Ballad of the New Pioneers

I. Towns Named After Dead Indians

They came from a town that sprawled near a city. Its name was a cluster of consonants fallen from a settler’s cottony mouth two hundred years before. It was a town of Korean nail salons, a drunk locksmith who always cut the wrong keys, a hail-pocked water tower, a Main Street strewn with garbage picked up from the city and blown down the train tracks.

It was a town with a boring and buried history that no one except the Boy Scouts cared to unearth.

A few blocks from the train station was the Moonlight Ranch, where Ava lived with her mother and five brothers in an RV strung up year-round with Christmas lights. At night, it was like camping. They had their own fire-pit and picnic table and hammock, and Ava’s brothers would roast marshmallows stolen from the dollar store. In the daytime it was like living in a rusted row of dominos, everyone’s lives spilling over each other.

Elliot lived on a street named for a tree. Maple or Oak, Ava never could remember. Words slipped from her mind like paper, like hair, like silk underwear.

II. Westward, Ho!

Their faces were temples to metal, to needles and steel and clean holes that they washed three times a day with gold Dial soap.

When they ran down the wide black streets of the town, their hoops and chains jangled like tiny bells, like pockets filled with change.

Ava’s mother told her that one day she’d want to remove the piercings and her face would be all pockmarks and pus. Elliot’s father said he didn’t give a shit what his son did to his face, as long as he didn’t knock up that blue-haired trailer whore.

When his grandfather died, Elliot was handed three thousand dollars and the paperwork on a house in northern Oklahoma.
Usually, disappearing acts require more effort.

III. Leaving, 1989

They bought a white van and painted the inside midnight blue. Ava’s oldest brother, the carpenter-mechanic, gutted the inside and installed their mattress without asking about the stains.

They told their friends they were going west. They didn’t tell their parents anything.

They tried to disguise their excitement. “We’re finally getting out of this shithole,” Elliot said as he untied his hardware store smock.

They didn’t think much about where they were going, but they had his grandfather’s address written on an envelope. Two West Street, a no-nonsense name. Elliot taped a business card for an Oklahoma lawyer on the dashboard.

It rained the day they left. They hugged friends in Elliot’s garage, then mounted the car like it was their horse and wagon.

Ava forgot her toothbrush and photo album. Elliot forgot a spare set of shoes. They kept these lost things a secret. They didn’t want any excuse to turn back. The town would forget them, swift and silent.

IV. Soup Kitchens Never Serve Soup

They slept in forests, in factory parking lots. They slept in RV parks for two dollars a night. A woman in front of a Walgreens gave them a pamphlet for a soup kitchen. She looked at the hoops and studs on Ava’s face and said, “Jesus loves you, sweetie. We get plenty of homeless kids coming in these days, I’ve seen lives change.”

Ava shrugged at the idea of homelessness. Her home at the Moonlight Ranch had torn seatbelts and four flat tires propped up on concrete blocks.They went to the soup kitchen anyway. Ava had never been to one before, and she hoped for split pea. Later she would learn the conspiracy of soup kitchens, that none of them serve soup.

They bowed their heads in prayer before eating cold lasagna and iceberg lettuce. They thanked the lady for being so kind to a couple of homeless kids, then they got back in the car and tore through Ohio without stopping.

She was not well versed in American geography. She didn’t notice...