They leaned against the pale green concrete wall of the restaurant next door — an odd couple. She was tall and pale and wore a thin, plain black dress. He was short and dark, wearing jeans and a long black T-shirt. The white sign above the building read “Chad, a Thai restaurant,” in hand-painted red letters. Even though I knew Chad and Thai were not the same, I never questioned how they fit together. I just let the gap hang.
The Barbecue Pit shared a parking lot with Chad, two restaurants side by side along the highway, the only establishments that could see each other with the naked eye. Both buildings stretched long and windowless behind their facades, Chad a rectangular prism and The Pit a caterpillar-esque pink dome of corrugated metal.
I was waiting for my dad to finish paying the bill, making a game of seeing how long I could keep my skin pressed against the screaming hot metal of his red pickup truck. The man leaning against the snot-colored restaurant wall held a roach between his fingers, which otherwise hung loosely by his thigh. The smoke was potent. The couple spoke to each other in short, animated bursts, otherwise silent under the long sun.
When Dad emerged from The Pit, the man flicked the roach and advanced toward him. A nut cracked in my stomach. I peeled myself off the car and pointed wordlessly toward the approaching man. Dad stopped, turned, pulling back his shoulders, and projected, “Can I help you?”
“I just wanted to see if y’all knew if there was a pay phone around here.” His accent surprised me — Southern, but from nowhere near Loblolly. His letters sounded long and tilted, like trees whipped from a hurricane.
“Why don’t you ask the restaurant if you can use theirs?”
“That’s a good idea,” the man smiled with some intent. “Thank you, sir.” He tipped his F1 baseball cap.
Dad left them each with a glare and pulled his hand around my shoulder. “You can hardly go anywhere without criminals hangin around.”
“Are they criminals?”
“They’re up to no good,” he said. “That’s why you’re workin’ this summer. Boys don’t need to be sittin’ around lookin’ for trouble.”
He reached into his pockets for the keys, big fingers fumbling, before turning out the fabric lining each hole. “Dammit,” he whispered, marching back into The Pit. Like a revolving door, the man who’d asked to use the phone exited soon after. I wondered if my dad had exchanged words with him as they walked past each other in the restaurant.
With her shoulders arched, eyes focused and fired, the woman met the man in the middle. Tentacles of heat warped a thick stripe of atmosphere above the pavement. Their ankles were wavy.
“What’s the news?” she asked.
“He’s worried about a storm up north. He doesn’t know when he can get down here.”
She nodded and then cracked a smile and laughed, a brief shake in her voice. “Is there anything else that could go wrong?” Her accent was neutral, with the exception of the last word, which lingered in the stale air.
“Nah, that’s it.”
“Were you scared earlier?” She said.
He paused but shook his head. “What would they get us for?”
She looked right at me then, and I jerked away, turning to face my dad’s truck. Gusts of warm air bloomed around my jaw, like biting into a lime.
“That’s what I was thinking,” she said.
He placed his fingertips against hers, and it bruised my chest.
Dad burst through the restaurant door with the keys in his hand, jangling them for me to see, not looking at the couple.
The man turned. “Y’all have a good day.”
I waved. “You too, sir.”
Dad gripped my wrist as he escorted me to the passenger side, nearly shoving me inside. “Why did you address them?” He growled when we were both in the cab.
“I was just being polite.”
“You don’t need to be talking to people like that.”
“Like what?”
“They’re trouble.”
“How do you know? You don’t even know them.”
“Don’t talk back to me, Wyatt.” A lean needle of spit lurched from the side of his mouth and wet the dust on the dashboard. I could’ve sworn it sizzled.
The ride home was silent. When we arrived back at my dad’s house, I walked straight to my small, beige-walled bedroom. I lay down on the blue bed in the corner and stared at the bent white lampshade covering the light fixture attached to the wall above my mattress. I always liked that bluebell shape. The parts of the shade that hugged the wire frame had browned, and every so often, the bulb flickered rhythmically, like a moth fluttering. I allowed an hour or so to tick by that way, until my dad’s heavy footsteps grazed across the living room floor and the metal screen door slammed closed. After a couple of hollow minutes, I crept from my bedroom and checked the house. His pickup was in the driveway, but the tractor he used for long-hauls was gone, meaning he’d probably driven up to the local truck stop to shoot the shit. I walked up our gravel driveway to the side of the highway.
There was only one place to stay, a Motel 8, a couple of miles away.
I stomped through the overgrowth lining the margins of the pavement as the cars whizzed by, until I reached the old gas pump, where Gavin’s sign hung from a dusty tractor tire chained to a barrel. Most people didn’t even know you could still get gas here. I thought to say hi to Gavin while I was passing by, but no one was in, not even his big sheepdog, Randy.
By now, the sky had that feeling that it should begin to darken, but was waiting things out to see what would happen. I kicked a rock from the vacant neighboring plot into the Motel 8 parking lot and took a lap around the building — only a few cars there. A black cat emerged from the grassy clearing behind the motel when I sat on the curb in the back corner. It meowed at me. It looked young, still a kitten, but with a medium build. I had a single wrapped peanut butter cracker from the restaurant in my pocket and peeled the two sides apart, placing half of the cracker, peanut butter side up, on the curb. The animal tiptoed closer before emerging next to me, licking the peanut butter straight away.
“Is that your cat?”
I jumped so hard, the cat streaked into the grass.
The woman was leaning against the spiral metal staircase, painted white, leading to the second floor of the motel.
“No,” I cleared my throat. “It just came up to me.”
She nodded and looked away.
I cleared my throat again. “I saw you at The Pit.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you follow me here?”
“No, I was just… walking around.”
She nodded.
“How come you don’t have a phone?” I projected.
“How come you don’t have a phone?”
I paused. “My parents won’t let me yet.”
“That was your dad you were with?”
“Yeah.” I got up and brushed my palms off on the side of my jeans. “Are you criminals?” I had to look away as I said it. I knew it wasn’t polite.
But she laughed right away, a real laugh.
“Not really,” she said. “Did your dad tell you that?”
I mumbled something incoherent.
“You’re pretty nosy,” she said.
“I’m not normally,” I said. “I don’t think.”
She nodded again in that way.
“Where’s the guy who was with you?” As I said it, he walked around the corner holding a couple of key cards. He handed one to her. She lifted her chin towards me. “We saw this kid at the restaurant.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Do you have a smoke?”
I don’t know how he’d spotted them so quickly, but I was glad Colin had shown me what having a box in my back pocket would do for our social standing at the end of the school year. The pack I’d found on the side of the highway only had four cigarettes in it, so I was precious about them. I walked over to the couple slowly, almost with a limp, and my hands felt heavy as I struggled to pull one out.
After she saw me open the box, the woman put her hand over the top and brushed my fingers. A snaking feeling pulled through my intestines.
“Don’t ask a kid for a cigarette,” she said.
“Here’s $2,” the man offered.
“We’ll buy our own,” she said. “Where’s the nearest gas station?”
“Gavin’s down the road, but he wasn’t in when I passed.”
“He shouldn’t be smoking cigarettes anyway,” the man said. “I’m doing a public service by taking them away.” He turned to me again. “I’ll give you $5 for one.”
She eased a bit, and I tried not to snatch the bills out of his hand.
The sadness on her face flashed like a fish flipping directions, exposing its scales to the moonlight. The surge was so brief but so deep, it didn’t seem to matter where she was or what she chose. She was as here as she would ever be, and somehow that made her outside of time.
He placed the cigarette in her mouth and lit it.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” she said to me, exhaling.
“You’re smoking right now,” I tried not to whine.
“I have a reason to smoke.”
“Maybe I do too.”
“Maybe,” she agreed, but she lingered on the doubt on my face.
The man sucked on the tobacco, the ember burning like a taillight. “I’m gonna check in the front to see where the nearest gas station is,” he said, already on the move, a trail of smoke leaking behind him.
“We’ll get you your cigarette back,” she said.
“I don’t mind,” I said casually, my fingers in my belt loops.
“How long are you in Loblolly for?” I asked, my head not far from her freckled wrist.
She sighed. “Hopefully just for tonight. Gray’s brother should be able to pick us up tomorrow.”
“He’s Gray?”
“He’s Gray.”
“So then… You don’t have a car?”
“We have a car, it just broke down.”
“Where?”
She took her time with a drag. “In Holloway.”
“Well, how’d you get here?”
“We walked.”
“From Holloway?… Wouldn’t that take days?!”
Gray rounded the corner and plucked the cigarette from her idle fingers. If I were a woman, I wouldn’t have found him attractive. He had a wide face and small, dark, shifting eyes that were hard to look into. They held too much, then splashed away. I tried not to squirm under the irregular beat of his gaze. He angled his jaw and simply turned. I stayed put and watched the man and the woman wander into a mirage. Drops of sweat had already begun to run down my legs and stick to the inside of my jeans, making them heavy and scratchy. I found my place again on the curb, an oily spot where the peanut butter cracker had been, and must’ve dozed off because I blinked awake to itchy long grass jutting into my back and the sound of clanging on the metal staircase. The couple simply opened the door to their room and slammed it closed again.
After some time, Gray emerged from the room, leaving the door open and wandering down the balcony with a flip phone against his ear.
“Hey, man, I’ve got a phone now,” he said. “Okay, we’re at the Motel 8.” He looked down at me. “Hey. What’s this town called?”
“Loblolly,” I pitched in, feeling confident again.
“Loblolly,” he said.
He peered into the horizon as if he were looking for something.
“I don’t know, man, look it up,” he snapped.
Gray hung up the phone.
The woman called from the dark opening. “Is he gonna pick us up?”
Gray shrugged. “Hope so.”
“That’s not good enough,” she said. “We’re not gonna hang out on the side of the highway until Victor feels like showing up.”
“I know, he’ll come.”
She breezed from the cave, sauntered down the metal staircase, tossed me a cigarette, which I nearly fumbled, and walked out to the long grasses, where the cat had been. Her glowing eyes turned on me. She was cold but not mean. “You should go home.”
*
I had to heave myself onto a rear tire to get into the bed of my dad’s pickup. I hauled out his toolbox and hucked it onto the driver’s seat, where I situated myself on top of the cold metal frame, testing the fit. It dug into my butt cheeks and boosted me up too high, but better than sitting too low. I started the car with the spare keys in the wheel well, and the truck rolled forward under the gentle pressure of my foot until I braked hard at the end of the driveway, then rolled onto the highway, speeding up as fast as I could, my heart swollen and blocked for the entire two miles. It was a much faster journey to the Motel 8 by car, like making an easy transaction, and I wheeled around the back, parked near the metal staircase, and turned the truck off. Sitting on my dad’s toolbox in the silence, a panicky feeling fluttered around the cab. What am I doing?
There was no sign of life outside of the couple’s room, or anywhere else at the motel, besides the cicadas with their loud, long rhythms, so I waited for my breathing to slow down.
No going back now.
I got out of the car and let the door slam, testing if the noise would startle some birds out of the nest. No movement followed, so I started up the spiral staircase, looking up, willing someone to come out. It worked. The door to their room opened, and I scrambled back down to the first floor, directly below their outdoor hallway. A lighter scratched, and I smelled smoke.
“You’ve got to stop following us,” she said.
“I have a car,” I said, my tone already pathetic.
“You can’t be older than 13. How do you have a car?”
“It’s my dad’s pickup — ”
“No.”
“He won’t even notice, I swear.”
Gray’s voice sounded from inside the room. “Who are you talking to?”
“The kid.”
“Goddamnit, go home! You’re gonna bring us trouble.”
“He says he has a car,” she yelled back at him.
The bed squeaked, and Gray appeared in the doorway.
“It’s his dad’s,” she said through an ironic laugh.
“Fucking hell, man. Your dad is going to call the cops on us.”
I felt dizzy, almost, maybe all the walking and the sun and the highway, but I had this persistence in my chest, despite the heavy stickiness that clung and dragged on it. I wish I still had some of that pluck now.
“He’ll be out until late tonight.”
“Out where?”
“Probably at the truck stop with his friends.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“How do you know?” He said, finally.
“He does it all the time, like every night.”
They were quiet again. She put a hand on the balcony and looked at Gray.
“How far away is it?” He asked, his arms folded across his chest.
“Just past mile marker eighty-one… Not far from here.”
“Let’s just go see…” He finally said, looking back at her.
“Okay,” I said excitedly, handing him the keys. Gray flicked his head toward the woman. She finished her cigarette and silently walked between us, taking the keys from my hand.
When we got in the car, she checked all the mirrors but didn’t touch them. “I’ll just make it work, I guess,” she whispered. She turned all the way around, her face not far from my face. “You’re not buckled.”
“Sorry,” I quickly pulled the belt around me. Gray wasn’t buckled either, and she looked at him. He threw up his hands and looked out the window, but she didn’t move. She sat back and unbuckled her own seatbelt, staring straight ahead. I didn’t say a word. I could hear my own breathing but not theirs. After what must’ve been five minutes, he pulled the seatbelt over his chest, the click of the mechanism locking into place like a gunshot in the distant silence. He pulled the chest strap behind him, looking out the window all the while.
She buckled back up and started the car in a single, practiced motion, placing her hand on his headrest so she could turn around and reverse. Her fuzzy armpit was dripping with sweat.
When we reached the road, she looked in the rearview mirror, but I could only see her mouth.
“Where are we going?”
“Take a right.”
We drove down the highway for five or ten minutes. She checked the mirrors constantly and didn’t change lanes. When we were almost there, I said, “On the right.” We didn’t slow down or pull over. She just kept driving past the truck stop. Gray’s face was glued to the window.
“There,” he said. My dad was in a bright red shirt, holding a beer and sitting in a lawn chair in the parking lot with Bobby Miller, Frank, and two other guys I didn’t know. They were laughing. She kept driving until the next exit, where she pulled into a Wendy’s parking lot. She turned off the car.
Alright,” she said. “We’re gonna get some things we need from our car in Holloway.”
“Where are we gonna put all our stuff? The motel?” Gray asked.
“We’ll need to plant right away.”
He paused. “You’re not serious.”
“We need to do it while we have access to a car. Otherwise, we’ll bake in that motel room with everything… Who knows when your brother is gonna show up, and I don’t want to include him in this anyway.”
He thumbed back at me. “What about this guy?”
She turned around. “Can we borrow the pickup for a couple of hours?”
“Yes,” I said automatically.
She sat back and looked at Gray.
“What’s he going to do?” He said.
She shrugged. “He can be the lookout.”
Gray rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know, I think we should just wait for my brother.”
“Wait for your brother to do what? Show up whenever he feels like it? He could be shit-faced in Atlantic City right now. We need to move.”
Gray couldn’t come up with anything else to say.
“He could be on his way,” he offered, by the time she was already putting the truck in gear.
“Shall I drop you at the motel and take care of it myself?”
At this he ruffled. “No.”
“Ready?” She said to me.
I was thrilled.
She pulled out of the Wendy’s parking lot, and we drove down the highway the way we came, past my dad and his buddies in the parking lot, past the pawn shop and the motel, past the Barbecue Pit and Chad Thai. We kept driving until we left the town of Loblolly, and there were no more shops or shacks or businesses, just flat brush and fields on one side and thickets of trees on the other. I forgot where we were going or who I was with or why I was going, just watching the sun refract the plain landscape into vibrant, sharp shades of golden-green and milky chestnut. The hills began to roll, and some old wooden buildings stood like preserved corpses in the folds.
After thirty minutes, we swayed onto the ramp of an exit I’d never taken before. There were no signs for fast food or gas, and when we turned the corner, there was nothing, just a couple of squashed sheds with their roofs caved in. She turned left onto a narrow gravel road and parked the truck at the first turnoff. Just beyond the trees and brush, there was a small clearing, where Gray pulled a neutral tarp off a beige Honda Civic. There was hardly anything in the car, just a small suitcase in the backseat. Gray pulled the keys out of his pocket and opened the trunk manually. I don’t know what I expected, but the trunk was full of tiny plants, dozens of them with fine, scythe-shaped leaves rimmed with burnt red and yellow stripes. He looked at her.
“How are we gonna get to the highway?”
“We’ll have to walk.”
“It’s gonna take ages.”
“No. It’ll be inefficient but not impossible. There are only thirty samples, two of us, three trips back and forth each, fifteen minutes to plant each batch.”
For the first time, I was a little scared in the humid brush, silent except for their voices, which echoed despite their low tones, the cicadas now ripping into the night. Sometime between when we left the Wendy’s parking lot and standing here now, twilight had snuck across the sky. I coughed.
The woman gathered four plants in a small tray and a trowel for each of them. Against the taillights, they caught a view of themselves with their plants and their tools in their hands. She was unable to suppress a laugh. He smiled out of the side of his mouth, but no light splintered across his eyes.
“Let’s go,” Gray said, picking up his tray. “Stay here,” he said to me. “We’ll be back in fifteen minutes or so.”
They ducked through the brush, and shortly after, the gravel crunched under their feet. They were speaking to each other, but I couldn’t hear the words, and they soon disappeared. My breathing began to project again, and I suddenly had the feeling I was about to pee my pants.
By the time I returned from splashing a tree, it was dark. I was starting to feel trapped in this thing I’d started when footsteps crunched the gravel up the road, and voices traveled downstream. I crouched behind the car, worried the voices could belong to anyone. It was dark enough that I could only tell it was the couple coming through the brush because of the way he moved his shoulders side to side as he walked, and her long silhouette, ponytail swishing when she turned to speak to him.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
They both jumped back.
“Jesus, why did you come out like that?” He said.
“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know if it was you at first.”
Gray popped open the trunk with the keys in his pocket, and the car lights highlighted them again. Their hands were covered in soil. He had dirt on his neck, and she had some on her forehead. They were both dripping with sweat.
“Can I come with you this time? I don’t like waiting in the dark.”
She looked at me with her inaccessible face and said, “Sure, but you have to stay close to me. It’s not safe.”
“Why isn’t it safe?”
“We’ll be on the side of the highway, and the cars are moving fast… Stay close to me.”
Gray huffed. “It’s not a good idea.”
“I wouldn’t want to wait in the dark either,” she said and handed me a tray of four plants. “It’ll be faster this way anyway.” She wiped her forehead, but some drops spilled down right after. Her dress was starting to stick to her stomach and legs.
Gray closed the trunk, and we set off. Her skin smelled like my dad after he came in from mowing the grass. Up close, there were little leaves and scratches on her forearms. We arrived at the crossroads — no streetlights, no cars, just the lingering heat on the pavement and the feeling that no one had been here in years, like all of humanity had moved on without us. We crossed the street with our plants in our hands and disappeared straight into the brush lining the exit ramp.
Gray started to slow down after a couple of minutes. “I think we’re close to the first one… Fuck, it’s dark.”
“Don’t use your flashlight yet. We were by mile marker forty-three,” she said.
“Maybe a 45-degree angle.”
“There,” he said. “There’s the log.”
“Ok,” she said, grabbing my arm. An electric eel slithered in my stomach, and I inhaled, masking it with a cough. “Step with me,” she whispered, even though there was no one else around. We stepped together, and she counted with each stride. When we reached forty, she pulled my elbow again. “Okay, here.”
Gray didn’t say anything and kept walking, counting five more paces before sinking to the ground and clearing the vines. She used her trowel to cut a hole in a tangle of roots on the surface and shallow section of the soil before digging with her whole shoulders and back until the hole could swallow her fist. A drop from her forehead, refracting a headlight from the highway on its way down, fell into the dark opening. “Hand me one of yours,” she said. She overturned one of my little plastic pots and let the plant slip between her fingers, catching it by the flat top of the soil base. She cupped the bottom and placed it back upright in the hole. “Now scoot the soil back,” she said, and I mimicked the scrappy movements of her fingers, returning the loose soil around the rim back to the hole and building up the base of the plant. “Be gentle but firm,” she said, patting the area flat. “Put some of these vines around it, so you can’t see the soil’s been disturbed.” I stood to collect some loose branches and dry leaves and tried to toss them organically near the plant. “The plant only needs a little bit of sun, don’t worry,” she said, pulling away a small stretch of vine that covered one of the two proud little leaves on the seedling. “Good job,” she whispered, and I smiled in the dark.
As we passed Gray, she grazed the back of his neck with her free hand, sliding two fingers across.
“Almost done,” he grumbled.
She kept us working efficiently, and by the time we ran out of plants, a halo of sweat ringed my hairline and dripped down my neck, and my shirt stuck to my chest, back and belly. When we unbent our legs, my neck was sore, and I felt like I needed to stretch my spine. My arms were somehow both slick and sticky with brush and dirt. I started back, but she said, “We need a temporary marker. Do you see anything?”
There was a small, rusted piece of scrap metal from what must have been a car accident some time ago.
“Move it a little closer.”
When we finally made it back to the car, I was beat from trudging through the thick branches and small vines.
“You don’t have to come this time,” she said.
“No, I can do it,” I said, defiant.
“It’s the last round, won’t be long.”
But it was later than she’d thought — 9:45 according to the clock inside the car. A nervousness hung from her voice now. “Do you think your dad will be back?”
I shook my head, but she leaned against the side of the car and looked at Gray. “I think we should take you back.”
“How will we get back here?” He said. “Or back to the motel?”
“It’s taking too long.” She was impatient, and Gray had already waded to the center of his irritation.
“Well, what else can we do?”
She sat for a moment, but then picked up the first four of the last ten plants. “Let’s just work quickly.”
This time her urgency prickled behind me as I tried to hustle through the brush. I could feel her body heat on my back, my shirt hanging on the notches in my spine and the pointed ends of my shoulder blades. When we reached the piece of scrap metal, she bent down and tossed it, with a velocity surprising even Gray, deeper into the brush.
The rest was a fever dream, with the woman forgoing some of the gentleness previously urged in extracting the plants, relinquishing more and more responsibility to me. The only rule she observed with meticulous consistency was covering our tracks.
“Here,” she said. “You get the next one ready when the hole’s almost dug.”
So that’s what I did, squatting in the tar-like air of a roadside ditch with two complete strangers and the enlivened insects and the fast-moving cars who could not see us or didn’t care to look.
*
By the time we finished, the soil was on her cheek, her chin, her biceps. Gray somehow managed to stay relatively clean, except for the spot on his neck. We wiped ourselves clean enough with a couple of old towels the couple had lined the bottom of their trunk with and shook our shoes before placing them in the bed of the truck.
The highway was visible only when other headlights charged ahead and the occasional backlit or neon sign of a business still open danced in the darkness.
“Why does your dad live in a place like this?” Gray asked in the middle of the quiet.
“I don’t know,” I said, and it was true. I’d thought to ask Dad a few times before but had developed a sense for what kinds of questions not to ask him. “He has everything he needs, I guess.”
The car was silent again for a moment.
“Do you?” She said.
I shrugged. “I think so.”
The silence fell restless on the floor.
“What will you do now?” I asked.
“Go back to Louisiana,” she said after a moment.
“What about the plants?”
“We’ll check on them in a few months… You understand not to tell anyone about them, right?”
“Yes.”
Gray rubbed the front pocket where his cigarettes were.
“Is that where you’re from?” I asked.
She paused again. “It’s where Gray’s from.”
“What about you?”
She shrugged. “One of the places.”
When we pulled into my dad’s driveway, the house was dark.
“How’d he have it parked?” She asked.
“Backed in, about a foot from the stack of plywood.”
We shook off the stiffness in our muscles, and she handed me the keys. She smelled of earth and grass and so much sweat it had turned almost saccharine.
“Thanks for your help,” she said. “Don’t offer your car to strangers again, and you’ll need to forget about the plants.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, my heart beating fast.
This seemed to amuse her.
Gray held out his hand. I approached slowly but shook it.
“You’re wild for taking your dad’s car,” he shook his head.
I didn’t want them to go, but she had already turned, and he jogged to catch up to her stride. She pulled him close to her, and his sturdy body finally softened, wrapping his arm around her waist and squeezing with his fingertips. Even in the dark, I could see it.
The next morning my dad was still not home. It was eight o’ clock when I walked to the Motel 8. The morning was unusually cool for June, but halfway through the journey, the sun straightened up and baked the air again.
After walking back and forth along the outdoor hallway of the motel for a few minutes, I plucked the courage to peek into the window of the couple’s room. I was surprised the blinds were open, but then of course, it was clear that no one was there. It didn’t even look like the bed had been slept in, the duvet still geometrically creased and the pillows square. I stood there for a moment on my tiptoes, pulling my body closer to the air they had once breathed and lightly kicked the wall. My shoe made contact with something that wasn’t concrete. Gray’s pack of cigarettes had been leaned against the side of the building on the ground. It was still half full.
*
Sometimes I think about them now — my dad who died of a meth overdose (in a Motel 8 of all places, though three states west), Gray from Louisiana, and the tall woman from everywhere. I think of the couple leaning against the restaurant, arguing on the balcony and the side of the highway, nodding and looking at each other only at an angle, and somehow I understand what bound them.
After some careful study of a few vegetation books, I was able to identify the plants as pusilius fundi. They were normally found in Chile, illegal to import into the U.S. They didn’t grow very big, could easily be mistaken for more common plants like glasili konuris and locurum hindri, and once mature, the leaves could be crushed into powder believed by some to cure conditions causing chronic pain. A single leaf sold for $75.
A few years after that summer, when I’d gotten my driver’s license and was visiting my dad one weekend in June, I felt a familiar sticky itch in my chest, like a single hair I’d forgotten about and let grow long, and I thought to check for the plants.
I either couldn’t find them anymore or they were all gone. Hurricane José had whipped through the county the summer before, and it occurred to me that if the couple hadn’t scooped them up first, the plants could’ve washed away in the storm. At that, I think the woman would’ve shrugged: “That’s life.” And he would have put another cigarette in her mouth and lit the end on fire.
