The Distance from Me to You (17 page)

Sam watched McKenna
feed a granola bar to the rangy hound dog. It wouldn't go away. The last thing Sam wanted was a companion from West Virginia. Not that the dog would let Sam touch him; that was a privilege reserved for McKenna, who'd already won their bet. Sam liked to stand back and watch the ritual she went through, scrunching down and coaxing the dog toward her. He would slither over on his belly, grab the food, and gulp it down. Then he'd lower his head, cowering, as if he thought this might be the time McKenna would haul off and beat him with a nearby stick.

The dog disappeared on a regular basis, and whenever he did, Sam hoped they'd seen the last of him. McKenna was always as happy to see him come back as Sam was to see him go. Today, Sam stayed put, letting the sad little lovefest take place. No doubt the dog had a good reason to distrust humans, probably he
had
been beaten with a stick and worse. And whoever had abused him in the past, you could bet it hadn't been a woman.

The dog lay down on the ground and showed his belly so
McKenna could scratch it. God knows what kind of fleas and ticks the animal had, but she went ahead, rubbing its stomach like someone had just given him to her for Christmas. She'd named him Hank after Henry David Thoreau, who until recently Sam only knew about from half listening in eleventh-grade English. By now McKenna'd made him read
Walden
, and while it wasn't the fastest-paced book in the world, Sam liked it, especially all the bits about not conforming to society.

McKenna walked to her pack and pulled out one of the cans of premium dog food she'd started buying and lugging around for when Hank showed up. Sam tried not to let her see it, how he wanted to shake his head. The way a rich girl wastes money, not to mention energy!

After she got her things together, they headed up the trail, the dog following at a barely detectable distance. McKenna was so set on covering miles, making good time. It was already October. They had less than four hundred miles to go the southern terminus in Georgia, and McKenna wanted to get through to Blood Mountain before it snowed. Whereas Sam: he was in no rush. What was he going to do once they got to the end of the AT?

After half a mile or so, Hank disappeared into the woods. These were the moments Sam liked best, just him and McKenna hiking together, no need for conversation. It was companionable, and so comfortable, like they'd spent their whole lives together and talking was unnecessary. The trail was too narrow at this point to walk side by side, so McKenna took the
lead. Sam watched her brown ponytail and her fancy pack, her good hiking boots. She sure didn't look like a girl who'd collect West Virginia strays like Sam and Hank.

• • •

That night in the Smoky Mountains, Sam helped McKenna set up the tent. For a while now they had been the only ones on the trail, during the week at least, nobody else camping, nothing but empty shelters. Even so, they usually would set up McKenna's tent, not wanting to risk a late arrival intruding on their privacy.

“Hey,” McKenna said, pouring dried beans and rice into her pot and adding filtered water. It was still light, but they had climbed up to a high enough elevation that the temperature was starting to drop. She'd pulled her wool cap over her unwashed hair and wore her fleece jacket. Sam had scored a black-and-red-checked wool coat from the free box in Shady Valley, but he still could've used a hat. McKenna kept offering to buy him one, along with boots and gloves. Every time they stopped, Sam made sure he got to the free box first so he could collect whatever dried food had been left there. Hikers were always getting rid of the food they'd grown sick of, and now that McKenna was too anxious to stop—they needed to make up time!—and fishing and foraging were dropping off with the temperatures, Sam had to scramble for ways to contribute. The thing was, it was different traveling on the trail with McKenna. No girls inviting him to meals. He'd never minded mooching in the past, but these days it felt wrong, not in tune
with how he felt about this relationship, the way he wanted it to be.

“Hey,” McKenna said again.

“Yeah?” Sam said.

“The weather's so good. Let's have a long day tomorrow. Maybe if we start early we can have our first twenty-five-mile day.”

“Not possible,” Sam said. “We'll be gaining elevation.”

McKenna frowned into the steam, stirring what didn't need to be stirred. He wondered if he could talk her into a fire tonight. Instead of asking, he stood up, started collecting wood.

“We had a fire last night,” she said.

Sam wondered if she would have ever made a fire if she hadn't run into him. “Look,” he said, pointing to the fire pit, someone else's scarred logs still in their tepee shape. “You don't have to be as careful this time of year. Fewer people come through.”

McKenna sat for a minute with a look on her face that Sam loved, like there were two different people having a conversation in her head, a very smart angel and a very smart devil. In this case the devil won. Lately, it usually did. By the time they were blowing on their first spoonfuls of crunchily undercooked rice and beans, the sky was dark and a fire licked up toward the gathering stars.

“You know,” Sam said, “we're making pretty good time. We don't always have to follow the trail.”

“What else is there to follow?”

“Our hearts?”

She laughed. “But seriously.”

“There are lots of cool detours that aren't in your guidebook. Especially in the Smokies. Cool graveyards. This is the most haunted stretch of the AT, but you have to be brave enough to venture out a little.”

McKenna was looking at the fire. He saw the devil and angel again, but only in profile. He put his arm around her.

“Have you heard the legend of Spearfinger?” he asked.

“I have a feeling I'm about to,” she said.

“Spearfinger is a witch who roams the trails through the Smokies. She looks like the most harmless little old lady you ever saw. She used to wear a kerchief and carry a picnic basket. These days she probably has a day pack and an outback hat.”

“Mm. So what does this elderly hiker do?”

“Well, she keeps a lookout for lost hikers. Especially lost children.”

“Sounds like a good reason not to go off the trail.”

“Well, what she does is, she finds the lost hiker, and she's got her picnic basket . . .”

“Or day pack.”

“. . . or day pack full of food. So of course one thing a lost hiker's going to be is hungry . . .”

“Any hiker is going to be hungry.”

McKenna had scraped her bowl clean of rice and beans. Sam knew that, like him, she was pretty sick of this reconstituted food. In the next couple days, they'd have to stop in a town
and replenish, maybe find some new brand or flavor, and have a real meal at a restaurant. They'd already made an agreement not to talk about the food they wanted when they were on the trail, it was too much like torture. Once they were headed toward a town—that's when the food fantasies could start. Usually McKenna talked about ice-cold Coke and salad.
Salad!

“Yeah,” he said. “Every hiker's hungry, so it makes her job pretty easy. What she does is, she feeds them so much amazing food that they get very tired, and then she takes them in her arms and sings to them . . .”

“She takes them in her
arms
?”

“Well, yeah, that's why it works better if they're little kids. Once they fall asleep, she turns into what she really is. A witch with a sharp stone finger. That she uses to cut out their liver. Which she eats.”

“Sam. That's such a cute story!”

“I thought you'd like it.”

“If she's got so much food in her picnic basket, why does she have to eat hikers' livers?”

Sam shrugged. “I guess that's her favorite.”

McKenna stood, gathering up their bowls. She was always busy, rinsing out her pot, hanging the food. Sam happened to know that even rangers didn't hang their food. McKenna pumped every drop of water, she packed out every crumb of garbage, and she never set a toe on a path that wasn't approved by her guidebook. There was nobody he'd ever met who kept so much to the letter of every trail rule.

“Sometimes I think you tell me these stories so I'll be scared to hike alone.”

Sam came up behind her to help hang the food a little higher. She leaned back into him, the wool of her cap tickling his chin. He tied the food and let go, wrapping his arms around her.

“You don't need to be scared to hike alone,” Sam said. “For one thing, you don't have to hike alone.”

“You're forgetting,” McKenna said. “I don't get scared.”

“Everybody gets scared sometimes, Mack.”

“Not me.”

Sam started to nod, but then let his head tilt from side to side in only partial agreement. He tried to picture her family telling stories about unscareable McKenna. They'd be passing platters of mashed potatoes and green beans, laughing like people out of a TV insurance commercial right before disaster strikes.

What was the story about Sam in his family? Probably Mike hadn't even picked up the phone to tell their dad he'd been there. It would never occur to his brother that his dad might be worried any more than it would have occurred to his dad to give a hoot.

“How do you know all these ghost stories, anyway?” McKenna asked.

“My mom used to tell us them when she took us camping.”

“Your mom took you camping?”

“Yeah.”

He didn't say that it was usually an excuse to get away from their dad when he was on a rampage, and that they never had money for a hotel. You'd think when they were on the run from their drunk dad their mom would have told soothing stories, comforting ones. But she knew somehow that he and Mike would want to hear the brutal ones, that it was better to hear there might be scarier monsters out there in the world than the one they lived with.

He couldn't see McKenna's face, but could sense in her pause that she was about to ask about his mom. Before she had a chance, he said, “There was this other story she used to tell. About a settler whose daughter got lost, and he got killed looking for her.”

“Oh great.”

“This one's nice. Because now he turns himself into a light, a little light that leads lost hikers to safety. We're also coming into the land of the Nunnehi. Do you know about the Nunnehi?”

“Not yet.”

“Very famous in Appalachia. Friendly spirit people, they were a huge help to the Cherokee. And they protected a North Carolina town during the Civil War.”

“Isn't that the wrong side?”

“Sure, but that's not the point. The point is they're helpful. If you get lost, the Nunnehi take you to these houses they've got built in the rocks. They nurse you back to health and then guide you home. But don't eat any of their food if you want to
go home. It'll make you immortal—but only if you stay with them. You'll never be able to eat human food again, so you'll starve to death once they send you home.”

“Tough trade-off.”

“So, see? It's perfectly safe to go off the trail!”

“Unless you happen to run into Spearfinger. Or in my case, Walden. Or unless you're hungry when the Nunnehi show up.”

“Well,” Sam said, “we're at an advantage because we know about them.”

McKenna wriggled her shoulders a little, like his arms were a straitjacket around her. But she didn't get out of his grasp, just turned so the front of her body pressed against his. Sam amended his thought from earlier in the day about the best part of their days being walking together quietly. The best part came at night, when it was just the two of them together like this.

“There's this waterfall,” Sam said. “In the woods around here, the Waterfall of the Immortals. It grants eternal youth and beauty. Let's go look for it.”

“You don't believe in that, a fountain of youth.”

“No. But I think a waterfall would be cool. And it would be fun to look for.”

“It's safer to stay on the trail,” McKenna said. “There's too much that could go wrong.”

“‘Do not go where the path may lead,'” Sam said, making his voice as somber and resonant as possible, “‘go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.'”

McKenna snapped her face up toward his. “That's Emerson,” she said, sounding surprised enough that if he wanted to, he could be insulted.

“No kidding?” He smiled.

“I just didn't expect you to be quoting Emerson.”

“Only people headed to college get to do that?”

Sam was joking, but McKenna sputtered just the same. He loosened his grip and put a finger against her lips. Even in the dim light, he could see the dirt caked under his fingernails. They were due for a stop, big-time.

“You wrote it in the margin of
Walden
,” he said.