Free Verse (12 page)

Yesterday was late May, and today is late May, but the difference between yesterday and today is the difference between a blizzard and a summer-day picnic. The whole heavy world is pressing down on us, and Mikey keeps stumbling. I pull him up by his arm over and over again. I won't let him fall.

•   •   •

It takes half a day in the woods to realize I'm completely useless. I've never learned how to hunt, fish, gather, scavenge, keep myself alive off the land. I've never learned how to hike, navigate, trailblaze. No one ever taught me how to scale a rock cliff or comfort a child. I don't know the first thing about making clothing out of plant fibers.

Mikey rips his jeans in two places in the first hour.
He had a run-in with a creek bed. He's wet and muddy. His underwear is showing. I didn't think to pack us clothing. I brought the suitcase with the money, but I didn't think to put clothing in it. I've packed an empty suitcase.

We drink from the creek, which tastes like coal smells. I remember that we have to drink, or when they catch us, they'll send us to the hospital. I can feel the stitches making my right hand itch, and I'd just as soon not go back to the hospital again.

I'm not Phyllis—I can't manage singing at a time like this. But I think Mikey needs to hear my voice. I guess I know that the same way Phyllis always knows when I need egg salad at four a.m. So I recite poetry while we walk. I tell him Anthony's best poems. I tell him Lisa's bad poetry, which would make him giggle if he wasn't crying. I tell him my Mr. Powell poems and my Michael and Ben and Judy poems and my bird poems. I tell him new poems I make up about the brambles and the coal creek and the walking.

“Coal,

black, invisible,

lives all over.

Can't get away from

it.”

And:

“Here in the black creek,

water comes and water goes.

So do you and I.”

And:

“Walking.

Slow steps.

Picking through brambles.

Someday we'll get there.

Wherever.”

We eat a million skimpy strawberries. Mikey doesn't speak all morning, and I keep telling poetry, keep praying poetry.

•   •   •

It was Michael's job to make the escape plan, and he did, but now he's gone and his plan won't work because it involved a car and grown-ups and college scholarships. So now it's my job to make the plan. If we follow the creek, we'll hit Route 10 between Bent Tree and Dower's Fork. From there, we can quit following the creek, with its briar bushes and mosquitos, and start following the road. The road will take us out of the county, and that, for the moment, is enough of a plan. We aren't so much going
to
somewhere as we are coming
from
somewhere. Behind us are sad things. Boxes in sheds and phones that ring in the
night. Fires that take away brothers and coal mines that take away fathers and mothers that go away. Up ahead are the things Michael promised. A different sort of life.

•   •   •

At first, I miss Phyllis terribly. I pick at the bandage on my hand. I think about how she sang for me while the stitches went in. I'm ashamed to have left without buying her a GUI-tar. But after night has come and gone, after we've walked till I can't think of anything but walking, thoughts of Phyllis and of Hubert—thoughts of all of Caboose—are like the flowers in Town Center that blew away. All that remains is a faint scent, like rotting fruit, and a memory too vague to pick out specific kinds of flowers. All you know is there were petals. All you know is you have left them.

•   •   •

Following a creek through the woods on a West Virginia mountain is easier said than done. Our creeks aren't polite. They spill sideways down rock cliffs. They churn and worry. They wear a path through solid rock.

And our foliage. Isn't that what people call it? I call it brambles. I call it briars. We're both scratched and sweaty. Mikey winds ahead of me, and branches slap backward to hit me in the face. I've been out of breath all day.

Phyllis—who has become one of the voices in my head—says I should think positive. And I do. I'm positive I am about to die of a heart attack. I've spent three months
lying on my back on worn porch boards. I'm not in shape for hiking.

There are words and phrases stuck in my head. Now that I've been reciting poetry, the floodgates in my brain are open and words are filling me up. Words like
escape
and
flee
and
run
.

Mikey complains that he is too tired to go on.

I've got to get us to the road.

The creek takes us to the bridge and the bridge takes us to the highway and the highway takes us to the town of Dower's Fork, where I stop at Gas-Quik and fill the suitcase with bread and peanut butter, crackers and cakes. I remember to buy bottles of water that won't taste like coal. Now the suitcase is heavy.

My original plan was only to get us out of Caboose, and here we are in Dower's Fork, someplace new. But Dower's Fork feels the same as Caboose, gray and gritty. I want us to end up someplace clean and fresh, someplace that doesn't smell like coal or floodwaters, someplace where the headlines aren't so sad. I'm not completely crazy. I know it won't be easy, just the two of us kids on our own. But we're strong, me and Mikey. We can make it work. We can find someplace dry and warm to stay, and I can do odd jobs for other people instead of Hubert. I
can save money and we can buy clean clothes that make us look older, and we can enroll in school again and study hard until it's time for college.

Me and Mikey both will be going to college. I've decided. It's what Michael always wanted for me, and as for Mikey, well . . . I'm not going to let another Michael Harless miss out on seeing the world.

The sides of the highway are chipping. The pavement is cracking. We keep our heads down. We catch ourselves trying not to step on the cracks.

Mikey doesn't speak, and I've run out of poetry. I'm trying to make up new poems, but I can't remember the forms. Poetry club is at school. We're walking in the other direction. I'm out of range of poetry club.

•   •   •

I think of hitchhikers. I think of those people in movies who hop into train cars. I think of how hot-wiring might work. I study the tired horses we pass in a crooked pasture by the road.

I'm not as brave as I want to be. We walk.

•   •   •

It's night. The kind with no stars. Then it's morning. The kind with red sunrise.

•   •   •

Dawn and the thunderstorm break at around the same time. Mikey's broken, too. He's sniffling. Tears drip off the end of his pointy chin. His lip juts out like a much
smaller child's, and I wish I wasn't too tired to scoop him up to carry. He's scared. He's tired. He wants his daddy. He wants to go home.

I can't let us turn around. I can't let us give in to being tired and scared. There's nothing left behind us but bad news.

I tell him, “I know there's a home for us up ahead.” I know he knows I'm lying, but neither of us says it.

He doesn't want to walk, so I pull him. I feed him peanut butter and pour the water into him. I feed him dusty strawberries growing too close to the road. A field opens up beyond the berries, and I know we've made tracks. There are no open fields down our way. There are only steep cliffs and filthy trees and twisting roads.

I tell him, “We're almost there.” He doesn't ask where. I don't tell him what I know: we're in the middle of nowhere. Wherever
there
is, we won't see it for days. This is maybe the stupidest thing I've ever done. But my feet refuse to turn us around.
We can't go back. We can't go back.

Mikey is stained pink from the strawberries. His tears make clean tracks through all the pink.

We fall asleep under the raindrops, out in the open. The grass makes us itch. It's dusk. The sky leans low. Mikey cuddles up to me. He holds my arm like a teddy bear. He's so little, here in the grass. I pet his hair like he's a kitten, and he doesn't shake me off.

I tell him, “We have to be there, almost.”

I tell him, “Hang on another day.”

Every once in a while, I'm overwhelmed by images of Hubert fixing the porch rail or holding one of the babies or looking lovingly at Mikey without realizing he's doing it. I feel an ache welling up that only walking will numb.

I tell Mikey, “We have to hang on another day.”

•   •   •

We hang on another day, and it's dry. The sun comes out. We're tired beyond tired. We're filthy beyond filthy. We are not just walking. We have
become
walking. There's nowhere we are going. But it's good. There's nowhere we're coming from. We are simply steps.
Step. Step. Step.

Stepping is getting easier because, away from home, the land gets less steep. The mountains become hills. The hills are dotted with pretty things. Wild carrots. Mayapple. Pale yellow coltsfoot. Not the part of a horse, but the plant. The trees are pretty here, too. They're not gray. They're greener than green.

Morning fades like blue jeans, and the midday sky is pale. Clouds wisp by. Mikey isn't crying. He breaks the tops off weeds as we walk. He kicks gravel into the road.

Midday deepens like water, and the evening sky is beautiful. The blue is
so
blue. The sunlight is orange and thin. We're walking in a high meadow, grass and flowers all around us. Off to the left are flat-topped mountains with no trees—a strip mine. Ben used to talk about working the strip job, blasting off the tops of mountains to get at the coal underneath. The field we're walking in might
have been a strip mine once, but there are flowers now and open spaces, and the openness makes me feel like I can get a breath for the first time in days.

Down below us, where the land drops off at the end of the meadow, the trees spring up like a boundary fence and then thin out. The fields give way. There are power poles. There are streetlights blinking on. We've made it to a new place.

My feet slow, then stop altogether. Mikey walks six or eight more steps before he, too, grinds to a halt, blinking at me as if waking from a dream.

“We did it,” I tell him. It's the first word either of us has spoken since yesterday.

“Did what?” His voice sounds scratchy and tired, but familiar and welcome under the blanket of summer bugs and treetop wind.

“We . . . we got here.”

“Where?”

I'm so tired, I'm confused by his question. “Well . . . well, how should I know? Let's go see.”

•   •   •

The sign says
ALLEY RUSH
. It's surprising to end up someplace I already know. I've been through it a few times. It's a town beside a town. If you keep going, you get to bigger places. You get to Hart with all its houses. Way on up, you get to Beckley with its mall. You get to the interstate that
takes you to Charleston, and from there you can get anywhere, because Charleston is near everything.

“We walked six hundred years to get to a place we coulda drove in a half hour?” Mikey asks. He seems less than impressed with my running-away skills, but I'm too distracted to care. I'm so relieved that it makes me shake. We aren't wandering in the wilderness anymore. I haven't lost us; I haven't gotten us killed out in the woods. Then, quick as the relief came, terror sets in. We're near places now, and I'm not interested in being near anything. I don't want to get found.

But Alley Rush is small. Maybe it's okay to stop here for a while. There are flowers springing up along the streets, so precise I know they were planted. Tame wildflowers—tameflowers?—in groups by color. I don't see mayapple or wild carrots or coltsfoot. I don't see anything here that I saw in the woods.

Mikey says, “Dang.”

He's looking at a street vendor opening his stand. The vendor cranks down one cloth sign at a time:
HOT DOGS. CHEESEBURGE
RS. CHOCOLATE-DIPPED
FRUIT.

“Dang,” I echo.

There is a banner above the city:

121
^ST
ALLEY RUS
H HARDWOOD FESTIVAL

CARNIVAL! GAMES! PAR
ADE! SHOPPING!

“We're just in time,” I say.

“Caboose has its carnival in a couple weeks,” Mikey said. “I mean, if you were gonna walk that far for a carnival.”

“Mikey—”

“I'm just saying.”

“We didn't walk to the carnival. We walked to . . . we walked to
get somewhere
.”

He shakes his head at the sky as if asking God for patience. It's one of the mannerisms Mikey learned from Hubert, and it makes my muscles all go tense at the same time. Now that we're not walking, the loss of my cousin might catch up. I can't let it.

“Hey, did I ever tell you about the time my brother and I walked for twenty-four hours straight, just to see if we could?”

“No . . . ,” Mikey says. “You didn't tell me that one. But that would have been good to know
before
I walked off into the woods with you. Might have give me some clue we were going to walk for
ever
.”

“Just to see if we could,” I repeated. It's only partway true. Me and Michael walked just to see if we could, but we also walked to see if things felt different when we got back. It was only a week after Ben died, and when we got back, Michael got practical. He started working at the grocery store and quizzing me on spelling words. He started making plans for us to leave.

The street vendors won't open their stands until it gets all the way dark. Our stomachs growl at sights and smells. We sit on the curb. Mikey stretches his legs out in front of him and leans back on his elbows. For a moment I'm struck by how much like my brother he looks, all casual.

“Well?” he asks. “Could you?”

“Huh?”

He rolls his eyes. “Walk for twenty-four hours.”

“Give or take.” We were gone a day and part of a night. I don't fill him in on the hours spent sitting with our backs against trees while one or the other of us cried.

“Opening-night special,” a man in a hat calls into the growing crowd. “Two footlongs, two dollars! Opening-night special, people! Get your footlongs!”

My hand uncurls from the suitcase. My fingers are cold from being wet. I scratch and scramble at the clasps until the case comes open. I snatch out two dollars, a third for tax, in case they charge it. I slam the case shut before anyone can see I'm carrying money. My brother taught me to always keep it hidden.

I catch up to the hot dog man and shove two dollars into his hand. “One with everything”—I don't know what
everything
is, but the more food, the better, I figure—“and one with ketchup.” Because I know Mikey won't eat whatever
everything
is.

The man's gaze slides from the dollars to my filthy hand. To my filthy face. To my filthy cousin.

“Y'all been enjoying the festivities already,” he comments. He takes the dollars, no tax, and serves up the hot dogs. He keeps looking. I take Mikey by the elbow and thread us back into the crowd.

Everything
turns out to include at least two things I don't recognize. Still, food is food, and I don't much care what it tastes like. We eat while we watch the narrow streets of Alley Rush fill up with people. Some of the people are dressed the way they would have been at the very first Alley Rush festival, in gingham and in overalls, as if they've come in from the farm. I know they're dressed this way only for today, because their clothes are clean, and because this isn't how farmers dress anymore. I see real farmers in town sometimes. They wear tan work boots and T-shirts with rectangles worn in the pockets from their cigarette packs.

Every power pole in Alley Rush has got a yellow ribbon tied around it. At first I wonder why, and then I feel stupid for wondering why. Just because I haven't been watching the news doesn't mean every other person in the region hasn't. The fact that the signs and ribbons are up tells me everything I need to know: the accident at the mine was bad. The ringing phone Phyllis went to answer would have brought us terrible news.

All the church signs have had the letters rearranged till they say something about the miners from down our way:
GOD BLESS OUR MINERS
and
WE LOVE
OUR MINERS
and
PRAYERS W
ITH THE FAMILYS
, which is spelled wrong, which makes me feel like crying. I know there isn't a city in the region that doesn't have the fate of the Dogwood miners in mind. It doesn't matter whether the town's got mines of its own. We all feel it when something bad like this happens.

There are booths all up and down the street. Nearly every one has a sign announcing it sells something carved out of certified Alley Rush hardwood. There are game booths for knocking over bowling pins carved out of hardwood. There are antique booths stocked with old figurines carved out of hardwood. I look around. Alley Rush was carved out of hardwood. The only trees still growing in city limits are saplings, young and skinny like Mikey.

There's a live band, too. They're not very good, but no one seems to care. People are dancing in the street. The later it gets, the more people dance, and the fewer of them are kids. If this were a movie town, there would be a clock in the square. I duck to look at a man's watch as he reaches for a footlong. It's nearly midnight.

It feels so good to be full. It feels so good not to be walking. I feel so good, I sweep Mikey into the street. We spin. We dance. It feels good to dance. Lights spin around us.
We spin around each other. Our feet get faster the more tired we get. We sing songs we don't know the words to. We hold on to each other's hands so tight we might never be able to let go. We laugh like happy people. We breathe air that's getting colder.

•   •   •

Later, we stop dancing, but the world does not stop spinning. We lie down on the grass of someone's lawn. The world still does not stop spinning.