Hick

by Andrea Portes

  “All right, now, you hand that to me and reach up over here and grab the wheel.”

  I do what she says, leaning awkward over the seat. She unclasps the gold and pulls out a tiny oriental vial with a dragon on it, squiggling up the side. She presses it to her nose and sniffs up hard, tilting her head back. Her face freezes for a second, like the world is on hold. I am watching her with every bone in my body, trying not to drive us into the ditch. I feel like I’m with a movie star.

  And then I remember something, something about the sniffing back hard and the back-of-the-knuckles wiping off the nose. I know it. I know it cause my dad got fired from the Kuhnel farm down on Highway 34 and there was five days of sniffing back and knuckle cleaning and white powder and never sleeping and some guy named Randy that I’d never seen before and never saw since.

  There it was, for all the world to see, cut out in lines on the kitchen table and a dollar bill rolled up and razor scraping, always scraping, for just a little bit left. And there was my dad and Randy, the new-best-friend stranger, with all their plans of all this stuff they were gonna do, like start an alpaca farm or make a ranch out of tires or open up a barbecue slash strip joint down on Savage Boulevard.

  And he would get up, my dad would, and start pacing around the floor and gesticulating all around the room and they were gonna get this guy to do this and they knew that that guy would do that other thing for free and they were gonna have the whole world on a string, no doubt about it, right after doing this next line.

  And there was no sleeping or eating or even going out. It was just days and days of this new ingenious scheme and that new old contact to make and they were gonna have just about every cousin and high school buddy and long lost lover on the payroll and it was gonna be a golden day until sometime in the middle of day five when Tammy came walking up the driveway back from visiting Aunt Gina in Alliance. And I was sure glad to see her cause by this point I was getting down to the last dregs of the leftover Halloween candy, and a girl just can’t live on lollipops the way she can live off Snickers, and I am just hoping Tammy doesn’t wring my neck for letting this go on so long.

  She walks through the front door and takes one look at the lines going up the table and the new-best-friend stranger and the hole someone made in the ceiling somewhere in the middle of day two, and I swear to God you could have taken that razor right off the table and cut little lines up into the air cause there ain’t nothing or no one could freeze your blood cold inside your body like my mama.

  Dad tries to make it better by giving a little half laugh and introducing Randy, saying, “He’ a great guy, you oughta get to know him.”

  And that’s it.

  She doesn’t even say nothin. that’s how bad it is. She just marches straight across the room, grabs my hand and walks out the front door and takes off, me by her side, for three weeks back with Aunt Gina in Alliance. When we come back there’s no sign of Randy or the lines on the table and even the hole in the ceiling is patched up with white and painted over in blotches.

  No, there was no physical sign, no evidence of the preceding events. There was nothing you could point to and say, “A-ha! That was it. that’s what did it.” There was nothing tangible that might have helped you put together in your head that now things were different. That, when before my mama used to come over with honey words and hair scruffing in those times of woe when my dad used to bow his head down and wonder how he was gonna turn the world into an oyster for me and my mama, that now . . . that now there were no more silk spun words and cotton-candy assurances. Now there was just silent resentment. Now there was just disappointment that he’d never amount to nothing. Now there was just looming hatred and wishing she could be someplace else and the crushing realization that she’d made a mistake.

  And that’s not all. Now there was going out late and looking for something else. Someone else. Now there was late night giggling and coming home and pretending she wasn’t screwing around with you-know-who from down at the factory. Now there was just the constant piddling escape from endless days of defeat with a flirt here and a dash out the back there and anything, just anything, to make it better, please make it better, even for just fifteen minutes in the dark behind the Alibi.

  “Okay, kid, you game?”

  Glenda wakes me from my musing and I’m glad to be back. I do not want to spend my days dreaming with my eyes getting wetter and my jaw getting tight. That was that time, behind me, never again. Never again. I’ll flip the switch on it, and it’ll be off and off for good. Flip.

  Glenda grabs the wheel back and hands the vial over. She senses my hesitation. She doesn’t know the half of it and I am not about to tell her. I slink back, staring at that swirling dragon, red and better not.

  “Okay, look, how old are you?”

  “Thirteen”

  “Thirteen, huh?” She thinks. “Well, sooner or later, you’re gonna be doing this. At least trying it. And It’s probably gonna be with some fat slob that just wants to get in your pants. So, I figure, you might as well try it in a safe environment with someone that ain’t after nothing X-rated. See what I mean?”

  She looks at me and gives a shrug like who cares anyways. I think about it, forgetting about all the bad stuff from my previous life, which no longer exists because I flipped the switch. I decide she has a point. My previous life no longer exists, no way, no how. I should just do what I would have done without knowing anything about it.

  I take the vial, put it up to my nose and sniff at it like she did.

  Nothing much.

  “You gotta snort harder, cover your other nostril and sniff it up fast.”

  I do it like she says and It’s like someone just burnt a hole through my nose and back into my eyes. It feels like pins and needles, numbing me from inside my face. I sit back and wait to start seeing things. She reaches back for the vial, takes it from me and puts it between her legs, out of sight. We’re both sniffing to ourselves, not talking, just sitting there, rubbing our noses, electrified. She reaches for a cigarette and offers me one. I’m like her now. I’m a big girl. I can take it. I roll down the window and light my cigarette off hers, leaning forward. I have this feeling, this amped-up feeling like I’m better than I am, like we’re movie stars and this is the part where you’re meeting us for the first time and wondering who we are and what danger lies before us.

  Outside, all there is rolling past us is two giant orange trucks, scooping out the side of a hill and one man with a bullhorn, yelling orders.

  “When do I start, um, seeing things?”

  “Seeing things?”

  “You know, hallucinating, like, seeing stuff . . .”

  She laughs out loud but doesn’t look back at me. Her eyes in the rearview, serious and mean. She keeps scrunching her mouth together and licking her lips. She has that look in her eyes like my uncle used to get when someone from out of town came into the bar, like she’s chomping at the bit to start a scrap.

  “Well, kid, there ain’t no seeing stuff goes along with this. that’s not what this is, see. This is not one of those things that takes you out of everything. No sir. This is something that puts you right back in.”

  I nod, meaningful, pretending I know exactly what she’s getting at. I feel fast, now, anxious. We’re going about 100 miles an hour but it feels like 900 and I feel like any second now we’re going to catapult off the ground and fly straight into the stars.

  “Um, Glenda, do you ever go to church?”

  “Nope. Lookit, kid, God doesn’t go to church . . .he goes on first dates and stuff.”

  “Well, you ever seen him?”

  “Not at church, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Well, have you ever seen him on a first date?”

  “Lookit, kid, stay focused, we’re gonna need to stay awake if we’re gonna make it in time.”

  “In time for what?”

  This is the first I heard of any time constraint, schedule, or anything to do with the outside world, the
world outside this car, the world outside this movie with this woman and this girl and this bunny rabbit.

  I don’t like it.

  “Oh, I’ll tell you later, It’s kind of a long story. You know, I’ve got some things you might be interested in. Little things. Along the way. Things you could do for me or with me or we could do together, helpful things. I mean, you never know, this could turn out to be a real blessing.”

  She turns back and looks me over, up and down.

  “Are you wily, kid?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you wily, you know, street smart, like, if a ship sank and you were on it, you know you’d be the one waiting, floating on some piece of bark when the rescue boat came, sharks circling around you, sunburned. That kinda thing.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I guess I am. I don’t wanna toot my own horn, but I do believe I am.”

  “Yup, that’s what I thought. You seem like it. Seem like there’s something kinda mean up in there. Seem like you’d catch on quick.”

  The sun is coming up behind us. I can just start to make out the rows upon rows of corn streaming up along beside us. At this speed they look like a jagged leafy fence, smudged, blowing by.

  “Why do you keep that bunny rabbit in the front seat?” I just ask it, might as well get it over with.

  She doesn’t hear me, or maybe she does and chooses to ignore it.

  “You know one thing about a man, if you ever find one that you like, is, he’s gotta know how to fuck you. Rich. Poor. Cute. It don’t matter. He’s gotta know how to lay you down on your back, spread your legs and fuck you.”

  I stare at the corn.

  “I know, I know, maybe I shouldn’t talk like that in front of you. But It’s good you learn it now. Lotta girls just go with any old boring suit or some fatso with a job sending her flowers, then they wonder why they’re so miserable and why they get so ugly and sad and old. They say to themselves, staring at the ceiling, husband snoring away beside them, ‘What the hell happened? Where’d all the time go? When did I get so old and sad and wrinkly?Ù I’ll tell you when, when you were lying underneath that fat shitbag who couldn’t fuck a woman if he had a step-by-step guide. And they never say, ‘This is not enough. Laying here, yawning, while this fat fuck pokes at me until he rolls over and starts snoring.’ Because if you don’t say that, listen to me, here, if you don’t say that, they’ll reel you in. They’ll play nice and buy flowers and reel you into their pathetic little life and the next thing you know, you don’t even remember your own name. It’s just Mrs. Something-or-Other. Mrs. Shitbag. See what I mean? No way. Not me. Not fucking me.”

  “Wull, um, do you even like guys?”

  “Phumph.” I feel like I said something stupid but then she smiles to herself. “I like em when I first meet em. When they’re putting on the Ritz. But, you know, It’s all downhill from there.”

  She takes the vial from between her thighs, opens it up and snorts again. she’s starting to lose that halo around her. In the morning light, she’s not all glamour. she’s starting to look a little less heaven-sent and a little more like someone you might see down at the track. In the mirror, I see now about how she has tiny wrinkles threatening to spread across her forehead. I’m watching her and I’m thinking to myself that I can’t tell if she’s good or bad. she’s one of those people you don’t know about until something happens, something big. And I’m wondering, as I look at her wheat-spun hair in the golden light, what, exactly, that something will be.

  TEN

  Now, I am not a lesbo, and I do not intend on signing up, but it just so happens that when I look at Glenda, when I listen to Glenda, I get this feeling in my gut like I want to jump inside her, like the space between me and her is too great, too distant, and if I could just smash up against her maybe I could see the world through her eyes.

  She catches me looking at her.

  “Do you know where we’re going, kid?”

  “Nope.”

  Nothing I say comes out natural because I’m too busy trying to sound natural.

  The sun is straight up in the sky now, blazing down in a line, boring a hole through the top of the roof. The bunny rabbit sits listless in the front, tired of this new back-seat tag-along. The flatlands spread out in beige and green square patches sprawled out into the horizon for miles and nothing there. None too colorful, not like the McDonald’s commercials where the sun comes up against a farmhouse and someone’s rooster starts to cock-a-doodle-doo into the golden light, ringing in the arrival of hash browns and sausage. Not here, this is mostly shades of drab and drabber, stretching out to eternity and no promise in it.

  I saw pictures of the East Coast in school. It was green and everything was scrunched up together, like they had no idea everyone was coming, so they just make-shift stuck everything together and hoped it’d work out. And I read that sixty-two percent of everybody in America is just sitting there between Boston and Washington, D.C., waiting for something to happen, piled on top of each other, like a beehive, this box inside that box inside that box.

  The East Coast is where you get to go when you’re out of school, if you’re from Lincoln and a member of the Knolls Country Club and live on Sheridan. You get to come back all chuffed up on Thanksgiving and make a circle with all the other older brother Chads and cousin Jennys about this game and that class and how you had to stay up till five last week just to get three papers done and then about fell asleep in class and ha ha ha you sure felt silly.

  And you could be like me and sit there dripping in your towel at the Knolls, like some wet rat, out of place, invited on a lark, practically by mistake, out of politeness to Becky’s cousin Cindy, but ending up there regardless and listening. And you might think to yourself, What kind of world is this that lies somewhere outside the drip-drab horizon with rolling hills and halls of granite, green and books? What kind of world is this that nobody told me about that extends its hands out to nowheresville and plucks lovingly, exclusively, the cream of the crop? Who the hell gets to go there and why and if it’s Cindy then she ain’t near smart enough and why her not me?

  You might think that. And it might tear you up for a second and make you run inside the locker room before anyone catches on that that’s not just swimming-pool water running down your face and before everybody starts whispering, Who the hell invited that girl? Well, you might as well just hold up a sign that says, “I don’t belong here just take me back to shitsville.”

  But if you’re smart, you’ll just bite down and forget you ever heard it. Just pretend that was some black-and-white movie and that whole snooty universe doesn’t exist or it might as well not cause it sure as hell doesn’t exist for you.

  And never will.

  You don’t want to be squeezed in between sixty-two percent of snootsville, anyways. Bunch of limp city folk that couldn’t figure out how to pour whiskey out of a boot with directions on the heel.

  I stare out at the fields in green and yellow patches rolling by into the dusk coming up from behind. Glenda sits in the front, knuckles turning white on the wheel, shoulders hunched and leaning forward, heading west.

  Out west everything has its own space. Every little ramshackle cabin, shack, hut sits perched atop its own little piece of destiny with room to breathe, room to live, room to die. You’ll see them, the dead ones, sitting by the side of the road like some faded gray and rotting mystery, thinking about the good ol days before trains and cars and wanting more.

  And you’d best be prepared for heading west. Otherwise, you might just end up eating your best friend’s ankle, hunkered up under a snowdrift somewhere, like the Donners . . . marking the bodies so you don’t eat your own uncle, watching your pastor starve to death, calculating his weight versus the rest of winter. And you might look over at that one nutso German and have the sneaking suspicion he’s just killing people and eating them before they die, on a whim, for fun.

  But that was out by Reno. Here, before Chimney Rock, it wasn’t quite that
dramatic. Mostly, in the panhandle, folks just froze to death, uneventful. You’d be wandering around after your dream and you’d come across some half-thawed Swede in the slush. And you’d look at him, shrug your shoulders and say a prayer, but you weren’t about to stop.

  I look out past the corn and the wheat and wonder how many sets of bones are buried, unspoken, keeping their stories to themselves in the dirt. I wonder if they know the sky is bright blue today and the air smells sweet. I wonder if they still listen in. I wonder if the caterpillar trucks will roll over them, too.

  Glenda pipes up from the front seat.

  “Okay, kid, here’s how it’s gonna be. And no naysaying. If you naysay even once, I’m gonna kick that door open and throw you out after. I mean it. Nobody likes a naysayer. Nobody, got it? So, we gotta get to Jackson. Never mind why. Just that we’re headed to Jackson for some very specific reasons that I’ll tell you later. On the way, we’re gonna have to make a few stops, see, for provisions. Now, on these stops, you’re gonna have to do a little acting. You ever acted before?”

  “Only my whole life.”

  “Okay, good. that’s good. Now, did you ever see, on TV or in the movies or something, somebody having an epileptic seizure?”

  “A what?”

  “Like, somebody’s in, like an airport, say, and all the sudden they just fall to the ground and start shaking. Like this.”

  She shakes her body around like she just stuck her finger in a light-bulb socket. I try not to laugh.

  “Don’t laugh. This is important. Okay, now. Do what I just did.”

  I hesitate.

  “Member what I said. No naysaying.”

  “I feel stupid.”

  “Well, you’re gonna feel real stupid by the side of the road, how’s that?”

  I do it real fast and keep doing it and don’t stop till she’s convinced, shaking my body this way and that, flopping round like a fish out of water.

  “All right. All right, kid, I get the point. Now, what you’re gonna do is, you’re gonna look real sweet, act real nice and go into this little store. Alone. Now, while you’re in front, I’m gonna be in the back, never mind why. Now, you have to do that, like shake like that and fall to the ground and keep shaking, for about two minutes. No more, no less. Got it? Count in your head if you have to.”