Ben Ririe is an English Major at BYU-Idaho. Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, he first took an interest in writing fiction at the age of eleven after reading several books by R.L. Stein. He now writes fiction, poetry, and music for the enjoyment of it. He writes with such influences as Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, and Robert Frost.
Highway Migrants
A dry wind brought the scent of fire from out of the west as if it were coming from the sun. It sat behind a veil of smoke, burnt and low over the plain, and Charlie held it there in his gaze without squinting.
The boy walked alongside an old black lab at the rear of a highway caravan going north along I-15 away from Blackfoot. He kicked at pieces of gravel and talked to the dog, said things to it about the hardness of the asphalt and how it must hurt walking all day without shoes, while the dog just looked ahead and let droop its tongue as it sauntered with him down the middle of the road.
“You’re gettin tired,” Charlie said. “You’ve been walkin all day.”
They lagged some twenty yards behind the group in the knee-high shadow of a volcanic shelf running alongside the interstate. A dead tangle of weeds blew in front of them and wheeled over into the shoulder of the road.
“But you can lie down when we make camp for the night. I’ll get a big old bowl of the soup for you, and you can have that.”
From up ahead, Charlie’s mother called his name. He ran up into the group, leaving the dog behind where it plodded at a slowing pace. The sun fell lower and the dog trailed further behind. When Charlie looked back, it walked a long stone’s throw from the group. He turned to his dad who pushed a dolly with stacked and bungeed cardboard boxes. “Dad.” He pulled on his dad’s flannel shirtsleeve.
“Yes.”
“Ringo’s still back there.”
The dad didn’t turn to look. “He’ll catch up.”
“He’s way back there though. Look. We have to slow down for him. He can’t keep up.”
“He’ll catch up.”
“You sure?”
The dad looked ahead smiling. “Yeah. Don’t worry about him. He’s a dog. He’s tough. Always been tough.”
A while later the sun settled under the horizon and left the sky overhead blue and fading and turning almost all dark opposite in the east. Charlie looked back, and the old lab was gone somewhere to the divots in the highway or maybe behind the stretch of road going all the way past the last point where it dipped down and out of sight.
He yanked on his dad’s shirtsleeve again, trying to pull it away from the dolly. “Dad, look. He’s gone.” His voiced cracked.
The dad turned his head to the boy and then over his shoulder for a second and then back to the boy. “He’s okay.”
“No, he’s not. He’s gone. What are we gonna do?”
“Oh, he’ll find us when we make camp.”
“He’s lost, and he won’t find us. We have to go back and get him.”
“He’s okay. But if you want, you can go out there and find him. Bring him back.”
Charlie looked back down the highway. It ran a straight course down the plain and out of sight, and nothing moved out there except tall grass in the wind. The pavement grayed to a black against the darkening cyanic blue of the horizon, hardly visible.
“I can’t,” he said. He started to cry.
Charlie walked along blubbering behind his dad and whimpering with no words. He quieted to a sniffle after a while, and the group made a late camp off the side of the interstate. They built the fire and boiled pots of mixed soups and ate at the edge of the firelight, the night now a deep-oil black with only the stars. No shades of blue at the west edge of the sky.
While the men and women sat on mesh chairs and stumps and talked in low voices, Charlie stood at the edge of the camp and looked up toward the highway. He glanced back to see if anyone might notice him, and then he made through the sagebrush. Coming up onto the road, he looked south. Charlie saw nothing down the highway the direction they came from save the dark column of the asphalt going away and out of the fire’s light a little ways ahead. A black dog in that black night was impossible to see. He stepped forward as if to venture blind into the void, but he stopped. His own feet disappeared beneath him in the dark, and he grew hot and wet about the eyes. The night just outside the fire might have stretched out forever in all directions, and all of it was unseeable, and all of it was unknowable too, and perhaps nothing could abide it alone whether it be man or woman or boy or girl or dog.
Charlie ran down off the shoulder of the road and back to the campfire. He slowed to a stagger and stopped to bury his face in his dad’s chest. “We have to go back and find Ringo.”
“Son, we’re not gonna get him back.”
“He’s out there.” He pulled on both his dad’s sleeves. “Who’s gonna help him if we don’t?”
The dad ran his fingers through the boy’s hair. “No one. If he hasn’t found us by morning, we’ll just have to move on.”
“But what if he’s still looking for us?”
“Maybe he will be.”
“Then we can’t leave. We have to stay.”
“We can’t stay.”
“Why not?”
“Son, Ringo’s old. He isn’t gonna live much longer anyways even if we do find him. But he’s been a good dog.”
Charlie started to whimper again.
“A lot of people have lost their dogs before. It’s part of life. And these days a lot of people are losing a lot more than their dogs. They’re losing their parents or their best friends. And they just have to move on same as us.”
Charlie didn’t cry less. He only pulled harder on his dad’s sleeves and cried himself all the way out until the fire was low to a glowing red patch, no flames escaping over the cinders.