Hick - Andrea Portes [18]
I grab the Tupperware and thank God and all twelve apostles for the marshmallow Jell-O, mashed potatoes and fancy bread with no slices. I say a prayer that this’ll mark a brand new phase of my life, of my dad and Miss Crisp and rump roast with carrots or peas, you take your pick.
I make a promise to the ceiling and the upstairs beyond that I will do whatever it takes, be good and never swear, if this could be my new day dawning, with corn on the cob and pumpkin pie and my dad laughing silly up the stairs. I won’t lie or cheat or swear or steal, I promise.
But the schoolteacher never comes back. She never comes back and never says another word about two kinds of pie or rump roast or kisses on the porch that sweep you off your feet.
But she does one nice thing that I’ll never talk back to. From that day on, every morning, when I look in my desk, there it is. it’s a tiny little brown paper bag and inside is grapes and a grainy kind of food, God knows what, and not one but two, two Fred Flint-stone vitamins for dessert. that’s the candy part.
And I don’t know if it’s the way my daddy swept her off her feet or the way I can’t seem to get an F, but that little schoolteacher, with skin the color of paper, takes me back from being the full bad person I’m meant to be. She puts a light on in the attic and keeps it on, just barely.
But, boy, you should’ve seen her blush. That paper turned red all right.
Once I get to Vegas I’m gonna find someone to make my legs dangle.
EIGHT
Sometime deep into the night I am awakened from my grassy slumber by the sound of something streaming steadily beside me, up a ways in the ditch. I sit up and squint blindly into the dark. Much to my surprise or fear or wondering if it’s just a late night vision, I see a woman there, standing upright in the moonlight. Her skirt is jacked up above her hips and her legs spread, pissing straight down like a man, miraculous in her accuracy. Her high heels are dug into the dirt and she seems, at that moment, to be some kind of superhero, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, or at least to stand straight upright and piss boy-style.
She’s pretty, not so much from some glossy, made-up, magazine-like imitation but in that way that has something to do with knowing or feeling or having been up to no good. Like trouble. She has that same blond Doris Day flip like my mama, only with a little more roots and a lot more hairspray. She doesn’t see me. She just stands there pissing casual over the night.
I watch her with a weird little thrill that she doesn’t see me but I see her, till I remember my predicament and have a vision of her driving away, leaving me behind, without a trace. And that would not do.
“Jesus, lady, you trying to piss on my head?”
She starts, not exactly a jump, but I know I surprised her, which seems not easy to do, judging from the look on her face when she spots me in the dirt. She sighs through her lips, almost like a pout and a sigh met on the dance floor and went for a whirl.
“Holy fucker, kid, you could give someone a heart attack yelping out from the ditch like that.”
“That was not a yelp, and anyways, you bout pissed on my head.” “Sorry, I didn’t see ya.” She susses me out. “What the hell ya doing out here anyways? You oughta be in bed.”
“I am in bed.”
“You some kinda runaway or something?”
She takes a cigarette out of her purse and lights it, throwing the match down and squishing it into the ground with the front of her heel. I take note that, within her peeing extravaganza, she didn’t seem to bother with any kind of panties.
“How can you pee standing up like that?”
“Whattaya mean?”
“I mean, don’t you have to squat a little? I always have to squat a little.”
“Naw. Not if you’re smart. You just find where the hill goes down, move your feet out the way and shoot.”
After that, we just sort of