Chapter 11
11.
I go home and pack a bag. I put my atlas to America's highways and byways in it. I find some envelopes and stamps and put my napkins in them. I walk by my phone, which is blinking with its unheard phone messages. Not now, Mr. Phone. Not ever.
As I pass the coffee table, I see Nina's letters, piled neatly in a stack. I grab them and stick them in the side pocket of my duffle.
And with a flick of the lights and the click of the lock, I am gone.
I get in my car and I drive. I have no direction. I drive drunk, blind, darkly following the quarter crescent moon, slung low, like a cradle, over the treetops. The moon hangs as an afterthought, a nail clipping that fell onto the sky and was never retrieved.
It's as though I'm flying and the sky, she flies with me. The clouds are my comrades, their puffed cheeks upturned to the wind. I leave behind the lights, with their envious glows.
Finally, in the cushy interior of the car, I feel complete, completely alone and unfettered by the snares of caring. The world is my only companion, like countless sunsets on infinite horizons.
"Remember this." I whisper, as I pull onto the shoulder of the road to consult my map.
I am back. I am full and floating, though unsure. I am steadfast.
"Remember this." I repeat. And I will.
It takes me a while to realize that I had fallen asleep. I rub my face where I was laying on it. I can feel the pattern of the car seat imprinted on my cheek. The whir of cars passing on the street can barely be heard over the rustle of the trees and the nighttime singing of crickets.
The sky is so pretty on nights like tonight. The stars are splattered on an unreal looking sky, like paint from a careless painter's brush. The near-black color of the sky deepens into the inky black of the road.
I recline my seat and say my prayers before I go back to sleep. Something heavenly promises to answer me. I'm almost certain that on one of these dusty roads my destiny will find me. And then, I swear, my own ruckus will begin.
Morning brings light, but not sight. My head is still clouded, as I continue down long stretches of road.
The trees are my audience, My witnesses. The trees are whispering behind me. They laugh because I have no one's hand to hold but my own, gingerly, and am small. The
evergreens are nicer, more discreet, but the colored leaves just laugh and laugh and fall from their boughs in windy hysterics.
The day unfolds like starched sheets. The clouds spread and rise like heavy cream. The mountains unfold around me like fertile velvet. And I make similes to pass the time.
A celebration of my liberation. All I want to do right now is raise my hips to someone gently, gently, like the incline of a tender head. All I want is someone divine, someone supine cradled between my thighs. Spices from the middle east and farther scent my skin, leaving heavy heady traces that hide the raw smell of addiction. Breathe in my scent, someone, smell the night and forty thieves. Kiss me, posses me. Tilt my pelvis, make my eyes close in pain...? Pleasure? Aren't they the same now?
My fingernails cling like thorns to your imaginary back as I scream your name. Martyr, victim, you have nothing if you don't have me.
Take me, posses me, pleasure me, someone, please. Be a brute, be a bully, be whatever, just be inside of me. Butterfly kisses, a fist full of pleasure/pain for your virgin/whore. I'll play the role as the cast of characters slowly evolves.
Time marches on and still I whisper a prayer to the sapphic seraphs: pleasure me, please, for love is easy to make and hard to give.
Realizing I am hungry, I pull into the next gas station. A brunette boy of about seventeen is pumping gas into the sedan in front of me. I turn down the radio and smooth some carmex over my agile lips.
"What can I do for you?" His struggling voice has finally climaxed over puberty. His smile starts low, on one side of his face, like the tug of a fish hook.
"Actually, I'm looking for somewhere to eat. Where can a girl get a good meal in this town?"
He eyes my lips cautiously. They are too smooth.
"Yeah, I know a great place, if you like diners...I'm actually getting off work right now. If you can give me a sec to punch out, you can follow me there."
"Okay."
He goes inside and takes off his coveralls. I can see him alternately through the glass windows and the clear garage door. He glances at me occasionally and smiles, putting up one finger as a promise. The sky is a cloudy slate gray. Night is falling.
I follow his car into the lot behind the diner. There are lots of trucks there, dwarfing the cars between them.
He rolls alongside me.
"So this is it...will you be able to find your way back to the highway?"
"I think so. Are you hungry at all?"
"Sure. You mind some company?"
"Nope."
We both park and walk together toward the brightly intrusive diner. The sky is all but dark now. His hands are in his pockets. I give him a sidelong glance.
"What?" he says without looking at me.
"What's your name?"
He chuckles and a smile tugs at his lip again.
"Sam," he says sheepishly, "well Samuel, actually."
The click of my cowboy boots against the pavement fills the silence.
"Hey, how about you?" He nudges me with an elbow, "What's your name?"
"Elle."
"Like an elevated train? El?" he frowns.
"No. Elle, like 'she' in French." I say to the boy who took Latin.
"Oh," he says, reaching for the door.
We are fucking behind a truck. I am sitting on the cab's steps. My skirt is drawn like a window curtain to my waist. It is completely dark.
There is nothing but his smell. The smell of gasoline and sweat and the greasy diner. Nothing but that smell and the feel of his seventeen year old dick thrusting me back against the cold metal of the truck.
I don't know if I first kissed him because I couldn't believe he was a virgin or because I wanted him to stop being one.
The gas station attendants, I find, fuck better. The older men in bars smell of booze and Bryll Creme, and their fat bellies get in the way of the fuck. It's funny to watch their carefully slicked hair fall into their reddish eyes though, revealing a shiny bald spot that reflects the minimal light of the back room of the bar, of the parking lot, of the quiet residential street two blocks from the pub.
I don't much care for hitchhikers either. They smell. It sounds mean, but they do. And it's weird because you feel like you're fucking an old friend. After all the hours of chat that fill the silence, that convince you that "no, this one isn't a serial killer", to fuck them in a rest station doesn't seem as intimate, somehow, as it should. And then the "thanks, take it easy" and the "hope you get there safely" that you exchange through the open driver's side window as you part don't really cut it. So I'm trying to stick to gas boys exclusively now.
As if any of them could compare to the skeletal softness, the distinct unscentedness, of my Nina. I haven't bathed since I left home. The smell of my acrid, salty skin clings to my unchanged sweatshirt. My body reeks of labor, of manliness. Sensuality. Salted meat, salty flesh. And I like it.
I stop at a gas station to get some grub and the deodorant that I forgot to pack. It is in the snack shack of this gas station that I see an exact replica of you. She ignores me, my shocked and lusty gaze, as you so often have. She is with a band of other young nymphets, all gangly and boisterous. But how pretty are those elfin girls, with necks so long and faces drawn. How whimsical their days must be, filled with sunlit prayers for unending spring. How selfishly they withhold their glances, as if one must be special in their presence. And when they frolic in a round, how holy is that sound.
As she purchases her corn chips and diet Pepsi, I wonder if God is kind or cruel to give me this moment of remembrance.
