The Teacher

Part 16: A Sneak Attack

She plopped back down on the hood of her car and began a slow, mostly fruitless Internet search for plane tickets on her phone. She was marooned in the middle of nowhere and knew she was lucky to get even a bar on her phone, maybe two if she angled her phone just right and lifted it toward the stars above, as though to prove to them her good intentions. At last, a search result popped up, a thousand dollar, one way flight from San Antonio to Newark that included two layovers and ten hours of travel time.

"Goddammit," she cursed aloud, and then saw the gleam of a tiny light flicker to life in the distant night. Her heart leapt to her throat and she clambered back into her driver's seat just in case it was a redneck highway bandit in search of helpless English teachers stranded at the side of the road in the middle of the night. At least she would be able to lock all her doors and call 911 so the authorities could locate her body, or at least be made aware of her fate so they could let her sister know she hadn't once again skipped out on her responsibilities.

Luckily, it was a familiar pick up truck that pulled up on the shoulder nose to nose with her own car, and she sighed in both relief and a different kind of anxiety when she saw Cam step out and walk towards her. She squinted but couldn't quite tell if anyone was sitting in the passenger seat.

She climbed out of her own car to greet him, grateful for the darkness that hid her inevitable blush whenever she found herself in the presence of a Walker man.

"Hey," she said, "Thank you so much for this. I didn't know who else to call."

She hoped she sounded suitably apologetic. For everything.

"My dad?" he said, smiling bemusedly. He leaned against the side of the car, crossed his arms, and looked down at her with raised eyebrows.

"I didn't want to bother him this late," she replied. It was so much easier to lie when the other person couldn't see your face.

"Alright," he said, his tone inscrutable.

Unfortunately she couldn't get a good look at his face either. A silence fell between them, broken, at last, by the faraway howl of a dog.

"Shit," he said, sounding annoyed. "That's a coyote. I thought we'd run them all off."

"A coyote?" she said in alarm, and put her hand on the car door in case she needed to jump back in to safety. Jesus this place. "Are they dangerous?"

"Only if you're a calf," he replied, and sighed in frustration. She had never heard him sigh like that. Like an adult, run down by life and its challenges.

"My dad and I have been busting our asses the last couple weeks to get rid of them, they keep tearing into the herds," he explained. "They've been costing us a lot of money, but there's no winning with them."

So that was the hunting his dad had been busy doing the other day, leaving Cam to man the business on his own. She thought of the house he lived in with his father, how solidly middle class it had seemed to her; and yet, she realized, their lives were built on the shifting fortunes of Nature, of forces that could barely be controlled and which had little to no effect on her own life. When she was Cam's age she had been busy plotting a backpacking trip to Europe before starting her freshman year at Barnard; she had somehow convinced her parents it would make her "more ready" for the rigors of college and of living on her own in a dorm. An absurd notion and one that was paid for by the combined salaries and upper-middle-class stability of her well-educated parents. Who, out here meanwhile, had the time or the resources to even consider college, nevermind whirlwind European tours, when your ability to provide for yourself and your family depended on the daily fate of your livestock, or tips made tending bar or waitressing at Denny's? She knew that her students' lives outside her classroom had been a mystery to her in this new place, but she hadn't really cared until now.