pt. 2
“What are your numbers?” Bergman asks. He wants me to take off my watch and hand it to him, cause he cant remember my strava name. He wants to export it into his own spreadsheet, the one that he keeps for every student and every season, all separated out into their little cells. I think he must have been in the army before cause thats how he sees us, all in our squares like a bird flying overhead. Army-like. I bend over the desk and type my name into the web browser instead. He counts: 2 miles today, 3 the day before, when me and nat did laps. 7 this week, outside of what the girls are already doing. He asks me if im sticking with intervals, yes sir I am. Bounds? Of course sir. He asks if I read that paper he handed out to the boys, the one about heat exposure and VO2, before finding out that he hadn't given it to the girls. He looks surprised, scratching his head and swears he meant to. Thats okay. I don't think it would have meant anything.
We all know our numbers. The important ones, PB times, qualifier times, the difference between me and Vee, the difference between Nat and god. After Jacob and Earling got in that car crash, I went from number three to number one overnight. Im faster than the boys in my age group. That makes me a boy. Makes me something else maybe, the better-than-the-boys girl. Weird thing. Anomaly. Fastest time in Inyo, fastest runner in Tulare youth divisions. They made up reasons for Michael Phelps to be that good. They said he had an abnormal wingspan, lungs so deep and large they ballooned up the whole thoracic cavity and redlined out the other, less-necessary organs. I wonder what they'll make up about me? If I keep going they're going to say something about me. Maybe they already do.
Bang.
I think I have an extra organ already. Ever since I was a kid I always knew people were looking at me, like I had eyes on the back of my head. I learned about those moths and caterpillars as a kid. The ones that have the two or four eyes painted on their backs to look at you look at them, like a project made by Schoerdinger instead of god. For a little bit I felt some kind of kinship to them, that was before I found out those eyes were purely decorative.
Bang.
If you have hope (like most of the girls on the team), then your numbers are your compass. You cant get lost at all if you know yours. Just pick a direction. Its so easy. You can just close your eyes and go, cause your numbers will tell you how. Thats why Vee is always pecking at her watch. She don't even know if she ran well until the watch feeds her a number.
I turned sixteen years old when I outran Nat the first time. I didn't know what I was doing. You're in for the greatest high of your life seeing your numbers rattle down age 14-15-16-17. Thats when your stride length catches up to your heart size. If you can run a six minute mile at age twelve, your gonna crack four at 15. We all got hooked on that crazy number high and it leads us to these meets where everyone is drunk. Fuck Bergman looks like a snapping turtle today. His neck is awkwardly long and his fingers grubby as he punches my life into Excel. His frame fills out his sweatshirt frumpy. “Are we done?” “Hold on.” he keeps typing single number at a time but I am already up and leaving the office. He wants to ask me a question but im gone. I can feel the frustration in his voice as he yells to remind me that Im leading drills in the morning tomorrow. And what if I don't show up? What if I just sleep in? It settles my stomach to know that I have the one-of-a-kind privilege of being so incorrigible. It makes me so smiley.
Theres a dry heat that brushes my hair when I step into the halls. The school is full of kids who form a sea current. Theres the jansport fishes and the Fjällräven Kånkens, who find themselves clumped into their own little groups. Pulled by schedule, they're kinda sorted by phenotype: the blonde haired kids and the dirty shoe ones, japanese club kids and the football team. I let the current take me towards english class while retracing last nights reading. Some of my classmates catch me drifting in and we form a whole clump.
-
Class today was good. Mrs Preity showed us the movie adaptation. She paused twice and asked us to contrast how different it was. The actors didn't look like the people in my head, but when I left class their faces were the only ones I could think of. The girl behind me braided my hair while the movie played.
In the halls Caleb flags me down. Without talking about it or bringing it up, he must have memorised me and Nat's schedule. We head out towards the parking lot, cutting through the sycamore trees and hot, still air. I can feel his gaze lay on the back of my head like I have grown a tail. His hand hovers indecisively before he swipes at the braid back and forth.
“Cut it out.”
“How come?”
“Your messing it up.”
“Nah im not." He smiles real bright like. Sun like.
“Your gonna hit the band. At the bottom.” I scowl.
“Oh. Right.” He looks down, having to play by catch and release rules.
“Did you see Ms. preity uh.. When you were out with Jacob and.."
“The other boys?”
“Yeah.”
“Did they tell you about it?”
“I mean, they've been talking about it.”
He faces forwards as we keep and cracks into an amused grin. It's boyish. It looks like he is eight years old and has covered up a broken vase with twigs and leaves. I have seen his side profile many times now - riding in his pickup back and forth from school to town, to meets, to games.
“Are they bored or something? I mean it ain't illegal to go to the grocery store.”
“Even if youre a teacher.”
We get into his truck, scooting our way into worn white leather and plastic dust air. The windows still crank, and even jam up and beg for a beating. Like he has, a hundred days before, he peels out of the parking lot smooth along that groove in the asphalt dug by repetition and dumb body memory. “You don't know?”
“What?” His turn signal is metronoming the beats in our conversation. A tick-tick-ticking while he watches other cars turn. Caleb is way too patient to be compromised by an argument over right of ways or assertion. He just watches the other guy go.
“What?”
“That guy she was with wasn't her husband.”
"Oh."
“Can you point some air at me?” he asks.
My hands fall all over the console and then the vent to make and point wind. I try to aim it directly up his nose and he faces out towards the houses and their miniature kingdom lawns. There's that look again, like he's chewing food.
“But she looked happy though.” He added, forming details that weren't in the Jacob-Earling version.
“She was smiling and- hell they were almost dancing or something”
“Hey, maybe the apples were free or something.”
He looks expectant to a landed joke so I stick my head out of the window and let the air draft between my ears, close my eyes tight tight and join the secret kingdom called drainage ditch: the cat-tails and dragon flies, the oriental fruit fly flitting, feasting on orange flesh, feasted on by dragon fly, burrowing roaches flooded out by variable water levels, open air tanning on river bank, gossiping with the flicking of antennae, purring sump-pumps frothing up whitewash and seafoam 200 miles from the sea, translucent soapy froth indistinguishable from clutches of frog-egg clinging to horse reed swaying, from whipping snapping wind cracking hair sound, the sound of a lone man splashing gallons per minute from hose fruitlessly against orchard ground above, running off back into the ditch where it came, salty rain. Rains buoyed with NPK and stinking of cow shit and fertility.
He kinda swerves a little in panic but rights himself for composure, still looking at my sudden-ness with some feeling. Even though I found it funny I don't want to show Caleb how my face crease up. Cause maybe then he will figure out that I am a seventeen year old girl and not grown at all and it just isn't fair.
-
Caleb pulls into my street beelined on my one lamp light on living room, and gets out of the car to say bye-bye. Theres noone on this street in the whole world but maybe these houses are too spaced apart that even if there were, we would be two black specks in a sea of yellow grass and dry bush. “Bye baby” I whisper to his ear with an effect I hope lands. He wraps his arms around me and makes me small and I do the same and make him big. Our bodies are comparative, we are comparing. I even let him grab my ass, although he is apprehensive and it is foreign. Before we part and I head in and he heads to his truck and peels out following that schedule of his. Life on a string: to meets, to games, to school.
-
After fingering the keys and jiggering the lock, I leave the door open, screen door closed, and head into the living room. Abuelita is sitting-laying on her reclining chair, with her eyes on the TV or out the window towards the road. Beep, goes the blood pressure monitoring machine, letting us know that it has recorded another moment of Abuelita's number. It sounds like a little fire alarm. She is either staring at the judicial program where people are judged, or on the sidewalk if there is a person or cat walking by - which is always more interesting. She is a raisin of a woman. “mamá.” I make myself known, kissing her on the cheek and putting down my bookbag by the chair across from her.
She doesn't say anything.
“mamá lets pray.” I pick up the rosary beads from her limp arm, pushing them with my thumb, holding their carmenlian-black pearls in the crook of a finger. Taking the remote with my other hand, I figure its best to leave the crime sentencing for the deaf-mutes while we ask to be pardoned. Abeulita are you there? Knock knock. Im wearing my costume now, do you see who im dressed as?
“Dios te salve Maria,” I mouth, my eyes being buried in the fold of her wrinkled mouth. Beep. It looks crazy deep as if she has stretched it out from chewing with her mouth all the way open since she was a kid.
“Dios te salve María, Mamá.” I say, a man insisting that his bike takes multiple kicks to start. I press the beads in between her swollen knuckles. It touches rock on rock, bone on bone.
“llena eres de gracia.” she mouths the words back at me, lagging behind, failing to produce noise. I press my hand on her colostomy bag. It is half full.
“El Señor es contigo, bendita tu eres entre todas las mujeres, y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús” she begins to fill in the lines of broken spanish with her own, old unintelligible ancient speak. A dialect I was told was from an alien place that I never remembered the name of and never went to and never saw. A place full of Abuelitas the age of children, before they got raisin'd, when the sun made them whole and loud, with the casual cruelty and honesty that only children can have - living and dying and drinking up life. A place where the churches are full with true believers and they must have run out of the sick to pray for so maybe they installed pews in hospitals or became ambulance chasers. A place we shouldn't have left is what I was told.
I realise that I am praying when Abuelita squeezes my hand onto the rosary, pressing with surprising strength, indenting my palm with a line of little spheres. When you get to heaven what happens to the sick? I mean the blind or the crippled? They get healed, I suppose. And what happens to the people that spent their whole lives blind or without legs? Where they didn't know any other way to live? They get healed, I suppose.
“... Amen.”
And then she returns to being empty and I turn up Judge judy just in time for the sentencing, and the blood machine beeps, and her colostomy bag fills a little more.
-
Back down on the chair again. Whats next? “I love you mamá” I say, feeling the shape of the word in my mouth. My tongue feels like an eel. It doesn't seem to reach Abuelita, at least not over the honorable judy. Its not even something I say to my parents. The sound of digital gunfire drifts over from upstairs. My little brother must be home. The walls muffle his comms so all we hear is quiet and polite wordless bang bang bang, kill kill kill, ive been hit, ive been hit, they've got me, im dying now. Thanks for nothing team. Beep. Whats next? “I love you Caleb”. But like. Its not true. I don't even say it to my parents.
I've never been into men. I think God must have sent Caleb down for me. All of the things that make men, he is not. He is a window the size of himself that leads to an empty chamber with a little boy in it. He turns over levers and knobs, and gets surprised when an arm flings forward or a leg shoots up. He tweaks the microphone that picks up on sounds and puts his ear up to the speaker to listen to the sound of words and letters without understanding them. He makes for good conversation that is always empty because he is fascinated with noise and letters. And despite all this his body went and filled out before he was ready for it, from one hundred and thirty pounds to two hundred in three years. Which is kind of a blink of an eye if you think about it.
It was an arranged marriage. His friends knew my friends. He's on the football team, whose afterschool schedules matched track. People think hes a nice boy, and people think that Im a nice girl, so why not stick together? I didn't really have a good answer to that question so we stuck together.
“Emi?” Abuelita asks, wondering if I am really here. I wonder if she is mouthing the other syllables. or if she is aware of her own limitations and does not finish the full “Emiliana” out of pure economy.
“Yes Mamá?”
“Im thirsty.” She mouths, and leaves the “water” for me to figure out.
I head into the kitchen. The light is refracted through bay windows and cigarette yellow lace curtains. It bounces off of unwashed plates, and falls into grooved floorboards. As I fill a glass, I close my eyes and watch Bergman touch the other girls and I know exactly what he is thinking. I am putting his thoughts in his mind. But Bergman is not anything special. He is not even original. He is helping one of the girls stretch her hamstrings. It is up to me to put the thought in: he is pulling her tight, tight, tight, like an archer does, just to pluck the string, just to hear a noise.
Judge judy ends and the repetitive cycle of verdicts and applause and orchestral swinging is mechanically swapped with another's, and then another's, before I change the channel to some football and go through the phantom motions of recording it for dad, as we did in the past when recording shows and programs was still a thing. Its an Ole miss game versus an away team that I never heard of. Sometimes I look up from homework or my phone to see a kid get CTE'd by Bruce Banner. I hear the quiet firing of moms car in the distance which putters along until it beeps in satisfaction. I can see her brown fingers putting on key rings and hear their rattle and door open and she walks in through the livingroom and into the kitchen before letting loose one big breath that she must have held from all the way back in the car.
She is wearing her nondescript black pants and green polo uniform emblazoned “ALAMEDA SEWING”. I once asked her why it was called alameda sewing, after wikipedia told me that alameda was a town near 200 miles away. “Its a chain” was the answer.
“Oh”.
“Grandma's calling me your name again.” I tell her. She fills a glass of water and slings her purse/duffel on the back of a chair.
“Did you pray with her?” she asks, routinely.
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
“Did you change her bag?”
“No.”
“It's only half, so we can do it later.”
“Look, I don't wanna be the one cleaning it up okay?”
“Okay?”
She is waiting for my “yes mama, but I'll let her wait. I hear the scrape of a chair pulled back and the ruffle of papers coming out and the somehow flavorless soggy smell of press cleaning coming out, and from here I can see how her stomach rolls green over black hills when she is sitting. I hear the steady punching of acrylic nail on calculator and then the scratch of a pen. Fwee blows the whistle for halftime. I can tell that if I bring up dinner plans while she is working away I will catch a beating. But we really don't have any dinner plans.
She is going to tell me about this video she saw on reddit of an ancient river rock lady who is having “swan lake” played for her on iphone speaker, and how this lady rises up and turns into a twenty year old for the next 5 minutes, doing pirouettes, or gesturing so as much as her body can, and making up the illusion of a big dance or whatever. Her point being that we are creatures of habit and it keeps us young or at least we would like this to be true for abuelita. But I know all that stuff already.
Im kind of hungry but bored too, and I figure a short run is a good way to kill time and get really hungry. I tell mom im heading off and I think she looks up from her thingy, but I didn't look.
-
Something happened and I feel all raw about it. I asked Nat if she wanted to come with, and she said to give her like thirty minutes or so, so I figured that I should take a lark along 178 before turning into town. I am trying to keep my heart under a certain speed, cause that means I get to slow down. There are just miles and miles of fruit trees here. Well, farmers call it an acre, so miles isn't quite right. It is apples and plums and greenhouses with tomatoes and almonds and billboards and since I am out along the highway there are whole orchards of billboards and telephone lines and the occasional Rickety farm stand that smells like naive hope. They have hand painted signs of approximate fruits and big letters and impossibly cheap prices and two or one little woman that sits there bored, and looks at the traffic when she is not on her phone and sort of lulls you into pulling over out of a combination of pity and price and some sort of hypnotic luring beam she fires from her eyes.
It is a muggy and cloudy day. There's a lot of patches of gravel I try to stay on instead of the road, cause I'm a little afraid of how hard it is and that feeling of touching down hard on the ground and having it rattle up your leg. I'm running at the Natalie pace so it doesn't even matter, but a rules a rule. It feels like the air is so still and manure-y that I'm running in a big pot of soup. Its like the air is being lidded up by the clouds. In some places its pretty thin, and you can see the sun like a distant neighbor, or the outline of an uncle your trying to remember that visited one time, but there's these other spots where its just heaps and heaps of clouds, clouds on top of other clouds forming big fortresses impermeable and dark. It polka dots the orchards in sun-spots, and sorts the trees into the haves, and have-nots. A suggestion. That's thats the word for it. It gives the suggestion of sun being there.
If only the sun was here and everything would be blasted hot and dry and then I could sweat in peace. I stop and pick up a rock and aim straight at the sky right where the moon should be and throw it. I hope and it goes up and up and it punches right through and the atmosphere goes fweeee and the pressure cooker lets its steam out.
-
Nat is wearing some goofy neon vest with pockets, and the whole thing looks like it was made from gasoline or sprite or something. We walk back the way I came, out into the opposite traffic and the other side of billboards with their big whitewashed backs, and the opposite flowing water. She is telling me this whole big thing about how she went down to the drug store for her mom but they wouldn't hand anything over cause she brought her moms id and her mom has brown hair but hers is a little blonde, and she never even wanted to pretend to be her mom or whatever but it devolves into this whole thing cause the pharmacist thinks she's tricking. “But I really wasn't trying to trick” she is saying, somehow really hurt. She is walking one foot swinging over the drainage ditch, one arm leaning on me. I could push her in right now. If I just leaned a little I could see her tumble down and get all soaked and pissed and sprain her ankle maybe. She is telling me about classes and her boyfriend and the last movie she saw, which she thought was too phoney to be believable. I think she is waiting for me to say something. So I talk:
“You know the deal with my grandma right?”
“Yeah.”
“The doctors said they like uh removed her intestines”
She's looking at me with her brows all furrowed, and I realize how crazy I can sound.
“Yknow, just like a part of it.”
“She got like this kind of thing where her colon can't handle food and stuff”
“So she has a bag, it's called a stoma.”
Nat is looking at me and I am watching the cars and wish I could be squinting at the sun.
“And like there's some foods she really can't eat right? Like fiber and stuff cause it messes up your .. your I don't know, it's whatever.” I tell her. She is somehow paying attention to all this so I start kicking gravel at her feet and pretending to punch her legs and punching and kicking her shadow while she is looking all dumb and then laughing. I think nat is a real moron. She's got all this time she spends on mundane useless crap, reading stuff and spitting it right back out. The other day she talked to me about the difference between linen and cotton shirts for thirty minutes. For thirty minutes it was this prattle of everything anyone could know about this thing. She probably talks ten times more than I do, but she never seems to have a point or any greater importance to it all.
“So my mom uh tells me to feed grandma this chocolate pudding after dinner.”
“But like, the doctor says that's like one of the foods that's really bad for her. Cause she can't process it at all or something.”
“And like she knows that”
“That's the thing, she knows that.”
“It's so fucking stupid.”
“And like she wants me to feed it to her and I say no and we get into a really big fight about it.”
Nat is looking at me and I realize she is trying to piece together what my face is saying but I don't know what my face looks like so I feel all weird about it.
“What did your mom say?” She finally asks.
“..I forgot.”
“I mean like we said a bunch of stuff but I was really mad and uh I forgot exactly what it was.”
“And that's why I texted you if you wanted to run.”
There Nat. Put that on your plate.
-
Me and Nat traded bye-bye's and hugged a bit and I got home right as the sun was a little over the fences and getting swiss cheesed between the grates. I was going in and out of sleep but woke up to the sound of a quiet vacuum dying. It occurs to me: she wore that goofy green vest with the pockets for the gels and waters, and all we did was walk. Maybe she ran home after splitting? It must be two o clock the way the moon looks fat and hangs in the sky like an egg in black soup. Thirsty. Im really thirsty. Im creaking down the stairs and notice that my brother has stopped killing people online and theres that weird desert sound again. I fill up two glasses and peak upstairs into abuelita's room and see her stir and breathe, shallow and dry. She wheezes deep, her face parts in gentle agony that looks so far away and her chest is heaving outwards out out. It pushes like a tentacle is thrashing around inside her, bulging outwards. It is like a hand has slipped into her through the hole in her insides and wrestles to control her. And then she sees me.
What does she see? Her daughter but not really? Something dear mixed with something unknown, unknowable, cuckoo hostile and in her room where her eggs nest and her children lay? I feel her move and start to thrash and her throat clenches fully down and chokes out any noise and her voice is so so dry that it is trying to swallow her own tongue it is the only thing left to
“Abuela, abuela.”
“Its me.”
Shh-shh shh shh, “its mia, its mia.” I am trying not to make a racket and have mom wake up mad or something. She is wrestling forwards and tilting off the bed, and I realise that she is the size of a bear, this huge woman. Her colostomy bag is sloshing to the side and it is full too full of piss and shit and bulges out and shh-shhh shhh shh.
I put my hands clammy over her face, as if she is a horse and that would work. I feel her face is so hot and rubbery and my hands are cold and sweaty why? Why am I so sweaty, panged with fear even though I am the home intruder.
I part my hands fingers at a time and let her look at me, flicking a lamp on for light. “Its me, mia” I tell her. “Do you remember me?” She still cant speak.
“I have water for you but I need to change your bag okay?”
“Just wait one second.”
I fumbled around at her bag and it is too full with piss/shit to ever possibly unscrew cleanly. I picture myself moving my hands like a princess, daintily taking it upon myself and the moment I get it free, a little bit of piss flows onto my hands, and like a princess I trash the bag and daintily get baby wipes to clean things up while pointing my nose up, in a haughty way and not in a avoidant of fumes way. Finally I can give her water and I put my now wiped hands on Abuelita's forehead. I wrest her up to sitting position and give her a glass and drink my own.
I can feel her eyes on me up and down, studying my features to see if this really is Mia, with preternatural awareness of what has happened and why. Finally she asks,
“Mia.”
“How old are you now?”
“Im seventeen grandma.”
“Do you still run?”
“Yes”
“I remember when you were twelve.”
“Yes grandma I-” “Listen to me- when you were twelve I remember a man came to find you, and me and your mother were so happy.”
I can see her stirring to life and growing restless as we speak.
“And you wanted to go to the school this man worked for and"
“Yes grandma I remember.”
“Youre going to college. Are you going to run too?”
“No. Im quitting.”
“Do you like running?” “Its okay.”
And she is getting mad and I can feel it on her gaze using my extrasensory organ, so I dont look at her.
“Lots of people would want a body like you Mia. And a lot of people want to run but they can't."
She is stirring and turning but in a different way than before, looking aggravated and it drives me further. It puts vulgar phrases and rejection in my mouth, it makes things that just spill out, just to see what would happen.
“If I run, then I go pro in school. I go pro and then ill go to a shitty school and get a shitty communications degree.”
“And then I get whopped by some 16 year old sprinter who runs a 4:30 mile.”
“And I'll be twenty four years old.”
“Ill be twenty four and looking for a job cause running doesn't pay and I have this shitty degree and nothing else cause I did all this fucking shit just to get beat by a teen thats been shooting up steroids for years. And even if I make it all i get is the privilege to go to the diamond leagues for two seasons.”
“You know what you get for a gold medal?”
“Fifty thousand fucking bucks.”
“Even if I win it all im still under the fucking poverty line. Im not running in college.”
And the best and most wrong feeling thing crawls out of me: “Anyways, it doesn't even matter cause I got a hairline fracture in my left ankle two months ago.” She is about to yell but her throat rejects automatically and becomes hoarse and strained, and she is rising up and out of her bed with all of whats left of her big bear like body, lumbering and sloughing mounds of flesh off the frame. I give her whats left of my glass. Her voice is ringing out right and angry, and she is not going to remember anything tomorrow morning. And things will be fine and I wont think about why I said these things and got this weird perverty happiness out of it. But for now she is rising and her voice is loud and the things she is saying are correct and my brother is waking up and and the things
Hey. I saw this youtube short the other day. It was called “blind-and-deaf dog has too much energy :laughing-crying:”. This white weiner dog kind of mutt roams around this living room, with its tail going wap-wap-wap against its body. Theres these five dogs all huddled in a corner of the room, using their seeing and hearing, and holding their breaths in avoidance of this dog And it is going around and around in circles so happy looking for pack. It just keeps going arround and arround and arround. I wonder why that youtuber put happy-funny music to it?
-
In the morning, I hold Abuela's hand, and walk down the stairs with her. She asks me why I'm up so early, and I tell her that I'm going on a run with my friends. She finds that funny. The running part. I mean, why would you go running with your friends? You can go dancing, or drinking, all of these things you run to. Why would you run, going nowhere, like mad, tearing yourself up, till you get restless laying down, why? I smile at her. mamá, to get faster at running , and we both crack up. Im doing this nutritional experiment where all the food in the house has gone bad so I skip breakfast.
I get to Vee's house first, and then Cathy's and all the other girls. We all fall into a kind of long strand of people in a row, and Cathy goes to play something and I tell her to shut up cause its 6AM and she puts on “quiet music” which only isn't much louder than the stamping of ten elephant feet on asphalt. Which is an okay compromise I guess. Coach wants me to lead the group out past the orchards, onto the backroads and then boomerang back into school. It's a route that shouldn't take longer than forty minutes, and we take it at a leisure pace cause of the freshmen.
He really wants us to be 10k runners I think. I mean, whats the point in making a sprinter run at some snails pace for a hundred years? Getting all diesel'd out by the trucks, getting run off the road and looking like a bunch of idiots. He had the other, non-runners join us at the start of the year, and we had to go so slow that we were late for school once. I had a great time. We had a hammer thrower on the boys team that got so red in the face and I think he threw up and fell over and just gave up on the spot. There were all these long jumper, high jumper crickety types that I never see around and they were all mad and I guess everyone formed a union or an army and complained. And that was it I guess.
A putter putter of a modest engine matches our patter patter of feet. It's one of the fruit picking trucks, full of the fruit pickers, who come from out of the valley or camping in big societies of tents or car parks or something and get bussed in by the farms. I hear it from behind, and our whole group moves to the side to duck it, and I hear Vee and some of the other girls make a stir before I see it. Jacoby and these two seniors are sitting with the fruit pickers, greatly amused and showing it on their faces.
“Well well well.” Jacoby always talks like he's got some problem. He yells something in spanish and the driver slows to our freshman pace, with the entire truck gawking. It fills the air with the kind of headache gasoline smell that you see in Dawn commercials, with the ducks oiled down to the guts.
“Whatre you doing here?”
“My dads a mechanic ”, He points out someone clean dressed pressed pale blue jumper.
“I guess Im learning to fix stuff too.” He would have turned his eyes into himself if he could.
“How's the leg?” Vee asks, and I shush her, elbows in ribs. She can be so insensitive at times.
“What about Sam and Geordie.” “Hey Mia”, Sam shouts happy over the engine.
“They've been picking since senior year. you were there at graduation.”
“Look.” Jacoby says, whuffing an imaginary cig, facing the girls as a group,
”theres an old Chinese proverb: “man who runs in front of car gets tired, man who runs behind car gets exhausted.”” And maybe some of the girls start giggling so I run at him and pretend to try to kill him. I'm throwing fake punches at him and he and Sam and Geordie are all singing the rocky theme back at us while the other workers watch.
“Du du du duuu du du du” it goes stupid horns and stupid trumpets and ugly mouth kazoos, and it's so smarmy the way they are. So invincible. it must have been the dust or the lead in the gas fumes or something cause I really am yelling at him and throwing more real punches, glancing off the metal body, falling into catchers mitts. And Jacoby is explaining to Geordie who looks caught out “see, this is what she likes to do: get all riled up” like I am a fish on a hook. Vee picking up speed to catch up, all these eyes on me 9 girls, 8 guys, one driver, green trees, clouds, thats 36. shoving away, reaching towards, 36 eyes back and forwards, car pulling away, new obsession, new thing, moving on, Jacoby big smiles big smile mocking, Like you got me figured out, broken leg mocking, You copy-cat , fist full of gravel, throw.
There isn't much song by the time Vee gets to me. I let her get to me I am thinking, cause there is no way she could ever catch up to me if I tried. But I was caught. Cause Jacoby looked at me like he had never seen me before, and I realised as soon as I let go that I had hit him, and the one next to him, and Geordie and his dad. Dust in his eye and spot of blood on his face, the truck pulled away with his defensive, defeated war-cry whoop. Pyrrhic stupid and defeated, with only smugness to save face. Looking at the new newness, the one who placed times on the board now.
“Did you see that?” I am asking Vee, strange ecstatic happy and out of breath.
“Did you see that??”
Her face looks like nothing I have seen before.
“You threw rocks at my boyfriend.”
I meant to say “I didn't know” cause I really didn't know if she and Sam or Geordie or whoever, but I don't know why but I say “I won.”
She punches me as hard as she can in my thigh. Punches me in places she knows it wont do anything. Wont damage Nat's beautiful form.
Cause she still respects the big dog.
-
Caleb dropped me off and now I am laying out in the back porch with my phone on my stomach, staring at some clouds that look like tomatoes rolling along.
In my headphones is a track Bergman had made for me and all the other starters. It is a recording of him at the gun range. He waits for 2 minutes at the shortest, 5 minutes at the longest, and fires his pistol down the line. I don't know what model it is. We are meant to lock our chins to our collarbones and explode our legs the instant we hear it. It's a good exercise. It really keeps you in the same in-between zone at the meets. When its all sleepy drunkenness and cocaine mania and the whole day is all brown, brackish water.
Bang, fire. Bang, fire. Bang, fire.
Seven minutes right there, heats one two and three. Pause. I have a good idea. Heading inside (hi Abuelita), upstairs, into my parents room, my hand into the nightstand top drawer, producing a carton of Daddy's cigarettes. Back down, out into the yard. I mound up a small hill of dirt, and stick a cigarette in it, straight up. I dig a small tunnel for “it” to breath with, and light the cigarette. Then I put the track back on and my earbuds back in. The earth puffs on the stick and I wait for Bergman to shoot and it is a race. A real proper race.
I destroy 3 of Daddy's cigarettes this way. The score is Bergman 7, Daddy 0. Total massacre. I rack my brain for any way to give a handicap for team Camel. I light my fourth stick to give myself a timer to think. Bang.
I think about Mrs. Preity and Mr Not-Preity, dancing in the grocery aisle. In my head they were slow dancing, Mr Not knowing all the moves. Something about it just seems so impossible. I think it's her smile.
Bang. It is winter, 2020, and I am a late adoptee to discord. Nat pings me on skype messenger and I tell her about the cracks in my bedroom insulation and my single pane window and I woke up to see ice crystals forming on my window, even though it has never even snowed in this valley ever. She tells me about this thing called “hot dr pepper” and I am so disgusted I tell her I am leaving call. We plan on running together later while theres still sun left in the day.
Bang. I look at the nothing left of Daddy's cigarette, and the now grey mound of ash-dirt. I think about feeding it number five but then I just throw the whole carton into the gutters of the roof.
Bang. I am barreling down the track with 43 meters left and I look up and see the faces of the visiting team from Los Angeles in slow motion. I am drinking up their rage and horror, their sorrow at having to drive out here only to watch their daughter getting smoked by this hick. It is 2023, and I will place first.
Im bagged. im so bagged. I got a lot of hot summers left with Nat and a hundred colostomy bag changes and a hundred million trips home with Caleb where he will-they-wont-they's me into fucking him and I can just feel myself going to college and dragging mom and dad into a hundred overnight shifts, doubletime shifts, work until your body drum stops beating style work, They say that grandpa worked like a dog, and everyday laid brick and dug trenches and he goes home one day, without saying nothing to no one, dragging with him a whole pig and he starts digging and digging in the yard and abuelita is just screaming at him cause he has just lost his mind and he gets near four feet dug with this trench and fell over dead. 57 years old. That was in the name of Love. They asked for an autopsy and they found nothing but love in there. They got me bagged real bad and I am just wondering how anyone can take it.
Bang. 200 meters left, 2019 women's county meet. Nat got second place and felt impotent. I placed fourth and got high.
Nat put a plastic bag over my head and pretends she didn't do it and tells me to breath cause she resents me. That I finished the capital P Project and wrote her name out of the books. That I played her game better than her, so she goes out and breaks her fucking leg so that she can bag me. And Coach has the fucking nerve to tell me to leave the cripple alone like she hasn't got me bagged down. He says it cause he knows it is impossible for a retard like me, and then he puts one more bag on me with his fucking dreams and aspirations and meets and junior championship titles and state meets. Did you hear that his bonus is capped to how his extracurriculars perform? I heard those rumors too. They do it cause they hate that all I ever wanted to do was run. Can't they see it? All I ever wanted to do was run. Whys it gotta mean a single god damn thing?
Bang. 2100. I am in a pure white land. No clothes. No people. No blood machines. No rain, no heat. I am running my own style. My shoes have perfect friction. My laces are perfectly tied. I can get tired as much as I like.
<-part one part three ->
