Half Wild (6 page)

The year we turned seventeen Annie and I played hooky in a purple rusted '57 Karmann Ghia that used to belong to her brother, Jack. It sat between the back of the barn and a Northern Spy apple tree, facing a slope of cow field and a creek with banks grown up in sumac and pin cherry and wood ferns. Above that creek was a small hill covered in white pine and hardwoods, and above that was sky. Jack had blown the engine six months earlier on Route 100, towed it home with a rope and a Dodge truck, and since then mice had given birth in the stuffing of the seats, leaves had blown in the open windows, and grass had grown up through the hole in the passenger-side floor. She smelled of mildew and mouse and rotting leaves. We didn't care; she was ours. We called her Karmann.

November: the sky steel blue, ashen in places. We smoothed our fingers over the cigarettes we were rolling,
tapped our thumbs on the steering wheel, sang the words we could remember of Neil Young's “Helpless.” I stuck my cigarette between my lips and breathed in. “Tastes like rat's nest,” I said, coughing.

Annie closed her eyes and inhaled. “I like it,” she said. “Makes my throat burn.”

Jack had left for Vietnam in April, a few weeks after the engine blew, and the Drum came from the bottom of his sock drawer. We could have gone to the IGA in Nelson and bought fresh pouches, but we liked smoking the free stuff we scavenged from Jack's various hiding places best: dresser drawers, backpacks, pockets of his jackets and jeans. Jack was everything this place was not: he picked apples in the fall in order to drive himself around the country every winter; he listened to music no one else did—the Flying Burrito Brothers and Mississippi John Hurt—and had a picture of Grace Slick tacked to his bedroom wall; when he danced he would tilt his head back, close his eyes, and shake his skinny hips. He was the only man I knew who danced.

“Hoo,” Annie said, blowing fog onto the windshield. The glass clouded over, then cleared again, showing the heart Jack had scratched with a nail into the hood one night when we were stoned.

“Fucking cold,” Annie said. I nodded, feeling the seat's icy cracked leather through the butt of my jeans. We had taken to wearing men's blue jeans and wool jackets we found at the Salvation Army. Annie's jeans had a hole in
each knee, and her jacket smelled like pine pitch; mine smelled like the smoke of some World War II veteran's pipe. We were growing our hair straight and long like the women on the back covers of Jack's records and had stopped wearing makeup. It wasn't what boys were into, but we didn't care. We were virgins still. Annie wanted to look like Joan Baez, and sometimes did. She was that beautiful. I wanted to look like Grace Slick. “Why her?” Annie asked me once. “You don't look anything like her.”

“No reason,” I said, swallowing, thinking of that poster on Jack's wall.

“You look like trash,” Annie's mother had said to her one day, glancing up from the pile of laundry she sat folding. Mine had squinted her eyes and said, “Clare, you could be so pretty. And Annie, she used to be so pretty too.”

My mom taught second grade and raised me alone. In her free time she made beautiful gardens with neat edges around our white house and was the captain of the bowling team in Nelson. Since Jack left, Annie's mom had stopped cleaning or cooking or leaving the house. She reached two hundred pounds and sat out on the porch crocheting doll-size American flag blankets to give to the American Legion.
Loony as the bird on North Pond,
Annie said. Her dad had gone on with life as usual: rising at dawn to milk their two worn-out cows, going to the lumberyard at six, coming home twelve hours later to milk again. Annie was getting by doing what she and I
did: skipping school, smoking what we could scavenge of Jack's tobacco, imagining the places we would go if that car would only drive: Mexico, Arizona, California.

Jack had been all those places. He used to send Annie postcards from the road, which she had taped to the dashboard. One showed a roadrunner crossing a two-lane highway, a saguaro cactus waving in the background, the sky the orange of varnished pine. Another showed a white sand beach in California, grass ablaze with wildflowers,
BIG SUR
swirled in neon-pink cursive across the top. On the back of the card the names of some of those wildflowers were written: sticky monkeyflower and baby blue eyes.
Baby blue eyes reminds me of you,
the prettiest sister in the state of Vermont,
Jack wrote to Annie in handwriting as restless as a ten-year-old boy's. In the last few years when Jack came home for apple season he would take Annie and me places: the quarry in Dorset, the Northfield Drive-In, once, in early December, sledding by moonlight on Whiskey Mountain. On that ice-covered hillside he had put his lips next to my ear and whispered something that sounded like
beautiful,
before flying down that hillside with a blind whoop and holler.

Annie leaned her head back against the leather seat and started picking at the loose stuffing that exploded from the cushions.
“If you're going to San Francisco,”
she sang, then hummed a bit. California was where we wanted to
go most: a place our mothers had never been and would never go, a place where we thought no one believed in war.

“Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,”
I finished the line.

“California dreaming,” Annie said, scratching frost off the window with her fingernail. Earlier that week Mr. Davis, the new history teacher, had shown us photos of people sticking flowers into the barrels of rifles in Washington, DC. “Not everyone believes in war,” he had said. Mr. Davis was young and from elsewhere, with sandy blond hair. Most girls were in love with him.

I was in love with Jack. When we were kids he taught us how to light fires without matches, how to do wheelies, how to build forts in the woods by the creek. “Like this,” he said once when I was nine, taking my hands and showing me how to bend a sapling and hook it into another to make a frame. I could feel his breath on my cheek, could smell his unwashed clothes. His best friend, Trevor, a big kid with a spongy face who lived in a cabin down near the river, would say, “Dumb girls,” when Annie and I were around, but Jack would just shrug and wink at us. “Wildcats,” he said with a blue-eyed, innocent grin.

“Fucking winter,” Annie said, and started to shiver. She took another drag of the cigarette and coughed.

“We could go back,” I said.

“No way,” Annie said. “I'm driving this thing to California. That's why we're so cold. We're driving through
the plains of Nebraska.” Her thin fingers gripped the wheel until her knuckles turned white. Her gray eyes blazed.

“Look at them buffalo,” I said.

“Indians,” she said.

“Bucking broncos,” I said. We weren't smiling.

In December Annie got a letter from Jack. It was midweek, morning. We sat in Karmann watching snow skitter across the frozen fields. No one seemed to care if we skipped school—worse things were happening all over: three kids had crashed and died on their way home from the Five Flies outside of North Bennington; a selectboard member's son had disappeared into Canada; a girl had gotten knocked up and tried to kill herself by drinking a bottle of Lysol. Snow blew in white gusts across the silver grass and drifted toward the frozen-over creek. Annie read the letter out loud.

Jack didn't say much about Vietnam. Instead he told her all the things he missed about home: driving up to Indian Love Call and diving off the deep end into cold black water; the smell of hayfields at night in June; driving across the US of A with its flat, open spaces; going into the woods and feeling safe there. He said he never felt safe where he was. Never. He told Annie to live boldly,
to not end up like their parents: ghosts on a farm with a couple of dried-up cows, or like Trevor, stuck in a town that would never change him. He told her when he got back he would take her on a long road trip to somewhere exciting.
Light up your eyes,
he wrote.

Annie folded the letter and stuck it in the back pocket of her jeans. “Jesus,” she said. “I wish we had rum.”

“At ten
A.M.
?”

She shrugged. “Why not?”

A nurse from the state had started checking in on Annie's mom; her house was smelling like cat piss and unwashed clothes; she needed diabetic wraps on her legs. Her dad spent more and more time in the barn where he used to milk forty Jerseys when he was a boy, just standing quietly now in the empty stanchions.

Annie looked down at her hands. “You think he'll make it?”

“Who?”

Annie rolled her eyes. “Jack.”

The wind had let up, and the field was still except for the snow's settling sheet of white. One of the two cows lumbered around the corner of the barn. It looked our way, then back toward the fence. The ground of the paddock sponged black mud under its feet. “Yes,” I said.

“Me too,” Annie said, picking at the rip in the knee of her jeans. “But I can't fucking wait. I fucking hate waiting. We're all just fucking waiting.”

“Everyone here is waiting,” I said.

“Flipping their wigs, waiting,” Annie said. It was true: we were all waiting for the people we knew and loved to disappear, or die, or not.

Annie squeezed her knees together tight and grabbed the steering wheel. “You ever want to go somewhere so bad you'll do anything just to get there?”

“No,” I said. “I don't think so.”

Annie nodded, then reached into her pocket and rolled us each another cigarette. It didn't burn so much going down; our throats were toughened. A gust of wind picked up and blew a piece of stray scrap metal across the yard.

“This place is going to hell,” Annie said.

“Aren't we too?”

Annie laughed. It was like a streak of sunlight in that car. “Guess so. Yes. Hell.”

A warm January day, snowmelt in the ditches and patches of bare dirt by the side of the road. We walked back toward school, kicking our boots into the blackened snow. Trevor drove by in his Dodge pickup, then pulled onto the gravel edge in front of us. A year ago Trevor and Jack had pinky sworn that if either of their numbers got called, the other would go too, but Trevor's number hadn't been called, and he hadn't enlisted. It was something the whole town knew. Now he had a job at
the sawmill and a cabin of his own down by the river. Since Jack left, he kept his big shoulders pitched forward and his eyes on the ground.

He rolled his window down as we got near, sat looking out at the road in front of him.

“Trev,” Annie said. I had only seen her talk to Trevor once since Jack left. She had called him a phony bastard and a ball-less wonder.

He glanced at Annie. “Hi,” he muttered, blinking, then turned back toward the road.

Annie grabbed the truck's door handle. “Where you going? Anywhere fun?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Back to work. Want a ride?”

“Nah. Hey, Trev,” she said, digging her boot into gravel. “Take us somewhere fun sometime. Take us somewhere Jack would have taken us.”

Trevor looked at Annie for an instant, then at his hands on the wheel. He picked at the scab on his left hand, and it started to bleed. “There's a party Friday,” he said.

Annie nodded. “That'll do.”

That afternoon Mr. Davis showed us pictures of blind and burned kids in Hiroshima. He showed us a picture of a baby who had no eyes. “Imagine that,” he said, shaking his head. Annie took a jackknife out of her pocket and whittled a peace sign into the plywood top of her desk. Below it she wrote, “Fuck.”