Half Wild by Robin MacArthur Page B

fire department at the time, said the woman was fine, “just cold as a witch’s tits.”
    There’s still no sign of headlights coming down the river road toward me, so I get up and start walking. My cell only works once I hit the pavement, about a mile away, so I can’t even call Jimmy. He told me he’d be here by four and now it’s eight, and so I hope he’s at one of his buddy’s apartments: Duke of Hazzard and Skinny Lenny, that’s what Jimmy calls them, to their faces and behind their backs. They love it—grin their pocked faces and slap him five and say “Shit yeah” and know that Jimmy will be back tomorrow with however many OxyContin they want. That’s the kind of guy he is: the man. My man. Twenty-four-year-old Jimmy with a brand-new Jeep SUV and that beautiful win-you-over shit-eating grin, throwing fives down the front of my dress when we’re at parties, saying, “Shake it, Vale, come on, show me what you’ve got, shake it.” And just like a stripper I do.
    The river road that winds along this side of the field isn’t a real road, it’s just a dirt track packed from farm trucks and tractors, so the heels of my boots sink down into mud. I stumble but the grass is worn enough so I can see where I’m going. Just a skinny moon—Skinny Lenny moon—coming up behind Hazel’s hill, turning my dress all shiny crimson. I didn’t grow up in fields like this; I grew up in Nelson, and it was only once a month or so that my mom would drop me off out here to throw hay bales up onto a truck with my cousin Danny or make strawberry jam in June with Hazel. My mom would never stick around. “It’s like hillbilly central out there , ” she’d say, flicking her cigarette out the window, as if this wasn’t where she’d been fucking born and grown up and lost her virginity, no doubt, in some field like this one, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mind it then, getting away from her and her shit. I don’t even mind it now, for the summer: this trippy field down by the water and crazy Hazel on her tractor (how many girls have tractor-driving great-aunts?) and the camper all my own where I’ve hung a picture of me as a baby and a picture of me and Jimmy last summer, swimming, and my collection of miniature owls. Owls—I don’t know why, except that I found a couple at a flea market once and they’ve been popping up ever since—salt and pepper shaker owls, plastic owls, wooden hand-carved owls. I go into the junk stores in town every now and then and look around and buy another for a dollar or two, and so they’re lined up on the bookshelf, staring at me when I’m trying to sleep, and the crazy thing is that there’s a real owl down here by the river that almost every night makes his crazy hooting love song, and when I hear it I turn to my little owls and say , “Hear that? The real thing, you little bug-eyed babies. The real thing.”
    At the pavement I stop to catch my breath, pull my cell out of my bag. Where I don’t want him to be is at a party, without me. Where I don’t want him to be is near any other girl. I get two bars on my cell and call Jimmy. It rings three times, and then he’s there: “Vale.”
    â€œDude,” I say. “It’s eight thirty.”
    I can tell he’s at a party by the music in the background. He laughs and yells, “Get your hand off my butt!” And then, “Sorry, Vale. What’d you say? Girl, where you be at?” And when I tell him I’m standing by the edge of the road at the edge of a fucking farm looking hot as melted butter he laughs and says, “I’ll be right there.”
    I can hear his Jeep before I see the headlights—he’s pinholed the muffler so it sounds like a pack of Harleys.
    â€œWoman,” he says when I open the door. “You look like a goddamn whore