JIMMY
November 29th, 1989
Day One:
Starts off wif us running, cause it’s called running away and that’s all that makes sense to us to be doing. Samantha’s fingers laced my hands, singed, and I figured the skin was molding and clinging to each other like we was one person instead of two. The fear and adrenaline fuses to make a clear liquid that pumps my up veins instead of blood: I call it terror.
Sammy starts off frantic, kinda clawing at her hair and making black liquid pools under her eyes that balance just on the tippa her cheeks before falling down in straight streaks past her chin. Her clothes hang slack offa her like she wasn’t eating, but I know it’s just cause they’re her sister’s clothes and they don’t fit her right
First thing we do is get us down to the bus station. Bus comes through just once a week, Friday at six-twenty PM.
Samantha is afraid that somebody is gonna see us getting onto the bus and tell the folks, but nobody comes to this part of the town. Nobody rides the bus out, excepting strangers.
When the bus comes we duck out from behind the trees and run to get on it. I pay the forty dollar toll and say, “Next city, please, Sir.”
The bus driver nods his head briskly, and we hurry us back to the back of the empty aluminum can of a bus. My throat goes dry and I tell Sammy, “Duck down, Samantha, or somebody might see.”
The worst part is waiting for him to drive. He has to wait for ten minutes lest somebody else wants to get on. I want to scream till my throat is raw for him to just drive, drive, Mister Bus Man!
Finally he puts on the ignition and slowly pulls out of this devil town. All the blood drains from my head then, and I feel partly relieved and very happy and affrighted.
Samantha is first closing her fingers to her palms, then unclosing them, then closing them again. I look at the side of her face as she looks out the window. Just on her cheekbone, you can see a thin, thin scar where her Pap threw a vase at her. She was littler then.
The bus ride goes on and on, and it’s hot and I get hungry and have to go to the bathroom, but when the bus man stops I don’t want to get off cause somebody might see. Samantha says, real soft-like, that that’s impossible that anybody should know us way out here, so we get off and use the porter-potty in the back of the run-down gas station.
And then we are there, in the City, and we get offa the bus, stretching our legs. Samantha and I exchange these short little glances, and we know we just have to run, just run, because we are free.
We sling our backpacks over our backs and we grasp hands and we start running, not even knowing where we’re going and not caring. The concrete feels strange beneath my feet, they are not used to it. Reckon I ain’t never been outside Blacksville before. I’m damn scared, too.
We get tired of running behind a Wal-Mart building, ‘bout collapsing down onto the cold concrete. Samantha rests her chin in the nook of my neck and her hair tickles my nose but I don’t care. I rest one hand around her waist and the other on her lap, and she folds her hand so it fits right in mine.
She’s nervous, kinda shaking, but maybe that’s the cold. I wanna say something to comfort her, but I don’t know what.
“Reckon it’ll be fine, Samantha.” I manage to slur out, after chewing my lip for a time.
She sniffs real loud, her nose is runny for cold and frost. She wipes her nose a little bit on her sleeve and says, “Yeah, Jimmy, reckon it will.”
But she wants reassurance, so I say, “This was a right good idea, what wif all the stuff goin’ on here, y’know?”
I figure it’s not too good an idea to reiterate what all the stuff going on is, cause that will just make her more nervous.
“Yeah,” Samantha agrees, but then she starts crying into my shirt and I don’t know what to do, so I just sort of pat her back until she starts to feel better, and she sort of sniffs out, “You’re such a great guy, Jimmy, really. You make me feel so safe.”
That makes me feel kinda funny and awkward on the inside but I go, “Yeah, yeah, this’ll work and it’ll be good…was a good idea, we planned in, Sammy, so don’t worry.”
It don’t convince her or me, but I figure it’s the most I can say,
so I pat her hair a little more, and shake with nervous excitement.
THE STRAY DOG
I swung up my tail and pawed my way along the lot, hopping over the gray bits and around the aluminum blobs. I could smell something greasy coming from a long ways away and wanted to investigate this matter further, so I followed my nose along for as far as it would lead me, and when I got there, I stopped, swinging my head wildly, in search of that scent.
It came from a trash bin, which I jumped into, and pawed at, until I found a bone. I gnawed at it until it was flavorless.
I dragged the bone beneath me on the gray sidewalk, turned the corner and there they were.
He had her all curled up on top of him, but he wasn’t getting any rest. I barked at him, furious; he was on my turf, him and his woman both, and I demanded that they should leave in the simplest way I knew how.
“Oh!” the girl cried, waking up. “Oh, it’s a big old mangy dog! Jimmy! Let’s run!”
He took her hand, pushing the girl behind him, and slowly began to back away, avoiding eye contact.
I was appeased by the respect he was showing for me and my turf, but I continued to bark until I drove them away.
“I think it has rabies, Samantha,” I heard the boy say as he tripped over the curb. “Did ya see the way he was foaming at the mouth? I think wif rabies you die in a coupla days or weeks. See how overgrown his coat was? I think he’s lost his family. He’s a stray.”
Hah. Haha. He thought I was a stray. Those two looked like the worst couple of mutts I’d seen in my day. And though I remember a time when I had a house of my own it was too long ago to consider relevant, so I sat down where they’d been and I gnawed on my dead bone.
I don’t know what it was that the bone belonged to, and I don’t feel sorry for it. Even strays have to eat.
TAUNDRY –or- THE BRIDGE TROLL
Figger I were under my bridge like the Troll when showed these two scrawny little buggers tryin’ to hog up the corner. Walked straight up to ‘em too, I did, an’ showed my teeth.
The yarn haired girl made a squeaky sound like Raggedy Ann on speed. Looked like she’d clean rubbed dirt in the hollows of her cheeks, she did. The boy put his arm round his girl an’ in fronta her, an’ said, “See here, mister, now see here, we ain’t hurtin’ nobody, mister.”
Figger they were under my bridge though, figger I was the Troll an’ they had ta pay the fee, see. Figger it’d been my bridge since I was a scrawny bugger me self, an’ I paid the toll. Figger they could manage just that.
The boy, though, with the side-parted red fire-hair, stood up right in front of me. He were a little shorter than me an’ that says a lot, as I reckon I ain’t no taller than five nine. He stood up and puffed up his chest, and I could tell he ain’t been hungry and wretched fer long cause he still had that light in his eyes, like Oliver Twist after being fed meat.
“I say, lad,” I said, standing up to my full height, and flexing my arms to show my brawn. “I say lad, this here be my bridge, boy, an’ you’s gonna pay the toll or get you out, boy.”
“It’s rainin’ cats and dogs, mister! We’ve gotta be under somethin’, haven’t we? And I ain’t got no ‘toll.’ Reckon I ain’t too sure what a toll is.”
“It’s money, boy!” I boomed, and the lightening flashed behind me like I were God.
He shook his head and the fire spread from his hair to his face, and he said, “You got no more right to the bridge than we do, and if you wanna be like that you’ll have to drive us out.”
I stood up and I shakes and I shakes, and I grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and pushed him up against the concrete bridge. Raggedy Ann screamed. I shoved him forward and knocked the back of his head with my palm so hard his teeth ground together and he fell to his knees.
That outta have took some of the spark outta him.
Then I said to him, I said, “You get you and your girl outta here, boy, if you ain’t gonna pay the toll.”
It was rainin’ so hard, it almost took some heart outta me to do it, but I had ta, cause if you make one exception, word spreads out the King is gettin’ weak. An’ that can’t happen.
