We spend our nights cruising up and down Highway DD, a road that is more dirt and gravel than pavement—ten or twenty cars, full of people drinking and blasting trash rock and yelling dirty things to one another. We call the road Knockers. Most of the time, I’m with my boyfriend, Craig, his older brother Cliff and Cliff’s girlfriend Tammy. We’re all in our late twenties. Anywhere else, we would have stopped cruising Knockers a long time ago, but at the end of the world there is little else to do but go around and around and around.
Cliff drives an old Chevy pickup that is slowly disintegrating. Craig and I lie in the truck bed so worn out I can taste flakes of rust on his breath when we kiss. On clear nights, Craig and I shout faster faster faster into the wind. The faster Cliff drives, the more the sky above us stills.
Tammy has a reputation because she wears short skirts and high boots and lets her bra straps show. She’s a nice girl though. She loves real hard. Tammy sits so close to Cliff while he’s driving she’s practically wedged between his legs and the steering wheel. She knows he’s the type of man you have to hold real tight. Cliff and Craig are loggers for a small operation that clears land for people who need the money or want to build a house or whatever it is that people who own land do. Cliff says someday he’s going to start his own company and his little brother is going to work with him. They’re going to be rich like the men who live in the grand houses overlooking our Upper Michigan town. Cliff is long on ideas but short on everything else.
Growing up, we always looked up and wondered what it would be like to live in the grand homes looking down. At Christmas, our parents drove us along the overlook. Our mothers cooed at the beautiful decorations even though on every other day they cleaned those houses and took care of the children living in them. Our fathers, who worked for the grand homeowners, grunted. They said it wasn’t anything special. They swallowed the bitterness of their envy and chased it with a nip of whiskey. The grand houses had huge windows. We could see the perfectly decorated Christmas trees and the beautiful dining room tables and the illuminated chandeliers in the foyer. We never saw any people. In houses that big, there are lots of places to hide.
by Roxanne Gay, Knee-Jerk | Read more:
Photo: Michael Wriston via
h/t: GS
