Escape To Anywhere Else - Robert Rippberger

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the thought made me wince. Her twin moles and the hair on her upper lip were enough to distinguish us, I hoped. Once when we were in town, a man passing through from Chicago asked if I wanted to model for his magazine. If I’d been eighteen, I would have said yes on the spot and escaped with him, but before I could even lie, Mom had my arm and was dragging me in the opposite direction.

      She sat down at the table. I smiled big. I don’t know why, but for whatever reason I was feeling lucky this morning. “So, what do you have to do today?” I asked.

      She raised a brow as if I had never asked a question so sweetly before in my life—which I probably hadn’t.

      “Can we maybe...I don’t know...go into town after breakfast?” I said, putting it a little more bluntly. There was a cold silence for about thirty seconds. Her face stiffened, reddened, and she slapped the table. The plates and glasses leapt with fright. My eyes fancied the floorboards.

      “Why do you do this to me? Why do you do this to your father and I? Do I have to say it a hundred times? There’s nothing in there for us.”

      My frustration boiled over. How could a woman of her age not know of anything to do in town? There were fun and interesting people, restaurants, movies, boys...

      She took a puff of her cigarette and fogged the room. I eyed it with indignation. No wonder she didn’t care to go into town—she had just stocked up. I wanted to yell and shriek and cry, but it was a battle many times waged, always lost. Having only picked at the eggs and knowing I would forfeit my meal until late that evening, I excused myself and marched upstairs.

      There was a clanking of forks and a small scuffle as my food was divided. Dad muttered something about teenagers being pigeon minded. I stepped into the peacefulness of my room and slammed the door.

      chapter two

      “We need more ice!”

      Louie pushed open the front door, jumped off the porch, and stumbled across the yard. I uncovered the pitcher and held it out. The cubes splashed in with a hiss, crack, tink. I fixed on the lid while Louie gathered the rest of the supplies.

      We wandered up the driveway toward the road. My arm was cramping so I exchanged the pitcher for Louie’s cardboard sign. Propping the sign on my head, I made a game of wrestling the wind as the air caught its underside. Its eight years in action left the edges torn and waterlogged, but it did the job. Thick orange and black letters read: “The only lemonade sold in 50 miles.” Since we’d first started, our sales price had gone from ten cents to fifteen to twenty-five to fifty, then back to twenty-five. The result was an illegible ink splotch that looked like a bird had done a fly-by.

      See, whenever Louie and I were bored with being bored, we would sit on the side of the road with sign in hand and sell lemonade. It was rare to see a car and even rarer for one to actually stop in this godforsaken place, but we didn’t mind. It was something to do. It was an excuse to get away from our parents, to lie in the sun, and dream about the possibilities just over the horizon.

      I set up the two chairs and the umbrella next to the cornstalks. Louie squinted in each direction. You can see for miles on a road like that, and we noted there was not a car in sight. Not one. I took a cup from the towering stack and filled it. It was mid-July and the heat was unforgiving. To be shaded from the sun with a drink in hand and to be away from our parents was the height of our lives. I downed the glass and poured another.

      “Stop, you’re going to drink it all.”

      “In all the times of doing this, on our best day we didn’t sell more than four glasses. And that was only because a family van stopped. So shut it.”

      Louie didn’t want to admit I was right. His hand hesitated toward the lemonade and then retreated when I looked his way. I refilled my glass and poured a second. He took it without objection. And so there we sat, sipping, staring up the road, waiting for a car to pierce our solitude.

      An hour lapsed by, and still nothing. A few pheasants and doves passed, but that was during rush hour.

      “School starts soon,” Louie said, shattering the serenity of the moment.

      It was beyond me how he could mention such a horrid thing at such a pleasant time. I was trying to ignore school’s speedy arrival and had been doing a damn good job.

      “Aren’t you excited to see your friends?”

      “Are you worried about being a freshman? You get your ass kicked, you know?” I said, changing the subject.

      Louie nodded, fully aware. I considered leaving it at that but couldn’t resist...for his benefit. So he could prepare mentally for what awaited him.

      “You know what we’re going to do to the freshmen this year?”

      Louie’s eyes grew wide. “Fill water balloons with piss? Tether us to the flagpole? Make us swim in Lark’s Pond?”

      “Nothing that dull.”

      He pestered me for an hour, but I refused to talk. After all, he was going to be a freshman, and I was to be a senior. I couldn’t let him in on the secrets—even though there weren’t any. In my opinion, getting over high school fears is the initiation itself and the most important initiation into life. I wanted to set the bar high.

      “You’re not going to do anything to me, are you?”

      “Of course not,” I replied as Louie let out a sigh of relief. “I’ll have my friends do it.”

      The seed was planted, watered, and ready to sprout. Louie swallowed his lemonade and choked. Then in the distance, extraordinary as it may seem, a car. It was a small speck on the horizon, probably five miles out. Louie noticed it as I did and hurried from his chair to get the cardboard sign at attention. We waited, excited and eager.

      Faster and faster the car grew closer and larger. Dust spat from the back tires as the car crested the hill only a half-mile away. My jaw dropped. It glimmered and glistened in the sunlight with stunning vivacity. It was the car I dreamed about. The one Dad and I drooled over since we first saw it in the Road-Show magazine the previous summer. The red 1967 Corvette Sting Ray—“American elegance at its finest.” The car roared closer, and then with a curious abruptness, its brakes locked, and it slid and whined. Unable to keep traction, it twisted sideways across the road and teetered at the edge of the irrigation ditch. Louie and I looked at each other confused, neither of us with an explanation. The car came to a complete stop but fifty yards from us.

      “Get a cup ready.”

      Louie went to the chairs as the Corvette hissed back into gear. It rolled toward us like a model sauntering down the runway. The red paint glimmering in the sun. Every inch chromed, which made the car look as if it was a light source in itself. From the precision and flawlessness, it was clear this wasn’t just someone’s car, this was someone’s life.

      “Oh no,” Louie cried, turning the pitcher upside-down. “We drank it all!”

      “Get back to the house. Make more. Quick!”

      Louie grabbed the jug and bolted into the cornstalks. The 1967 Corvette Sting Ray came to a stop beside me. Yes, the red ’67 Sting Ray stopped beside me, Ivey Doede. The passenger window slid down and I knelt into a plume of fruity mandarin that burnt the nostrils like the stuff Dad chugged. The man’s precise stop made a little more sense now.

      He was pale with a tint of green, sloppy with his gestures, slurred in his speech, and his eyes were so baggy it looked as if someone taped prunes under them.

      “What’s this you’re...” He burped a little. “You’re selling?”

      I glanced down at the sign, wondering if he was illiterate or too hammered to read. “Lemonade,” I said, sounding the word out for him. “Twenty-five cents.”

      For the first time the man looked up at me. We locked eyes and I felt it impossible to dodge them. Past the glaze I saw something I had never seen in someone before. It was a look of

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