The Story of Beautiful Girl

by Rachel Simon

  With the moon as his light, Homan could see a few feet inside. There was an overturned chair and a table with a broken leg, a stone fireplace built into a wall. On the mantel was the glint of tinfoil from a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. Maybe the smoker was just waiting to jump him. But the hut had the musty odor of a home long forgotten. Holding the door with his foot, he grabbed those matches and got one lit.

  The room grew clear. The walls were lined with dusty shelves. The floor was bare, with weeds tufting up from the boards. And the far wall wasn’t the rock of the cliff. It looked like it went inside the rock. He saw a lantern on a peg and lit it. The fourth wall was a cave.

  Holding up the lantern, he spun around to be sure he was alone. No one. He turned back to the cave. It was empty, except for a bed made of branches. No blankets, no pillows, no grizzled old man giving him the evil eye. If only he’d found a place like this when the baby was coming instead of a cellar in a backyard. Then they would never have gotten chased out. Then they would never have gone for miles in the rain—or spent all these months without each other.

  Lantern high, he ran to retrieve his blanket-sack.

  Only when he closed the door and jammed the chair beneath the knob did he realize his luck was better than he’d thought: On the shelves were tins of fish and packets of beef jerky. He ate until he could eat no more, then lay down on his clothes, hiding in the cave behind rocks, in case anybody did break in. Relaxing for the first time in too long, he fell into a heavy sleep.

  After bolting from the truck lot and the swarming police, Homan hadn’t planned on being alone for so long, only to end up finding refuge in a cave.

  Instead, as he’d grabbed on to the rushing freight car, he’d felt pumped with hope that he’d get back fast to the Snare. All he had to do was keep fear at bay until they pulled into a train yard, then hop a boxcar back to the city he’d just left and find his way to the river. It wouldn’t be simple, but he could do it. He had to do it. So that night, stomach down to the metal, air currents ballooning the rabbit jacket and his pants, he’d pushed away fear by thinking of her. Beautiful Girl sneaking into the barn one afternoon, where she laughed as he taught her to milk cows. Beautiful Girl in Chubby Redhead’s office, where she wedged the radio in his pocket so he could feel the vibrations and they moved their feet in a slow dance. Beautiful Girl holding him in the cornfield, on what he would name the Day of the Red Feather.

  Eventually, still gripping the train, Homan turned his head. He couldn’t tell how long he’d lain here, but the stars were the stars just before morning, and the landscape was countryside.

  He realized he was on the run again. Yet he felt nothing like the rage that had overtaken him long ago, at the end of the last Running, when the gates of the Snare had clamped closed. Furious with the police, the judge, and, yeah, himself—You caught for speaking your name! You ain’t never mouth-speaking again!—he’d then spent months fighting and throwing things. He didn’t belong there! He wasn’t no dimwit! His tantrums only got him put in the building with the most violent boys and a nurse feeding him a syrup that made his thinking muddy. Desperate for something, anything, better, he remembered how Blue had fought meanness in the world. I don’t let nothin’ break me, he used to say. Not folk who think they better’n me. I got things to do, and being your big brother the highest one, and nothin’ gonna stop me from that. Even through his mind-haze, Homan understood: Blue found his place in the world by giving himself to another. It galled Homan to consider doing that with droolers and head bangers. But he had to get his mind back.

  So one day he saw that Shortie, who slugged anyone passing by, didn’t get to punching until his favorite guard left every night. Just before the shift change, Homan started rolling a ball to Shortie. It took a while for Shortie to care, but then the ball got his mind off his guard and the slugging happened less. Soon Homan started wondering who else needed giving. He took over diapering Man-Like-a-Tree. He figured how to get Whirly Top to dinner: Go up next to him, spin round and round like Whirly Top until Whirly Top stepped out of his whirly circle. One day Homan helped Big-Bellied Handyman set a window straight. Soon he started getting privileges.

  Giving, he found, made him proud. And pride made him bolder with doing what he had a knack for—unclogging pipes, oiling hinges, driving the tractor. And doing a good job made him get more privileges. Finally he was almost as free as a Stuck-for-Life could get. Until, that is, Beautiful Girl grew into a woman and he wanted to be even freer.

  Dawn rose through the hut’s window, and, as always, Homan reached toward the dream selves. Beautiful Girl was combing her fingers through her hair, her face up to the sky, smiling, as blossoms showered down from a tree. Little One, growing up fast, was crawling under the tree, pulling up clover. Even though Homan was far from sure about what had happened, he told himself Little One was in the safe hands of Roof Giver. Yet when he saw Beautiful Girl in the mornings, he pictured Little One with her, and then made his good-morning greeting to them both. Today, he remembered he didn’t have to jump up and run. In a hut with a locked door, he could lounge about as late as he pleased.

  He’d long fancied the idea of staying in bed, starting when he was still in Edgeville and leaving boyhood behind. He’d wake thinking about a lady being in bed with him, and the saddle part of him would be all afire. He’d want to take care of business, and on the rare mornings when his brothers and sisters and Mama had gone off and Blue was out with Ethel, he would. Forget that luxury in the Running. Then he’d wake with his eyes darting and heart thumping and have to just get up and go. How he’d come to envy all the folks who could lock their doors. He’d see them through their windows, putting their arms around their women, kissing their lips, their neck, unbuttoning shirts, lowering the shade. Things were even worse at the Snare. If the guards caught a boy doing things to himself, they’d whack his fingers with a belt.

  But no lady caught his eye for a long time. Even Beautiful Girl didn’t have that effect on him at the start. When he first saw her, she was young and he was digging a grave, and what made him pay notice wasn’t her long blond hair and wide, open face. It was how she cried as the coffin went into the ground. After that, he began noticing her across the dining room, walking the grounds: She never got pushy or hotheaded, she had a friend and visited a redheaded guard. She didn’t smile much—and when she did it was sunshine. Only when she grew tall and took on the curves and walk of a woman did he realize she was as beautiful outside as she was within. Then, in the mornings, he thought of her. But once he knew there was a baby in her, and that she suffered when the boys did what they did, he decided to wait until after they were free.

  This morning, in the cave, he had a locked door. So he finally let himself stop waiting.

  The morning after escaping Pudding and Dot, he woke hugging the railcar as the train rocked to a stop. Sunlight warmed his back. He stretched his arm beside him, pointed his fingers down, and looked. The shadows were short, which meant it was close to noon and hiding would be harder. Yet he had to find a train going back. He propped himself up on his elbow.

  He was in a train yard. To the left was a building where men in uniforms milled about. To the right were railcars, then grass and hills. If he could steer clear of the men, he’d be okay.

  With none of the men looking his way, he sat up. His body was stiff and tired, he needed to relieve himself, and when he stretched out, his leg still hurt. He was hungry, too, having not eaten since before the truck lot. Then he remembered the envelope the man had pushed into his jacket. He shouldn’t take the time to look inside except it was thick as a sandwich, and maybe that’s what it was. He rolled to his side so he couldn’t be seen and pulled the envelope out of his pocket.

  Inside were tissues tied with twine. He undid the knot, and disappointment hit like the smell of rotten egg. It was just a fat stack of green rectangles. Money. He remembered customers paying the McClintocks with money, but he’d never used it. He flipped through the
stack and saw each rectangle had a picture of a man. Some were bearded, some clean-shaven; some were stout, some thin. Maybe ten silver circles didn’t equal all of these. What equaled what? How many of these did you need for a new engine, a car wash, a hamburger?

  He stuffed the money back in the envelope and pushed it deep into his jacket.

  Then he sat up again and looked down the train cars stretching behind him. He didn’t see a ladder to climb down. He turned left, searching the roof’s edge for something to grab on to. Nothing. He turned right. There, at roof level, were the polished shoes of a man.

  Homan did not lift his eyes. He knew the man must have climbed to the roof, maybe after yelling up. Homan whirled to his other side and saw, down the side of the train, other men climbing up. Homan whipped back and looked. The man had a leather stick in his hands.

  Run!

  Off he went across the top of the train. In cowboy movies at the Snare, he’d found this thrilling. But doing it? His stomach was tight, his limbs lit by lightning. He might fall between the cars! They could have a shotgun! He forced himself not to look back. He hurdled over one train car, two, three—then pitched himself off. The ground came up fast, and he fell hard. New pain shooting up his calf, old pain stinging his knee, he flew down the line of trains. He knew he was fast, he was happy he was fast, and he wished to high heavens he didn’t have to be.

  But now he could finally head back, he told her dream face that morning, before he left the hut with his spear to catch lunch. His legs had long needed to heal, his bones to thaw, his belly to fill—and now they could. Just hang on till I rest, he assured her. Won’t be long now.

  Though as he made wider and wider arcs from the hut, searching for game, he wondered how he’d find his way back. Blue had taught him to hunt. Tramps in the Running had taught him to jump trains. Homan had taught himself how to steal farmers’ chickens. But how would he get from an unknown here to a far-off there? Trains weren’t safe now, and for buses he had to know money. He’d seen Ride Thumbers on TV, though how would he tell a driver anything? And what was the name of the town where the Snare was found? What was the name of the Snare?

  But wait. A rabbit stood a few feet off. Unlike the last two, it wasn’t watching him, so if he was quick, he’d get his lunch. He tightened his hand around his spear. The rabbit caught on as the spear flew forward, but it hit its mark before the creature could run.

  Pleased, he retrieved his meal. What was he doing, worrying about how to get back? Not for one minute since he’d been parted from Beautiful Girl and Little One had he let himself cry. He’d made mistakes, that couldn’t be disputed, and he’d stumbled so far from the train yard that he might as well be in Edgeville. Yet he’d got clothes. Shelter. Food.

  He built a fire. Maybe he couldn’t imagine how he’d find his way back once he got rested, but as he held the rabbit over the flames, he thought about how he’d just found lunch at exactly the right moment. The hut had appeared just when he’d needed it, too, and the train, and the loose dirt in the truck lot. Maybe the thirty-eight years he’d been on this earth hadn’t been a long stagger from one calamity to the next, the way he’d always supposed. Maybe there was more to it. Because hadn’t his doglegged journey also taken him to the McClintocks, and Shortie, and—he watched her now, the steam from the laundry all around them, her hands following his, speaking his sign for her name—Beautiful Girl?

  Over the next many days, as he kept nursing himself back to vigor, he thought that maybe when you’re making your way forward into your life, it just looks higgledy-piggledy, the way, if you were a fly walking across one of Beautiful Girl’s drawings, all you’d be able to see was green, then blue, then yellow. Only if you got in the air before the swat came down would you see the colors belonged to a big drawing, with the green for this part of the picture, the blue and yellow for others, every color being just where it was meant to be. Could that be what life was?

  Part of him rolled his eyes for thinking something so dumb-assed. Because why, if he was supposed to get the fever and start the Running and get caught in the leghold of the Snare, would catastrophes just keep on coming? But part of him gave pause. What if the moments, good and bad, had to be there? What if there was a big drawing? Did that mean there was a Big Artist?

  A week passed. His body began to fill out. Another week passed. His bruises receded.

  By the third week, he wasn’t feeling sure about this new wondering. He was, though, feeling so sure of himself that one afternoon, he decided that tomorrow he would get on the road again and somehow start making his way back toward Beautiful Girl. This meant it was time to do two things. One was to take care of some hiding, so he took off his boots, got out the pocketknife and money, and slit secret pockets into every spot in the boots that gave under the blade. Then he slid the money around his feet. Now he could ditch the rabbit coat.

  That task done, he needed to go farther than he’d gone before and survey the possibilities for setting out. He’d come to the hut from the south and run into a wide river when he’d gone east. So that afternoon he walked north, until he finally came to a rocky ridge.

  Below was a broad, tan building and, beyond it, lawns and streets and houses. He crouched down and peered through bushes. To one side of the building was a parking lot with yellow buses; to the other, a field ringed by stands filled with people. As he watched, young men in matching tops and bottoms ran out of the building, followed by another group in other matching clothes. The first group fanned over the field, which was when he realized he was sitting above a baseball diamond. At the Snare, the guards played baseball, and once Homan got privileges, he joined in. But he’d never had a front-row seat to a real game.

  As the first batter went up to home plate, Homan remembered playing the game himself, his bat belting the ball into the air, his legs taking him base to base. He wished he could be down on that field right now. The pitcher threw the ball, and Homan decided that even if he couldn’t be there, he could play as if he were—and imagine Beautiful Girl watching. So he stood and hurled a make-believe ball into the air. Then he swung his arms, mimicking the batter, and when the ball flew past the bases, he held his arms wide like the outfielder, jiggling his legs back and forth until he smacked his fist into his palm as the ball hit the player’s glove. The crowd burst into applause, and Homan, along with the dream Beautiful Girl, slapped his palms together, too. For the next many innings, he struck batters out and stole bases. Then, in the middle of a play, he spotted something outside the field. Past streets and shops and houses was a tall cement bridge that spanned a river. He clapped right then and there at the sight. How clear his way would be tomorrow. How perfect that his wandering had led him here. See? he signed to Beautiful Girl. Said I’d get back, and this how.

  That night, already dressed for his leavetaking tomorrow, he lay down in the cave on his makeshift bed, smiling into the dark. He didn’t only feel closer to believing there really was a Big Artist—he hoped there was. Because then, no matter how many hardships he had to face on his journey back, they’d be a lot easier to bear.

  But when he woke, it was still night. At first he thought it was the excitement of leaving that got him up early.

  He passed his gaze over his sack, ready to go. He wiggled his toes, feeling the money in the boots. Then, wanting to see the stars, he turned his gaze toward the windows.

  Glass exploded into the room. He rolled behind the farthest rock in the cave, his breath hard. Then they were climbing through. Had they hollered first? They were coming fast, shining a flashlight, finding him, yanking him to his feet. He was strong again, so he could fight, shoving one across the hut, flinging his arm back to get another. Why this gotta happen tonight? he wondered just before one of them grabbed his arms and pinned them behind. Because there ain’t no big picture, you stupid lunk. The light hurt his eyes so much that he felt blind. Sorry, Beautiful Girl. Look like I’m in a second Running. Then their fists stormed down upon his body.

&nbs
p; Accomplices

  KATE

  1969

  With Lynnie’s drawings on the seat beside her, Kate drove across Old Creamery Bridge. The drawings were her map. She’d removed them from the locked drawer, knowing Lynnie objected. But Kate had not gone into this line of work simply because she’d needed a job when her husband took up with another woman and she’d lacked the guts required of waitresses, the flexibility in her child-raising schedule for factory shifts, and the savings to cover cosmetology school; she’d come here because of a transformation of her own. Those first months after her husband left, she sobbed and slept and had vengeful thoughts. Then she woke one morning realizing she hadn’t protected her three young children from her husband’s temper, having been too caught up in her own pain. Searching for direction, she returned to church and committed herself to righting her wrongs by caring for others. That was when she applied to the School. Soon she became so attached to the residents that even in the midst of harshness and disillusionment, she believed this was the work she’d been meant to do. She knew some co-workers had other motivations and that although they enjoyed a smoke with her and shared cake on their birthdays, they thought Kate a troublemaker for treating the residents as she did. Kate, though, found her work an act of penance. She thought often of the Gospel of St. John, when Jesus says, “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” She thought too of the Gospel of St. Matthew: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” She taught her children that every person—from the one-legged veteran who played organ at their church to the stuttering old man who ran the boiler room at the elementary school to her children themselves—deserved kindness. So how could Kate not try to learn what she could about the baby, even if Lynnie had asked her not to?

  But Kate hardly felt virtuous as she continued along Old Creamery Road. She felt remorse, having allowed almost four months to lapse since Lynnie had illustrated her escape. For a while she’d told herself she’d take action as soon as she could get a break from so much overtime. Then yesterday, while driving home from a sixteen-hour shift, she’d admitted to herself that there were less noble reasons for her delay. Suzette was right: If Kate brought this story to light, she’d probably lose her job. So for months she’d lain in bed at night, looking at water stains on the ceiling, worrying about Melinda’s braces, Jimmy’s chances of getting into college, and not thinking about finding the baby.