A String of Beads Read online

  “It won’t hurt to check,” Jane said.

  As Jane remembered their conversation now, she’d had no sense of concern, no reluctance or foreboding. The rest stop was just an unoccupied place that might be dry inside.

  They got a sense of the speed of the trucks, the average distance between them, and a measure of how far in front the beams of their headlights extended. They clambered over the chain link fence, moved closer, and waited for the right moment.

  It came. They scooped up their packs, ran hard, and came across to the wooded center strip before the next truck’s headlights could reach them. They squatted in a thicket for a few minutes before they chose a time to run again, and this run was successful, too. They made it all the way to the opposite fence before the glare of the next set of headlights appeared.

  They used the next period of darkness to climb the fence and trot into the long parking lot of the rest stop. Jane remembered that she felt hopeful for the first time in hours. Her sneakers were so wet they squished as she walked on the pavement. She said, “I only see two cars, and they’re way down there by the entrance. That building is probably bathrooms, and this one too.” She pointed to a low building like a cinderblock box with a roof.

  As they approached she saw a small sign that said MEN and let Jimmy peer inside while she walked around the building to the door that said WOMEN. She held her breath as she reached out to the doorknob. It turned and she breathed again.

  She slipped into the restroom and felt the rain stop pounding on her head and shoulders. Suddenly the water was reduced to a thrumming sound on the roof, and a noise as it trickled down off the eaves. The room was a single ­concrete-and-cinderblock box with three toilets in small stalls, three sinks, and a big plastic trash barrel. The mirror above the sinks was scratched with initials. She couldn’t imagine why some woman would make use of a diamond that way.

  Jane used the farthest stall and thought about the luxury of it after three days on the trail. She came out the door and sidestepped along under the eaves, where there was a curtain of water coming down. She stopped at the men’s room door and knocked. “Jimmy?”

  “Coming.” She heard a flush.

  She waited until he opened the door a few inches. “Come on in.”

  She said, “No, it smells like pee. Let’s wait it out in the ladies’ room.” She remembered thinking that men and boys’ anatomies gave them the option of missing, but didn’t want to say anything that would start that kind of discussion.

  “Okay,” he said. They sidestepped to the ladies’ side and entered.

  There was a switch on the wall like the ones in hallways at school that kids weren’t supposed to be able to operate because only teachers had keys. But the girls Jane knew had discovered by second grade that a bobby pin was just as good as the principal’s light key. She had a couple of pins in her jeans pocket, so she took one out and stepped to the switch.

  “We don’t want light,” said Jimmy. “It’ll attract attention.”

  When they started out they’d both been convinced that they had a perfect right to be exploring a part of the Seneca homeland on foot. They also believed that if the state police came along they’d be arrested and their mothers forced to drive to a remote police barracks to bail them out. “Yeah, you’re right,” Jane said, and put away the pin. There was light coming through the small, high window from a streetlamp lighting the parking lot, so they could see well enough.

  They sat down on the concrete floor together and listened to the rain. “It’s raining harder,” she said. “We’re lucky we found this place. We’d better plan to sleep here.”

  Jimmy shrugged. “When we get home let’s not tell people we slept a night in a bathroom.”

  Jane imitated the shrug. “In the old days the warriors would have loved a nice, dry girls’ bathroom to stay in.”

  Jimmy laughed. “But one of them would have said, ‘Let’s not tell anybody.’”

  They unrolled their sleeping bags and found that they were only soaked around the edges, where their covers had left an end exposed. Then they took out a few items to see if they had also stayed dry. Jane was already thinking about the awkwardness of changing clothes in the restroom, but she was pretty sure she was going to try. She had packed fairly well, with her clean clothes in a couple of plastic trash bags, and her snacks in another. The maps and other papers had been in a pocket on the side of her backpack, but even they seemed salvageable.

  She opened the road map they had used the most because there were details besides roads, and held the paper under the hand dryer on the wall for a couple of minutes, until it was crinkly but dry. At the same time she surreptitiously moved her lower body under the dryer too, and found that the hot blast of air helped. She turned around to look at her friend. “Jimmy,” she said. “What’s that?”

  In his left hand was the frame of a small gun-blued revolver, with the cylinder pulled out and to the side. He was wiping it carefully with a rag made from a torn-apart cotton undershirt. He had emptied the cylinder onto his sleeping bag, and Jane could see nine .22 long rifle rounds. “I’ve got to wipe it down so it doesn’t rust.”

  “Where did you get a gun?”

  “It was my dad’s,” he said. “I guess that makes it my mother’s now. It’s only a twenty-two, but it holds nine rounds. He was going to take me out shooting cans and things, but I didn’t get old enough in time.” Since Jimmy and Jane had both lost their fathers, she was familiar with the feeling that she hadn’t grown up fast enough to do things with her father that she would never do now.

  “Can I see it?”

  She could tell he was reluctant, but he knew he had to acquiesce because Jane was his friend, and he could hardly bring out a gun and then refuse her. As he held the revolver out, he turned the barrel downward toward the concrete floor and left the cylinder open. “See?” he said. “You always look to be sure the cylinder is empty.” His right to state the rules was all he insisted on keeping for himself.

  Jane took the pistol. Engraved on the barrel was EUREKA SPORTSMAN MODEL 196. She swung the cylinder in and aimed the gun at the Tampax dispenser mounted on the wall across the room. Then she slowly turned the cylinder and appreciated the clicks as it reseated each of its chambers between the hammer and barrel. “It’s cool,” she said. “If my mother knew you had this, she wouldn’t have let me out of the house.” She gave the gun back to him, her carefulness displayed as respect for its powerful magic.

  “I wasn’t planning to take my gun out, so nobody would ever know unless I needed it.”

  “For what? Are you suddenly afraid of bears?”

  “This wouldn’t kill a bear,” he said. “But it might sting him enough to make him leave us alone.”

  Jane smiled. “Or maybe you could just bravely hold him off while I run two or three miles to the next town.”

  Jimmy laughed. He finished wiping the gun down, used a separate rag from a plastic sandwich bag that smelled like oil, and then reloaded it and put it into its own pocket inside his pack. Jane couldn’t help memorizing its exact position, because knowing was power too.

  They sat in the dim light, listening to the rain.

  Jane couldn’t remember when she first became aware that there was trouble. Afterward she thought that she had heard trouble in the sound of the car coasting off the highway into the rest area. The engine was too loud, a burbling sound that meant it had a rusted-through muffler. There were deep puddles in the rest stop lot, and when the car went through them she could hear the spray whishing up against the thin sheet metal, and an occasional squeak of springs. The headlights were bright, stabbing through the small, high window and lighting the women’s restroom.

  They saw the light go out, then heard the car door creak as it opened and then slammed, and then a man’s footsteps splashing a few steps to th
e shelter. They heard him enter the men’s room, and then there was silence for a time as he was, she imagined, relieving himself.

  Jane and Jimmy didn’t need to tell each other to remain still and silent. There had been only one set of footsteps heading into the men’s room. That was good. In a minute or two maybe they would hear him leave. They listened, but it didn’t happen. Instead, the door of the women’s restroom swung open, and the spring pulled it shut.

  “Well, well.” A man’s voice, not young. It sounded slightly raspy and cracked, and they could smell cigarettes. There was a slightly Southern elongation of the two words that told Jane he was from the Pennsylvania side of the road, a few miles south. “Where did you two come from?”

  Jimmy said, “If you need to use the bathroom, we can go next door and give you privacy.”

  “Me?” The man laughed. “No. I just did that, and I’m not shy.” He took out a cigarette and flicked his lighter. The flame cast an eerie wavering light like a weak candle, but the glow made his eyes gleam. He was about forty, but he had long hair that was longer in the back, and a tattoo on his left hand. “Oh, my Lord,” he said. “A girl too. And you’re both all wet.” His lighter snapped shut, throwing the room back into darkness. “You two run away from home?”

  “No,” said Jane. “We were just walking and the rain got worse. We don’t live too far from here.”

  The man said, “Yes you do. Nobody who lived close by would choose to spend the night in a shit house.” There was no rancor in his voice, but no kindness either. It was simply an observation, a fact.

  “We figured the rain will stop before long,” she said.

  “You’re probably right,” the man said. “Tell you what. I’ll hang out for a while, so you’ll be safe, and when it stops, I’ll give you a ride.”

  “We’re fine,” Jimmy said. “We don’t really need a ride.”

  The man chuckled. “Hell, the two of you sitting in here shivering wet, you need some adult supervision. First thing you got to do is get some dry clothes. That hand dryer over there work?”

  “Yes,” said Jimmy. “But we’re fine.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of you so much as her,” said the man. He kept talking as though nothing they said mattered, looking straight at Jane. “A young girl like you could catch her death sitting all night in wet clothes.” He leaned forward to look at her. “I’ve seen that happen. What’s your name?”

  Jimmy said to Jane, “I think the rain’s slowing down. Let’s go.” He began rolling his sleeping bag.

  “Okay,” the man said to Jane. “I’ll give you a name, then. How about Jenny? Or Jill. Or—”

  “Thanks for the offer, but we’re leaving,” Jane said. She began to pack her things hurriedly.

  “If you’re too shy to change among friends, I’ll help you,” the man said, and stepped toward her.

  Jimmy lunged and collided with the man in a football tackle that pushed him into the wall, but the man wasn’t entirely taken by surprise. When Jimmy tried to disentangle himself and fight, the man held him in a headlock and punched him in the face three times, then brought his knee up into Jimmy’s face. Then the man tossed him to the concrete floor, where he lay unmoving.

  “Your playmate’s plan seems to have slipped his mind,” said the man as he took his next step toward her. “If you’d like to take your clothes off yourself, get started.”

  Jane’s hand was already in Jimmy’s backpack feeling for the gun. She closed her fingers around the handgrips just as the man clutched her arm. He yanked her arm up out of the backpack, but with it came the gun, and Jane pulled the trigger.

  The shot was a bright flash of spitting sparks, and the small caliber charge gave a loud, reverberating report in the tiny concrete room. The man completed his tug and pulled Jane to her feet, but she didn’t release the gun. Instead, she squeezed the trigger and the bright light and loud noise ripped the air again. It was then that the man realized he had been hit by the first round. “Bitch.”

  Jane kicked her foot toward his groin, and probably missed, but she kicked his thigh where he had been shot, and he pushed off backward and retreated toward the door.

  “Wait,” Jane yelled. “Take out your car keys and drop them on the floor.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  She gripped the gun with both hands to keep it from shaking. “Do it.”

  The man began to fumble in his pocket.

  “Pull a knife,” she said. “Please try it.”

  He changed hands and pockets, and then dropped the keys at his feet.

  Jane said, “That’s it then. I’m not the only one with a gun. When he wakes up, he’s going to be mad. If you’re not gone, he might kill you. So get going.”

  “How am I supposed to walk out there after you shot me in the leg?”

  “It’s not my problem, but you’d better get as far as you can, because if either of us ever sees you again anywhere, we’ll kill you.”

  The man went out through the door, and she heard the spring pull it shut. Jane moved to stand along the wall at the hinge side of the door, the gun in her hand, watching the door for the next half hour before Jimmy came back into consciousness. Now as the grown-up Jane approached the rest area in daylight, she thought about the fourteen-year-old boy who had taken that terrible beating to protect her. It was unlikely he could have grown into a man who would do something as cowardly as ambush and murder a witness against him. People changed, but she was sure Jimmy hadn’t changed that much. And as she allowed herself to repeat the feelings of that horrible night, she knew a second reason why she had come. It was her turn.

  5

  Jane felt trepidation as she came from the brush on the side of the Southern Tier Expressway. She stood perfectly still for a full minute as she studied the cars in the lanes close to her. She looked in each direction and reassured herself that all the threats were simple and visible. She walked onto the parking lot. Nothing had changed in this place since she’d been here twenty years ago. She kept looking ahead for signs of Jimmy. She had guessed that when he decided to escape, he would think of the path they had taken the summer when they were fourteen. Maybe she’d been wrong.

  She looked at the small building at the end of the parking lot as she approached, and her stomach tightened. She hadn’t imagined she would ever return to this rest stop. She walked directly to the ladies’ room door on the small, lonely building. She pushed the door so it opened against its spring, and then closed as she came in. She looked around her. The initials scratched in the mirror over the sinks were gone. Probably someone had gone all the way and broken the mirror at some point, so it had been replaced. Today there was graffiti on the walls. Had there been twenty years ago? No. If Jimmy came here and saw the writing, he might have left a message to her here. When she had the thought she realized that was what she had been searching for—not Jimmy himself, but a message only for her, to tell her where he was hiding. Jimmy wasn’t somebody you could just track down and find at the end of a trail. He had to invite her, allow her to find him.

  Jane stepped to the spot away from the door where she and Jimmy had sat that night and tried to get their sleeping bags to dry. There were the same three sinks on the right, the three stalls beyond them, and the same hand dryer on the opposite wall. She took out a hairpin like the one she hadn’t used twenty years ago and walked toward the switch plate for the lights. She stopped. Last time, when they were fourteen, Jimmy had stopped her. Keeping the lights off hadn’t kept that horrible man from finding them, but the darkness had probably saved her from being raped. This time she used the pin to turn on the lights, then stepped to the wall and began to read.

  She knew his message wouldn’t be any of the big, bold marker lines. His would be one of the small pencil messages that a person had to look for. “They’re cute when they’re lit
tle, but don’t bring one home,” some woman had written. “They grow up stupid.” She kept reading the small handwriting on the wall. “Kylie, Mona, and Zoe were here, but wish they were somewhere else.” Somebody had replied, “We wish you’d never come back.” There it was. “J. If you’re here to help me out, I’m heading for the oldest place. J.”

  Jane knew what Jimmy meant by the oldest place. When they had come this way twenty years ago they had been on a summer camping trip. But they had also been trying to go back in time. They had wanted to feel the way they would have felt if they’d been an Onondawaga boy and girl long ago. For them the easiest way to do that was to turn away from everything that had happened since the 1600s, and that meant entering the forest. In the second-growth woods between the Tonawanda Reservation and the southwestern part of Pennsylvania, they felt like ong-we-on-weh, “the real people.” They were on parts of the land that had not been damaged much. They were where the past still was.

  Jane found the pencil in her backpack, took it out, put her face close to the wall, and erased Jimmy’s message. She checked it from several angles to be sure it couldn’t be read or brought back, then wrote in the same tiny space, “J., I’m going to the oldest place to find you. If I miss you come see me. J.,” put the pencil away, turned off the lights, and went into the cleanest stall to use the toilet, then headed to the door, pushed it open, and looked in both directions. It was at that moment that she realized she wasn’t alone.

  She saw the man on the north side of the divided expressway. He was tall and thin, with blond hair, a reddish face, and big hands. She watched him emerge from the trees beyond the expressway. He began to trot toward the highway. He ran at about half speed and looked comfortable loping along, even though he was in the high weeds and uneven ground of the margin. As he neared the chain link fence, he sped up slightly, ran up the fence high enough to get his toes into some links at midpoint and his hands at the top at a vertical post, and hoisted himself up and over. As his feet hit the ground, his knees bent to absorb the shock. He popped up and resumed his trot.