All That's Left to Tell(37)

“So you train your dog to piss on the cars that haven’t paid?” Genevieve asked.

“Sorry ’bout that. He doesn’t know any better. It’s just your tire.” He rested his hand on the truck bed, and Genevieve reached out and took hold of his wrist and pushed it back toward his side.

“Whoa!” he said. “Excuse me!”

“This might be your campground,” Genevieve said. “But it’s not your truck. Keep your hands off.”

“Look, I’m not trying to cause problems here.”

“Then why didn’t you wait till morning?” Claire asked.

“People drive off without paying. They get up at the crack of dawn, and drive off. Usually I take down people’s license plates just in case.”

The dog whimpered once at his heels, and offered a single bark, and the man said, “Settle.”

Claire was in her pajamas, and had locked her wallet in the cab of the truck, and she started to climb out of the truck to retrieve it, but Genevieve said, “I got this.” She had slept in the clothes she’d been riding in all day, and she reached into one of her pockets and pulled out the twenties that she’d stolen from the gas station.

“It’s fifteen, not twenty,” the man said after she handed him the bill.

“Then give us our change,” Genevieve said. He smiled, and reached into his back pocket and pulled out a small clip of bills and peeled off one and handed it to Genevieve.

“Tell you what,” he said. “It’s unusual for people to pull into a campground and sleep in an open-air truck bed. Could have pulled off most anywhere under a nice, bright light and saved yourself the trouble.”

“We thought this was most anywhere,” Claire said, but he ignored her.

“It’s pretty unusual, too, to find two women sleeping in the back of that truck. Nice-looking women. Don’t know where you’re heading to, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it again out along these roads.”

“I see,” Genevieve said. “What year is this?”

The man shook his head. His face was round and heavy. Claire could see him better now in the starlight—middle aged, fat, like the bad-guy sheriff in an old movie.

“If you lived in this area long as I have, you know the year it is don’t matter much. At least not out here in the wilds. Not for two women alone.”

Genevieve snorted at this. “This isn’t the wilds. You’re ten miles from the city.”

“You’d be surprised, miss.”

“This isn’t the wilds,” she said again. “I know them better than you do.”

He stood staring at them for a few seconds longer before he smiled, said, “Good night, ladies,” and walked off toward his camper. Claire hadn’t seen the dim light coming from its curtained windows till now. The dog followed him into the back.

“Aren’t you the bold woman?” she whispered to Genevieve. “Taking hold of his hand like that and sticking it back in his pocket. Calling him on his little story.”

“I hate bullshit,” Genevieve said, without whispering.

Genevieve tilted her head up to the sky, sighed heavily, and then lay back down with her shoulder turned away from her. The night was rapidly getting colder, and the warmth from Genevieve’s body was comforting. For a few minutes, she’d forgotten why she was out here—this journey to visit her father who might very well be dying—as if the trip had emerged whole cloth from some other realm, and Genevieve was her best friend on some unplanned adventure. She was sleepy. She resettled herself on the mattress.

“It’s weird,” Genevieve said.

“What is?”

“That dog. I had a dog when I was a kid that looked like that one.”

“Yeah? Nicer than this guy’s?”

“No, not really. We were out living in the country, and my dad wanted a farm dog, even though we weren’t on a farm. She was a black Lab, about the same size as the one that peed on your tire. She liked to chase birds, and you could hardly blame her, since she was bred to do it. My dad insisted on keeping her unchained to roam the yard and ward off strangers, and she’d catch a crow or starling from time to time, and my dad would stroke her head afterward and tell her she was a good girl. Then one day she got out of the yard and into a neighbor’s chicken shed, and killed something like forty laying hens. That was the end of the dog.”

Claire felt something run through her, as if this were a parable she should remember, but she couldn’t name it.

“I always wondered,” Genevieve continued. “Killing forty hens like that. Would you call that violence? When the dog goes after that many chickens? Or was it violent when my dad left the dog unleashed when he knew that dog killed birds?”

Claire was trying to figure out how they’d gotten here.

Nearby, there were the sudden ticking wings of an insect, and the dog barked once.

“That was supposed to be funny.”

“You’re a very strange person, Genevieve. I mean that affectionately.”

“Sure you do,” she said.

*

In the morning, Claire was wakened by the man in the camper pulling away from his site and out onto the road, and once she could no longer hear his truck, she climbed out of the bed and pulled on fresh clothes under the still-rising sun. She glanced over at the tent pitched a few yards away, but it now appeared that no one was in it. Once she was dressed, she tugged on the blanket that Genevieve had pulled up to her nose and said, “We should hit the road.”