Novel Excerpt

It isn’t all that long with me walking slow and careful, nursing as much ease as I can, before the first few cars roll right on past me and my backpack and my thumb, not even so much as slowing down to get a look at me, to see if I’m a boy or a girl and either way if I’m the sort that might keep a long screwdriver or a sharp blade in my belt. Which I am, like anybody who has been out here long enough to have learned how it is you stay out here that long, but I hope it doesn’t show, especially once they figure me for a young girl, which I also, half the time, hope doesn’t show.

I can tell a lot about a place just from how it is to hitch there. Some places, you can’t hardly step foot out of one car before another one is pulling over. Not to look at you but just to lend a neighborly hand, even if you ain’t and never will be that-a settled down and settled in kid next door. Other towns, you got to work to get a ride. Got to convince the citizens who want to feel different and bigger hearted than the rest that you’re worth the risk so later they can tell a friend what an interesting character they met while they were doing the Good Samaritan thing. I’m thinking that’s an awful thing to think even as the words are working their way through my hurting brain, but the morning is already getting to be too sticky and heavy and hot for nice thoughts.

This morning the sun is that white bright that makes me sneeze a half a dozen times every time I look up and away instead of down at my feet or maybe off to the right where the scrub grass starts and things collect. Things like finger long curls of lead that are meant to be balancing someone’s tires and red plastic shards of brake light covers, crumpled burger joint bags and flattened six pack cardboard and bleached out lottery tickets full of nothing but disappointed dreams. All the usual roadside garbage I’ve been seeing everywhere. All the junk that every anybody drops out their window. Cigarette butts and bottle caps and long black strips of rubber from blown out tires.

I’m keeping my eyes down there in the crabgrass and garbage and away from the sun and then it’s like someone came up to me, in my sleep, and put a size twelve shoe on my chest and I can’t breathe and this day is just one damn long bad one already building up a head of steam.

Because down there with the plastic bags and the crushed beer cans I would have to go and see about the last thing I could have wanted to see this morning, or ever. Down there sticking out of a clump of dirty rags is a flash of pink and it isn’t just what my grandmother would always say as we drove through some lonesome stretch like this. How what a good place it would make to dump a body. It isn’t just that that makes me stop when I know good and well that I should keep on keeping on. It’s that the flash of pink has a shape and the shape is round and full and it’s the size of a baby’s leg. Three steps in the wrong direction, which is toward that pink instead of away from it, and I’m crouching down, all my weight on my heels and rocking a little because they’re worn into their own black arc and when I reach out to pick whatever it is up, I feel the cigarette still in my hand and there’s a fast sharp hurt from the burn. Drop what’s left of it into the oily dirt and place my fingers on ragged plastic toes, the toy sized arch of a foot.

Another car shoots past and honks its horn and I wonder what Mr. Driver thinks of this skinny kid kneeling like a pilgrim and weeping over two hands full of something broken and dirty. Because that’s what I’m doing, now. Crying like the baby doll this leg came from would have cried if it were real, or maybe like the little kid that owned it once and doesn’t anymore, or else has a one-legged doll. Crying like I don’t ever remember crying before, or maybe just don’t want to remember since something feels awful and familiar about all of this.

There is dirt smudged all into the deep scratches on this bit of make believe child and where the plastic has been made into a screw thread joint, where the leg once made a whole with the rest of the body, someone dabbed orange finger nail polish and a bit of some kind of glue. It smells like nothing anymore but grease and dirt and damp things left out too long and it feels smooth and gritty both when I run my thumb along the bend of knee and bump of ankle. And I honest to Christ don’t remember ever crying this hard. Crying so hard I ought to wipe my nose with the back of my hand but my hands are holding something I let go of a long time ago and I’m remembering things. Things I can’t put down, now, and there’s nothing to do but stay here, stooped over and smelling the last of my smoke burn down dry in the dirt while I make sounds like those crows off to somewhere

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