Today's Guest Blogger is Sophie Littlefield of Can't Stop, Won't Stop Blog.
I knew a place, just ten or twelve miles shy of the rally, a dirty little job that sold most of what you might need on the road, on shelves that hadn’t seen a rag in months. Like a mini-WalMart in the middle of nowhere, a family place, daddy selling homegrown out the back room and mama keeping a bottle opener by the cash register so she could pop your top for the ride, to hell with a bag or a receipt.
I had anticipation running high in my blood and I meant to savor it. I’d been looking forward to the rally since Smith’s cryptic 3am text a couple weeks back. Some old friends were going to be around. Plenty of assholes too which is probably why there were only four of us – most of the members of our all-women’s club didn’t see much sense in breaking ranks and I couldn’t say I much blamed them.
But my taste for trouble was decades old and I figured by now I was stuck with it. I had that feeling in my blood and my senses were fine-tuned and I don’t care how badass your girlfriends are, keep the men out long enough and eventually you’re going to feel like you’re knitting booties.
I needed a change of scenery. I needed a jump start. I needed to get laid.
We pulled into the little store’s parking lot and it was that shade of dusk where you look at a face and all you see is eyes. Gloria and Britt headed for the john first thing, Lell pulled out her cell phone and went over to lean on a falling-down stretch of fence to call David. I rolled my eyes for no one to see. I don’t care that David’s a pharmaceutical exec. I don’t care that he belongs to New Milford Tennis or that he calls me Mar-ga-ret. My thing is, you leave town, you leave town. Emphasis on leave.
I headed for the door. What I needed:
Handi-wipes
Mentos
Tylenol
Perfect list for a place like this and in half an hour, if everything went according to plan, I’d have one of Irish’s charred merguez in one hand and a tall frosty one in the other, the Unholy Bastards belting Run Through The Jungle and Twister looking at me like he won the lottery.
Only on the steps was this little scrub-rag of a girl that I didn’t remember from before. Thirteen, fourteen, all elbows in her dirty tank top and jeans that cleared her ankles by a couple of inches – when she stood up I could see why, she must have shot up half a foot recently – she was taller than me and growing pains were written all over her bony arms, her big-eyed scowl. Her haircut was a home job, jagged ends clearing freckled shoulders. Her teeth weren’t likely to meet up with an orthodontist and that was a shame.
“You a dyke?” she demanded.
I raised my eyebrows. Truth is I’m a woman who’s learned to appreciate a little variety but I figured that wasn’t what the girl was asking.
“Not really,” I said. I held out my hand. “I’m Mar.”
“You look like one,” she said. She didn’t take my hand. She stared me down hard and then she turned and spat in the dirt.
That made me want to smile but I carefully didn’t. Movement on the screen porch caught my eye and I looked in; someone snapped the light on and I laid eyes on eight kinds of hard-road beauty wound tight in this girl’s big sister, and suddenly I remembered.
Last year at the rally, the last night, that crew from St. Josephs - fuckers who never know when to quit - they brought this girl back from a midnight Skoal run. Her eyes were glazed and her feet weren’t really connecting with the dirt as they walked her toward the bar. I was pissed off because they’d brought her into the best part of the evening, Patrick’s guys finding their way through some old Nazareth and my buzz at that place where numb meets endless possibility, Twister’s hand high on my thigh. The St. Joseph’s crew had been warned and they weren’t much to begin with and any kind of courage they had came from whatever they were horning and I knew where the night would end even as Smith and his boys came out on the porch four across with their arms folded and told them to put the girl down.
I don’t know who drove her home that night but any reprieve she got was temporary – you could see that this was a girl who only knew one way to go and that was to give everything away every chance she got.
I looked down at her little sister. “What’s your name?”
She looked over my shoulder into the twilight and squeezed her lips into a thin line. “At’s a Softail,” she said, voice hard. “Last year’s. Ain’t it.”
“Yes.” I tried not to show my surprise. “Your daddy teach you?”
“Hell no,” she hissed and I could see there was a lot more story there. Inside the porch the older girl looked out through the screen and saw me, then returned to her task without a flicker of interest.
“You want to ride, when you get bigger?” I tried, but all that got me was a contemptuous smirk, a cheshire kitten with a grudge as old as she was.
“Well, all right,” I said. “Nice meeting you. I got to get a few things.”
It took a while to make sense of the shelving system. The older sister moved listlessly on the porch, windexing off plastic tables. The skinny ponytailed man at the register didn’t look up from his plate-sized television even as he made change. The words he mumbled when I said thanks could have been “You’re welcome” or “Burn in hell” and it didn’t look like it made much difference to him either way.
Outside the sky had gone darker but there was still a rime of glow at the horizon. The little girl was sitting on my bike and she was doing it all wrong.
And I could see burn marks above her dirty ankles. Old ones. Repeats.
“Someone teaching you to ride?” I asked her. I didn’t come too close; it was like coming across a deer out in the cul-de-sac, one quick move and it would be gone.
“I don’t need nobody to teach me,” she snarled but I could see she was spooked. She tried to get down but it was a stretch even with all those miles of skinny legs and for a moment there it was touch and go, the bike nearly went over, and her eyes went big and scared the way only a smacked-around kid’s eyes can get.
Then she hit the ground with a nimble little jump and stood there for a moment with her hands on her fists, glaring at me like she wanted to set me on fire.
“This here’s a pussy ride.”
Then she bolted and I figured she’d run up on the porch into the shop, but she cut a wider path and disappeared across the uncut grass around back, off to some private hideaway place where she could simmer and burn and wait to grow up.
“Lord help that one,” I prayed as the four of us hit the road towards the rest of the night. If she could hold on for a few more years I figured she had a chance.
Tonight on the Main Stage: Nazareth, "Miss Misery"
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