by Kent, Julia
I stared hard at Joe. It was pretty obvious that the only answer was yes. “Yes,” he said.
Good boy.
I marched away and fished the phone out of my pocket, dialed my uncle’s number and waited.
He was a big man, quiet, and had helped raise me…when he was home. Being a long haul trucker meant that he wasn’t home that much, a night here and there on the weekends and then longer stretches if he was out of work. From what Mama said he wasn’t much like my daddy who had been a bit more cultured, if wild – she always said that I got my wild streak from my daddy and I got my intelligence from her. I don’t know how much of that is true because I don’t remember my father.
At least, I don’t remember much of him that hasn’t been tainted by other people’s stories of him, as if the re-telling grounded it in my mind, making it real. Maybe that’s why it was so strange to have Trevor here, and now Joe, because if I felt more real when I was with him then what was real? But right now I didn’t have time for any of that.
Uncle Mike answered the phone. “Yup.”
“What’s up there? It’s Darla.”
“Yup, I know. I got caller I.D..”
“Umm…. I’ve got some friends here with a broken car and I’m wondering when are you getting back?”
“I’m back tonight ’round nine.”
“Well, I’m off my shift at nine. Can you meet us here at home and take a look?”
“Yeah. What kind of car is it?”
“Umm….it’s a…what year is your car, Joe?” I shouted.
“2013.”
“It’s a 2013 BMW.”
Silence. That’s about what I expected for an answer.
“What kind of friends you got there, Darla Jo?” he asked slowly.
“New friends,” I said, doing my best Chippie Pete imitation. “New friends.”
“Darla, the only people in our area who drive a 2013 BMW are people driving through.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But they’re friends and it’s broken so can you help or not?” The pain of what he’d just said was like a stab in my ribs. I had to breathe through it like a stitch in my side that would eventually go away if I just ignored it enough.
“Sure. I’ll be there,” he said, yawning.
“You tired?” I asked.
“I’m always tired, sweetheart, but I’ll help you.”
“OK, thanks.” Click. He hung up before I could and I went back and said, “He’ll be here around nine tonight.”
Joe looked at his phone and checked the time. “That’s almost ten hours.”
“Yup.”
“There’s no other option?”
“Nope. Welcome to Ohio, the heart of it all,” I said.
Trevor slung an arm around my shoulders. I could get used to this. “What are we going to do for the next ten hours?”
“Well,” I said, reluctantly. “It’s more like five hours,” I said, thinking it through. “I have to work at four.”
“Where do you work?”
“The gas station.”
“There’s a career,” Joe muttered.
“Around here, it is,” I said. The rich boy, snotty stuff was coming out, just like with Trevor and my phone and I wasn’t gonna take any of that shit.
Trevor nudged him and then shook his head slightly. Joe picked up on it and said, “Fine. What the hell are we going to do around here?”
He looked around and spotted a naked two year old running down the steps of a trailer with a naked one year old following, stumbling along in the path while their mom chased after them with bath towels. Trevor laughed and pointed and said, “I already did that. Let’s find something else to do.”
“What do you do?” Joe said.
What I had thought was standoffish, I was quickly realizing, was some kind of an insecurity in him that he masked with an irritable snobbery. At least, I hoped I was right because otherwise he was just an asshole. I thought about it – five hours, nothing better to do, daytime in early May.
It was time to find a bowling alley.
Joe
“Bowling? You want to go bowling?” Was she crazy? You had to be fucking kidding me. My car broke down in the middle of the set of My Name Is Earl and Trevor and Darla wanted to go bowling? Why on Earth would they want to go bowling? I took another good look around. Naked children wandering on the dirty ground? Check. Chickens roaming aimlessly? Check. Buildings falling apart and endemic poverty persisting in a trailer park? Check. Darla living in a rotting shed that would be condemned by the Sudborough Town Inspector in about three seconds? Check.
Bowling it was. I imagined that was probably the only thing people did around here other than drink. If nobody could look at my car for the next ten hours, then at least they could do something to keep themselves occupied.
“You don’t look good, dude,” Trevor said.
I took another look at the clock – 11:31. A wave of exhaustion hit me as I remembered that I’d been driving all night, and then a sickly nausea seeped in to my bones, crawling up my balls and into my gut. My life wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to be back home, starting to study for finals, making sure that all the ducks were lined up in a row so that I could get into the right Honor Societies, graduate with the right awards, get my law internship all set up for summer. Then I could have a crazy ass, wild party at the end of graduation, which would include Trevor and the other guys from the band and just let us have a fuck of a good time. It wasn’t time for that letting go, yet, and driving six hundred miles to get Trevor from some haze-induced state wasn’t part of my plan ever. And now they wanted to go bowling?
“You guys have balls,” I said, my mouth feeling pasty and my head swimming. Her little shed was tiny and I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do. I’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours, driven for nearly half that alone, and was bone tired in more ways than one.
“Well, no, the bowling alley has balls. I don’t own one,” Darla said. She shot Trevor a smirk. I rolled my eyes.
“Ha ha, very funny.” The last thing I wanted to do was go bowling, but it looked like we were stuck here for the next ten hours and I didn’t know what to do.
And then, it hit me. “Darla, your car works, right?” I looked over at what I assumed was her car. It had more rust than blue and it looked like it had been a Toyota in an earlier life. We walked over to it, now standing in front of her shed, the door open, sunlight illuminating the shabby interior. It was cute – like a thrift-shop version of the princess cottages that dotted the backyards of my friends’ houses when we were in preschool.
“It will get you wherever you need to go. Not Sudborough but you know…the local gas station or a place to get something to eat.”
“What about a hotel?”
“A hotel?” She and Trevor said the words in unison, skeptical.
“Yeah, a hotel. I’m exhausted and if we’re going to be here until at least ten o’clock at night I’d at like to get some sleep.”
Darla pointed to the bed in her shack. “You can sleep there.”
And that’s where my brain just unraveled. “Umm…yeah. No.” I looked at the room, the bed, a couple of men standing in front of Darla’s broken porch, smoking cigarettes and looking like they had about eight teeth between the three of them. “I really couldn’t put you out,” I said.
What I really wanted to say was, I’m freaked out and I need a comfortable bed that I control without the stink of Trevor and Darla in it and without the sense of boundary crossing that this entire world represents. This was about as foreign to me as being drop shipped to Beijing. At least I knew a few words of Chinese.
“Why waste all of that money,” Darla said, “when you’ve got a perfectly fine place right here?”
Something in my face must have made her stop short because that’s exactly what she did. Trevor’s face shifted from bemusement to neutral – he knew; he got it. I suspected he was secretly relieved that I was suggesting a hotel. This was so out of our norm that it was my educated guess that, as the peyote wore off, he was growing increasingly uncomfortable.
Darla’s eyes narrowed and I could see I’d offended her. This was a woman you didn’t cross.
“I see,” she said. “Joe, my friend, let me direct you to the Waldorf Astoria. It’s over there, beyond old Jenkins’ farm, behind the outhouses. Meanwhile, the Biltmore is two exits up, past the hog slaughtering factory. And then, of course, we have the Marriott Suites, which are in Cleveland. For you, sir,” she said, her voice syrupy and sickly, making my heart feel heavy.
A thin thread of guilt came out of nowhere – why in the hell would I ever feel guilty for wanting to take care of myself, for wanting to take care of me and Trevor? Extricating ourselves from this crazy, blonde bitch was natural. If my car hadn’t broken down we’d be out of here, right?
Trevor put a hand on her arm and whispered something in her ear. A flame of anger and rage plumed inside me and I tamped it down instantly. No time for letting my emotions get the better of me. It was time to be reasonable, rational and logical. Logic dictated that we needed a room so that Trevor and I could peel ourselves off of this woman, this…groupie? Random Acts had groupies in Ohio? That was cool. She seemed to know who Trevor was and seemed to like the music. That part was awfully odd.
“Let me tell you something, Joe,” she said. “There’s really only one hotel nearby – it’s at a truck stop. The room’s gonna be a little bit bigger than my place and yes, you’ll have your own bathroom. You won’t have to go in and talk to Mama about what she won in her online gambling this week. And the rooms are gonna smell like cigarette but not quite as bad as my trailer. It will be nothing like my little shed here. And you can have your nice little calm life back for a few hours where you don’t have to rely on the hospitality of people who scare you.”
“Fuck, no. You don’t scare me,” I retorted.
She raised her eyebrows, looked at Trevor, looked back at me. Something in the way she studied my face made my pants tighten. She had a curvy, devil-may-care attitude about her. The way she shifted her hip, the swell of her breast against her ribcage, the jaunty smirk – and then there was the fact that she was right – she’d hit the bullseye. These people scared me. Lots of things scared me. How could someone I’d never known figure that out so fast?
If she could, in the middle of nowhere, then what would the world know about me when I went out into it? I had to be a pitbull in order to function in big law. That was my parents’ goal and mine, right? Mine – my goal. I decided to try being a pitbull back.
Before I could open my mouth, Trevor interrupted both of us. “Let’s just take him where he wants to go,” he said to Darla.
She started to protest and he cut her off with fingertips to her lips. It was a gesture I’d never seen anyone do to a woman and I expected she’d blow up at him but instead, she popped one fingertip into her mouth and sucked on it through a grin. Holy shit. If I’d been uncomfortable a minute ago, now I was so hard I was stratospherically crawling out of my skin – for a much better reason.
Trevor pulled back and some sort of look passed between the two of them that made me feel like I was intruding. “Besides,” he said quietly, “if he has his own room then you and I get this to ourselves,” nodding his head toward her little broken shed.
Darla
“You two argue about whatever it is that you wanna do while I go take a shower,” I said, escaping the back and forth between these two. My body still tasted like Trevor’s mouth, smelled like both of us, and needed a good, full cleansing. Kind of like being dipped in a baptismal pool. My new existence needed that kind of reset and my heart needed that kind of purity because, even though we’d been handed these extra hours, that was it. After that, my new life would leave me in a puddle of misery and nostalgia.
That, though, was better than what I’d had before I’d picked up this naked soul. Walking back into the trailer, I saw where Joe had put his foot through the rotted out porch. Dammit! I knew the floor was going, I just didn’t think it was going to go that quickly. Some furry creature of indistinct origin scurried under there and I hoped to God it wasn’t a swamp rat from the nearby wetlands.
When I walked into the trailer, Mama was in her place at the kitchen table and she looked up and just shook her head slowly. “Two men, now, Darla? Really?”
“Not at the same time, Mama,” I said, laughing at her, waving a hand as if the idea were so extreme that no one would ever think to do such a thing. Liar, a voice in my head whispered. Oh God, at the rate I was going I was gonna have more voices in there than a goddamn tryout for American Idol.
The shower spray was non-existent. The water pressure was down, which meant somebody was washing clothes or running the dishwasher right now. If it was Mama I’d be surprised. Most of the cleaning that got done around here was by me or Uncle Mike when he was in town. Maybe she was having one of her better times. That would be nice. When Mama was going through a good phase it meant that the world was easier to take.
As I washed the parts of my body that Trevor had touched most, the soap stripping away his essence but not his memory, I felt a twinge of regret. The scent of him was burned into my brain, the pressure of his fingertips, the friction of his skin against mine a sultry memory. It didn’t have to be just a memory. What we’d done already, of course, was stored away, nice and neat in a compartment in my mind that I could draw from whenever I needed it. New memories could be made in the next couple of hours and I didn’t think that bowling was gonna be one of them.
Washing my hair, discovering we were out of conditioner and cursing myself for not keeping track of that, I realized that when I blew dry my hair I was gonna look like a giant Chia Pet. Better to leave it damp and down and let it curl up than turn into a frizzball. I found some clean clothes in the dresser drawer of what you could loosely call my room – it was taken over mostly with trinkets that Mama had won over the past five or six years using online sweepstakes and gambling to keep herself busy.
Every once in a while she won something nice. One year she got a couple hundred dollars and a night at any hotel she wanted and she picked the water park and sent me and some friends. Another time, she won a really nice two week trip to Italy, all expenses paid, but it turns out when you win things in a sweepstakes you have to pay the taxes on the value of the thing or trip and we couldn’t afford it. Someone else got Mama’s trip to Italy and we just got a story to tell.
I walked back clean and ready to take on the rest of the day only to find Trevor and Joe whispering to each other furiously, Joe darting glances at me that didn’t look inviting. “What’s going on?” I asked.
Trevor slid his arm around my waist and smelled my wet hair. “You smell nice,” he whispered.
“It’s coconut chemicals,” I whispered back.
That made Joe go from sour to smirking. It was a small victory but I’d take it. “Joe definitely wants to go to the hotel,” Trevor said, frowning.
When I made eye contact with Joe, it was like falling into a pool of beautiful. I wanted to swim in it forever. I shouldn’t have had these thoughts but I did. It was like I was cheating on Trevor right in front of his face but I wasn’t. I wasn’t interested in Joe, I just kind of wanted to marvel at him. Nobody around here looked like him. Nobody.
Around here, adolescent acne meant that you had adult scars, crooked teeth just were, and walking with that kind of fluidity and grace, well, you didn’t get that way working at the gas station, bagging groceries, or framing a house. You especially didn’t get that way driving truck, spending seventy, eighty, a hundred hours a week on the road, hunched over a wheel.
“I can take you,” I said. “No problem.”
Trevor looked at me and his eyes widened a little, then he smiled. “Let’s go.”
Joe
“Alright,” she turned to me. “Get in the car. We’ll take you to the hotel. Do you want to go bowling with us first?”
I yawned. I swear to God it wasn’t fake. The exhaustion of dealing with Trevor’s disappearance, with his mom, with the drive, my broken car, all of it was wearing on me.
“You don’t need to throw that in,” she said as we walked over and I opened the back door. I could see parts of the asphalt beneath us under her car and wondered if I needed to put my feet through to make this thing run, like something out of a cartoon. She started it up and it was surprisingly quiet, Trevor crawling in the front seat.
As he sat down he said, “Oh! My ass feels weird.”
“What did you guys do last night?” I asked.
Darla let out a loose peal of laughter that made me start to like her a little bit. “We only used the strap-on once,” she said.
Trevor punched her lightly on the shoulder as she started the car. He turned around and said, “No, I mean I only rode in the front of this car naked. Not being scratched by the torn vinyl is a luxury.”
Turning around to catch my attention, Trevor kept glaring at me in ways that clearly expressed that he thought I was being rude – but it looked like Darla had figured out my point of view. What a treat to be considered for once. Trevor’s selfishness pervaded this entire experience, from the moment he disappeared – no, actually from the moment he ate all my peyote – right up until the second Darla reappeared. All I wanted right now was my own room, my own space, my own bed. Later tonight, if the car could be fixed or tomorrow morning – God, I hoped it wasn’t tomorrow morning – then away we went and I could escape from this chaos.