by Alison Stine
“That’s right,” the second man said.
“We wanna know,” Mick said, “what you can do.”
“Do?” Grayson’s voice cracked.
Mick and the other man turned their heads and stared into the back seat. At me.
Everybody looked at me, Dance and Grayson craning back over their shoulders. Grayson looked panicked. Dance, though, had a different look. Resigned. He tightened his mouth. He turned back around in a flash while Grayson was still staring, horrified, at me.
Then they spoke at the same time, both to the men with guns, though Grayson looked at me when he said it. “I can cook,” Grayson said.
“I’m a truck mechanic,” Dance said.
“What?” Mick said.
Grayson started to repeat himself, but the man said, “No. Your friend. What he said.”
“I’m a truck mechanic.”
What an amazing liar, I thought, before I realized he was telling the truth.
“That your job?”
“No,” Dance said. “But it was my daddy’s job, before he got too drunk to do it. And he taught me everything he knows.”
“Works for me,” the second man said.
In the back seat I said nothing.
The men pulled back from the windows, and stepped away from the truck. With their guns, they indicated we should drive through the gate.
“Pull up to the main house,” Mick said. “You’ll know it.”
Dance rolled up the windows and gave a friendly, fake wave. Once we had driven a few feet away, and I could see the men in our rearview, standing in the frozen dirt, admiring the back of my house, Grayson said, “What the hell did you just get us into?”
“I got us out of a whole lot of shit,” Dance said. “They weren’t going to let us leave, not without—” he glanced in the rearview mirror “—something. Something bad.”
“Can you even fix trucks? Do you even know what you’re doing? Was any of that true?”
“It’s all true. My daddy was a mechanic once. I can fix whatever they want.”
“Well, they’re going to want a lot.” Grayson slapped the dashboard. “Why did we come this way?”
Dance looked at me in the mirror. “Wil, are you okay?”
I had felt a jolt go through me when I had seen the men, when they had leaned into the cab and noticed me, the way their voices perked up at the sight of a woman, the way they had paid attention. I had a bullet lodged in my chest, ice in my throat. I felt like I was being strangled. How could I tell Dance that?
“I’m fine,” I said.
We traveled up the driveway through the gate. We saw the usual collection of outbuildings, trailers, and sheds, each more collapsing than the next, planted haphazardly on the hills like tumors growing out of the ground. I was used to seeing cars on blocks, buildings left to rot, even old farmhouses with trees sprouting through their roofs. But some of the cars parked here beyond the gate were burned, bombed out, and vandalized like the cars on the highway. Some of them looked as though they hadn’t been running for years, snow mixing with rust. This place was a junkyard.
Or a graveyard.
The truck bounced over the ruts of the road, knolls of ice along the driveway’s eroding edges. They had not dug ditches here. I looked back at my tiny house, still chained to us. Still intact. The driveway grew more difficult, and the house jostled. I heard the brakes of the truck grind. I straightened around to see where we were going.
Something had been built into the hill ahead of us, the ground hollowed out for what appeared to be a giant, curving swimming pool. But it was drained and empty, the curves swept clean of snow despite the white ruin all around us.
This was where the skaters had slipped off the edge of the world, flying into the sky. The big, band shell–looking thing I had seen from the gate was perched at the top—it was not a band shell at all but a dome, resting above a concrete bowl, deep and wide.
“I think that’s a skate park,” Dance said.
“It’s a theme park in hell,” Grayson said.
“If you own land, you can act like a king. You can build what you want.” I was glued to the window.
We came over the crest of the hill and saw the main house, as the men at the gate said we would: two stories, shingled with rot-black wood. A farmhouse turned flophouse. A sagging front porch hid any people who might be standing there, watching us from the shadows. The roof, sloppy with snow, threatened to collapse onto their heads. An addition onto the house had never been finished, and tar paper flapped, loose in the wind. The pink insulation made that side of the house look naked. It would never be finished now.
Junk was everywhere, tires and beer cans. Fires burned in the barrels scattered around the hills, and in pitted, ashy craters in the ground.
Trash was being nosed about by dogs, which seemed to roam freely, thin-ribbed and snappish, the kind of dogs that were kicked by men. I had grown up with men like these, slapping off their hands and walking through their comments like it was nothing, faint music from a radio down the street. Men who would not think twice about staring at a woman. Men who carried guns and laid them out on tables when they came inside a house.
Men were coming out of the farmhouse now to look at us.
Then I saw a woman, standing in the doorway of a shed, blond-haired and small, a red-faced baby on her hip. I couldn’t see any emotion on the woman’s features, any fear or hope. She was shut down, as blank as the sky, a painting of a woman more than the real thing. Even the baby on her hip was silent.
One man broke away from the group at the farmhouse. He stepped down from the porch, spreading his arms wide. The others moved to let him pass. He had a kind of glow about him. I recognized it. He was in charge.
“Welcome!” the man was saying, loud enough to hear from the truck. He wore a fuzzy hat and a long wool coat. I noticed his gun when he outstretched his arms, causing his coat to flap open. A handgun, holstered at his waist. Other than the coat and hat, he wasn’t dressed right. Not for work, not for the weather. He wore a muscle shirt under his coat. And—I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—he wore flip-flops. “Come out, come out!” he shouted, gesturing to us like we were children.
Dance put the truck into Park. We all looked at each other.
“If we die here—” Grayson said.
“We’re not going to die,” Dance said. “Wil—”
“Nobody say anything about the seeds,” I said. “Or the grow lights. Or me being a grower. Nothing. You hear me?”
“Okay,” Grayson said. “You can trust us.”
I looked at him. I looked at Dance. “We’re going to get out of this,” I said.
I opened the door.
First I noticed the smell, noxious and oily. Burned gasoline in the air. The sour smell of the trash. Fire popped in one of the barrels. I thought I heard a baby crying.
“Heard you got some skills,” the man said. “My boys radioed ahead.”
“Your phones work?” Dance couldn’t keep the hopefulness from his voice.
“Walkie-talkies,” the man said. “We’re old-school here. Well, welcome, welcome. I’m Jake. And this is my utopia.” He indicated the unfinished house, the cars, the sheds.
Someone had pulled a TV out onto the patch of dirt in front of the farmhouse. A tractor tire was positioned before it, like a La-Z-Boy, surrounded by empty cans. An extension cord, patched with tape, snaked back into the house.
“What is this place?” Dance asked.
“Paradise,” Jake said. “Skating, shooting, drinking, and babes. What more do you want?”
“How long have you all been out here?”
“Oh, we been here forever. But lately—” he winked “—it’s gotten real interesting.”
“They said you’ve got some trucks that need work?”
“Do I!”
He gestured around the dirty yard.
“All these vehicles—and you don’t have a mechanic?”
“He died,” a thin man in a trucker cap said, then spat.
Grayson was silent, shifting on his bad leg. He had his hands deep in his pockets, and his head down, turned away from the men. He was hanging by the back of the truck with me, trying to hide. But there was no hiding.
Jake saw him. “Well, you’re no good.”
“I can cook,” Grayson said.
“Of course you can. Why didn’t they just shoot you?”
Grayson flinched, but Jake strode right on past him and came up to me. To his credit, Grayson didn’t move. He stayed standing in front of me, trying to block me with his hunched shoulders. But he couldn’t, of course. Jake would find a woman, find a weakness, a mile away. He stopped before me. He stared at me strangely.
“And you?” Jake said to me. “You dance?”
“Dance?” I thought of the gun in the truck. I thought of how fast I could run. Jake looked me up and down. His face was so tanned it looked stamped. There was a scar under his eye, a white line I recognized as a knife scar. He wasn’t much taller than me, but his chest and arms looked bulky and muscular. His neck was veined. He would be strong.
“How many trucks do I have to fix,” Dance said loudly, “to get us back on the road?”
Jake turned away from me. When he broke his gaze, I realized I had been holding my breath. I tried to recall his face: the soft spots, the weak spots, the places I might break with my fist. His eyes were small. His nose had already been broken once or twice. He was missing a couple of teeth.
“Don’t know,” Jake said. “Depends on how good you fix them.”
“Let’s get started, then.”
“All right. I like a man with initiative. Follow me. You.” He pointed at Grayson. “Park your dollhouse behind the main house. Girl ... What was your name again, darling?”
“Sarah,” I said.
“Sarah.” He repeated it, staring at me as if he did not believe me. “Right. Sarah, you go along with Jamey now. You’ll probably want some girl talk, after being with men for so long.”
The woman with the baby on her hip, the silent blonde, flicked a look at me, then deliberately turned and went back into the shed without saying a word. I got the feeling she didn’t want me to follow. Jake started to walk up to the main house, his flip-flops slipping in the snow. All the men with the guns were turning away, going back into the farmhouse. It was too cold to stand out here talking.
Dance opened the truck door. “They’re separating us on purpose.”
“What do we do?” Grayson said.
“There’s a gun in the truck,” I whispered. “It’s not loaded. In a hole in the cushion of the driver’s seat.”
“Jesus,” Grayson said.
“Let’s get a move on!” Jake said.
“I can’t take a gun.”
“There’s a knife in the glove box, then. Stick it in your cast when you move the truck.”
“Hello!” Jake called from the porch. Somehow he had already gotten a beer in his hand.
“We can’t leave Wil without a weapon,” Grayson said.
“Less talking, more working!” Jake said. At a signal from Jake, the man in the trucker hat started toward us, hunting rifle slung in his arms.
“I have a knife on me,” Dance said quickly. “Take it, Wil.”
“They’re looking at us,” I said. “I can’t take it now.”
“Here,” Dance said. Before I knew what was happening, he had grabbed me around the waist and pulled me toward him. He kissed me, hard and cold. His beard pricked and I felt his hands at my hip, searching.
But I wore coveralls; there was no waist, no way to pass a weapon to me. Men said those things were like a chastity belt. Finally, he tucked something colder than his fingers into my pocket. A knife.
“Damn, boy,” Jake said.
“If you touch me again without asking,” I whispered to Dance, “I’ll kill you. Even if the world ends.”
“Just saying goodbye to my girl,” Dance said loudly.
The man with the hunting rifle spat.
8
I had lost my virginity to get it over with. I was eighteen; it felt past time. Avoiding the boys in town and their constant requests for weed meant I had missed out on a lot of what other girls went through: being cornered at parties, being led upstairs, giving in. That was how girls talked about it. I just got tired. It just seemed easier.
One of the men who bought from Lobo was younger. He seemed different somehow. I got the impression that he had been dragged along, that the price of the ride he needed from his friends or his daddy was a stopover here at our farm, and a long, long wait while the others smoked.
Or maybe I just wanted him to be different.
I first saw him getting out of a truck. He had been sitting in the back with a horde of men. The others spit, adjusted their jeans when they hopped down from the truck bed, but he didn’t. And when he got back into the truck a few hours later, he smiled at me, gave a little wave. I guess that was enough, that was as good as I might find in the holler.
The next time he came over, I watched him from the yard where I was weeding. It was summer then. We did things like that, knelt in the earth and pulled things from it, things that had grown green and warm. Too many things had grown, so many that we could be choosy about what we kept and what we uprooted to toss and rot in a pile; we could be careless. He must have noticed me, too. When the teal truck, dented with dings, rolled to a stop in front of the farmhouse in a show of dust and gravel, he came over to me. The others went inside.
“Too hot to do that in the daytime, huh?” he said, nodding at my pile of weeds.
Twilight gave everything a fluid outline: the weeds; my arms; the man’s arms in his T-shirt, lined with hair. It was like we were being rubbed away. He had long, straggly brown hair, home-cut from a pocketknife, and a beard that was red.
“Yeah,” I said. “Too hot to do much of anything.”
It must have been June. The tomatoes were stalky and fragrant but still green and hard. He unscrewed the lid and took a swig from a plastic bottle of water. Nobody around here drank just water, but that’s what it was.
I had a window AC unit at my shack then. Maybe that’s what I used to get him there, the lure of the cool chemical air. I couldn’t remember. Probably I didn’t need to use or say much of anything. It was like the girls always said: men fell into bed with you. It was harder, much harder, to resist than to give in.
I didn’t have to do much of anything. He didn’t want me to. He wanted to do things to me. But what was I supposed to do, what were we supposed to talk about while I was just lying there, naked from the waist down, and he was kneeling over me in my loft. You just get into it, girls in the holler said. You just let your body take over. But mine didn’t.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said.
What did that mean? I felt like he meant that I was skinny. I felt like he meant that I was young, which was nothing to do with me. Just an accident that I was in the middle of.
The AC blasted, and my skin felt pickled. Through the window in the loft I could see the plane trees waving in a new breeze. The sun was drowning behind them, almost down.
I looked up at the ceiling. “Sorry, I think I put Bag Balm on my knees. They were really dry. Sorry if it tastes weird.” But he wasn’t at my knees.
“Are you kidding me?” His voice had the awe of weed, the hush of amazement at the cosmos, at the sound of my name. He was out of himself, brought down to his knees by my nakedness, and I should have realized some power there, but I didn’t. I just wanted it over with.
Soon, it was.
It didn’t hurt, like girls said it would, but it also didn’t feel like anything. Maybe because he kept falling out. He w
as nervous. He kept saying that: I’m so nervous. And I had to comfort him, telling him it didn’t matter, and it didn’t, but not for the reasons I pretended.
A few nights later we tried again. It hurt this time. He was ready. This was what the girls spoke of, trading cigarettes in the bathroom of the roller rink we would be banned from. Sharp, rending, tearing pain. Stabs, like fishhooks in my body. I felt like a bedsheet being torn, ripped into sections. There was a burning, and my stomach felt tight.
The pain came from where I imagined my soul might be, if I believed I had a soul: my center, that spot where I felt a heartbeat sometimes. Girls might tattoo a circlet of flowers or stars there, a landing pad for the tongue. The pain felt like I was being pulled to the ceiling—and I decided to stay there.
After that night, Lobo wouldn’t sell to the man’s daddy or his friends. One of the other men must have said something, or maybe the red-bearded man told them: how I had led him to my loft with the flowered sheets and the pink quilt my mama had made for me, how I had practically begged for it, how I hadn’t bled or cried.
Somebody said something. Somebody told. After that night, things changed.
Some of Lobo’s customers would stop by the lower field on their trip home and try the door of my shack, to see if maybe I had something to sell or give them, too. After the first surprise visit—a heavy-bellied pothead stumbling into my room, already taking off his belt; he was too stoned and drunk to walk straight, and he went out the door hard when I kicked him, surprise bubbling up like vomit on his face—I learned to lock the door. I would brace whatever I had against it: a bookshelf, cords of wood. I used bags of potting soil as sandbags. I stopped sleeping well.
I didn’t see the red-bearded man again, but I didn’t expect to. I wouldn’t sleep with another man who came to the farm, nobody who knew Lobo, nobody who might get my mama high. There were a couple of men in town: one from the feed store, one at the biker bar the boys from high school were too tired to go to now after their shifts, too worn out from children they didn’t know not to have. For those men, I took off my clothes in trucks—those pieces I needed to take off—slipping out of one leg of my jeans but not the other, leaving my shirt on but raised. I could wiggle out of my bra without taking off my top. The windows steamed, and the men cried out, and I felt the same thing, the same two things: pain and nothingness, twined together.