Alignment in a Ford F-150

TIMBER 2015

Kristen Arnett

Kristen Arnett is the NYT bestselling author of the debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was listed as one of The New York Times top books of 2019. She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter's Literary Award in Fiction and is a columnist for Literary Hub. Her story collection, Felt in the Jaw, was published by Split Lip Press and was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award. She is a Spring 2020 Shearing Fellow at Black Mountain Institute. You can find her on Twitter here: @Kristen_Arnett

I know that the truck didn’t have air conditioning.

The memory gets cloudy when I think about his face, because faces all look filmed over when you’re young, like you’re remembering three different versions of a person. I know that I was four years old, because I hadn’t started school yet, but I could read my uncle’s name on a paper in the center console. We were sitting in my uncle’s truck and we were parked in the side yard of my grandparent’s house. It was my uncle’s big red truck, the one with the back rusted out from pockets of rainwater that never wanted to drain, the one that my brother and I liked to climb inside and salvage bits of scrap metal. It was late morning; I know this because my grandparents weren’t home. They owHéctor Ramírezned an antique store that they called Emily’s Post after my grandmother, whose name was Darlene, but she went by Emily, and my grandfather hauled around a big trailer to pick up used furniture. He kept blankets in the back of that long white trailer. Sometimes my brother and I made forts out of them or pretended we were natives, hiding out in our wigwam, an old doghouse at the back edge of the property. That morning my brother was out back in the doghouse and I was out front with my uncle, in the big red truck, parked over in the side yard.

I know that the vinyl seat burned my legs.

Certain smells have stayed with me, but nothing concrete. The odor of rot and dead wood, the damp smell of grass in Florida that reminds you that mildew and algae can grow anywhere it wants. The best I have are snapshots of how the inside of the truck looked – how the seat was shiny red with off-white stitching, that the knobs on the stereo were ribbed black with matte silver faces. There was a big pack of gum on the seat between us, and my uncle was offering it to me. I was chewing two pieces already, and then he handed me a third. I think I licked the wrapper, because that’s what I always did with candy, and my tongue came away bright and sugary like when I’d tried to eat the sweet ‘n low packets at the church picnic. I cradled my thighs in my palms and the skin felt hot and sweaty, then I put my feet up on the seat to try and cool down. I was wearing jelly shoes that were muddy on the insides and my toes felt slimy. The way that the shoes smelled was like the garden hose that we used to fill up the plastic kiddie pool, or like the rubbery worms that my father bought in slimy packs for fishing in the retention pond.

I took my shoes off because my uncle told me that I could, I remember that. I know that was something that happened.

My parents never let me take my shoes off in the car. They said I might lose them under the seat, and they didn’t want to have to dig them out when we got to wherever we were going. My mother said she didn’t want me to step out onto the dirty ground and crouch down to dig underneath the seat, because maybe I was wearing a dress and then my underwear might show when I bent over. My father said my feet probably smelled bad, and he didn’t want to test that theory. My uncle didn’t care about my bare feet, he told me I could take my shoes off, so I did and I put them flat up on the seat.

Out of the shoes, my sweaty feet were dirty and I know I felt embarrassed.

There were small black pinholes in the vinyl and I picked at them even though I shouldn’t have, because it wasn’t my truck. It was summer or maybe spring, but the windows were rolled up and the sun was baking my skin through the passenger’s side window. I know that I had on a tank top because my shoulder felt hot and smelled warm and yeasty like baked bread. There was a big oak tree in the yard that my brother used to climb. I know I wished that tree would shade the truck because I was getting sunburned and it hurt. My uncle touched my foot with one of his fingers and I laughed and I moved it away from him. I did that because it tickled and because my foot was dirty and it might have smelled.

I don’t know why we got in the truck together.

There are big chunks of people’s lives where they do things because their family asks them to, and you do them, because you don’t question your family. That is normal behavior, especially for children, this is what I tell myself. When my feet were on the seat, I could see that they were dirty, and I could also see my weird middle toes. My middle toes did not look like the rest of my toes, though they were just as dirty. I liked my middle toes because they didn’t look like anyone else’s toes – they curled in on themselves like they were tiny pink shrimp. Like they were hiding from the rest of my foot. I used to tell my brother that they were my shyest toes, and when she was helping me put on my tights for church my mother told me that they would come out when they were finally ready. My uncle took his hands and pulled my middle toes out from their hiding place and curled them so they rested on top of my second toes, until they were stretched out in an uncomfortable shape.

I know I tried to uncurl them and my uncle told me to leave them alone.

Sometimes when I wore sandals people could see my toes and they would talk about how weird they looked. There was a girl in my Sunday School class who said they were gross. The girl who said my toes were gross had a big red bow in her hair. I remember that because I always wanted my mother to put big bows in my hair, but she said my hair was too thin and that it would just fall out and I’d lose it. My uncle was tapping at my toe and it didn’t tickle, but it felt funny and I didn’t like it very much. I tried to pull my foot away from him and he held onto my ankle.

There was too much gum in my mouth and I know I felt like I was choking.

My uncle pulled on my leg until my foot was resting in his lap. I know he was wearing jeans because he always wore jeans, at least before he got the nice job in Atlanta where he wore a lot of suits and ties and had to shave off his facial hair. I was worried that I was going to get his pants dirty because my foot was dirty and I didn’t want to get in trouble. My mother was always upset with me because I couldn’t keep anything clean. All of my clothes had stains on them, including my church dresses, but she wouldn’t stop buying me things in pale pink and yellow. That was before my baby sister was born and my mother started buying her all of the pastel things. Then I just wore an older cousin’s hand-me-downs, what my mother called leftovers, clothes that my aunt gave us in a big black garbage bag.

He scraped the bottom of my foot with his fingernails and I know that I laughed.

When someone tickles you, you’re laughing, but it doesn’t necessarily feel good. It usually feels bad, like you just want it to stop. That’s confusing because when you hear someone laugh, you think they’re having a good time. When you’re being tickled, you know that’s not true, but then it’s like you forget. You’ll tickle someone else even though you know that they’re not really laughing, they’re really saying stop. My uncle tickled my foot and I laughed, and I remember that his teeth were very white. When he smiled his brown mustache lifted up in the corners, and it was like he had two smiles instead of just one. He held my foot and his hand was warm and my foot was sweating and I was embarrassed. At least it seems like I would be embarrassed, because ladies don’t sweat. Except I would always sweat when I got hot or upset, and sometimes it would show up in rings on my clothes and my mother would make me change them so I’d look fresh and clean.

I know that when he twisted my toe, I screamed and the gum fell out of my mouth and landed on the seat.

There was a second when it didn’t feel like anything, it was just a strange popping noise. My uncle wasn’t smiling anymore, he was grimacing, and he wasn’t looking at my face because he was staring at my foot. When the pain came, it was like a rolling wave. It started at my middle toe and it moved up into my ankle and then into my calf and thigh, and up my torso until my mouth opened and I was sobbing. I started crying without knowing what had happened, or maybe I did know what had happened, but it didn’t make sense. When you’re young, your family takes care of you: this is what television tells you, and it is also what Sunday School told me when I drew the pictures of “god’s family” and it included all of my relatives. My grandmother put that picture up on her refrigerator with the banana-shaped magnet and the paper was all curled up from the humidity.

My gum was on the seat and I know my uncle told me to pick it up.

I put it back in my mouth, but it wanted to fall out again. He never told me to stop crying. He kept holding my ankle, but he let go of my foot. I wanted to put my shoes back on, but I didn’t feel like my foot was part of my body anymore. I thought maybe since other people could break it so easily, that my foot was accessible to anyone and it could maybe be everyone’s body part. When he finally let go of my ankle, I cried again because I wanted to put my shoe on and it had gotten kicked under the seat. I’d have to squat down and look under the seat and maybe I would flash my underwear at the street, just like my mother had said I would when I took my shoes off in the car. When he tried to touch my other foot, I screamed and yelled no, and that’s when he told me to be quiet. I didn’t yell anymore, but I kept crying. He didn’t seem to mind that, even though he still wouldn’t look at my face. I didn’t look at his face, either; at least I don’t think I wanted to look at it.

I know that he gave me the pack of gum to keep when we got out of the car.

I threw it away in the tall kitchen garbage can, or I gave it to my brother, or I hid it under a big clump of Spanish moss in the front yard. I know that I put the gum from my mouth in that moss and I could still see it shining yellow-green even when I was already ten steps away from it. The mint taste made me sick and I wanted to drink some water. I walked over to my grandparent’s house and my toe throbbed. My uncle stayed out in the truck with the windows rolled up, even though it was hot and his face was dripping sweat, except maybe the windows were down, and maybe he had his door cracked open. I didn’t wipe my feet on the mat outside the front door, but the bristles dug into my soles and it tickled like someone was scraping at the bottom of my foot. When I got inside my mother yelled at me for walking outside with no shoes on, so I put them on right there in the doorway and felt ashamed of myself.

Now my feet look different from each other, I know that for a fact because they are my feet and they are a part of my body.

When I showed my mother my foot later that night in the bath, she said it looked better than before. She didn’t look at my face when she said this to me, or maybe I wasn’t looking at hers when she said it. I know that her hands felt strong when she tipped my head back and poured the cup of water over my head, and I know that she shielded my eyes from the soap so that it poured around the sides of my face and dripped into my ears. I know that I trusted her with my safety because she was my mother and that is what your body does. I know that when she hugged me goodnight that she kissed my mouth, because that is how she always kissed me goodnight until I hit puberty and we stopped kissing each other. My foot stopped hurting after a few days and then I didn’t think about it anymore.