Dead in Her Tracks Read online

  “I know,” she said.

  He lowered the paper, tapped a headline. “Look here: Beijing Trade Talks Stalled.”

  She didn't know what to make of that. She hadn't followed any news since well before starting her walk, and she'd never been much for current events anyway. She just stared at him.

  “Or what about this one,” he continued, turning a page. “Russia Invades the Crimea.” He pronounced Crimea like Crime-ah. “Just when you think the goddamn Cold War is over and we goddam well won it.”

  She said, “I don't think any of that matters anymore, does it?”

  “Well of course it doesn’t, I’m not stupid and I’m not crazy,” he said. “This paper’s more’n a year old, I know it. But I like to pretend it just happened. Nothing else to do out here except read whatever I can find to read.” He brightened for a moment. “Hey, you got anything to read?”

  She shook her head.

  “Ah, well. You're the first person I've seen in weeks, and that's counting dead people.” He peered at her, gave her a long and lingering up-and-down. He said, not unkindly, “You look horrible.”

  She didn’t take offense, had walked well past that. “I haven’t been able to wash in a long time.”

  “You look like a drowned cat I saw once,” he added. “You’re skinny, and you got the same matted hair and the same glassy eyes. Kinda like those dead people, actually.”

  She said nothing, but he plowed on anyway.

  “I'd almost like to see some of those dead folks once in awhile. I haven’t seen any out here in maybe three, four weeks. I was thinking I might tie one up in a chair right here on the porch, talk to him about what I read in the papers.” He gave her a shrewd, searching look, as though daring her to laugh.

  She only looked at him, perplexed. This man was a rambling old loon. She was beginning to think she was best off never speaking to anyone ever again.

  “I guess it would probably scare my customers though.” He grunted sourly and nodded at the vacant parking lot to indicate that this wasn’t much of a concern.

  She hadn't been joked with in a long time, and had forgotten how to handle it. He eyed her for a second or two, perhaps waiting for her to laugh. When she said nothing, he rambled on.

  “Well, there's no gas,” he said. “No gas and no bathrooms, neither. Pipes froze this winter, and I tried to get them going again with a blowtorch, but I held the flame too long and put a hole right through the main shitpipe.” He turned the page of his newspaper again. “I dug a latrine out back, though, if you need to have a squat.”

  “I don't need to,” she said, “and I don't need gas. I'm on foot.”

  “On foot? Just out for a stroll? Where you walking to, and where you walking from?”

  “I’m walking from Sioux Falls,” she said, “and I don’t know where I’m walking to.”

  “Sioux Falls? Other side of South Dakota, Sioux Falls? Good lord.”

  She nodded. “It was a long walk.”

  “Yes the hell it was. That must be three, four hundred miles.” As he spoke, he carefully folded his newspaper and dropped it on the stack beside him.

  “I can’t imagine how you survived,” he went on. “My wife woulda said you had the fool’s luck, lady. All the dead, and then all the people. The people are the worst.” His gaze narrowed, speculative. “Must be dangerous, a woman by herself. All sorts of bad seeds around these days. You got a gun?”

  “No,” she said, thinking of Colin. “I don’t like guns.”

  “Yeah? You got a man somewhere? Watching us, maybe?” His eyes, as shiny and dark as those of a wily old crow, shifted around from the gas pumps to the high grass along the roadside.

  “No,” she said. “I’m alone.”

  After a moment, he looked back at her and gave a slow nod, as though that made sense too. “Well, you're not very pretty. Probably no one would bother you.”

  If he’d been looking to insult her, he’d missed his mark. She was past caring, past feeling much anything, and she only blinked once, waiting for him to continue.

  But he snapped his mouth quickly shut, and looked embarrassed. He hurriedly added, “I’m sorry. I don't see too many people out here, and I started talking to myself to fill up all the quiet, and I've been… forgetting the rules about what you should and shouldn't say.” For a moment he looked stricken. “It's not clear anymore.”

  That she could relate to, and she nodded again easily enough. She’d come to understand that conversation was a tool that rusted if you didn’t oil it from time to time. It was like riding a bike — as they said, you never forgot how, but if she climbed on a Schwinn today, it would be at least a few miles before the tires stopped wobbling.

  “Anyway,” he said again, “I’m sorry.”

  She pointed at the sign hanging above him. “‘Custer’s Last Trading Post’ — are you Custer?”

  “Nope,” he said, speaking a little more hesitant now, choosing his words carefully. “His bones are just a few miles from here, though, if you'd like to pay your respects. His and a few hundred other cavalry soldiers and Sioux braves.”

  “I don’t think I’ll bother.”

  “Hey, what do you think would happen if I went and dug all them bones up, huh? Would they get back to their feet, start fighting it out again?”

  She considered. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  He said, “I guess they probably wouldn't do nothing. Too long dead to get back up. They need meat on them — you don’t see no skelertens walking around, only the zombies. I think about doing that a lot, actually, digging them up. One day I'll probably go do it. Not like anyone would stop me.” He paused. “Hey, you haven't seen any of them around here, have you? The dead?”

  Talk about the dead confused her – she only had the vaguest sense of what they were, so she only smiled at him, in much the same way she'd have smiled at a confused dementia patient.

  “No, I guess I haven’t seen any skelertons,” she said, and that made him laugh.

  “My name's Clay,” he said. “You hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “I got some eggs in the cold locker. They're about to go bad and I was going to choke them all down myself today, but I'll share, if you want.” He eased out of the director chair, hitched up his pants by the belt loops, and stretched. She heard his joints pop. “Normally I trade for things, but no one's been past in three weeks, so I'll feed you on the house, if you tell people about my store.”

  “Sure,” she said, “I can do that.”

  She was curious about Custer pie.

  2

  But Clay didn’t have any.

  “It was just ordinary custard pie, with a little Union cavalry flag on a toothpick in the middle and a bunch of red M&Ms surrounding it. I had to stop making desserts. Don’t keep long enough.”

  He had brought her to a round kitchen table in one corner of the store. It had a red-and-white checked tablecloth and a vase with a single sunflower.

  “Me and my brother come up here from Denver,” he continued, though she hadn't asked. “We went in together on this place.”

  “Why?”

  He made a who can say? grunt. “Seemed like a nice enough idea. Run a little country store, sell junk to the tourists on their way to the Little Bighorn or to Rushmore. My wife had come down with cancer and passed away, that was in ‘92. So I said, sure, why not? I was driving a bread truck in those days, not like I was gonna lose my 401k, or nothing.”

  He was talking while he fried eggs on a pot-bellied wood stove, deftly whisking yolks around in a skillet. The woman watched him work, faintly awed that someone was cooking her a meal on a stovetop. Days before she’d eaten raw tubers from an overgrown garden, and here she was sitting down to a country breakfast with a tablecloth and a flower.

  Custer’s Last Trading Post also impressed her. There was so much… stuff she could barely focus on any one thing. She’d poked around a lot of abandoned stores thes
e past months, and nearly all of them had been ransacked. Three days ago she’d come across a lonely Conoco station with bare shelves that still bore the dusty outlines of their goods. It looked as though someone had backed a truck up and taken everything that wasn’t nailed down, including the cash register. Even such useless artifacts of the old world as household goods — light bulbs, toilet paper, car air fresheners shaped like pine trees — were gone.

  But Clay’s store had rows of stocked shelves, racks of potato chips, breakfast cereals in single-serving containers, assortments of mixed nuts and candy bars. The tourist junk he’d mentioned was still here, too — there were hangers with XXL-sized T-shirts for portly adults, and bins of six-shooter cap guns and rubber tomahawks for their portly children. There was a display case of marijuana pipes blown in swirling, hippy-dippy colors, and faux native art on the walls. These latter looked like cheap-o Currier & Ives reprints to her, each with carefully penned price tags on the frames. Nature scenes and steam locomotives and lone Indian braves on horseback.

  He had asked her something, and she looked back at him, saw he had raised an expectant eyebrow.

  “Sorry?”

  “You ever been to Colorado?”

  She shook her head.

  “I guess it’s good that I came here,” he said, his voice dropping. “If I stayed down there, I don’t know that I’d be alive today. Denver got firebombed — did you hear? The Air Force flew a couple of B-52s over the mountains and just dropped hell down on it. I saw a picture, when there was still TV. The stadium — Mile High Stadium — was on fire. How’s a stadium even burn? A big empty field surrounded by bricks.”

  He stared off into space for a moment, shaking his head over the rising heat of the woodstove and saying, “Unbelievable, unbelievable.”

  “Wall Drug burned down,” she offered.

  “Yeah? That tourist trap?”

  “There was nothing left,” she said. “The whole thing just burned to the ground.”

  “That’s terrible,” he said, and they were silent for awhile.

  “I’m not mad about it, the bombings,” he went on, over the pop and sizzle of frying eggs, and the steady slap of his spatula. “The news said Denver was just... lost. All the people had, you know, turned. It was either bomb it, or let them things come pouring down the mountains, down into Kansas and Nebraska.”

  She found it difficult to follow his words. The smell of the eggs, salted, browned, and paper-thin at the edges, was a mix of heaven and madness. Her mouth had fallen open and she didn’t think she could shut it.

  Clay stopped stirring and gazed out the wide window at the front of the store. “They said the cities were the worst places to be, you know. All those people in their cramped little apartments and townhouses and whatnot, just sitting on top of each other. Lined up for the dead like a Chinese buffet.” He shook his head. “I’m glad I wasn’t there. That’s no way to die.”

  He looked at her, a little forlorn, and for the first time she noted the red in his eyes and the droopy bags hanging under them, and by his expression she realized that now he did expect her to say something.

  “How do you want to die?” she asked. She knew her question was a strange one, but her mind was overwhelmed with thoughts of food, and she never did well when put on the spot. Scrutiny from strangers always made her babble, made her mental arms flail about for the ‘correct’ response.

  “Huh? Me?” He scratched his head and dropped his jaw, an unwitting caricature of a dumbstruck country bumpkin. It took him a minute to answer.

  “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’d just as soon live forever.”

  “Sure,” she said, “of course.”

  Clay said nothing more until he was scraping the eggs off the skillet and onto two aqua-colored Bakelite plates. He poured two glasses of orange juice and joined her at the table.

  “I didn't catch your name.” He was dousing his eggs with a squirt bottle of what looked like butterscotch topping.

  She had already torn into her breakfast, and had to chew and swallow before she could answer. They were truly the best eggs — no, the best things — she’d ever tasted. “My name’s Elle,” she said.

  “Elle – for Ellen?”

  “Eleanor.”

  “That's an old-fashioned name,” he said, in approving tones. “Like mine. People always think it's short for Clayton or Calvin or something, but it's just Clay on my birth certificate, like pottery clay.” He held out the bottle of butterscotch, but she decided she wasn’t that hungry, and grunted a negative.

  “From Sioux Falls on foot, all the way here,” he mused. “That must’ve been what—three, four months?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. It was the truth.

  “A woman, by herself, walks clear across a whole time zone and shows up at my doorstep for breakfast. How about that. Where are you heading?”

  “I don't know.”

  He paused mid-bite, looked concerned. “You don't know much, do you?”

  She just shrugged.

  “I’m amazed you aren’t killed yet, either by dead or by living.”

  “I haven’t had any trouble,” she said, thinking briefly of the woman on the Harley-Davidson, and the two women on the prairie with the pistol and the glowering, shoebutton eyes. She added, “People keep away from me.”

  “Well, don't go east, and don't go west. That's the Crow Nation either side of the highway. They've been killing folks who wander onto the rez. I don't know who's running the show there, but they hate white men worse than the dead now. I'm about the only one they tolerate, and that's just because they trade with me. North is Billings, about sixty miles. You want some advice, stay on the highway and don't stop til you get there. Billings's nice – civilized still. They got a government and all. Running water and mail service, last I heard.”

  Elle picked at the last few flakes of egg on her plate, eyed the bottle of sugary butterscotch. She considered squirting a blast of it on her plate and licking it clean right in front of this man. She thought she could easily eat ten or twenty more eggs. She would eat them raw until her stomach ruptured, if he let her.

  Clay eyed her empty plate. “Always good to watch someone eat,” he said, smiling. “I don’t see it often, way out here with no one around.”

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “In this store, all by yourself. Why not go to Billings, if it’s so nice?”

  “For now things are okay for me,” he said, slowly, carefully. “The Crow trade with me, travelers trade with me. I got food and there’s a spring for water. Not much reason to move on, I suppose. Maybe before next winter I’ll head up that way, if things change.”

  She shrugged again, swigged down her OJ in three large gulps. She didn't care about Indians, or about civilization, or about dying, really. She just wanted to walk a bit longer. Even now, her legs had that twitchy feeling, and she could feel her mind eager to retreat into the comfortable, plodding lull of motion.

  “You oughta listen to me,” Clay said, a little annoyed at her indifference. “It's no joke if you take a wrong turn and wander onto that rez. Heard they went back to the old ways, taking scalps and such.” He glanced at her, saw she wasn't paying attention, and shook his head. “What'd you do before – well, you know, before. I'll guess schoolteacher. Schoolteachers always think they know better.”

  The question seemed so foreign she had to ponder it. When the word finally came to her lips, it was like finally remembering how to say please in your distant high school Spanish.

  “Pathologist,” she said. “I'm a pathologist.”

  “What, like a coroner? Autopsies and such?”

  “Not exactly, but like that.”

  “Well, no wonder you ain't concerned about the dead,” he said. “You're used to ‘em.”

  “No,” she said, and thought about Colin again. “No, I'm not.”

  3

/>   Clay let her have another helping. She would’ve eaten more — in fact, the more she ate the more her hunger grew — but he announced “that’s it for the eggs” and showed her an empty carton. Then he filled her canteen with water from his cistern and walked her to the door.

  “I can't pay you,” she said, when he handed her the full canteen. She slung it over a shoulder by its strap, where it hung past her waist like an oversized pocket watch.

  “You paid with your company,” he said, and he gave her an odd, pained smile. “A word of advice, though — when you get to Billings, find yourself a gun, or at least a knife or a baseball bat or something. No one should be unarmed these days. It’s not safe.”

  She nodded absently, turned to the road. She wasn’t sure she would even make it to Billings, and she doubted she would remember Clay and his store if she did. Already it seemed dreamlike to her. An oasis with omelettes and water and a friendly, chatty storekeeper? Maybe she was right to worry about her mental state. Maybe she was hallucinating.

  Clay stood on the porch, scratching the scruff beard on his neck and watching her go. When she got to the road, she turned back and said, “Thank you.”

  “No trouble,” he said. “Just don't forget — stay on the road.” He gave her a wave and she nodded, turned, and started to walk.

  “There's real bad people around,” he said, in a lower voice she wouldn't hear.

  He watched her go, a mad woman on a mission she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, explain. A departing mop of dirty hair on a body like a push broom. She moved with a purpose, he saw, her sunburned shoulders squaring off with every step, her gaze locked forward and unwavering.

  A pathologist with a purpose, he thought. Wasn’t that something?

  It was something, yes. Jon Door would want to know about her.

  When she was little more than a black speck on the horizon, he went to the ice freezer on the porch, which hadn't worked since well before winter. He rummaged around inside, pushed aside a dirty blanket. When he straightened up, he clutched a handheld radio – UHF band, long-range, encrypted channel. A label-maker decal on the back said CROW NATION TRIBAL POLICE.