Hick

by Andrea Portes

  And as I see myself go, as I watch myself go from the other side of the bank, I want to grab myself back and throw myself back in the water, underneath the current, with the water rushing overhead and Glenda tucking my hair behind my ear and pulling me down underneath the slippery rocks, taking me with her, taking me with her, lulling me to sleep deep beneath the deep blue sea.

  THIRTY–SEVEN

  Beau makes it so the cops don’t bother me. He makes it so they think I’m his stunned precious niece and don’t know nothing and why bother with me anyways. He makes it so, when their lights come up, red and blue, red and blue, in circles, and I sit in the corner with my hair drying, Karl sitting by my side, keeping watch, that I don’t get scared or start crying or make a scene. He makes it so Karl sits next to me and puts him on protector duty while he goes out and tells a story about how Eddie and Glenda were always fighting and how he knew it’d come to this and he just heard shots and there they were.

  There’s a big circus outside with cops and sirens, blue and red, blue and red, in circles, and questions and more questions. There’s yellow tape and Beau outside telling the same story, word for word, over and over again.

  There’s a red-headed cop that comes up the stairs asking eight hundred questions about what I saw and where was I and how many planks in the floorboards and what’s the price of tea in China and I keep my answers short and sweet till Beau comes in and calls the whole thing off, saying, “Look, Officer, she’s just a kid, she doesn’t know what’s going on and I can’t say I want her to, you know? I don’t want her to be traumatized or anything.”

  And when I hear this, I remember that there are people in the world who would actually try to make it so you were protected. You’d be sitting there in the corner and they would shield your eyes or not let you see them drunk or try not to fight. They’d say, “Not in front of the kid,” or they’d say, “Let’s talk about this later.” They would, if you were just a little kid, put you in a category of something to fend for, something to protect, something to keep away from dirt-bags that want to give you a Hot Stuff necklace.

  And when I remember that there are people like that, people who would try to keep you safe and read you bedtime stories and tuck you in, people who would make you hot chocolate and put in a nightlight and kiss your forehead last thing . . . when I think that there are people like that, people that I never met but that exist somewhere, people that I never even dreamed of, I want to start laughing. I want to start laughing cause it’s such a funny joke. it’s such a funny joke that there are people like that and look what I got, look what I got.

  That’s a good one.

  THIRTY–EIGHT

  You would think that death is something that makes you feel fearful and numb. You would think that it’s something that makes you want to curl up into a ball in the corner, twisted up and hanging on for dear life.

  But that’s not what death makes you want to do. Death makes you want to be reckless. Death makes you amazed you were even alive in the first place. Death jolts you up out of that passing through, that getting by, you’ve been doing all your life.

  I wake up in the middle of the night on a lumpy bed, under a window, moonlight streaming in, cutting a square of light onto the floor.

  There is something in me, something in me like a drum beating, below my heart and well below my head, something that wants to take the day’s events, the death and the blood-soaked denim, and tear it up into some animal thing, some freedom from the grave and close-call lust. I cling to the bed and wait for dawn.

  THIRTY–NINE

  In the morning the room is sun-drenched gold by the day coming up outside the window.

  Beau stands across the room making eggs on an old-fashioned white stove. He doesn’t notice me wake and I stay quiet, watching his profile shaking the pan. There’s a looming to him, a dull gloom that pushes his head forward into the task at hand, his place and the day. The years behind him pressing into his shoulders, weighing down on his triangle back, through his spine and into the floor.

  The rugs on the floor are deep burgundy, with intricate designs, from faraway places with names with too many letters and not enough vowels. And if you’re looking to hang a painting, you better think twice cause nothing doing. it’s covered from floor to ceiling with shelves upon shelves and books stacked top to bottom, left to right, with magazines in between. it’s like Beau kicked out all the little kids and moved into the library.

  He’s got furniture that looks like you just got out of your space-pod and landed two hundred years in the past with dark wood, swivels and birds’ claws for legs. it’s like he stole a room out the East Coast, drove it west down I-80 and planted it here in the middle of the piney woods just to make you wonder. He’s got crystal glass animals that catch the light and break it in two, an old wooden globe with a ring around it and wing-back chairs fit for Sherlock Holmes, pipe in hand. He’s got a dark-wood, straight-back piano with little candleholders coming out, mother-of-pearl inlays making flowers on the front. There’s a fireplace at the other end of the room with a mantel made of stone and, on top, a giant oil painting of a pale, pretty lady in a puffy dress you need a hoop for.

  He catches me turning the room over.

  “Do you read much, kid?”

  “Yup. I got a yard-sale World Book.”

  “Hm. that’s it?”

  “Yeah, I practically got it memorized.”

  “Well, how about the library?”

  “Looks like you stole it.”

  He waits there for a second and then laughs, soft.

  “Yeah, I guess it doesn’t suit me, huh?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, my mom left it.”

  “Oh . . . I’m sorry.”

  “No,” he says, cracking the eggs. “She’s not dead or anything . . . she just moved, you know, went down to Los Angeles or someplace weird.”

  “Oh. that’s nice. Nice that she left you all this stuff.”

  “I guess. . . . she’d like you. She always wanted a little girl.”

  This stops the air cause we both know she already had one. She had one with a heart born on the wrong side and what do you say to that?

  “You could go visit her. she’d like that.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “She teaches at some weird place where they have huts for the little kids, little hobbit huts and everyone speaks French.”

  “Well, I don’t speak French.”

  “Well, I reckon that’s why they teach it.”

  He stands by the stove, sizing me up. “How bout I give you her number and maybe—”

  “Look, it’s okay. I’ll be okay.”

  He stops and stares a second out the door.

  “All right, well . . . I reckon I’ll just leave it with you.”

  He turns back to the bacon and eggs, making a plate. He sets two plates down on the table, between two sets of forks and knives made with intricate designs like the rugs. He pours orange juice into crystal glasses you see in commercials for wine, with rolling vineyards in the background and grapes on the table. The chairs for the table are matching with dark wood, lions carved in the back and velvet pillows where you’re supposed to sit.

  There’s a sadness to this room, a loneliness, as if the only people ever here are the people on the pages of those books.

  I look around the room and jump back slight as I catch my reflection in the window. I forgot the part about my hair being black and choppy and being turned into a boy. it’s an ugly look, like I went from Cinderella to the wicked stepmother overnight. But there’s something to it, some preemptive strike against what it is I’m supposed to look like and who it is I’m supposed to be. There’s something to it that makes me feel a little more brave and a little less ashamed.

  I still wonder if you pinched me if I’d wake up back in Jackson and all this was just some daydream by the side of the pool, with Glenda still inside moving up and down on Lloyd. How can it be that you believe a li
fe that blinks on and off from a lit-up tube more than you believe a life that passes smack-bang in front of you? How can it be that you’ll believe a man can walk up on the moon before you’ll believe that Glenda flew up in a bubble and Eddie didn’t make it off the floor?

  These things are distant, you think. These things are distant and don’t happen.

  But somewhere in America, between the freeways and the Food-4-Less, between the filling stations and the 5 o-’clock news, behind the blue blinking light coming off the TV, there is a space, an empty space, between us, around us, inside us, that inevitable, desperate, begs to be filled up. And nothing, not shame, not God, not a new microwave, not a wide-screen TV or that new diet with grapefruits, can ever, ever fill it.

  Underneath all that white noise there’s a lack.

  Beau finishes his eggs and leans back in his chair, cleaning his glasses.

  “Where you figuring on going?”

  “I don’t know. Thought I’d go to Vegas.”

  “I reckon I won’t take you there.”

  “How come?”

  “That’s no place for a girl your age, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Where’s my .45?”

  “That was yours, eh? Well, I’m afraid it belongs to the boys in blue now.”

  I look at Karl, keeping watch on the porch, his head on top of his paws, resigned but not skipping a beat.

  “I reckon it’s best you get home.”

  “Wull, what if I don’t wanna?”

  “I reckon you do.”

  I scan the rows upon rows of books, lining the walls, with names like Bartleby and Metamorphosis and The Age of Innocence. I scan the bindings and gold trim, each one different than the next, each one carrying some sort of timeless secret giving you the keys to the kingdom if you can just suss it out.

  Beau catches me lost in the bindings.

  “Where you from anyway?”

  “Palmyra.”

  He stops half out the door.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Palmyra, Nebraska.”

  “Huh.”

  “it’s not so bad. We got a good football team.”

  “Yeah, okay. Listen. Two hours, then we’re leaving. There’s a bus stop in Salt Lake, that’ll take you to Omaha.”

  “You’re not dropping me off in Utah.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Listen, Mister, you can drop me off in Dallas, you can drop me off in Spain, you can even drop me off in Sparks . . . but there is no damn way you are dropping me off in Utah. If you do I’ll die and it’ll be all your fault.”

  “Listen—”

  “If you do I’ll go straight to Vegas and become a crack whore and die in a shoot-out and you’ll see it on TV and it’ll haunt you till the day you die.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Two hours. Lord have mercy.”

  The screen door bangs into the frame behind him as he stalks off down the path into the woods, Karl in tow. I watch him from behind and suppress the urge to follow.

  That lady with the hoop skirt is still staring at me from the painting. she’s made of oil and chiffon but there’s something behind her eyes like she just started smiling. There’s something in her eyes like she’s trying to tell me it was hard for her, too, and that’s the way to buck up. she’s trying to tell me, Join the club, kid, you just got to put your head back up top your neck and pretend blush and wait for the next waltz.

  FORTY

  Colorado is split in two pieces.

  On one side Colorado is made of piney passes through snow-capped mountains with blond folks made of smiles and exercise and the other half is made of yellow weeds, grumpy clerks and nothing on the ground but a gray tree, one for each acre. it’s like God himself put Miracle-Gro on one side of the state and it bloomed up mountains and valleys and crested buttes with wildflowers and then he looked at the rest of the state, looked at his watch, shrugged and took a nap.

  Beau drives a giant red truck from the Fifties, rounded off and old-fashioned, like something you’d see in a Coke commercial. He’s got some kind of engine in it made of horses, cause he can still get ahead of you, even through Monarch Pass.

  He doesn’t talk while he drives. He just leaves it to me to look around and entertain myself. You could just sit here and look at the road for hours and pick up thought after thought, like pebbles on the riverbank, pick one up, put it back, pick that one up, throw it back, for hours. I got one stirring up I’m about to throw back.

  This one’s about my mama and all the late nights and all the jingle-jangle of the wind- chimes slamming into the screen door at four in the morning, giggling silly on the porch. When I think about all the flirty looks at the boys working at the service station or the Hy-Vee or the Alibi . . . the shamey, desperate shaking of the hips on the way out the Piggly Wiggly . . . I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that didn’t fill up somewhere near the front of my cheeks with shame and blushing and redness. I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t a part of me that didn’t have at the bottom of it the most deep-seated, unavoidable, scared-to-smithereens feeling of dread that, one day, that is gonna be me. That somehow, I’m designated by fate to become all of the things that make me cringe and shiver and look away.

  And you could be one of those people that sit around, sipping lemonade on the porch, saying right or wrong, yes or no, black or white, and pointing fingers, making grandiose statements about the way of the world, the way to heaven and the way to tuck in your shirt on a Sunday morning. You could be. But maybe you could look at it like this, maybe you could see it like maybe something happened somewhere along the way, something mean and unforgiving, like watching your baby boy turn to ice or getting knocked to the ground or getting tied up to the bedpost for three days straight.

  And maybe it wasn’t just one thing but a whole lot of little things, strewn together, like oil stains on the asphalt, telling the story of some broken-down beat-up old car, sputtering and coughing, making its way slowly, hopelessly, over the blacktop and into the horizon.

  And you could say that maybe even if some kind old stranger came out from the middle of nowhere and gave you a shiny new engine, new pistons and a whole new set of tires, fixed the air conditioning and gave you a last-minute Turtle Wax car wash, that even so, even though now you’re brand-spanking new and ready to take on the world with a smile, just the memory of that beat-up old broken-down old time would make you, inside, just a little different from those other brand-new shiny swanky cars, passing you on the road. They might look like you, sound like you, drive like you, but somehow, deep down, they would never be like you. And with this kind of back of the mind, bottom of the belly knowledge, you just might not be able to drive right. You see what I mean? You just might not be able to drive smooth.

  And I wonder if now I get to be that beat-up old broken-down car, no matter how shiny and new you make me. I wonder what you can do to me, how you can gussy me up, how you can put me back in myself or if that’s just like some dream you used to have about being a girl before a Hot Stuff necklace and sweet words and watching yourself getting moved up down up down from the rafters in the corner.

  The road gets icy and it starts to snow two miles outside a lonely little town called the River of Souls Lost in Purgatory and I throw that broken-down car back in the river and I wonder if Glenda is down in there, too.

  FORTY–ONE

  By the time we get to Denver, it seems like we’ve been driving for three hundred days past row after row of endless aspens spreading out into the horizon and past, on and on, into eternity.

  We pull up to the station and it looks too classy for the likes of me. it’s got stone this and stone that and three arches you got to walk through, just to get in. Beau and I sit staring forward in the stopped truck, not knowing what to say. He reaches behind him into the cab and pulls out an envelope, crumpled and beige.

  “Here, Luli, you might be needing this.”

 
I open it up and there it is, all that’s left of me and Glenda and our short-lived career as High-Plains criminals. Two grand. All that’s left from a million miles away before bacon and eggs in the piney woods for breakfast.

  “I reckon that’s yours.”

  And I look up at him and remember about all those people that put in a nightlight and read you a bedtime story and scruff you on the head before sleeping. I remember that there are people in this world who would hold your hand before crossing the street and pretend Santa was coming for Christmas. And I think about Glenda looking down from her bubble and I bet you anything, I bet you anything, she put this whole thing together.

  “Thank you, Beau. Thank you.”

  “C’mon, now. You think I’m gonna take your money?”

  “Still.”

  “Okay, well, here’s that number, in case you ever need it.”

  He hands me a piece of paper with a number, a name and a map.

  “Don’t lose it, kay?”

  “Okay.”

  I nod. I’ve got that two grand now, carrying it, wrapped up and sealed. I’ve got a new way out and I can put it in my pocket and keep it with me no matter how not-invited I get. I’ve got a new way out now and you just wait, you just wait and see how I can throw myself through the clouds.

  “Bye, Beau. Thanks for being so nice and all.”

  “Aw, well, no big shakes.”

  Beau squints into the sun and I don’t look at him. I grab my bag and jump out the door in one move, cause I know if I break it up it’ll be impossible. If I break it up I won’t even make it out the cab. I’m halfway to the station when I hear his voice.

  “Hey, Luli?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When you turn eighteen—”

  “Yeah?” I say, expectant.

  “Don’t forget to vote Libertarian.”

  He winks and starts the engine. I watch as he turns down the road, back to Nevada, somewhere between Elko and Jackpot. Somewhere I saw a movie with slippery rocks and a rag doll, somewhere with a fly trapped up in the corner, looking down at nothing left.