We fucked a lot in those days, because it was wholesome and because what else was there to do.
Everything we did felt like foreplay: how we’d cruise the park and pull in by the river, down a bottle of cherry wine in the time it took a barge to roll on past. Someone’s hand was perpetually heating up someone’s knee, then thigh.
Our town rolled up its streets by 8 p.m., but around us woods and farm fields beckoned. There was always a place to build a fire and lay out a blanket, or else a place to park the car, ease the seat back, turn the radio up. Sometimes there were cops, and sometimes the cops were cool – amused or bored – and they’d send us on our way.
One of them, Deputy Caudill, was a different story. We’d look up and find his head through the window – he’d have pulled up dark and quiet just to mess with us, and he’d stare at us, malice in his smile, and offer to let us finish if we needed more time. We knew better than to need more time.
We didn’t have cliques. Farm kids were in the pep band. Brainiacs played football. And all of us were a very specific kind of athlete, gymnasts of a sort.
We had this place under the highway. Someone used red spray paint to give it a name: Odysseyland. We didn’t know yet why this was ironic, though we knew none of us ever planned to go anywhere. But we visited that vast cave the highway department constructed, and we’d holler so our voices echoed back at us, and otherwise we’d just sit and stare at each other, barely believing how great it all was. Someone had brought a barrel and we built fires in it, burned whatever we found handy. We were invisible there.
It’s hard to explain why this was fun, except that fucking is fun and drinking is fun, too, and spray-painting is lawless fun that doesn’t hurt anyone but casts a spell. After “Odysseyland,” we’d painted whatever came to mind – lyrics, philosophies, names, or sometimes just shapes, triangles and lines and circles that signified nothing.
Somehow, the place felt like ours. It was part of the public infrastructure, a state highway, funded by our parents, home watching TV and watching the clock. But our parents didn’t go there and wouldn’t have guessed it existed. It was just a place to drive over on their way somewhere to misunderstand us.
One winter night as the light deserted Odysseyland, we began to notice a glow, low like swampgas, so dim it seemed imagined. When we climbed the slope to investigate, we saw it belonged to the single illuminated eye of a Chevy Chevette – the passenger side, because the driver’s side light was smashed in with the fender and the door.
Someone sat inside and from a distance looked slump-shouldered and defeated, like he’d lost a race. The engine wasn’t running, but the single light persisted and drew us in.
Sir, we asked, sir, are you OK, only when we got closer we saw it was a woman, her hair cropped short, blood on her face, her head not plumb with her neck.
You’re going to be all right, we told her, but she already wasn’t. Her eyes were glass and she was rigid and still.
Some of us reached in to touch her, to finger a cold cheek or nudge her shoulder. For the most part, we’d never touched dead before, outside of farm animals or turkeys or deer.
We didn’t want cops in Odysseyland, or the coroner, or anyone else who would come to clear the scene and drive us home. That’s why, gentle, we pulled the broken lady from her seat. We checked her purse and learned her name. We sang a song we all knew about how she’d been lost but now was found, and then we offered a prayer, a little drizzle of wine.
She asked us not to leave her there. We all heard it. Give me a proper burial, she said. So that’s when we gathered wood and laid it out even, smothered it in dry leaves, then got our lighters going. We kept at it, but it didn’t catch, but then one of us siphoned a few gallons of gas from the Chevy and doused the woman head to toe.
We rolled her to the pile, dragged her onto it, then straightened her out, her thin hands folded over her chest, flat like a boy’s. Her gas-soaked jeans and flannel shirt got the fire going, and we watched the flames climb high into the underside of the road. Above, cars sailed past, oblivious.
Some of us pushed that tiny car down the slope and farther along the rutted path we’d followed in there. We pushed it until the track ended, then on into the trees, the thick forest undergrowth, and soon there was barely a trace of it, and all night we watched that lady smolder under inscrutable Phoenician text.
