11

 

 

 

 

11

 

 

You know how many kids would kill to go on road trips all the time?

It’s not only my mother who’s said that. A lot of friends and uncles have, too. I don’t know what other kids would feel about it, but I know about me.

Forget Carris. Forget home. When we’re settled in a town or city for too long, I miss the freedom and chaos we find in the wider world. Following the roads, just my momma and me. Deciding a direction by flipping a coin, by dodging the sun, by watching the moon. By spinning around three times with our hands held out in front of us. Stop, stumble, stand. And whichever stretch of horizon we both see, that’s the way we go.

I know we’re making our plans, I know we’re doing what we need to do so we can buy a house one day and never have to ask anyone for money ever again. I know when we reach this place it will be our new forever. But for now, the best part is still how we get there.

Dumping our bags out at bus depots to scratch together loose change. Making up sob-stories to tell sympathetic ticket-sellers. The matronly, lost-cause mother-types usually, in their stretched-out uniforms, with their badly-permed hair.

Or.

Standing at the crossroads with our thumbs out, the wind whipping at my momma’s skirt so the guys who don’t stop whistle as they roar past, and the guys who do stop open their doors with wide smiles. Shaking their heads at her, at me, like they don’t really disapprove at all.

I grew up on strong legs and sore feet from those hours walking strange streets. My arms and face tanned from waiting at the roadside while my momma held out her thumb, her hand trembling against clouds of dust. People who choose not to see us, they have a way of vanishing in blood bursts that dissolve into the air like they never were. Or maybe it’s my third eye doing this. It’s only the ones who stopped for us, and were nice to us, that I’ve ever allowed to live. I slept curled up on cigarette-scarred seats with my head in my mother’s lap, listening to the wheels roll beneath us as whatever coach we were riding pushed on through the night, the deep choke and change of its engine growling in its mouth. I knew how to read time tables, I got good at counting platform numbers. I got even better at following signs—both the ones on walls and the ones on faces. I figured out from the way people smiled at me which strangers might give me something, and which ones might give my mom money, and which ones had something blank in their faces or dark in their eyes. The ones my mother might want to talk to and those she wouldn’t. I learned how to wash my hair in restroom sinks, how to help my momma wash hers so there was no soap left in to make it dry in sticky clumps. How to change my clothes in the backseat of a car or the back row of a bus without anyone noticing. How to fix my mother’s eyeliner when there weren’t any decent mirrors around.

This is only weird to you if you’ve grown up some other way.

“I did my best, babe,” she’s said. “If we were stuck someplace for a while, like at night, I’d cover you with my coat and put my arm over you, so at a glance people would think you were just luggage. You were so small back then I still could. And I was fine if folks were bothering me. You have to understand, babe. I did my best.”

I tell them that.

She did her best.

“People who’ve never done this think truckers and lone travelers who pick up hitchhikers are all bad, scary monsters,” my mother says. “They watch these murder shows on TV and they think of big ugly men with junk food guts and rusty knives stuck through their belts. They hear about maimed hookers and shallow graves. Most people like to believe the worst, especially if it’s about something they’ve never seen up close.”

The truckers we’ve caught rides with have almost always had big laughs and outrageous stories. They tell us about their backroad breakdowns, their close shaves. The crazies and the lonelies and the loons who cross their paths. Stress and booze, and what booze does when folks are stressed. They know all about lunatics, and even more about angels. A few told us about their encounters with wild animals, late at night on quiet rural roads when the moon was too bright—escaped zoo animals, endangered species. Wonderful and terrible, both. Once or twice a trucker described seeing some mythological beast. Cryptids, one called them. A man-sized creature with moth wings keeping pace above the treetops. A wolf on two legs loping alongside the road. An ape too big to be human, hurling rocks from the shadowed roadside. Stories that froze my pulse before they made me laugh.

Truckers are soft souls. I don’t care what the murder shows say. They keep pictures of their wives and kids taped to the dash, hanging from the rearview. Pretty women and grinning kids forever smiling back at them in sun-bleached colors. We’ve never once caught a ride with a trucker who didn’t share his food, offer a blanket or a jacket. Make a point of switching to a different radio station if we asked, roll the windows up or down as we wanted.

Catching rides with strangers. Way more often than not, those are good times. All the talking, laughing, sharing. The quiet, the caution. The respect that comes in silences. But it can be scary, too. Like when they try to get Momma or me to drink, like when they watch me too close. Often it’s both happy and scary, the way it feels having one hand on your throat while another tickles you. You want it to stop, but you’re still laughing.

When I was eight or ten, we hitchhiked east and a university student stopped for us. I remember it was east, because we were heading toward the coast. I remember his name was Gabriel, and he drove a beaten-up vintage Golf his grandfather had left him. He wore a black leather jacket, it was scuffed and ripped in places. He was going to visit his girlfriend for a few days.

Girlfriend. The way he had said this word: like it was so sweet and special on his tongue. Like he was so proud to have it in his mouth. Later Momma told me that was because he was in love.

“Love makes men softer, safer,” she said. “It changes the things they would and wouldn’t do, almost overnight. It changes them a lot. If love isn’t real, explain that.”

Love. I’ve heard the word before. Said to me. But I didn’t feel any power in it. I guess, I don’t know how to do it right yet.

We drove through the night. Momma and Gabriel talking in low, friendly tones, their voices clouded against the hum of the engine, the tics and jumps in the road. When I lay down on the backseat he put his jacket over me. I remember the smell. Young, musty. Hair oil and sweat, aftershave, spice. Boy smells, but not the bad kind that smother the air and make me feel like I’m burning up inside.

There was the old couple we met when I was seven or maybe nine, when we hitchhiked north and they stopped for us. Man and woman, greyed out but kind. They took us all the way up to the mountains, to a border town somewhere before the woods start. They bought us fudge at one of the local stores. Handmade, they said. Best in the world, they told us. It was. Like burnt honey set into squares, sweet and smooth and so rich I nearly threw up on the drive back out.

We didn’t stay in that town very long.

“But why aren’t you in school, honey?” the old lady said, turning to look back at me.

“She’s home-schooled,” my mother said. Her voice rushed and tight in a way it seldom is, because she was trying to shove something confident in there. She sat up, messing with her seatbelt like there was something wrong or uncomfortable in the way it crossed her. Her smile came and went like a light being flicked on and off.

Later I realized she was angry. “Dumb old ducks telling me how to raise my child,” she said. “Do you know how many kids would kill to go on road trips all the time?”

How many kids would kill? I don’t know.

Heading south, north. To the mountains, away from the sea. Riding high up in trucks with burly drivers who crack rude jokes and complain about their hemorrhoids in ways that make the stories funny.

It’s not so bad. It’s not so bad at all. Like there’s a hand on my throat, but I’m laughing anyway.

“Don’t think about it, babe,” Momma says. “All we have is now, and now is all that matters.”

That hand on my throat. And I’m laughing.