All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

18

By the time we pulled off the road it was near dark, and I was feeling sick from hunger. They found a place down by a little creek that had some water in it, and we got the groceries out.

Timmy used the car door handle to hook the Coca-Cola bottles under so he could pop off the lids. It scarred the car. It wasn’t my car, but it made me feel guilty. Old Man Turpin had always taken care of it, and now it was scarred. He’d had it for a while and kept it perfect, and in a couple of minutes, Timmy had messed it up.

There weren’t any trees right where we were, but the bank was deep and the water was shallow, running over white gravel that we could see in the creek bed through the water. I looked down the creek a ways, and about thirty feet away was a little clutch of struggling willows growing on the edge of the bank. The bank had fallen out beneath them, leaving their roots hanging down like electrical wires. The place where the dirt had washed away was from a long time ago, when there had been some good rains and the water had been high and had pushed the earth out. The dirt there had turned hard and it was dark, unlike the sand along the creek, which was red and white mixed up together the way I thought strawberry and vanilla ice cream might look.

Truth was, I’d only seen pictures of strawberry ice cream. Only kind I had ever had was vanilla, made with ice cream salt and milk and lots of arm cranking on the ice cream maker. Someday, I wanted to try strawberry. It was another thing to live for, and another reason to think about escaping.

Timmy took a pocketknife and opened up some cans of potted meat with it and gave them to us. That made me remember I still had a pocketknife. They hadn’t even bothered to search us. It wasn’t much, that knife, but I liked knowing I had it. I had forgotten all about it.

We sat and scooped the meat out of the cans with our fingers and licked it off and drank our Coca-Colas. When I finished, I was still hungry, but I was used to that. There never seemed to be enough. The last time I had really been full was when I had eaten all that rabbit, and that had been the first time in a long time.

Timmy went back to the car and came back carrying some toilet paper. He come close to Jane and threw it hard, hitting her in the head.

He laughed when she let out a noise.

“How you like that?”

Jane picked up the paper and laid it in her lap. She said, “Don’t think I’ll forget that.”

“Ha,” Timmy said. “Do or don’t. I’d rather you didn’t.”

Timmy went over to the sack and pulled out a couple extra cans of potted meat. He tossed one to Bad Tiger and kept one for himself. They opened them with their pocketknives and ate.

There was a darkness moving in from the north, and I was proud of the fact that I was now certain which way was which. I was learning. At first they just looked like rain clouds, but I’d seen clouds like that too many times. I knew better.

Bad Tiger had seen them too. He said, “Looks like tonight we’re going to have a blow. I figure me and Timmy will sleep in the car. And I’ll keep you with us, sister.”

“Why me?” she said.

“Why not you?” Bad Tiger said. “I got to have one of you in the car so the other two don’t run off. You’re my hostage to hold the other hostages, so to speak. Course, they still might run off. But if they do, I still got you, and me and you, we could get cozy if we had to.”

“I’d rather die,” Jane said.

“Yeah, that could happen,” Timmy said.

“You don’t want to value yourself too highly,” Bad Tiger said. “ ’Cause a thing you ought to know is we don’t even value ourselves all that much.”

“I hate to admit it,” Jane said, “but that does show something I didn’t expect about the two of you.”

“What’s that, sister?” Bad Tiger said.

“You’re good judges of character,” she said.

Bad Tiger let out a hoot and Timmy sat silent.

“We got some time before the storm,” Bad Tiger said, “so you got some business to take care of in the bushes, this is the time to do it. You got your paper, now, honey. That make you happy?”

“Ecstatic,” said Jane.