Wasteland Flower

TW: references to violence and elder neglect

I see Luck twice before I let him inside my car. Before I stick my head out of the window and say “Where are you heading?” and he slides into the passenger seat as if it was made for him. He is all sunburn and dangling silver necklaces and he says “Anywhere.”

The sun was sticky, trickling down my skull like someone had cracked an egg over my head. A physical weight that constantly made me brush over my hair to check if something was caught in it.

There were forest fires in Florida and California and the fevered buzz of the Manson murders electrified the highways all the way down to New York. I drove barefoot and felt history as a slick, gummy substance under the wheels, tacking down everything that passed across it like my grandmother´s homemade honey trap flypaper.

I stopped in Staunton Virginia and found a dingy little thrift store where I traded my slacks and blouse in for a white cotton dress that slipped off of my shoulders and folded around my thighs with pleasing weightlessness. My hair grew out, bleached in the sun, and grew frayed around the edges. I watched my transformation in truck stop bathroom mirrors become a different person with a luminescent tingle. I drove west throughout August. I traded rumors with truckers coming down from California, who told me that Sharon Tate´s killers had been kids, had been girls, hippies, who told me that the murders were committed by a satanic cult and that the walls had been painted in bloody pentagrams, who told me that it had all been made to look like the hippies did it, but really, it was the government and that was the truth of it. Those few lives that had been canceled out seemed so important and all-encompassing that summer, because somebody had turned over the stone that was America, and exposed the twisted little bodies crawling in the dirt beneath it.

I watched my reflection tan in roadside diner windows. I watched the sky fade out over the road like sheets hung up after a wash, giving the world a cleansed feel, drowned in bleach until it shone with white radiance.

I started smoking, I reveled in the way I smelled like somebody else: smelled burnt, hot and wild, of cigarette, evaporated sweat, and the dust of the highway. The way I smelled like a girl the girl I used to be would have eyed shyly at the local gas station, trying not to be caught looking at the exposed shoulders and sun-fried hair, the naked aura of freedom and reckless abandon.

When I saw Luck for the first time I was stopping just outside of Chicago, suddenly desperate for a cup of coffee. On the way back from the diner he seemed suddenly spotlighted by the glaring midday sun. Standing at the Greyhound bus station with one foot resting on his threadbare army backpack. His pinched face lifted towards the sun. He wore cowboy boots that carried a whiff of desert dust on their heels and faded denim pants, and above them nothing but a patched silk waistcoat over his thin, sun-burnt chest. He smoked his cigarette and the bus ground to a halt in front of him, and he slung his backpack over his shoulder and vanished from sight.

At night I slept in my car, curled up in the back seat with the window cracked, a stolen motel sheet covering my body, and thought about all of the stories that heap up on one another - all of the ways you can get killed on the empty American highways, all of the faceless men that will lie in wait, rape you, strangle you, snuff out your life and leave you in a ditch by the side of the road - until I fell asleep. The strange outlaw glamour these nameless men are infused with. The compulsive, neurotic revisiting of this narrative in literature, in the movies. I imagined being a boy, growing to manhood listening to this narrative, over and over again, just as I did. Only listening to the other half of it. Being force-fed, not the perpetual warnings of strangers, of getting into their cars, of picking up hitchhikers, the general predatory threat of the world of Man, but instead, the insipid, creeping voice whispering this could be you, this is what you are capable of.

So I sucked up the rumors that trickled down like syrup from California. That they were girls, most of them, girls with the power to choke-hold the nation.

I listened to Jefferson Airplane on the car radio, to the Creedence Clearwater Revival, to Janis Joplin. I bought a small hunting knife at a general store on the fringes of Illinois. I felt my body growing lighter on my diet of diner doughnuts, trail mix, and cigarettes. The lightness felt good in the heat, the freckles on my hollowing cheeks creating a satisfying distance to the person I was in upstate New York.

I drove aimlessly in all directions. On a dusty road through the Colorado desert, I passed a truck squirming with migrant field hands, passing a bottle from hand to hand, and caught sight of a mop of sandy hair and a pinched, tanned face, before overtaking the vehicle. A scrap of patched black silk on the wind.

A part of me expected fliers, posters: wanted, dead or alive. I wasn´t worried. Worry had adhered to the flypaper of history hundreds of miles behind me. I was no longer the same person. But there would have been a thrill, a current of sparkling electricity, at seeing my face on paper, in opaque reference to danger, glamour, guilt. I stood before a murky bathroom mirror in back of a highway diner and pulled a gun on my reflection, fingers clenched into a barrel, found my glinting green eyes between my overgrown bangs, and pulled back the safety clip of my thumb. I smiled and my teeth were feral, carnivorous under the broken fluorescent. I went back to my doughnut and the man in denim overalls in the seat beside me called me darlin´ and paid for my coffee.

This is the almighty system of capitalism. Nobody deserves a thing without a service, the satisfaction of even the most basic human need demands a transaction. An understanding so ingrained that half the population has discovered the advantages of making unsolicited payment before being asked for anything. Tat for tit, so to speak.

I slid a bill across the counter and ordered another coffee for the man. A mystery of the human race: a man paying for a woman´s drink implies proposition, but a woman paying for a man´s drink signifies rejection. Aliens would puzzle their big green heads.

Bright blue desert flowers spangled the dead earth beside the road, alien life in the wasteland, and I tapped the small dull blade of my hunting knife on the steering wheel to the rhythm of Fortunate Son´s opening lines. I thought about the other girl, with the clean-cut fringe and the colorful blouses, bringing home her grandmother´s groceries. What I did would not pass as murder. There is glamour in the lonely highway narrative. Glamour in the rape and stabbing of a woman on the open road. This is elegant, animal. The gradual withdrawing of help, the deliberate neglect of a senile and shaking grandmother until her life wastes away with exponential acceleration is so painfully, filthily human that it does not pass the American standard of crime. There was no other possible outcome other than getting away with it.

A single small black pinprick punctures the sepia gray of the horizon, rapidly slides closer, and grows into a man, with sun-burnt shoulders under a faded black satin waistcoat and denim cuffs pushed up awkwardly over his cowboy boots. As I approach, his arm swings up, a safety clip thumb pointing at the sky. I accept him into my life.

I slow the car and stick my head out through the open window and he slides into the passenger seat as if it is made for him. He grips my hand, sanding down my skin with his calloused fingers, and says “Luck.”

“Like bad luck?”

“Like lucky you.”

We drive. The sky darkens.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Far away,” I say. “Maybe California.”

Small candle flame campfires appear out of the dark, out in the desert and I stop the car and hear distorted fibers of music drift across the dust. We get out and walk between the blue prairie blossoms guided by the split ends of guitar chords.

A quarter-mile off the road, a circle of motorcycles rings a sort of camp, with several small fires burning at its edges. The men between the fires are bearded in the flickering red glow. They smell of leather, of engine oil, and sweat. Two of them hunch over a pair of battered steel-string guitars. They pass us bottles of beer, bottles of whiskey. They peer appreciatively up the hem of my dress. The twang of the guitars quickens as they beat their separate rhythms against each other. The whiskey softens my skin, leaks a dull fuzz behind my eyes. The steel strings vibrate in my thighs and I spin, dancing on the flypaper fabric of history. Spin with my feet beating the dust and my dress flapping and brushing against me. Cotton, earth, wind, and sky. So many stars out here in the desert. The constellations spin with me. Somewhere in the spinning world, a gruff wolf whistle. Somewhere out there, prairie beasts stalking each other across the dirt. My head falls back on my shoulders and I look over at Luck. He smiles at me, his whole body thrums with the steel-string rhythms.

And I think how alone I am among all of them. How protected I am from their truly knowing me, just by my womanhood. Luck rocks with the music and I think of how he got into my car. Bare and exposed, without worries or fears, just for the way my skin is soft, and my hair is long, and my smile is parched and warm.