by Kent, Julia
A few deep breaths didn’t calm me down. Looking at the outside of Darla’s little hovel did. In stark daylight it all looked worse. There was no real grass to speak of on the side of her house and the trailer was actually three or four different tones of a dull gray on the outside, with sections of the aluminum siding dented as if someone had kicked it all around the side, the holes about two feet off the ground, divots in the metal.
A chicken, a little scrawny creature with red and brown feathers, cackled by. Probably the same one that was chased by a three-legged kitten earlier. Just standing here, letting the breeze float across my angry skin, my hair heavy against my scalp, the trailer park coming to life with people walking by and peering at me in confusion – I took it all in.
My life on the iPhone – all the contacts, the phone calls, the text messages, the data plan where I downloaded and uploaded an electronic existence – that wasn’t real. It had seemed real for so long, back home and at school, that I found myself surprised by how little I cared about all the electronic messages.
What was real right now was in front of my face, some sort of existential creation that I had conjured in a peyote haze. Whatever had gotten me from Massachusetts to Ohio, buck naked with a guitar and a hat, was more powerful than any edict my mother could hand down, stronger than any song I could sing at some college bar in some fake, plastic suburb of the fake, plastic region of the fake, plastic life that had been carved out for me.
A deep wellspring of hunger for more, for dirt, for Guinea hens and dented siding, and sunlight, and wind and self possession built up in me like bile stuck in the back of my throat. As I walked back to the shed I saw Joe’s car. The car I was supposed to get in in a few minutes and be carried back to my mother, back to finals week, back to my summer internship, and back to that basement sanctuary where, thirty-six hours ago, something deep in me had stripped down to the marrow and functioned on a completely different level, escape my only goal.
Going back right now would be admitting defeat, to say that the impulse that had brought me here was irrational, that it was the outlier, that it was abnormal. What if that was wrong? What if everything I’d been taught, everything I’d been told, everything that I had been was abnormal and this…this turned out to be the truth?
I made my way carefully into the trailer, needing a two-minute shower to cleanse my body and my thoughts. Cathy wasn’t at the table, which was a relief. Gingerly, I walked down the little hallway into the bathroom, where a quick shower got me back to baseline, even if it didn’t really diffuse my anger. Walking out into the door yard, the blinding light of the sun reflected my inner blinding rage.
As if my hands were possessed by the same spirit that made me find my way here, something outside of me and yet deeply guided by an inner core that knew exactly what it was doing, I popped Joe’s hood and started to randomly pull little tubes and wires, yanking not with abandon but with a precision that belied my ignorance about cars. I carefully tucked the little tubes and wires in so that it wouldn’t be obvious what I’d just done and then gently closed the latch.
If I was right, I had just bought myself a few more hours here, my hands doing the dirty work of my inner soul. That I needed to steal a few hours by destroying the one method home pinged through my mind like a bullet ricocheting in an echo chamber.
Joe shouted, “Hey, Trevor! Come on!”
A grin tickled my lips but I bit it back. My hands flexed into deep fists that made the small muscles around my knuckles ache. I’m coming alright, I thought, but on my terms.
Joe
Trevor saved me from my own thoughts by bounding into this whatever-you-call-it…this purple shed…and saying, “That was unpleasant.”
“What was that?” Darla said, wiping one tear out of her right eye.
He ignored her, which I thought was a little brutal, and just looked at me. “I just talked to my mom. She hates me.”
“No surprise.”
“She hates you, too.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. She says you were lying to her all night.”
“I was lying to her all night.” Darla blinked hard, over and over, the way you do when you’re struggling to contain emotions that are so strong you don’t want to display them and be vulnerable. She might consider me a pretentious asshole from Massachusetts but that didn’t mean I couldn’t understand how hard it was to put up a good front when your heart told you to do anything but.
“Yeah, she figured that out.”
“No shit, of course they figured it out, Trevor. They always figure it out and we just lie because that’s what we do and they scream at us because that’s what they do.”
“Thanks for taking the heat.”
“You’re welcome. Now get your ass in the car and let’s go home.” A sympathetic part of me wanted to reach out and pat Darla’s hand or assure her she would be OK after we left. Another part didn’t care, and was more worried about our pissed off parents. Finals week was far too close and this rip in the fabric of our lives needed to end. Now.
I stood up, walked to the threshold and figured I needed to give them a few minutes to say their goodbyes. A hard look at Trevor and I said, “I’ll be out in the car. I expect you in a minute.” And then I looked at Darla, her face turned away from me as Trevor stood over her, hands on her shoulders, a soft look on his face that was different from anything I’d ever seen him direct at a chick.
“Yeah. I’ll be out in a minute,” Trevor said absentmindedly.
Then Darla turned and looked at me and said, “Pleased to meet you, Joe.” She opened her mouth to say something else and then snapped it shut.
“Likewise,” I answered, nodding, and got the hell out of there to go wait in the car. I knew she was lying – she was anything but pleased when it came to meeting me. She wanted me gone, and I was about to obey her every wish.
Trevor was the one holding us up.
Chapter Seven
Darla
As Joe walked out, I realized this was the moment. I had to steel myself for it, I had to be strong, I had to make sure I didn’t make a fool of myself so I did what I always do and I opened my mouth and I blurted out the stupidest shit possible.
“I would love to see you again, Trevor,” I said. “The next time you decide to eat a stupid shit amount of a mind-altering substance and travel naked six hundred miles, give me a visit.” Wink. Oh, God. I might as well have said “Y’all come back now, ya hear?” and thrown cornbread at him.
He smiled gently, his fingers touching my cheekbones, traveling down to the nape of my neck, making me want to blurt out even stupider words, like I love you, like stay, like make babies with me, like take me with you, like write a song about me – and I was damn close to saying all of those things but he just leaned in and shut my mouth up by pressing his against it.
The kiss wasn’t a goodbye kiss. It was more chaste than anything we’d shared over the past handful of hours and that’s what finally made me cry because it was less about passion – which we’d had plenty of in handfuls and spurts (no pun intended) – but this was a kiss of sorrow, a kiss of regret, a kiss so sweet and endearing and apologetic and nostalgic that I could feel it ten years ago and ten years hence.
What was Trevor doing, giving me a kiss like that? Bearing his soul to me with his lips, with his tongue, with fingertips that touched all the crying parts in me, all the aching cells, the mourning skin, the sad, sad heart that beat just for him right now. Everything I felt was so melodramatic and gratuitous and carved out of a Darla that I liked to pretend wasn’t there. Trevor made me real. Trevor made me come out. The me that I always imagined was there, undamaged, untouched by the years of wondering what if? What if Daddy hadn’t died? What if Mama had been OK? What if I’d gone to college? My own what if – thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster – would never be what i
f I had just driven past the naked rock star by the side of the road?
I may be stupid and I may make foolish choices but that one…that one I would never regret.
Trevor’s mouth pulled away and his eyes sought mine. “It’ll be OK,” he said. “And of all the people in the world and of all the places in the world, Darla,” he leaned over and kissed my forehead and pulled back, that jaunty, sultry grin like warm chocolate. “The next time I decide to escape my own life, naked and ready for anything, I’ll make sure I’m headed west.”
Joe ruined what would have been an absolutely perfect Hallmark moment – if Hallmark had a demented line of cards for shitstorms like this – by thumping through the door and shouting, “My fucking car won’t start!”
Something in Trevor’s eyes was a little too mischievous for me to think that this was just a coincidence but I kept my mouth shut. Trevor’s eyes widened, real big like a little kid trying to lie, and then he let his muscles relax. It was very intentional, as if he were focused on trying hard not to look like a liar, which I’d been able to spot since I was a little kid.
“Really? Well, that’s weird,” Trevor said.
“Shit!” Joe said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Well, why don’t you both go look under the hood?” I said. Four eyes lasered in on me as if I had just proposed that they perform a bowel resection.
“Look under the hood?”
“Yeah. Just go see. Maybe something’s loose or…I don’t know.”
Trevor looked at me, cocked his head and widened his eyes. I don’t know what he was trying to communicate but I decided that I would just stop talking because as Mama always said I open my mouth and stupid shit pours out. So, if this was one of those times, then short of having him kiss me into silence, I would have to just do it myself.
Not the kissing part, but the keeping my mouth shut part, which was a hell of a lot harder than it was for most people. See, I can’t even stop talking right now.
“Is there a mechanic out here?” Joe snapped, waving his arms wildly as if ‘out here’ were some sort of giant field where the only thing you could see were alien crop circles and certified auto technicians.
“Yeah, there are plenty of them,” I said. “Every guy in this trailer park’s a mechanic. At least they’re an amateur mechanic because around here you don’t take your car somewhere unless it’s an absolute emergency and…” I let my voice trail off. “Hell, if my uncle were here I’d tell him to come out and take a look.”
“He’s not around?” Joe asked, looking nervously toward the trailer.
“No, he’s a long haul trucker. He’s out on the road, he won’t be back until…” I pulled my phone out of my pocket and looked at it – it read 11:19. “Until a lot later today,” I said. “And the first place he’ll go is Jerry’s Bar.”
“Great!” Joe shouted. “So what am I supposed to do? What are we supposed to do? Your mom is going to kill us, Trev.”
Joe’s face had a tight kind of horror to it like a very prim and proper person who was reacting to a situation and trying to keep it within the bounds of the whole prim and proper thing but was actually unraveling on the inside. It was strange to watch because around here nobody bottled up their emotions when it came to anger. Of all the things we felt we were entitled to feel, anger was number one in this town.
Trevor slipped his hand in my back pocket, leaned down and whispered, “I guess this isn’t goodbye just yet.”
I shot him a dubious look, eyebrows flying high and said, “Huh.”
He grinned and we walked out to go and look at Joe’s car.
My mind formulated a plan: I would take a look under the hood and figure out just what kind of mess we were dealing with and then find someone here who might be able to take a look at it. Then again, anybody who was gonna look at the ca –
Oh, my fucking sweet Jesus!
As we got within sight of Joe’s car I realized just how difficult this one was gonna to be. It was a BMW and I don’t know nothing about brand new cars like that, but this thing looked to be so clean, so shiny, and so new it might as well have been in a womb.
“Holy shit!” I said. “What is that?”
I don’t think I’d ever seen a car that didn’t have a rust spot on it, much less one that looked like an alien spaceship. Might as well have been, at least – and yes, I know that’s hyperbolic. But it was like Joe had landed here with some new technology that people wouldn’t understand for the next twenty years.
See, we all drive beaters, unless you’re someone who drives a work truck for a living and then you get a decent Ford from your foreman. So, the trailer park was filled with old, rusted out Cadillac DeVilles, Chevies of assorted ages ranging from the Chevette to the Caprice, a lot of Ford F10 trucks and absolutely no foreign cars of any kind unless you count the rusted out, old VW van over in Mr. Jenkins’ side yard which was currently acting as his chicken coop.
Helping Joe get his BMW fixed was going to be about as easy in this town as finding someone fluent in Croatian. That didn’t mean you wouldn’t find someone, it just meant that it was gonna take a while, that we would have to increase our search radius – and that, whatever the result was, no one was going to be happy. Except for Trevor, who was suppressing a grin and grabbing my ass like it was discontinued and would not be available in stock for ages.
Joe climbed in the front seat, shoved the key in the ignition and turned. Ruur ruuur ruuur rur. It wouldn’t turn over. He was going to drain the battery if he kept going. He slammed his hands against the wheel and screamed some rageful, guttural growl that almost made me laugh because the combination of his perfect, exquisite face, gorgeous, graceful body, and that scream was comical. I couldn’t take him seriously. Trevor started giggling too. Joe just started muttering and grabbed his phone and texted someone.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m doing a search.”
“Oh. What’s that?”
“I’m searching for BMW dealers in this area.”
I snorted. “You’ll have to go to Cleveland or Pittsburgh for one of those.”
“How far is that?” he asked, naive and innocent.
“I…uh…” I stumbled. How could I tell him that we were talking about a fifty plus mile tow? “A good hour.”
“Shit!” he screamed. “There’s no one in town who can fix this?”
My mind sorted through the options. Who could possibly…? And then I thought about how close to home the answer really was.
“There is only one guy,” I said. “He’s not a BMW mechanic but if anybody can fix it, it’s him.”
“Who is it?” Joe shrieked. He looked at his phone and said, “Damn it, you’re right. Goddammit! Nearest BMW dealer fifty-eight point four miles. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“It’s my uncle,” I said.
Joe went pale. “But you said he’s not home until tonight.”
“Yeah, he’s not. He’s probably not home until more like nine or ten o’clock.”
Like Trevor moments ago, Joe seemed to take all the tension in all his body and forcibly melt his muscles, as if programmed to trigger some kind of relaxation inside of him. He took a couple deep breaths, leaned back in the driver’s seat and stared up at the visor, sighing. “OK, there’s nothing I can do about this.”
He reached into the glove compartment, pulled out a small baggie, and started stuffing tobacco into a pipe.
Wait – that wasn’t tobacco.
“What are you doing?” I hissed, running over to the window.
“I’m toking up,” he said. “I have to do something to chill out here. This is – I can’t believe – my mom is going to freak. I’m already – ”
“You can’t do that here. Not in public,” I said. “If you wanna do that come in my ho
use.”
He looked at the trailer. “No fucking way I’m going in there with your mom in there.”
“No, I mean my little house.”
“The shed?”
“Yeah.”
“Why can’t I do it right here? It’s perfectly legal.”
“What?” I screeched.
Then his face closed off and he shoved the baggie under his crotch, the pot spilling out a few little pieces onto the floor. “Oh, shit, that’s right. We’re not in Massachusetts.”
“No, Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore,” I said. “What does not being in Massachusetts have to do with anything?”
Trevor came up behind me and whispered in my ear. “In Massachusetts it’s decriminalized if you have under an ounce.”
I pinged my head between the two of them, looking at them. “You drove through how many states? Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, and now Ohio with pot in your glove compartment? Are you out of your fucking mind? And you two are going to be fucking lawyers? Pfft. I don’t know what kind of education they give people in Massachusetts but it sounds like you two got an F in basic common sense.”
Joe sheepishly stuffed all his paraphernalia back into the baggie and under the seat. “Sorry,” he grumbled.
“Around here, that could make someone lose parole.” Shaking my head, I saw a guilty confusion fill Trevor’s face. “Just be discreet and don’t let it near the trailer. Mama would kill me.”
Joe laughed. “Back home it’s a $120 or so fine.”
Everything came easy for him, didn’t it? In Massachusetts, even drugs were no big deal.
This was starting to get out of hand. Hah! Starting? I could tell I needed to take control. These two amazing, virile men standing before me and I was the one who had to exert my authority. You do what you have to do, right? So I said, “Look, let me go take my pathetic little flip phone here,” Trevor rolled his eyes and Joe got a puzzled look on his face, “and go call the person I know who can help us. The problem is, yeah, he won’t be back until late tonight but he can help. You OK with that?”