On the Road

There were no more doves at Uncle Jack’s house.

It was a funny thing to notice. Livvy didn’t care much about birds. Her brother, Kit, was the expert. Every morning he sat out in their backyard and drew every bird that visited the feeder, even though they were just the plain ordinary ones you saw every day, like pigeons and sparrows. He never let Livvy sit out with him—she was too noisy, he said, and never sat still, and scared all the birds away. Not that she cared. 

Still, when she thought of Uncle Jack’s house, she remembered sunlight streaming in through the big grand windows, and the doves singing in the morning. Now, any birdsong had to compete with the relentless roaring of the semi-trucks barreling down the highway, and it evidently wasn’t winning.

“Good Lord,” their mother said. She hitched their gigantic suitcase out of the back of the car. Since they were only staying a night, all of their clothes were crammed into one. “I don’t remember the road being this loud. No wonder Jack was half deaf.” She wiped sweat from her brow.

They were all sweating. It was early October in Texas, which meant it was nearly as hot as summer. Livvy was warm and sleepy and a little nauseous from absorbing the sun through the car window. “Can we go swimming in the river?”

“Yes. You remembered your swimsuit, didn’t you, Livvy?”

“She forgot it at home,” Kit said instantly. He was two years older than her, and upon turning thirteen the month before, had seemed to cross over some invisible line that turned you unexpectedly into both a stranger and a traitor. 

“Wear a T-shirt, then. Kit, give me a hand with this suitcase…”

“It’s Chris,” Kit said, but he dutifully helped her lug the suitcase up the porch stairs, avoiding the places where the wood sagged dangerously. 

The house bore no resemblance to the white castle of Livvy’s memories. Paint peeled from its sides in strips. A yellow jacket buzzed disinterestedly at the porch steps. The windows, no longer clear and shining, looked down at them like dark, solemn eyes. 

Livvy hurried after her mother and brother. She didn’t like looking at the house, not with all the light gone out of it. When Livvy’s mother opened the front door, the darkness inside was so complete that it made Livvy’s vision swim unpleasantly. 

There was the strong smell of cat pee. Catching Kit’s look, their mother said, “Remember that no one’s been here in a while, please.” She flicked on the light. Most of the furniture was covered in cat hair, and although Livvy looked around hopefully for a cat, she didn’t see one. 

She and Kit went upstairs to change into their swimsuits, walking funny to avoid the yellow stains on the carpet. “I don’t want to sleep here anymore,” she said, eyeing the cobwebs at the windowsill. “It’s creepy.” She’d thought for a moment about asking Kit for some scary stories —he got all the really freaky ones from the other seventh-graders—but now she wanted nothing else in the world but to be back outside in the sun. She expected Kit to laugh at her and call her a baby, but silently he seemed to agree.

They slipped back downstairs together. Their mother was in the kitchen, ice cubes clinking as she poured herself a glass of root beer. She was talking loudly to someone on the phone, maybe their father but more likely one of her friends from church, and didn’t look up as they rooted around in the ice cooler for Capri-Suns and left for the river.

Escaping the smell of mildew and feeling the sunlight on her skin cheered Livvy instantly. The golden summer visits of the past seemed closer now without the close, creeping walls stifling them. Before Uncle Jack, the house had belonged to Great-Aunt Margaret—Livvy’s mother had grown up there, as had Margaret, and Margaret’s mother probably had too. Back then, there were parties every summer. Livvy’s memories were vague but cheerful, full of older cousins running and laughing in the grass, splashing in the river, melting popsicles and iced glasses of lemonade. Inside, the adults huddled together in clusters, talking in their low, rumbling voices, as soothing and familiar as the sound of running water.

She remembered sitting on the riverbank, too young to be allowed to play with the riverbank. Although his face was indistinct and blurred with time now, it was Uncle Jack who had taught her to catch the little crawdads in the river and collect them in buckets to show off to her cousins. It was a far cry from the hot, dry summer she’d spent at home that year, where the only tolerable activity was lying on the cool bathroom tiles and reading library books.

The river, though, disappointed her. The trees were just as she remembered, those long, elegant willow branches dipping down to touch the water. But the sun had forced the water to retreat from its banks and turned the water a dirty greenish-brown. The hot, rotten smell of baking mud made her wrinkle her nose.

“Stagnant water,” Kit said wisely. “Can’t swim in that.”

“What’s ‘stagnant’ mean?”

“The water’s gone bad. Now it’s full of flesh-eating bacteria, probably. If you’ve got a paper cut or something, they can swim up into it and eat your insides.” He made a wriggling motion with his finger that was maybe meant to be a demonstration. 

She didn’t believe him about the flesh-eating bacteria and might’ve risked the river, except at that moment, a water moccasin detached itself from the opposite bank. It glided dreamily across the water’s surface, visible for a moment, and then disappeared under the surface.

“Bet there’s leeches in there, too,” Kit said with a shudder.

“Whatever,” Livvy said. She didn’t want to go back inside. “Let’s find something else to do.”

They wandered around the side of the house back towards the highway. The river cut them off from everything else. Kit had his sketchbook with him—he’d seen a small congregation of vultures huddled above the road earlier.

Much to his disappointment, the vultures were gone by the time they reached the front yard. The air shimmered above the black pavement like a desert from an old adventure movie. Beneath the highway was a dark, round opening that Livvy hadn’t noticed before.

“Secret tunnel,” she said, impressed.

“It’s just a drainage tunnel. It goes under the highway. Here, look.” Kit ducked into the opening. The darkness swallowed him up entirely.

A moment passed. “Kit?” Livvy called after him, a little nervously. 

He stuck his pale hand back into the light and waved it at her. Relieved and embarrassed at her relief, she scurried in after him. 

The tunnel was dark, but the opening provided just enough light to see by. It was very dirty. The floor was littered with crushed cigarette butts and jagged shards of amber glass from broken beer bottles. “Don’t touch anything,” Kit said to her bossily. “It’s nasty down here.” He stooped to avoid bumping his head. Someone had drawn several obscene body parts on the wall— “And don’t look at those, either,” said Kit—in addition to several swear words, drawn in bold, spiky lettering. 

There came the distant dull roar that she was by now familiar with: a truck was coming. She began to dart towards the opening, but Kit caught her by the wrist. 

“Stay still!” He had to shout—the truck was directly overhead now, the sound was deafening—she had a sudden vision of the tunnel collapsing over their heads, her heart pounding in her chest like a bird’s—and then it was over. The truck had passed. Together, Kit and Livvy scrambled out of the other end of the tunnel.

To her surprise, there was a second hole a little ways down the road, and then another, and then beyond that one. Like hungry mouths in line for a meal. “Let’s go back,” Livvy said, annoyed by the babyish whine in her own voice. She tugged at the duct tape her mother had stuck to her heels to protect her from blisters. “Mom says not to play in the street.”

“We aren’t in the street, you baby,” Kit said, predictably. “Let’s see what’s in this one.” He took off, vanishing into another tunnel. Forgetting her fear in the indignant heat of being called a baby, she shot after him. 

They wove in and out of the tunnels like rabbits in a warren. Other highways intersected with the main one, and these had tunnels of their own to explore. They entertained themselves for a while by popping in and out at random, playing hide-and-seek. 

Kit sketched out a simple map in his sketchbook and they pretended to be Louis and Clark sent out on a fantastical subterranean expedition. Livvy couldn’t shake the momentary chill of fear when a truck passed overhead, but she couldn’t quite shake the thrill it brought, either. First the tunnel walls would begin to shake—then the heavy smell of exhaust would become heavier, suffocating—and then the roar of the truck would cease to be any modern sound she recognized and instead became the roar of a beast from a fantasy book, a dragon or a manticore. She felt strange and floaty in the hot darkness of the tunnel and the choking clouds of truck exhaust.

One truck dislodged small pebbles from the tunnel entrance that struck her bare arms like stray bullets, startling her so badly that she nearly forgot where she was and shot out of the tunnel onto the highway. After it passed, she scrambled up out of the dark and into the brightness outside, blinking away the spots that danced across her vision. Kit followed her with his hands up to shield his eyes. 

It was occurring to Livvy that they had been outside for a very long time. She couldn’t see the big white house anymore. They had walked for at least an hour, doubling back on themselves, crossing the highway and then crossing it again. There was a dead bird by the side of the road.

Suddenly, she didn’t feel well. The sun and the smell of exhaust made her dizzy and hot all over. “I want to go home.” Her Capri-Sun from the ice cooler was a distant and torturous dream. 

“In a minute.” Kit said. He knelt down by the dead bird. Its feathers were too dirty and matted to discern the species. Maybe it was a dove. “I want to get this poor bird off the road. Get me a stick.”

There was nothing around them but the highway and the trees. For a moment, Livvy thought she saw vultures circling in the sky above until she realized they were nothing but big black spots floating across her vision. Kit jumped back to avoid a semi-truck that came barreling past them.

Suddenly she was struck by the terrifying idea that they were no longer really on the highway at all. They had passed through the tunnels and gotten lost in some alien place where nothing existed but sun and pavement. She sat down hard on the concrete. 

Kit was saying something—he was in black and white now, how funny–but it sounded like he was speaking underwater, or maybe he was just mouthing the words and not really speaking at all.

The horrible floaty feeling had returned, but somehow her body felt heavy. In spite of the distant panic jolting through her, she couldn’t move. She thought maybe she was dying. Was this how it felt?

At some point, she became aware that Uncle Jack was on the highway too, walking far, far ahead with his back to her, getting smaller and smaller until he was just a shimmering speck on the horizon.

She was briefly aware of being jostled and then lifted, which made her feel so sick she wanted to pass out, and then she did.

She drifted in and out of awareness for a while. Gradually, she became aware that she was in her little room in Uncle Jack’s house with a damp towel on her forehead. Her mother had drifted in and out, to ask if she was feeling any better and bring her water, although Livvy really just wanted to be left alone to sleep.

At some point, Livvy’s mother came back in with a bowl of microwaved macaroni. She took the towel away to press the back of her hand against Livvy’s forehead. “Not so clammy anymore,” she said approvingly. “That’s good.” She set the macaroni down on the dresser. As if speaking to herself and not Livvy, she said, “I always hated this place. I don’t know why on earth we held onto it for so long. That road…” For a moment, the expression on her face seemed so alien that Livvy would have said anything to distract her.

Desperately, Livvy said, “I’m sorry for playing in the street, Mama.”

Her mother came back to herself. “Well, you should be.” Perhaps some of Livvy’s regret had come across in her voice, because her eyes softened a little. “I guess you won’t do it again, anyways. Go back to sleep now. You’ll feel better in the morning.” She hugged Livvy hard once, and then she left.

Kit came in later, but she wouldn’t talk to him.

Instead of lying down on the covers next to her like he would have done when they were little, he sat by the windowsill. “What’s with you, Livvy,” he kept saying, crossly. Their mother must have really let him have it. 

She wanted to ask him if he’d seen Uncle Jack on the road but she knew at once from his face that he hadn’t. “Go away, Kit,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut.

“Keep telling you and Mom it’s Chris now,” he said moodily, but he set an icepack down on the pillow by her head and left her alone.

Everything familiar—Kit, her mother, the house—had turned unexpectedly strange, like missing a stair in the dark. Outside, the highway roared. She buried her hot face in the pillow and cried herself back to sleep.

The next day, they drove home.

Already Livvy felt better. She barely remembered what she had been so upset about the night before. It was just some strange feeling she’d had, buried quickly by the the books she had to check out from the library, the lemonade stand she had to operate, the math homework she had to struggle through—and then later, late nights driving home with her friends, roasting smores at summer camp, waving goodbye to Chris as he packed his boxes into the car and headed off for college, everything changing so slowly you barely felt it happening.

But some nights, as she drifted off to sleep at night, the image drifted unexpectedly back to her: Cousin Jack on the highway, just walking and walking.