Retreat

“Colorado’s supposed to be very bad,” Mom said as the empty desert closed in around us and the last signs of Albuquerque shrank in the back window.

“Okay. Let’s not go then,” I said supportively.

“We can’t get to Wyoming without going through Colorado. I mean, I guess we could go through Kansas, but we’d have to go like 1,000 miles out of our way,” she counted. 

Good thing Mom always had a backup plan. I’d never been to Kansas, but from the way she said it, I could tell it wasn’t the sort of place where a girl, a dog, a Witch, and a moving house would get into trouble. “We went like a zillion miles out of our way to go to Oregon,” I reminded her. “Is a zillion more or less than a thousand?” 

“A zillion isn’t a real number,” Mom said territorially. “And we went to Oregon for something. It’s different. Now we’re running away. We should try to get across quickly so we have contact with as few people as possible. Especially if Colorado is as bad as people say.” 

“Bad how? Who says?” 

“I don’t know. The guy in front of me in line at Whole Foods was one of those annoying jerks who talks on the phone in public. He kept saying that his sister lived in Colorado, and all the ski towns were very bad. Whatever that means.” 

As much as it sounded like Mom was starting another round of the worry game, this one checked out. I’d heard about the Colorado curse, too, way back at the gas-station-general-store in Nowhere, Utah. Even the Witch agreed. She’d been taunting Mom with mapps showing a stain over Colorado that spread darker and wider by the day as the boogyvirus sank in and set. If the gas station scuttlebutt was true, Colorado was one of the most dangerous places to breathe in the whole, wide west. 

“How long is the drive to Cheyenne, Wyoming?” Mom asked the Witch.

“Traffic to Cheyenne is light so I’m estimating eight hours and seven minutes.” 

“Gosh darn it all to heck,” Mom threw the Witch in her lap in disgust. “I knew I shouldn’t have slept in. Now we won’t clear Colorado till after dark.”

“What if you just hold your breath all night?” I suggested. 

Mom stole another look at the Witch and sighed. “I don’t think we have a choice. Let’s at least get past Denver. Nothing good can happen that close to the third-biggest airport in the country.” She held up the Witch so I could see the darker shades of grey on the mapp. “Look at all this green north of Denver.”

Green was one of those words that I couldn’t quite understand. It meant go when she was looking at the road, but it meant a good place to stop when she was looking at a mapp. One of Mom’s best sleep-hunting strategies was to look for where the mapp background behind the highway turned from city-white to grey of wilder-ness. Rules about where you can and can’t sleep are born in cities and leak into the wilder-ness on roads, as most civilized things do. The bigger the road, the bigger the leak, and the bigger the leak, the more Law-mobiles floating around. The darker the background, the weaker the rules, so Mom looked for the darkest parts of the mapp and zoomed in on the gaps in between words. When she found a road so small that it was invisible without a magnifying glass, she asked the Witch to take us there. When the Witch told us we were getting close, Mom would move her search from the screen to the window, looking for dirt roads between the trees where our sleeping won’t disturb anyone.

“Is green the light grey or the dark grey?” I asked. 

“The whole top ⅓ of the state is green,” Mom said, like it was obvious. “There are bound to be a million forest roads. How about we pick an out-of-the-way trail and sleep at the trailhead so we can go for a short run before we leave in the morning? As long as we take the bypass around Denver, we won’t have to worry about running into too many people.”

With few other cars around, Mom spent more time looking at the Witch than the road, like a TV driver who knows there’s no accident in the script. “Loveland, Colorado… That sounds like a one-horse town, doesn’t it?”

“Definitely.” I hoped that the horse was still taking visitors. “That’s the kind of name you give your town when all the official-sounding names are taken.” 

“Or when the mayor lets his 6-year-old daughter name the place,” she said with a nod. Mom was too serious for people who like greynbows and unicorns, even if those people were still puppies. “It’s far enough from Denver and Boulder that we probably won’t have to worry about city germs and town ordinances, at least.” 

“You should hold your breath all night, just in case the air is poisonous,” I coached. “At least you won’t snore.” 

“I don’t snore, you snore,” Mom lied. 

Mom’s sleep-spotting technique was pretty good in California, where she knew all the cities to look out for, but cities had a tendency to sneak up on us when we were far from home. Cities big enough for airports are like giant whirlpools that suck all the roads through them and splatter rules far and wide. By the time we realized that Loveland was another one of the Witch’s nasty pranks, we were already in Denver’s current. 

“Keep the windows closed!” I panted as the glass-and-steel canyons sucked the Wagon through a forest of billboards. 

“I told you, it doesn’t work that way.” Mom turned down the blowers anyway. “We’re literally the only ones out on the road. I’ve never seen a major city deserted in the middle of the afternoon before.” Her voice came out thin and shaky. It was hard to tell if she was scared, or if it just sounded that way because she was taking breaths so tiny that her chest didn’t move.

She kept rebreathing until the buildings flattened and spread apart.

“Phew!” I left the copilot’s seat and flopped into bed for the first time since Colorado Springs. Copiloting is hard work. “How long can I nap before Loveland?”

“Sucks to be you. You’re almost there already,” the Witch cackled.

“Oh no! It’s a tourist town!” Mom wailed. 

“Oh no! It’s a bluburb!” I joined in. 

“We’re gonna dieeeeeee!” we howled together.

The town was too big for campgrounds and too greedy for public lands. We would need to find a place to hide out where we wouldn’t be busted as referees. 

Who me, officer? I practiced. I’ve never met that mailman van in my life. I’m a Coloradog; have been since puppyhood. How dare some mailman cross the borders of our great state with their nasty California germs. 

“I guess we’re gonna have to stay in a hotel,” Mom said, “… if they’re open.” 

“A hotel is the first place they’ll look for us,” I panicked.

“Nobody’s looking for us.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“No, not really. But I think they just want us to stay put.”

“I thought they wanted us to go away. How are we supposed to go away if they’re commanding us to stay?” 

“I have no idea.” I expected Mom to ask the Witch for advice like she usually does when she doesn’t know where to go, but instead she said, “Let’s just see what happens.” 

The first hotel had no cars in its kennel, so the Wagon kept driving until it found one that was less deserted. This place looked more like a car pound than a car kennel. The Wagon’s scarred paint and butt full of stuff blended right in with the mismatched doors, trash-bag windows, and constipated back seats of the other stray cars.

Mom put on the leash and followed me into the lobby. Mom usually does the talking in situations like this, since I’m the one that people think might be dangerous. But now that Mom was a leaky bag of germs liable to kill anyone who came too close, I thought I should take the lead. 

“One room, please!” I announced with a hearty awoo. 

“He’s a support animal,” Mom introduced me with a bottom-toothed smile. Support was the password she used when she didn’t know if she was allowed inside on-leash. “I hope that’s okay. You’re the only hotel in town that’s open.” 

The man behind the counter took a cookie from the jar on his desk to thank me for my service. Lots of people hear service when Mom says support, but I never correct a man with cookies. 

“We’re considered residential because we do long-term stays,” he bragged, puffing out his chest like he’d won a prestigious award. “They’re saying we qualify as an essential business.” 

“All businesses are essential,” I told him. “Isn’t that right, Mom?”

Mom didn’t give him the ecomomics lecture she’d given me last night. “They’re actually enforcing that essential business thing?” she asked instead. “How does that work?”

“Oh yes. We got papers from City Hall and everything.” The man stood tall like he was proud to live in a town with civilized rules, and prouder that he was an exception to them. “I keep them in my car just in case I get stopped on the way to work.” 

“There are papers that protect you from the Law?” I asked. “We don’t have papers in our Wagon. Maybe an important man like you can grant us safe passage to Wyoming. Please? ” 

It worked! The man handed Mom some papers and a card. I was about to ask if they really were what I thought they were, when Mom pulled the card out of its holster and wiped it against a box next to the door. “Access granted,” the box honked. 

I smiled at our neighbors to distract them as I smuggled Mom down the hall. “I love your face tattoo… Great shirt! Did it come like that or did the sleeves rip off when you flexed? …Whatcha drinking there? Is that mouthwash or nail polish remover?” Each time I got close enough for pats, Mom pulled me away, pointing her closed smile but not her eyes at the neighbor. 

“The people here seem so fun,” I said as Mom used the Card to the City to unlock the door to our hideaway. Inside, the smells of old smoke, bad choices, and sleep farts clogged the stuffy air. 

“At least it has a shower.” Without a moment to lose, Mom peeled off her crusty clothes and added another layer to the dirt in the tub. 

After dinner, I stretched out in the middle of the bed. Mom nuzzled into the sliver of mattress I wasn’t using to coochy-coo with the Witch. We lay there, peacefully listening to the muffled voice of the neighbor’s TV telling the familiar ghost story of how the whole world was doomed. I was just starting to dream when the Witch woke me with the loudest fart I’d ever heard. 

BRRRRRT! Brrrrrrt-BRRRRRRRRT! The ringing stayed in my ears after the blast faded.

“What the goose was that about?” I asked. 

Mom gave the Witch the look you give someone who doesn’t excuse their farts. “It’s a public safety announcement reminding us to stay home. It says that the shelter in place order starts tomorrow.” 

“Good thing we’re not in the Stuck House. Everyone in My Hometown is gonna be so jealous that we’re in Colorado while they’re trapped at home.” 

“The announcement isn’t for California, it’s for Loveland. They must do it by GPS location.”

“The Witch tattled on us? What a rat!” 

Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.

Want to read more?

Subscribe to dogblog.wf to keep reading this exclusive post.

Subscribe Now