What She Is

Long white-blonde hair in front of the white clapboard chapel. Her body almost invisible in the afternoon sun except for tan legs, bare feet, the straps of sandals held in one hand like an invitation. A small valise at her feet, weathered, blue, hardly big enough for a change of clothing. He noticed her before he saw her thumb, out of place the way she was in front of Phillips Chapel. One thing for a white man who had business there, but a white girl with white hair standing on that corner in front of the church, white in the daylight, he wasn’t wrong to pause, to question, just for a moment, before deciding the answer wasn’t important. Her thumb pointing the opposite direction of the way he was driving. His foot on the brake before his mind made the decision. No harm in it.

He regarded her from across the road. The green patterned fabric of her dress met itself in seams, draping her hips. Her lips were red, but not from lipstick. He’d been on the road for two weeks. It was July already, and he had a few hours’ drive ahead of him. Years later Jim Flessroy would reassure himself that anyone would have stopped for the girl, that she seemed an innocent, that she seemed in need of rescue.

“Where you headed?” he asked through the car window, putting his hat to his head. As he lowered his arm against the open frame, he noticed dirt caked in the beds of his nails. It didn’t matter how much a man scrubbed.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“You lost?”

“Not yet.”

From just beyond the chapel came the strange call of the lesser prairie-chicken, a small spiral of a hoot followed by a cackling laugh.

“I’m heading to Carlsbad. I’ve got to see a man outside of town. Then on to El Paso,” he said.

“Sounds fine.”

She crossed the dusty road, not blinking at the tiny rocks she must have felt underfoot. He hadn’t noticed, until she drew closer, that she was tall. With her shoes on, she would have stood at his height. He got out of the car to put her one small piece of luggage in the trunk alongside his. Her suitcase might as well have been empty, how light it felt in his hands.

“Opposite direction,” he said, walking past her to open the passenger door.

“Of what?”

“The way you were facing. That way wants to go to Silver City.”

She looked the way he pointed, squinting as if she might be able to see the place, hundreds of miles away.

“I was facing that way because I liked the sun on my back.”

He held the door for her and she gathered the skirt of her dress in her hands. A smell of heat and sweat and orange blossoms as she slipped past him into the passenger seat.

The street was deserted. No one to speak any judgment about right and wrong. Nothing except the bird’s cackle as he settled into the driver’s seat once more, leaving his hat on. “Jim Flessroy,” he said, touching the brim.

“I’m Margaret.”

The name startled him. Something about the formality of it.

“You go around with no shoes often?”

Her blue eyes on his, the same shade as the hydrangeas his mother grew back home. He wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief.

“Smells like a new car,” she said.

He patted the steering wheel. “1959. Right off the line.”

She ran a finger across the ridged dashboard.

“A Plymouth,” he added, in case she hadn’t noticed.

Turning away from him, she rolled her window all the way down, circling the crank slowly. “Carlsbad. Aren’t there some caves there?” she asked, looking through the open frame. Clouds had covered the sun, but they were nothing, a thin layer of skin wounded by the circle of light boring through.

“Caverns,” he said. “I haven’t seen them.”

As he grew older he would forget the conversation, forget how...