Short Story / Bolder Days

After we don’t pay the rent, John says we’ll  have to watch everything, expect tampering. “They’ll even try to put broken glass in our powdered milk,” he says of our large box of it under the sink, which I only ingest because he won’t get the real. I can take it with instant mashed potatoes or in a cake, but it ruins a bowl of tasty cereal with its watery consistency, and its blue tinge in a glass or cup is a dead-give away.

I say how did you know? When he brings me out to the trailer’s kitchen at 1 a.m. and quietly pours a bunch of the milk powder into a clear Tupperware bowl and flicks out little slivers of glass, some over an inch long, thin and sharp every step of the edges.

“I know people, Amber.” He says it ominously.
I’m desperate to laugh at his paranoia, not, my God, find he’s right, and I shiver at what’s happening. “Which one of them?” I have to know.” Which one’s the kind who’d do this?”

The ad’s phone number, the interview, took place at Calvin and Naomi’s next door, with John “Ramsey” Ramsey the Third present. Calvin, high sandy hair almost a “fro”, owns the two side-by-side trailers and the two lots. Short platinum-blond Naomi, short hair parted on the side with bangs growing out, is Calvin’s girlfriend, never looks you in the eye while talking, and rubs her eyes the whole time she talks- a definite eccentric. John Ramsey is their tenant in our trailer, and the idea that Calvin so controls who John’s roommate is makes John and I snicker. Ramsey is an overweight, blundering idiot with a high voice, the excitable nature of some girls, and a puppy-dog crush on Calvin, which we’ve learned Calvin must have in his people, that tendency to fawn over him. It sure knit him a protective circle—we’ve been here 32 days and don’t know which would have planted the glass. The others do anything Calvin says.

Because the others are Calvin’s puppets, John can’t answer. “I know,” he allows,” that Calvin’s the only one clever enough to think of it, but any one could’ve done it. And other things.”
“But that’s not chasing us out, John- that’s killing us! It’s not like they crossed out “milk” and put “glass” on the box.”
“Amber has an intelligent thought all on her own!” John crows.

“We gotta go, John- there must be other things to kill us all over this place!”
Right then the hall light snaps on and the bear lumbers into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes at sight of us.
“What are you doing up?” John Ramsey says in his pre-pubescent voice, quite funny coming from a hairy fat guy who played football for the Nebraska university he graduated from.
“Midnight snack,” my John responds.
“We’re watching a movie,” I say. We’ve got a small television in our room.  Bringing it up reminds me of turning it down when the noise through the wall usurped it – then, we listened to him and his hero’s girl get it on in his bed, our second night there.
It gives us the impression these people have gone unaccountably out of their way to show us they are three for all and all for three; that we will never be 4 and 5; that they are in solidarity against us and outnumber us. Tribal politics. How else to explain something John and I could creatively avoid– creaking , groaning bedsprings– the thump of the headboard against the wall.
We’re hearing this on purpose, John’s sure. He thinks they usually do it next door, Fabian directing. Then, John says wickedly, because he has a sick mind he refuses to keep to himself, Calvin pokes Ramsey while Naomi – well, I don’t like this stuff, don’t have to repeat it, I’m blissfully naive. I know the three he means are different from me, less sexually inhibited, they’d deem it, but to me they are loose, slutty. That they look down on me is insane, since I’m  just a good person, and they are weird sex freaks . It’s not fair, since they don’t know me.

Ramsey here now is saying he needs a glass of wah- wah to take medication. We know all about–well, enough about– his spastic colon,  his irritable bowel syndrome,  IBS, when it’s got him in it’s grip; he won’t shut up about it. Just one of the many reasons we feel we pay our dues around here and deserve their respect back. But,
very obviously,  now we’re not going to get it.

I notice the Tupperware isn’t on the counter. John has hidden it, or has it behind his back. We watch the small bath towel around Ramsey’s  waist slip and show the tan line at his butt as he moves about getting a glass from the dishwasher and filling it with bottled spring  water from the fridge- without so much as peering for glass shards first.
“Coming?” he says, pausing at the kitchen light switch. This is normal for here. They don’t seem to like us up and about when they aren’t.
Like we’d put poison in their food, I think..
“Inamin,” John yawns.”Right, Haggatha?” he nudges me so hard my ovary or whatever aches.
After Ramsey stumbles back to his room , towel hitting the floor just before he’s out of sight, John pulls up the box of  powdered milk and what  he’s poured and slightly sifted..
“See?” He says.“The pieces glinting in the light?”
There’s no way we can pick the glass out.  I take a deep breath, look at John. I can ask my grandmother for some real money. We don’t have to get milk in 8 weeks’ supply powdered form,: we aren’t visiting the Moon , fleeing WW3 by boat, spelunking. Cave-In’s Land. But it seems important to him that John and I make it without turning to my family. The only reason he let them do rent is because they would think something was wrong if I didn’t accept that portion of my inheritance, since they are thinking I live alone. As it is, he has us in ordinary apartments, not for the poor but not prestigious, either.
The only reason rent is late is my irresponsibility due to my age..
We were way good for it; I  spent the money on restaaurants and clothes and books, thinking I had a job at this pizza place. But when job stuff came round…. well, I learned a lot, like, just because they call you back, doesn’t mean you got the job ( they had 6 other girls sitting there when I got to the call-back) and, you better  use a lot of the company’s product, or at least know your favorite product of theirs
(Telling them I didn’t eat pizza was like saying bye, y’all).

I know if I tell my grandmother, I’ll get another check, but I’m ashamed; I don’t know how to explain it where I look innocent or at least changed; a person  worth the gamble. So I kind of wait too long, then beg for money to get out of here- no moving van necessary, I say, hoping to earn sighs of thanks; just first month’s rent and deposit, average is xx dollars.
It’s on its way, but I’m not going to pay this month’s rent with it just because  I ‘m  2 days late moving out.
I was 18, she was in her late fifties and the wife of a bartender of one of the well-known casinos. I couldn’t fly home,  see– what would happen to John? And so we learned not to say I was doing badly.

I need it for a new place. I didn’t ask for extra for gasoline, food, etc. I had kind of forgotten to mention that the job had fallen through, for one reason. I’m 18 and across the country from all family and my father has already responded to one call for money by wiring it to a friend to buy me an airline ticket home; she then was to walk me to the boarding area and leave only when I’d boarded, but John and I went there ahead of time and got the layout of the Las Vegas Airport down, where she was taking me to and where I would suddenly divert from her and gaily saying I forgot to mail my postcards, run. And get on the escalator full of people , me in a crouch so she couldn’t see me over them, since I’m  taller than most folks. I had to get to the ticket refund booth before she could , and get my refund and be gone when she got there.

Anyway, John is  the man. He’s not comfortable when he can’t take care of me.  He sees in my eyes what I’m struggling to keep out.

“They’re going to be watching the mailbox, Germy. Tell youse what. Get your grandmother to send it General D to the Denver P.O. got that? They are gonna be watching that mailbox like a cat watches a bird that’s left the nest its first time. The most important thing is getting outta here. Then we can ask for more. Here.” he picks  up the only phone, as far as we know, in the trailer. Quietly, I dial my  brother in Michigan. Or rather, that is  who is awake to answer. In a low voice I tell him the general delivery instructions.
“They still do that?” he says. I groan inwardly. The last time I  called, collect, the 15-year-old had said to the operator ”Denver? You mean, Denver, Colorado?” he is  so–thick. I can only hope the message gets through right.

The phone rings. I get it before the first ring ends. It’s my grandmother.  No one woke her up, she’d been awake, lying there worrying about her grandchildren.  I want the check to go to General Delivery in Denver, not Boulder?  Do I need extra, fine. We would always keep her worried–
The way she hung up. Trailing off on a sentence. No goodbye. That was her style. She was a business woman.

I’m from I guess you’d say a professional family, grandfathers, father, mother, uncle, in the professions. John was the first poor person whose house I saw inside. We use to see them off the John Lodge, off the dirty Detroit freeways, dilapidated houses filling streets on both sides near junk car lots and dumps, clothes on clotheslines telling you the shack was actually occupied!
No, it wasn’t John’s. He lived with his mom still in a little house on a road of them in Pontiac. Greasers, black leather jackets?
But he was the poorest person I’d ever met- no living room carpet.

The first time I shoplifted, and the last, at 16, I had to go to group therapy with the 2 girls with me and a group of kids from the poor part of town we’d never mingled with. I met John here. His mom had a linoleum living room and kitchen  floor- that yellowish one with black and white  dots all over it like crumbs of food.  Her kichen sink had one sink and a drainboard of chipped white ceramic with bumps so glasses could drip dry and her bathroom sink was square, not a roundy bowl; no seashell-looking luxury. The water, of a very low pressure, ran staight down the rust-colored drain; the faucet didn’t turn to aim it at the sink’s sides, making it impossible to wash one’s face, or someone else’s hair-no bowl, just a deep dirty square.

All his life he’d slept with his now 15-year-old brother Tom and his ma slept with the sister, Gwen, 17. They’d never afforded more’n two tiny bedrooms. His ma never drove and took a bus to work and there has never been a car in his family so you can imagine what he missed out on, from circuses and zoos to beaches and fireworks displays, movies, concerts, shopping , vacations and after-school functions or like, Mom at your chorus concert.

My family, well, John and I both remembered kids tables where all the kids sat at family reunions. I went to one of his kin’s picnics-they are proud of their  Polish heritage, culture, victuals, dances, and music. But Well yeah OK, mine was Christmas yearly at Grandpa’s brother’s. Ben was co-founder and vice-president of a large bank (both in its impressive downtown Detroit carnation and in its astouding number of branches, all successful) spread over Michigan and Ohio  and we ate in a splendor John had not seen ever, us kids being allowed to use the hard-wood library floors and look at books and go  down the elevator to the basement with the 3 jovial old brothers and Dad and see the latest Uncle Ben did to his model train that’s in an area as big as the rest of the stories of the mansion. Out in their yard they had stables and a duck pond in Grosse Pointe Woods.

John did grow up near a girl my age whose family owned, showed, and boarded 7 horses, but he didn’t know it until he was 21 and I introduced him to  my friend Valerie.  Whose family did all that.
It wasn’t hard to see why Val had a problem at home at 15. You went to a horse race and show with them, Valerie’s little brother chasing the dogie in the rodeo arena; her tiny little sister  showing off her horse’s gait ; her sister a year old, competing, racing and jumping events Valerie was the only one who didn’t care to live out her parents’ life dream for 4 kids. And whenever anybody came over, that’s all they came over for- to get close to that. So she ran away to relate as a girl without access to horses. We met in juvvie. Big, bad criminals, us. (I was shoplifting- ma refused to come get me, telling the cop I didn’t wear a bra. That first and last time I told ya about.)

There were big differences in our fabric, for having a children’s table in both cultures. John’s side would actually be seen standing at a city bus stop.

I felt terribly sorry for John but I also found he complimented me nicely. I’m an endangered species and he cares enough to force me beyond my limitations. I have no awareness and no autonomy and he’s teaching me what to be. Like, he taught me to eat only wheat bread- white bread’s dough. I listen to him,  partly because I’m 18 and he’s 23; mostly because he’s controlling and has a serious compendium of street smarts. While I have none. I wouldn’t make it without him.

So we’re two days late with rent. Wow I mean it’s not like my family will ever not have it. I don’t get why the landlord doesn’t believe me that it’s coming.  That’s what makes me want to move out- their lack of trust in me when I am being honest. John, who gets it, can’t explain it to my satisfaction.
“That’s what everyone says,” he’s tried.

“But I’m a first-time renter, fresh out of long afternoons in a Catholic boarding school classroom listening to bees drone out the windows. I haven’t yet read stories where people do that. I never knew anyone who rented. I’ve newly stepped from an entirely different world where nobody rents nothin. As in, illegal to let renters in  within miles in each die-rec-tion north south east west.

“I feel like I stepped into a war; warrior-aged men versus me. ...John?   Can’t they tell I’m too young or too upper class to know this stuff?”

John laughed at me. “You don’t have to know what people are like, yet, Girl. A landlord does.. They know. The assholes ours are, probably every renter they had wanted to stick it to them on their  way out.”

I argued,” If I was a first grade teacher and a pupil said the dog ate his homework I’d believe him because he had no experience with the joke.”

“That’s the beauty of a liar, Rapunzel–  they think you ain’t on to them and never expect you to get even with them. They think you’ve never dealt with someone as clever. They think they are  the only liars– let me correct that. Best liars you’ve had truck with.”

I’m getting to feeling nasty at the idea that the roomies knew I wasn’t going to pay them out of this precious check, that I intended to  split.

But you’d split, too, finding glass in your 2-week’s supply of milk. If they hadn’t made it unbearable–they must have wanted us to split. How could they demand a month’s rent for a month they intended to chase us off before it began? None of it made sense.

“How can they cash my check?” I demanded.”It’s to me.”
“Dontchoo know anything, girl? Calvin’s been here for years. He’s got people who’ll cash any check he brings them. He can write your name anyway he wants, sign his John Hancock under it, and deposit it.”
“But I’ll say he stold it.”
“And he’ll say you signed it funny on purpose so you could later game everyone and say you didn’t sign it. There’s three of them; one you,” John looks about at the snow in the arc of the streetlight . We can’t see them but our trailer park is the last thing before the foothills and over them loom the Rockies. It had been a neat idea- gone too soon- guess those who  ”have”:,           it  it, get to control who gets to enjoy that view  on that edge, and if you can go out the door and be striding up foothills instantly or its a thing with a car, a long cruise,  a sticker and out pre-dark.

“I think maybe the pay phone’s bugged,”I get. For lines. John’s are like, no more drug-testing  brains  that know as little  you, guinea-poo.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         PART 2
Two
  “As soon as they leave to go somewhere, we’re gone,” says John. He ends up waking me up for our great adventure early the next day.
“What,” I say irritably, having been in a nice dream that has fled my consciousness totally and forever because of him.
“All three perverts just left. I’d say we have 5 minutes. Come own!”
I put the little I have in my Samsonite hot pink suitcase and he puts what he hasn’t left in his car all along into his pillowcase which still has a pillow in it. We’re stealing the pillows and blanket. We get our stuff from the bath and kitchen and throw it in our Beetle and I jump in. John knocks some snow off the windshield and starts the car. Calvin’s car zips up the driveway behind ours.

You ‘d think this was unnecessary, all of it.
Grandma was all my brother and I had but she  did me right. I went to Hawaii with her yearly when Michigan ‘s first frost hit, returning for the tulip festival in spring in Holland, Michigan. Sometimes we went to London and Paris , the world she was of..  She would have paid Calvin his rent and my new landlord rent too but I was highly protective of this little old lady. It seemed to me Calvin was ripping her off- a month’s rent for 2 days? And I couldn’t be party to that.

Of course, he didn’t know we were leaving right soon. But then again, surely he did. In coffins, he thought.

“I knew they’d creep right back,” John’s saying as he gears into forward.

Our little VW without snow tires goes zooming between the two trailers, two trees it looks as though we can’t fit through, then over untrammeled snow like plain yogurt all over the grass, down the drive of a trailer on the road behind ours and onto Arapahoe, turning towards town in a spin. I’m looking through the mirror on my sunvisor when it dawns on us that I should’ve ducked from the get-go – if they thought I was still in the trailer they might’ve stopped to go in and harass me while I had no protection, scaring John into returning to protect me.

But it’s too late so I watch them while John works with every car chase he’s seen on TV and been in in real life contributing to his choices.

“They can’t get through the 2 trees,” I say of Calvin’s 4×4. “Not if he wants his rear view mirror. Now they’re trying to go around them. They’re backing up. They’re rushing down our street backwards to catch us at the next intersection.”

John reaches the intersection first and hangs  a louie at the light. He tears up the road until there are a few vehicles between us, then swings into a corner gas station and goes between a truck getting gas and a set of pumps in a space so narrow I squeeze my eyes shut and scream. One tire spins off the pumps’ cement base as we tear through with less than an inch to spare to either side of us ans swing a right behind the building , never slowing down as we race up hills and through allies until we are at one with a long drive whose house is obscured by snow-droopy big pines.

Total silence. John grimaces when I push the car’s cigarette lighter in.
“Open the window,” he orders.
“What if someone comes out?”
“We’re looking for Billy, Billy Dancourse.”
“If Calvin pulls up?”

John pulls his 9 mm out of his door pocket and sticks it somewhere inside his wino coat. It’s a 40’s era trench-like coat in length but of an ugly brown material like wool that’s pilling all over. .I don’t know which I like least- it’s rough feel or shoddy look. John calls it his wino coat. It doesn’t have the belted waist of a trench coat but hangs straight down to his knees.
On many cold nights it has been our blanket.

While John reads a Colorado road map ( we have to get through Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, and Wisconsin to get to Michigan), I open my door and let the fierce sunlight hit me in the face.
“How do you think Ramsey got a tan?”
“Farm boy. Never lost it. Plus his shirt probably always rode up account of his fat ass.. Why, you think he’s from Florida?”
“I dunno.”
“If he was, he’d a stayed there.”
“Why?”
“Lotsa a hims out there. Paradise, madam.”
“Lots of hims?”

John’s response is to imitate King Herrod in Jesus Chrst Superstar, waving his wrists limply to and fro while softly singing, ” And so Jesus Christ, The Great Jesus Christ…walk across my swimming pool..” and you can just see all the near-nude young fellows sitting on the marble steps around him at his pool , some feeding him grapes. Metaphorically, on them grapes, probably, but it’s the impression I get.
We’re in Denver.

Part 3 3                                                                          

In keeping with his renaming cities as birds, John christians it “The Din Bird”  before we go, while looking down upon it from a mountain one day. The valley the city lapped across was filled with fog. Smog, John told me.  ”God! Who would go down into it?” I said.

Anyway, guess who ’s going there to live.
“Tii- in- ver!” John shouts when his towers of generic canned food from a church ministry falls over.                                                                                                                                                                                               Embarrassed as we are to be in the city of disease we’d rediculed people for residing in, John and I find  plenty of ways to fun on Denver, The Red-Neck  State capital. We get my check, a postal money order you can cash right there; then we go to the crib of the only friend we’ve really made since hitting Colorado. In Boulder, you see, you meet folks by walking about on the Hill; but they’re the low-class scum you avoid in your own town : drug-abusing scam artists with no talents or goals except to get over on you; you being everyone- no one’s exempt from their contempt.

In Denver however there’s a rally going on at the university and we meet a girl there who takes us by a guy’s who befriends us and well,  we like people who befriend us.

Our landlord / roommate/ and chick posse has no idea we have a Denver friend but John still parks 2 blocks to the east and 2 blocks to the south of the house the apartment is in. Around the capital building and campus Denver has a lot of old houses that have been converted into four apartments, and this makes it easier to park somewhere than say in a city full of single-family houses with private driveways and garages..

Our friend’s name is Phil. We don’t know his last name, but,  you  don’t. Circumstances like this. He’s fillipino or Japanese or something, or half it, and he’s one of the rare guys who like John.
Yuck! But when he doesn’t, he’s a cutie.

John’ comes off as the loner rode into town with the six-shooters and calculating mind. Nobody wears long coats like his, or seems as closed and private. He has this air of cultural refinement ( his goatee) along with street-ness– his Negroe accent. People describing blue eyes always assure you these are unusually blue eyes, but his were. A real light blue, not the kind you have trouble distinguishing from green. With coal-black hair, fine but wisping off into springy tendrils about his face and neck. Sometimes he goes and does  himself bangs and somehow looks  Captain Kangarooish.

We were suposed to get to wash up and eat free at Phil’s, but when he heard we had nowhere to wash he knew we had no where to sleep and  he told the girl to tell us we could stay the night, too.

When a strange male goes overboard to have you around him, that’s the last place you want to be- he must be a kook, have no friends, be very hard to get along with, to want  the company of strangers  so  much. I thought. And male company…

Supper  takes a long time because Phil is very odd-whenever he has guests he makes them make music with him. He has a piano, drums, guitars, harmonicas, moraccas.  His voice sounds just like Stevie Wonder’s- you can’t tell the difference. While we were there the first time he had a very pleasant blonde without make-up or anything fake about her cooking spaghetti for everybody plus, while he encouraged the people there when we arrived and all who followed to play music, letting us choose instruments, a preternaturally happy fellow who got us all playing even if we were inhibited at arrival. John plays acoustic and electric guitar so they cemented a life-long friendship the first hour they met. Phil got on piano , me on maracas, and others on other stuff and we chased back the night and had spaghetti and salad and iced tea . The girl and Phil are the type who hug everyone and John said after we left them,”Now that’s real people!”

So we are staying at Phil’s now, our first night homeless. It’s pancakes for the masses, this time, because we aren’t the only people with our idea, and the couch is occupied, its cushions are otherwise occupied, and there’s even someone in a straight chair, curved over into an afghan. We’re young and hardy– we take the floor, atop some of our clothes from the trunk.

Everything is so good- you know, Elton John tunes, CCR, delicious pancakes with syrup, sincere hugs by the beautiful people– that we really are crushed when we get to our car the next morning and find a piece of paper under the windshield wiper. We know, even though we tell ourselves there’s no way ; and we’re right-it’s from Calvin.
“We don’t owe him diddly,” I say irritably. “We only slept there 2 nights longer’n we paid for. He can still rent it for full rent and probably is.”
“The rent’s about $8 a day,” John says.”You owe the ass $16.”
“What about the big box of milk he ruined?”
“And who knows what else–“ John’s talking about how we threw the toothpaste and toothbrushes out.
“We owe him $8.” It makes no sense to me.”Aint he got nothin’ better to do– how the hell did he find us?”
“I knew the mo’fo’ would go up and down every street in Boulder but the sucker spent thre night crawling all over Denver,” John said.
“There’s no way, no way he’d find us in such a big place. We could’ve gone to Golden–“ I catch myself. I’m not talking turkey. There’s just no way . Come on. John knew there would be glass in the milk, John parks away from Phil’s like he’ll find us there– I say carefully,”Are you sure you didn’t tell him we had a friend in Denver?”
“No, Candida, I did not tell him.”
“Why am I suddenly a  venereal disease?”
“You don’t remember the song Candida?”
  
“Did you tell Ramsey or Calvin we went to Denver? Still, it’s huge.”
“I think I know,” John says, eating a handful of unsalted nuts, which, along with dried fruit and spring water, is what we carry instead of eating at restaurants.”I told Ramsey how our state capital building made Colorado’s look famished.”
“Famished?”
“But in my defense, I thought of that and that’s why we parked a few blocks away , on E. Colfax.. I suggest the man is crazy and we need to leave Colorado now.”

I don’t; I’m not his age; I change the subject.

“Can you see him in Michigan?” I said, with a giggle.
“I’d like to. He’d wish he’d never met me,“ John said, I can’t say humbly, but he certainly wasn’t exaggerating: there’s  a huge fan club for him back there. You had to have seen what he did. At 13 he and a 12-year-old friend climbed the fire escape of the Pontiac State Bank Building– 14 floors- held the steel block keeping the door ajar over the stairwell, counted three, let go-and killed a security guard an inch away on Floor One who had a heart attack.

John wouldn’t rat out the friend and did 5 years at the equivalent of prison for minors. He and another murderer escaped once– first farm they came to turned them in, pretending to be their friend.

When he got out he got the highest GED score ever recorded in the county and a scholarship to the university out in Siberia I mean Marquette.

There he made his third group of blood brothers, somehow maintaining some 90 friends willing to die for him. Well, to fight for him.  The redneck elite, the young criminal, the collegiate  where eating your own rabbit and venison is common.  Three separate parts of the state, he was a hero. On top of that, he had the gay vote, being bi; hunters;  plus the connections, the strings to pull, from being  the boy of seven different rich and important men.

“We have to leave,” he is saying now.
We have everything we owned in the car, and some white crosses I’d bought off a street hippie on the Hill in Boulder (“Take 7,” he’d said).
I take  seven so I can be alert and drive so we can drive continuously to Michigan.

But somewhere still in Nebraska, a horribly boring flat state, the car suddenly tips to the driver’s door and I grab my door handle, hang on with all my strength, and scream until John slaps my face.

“ We’re tipping over!” I scream.
He asks what’s going on with me. I tell him that if I let go of the door handle I’ll fall on top of him. He says we’re really on our tires. I say we’re not.

“Those pills,” he curses. “Take 7– dude could’ve killed you!” He pulls into a motel parking lot..
“Be quiet– duck down.”

Ducking isn’t easy when you’re so nauseated you’re  about to lose it , and ducking down even harder when you aren’t sure where down is. He rents a room and leads me to a bed I fall on- it’s not soon enough.

“Fucker probably sold you his granny’s heart meds,” John says, peering out a curtain as the stale- smelling  heater  comes on in the cold room. “You’ll have to sleep it off.”

“Don’t let them get me,” I beg, “Not while I ‘m so sick-“ I can’t say another word.
I can’t die and I can’t move so I lay in as good a state of shock as I can muster through sheer will. I’m in hell, I tell myself grimly, and, I’m not going to think about it.

In this way , it’s not as if I get spared by falling asleep deeply, neither is it like it suddenly goes away , but yet I’m not feeling the fullness of the sensation, and can cut out John’s noises, which I think might be TV channels changing, and sort of unbe. You know, anything would have helped. Well, for an example, what am I saying, for the only example, marijuana would help.

Because it would be just dumb to drink myself into unconscienceness when I was over-dosing on someone’s strange prescription, I could be a glass of wine away from kidney failure and I don’t have a Merck manual on me to see if people die from that. I’ve heard too  many story tellers never get to tell their wildest story. How I Died.

Pot could take the edge off this feeling that all my coneective tissue is inflamed , every joint needing “oil can”, but we haven’t seen any, for the first time in our lives, the first state we couldn’t get any in.

Somehow, Colorado having the dubious distinction of  being the first United State I couldn’t find pot in, makes  me get this down feeling just looking at those snow and forest green license plates- it’s what hick means as far as I’m concerned.  No fugging  pot!

I hear the click of his safety going off.
John ’s over me, saying he’s going to the last gas station we passed and get food.I feel safer.
I can’t say anything.

John’s going on about someone getting a new asshole.  At first I somehow think he means a seashell-shaped sink.                             .                                                                                                                                                                   Part 4 4                                                                                                            
It seems like he goes. I drift in and  out of this idea that gas stations about sell only that, and there isn’t a one that doesn’t have signs saying
” _{FULL SERVICE GAS STATION} ” But John, John went to get food, see, to where there’s all these Amocos with aisles of bread, candy, chips, soda, milk, soup. I’m like, which one’s the real one? I decide it has to be the modern one, because that would incorporate the earlier one when you stayed in your car. But the olden days seem like the fresher experience, to me.

I get undizzy enough that I ‘m laying on my back, able to  watch TV. I’m drinking water to flush the pills out of my system. Weak, burnt, and the small of my back, both sides, hurt, I’d pick from the drop-down menu  for “My current mood is” on my Myspace blog.

I was right; those suckers did a number on my kidneys. But then, you usually know your body subconciously. Right now I’m studying how my heart suddenly spasms, punching so hard my shirt goes out. There’s always 2 punches, at the end of a roller coaster falling backwards in a verticle dive.  It’s happened at least three times.

I’m  able to take two, maybe one hit off a cigarette ( which I then put down as unfortunately the heart flop happens just then)And I’m like confident John’s gone so long only because the stores he’s thinking of have nothing nutritious and he’d go to the next town, probaby, I know he’ll look all over for a grocery, to get something nutritious for us. He’d never come back with junk food-it’s not in his ethics.

Except, maybe, chocolate Nutrament, which I  hope he’s getting, that we’re going to  bring me back with liquids first(tasty ones).

He can come up with some queer stuff. Once he made me try little brittle fish skeletons that actually come in a jar from a store. Once I had to eat one raw oyster.

I don’t know if he can get me to eat stuff any more, though. On the way here, on the way to Boulder from Florida, he stopped some place where over this little bump of a hill stood tall cactii .It was the first cactus growing free we’d ever  Over the sand he goes to it, and soon he’s like, never coming back, or something. I finally get out og the car. he’s sitting there looking glum.
“I did a very stupid thing, Amber, ” he said solemnly.
His tongue was all red and looked like a dog’s cauliflower ear. He had his green switchblade in his  hand and there was a piece of bark gone  off a cactus he was carefully not leaning on there.

Suddenly he reached into his mouth and twiddled with his  swollen tongue..”That hurt,”  he said, and held out his index finger. Something like a newborn porcupine’s quill was on it, along with a little spit.
“You ate the cactus,John? You would’nt eat cactus.”
“Shuddup.”
“You ate- ”
“I read this article that said you could, ” he hissed. I was stil incredulous and he told me not to tell anybody only it was a threat, like the only one he ever gave me.
I’ve never told anyone. You know it would get back to him.

Well now I’m getting around I see his gun’s under a pillow and then I remember him telling me it was. I don’t know what it is I’ve never taken interest but I mean I know it’s a .38 snub-nosed revolver. That means lots of bullets. Fully-jacketed hollow-points.
Don’t ask me why John has a gun. Residual from being a prisoner?

The  only people John doesn’t like are female  nags. I don’t know why he finds them so abrasive when he wasn’t raised by one. Let alone carries a piece.

John’s  mother is so quiet—! She’s short, squat, and dumpy, dumplings of freckled snowy flesh , plain-faced, wordless, dirt poor, conservative, silent, afraid to drive, and I have no idea if she speaks English. She comes from Poland like his dad.

Since she’s so silent, I don’t know why he’s so angry toward nags. Neurotic, it was called.
Now I’m in my year my upper back is what aches  and I spread out on the floor for firm support of my spine.

I don’t know why, and all that. But a cheerleader has just been saved and now Listerine is finishing the job, a man’s assuring me, when the door  lock makes a noise and swoop, it’s opening.

I say opening because everything stops here and a decision is  made that is going to ripple somewhere long long from now still. I’m not watching a horror movie or anything- a cute  indestructable  cheerleader is not comparable to some of those pyschological thrillers- but the sickness has  me edgy. Well of course the whole John Ramsey and Friends thing is what has me edgy, so I grab up the pistola and realize I’m all alone and when Calvin ’s head pops up on the other side of a maid’s cart-which I know they don’t bring into the rooms- automatic reflex. Seconds ago a female voice said but there are people that want to hurt me.
Didn’t realize that was a silencer.  My God.

Thank my God it’s a silencer. While you could definitely hear the gas explode, the muzzle sounded muffled and  like something else. A  tall black girl in loose white cotton pants and top with yellow-dyed hair and a false piece full of tiny braids atop her head  lies draped over the stained wood and floral cushion  easy chair , definitely dead. I’m like, Johnnnnn.
Hopefully John registered as something kookoo. He’s been known to receive telephone service  in the name of a Marvel Superheroe’s alter ego. And with Calvin out here, you know he wouldn’t give his real one.

Hurry John we’re gone. I’m gone. I know this place in  Seattle where I can get credit card numbers by posing as the newspaper giving really good deals on a year; everyone falls for it although it’s too good to be true.

It’s been in my mind. But I‘m too antsy around things looking like they’re out of Night of The Living Dead to wait around. Freakin John! Somehow I have to get to John. “Johnny’s got the keys..”

I pick up my pillowcase of stuff, add his few things-toothbrush, soaked socks he washed in the sink, bar of Castile soap, maps, Readers’ Digest. (His mom sends him that one, or did before we went on the road.).

Now I’m glad the maid pulled the cart into the room; it’ll take them awhile to find out where she is. I don’t feel as bad for her, too, when I get outside and see John’s hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob.

Up at the road’s edge its that proverbial ribbon of highway dissecting a flat, plain Nebraska as far as you can see, a little snow still on each side, on whatever’s growing. Map says go left.
I’m just at the brink of crossing the road the motel’s on when a car comes toward me, and before I can even put out my arm I see it’s John. Went right past the motel before he saw me.
“Well,” He says when I’m in and seat-belted .
“Here’s an hour, John. Give me an idea what’s going on.”
“ When we go back to the room,”he says.
“I don’t think you’ll want to do that.”                                                                      
“you must be feeling a lot better,” says John.
“Did you put the glass in the milk?”
“Say whatchoo talkin about!” John does this crazed doubletake.”Are you drunk?” He rides the Rabbit off the road and parks. There is a can of unsalted nuts and a box of raisins on his seat, and a 6-pack of personal bottled waters at my feet. The new stuff.

” Why are you wearing the motel’s banket?” He says.
“Is that why you picked me up- didn’t realize who I was?” I parry.                                           ”I know you, Amber.” He is calm, matter-of-fact. He sighs, blows out of  pursed lips slowly.”I’ve known you for years.”
The words hit me like the great climatical delivery line of an epochal movie. It is like I’d never forget them; they’ll always symbolize something much more significant than anything else. They are seared into me like a song’s high point.  I fight what I guess is hypnotism off. “Where were you going, John?” My voice cracks.

“To get you, Booby. Where were you going?”
“You never came back.”
“Why are you afraid to go back to the motel, Amber?”
“Never mind. Do you want to go to Seattle?”
“With you shooting me in the head when I’m in the shower?”
“Why’ d I do that?”
“You aren’t thinking too clear, Gruesome. And you’ve got blood splatters on your clothes. Why would I ruin my own milk you don’t even use?”
   I pull the blanket back together at my throat.”Saw you put a paper under your windshield wipers.”

He gives me a look so frightening I quickly qualify, “Once.” His eye whites bug out real big and he looks at me from a certain angle where his chin is presented first, figurin -like, while  his body comes out at me, but it’s not the words he says, and its not merriment in his eyes that’re just bugging out at his mock assessment of me;  what frightens me is, he looks like a whole other person, and an African-American to boot, with facial fat from the skin drooping down and huge popping out eye whites, and shape-shifters are from the devil so I see that. The devil, next to me in a car.

Then his face goes John again. His tight-skinned cheekbones are reddening and he goes,
“I want my gun, Prunella. Now
There is a way he has of saying things..I get it out from my waist band and give it him.
John checks it out, spins the chamber, puts the gun  in the holster under his arm . “Choo know,” he says slowly, “As I was leavin’ it , I thought about this.”
“Yeah?”
“Not good enough,” John will only say.
“I thought she was you,” I go.
“You’ve gone mad,”He says, not even surprised enough to look at me. “Don’t You Worry Bout A Thing” comes on the radio, and he turns it up.

We sing it loudly many times, did it a lot on this trip, him with his arms bent at the elbows in front of him, his two thumbs emphatically pointing at his chest over and over to the beat like a Disney World animatron looking at me while the song said “I’ll be standing here by your side..”. Once he turned up this Siegal Schwall tune and pronounced it our wedding song. A guy sings to his girlfriend that she goes to work, he stays home, She makes money, he’ll be right there to protect her, honey . She gets popped, he’ll go her bail, she gets time,” tell you what I’ll do- I’ll stay right here  and wait for you.”

He was the only person in the world I trusted the day I ran away from home. It was grey and there were evil men  on hogs and the city downtown was so big and  ugly and polluting and I was so 16.

And I’m still here. I look at my moccasins. If he was going on past the motel to make sure no Calvinites are parked behind a stand of pines down the road, well, his reward is me still running with him. If that isn’t it, he’s carrying a murder weapon he doesn’t know they’re looking for. Any trouble from him, I just have to call any police. Guess I’m pretty safe.

“Who’s name did we put the room in?” I mumble through a mouthful of grapes.

“Well now I figure there’s one person Old Cal wouldn’t think of spreading the name of to  all the motels in  two cities where he’s seeking a party staying at a  motel. I figure he’ll start with my name and then have her ask yours and then his puppy will try some clever name but not the one I registered with. That’d be a dumb move. Even if he thinks I used it, he can’t risk asking. He wouldn’t be able to have any fun if he did.”

I yawn.  ”It would keep cropping up in police reports?”
“Yep. And no matter how tight his  alibi, it would smell like rotten fish  that somebody thought he was at a motel today where they  coincidentally found some corpses. A dude who owns his own home nearby and doesn’t need a room. If his aim ’s to whomp ass he don’t want his name all over .. “

“Um- they’re going to be looking for him. ” I’m  anxious. “And your uh piece. ”                                    
I’ve got the gun, DoDo,” John’s voice suddenly comes in my head, circumventing my ears. Detached from him.

“We could go to Seattle.”
Yep. I told Phil we were going to Missiouri. Kansas City’s  anathema.”
“Phil’s our friend.”
“He’s a genuinely nice guy, Amber. But that don’t mean his  beloved dadddy isn’t  a homocide detective. He might not trust us when he hears we killed a lovable dude or two. The survivors aren’t going to tell about the glass.”

That’s because only you and I know about it (I think).

I mean, I’m realistic: everyone I know is already going to be laughing at me  when I next say Calvin left that note. Went from Boulder to Denver, searched every road. How’s the next one for rolling around laughing : John just happened to not get caught at the crime scene because he happened to be leaving me just  then and driving on by the motel. Everyone laughs the hardest at this, except John, turning from fixing a speaker to correct me, an intense look on his face, but the crowd roar is deafening. I’m alright with this. Still, I’m surprised that John trusts me not to have set him up, if he really  didn’t set me up; I don’t deserve that trust. I’m not trusting him.

Hey, can you blame me for not wanting to face that Calvin might have a  pact with the devil?
They have this saying, what doesn’t unglue you will make you stronger, that’s the gist, and, well, John coming unglued would unglue me. I don’t think anything else would.

I remember stopping for gas with John and waiting in the car in this disgusting exhaust- and dirt- choked intersection . An immigration of  birds was everywhere- all sizes, colors, types, with so many different songs. I had to know what would make them plop onto that particular intersection. I threw back my head, looked at the up as if over it. The birds had seen bushes and treetops, a funeral home spire they may have seen as a church. Sun, shade, maybe worms in the groumd, certainly the red of the stoplight. But they’d soon pick up, fly on. In a bird’s lifetime it probably visited many many little sections of cities and unoccupied forest glades and vallies.
John better  be stronger than me. I once had a boyfriend who got headaches..

There are no reference points to eras and ages; yet the bird fully participates in the moment.                                                                                                                                                                                            

Pretty soon he lets me drive some and we get through the mountain pass totally dying to know who was behind all these miles of roads through hills , and how it felt to be first. While he drives I pick up and read local works. I read about the Children’s Blizzard in Iowa and South Dakota where many perished in the 1800’s. In Nebraska I  read a book on  the 1952ish Starkweather murders through that state; we get here, Washington, there’s nothing contemporary to read, and what good is old Washington? At least we’re by Vancouver, which likes pot.

Windows down and maps flapping, we’re running together and we’re here.

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