There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,67

out the door, I knew everything I left in that house I’d be leaving for good. Most of it was easy to leave. But my medicine box, the one his dad had made for me, my fan, my gourd, my cedar bag, my shawl—these I’ll have to learn to leave over time.

I didn’t see Geraldine all day and not after work either. But I’d made my decision. I headed to the highway with nothing on me but my phone and a box cutter I took from the front desk before I left.

* * *

—

The plan is to get to OKC. To the Greyhound station. The job doesn’t start for a month. I just need to make it back to Oakland.

A car slows then stops ahead of me. I see red brake lights bleed through my vision of the night. I turn around in a panic, then hear Geraldine, so turn to see her old-ass beige Cadillac her grandma gave her for graduating from high school.

When I get in the car Geraldine gives me a look like: What the fuck? Her brother Hector is laid out in the backseat, passed out.

“He okay?” I say.

“Blue,” she says, scolding me with my name. Geraldine’s last name is Brown. Names that are colors is what we have in common.

“What? Where we going?” I say to her.

“He drank too much,” she says. “And he’s on pain meds. I don’t want him to throw up and die in his sleep on our living-room floor, so he’s riding with us.”

“Us?”

“Why didn’t you just ask me for a ride? You told Paul—”

“He called you?” I say.

“Yeah. I was already home. I had to leave early for this fucker,” Geraldine says, pointing with her thumb to the backseat. “I told Paul you had to stay late with a youth waiting for an auntie to show up, but that we were leaving soon.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“So you’re going?” she says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Back to Oakland?”

“Yeah.”

“OKC Greyhound?”

“Yeah.”

“Well shit,” Geraldine says.

“I know,” I say. And then our saying this makes a silence we drive in for a while.

I see what I think is a human skeleton leaned against a barbed-wire wood-pole fence.

“Did you see that?” I say.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“People think they see stuff out here all the time,” Geraldine says. “You know that part of the highway you were walking? Up north a ways, just past Weatherford, there’s a town there called Dead Women Crossing.”

“Why’s it called that?”

“Some crazy white lady killed and beheaded this other white lady and sometimes teenagers go over to where it happened. The woman who got killed had her fourteen-month-old baby with her when she got killed. The baby made it out okay. They say you can hear that woman calling out for her baby at night.”

“Yeah, right,” I say.

“Ghosts aren’t what you have to worry about out here,” Geraldine says.

“I brought a box cutter from work,” I say to Geraldine, and pull it out of my jacket pocket and slide the plastic clip up to show her the blade—like she doesn’t know what a box cutter is.

“This is where they get us,” Geraldine says.

“Safer out here than at home,” I say.

“You could do worse than Paul.”

“I should go back then?”

“Do you know how many Indian women go missing every year?” Geraldine says.

“Do you?” I say.

“No, but I heard a high number once and the real number’s probably even higher.”

“I saw something too, someone posted about women up in Canada.”

“It’s not just Canada, it’s all over. There’s a secret war on women going on in the world. Secret even to us. Secret even though we know it,” Geraldine says. She rolls down her window and lights a smoke. I light one too.

“Every single place we get stuck out on the road,” she says. “They take us, then leave us out here, leave us to dim to bone, then get all the way forgotten.” She flicks her cigarette out the window. She only likes a cigarette for the first few drags.

“I always think of the men who do that kinda thing like, I know they’re out there somewhere—”

“And Paul,” she says.

“You know what he’s going through. He’s not who we’re talking about.”

“You’re not wrong. But the difference between the men doing it and your average violent drunk is not as big as you think. Then you’ve got the sick pigs in high places who pay for our bodies on the black market with Bitcoin, someone way up at the top who gets off on listening to