Hick (7 page)

“You from around here?” She lets me off the hook.

“Yup . . . um, Palmyra. Maybe you know my dad. Nicholas Scott McMullen.”

“People call him Nick?”

“Yeah, you know him?” I say, all hope and glory. I sound like a small town girl. Small potatoes.

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

“I just figured . . .”

“Oh, right.” I laugh a little, embarrassed. I can see her eyes in the rearview. She smiles, not wanting to be mean. that’s where that light comes from. It’s like she comes from a place where you can just sit there and don’t have to cut down.

“Okay.” She nods, “Well, now that we’ve got that established, what about your mother?”

“What about her?”

She sizes me up in the mirror. “What’ the matter, you got some pending issue or something?”

I don’t say nothing.

“All right.” She tosses her cigarette out the window. “They know you’re out here?”

“No.”

“Bet they’re worried.”

“I doubt it. My dad left and my mama’s fucking a peeled worm.”

She laughs at that, a hearty laugh, like she’s on the Tonight Show.

So, how’d you get stuck out in the ditch like that? You’re about three hours west of Palmyra.”

“I hitched a ride from some guy. He was crazy.”

“They all are. Some’re just better at hiding it.”

I stare out the window at the pitch black, the only light coming out from the headlights, endless and straight.

“Well, what’d he look like?”

“Who?”

“The guy.”

“Crazy. Bug-eyed. A real freak.”

Her ears start to prick up.

“Whattaya mean, bug-eyed?”

“You know, bug-eyed. Like a frog, kinda.”

She gets real quiet now. I can feel something sizzling in the molecules circling around her.

“You get his name?”

“Eddie. Eddie Kreezer.”

“Tell me you did not just say that.”

“I did not just say that . . . but that was his name. Eddie Kreezer.”

“Good motherfucking Lord almighty.” She slams her hands on the dashboard. “Jesus.”

All the sudden everything’s changed and that light around her turns from white to red.

I shuffle my feet, look at my shoes, not knowing what to say or do or what to make of it. Finally I say the dumbest thing ever.

“Know him?”

“Know him?” She laughs, but It’s an unhappy laugh. “Yeah, I guess I do know him. I know him better than he knows himself.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Goddamnit . . . good thing you got outta that car.”

“Truck.”

“What?”

“He was driving a truck.”

“Oh, I see, he drives a truck now. Well, that’s perfect. Probably crashed that old Buick. Good Lord.” She sighs. “Boy, he is just one bad apple. Just rotten to the core.”

She grabs another cigarette off the dash, where each cigarette is lined up, one by one, in a row, a ready-to-smoke system conceived of in some brilliant moment of necessity into invention.

“So . . . did ya think he’s cute?” She clicks in the cigarette lighter.

“No. Wull. I don’t know.”

“Yeah, there’s something about him, I know. Even though he’s so ugly. There is something. Hell, he had me fooled.”

She lights her cigarette.

“One thing about him, though. He was just real weird, you know, like he had a few screws loose or something. Whatever, I
probably shouldn’t be tellin you this, anyways. Did he call you darlin?”

“Yup.”

We drive on silent, the road disappearing underneath us into the dark.

“Okay, here’s the plan. If we stop anywhere, and I do mean anywhere, and there he is . . .run, don’t walk, back to the car, lock the door and duck. No questions. No talking. We’ll just take off. Got it? Lesson two. Although, that’s more like a rule. We’ll call it rule slash lesson two.”

She takes a drag off her cigarette. I shuffle in my seat. I’ve been nodding at her this whole time, pretending like I’m right there with her, more so than the bunny rabbit.

“Guys like that, you just gotta put to bed. Kiss them good night. Turn out the light. Walk out the door. Cut your losses.”

She goes to put her cigarette out in the ashtray and I can see her hands are shaking. I want to change the subject but I don’t know how to without making her feel like she’s just been spilling her guts out while I’ve been counting fence-posts. She starts reaching behind her, grabbing around the backseat, steering this way and that, not paying no mind to the zig-zag we’re making on the asphalt. It’s starting to get reckless and maybe just a bit too carefree for comfort.

“Um, you want me to help, while you steer?”

“Yeah, kid, sure, can you hand me my purse? It’s red.”

I nod, relieved, and search the backseat beside me, through the puzzle of wrinkled clothes and empty cigarette cartons, wanting to make her like me. I pull out a ruby-colored alligator rectangle with a gold clasp. She sure has good taste. Classy.

“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.