Tough shit, I was told. Cayta would tack me on to her trip to get bread. We’d leave at five; I’d start hitching by twilight.
Around four, Arol descended from the master bedroom to her kitchen, hair gleaming silver against her purple robe. Seeking closure—plus a hint that she’d miss me? a sliver of hope?—I approached. My heart thumped, though I’d already plunged from her favor. Exile meant distance, not release.
“I just wanted to say goodbye to you,” I said.
“Oh?” She turned to face me. “They decided you should go?”
Her show of ignorance might have perplexed me—had I been less obsessed with gaining one last shred of wisdom, or blessing.
“Yeah,” I said.
She glanced at the sky, gray with rain clouds. “Oh well. Maybe you can develop your writing.”
A scrap of hope, wrapped in despair. We both believed I’d fail at whatever I tried—art, friendship, love—without her guidance.
Yet into my pocket I’d slipped two white sheets, folded in quarters. On these, beyond her gaze, I would start my own story.
[ chapter 14 ]
Release
I CLIMBED INTO THE CAB of Hunter’s semi in the parking lot of a Country Kitchen off Interstate 40 in western Tennessee. His tractor, a sleek black Kenworth, had red and gold lightning bolts shooting from the grille.
“Mi casa es su casa,” he said with a wink, shooing Venus, his black Lab puppy, off the front seat. She curled up behind a gearstick high as my hip.
I met Hunter on September 29, two days after I left Zendik. By then I’d filled one white sheet with tugs, in tiny script, at doom’s grip: Might exile free the “I” trapped in “we,” prove that my time at the Farm belonged to me? Perhaps my task now—since working harder hadn’t worked—was to let go and let life add to my list of Things I Was Out Here to Experience. So far I’d enjoyed a night alone in a room of my own with a door I could lock, and the kindness of a string of men driving trucks. Hunter was the fourth trucker to pick me up.
“You can throw your bag in the back if you want.” He jabbed a thumb at the thick midnight-blue curtain dividing our seats from the sleeper. The night before, I’d slept in a top bunk in a cab trimmed with Christmas lights. I wondered if Hunter had one bunk or two. I knew he was due in LA Friday morning. It was already Wednesday afternoon. Maybe he’d drive all night and the question of sleeping arrangements wouldn’t arise.
“That’s okay. I’d rather keep it with me.” I fastened my seat belt and stowed my pack at my feet.
Past Memphis, hurtling over the Mississippi, Hunter showed me photos of his two teenage daughters and his ring from the Virginia Military Institute. He’d served twelve years as a lieutenant in the naval reserve, he said, before buying the semi. His wife, back home in the Blue Ridge, was studying for a degree in pharmacy. He was giving me a ride, I decided, because he craved company and believed it his duty to help those in need. I grouped him with the born-again married man who’d driven me from Nebraska to Utah, my first time thumbing cross-country, and never once touched me.
I hoped Hunter wouldn’t ask what I was doing on the road. When I’d tried to explain that to trucker number one, my voice had gone squeaky with sobs I couldn’t stop. “I don’t understand,” he’d said. “It doesn’t add up. You’re crying like this over leaving your friends?” He’d sworn I was fleeing a lover who beat me.
Around midnight, we stopped to eat at an antiseptically perky roadside diner. I ordered bacon and eggs, crushing visions of caged pigs and chickens. For now, penury locked me in a toxic foodscape.
As I plucked the last fleck of egg white from my plate and started on the garnish—ornamental kale, an orange slice—Hunter asked, a teasing glint in his eye, if I knew what turned the sky blue. Rifling through my mental scrap heap, I snagged a tattered thought. The sky reflects the sea, right? Or the sea reflects the sky? I didn’t know. But I wanted to. I noticed, as I groped for an answer, that I was flirting with him. He’d noticed, too. I saw it in his cocked head, his sly grin, his brows like furred rust, arched in expectation.
Back in the truck, he asked, “How are you at giving back rubs?”
I tensed. “Not so good,” I said.
Letting go of the gear knob, he reached over and ran a finger down my spine. “It’s this part that gets stiff from driving.”
His touch left a tingle. I relaxed. Had I been too quick to deny a request as harmless as mine for a ride?
If concern for his wife surfaced, I dismissed it. Marriage was Deathculture bullshit—a mutual defense pact, masked as lasting love, that all couples, consciously or not, wanted out of.
Well past midnight, we crossed the line from Oklahoma to Texas. Hunter pulled off the highway at Texas Exit Zero.
He didn’t say why he’d stopped. Maybe—despite the cigarettes and ginseng pills, the half-gallon thermos of coffee, my drive-all-night fantasy—he needed to sleep.
He killed the engine, then disappeared behind the curtain. Venus thumped her tail against the floor. “Come back here,” he called. “I want to show you something.”
What the hell does that mean? I thought. And then: Maybe this is something else I’m out here to experience.
Behind the curtain was just one double bunk, its mattress neatly sheathed in baby blue. Hunter sat, facing me, at the foot of the bed. “Lie down on your stomach,” he said.
I buried my nose in a pillow reeking of aspen cologne. I felt his thumbs on my back, then his palms. The steady press of his powerful arms.
“Pull your shirt up. Undo your bra.”
I tensed again. Had I shunned the role of Girl in The Oraculum only to take it on now?
“No. I don’t want to.”
But then his hands crept up toward my shoulders and over my breasts and my back arched into his heat. I ached for this. Doom released me, for a few delicious beats.
After, speeding west through a foggy dawn, I savored the gift of this night—coupling, for once, on my own recognizance.
Could exile be wholly a curse and bear such luscious fruit?
Each week, Hunter drove round-trip, Virginia to California. I lodged at a hostel in Flagstaff, Arizona, and walked to the Little America truck stop every Thursday evening to ride with him to the coast and back. Saturday nights we bobtailed into downtown Flag to dine at San Felipe’s Cantina or the Weatherford Hotel. Sometimes, after a couple drinks, I forgot my betrayal.
Between weekends I sought work, with scant luck. How to account for the gap in my résumé? I shied away from framing Zendik as a typical farm or artists’ collective—and besides, I would have risked a bad review from any resident listed as a reference. Worse, I didn’t want to wash dishes or bus tables or count cash for five or six dollars an hour. And I refused to gain a trade skill, as that would have meant investing in life beyond Zendik. So I scraped by on a couple money orders from my mother, the occasional twenty from Hunter, wages from day labor, and the kindness of a roommate, who paid for my bed at the hostel one night. I swung between panic and trust that I’d be all right.
One afternoon in early November, Hunter squinted into my future, the road ahead a haze of slate-blue rain. “I don’t know what those people at that farm did to you, but I see a girl who’s beautiful and intelligent and thinks she can’t do anything. You need a plan for what you wanna do and how you’re gonna do it.”
I couldn’t argue. Recalling that for a short time in North Carolina we’d thanked farmers beyond the Farm, in a grace before meals, I decided to try growing organic produce.