Solemn (40 page)

“Don't leave me. Wait! I can't see!”

Solemn jutted her face forward and cut the spring night, stuck her nose out like a plane's, dependent upon gravity and lift at once. Whether she flew straight, left, right, or back, she was unsure. The fog canceled out the light. Once, two miles out, Majority caught her from behind. She reached for her roommate's collar, to force Solemn into a paired sprint. She clutched the clasp of her cross necklace instead. It snapped off, but not before it cinched Solemn in her bottom lip and cut her up there.

Why my feet fit these shoes? Why this bra hold my breasts? Why I got jewelry? Why I see so clear now without my glasses? Did I ever need them? Is …

On the floor in the kitchen of Fanny O. Barnes, Miss Ruth did not know how to succumb. Strangled by her work coat strings, she knew how to breathe. But not how to not. First Solemn had not watched. She listened. Choked. Swallowed the smell and taste of it. Once the fascination passed there was shame in herself for being there. She thought herself back to the trailer park bedroom, hopes to hear her mama flush the toilet in middle of the night, or feel the cat-pat paws at her tender breasts, or see her daddy come in later than he should have to fill the living room with calm of a man. She withered into a wish for a walk to the well to scare herself for the hell of it and then go right on back home to watch a movie. She sank down to a craving for the hard seat and cramped writing top of a school desk, where she had always paid attention even when it appeared she did not.

Majority surprised herself even. It was as silent as either one of them could have hoped for. Night Worker 2 forgot them. No formal count until time for meds. Maybe Night Worker 1 would look for them. The hope wasn't high. The highest danger of discovery for their absence was another charge who questioned where they were. Put them out. But Solemn was not that popular to be missed. The majority were relieved when Majority was gone. How long did they have to get away? Two hours? Three?

How long I been running?
Solemn thought she had sixty-seven weeks to go. It was sixty-four.

She saw a second of two of it: bleached white orthopedic shoes, kicking. Then, the shoes scooted along against pots and pans clanging. And Majority danced around the kitchen, back and forth, side to side, pulling and pushing; a jiggly aura she made. No weapons. No kicks. No punches. No fists. No stomps. Two white apron strings were enough. Then, from Miss Ruth, Solemn sensed a last breath unshackled to hurl itself through a tunnel of life disregarded without it. In the inside where everything is bigger and louder but feels like it isn't even there—better than a queasy ride at a carnival, more wild than she imagined Disney World, easier than a stage—an energy rumbled in Solemn.

She recovered at least one part of the secret: to give Majority a fight, to twist and writhe with an unfortunate soul squat and inert in unawareness, a cynocephalus and rogue. The hooks and hangers on the ceiling stilled to form watch over the moment, just another. In the glimmer of long, flat stainless-steel counters was the glare of a sweat river washed up from the floor onto their backs. With the girls fighting now, Miss Ruth took aim at her own throat, to release the little strings. But she kept her eyes on those two girls.

Those two girls…,
was mostly all she thought.

Solemn heard “No!”—more before it and after it. She stopped and backed off. Majority's nose was smashed red. Then, Solemn saw her for who she really was. The girl tore down a set of keys from the hook and tussled with the wooden door's fancy knob. Then, she ran through the torn screen door to the open back door. Solemn looked at Miss Ruth thrash and extended between her steel cauldrons.

 … breathe aye aye oh awa iwa owwa ow ahhhh ohhhhhh breathe.…

Once outside, those two girls hesitated and turned in a circle of disorientation. Solemn stood in the garden, assaulted by gaze of moonflowers. They charged into the flowers. The stems with thorns made it through the tough pants the girls wore, lashed out, and scratched both their legs up the minute they stepped into the garden outside the door, no amount of fabric capable of blocking the jabs. Solemn saw herself walk through the back door to join others in the game room and stay mute. Now, acres and then miles away from the possibility, she simply shouted it as she ran. No choice now.

“You crazy! Stay away from me. Stay away!”

“I'm crazy? You crazy? You a liar! You didn't do nothing.”

“You ain't said nothing about that, Majority. You lied about that.”

“Yeah, but who running now bitch? Who out now bitch? You! 'cause of me.”

“We didn't have that long. We didn't have that long. Now. Now…”

But arguing cost breath. So they stopped. Majority was already so wicked ahead she tore the grass from under her feet to wipe her nose. Chi fights taught her that. No blood on the clothes. Just ain't sexy, let alone the attention it bring.

They had left stockpiles of food in their rooms. There had been no recent rain, so no puddles or water to anticipate. It felt hot like noon. The extra clothes, pictures, and unicorn jewelry box Solemn stuffed into a pillowcase were left behind as well. Majority's sketching would be soon ripped off the wall. All that was supposed to follow them into the freezer, and then out the door, into their new lives, or old lives back at home. With nothing but the clothes on their backs and shoes on their feet and a gold cross around Solemn's neck, they had run out the back kitchen door. With no destination or plan, only something they imagined as freedom now turned nowhere to go and a need for new names. Had it all been different, so different, how they ran, they could have competed as athletes—in track, to scholarships, gold medals, money. Now they just swallowed heaves of fog and breath for their homes with no maps, no star, fables or lessons, no ground, no anchor, no compass. Solemn ran so long, so aimlessly, so hard, she collapsed. Every blue moon seemed to pass as she coughed her way up again. Majority caught up. She collapsed, too, half on Solemn's back. She looked up for her elusive North Star, as she had done when she came to Mississippi already wanting to go home. All black. Nothing. The timber fields were behind now, at least. Had to be a road not too long now.

We ain't stoppin'.

Majority gulped her breath. She began to drag Solemn by the feet, passed out from exhaustion and shock. She needed her. Solemn understood the night, already led them this far. So she pulled her, to rest but not to stop. Solemn might be pulling her next. But she sputtered awake, hacking and kicking. Awoke to a chalky expanse and connected to nothing but a new stranger hanging on to her by the feet. No one but her. Not her mama. Not even a lightning bug or a cricket or a mosquito. A jackrabbit shot close.

“Get up!” the stranger shouted. “Get up, now! Come on … there's a road.”

So, they started again. Walking this time. Solemn did not recognize nowhere. But she walked feeling somewhere would eventually show up. Majority latched two fingers to the back of Solemn's jeans. Solemn sped up, renewed and no longer so smothered by her wishes. She tolerated this girl child behind her, whom she had slept near and even once felt a creamy excitement for.

She walked. They would be caught. They could be murderers. Or she would be something to do with it, just like with her daddy. Or she would be blamed entirely. And she was to blame. She walked this way, now. It was just supposed to be a plan. No action. None of it, none of it, not a moment of her, had been planned. Except maybe her sight of that long white ark stopped ahead on the road. Solemn squinted so her eyes could draw back on a curtain of fog. She read:
ANTIOCH'S
.

*   *   *

Two girls appeared at an edge of I-55 North soon as one of the first of Hank Williams's gospel songs began on the radio. A retrospective series. A remnant, along with the shotgun, of training with men alone. The driver was a woman, widow peaked.

Given the fog, she inched along tonight. To Indiana, today and tonight. When she saw those girls, she had been ready to stop—anyway. Had to toss cud. The figures crept, one behind the other, with the one in front having a slight limp and her thumb stuck up. It was pitch-black. If not for her dome headlights and her assurances of the vehicle, well …

She squinted. The hitchers were young. One black. She had only seen white hitchers in all the times she decided to not stop. Blacks knew better. On 55 North this evening, there was no rough traffic or even many travelers. She caught baby faces in her windshield. She passed them. Then, “Shit.” Up ahead on the road, she pulled over.

Her heart told her to make no time. But two young girls out in the middle of the night? Not one.
Two?
How terrible. They'd be picked up by lecherous men; one was a risk, but two were too good to pass up. The shotgun was in back of the trailer. Should she unlock the hatch to get it? Was she pessimistic? It wasn't so late. Only a little before 10:00 p.m. And she had packed extra tuna sandwiches and took desserts from the last buffet.

While she thought about it, the two girls walked up and decided for her.

Solemn passed a stream of drooped eyes and lapping tongues extended behind the rig's cabin. The cattle filled the night with wails and groans and the scent of earth turned over. The cows shook the trailer with their patient stomping. They pressed their faces against the tin gateposts. Their snouts dripped with liquid they shook away in streams.

“Howdy!” the truck lady yelled from her driver's side let half-down. And she was black, too. “What y'all doing out here like this?”

“Lost,” Majority told the truck lady. “We not from 'round here.”

She ran around the front to the side of the truck. Solemn stood back, waiting to be asked. The truck lady looked friendly but skeptical. She had only rolled down the window, not yet opened the door.

“Where you from?”

“Chicago.”

“Well, what yas doing all way down here?”

“Family reunion. We came all way down here for it. Family left us.”

“God. What kinda family you got?”

“They all had to get back to work. We just wanted to stay longer. We was staying down at the motel…”

“Which motel?”

“That one, the one, the one, uh … up there.”

“Oh yes. Uh … the Eight Ball?”

“Yes ma'am, that's it. We ran out of money before my mama and daddy could wire us some more. They wouldn't let us stay.”

“Well, that's no good.

“Hello,” the truck lady said to the dark girl stood back against the tableau of fog, stirred gravel, exhaust smoke, collection of mosquitoes.

Solemn shifted her feet, and waved. She wanted to ask how far to Bledsoe, which she should have known from the maps. Daddy. Akila. Landon. They showed them to her.

Majority continued to spin a tale, conditioned and pathological and degenerate.

“I can give you gas money, if we make it to a Western Union. Then, we can just get us a new hotel and catch the bus from there.”

“I'm gonna be in Indiana 'fore dawn,” she said. “Chicago right next door.”

It was as much an invitation as Majority needed to jump in. Solemn stood back, weak at her knees, doubtful if she could hoist herself up on the running board to slide in.

“Oh my God, thank you,” Majority told her. “Thank you so much. I just can't believe, can't believe you would give us a ride. We been walking so long.”

Majority slithered to the middle. She reached out her hand to help Solemn up.

The gift of the handshake was the sense it gave for the first time since the truth of it, so Solemn felt inside her body where she was, for real now: not in Bledsoe anymore.

And it had been damned near a year but just never registered. She made it. Out.

The lady roared her truck back into gear on 1-55 North. The giant trees of Solemn's South extended soon into mythology, their branches and leaves outstretched toward her, her vision blurred and senses askew, and her lovely trees and their branches were waving, beckoning, wanting her to talk back, to bid proper good-bye. For the next two hundred miles to Nashville, according to signpost, Solemn would not turn 'round to remember them or to forget them, either, for recollection of a time a woman did and she turned to salt. Solemn had a different taste in her sixteen-year-old mouth: freshness and sweetness of life.

I'm like the cicada … I come back …
Then,
How come I was so ungrateful?

A man whose name she did not know sang out from the radio, about sweet baby Jesus and a house of gold.

 

ALSO BY
KALISHA BUCKHANON

Upstate

Conception

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KALISHA BUCKHANON
is author of the novels
Upstate
and
Conception
. Her short stories have been widely published in many online and university print literary journals. Her articles and essays have appeared on several popular women's blogs and cultural Web sites. Her writing awards include an American Library Association ALEX Award, Friends of American Writers Award, Illinois Arts Council Awards Fellowship, and a Terry McMillan Young Author Award. Kalisha's work has received attention in major media outlets such as
Essence, The Guardian,
BBC-London, TV-One,
People, Elle, Entertainment Weekly,
and
Marie Claire
. She has an MFA from The New School in New York City, and her B.A. and M.A. in English are from the University of Chicago. She writes at her blog,
Negression.com
, and her Web site is at
www.Kalisha.com
. Or sign up for email updates
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