“Come on,” I said, smiling at his morbid humor. “Don’t be such a wuss.” All morning long he’d been giving out these one liners that had me laughing. He was good company. “There’s an exit ramp just up there. We can stay under the overpass.” I checked Buster and he seemed happy, his chin hanging over the edge of the trailer and his ears flicking forward and back from time to time as he caught sounds coming from birds or the wind in power lines or palms. We had rigged a tarp to give him shelter from the sun. Peter had been afraid Buster would get a sunburn - I was just worried about him having a sun stroke. I refused to let Peter put any of our sunscreen on the dog, though. We had to conserve it for ourselves. Buster was just going to have to deal.
We got off the highway that seemed to stretch out forever in front of us and turned around to go under the overpass. The temperature was markedly cooler there in the shade, and the steep, ramped edges gave me a sense of security. If someone wanted to come get us, it was going to be an uphill battle - literally.
We perched the bikes up there on their sides along with the trailer. I wedged the bike pedal making contact with the ramped surface into a small hole, keeping the trailer from being able to drag the bike down to the bottom.
“Now what?” asked Peter.
“Now we cover ourselves. Or our bikes anyway.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, sitting down and taking a swig from his water bottle. We had three that were full of drinkable water. The other one we planned to use for cooking only.
“Just watch and learn.” I went into one of the backpacks and pulled the large tarp from inside. One side of the tarp was a dull gray and the other various shades of green. I opened it up and put it on top of our bikes and most of the trailer, green side down. I pointed to the corner nearest Peter. “Put your foot on that side.”
He did as instructed.
I walked down the ramp with Buster following me. He looked so funny walking down at such a steep incline, I felt sorry for him, so I picked him up to carry him the rest of the way down. He had looked like he was afraid he was going to tumble ass over teakettle as my grandma used to say, but it hadn’t stopped him from going with me anyway. He was nothing if not loyal.
Once we got to the bottom, I put him back on his feet and went in search of some rocks. I found four pretty decent sized ones and returned to Peter, leaning into the slope to make my climb with the extra weight easier. Buster was much happier going uphill than he had been going down.
I stretched the tarp back out and placed rocks down on the corners to hold it in place.
“Voilà,” I said when I finished. “Done. Now no one will see us hanging out up here.”
Peter looked down at his red t-shirt. “Uhhhh, yeah.”
“Oh, right. Hold on a sec.” I lifted up the tarp to reach into the backpack one more time. I had seen this t-shirt on the floor in the army-navy store, so I had shoved it in the bag for later. I pulled it out and threw it to him. “Put this one on. Take the other one off. We’ll use it for … bullfighting or something later.”
Peter slowly opened up the camouflage shirt, his eyes taking in the printed slogan on the front of it.
“No way. I am not wearing this.”
I frowned at him. “Listen, life isn’t a fashion show anymore. You can’t afford to be picky. Just put it on. You’re going to call attention to us with that friggin siren of a shirt on.”
“But come on, Bryn. This shirt?” He looked at me, a pained expression on his face.
I shrugged. “It was the only one left. And it’s your size. Just put it on backwards if you can’t handle the words.”
I turned so he could have a little privacy. When I looked back a few seconds later he was pulling it over his head. He had the skinniest chest I’d ever seen. It prompted me to go over to the bags and try to find some food for him. I pulled out one of the damaged meals and walked over, handing it to him. “Eat this. You’re so skinny it gives me a headache.”
He took the food without saying anything, handing me the red shirt in exchange. I quickly folded it up and shoved it into one of the bags. It reminded me that we’d have to find a way to wash our clothes when we got to our destination. If anyone got downwind of either of us they’d smell us coming from a mile away.
I took out a can of beans and popped the top open, tipping the can to my mouth to let a few beans fall in. After I’d had three mouths-full, I handed it over to Peter. “You finish these. I’ve had enough.”
“You have to keep your strength up, Bryn. You can’t give me all the food.”
“I don’t plan to. But that was good enough for me. I think we’re going to go past some orange groves on our way. Maybe we’ll be able to find some trees with fruit on them tonight.” I seemed to remember smelling orange blossoms on our way down, when I went to the Everglades with my dad.
“I think orange season is over.”
I shrugged. “I don’t mind eating overripe fruit.”
Peter didn’t argue. He ate everything I gave him and then drank half his water. “I’m going to take a nap,” he said.
“Good. Me too.” I motioned for Buster to come sit next to me. He climbed up in my lap instead. “Hey, dog. How am I supposed to sleep if you’re in my lap?”
He jumped up a few inches to lick my chin.
“Come here, you goofy mess,” I said, resting on my side and putting him on the ground near my stomach. I brought my knees up to shelter him a little. “No more licking. Just go to sleep.”
Peter and I were back to back now, each of us facing out to one side of the overpass. From my vantage point, all I could see was scrubland and some short trees off in the distance.
“You got your gun?” I asked Peter.
“Yep.”
“Shoot anyone who looks dangerous.”
“Okay,” he said, yawning.
“Buster, you make sure no one gets near us, okay?” I said in a low tone.
Buster took that as in invitation to get up and dance, so I pushed my hand down on his back. “No, sit, you dummy. Stop dancing around.”
“Would you two be quiet? People are trying to sleep over here.”
I bumped Peter’s butt with mine. “Shush. You’re going to blow our cover.”
That was the last thing I remember saying before drifting off into an uncomfortable sleep, tiny pieces of gravel digging into the skin of my arm.
A loud clap of thunder woke me from the bad dream I was having of the canner who’d grabbed me, chasing us down on a motorcycle. The thunder had taken on the ominous tones of war drums, beating as he got closer and closer. I woke startled, sitting up so fast I almost slid down the ramp.
I looked at our bikes and noticed that the tarp had come up on one side. Peter was still asleep and I decided to leave him that way as long as possible. The kid was obviously exhausted.
As the first drops of rain fell, inspiration struck. I quickly got under the tarp and took out the square of plastic and small bucket my dad had bought for me before he left. Buster followed me over to the edge of the overpass, where I proceeded to try and rig up a water catcher.
I gave up after a few minutes and just sat there in the rain, holding the plastic up and slightly folded, on a diagonal, so the water hitting it would drain into the bucket I was holding steady with the insides of my feet. The shower was over in less than an hour, but it had come down hard enough to give me enough water to fill all three bottles with some left over. I poured the extra into the bowl with the straw on it for Buster, who eagerly drank it all up.
I sat there thinking about our next move as Peter slept on, waiting for the humid air to dry me off. It wasn’t working so well. By the time he got up an hour later, I’d mapped out the next couple days of riding but was still pretty damp.
“Hey,” he said, sitting up and stretching. He looked around and then over at me. “What the heck happened to you?”
“I got us some more water.”
“Did you get it from a drainage ditch?”
“Ha, ha, very funny. It rained. I filled up our water bottles. Here.” I handed him a full one.
“Awesome. Thanks.”
I watched him drink half of it in seconds and made a mental note to be sure to get more in the bucket next time. I was feeling better and better about going towards the Everglades. We’d never run out of water or food there. The key would be figuring out how to catch the food. I wasn’t even sure if the fish we’d get there were edible. I wished we had a book about the animals in the swamps - other than just the one we had on snakes.
“So what’s the plan?” asked Peter, his thirst now satisfied. He handed me his bottle and I put it back in the trailer.
“Well, if we move from four in the morning until nine, we’ll be able to get about fifty miles a day. And we’re about two hundred and fifty miles from where I think we need to be.”
“So about five days of traveling, you think?”
“Something like that. I don’t remember much about the area; I’ve only been there once. I figure we’ll get down there and stop when we find a place that looks good. Maybe once we get closer we can go into a tourist shop with some books that have info or a map of the whole place.”
“The Everglades are pretty big,” said Peter, sounding skeptical.
“I know. But we need to find a specific spot. One that’s hard to reach and has trees to hide a shelter in.”
“How are we going to get into it if it’s hard to reach?”
“Boat?” I suggested.
“I can see you’ve put a lot of time into this plan,” he said sarcastically.
“Yeah, well, how much time have you put into it, smartass?”
“None.” He held up his hand for a high-five. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I appreciate you doing all this for us.”
I begrudgingly slapped his hand back. “The plan is flexible. We’ll just figure it out as we go along. It’s better that way, anyway - if one of us gets caught, we won’t be able to divulge any secrets.”
“Since we don’t have any.”
“Exactly.” I smiled at my unintentional genius.
“Let’s just pray we don’t get taken captive, because the only reason someone would do that would be to … well, you know.”
“Invite you to dinner,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to tell me about your sister now?” I tried not to cringe at the fact that I’d just brought up his sister while we were on the topic of being eaten for dinner, but it was impossible. Sometimes my mouth got away from me before I could stop it. “Sorry. That wasn’t cool.”
Peter didn’t seem to mind. His eyes got a far off look to them as he stared off into the distance. “She was twelve. Really small for her age, though. She looked about ten or so. We used to fight all the time. She was always getting into my stuff and I hated it.”
I had no experience with siblings invading my territory, but I could see how it might be irritating.
“We were in Sanford, in our house. We had to bury both of our parents in the back yard. They died on the same day.”
“That’s awful,” I said, meaning it. I had only lost one parent and that was bad enough.
“My sister and I had a hard time moving them out into the yard. We couldn’t stop crying, because we kept worrying that we were hurting them. Isn’t that stupid? I mean, they were already dead. We checked their pulses like a hundred times to be sure.”
I shook my head but said nothing. Even when bodies were dead, if they belonged to people you loved in life, they seemed sacred. I was once again reminded of how grateful I was to my father for doing his dying elsewhere.
Buster went over and sat in Peter’s lap. Tears were going down his cheeks and Buster kept trying to jump up and lick them. Peter kept him contained by playing with and petting his ears absently as he continued his story.