Stories

The van smells like wet dog and gasoline and the suffocating scent of breakfast souring in its to-go bag. Ruby's breath fogs the passenger window as she watches the highway unspool, her massive pit bull head resting on the huge paws she never grew into. She's gentle. She's always been gentle. Scotty's father used to say you could tell everything about a person by how their dog turned out, and if that's true, Scotty doesn't know what Ruby says about him anymore.

The speedometer reads seventy-three. Has read seventy-three for what might be hours or days. Time moves differently now, like honey, like blood, thick and uncertain. His phone sits in the cupholder, screen cracked in a spiderweb pattern from when he dropped it outside a gas station in—where was it? Oklahoma? Kansas? The states blur together like watercolors left in the rain.

He picks it up at a red light that appears suddenly in the middle of nowhere, a single traffic signal hanging from a wire over an empty intersection. No cross street. No buildings. Just the light, swaying in wind he can't feel through the closed windows.

“Hey man,” he types with one thumb, the other hand still on the wheel even though the van is stopped. “Found this crazy vintage cowboy hat in a thrift store outside Amarillo. Real beaver felt, the guy said. You'd lose your shit over it. Bringing it back for you.”

The light stays red. Ruby whines, a sound like a door creaking open in an empty house.

“I know you're probably pissed I left without saying anything. I just needed to clear my head. You get it, right? You always get it.”

The light turns green and Scotty drives through it, and in the rearview mirror he watches it blink out of existence entirely, the wire it hung from dangling empty against an empty, cornflower blue sky.


His father's old shirt—thebrown Carhartt tee, worn soft as skin—hangs loose on Scotty's frame. He's lost weight. The sleeves are too long and they keep tickling his elbows, making him think a mosquito has landed in the most awkward of places. His hair, grown past his shoulders now, keeps getting caught in the seatbelt. One of these days he going to chop it off, but he always puts it off. It’s never convenient to cut his hair, or his toenails, or shave, or anything anymore.

The radio plays nothing but static between stations, and when he does find music it's never what he wants. He has a box of cassette tapes in the back (his father's collection, Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles and CCR) but the van's tape deck ate Rumours somewhere in New Mexico and now he's afraid to try the others. So it's static, mostly. White noise. It’ll react sometimes to the whine of the engine, and hit a blood curdling squeal if he accelerates too quickly.

Ruby needs to pee and Scotty pulls off at a rest stop, the first in miles, the first he remembers seeing in days.. It's not on any map, not marked by any sign, just a gap in the scrub brush that opens onto a gravel lot and a cinderblock bathroom and a picnic table with initials carved so deep into the wood they look like bleeding, irritated wounds.

The bathroom door hangs crooked on its hinges. Inside, the mirror shows Scotty walking into the room, his back to the glass, Ruby's leash in his hand. He watches himself enter, watches himself turn toward the sink, watches the moment approach when he should see his own face. But the Scotty in the mirror stops, frozen mid-turn, and the real Scotty stands there breathing hard, his heart a fist pounding against his ribs.

He pisses without looking at the mirror again. The fluorescent light flickers and hums. Someone has written HELP ME on the wall in what looks like Sharpie, and below it, in different handwriting, HELP YOURSELF.

Outside, Ruby has found something dead in the brush—a rabbit or a squirrel, hard to tell—and Scotty has to drag her back to the van. Her nails scrape against the gravel. The sound sets his teeth on edge. Everything sets his teeth on edge now.

He opens his phone.

“Remember that time we watched Dazed and Confused like four times in one weekend? You kept doing that ‘Alright, Alright, Alright’ thing to everyone you spoke to. Made everyone annoyed. I miss that. I miss you being ridiculous.”

Send.

The message sits there, delivered but unread. They've all been delivered but unread. Scotty tells himself Ben's phone is dead. Tells himself Ben's busy. Tells himself Ben's just giving him space because that's what you do when your best friend loses his mind and buys a van and disappears into America like dust in the wind.



Roswell, New Mexico is exactly what Scotty expected and nothing like it at the same time. The alien museums and UFO-shaped streetlights and tourists in antenna headbands—all of it's there, garish and desperate and somehow sad. But the sky is wrong. The sky is the color of old newspaper, yellow-gray and thin.

Scotty parks outside the International UFO Museum and Research Center. Ruby stays in the van with the windows cracked, her water bowl full. He promises her he won't be long.

Inside, it smells like dust and air conditioning and the lights are too dim for a true museum. Maybe they’re trying to blur any lies about their stories in the shadows between exhibits. Scotty wanders past dioramas of alien autopsies and grainy photographs of lights in the sky and testimonials from people who swear they were taken, examined, returned. He thinks about Ben laughing at him, that time Scotty got drunk and went on a rant about the statistical probability of extraterrestrial life. “You're such a fucking geek, dude,” Ben had said, grinning, and Scotty had thrown a couch pillow at his head.

He buys a postcard in the gift shop. It shows a classic gray alien giving a thumbs up, the caption reading GREETINGS FROM ROSWELL. He'll send it to Ben. He'll write something funny on the back, something about how the aliens are real and they're all wearing cowboy hats, and Ben will get it and call him an idiot and everything will be fine.

But he doesn't send it. He puts it in the glovebox with the others—postcards from Amarillo and Albuquerque and Flagstaff and a dozen other places, all unsent, all addressed to someone in Atlanta who isn't there.

When he gets back to the van, Ruby is standing on the driver's seat, her front paws on the steering wheel, staring out the windshield at something Scotty can't see. He follows her gaze but there's nothing there, just the parking lot and the museum and the wrong-colored sky.

"What is it, girl?"

She whines again, that door-creaking sound, and won't stop staring.

Scotty drives.

---

The nights are the worst. The nights are when the van becomes a coffin, a capsule, a tiny metal box hurtling through darkness with only Ruby's breathing to prove he's not alone. He parks in Walmart parking lots and rest stops and once, memorably, behind a closed-down Dairy Queen where he woke to someone knocking on the window—a cop, maybe, or a ghost, he didn't wait to find out.

Tonight he's somewhere in Nebraska or maybe Wyoming, pulled off on a dirt road that cuts through flatland so vast it makes his chest hurt trying to comtemplate the size of himself in comparison. The storm came out of nowhere, the way storms do out here, and now the van rocks in the wind like a boat in rough water. Rain hammers the roof. Lightning turns the world white and black, white and black, a strobe light God is using to find something He lost.

Ruby is pressed against Scotty's side, shaking. She's sixty pounds of muscle and jaw strength but she's terrified of thunder, has been since she was a puppy. Scotty wraps his arms around her and feels her heart beating against his ribs, trip-hammer fast.

"It's okay," he tells her. "We're okay."

The lie tastes like copper.

The wind screams. The van shudders. Scotty thinks about his mother in her house in the mountains, the house he grew up in, the house his father died in. He thinks about her alone there, waiting for a phone call he hasn't made. He thinks about her hands, how they've gotten older, the skin thin and spotted, the knuckles swollen. He thinks about how she used to hold him when he was small and scared, how she'd sing to him, old hymns she learned from her mother who learned them from hers.

He should call her. He should have called her weeks ago. Months ago. However long it's been.

Instead he opens his phone and types: *Do you remember that storm we got caught in, driving back from Athens? You made me pull over and we just sat there watching it, and you said storms were proof that the universe didn't give a shit about us but in a good way, in a freeing way. I didn't get it then but I think I do now.*

The message doesn't send. No signal. The phone shows one bar, then none, then one again, flickering like a dying bulb.

Scotty puts the phone down and holds his dog and listens to the storm try to kill them both.

---

Wyoming looks exactly like Georgia.

This is impossible. Scotty knows this is impossible. He's seen pictures of Wyoming—mountains and geysers and vast empty spaces that look like the surface of another planet. But when he crosses the state line (if he crosses the state line, if the sign he saw was real and not another hallucination), what spreads out before him is red clay and pine trees and kudzu choking the roadside like it's trying to pull the whole world down into the dirt.

He pulls over. Gets out. Ruby jumps down after him and immediately starts sniffing a patch of weeds that could be growing in any ditch in any county in North Georgia.

The air smells like home. Smells like the summer he turned sixteen and his father taught him to drive on back roads just like this one, the old man patient and quiet in the passenger seat, letting Scotty figure it out, letting him stall out and restart and stall out again.

Scotty walks to the edge of the road and looks out at the landscape and it's Georgia, it's absolutely Georgia, except there's no one here. No houses. No cars. No power lines. Just the trees and the red dirt and the sky pressing down like a hand on his head.

He gets back in the van and drives and the Georgia that isn't Georgia goes on forever.

---

The horses appear outside a town that might be called Medicine Bow or might be called something else. The sign was too faded to read. They're tied to posts outside what looks like it used to be a general store, the kind of building that exists now only in movies and photographs and the dreams of people who've never actually lived in small towns.

Scotty counts six horses. No, seven. No, six. The number keeps changing.

He parks and gets out, leaving Ruby in the van because she doesn't like horses, never has. Up close he can see that the horses aren't quite there. They're shadows, outlines, suggestions of horses. He can see through them to the building beyond. When he reaches out to touch one, his hand passes through its flank and he feels nothing, not even cold, just a faint resistance like pushing through spiderweb.

The horses don't react. Don't move. Their reins are tied to the posts but the reins are shadow too, and the posts, and maybe the building. Maybe all of it. Maybe Scotty himself.

He stands there for a long time, his hand inside a horse that doesn't exist, and thinks about Ben.

Ben who loved cowboy movies. Ben who wore a bolo tie to Scotty's graduation as a joke except it wasn't really a joke because Ben looked good in it, looked so natural. Ben who said he was going to move to Montana someday and buy a ranch and learn to rope cattle, and Scotty had laughed because Ben was from Decatur and had never been on a horse in his life, but Ben was serious. Ben was always serious about the things that didn’t matter.

Scotty pulls his hand back. The shadow-horse flickers, there and not-there, and Scotty gets back in the van and drives away and doesn't look in the rearview mirror because he knows if he does the horses will still be there, or won't be there, and he can't decide which would be worse.

---

His phone rings.

This is impossible because his phone has been dead for days, the battery drained, the charging cable broken somewhere back in Colorado or Utah or one of the other states that have blurred together into a single endless landscape of gas stations and fast food and parking lots where he sleeps and wakes and can't remember which is which.

But it's ringing.

Scotty picks it up. The screen is black. The crack has spread, a delta of broken glass spreading from the impact point. But it's ringing, he can hear it, can feel it vibrating in his hand.

He answers.

"Hello?"

Static. Wind. Something that might be breathing.

"Ben?"

The breathing gets louder. Or maybe it's not breathing. Maybe it's the sound of distance, of all the miles between here and there, here and everywhere, here and nowhere.

"Ben, if that's you—"

The line goes dead. The phone goes dark. Scotty sits there holding it, his hand shaking, and Ruby licks his face, her tongue rough and warm and real, the only real thing left.

---

He's been driving for a lifetime. He's been driving for a day. Time doesn't work anymore, hasn't worked since he left Atlanta in the van he bought off Craigslist from a guy who said it was reliable, who said it would get him wherever he needed to go. And it has. It's gotten him here, wherever here is, this place between places, this geography of forgetting.

The windows show deserts that don't match the map. He's in Oregon, according to the last sign he saw, but outside the windows is nothing but sand and sagebrush and heat shimmer rising off asphalt that stretches to a horizon that never gets closer. He drives toward it and it recedes. He stops and it stops. He's caught in amber, in gelatin, in the terrible stillness of a moment that won't end.

Ruby is sleeping in the back, curled up on the sleeping bag Scotty hasn't used in weeks. He doesn't sleep anymore. Doesn't need to. Or can't. He's not sure which.

He thinks about his mother. Thinks about calling her. Thinks about what he would say.

“Mama, I'm lost.”

“Mama, I can't find my way back.”

“Mama, Ben is dead and I knew, I've known the whole time, I was there when it happened, I held his hand in the hospital and felt it go cold and I left anyway, I ran anyway, I bought a van and drove away from his funeral and I've been driving ever since.”

But he doesn't call. He just drives.

---

The text messages pile up, unsent or sent into a void that doesn't answer back:

“Found a vintage Stetson in a pawn shop in Tucson. Guy wanted $200 for it but I talked him down to $75. You would've been proud.”

“Saw the most insane sunset tonight. Whole sky looked like it was on fire. Took a picture but it doesn't do it justice. It never does.”

“Ruby misses you. She keeps looking at the passenger seat like she's waiting for you to get in.”

“I'm sorry I left. I'm sorry I wasn't there. I'm sorry I'm not there now.”

“I don't know how to come back.”

“I don't know if I can.”

---

The decision to go home doesn't feel like a decision. It feels like gravity, like the inevitable pull of something he's been orbiting all along. He's in Idaho or Montana or somewhere that doesn't matter, and he turns the van southeast and drives.

The landscape changes. The impossible deserts give way to mountains, and the mountains give way to plains, and the plains give way to forests, and the forests start to look familiar. The air through the cracked window smells like pine and rain and red clay. Smells like home.

Ruby wakes up and sits in the passenger seat, alert now, her ears forward. She knows. Dogs always know.

Scotty drives through the night and into the morning and through another night. He stops for gas and food and to let Ruby out but he doesn't stop moving, not really. He's a shark. If he stops moving he'll die. If he stops moving he'll have to think about what he's been running from.

The mountains rise up around him, familiar and terrible. The roads get narrower, steeper. He knows these roads. He learned to drive on these roads.

His mother's house appears around a curve. The porch light is on even though it's morning. It's always on. She leaves it on for him, has left it on since he moved to Atlanta for college, a beacon saying *come home, come home, you can always come home.*

Scotty parks in the driveway. Turns off the engine. The silence is enormous.

Ruby whines, waiting.

Scotty sits there, his hands on the steering wheel, his father's t-shirt hanging loose on his frame, his hair tangled and unwashed, his face in the rearview mirror a stranger's face, gaunt and haunted and so tired he could sleep for a thousand years.

The front door opens. His mother steps out onto the porch. She's smaller than he remembers, or maybe he's just forgotten how small she is, how fragile. But her eyes are the same. Her eyes see everything.

She doesn't say anything. Doesn't call out to him. Just stands there, waiting, the way she's been waiting all along.

Scotty gets out of the van. Ruby follows. His legs barely hold him. He walks toward the porch and his mother comes down the steps to meet him and when she opens her arms he falls into them, falls and falls and falls, and she catches him the way she always has, the way she always will.

"I know, baby," she says, her hand on the back of his head, her voice the first real thing he's heard in months. "I know."

And Scotty breaks. Breaks open like a dam, like a levee, like something that's been holding back an ocean. The sobs come from somewhere deep, some painful lesion in his heart, and they tear through him like the storms, like the wind that battered the van, like all the miles and all the lies and all the impossible geographies he's traveled trying to outrun the truth.

Ben is dead.

Ben has been dead.

Ben died three months ago in a hospital in Atlanta while Scotty held his hand and promised him everything would be okay, and then Scotty went to the funeral and stood in the back and couldn't breathe and left before it was over and bought a van and drove and drove and drove, collecting souvenirs for a ghost, sending messages to a phone that would never be answered, running from a grief so big it had teeth, it had claws, it could swallow him whole.

His mother holds him and rocks him and doesn't let go, and Ruby presses against his legs, and the mountains stand around them just watching, and they've been standing for millions of years and will stand for millions more just to bear witness to this. Scotty cries until he has nothing left, until he's empty, until he's just a boy in his dead father's clothes being held by his mother on a porch in the mountains where he was born.

"I couldn't save him," Scotty says into his mother's shoulder, the words muffled and broken. "I couldn't save him and I couldn't stay and I couldn't—"

"I know," she says again. "I know, baby. But you're home now. You're home."

And it's not okay. It won't be okay for a long time, maybe ever. But it's true. He's home. He's stopped running. The van sits in the driveway, full of unsent postcards and a cowboy hat Ben will never wear and all the miles Scotty put between himself and the truth.

But the truth caught up anyway. The truth was always going to catch up.

His mother guides him inside, Ruby following, and closes the door behind them. The porch light stays on. It will stay on through the day and into the night and through all the nights to come, a small light against the darkness, telling him he’s home.