Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

“That’s how Zeke lost his nose.”

“A comet hit his nose?”

“No. He was snorting the toilet bowl cleaner.”

Just as Nat, the box, Ruth, and Mr. Bell are lined up on the diving board, ducks in a row, things that hadn’t made sense before fall into order: a box of money, a comet, and a cult. Linked points on a map.

“We need to leave. Soon as this storm stops, we’re out of here.” Mr. Bell bangs his hands together.

“How? We’re stuck,” Ruth says.

“Why did you bring us here?” Nat asks.

“You don’t want the money? It was here. I had to come get it before he destroys the place.”

Nat and Ruth look back to the box.

“Calm down.” Mr. Bell smiles. “There’s no reason to panic. If we can’t get out of here, no one can get in. Soon as the snow stops, we’ll leave. We’ll dig out tomorrow and be on our way. It’s going to be fine.”

They have no other choice, so they believe him.

Mr. Bell and Ruth make lunch. He chops. She opens cans. He puts his hand on Ruth’s waist, sliding past her at the sink. They work together in the kitchen, rubbed smooth by friction. They make buttered rye toast, sardines, garbanzo beans, and beets. The three of them eat frozen blueberries with condensed milk in front of the living room fireplace.

Mr. Bell returns to the kitchen to clean up.

Ruth flicks a bit of hangnail off her tongue. “Remember the night the Mother came to a séance?”

“Yeah.”

“I told her I was making it up, and she said that my being a liar didn’t stop ghosts from talking. She said there were things in the world, not of the world.”

“She’s a drug addict.”

“I’m just saying, unexplainable things happen even when you don’t believe in them.”

“Like what?”

“Eyeballs.”

“I believe in eyeballs.”

“But if you’d never seen them before, you’d think they were supernatural.”

“How could I see them if I didn’t have eyeballs?”

“Nat.” She means, Fuck you. “What about tides? Goats? Yogurt?” She twists toward him.

“That’s science.”

“Snowflakes? Lungs? Premonitions?”

Nat nods. “I believe in snowflakes and lungs.”

“But how do they happen? What makes ice form crystals?”

“I don’t know. Go to college. Become a scientist. Use some of the money for that.”

“What about people who know when they’re being stared at? Things you can’t explain. Phantom limbs. Pigeons finding their way home. What about a freaking box of money appearing in the bottom of the pool?” She slaps the side of the cardboard.

“Mr. Bell put it there.”

“Why would he give us a half-million dollars? That’s nuts.”

“Maybe he owes us something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I can observe, an essential skill of scientists and con men alike.”

“And you don’t believe what you can’t observe?”

“Hell nope.” Nat’s lips slice into an ungenerous line. “Humans are so good at imagining things, they invent gods who feel so real, they then betray us by not existing.”

“God saved you when your own mom wouldn’t.”

“If the Father is the best God can do, that’s not good enough.”

“So you don’t believe anything you can’t see?”

Nat thinks a moment. “Remember Miss Karen?”

“Barely.” Miss Karen had been Nat’s caseworker for seven years. She’d gone to grad school. She brought Nat to a tree museum once.

“Miss Karen took a vacation to Arizona, and when I saw her again at my next appointment, I told her the Father had been withholding dinner for three days because someone stuffed a sweatshirt down the toilet. Remember?”

“Ceph.”

“Miss Karen said, ‘When I was in the desert, a golden column of light appeared in front of me.’ A UFO. She said, ‘Don’t worry about Arthur. The aliens are here, and they’re going to take care of us.’” Nat squints. “Miss Karen wouldn’t tell a lie, but I don’t believe in UFOs.”

“But you believe her so—”

“I did. I still do, but I can’t get past thinking that if the aliens are here, how come they never rescued us, Ruth? Never. No aliens. And no God. And we could have used both.”

Ruth sets her chin. “Forget God. Or don’t call it that. I’m talking about mystery, unsolvable mystery. Maybe it’s as simple as love. I say it exists, and here’s how we’re going to settle it. Ready?”

“Sure.”

“OK. Whoever dies first, come back and tell the other.”

“What if it doesn’t work that way?”

“You’re smart. Figure something out. Leave me a note. Dump a box of cereal on the floor. I’ll know it’s you.”

“Or you’ll convince yourself that the wind blowing through the house is me.” Nat picks at his socks. “Don’t do it, Ruth. You set yourself up for disappointment when you dabble with the supernatural. My mom used to sing, ‘Fall on your knees, hear the angel voices,’ and it was easy to believe that the universe made sense when my mom was kind and good, but then she left. So if you want to convince me that there’s something bigger going on here, some sort of grand plan or map or order in the universe, you’re going to have to first explain why God makes bad moms.”

Ruth shrugs. “I don’t know why.”

“Well, I do and it’s because he doesn’t exist.”

ONE HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT BUILDING,one gas station, one general store. The cashier is happy to see a pregnant woman, so is the man behind the deli counter. Ruth has a gallon of milk and some cereal in her basket. These are not our usual road supplies. These supplies suggest a place with bowls, spoons, refrigerators. “We’re almost there?” I ask. Ruth smiles. She places the basket on the counter, adds two chocolate bars to the order.

“Today?”

Ruth says nothing.

“Yeah, today.”

“Good luck,” the cashier tells me.

“Good luck,” says the woman pruning the shrubs outside.

“Thank you.”

Ruth carries everything now, the groceries, her bag, my bag. I carry the baby. The end is coming, and having it in sight makes the walking a little easier. At every curve in the road, I expect something hidden to be revealed. Specifically, what the end looks like. Is the end good or bad? Then we gain the curve, and there’s nothing around the bend except more road, some trees, and a farther curve up ahead I can’t see past. We keep walking. Ruth seems even quieter than before, quieter than she’s been since the car broke down back in another solar system. I can almost remember what color that car was.

We have a definitive number of steps remaining, a countable number, and then I don’t know what. A bed or a couch. A bathtub. A baby. The end. Or else a new start. A house near the Falls for Ruth and El and me and the baby. That’d be nice, to live with them, to be near the Falls. It’s important to live near water. I won’t go back to what I was before I started walking. I don’t want a lot of rubbish to smother things as quiet as Ruth, intelligent as this child, kind and complicated as El.

We head into another curve. Ruth twists the plastic grocery bag in her hand. The trees make a full canopy of shade with no power lines to cut them back. “Can we take a rest?” We sit on a rock covered with moss and British soldier lichen, little redcoats. Ruth is anxious to finish, but I’m a bit wary of the end as it’s unknown. She stands, dusts her butt, reaches out a hand to help me up.

Each step we take chokes the width of the road, the possibility of retreat. This is not a road many people take, and to evidence this, around the next bend we’re greeted with a sickening sight: a wooden trestle, rickety and ancient. It looks no sturdier than some jungle rope bridge. The river it crosses is so many hundreds of feet down that the boulders of the channel seem small and shadowy from here.