S O M E T H I N G N E S S
1
Eight hours of walking in the hot sacred south. No rides for this crazy white man hitchhiking in an area where, well, there just aren’t any white people. No vehicles in sight, no shelter from the sun, heat waves shimmering above the scorching ribbon of highway. Parched fields on both sides of the road are squared by orphan rows of trees and brush.
Drying out, burning up, dying can be a very real happening out here. My water bottle seems distressingly small and I seem distressingly mortal and alone. My backpack is a monster weighing down my every step, thinking has been walked and sweated out of me. Is the next step on my journey worth this?
Far ahead a sparse scattering of decrepit houses lines the roadside, with overgrown yards too poor to have even broken-down vehicles littering them. Some kind of community, but no town or stores. As I approach the first outlying homestead, I see two toddlers playing in the yard, their mother sitting on a broken termite-rotted porch, smoking, sweating, looking past the kids, staring over the dead fields.
They all notice me at once, walking by on the road, an unusual sight to interrupt their tedium. I stop and point to the old garden hose snaking through their yard of dry weeds.
“Do you mind if I fill my water bottle? Been walking since this morning. No rides.”
She blew out a puff of smoke and gestured vaguely to the side, which I took to be a Yes and a direction. So I shucked my heavy pack beside the road, waded and crackled through the parched grass to the side of the house, found a rusty tap there. The hose wasn’t attached. As I squeaked the tap open and dribbled questionable but welcome water into my bottle, the toddlers stood silently in place, watching. Their mother wasn’t interested.
“Hi,” I said to the kids, and smiled.
One of them blinked. I didn’t venture further comments or questions. Bottle full, I returned to the road to heft my backpack on, and faced them for a moment.
“Thanks,” I said, with a little wave. “You may have saved my life.”
The kids remained still and staring, but their mother gave a half-wave, or a dismissal or something, with her cigarette.
A mile down the road I looked back. The children were on the ground playing, but the porch was empty.
2
After another hour walking under the merciless sun, a plain no-nonsense wood sign welcomed me to my destination town, finally. The outskirts looked deserted and hardscrabble like the towns behind me, but there were more trees and brush, and crops of early spring growth in the fields.
Just before the town limits a dirt side-road trickled off to the west, running past a large sixties-era farmhouse down the way. I could hear hammering and metal sounds from the open garage next to it. Live, busy humans was a good thing right now, so I swung onto the dirt road and walked along it, past a couple hundred yards of crops to the farmhouse driveway.
Beside the garage a skeletal littering of rusted-out vintage tractors and unidentifiable antique farm equipment strewed an ungainly maze into the fields. I kept a cautious eye for any big dog running at me out of nowhere, but none appeared as I approached the garage. It didn’t have doors, just open bays with space for at least four large vehicles. Inside was a hardware store’s worth of tools and equipment, two large new king-cab pickup trucks, and two of the largest men I’d ever seen, working under the open hood of one truck.
“Hello,” I called out.
The intermittent ratcheting and clanging continued, and I heard low mumblings involving engine-part words. I took a few steps closer.
“Hello,” I said again, now standing beside the truck box, still out in the sun, but not crossing the stranger-line by entering their garage. One man was bent over the truck’s engine compartment while the other stood looking on. Both were huge; I’m a six-footer but I’d have to look up to the chin of the standing one. Both wore well-used farm overalls and boots, both had huge Popeye forearms and hands like hams. Their faces were almost clean-shaven, their hair was short and sweat-slicked back.
They continued talking about the engine but threw occasional side-glances at me. I realized they had been able to see me for quite some time, walking down the highway and trudging up this dirt road. And there was indeed a dog. It had seen me too, but it remained lying on a rag in the shade between the two trucks, half-opening its lids to see what I was. That was the sum total of its aggression.
The patience of the old man was becoming a part of me, apparently, because I stood quietly for a while, looking over the young cotton fields, the rows of trees, the sheds at the far ends of the crops. I sipped some rusty-ish tap water from my bottle. Grasshoppers chirred loudly, incessantly, in the hot grass.
Finally there was a lull in the metallic sounds and mumblings. The two giants, looking very much like brothers, were standing casually, facing me, one wiping his hands.
The slightly taller one said, “You lookin’ fer work? Ain’t got nothin’. All’s they is is mostly weedin’, this time of year. Got a reg’lar crew fer that.”
“No, thanks. Sorry to interrupt. I’m looking for someone who’s supposed to live in this town, but I don’t have an address.”
I told them her first name, which was all I knew. “She’s around seven years old,” I added, hoping that would narrow it down.
The shorter one—shorter meaning still a half-foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than me—leaned an aside to the other and mumbled something I couldn’t make out. The taller one nodded and grunted.
“At the river. Always walk by here,” the taller one said.
“She lives by the river? Can you tell me how to get there, please?”
He sized me up, didn’t seem concerned by anything he saw, thumbed toward the dirt road and said, “ ’Bout three mile thataway.”
Three miles further down the dirt road I’d just come. I’d find more directions there, I guess.
“Thanks, appreciate it,” I said, turning to leave.
“Drive you,” the shorter one said, opening the second truck’s door, snatching his hat from the seat and patting it on, and climbing in. Not a lot of chatter-talk in the kind of people this area grows, but they size you up quickly and then they just ‘do’. I don’t know if it’s kindness in particular, but they help out, even for a strange white man.
I threw my pack in the back, climbed in the cab, and watched our tail-dust plume behind us in the side-view mirror as he sped us along the dirt road. Far in front of us, beyond these crops and grassy fields, I can see a thicker long line of trees that must herald proximity to water.
Eschewing the air conditioner he hangs one arm out his open window, and the other hand, twice the size of mine and with huge sausage fingers, grips the wheel with more assurance than I’ve ever had in my entire body. He glances at his crops, always checking. No urge to speak, just doing a deed you do around here, then back home.
“Does her family have a house beside the river?” I asked, wanting to know a little more about the situation I was heading into.
“Ain’t no houses by there. Flooding. Only houses this side the levee,” he said. “Girl play out here. Walks by ever’ day, on her lonesome.”
“Should I talk to her folks first, make sure it’s okay with them?” I asked. I wanted to do everything in the clear, where a seven-year-old girl was concerned.
“She mama ain’t give no shit,” he said.
3
Our dirt road ended abruptly at a T-intersection facing the levee, where he unceremoniously wheeled a U-turn, dust cloud catching up and wafting through the truck as he stopped.
“Jes’ walk the levee an’ yell she name, she down there somewheres,” he said. He cocked his head, eyed me dubiously. “You one ‘a them spirshial nutties? Couple more looked for her las’ month.”
I expect, to his mind, I could indeed be classified as another of ‘them spiritual nuts’.
“Yes,” I admitted, stepping out and retrieving my backpack from the truck bed. “Harmless, though.”
“I guess,” he said noncommittally, then roared the big diesel king cab back down the road we’d come, drowning out any ‘Thanks for the ride’, so I didn’t say it.
This new road paralleled the ten-foot-high earth levee, so I walked up the nearest levee ramp and stood on the top, looking south. The levee, wide enough for a vehicle to drive along, stretched as far as I could see in front and behind, with up- and down-ramps on both sides every fifty yards or so. To the east the ramps ascended from the dirt road, and to the west they descended toward a line of trees and brush so thick I could only espy small scraps of a river through them.
Wanting to see an actual body of water again in this dry land, I walked down the river-side ramp, followed a narrow trail that wound through the grass and trees, and emerged on a high bank overlooking the river.
A vast river, the largest I’d ever seen in person, with a wide, wide expanse, the treeline on the far side looking only inches tall from here. If I threw a rock as hard as I could, it would land a tiny fraction of the distance across. And muddy; hopping from boulder to boulder down to the river’s edge, I dipped my fingers in the water and could not see my fingertips.
I peered far up- and downriver, looking for but not seeing the slightest human motion.
4
Binka Bonka.
Miffy Toad.
Zootie Gog.
Blabba Doogie.
The shoreline was a stepped slant built of huge boulders, and as I hopped carefully from one to the other making my way downriver I discovered made-up words, or funny names, painted in small letters on boulders here and there.
Jinkle Jammies. Sissy Freckles. Flicka Magica.
Written neatly but naively in a child’s hand, in pink, or purple, red, glitter, gold, silver, some having little flower or butterfly stickers around them. Obviously a child giving vox humana to imagination and fancy. Many were faded to degrees by months or longer of weather, evidencing a long-term creative whimsy.
I sat down on Skoozy Sizzlepants, a refrigerator-sized boulder, to rest and to ruminate on my next moves. I suppose I could indeed walk the levee and yell the girl’s name; however, the silence inside the old man was somehow reaching out to me even here, thousands of miles away, and I did not feel it was ‘me’ to be walking along yelling, even if it was to find someone I wanted to find.
I lay down on my back atop the boulder, hands clasped behind my head, using my backpack as a pillow. My cap I tilted well forward to shade my eyes from the sun, and thus reclined I watched the big muddy river roll and roil inexorably past.
5
“How come you here?”
I sat up and swiveled around to face this voice. Twenty feet behind me, above the rocks and in the shadows of the tree line, stood a girl. Had to be my girl.
She was young and gangly, you’d think she was a tomboy in her camo hoodie, long baggy cutoff-jeans shorts, rock-hopper sneakers, and gangsta cornrow hair. But I looked past that, at the way she stood, her small movements, and it was pure grace, pure little girl.
“Hi,” I said, and smiled, and said her name.
She looked at me for a few seconds. Now she knew who’d sent me, it made instant sense to her, and she was processing.
“You was just starin’ at the water, I watchin’ you fo’ while. How come? You sad, like me?” she asked.
Big eyes, but guarded, peered at me from an adorable face still blossoming in innocent youth. Yet already the creator’s hands were busy with some foul hidden work, re-sculpting the edges of her expression into something more… haunted. Even at this young age, here stands a girl you do not talk to in a child’s voice, about child things.
“Sad is the wrong word, for me,” I said carefully. “Empty, is the word I keep using. It’s not really sad or bad, it’s just that I always feel it. Even right now, a little. Empty.”
“Don’ know what that means. I only feels sad,” she said. She didn’t lace her voice with pathos or complaining, like most kids would, she just stated, unemotionally. She hadn’t moved any nearer, and I was still sitting on the boulder. We simply and organically fell into the talking.
She sat down up there, too, half in shade and half in sun, looking down upon me easily, her arms wrapped around her folded-up legs, chin resting on her knees. Like a kid.
At that moment, everything I was here for changed.
You’re a kid, I thought.
I came all this way looking for more wisdom, to somehow learn something from you because the old man referred to you as a ‘teacher’. I came to you wanting, like I went to the old man wanting.
But you’re a kid. I should not be here trying to take something from you, looking for my next experience or lesson. The old man said that it is my responsibility to learn anything I can from meeting you. It is not your responsibility to deliver me anything.
You opened not with a statement or wisdom, but with a question. Maybe even a pleading. So I will stop looking for anything from you and I will start giving. Between the old man sending me here, the comments of the man in the truck, and what I see and hear in front of me… sweet girl, you need something from me. That’s why I was sent here.
“Do you like oranges?” I asked, for starters. “I gave one to the old man we both met, he said it was the best orange in the world.”
“You mean the ol’ woman,” she corrected. “She say my apple the best apple in the world.”
I had to laugh. I tossed her the orange, gracefully caught.
“Are you sure it was a woman? I met him on a mountaintop way up north. Pretty harsh terrain to live in, and to me it’s a guy.”
“You watch him pee or anything?” she asked.
“No,” I admitted.
“See?”
Ah, the inarguable logic of youth. I could have countered with something like ‘Did you?’, but I am not seven years old.
“Okay,” I conceded, “henceforth he is a she, between us.”
“She wuz on a mountaintop?” she asked, slurping three orange segments at once, peelings thrown widely and randomly. No one-hour orange savoring, here.
I said, “Had to walk two days through some forest and hills, then hiked up a mountain on the third day. The bears and mountain lions didn’t get me, but the mosquitoes sure did. Then I found her, up on top.”
I was curious: “Where did you meet her?”
This girl didn’t seem like the type who’d ever left her home town, let alone voyaged thousands of miles and hiked up a mountain. Yet.
“She walk through town. Somebody say some really old cracker with a backpack walk out here, so I come see who.”
So the old man does come down from the mountain occasionally, to walk the earth. This is quite a walk.
“She camp ‘side them trees for a coupla’ days. I come talked to her both nights, after supper,” she said.
“You liked her.”
Her face lit up.
“She was… she was… magic!”
I smiled. I understood.
“She was magic for me, too. Just being around her… I started to feel better. A little. I guess I started right at that moment. Healing?”
“Zactly! But ‘tain’t no bullshit healing, know m’I’m sayin’? She make it all about… all about…”
“All about you,” I filled in. “Right? She took it right to you.”
“Straight. She weren’t pushin’ nothin’ of her ownself, she made sheself into, like, nothin’, an’ she made me into everythin’.”
She cocked her head at me. “She do that fo’ you, too?”
I nodded. “Changed my world. I only met her once, for a few hours. But I think she does that for everyone. I think she’s like that every second of her life. She made me feel… seen. Completely seen, completely heard.”
Her face converged into seriousness, the young making a pact: “I gonna be like that, one day.” She nodded once in determination. “I gonna have that.”
“Me too,” I avowed. With a seven-year-old, even one as wizened as this, you could still use one or two words to represent a dump truck full of explanations.
Strangely, this put us on equal ground, this seven-year-old girl stuck in one town, and this full grown man hoofing all over the earth’s crust. Both seekers of something, both seeing evidence that it’s real and attainable, and both sharing the angst of not yet ‘having it’.
Journey continues on the next page.