New to Tricks and Stones? Start from the beginning!
“Mornin’, sunshine!” Amelia, the driver who didn’t have the guts to run me over, says with a smoke stained grin, “Hungry?”
This isn’t a dream.
I look around. The sun is just popping up over the horizon. My mouth tastes like old sour ketchup and pennies. “Where are we?” I ask.
Amelia tightens her bandanna. “The International House of Pancakes, Snoozer McLoser. You dozed off there; in the middle of my best story, too, but I ain’t mad atcha. All’s forgiven in the eyes of the pancake god.”
“Pancake god?”
“Yeah,” Amelia scratches her head and adjusts her bandana, “Aunt Jemima.”
She’d been talking nonstop, making up names like that for me then entire way. Scrawny McDonny. Looky McCookie. Scary McBarry. She’d been on the road by herself for six years, eight months, eleven days, and seven hours, when I had met her. Six years, eight months, eleven days, and seven hours too long if you asked me. It was exactly why, after her detailed family history and one too many trucker jokes, I “dozed off”.
Amelia cracks open her door. “Come on. My treat.”
“What city are we in?” I ask, scooping Lucy’s bag up into my arms.
“Does it really matter? I saw I.H.O.P, so I pulled over.” Amelia climbs out of the truck. “Just come on. Gotta eat. Ya look like shit.”
I feel like shit. I probably even smell like shit. The parking lot is relatively empty. I look back over at Amelia, questioning her with my sad brown eyes.
“I can’t be harborin’ a starvin’ girl, Cookie.”
“Okay,” I say, pulling the bag close to my chest.
“Leave your shit. Nobody’s gonna steal it.”
She slams her door. I climb out and slide down the steps with the bag. My legs are tingling. My muscles are quivering. My body doesn’t feel like my own. The air is stiff and stale, like wet something that had been sitting in a paper cup for too long. I stare down at my feet as I attempt to drag them across the asphalt. They are barely moving. My thighs and calves ache from running. My ass and neck hurt from sleeping. My mind hurts. My heart hurts—every beat forced and unwanted.
“Look like you need a good back cracker, Cookie,” Amelia laughs, staring back at me over her shoulder. “And a dry cleaner.”
I nod and follow closely behind her.
We walk through the door, the smell of pancakes turns to rot in a matter of seconds. I inhale the scent of everything I had just run away from. It seeps into my nostrils and down to the pit of my stomach; the smell of my mother in the kitchen while Ray’s hands are down my pants, forcing mine down his. The thought of his hands, his breath, her cooking, his whispering, it gags me. I turn to rush out. Amelia comes flying out behind me. I throw myself over the side of the railing, vomiting up whatever I had left in me from last night; vomiting out the memories, the nightmare.
“Cookie, you knocked up?” Amelia asks, her hands on her hips, almost disappointed. “Is that why you’re runnin’? Cuz runnin’ aint nuthin’ but a bitch move if you ask me, it’s just a cop out. You open your legs, you open—”
“I’m not pregnant!” I shake my head and wipe my mouth with my sleeve as I sit up straight. I take in a deep breath, “I just can’t eat in there.”
“What?”
“I can’t,” I tell her. “You eat. I’ll wait out here.”
“Who can’t eat I.H.O.P?” Amelia curses. “As The King says, ‘No American, can’t take down a flapjack or three.’”
“Elvis said that?”
“Of course he did.”
I slide down against the rail, knees into my chest, “I’m sorry.”
Amelia throws her hands on her hips, “Now don’t go apologizing on my behalf.” She smacks her lips together and stares back at her truck, “I just. I guess I just really wanted some pancakes.”
“Seriously,” I beg, “just go eat. I’ll sit…”
“Now, I can’t really eat a pile of steamin’ flapjacks and scrambled eggs after what I saw you chuck up.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. It’s a sign of weakness,” Amelia says. “Are you weak, Cookie?”
I shrug my shoulders.
“Use your damn words,” she coughs.
Amelia starts having a coughing fit. She pounds on her chest and shakes her head from side to side; her big brown eyes are narrow but strong. It was like she is having a staring contest with God, seeing who was going to win the round. A few moments later she emerges victorious and rewards herself with a couple more celebratory puffs.
Amelia pulls out a cigarette, lights it, inhales, and blows a smoke ring around her head. I watch it float up and away, a dusty gray halo. She squats down beside me, stares over at the tiny pile of vomit behind us. “What is that anyways?”
“Fries,” I sigh, remembering how good they tasted going down.
Amelia starts messing with the strap on her steel-toed boot. “Cookie,” she says, “what am I gonna do with you?”
Get me to Chicago, I think
Amelia stands up and kisses her cigarette a few more times before dropping it to her feet and smashing it with her toe. “Well come on now,” she takes off walking. “A gas station donut and coffee will have to do.”
At the gas station, with about a hundred dollars in my pocket I buy a toothbrush and some toothpaste, just to clean up a little in the bathroom, to get the sour taste of my past out of my mouth and off my breath. My hazel eyes are bloodshot; a combination of a smoke-filled cabin and sheer exhaustion.
Amelia looks over at me from the adjacent sink. “What are you, mulatta?”
“What?”
“You’re a mutt for sure, cute, but a mix a somethin’. What is it? You Mexican, black?” She laughs. “Are you a Blaxican?”
I look just like my mother. Thin cheek bones and her pointy nose. Multiple shades darker and a few inches taller, but as I look in the mirror and there she was; huge rings of long dark brown curls, fleshy pink lips and misery stamped in bold letters across my forehead.
By fourth grade I knew a lot. I knew Ray wasn’t supposed to touch me like he did, and I knew I shouldn’t have let him, but if I didn’t let him I was almost sure that he’d take it out on my mother. But if I told anyone about what he was doing, I knew that they’d be so disgusted, just like my mom was. She couldn’t even look at me anymore; I couldn’t stand everyone in my hometown looking at me that way. I was already different enough. I wasn’t white, at least not completely, but I was too afraid to ask my mother about the other fractions, the fractions that were nothing like her. I was afraid to even look at her. Her eyes had changed. The stony gray color that once comforted me now looked stormy and empty.
She had evaporated fully into Ray’s sociopathic world, or so I assumed. My skin was the color of a peanut. I often wondered if my real Dad was black, or at least brown. I dreamed that my Dad was on some exotic island or somewhere further south where the sun toasted people to a shade nearer to mine. That was right around the time I had started telling people that I was adopted. Then Lucy showed up, a paler than pale redhead with paint splattered freckles covering her body. We took one look at each other, outsiders of different hues, and we knew that at least we’d have each other.
Lucy had strawberry blond hair and big brown eyes. Her face was covered in tiny brown freckles that we swore, if connected the right way, would lead us to secret treasures and make us the richest, most powerful women in the world. She wanted to be an astronaut. Lucy loved outer space and knew everything about everything about stars and planets and the space creatures that she’d be the first to discover. I loved to hear her talk about outer space and other worlds. She promised to take me there one day. She was so unlike anyone I had ever met before.
“Cookie! Ya hear me?”
“I don’t know.” I say.
“You are one strange little somethin’, kid! How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
Amelia laughs, presumably at the lie I had just told. “In human years, not dog years.”
“Seriously,” I say, taking it upon myself to add two years on to my life. All the abuse had to count for something.
“Where ya people at, huh? Why ya runnin’? I meant to ask that last night, but you passed out on me ‘fore I could. So where are they? ”
I stare into the soap-spotted mirror and say the words that I had yet to allow pass through my lips, “They’re dead.”
She looks at me, these sad, quizzical eyes, and dries her hands on her blue jeans. She pulls out a cigarette. “Well, let’s get on it. Deadlines are bitches.”
Amelia named her royal purple semi Jenny. She never says why, just that she and Jenny have been together for years. Initially I think she is referring to her lesbian lover, but when she spoke of hitching things up to the back of Jenny and riding for miles, I figure it out.
The smell of wet dog and cigarette smoke kind of grows on me. The leather seats are worn out, decorated with cigarette burns and sticky food stains that seem to have been there since before I was born. She mumbles into her ratty, old CB radio every thirty miles or so, but clicks it off when the chatter becomes too bothersome. Her thin hands have worn grooves into the humongous steering wheel. She handles the wheel with such ease. How has she learned to control something so big? She is small, yet still, I don’t have the courage to ask.
Amelia has a large wooden cross plastered to the dashboard of her big rig. Not because she is religious or anything, but because she finds it soothing. She says that she likes the woodwork. She likes the idea that somebody took the time, had the time, to sit down and carve something that beautiful. She tells me that she used to want to make things but now she spends most of the year on the road. She has no family; well, no husband. There is an older brother, and some sick parents down in Tennessee who have a snapping turtle named Bucket in their backyard. I don’t see why she doesn’t have a family, kids, or a husband. I can look at her and tell that she was probably really cute, about twenty years ago, but now she has wrinkles in weird placesm, and worry lines drawn all over her face, like a road map to nowhere.
“Eat your donut,” Amelia orders, sliding the bag that has been sitting between us for the past few minutes over to me, “and drink some water. You look, dry.”
I nod and do as she says.
“I ain’t been on this highway in a long time,” Amelia chuckles, surveying the area as she cruises along.
The landscape hasn’t changed dramatically. A few more trees and hills than I was used to, but sadly it still feels like Murphy City, Kentucky is still right behind me—right around the next corner.
“I’m hardly ever this far north. I gotta snag steel in Canada,” she stammers. “Ever been to Canada?”
I shake my head as I bite into the glazed pastry.
“Don’t. They just smile at ya, and offer ya that weed all the time. I ain’t never seen folks so damn happy in my life. I hate happy people.”
I don’t bother asking why.
“I mean, there’s a difference, a big difference, between happy people and people that are happy. Happy people are idiots, but people who are happy, well, they just don’t know yet. The King said that.”
I take a sip of water. It feels so good sliding down my raw scratchy throat.
“You seem like good people,” Amelia nods.
“How you figure?” I ask.
“Well, you don’t have a bit of happiness about you. You got just enough sad in you, just enough hurt, to need to try somethin’ new, or else you wouldn’t be runnin’.”
I nod.
“You loose enough, and then you say, ta hell wit it! The King said that.”
“Is that right?”
“Of course it’s right.”
The room was so cold. My mother’s body laid there on the table exposed, with nothing but a thin white sheet to protect her. It wasn’t the beautiful mother from my childhood, but the petrified shell of a woman that Ray had turned her into. A nurse was cleaning the blood from my mother’s face, and another was collecting her belongings at the foot of the gurney, tossing her shoes and jacket into a blue plastic bag like three-week-old lasagna.
Mom looked just like she did when I would come home from school and see her sprawled out on the sofa, only more at peace. Her lips and eyelids were blue, and her light brown hair was streaked with blood. It reminded me of a newly bloomed tiger lily.
I didn’t go near the table at first. I couldn’t. I propped myself up against the wall, trying to steady my heart, waiting. Watching, I waited for her to pop up. To jump up and tickle me like she did when I was a little girl. To get up and pretend I wasn’t there like she did last month.
“We’ll leave you alone a minute,” he doctor whispered, motioning for the nurses to move out of the room. When they walked out, the room grew larger, colder. Vacant. I had never felt more. My hands were shaking. I looked down at them. I had my mother’s hands; long, bony fingers, and palms with more lines than the desert.
A few minutes crept by before I convinced myself to walk up to the gurney, but I did. I stood right next to her head. I closed my eyes and reached up to touch her face. I ran my trembling fingers along her hairline and down her cold hard cheek.
“Mom?” I whispered.
She didn’t answer. A fire grew inside the pit of my stomach. I collapsed over her, digging my face into her hair, looking for tears or words, anything, but nothing could cultivate. No thoughts, no proper displays of emotions were found within this hollow casing I had become.
Her hair smelled of lavender and plastic, that old familiar plastic smell, the one that came from her hat boxes. I sat up and stared at the empty space above me. The bulbs burned into my eyes. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. I needed my friend. I needed Lucy.
“She tried to kill me,” Ray’s voice snuck up behind me.
I jumped and turned around to see him wheeling himself into the room. His head was wrapped like a Q-tip. He had a cast on his left leg, and tons of tiny scratches across his face.
Ray snorted, “She said, ‘I’m gonna kill us.’ She said it, and then she started laughin’, like some crazy woman.” He wheeled himself closer, looked up at me, then down at mom. “Next thing I know, dumb bitch is drivin’ off Collins Bridge.” He sighed. “We hit the bank. I guess I blacked out a second. I felt the car tiltin’, so I climbed out the window.” He laughed, “She never could do nothin’ right.”
I looked down at my mother, then over at Ray. He was staring at her like he looked at his empty beer cans; plenty more where that came from. I stood up straight and turned to walk out of the room, but Ray reached up and grabbed my arm. I stopped and looked down at his bruised hand clutching my wrist and down into his beady black eyes.
“You’re hurting me.” I said.
“Where do ya think you’re goin’?”
“Outside.”
“Don’t even think about it.” He gritted his dirty yellow teeth.
That’s when I knew for sure. Mom was right. No one was listening. No one was there. We’d have to make our own damn changes in this world.
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