Exotic Animal Farm

I am walking through the dusty gravel dirt road, the large chunks of sand edging their way in between my heels and the soles in my Birkenstock shoes. My son trudges next to me, his unruly brown hair waving across his face when the occasional breeze pummels through, the faint smell of anomia from unwashed shorts that he wore the night before wafting up to my nose. We are engaged in a strange anomaly – a mother-son weekend at an exotic animal resort in rural Kansas.

The sun crawls lower in the sky, the bright bulb of a summer solstice sunset whose light gradually dims below the horizon. With each step, more dirt and grime kick up behind us. Grasshoppers chirp with a crescendo-ing hum.

In the midst of the grasshopper chorus, a faint engine roar in the distance seems out of place. So out of place, in fact, that I first mistake the rev of a car engine for an enthusiastic grasshopper song. The car engine sounds grows louder, the noise of the engine drowning out the grasshoppers. Suddenly, I feel the dust clouds behind me grow larger than my son and I ever kicked up with our shoes.

I turn and look behind me, and, in the midst of the isolated dirt roads, a blue mid-1990s American sedan car is approaching behind us. My son and I stop, to let the car move past us. But instead of moving over to the left-hand side of the road and passing by with a small wave, the driver stops the car right in front of where we stand.

“Hey,” the male driver says, and I notice that the passenger-side window of the sedan is already rolled down all the way to the bottom. “Do you know how to get to Hutchinson?” The driver’s beard is scraggly, his teeth crooked, and half of a cigarette rests in his lips.

This is a perfectly acceptable question, but somehow, viscerally, every hair on my arm stands on end. 

“I don’t know how to get to Hutchinson,” I sputter to the driver of the blue Sudan who has appeared out of thin air on this back-country road. I wrap my hand around my son’s forearm, my nails digging in hard enough to leave thin red lines.

“Hey,” the male driver responds, inching his right shoulder toward the open passenger window.

I hear my heartbeat in my chest accelerate, its beats pumping out in rapid succession: ONETWOTHREEFOURFIVE. My armpits feel wet, my purple t-shirt starting to drip with sweat.

“Let’s go, Daniel!” I yelp out at my son, careful to avoid eye contact with the driver, making a concerted effort to stare straight ahead at the dusty gravel road in front of me instead of at the driver’s scraggly eyes and beard.

I start to walk so quickly and with such force that my son is forced to run with his small body to keep stride with my legs. My fingers remained clasped around my son’s forearm, dragging him along with me, desperate to make it back to the exotic animal resort instead of stuck here on this abandoned dirt road, the twilight hour growing dimmer by the moment, with no witnesses surrounding my son or me other than this blue Sudan driver who seemingly summoned himself to this deserted spot.

“Mom!” Daniel protests as I walk with one long stride for every two that he trots with his short legs. “Mom! Slow down. You are walking too fast!!”

I pause, listening closely. I hear a faint rumble of a car engine in the distance, but it appears to be growing fainter with time, rather than moving closer to us. The grasshopper chorus in the adjacent field grows louder once again.

“Daniel,” I say, my voice shaking despite my concerted effort to project a sense of calm confidence. “Sorry, buddy. We just really need to get back to the animal hotel.”

“But Mom,” my son crinkles up his forehead. “Why do we need to walk so fast to the animal hotel?”

The lights of the exotic animal resort twinkle in the distance. Keep moving. We need to just keep moving, and soon we will be safely within the grounds of the property, surrounded by tame giraffes and zebras and ostriches that will provide a cocoon of protection around us.

What can I say to my son? That the driver of the blue Sudan creeped me out? That something felt very, very off about the way he had appeared out of nowhere on this deserted gravel road and had seemingly followed us along our evening walk? That I seriously doubted that the driver did not know how to get Hutchinson?

But I say none of that. Instead, as the rod-iron gates of our resort appear in closer sight, I press my son’s body tightly next to my own. “Sorry, buddy,” I try to explain. “Sometimes we just really need to get back home.”