Hick - Andrea Portes [68]
And even here, with two dull red stripes leading their way across the floor, outside the doorway, in a cabin bathed with blood and whiskey, in the piney woods, I know it’s not as bad, it never was as bad, as it was in my head, fearing it.
Beau sits next to me on the bed. The wind blows down from the north, the sky turning orange and the moon hanging its head over the trees, turning the day in. He sighs and picks me up like a sack of potatoes, throwing me over his back, walking out the door, down the stairs, across the gravel, and not looking back, not even bothering to close the door behind us.
He’s three times my size, a different species, hauling me over his back to God knows where with the cabin growing smaller behind and the late afternoon in front, turning the forest red and gold.
THIRTY–SIX
Two acres down the path Beau’s dog, Karl, comes flopping up to meet us. He’s a big dog, heavier than me, with two or three teeth left, the kind of sharp German dog that’s smarter than most Yankees. I’m grateful for him, sick of silence. Used to be a silence meant something wrong, but not to Beau. To him it’s like air, plain and simple, something you breathe in and breathe out, better listen to. it’s the words that cause all the trouble.
There’s a clearing up the path and the sound of running water. Beau sets me down by the side of the creek.
“Wait here.”
He stalks off, pointing at Karl to stay behind. Karl sits up straight, keeping guard. He looks at me, expectant. This is a dog that could rip your throat out or kill a goat, but he’s on duty now, following orders. He looks around and decides to make a perimeter around the creek, marking out a circle, scaring off a bird.
Beau comes back with a bar of soap, a washcloth, a towel and an old-fashioned dress. He lays them on a log next to the creek and heads back up the path.
Something in me starts to panic. I cannot start again. I cannot start all over again, with Glenda floated up in the forest and Eddie face down in the floor.
“You coming back?”
He’s nearly out of the clearing and in the brush when he turns around.
“Pardon?”
“I said are you coming back?”
“Well, you don’t expect me to just stand here and watch, do you?”
I hadn’t realized that I’d reached a point where normal expectations seemed strange and distant, like French to an American.
“I guess not.”
“Just holler out when you’re done, I’ll be right over here.”
I dip my toe into the creekbed and look around. it’s sludgy between my toes but the water is see-through crisp, and before I know it I’m halfway in, washing off the day and the night before that and the night before that. It isn’t until I get to the part between my legs that my hand starts to shake. I forgot about that part. I put the lid on it somewhere outside of Devil’s Slide and now, here, halfway up in the glistening water with the leaves turning red, it’s starting to unscrew.
I don’t notice when my hands shaking turns into my whole body trembling, just as I don’t notice when my feet give way beneath me and there’s a splash and Karl barking and the water comes up around me and now I’m underneath. Now I’m underneath and maybe this is where I was supposed to be all along, with the current coming up around me and the twigs and Glenda beckoning me from the slippery rocks.
The green blue water lays itself out in sharp prisms, slices off the sun, cutting triangles this way and that, turning the creek into crystals, making heaven out of slippery rocks, below the churning of what you never want to talk about or think about again.
If I could stay down deep under the slithery prism rocks, I could stop time from turning and make believe I’d never been. If I could stay down deep, beneath the lost sage tumbling, I could bury that night by the side of the road. If I could stay down deep, I could drift off underneath the rapids and no one would ever know about what happened between my legs with the red coming out and getting two black eyes and a Hot Stuff necklace.
If I could tear my skin off and send it down the river,