Short Story

THE FALLS

by

Beverly Carol Lucey
 

The window in the top left corner of the peeling gray house frames a cross-eyed Rebekkah. She's watching the road from between two bedspread curtains. The houses on this street sag all defeated like. Not worth painting. Bekka nibbles the green glitter polish off her right thumb. She wants a tattoo, but doesn't know where people get them.

Lately she's snuck out some nights, when everyone thinks she's up there just drawing weird animals in her room, like usual. She's met a few boys. The ones who hang out near Tubb's don't care one way or the other when she shows up. Long as she keeps her mouth shut. Long as she looks impressed when they talk about the things they've done, and the dumb things they are planning. She could live or die. Show up or not. But last week a new face asked her name. First one who ever did.

Now, Guy has just coasted next to the hedge with his Chevy idling, right at nine, like they said. She's leaving for good. Tonight is the night. No one notices her sliding out the back door with the frayed gym bag.

Behind her in the house, there is yelling and whispers. In the back seat of the car outside are two sleeping bags, a puffy eyed cat, and a cooler. He looked to have all the stuff they needed. Just like he said. Rebekkah is going to smoke a cigarette, turn the radio dial any time she wants to, stretch and yawn real loud. She's going to feed Jasper, and pet his fur, if Guy lets him out of the screen box. She's going to let her hand rest on Guy's leg, and who knows what after that.

Once in the car she realizes he isn't talking very much. Rebekkah keeps shooting sharp looks over at the boy's bony chin. His hands hold the wheel exactly parallel and his shoulders meld into the back of the worn, woven green bench seat. He has looked at her only once since she's gotten in. Trying to get his eye, Bek rolls down the window, then spins the knob about five times and takes a deep, deep breath. She sticks her head out of the car frame and yells like a rodeo guy. No one would let her go to the traveling fair last year, so she hid behind some bushes and heard this cowboy yelling, "Whooh yaw!"

From another leafy clump she'd watched her step brothers glue each other up with their gummed up cones of pink and green cotton candy. She'd spied her dad and his hussy wife Missy walking and stopping at every booth, laughing and bumping hips. If she'd gotten caught she'd have been dead. Step-mothers ruined everything.

But now, tonight, she finally yells out the whoops and joy she's only overheard, the ones always seemed to be coming from the next house over, or out on the street past the hedge or in the smart kids' classes in the rooms across and down the hall at school.

None of that matters now. She is out and she is never going back.

When Bek was four, her mother had died having another baby. Pa told her that Ma got sicker at the hospital. Rebekkah was pretty sure her ma just must have got sick of her, else why would she go bother having another one. Then Missy came with two sticky boys of her own. Plus, not one kid in school ever said anything sweet. They'd fired the one nice teacher. In these twelve years since, she'd mostly been told to go to her room and think about her place in the family and whether she deserved to stay.

"Take that you stupid Gai-ther-ton! I hate you all! You rotten...you..." Then she laughs and looks back in to see if Guy is smiling at her but he isn't. She reaches back into the cooler and chooses an orange Nehi to start. She'd traded a camping knife with Bobby Wallace last Saturday after he caught her looking in his back yard. Said he'd give her the knife if she let him unzip her sweatshirt and see what she got under. He'd squeezed at her a few times but now she didn't care. She just pops the cap off that bottle as pure as you please with one of the swell knife attachments.

"Where are we goin', Guy? You said a pretty place. Is it far?" But Guy has to slam on the brakes just then to avoid a deer that was all of a sudden in front of them, and he never answers. Rebekkah sees the lights go out at a one-pump store, then an old man comes out. The old man looks over at the screeching sound, then keeps moving to the side stairway and goes up some rickety steps to a half-lit couple of rooms. No streetlights are on and wet fog lazes on the headlights while the buck claps off into the woods.

When they get about fifty miles out of town, over in Franklin County, Guy pulls over to a rest stop and leads her giggling into the woods. The sound of rushing water gets really loud and a fuzzy half moon appears on top of a pointed fir. He is dragging her now, pulling on her to hurry.

"What about the cooler, Guy? What about the sleeping bags, Guy? Are we leaving Jasper alone? How are we gonna sleep without the bags, Guy? Guy? You know where you're goin? You got a house out here? Didn't you say we was goin' to find ourselves a place to live? Guy? I got a pain in my side from running so hard. I can't go no more for now. Don't be mad."

They are just at the edge of a ravine. The water falls so strongly that it shoots up spray to kiss the night mist. Rebekkah has never seen such natural beauty before. Her old mill town is a gritty place in summer, wears dirty slush in winter and in all the twelve years since Missy had come to fill the house, Rebekkah had never seen anything pretty except in a magazine.

Guy is breathing hard. He is looking right at her like the way he looked when he'd hatched the runaway plan. "I know where to go," he said last week. "I done this twice before." Part of his face always hangs still from Bell's palsy but the other half is finally smiling at her in the moonshine as one arm snakes around her waist and he faces her to the falls. "Just step out a little." He is nudging her, hiss panting. "You'll see something."

He promised her the most beautiful place in the world and now, at least for one wet suspended minute, she finally sees it.

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Beverly Carol Lucey has published short fiction in Portland Maine Magazine, Flint River Review 1999 (GA), Moxie Winter edition 2000 (CA) Four stories are anthologized in We Teach Them All (Stenhouse Press, Maine). Another is in the Quality Women’s Fiction, 2001 (UK). Four non-fiction pieces will appear in upcoming editions of the inspirational Chocolate for Women series.

Extensive presence online include ezines: Zoetrope All Story Extra, Vestal Review, CollectedStories.com, and Millennium Shift.

The author, a life long educator, lives in Georgia, and is a member of the Georgia Writers Association.

Visit her websites:
THE LANGUAGE WRANGLER on education.

POODLE PRESS - for animal lovers.

A WOMAN OF A CERTAIN AGE for humor and fun.

ETHICAL OASIS for everyday ethics.

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