Little Miss Strange

by Joanna Rose

  “He didn’t have a mom,” I said. “His mom died when he was thirteen. Indianola, Iowa. It’s all farms and fields.”

  “Jimmy Henry was a farmer?” Elle said.

  “That’s where they’re are from,” I said. “Constanzia said ‘my people.’ Well, she said ‘your papa’s people.’ You know, like she says stuff.”

  “Jimmy Henry lived on a farm?” Elle said.

  “No,” I said. “His dad was an insurance guy. They don’t live there anymore. But that’s where they’re all buried.”

  “All in the same place?” Elle said. “In like a big cemetery? Like with a big gravestone? Cool.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Rookery Bend Cemetery. It’s a place on Earth they all go back to. That’s like he said it, like that.”

  “Your mother’s family too?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. He said like his grandma and his Aunt Betsy.”

  “Why don’t you ask him,” Elle said. “Say, ‘Where is my mother’s side of the family?’ Just say it like that.”

  I said, “I don’t think he knows.”

  “You’re just afraid to ask him,” she said. “I don’t see why you’re afraid to ask him.”

  “He doesn’t like it when I ask him stuff,” I said.

  “So what?” she said.

  I said, “So I don’t want him to go back in his room all the time, that’s so what.”

  My apple had a brown spot. I couldn’t decide whether to eat around the brown spot or throw the apple across the alley.

  I said, “What will you give me if I get this apple in that Dumpster from here?”

  Elle looked at the Dumpster.

  “Quarter,” she said.

  The apple splattered onto the brick wall above the open top of the dumpster.

  “Part of it probably went in,” I said.

  “Doesn’t count,” Elle said.

  “It should be worth at least a dime,” I said.

  “Doesn’t count,” she said.

  COOKING SMELL filled up the stairway.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Lady Jane was in the kitchen. Her hair was all under a paisley scarf that tied around to the back of her neck.

  “Hey, yourself,” she said.

  I said, “What are you cooking?”

  “Oatmeal cookies,” she said.

  “Oatmeal cookies?” I said. “Without raisins, I hope.”

  Lady Jane looked up from the mess she was stirring in a bowl.

  She said, “You don’t like raisins?”

  “Yuk,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “The next batch can be without raisins. Do you like walnuts?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t care about walnuts.”

  Jimmy Henry’s bedroom door was open, and the curtains in there were pulled back, the sun coming in. The bed blankets were laid out neat, and Lady Jane’s sweater hung from the doorknob. I took the sweater and laid it on the arm of the couch and shut the bedroom door.

  Lady Jane hollered from the kitchen.

  “Why don’t you put on another album?” she said.

  It was quiet, except for her banging around in there, yelling like I was all the way outside instead of right in the front room.

  I said, “Where’s Jimmy Henry?”

  “Well,” Lady Jane said. “I’m not sure. I think he went to see about a job. Maybe.”

  I said, “When will those cookies be ready?”

  “Twelve minutes,” she said, looking at the wrapper from the bag of walnuts.

  The newspaper was folded up on the chair by the door. There was a stack of books on the applebox table. The top book said Steppenwolf. Inside the front cover it said “Tina Blue.”

  “Hey,” I said. “This book is from the box.”

  Lady Jane came to the doorway

  “I know,” she said, wiping her hands on a towel. “We were looking for an address.”

  “Who?” I said. “You and Jimmy Henry?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “There wasn’t any.”

  “Was Tina Blue your friend?” I said.

  Lady Jane sat down on the arm of the couch, on her sweater.

  “She wasn’t anybody’s friend really,” she said. “Just Jimmy Henry’s. She stayed by herself mostly. She used to take off for a while, just disappear, but she always came back after a while. A couple months. It just got longer and longer. She used to write every once in a while.”

  She slid down onto the couch, looking at nothing.

  “That last time, she was going to stay, I know she was,” she said. “She’d been gone, God, a year, maybe longer. She fixed that place all up downstairs.”

  She leaned her head back, her eyes all spaced out. Blue eyes, same blue like the paisley scarf.

  “She was beautiful when she had it together,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said. “Cookies.”

  Lady Jane said, “Shit,” and jumped up off the couch.

  The cookies were black around the edges.

  “This oven cooks pretty hot,” she said. “The next batch will be done pretty quick.”

  “I’ll be out front,” I said.

  The burnt cookies smell came all the way out to the front porch. I picked at the peeling paint on the porch railing. It was gray under the red. Back when it was someone else’s house, it was gray.

  A black pickup truck with rusty red doors drove up and stopped at the curb, squeaking. Jimmy Henry got out of the driver side and slammed the door. He slammed it again.

  “Hey,” I said. “Where’d you get the truck?”

  “Far out, huh?” he said, coming around the front end, up onto the sidewalk. He looked at the truck.

  “Is it yours?” I said.

  “Yep,” he said. “Four hundred bucks.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Why did you get a truck?”

  “Work,” Jimmy Henry said.

  “Work?” I said. “You got a job?”

  “Kind of,” he said.

  “Kind of a job?” I said. “What kind of a job? Driving this truck?”

  “Kind of,” he said. “Doing some work for some guys, working on some houses out in Aurora.”

  Lady Jane came out onto the front porch. Her hair was brushed down out of the paisley scarf and she had a white smear of flour on her face, and all over the front of her shirt.

  “A truck,” I said, and I opened the door at the curb to look in.

  She said, “Did you get the job?”

  “Yep,” Jimmy Henry said.

  She came down the sidewalk.

  “Did they give you a truck?” she said, looking in the door at the curb, looking at the dusty brown seat of the truck.

  “Nope,” he said, “Bought it.”

  She said, “Far out.”

  I said, “Can we go for a ride?”

  Lady Jane said, “I have cookies in the oven.”

  Jimmy Henry said, “You’re making cookies?”

  “No raisins,” I said.

  Jimmy Henry said, “Oh, well, that’s a relief.”

  He kissed Lady Jane on her cheek, and got white flour on his nose. Lady Jane wiped the end of his nose with her finger, and then she kissed him on his mouth.

  “Watch out,” I said, and they had to get out of the way so I could slam the door, hard.

  Lady Jane said, “I better check those cookies.”

  She ran into the house, and Jimmy Henry watched her. I looked over the side, into the back of the truck, leaves and dirt blown into the corners.

  “Can I ride back here?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jimmy Henry said, not looking. “Guess so.”

  “When?” I said. “Now?”

  “Well,” he said. “It’s not quite legal yet. Tomorrow I’ll get plates. What kind of cookies are they, besides not raisin?”

  “Oatmeal,” I said.

  I NAMED the truck Blackbird, and the next Saturday Jimmy Henry and I went for a ride.

  He said, “I have to take some cans of
paint out to these guys.”

  He had a key on a twisted piece of wire, and he stuck it in and stomped on the pedals on the floor. Blackbird started up loud and filled with gas smell. We jerked forward, jerked again, and then we were driving on Ogden Street, making a lot of noise, Jimmy Henry stomping at the pedals and jerking on the handles and steering.

  After a while he drove better, not so bumpy. We drove on Ogden Street to Colfax Street, and then we drove on Colfax Street with cars and buses and other trucks. Colfax Street went on until the stores and restaurants and little places were bigger places in the middle of parking lots. Colfax Street got wide and four lanes all the way across. Jimmy Henry steered with one hand on the steering wheel and his other arm stretched across the back of the seat, stretched across as far as me. He grabbed my hair and tugged. He did that a couple times, just driving Blackbird along Colfax Street out to Aurora.

  Aurora was away from the Rocky Mountains, out where there was nothing past it, out where Colfax Street turned into being a highway. We turned off the highway, and Jimmy Henry shifted and stomped and slowed down to stopping to wait for our turn to get on another road. Quiet caught up to us. The dried yellow weeds clumped around the Stop sign and lacy black dead flowers blew from the wind.

  “Dead flowers,” I said.

  Jimmy Henry leaned over and looked out my window.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Nice.”

  “No sidewalks,” I said.

  Jimmy Henry looked out my window again.

  “Yeah,” he said. “No sidewalks.”

  A sign said CHAPARRAL PRAIRIE ESTATES and we turned into an empty street there. It was a perfectly empty street. A brand new empty street that went straight out into a field of dirt, and made a corner there, and went on for a way through the dirt in another direction. Along one side of the street there were some neat stacks of wood lined up by square cement holes.

  I said, “What’s Chaparral?”

  Jimmy Henry said, “I think it’s some kind of weed that grows up in the mountains.”

  I said, “Are they going to fill this street up with houses?”

  Jimmy Henry said, “I think that’s the plan.”

  “Then what about the rest of this field?” I said.

  “Probably,” Jimmy Henry said. “Sooner or later.”

  He drove along the empty street partway down and then stopped. Blackbird jumped when we stopped.

  “Wait here,” he said, and he got out and slammed the door.

  He took two big cans out of the back of the truck and carried them over to a stack of wood and some stuff piled up there. Two guys were sitting by the stack of wood. They were smoking cigarettes and one guy had a can of pop. Jimmy Henry set down the cans of paint and took out his cigarettes.

  I laid down across the front seat and put my feet out the window, black hightops and blue sky with no clouds. There was the smell of gas and cigarettes and the dusty seat. Up in the sky, between my hightops, a bird floated in a wide circle.

  I sat up and Jimmy Henry was still talking to the guys. He handed his cigarette to one of the guys, who smoked it and gave it to the other guy.

  Out where the new empty street ended the brown field took off and went as far as the brown cloud that faded up into the sky, a brown cloud that went along the ground way out. Way out on the horizon. There was a single bird sound from far away.

  Jimmy Henry came back across the dirt and got in.

  I said, “There’s a brown cloud on the horizon.”

  He said, “Huh?”

  “Horizon,” I said. “Brown cloud.”

  He looked out the window.

  “Haze,” he said. “It’s dusty out here.”

  “Why are they going to build houses here?” I said. “There’s nothing here.”

  “I guess that’s why,” Jimmy Henry said,

  I said, “What’s why?”

  “I guess they’re going to put stuff here,” he said. “To go with the houses.”

  “Like stores and stuff?” I said.

  He started up Blackbird’s engine and we sat there bumping.

  “Are those guys your friends?” I said.

  “Just some guys,” he said.

  “Well,” I said. “What are they going to paint?”

  He said, “Huh?”

  “There’s nothing out here to paint,” I said.

  “Numbers,” Jimmy Henry said. “On the curbs. Every hole gets a number.”

  I said, “Every hole gets a number?”

  Jimmy Henry shrugged his shoulders.

  We went back on the same highway, back toward where Denver was the tall buildings poking up out of the dark cloud.

  “No mountains,” I said.

  “Haze,” Jimmy Henry said.

  I said, “Is it still a horizon if it’s mountains?”

  Jimmy Henry looked at me and he said, “I guess.”

  I said, “Let’s just keep on driving and drive up there.”

  “Next weekend maybe,” he said.

  “Just us?” I said. “Or us and Lady Jane?”

  “Maybe Lady Jane, too,” he said.

  “She probably has to work,” I said.

  LADY JANE didn’t have to work. We all three got in Blackbird on Saturday morning.

  I said, “I get to sit by the window.”

  Lady Jane sat in the middle, between me and Jimmy Henry, and the smell of her, her herbal musk oil from the little brown bottle, mixed in with the gas, the dust, the cigarette smell.

  The mountains were flat against the sky. Jimmy Henry drove up the road that curved into the brown hills, toward blue pine trees filling up the hillsides farther up. We drove slow, my ears popped, and the blue-gray mountaintops appeared and disappeared between the brown hills. Blackbird went slower and slower up the road, until Jimmy Henry turned into a gravel wide spot and stopped, and I got out.

  The air was cold and the wind came from far away in the sky. The jagged blue mountaintops were still high and flat against the sky. From the fence at the edge of the gravel the hillside went down steep in a spilled mess of broken rock. Lady Jane came crunching across the gravel and leaned on the fence next to me, and she looked down at Denver, way down below. Denver spread away from downtown, out into the flat haze horizon.

  I said, “It looks like a scab.”

  “It is a scab,” she said. “A festering wound.”

  “Festering?” I said.

  “Nasty,” Lady Jane said. “Cities. Wouldn’t you love to live up here?”

  The hillside across the road was more steep fallen rock. “There’s nothing here,” I said.

  Lady Jane said, “It’s so quiet.”

  “It’s quiet ’cause there’s nothing here to make any noise,” I said.

  She said, “I’d love to live out of the city. Maybe someday soon.”

  “Where?” I said. “Like here?”

  “Some little town,” she said, staring out, all spacey eyed. “In the mountains, or by the ocean. I’d have a dog and a fireplace.”

  “A dog?” I said. “What kind of dog?”

  “An Irish setter,” she said. “I’d name him Boo.”

  I said, “Boo?”

  “Boo,” she said. “Corn muffin?”

  I said, “What?”

  “Do you want a corn muffin?” she said. “I made some corn muffins.”

  We went back to Blackbird, and Lady Jane and Jimmy Henry sat inside and ate corn muffins, her scooted all the way over next to him, and I ate my crumbly pieces of corn muffin sitting on the side of the back, my legs hanging over.

  Nothing but rocks.

  When it was time to go, Jimmy Henry said we had to go back down.

  “This old thing had to crawl to get this far,” he said.

  I stayed in the back riding back down the road. I tucked down in out of the wind, under the window. The wind blew at me anyway, blew dirt up into my face from the back of the truck, and in my mouth. Behind us, and above us, the mountains slid by in the sky.

&nbs
p; THE OTHER sixth-grade girls sat at the other end of the bleachers. They practiced singing songs and putting on makeup.

  “Weird,” Elle said. “Singing songs.”

  “Why?” I said. “They know all the words.”

  “Those girls are weird,” Elle said.

  Mr. Rivera played basketball during lunch. He rolled up his cuffs of his shirt and he put on white sneakers and a whistle. Sometimes his shirt came untucked out of his pants, and sometimes he undid his tie at the top and dark curly hair showed. He waved his arms for signals, and his shirt was wet from sweat under his arms.

  Back in class, Mr. Rivera would be changed back into his brown shoes and his tie back the right way, and his hair damp and curly around his face. He had a sweaty smell that mixed in with soap smell from his white shirt.

  After school we went to my house first, to see if Blackbird was there, to sit in the back, parked at the curb. We sat up on the side of the back, hanging our feet over the edge, or we sat down in the back and had cigarettes, until it was too cold to stay outside.

  We were sitting in the back when Lady Jane came walking on the sidewalk in her clogs, and we got down to where she couldn’t see us. She went up to the front door and let herself in with her own key.

  “Looks like dinner tonight,” Elle said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She didn’t have a grocery sack.”

  Elle said, “Maybe she’s just going to go get in bed with Jimmy Henry for a while.”

  I said, “Is that all you ever think about?”

  “No,” Elle said. “Do you ever hear them?”

  “No,” I said. “Shut up.”

  Elle scrunched over next to me, and the wind got at us, cold wind, cold metal smell.

  “Snow,” I said.

  “What do you want to do?” Elle said.

  “Homework,” I said. “I have homework.”

  She said, “Come over my house to do your homework.”

  I said, “I’m not doing your book report for Banks of Plum Creek.”

  “Why not?” Elle said. “You read it already.”

  “I’ll tell you what it was about,” I said. “But I’m not writing your whole book report.”

  “Just write what it was about then,” she said.

  I said, “They got completely buried in the snow, even their house.”

  “Good,” Elle said. “Write that.”

  “You write that,” I said. “Didn’t you read it at all?”