Marisi
Ornstein
A lone hawk sails over the New Mexican landscape, dancing shadows along the purple, orange and red rocks, swooping in through a valley and banking low into a deserted shopping mall’s loading dock where a group of teenagers are drinking Rolling Rock, smoking weed and pushing each other around.
A double barrel boombox blasts a warped bootleg cassette of a Bruce show from the Capitol in Passaic.
A young girl with long black hair looking like a thoroughbred sits with her elbow on the boombox, gazing far.
She’s wearing faded Levi’s Five-O-Ones, a white tee, a denim Levi’s jacket, beat up Red Wing engineer boots, and an orange bandanna round her neck.
Will is sixteen, riding his old Triumph a distance from the loading dock.
He’s wearing faded Levi’s Five-O-Ones, a white tee, denim Levi’s jacket, beat up Red Wing engineer boots, with his truck driver Pompadour bopping high in the wind.
At full speed, Will’s eyes connect with the black-haired girl’s and time ceases to exist so abruptly that he nearly flips over the handlebars.
Once still, after halting the bike on gravel, he attempts to find his breath.
Lost in the wonder of the vision of her, he searches through the cloud of skid-dust, frozen, but moving a million miles an hour through the new sensation of a full on body buzz, where his hands feel like lobster’s claws and everything is bright.
A wafer thin and scraggy teenage street car racer named Skull pulls the black-haired girl down from the loading dock by her wrist. She stumbles to the ground with Skull looming over her. He walks toward his custom black GTI, “Let’s drive.”
“No way. You’re drunk as hell.”
“I ain’t drunk as hell.”
He sways back her way, “Watch.”
As he extends his arms and spins in lopsided circles, his heavy silver Skull ring connects with her cheek, slicing her skin.
Skull laughs, “Maybe I am drunk as hell.”
Will revs his Triumph to an eagle’s screech, and, standing on the pegs, he aims directly at Skull at full throttle. Laying the bike down, he starts in swinging. Skull connects to Will’s eye, and he shoves Skull to the ground.
He pulls an old knife with a heavy wooden handle from his boot and calmly places the tip of the blade to Skull’s cheek in the exact place the black-haired girl’s cheek was sliced, “Watch.”
He slices Skull’s cheek, clean and easy to stitch. Skull is dumbfounded. All he can do is bleed.
The other kids fall silent as Will slowly stands, sheathes the knife, picks his bike up and swings a leg over. He extends his hand to the black-haired girl, “Come on.”
She lifts her boombox and walks as slow as possible to the bike, slides on, and they’re gone.
Skull leaps to his feet, “Who’s coming?!”
Nobody’s coming. Everybody’s eyes to the sky.
“Fuck y’all.”
He limps to his GTI, cranks Boston and peels out of the lot, slamming into a railing and fishtailing onto a two lane county road, speeding after the Triumph.
Will and the black-haired girl are making good time, her long hair streaming in the wind.
She holds tight to Will and nearly allows a smile, as he glances to the rearview to catch a glimpse of Skull’s GTI at a distance behind, moving fast.
Will’s bike sways to the wind-wake of an oncoming pick-up truck speeding by them towards Skull’s car.
He glances back, just as the pick-up swerves head-on into Skull, bursting into a Schoenberg of glass, metal, desert dirt and fire.
Will glides, u-turns and rides back to find Skull slumped over the steering wheel, both arms reaching through the windshield, eyes open, in lifeless shock, More Than a Feeling ringing through the last waves of his mind.
The black-haired girl says a prayer all her own, as Will pulls back onto the road. She holds tight and closes her eyes, letting the wind try to dry the blood, still fresh on her cheek.
Beyond late and under a full moon, the black-haired girl sits on a colorfully graffitied concrete wall, under a railroad trestle with her elbow on her boombox, while Will skips rocks down the tracks.
She kicks the heel of her boot into the concrete, “Quit skipping rocks.”
“Sorry.” Will lets the rocks drop from his hand.
She squints her eyes, “Quit moving. You’re always moving.”
“I know.” He blushes, “Can’t help it. Sorry.”
“Come on up here and sit down. Console me.”
Will slides himself onto the wall beside her. She lays her hand onto the cold concrete between them, “Hold my hand.”
He swallows and slowly takes her hand.
She looks to his hand, “Is that grease or oil?”
He shrugs, “Little of both.”
They sit in silence with her looking one way down the tracks and him looking the other until she lets go of his hand, “It’s past three, you better go home. Your Mama must be worried.”
Will slides down the wall and scans the ground for skipping rocks, “My Mama don’t worry.”
“Your Pop?”
Words that Will doesn’t mean to speak come rolling out of his mouth, “My Pop lives in New York City in my Ma’s family house. He left us for his assistant and they got a son of their own. He don’t care about me, never did. Can’t trust him. He’d slice me in a second.”
Will notices her staring and catches himself, “Did I speak out of turn?”
She shakes her head.
“My dad’s an asshole, too. Left when I was six.”
He picks up a perfect skipping rock, “Can I please skip this rock?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“Thanks.” Will skips the rock, twelve skips.
She realizes they’re wearing the exact same clothes and finds that pretty cool, “Nobody’s waiting on you?”
“Scratch is always awake, but he ain’t waiting up for me. He never sleeps. My uncle Francis doesn’t sleep much either. We take drives most nights. The only time he can fall asleep is when I drive him through the night, sometimes into the day, too. But, he’s got his own concerns, he’s not waiting on me.”
He skips another rock, “Then there’s Saint Christopher, but Chris watches out for everybody.”
“Saint Christopher, the saint?”
“Patron Saint of Travelers, yeah.”
She stares.
Will searches for another skipping rock, “He’s an outlaw now that they took his sainthood away. He works just as much as he always did, only on his own. Outside the law.”
She watches him skip another rock, “How old are you?”
Will stands up straight, “I’m almost sixteen and a half. So, I’m, like, seventeen, almost.”
“Okay.”
He trips on a rock and regains his composure, “How about you, how old are you?”
She turns up the collar on her Levi’s jacket,“Come here.”
As Will approaches, she unties her orange bandanna and takes her time tying it around his neck, “A long time ago, when a man did a good deed for a woman, she’d give him her scarf to wear.”
Will notices that her eyes are so deep that looking into them is what it must be like to be traveling in an endless high speed tunnel of whirling kaleidoscope lights. He also notices that his every breath brings with it a feeling so overwhelming that he loses all sense of time and space.
The black-haired girl looks up to the full moon, “Your heart is beating really loud and fast. I can literally hear it.”
“Been riding all day. Ain’t eaten.”
The black-haired girl places her hands on Will’s head and gently kisses him on the forehead, “Thank you.”
The ground falls away under his boots, leaving him floating in the stillness of an even newer and brighter world.
He tries to swallow, “What’s your name?”
She slinks off the wall, grabs a rock and skips it fourteen times, then slinks back up on the wall, “You from around here?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never seen you in school.”
“Don’t go to school.”
“You home school?”
“I don’t school at all.”
He shrugs, “My uncle feeds me all kinds of books. We got a big old library, I can read whatever I want. Odyssey. Don Quixote. There’s so much to read. I get overwhelmed with how many books there are, I want to read them all.”
He shoots her a glance, “Am I talking too much?”
“No.”
“We tell a lot of stories, passed down. True stories about where we live. Desert magic stories.”
She weaves a braid, “What about math, you learn math?”
He glances at her with a quick smile, “I learn math from my Mama, we play math all the time.”
“Cool.”
He shrugs, “Do you play math?”
“I hate math.”
“Whole world’s made of math. Even time is made of math.”
“Yeah, I know. I get it and I’m good at it. I just hate it.”
She gets lost in his hands again, the grease, “You work on cars?”
“I work on my bike and old trucks. Big rigs. Drive them, too.”
“Like, trucks?”
“I’ve been driving trucks since I’m eight.”
“Bullshit.”
Will finds a rusted railroad spike and picks it up, “On my eighth birthday, my uncle Francis drove me out to the desert in an old International semi cab. He put some blankets on the driver’s seat and taped wood blocks onto the pedals so I could reach them. He told me to drive him home. Once I figured out the gear system, I didn’t get out of that cab for three days, just couldn’t stop moving, driving, day and night. I still have the International, I’ll always keep it. I work on it all the time. Worked on it this morning. You got something you need me to fix? I can do anything.”
“What’s with the hair?”
“Pompadour.”
“You got a black eye.”
“Yeah.” He smiles, “I get a lot of those.”
She slinks off the wall, walks to his bike, kick starts it and revs the motor high, “Drop the rocks. Grab the boombox.”
Will grabs her boombox, hops on the bike and hangs on as she stands on the pegs and works the knobby tires through the rocks and out into a full moon ultramarine star sprinkled night.
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