We Can Be Jack and Sally
by Sarah BlackmanStarting with the saw grass, the palmetto. Jack said We can be night-riders, and I, as a young child, had scarred the side of my hand just running it down the blades of the bush. What he didn’t mean, or me neither, was to travel for so many months—but first of all we were borrowing the car, and second, it wasn’t stealing until we hit the border. Then, we were in the Smoky Mountains and even though Jack said he had left his grandmother a note, there was neither a place to turn around or to come back home from. Come in, instead, he said, holding the door to our first hotel room. Do you remember the kind of biscuits your mother used to make. What did they have, black pepper in them? And we went to bed thinking of biscuits which was almost enough—almost a mouthful—except for, in the middle of the first night, I woke up with his hand down inside my underwear and afterwards we walked to the Waffle House across the parking lot and had the hash-browns, over everything. The cook had a tattoo on his arm that said: Insane.
When someone doesn’t have a story to tell they can name the things around them instead. Jack and I made this up in New Mexico and it became a rule—Wing Mesa, Bluish Mesa, Crab Mesa, I said, and Jack said, No, that’s not worth a whole story anyway. Jack would tell me about before he and my daddy came to our house (or the House of Many Ladybugs, Seesaw Towers, Locust Point). This was after six years of him, and I was born right after, so there is not so much landscape we didn’t do together, or the right words for things (like how to name a house) that we didn’t come up with sitting in the hollow of the forsythia bush with a spit-full beer can to catch our butts. Jack says he smoked already when he and daddy rode down the long road into our driveway. I know what it looked like because I’ve seen the dust blow up around other cars, or in the winter when it rains for your entire life, how final and gray their metal looks and they seesaw around in the mud.
We lived in a hole for alligators. When I was born, Jack had already had his pointer finger tweezed off by the swinging door when he was trying to escape. Now, when he wants to point, he does it with his stub and when I am riding in a flat, low place and he is bored of the scenery, I take it in my mouth and run my tongue around the knot of scars. He says he can feel me better there than anywhere else on his body because it was opened up and got a taste of salt air.
When Jack was a baby he didn’t look like me. That came later, when we knew each other and how to find the rocks in the swamp that would hold you on their backs and the tough, rounds of grass that would only sink enough to wet your toes. Wild, my mother said, You’re too wild, but Jack looked like his own mother—his eyes were flat and his mouth stretched like a lizard’s, all his fingers were there at the start. My mother said, That boy came from whoring, but your dad’s a good man, now, and that was the last thing she said before Jack and I hitched to Tallapoosa and jimmied into his grandmother’s house.
Once, riding through the worst and most impossible flat land in South Dakota, Jack made me get out into a windstorm. We had been fighting over
It wasn’t the Bad Lands—which was the next day—but the sun was coming down in a strip like cotton pink and above it were stripes and stripes of black. The wind pitched clods of dirt under our wheels and when I stood into it I could lean forward and let it take almost all of my weight. Which is what I did, not even looking, and Jack revved his grandmother’s car when I did not look back, but the wind held me crooked and I smacked my palm into it, like water only moving further away.
We decided in Virginia to be Jack and Sally. Before we were using the old names—mine was for a kind of flower that I had never even seen—and there was something old and moldy about us. In the sunlight hovering between mountain peaks, the hairs on Jack’s forearms started up like fierce gold. I stretched my leg out so my bare toes pressed the windshield and, after too many stop-moments where my skirt tugged up further, we pulled off in a bare and hidden place where the mountain people drive to dump their trash. The muscles in Jack’s back are like the unsprung coils of a seashell, his stomach rubbles like flood plains down into his lap where, just before his jeans, there is a patch of dark hair, wiry and soft. Jack’s face is my face—my eyes, my sharp nose—and when I watch him driving, I see the way I will drive the next day, how hard I will grip the wheel and the way my eyelashes will brush my cheek. But all this was after we changed our names.
We can be Jack and Sally, Jack said, and around the curve a coal mining town opened up with its rough and splintered mountains, the tiny white houses clinging to the sides of the hills.
Mustard Mesa.
Mesa made of Indian Teeth
Blue Water Caught On Fire Mesa
Hoop-Snake Mesa
Mesa Part Two
We are not so stupid we think we can drive forever. We have almost crossed the border to California, but decided, at the last minute, we would never get enough of desert. We have developed a deep fear of oceans, and even the gray lakes we saw in Michigan made my skin pop and fizz until Jack took off his flannel shirt and draped it around my shoulders. It smelled like him and Jack smells like October in the northerly parts of the world—burnt leaves, a wide, crisp sky. This is how I know him, so when a mile off the Utah border his sweat suddenly changed shapes, I figured we were close to done. Now we both have a settling feel. It is under my thighs and before when I sat I was all hollows, like a bird about to hurtle like they do and drag up at the last second, skimming the saw grass. Now I spread.
Once, Jack told my mother that marriage was like a goldfish bowl. He meant that she was like a goldfish, she’d grown to fill her space, but outside the alligators were bellowing because they too wanted a wife. We stopped at a no-name gas station—a million miles from the edges of everything—and Jack picked up two handfuls of brochures. They were colored like lollipops and advertised the things the wind does anyway—erosion, pinnacles, dead mud valleys, egg holes to the sky. One said: Miner’s Chapel, and Jack didn’t even point to it, but we are clean people. Our edges are set and defined. When we move through space, we leave behind us nothing but the hollows and eddies of air we have since ceased to fill.
Now, we have a destination. Or are coming up on the place to be. I tell Jack about the summer he went away to Dinosaur Camp. He knows every on of my days, but I chipped my tooth flying out of the cypress tree whose roots are live in water and Jack will run his tongue there, like it is pacing over that unfamiliar ground. Jack found the head of a Tyrannosaurus. It was complete and entire, even the eyes, and when the counselors came to see what he had in his sack, he turned and ran it back into the dead lands because he could feel it pleading with him, the slow language of blinks.
“Once,” I say to Jack, “there was a girl named Sally, and outside the car was a flat, orange land where the ground had plated like a turtle and the sky had sucked up its gut and moved far away.”
Jack nods at me and tightens his grip on the wheel.
“Where are you going Sally? said the boy named Jack who looked a little bit like her, around the eyes, but to be honest had a different face and hands. Why Jack!, said Sally, I don’t know! But where they lived the alligators were constantly shouting their demands and somewhere else there was a quiet place where two people might hear themselves thinking for awhile. And then maybe too much, so there’s always another kind of road.”
Jack put his arm out and wrapped me in it. My head rested in his armpit where his shirt had folded back and, with the tip of my tongue, I could taste his settling mat of hair, the settling sweat beading on his skin and, just as quick, wavering to air.
Somewhere there is another bend in the road and we will get there. Jack points out the window with his stub and I say: No, wait. I think I have a story after all.
