I had always wanted to ride the train for as far as it would take me, only looking back to watch my shadow bounce off the ground, bask in the fragility of Autumn, and stick, but I never had the chance, and the train kept on moving. No matter how I moved, my shadow never stuck. I still had the smog drifting off my coat tails from the car ride out of Chicago and people around here could tell. The Bible Belt is no place for a teenager who gave up on Santa Clause a long time ago and is well on his way to giving up on Jesus.
“Don't forget your tooth brush,” Mom yelled as she quickly strapped the last remaining suitcases to the roof, the ones that couldn't fit in the back seat of the acid stained Toyota Corolla that had been acting up again and just when we really needed it.
“I know Mom,” I said. It was funny that kids where always forgetting their tooth brushes. It made me think maybe it wasn't so natural to be brushing our teeth all the time. I mentioned this to her once and she didn't understand the reason to rethink something that had always worked for her.
“It may be natural but it sure makes your mouth stink,” she said laughing a crisp high pitch stutter that she had and continued tightening the rope with a knot dad had shown her before the war. There is a knot for anything he always said. She was always getting a kick out of her own jokes and it was starting to become easy not to join in for the sake were running for our lives and still she had her sense of humor.
“ Where are we going,” I asked as she pulled the rope tighter and tighter securing the green suitcase she had owned since college to the roof of the car, snug against my red bag the Red Cross had given me at CPR training for a job as a lifeguard one summer a lifetime ago. The bag was a pulsating sore thumb against the green of the others.
“Anywhere you would like, where ever it is, we need to go now,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”
“I heard Florida was nice.”. I had been there once on vacation with the whole family years ago.
“Too many alligators.” she said. This was another one of her jokes that I didn't find amusing. So much for the sand and the ocean and girls who wore fewer cloths then what they usually wore under their already scarce garments.
“How about Tennessee?” She said wiping her hands on her farm girl denim pants as to scrape off the rope burn sting. Mom was always talking about going south even when dad was still around and she figured it was a good place to start a life without him. She spoke of the south as a world made up of single people who were part of families but stayed separate from the down falls of the imperfections that come with relationships. A detachment from the casual interferences that tore most people apart in the cities. She always said the south was a training ground for city life. Since we were going backward we would know something everyone else didn't. Secrets heard from living between four walls of chaos and finding amorphous intervals of happiness within them. We would have an irrevocable advantage so long as we pretended we were from the south all along.
In Chicago the moon had showed its back to us and the street lights only pointed up. They did this so that the stares never inspired anyone to get the bright idea there is anything else out there and discourage anyone from changing things. People in Chicago don't care for change to much, only the homeless, and they don't accept pennies anymore.
Packing winter cloths we picked up our lives along with toothbrushes and drove I-65 south, an interstate in route market with dotted lines and exit signs. There was no weight in the thought of going back to the city. If that thought did arrive on any brisk wind or water logged chance encounter with the down falls of fate, it was best for us to stay in the car and put on a few more layers to keep warm. Falling down the map it was our hope that fate would embrace us the further we went but it was never likely because fate chooses sides and for all we knew it was against us. Mom had bought a lottery ticket once and won two thousand dollars from a scratch off ticket. That same night she lost the ticket. I believed fate had come in that night and taken the thousand dollar dreams and flushed them down the drain. It was possible dad had come back by then and used the money for the purposes a man on the binge would do with that sort of money. When bad things happen it's not because fate they turned out that way, it's only your fault when bad things happen. Fate was made for good people. In the apartment we had come from it was impossible not to wait with groping suspicion that fate would be coming through the door at any moment, blocking the day and its slew of disguises that had tricked us into settling for so long, allotting just enough space for air to whisper through carrying dusty memories and secret insects before the door closed again. But fate staid away for no one ever called us good people no matter what we did.
