From the passenger seat, Savannah watches the hairs on Allison’s arm go golden in the late afternoon sun as it hangs out of the driver’s side window. The sun’s been moving across the arm for the last four hours as they’ve driven east, spreading a rash of redness across that thin strip of skin, from wrist to her elbow, while Allison herself, wearing her enormous Jackie O sunglasses, stairs ahead unflinchingly as if the flaming star sending light to her through several months of black space, were just some boy extending an arm to grope at her.
They’re driving across the state to Tom’s cabin on Lake Sidree, the third deepest lake in all the world so they’re told. Tom’s Allison’s boyfriend of a few months. Her parents don’t like him. But she says he’s the funniest boy she’s ever known. Savannah wonders how many more times she’ll have to hear about how funny he is. They’ve got a border to cross and three hours to go before she’ll get to find out herself.
Allison tells her to not worry. There will be other boys there.
Boys. Hearing the word, Savannah remembers some dirty faced kids crawling out from under a car to throw eggs at her and her starchy, plaid skirt on her way to Eastside Christian.
She also thinks of her schoolmate’s brother. They’d been having a slumber party with several other girls and Savannah had walked in on him in the upstairs bathroom shaving. She looked at him through the white light and saw his naked chest with ribs showing. Noticed his crouched shoulders and the bare, flat landscape of his body. How he looked at her for a minute with a face of silence before slowly closing the door on her, leaving her outside the light, facing the dark wood.
Savannah thinks how she doesn’t want that. A boy. What she wants is less defined. She can’t picture it. Can’t even tell what gender it is. Like someone thumbing out on the highway half a mile ahead.
“Who would your ideal hitch-hiker be?” Savannah asks.
“Hmm. Good question. A toothless rodeo clown runaway. You?”
“Maybe a prison escapee. Or a convicted killer. Well, maybe not a killer. But someone on the lamb at least.”
“No. A killer…” Allison flicks through her I-pod and “Rider on the Storm” starts playing.
Savannah laughs and sing-shouts with Allison, along with dead Jim Morrison’s echo,
There’s a killer on the road.
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad.
Allison’s the first friend she’s made in public school. A friend that ensured an end to all slumber parties by providing Savannah with new friends, which in turn allowed Savannah to delete all her slumber-party friends’ phone numbers.
Give this man a ride,
sweet memory will die.
They met on the tennis team. In fact both their parents think they’re finishing up a tennis camp in Fircrest—about a hundred miles west of their approximate location. An empty highway between rolling, yellow hills, copses of ponderosa pine and open sky.
Allison’s driving her dad’s old Golf. The white hatchback buzzes and snorts up the hills. When the hills rise, the buzzing gets louder. So Allison turns up the music.
“Mmm. I’m hungry,” Allison says.
Savannah turns to rummage in the back seat to fulfill her co-pilot role and notices they’ve eaten everything. The only things left besides their duffles are two bags. One filled with fortune cookies. The other filled with condoms.
Savannah peers into the bag of condoms for a moment. Notices again the round, candy-like shine reminiscent of lollipops you got at the doctors. But she didn’t think you got condoms at the doctors. She wasn’t sure where you got them.
She pulls up the bag of fortune cookies she got at the factory downtown and pauses for a minute to watch Allison’s body responding to the music. The music works Allison over. It rolls her, shakes her, makes her open her mouth.
Savannah marvels at how Allison can act like she’s alone. Her cheekbones are red crab apples. She wears a fuchsia tube top and Daisy Dukes, showing as much skin as she can without getting arrested. Her skin has the same creamy, high gloss of the fortune cookies. Savannah doesn’t understand. How someone can be allowed to have a body like that. She seems so equipped. And ready.
Savannah offers her a cookie.
“What? Oh, thanks. Sorry. I love this fucking song!”
They’re shedding the plastic wrappers, then prying open the stubborn lips of the cookies and reading their fortunes, ending each with “in bed”.
“You are sure to be making a life long friend…in bed.”
“Your adventurous spirit will bring good things…in bed.”
“An exciting experience is headed your way….in bed. Haha, headed. Get it?”
“We’re so retarded.”
Allison eats half of each cookie and flicks the rest, fortune and all, out the window. Savannah stashes hers in the pockets of her black short-shorts and eats the cookies, licking off their buttery sheen for a few seconds before cramming them into her mouth. She consumes them with a frustrated cycle of jaw work.
“Jesus, Savannah,” Allison laughs.
Savannah has to fight a feeling of wanting to hide or disappear or at least keep quiet. She’s been noticed being stupid by her friend. But she tries to laugh and bob to the music and even say something:
“I’ve heard the fortunes won’t come true unless you eat the whole thing. Besides I’m starving.”
“Yeah, well you better save some for when we get there,” Allison replies. “Or you’ll have to start in on the condoms.”
“You’re the only one who’s going to be eating those,” Savannah says.
“We’ll set you up, kid,” Allison says, punctuating each word with a slap on Savannah’s knee. “Don’t worry.”
The sun has a very different effect on Savannah’s arms; it brings out every black, villainous hair clinging to her dark complexion. Her mother’s half Indian, a heritage that’s hard to wax off. Especially considering how little it’s discussed.
“Big change equals big earnings,’” Allison reads her newest fortune. “…in bed. Yum! I think I’ll eat all of this one,” Allison says but puts the broken cookie between her legs.
The crumbs glint like grains of sand on Allison’s skin. A quiet scratching comes from the broken pieces. It unnerves Savannah. Makes her want to eat. She snatches the shards of cookie from Allison’s crotch and starts chewing.
“Gross, Savy. I don’t know if I can be seen in public with you.”
“If you can’t handle it, go home,” Savannah says through a mouthful, playing confident like she’s watched Allison do.
“We’re in my car,” Allison laughs. “If anybody’s going home, it’s going to be you and you’ll have to walk. Or hitch.”
“Ooo, maybe then I can maybe meet a boy.”
Pines are replaced by sage brush. The hills get bigger.
The Golf starts to snort more than buzz.
Allison turns the music up.
The car jerks. Then stalls near the crest of the uplands.
The music cuts.
They hear a gust of cold wind sweep long over the yellow scape of nothing.
The road would have led them down into a mild looking valley with rows of poplars and scattered blocks of buildings. Allison has Savannah get out and push her into a turn off. The ignition gives a few hisses and then goes silent.
Allison gets out and opens the hood. The grey tangle of engine steel emits a smell like burning vacuum. They cough.
“Shit.” Allison says.
“I thought you said you had this thing checked out.”
“I did.”
“What’d they say?”
“They said I probably needed a new fan belt.”
“And?”
“I had to buy the condoms.”
Allison’s walking away from the steaming hood towards the road. Her hips start to roll as she saunters in her cowboy boots. She curls a thumb around a belt loop on her cut offs and slides them down just slightly so that one of her hip bones sticks out; she posts her other thumb straight up.
“What are you doing?” Savannah asks.
“Bet the first car’ll stop for this,” she bites her lower lip and gives a scandalous look.
Savannah stands there like a deer in crosshairs. She knows she looks this way. Can see it reflected in Allison’s bug-eyed sunglasses.
“Why don’t you just call Tom?”
Allison bites her lip and doesn’t reply.
A school bus passes.
“Haha.” Savannah says.
“Doesn’t count,” Allison says, shaking her blonde curls.
The highway stretches emptily. The five o’clock sky is a severe blue slowly dipping into dusk.
“Just call Tom. He likes you, right?”
“Savannah. Rule one about guys. DON’T be needy. Besides he’s three hours away and at work. He’s told me never to call at work.”
They hear a sports car zooming up from the valley. It passes and all they see is their reflection in the tinted windows.
“Don’t even say it,” Allison says.
“They were probably gay lesbians,” Savannah replies.
“Wouldn’t they want me if they were lesbians? Ditz.”
For a moment there’s only the wind. It rattles a line of barbed wire strung between stumps along the road.
A tank-sized rumble comes up over the hill. It emerges as a grey-black Suburban. In the cab, Savannah sees a collection of males who, without smiling, swerve their lumbering vehicle into the turn off.
“Maybe they’ll rape us!” Savannah says.
The look Allison returns her with makes her immediately sorry she said anything. It’s a look Savannah didn’t know Allison could have. The swelling strain in her red cheeks. The shrinking of her mouth as she swallows quick.
The driver gets out of the cab. He looks twenty something with a beard, wearing a trucker hat that casts a darkness over his face. His eyes are small and he wears a dusty thermal shirt over an abdomen with some shape to it. He’s a guy, Savannah realizes. Not a boy.
He asks what the problem is.
From the covered trailer and passenger seats, five boys step out. None can be over sixteen. The youngest around twelve. None of them gawk or smile. They look remarkably pale. Their eyes squint in the sunlight as if coming out from a dark closet. Their quietude, their over-bitten teeth and dusty faces make Savannah want to feed them for some reason. They look hungry.
Before they can answer what’s wrong, one bare-chested boy wearing suspenders says he thinks it’s a fried fan felt.
The driver looks from the speaker to Allison, “Could that be it?”
Allison nods.
“Well, that’ll be easy enough to fix,” the driver says.
“In town,” one of the boys puts in.
“Yeah, ‘cept it’s closing time,” the driver adds. “Only one place’ll take you and they won’t be able to have it ready by morning.”
The light is reddening in the west now and Savannah sees a telltale sliver of the moon in the east. Wind scythes effortlessly through the plains that offer themselves bare without even the semblance of shelter. Not so much as a nook.
“You two got a cellphone?” the driver asks.
Allison does.
“I’ll use it to call my guy in town.”
Allison gives the driver her phone and traces a half circle with her boot in the dirt as he mutters something about the highway and make of the car. He gives her back the phone. Savannah notes that their eyes have settled on each other. She wonders about the origins of Allison’s bodily magnetism. For the last year she’s watched Allison tractor beam several guys this way and each time she’s watched with the same excitement and revulsion of watching a carnivorous plant trap a fly. They give a kind of consensual shivering that makes it hard for her to sympathize, exactly. It must be that skin of hers that’s to blame. Guys must mistake the sweat on Allison’s arms for honey.
While Savannah’s thinking this, she rummages in the car for the bag of fortune cookies, almost pulling out the bag of condoms by mistake. Both are situated next to each other in the same duffle in non-descript grocery bags that say Thank You in red. She goes around feeding the boys fortunes.
She likes how they pop the air from the plastic wrappers and break the cookies gingerly. How each one reads over the little waxen papers slowly and sniffs before eating.
Savannah eats one too.
One of the scrappier-looking ones, not a day older than twelve, in his wife-beater and rat tail—asks her what her fortune is.
Savannah tells him she’s got lots of them. She keeps them all.
He says that’s bad luck.
Maybe it’s bad luck she’s looking for, one of the other boys suggests.
“Hush up,” the driver tells them and they hush. The driver turns and asks the girls if they have a place to stay.
A half hour later, they’re riding in the suburban with the driver. Allison is riding in the front seat. Savannah sits diagonally behind her. The seat next to her remains empty. In the place that normally holds the radio, an open hole gapes it’s black wires like wax snakes.
The tow truck came and went. The driver knew the tow guy, who assured them he’d have the car ready in the morning. But didn’t bother offering to drive them into town and sped away. It was then they noticed that the tow was unmarked.
The driver is now driving them to a hotel he owns. One he’s fixing up. It’s not much but a place they can stay a free night.
From the viewing window in the truck’s canopy, Savannah can see the other five boys riding in the covered truck bed. At each bump and turn, their heads bob.
“So what brought you out here?” the driver asks.
“We were going to Lake Sidree,” Savannah answers.
“Oh yeah? That’s a fine lake. Second deepest lake in the world.”
“I’ve never been,” Savannah says.
“It’s not the nicest time to go. Real hot and sticky out there, now. Tons of people,” the driver continues.
“Well, Allison has a friend who lives on a lake.”
“Huh. Swell friend,” the driver looks at Allison. “Making you drive all this way. Having a bunch of rednecks pick you up. I’d have driven you from Point A.”
Allison is staring ahead. Her big, buggy glasses have become a visor of blackness betraying no expression.
“His name’s Tom,” Savannah says.
“You don’t say. My name’s Tom,” the driver says without looking at her.
“Maybe you could be our new Tom,” Savannah asks.
She hears Allison let out a flat exhale of disgust. Savannah goes silent.
“Hon, you can call me whatever you want. I’m just a guy giving you a ride. But hey,” Tom puts on a pair of silver aviators. “You know why they call it Sidree?”
Savannah doesn’t dare reply.
Allison gives no response.
“Desire,” the new Tom says. “All mixed up.”
The car goes over a bump.
The heads of the boys bob.
Savannah looks at them. They look at her like strays rounded up in the back of an animal control car. She shuts the viewing window. Behind the tinted glass, the boys become faceless shades with gaunt shoulders.
Tom says that since the hotel’s being renovated, they’ll have the place to themselves.
Another bump. Then bobbing of heads.
Allison turns sharply to him, “What are you going to want from us?”
He laughs. It’s a dusty, leaping sound that Savannah finds pleasant. “Depends,” he says.
Savannah wonders what Allison’s problem is all of a sudden. She guesses it’s that Allison already has a Tom and doesn’t like that this one is hitting on her.
He could hit on me, Savannah thinks.
The new Tom continues, “I couldn’t ask for much from two stuck travelers.”
“Too bad,” Savannah says.
Allison hisses.
For the first time, Tom looks at her from the rearview mirror.
Savannah looks back.
But then she sees his eyes flit back to Allison’s go-go pink top. “Yeah,” he says. “I bet you gals could put on a show if you wanted.”
The shadows of the boys bob behind the glass. No bump needed.
It’s dusk. The new Tom rolls through town. Which it turns out, is a row of abandoned warehouses with boarded up store fronts as blank and expressionless as the hills they’d been passing. Tom pulls the truck up into the empty parking lot of an unmarked, two story building with a length of rooms running in rows along the top and bottom stories.
One streetlight illuminates the grounds, along with the now red light of the setting sun.
The doors have wrought iron screens covering them. Every door except one. A white door in the bottom middle.
“This is a hotel?” Savannah asks.
It could just as easily have passed for a storage facility.
“It will be. Like I said, I’m renovating it. I’ll show you.”
“Can you just give me the key?” Allison asks.
Tom shrugs disarmingly, “Anything for you.” He slides an off gold key onto the arm rest between them.
Allison takes the key and gets out, boots stomping up dust angrily. Savannah follows with the duffle, finding herself having to run after Allison.
“You’re welcome,” the new Tom calls out.
Savannah turns, “Thank you.”
“And don’t worry if you lose the key. I have a skeleton. I might be by later to check up on you. See if you need anything.”
Savannah’s step falters as she trips over his words in her mind. Looking back, she sees herself as a shrunken figurine in new Tom’s icy-looking aviators as he stands on the driver side’s running board, staring over his open door at them. The back hatch of the Suburban opens and out crawl the other boys. She sees their muscles below their thin skin, paler somehow and more primal, their movements quickened in the gloaming light like nocturnal animals beginning the hunt. They step gingerly onto the running boards and redistribute themselves throughout the cab.
Allison pulls her into the room and shuts the door, “Stay here.” Allison starts walking circles around the room. The room has a bed. A bed, dark furniture, thin, green carpet and wall paper with sketches of road runners bulging their eyes as if in terror. A white fan with heavy blades hangs from the ceiling. The back window faces southward to open country.
“Watch them leave,” Allison says.
Savannah notices she’s whispering. She tries to look out the eyehole. But all she sees is an opaque circle bubbling towards her. “Allison.”
“What?”
“The eyehole turns in.”
They hear the truck engine start. Allison opens up one of the heavy curtains enough to see them pull out.
Allison turns to her, “Of course it does.”
Allison’s voice is starting to sound older. Harsher and grating. Like Savannah’s mother’s voice sounded when Savannah would walk out into the street. “We’re in deep.”
The ghost town. The empty hotel, the skeleton key. Maybe they’ll rape us. It sinks into Savannah like a hot knife. “Oh my God,” she gasps.
“And you flirted with him.”
“I’m sorry!” she shouts.
“You dumb ass. The one guy you chose to flirt with.”
“I said I was sorry,” Savannah says and feels her knees give out. Savannah feels the clamor of a crowded room in her stomach, her cells bobbling inside her like the beady little heads of the boys in the jostling truck.
Allison is crying on the bed. Savannah hears her saying into her phone, “Pick up, pick up!”
Then she’s whimpering on the phone to her Tom, “Tom, Tom, Tom,” is all she gets out.
Savannah can hear Tom’s voice on the other end. The voice stops abruptly.
Allison starts shrieking, “Tom. No, don’t hang up. Tom this is an emergency. I don’t care about all that. I know. I know I’ve been calling a lot. But this is real. Tom. Tom! Tom?”
Savannah hears the phone crack again the wall.
Then silence.
After a while, Savannah creeps up to the corner of the bed to see Allison lying rigidly as a roof beam on the mattress, fists clenched. “I’m sorry,” Savannah whispers.
Allison lets a blast of air out through her teeth, “It’s alright. You didn’t know what you were saying.”
Savannah feels Allison’s arm come around her. “Get up.”
Savannah sits on the bed.
“I am going to take a shower, hon.” Allison says, brushing Savannah’s black hair back away from her face.
“Why?” Savannah asks.
“If he knocks, tell him I’m not ready yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, they’ve got us trapped Savvy! Like he said he can’t ask for much. But he’s going to ask for something.”
“Oh, my God,” Savannah cries and starts ringing her hands. “You’re going to give it to him aren’t you?”
“What choice do I have? What choice to we have? If I give him what he wants, I’ll make him get us our car and send us on our way. Believe me, Savvy, it won’t take much to get a guy like that around my finger.”
“But. But what about your Tom? Don’t you want to be his.”
Allison shrugs coldly, “Yeah, but I’m not. So I’m going to fuck this guys brains out and save our lives. Got a better plan?”
Savannah feels her breathing slow as an idea comes to mind, “Let me do it.”
“No,” Allison says getting up, heading to the bathroom.
“Why not?” Savannah pleads.
Allison turns, “Because this isn’t one of our fucking word games, Savvy! We’re talking about something else. Something you don’t know about. Do you know how much it hurts the first time?”
“No.”
“No. You don’t. You don’t know what it tastes like or what it looks like. And you don’t want to know. You talk like you do, but you don’t. You don’t want to know how mad they get when you don’t do it right. Or what it feels like inside when you don’t see them again.”
“But I want to.”
“Not with this guy, Savannah. Save it for someone who’s worth it.” Allison goes to disappear in the bathroom but Savannah catches her by the arm.
Savannah grips Allison’s arms and finds them surprisingly wet and cold. Not like the hot currents of blood she imagined. Savannah realizes she’s been wanting to touch this skin for the last year and now that she has, she sees it slipping through her hands, the little golden hairs smoothing flat as it goes.
Allison has slammed the door of the bathroom closed.
Savannah sits on the bed for what feels like hours and remembers a party at Allison’s house. After everyone had gone home, she’d stayed. She walked out back to the pool and found Allison sitting on Tom. With her blonde body moving up and down him and him moving back, they seemed to have turned themselves over to some rhythmic power synching them inseparably.
Savannah watched alone, her dark, hairy arms goosebumping in the cold. If Allison knew she was there, she didn’t let on. She belonged to a rough, tussling cult of skin, able to confide in desire and tame it. While Savannah was left at the edge of the waters where a reflection of herself refused to coagulate, shifting in the ripples of their motion.
Savannah has seen and re-seen this moment in her head, in the dark, in her bed. She has wished to be them—one then the other. But she has remained herself and she doesn’t know why.
In the only room in the empty town, she lets out a cry, “What am I supposed to do?”
“How should I know, Savannah,” Allison says from inside the shower. “Go stand guard. Or mount yourself on a fence pole or something. Just go.”
Savannah grabs one of the bags that says Thank You in red and runs out the door, right into the flood lights of Tom’s suburban pulling in.
The full moon looks like a battery powered camping light in the sky. The summer evening is lavender and everything is still quite clear.
How hard is it to join a cult of skin, Savannah wonders? Don’t you just plunge in?
She darts around the truck and inches towards the driver side door. When Tom steps out, she pushes herself into him.
She tastes his beer smelling breath and feels the tickle of his beard on her lower lip. She presses her hand between his legs.
“I’m ready,” she whispers, even as he puts up a hand on her clavicles.
“Uh, hi hon. You’re. You’re pretty nice and everything. But, I’m not going to have enough for both of you. Sorry,” he side-steps her.
She slumps against his truck.
“Sorry,” he says again and jaunts up to the door. He opens it. She can see one of Allison’s pink legs posed triangularly on the bed and then nothing.
The lights of the suburban are still on.
Savannah follows the light to the door. She presses her eye to the eyehole and can see everything.
She can’t hear anything but sees the sounds brightly. The insistent struggle, the coaxing down of denim to the floor, the unclasping of everything and the suction releasing of heavy lipped kisses. The awkward start and stop. The stammer of limbs unlearned in each other. It all looks about the same with this Tom as it did with the Tom back home.
Allison’s legs bow spider-like, pulling the driver in close by his hairy cheeked buttocks, then stopping him with the balls of her feet at his pelvis. Savannah sees her searching the duffle for something.
She doesn’t find it. She curses loudly enough to penetrate the thick oak of the room. She pushes Tom aside and goes into the bathroom. She watches Tom stroke himself slowly as he stands there. Allison comes tearing out to look around the floor.
Savannah reaches down into her bag for a cookie but stops as the feel of a shiny, stiff plastic packet comes to her fingers.
At this same moment, she sees Allison’s hot red face barreling towards the door.
The empty air feels like a dry hex on Allison’s exposed body. A blue neon light spotlights her to whoever could be watching. The parking lot, however, appears completely empty. She takes a step out of the light and is instantly blind. She turns and takes a step. She calls out Savannah’s name. Then again. Then a third time before she feels a hand grip her.
Savannah saw Allison step into the space between bungalows, the alley shaft of dust where Savannah knelt. The bag of condoms sat between her shivering legs. It seemed to her that Allison could have seen her crouching from her peripheral vision but something stopped her.
“Whoa, whoa there,” came Tom’s voice.
“No. She has my condoms.”
“Well, there’s not much we can do about that now is there?”
Savannah watched Allison try to pull away. Each photon of light seemed to be a needle pinning her bold skin to its place within his grasp.
“She probably did it on accident,” she kept talking. “I doubt she knows what a condom even looks like.”
“Oh, I doubt not.”
“Let me look for her.”
“It’s a little late for that.”
Allison stiffened.
“I’m sorry.”
“No.”
Allison digs her heels into the wood and her arms become taut crossbars pulling away but then she’s gone.
Only then can Savannah stand up.
She doesn’t hear shouting but a cycle of bitter thuds against the hard surfaces inside.
Creeping out from behind the shade of the alley, single condom packet in hand, she stops in the light and, fixed in it too now, she looks out into the invisible hills. She doesn’t know what she’ll do; except she thinks she’ll run into the hills and run herself bloody along the barbed wire fences, following their broken line to a shimmering body called desire, the deepest lake in all the world where she can drown herself.
She thinks this is what she’ll do.
Until she sees the lean shapes of exposed shoulders gathering in from the light. Their limbs carry them forward in a steady shuffle marked by intent; but there’s an unsmoothness about them, an anxiety with their new prowess. Their heads bob, alien looking as creatures from the moon. As they draw slowly closer, she sees that their grubby faces are reading small strips of paper—the most any god ever gave them as to their fortunes. When they arrive at the door, they stop, look up from their fortunes to see her standing there and they reach.
[Image Credit : Photo by Artur Aldyrkhanov on Unsplash ]
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Latest posts by Shaun Anthony McMichael (see all)
- Skin People - July 2, 2023
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