Fiction by Kai Cooley

Kai Cooley lives, writes, gardens, and walks dogs in the Appalachian foothills. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Dayton Daily News, Nerve Cowboy, Skipjack Review, and Still: the Journal.

Cloud Racing

For a few hours one spring afternoon, I was a movie star in the passenger seat of Buck Trotter’s car with the windows down, arms resting against the shiny exterior while gravel popped beneath the tires. A hawk took off from an old telegraph pole and flew parallel with us before Buck sped up and we left it behind, racing the clouds like we might live forever.

I didn’t even like Buck. If you rewrote the story of Narcissus with a gleaming basketball trophy instead of a pool of water, that would be him.

But I loved his ’54 Packard. The last time I had ridden in anything besides a school bus was when our teacher, Mr. Lynn, loaded our class in the back of his truck with wooden side rails, took us to see the circus, and then paid the nickel for us each to cross the toll bridge so we could say we’d visited another state.

Buck parked the car at the overlook. Wild trillium blooms spilled like a bridal veil down the ravine over top of the trash everybody dumps there.

“Now we play a game,” he said. He smirked, and I’d seen less shifty eyes on rats in a compost pile. “You know the game don’t you, Dot?”

I did not.

“Put out or get out,” said Buck. “What’s it gonna be? Aren’t those your sister’s heels you’re in?”

I turned away. There was a pair of cardinals on a nearby branch, the male fanning and vibrating his wings, the female looking bored. “The boy red-bird is that purty color,” Daddy had schooled me, “’cause it’s the lady does the choosin’.” Not just of whose feathers flame with heat, he explained, but who can provide the best for their young’uns and keep the snake of hunger away from the door. A matter of life or death.

I slammed the car door.

“Dot, come on! Don’t be such a prude! You can’t hoof it that far.”

I didn’t look back. I steeled my ankles and headed down that unpaved road. It was like trying to balance on railroad spikes. Once I was certain I was out of sight, I sat down in the rocks and removed the heels. Can’t walk all that way? He didn’t know who he was talking to! I didn’t even have real shoes until I was ten. My foot soles were terrapin skin.

Chin up, molars clenched, I walked on. Wild garlic shoots and black cherry blossoms scented the air, and every little ditch and creek was gurgling with flowing water plaiting sunlight. I had seven miles to taste the pace of wind and sky outside a car. Buck never drove past and neither did anyone else.

My folks and Mr. Lynn were on the porch when I got home. My daddy and Mr. Lynn have been friends since boyhood, and they still liked to get together and swap stories, but ever since he injured his spine in a wreck, Mr. Lynn sips his whiskey too fast and our coonhounds won’t come around him anymore because he smells like all the men they’ve known who are mean.

I shared what had happened.

Mama was rinsing the grit from beans. She frowned. “A nice town boy with a fine car. What’d you do to make Buck say such things?”

Angry salt in my eyes. I hated that for even a single afternoon I had been awed like her by what is shiny.

The men stood. Mr. Lynn belched and swayed. “I’ve got a tire iron,” he told Daddy.

“No need.” Daddy worked in timber, had a grip that could crush a man’s bones. “Dot, show us where he lives,” he said.

I ignored Mama’s pleas and squeezed in next to Daddy and Mr. Lynn in the truck.

Outside the Trotter place, in view of the windows, I started hammering at Buck’s car with my high heels like a bird enraged by its reflection.

Buck ran shouting out the front door and right into Mr. Lynn and Daddy waiting on him behind a porch column.

He started to fight, but Mr. Lynn waved his tire tool in his face and said, “Go ahead. I’ve been wanting to show somebody what it’s like to have a broken spine.”

Daddy had Buck’s arms locked behind him. “We’re going for a ride.” He shoved Buck into a forced march.

“Where’re you taking me?” Buck’s voice was higher than usual, and he kept licking his lips like they were chapped.

Daddy lifted him into the back of the truck easy as a locust fence post and tied him to the side rails with a length of hemp. “That’s Dot’s choice,” he said, and Mr. Lynn nodded and tossed me the keys.

The metal had a nice weight in my palm. My first driving lesson! Mama never learned to drive—thought it wasn’t a woman’s place.

I got behind the wheel and followed Daddy’s directions on how to start it up. We lurched a bit at the beginning with Buck getting knocked around in the back, but Mr. Lynn kept hollering, “Clutch—shift!” at the right times, and Daddy guided my hand on the gear stick until I caught on. Soon we were puttering along smooth as anything.

I drove the ten miles out to Hanging Tree Road. Go on, Buck, and think on how it got its name. “What are you going to do?” he kept asking.

Nobody answered. I pointed where I wanted him, and the men dragged Buck across the meadow where the honey locust forges its thorns in fire and the blackberry barbs its canes with teeth, and then we took his leather loafers while he whined and cussed, and me and Daddy and Mr. Lynn, we left Buck there in his bare feet and we sped off, racing the clouds like we might live forever.