On the Highway

She exited after driving almost two days straight. The empty frontage road led to a store with a sign so cracked and faded it rendered the place nameless. A small dog sat by the door, filthy with wiry blond fur. His tail started wagging before she turned off the ignition. He touched her hand with a quivering nose as she passed him.
Inside, even the candy bars lay under a patina of dust. She poured a cup of acrid coffee from a grimy carafe, found a road atlas behind the porn mags, and grabbed a postcard off the spin rack. On the postcard a startled roadrunner stood among the beige rubble of the high desert. She flipped it over and read, “The Greater Roadrunner, marquee bird of the American Southwest, is actually a ground-dwelling cuckoo.” Behind the counter, a thin black man with a deeply creased face stared placidly ahead as if at ease in a military inspection line. She put her things on the counter.
“Is there a post office around here?”
“No ma'am, but there is box just past the pumps,” he said. “Watch for cars though.” She looked out at the deserted feeder road, the highway hidden beyond a low grade sprayed with bright green paint.
“Okay.” She took a pen from the counter, flipped the card over and stared at the small blank space. What could she write that he couldn't turn to his advantage? Nothing. She was sure he hadn’t told anyone about the money. Not yet. That would be difficult to explain, even for him. She looked up at the clerk, still standing at ease.
“Can I just buy the pen?”
“Sure.” He rang up her little collection of items as she peeled a damp twenty off the roll in her pocket.
“Is that your dog out there?”
“No ma’am.” He put everything in a small paper bag. “I believe he’s a stray,” he said. The dog trembled, watching her through the glass. “Manager says he’s goin’ to shoot him if he don’t git.” The man returned to staring at something beyond the back wall.
“No way!”
“Yes ma’am, he did say that.”
“What if he went with me?"
“That’d be real nice.” He flicked his eyes back to her for just an instant.
“Okay.” She walked to the door.
“Have a nice day.” He called after her.
Outside she crouched down by the dog. He shook harder stretching up to smell her.
“You want to come with me?” She stood and walked to the car, he followed so close his fur scrubbed against her jeans. He jumped in and across to the passenger seat, settling himself in familiarly. She plunked into her seat and looked up to see the convenience store clerk standing just inside the doors. “Okay, then,” She said to the dog. She started the car and gave the man a short wave. He held his hand up to the glass as she backed away.
All day they drove, watching the land gradually change like an endless movie reel unspooling in slow motion. In California, the road cut through the Mojave casting aside mammoth slabs of desert rock, which lay in jumbled piles to either side. Then thousands and thousands of white windmills, some turning and some still, marched rank and file up the barren side of a mountain range as they ascended the twisting road into a low cloud, which kept the other side of the range a secret of cool fog until the land below the line of moisture revealed itself so verdantly green that the occasional farm buildings and the cows contentedly speckling the landscape seemed, illusory like the windward side’s dream of Eden.
They descended into California’s Great Valley and shot up Route Five, which bisected it. This is where the second act began to sag; a feedback loop of vast industrial farm tracts, lush yet purgatorial in its repetition.
At night there were a million more stars than she’d imagined, crowding together across the sky in rippling shoals that seemed to shift and move as she craned her neck to look at them through the windshield. The dog would do the same then look to her for an explanation, before returning to systematically shredding fast food wrappers.
She’d always wanted a dog and now she had one, as easy as that. She’d get him a collar, a bath – she began to think that a lot of things were a lot easier than she’d been led to believe. A set of distant antennas blinked a series of red lights out of synch as if keeping time to some strange, secret music. It was a long way to anywhere. She couldn’t see even the smallest halo of light on the horizon, no town, no gas station outpost with its white fluorescent light bouncing off the pumps.
Before the sun set she’d watched the deer grazing in the median and along the broad shoulders of the road but now, in the dark, they had disappeared, replaced by more frequently occurring carcasses. Each one told its gruesome story in the rapid, sliding glare of her headlights, hips corkscrewed, legs trailing back like thick, wet ropes of bound hair. Their eyes bulging or midsections split to reveal gelatinous mounds of intestines. Occasionally there was just a car-sized patch of blood where road crews or scavengers had removed the corpse.
The dog whined, appealing to her, shifting in his seat.
“All right, you.” She said pulling off the road. She reached over and opened his door. He loped across the gully to squat. She got out and leaned against the warm hood. She would have to name him at some point.
The dog moved into the slanting light of her headlights, looked at her, then veered away, trotting up the road. “Hey!” she called, “Come back here.” She shut her door and started walking after him. It would help if he had a name, she thought. The soft crunch of his paws on the loose ground receded into the darkness as she followed him. The light from the headlights became murky, long arched shadows reached forward from each piece of gravel. “Okay, we’ll figure out a name for you.” She called, trying to make a joke as the legions of tiny shadows at her feet faded into the more complete darkness. She could hear him a little further along, making a different sound now, like felt tearing. At least he’d stopped. “Time to get back on the road, buddy.” She took a couple more uncertain steps. “Where the hell are you?” The sound was louder now. slightly wet. With her next step she kicked something soft and rounded. “There you are you little shit.”
She reached down and felt cool fur of a different type, smooth with a dry residue, like someone had dusted it with talcum powder. The form jerked. She jumped back and screamed. Crouching, she looked into the darkness. As her eyes adjusted she could just make out three shapes. The dog, his back arching, tugged at the innards of a dear that had been entirely split in half by the force of some terrible impact. “Oh, Jesus!” She stood up and turned on her heel. “Disgusting.” She called back at the dog.
She got in the car and rolled back onto the highway. As she passed him, she saw the dog look up then back to the carcass for a second, calculating, before setting off for the car. Bright red in the rearview mirror, he was running for all he was worth. She slowed and popped the passenger door open; he skidded to a stop in the passenger seat. Panting, he tried to nuzzle her, flecks of black blood clinging to the hair around his nose. “No! Bad dog!” She swung her arm around behind him to close the door. He sat looking forward with enlightened interest, licking his chops over and over. He smelled of the fresh night air, blood, meat, and something to do with digestion that had been halted.

By Rebecca Schwarz