Reliance
Not everything is yours to carry.
Note: A friend pointed out to me that I’ve yet to post any fiction to Substack, which is what I hoped to do when I first signed up. This short story is a first effort a correcting that oversight.
Colette knelt over the edge of the blacktop, studying the road beneath her for contrast. In these last seconds before sunset, when a nickel lying flat would cast a shadow, the apex of a hill should not be so hard to find. She pinched one of the pebbles she held in her palm, lobbed it onto the asphalt and watched it bounce, hoping it would offer a clue to the exact point where up gave way to down. But the stone took an irregular path, zig-zagging to a stop six feet to her right, yielding no useful data. She raised her eyes and stared across the sea of prairie. Turned her head northward, where the river valley was already in shadow.
Below her position, the lighted sign of the Tumbleweed Casino cast streaks of pink and blue onto the shiny black surface of Rawley’s immaculate pickup. He sat on the lowered tailgate, smoking a cigarette and trying to look unbothered and, from this distance anyhow, pulling it off.
She threw another pebble. Frowned at the result.
The fight with Rawley started in the casino bar over money—what else?— and she knew by the rate of his drinking that it would be a bad one. Their raised voices attracted plenty of attention, but it wasn’t until things turned physical that anyone felt the need to step in. She had her hand lying flat on the bar, and he’d brought down his empty beer bottle hard onto the tip of her finger. She could tell by his expression that he knew he’d gone too far, but she’d thrown her drink in his face anyway. Before they could even speak, the bartender yanked them up by the elbows and ushered them outside. She’d kept walking, spitting on Rawley’s pickup as she passed, and stalked off down the highway to the top of the hill where she now waited. Any minute, the manager—Rawley’s cousin—would escort him back to the bar and drive south to pick her up. No need to hurry after her. Rawley and his cousin both knew she had nowhere to go. By the time anyone caught up with her, she would probably know it too.
The timer in her head told her to stand straight, to scan the horizon. thirty-eight months since her final deployment—Kandahar—and she was still a slave to attentiveness. She watched and she counted, those habits as engrained in her as breathing. Three possible approach routes, including the dirt road that teed into Highway 47 two miles south. A hawk. Eight mule deer with long ears pointed in her direction as they made their own assessment. All around them a vast swath of empty, a grassy desolation. Silence.
And then a pickup, just crossing the river.
A familiar pang of dread twisted down low in her stomach, the way it did anytime a lone vehicle approached the checkpoint. That happened at least twenty times every shift, almost all of them harmless.
Almost.
She patted her pockets, taking stock of the resources on hand. She’d left her pistol beneath the seat in Rawley’s truck. No way to fix that. She’d use her keys on anyone who tried to mess with her, go for the eyes. If she made it through to the next town, she had $30 in cash and a near worthless debit card to get her by. It might be enough, though. Might buy her gas station food for supper and a motel room in which to begin disassembling this latest attempt at life. She’d get a ride—her nephew Adam, maybe, kind boy that he was—and go somewhere she could lay out all the pieces in hopes that some new design might emerge.
She dropped her handful of gravel into her pocket. Turned again to watch the pickup approach. Acid rose in the back of her throat.
In her last week in Kandahar, a van made a run on the checkpoint—not an attack, but a miscommunication. A newbie named Case used an American hand signal that didn’t translate, confusing the teenage boy behind the wheel. When he saw the van speed up, Case panicked, raised his rifle. Colette lunged toward him, screaming at him to stand down, but too late. Before she could stop it, he squeezed out three rounds, one of which hit the driver in the chest. The van lurched and rolled, finally coming to rest atop his lone passenger, a girl who might have been the boy’s sister or wife. One moment, barely even a decision. Two dead, more lives wrecked. The world before pivoted and became the world after, defined by that instant.
Colette squeezed her eyes shut. Listened as the pickup slowed. When she looked again, it was rolling to a stop in the middle of its lane, all four tires still on the blacktop. She spread her feet to shoulder width and squared up to look it over. A series of dents ran from the front fender across both doors of the crew cab and all the way back to the rear bumper, the whole line tied together by long, deep scratches in the navy paint. The driver was on the downslope of middle-age, dark-skinned and thickly built, his features unmistakably Lakota. Wild silver hair sprouted from beneath his trucker’s cap.
“Name’s Paul,” he said.
“Hi,” she answered. “Colette.”
Paul jerked his thumb back toward the Tumbleweed. “You coming or going?”
She looked down, as though the answer might be printed on her boots. A field mouse scurried past the toe, keeping close to the lingering warmth of the blacktop, hugging the line between the traffic on the road and the hawk somewhere overhead. Defiant little guy, she thought. Or maybe just stupid.
“Going,” she said to the driver.
“I can get you far as Chamberlain. Probably will stop for gas in Reliance, if you’d rather let off there.”
In the fading light, she caught sight of her reflection in the tinted rear windows. A screaming come-apart with her boyfriend plus a two-mile hike in the wind had done her appearance no favors. She looked wild, vulnerable—anyone could see that.
“Reliance would be good,” she said. “It’s what, six miles?”
“Twelve if you’re lucky, and a hell of a lot of empty between here and there.”
She leaned in to scan the vehicle. Caught sight of another figure slumped in the backseat. He was a young man about her age, sacked out with his mouth open, head wedged between the seat and the window glass. His was not a natural position, nor a natural sleep. Drugs—meth or oxy. Her hand flashed to her hip for the sidearm she no longer carried.
“Easy,” the driver said. “He can’t hurt you.”
“Is he okay?”
Paul shook his head. “He can’t hurt you.”
“Jesus.”
“He’s just a kid. I’ll vouch for him.”
A newer model pickup zoomed around them, horn blaring and expletives flying. Paul looked at his hands. Picked at something on one of his knuckles. The young man behind him remained frozen. Not drugs, maybe. A brain injury or chromosomal abnormality—something physical and thus amoral. Maybe he’d gotten blown up in the Army. She knew plenty who had.
Another car passed, this one without commentary. Before Colette turned to look, it was a hundred yards beyond, far enough for sound and sight to detach from one another again. She blinked hard, the world and her awareness of it out of alignment.
“Reliance?” she said.
Paul reached across and opened the door. She climbed into the passenger seat.
He accelerated steadily, climbing to 75mph just as they passed a thin green sign announcing Lyman County. He held the wheel in an easy grip, as though leading a horse. Every few seconds his eyes swept the cone of light cast by the headlamps, scanning for deer. Inside the cab, Colette could hear the steady exhale of the heater at her feet, the occasional sniffs of the driver. The man in back made no sound at all. She tried to push him out of her thoughts. Was still pushing when Paul spoke.
“You’re Sarah Phares’ girl, right?”
“She’s my aunt.”
“You favor her.”
“Some people say so.” She fished her keys out of her pocket. Quietly positioned one between her knuckles.
“I used to drive truck for Sarah in the summers, once school let out,” he continued. “She talked about you some.”
“Like what?”
“Military service and the like. She was proud of you, I think. She said you were on the sheriff’s payroll for awhile.”
“That didn’t work out.”
“Said that too.”
She looked out the window toward the sliver of pink at the horizon, no telling how far away. It was not so different a sky as she’d seen in Fairbanks or Kandahar, her two longest deployments. The Army got that much right, at least. If anyone could handle space, it was a Dakota woman.
Light from the headlamps glinted off another vehicle parked near the road to the west—a police SUV, poised at the edge of a gravel driveway. Paul lifted his foot until he’d backed down to 65. He adjusted his fingers on the wheel. Checked the rearview mirror. Once they passed over a low hill and out of sight of the cop, Colette let go a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
She looked again into the back seat, held the motionless figure in her stare long enough for Paul to feel the question.
“That’s Reef,” he said. “I coach his basketball team.”
She lifted her phone to wake it. “Should I call someone?”
“Who would you call?”
“I don’t know. 911, I guess. Maybe the sheriff.”
“Go ahead if you want.”
She thought about it for a moment. Tucked the phone back under her thigh. She pivoted in her seat to get a full look at the slumping figure—Reef, the basketball player. He was wrapped in a puffy old coat far too big for his frame, and younger than she’d first thought. No more than sixteen.
And—she could taste the bitter thing in the back of her throat, now that she’d allowed herself to know it—he was dead.
The weight of it rolled back on her, pressed her down into a dark inner valley strewn with unchangeable things. Pinned her there with Case, nineteen years old and destroyed by a moment. With the driver, undone by a single bullet. With the girl beneath the overturned van, who knew she was dying and could not call out and died anyway, in the sand at Colette’s feet.
“He can’t hurt anybody,” Paul said again.
“You sure about that?
He did not answer.
The town—what passed for a town in places like the Dakotas or Kandahar Province—came into view. Three miles ahead the lights from competing truck stops blazed across the street from one another. Just beyond that, I-90 carried a steady stream of eighteen-wheelers and campers and dually trucks hauling motorcycle trailers away from Sturgis, back home to Fayetteville or Terre Haute or wherever. When she trained her eyes beyond the sodium lamps and traffic, Colette could barely make out a handful of safety lights, illuminating tiny clusters of prefab houses.
“I’ll get out at Reliance.”
“Thought you might.”
“I can give you some money,” she said. “For gas.”
He shook his head. “It’s my good deed for the day. My son was in Afghanistan for awhile. Further north than where you were.”
He paused long enough for her to dread what she knew was coming: Are you sure? Are you okay? Questions for gossips and therapists—people who got off on drawing things out of you, who lived vicariously on your pain. No one who had seen that couple die would be so goddamned stupid as to ask, not when the answer was so obvious.
“He had a rough go,” Paul said instead.
“Afghanistan was no joke.”
“No.” He jerked his head toward the dead boy. “Reef. You don’t have to feel sorry for him. Just don’t judge him too harshly.”
“Right. I won’t. Things happen sometimes.”
She could sense a change in Paul when she said this, a shift in his breathing. She thought he might be crying and so did not look over. He cleared his throat. “Things happen, and you deal with them,” he said.
“And then you move on.”
“Or you don’t.”
She looked out the window. Darkness had swallowed the horizon line all at once, taking with it every feature that might distinguish this empty place from others. To her right, at the edge of the headlamps’ beam, the visible world ended in darkness, offering no clue as to what came next. She kept her eye out for a road sign or billboard or highline pole. She saw only white line and gravel and prairie grass, until a bright green dot appeared at the very edge of the road—light reflected from the eye of an animal. She drew in breath.
Paul noticed the deer at almost the same instant. He jerked the wheel to the left. The pickup lurched toward the center line, the force of the swerve pinning her to the passenger-side door. Paul turned his body into the wheel to try to hold the pickup’s line, trying to leave room for the deer to escape. The spooked animal jumped, its long body extended as it rose with astonishing grace. But it was not enough. The fender on Colette’s side clipped its hind quarters, sending it tumbling back over the roof of the pickup. For a moment all was light and noise.
Paul guided the truck to the shoulder, punched on the trouble lights and jumped out onto the blacktop. Colette could hear the thrashing and snorting of the wounded animal in the grass behind them. She crawled out through the driver’s side, emerging just in time to see Paul withdraw a shotgun from a safe in the bed of his pickup. He handed it to her and reached back in to reposition the boy. Twenty yards back, the wounded dear bleated mournfully.
She stepped away from the pickup, felt sand grinding beneath her boots. She checked to make sure it had shells, held it so the barrel pointed away from them both and undid the safety. Dread pounded on her ribs from the inside. She had killed dozens of deer on the hunt, where moral questions had been settled before she encountered her target. What this moment required of her was not so clear. She wanted to rewind, to put a hand up to the past and undo the whole thing.
Gentle hands retrieved the shotgun from her grip. “This burden isn’t yours ,” Paul said. “You’ve got plenty, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I can do it. I’m fine.”
He nodded but did not offer back the gun. As he turned toward the suffering animal, she called to him.
“That cop up the road will hear if you shoot.”
“Probably so.”
“You sure you want to do that then?”
He did not answer. By the blinking red of the trouble lights, she watched as he raised the gun and fired. The noises stopped. The old man waited a few seconds. Touched a finger to his forehead. Walked back to the pickup. He pulled the tailgate down and sat hard on it.
“You might walk on,” he said to her. “Get yourself free from this before it starts.”
“Free from what?” A cold feeling shot up her neck and across her scalp. “You didn’t kill that kid, did you?”
“No. Found him slumped outside the gym after school. He’s got family in Chamberlain that want the body there.”
“Do they know he’s—do they know?”
“His mother does. Can’t say about the father.”
She looked back to the north. Faint blue lights flashed from the other side of a hill. “Maybe the cop will let you take him to his family. It’s not like they don’t have enough to do, with the rally just ending.”
“You know it doesn’t work that way. But it’s all right. Sometimes things happen. You deal with it.”
“Or you don’t.”
She dropped onto the tailgate next to him. Examined the stars, brightening against the cold sky. “I was looking for the highest point of that hill, back when you picked me up,” she said. “I know that sounds weird.”
He turned up a palm, considered for a moment. “It’s a knowable thing, which makes it a good thing to know.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Seemed to matter to you.”
“I don’t know why.”
She was glad for the dark, how it hid the glow in her cheeks. That rise above the Tumbleweed was only a hill in a sea of rolling hills, but it bore witness to order. The pinnacle was an identifiable point of change, one of many sown by the universe. A thrown rock, a leaping deer, an artillery shell—all described arcs with an apex. They went up, propelled by some initial force, until at last they succumbed to the pull of gravity and began to descend.
She could talk like this in the desert, when talk was a necessary part of staying sane. But to speak of such things here, West River? These were ranchers and HVAC techs, Lutherans and Catholics. People concerned with soil moisture and the price of gasoline, for whom the conceptual was worthless as tits on a boar hog.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right,” Paul said, and tugged at the bill of his cap. “Truckers and soldiers. Too much damn time in our own heads.” He fished a filter-tipped cigar out of his pocket. Lit it with steady hands. “You should go.”
“It’s okay. I’m fine.” She hopped down from the tailgate and fished some of the gravel pieces from out of her pocket. Hurled one toward a speed limit sign a few yards ahead. She could hear the rustle of prairie grass as it landed some distance beyond her target. When she turned again to Paul, he was staring at her.
“I said I’m fine,” she snapped.
“I never said you weren’t.”
“You’re thinking something.”
“Sure.” He stopped as though he would leave it at that. A few seconds later, though, he spoke again. “If this is what you call fine—.” He spread his palms out in front of him.
She faced north. The yellow haze from the trooper’s headlights shone from just behind the hill. In ten seconds, the beams would be on her, and leaving would look like running away. And what would come of that? The news would spread from town to town by morning, locals gossiping in gas station coffee nooks about how one of the county cops heard a shot and found a Native driver and a dead boy. That former Gann Valley deputy—Stephen Holcomb’s girl, the one who’s not been right since she got back from the desert—was mixed up in it. The old men would speak in the same assured tones in which they talked of war, repeating the facts as though facts somehow made a story.
“Maybe I’ll walk into town,” she said.
“Best if you do.”
“Thanks again.”
“Okay. Well.”
She turned her back to the blue lights. Stepped into the shadow in front of the pickup and followed a path that kept it between her and the police SUV. She looked up, past the darkness and beyond the highway, to the dim glow of Reliance. She figured it at two klicks—a slog in the dark over sand and gravel and prairie grass. No way to except to go through. The terrain would rise and fall from here, and she with it, if her right foot landed solid, and her left did the same.
