The place I grew up and the name I was burdened with at birth are an inescapable part of who I am. Over the years, I’ve tried to outrun both only to find that, no matter how long or far I ran, I was always too slow. When I got to wherever I was going, they were always there with me. I pretended to be a person I wasn’t for people that didn’t care, and those people would forget that person I was the moment that person ceased to occupy space in their small slice of the world. But it never mattered how many people I pretended to be nor for how long because, in the end, I was still that same person with the same name from the same place.
More than anything, I remember my insignificance among the pine forests of southeast Texas. Those trees had lived lifetimes before I was born and would live lifetimes after my death. They were towering watchers that had seen more than I could ever know, and knew more than I could ever hope to someday. They’d been there as untold numbers of people had traveled amongst them, made their homes from the felled of their kind, and abandoned those dead stacks of timber to rot and ruin when times got lean.
Still, The Pines remained abundant and resilient, in spite of the senseless violence of human progress.
It was a dark place. Even at midday the light that touched the ground was sparse and mostly confined to dry creek beds that meandered through. Game trails crisscrossed the land but were hard to see unless a person knew how to look. The few actual trails to be found were remnants of a time when the first settlers, the ones too weak to really make a go of it in a place like this, had given it their best shot in the new world after having made their way inland almost a hundred miles from Galveston.
Maybe weak isn’t the right way of putting that. Maybe they’d been smart enough to catch on to what these woods really were. Maybe they reckoned it quicker than the rest of us and got out while the getting was still good. Maybe those of us that ended up staying were the weaker of the species, too afraid to keep pushing, or too lazy. Maybe we were the ones that shouldn’t have survived in the place we staked our names.
Maybe.
I spent more nights sleeping out in those woods when I got to be old enough to run faster than my family was able. You learn to get quick when you know what’s coming after you. When you’ve learned what being caught means, you get real quick, real quick. Knowing those woods the way that I did, I didn’t really need to be quick, but I got that way. I could cover miles through dense foliage in a matter of minutes when it took others hours. If you caught me in open ground, you could hang it up. I’d be gone before you took more than a step or two.
That speed caught the attention of the high school cross-country and track coach, an old lady named Debbie Hartland. She knew that I was running from something and wanted to give me a leg up in that race. I was put on the varsity team as a freshman and made a different kind of name for myself, even if that name was still tied to the people I was running from. In a town as small as mine, you don’t get away from those kinds of things and people still look at you a certain way no matter what.
During the years between my first day as a freshman and my last as a senior, my younger brother and sister were pulled out of school by my momma. When I was home, I’d have to sneak out early in the morning, run the six miles to school, run whatever distances for practice, and still make grades good enough to stay eligible to compete. The nights I wasn’t home or in the woods, Ms. Hartland would let me sleep in her spare bedroom and give me a ride to school. Her door was always unlocked and there’d been plenty of mornings she’d wake to find me crashed out, still sweating from the run, on her couch, and I’d wake up a while later to the smell of breakfast being made in the kitchen.
From a young age I knew how things worked in my town. If your place was situated with the right name, there were more doors that were open than shut. If you weren’t so blessed, I’m sure the obvious doesn’t need to be stated. I, of course, came from the latter. Even if I was winning regional and state meets, my name still was what it was, and meant what it meant.
I was seventeen the first time I saw a dead body in real life. It bore none of the peacefully sanitized serenity a person sees at funerals. It was messy and terrible, and made all the worse because I knew the person and had seen the doing of what led to the aftermath.
Penny Carter was a month or two older than me. She was a black girl that lived near the train tracks in a slummy neighborhood where my daddy bought his dope. We were friends in the way that only kids dealt the sorts of hands we’d been can be. Her daddy and mine had played football together in high school, and their relationship had stuck when they both dropped out of college to go to work when they’d gotten our mommas pregnant. There was resentment in their hearts for the both of us. They blamed us, each in their own way, for all the broken promises their choices resulted in, and that we represented. That resentment tended to boil over at times.
Penny had one leg shorter than the other because her momma had been using while she was pregnant and it caused her to limp. In spite of this, I’d always thought she was the prettiest girl in school, and told her so often. She’d never been able to run the way I could and had trouble getting from class to class so, I’d carry her books, make sure she got to where she was going, and hightail it to where I needed to be just in time to make the bell. When I’d struggle with class, she would always be there to help me get enough of an understanding to get by. She was already taking college classes when it happened.
The folks that live in the drug world, even if this doesn’t make a lick of sense, have their own hierarchy. Those that sell tend to look down on those that use, even when those that sell use themselves. Friendships only go so far in this world. When Penny’s daddy, Marcus, caught wind that she and I were a thing, he didn’t take too kindly to the idea. He decided to put things right with a brick one day when I walked Penny home from school. I was catatonic when the police came shortly after he’d done what he did and was looking to do the same to me. I felt the wind of all 23 rounds as they tore past me and into Marcus. My momma and daddy were more upset they’d have to find a new dealer than that I’d seen what I saw that day.
I was still covered in Penny and Marcus’s blood when the police deposited me at my family’s trailer back behind Mammer and Poppa’s house. My momma wouldn’t let me inside unless I stripped naked in the yard and washed myself off with the water hose. It was December, a week before Christmas and, as the lights of the patrol car disappeared down the gravel driveway, all I could think to do was run.
So I ran, as hard and fast as I’d ever run in all my life. I ran out of spite for the voices chasing me. I ran to blur the image of what I’d seen happen to Penny. I ran until every breath burned like acid, and the tears that fell down my cheeks turned horizontal. I ran from the darkness of my world for the darkness of The Pines. I ran through the stinging cuts of the brambles that tore at my skin, and the limbs that lashed my face. I ran until death felt as close as it had been when the cops shot Marcus. And when my legs and lungs threatened to give out, I ran harder.
I collapsed at the edge of a swamp. Too tired to cry. Too tired to move. Too tired to live. Too tired to die. Sleep came only out of exhaustion. It was a fitful and cold kind of sleep. The kind of sleep that’s interrupted over and over because you can’t find the right position, the ground too hard from freezing, and the mind too busy. I was only vaguely aware of the sounds around me when one came that cut through the familiar. A fluttering creak, like the beating of wings mixed with the bending of tree limbs in a light breeze wafted through the stale air of the swamp. I sat up and looked out through the early morning fog into the waterlogged pines and grasses. The sun wouldn’t be up for a while but there was enough light by which to see the surrounding area. My breath was deliberately slow, trying to make as little noise as possible to hear the sound again. I squinted through the gloom searching for its source. It came again, and my eyes darted in its direction. A silhouette came from behind a tree some hundred or so feet away, moving slow but not slow enough that water didn’t slosh as it did. It was tall and thin with a large, strangely elongated head. It walked upright like a man but the shapes were all wrong, and I felt that I was seeing a thing I wasn’t meant to see. The fluttering creak reverberated with each movement and I felt a deep melancholic despair the longer I watched. It was as if all the light in the world hadn’t been just covered but ripped away in the most violent way possible. I choked on the air, felt tears pulled from my eyes as though I were moving fast without protection from the wind.
With more effort than I’d given to running the night before, I pulled...no, dragged...my eyes away from it, trying to convince myself it was nothing more than a trick of the light and fog. Still, in spite of the rational part of my brain telling me this was true, I stood and walked away as quietly as I could. Putting my back to the thing I saw and the swamp it moved through, and walked back out of the forest.
The cold that had been kept at bay returned with fury as I walked. Picking up the pace did little to warm me. Eventually, I found the trail I knew would take me to the one door I knew would be open. After a few hours I came to the edge of the woods and saw Ms. Hartland’s house, lights already on even at that early hour. Ordinarily, I’d have walked up straight away but the presence of a powder blue, shit box Buick in the driveway gave me pause. I knew that car as sure as I knew my own reflection. Even from a distance, I knew the form of my momma, thin and malnourished, leaned against its hood puffing away at one of her Marlboro Reds. I knew the shape of my daddy, tall and muscled from years of manual labor, at the open door, hands waving angrily. His voice carried to my ears but I couldn’t make out what he was saying, though I could figure the gist. Words like bastard, little shit, and mother fucker don’t need to be heard outright to be reckoned by the way they break the wind.
He pushed her and I heard the heavy oak door slam in his face. His fists pounded a time or two at the door. He wasn’t going to get through no matter how much effort he put into it, he knew that much. After a spell, he turned away, trudged down the steps to the shit box, said something to momma, and the two of them got in the car and drove away.
I waited for a long time out there in the cold. Hidden by the shadows of the trees, waiting to see if they’d come back but they never did.
The walk across her back yard felt longer than it ever had before. It wasn’t a big piece of land but, my cold stiffened body screamed with agony as I moved towards the promise of warmth. My body moved without my consent or consciousness. It was on auto-pilot, and looking out for itself no matter the cost.
Ms. Hartland must’ve seen me through the kitchen window because, before I knew what was happening, she was wrapping me in a thick quilt and taking to rubbing life back into my arms and back. Her voice was clipped to my ears and I had no recognition for the words. All the same, she kept talking and a part of me knew things were going to be alright for a while, until my family came looking again as I knew they would.
Sleep came quickly. I was out before my head hit the pillow, and would remain so through to noon the next day.
Whatever the people of my town thought of my family, they had respect for the one that Ms. Hartland came from. Those that needed to tended to listen when it was a Hartland speaking. While I was wherever I was in the time between my eyes closing and opening, she’d been talking, and people’d been listening. So, I wasn’t surprised to find the mayor, the county judge, and the police chief in her living room when I finally had the strength to stand. They had names I knew but couldn’t recall at the moment.
The sight of me, still covered in blood aside from my face where she’d wiped it with a damp washcloth, caused both men to stand abruptly, the police chief’s hand instinctively reaching for the gun at his hip. She calmed them and made to guide me, delirious as I was, to the bathroom. I showered and put on the sweats she’d brought from the school while I was sleeping, and rejoined them.
They talked. I listened. She smiled. I nodded.
It was all one-sided, but it was a one-sided that didn’t bother me. They’d been busy making arrangements while I’d been busy being gone. I’d be staying where I was for the rest of my senior year. Protective and emergency custody orders had been written up and signed, giving Ms. Hartland guardianship over me. The situation had been explained to my momma and daddy in no uncertain terms and they didn’t fight back. I think, more than anything, they were just glad to be rid of a mouth they barely had the money to feed.
When all was said and done, and the men had gone, it dawned on me just how much sway a person’s got to hold to make folks work on a weekend. Never mind they’d been made to wait around for a bloodstained kid on a Sunday morning in a very Christian county.
I’d finish high school a few months later, taking state one last time in Spring, and being adopted by Ms. Hartland three weeks before turning 18. I’d been offered a few scholarships for cross-country at colleges as far away as Washington and Maine but ended up settling on the University of Texas at Austin so I’d be close enough for Ms. Hartland, or mom, as I’d taken to calling her, to be able to drive up on the weekends. She never asked, but I knew she understood why I planned to never come back to that place.
Sadly, the plans we make when we’re kids have a way of being ruined as adults. That place and my name would drag me back across all the miles and years I’d put between them and myself.