They are gone for maybe fifteen minutes. Kimble comes back holding a tape. ‘Let’s go.’
‘We’ll find a motel,’ Marc says.
Kimble shakes her head. ‘I’m not staying in this town.’
‘Van? Campground?’
She nods and strides ahead out of the store. ‘We’ll pick up food,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘To soak up the bourbon you’ve got on board.’
‘What did you say to her?’ Marc asks. ‘How did you get her to let us have that?’ The road snakes ahead in the low light. Kimble hasn’t said a word since she got behind the wheel.
Kimble bites her thumb. ‘She gave me a note to give to her son.’
‘Ok.’
‘He ran away four months ago. She thinks they took him, or he joined them – the Nowhere children. I told her we were making a documentary about them, that we were going up there.’ Kimble shrugs. ‘So I said I would give the note to him, if we found him.’ Kimble’s hands tighten on the wheel. Her face is calm, you wouldn’t know she was upset unless you were paying very close attention, or knew her really well. Marc can see the simmering in her, the anger in her skin.
‘And?’ he asks, neutral.
‘I’m not going to do it.’
‘Why not?’
‘She told me how to identify him,’ Kimble says. ‘It was by his scars. None on his face, his stepdaddy was careful.’ Kimble takes the note out of her pocket. ‘He had a head injury as a child so he’s slow, she said. The kid was always making trouble so his stepfather had to keep him in line. It got out of hand, sometimes, the discipline.’ Kimble crumples the note in her fist. ‘She defended him, the stepfather.’ She rolls her window down and lets the crumpled paper fly out. ‘I’m not doing anything for that woman.’
They pass the rest of the trip in silence. It’s a relief to go up towards the peaks where things are less complicated. They drive up and up.They don’t see another car on the mountain. Once a herd of deer, glimpsed to the left, melts out of view, startled into forest shadow. This road, like every road around here, feels like you’re the first to travel it. Kimble and Marc drive until they find a turnout overlooking a green valley meadow. There’s a dented sign with a scratched campsite logo leaning hard to the left. They pull over and sit on rocks to eat the burgers. It’s difficult to shake off the day – Annie, the cashier from Mountain Foods and Goods, all the rest of it. The grass waves like silk below.
‘Merde,’ Marc says, absent.
Kimble nods, grim.
Marc screws up his burger wrapper. ‘Mountains give me the creeps.’
Kimble breathes deeply. ‘I’ll ask again. You ok to go on with this?’
Marc realises that the cigarette in his hand has broken in two. Flakes of tobacco fall through his fingers in a gentle shower. He watches with intense regret. It’s the last in the pack. He wishes his eyes could set the tobacco alight, turn it to smoke as it drifts. He’d lean in, suck the smoke right out of the air. A dragon taking back its own breath.
‘It’s a filthy habit,’ Kimble says.
‘I know,’ he says.
‘We’re just a couple of ridges over.’ Kimble points at the rise beyond the meadow, which is dark with pine and spruce. ‘It’s somewhere over there. Nowhere.’
‘You can’t know that,’ he says, exasperated. ‘It all looks the same. Forest, forest, mountain, mountain.’
‘Don’t be so French.’
‘I’m Canadian,’ he says, mindless.
‘Then this should feel like home.’
‘It gets to me. The Nowhere children, all that urban legend.’
‘Urban legends tell us who we are, and what we fear.’
Marc kicks a rock like it’s the rock’s fault.
‘I was busy while you were drinking,’ Kimble says. ‘Tomorrow I’ll show you.’ She picks up the burger wrapper Marc has dropped. She looks out over the hills, in the direction of Nowhere. ‘It seems to happen less often than it did. But it’s always the same. They’re taken, and they are bled.’
