Mom looked stressed and I was sure I knew why. The rent on the dump was due and she hadn’t made near enough to pay the landlord. Although I was only ten, I knew that she could have paid the difference in other ways, but she hadn’t yet sunk that low.
We lived in a small two-room trailer parked out back behind the landlord’s business. He sold junk cars, scrap metal and whatever he could pick up and resell for a profit. From the fancy car he drove, I guessed he must have made some money. He always had a big wad of cash in the pocket of his ratty old jeans. I tried to stay out of his way, there were times when he looked at me as if I were candy.
The trailer had been one of those nice ones pulled behind a pickup truck but had been sitting there for the last twenty years. It was heated by a small furnace run off a twenty-pound gas bottle and it was my job to carry it to the convenience store and exchange it for a new one. Cost about twelve bucks and we had to fill it twice a month in the summer, more often in the winter. I usually made enough picking up cans for the most part and the rest I found scrounging in the back seats of junk cars. People lost all kinds of things in the creases of the seats. Once I found a diamond engagement ring – I pawned it for a lousy twenty bucks and saw it later with a price tag on it for $400.00.
Mom was pretty. It wasn’t just me saying that, I heard other people say it, too. She was tiny, blonde with huge blue-green eyes, dimples and curved just like those Barbie dolls. Dudes were always hitting on her and it pissed me off. But then, I was only a kid and couldn’t do anything about it. She’d told me that her people had come from northern Italy and that was why she was blonde and not dark like most Italians. There was Swiss in her background, too.
We lived now in rural Tennessee, in the Hollows. I ran wild through the woods and knew every trail, deer hide and copse for miles around the trailer. We were poor, but I didn’t know it until we had left my father. He was tall, dark-haired and eyed, with a quick temper that flashed most on Mom. She said he was Creole, from Louisiana and that was why he was so quick to jump on either of us. I had lived there until I was five and didn’t remember much of it, just the swamps he had taken me through to teach me about his childhood.
One day we just up and left, but she wouldn’t tell me why. But it was much harder for the both of us after he was gone. Food was scarce, and I often walked to school with sneakers where the sole flapped and wearing a coat that was missing buttons, or the pockets had been torn off. I was always hungry until Mom took me out into the woods and showed me how to pick out the bounty that nature provided. I became quite the hunter, even made money selling the hides. What I didn’t know myself, I learned from reading at the library. It was one of the few places that I could hang out and not be chased, yelled at, belittled, or attacked. I loved the quiet stacks in the cool dim reaches of the old building. The ceilings were ten feet over my head and decorated with ornate plaster of Paris cornices and bric-a-brac. A true Victorian masterpiece. I only had to walk five miles into town to get to it or wait and hitch a ride with someone I trusted going that way.
Mom stood at the door of the trailer, so worn that I could see through the metal. Luckily, it didn’t get cold enough that hanging a blanket on the jamb during cold spells didn’t work. Her face was pale, paler than normal and she clutched the door jamb with white-knuckled fingers.
“Mom?” I asked, my heart pounding in my throat. “What’s the matter?” I looked down the thin path that led to the front of the junk yard.
“We have to leave,” she said abruptly. “It’s not safe here for you.”
“Did he come for the rent? I’ll have the rest for you in a few days,” I said. “I found some silver in an old car back under the dead trees. Sterling. I can pawn it, but I have to go to Taylorsville instead of Greentree.”
“Why?”
“The pawnbroker told me he can’t take any more stuff unless I can prove it belongs to me,” I shrugged.
“No, baby. That’s not why we need to leave.”
“Is it Dad? Is he coming here? How did he find us?” I was panicking. The last time my father had been with us was the reason we had left town and a nice apartment for the rundown shithole we were in now. He beat mom and me, but the worst part was that he drank and when he had too much, he tried to pimp out both of us. The last time, I had broken a bottle over his head and knocked him into tomorrow. He’d thought he’d fallen into the corner of the staircase, or so he told the Sheriff Department when he reported us missing. We’d left on the bus that night and hitched until our money ran out, stopping in the tiny hamlet of Taylorsville where she’d found a job as a cleaning lady for the local motel on the highway.
Its one advantage was that it paid cash and she could walk to it through the back of the junkyard, a mile of easy walking and no one to hassle her once she made it past old scroungy Mr. Calibrisi. I hated the way he looked at her when he thought no one was looking but it was the way he stared at me that gave me the biggest creeps. I might be only ten-years-old, but I knew what he wanted. To Mom’s credit, she never left me alone with him. If she thought he was going to just drop in, she brought me with her to the motel and I helped her clean. I didn’t take so much as a roll of toilet paper or one of those small bars of soap. I wouldn’t risk getting mom fired for stealing, not when we needed it so much. Lots of times, the people who stayed there would give me a couple of bucks to help carry their luggage or keep an eye out for the cops, a certain car or husband if the woman was cheating. I learned more about the nature of humans from hanging around the no-tell-motel than I ever learned in school.
School. I went every chance I had. I loved learning and read anything I could get my hands on. I was a Prince in a mystical land, a Pirate on the Seven Seas, a Beast Master in the far future where animals communicated with man through ESP. Sometimes, my dreams were more real than the life I was living, and I had to be careful not to confuse the two.
I’d done that in class one day and been tormented by the class bully for days until he found a new target to harass. I was fast, able to run from him and had a wild creature’s awareness of the danger always around, so it was hard to sneak up on me. Unless I had my nose buried in a book and Shelly Manning had caught me in the bleachers reading The Lord of the Rings one evening when I thought the school grounds had been deserted. He was there necking with LaShere Duchenne, one of the girls who’d found it easier to give in than fight. She’d run when he knocked the book from my hand, picked it up and swatted me with it. I’d fallen over backward and didn’t remember anything after that. I’d woken up on the ground with the pages of the book ripped and thrown over me, butt naked and with blood covering my face. I’d gone into the school bathroom through an opened window, cleaned up to find a huge knot on my head crusted with blood that had run down into my hair. Pieces of bloody paper were stuck to me and when I stared at the image in the mirror, I saw a wavering, pale and shocked kid with huge eyes. I was afraid to look anywhere else or examine the reason why I was bare-ass naked.
I found clothes in one of the locker rooms, left behind by some careless jock who didn’t bring them home, so his Mom could wash them. They stunk of sweat and BO, but it was better than slinking home naked. I had massive headaches for months after that, some so bad that Mom took me to the Emergency room where the doctor did X-rays and an MRI. I knew what that was and even understood him when he talked about cranial fractures, brain trauma and cerebral pressure. He wanted to keep me overnight, but Mom said no, we had no insurance and she was too afraid to apply for State Aid, afraid that my Dad would find us that way. He had the power to do that, he was a Sheriff Deputy in the town we had left in the dead of night. His buddies had looked out for him, covered for him on other occasions when he’d hit us. Even the Sheriff had looked the other way several times when Mom or I had shown up with bruises and cuts.
I took after mom. Small, delicate bones and with huge flame-blue eyes in a face that was too pretty. Mom said I looked like a Botticelli model if he had painted boys. I looked that up in the library and thought she had been describing herself, she looked like one of those angels and cherubs, not me. I hoped that the one thing I’d get from my Dad was his height. He stood six-feet three inches with the build of a swimmer. Wide shoulders, narrow hips, and long legs. Curly black hair and snapping deep brown eyes. Women thought he was handsome, and I saw that he never had any problems catching any girl’s eyes. He flirted with anything he called a split-tail. A term mom had explained was not a polite way to describe females of any kind.
“Why do we have to go, Mom?” I asked again, my stomach in knots.
“They let me go at the motel today,” she said, and her voice trembled. “I need the rent money to get us out of here. If I don’t pay Mr. Calibrisi, he’ll want me to pay for it some other way or he’ll kick us out.”
“What other way? Sleep with him?” I demanded. “I won’t let him touch you.”
“Not me, Cris. You. He wants you.” Her face twisted in horror. “Has he ever —”
“NO! I’ve never let him get me alone. I’d kill him first.”
She cupped my face. “You are my beautiful Botticelli angel, Cris. I’d die before I let anything happen to you. Mrs. Creighton is going to Gatlinburg. She said she’d take both of us with her. We must meet her at the Circle K on RD. 28. In an hour. I’ve already packed our things. Can you carry a backpack?”
I nodded. There wasn’t much in the old trailer that I wanted to keep, even most of my books were borrowed from the library and I had just taken the last batch back. Most of my clothes would fit in a small backpack and I had no toys worth dragging along. All my most precious items were stored in my head. I’d always known this day might come, but I had assumed that my Dad would be the reason we’d need to leave.
She tucked my coat around me, slipped her hand in my pocket and gave me a kiss on the forehead. “I gave you a hundred dollars, Cris. It’s emergency money. In case something happens. And there’s a phone number and address in there for your grandfather. In case something happens to me.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you, Mom,” I said in panic. “Like what? Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“No, but sometimes, things happen that we have no control over, Cris. Just remember, he’s a last resort. Don’t call him unless you have nowhere else to turn, okay?”
“Okay.” I went into my room, a tiny box closed off from the rest of the trailer by a sliding curtain. The furthest room from the heat, there was often ice on the thin windows, but I was always warm snuggled under an old down-filled quilt. My closet was empty, the drawers under the bunk bed cleaned out. Mom had neatly folded and packed my backpack, leaving almost nothing behind. Except for my .22 rifle. That had been my dad’s and I had stolen it when mom and I had split. I knew that I couldn’t take it with us and truthfully, it was so worn out and old that it wasn’t worth much. I left it for the landlord. He could pawn it for ten bucks. I gave the place one last look around.
When I went into the space that she called her bedroom which was nothing more than the couch pulled out flat and served as both couch, dining room chair and bed, she had all her meager possessions in a small, ratty suitcase that had wheels and a long pull-out handle. It would be too awkward to use in the grass of the field but would roll easily once we hit the paved road.
She held the door open for me and I slid out, keeping a wary eye for Mr. Calibrisi. Mom told me that he wasn’t there, he had made a run out to a local auction to pick up a flatbed of scrap metal, old copper wires, aluminum awnings and other items that brought good money.
We walked through the old grass and beggar’s lice. The tiny prongs of the seed heads poked me through my thin pants and made me stop to dig them out. I had sensitive skin that itched and turned red with the slightest irritant, just like hers. She said we had peaches and cream complexions, a true Botticelli except for the red hair. Sometimes, in the sun, hers glowed almost the color of that last flash before the sun went down. Mine was nowhere near blonde, nor red but a mix of blonde, red and brown so that it looked as if it had been frosted by a drunk and crazy hair stylist. Usually, it was a mess, sticking up and full of grass, leaves and twigs from my time spent in the woods.
This morning, it was flattened down with water and tucked under my watch cap, so I could hide what was a distinctive look if Mr. Calibrisi was looking for us.
Mrs. Creighton was waiting at the corner of County Rd. 28 where the railroad crossed the tarmac right behind the convenience store. She’d obviously gassed up and had bought snacks and soda water, a six-pack of Diet Pepsi and Dr. Pepper in glass bottles. She handed one of those to me and I took it gratefully. Soda was a treat that I didn’t get often even though I usually reserved some of my return change for a fresh one.
“Been waiting long, Mrs. Creighton?” Mom asked breathlessly. She looked tired, even more so than usual, as if the walk had exhausted her.
“No, dear. I saw Calibrisi at the Rohmer auction. He was heading out with a great big flatbed loaded with scrap.”
“He’ll be gone all day, then? If he has to drive to the scales in Portia. I heard the ones in town are closed due to someone fiddled with the Weights and Measures stamps. State has to come out and re-license them,” mom sighed.
“You running to or from?” the old lady asked.
Mom laughed shakily. “We’re going to see my father in upstate New York. He’s never met Cris and I thought it high time the two got to know each other.”
“Uh huh,” the old lady nodded. “Just want to mention that Eula-Mae told me that she heard there’s a good-looking Deputy looking for runaways. Made it as far as the Sheriff’s Office in Diamond. They sent out a flier that looks kinda like you and the boy.”
“Really?” Mom was silent and then made sure my seat-belt was latched. She smiled at me. “Be a long ride, honey. You tell me when you have to pee or anything, okay?”
“Mom,” I said in embarrassment. Mrs. Creighton snickered and put the car in gear. We drove off and I resisted the urge to stare out the back window of her Subaru at the receding town limits.