Some Go Home by Odie Lindsey

Author:Odie Lindsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

SOME GO HOME

1

Colleen came to at daybreak, in the driver’s seat. One eye was swollen shut, and her jaw thrummed from being struck. A swarm of pain amassed around the exposed nerves of her bottom teeth—teeth that had punctured her lower lip before chipping off against the steering wheel.

This was in the time before Derby, but just after the war. Four, maybe five years before she got pregnant.

The sunlight was gentle through the haze of humidity. She looked out at the vast field of green corn she’d swerved into the night before, and the massive sprinkler truss she had hit head-on. The hood of her car was wrinkled against the pivot irrigator tower.

She held her breath, and twisted the keys in the ignition. Trembled with relief when the motor somehow cranked. The tires rubbed the battered wheel wells as she drove in reverse, doubling back in her ruts until she reached the county road.

She passed boll buggy and row crop, farmhouse and hamlet, past clutters of country folk on warped wooden porches, their hair wild, their Quikrete carports attached to long-rooted double-wides. She passed buttoned-up single-family homes on modest acreages, houses that were clones, somewhat, of the one she’d grown up in (and the one she would one day wind up in with Derby).

She followed the yellow line between Highways 7 and 15, toward Pitchlynn proper. At a stop sign just in town, the car’s engine light lit up; the vehicle shuddered as its power seeped away. She managed to turn toward a three-store strip mall before the engine was starved and the steering wheel locked. Colleen listened to the change in the asphalt grade as the Cavalier rolled dead in a beauty parlor parking spot.

She lumbered out of the car in her miniskirt and desert combat boots. Her white blouse and pink tank top were marbled by blood. She had to steady herself against the vehicle before wobbling into the salon, and posting up against the reception desk.

The air was frigid from industrial AC and fouled by the tang of hair dye. The room was loud with the yikyak of middle- and old-aged ladies, and the young and middle-aged women who primped them.

Colleen stared around the room, the white of her open eye flared by a ruptured blood vessel.

“What in the world?” a woman in foil strips hollered.

“Lord have mercy,” another gasped.

“Who is that?”

The braid of mostly elder voices rose into a high-toned, full cackle, their comments spanning fear and fascination. Of course, nobody did anything, save lower their glamour mags and shake their heads in disbelief.

“Land sakes, she’s bleedin’!”

“She shore is.”

“Well, how do you think she—”

“Jesus, y’all,” a young beautician finally barked. “Somebody get up and give her a chair.” This woman did not wait for a volunteer, but instead cocked the hood back on a commercial hair dryer chair and yanked a client out from underneath. She then helped the broken stranger into the seat.

“You’re okay, gal,” she said. “You’re okay.”

Colleen tingled from the beautician’s touch. She sat down slowly, her contused back in spasm.

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