Fly Away

It hasn’t rained in a while, and there’s a fine coat of dust lining my throat. I glance over at my girlfriend Keana—and she’s got her bare feet kicked up on the dashboard, torso contorted until her head stretches out the window like an eager hound. “Let’s go to Burning Man,” she says over the dry Texas wind. 

“Burning Man?”

“It’s a festival in Nevada.”

“I know what Burning Man is.”

“Pull over!”

She’s like that—sporadic whims, commands she expects you to follow and would be unable to imagine you doing anything else. I don’t mind. It’s nice having someone make all your decisions, so I comply and pull onto the shoulder of the road that we’ve been cruising on for over an hour, then I watch as she throws open the door and runs outside, barefoot.

I follow her. She doesn’t seem to feel the sand that I know burns like hell as she picks her way through the brush before stopping at a stubby cactus. Her waist beads peak from below her tank top as she bends down and pricks her finger once, twice, three times against the needle points. I smile. I remember when she made those beads, as she makes most things if she can find a tutorial online. We’d scoured the internet for the perfect lime green and lavender crystals and the perfect Africa-shaped charms, and then I’d watched her string them on one by one, her shitty eyes never quite gauging where the bead’s hole was the first time she tried to put the string through. 

She’s rarely taken them off since. “It’s so pointy,” she remarks. 

“That’s what makes it a cactus.”

She ignores—or perhaps is unbothered by—my snarky comment. “I want it.” She starts digging her fingers into the dirt around it, and I don’t try to stop her, or reason with her, or convince her we’re better off without a small cactus accompanying us. Any attempt at reasoning sifts through the mesh of her brain and out the other end, I’ve learned, and it’s almost always better to save my breath for a different, more urgent argument. 

Like, for example, the one I’m about to start, as soon as I work up the courage to tell her what I’ve been avoiding for the past two days. 

I lean on the hood of the car, tilt my head up, and close my eyes. Fuck. At least the sun feels good today. Some days it takes on a vengeful, dry heat like it wants to chafe through my skin and turn my bones into kindling, but today, it’s quite nice, although I can’t tell what has changed about it. Maybe it hasn’t changed at all. Maybe I’m the one who’s changed. I don’t even mind when my underarms start to drip. 

“Ouch!” she shouts. I look down. Her first finger is stuck between her lips. The cactus’ roots are exposed, but she can’t pull it out. “It pricked me! Do you still have your gloves?”

I sigh and open the back seat, where we’ve stored a couple bags. I’d packed my motorcycle gear, fully intending to bring my bike, fully intending our road trip to be a brief one where I could speed along some back route until Keana decided when we’d turn back around. But then she shook me awake the day before we were supposed to leave, shouting, “We gotta get out of here!” as she told me about the shit she’d been stealing from the rich families she babysits for, begged me to help her stuff it all in the trunk, begged me to run away with her.  

What’s worse is that for the past week, I’ve been doing just that. Now, my helmet sits on the car floor amidst a steadily growing pile of trash with no motorcycle to accompany it.  

I dig the motorcycle gloves from my large duffel and hand them to her. Each glove is slightly too small on her, something she’s always teased me about. It was the first thing she’d noticed about me when we were teenagers. You’ve got cute hands. 

By the time she’s managed to dig the cactus free, I’ve zoned out just far enough to make her impatient. “Imani…” she says. She’s holding out the cactus toward my hands, expecting, of course, for me to take it, shaking it when it’s clear that I’m refusing.

“What the hell am I supposed to put that in?” I ask. I guess it’s the primary downside of being the follower of someone else’s orders; I have often found myself at the mercy of a command I can’t or don’t want to follow, yet too ineffectual to deny it and insist on something else. Keana knows this, so she tilts her head and raises her brows like it’s not her problem but mine, because so long as I don’t find a container to put it in, I’ll be holding a cactus in my lap. 

I sift through the car again for my helmet. I won’t be needing it anyway, so I let her dump a few handfuls of dirt inside before she nestles the cactus in the center. She’s proud of her handiwork and tucks the gloves in her back pocket. Now, they’re her gloves. “Thank you, baby,” she says softly, placing a small kiss on my lips. It’s a kiss that, as a kid, I thought I’d never be lucky enough to feel. 

We get back in the car. Less than ten minutes in that heat has made us a little musty, but we’ve yet to buy more deodorant. A trunk full of stolen, expensive shit—Swarovski crystals, Rolex watches, Chanel bags, designer sneakers, and even an eight-hundred-dollar bottle of wine, all on a bed of hundred-dollar bills—and we haven’t bought much of anything, save a bag of candy and just enough water, chips, and cans of Campbell’s soup to keep our hearts beating. I’ve been telling her that it wouldn’t be smart otherwise. Paying for a whole bunch of stuff with hundred-dollar bills screams crime, and if it weren’t for my sense, the police would have caught up to us by now. For the fourth time this week, I chuckle at the irony. Technically, we’re millionaires, and yet my stomach is growling so goddamn bad I might crack that cactus open and eat it.

We’re on the road again, and I start checking every green sign for a gas station, which are few and far between in these parts. Keana fiddles with the radio as if there have been strong enough signals in the past four days, and when she is eventually disheartened by the static, she settles for humming. 

I tap my hand along to her little rhythm. I should tell her now, part of me thinks—I should tell her now. But I allow myself to get lost in her voice and the road and the wind and the heat instead. She’s always had a great voice. 

After a while, she opens the glove compartment and asks, “Where that good shit at?”

Before I can answer, she pulls out a jar holding what little remains of my bud. We’ve plowed through most of a quarter ounce since being on the run, chomping through blunts at a rate I haven’t attempted since our high school days. Keana screws open the jar and hovers her nose over the top. “Mm,” she murmurs, “let’s roll up. This stuff helps my mind.”

I force out a laugh and find myself muttering what I’ve never dared to say before. “Technically, it doesn’t help. Technically, it makes things worse.”

She’s hardly paying attention. The cactus rests in the crook of her elbow, and her feet are now hanging out the window where her head had been thirty minutes ago. “Says who.”

“The doctor, who wanted you to stop smoking.”

She pauses, and I know she’s glaring at me now, but I keep my eyes trained on the road. “The doctor wanted me to take those awful pills,” she says.

I sigh. We’ve had this conversation before. “He can put you on new medication.”

“But I don’t like it.”

“But you—”

“Shhhhh,” she croons, and her hand reaches into the glove compartment again, this time pulling out our rolling papers, and she gets to work. She’s made her decision already. “Stop. Talking.”

She replaces the silence that follows with another bout of humming as she pulls on the blunt. When she offers it to me, I shake my head. No gas stations.

A few minutes pass. “Do you still want to go to Burning Man with me?”

I don’t remember ever confirming that I actually wanted to go. “Ain’t no black people at Burning Man.”

“That’s not true!”

“Search it up and tell me whose face you see.”

“Maybe you just have to search ‘black people at Burning Man.’”

I laugh. She can always make me laugh. “That’s not helpful. You can search ‘black people in Sweden.’ It doesn’t mean we’re an abundant population over there.”

She shrugs. “At least there’s an abundant lesbian population.”

“In Sweden?”

“At Burning Man.” I feel a finger flick my shoulder. “Do you want to go or not?”

I don’t ask the practical questions one would ask, like when? and what are we going to do with the million dollars’ worth of shit in our trunk when we get there? I tell her, “Yeah, I’ll go.”

That’s enough to satisfy her. 

I finally find a gas station twenty miles and twenty minutes of similarly impulsive conversation later. When I pull into an empty pump, she exits and opens the trunk, where we’ve placed her duffel bag, a bookbag, and a pillow to disguise the scattered carpet of stolen goods that lies beneath. Amateur, I guess, to hold it in such an obvious place, but to be fair, we’re not practiced criminals—at least, not we. Keana simply digs to the bottom and pulls up a small, conspicuous clump of money. We’re lucky we’re in the middle of nowhere.

She doesn’t count the bills and just hands them to me. “We’ll need a full tank,” I say—but had she glanced at the gas level lit up in a dull white on my instrument panel, she would have seen that we’re over half a tank and have no need for a fill-up. 

She doesn’t even seem particularly interested in the money either. If it weren’t for the reminder every time we extract just enough to pay for small necessities, she probably would have forgotten about it altogether. Before I can even tuck the money in my pocket, she’s already bouncing back to the car, singing cactus cactus caaaaactus. 

I stick the pump in the side of the car. It’s her car, but I think I’ve driven it more than she ever has. She’s never liked driving, and when she’s off her medication, I don’t like being in the passenger seat. 

The soft click tells me the tank is full in less than thirty seconds, so I shove it back into the holder and head inside the gas station. It’s the type of grungy little corner spot you’d typically avoid on vacation if you’re a six-foot-tall-muscly-brown-skinned woman dressed in a black wife beater and a pair of basketball shorts. The man behind the counter, khakis pulled up across the wide expanse of his waist, squints as I walk inside. It’s definitely a place that The Green Book would have warned me away from—the candy bars are the only brown these people have seen in a while, aside from their own shit. 

But at this point, it is what it is. I walk right up to his counter, pull off my sunglasses, smile, and say, “Pump four.”

He nods and punches at the cash register. He’s got a little radio behind him—of course he does—and it’s playing a twangy, heavily harmonized version of “I’ll Fly Away.” I glance out the window, but Keana has her head down. Probably looking at that damn cactus. 

Her distracted mind is rarely helpful, but right now, it’s a good thing. The man rings me up, muttering, “Ten thirty-two.”

“Wait… something else.” I turn back to the aisles until I find the section for medical supplies and over-the-counters. There’s a small purple bottle of melatonin, a teddy bear curled up under a starry blanket on the plastic label. Capsules. 

At the register, I smile again. “Trouble sleeping,” I say. 

He looks like he doesn’t care. “Sixteen sixty-eight.”

The small wad of cash I pull out is still suspicious even though it’s a fraction of the whole thing. I hadn’t even noticed how many bills said 100 while we haphazardly shoved the money into the car during that pitch-black night a week before. I only remember almost tearing each bill in half with the speed of my motions and then hearing the soft twinkle of Keana’s laugh. What’s so fucking funny, Keana? I’d asked her.

It was a rhetorical question, but she answered me anyway. You are. You don’t have to panic, you know. It was so easy. I’ve done it for months now. Those people won’t notice a thing out of place. 

It was a wonder so many families had let her around their children. But then again, no-medication Keana just seems like one of those free spirits, a child at heart willing to run around barefoot with six-year-olds and eat dinosaur-shaped nuggets like a pig. The type to want to go to Burning Man and skydive and swim naked through a clear-water lake in Utah. To be fair, Keana’s just as likely to do all that on her medication too, and she was just as likely to do it before medication was ever part of her life. It’s what makes you fall for her so quickly—only to find yourself confused when her spontaneity becomes something wilder. In this case, something criminal. 

I bite the inside of my cheeks when I realize I’m smiling a bit. Goddamn. 

I hand the man a bill, and he sighs, holding it up to the light before doling out my change. 

I ignore the look he’s giving me and glance out the window. She’s still got her head angled down. I tuck the melatonin in my pocket, pull out my phone, and dial my brother’s number.

We drive again, far enough for the gas station to be out of sight but close enough to maintain cell service. 

Keana knits those eyebrows together as the car scratches to a stop on the side of the road. “What are you doing?”

“I’m beat, Keana.”

“Already?”

“Yeah, already.”

“We haven’t been driving that long. It’s still early.” She looks up at the sun like it can tell her the time to the minute, instead of just looking at her phone like normal people do. We’d left the motel around nine this morning, paying for our room with our dollar bills like drug dealers would, and now, my phone says it’s only two o’clock. She’s right, but I don’t want to get too far from the gas station, the only marker of civilization we’ve seen for miles. I think we ended up on some back road. Route 66 is nowhere in sight, and it’s the main thing Keana was hoping to see. I’m sure there’s plenty of cool stuff to see on Route 66.

I respond, “You haven’t been driving that long.”

She raises her brows. “I would, if you’d let me.”

My phone starts buzzing from its place in the cupholder. Before I can grab it, Keana has seen my brother’s name on the screen. “Antoine’s calling.”

I glance at it and shrug, but on the inside my heart rate has jacked to double its pace. “I’ll call him later.”

“He’s still living in Dallas?”

“Yup.”

She pokes my shoulder. “We could have visited him! You didn’t want to?”

I don’t know how to change the subject, so I just yawn and make my eyes droop. She rolls her eyes and kicks the car door open. 

I stay inside and watch her weave her fingers together before stretching her arms up to the sky. Her underarms are cushioned by a puffy layer of curly black hairs that she once proclaimed she would dye lime green to match her waist beads. It’s the type of wacky shit that once inspired my dad to call her a rascal when we were kids. Though most recently, he’s replaced all the softness in rascal with the word trouble. Oh yeah, she’s trouble, he’d told me a year ago, shackled to a table in a prison’s visiting room. 

She makes her way to the driver’s side door and yanks it open. “You taking a nap, then?”

“I would, if you’d let me.”

“I will,” she says, as she does the exact opposite—one soft, round leg hikes itself into the car and straddles my lap, the other one in tow. The car is too small, and her backside bops the horn, making us both jerk, and then laugh. Her weight is so familiar, every curve of her figure and every corner of her joints. My hands find their usual place around her waist. “I will,” she murmurs, easing her mouth toward my neck. It’s her favorite spot. “As soon as we….” 

My phone starts buzzing again. I reach over and turn it off.

When I wake up, the sun is low in the sky, and it’s much cooler. Keana isn’t in the passenger seat, so I climb out of the car and start looking, picking my way through red rock and scrub brush. There’s no need to worry—Keana’s always been able to hold her own, just like any rascal worth her salt. And true enough, I soon find her perched on a large, fiery-colored boulder about fifty or so feet from the road. She hears the crunch of my feet and smiles at me over her shoulder. “Come sit with me.”

By the time I pull myself up there, my clothes are smeared with red and orange. We’re facing the sunset, and she’s watching the sky, and I’m watching her. She’s got faint sprays of red dust freckling her short crop of hair, and her glasses are a little smudged. I pull them off her face and rub the lenses clean with my shirt, then slide them back over her ears. 

She scoots closer to me. “Let’s watch the sunset.”

“Okay.”

She’s watching the sky again, but I’m still watching her. Before long her hand is snaking up to my chin and turning my face back to the horizon. “Watch. Sunset.” 

“You know what song I’m thinking of?” I ask. “‘I’ll Fly Away.’ Guy in the gas station was playing it.”

Keana starts humming the chorus.

I look at her, but her hand immediately turns my face again. “The sunset.”

It’s a beautiful thing, sure, with all those colors burrowing into the ground, but I can’t pay attention to it. I wrap one arm around her shoulder before I say, softly, “Would it be so bad to go back home?”

Of course, it’s not the thing she wants to hear. She stays quiet. 

“Keana?”

“Mani. I wanna watch the sunset.”

Quiet again. 

I consider being quiet too, but my mouth does all the talking anyway. “My dad just got out.”

There it is. Part One of what I’ve been waiting to tell her. And this, finally, makes her look at me. A hand settles on my thigh. “I didn’t know that. When?”

“Two days ago. My brother texted.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she says. 

“I didn’t know how to feel about it. But I’ve been thinking about it. And he’s gonna need some help getting back on his feet.”

Keana pauses for a moment, then smiles. “We can mail him a few hundred-dollar bills!”

Maybe I would have laughed a few days ago, but she isn’t getting it, and I’m starting to get impatient. “It wouldn’t be so bad to go home and help him out…”

She scrunches her nose and says, “You want to go back to help him?”

“Yes,” I say. There’s Part Two. “But that’s not the only reason. I…” Now I’m the one looking at the sky, worried that staring at her too long will bully away my resolve. “I was thinking it might be nice to take a few classes at DuBois Community—”

“Why take classes when we have enough cash to retire right now?” There’s a bite in her words.

“All that cash looks way too suspicious to carelessly use anyway. That’s some insanely illegal, WANTED sign shit, Key.” And there’s no way those folks back home haven’t noticed what’s missing yet. 

“What would you even do in college?” 

She says it like she can’t possibly imagine me doing anything at all. “I don’t know yet. I was thinking computers or law or—shit, I don’t know. Something.”

She snatches her hand off my thigh and scoffs, “I’ve known you for over ten fucking years, and not once have you mentioned computers or law.”

I can’t look at her, but I feel those eyes on me. She punishes me with silence, but eventually, she leans against me again. Her anger isn’t like mine—hers burns hot, but it doesn’t last too long. “Wouldn’t you rather watch the sunset?”

So we do. We watch it sink and sink, and I wish I could appreciate all the colors.

We sit there for a moment longer before I make up my mind. “Let’s just sleep out here,” I say. “Under the stars.”

The idea makes her smile.

From the car’s trunk, we grab our blankets and pillows and spread them out a ways from the road. We pile dry scrub and twigs into a circle of rocks, and then I flick my lighter until we have a small bonfire.

“I’ll grab dinner,” I say. She nods.

At the car, I glance over my shoulder to find Keana’s attention back on the flames, so I quickly reach for my phone and turn it back on. There are two missed calls from my brother Antoine and a text that reads, I told u so.

I call him back, and he answers on the second ring. He’s just getting off work. He’ll be there around midnight, he says. 

“Okay,” is all I can manage to get out. 

“Y’all pack light. I ain’t got a lot of room.”

“I don’t know if she’s…” I pinch my eyes shut. I try to explain to him. I mutter something about how stubborn she’s been, how reluctant she’ll be. I’m remembering how often my brother has gotten us out of more shit than I can count, how often he’s told me to clean myself up. I tell him my plan, all the while hunkered down in the car seat, out of her sight.

“Don’t do that shit. You might end up doing more than just knocking her out. If she comes, she comes, if she don’t, she don’t.”

“But—”

Our poor cell connection cuts before I can respond, but maybe that’s for the best. It’s been too long now, and Keana’s probably wondering, so I wipe my eyes, take a breath, and reach toward the back seat, where we’ve stored our food. There are eight more pull-tab cans of soup. The clam chowder is always hers. 

I reach into my pocket and pull out the little bottle of melatonin. My hands are shaking. Goddamn. I crack open one of the capsules, dump it in, crack open another, dump it in, feeling everything at once and nothing at all. There are tears, sure, but I move urgently like it’s all business. Goddamn.

Her cactus is sitting patiently in the passenger seat. I dig the car keys out of my other pocket and place them in the seat too. 

We’re settled on the ground, me on my back, the fire warming up the left side of my body as her body warms up my right. We both ate pretty quickly, and now, we watch the sky. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say we were in the Twilight Zone—no cars for hours, and a strange stillness, like we’re caught in the last frame of a movie. I know none of the constellations nor the difference between the light of a planet and the light of a star, and yet I find myself connecting the dots into shapes and figures anyway. Keana was right about at least one thing. In a perfect world, I’d rather watch the sky. 

One of her hands is tracing the chrysanthemum tattoo on my collarbone. The silence is suddenly filled with her humming, slow but bright. When she’s on consistent medication, her humming turns into a melody, the melody into lyrics, and soon, she has created a song out of midair, only satisfied when she can finally inscribe it somewhere, be it on a napkin or the cover of a mass market paperback or against the lighter skin of her palm. 

With her medication long gone, though, Keana can only repeat her long-since worn-through and faulty phrase: “I’m going to be a singer.”

“When?” I ask. 

I feel her looking at me, and I don’t move my eyes from the sky. 

“When I’m ready,” she mutters, and it’s too definite, as if ready is a specific day and time that she has already decided on, and she’s now irritated that I didn’t remember. 

“You can’t be a singer and an outlaw at the same time.”

Her weight shifts until next thing I know, her face is over mine. One of her fingers tugs at my braids. “Your hair is messy. You want me to re-braid it tomorrow?”

I nod. “Yeah.”

I lift my head and kiss the little beauty mark on the right side of her chin. And then I find my way to her lips. 

We have sex for what I fear may be the last time, so I trail my tongue from her neck to her chest, and I kiss her soft, sweet nipples over and over again and touch every inch of her body. She’s squirming and heaving beneath me, and it’s a feeling and a sound I know I’ll always miss. And because she’s Keana, because she likes to tell me what to do and I like to listen, she says Lay on your back, and I do, and I let her ride my hips, and she moans, and I moan. 

I already miss her, so when we both finish, I pull her down again and start back at square one. She giggles, “Mani, wait, wait.” I don’t wait. I keep going until I hear her in my ear again, softer and softer as we fall asleep. 

I wake to Keana slapping me in the face.

Shit. The darkness is disorienting, the fire is low, and for a second, nothing exists but the sound of Keana’s voice—

“WhereareyougoingMani? Whereareyougoinghuh? Whereareyougoing?”

I slowly sit up. My phone is in her hands, and she shoves it into my face. Shit shit shit. I know before looking at the screen that it’s my brother. There’s a text from three minutes ago that reads, I’m almost there. You ready to go?

I don’t have time to explain myself or to let her make me change my mind—because down the road, there’s the tumble and crunch of dirt on shitty tires and a bright stream of headlights. Antoine’s car pulls in beside ours. 

We dress quickly, but not before she drills me for an explanation. The melatonin was no match for her brain. “Imani?!”

I’m a goddamn coward. I can’t even look at her, reduced to looking at the ground instead as I take a deep breath. “My brother’s here. We’re taking the license plate, ditching the car, and he’s driving us back to his place. We’ll lay low for a little bit, stay out of trouble. He knows some folks who can clean this shit up, and then we can go back home. I’m not doing this shit no more.”

“What? No.” 

“Keana, this doesn’t make sense and you know that.”

“I’m not going back home.”

I pause, and she pauses, arms crossed tight, lime green and lavender waist beads sparkling in the light of what remains of our fire.

Something in me snaps. I reach forward, grab her by the elbow, and start yanking. “Let’s go.”

Of course, she starts wrenching herself away, but I’m stronger, and we scrap our way back through the scrub toward the car. “Let me go! Let me go!” she shouts through her teeth, first slapping my hands and arms, then scratching, then dropping to the ground, then dragging her legs behind her. I don’t care. For once, my determination is finally strong enough to combat hers, so we play tug-o-war with her body, me scrtch, scrtch, scrtch-ing her through the dirt and her nails scrtch, scrtch, scrtch-ing their way through my skin. She’s strong, but I’m winning. 

With my brother still in his car, we reach the road, and I finally let her go. “We’re leaving, Keana. We’re leaving.”

I say we, but I know better. Because as I start swinging open doors, grabbing my shit, and shoving it into my duffel, she just watches, panting. I grab her duffel too and toss it at her feet. “Pack what you need.”

She kicks the duffel as far as she can muster, and it skids further away. And then, she doesn’t move, even when I stomp to my brother’s car and open the trunk, even when I stuff my bag in there. When I stomp back over to her, she dodges me, opens the passenger door, and grabs my helmet, where her little cactus is burrowed in the center. “You forgot something,” she hisses. She upends the helmet, dumps the cactus on the desert floor, and then hurls the helmet at my head. 

I catch it. “Get in the car.” 

She heads for the driver’s seat, but to her car, not my brother’s, and I drop the helmet to run after her. As our hands slap on the driver’s side door handle, her pulling it open and me pushing it closed, she shouts, “I hate you!”

She’s not even crying, just pure anger cording the muscles in her jaw, her neck, her arms. Her other hand starts beating my chest, my face, my arms. “No no no no no no!” 

I’m blocking my face with one arm and grabbing at her flying fists with the other, and I wish my brother would get out and fucking help, but I know he won’t, I know he’s just watching it all unfold and shaking his head, muttering, I told you so I told you so. 

Her energy is starting to wane. I grab her by the arm again and start dragging her toward my brother’s car, but this time when she drops to the ground, I fumble and let her go. 

“Fine!” she shouts, panting, eyes on the ground. “Fine, I’ll go.”

She looks like an animal crouched there covered in red dirt, and it scares me how feral she can get, even though this isn’t the first time she’s snapped at me. We’re motionless, watching each other for a long time before she says, “Get my duffel bag.” 

I’m so goddamn relieved that I don’t even hesitate. I turn and make my way through the scrub where she’s kicked her bag and try to imagine what the fuck the next few days will look like. How many news reports are already reporting a robbery? How long will we need to hang our heads and stay under the radar? And a worse thought—how long do I have until I’m just like my father?

“Imani!”

I hear my brother shout my name at the same time I hear a car engine. I turn, and all I see is the back of Keana’s head in the driver’s seat as she skids back onto the road and speeds away. 

I forget about her duffle bag. My legs sprint back to Antoine, my hands fling open the passenger door. I don’t have to tell him to start his engine, but his car is a piece of shit. When he turns his keys, the engine coughs and revs, then sputters and grinds. I slap the dashboard and curse. He turns the key again and again, and all the while, I watch Keana get further and further away.