N.J. Webster
On our hike to say goodbye, we find a tortilla chip truck at the bottom of the canyon. I say it has to be an ad. An elaborate, inappropriate ad, placed there by the off-brand chip company to whet the appetites of the amateur outdoorsmen who make it to these trails just outside the city. Jonathon says we need to take a look—he hopes it still has chips.
It is a ten-year-old’s thought and a ten-year-old’s hope. I should find it endearing. But as we trudge down the bouldered ravine, slipping on a molting fur of brown and yellow leaves, probably about to break our necks, I have an urge to yank him back toward the trail and tell him to grow up.
As the older sister bound for college far, far away, I control myself. I try another tack. “There’s no way that thing still has chips.”
“It could.”
“I mean, even if it does, they can’t be good anymore, look at that—”
“Huh?”
“I said, even—” I slip on a wet vomit of forest debris and catch myself on the serrated edge of an overturned pine.
“How do you think it got here?” Jonathan asks, out of breath.
“They drove it.”
“On the trail?” He’s not being sarcastic, believe me, I look for the signs. He sincerely wonders if my answer makes sense. It doesn’t. They couldn’t have driven it. There are no roads for miles, and the trail is barely big enough for three—me, my brother, and my dad—walking it shoulder to shoulder years ago on a different hike to say goodbye.
“I guess they airlifted it in,” I said.
“But why?”
“Like I said, for a commercial.”
“And then they just left it?”
“Sure. It was probably cheaper than getting the helicopter back up here.”
Jonathon considers this, wipes a sweaty, dirt-streaked arm across his nose and sniffs hard. “Litterbugs.”
I laugh at the joke and look at Jonathon and see he isn’t joking.
We finally stumble into the bottom of the creek bed. The busted truck, with its faded, peeling image of a pretty lady enjoying a two-foot-long tortilla chip, straddles the stream. From under it eeks the black trickle, a slow and soiled bleeding—a sign of rot and death.
Far off, probably somewhere on the trail, there is a sound like chanting, or hollering. Undulating childlike screams. I can’t find the source. I look back at the steep incline and uneven ground; I shouldn’t have let Jonathan drag us down here. I get the feeling that we’ll never leave. That we’ll never make it out of the valley. When I turn around, Jonathon is at the truck.
He studies it, hands on his hips, tilting his head to get a look at the tire, giving the saggy bumper a good kick. His shoes are coated in mud; stinking leaves and grime cling to his jeans up to his knees. I will clean them, when we get home, to reduce the friction. But really, I should have him do it—I’m not going to be there to do it anymore.
“Take my picture,” Jonathan says. He hops on the step outside the driver’s door and hangs on the mirror. It’s big, square, and opaque with dirt and time. He mugs a crazed smile as I snap a photo on my phone.
“Now,” he says, jumping down and rubbing his hands together like a greedy cartoon character, “let’s see what’s in this baby.” His S’s still possess infantile lisps, despite speech therapy three times a week, more sessions than even the doctors think is necessary.
“I told you nothing is in there.”
“It could be filled with chips.”
“The truck’s been here forever, it looks like shit. It’s not filled with anything. You really want to eat chips out of this thing?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
I spend a second being annoyed and picking dirt from underneath my thumbnail. Jonathon just waits, patient. When I finally trudge through the mud to the back of the truck, he follows gleefully.
I get to the big swinging back door, rusted like out of a horror movie, and I imagine emerging from its interior a masked and bloodied murderer. The eroded handle gives a gritty half-click and does not budge. Maybe it is locked. Maybe it is sealed with age. I look at Jonathon; he looks back expectantly.
I tug and pull, my face screws up, and Jonathon’s stupid expectation only grows. The anticipation is feeding his suppressed grin and tapping feet and anxiously clasped hands and I don’t want to let him down, I don’t want to see him hurt, but at the same time, as I strain red-faced and powerless, I just want to shout that he’s hoping too much, that his happiness can’t depend on me, that he just needs to keep his head down and get the fuck out of that house the moment he can, just like I’m doing—just like Dad did—and in that exact moment something gives and the door lurches and the webbing of my right thumb is nipped in the handle’s joint.
“Wow,” Jonathon says.
I too am staring in the truck. My hand, my wound, is in my mouth. The blood trickles warm and tepid, a dirty rivulet at the bottom of a canyon.
N.J. Webster is a father, lawyer, and writer with fiction published in The Offing, New World Writing Quarterly, and other publications. If you’re a nerd, his published tabletop roleplaying games can be found here: https://thistle-games.itch.io. Please bother him on Twitter at @realnjwebster.