The Lauras Page 5

  If cops showed up at our door, it wasn’t going to be my fault this time.

  CHAPTER V

  The bus left at four a.m., stinking of people that hadn’t slept or showered or got much hope left. I sat near the back and wrote a letter to Dad in my marble composition notebook—it seemed like a long way to go just to send a postcard. I wasn’t running away, I just needed him to know that we were OK, that I was coming back one day. Maybe going to Alabama was overkill, and I just needed to go to another city, somewhere not where we were living but still Florida. Or maybe I myself needed to go to Alabama, to get out of my mother’s reality for a bit.

  Dear Daddy—it went,

  I’m just fine. I haven’t sent this from home where I am though, because the last time I did cops turned up and we left in a hurry. Mom’s all right, too. She seems to have a plan—or I hope she has a plan—so I’m going along until it’s finished, and then I’ll come back. Please don’t move; I need to be able to find you again. I’m still in school and I take care of myself, so there’s nothing for you to worry about.

  After that I didn’t know what to write, but I felt like I had to write something, so I remembered all across the page until the heat and the rocking put me to sleep and when I woke up we were passing through Ozark and my pen had left a dripping snail trail of blue at the end of a closely packed page of text.

  I couldn’t save my school lunch money, but I could save my lunch, so I had bruised apples and clementines and sandy sawdust brownies and dry sesame bagels in my backpack, and I ate enough of them that I could pretend that I wasn’t hungry. The air at the bus stop was slick with diesel fumes and made me almost throw it all up again, but I kept it in because I didn’t have the money for food.

  Part of me thought that I should look around, make the most of being in a place I would probably never see again, but the essential part of me went looking for a blue U.S. Mail box, then wrote our address on the envelope in careful block letters, put on two of the stamps that I’d gotten from the English teacher’s desk, the extra one just in case the letter turned out to be heavier than standard, and pitched it into the darkness. Then I went back to the station and waited for the bus to Florida, got in line, put my hand in my back pocket, and found that my ticket had wriggled out and run away.

  I had a vague idea that hitchhiking wasn’t advisable—you could get kidnapped, have your internal organs stolen, or get picked up by a serial-killing cannibal druggie and never be seen again. Boy, girl, young, old, it wasn’t safe for anyone; the kind of person that stopped was exactly the kind of person you didn’t want to be alone with in a confined space, not when they were in control. But I couldn’t walk back to our apartment in Florida, not from southern Alabama. So I walked to the on ramp of the highway south, tried to look as harmless as possible while still giving the impression that I could protect myself, and stuck out my thumb.

  The first dozen people didn’t stop, and I started getting worried that the police would show up—I was standing right by a No Hitching sign. I could have given up and walked, or found a cop to take me home, but at that point I was still clinging to the idea that if someone stopped for me I might make it back before Ma missed me, might tell her that some friends had built a bonfire on the beach and I’d fallen asleep on the sand. There was a chance she wouldn’t get in until tomorrow night.

  Then lucky number thirteen came, a youngish woman driving a dented sedan that rolled to a careful stop a few hundred yards past me, and I trotted over like a grateful dog and hopped in the front seat.

  “I sure am glad you didn’t keep going,” I said.

  “My sister has a kid your age, I couldn’t leave you there,” she said. I realized then that she only looked youngish: she was probably about fifty and careful, freckled and tanned with her dark hair streaked brassy from the sun, the kind of sun you only get from being outside and too busy or excited to remember a hat.

  “I’m not as young as I look,” I said, trying not to sound too cocky about it.

  She pulled back onto the road.

  “Where you headed?” she asked.

  “Back to Florida.” I hadn’t thought of a story, but it came together as I talked. “Got the bus up to visit my grandma, went to go home and found out that I’d lost my ticket back. So I’m stuck hitching.”

  The woman made a sympathetic noise. “Couldn’t your grandmother get you a ticket?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No, ma’am—she’s in prison.”

  “Prison?”

  “Yes, ma’am, she stole a whole bunch of gem rings from some fancy department stores, waltzed right in and got a nice young clerk to take a bunch of them out for her to see, and when she was finished looking and had tried on almost everything she walked out with one of them on her finger. She walked in with her hands just full of rings in the first place, so the poor clerk didn’t notice till too late, and no one suspects a little old lady is there to rob them blind. So now Grandma’s in jail and I have to get the Greyhound if I want to see her.”

  “I didn’t know there was a prison in Troy.”

  “No, ma’am, but there is one in Montgomery. I thumbed it this far hoping to get home before my mama notices I’m gone.”

  “You’ve come all this way and your mother doesn’t know where you are?”

  “I saved my school lunch money to buy a ticket. Hoping that I can get back before anyone notices, or else I’m in some serious hot water.”

  I hoped that my story would tempt her to take me farther than she’d originally planned to drive, but her reply let me down quick.

  She sighed, and said, “I’m pretty reluctant to set you back down out there, but I’ve got a dental appointment in Dothan, and that doesn’t land you far. By rights I should take you straight to the police station. Better to be in hot water and safe than not back at all.”

  “I’ll be all right—I’ve done this before. And I never take rides from men on their own.”

  Both halves of that statement were a lie. When she set me down outside of Dothan and gave me a fiver for a sandwich I stuck my thumb out again, and the first person to stop was a man on his own. He let me be, just played talk radio, but we only got ten miles or so before he turned off the highway and I hopped out.

  With the next fellow I ran out of good fortune. I had my eye out for police cruisers, figuring that I was pushing my luck, so when an ugly brown Oldsmobile with tinted windows stopped for me I went for the passenger door before I even looked at who was driving. We rolled back onto the highway as I buckled my seat belt; I looked up to say thank you and saw that he had his dick out and wiggling at me, stiff and veiny purple like a deformed thumb. I looked away quick, stared out the windshield and pretended that I hadn’t seen it, like that would make it go away. We were going about sixty, maybe seventy miles an hour by then, and even though I knew that something bad was about to happen I didn’t like the odds that jumping from a car going that speed onto a freeway offered. It wasn’t like he could kill me with his dick, and as long as he had one hand on it and one hand on the steering wheel he didn’t have any hands left to reach for a gun or a knife or anything I needed to really be worried about. I wondered first if he’d pulled it out because he thought I was a girl, then wondered if it was because he thought I was a boy, then figured it didn’t really matter to him what I was; he just wanted to wave it at someone who wasn’t expecting it and couldn’t make him stop.

  “No one in life is entitled to a free ride,” he drawled, and it sounded like the politicians on television when they’re talking about immigration or social welfare. He rubbed his hand up and down as he spoke, slow and lazy, like he didn’t realize he was doing it. The smell of the cinnamon gum that he chewed was overwhelming. “Least of all people your age, who haven’t paid back any of what their parents and society have so generously given them.”

  His voice had a hypnotic quality to it, and even though I didn’t want to I slowly turned my head to watch what he was doing. I’d never seen a full-gro
wn man’s dick in real life, just in magazines. Time went all like silly putty, so I could make out real clear the smooth head and the slit across it, the angry purple skin with angrier blue veins like expensive cheese, the nest of coarse, straight hair that sprang from his open fly. It looked like it couldn’t belong to such a clean, neat, pale-skinned person, like he’d sprouted a scorpion’s barb between his legs. It looked ridiculous, unfinished, an afterthought stuck on because there had to be some way to tell men and women apart. I almost thanked him for the show even as my heart ka-thumped into my gut, because I knew without being told that, like a loaded gun, a naked cock meant trouble for someone.

  “Now, you’ve got to the count of ten to figure out how you’re going to be paying for this ride,” he continued, “and then I’m taking you to the nearest police station and telling them to charge you with vagrancy and solicitation.”

  He began counting, but before he’d gotten to two I had both hands on the door handle, shoving as hard as I could, trying to get out. He let go of his dick then, mashed down on the auto-lock button with one thumb, flicked the signal stalk with the fingers of his steering hand, and slid over towards an exit ramp.

  “Hold up, hold up, I’ll be good,” I said, and my voice sounded more panicked than I felt. I knew in a far-off way that I couldn’t let him stop the car. His hand kept time, up and down, and as slowly as I could I unbuckled the seat belt, leaned over the gap between our seats, and licked the smooth, rubbery end of his dick. It tasted like pool water, and trouser lint, and overly yeasted old bread dough, and he moved his hand to nest in the short curly hair on the back of my neck.

  “See now, you’re a smart kid. Not half the ones I’ve picked up on this road have been this smart. Most little shits don’t know when to shut up. Now you keep going.”

  I pulled my head back enough to say, “I keep going as long as you keep driving,” and even though he chuckled as he pushed me back down, the hand on my head made something in my chest flutter.

  He was silent as I sucked, and my jaw ached immediately and he smelled of crotch sweat and cinnamon, and I thought that it was funny that after so long—or so it felt—aching for sex this was what I got.

  I was still fixed on getting back, hadn’t been thinking about what I might need to do in order to make it back before Ma missed me, hadn’t thought that some of the steps that might be required to do that might not be worthwhile in the final analysis. If you asked me what I was more scared of, my mother knowing I’d run off or the man with his cock out, I would have said Ma, even though I couldn’t have said exactly why, or what I thought would happen to me if I didn’t get home before she figured out what I’d done.

  I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, besides keeping my teeth to myself, but eventually figured some of it out. The taste improved as my spit washed away the film of sweat from his skin, but the chlorine burn in the back of my throat never went. I drew him out slow, as slow as I could without pissing him off, and it felt like we’d been driving forever when he pulled over into a private, wooded area to finish. I had no way of knowing how long it had been—the only things I could see were the weave of his trousers and the brush of his hair—and I kept my mind blank as I could because I knew if I started thinking about what was going on I’d probably start freaking out completely and there was no telling what he’d do if I did that, and time passed even slower with his dick in my mouth than it had when I was seeing it for the first time.

  He finished fast and hard and when I wasn’t expecting it, and I choked on the thick white fountain and some of it came out my nose, while the rest burned the back of my throat and ached my teeth and tongue like I’d drunk vinegar and then sucked a mouthful of old pennies. He pushed my head down as he did, but as the spurting let up his grip went loose and I pulled away, coughing and gagging with my eyes streaming. I got one hand on the door handle and the other on the strap of my backpack, couldn’t decide if it was better to jump out and run or stay where I was, wasn’t sure if I could make myself run if I had to. He leaned back against the headrest, closed his eyes and breathed out hard, and when I thought he’d fallen asleep he sat up straight and turned the key in the ignition.

  “You’re a good kid,” he said. “I’ll take you a couple of miles further.” He didn’t seem to notice the hunk of slime on his trousers. Instead he started telling me about his wife, who was a frigid cunt who’d left him and taken his two kids with her, and now expected alimony out of him. She hadn’t even left him for someone, she’d just left to spite him, after all he’d done for her, and how did I like that? He asked how I liked things a lot, but I didn’t answer. I scrubbed my face dry with rest-stop napkins from the glove box. My throat burned. When he dropped me on an off ramp I walked a mile to a gas station and rinsed out my mouth and throat and sinuses with sink water until the clerk threatened to call the cops on me for truancy—it was a school day, after all—but I couldn’t get the penny-lint-chlorine burn out of the back of my throat.

  CHAPTER VI

  For a few moments or hours the need to continue on warred with the need to go to ground, to find a hidden place where I could cease to be until I could trust myself to be let loose in my own body again. But my feet won, bullying me back to the highway and dragging me along the green part, behind cover of the thin trees like over-mascaraed eyelashes. With every step forward I felt myself sucked back as though the earth before me were being stretched; even as I moved towards home it was pulled farther from me.

  Then a college-aged girl in a white pickup stopped and shouted at me to hop in, and her skinny sunburned little sister squeezed over so that I could fit, and time suddenly began to drip and bleed in the more normal way again. They didn’t ask questions but told stories instead, talking over each other until their voices blended together in a counterpoint of contradiction. They pulled off the highway for greasy bacon cheeseburgers, and I realized how late it had gotten, how far I still had to go, but even so the food and the rocking put me to sleep.

  The girls let me out when they turned off the highway, and I thanked them before stumbling sleepily into the roadside brush. It was time to call it quits for the day: I had been up since before four, and none of the sleep I had had while moving had made any impression on the heaviness that pressed like limp pastry on my eyelids and shoulders and muzzed the inside of my head. I stumbled farther into the brush, crawled under a mass of greening forsythia whips bound together by kudzu, and pillowed my head on my backpack.

  And, of course, because I had chosen to give chase, sleep stuck its thumb out, leaving me still on the hard ground, listening to the hum of cars go past.

  My mind wandered restlessly, took strange turnings as I looked but didn’t see the wavering leaves, the birds that perched and flew as the shadows lengthened and melted together into night. I thought back to half-remembered conversations, interactions years before, looked ahead and daydreamed improbable heroics, invented friends and admirers and people who would adore me simply because I was—thought about everything, in fact, but the man in the car, which I avoided like a sore tooth which might not be sore anymore but which isn’t worth the risk of pain to test.

  It had been an exchange of resources, a milestone reached in an unusual way, an odd moment stretched out and filled with an awful mineral taste. It was over. I hadn’t told him to let me back out, that I’d get a ride with someone else; I’d gone along with it. Nothing bad had really happened. But I did not have those thoughts until later. Instead that night I played in the maze of childish dreams until the angles of my body wore comfortable spots in the firm earth, and I could sleep. But even in sleep the odd feeling remained, the quiet need to cease existing, just for a little while.

  The sky was pearling with four a.m. when I decided that I could not lie still anymore, so I gathered myself and broke the crust of morning. It felt a violation to be awake and moving in the darkness, to breathe too deep, to make human sounds, even though the birds were raising hell all around. But I had been gone f
or twenty-four hours, and with each minute that passed the chance that my mother had noticed my absence became more of a certainty.

  At least I was getting close: there had been signs for our city counting down the distance in painful increments that seemed to have no direct relationship to the rate at which I traveled. I wanted to break off towards the coast, follow the rolling breakers home, but that would add miles, and miles meant time, and I had to be home, like Cinderella’s princeless doppelgänger, by evening, while there was still probable doubt, when I could have been out living it up instead of run away or kidnapped. Logic escaped me: I could have found a pay phone, called the bar or my mother’s cellphone, told her I’d been out all night doing something appropriate to youth and high spirits but not ridiculously dangerous or stupid. Perhaps she would have come and picked me up even—I was at that point not so far from home. But I was fixated on the idea of getting home before she realized I had left, though when I began to agonize over it, as I put one foot sorely in front of the other, trying not to shatter the morning with my humanness, I realized that her random comings and goings were not so random, matched up with changing shifts at two unreliable jobs plus a few hours here and there spent in ways I had no more right to question or judge than did she my personal recreations. She was never gone for more than thirty-six hours at a time, popped her head in sometimes on her way from one job to the other, kept me in weather-appropriate clothes and fresh fruit and granola bars seemingly by magic. The absent, preoccupied mother I had assumed would not miss me when I stepped onto the Greyhound became in my mind, as I walked, the embodiment of the panopticon, conscious of my every movement, of all of my plans, knew that I had skittered off and waited, knowing, for me to return so that she could hand out judgment and castigation.