My Quirky Novel Chapter 3 - (i don't have a title) - experimenting

The city held in the heat and light of midsummer well through October and we were held close to the bosom so we were most warm, and still Lee wore an extra thick sweater. She said she wanted something to wrap herself up in, wanted to be sure that something was touching her, wanted the comfort of tactile contact.

We sneak through in a quiet old car, Lee's mother's Chrysler. Lee said once that she liked sliding down into it, like a warm safe hole, told me she remembered riding to primary school inside the deep cloth bucket seats. I elected to drive this car for that reason alone.

The light of the October moon splintered in the haze, soaked up by the sidewalks, covered all the drifters and the kids with bad intentions. They said, I remember, that we loved the devil as we walked into the little doctors office. They said that we would burn forever in hell. All I could think of was a scene on the side of a river, the hills wide and tall like expecting mothers' womb, and two people discussed what we were just to have done. They only let in a puff of air, said he.

The line repeated it's self over and over inside my mind, darting back and forth and invoking some sick twisted sense that perhaps we were doing something hard and worth hearing about. We had become characters beneath the pen of Hemingway or Faulkner, Salinger or Lee.

It also welled up the deepest sort of guilt, the kind that sticks to your soul and weighs you down, the exact kind you don't need when you are drowning like were back then.

My fingers parted on the steering wheel and Lee lit a cigarette. She'd been chain smoking, one after other, until her voice was rough with my ears; the distant sound of gravel voiced beneath tired treads of an old blue pickup and a dusty Tennessee road.

She filled herself up with the cheapness of smoke; I couldn't help but think she was trying to replace what was lost. I want to replace it with myself, I want to take that sacred child's place, the one that we sacrificed on a cross around midday.

I named her Luanne in my head, and I called her Lu for short. It was Lee's mother's name, and it was a permutation of Leeanne. I wanted to think of her, pale thing framed, razor thin dark hair hanging loose, maybe with flowing and sloping curls she stole from my head. She had Lee's soft eyes, the eyes that flooded out pale light with the intensity of the waning moon. The eyes that drew me in, the soft hurt eyes that seemed to splinter some time today and I worried would never heal.

I drove past our hotel room and Lee follows it with her eyes. "Where are we going?" She asks, her voice a harsh whimper like a kicked and broken dog.

Sometimes when I was 16 and I was just able to convince my parents to go out, I would drive not into the city to see friends and talk loudly in moderately quiet places until past midnight most people my age would have. Instead, I would take two borrowed cigarettes from my father when he wasn't looking, and maybe Saturday nights, when I had to come home early anyway, I would drive to the little airport.

It was a municipal airport, not for public use. I never saw any planes land or take off, but I also knew they didn't have any traffic after dusk, and the only times I was able to come, even unhindered by the freedom of summer, was later than eight or nine.

And so, like so many times before, I sat on the hood, this time of that aging relic Chrystler with a cigarette hanging limply from my lips. Lee leaned her lithe frame on mine, feeling lighter, less burdened by the weight of a second soul. I could feel the ache welling up inside of her, but she suffered through her cigarette, the smoke coming in spouts from her nose and mouth.

Lee didn't cry.

I did.

It came in heavy sobs, all the guilt I felt that Lee could hold down and keep beneath her lungs and ribs. Always quiet and strong.

"Lee." I say her name in a long huffing syllable, gasping before and afterward. She puts my face into her breasts, they muffle the words but she feels the vibrations in her shirt. "Did we do anything right: today, ever?"

The air shakes between us and a noise and light flood our car for a moment then dissipate, spread across the field. The dim glow of the fog lights gain a companion and the noise fills the inside of our ears, make our drums tremble.

Through eyes streamed with tears, between Lee's short dusty hair and my own fingers, I wipe my mouth and watch for the first time ever a plane descend from flight and return to the safety of land.

more later...(?)