A stranger.
THEO
By evening, the rainstorm has passed, and the moon makes long, angular shapes through the trees as I walk up the road to the guard hut.
Through the dusty window, I can see Parker seated inside: narrow shoulders and close-set eyes, like a young deer, watchful of anything twitching around him. He nods at me when I step through the doorway of the small hut, picking up his coffee mug—handmade by someone in the community with a handle like a tree trunk. On the desk, the pitcher of coffee looks like it’s still warm, steam rising from the top, and there’s enough left to get me through the night.
Parker sidles past me in the doorway, tossing whatever’s left in his mug out into the grass beside the road. His mom makes the coffee fresh every morning and afternoon, then brings it out to Parker, and he leaves whatever he doesn’t drink for me. It’s ashy, gritty stuff, but it’s drinkable. And most of the others in the community would trade just about anything for a cup of it. Tea leaves are grown in abundance, while the few coffee plants produce far less—so I drink it gratefully.
“Fucking exhausted,” Parker comments, scraping his hand through his dirty-blond hair.
“You see anything tonight?” I ask.
“Sure did.” He pivots to lean against the doorway while I take a seat in the only chair inside the guard hut, looking out through the smudged window at the road. “Three UFOs and a bigfoot. That sucker could run though, I chased him for ten miles before he dove into a river and sunk to the bottom. It might have been a girl bigfoot though, hard to tell in the dark.” He winks at me and smiles so wide I can see all of his mangled teeth. Parker can be a little shit sometimes, and he taps a finger against the revolver strapped at his waist. Tap tap tap. As if it gives him more authority than anyone else within the compound—more authority than me. And maybe it does. I don’t know why Levi allows Parker to keep it. He’s more likely to shoot himself than anything out on that road.
I pour myself a cup of coffee then lean back in the old, repurposed office chair, adjusting the lever to lower the seat down. Parker is tall and lanky, like most twenty-one-year-olds, but he’s still shorter than me and he can’t see out the window when the chair is too low.
The summer wind blows through the doorway and Parker straightens up, as if the breeze were ushering him home. His shift over. “See you in the morning,” he says with the sudden gravel of a man twice his age, the long hours wearing on him, aging him quicker than it should.
“Hey,” I say, before he steps out of sight. “How far have you ever been down the road?”
An itchy maw of silence congeals between us and I wonder if he’s heard me. His jaw sticks out and his dark, sleepy eyes flatten. “Outside of Pastoral?”
“Yeah,” I answer, trying to sound like I have nothing to hide. I sip my coffee then wince at the bitterness.
“Shit, man, I don’t know, not far.”
In all the years we’ve worked the guard hut—the passing conversation when I arrive in the evening for the night shift, and then again in the morning when he appears after sunup for the day shift—we’ve never discussed this. Both of us have spent hours staring out at that long dirt road, where it slopes up and down over low hills before vanishing into the trees. A road that leads out into a world where both of us were born. Parker lived in Sacramento with his single mom before they moved here when he was only three years old. We got lucky, he told me once. Somehow my mom found this place.
But I don’t remember anything beyond Pastoral—I was only an infant when I was dropped off at the guard hut: abandoned, cared for by several of the older women in Pastoral, raised by the community. But whoever left me here thought this place was better than out there.
“I chased my dog down the road once,” Parker says, his mouth finding a strange flatness, like he’s fighting a warning in his head, telling him not to talk about it. “He was a collie, I think. Black and white. A good dog, shit at hunting, but he was loyal. Until that day.” Parker’s eyes blink rapidly, as if the memory were passing through him by rote, fingers twitching against the handle of the gun. “I was probably only twelve or thirteen when it happened. He was chasing something down the road, a rabbit, I think. I followed him for a bit, a good mile maybe, hard to tell when you’re that age, but he was too fast. The road got pretty narrow, intersected with other roads, and I wasn’t sure which way he went.” He shakes his head, shaking away the memory, and draws his shoulders back. “Never saw that dog again.”