Sissy Spacek Chemo Patient (pt 6).

Jackie Rose, named for a lifeguard she fell in love with one summer, visited her cousin at Health & Welfare the next day, gave the orderly ten bucks to go away, turned off the lights in her room and came in her. She did it to hurt her brother for his unfaithfulness, and after that she put the whole event right out of her head like it was something that happened a long time ago, or perhaps to someone else. Some things are just like that.

A week later with Halloween building up in the distance like a storm she is walking down the street at midnight with her loves, the little bird and the avalanche mountain: one has her brother’s hands and the other has his heart; they know nothing about each other and do not want to; the more they know the more it ends so the world can stay away forever as far as she's concerned. This must be what wearing six shooters is like, she thinks. They are the reason that Jackie is even still wearing her hair: some lonelier version would have given up and gone backwards but who would dare to say a word to her: with wind like that in her sails she has absolutely flown. She worries sometimes that it’s not wide open air but a jar with a lid, and that she and he and he have grown out of their original stories into something a bit better but probably a lot worse. But that’s it, she thinks, making another Great Connection: you want to jump over your own ending, you got to write yourself into somebody else.

Dixie is throwing fake punches at True. Put ‘em up, keemosabe, he says. When Jackie tells Dixie to quit picking on him, True tells her that he’s not a baby, and she and Dixie laugh. Yes you are, she wants to tell him. The only one.

The station wagon is parked in an unattended alley. We might leave him a note, Jackie suggests, getting in between them in the front seat. Warn him about this part of town.

He’s not from here. Dixie backs them onto State. Nobody from here would do that. He drives next to the river with the mill rumbling on the other side with smokestacks that smell like rotten eggs. Jackie lowers the window; Dixie tells her to roll it back up. He and True are arguing and she shushes them until they stop. Being mean is why they are but they’d never hurt for real. Everybody else is a blinking bomb, but not them.

I had a dream, True says, that there’s three other people on the other side of the world and everybody loves them because they’re the very best people of all time.

Then we need to find them, Dixie says, and kill ‘em, because nobody’s better than us.

Then there is something in the headlights and the wagon bump-bumps and Dixie is standing on the brakes, the Ford fishtailing until they burn to a stop. Oh there you are, Jackie thinks, squeezing her eyes tightly closed until she sees white lights beneath them. There you are you great big monster that eats feelgoods. You were right there in the corner of my eye and I wasn’t watching out.

They go behind the wagon and look. And they leave. And by the time three stoplights have passed Jackie has put the whole event right out of her head like something that happened a long time ago, or perhaps to someone else. Some things are just like that.