Roads With Mirrors

“I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.” ~ Zora Neale Hurston

July13, 2003

Jimmy Cale has passed. When her cell phone jerked and jumped on the nightstand at 2:40 a.m., she was certain it was not for any good. It could not be word that he woke up and asked, “Is Thelma all right?” Or, knowing him, he first inquired about the bike. No. When a brand new, black and chrome, 2003, seven-hundred and thirty-eight pound, One-hundredth Anniversary Edition, Harley Davidson Heritage Soft-tail Custom motorcycle is run off a West Virginia mountain pass, no good comes. She, Thelma Kendrick, the sixteen-year-old passenger thrown free, would wear a purple cast around her left leg for eighteen weeks or more. The steel rod placed inside the bone, she would carry for the rest of her life. She had held a daily vigil in The Miner’s Hospital, icu Waiting Room for over a week, leg propped on a worn-out, bottle-green chair while she breathed Lysoled air. Tonight, against her will, Mom had insisted she come home to sleep in her own bed. Jimmy Cale, the driver of the motorcycle, who wore only a red work-handkerchief on his head . . . she was sure he had passed.

Before he was killed in the mine last winter, Thelma’s father had taught her to drive his ‘93, s-10 Chevy pickup. “Pay attention now, Little T,” he said. “Now, you got to lean into these curves, and be always on the lookout for the convex mirrors nailed up on highway poles just before a hairpin. Look hard into those mirrors to see if something is coming at you, and don’t forget to downshift when you’re coming back down the mountain. You’ll burn up your brakes if you don’t.”

She wondered if Jimmy Cale had looked hard into the steel road mirror before he screamed at her to “Jump off!” She wondered if he knew she had landed in a mountain laurel bush with her leg pretzel-twisted up her back, her toes folded under his silver helmet he insisted she wear. No, she would not put that cell phone to her ear and hear them say, “Well, hello. We are so sorry. We did all we could. He has passed.” She would listen to it buzz and watch it blink and jerk before it fell to the floor.

She yanked the stray sheet wedged under her throbbing leg, pulled it up over her heart and covered her head. Tucked in caterpillar tight, she prayed for needed sleep. Shrouded in flannel violets, she listened to the curtains flap against the sill. A gust of mountain air blew in, circled the bed and dropped her back to July fourth, back on the warm, pulsing, black leather seat: rummmm, rummmm, potato, potato, potato. Summer sun scorched her pale skin. Her skinny bare-legs, whole and light, squeezed the small of Jimmy Cale’s firm back while her freckled arms coiled ‘round his belt. His silver helmet rested heavy on her head. She lifted the visor to breathe in rushes of summer air and to smell his neck, Dove soap and wind cooled sweat. Rrrrrrrrrr hummmm, potato, potato, potato, potato . . . the sounds of a perfectly tuned, big twin Harley engine soothed and carried her to sleep.

Jimmy Cale Singleton was the only boy Thelma’s Pop had not run off. Last summer he had bragged on him down at the mine, told about how the foreman’s boy, Jimmy Cale “tore down the engine of the ninetythree Chevy pick-up and put it back together . . . just perfect.” Her Pop had failed to notice that it was his own fifteen-year-old daughter, Thelma, who stood alongside the boy in the cinderblock garage. He had not heard Jimmy Cale say to her, “Hand me that socket wrench.”

Her right back, “Now, which one?”

“Gimme the 9/16.”

“Ask me nice,” she...