Part II. Hope is a Terrible Thing

DUST TO DUST.

J. MANN

PART II: hope is a terrible thing

I walk for a day.

I don’t see anyone, but the ground shimmers sometimes, and I think I see people. I think, at one point I see an Indian on a red horse. He’s bent low, and he’s riding as fast and as hard as anything. Just went he’s right on top of me, and I think I’m going to be trampled, he vanishes, and I stop short, breathing heavy. I didn’t know ghosts could see mirages, and that’s what it must be, a mirage, even though I swear I looked into his eyes, and we saw each other.

One thing that’s nice about being dead is you don’t get tired, or hungry. I walk through the night, and at first I want to be scared. There’s howls in the desert at night, and you can’t see where they’re coming from. Some of them sound like coyotes, and some of them sound like screams. I don’t need to, but I climb a big rock formation in the morning, and I watch the sunrise. It’s bright like a kerosene storm lamp being lit, and the streaks of scarlet across the sky look like places where matches are struck to light it. If I turn around, I can see my lightening tree as a little speck in the distance, but I’m too far away to see the turtle rock. If I look ahead, I can see a winding, brown/grey snake, and my heart leaps. It’s the highway, and it’s not that far at all.

I’m almost there, as the sun starts going down. These sunsets are so big here. Big and purple like bruises and violets. I really missed eating today. I was thinking about all my favorite foods, as I walked, and it passed the time so quickly it surprised me to find I was almost on top of the asphalt. I’d been swimming in gravy and mashed potatoes and fried chicken from a greasy cardboard box. There was a place just outside the Pit where April and I used to go to pick up dinner for us and Mama, and they made the best fried chicken and po’ boys.

I took Dervish there, when he knocked on my window the second night after he’d moved into the Pit.

I still have no idea how he knew which window was mine. I guess he must have watched me a little. I didn’t think about it at the time.

I was in my chickie shorts that I wore only to bed because of how short they were. They were soft yellow like a baby chick and made out of the same stuff as a bath towel, so they were the best to sleep in during the summer months. I’d painted my toenails silver with little sparkles, and I was wiggling them because for some reason I’d heard that helped them dry faster. While I was doing this, I was poring over one of my older magazines. I’d already been through it six or seven times and cut out all the pictures I’d wanted, and torn out all the perfume ads, but I was bored, and I wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

All of a sudden I heard a loud knock right beside my head on the tiny window. I just about jumped out of my skin it startled me so badly, and it happened twice more before I could even bring myself to lift the little purple curtain and look.

When I did, I saw that ridiculously handsome boy standing about ten feet from the trailer.  I must have looked so foolish because he was the last thing I expected to see, and I got so surprised, I just said, “Oh!” just like that, one word, no more.

He was wearing a grey hoodie, and his jeans and boots, and he had the hood up like he knew he was going to be sneaking around, and he smiled wide when he saw me, and waved.

Still in shock, I lifted my hand and waved back slowly. Dervish looked down at the ground, then back up, and I swear my heart was not beating this whole time, but he motioned with his hand for me to come out, and I dropped the curtain, and had a little moment with myself.

I could stay here.

Or.

I could sneak out, which I had never done in my whole life, and see what this boy, the most beautiful boy I had ever seen, mind you, wanted with me, of all people.

I lifted the curtain back up, and he was still there, a slightly less sure look on his face, and that was what did it. He looked nervous, like maybe I wouldn’t come out, and that just did me in.

I held up my finger to say one minute, dropped the curtain, and took three deep breaths.

Mama would be out like a light on the couch. She’d gotten halfway through her Soco bottle before dinner tonight, so that wasn’t a problem, but, when I turned off my little clip on fan, I could still hear the television, which meant April was probably still awake.

I slithered off of my bunk casually, and looked down the little hall at the living space, where the tv was. It’s light flickered across the floral settee where Mama was dead asleep, and, bless her, so was April! They were leaned on each other like two little old biddies, and I paused a moment to think about how cute they looked, before sliding my pink hoodie out of the Rubbermaid container I used to store all my clothes under my bunk.

I ducked into the bathroom for five seconds, so I could get a bra on, because a lady never leaves the house without one, and I spritzed on a little of my best perfume from an actual bottle that I hid taped to the bottom of the sink, because April liked to just spray any perfume but hers after she used the bathroom.

I slipped out the trailer door, and wandered out front of the trailer. It was humid out, but a little chilly, and I was pulling on my sweatshirt, when I heard a whisper.

“I was beginning to wonder what I was gonna have to do to get you out here,” Dervish said.

I looked up at him. I couldn’t quite see his face. There was a shadow from a tree over it, and he felt even taller than he had the other day.

I was still wiggling my toes.

Oh damn it. I had completely forgotten to put on shoes.

I looked down in shocked disappointment. I guess I wouldn’t be going anywhere with him after all.

“You really don’t talk much, huh?” Dervish said.

I smiled. “I guess nobody’s ever noticed before,” I said, after a moment.

He offered me his arm, like a gentleman, like a movie star, and I jiggled my newly painted sparkly toes with pure agitated frustration. I could feel the dust between my toes, and every curly piece of dead brown grass was like a ribbon tying me to the front of our trailer.

“I forgot my shoes,” I said dumbly, and then I giggled.

Dervish looked down, and he got a wicked smile on his face. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t move.”

Then he was gone, off like a ghost, or a light in the swamp that you think you see, but as soon as you look hard, you can’t be so certain anymore.

I fold my arms even though it isn’t cold out, but my legs are barely covered in my chickie shorts, and they are just covered in goosebumps. Dervish seems to have been gone a while, and I begin to wonder if, like a light in the swamp, he ever was here to begin with. I didn’t touch him. He might not have been real after all. Maybe I just nodded off on my bunk bed, and I had a this lovely, hopeful dream that I was about to wake up from any minute.

Just as I was about to give up and go back inside, I heard the sound of a car moving really slowly. I peered around the trailer next to ours, and it’s the truck I saw pulling Dervish’s trailer the day before. The lights were off, and he stopped when he saw me. I didn’t think twice. I just scampered right over to the truck. He flung the door open for me, and I hopped in and shut the door tight behind me. It was a little loud, my door, and we both looked at each other and froze.

I wondered in that moment, if I was about to see April storm out the front of our trailer, or worse, Mr. Pikes pop out of his tiny office. Even though I knew he was at home with his wife, my heart felt as big as a bowling ball, and I could hear every beat.

When nothing happened, Dervish threw the truck into reverse, and we tore out of the Pit like the devil was after us. He flipped the lights on, and I could see the ribbon of dust we blew out behind us, as we pulled off the gravel drive onto the main, paved road.

“Where are we going?” I asked, giddy, and nervous, and not entirely sure I cared.

Dervish looked at me sideways. “Well, I woke up this morning, and I could not stop thinking about this girl I met yesterday. She just seemed like nothing or nobody I’d ever met before, and worse, she smelled like sugar daddies, and jelly beans, and all the cotton candy floss I’d ever eaten rolled up into one. She smelled so good, I thought I might have made her up.”
I was blushing terribly, all the way down to my toe sparkles, while he said this, but Dervish just went on talking. If he noticed he was embarrassing me, he didn’t draw attention to it, and I thought that was polite. I didn’t care about that either.

“I had to help my Uncle Joel fix the plumbing on the trailor today, and it was probably the worst day of my life,” Dervish continued, but he didn’t sound so playful when he said that. He sounded angry and sad.

“And when we were done, my back hurt so much, and all I could think about was how much I just wanted some food, and to go to sleep, but Joel ate a frozen pizza, and only gave me a piece of it, and I was so angry, I just went to bed, and I was lying there thinking about how hungry I was, and all of a sudden this girl popped into my head again, and I thought I might go crazy between how hungry I was, and how nice this girl seemed, and as soon as Joel went to bed, I lifted his keys and snuck out.”

“To find me?” I asked, still not sure if I could believe him.

“I know!” he cried. “It sounds stupid. I just don’t know anyone, and you seemed special. Do I sound weird? I can just turn around and take you home if you like.”

“No!” I shouted.

 He pulled the truck over, and turned to face me on the blue leather of the seat.

I looked at him, my eyes must have been wide, because I felt like it took three hours to blink, and while I did, neither of us said anything. We just sat there, in the truck, looking at each other.

Then Dervish asked me something I hadn’t expected at all.

His voice was low and kind of ragged sounding. “Did I scare you?”

I looked over his shoulder at the road. We weren’t far from the Pit. I could have gotten out and walked home in less than twenty minutes, and only about ten minutes drive ahead of us was Goldies Fried Chicken, a drive in place I knew a lot of kids went to hang out, because it was open until midnight.

“Are you still hungry?” I asked.

Dervish slid a little on the seat, not a lot, maybe not even toward me, but it felt like he got closer. “Yes, ma’am.”

I laughed, because he just seemed so strange, so serious one minute, and so silly the next. I liked it. “Then just take us a bit further, dopey, there’s a place just up here.”

Dervish jerked the truck up off the shoulder back onto the road again.

“She called me dopey!” he said to nobody in an indignant voice.

                                                            *

I get to the highway sometime on the third or fourth night. There’s no way to keep track of the passage of time out here, and I’ve forgotten how many sunrises and sunsets I’ve seen even though it only feels like a handful. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to being dead.

When the sun has risen completely, I can see the hitchhiker. She starts out as a white blob way up on the side of the silver stripe that is the road. As I walk toward her, she takes a more permanent-type shape, and I can see she’s a hippie. She’s wearing a loose, white dress with a red cord cinching it in the middle, and she’s got long brown hair with bits that have bleached out from being in the sun so long. It’s straight, and reaches the middle of her back, but it’s not tangled at all. It’s smooth and silky looking. As we get closer and closer, I can see she’s got her thumb out, even though I have yet to see any vehicles on this stretch of road. She’s standing under one of those green signs that says how many miles until certain places, and I’m excited to read how many miles it will be before I get to where I’m going.

I don’t expect her to see me.

            She does though.

            She’s got on a pair of huge, green plastic, sunglasses, and she pulls them down as I get closer, like she’s checking me out, and I stop walking when she does that because maybe, I think, she sees a ghost.

            Then she takes a step toward me.

“Hey!” she says, like we’re already friends. “Where did you come from?”

“Who?” I say, confused. I don’t know if I’ve spoken since I died. I haven’t, so it feels weird.

She throws her head back and laughs, “You’re a trip, man. I like you.”

She has really straight, white teeth, and a big pretty smile. She looks like she belongs on a beach in California.

“What are you doing out here?” I ask, because it seems like the right thing to do.

“Oh, I’m looking to get a lift back home,” she says casually.

“Which way’s that?”

“West, baby. I’m from San Francisco!” She announces this all proudly, and then she laughs again.

It’s nice to be talking to somebody, but there’s something off about her, and it makes me feel sad.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Talula,” she says, and then she looks up at the highway sign like it’s the first time she’s ever seen anything like it. “Vegas. Two hundred miles? Ugh.” She puts her sunglasses back on.

I’m about to ask her something else, but then we hear something, and I turn around, and so help me, it’s a car, a big black thing, speeding toward us.

Talula whoops and thrusts her skinny, brown arm out thumb held high. “This is the one!” she says. “Come on baby! We’ve been waitin’ for you! Come on!”

I feel stupid, but I want to help her, so I stick out my arm too. I’ve never hitchhiked before, and staring down the road at this car barreling down at us feels exciting. I wonder if it’s going to pick both of us up. Maybe it’s a fancy gambling man in a dark suit who will drive us all the way to Vegas in no time flat. It’s getting so that you can feel the ground trembling under your feet now. It’s that close.

Talula’s right next to my ear, “Throw a smile on, honey!” she yells, “You get anything you want if you smile enough!” I look back at her, and she’s got one on from ear to ear. She looks like a toothpaste commercial. I turn back, and the car’s almost right there. I smile, knowing it looks nothing like Talula’s, but the car whips by us in a cloud of dust and engine thunder. It’s gone like a whipcrack, and Talula’s kicking at rocks and cursing up a storm.

“Aw man! Motherfucker didn’t have the time!” she yells, stomping her sandals and waving her arms. “This ride shit is really harshing my mellow, man!”

“How’d you get all the way out here?” I ask.

“My boyfriend,” Talula spits, “EX-boyfriend!” she says and whirls around. “We should walk on some. What did you say your name was?”

“Mae.”

“Wanna walk with me a little, Mae? I think we girls should stick together, can’t be too careful you know?”

“Okay,” I say, and we start walking, and I hope I don’t have to tell her that I’m dead.  

                                                            *

When we got to Goldies, there were a couple of cars parked around the side. The sign was bright yellow like the yolk of an egg, and, as the truck bounced over the curb, I flew up a little on the seat, and I was closer to Dervish, and my stomach clutched tight like a fist.

Dervish ordered fried chicken, a hotdog on a stick, and French fries. He got a coke, and I got a big cup of sweet tea with extra lemon. We sat on the hood of the truck, and I watched him eat like a starving animal. He wasn’t kidding about being hungry.

It was funny. I liked watching him. Just eating like that, he was still strange, and new, and I wanted to touch his dark hair as he bent his head over the red and white paper dish and dropped the chicken bones from his fingers with a deep sigh. I sucked at my sweet tea and pretended I hadn’t been watching so closely. I looked up, past the Goldies sign, at the stars. There was a plane flying over head, and I watched its lights fade into the distance. The medicine smell of a wetnap reached my nose, and I looked over at Dervish as he finished wiping his fingers and hoisted himself up on the hood of the truck beside me.

“Have you always lived here?” he asked after a minute.

“Not always at the Pit, but Lowport, Louisiana, yes,” I replied.

“I’ve never lived anywhere longer than a year or two, not even when I was a baby,” Dervish said. “I was born in Hawaii, you know?”

“Really?” I tried to remember anything I knew about Hawaii, and I could picture a tropical sunset, lots of palm trees, a beach, and a bunch of hula dancers. “What was it like?” I asked.

“I don’t remember much,” Dervish said, and he sounded sad. “We moved when I was two.”

 I whole landslide of questions piled up behind my lips, What happened to your parents? Why did you leave? Where else have you lived? What brought you to the Pit? I didn’t know where to begin though, so I just sucked down my sweet tea, and then I felt him get even closer on the hood of the truck. He held out a big, tawny hand in front of my face and counted off on his fingers,

“Arizona, South Dakota, and Texas for most of my schooling, until I dropped out and went off on my own for a couple of years.” He took his hand down and brushed my cheek with a knuckle. It was so sudden, my heart stopped, and I looked down, but he didn’t seem to skip a beat, and the hand went back down beside him on the truck, just as easily as it touched me. 

“I fell out with my stepdad,” he continued, “So I went looking for my real dad for a while, but the services caught up with me, and I got sent back home to my mom’s. So I ran away again. Then again. Until finally the only way they could get me to finish school was if they sent me to live with Uncle Joel, and that was fine with me. Joel doesn’t care if I go to school as long I help him with his plumbing business, and I don’t care to go to school as long as I can make money.”

“Why’d you move to the Pit?” I asked finally.

“Joel’s girlfriend kicked us out of her house, and Joel and I struck out two town’s over, which is here. I turn 18 in two weeks, and I promised Joel I’d give him a year, and then I was takin’ off for real.”

“Where will you go next?” I asked, breathless at the way he talked. All this travel, all these moves and ambitions. I’d never even been outside Louisiana.

“Oh that’s easy. Las Vegas,” Dervish answered.

“What will you do there?” I already missed him. How could he leave? He’d just got here. I felt another knuckle on my cheek, and I turned to look at him.

“I don’t know for sure, but I’ve got a good idea,” he murmured, and then he smiled that smile at me, and I didn’t even realize I was leaning, until he slid those knuckles alongside my jaw and kissed me.

I shut my eyes, and I felt weightless. My entire world was inside his mouth in that kiss. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think outside of the stars, his salt rimed lips, everything I had ever felt about the Mosquito Pit slid away, and I knew then if he ever asked me to do anything I would do it. I wouldn’t even blink. I wondered if he could tell. I wondered how much I told him with that first kiss, because it seemed like he knew everything already. 

My Love Affair with Trailer Park Love Story

Hey Everyone,

I got such a positive response for my freewrite on the trailer park love story, that I've decided to expand it into a much longer project.

Because it was born on this blog, i will be making it available (FOH MO' LESS DOLLAHS...ahem...for free), on this forum in the chunks I write, as I write them. 

There will be one or two passes for surface edits, but otherwise this is as raw as it gets.

I would love feedback, and sharing, so please please please, post links to this story EVERYWHERE. 

Tell me what you think, tell others what you think, just share it, and send people to it. 

I will post new chunks every Tuesday.

much love, much tinder,

let's do it,

J            

DUST TO DUST. Part I

J. Mann

When I pull myself free of the sand, there’s a moment where the last of my ghost doesn’t want to be free of this shallow grave. I sit down on the packed, dry earth, and I look at where he put me down.

            The wind blows a little of the loose dirt off one of my bare toes. The pink, faux feathery toe straps of the slippers I was wearing blow away from my cherry pie  varnish toenail, and for a moment I think I’m at the bottom of the ocean. I think about a sea anemone I saw on tv once. It was pink and waved like the toe feather waves, and a little pink fish swam in and out of those lovely, tender little fronds underwater, just like my poor dead toe. Except my toe doesn’t move like that little fish darting back and forth, like I used to tap it when I was nervous. My toe is dead now, just like the rest of me out here in the desert.

            It’s the week before Christmas, and a week before that I was still in the trailer park slipping Dervish the sweet eyes every time I saw him. A week before he kissed, married, and killed me.

            My name is Mae. I was sixteen years old, and I have been dead for a night, and most of this day.

I don’t know how long I stare at my toe, before I decide I had better be getting a move on. I want to remember this place. I want to be able to find my way back here, because I have this strange desire to keep my body company. She doesn’t feel mine anymore, but I have affection for her, and it’s lonely out here.

            I know Vegas is close. Dervish is lazy, or bold, and he only drove my body about an hour outside of the city lights before he dug my shallow grave.

If I can find the highway, I can follow it back to the city, and I had better get a move on. I’m sure Dervish is still there. His eyes were too big when we drove into town three days ago. Has it only been three days? Time is so strange. I guess more so when you’re a ghost. I think it will take me a while to get the hang of this.

            I reach out for the soft, plump little toe. I want to give it a little, comforting squeeze, but I don’t have fingers, and the shape that is my hand passes through the little toe, and it fills me with an infinite kind of sadness that takes possession of my whole being for a minute. But then I shake it off. I look down at my hands. I can see them plain as day, and as my big sister April used to say, ‘don’t let nobody tell you what you are, you square your shoulders and tell them with your walk.’

I know I need to walk away from the grave.  I look around at the landscape. There is an odd rock formation, and a lightening struck tree nearby. Side by side, the tree looks like a scarecrow a little, and the rock kind of looks like a humpbacked turtle. They could be having a conversation about where this young girl came from, and I sort of wish they were, but they’re just a rock and a tree, and I am not a girl anymore.

            The desert feels different than it did when I was alive. When Dervish and me drove through it was exciting and foreign as the moon. I drank up everything through the window of the, pale blue Taurus. It had all been so big and important, and that little breeze of loneliness blew at me through the window, and even though I thought it was the wind of change blowing me and Dervish into the city together, blowing us like a ship into the future, and I had imagined this is what all the great discoverers must have felt like when they sailed from England to the United States for the first time, like in those movies, where everybody calls it “The New World”. That’s exactly how it felt driving to Las Vegas to get married. Dervish held my hand, and it was sweaty, and mine was dry and we laughed, and he leaned over, as we took the exit for the city, and kissed me, and I was glad I’d just put on my cherry lip gloss, because I knew I’d taste hopeful and pretty to him.

            He tasted like dirt a little, but I didn’t care. He was Dervish, and he was mine, and we were in love, and only a few days earlier, I didn’t even know if he knew I was alive.

                                                                        *

            I was Aggie Dell’s third daughter, and I was the good one. Mama was on the welfare, and took up with any man who had work long enough to buy her a decent necklace or a fancy dinner, or at the end, a space heater for the trailer. My oldest sister, Subelle ran away when she was fourteen. I was only seven, and I thought for years she’d come back and pick up me and April and save us from the trailer park.

            In my daydreams, she rolled up in a convertible the color of pistachio ice cream, all grown up with suitcases just spilling big hoops of taffeta dresses in every cotton candy color imaginable. April and I would run out of the trailer as it trembled and shook and hail fell from the sky and shot it all full of holes. Mama wouldn’t notice, she was never awake before three in the afternoon. In the daydream, she doesn’t get hurt, Subelle just scoops up April and me in a swirl of candy colored dream floss, and we all ride away from the Mosquito Pit cackling like witches.

Our long blonde hair is all alike, and Subelle looks just like I remember her, like an angel, but older, and more beautiful and wise, and exactly what I want to look like when I grow up, and when I ask her where we’re all going, she laughs loud and carefree and says, “I’m taking you girls to the beach!” and I understand that we’re going to California, because that’s where everybody runs away to isn’t it?

Usually the daydream ended there, but it started ending sooner when I told April about it. Subelle was my age when she ran away, and I was starting to wonder if she would ever come back for us. April had dropped out of the high school and had a job at the corner store selling live bait and liquor, and other necessities.

She got fat pretty soon after that. Not that she wasn’t pretty, April was as pretty as Subelle to begin with, but she got so angry, and she didn’t do anything with that anger, so it just stayed in her. I don’t even think she ate that much, she just fed that anger inside her until it got too big, and then she got too big, and she was fat before you could blink and pull off false eyelashes.

It didn’t matter to the swamper men who came to the store to buy chicken livers. They looked at her thick eyeliner and her double DD’s and her grubby fingernails and thought she was a kind of girl that she wasn’t. She read a lot of books that she ordered off the internet at the library, and she didn’t want anything to do with those men, but that didn’t stop them from giving her the trouble. It probably made it worse.

            Fat April got meaner the fatter and angrier she got. She was fed up with the Pit. She was fed up with Mama sleeping all the time, and not working. She even seemed fed up with me because I still went to school, and I didn’t drop out and get a job like she did. Sometimes she sniffed at me, when I was getting ready in the morning, putting on my mascara.

“You putting on weight, Mae?” She’d ask, and after I didn’t answer, because I didn’t pay her no mind anymore, she’d get meaner.

“Doesn’t matter how much paint you slap on that face, it don’t mean you’re better than me,” she’d snarl, and slam the door to the trailer as she left for the store, even though, she could have given me a ride if she’d been inclined.

I took to doing my make up in my bunk bed. I’d lie on my stomach with my rose colored caboodles box, where I kept all my niceties open, and a hand mirror propped up so I could see my face up close. After I started doing that, April didn’t get so mad at me in the mornings, and I always got a ride to school. Even if it was a quiet one.

April was kind of obsessed with cleaning. She and I never had many friends, and she spent her days off doing laundry, and cleaning up the trailor, when she wasn’t watching movies on our tiny tv. I wasn’t so much into cleaning things. I liked collecting stuff instead.

I collected the perfume ads from all the magazines people got at the Pit.  Mr. Pikes, the lot manager, told me I could have any magazines that people put into the recycling bins outside his office. Mrs. Campbell, a friend of Mama’s who came over some nights and watched the tv with Mama brought me a stack of magazines whenever she went out to the liquor store. She liked me, I guess. Her breath always smelled like medicine, like Mama’s, and she was missing some teeth, but Mama didn’t have many friends, so I liked her back.

I could tear out a perfume ad perfectly, with no ripping on the edge. You had to keep the page whole. Then you could punch three holes in the side and put them in my special, perfume binder. It was aqua, the color of California pool water.

I never used the perfume in the ads. I just liked to flip through the binder and admire all the ads. They looked so glamorous, always glossy and glamorous with splashy pictures of cities lit up at night like fireflies, or lovers entwined with silken sheets. I could peel the ad open just a tiny bit and sniff at the sample hidden away inside and close my eyes and imagine I was classy and glamorous like those beautiful women in the photographs.

Poor April could wash her clothes a thousand times and it wouldn’t do any good.  That’s why I never used those samples. No matter how hard you wash something in The Pit, it’s still got the dirt of the trailers on it. That’s something that just doesn’t wash off. Not if you’re still there.

            If you get out, I used to think, I bet it’s easy to get clean and stay clean, in the rest of the world.

One day in July, after my first year in high school, I was sitting in a yellow and white plastic chair behind the trailer. April was sitting in a chair beside mine that was mint green and white.  The bottom of her chair drooped, and she balanced a thick book on her pale, chubby knees, and read silently. Even then I could feel her getting angrier just sitting there next to me. Even though I wasn’t talking to her or anything.

I had a pile of magazines that some of the ladies had brought me next to my chair. I had already gone through them and torn out the ads I wanted. My binder was tucked under my arm, and I was dozing off a little, daydreaming about the pages of a magazine open on my lap.  I was imagining what it would be like to be on a boat covered in Christmas lights. I could have a diamond clear martini glass between my fingers and a whole bottle of gold colored perfume waiting back in the cabin of this boat. 

After a while, April said the sun was too bright to read her book, and she folded it over her eyes and fell asleep. I thought about waking her up and telling her she was getting a sunburn, but she might have been even angrier at me for disturbing her, and I got to enjoy ten minutes without her sighing every time I asked her where she would go if she had a boat.

That was when I saw Dervish for the first time.

It was true. The sun was too bright that day. It felt almost white hot out there. If I let my eyes go out of focus, I could even see the heat waves rising out of the black asphalt road that circled through the pit and the trucks and the homes.  I might have been falling asleep myself, but there was this rumble that shook me out of it, and a new pick up that I’d never seen before came bouncing over the gravel, towing a shiny green trailer that looked like a big hard candy, all gloss and shine, in the afternoon sun.

I don’t know what it was about that trailer, but I felt like it was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen, like a stagecoach from a Western, or a car in a fancy old train where people drank champagne out of shallow glasses that tinkled and rattled like jewelry. I wanted to elbow April awake and point it out, show her that something was happening, but behind my curiosity, there was this pinch deep down in my stomach that told me to shut up and wait, because something else was going to happen.

The truck pulled to a stop in front of Mr. Pike’s rabbit hutch of an office. It was about the size of an outhouse and Mr. Pikes was almost never there, but he came out that day, swung open the door as soon as the truck was in park, and Pikes went around to the driver’s window, while the passenger door opened, and the truck shivered as the weight of somebody got out on the other side.

Dervish was tall and wrought tight like a rope. His skin was tawny and he had a mop of dark hair that looked like it might be curly if it was clean, but it was so dusty and dirty clod, he ran his hand through it and it stayed in place like some old movie star. He was wearing a white t-shirt with a band name that I didn’t recognize on it. His jeans were slung low, and he wore boots like a cowboy. He had broad shoulders and a sunburnt neck, and staring at him across the Pit, I thought he was the most perfect looking person I’d ever seen.

He kicked the tires of the truck, stuck his hands in his pockets, and ambled to the back of the trailer. I froze in my little plastic chair. My denim cut offs suddenly felt too short, and I could feel the soft skin of my thighs sticking to the plastic seat uncomfortably. I wanted to move, but I was afraid I’d make a squeak or a peeling noise, and I just couldn’t stand that kind of humiliation. Instead I just looked at him, terrified that he would look back.

He didn’t.

Mr. Pikes scuttled away from the pick up’s window back to his office. He was short and narrow, with an unbelievably round belly that made him almost look pregnant. He waved to Dervish, whose name I didn’t know yet, and the boy loped lazily alongside as the pick up started crawling off the asphalt onto the dirt of the lot.

April started awake just as the back of the lime green trailer slipped behind a line of homes.

“I’m so bored,” she yawned.

I stood up from my chair finally, gripping my perfume binder to my chest.

“Not me,” I said, and before I knew what I was doing I was standing beside Mr. Pikes’ office door.

“Who’s that?” he called out through the screen.

“Just Mae Dell,” I said in a singsong.

“Well little Mae, I don’t have any new magazines, and I’m busy right now, so what is it you need, honey?”

I opened the door a crack, and felt the relief of Mr. Pikes’ office fan working doubletime in the back of the tiny room. He was wedged behind his little desk with all the lights turned off. I like that dim coolness of a room in the dead heat of summer, but after the sizzle of the sunshine outside it was hard to make out one shape from another in the gloom. Mr. Pikes was just a potato shape. I pointed my face at him.

“Did we get a new set of neighbors, Mr. Pikes?” I asked, sweet as pie.

“Yes, honey,” he replied.

“Where they from?”

“Didn’t ask. Honey I gotta do up this paperwork before I can get back home to Mrs. Pikes. I got the grandkids visiting this weekend. Do you need anything, or can I get back to it?”

I could finally make out Mr. Pikes looking up from his desk and reaching for a glass on the desk. Ice clinked in a sound that made my mouth itch for some sweet tea.

“Just curious,” I said, backing down. I pulled my face out of the doorway and let the screen shut.

“You all right, honey? You been out in the sun long?” I could hear Mr. Pikes ask.

“I’m fine, thank you.” I said, and turned heel to walk back to April, who surely was fried to a crisp in her chair at this point. I looked up just in time to walk right into Dervish’s white t-shirt.

The half a second where I bashed right into his chest was the single most exciting thing that had ever happened to me up until then. I made a little gaspy noise of surprise, and I felt my stomach lurch and my face color. I clutched my perfume binder to my chest, and stepped back looking down.

“Oh, hey, sorry,” said the boy’s voice.

I stared at the toes of his boots. They were scuffed and dusty.

“Hey, are you all right?” he asked.

I swallowed hard and looked up at him. He had milk dud colored eyes, all sweet and caramel and chocolate. I was close enough to see the way a smile wrinkled them at the corners. I was close enough to see the freckles on his nose; the bright red mole on the corner of his mouth that looked like a fleck of raspberry jam.  I was too close. His face swam in the heat, and I gulped for my breath.

“That you Dervish?” I heard Mr. Pikes call from behind me.

“Yes Sir,” the boy answered.

“Dervish?” I repeated.

“Hey, you can talk!” he chuckled, and I blushed hard again.

“Is your Dad coming with those papers?” Mr. Pikes asked, oblivious.

Dervish bent strangely to look directly into my eyes. “What’s your name Candy Apple?” he whispered.

“Mae.” I said.

“Mae?”

“Yes?”

“You smell amazing.”

And with that, he stepped around me, and jerked open Mr. Pikes’ door.

I trotted all the way across the lot back to my chair, and then didn’t stop to wake April, when I should have. I pulled open the door to our trailer, and I went inside to my dim room, my heart pounding.

                                                            *

I can’t leave the toe behind.  It feels like abandoning her, abandoning me, and I want to protect her. It’s hard to explain.

I spend a lot of the first day trying to push sand over this one little token I have left. Something I took for granted while alive, reaching out and pulling up a handful of sand, is impossible now but I try anyway. I sit on the ground slipping and sliding my hand through and over the ground, and I relive every handful of dirt I’ve ever let foolishly slip through my pale, fleshy fingers.

I think about sandboxes I played in as a child, that syringe I found at the one in the playground and brought to Mama, before she wouldn’t take me there anymore.

 I think of the dust of the Mosquito Pit, yellow and brown and cracked. Some of the other women tried to till the earth. They planted tomatoes, little herb gardens. They all died- the plants, not the women- they gave up and all bought those hanging plastic ones from the late night infomercials and grew upside down herb gardens and tomato plants in cubes and stuff. That dirt, the untillable ground of the trailer park ran through your fingers like chalk dust with little loose rocks in it.

I remember sugar and flour from a yellow cake mix box, and how easily that slid through my grasp. I loved the feeling of it sliding through. I never thought I would want it so badly.

 The sun goes down, and I watch the stars. It’s probably cold, but I don’t feel it, and all I can think about is how the little toe is sad and vulnerable out in the desert night. One of the stars I watch goes out after a little while. This is very scary for some reason. I don’t like that it was there one second, and the next, just gone. I wait for it to wink back on like a streetlamp. I wait and I wait, and before long the sky is turning cornflower blue, and then the sun rises, and it’s salmon taffeta pink clouds strewn everywhere like the change room floor of a fancy lingerie store.

I don’t know why I try, but I press my lips to the ground just beside the toe, and I close my eyes, and I blow. A tiny drift of red sand settles gently beside the cold little toe, and a joy bubbles up inside me so instant and glorious that I whoop and holler with victory.

It takes most of the next day to cover up the toe by blowing sand over it, but I do succeed, and when I stand up and look over my handiwork, I realize that aside from the turtle rock and the scarecrow tree, there is nothing to this little spot of desert that seems out of the ordinary. You would never know I was there.

It’s an infinitely sad thought, and for a moment I want to sit down again and weep for the loss of my toe, my life, my family, and hell, even the Mosquito Pit, but I don’t. Instead I square my shoulders, and I think about Dervish’s hands around my neck, and I turn away from the place he put me in the ground.

I begin to walk the way the car had gone. It’s tracks are still there a little, smudged by the desert winds, but I can follow them, and I know if I can find the road, then I can find my way back to Vegas, and to him.

Hell. I’ve got nothing else to do, and all the time in the world.