The Apparent Junction of Earth and Sky

The Apparent Junction of Earth and Sky, Part VII

Dogs used to run around the trailer park, completely free. There were no leash laws in that part of the South. Most of them were hound dogs.They would chase little girls on little pink bikes, traipsing around on their clumsy feet, their salivating dewlaps slopping back and forth. The little girls' moms would watch from their wooden porches,smoking cigarettes under tacky wind chimes. Each wore a sad smile over their loose-neck cut-off shirts. They were happy mothers. But now they were all gone.

The trailer park was now quite empty, of that he was positive. He lay on his back, cocksure on the hood of the truck. The cigarette was newly gone and he tossed the butt into the air. It spiraled harmlessly into the grass at the side of the road. The wavering trail of its smoke, a trail that was soon gone completely, mixed with the waves of heat that hovered just over the crackled blacktop of the country road.

Closer to the now broken, creaky wooden porches of the trailer park,stumbling through its uneven gravel driveways, was a younger man. He didn't have a cigarette, but he walked with his hands tucked into his pockets, thumbs out to his side. When they first arrived, he passed through the empty lots with his head raised, his eyes peering through the dusty windows of the trailers. Many were covered in cardboard sheets. Others were caved in completely. None were boarded up;plywood was probably too expensive for many of these people.According to Brendan, everything happened so fast that people coped with whatever they had in their possession. For the younger man and Brendan, and the younger man's mother for a long while, that was nothing more than an old car. For these people, it was the empty boxes of Halloween decorations.

Brendan,the man on the hood of the car, looked up at the uninterrupted blue sky with a sickening feeling. He knew that they were close to a big decision. The young man was getting impatient and withdrawn. Brendan understood what that meant. He knew where they would eventually go the same way he knew that those cigarettes would kill him if he lived long enough. Both ideas scared him.

Suddenly, he wanted another smoke.

Ciaran, the younger man, was apprehensive, too. In fact, he was now sure that the trailer park was empty. When he first crossed the ridge between the lot and the road, his chest was puffed out. He hoped, as he hoped in the last twenty small towns, that this would be the place. If they didn't find her, he thought, maybe there would be some clue. Some arrow. Some breadcrumb. His eyes bounced around for any semblance of movement. His heart raced as he imagined seeing eyes peering out from the slits on the those windows. His mouth went dry when he came to understand that those people, the ones who took his mother, weren't good people; they would likely announce their arrival by the cocking of a rifle.

Now that he knew it was empty, though, he didn't want to walk back to the truck. He didn't want to confront Brendan. Brendan, who left their refuge on the beach with one rule: no cities. Because what they both understood was that fate was funneling them toward one inevitability.This path was not dictated by the roads or the ocean, but by the younger man's frustration.  And there it was on their eventual horizon, hundreds of miles away yet visible in both of their minds:New Orleans.

Ciaran wanted a cigarette, too. They were both detoxing now. The alcohol and the drugs that were in such high supply back home were gone from their systems, as was the constant lull of the ocean waves and the warm wind. It was hot here. Humid. Sticky. Gas was too precious to waste on amenities like air conditioning. They sat together in the car for hours, sweating and stinking and avoiding nostalgia because it was heavier than the air.

He peered back across the smoldering heat that turned his cousin into an oil painting, frozen yet moving in watery rolls. It would start a fight. That first step back toward the ridge was like pulling the soles of his shoes from cement. Then there was only the annoying inevitability.