fiction: go like this

Our last car was an old Volvo that was missing both fenders. I was fourteen, but looked older, and sometimes I drove. We weren’t going anywhere, though Phoebe would never admit it. West, she’d say, or, follow highway 118. Always like that. She’d get a cockeyed look on her face like she was feeling for direction. She’d nod vaguely toward the road and pass her hand over the Rand McNally, the light of her cigarette reflected hot and bright in the windshield. We went. We always got somewhere. Then we’d leave there and get somewhere else. 

Driving, I noticed things that weren’t obvious before. The road seemed to charge at me, the car rocked with the slightest flick of the wheel, it wasn’t easy to read signs. I held the wheel tight and with both hands. Phoebe laughed at me a lot and taught me how to smoke. 

“Like this,” she’d say, exhaling and pursing her lips slightly to the side. “It reminds men of sex.”

We would drive and drive for hours and not speak, or sometimes we would sing with or without the radio. Hendrix was Phoebe’s favorite but he was hard to follow, so mostly we just hummed or beat the dashboard in rhythm. At night Phoebe would tell me stories be- tween puffs of cigarettes about summers in Ohio, or aliens that burned mosaics in cornfields, or about Biloxi where she had loved my father. 

“Why’d you name me Biloxi?” I would always ask.

“I was drunk,” Phoebe would answer. She might have been kidding.

Gripping the wheel more tightly then, I’d change lanes and watch the exits buzz by, knowing I could take any one of them but wondering where I’d go from there. I had always been a passenger, and to me it had seemed that we were always just driving fast and straight ahead. I couldn’t remember anything else. 

I couldn’t remember my father either, but I had one faded picture of him. In it, Phoebe was leaning against his side, her dark hair falling across one half of his face. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt and cut-off jeans; in his hands he was cradling a wounded bird. They had been fishing that day and he caught the seagull on his line. At the moment of the picture my father was leaning forward slightly as if in anticipation of the wings unfolding into flight. 

“Nah,” Phoebe told me. “It died that afternoon. When it stopped fluttering around your father threw it over the side of the boat.” 

But in the picture I couldn’t see his eyes. Phoebe was in the way. I didn’t know if they were narrowed in sadness or wide with the expectation that everything would just turn out. I dreamed of him sometimes, but it was always the same. I could never see all of him, he was always slipping around some corner, threading his way through some crowd. And Phoebe was always there somehow, her shadow darkening his eyes beyond recognition, her body a screen I couldn’t ever get around. 

“Does he still live there?” I asked once.

“Christ,” Phoebe said, rolling her eyes until there was only white left and that meant shut up.

We never went to Biloxi, not ever.

The day before we lost theVolvo we picked up a hitchhiker inYampa.

“Pull over,” Phoebe shouted as we passed him.

I touched my foot to the brake but shook my head.

“No way,” I said, and I meant it.

“Pull over, Biloxi,” Phoebe whispered and touched my knee. “It’s raining and it’s cold.”

“But—,”

“Do it,” she said.

She was my mother and I still trusted her. I pulled over and backed up until I saw him outlined in the red of the brake lights. “Where you going?” he asked, leaning his wet head into the car.

“Where are you going?” Phoebe answered.

“California,” he suggested and shrugged.

“Yeah,” Phoebe agreed, as if something had been decided between them.

He gathered a duffel bag and backpack from the side of the road then got into the backseat. He didn’t say anything.

Phoebe turned and smiled at him. I glanced at him uneasily in the rearview mirror as I pulled back onto the highway. His hair was too short and his ears curled crookedly, like corn chips. He was rubbing his hair with a towel from the duffel bag. “So,” Phoebe said. 

“Yeah,” he said but his voice was muffled. He was pulling his wet T-shirt off over his head. 

He sat there for a minute all bare. I kept looking in the rearview. He had a tattoo of something on his chest. Above it his collarbone was a straight, visible line, below it his ribs were all tender angles stretching pale skin. His shoulders were small and poking, like a boy’s. 

“You heading to school or something?” Phoebe asked. She blew smoke out in that way.

“Uh, no,” he said. “Just California, I guess.”

I giggled. 

“Something funny?” Phoebe asked.

“No, Mom,” I said.

Phoebe frowned and crushed her cigarette in the ashtray with three quick stubs.

“I’m Phoebe,” she said, turning back to him.

“Eli,” he answered and pulled a dry shirt on.

He didn’t talk a lot but liked to watch the road. First, out of the side windows and then, a couple hours later, he leaned forward and looked out the windshield between Phoebe and me. I could feel his breath against the side of my cheek when he smoked his cigarette. He smelled like the boys I remember from gym class in Indiana, their hair flat to their foreheads after a game of dodge ball, the hot damp scent coming off their bodies like something between rain and the sweet fur of some animal. I was eleven then. Our Chevy had broken down in Fort Wayne, so we lived there for two months. Phoebe dated a soldier named Felix who thought she was beautiful. Then we got a Ford and moved on. 

That’s how it had always been. We would run out of money, and this is when we stopped, sometimes for months at a time. Phoebe would work at a diner or a gift shop, and I had to go to school. We lived in cinderblock houses, and rented trailers and apartments with drippy pipes and greasy marks on the walls. Sometimes Phoebe got married but I never called them Dad, even if they wanted me to. It never lasted long, though. A few months and we were always back on the road. There were times when we would coast back onto the in- terstate, and Phoebe would start blubbering, her face all red and wet. For a few minutes I would watch exits pass, wondering if she would get off and turn around. But she never did. We drove on.We never went anywhere twice. 

“You’re not old enough to drive,” Eli said, leaning closer. It was somewhere between an accusation and a question. It was the first thing he said that wasn’t an answer to a question from Phoebe. 

“I’m driving, aren’t I?” I said.

“True,” he answered. Some ache in me rolled with his voice.

“We should stop soon,” Phoebe said, turning to look at Eli. “Want to share a room with us for the night?”

“You can have your own bed,“ I told him, a hot streak running from my chest to my head.

“Christ, I think he knows that, Biloxi,” Phoebe said, rolling her eyes.

I could see Eli’s face reflect in the dark glass of the windshield. I tried to look beyond it to the road. Eli leaned forward again. “Motel this exit,“ he said and pointed his thin arm at a passing road sign.

At the motel, the sky hung in the dark, heavy ripples and the air stung with the fragrance of coming snow. The room was hot and dry, with two double beds and a black and white TV.

“I got to take a shower,” Phoebe said, flopping onto the bed.

“We’ll go get us something to eat,“ Eli told her and poked me back toward the door with a finger in my back.“There’s someplace across the road.”

Phoebe looked at me funny but didn’t say anything. She sighed.

“Bring me a burger,” she said.

Outside we saw the bright lights of a diner glistening from across the dark highway. I walked slightly behind Eli and he turned every so often and waved me toward him. I was still suspicious of him and he knew it; I had learned in more than one way that Phoebe was easily won over, gullible and quick to give away kindness, money, love. I could usually name what would disappoint her eventually in the men she brought into our lives, but Eli was different. He was not one of Phoebe’s lovers, but a boy, just a few years older than me. 

“What kind of name is Biloxi, anyway?” Eli asked as he leaned over a glass counter that displayed frothy cakes and pies, assortments of cookies with colored icing gathered in little points at the top. 

“Mississippi,” I said. “I’m named after a place.”

“You been there?” he asked.

I shook my head and pretended to look at the menu board. I was embarrassed somehow and in the mirror behind the counter I caught a glimpse of myself, my face reddened, eyes wet and shiny, hair wild with the electric charge of the winter night.The diner was warm and I felt myself starting to sweat. 

“We’ll eat here,” Eli said. “Food’s always better when it’s served to you. We can order something for Phoebe before we leave.” 

I shrugged and followed him to a booth by the window. Outside, the highway was black and slick with mist, trucks and cars flew by in a whir, and the mountains were just barely detectable in the distance, like shoulders disappearing under dark waters. 

“Don’t talk much do you?” he asked.“Of course, I guess you don’t have to much. Phoebe does enough talking for both of you.” 

“She’s my mother, you know,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” he replied.“Where you guys going?”

“Nowhere,” I answered before I could catch myself. The word felt strange in my mouth, disjointed and garbled, a mistake. “I mean, we’re not going anywhere really. We’re going wherever.”

Eli looked at me for a moment as if he were about to say something but was interrupted by the waitress swishing up to our booth and leaning in to take our order, the flesh of her stomach bulging uncomfortably under her uniform. We ordered breakfast food, more than we could ever eat—nickel pancakes and Belgian waffles, omelets and smoked sausages, gravy biscuits and juice and coffee and jam. We ate in silence, but watched each other carefully, our knees touching slightly under the table. When Eli was finished he leaned back into the booth and watched me chew the last of my pancakes. 

“Biloxi, Mississippi,” he finally said, uncrossing his arms and leaning back across the table. He was so close I could feel the rhythm of his breath against my eyelids. I held my breath, waiting. 

“Let’s go,” he said. 

We waited at the edge of the highway for a hole in traffic so we could cross. The wind of passing trucks ruffled our clothes around our bodies and my hair whipped back and forth. The night was loud with wind and the grind of engines and we barely heard the faint thud. Eli turned first and began to move slowly. I followed. 

On the side of the road there was something moving, alive. As we grew closer we saw that it was a small doe. Eli knelt down beside her and she lifted her head slightly and shuddered. Her body was not right I could tell, legs twisted beneath her, torso strangely bent, blood trickling from her ears and nose. Eli made a sound between a grunt and a sigh and then looked at me. 

“Come here,” he said and motioned for me to sit beside him and I did.

“She’s dying,” he said.

I nodded. Beside us the noise of the highway seemed to fall away, the headlights faded to just a dull blur and the stars seemed to cut deeper holes in the sky. I could feel the warmth of the deer’s body against my body, smell the pine of the dark forest behind us. I had never watched anything die before. We stayed there for what seemed like a long time, not speaking, watching her ribs move slower and slower. Eli was cradling her body and then suddenly, in the quickest second, he jerked her head back and forth and dropped it to the pavement. It lolled for a moment against the dark ground and was still. I felt her body heave away from me slightly. My tongue felt hot in my mouth and the smallest cry pushed from my lungs. 

“There,” he said. 

We dragged the doe’s body off the roadside to the edge of the forest. She felt heavier than anything I had ever held before but I lifted her the best I could, with all my strength. I wanted to get her somewhere quiet and still. Eli flung her legs carelessly and they dropped to the soft ground with a thump. He nudged at her with his toe. I was still touching her. 

“Stop it,” I said and he shrugged. I felt hard towards him then, something solid and unmoving sprouting up inside my chest. “Why’d you have to do that?” I said, loud. I wasn’t sure what I was talking about.

“Don't matter now, nohow,” he said.

We waited again to cross the highway. Traffic was slower now, and the night darker with the coming storm. The road seemed to go on forever, the white lines glittering under headlights, the long, black lanes cluttered with cars and trucks moving hard and fast. As we crossed, Eli gripped my shoulder tight so that I could feel every finger digging into my skin. 

At the hotel room, we found Phoebe already asleep and we washed up and got into bed quietly. I slept next to Phoebe but faced Eli’s bed and watched him for hours. On my hands I could feel the scrape of gravel from the roadside, on my shoulder the skin felt hot and raw as if his hand had burned me. 

As I fell into sleep, I thought hazily of my childhood, of the highways that ran like veins through Muskogee and Spanish Fork and Warkarusa, of cornfields that threw light like darts through their sweet, straight rows, of swamps that dropped in tea-colored pools, and bodies of water that tossed with the wake of the wind. On that razor’s edge between life and dreams I imagined the doe, her dark eyes and the way her body might have leapt to safety had the truck been going slower, or had the road followed a straighter line. And my father too, at the roadside, cheering for the doe’s narrow escape. I wanted it to get away, he said, I wanted it to live! 

When I woke, where Eli had been sleeping was rumpled and empty. Sometime during the night my mother had slipped into Eli’s bed and the naked curve of her back faced me, the knobs of her spine a pale, perfect line. I sat up and looked at my palms where streaks of blacktop and blood were still faintly printed into my skin. I lit a cigarette. Go like this, my mother taught me. Go like this. 

Outside, white. In the hours of sleeping, a deep and heavy snow had fallen on everything still; the only color was a dark square where the Volvo had been parked. Even the highway was hidden and motionless, a few uneven tire marks cutting through the white. Eli was gone. 

Standing there in my nightshirt, I watched the scene before me as if it were a picture, the edges coming into focus slowly, the details finally clear, in sharpened contrast, black and white. I thought of Eli and the doe’s head trembling in his hands, her still-warm body slipping from my grasp and I knew suddenly that Phoebe could never have done it. She had neither the patience nor the strength to watch anything leave her behind. And I knew this: it wasn’t sadness or hope in my father’s eyes that day of the picture, but something else. Acceptance of the irrevocable, of loss. An understanding of what it would feel like to finally let go. 

I didn’t know then that theVolvo was to be our last car. I didn’t know that Phoebe would take a Greyhound back east. And I didn’t know that, for the first time in my life, I would let her leave me behind. I knew then what my mother had never known: I didn’t have to go. 

Behind me, Phoebe was standing in the doorway smoking a cigarette. “What on God’s green earth are you doing?” she shouted.

I didn’t answer but knelt down and dug my hands into the snow. “Biloxi?” 

I didn’t move. Phoebe went inside and slammed the door, but I swear I heard her voice echo in the cold, still air, Biloxi, Biloxi, Biloxi, and as that sound beat across the empty lot I felt there was a name for this place and it was my own. In the sky a wedge of moon was tucked behind the pink dawn and I wanted to stay just like that, unmoving and planted on the packed snow, knowing I could not be leaving this place soon. 

in print discover issue one