Crime Doesn't Pay
Thinking about that Flip Flop (and boy what a flop) Lipgloss pushed my mind, my nose, my eyes back in time, a thousand miles away, to a small town named Sumner. I don't know what Sumner is like these days. My memories reach nineteen years into the past when I lived with my boyfriend in the short months before I got pregnant. But back then it was the color of raspberries and the smell of fertilized sod farms and the hot hard steel texture of railroad, and the taste of that lipgloss, the fresh round watermelon that dotted the fields two miles from our rented shack.
Our landlord owned a beat-up German shephard who loved nobody and nothing but eating water from a garden hose turned up high and me. Buddy hated his owner. Mr. Ewell tossed table scraps over the barbed fence and they landed in the dirt, sometimes on Buddy, sometimes in the cloudy water dish. He didn't have a dog house, didn't even have a collar. His coat looked like a relief map of a war-torn country and a cloud of fleas rose and fell with his breath. But Buddy liked me, and I snuck him cans of off-brand dog food I bought with my earnings from the Dairy Queen and in the dead of night I opened the gate and let him out to run.
We ran like the wind off of Puget Sound, the two of us, while Mr. Ewell slept dead drunk and my boyfriend sat watching hours of sitcom reruns on television. We ran to the place where the tracks met the country road and I'd pretend to be a famous Olympic gymnast on the balance beam, a Sumner Mary Lou Reton in stringy hair that smelled of burnt burgers and peanut parfaits. Buddy charged down the middle of the tracks, chasing shadows, chasing nothing, barking, no, howling, like a dog gone mad, gone happy.
All summer long I ate strawberries and raspberries. Some nights I stole beans from my landlord's garden. The Dairy Queen manager didn't let me eat the food no one would buy. It rotted in the trash while I starved, while my coworkers starved. He watched the trash like a bloated hawk.
Buddy and I watched the fields along the tracks. We saw blueberries grow plump, but they were protected by a tall wire fence. We saw more raspberries than you'd think could be possible, but weeks of berries left my mouth full of sores and seeds stuck between my teeth. One field was gold, though, and all summer I stopped my Olympic quest and made mental note of the fruit, watched it hatch from flopping yellow flowers, big round green fruit on thick vines. Watermelon. And no fence, no watchlights, no dogs, just the harsh ravine between the rail and the ground between us.
One night in the early fall the melons looked ready. I was three months pregnant and sick all day with nausea. Watermelon would quench my ills, I thought. My boyfriend wanted no part of a midnight snack raid two miles from home, so Buddy and I ran to the tracks, under cover of the new moon, only fireflies in the berry bushes lighting our path.
Walking train tracks at night in the country can be dangerous. Trains can sneak behind you, take you from this life. You need to feel your feet for the rumble, keep checking for the engine light, because the ravine on each side is steep and rocky and full of bramble bushes and the points of street intersection are few and spaced far apart. Some nights found me and Buddy running, tripping, breathing for our lives, train barrelling behind us. And this night, this watermelon operation night, was no exception. A quarter mile from the next street I felt the earth move and ran, ran for my life, Buddy far ahead, already waiting for me at the light.
I stopped in front of the melon field. A sea of hard green fruit fanned out before me, twelve feet below the track. I stepped off the rails and started placing one sideways foot before the other, slowly making my way down the ravine. The bushes stung with me tiny needles and a sharp rock tore through my thin sneaker before I reached the field.
I grabbed the closest big melon and pulled. Oh. Damn. The vine grew thick and I could not break it free. I twisted and tugged the melon, heaving, hyperventilating, stomping on the vine, everything I could. It took twenty minutes to break. The melon weighed twenty pounds and I groaned and gasped as I climbed back through the brambles and rocks to the track. I was two miles from home and every twenty rail ties I stopped to rest. Dawn started to break as I locked Buddy back in his prison and rolled the melon inside the shack. My boyfriend snored in the tiny bedroom, oblivious of the amazing treat we would be eating for days.
I searched the sink for the big knife, and failing to find it, went out to the barn for a small hand ax. I raised it above the melon and let the last of my strength fall into the fruit, breaking it apart in one blow.
It was an unripe pumpkin.
5:42:05 PM 
|
|
