| |
A week later, on Tuesday evening, I decided to push myself and run six miles on the road by our house. Unfortunately, Mom kept finding chores for me to do, so it was late when I headed out and almost dark by the time I turned toward home.
A mile or so from the house, I heard a vehicle roaring toward me from behind. It was the only one I’d encountered during my run. There weren’t many houses out our way, so I assumed a neighbor was headed to town. I moved to the left side of the road and waited for whoever it was to pass.
I kept pounding my feet as a car came closer and slowed quickly, its brakes squealing. Glancing back, I thought I recognized the car, but I couldn’t place it. And I couldn’t see the driver because of the glare from the headlights.
The car slowed to a crawl.
Its headlights blinked off.
The hair on my arms prickled. I didn’t dare look back again.
The track team boys had warned me that crazy drivers regularly ran them off the road. If this was somebody’s idea of a joke, it wasn’t funny. But maybe it wasn’t a joke.
My mind raced as I considered what to do. There was a barbed-wire fence on my left, so running across the field wasn’t an option—I might get caught in the barbed wire, and the driver might stop the car and... I didn’t want to think about what might happen. I couldn’t dart to the right for fear of getting hit. And turning around and running back to the last house I’d passed probably wouldn’t help. The best I could remember, its windows had been dark. So I decided to continue moving forward in the hope that whoever was in that car would get tired of scaring me and drive on.
The car rolled along at my pace. I sped up. It matched me. I slowed down. It did, too.
My teeth were chattering, and my heart was beating so fast I thought it might jump out of my chest. I moved off the asphalt and onto the sandy shoulder, watching as carefully as possible where I put my feet. But one foot stepped into a hole, and I went down, scraping both knees. As I started to get up, the car roared off, male laughter drifting behind like smoke.
I lay on the ground for a few seconds, breathing hard. Then I felt something wriggling on my legs. All of a sudden, I lit up with pain. Some creatures were on me, stinging and biting. I scrambled to my feet and brushed whatever it was off my legs. My skin felt like somebody was holding a burning cigarette to it in a thousand places.
Another car drove up, and it stopped. I knew I couldn’t run fast enough to get away, so I turned toward it. An old man with a kind face got out. “Are you hurt, miss?”
“Something’s biting me.”
He reached into his car and pulled out a flashlight then ran the light over my body and down to the ground. “It’s a fire-ant hill.” He looked at me, confused. “And you’re bleeding. What were you doing on an anthill?”
I moved away as I said, “I tripped and fell.”
“You shouldn’t be out on the road by yourself in the dark. Can I take you home?”
I wasn’t about to get into a stranger’s car after what had just happened, no matter how safe he appeared. “No, sir. I’ll be fine now.”
He drove off. I walked home, shaking all over and hobbling because of the pain. Now I knew why those demons were called fire ants. Before, I’d thought it was just because they were red.
When I turned into our driveway, I noticed the car parked in front of the Barretts’ house. And I realized where I’d seen it before. It was Benny’s rusty old Cadillac. He must have been going to visit his grandparents and had terrorized me on the way just for fun. What a jerk.
I considered knocking on the Barretts’ door and yelling at him, but something stopped me. For one thing, Benny was a football player, and I was essentially a nobody, even if I had made history in a small way. He could make my life at school even more miserable than he already had. Second, Mr. Barrett might side with him and make us move. After all, Benny was blood kin, and we were just tenant farmers. The one thing I didn’t want to do was move again when I was finally beginning to have a life.
Still, something about that car gave me the creeps.
In the house, Mom saw my bleeding knees and the red welts and ran for a cold washrag. She cleaned me up and dabbed baking soda on my many bites. We stopped counting after fifteen. After an hour or so, the stinging lessened.
When the crisis was past, Mom asked, “Why did you fall?”
I knew what she was really asking. “I tripped. There was a hole I didn’t see.” That was the truth, although only part of it. “I didn’t have any weird feelings or anything, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
I wasn’t sure she believed me, but she let it go. “All right. I don’t want you running alone at night anymore.”
She seemed a little surprised when I didn’t argue. I tried to hide my shock from Mom, but I couldn’t stop shaking. My mind felt frozen—stuck out there on that spooky road with that awful car following me. I knew I was more upset than I should have been, considering that nothing terrible had happened other than that I fell. Well, that and the ant bites, of course. The track team boys would say it was basically an ordinary day out running on the road. But my imagination was going wild, thinking about what might have happened, and I couldn’t control it. I went to bed early.
* * *
I WAS IN A SMALL DARK space, alone, and I couldn’t get out. The smell of pee was so strong it gagged me. I screamed and screamed, but nobody heard me. I was sure I was going to die.
Then Mom was shaking me. “Faye, wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”
The dream slowly faded. After a few minutes, I didn’t smell pee anymore, so I must not have wet the bed. My pillow was damp, though—probably from tears—and I was tangled in the sheet. Mom shook me again. “Wake up, honey. You’re safe. Calm down.”
I opened my eyes. “It was so real.”
“Was it the dark dream?”
I nodded. When I was little, I used to have that dream nearly every night, but it had been years since it had shown up. I’d thought it was gone for good. But on this night, it had seemed so real that I could feel and smell everything, although I couldn’t see a thing. My voice was hoarse from screaming.
Mom gave me one of my pills and lay beside me for a few minutes until I stopped shaking. When she left, I asked her to keep the light on. My dad had a thing about not leaving lights on when they weren’t needed, and he usually made me turn off my overhead light at ten o’clock. She gave me a look, but she did it.
I was too afraid to close my eyes for the rest of the night and too exhausted to go to school the next day. There was no way I was ever going to go running at night again. At least, not alone.