Feather slid her
backpack down her arm, smiled and walked on air toward the open door. “Real
gent, hey.” She tossed her pack in first and sprawled across the sun cracked
leather. Billy closed the door and looked all the way down her and wondered
what kind of creature could be found on a lost highway in South Georgia. Still
lucky, he thought.
He trotted around the
back of the car, got in and said, “Savannah it is. Ever been?” She just smiled
and dug in her bag for a pair of heart shaped sunglasses with cherry red frames
and slid them on and a memory swept him away. He’d seen them before, a long
time ago on a pretty little child at the county fair. She was maybe seven or
nine and so was he. He had fallen then too, as soon as he saw them gleaming in
the sun behind a cloud of pink cotton candy at the house of fun. He had led her
off from there and behind the trailers and into snakes of electrical cords that
hummed, vibrated and squirmed in the mud after a fresh afternoon rain. He stole
a kiss and talked her into a game of; I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.
He could remember it well and considered it his, first time. That first pungent smell of sex and what he saw when he
put his face down close and touched it. And when it was her turn, she put her
little hand out and squeezed it tight with her sticky tiny fingers while the
sounds of the carnival filled the air and what it did to him then and what it
was doing to him now as he recalled it. And he recalled it often like a secret
treasure.
He breathed deep as a
light breeze from nowhere brought that familiar musky scent to him now. He looked at her and she shined like the sun
on the first day of spring, and batted her lashes at him again as if saying,
remember me?
