M Coe - New Veronia

I must have started to feel like a real criminal for the first time that night. The Zimzee would be able to see straight through me to the things I had done to Toshi atop that stolen mattress in New Veronia (and the thing Toshi had done to himself later, the thing I couldn’t at that moment think to myself), and it would know that I’d fled rather than face consequences, and then held up a mini-mart, stolen money, nurturing my criminal inclinations.

I pulled Stella’s panties out of my pocket and, for the first time, huffing them didn’t make me horny. Instead, I thought about how they belonged to her, and about how much I wanted to talk to her right then, and maybe because it had been such a trying day or maybe because my head felt light and fuzzy and not quite a part of me, I made a sort of sock puppet out of her panties, a panty puppet, and then the puppet asked me how I was doing and it apologized for being so mean to me that day in the cafeteria, but that was what happened in school, it made you mean, and then it smoothed the hair back from my forehead, which encouraged me to open up, to tell Stella that I was more scared than I’d ever been, that maybe her brother was totally unhinged, but even if he was, I felt compelled to go along with him. I would probably do anything for him, bite off my own thumb, shoot a cashier in the teeth, renounce my love for Stella, even though she was my beautiful shining star. I told her how Jay was the only one who cared about me, probably he’d been the only one to ever care about me, and that meant a lot, it basically meant I owed Jay my life, and so even if he had some meanness at his core, I was bound to him forever. Jay was all I had left.

The night went on and on until the first strips of sunlight crept their way up from the bottom of the sky, and that lightness made me think we would be safe.

My tongue felt dry as a wafer, but the backpack with its half-full water bottle was tucked beneath Jay’s head, so I licked at the gritty droplets of dew that the leaves had collected in the dark.

Somehow Jay got a decent rest during our four hours atop that pile of sticks, because he woke up ready to figure out where we were and from there, how to get on down to Florida.

“All we need is a road sign,” he said, wandering back in the direction we’d come from last night.

“We should have brought a map.”

“You think my parents just have some old map of Florida lying around? Or did you think I had time to go to the map store in the middle of our running away?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking.”

The air felt crisp, on the verge of fall, though in Delaware the tail end of summer was obvious on the edge of every morning. To be in a place with a name I didn’t know made the world seem meaner, more threatening. Huge insects fell onto my skin from the treetops—but these were just dead leaves. Men yelled at us—but it was only a deep-throated, unfamiliar birdcall. Movement caught the corner of my eye, and I stepped closer to Jay, uncertain about the types of predators found here. Wherever here was.

Finding myself so dislocated reminded me of my first day of school in Delaware. My dad had driven me there because he needed to sign some papers at the front desk, and the route had consisted of so many turns onto roads that appeared identical to one another that I wondered if, somehow, we were actually staying in place. And then, when we finally did make it to the school, the strangeness continued. I remember that the secretary working the front desk had a jar of bacon and a Styrofoam cup of coffee right next to her pencil holder, and the similar way that the bacon and pencils poked skyward seemed obscene. She welcomed my father to town, patted her frizzy bangs, and told him the Amish made the best chocolate bacon and you could buy it cheap at the sale. I knew then that we’d landed in a place as foreign as Russia. But after a while, I got used to it, and now here I found myself, all these miles off, missing it.

Jay led us straight back to the road. The stripes between the opposite lanes were a different shade of yellow than in Delaware, another detail that made home feel far, far away.

“Road sign,” Jay was mumbling, “road sign, road sign.” Something green on a pole shimmered up ahead, and we kept moving toward it. When we got there, it said Berea Wash.

“Shit.” Jay shook his head. “Not helpful. But we’ll figure it out soon: we just find a road with north one way and south the other, and take the south way.”

“How do you know we’re supposed to go south?”

Jay knocked a knuckle against his head. “There’s no more south than Florida.”

“Well—maybe we’re already in Florida.”

“Quit dreaming,” Jay said.

We walked along the road for a while, and not many cars passed, but each one that did, Jay stuck out his thumb. I tried to catch a glimpse of the license plates, but the cloud of dust that followed the vehicles made it impossible for me to check the plates’ state. I was nervous that the folks Jay had insulted the night before would find us. Sometimes he did the stupidest things for basically no reason, acting brutish even when people were being kind, but there wasn’t any stopping his fits. They were like gobs of bile come up from the dark place inside him, and if he didn’t spit them out, he would poison himself. Or it could be that the bile was a sign he was poisoned already.

The small road we were walking along merged into a slightly less small road, and we passed a man mending a fence at the edge of a field. Jay hailed him. “We would be much obliged if you would tell us where we are, exactly, and maybe point us towards the biggest intersection around.”

Jay had never said “much obliged” in his life, and even through my distress, it struck me how adaptable he was, telling the people what they wanted to hear in order to get his way.

The man paused in his work. “Boys, this is Summers County.”

“In the state of…?”

The man shook his head. “West Virginia.”

I chewed on my cheek: we had gone the wrong way. Maybe we weren’t meant to make it to Florida. Maybe we were meant to go right back where we’d come from and face whatever punishment was waiting at home. I turned so that Jay wouldn’t notice the anguish on my face. West Virginia was a sign: fate was taking us back; we shouldn’t have run away.

Jay and I started to walk the way the man had pointed, the direction we’d been headed already.

“Did you see that guy’s overalls?” Jay said. “How do you even get that many holes in overalls? They must be ancient.”

“Jay?” I said. “Jay? I’ve been thinking.” I hurried up alongside him.

“Must be because he works so hard, but he’s still poor.”

“Maybe we ought to go back,” I said.

“I have all these ideas, so many good ideas about helping us get our jobs back. It’s not fair how all our money flows out to people who ain’t even real Americans. It’s bullshit.”

“Maybe this is a sign, since we got closer to home, and not further away.”

“Most of them don’t even pay taxes, it’s true, and we’re forced to pay the taxes, and so we carry them. Did you know that my dad lost his job a few days ago? He just got into a little tiff with this guy on the floor, not even worth it to call the guy his coworker, just a little tiff and those bammers toss him.”

“That’s awful,” I said. “Maybe he needs you, back in Delaware…”

“It’s so tough. Not providing for the family makes him angry, more angry than usual, and there’s so much shit in the world to be angry about. I figured out something because of it: all a man wants to do is work. He wants to make good for his family and his country. But if those others are stealing from him, then what’s the point?”