When school is out, I go to Garner State Park with my friend Raynell. She has three sisters, and a brother named Cotton. Raynell’s mom makes the girls wear tennis shoes in the river. The ones I bring have holes worn through and my big toes stick out. Cotton goes barefoot, which is how he cuts his foot open. His dad says it doesn’t look bad, but Cotton’s mom drives him into Leaky anyway. He gets nine stitches.
A few days later, Cotton gets real sick. Raynell’s mom calls mine to say he’s in the hospital.
“It’s blood poisoning,” Mom tells Dad at the dinner table.
I go with my parents to see Cotton in the hospital. He has needles in his arms. Cotton’s mom says the doctors are giving him medicine, to fight off the infection. At first Cotton gets better, then a whole lot worse. Then he dies.
Raynell and I are best friends, have been our whole lives. Our street falls off steep below my house, then dead-ends into a stretch of gully wash that separates the edge of our sub-division from the country club. We’re members there. My father plays golf Saturday mornings.
The day before Cotton’s funeral, Raynell and I meet on the corner. She has a pack of Marlboros she’s swiped off her father’s dresser. We walk to the deserted place at the end of our street.
“What’s it like?” I ask.
Raynell lights up a cigarette. “People bring us food all day, say how great it was when Cotton was alive.” She blows smoke out in a steady stream, like she’s been doing it forever. “I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
“Me too.” I’ve missed Raynell.
My parents take me to Cotton’s funeral the next day. I wear my nicest dress. The blue brocade with puff sleeves. We file past Cotton’s casket. It’s the first dead body I’ve ever seen. I look close at Cotton’s mouth. A girl at youth camp once told me how the lips are sewn shut on the inside by running a needle through the nose. Her father owned a mortuary.
The organ starts playing and we find a seat. The priest tells everyone how Cotton got his nickname. “His hair was so blond it was white almost, like an angel’s.”
Cotton’s mother makes a noise that sounds like a bird cawing. It rises into the vaulted ceiling.
After Cotton’s funeral, Raynell and I spend more and more time down at the end of our street. Most evenings, we sit on the trunk of a fallen tree by the dry creek bed. Raynell smokes cigarettes she gets from the packs her father leaves around their house. I smoke sometimes, too.
When Raynell sleeps over at my house, she makes us practice kissing. My stuffed animals, a Beatles poster, each other. She says we need to be ready for the real thing. We lie awake and talk about what life might be like, when our parents no longer tell us what to do.
“We can sleep with boys,” Raynell says.
“Or move to far off places,” I say.
“Either way, we’ll be the bosses of our own lives.”
One morning, Raynell and I walk to school, like usual. We’re one block away when we hear the first bell.
“We’re late,” I say.
Raynell shrugs. “Maybe we should skip.”
“They’ll report us.”
“So?” Raynell heads back and I follow.
We go to my house because my parents both work. I try to forge letters, excusing our absence. What if the lady in the attendance office compares our signatures to our parents? I bet she keeps things like that on file.
“We should leave town,” Raynell says. “Our parents are going to kill us anyway.”
Raynell is the same age as me, but looks younger. She’s built tiny and has the longest hair. It’s so thick she can barely get a brush through it. Her mother combs it out once a week, after it’s been washed.
Raynell’s shown me bruises before, where her father roughed her up over something not even as bad as playing hooky. Once, Raynell said, he yanked her mother around by her hair.
I pull out bread and spread slices with peanut butter and jelly. I empty books from my school satchel and fill it up with sandwiches, bags of Fritos, bottles of coke. I walk with Raynell to the nearest highway. We turn right when we hit the feeder. Two hours later, the bottoms of my feet feel like burnt mush.
“Let’s rest a while,” Raynell says.
“Maybe we should go back.”
“Or hitch a ride.”
I try to picture what my future might be like with Raynell, thumbing rides, hopping railroad cars. We cross the stretch of grass that separates the feeder from the highway. Raynell puts her thumb up.
A white cab with a flat-bed trailer passes by. It slows and pulls onto the shoulder. Raynell grabs my arm, hauls me over. She steps onto the running board and tugs the passenger door open.
A man sits behind the wheel. His face looks like the inside of a grapefruit, grainy and moist. His hair is cropped short, the ends yellow.
“We’re headed for the next town,” Raynell says.
“Hop in.”
Raynell jumps onto the bench seat. I slide in beside her, yank the big door shut. The man checks his left mirror and sidles back onto the highway.
“Where you headed?” Raynell asks.
“New Mexico.”
“June and I are sisters,” Raynell says, but the man seems more interested in his truck gaining speed.
“We’re step-sisters really.”
The man shifts the truck into second gear.
“Our grandparents live in the next town. That’s where we’re going.”
He shifts right and up. “Thought you girls might be runnin’ away.”
“We’d never do that,” I say.
“Cause you’re good girls?” The man pulls the gear shift down. His knotty fist is close to Raynell’s thigh.
“Yes, we are,” I say.
“But good girls don’t skip out of school.” The man slides the gear back up and over.
“That’s our exit,” I say. I jerk my head around at the road sign he’s passing.
“There’ll be another.”
“Let us out,” I say.
“Wait a minute, little girl.” The smooth edges come off his voice.
I grab the handle of the truck door. “We’ll jump.” I take Raynell’s arm as if I mean to pull her out along with me.
“You asked me for a ride.” The man’s voice softens a little.
“We’re running away alright,” Raynell says, from out of nowhere. “I hate my life.”
Everyone’s real quiet, like we’re not sure what to do next.
“My name’s James,” the man offers.
“You hungry?” Raynell asks. She picks my satchel up off the floor. Pulls out a sandwich and hands it to James.
“Thanks,” he says.
Raynell hands me a sandwich, then takes one for herself. Everything seems okay between us, even though we’re barreling down a highway with a man we’ve never met.
After dark, James stops at a rest area. He walks us to the women’s side and waits. After, he helps us into the cab and closes the door. We hear him making nearby, on the dry concrete. He climbs back into the truck and up onto a platform bed behind the seat.
“Stretch out down there if you’d like, or–” He pats the place beside him, “One of you can sleep with me. Promise not to touch.”
Raynell scrambles up next to James. He leans over Raynell and hands me a pillow. It’s quiet, except for the far-off noises on the highway. Raynell lies on the edge of the bed, but she doesn’t look scared.
The next morning, we wait in the truck while James goes into a grocery store in Sonora. He comes out with two cartons of milk and a tray of cinnamon rolls. He has a pack of cigarettes for himself, and a six-pack of beer.
“Where to, ladies?” he asks.
“New Mexico,” Raynell says. She has a look about her that she didn’t have yesterday.
James stops further west, at a spring pool in Balmoreah. He stuffs his beer in a canvas bag and sets it on a flat rock in the cold water. He hands us each one. I shake my head. I’m Baptist. Raynell’s Catholic, so she takes one.
James tells us stories about all the places he’s been. California, Florida, Nebraska.
“Sounds like fun,” Raynell says.
“Some day I’d like to settle down,” he says. “Open a snake farm.”
“I want to have kids,” she offers.
James and Raynell are in the water, stripped down to their underwear. James puts his face down close to Raynell’s and blows bubbles at her. They pop open when they hit against her mouth.
“I should send you home,” he says.
“What about New Mexico?”
“I could go to jail.”
Raynell throws her arms around James’ neck. “But I love you,” she says.
He smiles, but seems sad, too. “I could give you money to get back.”
“We can take a bus,” I say. I don’t want to live in a truck, or on a snake farm. I want to go to high school, college. Maybe get married someday.
“I want to stay with you,” Raynell says, and she kisses James on the mouth.
Late that night, James pulls his truck into a rest area, just outside of El Paso. Raynell crawls up into the bed of the truck.
I wake early the next morning. Raynell and James are still sleeping. His big hand rests on the rise of her small hip. Her back is nestled into the hollow of his belly. It reminds me of Mom’s mixing bowls back home. I look out at the sky, bright and bigger than I’ve ever seen. I watch a hawk fly up into the blue of it. I wonder where it will ever end.
–
Rebekah Love has a MFA in Creative Writing and teaches at Lonestar College in Houston, Texas. Her work has previously appeared in Red River Review, Sombrilla, Poetry Motel, Illya’s Honey, Rockhurst Review, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, City Works, and Splash of Red.
Photo by katieg93.
