Highway Walking by Lindsey Tauber

“El es Alejandro,” they told her the night she arrived. “El es un ‘house-boy.’” He stood, shoulders slumped, in a dark corner of the kitchen. There was something strange about his left eye; it lolled to the side in a way it shouldn’t have, making his expression look strangely vacant, but Caroline tried to smile anyway. He looked only a few years younger than she, about 16 or 17.

Later, alone in her room, she thought about the quiet desperation of this morning’s early ride to the airport. Was this still the same day? She blinked rapidly in an attempt to hold back the tears, but they came anyway.

* * *

She decided to walk home alone because she knew she should not. Just one walk, from school to her homestay, a short 20-minute pass along the highway, then up over the raised bridge and she would be at the walled gates to Las Pinas. It was cold for a Mexican night, the air chilly and clear so that she could see her breath come out in white puffs as she walked. There were few cars. The buses had stopped running. The only noise came from the occasional pack of dogs that rushed along the side of the highway.

She knew she wasn’t supposed to touch the dogs but they were all over, and they looked so hungry and sad. Some were big and fluffy, some were small and streamlined. They sat in doorways, on steps, on the sidewalk, in the street. At night they ran in packs, both in the more rural, deserted Chulula, and also through the busy streets of Puebla. She had never seen them before on the highway.

This pack was quite large, at least twelve, maybe even fifteen. They were all sizes, all colors. Their hair was matted and tangled from the dust that always hung in the air. When they ran together it was less like a group of animals and more like one large, composite animal; a 12-headed, 48-legged, tangled, furry mass. Their legs even seemed to move at the same time, as if they were all controlled by the same brain.

When Caroline first saw them she tried not to be afraid. So many things ran through her head: they’re just dogs, like the pets you have at home; don’t be afraid; they can smell fear. She remembered a horror story she had heard, meant to scare exchange students from petting the strays, about an American girl who had been mauled by an angry pack a block away from the house where she was staying. Her face had been nearly destroyed, and they had had to send her back to the States for surgery. But these dogs were on the opposite side of the highway, so she didn’t have to worry.

It was dark, with no street lights. A slim moon was out but seemed to hold its brightness in. The occasional light came from a gas station that was not open but kept the emergency light on inside anyway, a reddish haze thrown over the sidewalk out front. Far past the end of the highway that stretched out in front of her, the city cast its light up so that the sky and even the air seemed to take on a greenish tint. Every so often a car would speed by, its headlights bright and disorienting. The walk seemed so much longer in the dark.

* * *

In the nights she sat up late in her small dark room with low slanted ceilings, the beams exposed. She sat at the desk in the corner, her chair angled toward the window. The loneliness seemed to hang there, just beyond the panels of glass, where the streetlights stood. Down the red-tiled roof to the street made of stones.

She began to be afraid that she would never get out. Time happened wrong there, it didn’t work how it was supposed to. It was too slow and languid, and sometimes stopped working altogether. Like a crazy clock, it could go back or jump ahead, only to jump back again even farther just when it finally seemed to be getting somewhere. She reminded herself that it had been her choice to come, but in a lot of ways that only made it worse.

* * *

Caroline stiffened when she saw that the pack was running as though to cross the highway. Why would they do that? They would smell her fear—not only of them, but of everything here: the city, the darkness, the men. She stopped walking so that when they crossed, in a diagonal like a drunk trying to walk a straight line, they ended up nearly half a block in front of her. It was unnerving, all those legs, all those furry heads. They were strangely silent as they ran. What should she do? There were no cabs out, no busses running. She would have to keep walking. She began forward cautiously, then more quickly when they didn’t look back or seem to notice her at all. They trotted along, the many-headed beast, half a block in front of her as though they did not know she was there.

A few moments later they crossed again, unexpectedly, in the same drunken diagonal as before. Their legs kicked up dust so that it clouded up around them, enveloping them in the small particles of dirt. This they did, again and again, running back and forth across the highway, kicking up clouds of dust as they went. Where were they trying to go? What was the point of crossing back and forth so many times? More certain now that they would not bother her, Caroline continued her walk, quietly observing them as they ran, transcribing their zigzag across the highway.

* * *

She had daymeres and night dreams that she could no longer distinguish, of sucking down tequila and smoking endless cigarettes, in bars and in clubs and at school and on the street. She dreamed of carrying half a joint around in her wallet, of smoking it out the window into the empty street where she could not go. She dreamed of being pushed up against a wall in her house with her hands trapped above her head, of a boy with empty eyes.

* * *

It happened so quickly that she barely realized it was happening at all. One moment the pack was crossing and the road was empty. The next moment a car had sped past, engine humming loudly and bright headlights glaring. The loud “thud” and the impact of the body had not caused the driver to stop.

One dog lay in the center of the road. It lay on its side, delicate underbelly exposed as animals in the wild are not supposed to do. The rest kept running, kicking up their dust, shifting in their positioning ever-so-slightly so that you could not tell where the fallen dog had been.

Caroline stood still and looked out at the dog in the road. It was still, lifeless. She had seen things dead before, of course. She had seen as much death and gore on TV as any American child had. But she had never seen something die, had never been present for the ending of a life—the instant in which the heart stops, the breathe stops, and everything changes. It looked like so many other dogs she had seen, asleep on their sides; save for the rise and fall of breathe, that was distinctly absent.

The pack had kept running, she thought hazily. They had not stopped. And the driver had not stopped. Nothing had stopped, except for her.

* * *

She dreamed of his face moving toward her in the haze, of being cornered in hallway outside her bedroom—of his eyes, always so disconcerting. Did she deserve it? The whole trip culminated, encapsulated, obliterated, in that one moment: she deserves it.

The wood floors got so cold at night. The moon shone through the stained glass in the entryway. A flash of a second in which she knew that a part of her would never escape, never leave this place. She wanted to run away through the window, down the red clay tiled roof, but was not so drunk and stoned that she didn’t know there was no where else in the world for her to go. So she lay down on the bed instead, and she wishes she could say the rest is history, but history seems like something that is finished and she doesn’t know if this will ever be.

* * *

Caroline kept walking until she reached the raised bridge. She climbed the stairs, stopping to rest at the top, leaning against the chain link that went nearly eight feet up, to prevent pedestrians from falling—or jumping?—to the highway below. She could see the mountain in the background, looming over everything as it always did; she could see the dog. It did not get up and run away as she had hoped it would. It was not in shock; it was dead. The rest of the pack was gone, they had run too far down for her to see or had dispersed somewhere into the tall dry grass that grew along the periphery.

So this was it, then, she thought as she stood and looked over everything: at the highway, and the mountain, and the moon and the grasses and the gas station and Mexico and the dead dog. This was her one defiance, standing here on this bridge in the middle of the night, looking out over all this. She was not supposed to walk home alone because she was a girl; nor was she supposed to take a cab alone at night, or the bus, or go to a club or bar. She was not supposed to do anything alone because she was a girl, and it was not safe for her to be out alone. Caroline smirked; perhaps someday the whole thing would be amusingly ironic, rather than so pathetically sad.

But tonight she would not think of all that. Tonight she had earned this one moment, even if all that meant was a dead dog.