I turned thirteen in September 1969, but it all started when I
nearly got kilt by the snake in August. Or maybe in July when the diviner came
to Green Acres to find water for our new home. Or maybe even when I got born
again again in June. The stories are all mixed up together now.
In July, after the astronauts walked on the moon, we left home on
Renoir Drive in Jacksonville, Florida, and moved down to our farm, Green Acres,
for a vacation. First Mom made us watch them stake the flag of the United
States of America into that whole other place out in space, which seemed kind
of like magic, that one small step for man and all those neat-o no-gravity
leaps for mankind. But then we turned off the t.v., locked up our squatty
concrete-block house in the suburbs, and drove out to the farm through a maze
of dirt roads, all us kids—me and my little brother, Lee, and his friend,
Buddy, and my best friend, Ricki Ann—in the back of the pickup truck, bouncing
into each other over the bumps.
Our farm is called Green Acres on account of that’s Dad’s favorite
t.v. show, and our place is kind of broke down like that too. At home on Renoir
Drive, we watched every week, Lee and me singing along to the chorus: “Green
Acres is the place to be, farm livin’ is the life for me, land spreadin’ out so
far and wide, keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside.…” I know the words
to the second verse too—“New York is where I’d rather be.….”—but I just mumble
them, because the hazy city skyline and ZaZa’s accent and her eyelids painted
like Ricki Ann’s made me feel funny inside. Dad always used to snort at
Arnold-the-Pig jokes and city-slicker Oliver’s schemes before he dozed off in
his Laz-E Boy lounger, and Mom always came in from doing dishes and said, “Ed,
that story’s so stupid it’s funny.” But she wouldn’t have woke him up—none of
us would’ve—because no telling what he would do.
Our Green Acres has a shack made out of tar paper and tin that we
slept in on vacation, and fifteen head of cattle—I named them names like
Bessie, Martha, and Karen, pretending that nobody was going to eat them. There
are cedar Christmas trees in almost straight rows that Dad planned to sell in
town in December and a garden of long lazy watermelons with dark green stripes
and pale bellies that he was going to take to the farmer’s market. Dad’s
practically a farmer. When he was a
boy he plowed up stones in the mountains at his home on a farm near Birmingham
and picked tobacco for pocket money, but now he does regular work like at the
docks or on construction crews, except when he’s laid off like last summer.
Mom’s parents are still farmers, bringing us corn and tomatoes, mustard greens,
tiny brown field peas, bruised strawberries, squash, and okra from their garden
in Georgia, especially when Dad’s not working. Our white chest freezer is
always full of frosty vegetables, dead cows, and the frozen pizzas that Mom
buys when they’re “On Special, 2 for $1.” Dad told Mom that Green Acres was an
investment, because they’re not making any more land, but when we went there in
July, us kids riding in the bed of the truck, me bumping into Ricki Ann through
the maze of dirt roads, it felt like going backwards and forward at once.
When we got to the shack at Green Acres after the moon walk, Mom
sent me and Ricki Ann to the pump out back to fetch water for Koolaid and
cooking. “Watch out for snakes, Virginia,” she yelled like always. We followed
the path between blackberry stickers into the cool, dark clearing under oak
trees. The pump seemed like an old wizard, all crusty with rust, the dirt
around it stamped down black and damp in a circle.
“Cool,” Ricki Ann whispered.
I primed the pump by pouring in a coffee can full of water, then
push-pulled push-pulled push-pulled on the long handle. It squeaked and
groaned, stiff at first, until far away, down inside its throat, somewhere deep
in the earth, we heard a gurgling. In Florida, water comes from rivers in
caverns underground—veins of blue through limestone—the aquifer. We heard
something like the catch in your throat before you cough, a kind of voice from
under ground, and I told Ricki Ann to stick her head under the spout.
“Ye-ow!” she yelled when the water rushed up and out. She jumped
back, spluttering. “No way!” she said. “That’s too cold.”
“Then you pump,” I said, and put my face under the stream, so
clear and cold it made my head ache. In the summer in Florida, the days get so
hot and still you can’t hardly move, and the steam hangs over the bahia grass
in mirages, and the cicadas and tree frogs scream one note forever. But through
the water rushing up from the aquifer and over my eyes, everything seemed new
that day. I looked at Ricki Ann, wavery, pumping the handle, until I finally
had to jump back, gasping with the cold myself. The world whole world became sharp
and clear and cool and light.
That night, Dad unfurled the big blue scrolls of our house
plans—two stories, just like Yankee houses in picture books—and we all studied
them. We were going to move down to the farm forever someday. The site where
Dad was going to build our new home was across the cow pasture and past the
tree house, almost in the middle of our sixty acres, far from the shack and the
old pump. Dad looked up from the blueprint scroll, his face as serious as when
he reads from the Bible before Sunday dinner, and said, “We’re gonna need a new
well.” And that’s why the diviner came.
“Man, he’s old,” I said to Ricki Ann, watching the diviner from
the treehouse. He had a cool old truck and a big yeller dog that sat in the bed
with drool dripping off his tongue.
“It’s in his hands,” said Ricki Ann. Lying flat on the plywood
floor, we spied while the diviner walked down the pasture with my dad. His
hands were at his sides, but they were alive, even just hanging there while he
talked. He kept his shoulders and his elbows stiff, but his palms twitched out
every now and then, like butterfly wings. His hands were pale, not calloused,
even though everything else about him was rough: patched overalls, all grimed
and dusty; straw hat full of holes, shadowing his face; and his neck was like a
plucked chicken’s, bones and stringy stuff sticking out under his skin. Ricki
Ann was right; his hands were like they belonged to some other kind, the palms
so white you could almost see through them.
When I looked over at her, the blue of Ricki Ann’s eyes seemed
almost washed away, but the eye shadow on her eyelids was dusty and solid. Her
blond lashes were like ghost feathers. I pressed my body and my cheek flat to
the plywood…as flat as I could get with my stupid new boobs pressing back into
my heart. Ricki Ann watched the diviner without blinking. I closed my eyes.
Dad left. I heard his gruff chuckle, the muffled clomp-clomp of
his work boots on the dirt path headed toward the far pasture, and the hairs on
the back of my neck shivered like always even though I knew he hadn’t seen us.
And then quiet. Then the swish of bahia grass, a light step and a pause: the
diviner. Something rustled against the floor, a thrum in my ear. I opened my
eyes. Ricki Ann’s left boob—hers just a swelling, like something trying to
break surface—was beside my face. Maybe it was her heart that thumped.
I looked down again. The diviner cocked his head toward us,
listening. We didn’t breathe. His fingers fluttered once, like playing a quick
scale on the piano, or like the way a snake’s tongue tastes the air for
movement. He walked to a willow tree, reached into his pocket for a little
knife, and cut a branch, the blade glittering and bright. He trimmed the leaves
gently, as if undressing something he loved, not at all the way we stripped our
Barbies down for their costume changes. I could feel my own fingertips in my
damp hand, wanting to twitch, and something cool like leaves between my chest
and the wood floor. Ricki Ann breathed a sigh, and I felt her damp air stir the
little hairs on my neck.
The diviner closed his eyes up toward the sun through a break in
the tree branches, and the shadows made his face all dappled and spotted. The
willow branch balanced on his thin papery fingertips, held by his thumbs. His
nostrils moved in and out, in and out. Then the wrinkles in his face went flat,
smooth in the light. His long legs strode out, and he seemed to slide along
behind them, moving fast, pacing like he was measuring the land or being pulled
by that branch in his hands.
Me and Ricki Ann choked, trying not to laugh out loud. He looked
weird, tromping on those long legs across the flat pasture, right through cow
pies and tall grass, between rows of cedar Christmas trees, over rabbit holes
and gopher tortoise holes, not caring about Sid the Brahma bull or snakes or
anything, with his eyes rolled back in his head, looking up but not seeing the
fat clouds in the blue sky. When he got
far enough away we scrambled down the tree—the worn-through place in the butt
of Ricki Ann’s cutoffs leaking clear skin right in my face we were in such a
hurry—and skulked along the fence-line, following the diviner.
He stopped. We held our breath. His eyes focused on the tip of the
twig. And I saw it. The tip tugged down, the branch straining against his
thumbs. Just once, like the end of a fishing pole when you get a nibble. A
chill ran up the back of my neck, as if water had splashed up from the dark
blue caverns of the aquifer. Ricki Ann’s eyes met mine, wide, made wider by her
blue eye shadow. She had seen it too.
The diviner tossed the branch away, and Ricki Ann gasped. I felt it too. It was like a lover—like on All
My Children—abandoned. Wasn’t it any good anymore? Was the magic all used
up?
The diviner reached in his back pocket for his knife, looked
around, and cut a long stake from a sapling, which he poked in the ground. He
tied an orange flag on top. All the time I watched the willow twig, cast into
the weeds.
The snake happened in August, a couple of weeks after the diviner
drove away in his blue truck, the dog bouncing in the bed of the pickup,
grinning with the smells and the ride backwards into the maze of dirt roads. I
think that’s another story. Not the diviner story. But they get mixed up in my
head because of the magic. Was it magic that kept me from getting kilt? I want
to think it was God, but that doesn’t seem right, any more than what the
diviner did was God.
On Sundays at the farm, we sat on the sofa and listened to First
Baptist Church on the scratchy radio. I prayed for Ricki Ann’s soul the whole
time.
I had got saved again just before the astronauts walked on the
moon and we came to Green Acres for vacation. I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ
into my heart and became a Christian for the second time on account of the
first time didn’t seem to take. I think I heard Him calling me that day in
church, I must have. My heart beat fast, sweat rolling down my neck, legs
clammy under panty hose, my stomach empty. When Pastor Bob talked about
e-ternal hell and the Lord coming soon to rapture up all His children, I felt
scared. I didn’t want to be left on earth alone with all the sinners, dope
dealers, murderers and Buddhists. Standing there thinking about junior high
school in the fall, hanging onto the pew with my hands all cramped up and my
eyes squeezed so shut I was seeing stars during the invitation to be saved, I
thought I’d explode. I heard my ears ringing. It had to be Jesus calling me up
to the front to be saved, even though I thought I was already. So I went. I
stepped out into the aisle and just followed my feet down the plush red carpet
path, people wailing on the fourth or fifth verse of “Ju-ust as I a-am,
with-ou-out one plea….”And when Pastor Bob hugged me into his suit, smelling
like Dad’s Old Spice and dry cleaner chemicals, I told him that I needed to get
saved. And he said, “Didn’tcha get saved when you were a little girl?” And I
told him I couldn’t remember nothing from that time when I was six. “I don’t
think it took,” I said. And he said, “Praise God!” and passed me on to Brother
Floyd, who always kind of scared me because he’d get the spirit now and then
and start speaking in tongues, which sounded a lot like his mouth was full of
marbles, and sometimes even start drooling or foaming and have to be took out.
But he was a deacon, like my dad, and he’d led tons of souls to Jesus, so I
followed along with him in his Bible and prayed the words he told me to
pray—“Lord Jesus, I confess that I am a sinner, and I come to you asking you to
forgive me and come into my heart, Amen”—and he hopped up and yelled “Praise
Jeeezsus!” And I was saved. Everybody came and shook my hand or hugged me, and
Mom cried, and that night I got baptized again. I did remember that from when I
was six, because I remember it scared me, like the preacher was pushing me
under to drown me. This time I kept my eyes open and I could see all the people
in the congregation through the glass front window of the baptismal pool, all
blurry and wavy and blue-green from the water, and I knew to hold my breath and
how to grab the preacher’s arm, and he said the words with a pause when he
pushed me under so I could hear them: “Buried in the likeness of His death”—big
chlorine breath in, hold it, push down under the water, faces, I hope my robe doesn’t float up to show my
underwear, then up, breathing in again—“raised up in the likeness of His
resurrection.” And I was saved. Praise God.
Ricki Ann wasn’t saved at all back then, and I almost didn’t want
to go to heaven without her. I sat on the sofa on Sunday at the farm, her
sweaty leg stuck to mine, and I prayed for her. I didn’t want to leave my best
friend on earth with the other lost sinners when Jesus came back to rapture us
Christians up to heaven. I wanted to be the one to lead her to the Lord, to
give my personal testimony about being saved and have that story inspire her to
want to get saved too, but I kept getting mixed up about what to say.
Soon as the diviner left, Ricki Ann rushed over and snatched up the
willow stick. She closed her eyes and
stepped out wide. She walked back and forth, back and forth across the pasture,
balancing the twig on her fingertips, just like the diviner. Nothing. Even over
the place marked with the orange flag—the place where we’d both seen the stick
tugged down by water, cool and damp and deep—nothing.
“Give it,” I said, and grabbed the stick from her. I tilted my
head way back, the sun making orange halos inside my eyelids, and tried to feel
any quiver in the thin twigs between my thumbs and fingertips. I made myself
put my feet way out, trying to stride like the diviner had, but I heard Mom’s
rhymes about snakes in my head—red on
yellow; kill a fellow and cotton
mouth, black as sin—and stumbled and opened my eyes.
“You cain’t look,” Ricki Ann said. “Ya gotta feel it.” She
snatched the twig back and tried again, the blue of her eye shadow twitching on
her lids, closed into the white hot sun.
She walked with wide swishing steps on short, skinny legs, her thighs
brushed by tall green Bahia grass. Her small chin and pointed little boobs
poking out through her t-shirt seemed to be leading her down the pasture. I
felt dizzy in the heat. I stood very still beside the orange flag, waiting for
something to happen.
What happened was the snake. What happened was me flying, flying
apart. What happened was me starting to backslide. Now I think maybe the snake
was always there, lying silent and cool in the deep swamp below the spring. I
think it was there on the day when the diviner came, even though I didn’t know
it then. I think it was there before I was twelve-going-on-thirteen, before I
got saved again. What kept it alive in my head?
About a week after the diviner had come and gone, we were lying on
the tree house floor on our bellies again. The diviner’s stick hung from a stub
of a branch on the main tree trunk. I made my Skipper walk back and forth, back
and forth. Ricki Ann’s Barbie was taking a nap in the sleeping bag she had made
out of a sock. It was one of those days when you could hardly move, the air so
thick it was like walking through the thin sticky soup that’s left after you
eat all the noodles.
“Wanna look for rabbits?” I said, trying to think of stuff to do
so Ricki Ann wouldn’t get bored and want to go home to town.
“Too hot,” Ricki Ann said. Her chin rested on the backs of her
hands and when she moved her mouth, her head went up and down.
“Lee and Buddy might wanna play Monopoly,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “Ugh,” she grunted. “They’re sooo stupid.”
“Yeah.” My brother and his friend are just a year younger, but
boys are naturally dumb.
“They’ll just cheat anyway,” Ricki Ann said.
“Too bad we can’t ride Gus,” I sighed. Dad said the mule was way
too tired for us kids to be riding on him in the heat after he tried to lie
down with Lee and Buddy both on her. That was funny though. Lee ended up right
in a cow flop, a fresh one too.
Skipper paced back and forth, back and forth. Her hair was almost
military short, just shaggy enough in the back to touch her collar. In the
Barbie family, Skipper is my favorite. She has almost no boobs at all and her
hair is the same brown as mine. Ken’s just weird with that smooth bump between
his legs, but his clothes are cool for Skipper to wear. Barbie is like this
perfect movie star grown-up lady, nobody you can think is real, but Ricki Ann
liked messing with her hair and dressing her up in gowns and tiny high-heeled
shoes. I only talked her into this camping trip scene by telling her that Ken
might show up in his sports car later. The oak leaves whispered a dry scraping
sound overhead. Ricki Ann adjusted Barbie’s arms so they were outside her
sleeping bag. A cow mooed low and sad off in the distance. Skipper hesitated. I
don’t know what she was thinking standing there beside Barbie, the pasture
beyond hazy with heat mirages. It was like my arm was disconnected from me.
Like Skipper was part of it but not me. She swooped down and kissed Barbie on
the mouth, lying on top of her.
“Yech,” said Ricki Ann, and I grabbed Skipper back up, my face
hot. What was wrong with her? Ricki Ann looked at me, her eye-shadowed blue
lids squinted down over her eyes like she was thinking something hard.
I was blushing, I could feel it. It happens lots these days and I
hate it. Lee always points and laughs and calls me “flame face.” I sat up.
Ricki Ann still looked at me funny, twisted around, lying on her stomach.
“I know,” I said, “let’s go explore the creek.” My brain was
humming I was thinking so fast. What had Skipper been doing? The words jumbled
out of my mouth; my tongue felt thick. “The creek. Maybe there’s treasure. It’s
like jungle with all those vines and stuff back behind the spring. Like a
jungle. Maybe we’ll find caves or something. The water has to come from
somewhere. Maybe caves where it comes up from the aquifer.” I wanted to choke,
to drink something cold, to shut up, disappear.
Ricki Ann’s eyes slid shut in a slow blink, the water on her
eyeball hiding something behind it. After a minute of staring down into the
pasture she said, “Least it’ll be cool.”
When Mom tells the story about me and the snake, she always says,
“You girls were white as sin,” and her eyes go wide. “Funny,” she says, “you
could’a died.”
Cicadas whirred. The air was still and thick. When we crossed the
barbed wire fence, I held the wires apart for Ricki Ann like you’re supposed
to, stepping down on the lower strand with my sneaker and pulling up on the
middle wire to make a space, and she brushed my leg as she passed through. My
face flamed again. Barbie and Skipper lay back in the tree house, still and
lifeless.
After an hour or maybe a few minutes or maybe forever, we were so
deep into the woods that the earth had been swallowed up by the creek, which
wasn’t a creek anymore, just tea-brown water everywhere. It seemed as if nobody
since Adam and Even had been there, at least not since the Indians. There were
tracks of deer and coons and something big, maybe a bear. We had to hold onto
thick ropes of grape vine for balance and shinny around cypress trees, hugging
the soft bark and stepping on the lumps of root they call knees to stay out of
the muck. Our sneakers were black with it. There were no caves. The aquifer
just seeped up through a mud sieve of swamp, or maybe the swamp seeped down
into the aquifer. It was dark and quiet, except for the background scream of
tree frogs. I hoped Ricki Ann had forgotten Barbie and Skipper.
“Let’s jump across to that bank,” I said. “We can go back on the
other side.”
“Long as we can go back,” Ricki Ann said. Her fingertips brushed
mine as she rounded the other side of the tree after me. I wanted to look at
her eyes but I couldn’t.
I bunched my thighs and leapt across a trickle of water, feeling
that shiver from her touch like cool water travel up my arm. My feet sank into
the sand. “Uhh,” I said as I landed. I looked around.
Big and black as a truck tire, loop on top of lazy loop: the
snake. It tasted the air, tongue fluttering out like the diviner’s fingers,
trying to catch my movement, my heat. I saw a white mouth, fangs. Cotton mouth, black as sin; hell’s gate, moccasin.
“Ssssnake,” I whispered. “Snake.” I felt frozen.
Ricki Ann looked at me then the same way she had looked at me in
the tree house. Her eyelashes disappeared. Eye shadow streaked blue sweat down
the corners of her eyes and across her cheeks.
“Help,” I moaned, “get help.” My heart swelled into my throat.
“Sssnake.”
The watery blue of Rikki Ann’s eyes thinned, then she opened them
wide. She screamed, but I didn’t hear
anything, just watched her mouth like a pale pink cave, that thing that stuck
down in the back of her throat waggling. She turned and ran, aiming for cypress
knees, slipping off, her sneakers being sucked down into the mud. Then, when
she was gone, I heard her screams echoing like inside a room with water walls,
and I heard myself moaning. I felt the snake, heavy, in the small part of my
back, in the skin under the collar of my t-shirt, my hands, my thighs, my feet,
zinging and numb. I heard my heart thudding like it was waterlogged, moving
slow in time.
Now, it’s funny, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t remember
leaping away.
No muscles contracted; I didn’t move anything at all. Suddenly I
was up in the air—like flying, like maybe the Rapture will feel, no-gravity—and
the dark water down. I heard a thud in the sand behind me. Thunk. I hugged the cypress tree on the other side again, like
magic, like nothing had happened.
But when I looked back, the snake lay uncoiled, stretched out in a
thick, black line between my footprints—filling with water already—on the other
side.
I ran without feeling anything. I heard only my heart up in my
throat saying thunk, thunk, thunk. I
thought, snake. Big snake. Footprints. Brown water. I wanted to barf but kept
running. Then Ricki Ann’s screaming changed, and I could hear that. I followed
her sound. She wailed, something rushing up and out. Thunk said my heart up by my tongue, and I gagged, swallowing it
down. Thunk. Snake. Big snake. Cotton mouth, black as sin; hell’s gate, moccasin.
Ricki Ann hung by her hand, just below the thumb, on the barbed
wire fence. A whimpering scream escaped from her open mouth like air out of a
tire. She looked at me as if I wasn’t real, her eyes so wide I couldn’t even
see the blue on her eyelids. She had no color at all, like the blood was
plugged up somewhere inside. I thought I must look like that too. I grabbed her
hand and held it steady. I unhooked her thumb from the wire, lifting the hard,
taut metal back and up, feeling her gaze on my face. Both our palms were ice
cold. I felt her pulse in her wrist, one hard, sluggish beat. Thunk. And then mine. Thunk. Something seemed to rustle when
the wire slipped out of the base of her thumb, and I watched a big blob of
blood well up. As if I was in a trance, I lifted her palm to my mouth. I tasted
the thunk of her pulse against my
tongue. When I looked up, her eyes were turquoise smooth, like a swimming pool,
not blinking.
Ricki Ann got saved after we took her home. Her letter to me, back
at the farm, said, “I took Jesus Christ into my heart as my personal Lord and
Savior. Pastor Bob baptized me on Sunday after the tent meeting.” On the last
day of our summer vacation, her letter, all creased and wrinkled from me
carrying it around and reading it again and again, lay on the treehouse floor
next to Skipper, a postcard from Robert E. Lee Junior High School that gave my
homeroom number, and Ricki Ann’s plastic case of blue eye shadow. Some days,
when everything was still except the glittering white shimmer of evaporating
steam over fields of green Bahia grass, I took the diviner’s stick down and
balanced it on my fingers. Sometimes I walked over the earth alone trying to
feel something move in my hands.
Mom had said “Praise the Lord!” when I told her about what Ricki
Ann’s letter said, and I’d said “Yeah, praise God” back, but deep down I was
just sorry it wasn’t me that showed her The Way, The Truth, and The Light.
I dreamed about her baptism, almost like I was underneath the
water with her in the blurry blue light. Her hair floated around her face like
thin little snakes. She shut her eyes tight. Her robe started to swirl up and I
could see her underpants, so I tried to reach out—to pull her robe down, I
guess—but my hand smacked into the glass and her eyes opened wide like when I
pulled the barbed wire out of her thumb. In my dream, I pressed my face to the
glass, and I woke up feeling that cold flatness on my lips.
I wondered if swimming in the caves of the aquifer would be like
in the baptismal pool—all blue light and cold and silent.
At least that dream wasn’t the snake dream. Back home on Renoir
Drive with junior high only a week away, I kept waking up with that thunk in my head, my heart thunk-thunking back. Sometimes I thought
there were snakes all over my floor and I was afraid to get up to go find Mom
so I just hid under the covers and cried like a stupid baby. Sometimes I tasted
blood, like from Ricki Ann’s hand. Sometimes I tried to untangle the magic from
God, but I kept getting mixed up, like with the stories. Sometimes I would
stick my tongue out, trying to taste the place where the snake waited in the
dark like it tasted the air for me. Instead, I tasted the dust of the drive
back to town that night, Ricki Ann in the cab between Mom and Dad while I
bounced alone in the pickup bed. Dad had shot the snake and hung it up from the
clothesline pole, longer than he was tall and as thick as his arm,
cotton-mouthed, black as sin, and Ricki Ann said she wanted to go home.
I didn’t tell anybody about my tongue on Ricki Ann’s hand and the
taste of her blood, not even God in my prayers. It felt like I should say
something, but I didn’t know how to tell the story. All the stories were mixed
up together. Maybe it was a story that was just beginning.
I could feel something in the dark, and maybe it was the big
snake, even though it was dead. I knew
it was dead. Dad made me walk back through the swamp with him and his gun and
point to the place where I had hugged the cedar tree, jumped, and then flown back
like the Rapture. I had pointed, my hand shaking and pale. “Dumb,” I’d heard
him mutter. Or maybe it was “Damn,” but he doesn’t cuss. And then, behind me as
I stumbled back to the farmhouse, looking for snakes in every twisted vine, the
gun had boomed, echoing the thunk of
my heart. I knew the snake was dead
because Dad made me look at it after he’d hung it, thick and black, from the
pole, as long as he was tall, like a shadow beside him. “You’d be dead now,”
Dad said. And that’s when I fainted like a girl, sliding backward into
darkness.
That last day of summer, before I turned thirteen, I laid back on
the hard plywood floor of the tree house at Green Acres, the sun almost
directly overhead, and closed my eyes to a little slit to look at the moon, which
was down low in the east, round and pale in blue sky. I thought I could almost
see the little flag the astronaut had staked into it, could almost feel the
no-gravity up there in the dark. I opened the eye shadow case Ricki Ann had
left and touched the soft powder. It stuck to my fingertips and when I closed
my hand it smudged the inside of my palms like bruises. I lifted my legs up and
grabbed my bare feet and then they were streaked with blue too. I drew a blue
heart on my chest just above the edge of my tank top. I don’t know why.
When I rolled onto my side, Skipper was staring dumbly up into the
sky. Her hair was shaggy and uneven. I stripped her of Ken’s dress shirt and
Bermuda shorts and painted her with blue eye shadow all over. The cool plastic
of her stupid little nose and her stupid flat chest and her stupid little butt
was slick under my fingertip. I hated her. I folded her up, bent her legs as
far as they’d go, her nose to her knees, and stood up and stuffed her into the
knot hole that’s hidden on the other side of the oak tree trunk. The bahia
grass shimmered in the pasture below, and mirages blurred the full moon on the
horizon.
Skipper is still there, I guess. After we got back home to Renior
Drive, Mom told Dad we were going to have to sell the farm because he was still
out of work, and nobody but my little brother watched the show called Green Acres after that. The new well
into the aquifer won’t ever get dug. We won’t move. I started junior high. I
turned thirteen. The snake is dead, but it is still waiting for me in the dark.
When I pick up the diviner’s stick, I keep hoping to feel something magic in my
hands.