by Lulu Pratt
Dust blew past our window, further covering the beaten-up rustbucket in a layer of pale brown. I grimaced as sand smashed against the glass.
“Are you sure your cousin is really gonna want this car?” I asked.
She shrugged. “He’s sixteen. He’ll take anything with wheels and an aux cord. I think he said at one point that he wanted to use it for spare parts. Who knows. And he commented on my last Instagram of our trip that he liked how we were giving your car ‘character.’”
“That sounds pretentious.”
“Yeah, he’s going through his asshole phase,” she sighed. “Even though he liked my post, he DM’d me and said that making a private Instagram to chronicle our road trip was, and I quote, ‘tacky.’”
Damn, kids these days really were little shits. Back in my day — oh, never mind. I’m only twenty-one. Said ‘kids’ are all of five years younger than me. Still, the joy of lauding my seniority over teens had to be indulged in before I reached the point in my life where I no longer wanted to disclose my age.
“But it’s funny,” I argued. “Our trip, it’s not just like ‘la-la-la, here I am wearing a cute dress and looking hot around some cactuses.’ We’re giving the people humor.”
See, this wasn’t just any road trip from east to west coast. Jo-Beth and I, dirty-minded girls that we are, had decided to spice things up by staying every night in a town with a naughty name. To wit — Intercourse. Spread Eagle. Horneytown. The Fingers. We stopped in front of each town sign, striking a funny pose and taking a picture. We’d garnered an audience of about three friends and Jo-Beth’s cousin, but we didn’t care. The account was for us and us alone, to remember some of the best times of our lives. And there had been sweet adventures already — karaoke with strangers, delicious crawfish, mad baths in the woods. It felt like I’d lived a lifetime in the span of one summer, the last real summer I’d ever get to enjoy, because as my dad was so fond of telling me, adults don’t have real summers. They work.
Now wasn’t the time to think about that because warm rays were filling our sun roof, and everything was groovy, baby, even if we were planning on sleeping in the car that night as there was no motel in town.
“Rough and Ready, here we come,” I whistled to the tune of “California, Here I Come.” Which was appropriate, given that Rough and Ready was a little town situated in the heartland of Cali.
“The attractions of Rough and Ready are as follows,” Jo-Beth began. A few miles out of each town, we’d developed a tradition – whoever was in the passenger seat pulled out the beaten-up map that we had scrawled over with care, its wrinkles containing fresh inked guides to the tourist traps of each town. Normally, I prefer to go further off the beaten path, but as you can’t get much farther off the path than a place like Rough and Ready, we’d both decided it was for the best if, on this trip, we stuck to the town-sanctioned sights. After going through our list, we chose which activities still sounded like fun, and which were too hacky to bother with.
Jo-Beth read off the points of interest we’d located. “‘Notes: Mysterious alien light show in the hills. Go after midnight and before two. Bring beer and snacks.’”
“Okay, we’re totally doing that,” I rejoined. “I wanna see some spooky shit.”
“Are you gonna make me hold your hand like you do in scary movies?”
I blushed. “Uh-huh.”
Jo-Beth cackled, knowing me all too well. “You’re such a chicken, but we already knew that, so back to the list. There are only two on here. Second one is, ‘Abandoned building on edge of town, alleged by locals to have been a former brothel.’”
My brows shot up. “No way. In this little Podunk Hollow place?” I swept my arm across the windshield, through which we could see whole packs of tumbleweeds. The town probably had more tumbleweeds than people.
“That’s what it says here,” Jo-Beth replied, tapping the furrowed page. “Maybe it was for, like, gold diggers. Like, the real kind, the ones who dug gold.”
“Sounds sexy.”
“More like haunted.”
“Sexy and haunted can coexist,” I argued.
“Get your mind out of the gutter, Phoebe,” she joked, playfully slapping me on the wrist.
My friend was right. Of course, she was just messing around, but in truth, I did need to focus on something else.
Because despite my better angels, I’m a little bit boy crazy. There’s plenty of other crazy about me, but the ‘boy’ one sticks out. I wasn’t always like this. In fact, as a kid, I couldn’t have given two shits about how my male cohorts spent their time on the playground. I was content to read fantasy novels in the corner and munch on Ritz crackers. Is it okay to be twenty-one and still miss recess?
This — this being crackers, corners, and celibacy — all changed when I went to college. I know, you’re waiting for me to say that some frat dude with a snapback and a kegger broke my heart and I sobbed for three days and then emerged a hardened, hornier version of myself. And sure, there have been a few frat dudes here and there. But in reality, the clincher was all those damn classes on Freud.
I’m a psych major, and for whatever reason, we’re required to talk about Freud pretty much every day for our first year of college. Yes, I’m aware he basically founded the field I’m going into, but then again, all his “clinical findings” have been widely disproven by the modern experts. I’m just saying, maybe we could stand to talk less about a dead white guy who got shit wrong.
But back to my point. We started getting so into talk of sexuality and urges and desires and it was like somebody turned on my vagina’s faucet and never quite closed it. Understanding my body in a logical way helped me experience it in a physical, tangible way. Plus, listening to thirty-something male teachers in tweed jackets lecture you on penis envy is just hot. I don’t make the rules. In the intervening years, I went through so many stages of lust and acquisition, had the best — and worst — sex and generally self-actualized.
Never mind that none of said sexual encounters had manifested into full-blown relationships. I reasoned that, as a psych major, I knew better than to believe in anything so impractical as love. Those were chemicals and societal expectations working under pressure to transform to fluid humans into a solid relationship. The phase shift was painful and pointless, and both people ended up the worse for it.
Ahem. Anyways, that’s how Jo-Beth and I had ended up friends early on — through boy-craziness. Or, in her case, girl-craziness. In her spare time, when she wasn’t busy learning how to save the planet, she used her coding skills — where’d she get those skills? I’ve never learned — to help create a dating app for college campuses for the LGBT+ communities.
Jo-Beth leaned her head against the passenger window and sighed, her breath clouding the glass.
“I wish I didn’t have to work,” she muttered, for the umpteenth time.
My hand found her shoulder and I gave it a little squeeze. “Sorry, bud.”
“Being a physics major sucks.”
“Hey, you had to go and be all super-duper smart and shit. That’s on you.”
She smiled, and Jo-Beth was back to her usual sunny self. We’d both been grinding hard during the school year — hence the much-needed road trip — but as a physics major, Jo-Beth was putting in more hours than I was convinced existed in a day. She even had to work during our trip in preparation for the upcoming fall quarter, making her feel equal parts angry at her course load and guilty for abandoning me during much of the time we weren’t driving.
I don’t mean to psychoanalyze my friend. It’s just a force of habit, a habit I’m trying to break.
She tossed her blonde locks back and scooted further down into the seat, kicking her feet up on the dashboard.
“We’re gonna be seniors,” she said, an observation she’d made many times on the trip, each utterance delivered with different inflections an emotion. Fear, excitement, anxiety.
“Bridgeport’s been a hell of a ride,” I agreed. �
��I remember the day I got in.”
“Same. I got the card that said ‘Welcome to Bridgeport University’ and it was like my whole life changed in a split second. And now it’s all gonna be over.”
I turned to look at her. “The important stuff isn’t over. Like our friendship. That’s not a four-year thing, that’s a forever thing.”
Ever avoiding emotional intimacy, she replied, “If you don’t put your eyes back on the road, we’re not gonna make it to four years, or even four more minutes.”
Laughing, I shifted my stare from Jo-Beth to the road.
Only I didn’t shift quite fast enough.
What I now know to be a damn tumbleweed rolled into my view. I, mistaking it for a small defenseless desert animal, veered right. Jo-Beth screamed, I screamed, the car screeched, the dust churned.
And just like that, airbags were filling up the cabin and black smoke was coming from the crevices of the vehicle. Technically speaking, the airbags didn’t really fill anything — they were so deflated from twenty years of being cramped up that they just kind of hissed out like dejected balloons.
But airbag efficacy aside, we’d crashed into a tall, rusted metal pole.
For a moment, we sat there, stunned. We’d crashed the car only one stop from our final destination. What was this frickin’ pole doing in the middle of the desert?
“Are you okay?” I managed to ask my friend, breath coming heavy in my throat.
Jo-Beth shook the dust out of her hair. “Yeah, I’m okay. You okay?”
“Yeah. Shit.”
I shifted forward in my seat until I could tilt my chin up and look through the glass at our iceberg, the thing that had sunk us.
Well, that just figured.
At the top of the pole, in brick red and dull blue, with burnt-out bulbs rimming the edges, sat a sign.
It read, “Welcome to Rough and Ready.”
CHAPTER 2
Carter
A DROP OF oil splashed onto my face.
“Shi… shoot,” I muttered, tongue jamming between my teeth as I took a wrench to the source of the leak.
“What’d you say, Daddy?”
“Nothing, kiddo.” Learning not to swear around your kid takes years of practice and the patience of a saint. “Could ya hand me that flashlight?”
“Mm-hmm!”
The clop of Henry’s cowboy boots echoed through the high-ceilinged repair shop, reverberating off the cement walls. The boots were still a little big on him, but I figured that just left him with room to grow. In the meantime, I made him wear the boots with two pairs of socks so that they were snug as a bug.
“Here,” he said, his chubby fingers passing me the flashlight beneath the car.
I caught hold of his hand and planted a raspberry on his outstretched palm. He giggled and squirmed, and though I couldn’t see his face from my vantage, I could picture it — cheeks red, mouth full of baby teeth stretched into a grin, that asymmetrical dimple emerging like a secreted gem.
Shining the light on the engine, I sighed again. This old beauty — Cici, as Henry and I had dubbed her — refused to run.
We’d found Cici on the side of a highway on our way to Henry’s annual physical. Our little village didn’t have a doctor in residence, so to get complete workups, we had made a morning out of it.
This past month, the day after Henry’s sixth birthday, we were driving back along a road that was known only to the locals, and much to my surprise, I spotted an old race car just abandoned on the side of the road. Didn’t seem like there’d been an accident and the license plates had been removed. The body was in good shape. It was as if the universe had just plopped a gift into my lap.
Well, kind of. Cici needed lots of work. Turned out her motor was shot, she had a punctured hose or two, and the steering was a mess. But I figured that maybe she’d be a good project for me and Henry and I’d made a lot of headway on Cici. Daddy-son bonding, y’know? Besides, it’s not like my regular job as a car repair guy took up much time. We saw about one vehicle every other day, max, leaving me with plenty of time to soup Cici up.
Anyways, Henry had been learning plenty from our venture, the point of which had been to teach him an honest day’s work. Only a month on and he could name parts of an engine and fetch me all the different tools I asked for. I even let him get under the car with me, so long as he held onto my hand and squeezed it if he got nervous.
“I’m hungry,” Henry complained, one booted foot stomping on the ground.
“Me too, kid,” I said and slid out from underneath Cici. “Sandwich time?”
He nodded, his blond curls bobbing. “Yeah.”
I stood up with a groan, wiping the oil on my jeans and dragging a hand through the thin layer of sweat on my forehead.
“Uppy, uppy!” he crowed.
I obliged, kneeling down so that Henry could clamber on my back and intertwine his limbs through mine. Together, we trotted to the desk in the east corner, where I snatched up our twin salami sandwiches and baby carrots. For the record, I can cook. It’s not like a salami sandwich is the height of my culinary expertise. But when you’re a single parent, sometimes a salami sandwich is just the best you can manage for lunch.
Henry still fastened to my back, I walked outside to where I’d set up a small white painted iron table and two chairs, creating a lunch nook for us. It’d been the first adjustment I’d made to Big Bob’s shop, saying that since I was homeschooling Henry, the place would need to be more kid-friendly. In classic form, Big Bob’d shrugged and told me to do ‘whatever the fuck I wanted’ because it was ‘no skin off his arse.’ Much to my dismay, he still talked like that around my boy, who I suspected was already picking up on the language.
My son dropped off my back, hitting the ground nimbly and darting into his chair. He’ll be an athlete someday, I thought, though I hoped I could steer him in the direction of something safer, like engineering or accounting.
Sometimes I looked at Henry and was overwhelmed by all the dreams I had for him, the hopes that I’d pinned on his small head. My son deserved the world, and dammit, I’d give it to him.
Henry snatched the sandwich from my hand, and together, we tore into our lunch.
“Today,” I said, gulping down a bite of bread, “we’re doing presidents.”
He rolled his eyes, a gesture he’d only picked up recently, probably from Charlie, the cook at the diner Henry and I went to exactly three times a week. We couldn’t afford a fourth visit.
“George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jef-fee-son,” he recited confidently. “And then…”
Henry trailed off and looked at me, unsure. “Mon-woe?” he questioned, his brow scrunching up and the ‘r’ getting lost somewhere in the mix.
“James Madison,” I corrected. “But hey, you’re doing great.”
Henry beamed with pride. “I know more than you do.”
“That’s probably true,” I laughed.
Traditionally, you’re supposed to homeschool a kid by setting aside hours of the day for their studies. But I worked a full-time job, and didn’t have a partner to help. I twinged again at this thought, one that never failed to make me sick to my stomach. I knew, in my heart that Henry was infinitely better off without that woman in the picture, but that didn’t help quell my constant worry that I was letting him down.
He was six. Technically, he should’ve started kindergarten last year, should be starting regular school this year, in just a few weeks or so. But there was no state-ran school in Rough and Ready, and certainly no ‘preschool prep’ school. Just a few dirt roads, couple of shops and miles of cactuses.
I had decided to homeschool Henry for the time being. I was willing to revisit my decision in a few years, but I wanted him nearby and the long bus ride to and from the nearest school meant that he would have been on the bus for at least an hour each way, which was a long time for a six-year-old boy.
But what Rough and Ready lacked in educational opportunities for a single-p
arent family, it made up for in anonymity. I was disconnected from the outside world. Cable companies didn’t bother to come out here, especially the edge of town, where you could not see or hear your neighbor. It wasn’t worth their time or money to set up decent Wi-Fi. The only way to get on the internet was to go to the public library in the next town over. And the library there was as simple as could be. You were pretty much limited to the classics, such as Shakespeare or grocery store romance novels. Needless to say, I was only reading Henry the former.
When we’d escaped to the town a few years back, I thought I’d feel lonely. I was abandoning all my family and friends for a small scratch of land in the middle of nowhere and the dim hope that my son and I could get the fresh start we so desperately needed. Instead, it was the first time I hadn’t felt alone in years. There was no terror breathing down my neck, no monster who went bump in the night. Just me and my kid — the way I liked it.
Sure, there hadn’t been any new women, either, but I’d sworn off that whole business years back. Women are great, don’t get me wrong, they’re just not great for me. It’s better for everyone, but especially Henry, if I steer clear of the opposite sex. The thought of him once again getting embroiled in my romantic mess… it makes every muscle in my body clench. I’d lay down before a four-wheeler and let it drive over my naked flesh before I’d put Henry in harm’s way once more.
So, no girls, unless you count the old ladies who have ranches near town, and the ones who work at or run the few shops around. There aren’t many guys, neither — me, Henry, my boss Big Bob and a couple other stragglers. Nothing much to write home about. It’s quiet, sure. But I like the quiet. Quiet ain’t so bad when you’ve had plenty of loud.
“I can’t remember, Dad. Who’s next?” Henry asked, hand tugging at my sleeve and pulling me out of my reverie. Kids are good at that — keeping you grounded when all you wanna do is float away.