Eyes Like Knives

I was always certain that I would never find something to call my home until I met Coy Alexander and Starr. The day that I met them changed the entire course of my plans, of who I am and what the world meant to me. I always thought about destiny. How destined I was to meet them, to meet them and to never again look at a flower and say that it was ugly.

The night that I hopped off the tour bus and ran away for good was the only time I had ever felt freedom in an instant. If you have never found something that made you feel free the moment it happened, then you now know what you need to search for. There’s nothing quite like it.

I made my way across the stretching highway on foot, the moon guiding me like I knew my mother could have, as cars whisked by me infrequently. I didn’t know the roads of Montana all that well, or the general direction I was even heading in. With a good amount of money I stole from my dad’s recent paycheck, I purchased an iced tea to stuff in my bag at a gas station along the way, in case thirst got the best of me. I was determined to keep the money in check. It would be bad news if I ran out any time soon.

The return address from my mom’s letter was in Indiana. I had written it down on a small sheet of paper:

 

                                                                      9807, Saint Luther way, Dillsboro, Indiana

 

I was prepared to protect that sheet like it was the key to my very own 1980 Westfalia Camper in Hemi Orange. That car had been my morose pursuit ever since I was seven and I saw two kids around my age at the same truck stop as my dad’s tour bus. I still remember it like nothing else.

They were sitting in the car, the adult relaxing up front was blasting Roses of Godchild, and they looked at one another like the music was infesting their ears with insects of some sort. That’s always how I felt about my Dad’s music too. The two kids hopped up to their feet, stood on one of the cars seats, and then disappeared as they lifted themselves up to the canopy above. Peering through the pop out top of their camper, they both stared right at me, and waved me over to come up and inside.

I was an adventurous kid. Always being on a tour bus usually meant that the excitement was limited, so I always jumped on different opportunities when I could. I tip toed my way out of my bus, walked over to their van, and climbed up top. They lifted me up into the canopy area, and giggled as my foot lost its grip and I slipped.

The first thing I noticed was the boy and his crystalized eyes.

It was as if they were invested in their beauty, constantly growing and shaping and forming into even more of a crystal than before.

They lightened when he talked about Led Zeppelin.

They dulled when he spoke of his hometown, Burket.

“We invited you to come up to our special place for a reason,” the small girl said to me. I turned to face her, and noticed how the freckles on her face seemed to mirror the look of constellations, and thought that if you drew a line to connect them all together, you could create a picture as beautiful as her.

“Don’t you want to know the special reason,” the starry-faced girl said again.

“I guess I do,” I said. “Tell me.”

That’s when the boy added in, his voice like a ZZ Top record.

“We invited you up to our secret hiding place because to both of us, you look like you could use an escape. And we like to rescue people.”

I was confused, until he kept on explaining. I was familiar to the way he spoke, like his thoughts were not fixed up and placed in the correct order to articulate a proper prose. He just talked whatever he thought.

“Me and my best friend here, we saw you daydreaming out of your van. You looked bored and kind of hopeless and actually kind of hungry, so here’s a raisin cookie that we stole from her mom.”

I took that cookie in a heartbeat. Dad never usually remembered to feed me until I told him that child starvation is something that not many fans would support, and that it could hurt his rising fame in a moment’s time. That got him off his a*s quickly.

“Well, thanks for the cookie,” I said in between chews of food.

“No problem. Listen, your bus doesn’t look like very much fun, and if you want to ride with us we would let you. I like you.”

I thought my neglected little heart might have skipped a beat when he said that.

Just as I was about to respond, Dad’s agent Tammy started yelling my name. They finally found out that I was missing. To say she sounded frantic about my disappearance would probably be a stretch, she seemed only a little bit more focused on her blonde highlights and adjusting her jean miniskirt. But I knew that if I stayed missing any longer, Tammy would go on one of her tour bus delaying tantrums.

“I have to go. She’s calling my name. I better go back to my bus.”

I said it with desperation, with an emotion so shamefully obvious that I would do anything to stay with them in their van.

“We understand,” the girl said. “You can go if you have to, but we’ll always wish you would’ve stayed. I feel like I’ve met you before, and I like that.”

She smiled at me, and I smiled back, never feeling more at home with two people in my entire life.

“Maybe we’ll see you again one day, on the road. That’s the way we plan on spending our lives, us two. Driving. I want to fight crime.”

I smiled at the boy as he spoke, knowing how much I had in common with them.

“Goodbye,” I said, hopping down from the canopy. “I’ve dreamed of spending my life driving across the highway. Maybe we’ll have some adventures one day.”

With a wave, I stepped out of the van, and started walking back to the tour bus. As I did, I heard the boy saying one last thing through the window of the van.

“I have a feeling that I’ll take you on an adventure one day.”

 

Since I was seven years old, I looked around for that Hemi Orange car. I wanted the boy to be right just as much as I wanted him to have his place in a museum art exhibit simply because of those celestial eyes. But dreams like that have a tough way of actually working themselves out, as much as you may want them to.

Getting lost in my memories and thoughts, I’d barely been looking around to notice where feet had taken me. I was far down the street I had first started on, walking for miles and miles throughout the night. My shoes had already started to blister my feet.

Maybe I needed to start hitching some rides.

Sitting on my small backpack, I stuck out my thumb in hopes that someone would be generous enough to stop. I’ve noticed how unwilling people are to give strangers rides to where they need to be, and I never quite understood it. There’s no harm in helping a person get where they need to go, even meeting a nutcase that could give you a good laugh, a passion that could spark their own. 

I’ve always wondered about humanity’s ability to turn their cheek to things that are deeper than they are comfortable with.

After an hour of sipping on my iced tea and strumming chords on my ukulele to suffice the boredom, a car finally pulled over.

It was dark green, small and aged, with older man and woman inside. The man had long, tumbling hair that I thought looked like tumbleweed. The woman had the largest mole that I had ever seen glued to her cheek,

I opened the door and jumped in the back seat, setting my backpack in the seat beside me.

“Where are you looking to go, kid? We’re just headed as far as the edge of the state line, back home in Lima.”

“That will work perfectly fine, sir. Thank you for stopping. I didn’t think there was a caring soul left on this highway.”

The man laughed softly. “There aren’t too many willing to do a favor these days.”

And with that, we drove. He was a good driver, steady with his hands and feet. We drove for hours across Montana, occasionally stopping at a gas station or diner to grab some food. I learned a lot about their lives-- their wedding day was the day of JFK’s assassination and for a while they thought that meant bad luck, they have two teenage daughters back home who “don’t appreciate a thing given to them”, and they are driving back from a funeral that took place yesterday, but they didn’t seem all that distraught by the loss.

I told them about my days on the road with my Dad, and how big of a whiskey-downing loser he was. They had heard of his band, but summed it up as “a group of scream-singing wannabes”, which I took a liking to.

Those two, they were laughing and they were reminiscing and they were living as if the day was not dragging on behind them, but as if it was strung out just beyond their reach. They were alive. Maybe just another couple braving the world together, but knowing that there are people out there just like them kind of gave me a warm feeling that humanity isn’t always as bad as you might think.

The time came and went and eventually, we ended up in Lima.

“I’ll be sad to see you go, kid. My daughters would enjoy your company.”

The man smiled and pulled over to a truck stop area. They insisted that I stayed the night at their house, but safety and comfort wasn’t what I was after tonight, for some reason. 

“Now you come down to our house if you run into any trouble,” the woman said, and with that, I stepped out of the car.

“Thank you, really. For everything.”

“We just hope you find what you’re looking for, kid.”

“I think I will,” I said, and started on my way.

Headlights surrounded me. Entering the area, leaving the area, cars that took people where they needed to go. I didn’t know where I needed to go, or how I was going to get there. I wasn’t even sure why I felt the need to spend the night at a banged up truck stop instead of taking up the family’s offer to stay at their home.

I sat myself down on a bench, eating a few chips from a bag I had bought at a gas station. I was starving, and alone, and engulfed with this feeling of defeat.

I had never considered if I was tough enough, if I could handle these cold nights where it was me against the people I ran into, me against the night sky so dark that I couldn’t even decipher my own feelings.

I was lost in all of my thoughts, and doubts, until I noticed two men walking towards me. One had a red bandana and boots that made a loud clunk, the other thin with a nose that instantly made him look like a crook. I thought about running, but I didn’t know where.

One of them was holding something.

“My dad is a celebrity. He’ll kick your a*s if you come near me.”

I spoke as strong as I could, bluffing at the fact that my dad would do a single thing to put me to justice. Unless, of course, his publicist said so.

The man in the bandana laughed, it was a gross cackle, like forks in a blender.

“Hey now, pretty lady, we aren’t here to cause any trouble. That’s not what we want.”

Their gun was standard. Smooth metal, easy to hold, and fully loaded.

“Just give us the last of your money and we’ll be on our way.”

I panicked inside, like I was drowning, because as distressed as I was, I didn’t make a sound to show it.

“I don’t know about that. I don’t have much to give you anyways.”

One man nodded and grinned and drew a step closer to me.

“I see the bag right next to you,” he said. He brushed his hand lightly against my face, his other slowly down my neck.

“Just hand it over, and that will be the last of us.”

I didn’t know what else there was to do.

I couldn’t give all my money away, my journal, my ukulele, my few extra shirts.

Those were the only things that I had by my side.

The one with the gun, standing a bit further back, raised it up an inch.

He cocked it slowly, like there was all the time in the world.

“It’s just a bag, isn’t it, sweetie? Shouldn’t be too much trouble to give away.”

I was frozen, grabbing onto my backpack, but not making an effort to throw it their way.

That’s when the gun got raised higher, ready to sound at any moment, ready to blow me away into a whole different fate that I was not entirely ready for.

But then there was a sound.

A laugh, a small, amused laugh.

All three of us turned to our left, and that’s when I saw him.

“You know, I have a camera in my hand right here. It’s loaded, really. Videos, picture, the whole shebang.”

I never thought I would share a thing in common with those two crooks, but it turns out I did. They were just as confused as I was.

“Sorry, I probably should explain further. Videos and pictures of the two of you robbing that gas station a bit further down the road. Not to mention a few shots of this little episode right here. Have you really not noticed me following you?”

The two men glanced at one another, surprised, and then turned to face the guy.

“And who’s to say we don’t just pull the trigger on you as well? Then that camera won’t be functioning for long.”

“Well,” the guy said, his speech animated and sporadic, familiar. “Because what you don’t know is that my friend in that van over there, the orange one yes, has a laptop. I mean, all the pictures are already downloaded. She’ll drive away at any moment to report the two of you if convenient.”

He was brilliant, not challenging the two criminals with another violent advance, but intelligence instead.

“Come on, let’s just get out of here. We probably don’t have very long before the cops are on our a*s anyway.”

And with that, they walked away, and that was it.

The guy walked towards me, eyes bright and concerned.

“Are you alright?”

I turned to face him, not sure what to say.

“I’ve been chasing those guys for a few days now. It’s kind of what I do. When I saw them harassing you it was pretty much the perfect opportunity.”

I still wasn’t sure what to say. There was a reason I wasn’t sure what to say.

“I’m Coy, by the way. You are?”

I could barely mouth my own name, I could barely say it. I could not believe it.

“Nevada.”

“Nevada, I’m sorry, but I can’t really let someone like you stay out here alone. You’re beautiful, by the way. I mean, it wouldn’t go unnoticed. You’ll get harassed at every moment.”

I could not believe it.

“Are you okay? I mean, please, just stay the night with us. It’s really not safe alone.”

I nodded, and he grabbed my hand to pull me up.

Face to face, we were face to face.

I looked up to face him, our breath shortening with every movement that brought us closer.

Celestial eyes, eyes invested in their own beauty, the eyes that told me why I had spent the night at this very place.

Reviews

[sanyakhan]

Your amazing so talented. I love this.