Red Fox Road Read online

  So, yeah, I thought about her. But what I meant is that I hadn’t thought for a long while about the day she began to die.

  * * *

  I must have slept because when I opened my eyes next, it was light. It had stopped raining but the sun wasn’t above the trees yet. Mom wasn’t in the truck. The window was misted over, so I couldn’t see out. I listened, sniffed the air for her cigarette smoke, but I couldn’t smell anything. I opened the truck door and leaned out.

  “Mom?”

  To get out of my sleeping bag, I had to squirm across the gearshift and sprawl halfway onto the passenger seat, then shimmy out like a snake shedding its skin. It was cold, even in my fleece jacket. I jammed my feet into my hiking boots and scrambled out of the truck.

  I thought I’d see Mom sitting on the tailgate, but she wasn’t there.

  “Mom!” I called.

  In the heavy mist, the woods dripped with last night’s rain. Some twigs snapped with the weight of something stepping on them and then Mom was there, emerging from the trees on the edge of the road like a ghost.

  “Mom! I was calling you.”

  She looked up and saw me. “Francie. Good morning. I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I just went into the woods there to pee.”

  “Why can’t you pee on the road? You don’t have to go into the trees. You could get lost. People get lost just stepping off a trail to pee, you know. I read that about a woman on the Appalachian Trail. They were eating lunch, she went to pee and didn’t come back. Her friends never found her.”

  I said all this in a rush of breath. Mom came up to me and brushed my hair back from my face. “Shh. I’m fine. I’m here.”

  I realized my heart was hammering against my chest.

  “Where do you read all these crazy misadventure stories, anyway?”

  “I just read them. It was in a magazine.” There was a tremble in my voice and I took a deep breath to cover it.

  “Dad’ll be here this morning, I’m sure of it. That engine I heard last night must have been someone else. Kids out joyriding, probably. Hungry?”

  I nodded, not trusting my voice to speak.

  “Well, let’s see what we have left. I sure could use a cup of fir needle tea right now.”

  She smiled, then we laughed and I felt better again.

  What we had left were two pieces of bread, a bit of cheese, the bag of Scotch mints, a few sunflower seeds, two granola bars and the three sticks of Juicy Fruit gum. And there was a little water left in Mom’s bottle.

  “Is there any snow in the woods?” I asked Mom.

  “There are a few patches of it, yeah.”

  “I’m going to get some for water.”

  “Good idea.”

  I took my water bottle and the pot to gather the snow.

  “Stay within sight of the road,” Mom called as I crossed the ditch.

  “I will.”

  The snow I found was not so much snow as patches of ice crystals frozen into chunks like small melting glaciers. I used a rock to chip away at them and put the pieces in my bottle. There would be bits of bark and tree moss floating around when they melted, but it wouldn’t hurt us.

  Once I had filled the pot and the bottle as full as I could get them, I looked around for anything else we could eat. The soft, green fronds of a huckleberry shimmered in the mist. It was growing from a tree stump, but of course there were no berries on it yet, and I didn’t know if the new shoots of the leaves were safe to eat. I gazed out into the woods. On this side of the road, the land didn’t rise into a ridge the way it did on the other side. All I could see were trees—fir, cedar, hemlock—dripping with rain in the morning mist.

  I circled back to the ditch and there, growing at the edge of the tree line, were some wild roses. I didn’t see any dried hips on them, but I could walk down the road later and look. I pinched a few leaves to add to our fir needle tea.

  “A granola bar and a few sunflower seeds. How does that sound?” Mom said.

  “Should we eat both granola bars?”

  “Well, I expect Dad to be here before lunch, but we could save one if you want.”

  “Might as well,” I said.

  “He’ll bring food. I wonder what he’ll bring.” She gazed out at the road, looking thoughtful.

  “A bacon and egger. Potato patties,” I said.

  “Hot coffee. Anything deep-fried. Donuts, maybe. Those ones with the powdered sugar; those are so good.”

  “I hope it’s something hot.”

  “Me too. What time do you think he’ll get here? Do you want to bet on it?”

  I set up the one-burner stove on the tailgate, thinking about it. I put the pot of snow I’d gathered to heat while I chopped fir needles with my jackknife.

  “I say ten o’clock,” Mom said.

  “Exactly ten?”

  “Ten thirty. No—10:15. Split the difference.”

  I thought about 9:45, but that seemed too early if he had to arrange for a tow truck first thing. Most places opened at eight. If he left at 8:30, took a couple of hours to get down the road…

  “Ten thirty,” I said.

  “You sure? That’s your final guess?”

  “Yes. Ten thirty. Even if he’s later, I still win.”

  “You have to be within five minutes to win the prize, don’t you agree?”

  “What’s the prize?”

  “Dinner at any restaurant you want.”

  “Okay, 10:45.”

  “Final, final?”

  I nodded.

  Mom and I drank our tea and ate our half granola bar sitting on the tailgate in the drizzling rain. It wasn’t yet 7 a.m. My neck and legs were stiff from sleeping in the truck.

  I savored each sunflower seed, sucking the salt off the shells first.

  “That felt like something,” Mom said. “I actually feel better.”

  She jumped down from the tailgate and brushed off her jeans. Then she pulled the elastic off her ponytail, bent over and shook out her hair. Mom’s hair was chestnut brown, a hint of copper red left in it. She was a redhead when she was younger, she told me, when she wanted to reassure me that my hair wouldn’t always be as red as it was now. She straightened and refastened the elastic.

  “Let’s go for a walk up the road. We’ve got that sign in the windshield, and I can’t imagine they’d come in any other way than the road we came down. Anyway, we need to stretch, get the kinks out. That truck’s not the most comfortable place to sleep.”

  “Try sleeping behind the steering wheel,” I said.

  “No thanks. I’ll be happy if I never have to spend a night sleeping in a vehicle again, thank you very much.”

  I put the stove away and we headed up the road again. I brought a bag in case I saw anything we could eat. I knew we probably wouldn’t have to eat anything like that, but I liked the idea of being prepared.

  By my wristwatch, we walked for forty-three minutes, not hurrying. I found seven rosehips and put them in my collecting bag. And I found lamb’s quarters that were supposed to taste a lot like spinach. I put those in my bag, too. We might have covered a mile or a mile and a half. In places, I saw the stain of oil on the rocks where the truck had leaked. I didn’t point them out to Mom.

  When I found a patch of dandelions, I got a rock to dig out the roots. My guidebook said you could eat the flowers, though there weren’t any on these plants, and you could eat the leaves and the roots. They were supposed to be healthy in the spring. I had once picked all the dandelion greens I could find on our lawn and asked Mom if I could make a salad of them. I’d chopped up radishes and some tomatoes and I put the salad in a glass bowl on the table at supper. Dad had taken a bite and then said, “What’s this? It’s a bit bitter, isn’t it?”

  Mom had smile
d at me and let me tell Dad.

  “It’s a dandelion salad,” I said.

  “Where’d you pick them?”

  “She picked them right in our own backyard,” Mom said.

  Dad got a choked look on his face and spit out what he’d been chewing, then drank down a whole glass of water.

  “Dandelion greens are supposed to be good for you in the spring, Leonard,” Mom said gently, trying, I knew, to let Dad know he’d hurt my feelings.

  “I’m sorry, Squirt. Old Otto sneaks into our yard at night and sprays our weeds with Roundup. I saw him from the kitchen window one night when I was getting a glass of water.”

  “Oh my God, Len, why didn’t you ever tell me that?” Mom said. “I go out there in my bare feet all the time and then I come in and probably track that stuff all over the house.”

  That was the only time I’d almost eaten dandelion greens. Now, as I dug and picked, separating the roots from the greens, Mom sat on a rock and stared up the road. She waited and listened. Clouds hid the sun, but the rain had stopped for now. After maybe half an hour, she got up suddenly and said, “Maybe we shouldn’t have left the truck. What if…I hate to think of them waiting there for us. Let’s go back.”

  So we hurried and got back in half an hour, but everything was as we had left it.

  “I’d like to stretch out in the truck bed. We can put the tarp and sleeping bags down,” Mom said. “My back is so stiff. I just need to be flat for a while.”

  We worked together on setting that up and then we lay down together to wait. I drifted off to sleep with the sky brightening a little, taking the chill out of the air.

  “I hear something,” Mom said.

  I opened my eyes. The light told me that it was probably past ten already. I checked my watch. It was 10:38 a.m. Unless Dad arrived soon, I wouldn’t win the prize.

  “Do you hear it?”

  “I think it’s a plane.” I was still on my back and I looked into the sky and saw it tracking west to east through low cloud.

  “I wonder,” Mom said, almost to herself. “I wonder if they’d bring in a plane.”

  “I think it’s a jet, Mom. Look, you can see it.”

  She looked up. “What if Leonard couldn’t find the road again. It’s not on the map. He would have had to loop back from that other highway. It’s possible he couldn’t find the road.”

  I didn’t like the way she used Dad’s first name. It was like she wasn’t really talking to me. Besides, if Dad couldn’t find the road, it would make it his fault again and I didn’t like that.

  “There aren’t that many roads, Mom.”

  She turned and looked at me. “Have you ever noticed how you say ‘Mom’ at the end of your sentences when you’re trying to tell me I’m being a dummy?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t quite tell if she was kidding or if she was really mad at me.

  “Like, ‘That was a jet, Mom.’ I wasn’t suggesting they’d bring a jet out to look for us.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “And then you just did it again.” She fell silent. My mouth went dry. It was better not to say anything. It was better to wait and it would pass.

  Mom sighed and crossed her arms under her head, looking up at the sky. After a few more minutes, she said, “I’m getting tired of this waiting.”

  But we waited all day. We ate a dandelion-green salad with rosehips and sunflower seeds for lunch, but I forgot to take the seeds out of the rosehips, so they made the insides of our mouths dry and itchy. Every once in a while Mom said, “I don’t understand what’s taking so long.” Then she fell silent again.

  We fell asleep without eating anything more.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Listen, listen, listen!”

  “I’m cold.”

  Mom put her finger up for me to be quiet. She had the window open and her head cocked, partway out.

  “I don’t know what’s going on but I know there’s someone out there.”

  The noise I heard was close and loud, a high-pitched beep, beep, beep, beep, continuous, maybe ten times, then nothing, just the rush of a breeze moving high through the trees.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It sounds like some kind of tracking device. Or the signal when a truck is backing up. I don’t see any lights.”

  The sky had cleared and was crazy with stars, more than I had ever seen, so many that the black looked almost brushed with light. We held our breath, listening.

  Then it came again, a steady, high tone that sounded so familiar to me. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. I counted more than thirty beeps, almost no pauses between them, except in one place, almost a hiccup, and then silence.

  “Hello!” Mom called out the window, scanning the woods. “Hello! We’re here!” She got out.

  “Francie, get your flashlight. We’ll shine it into the woods so they can see us.”

  I found my flashlight where I’d left it on the dash and climbed out of my sleeping bag.

  “Give it to me. Hurry up.” Mom flicked it on and swept the trees, first in a low arc then a high one. “Hello, hello! We’re over here!”

  She flashed the light on and off. “What’s the signal for SOS?”

  “Three short, three long, three short.”

  Mom fumbled with the flashlight and dropped it. It rolled away and went out. I felt with my hands on the rocks and found it again, gave it a knock with my fist and it came back on.

  I flashed three short flashes, then three long, then three short again into the bush.

  “Do it again. Keep it up. I’ll turn on the truck lights.”

  As Mom went around and got in the truck, the sound came again, but this time I heard something slightly different. The noise stopped after every few beeps and then there was the slightest change in tone, followed by a little bark. Then I knew that the sound was not something human at all, but a bird.

  Before I could turn to tell Mom what I’d heard, a mighty blast of the truck’s horn shattered the quiet. I nearly jumped out of my boots. I clapped my hands over my ears. Three short, three long, three short blasts reverberated off the mountains and seemed to rock the ground.

  When the horn stopped echoing through the trees, Mom said, “Anybody out there will hear that.”

  “I think it was a bird,” I said quietly. “The beeps we heard.” I was careful not to add “Mom.”

  “That was no bird.”

  “I’m pretty sure it was. I heard it again just as you got in the truck.”

  “I heard it, too.”

  “It made a barking noise.”

  “I’ve never heard a bird make a noise like that. It was an electronic noise. Like a timer of some kind.” Mom came around to stand next to me.

  I wanted it to be an electronic noise, but I knew it wasn’t. Mom hadn’t heard clearly what I’d heard.

  We listened again and the woods now roared with the silence, like the sound of the truck horn had shocked everything into stillness. Even the breeze had dropped. She took my hand and squeezed it.

  “I’ll leave the truck lights on for a while so they can find us.”

  But I had the feeling that she knew what I knew, that the beeping was not the noise of someone coming to rescue us.

  It was almost morning. The stars had begun to fade in a gray light that seemed to seep into the sky like a dirty cloth rinsed in clean water. Back in our sleeping bags with the truck windows open, we tried to stay awake and listen. Mom fell asleep first. I shut off the truck lights. There were no more beeps, and I had almost nodded off again when a distinct, sharp crack of a branch snapped me awake again. It was close, in the trees just beside the road. Another one, and the low alders shook with movement. A flash of fear thundered in my blood, my heart knocking crazily against my chest.

  I was about to shake Mom awake wh
en an animal stepped from the trees. It had a big rack of antlers and it stepped onto the road, alongside the truck, and stared at me. I stared back at it. It was bigger than a deer, with a tan body and black neck; I thought it was probably an elk, which I had seen once when we drove through Banff. It just stood there looking at me, wondering what I was, and I looked back. I wanted to ask it a question, like, “Where did you come from? And do you know where the nearest highway is?” He put his head down and walked on, heading in the direction Dad had gone. I watched him until he disappeared into the trees and the birds began to wake up.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The letters SOS come from Morse code. Some people say they stand for “Save Our Souls.” I woke up on Day Four knowing this, although I hadn’t remembered it the night before. The words were in my head first thing as I felt the sun on my cheek and I opened my eyes: Save Our Souls.

  Mom was sitting on the tailgate, reading.

  A ghost of tobacco smoke hung in the air, but I wouldn’t say anything. The more Mom smoked, the less I could say anything to her about it, a fact I’d learned from experience.

  “We assumed that we couldn’t get the truck started,” Mom said, as if picking up a conversation we’d already been having. “That could be right. But what if it’s wrong? What if there’s a way to get it going? Even if we could drive partway out, it might be enough.”

  She held up the owner’s manual for the truck.

  “Good morning, by the way. How did you sleep?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m stiff.”

  “I didn’t sleep a wink. How’s our water situation?”

  “We’re going to need some soon.”

  “I wish we’d thought to collect it when it was raining. But we didn’t expect…” She stopped and handed me the truck owner’s manual.