New to Tricks and Stones? Start from the beginning!
Moonlight spills onto the glistening wet pavement of the bowling alley parking lot: to my right, the ice cream shop, to my left, the woods. It would be difficult, but with the moonlight and the stars, I can see.
I see Sheriff Webster, with multiple chins, round face, and potbelly, staring in Ray’s direction. Ray’s glaring at me through the passenger side window of his buddy’s squad car, blue and red lights swirling around us in the darkness. I’m not going back. Not now. I take a deep breath, and as quickly as the thought strikes, I dart towards the woods.
“Ele!” Both Ray and the Sheriff call out. I know they can’t follow. One too many decades of beer, pot pie, and a few broken limbs assure me that no foot pursuit will ensue.
I brake through the tangled brush, the moon piercing through the canopy of bare branched maples and oaks, moonlight blazing a path. It smells damp and raw, like all springs do in Kentucky. The brisk air whirls through my hair, welcoming me, encouraging me to go on. My feet hit a recognizable trail and take over. I miss Lucy in that moment; I miss my jogging buddy, my best friend, my stability. I speed up, my feet now pounding the underbrush at the same rate as my heart, and cold night air stings my cheeks and throat. Where are you going? I zigzag through the trees. Just keep moving.
Their voices die out; soon all I hear is the crackling of the brushwood beneath my feet and the unsteady rhythm of my breathing. Breathe like she taught you, I think. Just keep moving. This becomes the chant to which I pace my breath. Just keep moving. Just keep moving. Inhale. Just keep moving. Just keep moving. Exhale.
The expected howls and hoots of the midnight woods rattle my nerves, but the haunting sounds are immediately discounted by the thought of what I am actually running away from. There is nothing more dangerous in these woods than what is sitting back in that parking lot, and nothing more terrifying than what they are trying to send me back to. I am okay with pretending when Lucy is around to make it all feel like a dream, but it’s real. It’s real, and if I stop, if I slow down, if I turn back now, I will never be free.
Ray isn’t my real father but he is the only one I’ve ever known. He is a loud, hard man. A construction worker by day, and a demolition man by night. He wears his pants tight and his shirts unbuttoned. He walks with a slight limp and he talks in circles, not caring if he is right or wrong, as long as he can hear his own voice. He smells of cheap cigarettes and beer, and has scratchy, dark brown stubble taking over his thin jaw bones. His skin is leathery from decades of sunburn, and his eyes lack any distinguishing hue, unless Crayola had recently added Soulless to its box of sixty-four colors. He never talked to me as much as he talked at me, but I never heard him use the names Jesus or God without a swear word preceding or following it, and I never heard him tell my mother that he loved her without a bottle of whiskey in his hand.
My mother, Susana, was the most beautiful person I knew. Once. Once she smelled of lavender and wore the most precious shade of soft pink lipstick. Once she was my best friend, the spitting image of who, and what, I wanted to grow to be. Before I started preschool, everyday we’d play dress up. I’d try on all of her Sunday hats and, though none of them had ever seen a church or a Sunday outside of their boxes, they were gorgeous and worthy of a show. Then Ray would come home.
Run. A voice, no longer my own, began to push me along the narrowing path. A piercing pain shoots through my side. I pray it’s a bullet, one solid silver blessing to put me out of my misery. It isn’t. And the voice echoes. Run.
By the time I reach the clearing my heart is pounding in my throat. I don’t know exactly how long I have been running, but I know that they’ll never catch me, not with the maze of back roads they’ll have to navigate to get here. I put my head down to dig deep for the final fifty yards. I plow through the branches, and I fall to my knees. Unable to ease the wrenching pain in my side, I throw up. And as my body convulses on the side of the dark Kentucky highway, cold tears sliding down my cheeks. I clutch my stomach, look to the skies, “You promised,” I mutter, pounding my fist, first into the soil and then into Lucy’s bag. “You promised!”
I double over, gasp for air, one arm grasping my stomach and the other stretched out across the uneven grasses, clutching a handful of dirt and rocks.
Get up. The voice returned.
“No.”
Stand.
“Fuck you!”
I hoist myself to my knees and look around. I am on the northbound highway. I have just run eleven miles.
Still struggling to control my breath, I survey the area and something catches my eye. A light, like a flickering star, innocent and warm, slowly comes into focus. I see that it is two lights, headlights. So I scoop Lucy’s bag into my quivering arms and climb over the guard rail. I step out into the middle of the road and stand.
With my head back and eyes closed, the whirling tires move closer. A semi. I open my eyes. I can see it now, about a hundred yards away. I want it, need it, to bowl me over like a dirty wooden pin at the bowling alley I had just left, but the gears grind, shifting down, and the driver comes to a halt. The massive, dark purple semi creeps forward and parks right in front of me.
A few seconds later the driver, a middle aged white lady with stringy black hair and a Coors Light bandana, sticks her head out the window and squints her eyes at me. “What the hell you doin’?”
I stare at her.
“Get out of the damn way!”
I stand.
She shakes her head. “Move out the damn way, get run over, or get in.”
I slowly make my way to the passenger side door; a bright yellow star shooting across it in paint. The driver scoots over to prop open the door for me and I let the last bit of strength I have left hoist me up into the cab.
“There you go,” she croaks. “That’s it.”
It smells like wet dog, old burritos, and cigarette smoke.
I close the door and settle into the cab as she looks me over, “Looks like you just had the worst bowling match of your life,” she says, staring at my tattered borrowed bowling uniform, remnants of the forgetful old ladies who bowled every Sunday after midday service. “Where ya headin’?” She squints to see the name embroidered on the shirt. “Cookie?” she laughs. “Oh, your momma shoulda knew better.”
I can’t bring myself to speak.
She sticks her hand out at me. “Name’s Amelia.”
My arms feel like Jell-O, I can’t lift them to accept her introduction.
“Okay,” she turns back to her steering wheel and puts the truck into gear. “You’re gonna be a fun one, aren’t ya.”
I can see Scorpius through the windshield. I look down at the bag in my lap—Lucy Day Gulliver- East Baptist Hospital. I am going where we were supposed to go. I look over at the driver. I close my eyes, remembering our promise. “Chicago,” I say.
She smiles. “Well hey there, Raggedy Anne!” She takes a cigarette down from an overhead compartment, sticks it her mouth, and strikes her lighter. She takes a quick draw, looks over at me, and says, “Tonight must be you’re lucky night.”
I close my eyes, breathing a little easier with each whirl of the tire. Gaining more and more distance between me and my past, I know that this “lucky night” is nothing like the others.
Mom was out on one of Ray’s beer and liquor runs when Ray came up to my room; nothing new. I was sitting on my bed, back against my headboard, doing homework when he walked in, sweaty and smelling of God knows how many shower-less days. He sat down beside me, quietly, which wasn’t like him at all. He was really drunk. I could tell by the way his eyes floated towards the light on my dresser as he sucked on his bottom lip like a pacifier.
“Watcha doin’?”
“Homework,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Calculus.”
He slapped his hand on my notebook and set it flying across the room. “You don’t need no damn calculus,” he said, “you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
I flinched.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Ray sighed, grabbing my hand and putting it on his leg. “Come ‘ere. Stand up.”
I slowly pulled myself up. He held my arm and directed me to stand right in front of him. Placing his hands around my hips, he rested his forehead against my chest for a moment and started to cry. I looked around the room, confused. I glanced out the window.
Ray looked up at me. His dark brown, almost black, eyes floating around in his whiskey tears. “You’re all I got, Ele. You and your momma are all I got.” He pulled me closer to him and sunk his face deep between my breasts. “You know I’d never hurt you. You know that, right?”
I nodded.
“Right?” he whispered.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
His breathing grew harder and shallower. I could feel his hot breath leaking through my shirt like acid as his hands rubbed my lower back. He glared up at me. “Look at me,” he whispered.
I closed my eyes, trying to escape my body.
“Look at me, goddamnit,” he said, squeezing my waist harder.
I gasped for air, and I stared straight up at the ceiling.
“Look at me!” Ray screamed.
The pressure he was putting on my hips brought me to tears, then to my knees right in front of him. There was no escaping. Not this time.
Ray grabbed my head with both hands and forced my face towards his. “Open your eyes, Ele.”
I had never cried in front of him, not until that night.
Ray kissed my forehead, hard. His beard scratched against my eyelids. His palms were sweaty, and his hands were shaking around my face. He started shaking his head back and forth, slowly at first, then faster. Suddenly, he jumped up, pulling me up by my head and slamming me onto my bed. Ray climbed on top of me, got right in my face and screamed at the top of his lungs, spit flying all over me, with the smell of bourbon burning its way up my nose, “Why won’t you fuckin’ look at me?”
I was so scared and so angry that I was shaking—physically, visibly shaking. And then, without warning, without meaning to, I was laughing. Chuckling under my breath at first, then allowing faint blasts of air to escape through my teeth, hissing through tears, so frightened that my fear had forged an unnatural response.
Ray pushed himself off of me and struggled to stand. “What’s funny?”
He stood up straight, or as straight as he could. “You crazy like your momma, aren’t you?” I didn’t answer. I knew this time it was a rhetorical question. He turned, as if he was going to walk away, but swung around and backhanded me with his left hand. I fell over onto my pillow. Ray grabbed my ponytail, pinned me down, and jerked my pants down. “It’s your lucky night,” he whispered. “I’ll give you something to smile about.”
He used all the strength in his skinny upper body to pin me down on top of my floral comforter. He struggled, trying to rip his penis out of his pants. And the entire time he was on top of me, all I could do was stare at the clock on my wall, a pretty yellow one with hummingbirds and white lilies floating inside. The hands were moving. Slowly. Loudly. I could hear each tick. I could feel each tock. My eyes floated over towards my dresser, scanned my textbooks, the assignments that I still had to do, then back up at the clock. The hand hadn’t moved. Time was standing still. The sound of the TV, the basketball game Ray had been watching, had made its way up the stairs, around the corner, and into my room. They were cheering. I wondered who was winning.
He couldn’t get it up.
For a second, I thought I had gotten off easy, but his hairy knuckles plowed into my jaw once and then his open palm blew across the left side of my face. After he finished, as he walked out of my room, he bent down and picked up my calculus book. He looked at it for a moment, then threw it at me while I lay there, petrified, as he slammed my door behind him.
I sat still for a moment. My hands, still above my head, slowly began to make their way down. I placed them on my stomach and let them move down to my bare thighs.
He couldn’t do it. Thank God he couldn’t do it.
Get up. I couldn’t move. Get up.
After a few minutes, I was able to sit up. After a few seconds, I grabbed my panties and sweatpants off the floor and slid them back on.
Run.
I threw on my tennis shoes and ran out my bedroom door. Just as I made it down the stairs, Mom walked in carrying a case of beer and fifth of Maker’s Mark. I stopped, looked at her, tears streaming down my face, and all she could do was stare. With a black eye and a fat lip of her own, what else did I expect? I couldn’t look at her either, so I darted past her, knocking everything out of her arms on the way. The sound of glass crashing onto the hardwood floors echoed as my feet hit the pavement. In the distance I heard Ray scream, “Goddamnit, Sue. You good for nothing’ bitch!” And for a brief second, I believed him. Knowing, soon, I’d have to go back. I couldn’t leave her alone with him. I ran my normal route through the woods and around town, knowing that this air, this freedom, would only last as long as my legs could carry me.
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