That night I unrolled my sleeping bag on the couch and slept hard. I was glad not to have dew settling on my face or a rock sticking in my back or the sound of the tarp crinkling whenever I rolled over. I did hear Onny whimper a couple of times, but I went back to sleep.
I got up once in the wee hours to take a leak (which is why they’re called the “wee hours”), but I climbed back in my bag and fell asleep again. That’s when I had the most vivid dream. I dreamed I was back home, and Pap was telling Ma something in their bedroom, which was upstairs. I could hear their voices, but they were speaking so softly, I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then the door opened, and it wasn’t either of them. It was the girl, Jade, and she was pointing toward the window, but when I looked out, all I could see were the treetops moving back and forth in the wind. The sky was deep blue behind them, and I could see a faint, morning moon, but the trees were thrashing about like a storm was coming.
I woke up with a start and rolled over to see Jade kneeling in the kitchen and offering a bowl of milk to the pup. She said, “Here you go, Onny. You are feeling better, aren’t you? You want some more? Okay, here you go.” And she poured some more milk in the bowl.
I had slept in my pants, so I got out of the bag, pulled on a shirt, and walked up behind her. “How is he this morning?”
She stood. “Better. He’s going to be all right. Thanks to you,” and she turned to face me. She was barefoot and wearing jean shorts cut high. She had tied her tee shirt with a knot above her belly button and pulled her hair back in a ponytail. I felt a rush of desire come over me.
I didn’t know what to do, so I asked, “Can I pet him?”
“Sure.”
I knelt down and stroked his ears, and Onny licked my hand. He even wagged his tail, so that it thumped softly against the refrigerator.
Jade asked, “Would you like some breakfast?”
“That would be great. I’m starving.”
So, she took a small slab of bacon out of the fridge and brought it to me. “What do you think? Is it still good?” The bacon had a faint green sheen along one edge, but I sniffed it, and it smelled okay, so I said I thought it would be all right. She peeled the pieces apart and put them in the skillet, and pretty soon the kitchen was filled with the smell of bacon frying.
While Jade cooked breakfast, I sat at the table and picked up the January issue of Time magazine, and, boy, did that depress me. The Man of the Year for 1967 wasn’t a man at all; it was a whole generation, the “Twenty-five and Under” crowd: Jade and me and my friends back in East Norton High and the kids wherever Jade went to school and the boys going to Vietnam and the hippies in the streets and the black kids trying to go to white schools and fifty million other “young people” (which is what preachers always called us: “Young People,” as in, “Young people, listen to me! Heed not the voices of the world but hearken to the Word of God!”)
On the cover of Time were four illustrated young people: a white boy, a white girl, a black boy, and an Asian boy, and guess what they had in common?
Just guess.
That’s right, they were all handsome, even the faces that were half hidden. The representatives of “the twenty-five and under” generation had fine features and clear complexions. They were smart looking and confident, as if they went to Ivy League schools and spoke four languages and could do calculus, upper-middle-class young people who studied English literature and listened to Simon and Garfunkel and would someday write novels. They watched movies with subtitles and talked about them. They belonged to fraternities and sororities.
They were gonna change the world.
I remember sitting in that shabby kitchen staring at the magazine and wondering what it would feel like to walk in a room and win just by showing up. To have a TV face. To be tall. To go to a really good school. Then I looked at Jade, who was scraping the skillet, which made her butt jiggle in a good way.
I asked her, “What grade will you be in?”
“Ninth. I go to school in Huntsville. What about you?”
“I’m, uh, out of school. So … are you popular? You look like you could be a cheerleader.” I probably sounded like I was buttering her up, but I wasn’t. I was thinking about the magazine cover, and Jade’s chances of changing the world. She might have a shot at it. Pretty people have a much better chance of changing the world unless you’re really, really smart.
“Me? A cheerleader? You’ve got to be kidding. Poor girls are never cheerleaders; don’t you know that? Besides, I’m still new to Arkansas. Most of the kids in my school have known each other their whole lives. I know a couple tricks that make the boys like me, but the girls all hate me. They call me bad names for doing the same things they do, but I get talked about, and they don’t. If you have money, you can do whatever you want to, and nobody calls you a little slut. I don’t go all the way, like some of the girls, but I still get called names and they don’t.”
I had never had such a frank conversation with a girl about sex. I wanted to ask her about the tricks she knew, but that seemed risky, so I asked instead, “Do you think our generation will change the world?”
She turned around, holding the spatula in one hand and the frying pan in the other. “Do I look like I care about changing the world? I care about that beagle pup over there and, right now, about fixing breakfast without burning it. The world is what it is. How do you like your eggs?”
“Scrambled, I guess. Thank you.”
We heard the tell-tale thump, thump coming down the stairs, and we stopped talking. More thumping until he was standing in the doorway and looking at us. Jade said, “Mornin’, Daddy. Want some eggs?”
But he said to me, “You’re still here. I figured you’d be back on the road again … trying to find yourself or whatever the hell it is you’re doing.”
“I’m leaving after breakfast.”
Then to Jade, “How’s the dog?”
“He’s better. Thanks to Otis here.”
“I’m going to town. And when I get back—” He gave me a fierce look.
“Yes, sir. I’ll be gone.”
“Good.”
Mr. Stone thumped across the kitchen and out through the back door. Thump, thump down the stairs, the truck door opening and slamming, and the whaa-whaa-whaa of the ignition doing its best. A sudden shuddering, a shifting of gears, and then silence. The house felt empty and intimate and full of promise. Jade brought our breakfast and sat across from me.
She asked, “So, where are you going?”
“I don’t know. If I told you my story, you’d think I was crazy.”
“I’ve seen enough crazy shit in my life to know crazy. I don’t think you’re crazy.”
So, I told her about leaving home and hitchhiking to Roaring River where a witch came to me in the middle of the night and told me to go to Onyx, Arkansas, and, “Now I’m here, and you have a dog named Onyx, so maybe the prophecy has come true, and if it has, I have no idea what it meant or what to do next because what do you do after a prophecy has been fulfilled?”
Jade said, “Well … I don’t think you’re crazy, but that is a crazy story.” She paused. “I have to show you something.”
“What?” My hopes were not the only thing rising.
“It’s place in the woods. I go there in the afternoons during the summer.”
“What kind of place?”
“You’ll see.”
“Okay. But I need to pack my things and brush my teeth. I don’t think I should be here when your dad gets back.”
“I don’t think I should be here either, but I guess I will be. We’ll see.”
A quarter of an hour later, and my gear was stashed behind a rock outcropping, and Jade and I were trudging up a steep slope. I heard laughter coming from the other side of the hill. Jade said, “Come on. We’re almost there.”