A History of Wild Places(19)

I pour myself a cup of coffee then lean back in the old, repurposed office chair, adjusting the lever to lower the seat down. Parker is tall and lanky, like most twenty-one-year-olds, but he’s still shorter than me and he can’t see out the window when the chair is too low.

The summer wind blows through the doorway and Parker straightens up, as if the breeze were ushering him home. His shift over. “See you in the morning,” he says with the sudden gravel of a man twice his age, the long hours wearing on him, aging him quicker than it should.

“Hey,” I say, before he steps out of sight. “How far have you ever been down the road?”

An itchy maw of silence congeals between us and I wonder if he’s heard me. His jaw sticks out and his dark, sleepy eyes flatten. “Outside of Pastoral?”

“Yeah,” I answer, trying to sound like I have nothing to hide. I sip my coffee then wince at the bitterness.

“Shit, man, I don’t know, not far.”

In all the years we’ve worked the guard hut—the passing conversation when I arrive in the evening for the night shift, and then again in the morning when he appears after sunup for the day shift—we’ve never discussed this. Both of us have spent hours staring out at that long dirt road, where it slopes up and down over low hills before vanishing into the trees. A road that leads out into a world where both of us were born. Parker lived in Sacramento with his single mom before they moved here when he was only three years old. We got lucky, he told me once. Somehow my mom found this place.

But I don’t remember anything beyond Pastoral—I was only an infant when I was dropped off at the guard hut: abandoned, cared for by several of the older women in Pastoral, raised by the community. But whoever left me here thought this place was better than out there.

“I chased my dog down the road once,” Parker says, his mouth finding a strange flatness, like he’s fighting a warning in his head, telling him not to talk about it. “He was a collie, I think. Black and white. A good dog, shit at hunting, but he was loyal. Until that day.” Parker’s eyes blink rapidly, as if the memory were passing through him by rote, fingers twitching against the handle of the gun. “I was probably only twelve or thirteen when it happened. He was chasing something down the road, a rabbit, I think. I followed him for a bit, a good mile maybe, hard to tell when you’re that age, but he was too fast. The road got pretty narrow, intersected with other roads, and I wasn’t sure which way he went.” He shakes his head, shaking away the memory, and draws his shoulders back. “Never saw that dog again.”

I lean forward in the chair. Parker went past the gate, past the boundary. “You didn’t get sick?” I ask.

“Guess not. I never told anyone what I did.”

He was only a kid when it happened; maybe he didn’t go as far as he thinks. Maybe he only took a few steps over the border.

“Did you see anything else out on the road?” I ask.

“Like what?”

“You know what.”

His eyes drop and he kicks at the dirt just outside the doorway, like he knows he’s said too much. “Didn’t see anything,” he answers. We both know the penalty for going beyond the perimeter, the panic it would cause among the community, the ritual he would face: packed dirt and blood and bound wrists. He didn’t just risk his life by walking past the boundary, he risked it by returning, and now by telling me.

“I won’t say anything,” I say now, to reassure him.

He nods, eyes half-lidded like drowsy moons. We’ve known each other a long time, and maybe that’s why he’s told me this story. Or maybe he’s just tired—let it slip without meaning to.

A moment of quiet falls between us and the chair settles as I shift my weight back, taking another long gulp of the coffee, the liquid less bitter now—my taste buds already familiar with the grit and ash of it.

“Why you asking about the road?”

The jittery pulse of caffeine begins to thrum through me. “Just curious,” I say.

“You know you can’t go out there,” Parker warns now, raising a blond eyebrow at me, as if it were a pointed finger. “You can’t go past the boundary.”

No shit, I think. At every weekly gathering, we’re reminded of the dangers waiting inside the woods. And our job—our post at the gate—is meant to keep any outsiders who might wander up the road from getting in. From bringing the rot over our borders. We keep watch. We protect. But in all the years I’ve sat inside the hut, I’ve never seen a single person striding up the road to Pastoral.

I shoot Parker a look, a half smirk, like my question was only a joke. “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.” And I settle back into the chair, making myself look perfectly content to stay put, ignoring the lump rooted in my stomach. The lie so easily told.

He eyes me a moment longer, like he doesn’t believe my gesture of ease, as if he senses something stirring along my thoughts, a thing I’ve been thinking for far too long: What if I could make it down the road? What if I could make it through the trees to the outside? To the world that lies beyond?

Parker lets out a low, deep breath. “Okay, I’m heading back, need to get some sleep.” He tips his head. “Keep watch for Olive and Pike’s chickens, they’ve been burrowing out of their coop the last few days. Coyotes might get ’em if they wander past the perimeter.”