Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

“Someone’s going to think we’re criminals and lock us up.”

Mr. Bell hunkers in close, protecting a featherless newborn bird. He looks Ruth up and down. “But you already are locked up. Aren’t you, dear?”

SHE AND I FOLLOW A PATHthrough a field single file. We are trespassing. Yellow grass reaches as high as my waist. If someone came along, we could duck into this grass and be hidden. So far this morning we’ve seen no one.

The path gives way onto the road. Ruth turns left as if she knows where she’s going. Mostly it seems we’re following the Erie Canal. We’ll lose it for an afternoon sometimes but wind up not too far from the canal later on. We step over a garter snake hard-packed back to two dimensions. She walks and I follow. She hangs a left down someone’s driveway so I think we’ve arrived, but she passes behind the house and out into another empty field. I tuck my neck into my clothes in case someone’s home. Trespassing in upstate New York where gun shops litter the back roads. I pick freeloading burrs from my jeans as if they are spies.

Ruth bobs her head in time to the music playing on her Walkman. I didn’t know they still made Walkmans. “No one’s got cassettes anymore, Ruth.” But cassettes are what she has, three or four homemade ones, flip and repeat, flip and repeat. We see a sign for a sauerkraut festival. We pass a man mowing a lawn that doesn’t need it.

“When are we going to get there?”

But Ruth doesn’t answer because Ruth doesn’t talk.

That afternoon, when we don’t arrive wherever we’re going, we check into an awful motel. I dial El on my cell. She’s called me five times already in two days. I haven’t answered yet. The insurance company has called only twice. But I’ve walked far enough now. I’ve had a good adventure, and it’s time to go home. When I’m back home, I’ll post something about the crazy walk I took with my strange aunt. That will be cool. I snap a selfie in the motel. Ruth is sitting on the curb outside, bobbing her head to the music on her earphones. I snap a picture of her too, but the sunlight reflecting off the window turns her into a blur of light.

The motel room stinks of mildew as if it’s under water. There’s something wrong with Ruth. Where are we going? Nothing. How long will it take us to get there? Not a word.

I lift my phone to my ear.

El answers, “Cora? Thank God. I was so worried.”

When I was little, El would hold me, curl my body over one breast, a crescent light around the moon. We’d shower together, and before diving under the spray, she’d yell, “Don’t let go!” I’d claw into her, pretending we were Annie Edson Taylor, who, at sixty-three, became the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel. El knows everything about Niagara Falls. She’s worked as a groundskeeper there since I was little, using skills she picked up at the terrible group home where she once lived. The man who ran the home taught them to farm and to fear anyone outside the home. He was deranged. He named the home Love of Christ! — exclamation mark included like screaming a curse every time you say it.

The short history of El is she lived with my grandma until a few months after Ruth was born, then five years at Love of Christ! then a short stint on the streets of Troy, where she picked me up.

“Who’s my dad?” I asked her once.

“Well.” She thought on it. “You know how girl dogs can accommodate more than one father per litter?”

“No. I didn’t know that.”

“It’s true. So you could get siblings who are, say, half collie, half chow.”

“I don’t have any siblings.”

“No. You don’t.”

“You don’t know who my dad is.”

“Not really.”

“Someone in Troy?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

El shakes her head. “I was eighteen and homeless. I slept around to find beds. Until no one wanted a pregnant girl in bed.”

“Then what?”

“Then you were born, and I went to the library, started with Albany, Allegany. I checked the phone books until I found my mom in Erie. I had nowhere else to go.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, I’m not.”

El saw a man attempt Niagara Falls in a kayak. She saw him coming from above, though no one else had yet noticed. She started up a whoop. “Look!” She whipped her arms over her head like a cowgirl, drawing attention to his ride. A few tourists saw it happen, and El was filled by the excitement, the slim chance she’d see such an attempt, but then the man went over the Falls, got pinned underwater, and died. El was pissed. “Goddamn waste.” She couldn’t forgive such carelessness when she’d worked so hard, waded through so much shit, just to stay alive.

“Cora?” El says again. She gave me such a nice name. But then Ruth turns, looking at me through the glass, frozen eyes.

“Hello?” El says. “Are you there?”

I am here, listening to my poor mother worry, twisting up inside because the last thing I want is to hurt El. But I’m also here still stuck with all the ways I’ve always wanted to be like Ruth — wise, cool, and tough. Even if I imagined her, even if I don’t really know Ruth, there are things I still want to be, want to see. There’s a courageous way of living I want my own baby to know about.

“Cora?”

So it comes down to this, stop asking questions and walk with Ruth, or stay home, be an ass for Lord, get rid of this thing, hold on to my insurance job for dear life, surf the awful Internet forever.

“Hello? Cora?”

“I’m fine, Mom. Please, don’t worry. I’m fine.” Then I hang up.

Early the next morning, I leave a message for my boss. “I’m sick,” I say. “Really, really sick.” Ruth and I start walking again, another day, me following her, Ruth saying nothing at all. On a road beside a cornfield, my mom calls again, the fourth time since I hung up last night. I hold my phone out for Ruth. “El. Again.” Ruth takes the phone, looking at the device sideways, a species of glowing insect she’s just now discovering. After a number of rings, the phone quiets. Ruth passes it back to me just as the voicemail signal vibrates, a hiss that startles her. Ruth drops the phone onto the pavement. It lands with a celebratory smack. That’s how that world slips away. We inspect the ruined phone. Its dark and cracked screen displays nothing except the tiniest bit of reflected blue sky. I pick up the carcass and shove it into my bag. We keep walking.

The first two days without a phone, my insides are jumpy and nauseated, a true withdrawal. My veins ache for information from the Internet, distractions from thought. I’m lonely. My neck, lungs, blood hurt like I’m getting a cold. The world happens without me because I’m exiled with no Wi-Fi. I wonder if my shoes have arrived yet. Maybe Lord is trying to reach me with news of his divorce. I have a parade of grotesque urges. I want to push little buttons quickly. I want information immediately. I want to post pictures of Ruth and me smiling into the sun. I want people to like me, like me, like me. I want to buy things without trying them on. I want to look at photos of drunk kids I knew back in high school. And I want it all in my hand. But my cyborg parts have been ripped out. What’s the temperature? I don’t know. What’s the capital of Hawaii? I don’t know anything. I don’t even know the automated systems in my body anymore. I don’t know how to be hungry, how to sleep, to breathe.

We keep walking. “Talk to me, Ruth.” I’m fraying.

Ruth says nothing.