brit. They don’t know you or have any ties to you. They simply see you as an opportunity to get one or some of their basic needs met. Food perhaps. Deep inside, they aren’t acting maliciously, they are just doing what they need to do to survive.” I looked closely at her. “Do you understand the difference?”
She nodded casually. “I guess so. That doesn’t make it right though.” I nodded, very true. “The sooner I get to my grandparents’ place the safer I’ll be. That much I know.”
We turned and continued down the long, lonely road. Alone, but safe.
We walked for another hour before we took a break. You might think it would be boring walking down a deserted stretch of road like this, a 38-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl I had just met that morning. Brit had had enough silence for one day, so she made up for any boredom with a string of never-ending chatter. I discovered she could talk.
“So my mom, Sheri, she had me when she was 15. We lived with grandma and grandpa for a few years, but she figured she could get more government aid if we lived alone, so that’s when we moved to Balsam. I think I was four or five at the time. The first place we lived was a dump. I can sort of remember it. Bugs in the summer and mice in the winter. Inside I mean.” She looked to see if I was still paying attention to her riveting story. I had been nodding at her for over an hour to keep her going.
“Okay, so then we moved to a nicer place. Grandpa helps with the rent. But at least there’s no mice anymore. I got my own room, and she let me decorate it however I wanted. I had my friend Billie help me paint last summer. We did this cool design on purple walls. It was skulls and stars. It’s so sweet.” I could feel my brain dying word by word. But I kept nodding so she would continue.
Years as a school psychologist have taught me that most kids from broken homes want one thing above all others. Normalcy. They want a normal life, they want a normal family, they want their parents to have normal jobs. When normal goes missing, they start acting up, because … they want attention if they can’t have normal. Many of these kids are good kids deep inside. They just get a little off track due to their crappy parents. I guess I should be glad; this is what keeps me employed. Maybe kept me employed is a better way to put it given the current situation.
“I always wanted a dog, sometimes even a cat. But mom always said no. We hardly have enough money for food and utilities, much less food for a pet. I would have named my dog Snoopy. You know, like Charlie Brown’s dog.” My continual nod continued. Brit had a lot to say now that she had started. “I had a fish once, one of those beta fishes. But he only lived like a week. So it probably wouldn’t have worked so well if I had a dog.” She was getting more animated, more open the more we walked, and she talked. “When are we going to stop for lunch? I’m getting kind of hungry.”
I stopped and smiled. “We can stop right now. I’m sort of hungry myself.” We’d made about two miles in a little less than an hour. Not great time, but adequate in my mind. “Let’s see what we have in the pack to eat.”
I opened the pack as Brit looked over my shoulder. “Two cans of pork and beans, one can of tuna – in spring water, so dolphin safe – two cans of mixed fruit, three sleeves of soda crackers, one last bottle of water, and a partridge in a pear tree.” I called the items out as I sorted them.
Brit giggled at my partridge tune. “Can I have the tuna?” She opened her blue eyes and gave me a pleading look. I couldn’t say no to that.
“Sure. And we’ll split a sleeve of crackers. Should I open some fruit?”
She looked closely to see what kind of fruit we were talking about. Fruit cocktail of course. She nodded. “Yeah, I like fruit cocktail. Do you have more than one spoon?” Good question; I dug deeper.
In my hasty packing I hadn’t considered eating utensils very well. I had one spoon, one fork and a solitary table knife.
“You can have the spoon,” I said. “I’ll use the fork.” I opened her tuna, my pork and beans, and our fruit. We sat on a log in the ditch under the blazing midday sun. It was hot again.
We nursed our next to last bottle of water as we ate our food in silence. After I had finished, I dug the map out of my back pocket and laid it on the ground. Brit was carefully scooping the last of the fruit into her mouth as she leaned forward to study the map with me. She tossed Buddy a cracker, as he lay next to us in the grassy ditch.
“How much further you think?” Brit leaned over my right s
houlder as she studied the map carefully. I counted the miles in my head remembering we weren’t exactly sure of our destination. But she’d know when we got there.
“Well, Luck appears to be another three miles north of here. Frederic is another six north of that. If we make two miles an hour we can be to Luck by…” I looked at my pocket watch. It was 3:10. “4:40 or so. That would put us close to your grandparents place by 6 o’clock, maybe 6:30. 7 o’clock at the latest.” I looked up at Brit; she smiled at the map or maybe my words.
We left our resting spot and continued on down the road. Since we were heading north, I suppose I should say “up the road.”
We hadn’t gone very far when Brit grabbed at my arm. “Bill, up ahead.” She pointed to the north. Another group of people were on the prowl. As best as I could tell, they hadn’t seen us. I looked around for a hiding spot. The nearest side road was a ways back. Nothing close. At the present moment, we were surrounded by nothing but corn. Six to eight foot tall field corn. Acres and acres of field corn. I grabbed Brit’s hand and lead her into the field on our right.
Chapter 25