Hick - Andrea Portes [72]
FORTY
Colorado is split in two pieces.
On one side Colorado is made of piney passes through snow-capped mountains with blond folks made of smiles and exercise and the other half is made of yellow weeds, grumpy clerks and nothing on the ground but a gray tree, one for each acre. it’s like God himself put Miracle-Gro on one side of the state and it bloomed up mountains and valleys and crested buttes with wildflowers and then he looked at the rest of the state, looked at his watch, shrugged and took a nap.
Beau drives a giant red truck from the Fifties, rounded off and old-fashioned, like something you’d see in a Coke commercial. He’s got some kind of engine in it made of horses, cause he can still get ahead of you, even through Monarch Pass.
He doesn’t talk while he drives. He just leaves it to me to look around and entertain myself. You could just sit here and look at the road for hours and pick up thought after thought, like pebbles on the riverbank, pick one up, put it back, pick that one up, throw it back, for hours. I got one stirring up I’m about to throw back.
This one’s about my mama and all the late nights and all the jingle-jangle of the wind- chimes slamming into the screen door at four in the morning, giggling silly on the porch. When I think about all the flirty looks at the boys working at the service station or the Hy-Vee or the Alibi . . . the shamey, desperate shaking of the hips on the way out the Piggly Wiggly . . . I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that didn’t fill up somewhere near the front of my cheeks with shame and blushing and redness. I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t a part of me that didn’t have at the bottom of it the most deep-seated, unavoidable, scared-to-smithereens feeling of dread that, one day, that is gonna be me. That somehow, I’m designated by fate to become all of the things that make me cringe and shiver and look away.
And you could be one of those people that sit around, sipping lemonade on the porch, saying right or wrong, yes or no, black or white, and pointing fingers, making grandiose statements about the way of the world, the way to heaven and the way to tuck in your shirt on a Sunday morning. You could be. But maybe you could look at it like this, maybe you could see it like maybe something happened somewhere along the way, something mean and unforgiving, like watching your baby boy turn to ice or getting knocked to the ground or getting tied up to the bedpost for three days straight.
And maybe it wasn’t just one thing but a whole lot of little things, strewn together, like oil stains on the asphalt, telling the story of some broken-down beat-up old car, sputtering and coughing, making its way slowly, hopelessly, over the blacktop and into the horizon.
And you could say that maybe even if some kind old stranger came out from the middle of nowhere and gave you a shiny new engine, new pistons and a whole new set of tires, fixed the air conditioning and gave you a last-minute Turtle Wax car wash, that even so, even though now you’re brand-spanking new and ready to take on the world with a smile, just the memory of that beat-up old broken-down old time would make you, inside, just a little different from those other brand-new shiny swanky cars, passing you on the road. They might look like you, sound like you, drive like you, but somehow, deep down, they would never be like you. And with this kind of back of the mind, bottom of the belly knowledge, you just might not be able to drive right. You see what I mean? You just might not be able to drive smooth.
And I wonder if now I get to be that beat-up old broken-down car, no matter how shiny and new you make me. I wonder what you can do to me, how