While Joyner Lee was away at college her car broke down. It needed a transmission rebuild. Her family couldn’t help her. So she sold the good car parts she had for $500. Then she used the $500 to help her pay for books and get a good haircut. Joyner Lee studied English and she worked at the record store.
Her boss gave her a bike to ride back and forth to work with. So Joyner Lee rode for miles on the sides of the roads and on the little dirt foot paths when there were no sidewalks. She never hit a rock or got scraped up. Her legs got very strong. She was a very good record store salesperson.
Then one day, on the way home from the record store, a car full of men pulled up beside Joyner Lee at the stop light. They hung out the car windows and asked what kind of underwear she was wearing. She ignored them and waited for them to drive on so they wouldn’t follow her home. She was on her period. She wanted to pull the bloody tampon out of her and sling it right into their sweaty laps.
After graduation, Joyner Lee moved back home and no one would hire her. Not even at the Family Dollar, Dollar General, or Dollar Tree. And it was really hard for her to talk to her family about all the things she missed back in the city, all the things she had seen. She had one aunt who read Amish Christian Romance novels. And everyone she knew went to church.
She became incredibly lonely and posted on her Instagram story almost anything she ever did throughout the day, like eating apples and putting her hair in ponytails. Then one day a writer commented on her Jack Kerouac post, a picture of his “40th chorus” from San Francisco Blues:
And when my head gets dizzy
And my friends all laugh
And money pours
from my pocket
And gold from my ears
And silver flies out
and rubies explode
I’ll up & eat
And sing another song
And drop another grape
In my belly down
“That’s a God one,” he commented.
“Good one,” she commented back.
She laughed and he sent her a dm.
“My name is Sam,” he said.
“Well guess what, Sam,” Joyner Lee said, “I don’t live that far from Rocky Mount. Rocky Mount’s my nearest bookstore. That’s where Jack Kerouac lived.”
“Yes, I know,” Sam said. “But tell me about you—I want to hear the whole story.”
So she started at the beginning and when she got to the end he sent her a picture of his shoulder. He was in the bath. She could see half his face and his lips were beautiful. His name was Sam and Joyner Lee fell in love with him.
Summer turned to fall and her cousin said he’d pay her some money if she’d clean his hunting lodge in between hunters, so mostly a two-day-a-week gig, but it was better than nothing. So Joyner Lee stripped the beds and washed the sheets and towels. She scrubbed the kitchen floors. She stood up on the top of a stool and swiffered inside the bobcat’s mouth, cleaning cobwebs from his teeth. And she picked bottles of deer piss off the bathroom floor.
She sent Sam pictures of everything. Told him how hunters used deer piss to attract deer. And the differences between button heads, toe heads, and bucks. “Wow,” he said. He sent her heart eyed smiley faced emojis. And gasp emojis that made her laugh. He lived in L.A. and ran on the tops of mountains. He sent pictures to her of dry valleys and shrub-lined paths. She thought it looked biblical like Damascus Road. “Holy, holy, holy,” Sam said.
They found out they both were horses in the Chinese Zodiac. Which meant they were both charming, intellectual, and free. So Joyner Lee started running too, into the woods behind the lodge, when she was done cleaning. She’d jump over mudholes and snakes. And she’d always search for turkeys because that was Sam’s favorite word: turkey. He loved the way it felt in his mouth when he said it. She loved the way he said it. He spoke so precisely and correct. He’d call her from bar bathrooms, sometimes even his bedroom late at night. He lived with his parents but was moving to Nashville soon. She’d never been anywhere he was. She’d never been anywhere he was going to.
She put the money she earned in a purple Crown Royal bag under her mattress. She lived alone in an old house. And houses in her neighborhood were getting broken into all the time. Her cousin helped her keep her propane tank filled for heat so she wouldn’t freeze and he told her she needed a gun.
Fall turned to winter and sometimes after cleaning, if her sister couldn’t pick her up, Joyner Lee’d get rides into town with the old men in their rattly cars. The men told her they remembered her when she was little, playing in yards. They’d tell her the nicknames of old dead family members she never knew. Everything would smell like thick exhaust with the gospel radio blaring. And she’d remember some of the songs, the words coming back to her through hurts past and present. She was happy she had Sam now. Joyner Lee asked them but none of the old men had ever been to Nashville either. One of them gave her a pair of fuzzy gloves. And her cousin gave her deer sausage and sweet potatoes to eat, so she wouldn’t have to buy groceries.
Sam sent her books about mermaids and Paris and a postcard with blue maned horses that said, “Horsing Around in Nashville Town.” He said his family would love her. He said they’d all get along. He said he’d take her to his neighbor’s New Years Eve party. Every morning she looked forward to a text from him saying BABY BABY. And a call from him saying she was the real deal every night.
Sam believed Joyner Lee was a writer. But Joyner Lee never wrote. She was squirting windex into mounted buck eyes and drying dishes. She was taking out the trash. She was saving up for a plane ticket to Nashville, dreaming of turkeys, wiping her nose on her fuzzy gloves. Every day he worked on a novel and she immediately read any of it he sent to her. He was always using words in ways she’d never seen, words she’d never known. Sentences that looped upon each other again and again like a big spiritual circle she didn’t understand. Sam asked her if she believed in quantum entanglement. He believed they were connected.
It was cold in Joyner Lee’s house. In the mornings, she saw her breath. As mentioned before, she lived alone, and didn’t have anyone there to talk to. She wrote a note on her fridge that said:
Keep going for
- the boy who loves turkeys
- Nashville
- a new car
- and future kids someday
The only place Joyner Lee had cell phone reception at the lodge was under the cleaning shed. So while the winter birds cooed in the dry cornstalks and the tall grasses swished, she stood under the cleaning shed holding her cell phone, waiting to reach Sam. Wherever he was, somewhere warm, somewhere in Nashville, propped against a jukebox with a beer in his hand.
But here under the cleaning shed, when Joyner Lee looked up she saw the hanging racks. And every time she always remembered one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen and how it happened there. When she was a little girl, her cousin killed a bear and her family went out to the lodge to see it. It was late at night and her and her sister stood there in their pajamas and heavy jackets. Another cousin held a floodlight so everyone could see. And they hung the bear up by his front paws on the rack while another cousin cranked him up into the air. The big black bear hung there suspended in the cold night. Her cousin took the knife then and cut him from his private parts to his throat. His skin was pulled so tight across his ribs that it came apart like velcro. It sounded like velcro too. And his insides plopped out of him so fast onto the concrete below. A wet plop, a pile of purple red mush steaming and shining. The heat looked like smoke. Her mama shook like she had the heebee jeebees. “C’mon, let’s go,” she said. But Joyner Lee wanted to stay there all night to see it. She knew she’d never see it again and she wanted to see everything. She didn’t want to forget.
Joyner Lee knew there was no way she could ever tell Sam this in a way he could understand. She stripped the beds and washed the towels, scrubbed the bathroom floors. She didn’t see any turkeys. Sam said that was fine. Sam said he was coming to visit, that he’d cook her a very good curry and they’d take a trip to see old Jacky’s house in Rocky Mount. One day they’d go to Paris too and name their child Roy.
Then Sam stopped sending Joyner Lee books and heart eyes and gasping faces. And then he stopped wanting to hear what she thought about things. And he never came to visit. At night she pulled the covers over her head. She dreamed of Sam sitting in the middle of her bedroom on a stool.
Joyner Lee ran behind the lodge farther than she ever had before. She ran until she came to the dump pile of animal pieces. A little mountain of white, white bones. Deer legs and button head skulls, teeth and sometimes patches of hair, tall grass growing through eyes. She dug through them and found her favorite pieces. And she took pictures of herself holding skulls, smiling as big as she could. The vultures watched her from the trees. Everyone was hungry. And in the end, when it was all said and done, no one liked Sam’s novel anyway.