Half Wild by Robin MacArthur Page A

didn’t offer to let me live with her, and I didn’t want to, even though that’s what the social worker had in mind. Twobirds with one stone, pretending I didn’t know it. But Hazel didn’t want me in her house, and I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be where Jimmy and I could screech like barn cats, fuck like bunnies, pop whatever kind of pill we want to. So I took the camper. “Down by the creek,” I said—not knowing that the sun wouldn’t shine here till eleven, that it would set at four—so my cousin pulled it down here to this little field that borders the water, dragged a two-hundred-foot run of extension cords down from the barn, and here I am now, three months later, calling it home.
    I light a cigarette and step outside, sit on the cement-block step and smoke it. I’m waiting for Jimmy to come. Needing Jimmy to come. The sun went down an hour ago, and the fields are turning that hazy blue of evening that I like, the color of smoke . I don’t have a license or a car and my cell phone doesn’t work here, so when I get dressed up at night I have to sit outside and wait like this for Jimmy to wonder where I am and decide to come pick me up. Sixteen years old and I crashed my mother’s Chevy in a ravine and walked out too quick to hide the half-empty bottle of Bacardi on the floor, and so here I am sitting in fields getting a nicotine buzz on with leather on my feet, a red dress running silky down my legs, my face all made up, and no one to see me but fireflies. Or maybe Hazel. I can’t see her windows from here, but sometimes I like to think about her up there at the top of the hill, like a fucking ninety-year-old goat, teeth all splayed, hobbling backand forth between the barn and the house. “Hazel,” I whisper. “You crazy old horse of a lady. How ’bout coming and getting high with me?” And then I giggle, picturing her smoking a cigarette or cracking open a beer, but I don’t mean anything by it, because really I like having her up there, that light streaking across the field late at night, the sound of doors closing, her lawn mower starting up night and day. “Fucking ghost-woman,” Jimmy calls her, rifling through her bathroom cabinets and stashing bottles in his pockets, and I laugh, and then he pulls me toward him onto her bed, and then we are back in that place, that heat and sweet pain and necessity, and oh my God I’m not thinking of Hazel then.
    But I don’t mind thinking of her now, smoking my Marlboro. That’s the name of a college town nearby, full of rich kids—Marlboro—which is the reason I’ve always smoked them: “Spelled like the cigarette,” I’ll say, grinning, because I like to think how I’m sitting out in a field smoking a cigarette but I’m also, in some abstract way that turns me on, smoking this place, the whole fucking mess of it: the rich assholes and the punk kids like me and the sad old ladies like Hazel and the do-gooder hippies turned into yuppies or stoners and the ones with second homes and ski chalets meant to look like The Sound of Music Swiss crap. Now when people ask where I’m from I say, “Vicksburg, like the song,” and giggle, though most people don’t know the song. Yeah, that’s my hometown. Six generations, baby. Crazy fucked-up place the Japanese and southern bus tourists think is pretty. “Leaves!” they cry out, their buses getting stuck on back roads, falling into ditches and making detours to find the second homes of movie stars. Whoopi Goldberg has a house near here. For real. And once a Japanese woman fell into a beaver pond trying to get a picture of a maple tree reflecting on water. Fuck yeah! I giggle, thinking of them dragging her up out of the water, pond muck and rotting leaves and algae dripping from her face and hair. “So pretty!” I giggle again. Jimmy, who was on the volunteer