Steve S. Saroff
I had slivers in my hands because I was working without gloves. Picking up two-by-fours and carrying them to the carpenters, who were pounding the nails. The wind was blowing sand everywhere. It was not even minimum wage, but I hadn’t had to show anyone ID, and each evening I got an envelope with cash. It was some housing development outside of El Paso, and they had a few trailers set up as bunkhouses. Just across the Interstate was a convenience store where I bought food.
Everyone yelled in a drawl, “Hurry up.” I stuttered then and did not know how to look people in the eye and tell them to leave me be. So when they asked me to, I took the other laborers’ money and did what they said. I ran across the Interstate each evening and went to the store to buy them cigarettes and beer. But this evening the girl said, “No way you’re old enough for this.” I had no idea what to do since she had sold me beer before. “It’s n-n-not for me,” I stammered, pointing out the open door, past the bug zapper going nuts with mosquitoes, to the framed skeletons of new houses whose roof peaks were silhouetted by the evening sky. Cheap beer and Camels. My loaf of bread. My half-pound of cheddar. “Jeezz,” she said, “What have you done to your hands?” And she reached across the counter, holding my outstretched hand, looking at the festering cuts from the slivers I had gouged at and worried over. On her forearm there was a small tattoo of a bird in flight.
She was about my age, and she was in trouble too. She looked at me, asked again, “What have you been doing?” and this time I didn’t stutter when I answered. “Working without gloves,” I said.
“I’ll give you a pair of gloves,” she said, “but you go wash and put some stuff on those cuts.” She was direct like this, dropping my hand, walking out into the aisles, getting some medicine, then coming back and saying, “Here, you go back to the sink and use this. I’ll ring up all this while you take care of yourself.”
I had scrubbed my blisters and cuts and I was out from the restroom into the fluorescence of potato chips and magazines. Someone was in line at the register. The girl was ignoring me. When it was my turn, I handed her the medicine, but she said, “Throw it in there,” and shrugged toward the paper bag where she had put everything, as well as a pair of gloves. I pulled the cash out of my pocket and handed it to her, but she said, “Put that in the bag too. Screw this place.” Without looking at me, she stared through the open door, past the swarms of insects, over the Interstate, deep into the darkening desert night. “Y-You sure?” I stammered. She sighed, spun, faced me, leaned fast and way over the counter, put both her hands on my shoulders, pulled me to her, and kissed me. “Christ,” she drawled, “you so stupid you don’t know I am giving you a present? Now get out of here before someone else comes in,” and she pushed me hard. I nearly fell over, but I didn’t. I grabbed the bag, kept my face turned down, and went outside. I tasted cinnamon from her flavored lipstick. She had long, red hair. Her arms and face were tanned. When she leaned over to kiss me, I saw her bare midriff, the faded jeans, and the top hint of white underwear.
It’s the first kiss. A promise. Almost.
I ran back across the Interstate through gaps in the traffic, jumped over the center divider, and stood on the narrow shoulder. Headlights and the close sixty-mile-per-hour roar. A car horn, the abrupt high pitch dropping an octave as it passed. I tried to whistle against the craze of it all.
Back to the trailer full of drifters and bums. I put their beer and cigarettes on the card table. I put some cash there too, and when they started arguing over the exact change and yelling at me, I ignored them, climbed up into my bunk, and thought about her until I fell asleep, not having eaten, just wanting to keep feeling her hands on my shoulders, her mouth on mine.
The next day, I was wearing the new gloves she gave me, and I was running with the lumber, running to make the time go faster, trying to figure out what had happened and what would happen.
That evening, when I crossed the Interstate and went into the store again, she was working, ringing up purchases. I spent time picking out my next day’s food. I didn’t bother with the beer and cigarettes, and I waited for her. But each time one customer left, another came in. Finally, the store was empty, and she was putting my stuff in a bag. Again, she didn’t take my money. I tried to say something, but couldn’t. She laughed — not mean, not nervous — and said, “You came back. I thought I had scared you off. Scared you for sure.”
I was able to answer, “You did, b-but I came back.” Now that was a lot of words for me then, and I stood there waiting. Seconds went by. She was looking at me.
She said, “I came to this place three weeks ago, and I got nothin’. I think I am ready to leave it.” She shrugged, looked towards the traffic, then faced me directly and asked, “You want to come with me?”
I didn’t understand her, but I nodded and said, “Sure.”
She said, “Good. They owe me this, this is OK,” and just like that, she opened the register. I saw her hands scoop all the bills out, and she put them in with my groceries. She closed the register, and when she saw that I was scowling, said, “I am crazy, for sure, so you know it, remember it, and don’t be expecting nothin’. Now you go outside and wait for me.”
Walking out into the dusk, I believed I would never know anything more real than what I knew right then. As real as the slivers in my hands, I knew that I could trust her to tell me what to do.
I was outside, and she was out there too. She asked, “You have a car?” And when I shook my head, no, she said, “Great, I sure can pick them. OK, you feel like hitching with me? I think you know how it’s done.”
“I know how it’s done,” I said, looking at the highway. I didn’t tell her I had been catching rides for nearly two years. I didn’t tell her this because I thought she already knew me, knew everything about me, like she had heard in my stutter or had seen the history of the miles in the lines on my hands. I looked at the highway. I could catch a ride straight off. I didn’t need anything. All I had in that trailer was an old sleeping bag and clothes in a tattered pack. I looked at her. Things were bad enough for her, too, that she didn’t have anything. She had put some loose cash into a paper sack and picked me to help her continue her escape. She took the money from the bag and counted it fast, and said, “Thirty-nine dollars. Cheap shit place,” and shoved it in her pocket and asked, “Where to?”
I told her we could go north to Montana, but she said, “Florida is the other way. Let’s go there. I want a beach and those drinks with a little umbrella.” We walked onto the eastbound ramp. It was an evening with good traffic, and we got a ride in a minute.
Into a desert. The driver had been traveling all day. He stopped a few times to get us to go out with him into the darkness and look up. “All these stars,” he said, “You can’t see these from San Diego.” He was on military leave, driving straight through to Mineral Wells, a town in the middle of Texas. We had to keep him awake. I found out her name. Alicia. She heard mine too and told me that I looked like an “Enzi.” The driver laughed about us just meeting each other.
She went into the back seat and fell asleep there. I stayed up front and leaned against the passenger window and fell asleep as the driver sang along with the radio from five hundred miles away. He woke us near dawn. It was where he turned off the highway to go north. There was nothing there except the crossing of the two roads.
He gave us two old blankets from the trunk. Light was a hint in the eastern sky, but it was still teal-black to the west. There was no traffic on either road. She said to me, “Enzi, let’s sleep together,” and I didn’t know what to do, but my heart was beating fast, and I was smiling. She spread the blankets out in the scrub, there next to the sagebrush and small juniper trees. She knelt and pulled me down. Her hands went to my face. I lay still. Her hands found my shoulders and moved along my sunburned arms to my hands. She pulled on my fingers, lightly touching the cuts from where the slivers were. She breathed close against my face. I said her name. She kissed my neck, my face. She brought a hand up and ran it through my tangled hair. She moved her other hand down to my belt, to my worn-out jeans, and into them, making me shudder. I laughed and moved with her. Her mouth was on mine, her hair was in my eyes. The day was moments away. Headlights moved along the highway. Taillights faded.
The wind came again, and the desert swirled about us. We were both awake, hungry, and thirsty in the bright sunlight. She was curled about me, and I was still holding her, and we were both covered in dust. I was not as young as I had been the day before. This time, I kissed her, first kissing her hair, her ears, her closed eyes. And we didn’t care that cars were going by now on the highway; we didn’t care if we were close or far.
Then thirst and hunger came back, and the world of barbed wire and asphalt. We were standing again, waiting for and then catching a ride that took us to a small-town cafe where we used some of the cash for a big breakfast of eggs and potatoes and huge glasses of orange juice, and a pitcher of ice cubes and water. And bread. And jam. She ate more than I did and said, “In Florida, maybe we’ll get jobs in a restaurant like this one. A place where there’ll be big tips.” In the restroom, I washed my face and looked at myself. Pushed out of home. Never a direction. Never a plan. Now there were both: East to find a job by the ocean. I would wash dishes and whistle songs. And she would be there. Earlier in the day she had told me that from the first time she saw me, she thought I seemed like someone she could “disappear with.” I looked at myself in the mirror, and I repeated, “Disappear,” trying to get her way of speaking right. Softened drawl, ‘r’ brought to music.
I hurried out of the restroom to get back to her again, to reach across the table and hold her hand for a moment, asking with my hand, my hand which didn’t stutter, “Are you really here?” Like she would know what I was thinking. But she didn’t. She slapped at my hand and said, “That was sweet last night, but don’t go expecting more. I am like this bird.” She touched the tattoo on her arm. “I will most likely take off as fast as I showed up.”
I didn’t believe her, and I told her so. She said, “You were around at the right time, that’s all. You and I are traveling, that’s all. And you have less of nothin’ than me.”
And I didn’t say a thing, but instead, I stared at the floor, looking for patterns and anything that would connect and keep going. My hands were in my pockets.
We caught rides all day. I listened while Alicia talked with the drivers. She told one driver she grew up in Florida. She told another she was from California. I heard her laugh, and say, “When I close my eyes, I’m home.”
Between rides she said, “I can’t stand the dumb chit-chat, but it gets me down the road. I’m no good at being quiet like you.”
By night, we were out of Texas and in Louisiana, and we slept in a grove of trees in a median strip outside of Shreveport. First, there were mosquitoes that bit us through the blankets, and then it started to rain. We got up and walked along the road toward the bright lights we saw about a mile away, which turned out to be from an all-night truck stop. We went in and used up the last of the thirty-nine dollars on another large meal. We started asking truck drivers for a ride, and a waitress told us to leave, told us that we couldn’t bother the customers. Outside, it was midnight and raining.
We each had a blanket over our shoulders, and I told her she looked lovely, but she told me we ate too much and should have saved some money for tomorrow. She looked at the Western Union decal on the window of the truck stop and asked me if I had anyone I could call to wire us money. I told her I didn’t, and she repeated, “I sure can pick them.” I pointed to the highway and to an underpass at the end of the on-ramp. I explained that we could climb up under the bridge and be out of the rain. “Jeezz,” she said again, but walked with me onto the on-ramp.
A semi pulled out of the truck stop and came up slowly behind us. We both turned and faced its headlights and held out our thumbs, and it stopped about a hundred feet ahead of us. By the time we ran up to where it pulled over, the driver had swung down from his cab and was standing by the passenger door. He was wearing a white cowboy hat, a bright red shirt, a new pair of jeans, and boots that looked like they had never been scuffed by dirt. He smiled at Alicia and said, never even looking at me, “Saw you back there.”
I recognized him as one of the drivers who had been in the truck stop, and I asked, “How far are you going?”
He answered, still without looking at me, “Now hold on there. I only have room for one,” and continued, “I can take you all the way to Macon, all the way.”
Alicia asked, looking into the rain and darkness, “You have tunes in that cab?”
“Quad speakers, the works,” the driver said, and winked at Alicia.
She turned to me and said, “I warned you, I done warned you, but I am going with this guy.”
I tried to talk, to say anything, to ask her what she was doing, but instead, I stuttered, and she climbed into the truck’s cab. She stopped before she closed the door and asked, “You want this?” and tossed me her blanket. I caught it and looked up at her. She said, “Sorry,” and added, “People disappear. You know?”
Then it was the night, a highway bridge, and the roar of traffic in the rain. A place where I had been before, hoping for any ride. Getting into whatever car stopped, and slamming the door as the driver accelerated into a forgiving space of sky and wind.
Steve S. Saroff is a novelist, short-story writer, and startup founder. In a different era, he paid his rent with what he earned from his stories, which appeared in Redbook and other national glossy magazines. He is the author of the novel Paper Targets. His recent short fiction has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Jewish Fiction Journal, The Examined Life (University of Iowa), BULL, Across the Margin, San Antonio Review, and others, with more forthcoming. He divides his time between Western Montana and Northern California. Read more of his work at stevesaroff.substack.com and follow him on Instagram @stevesaroffWords.
Photo by Tim McErston on Unsplash