The Tempered Speed of Westward Travel

L.A. Harris

The blacktop shimmered July heat as the bus rolled out with the morning sky thirsty for rain. Summer unfolded her map and traced her route—Knoxville, St. Louis, Topeka, Denver, and over the lip of Wyoming to Cheyenne and her Ricky. Summer’s seatmate peeled open a People magazine. “Ma’am, if you don’t mind me saying, your hair would look real pretty like this,” the woman said, flipping pages to an elegant actress with her hair scraped up in a severe bun. Summer nodded and touched her heartsore chest, watching the last crease of mountains blur by through fingerprints that stamped the window.

Even though Summer was fresh to eighteen, she was used to being ma’amed. It had to do with what her mother witnessed. Summer’s mother was seven months pregnant when she found a dead drifter caught in the briars that ribbed their creek. The old man’s one eye was gouged-out-gone and the other stared straight through a tangle of silver hair. The shock seeped into Summer and cramped her mother into labor. Summer was born black-haired like her grandmother, but three weeks later, she shed herself bald and her head sprouted ashen white. Her Granny Zip said she leaned grizzled, even then, but she would need the look of years on her. Said it was better to carry the wiry, white-gray of age than to be a tow-headed slip of a girl. Summer’s mother thought different, fearing her daughter would always be afflicted with the cursed mark of the corpse in the creek. Summer struggled to find her own mind on it, but as time progressed, she became convinced her mother was right.

***

Summer’s seatmate gathered a comb and shiny hair pins; a few were even studded with crimson gemstones. The woman tugged through Summer’s hair. Ash-shaded strands floated into Summer’s callused hands, clumping into a pile as if she held a soft dove. “You lose it when you age,” the woman said, scratching up Summer’s thinning hair into a topknot the size of a fist. No one had fixed Summer’s hair in an up-do since her mother passed. When Summer gazed into her compact mirror, the look favored the style her mother carried to the grave.

***

During a shootout, three bullets whizzed through the heart of Summer’s mother, lodging themselves in a crooked cedar. The sheriff didn’t realize Summer’s daddy was days away when he opened fire on their house. Summer’s mother shouldered a shotgun and was cut down when she tried skimming out the back. Granny Zip plucked the three smashed shots from the meaty bark of the cedar and tied them in a red bandana. She folded Summer’s small hands around the cloth, explaining how a bullet that has traveled through a body brings the holder luck. The bullets were Summer’s holy things, now resting in her jeans’ front pocket along with her last ten dollars.

***

Summer watched the terrain flatten and spread toward the Mississippi. Her seatmate opened a tattered manila folder and applied stickers to a stack of children’s drawings—streaky farm animals and fantastical contorted creatures. “Homework for preschoolers. Can you believe such a thing?” the woman asked, centering a gold star on a tiny picture of a wine-red horse. Ricky always loved the horses best—would sketch them to Summer in love notes. Summer smiled and unzipped her small backpack that she cradled in her lap. She crushed her face against the cold bus window and re-read Ricky’s creased postcard, Howdy from Cheyenne, Wyoming—Home of Frontier Days, dated July 31 of last year. She touched each memorized word, the pressure of his pen. I’ve felt alone since before I was even born. Until you. Somehow, someway it was meant to be. We were meant to be. I love you, baby. Can’t wait. She folded up the postcard that she’d only just answered.

***

Back before Summer put Granny Zip in the ground, her grandmother would take her to their creek to see the future. Summer would grab Granny Zip’s arthritis-bulbed hand and lead her to the briars where her mother found the drifter. Since he was discovered, the creek bed grew silted and shrank, slowly buried by the overburden five miles up the mountainside. Through the scum of the shallow water, Summer caught the silent drifter’s good eye and over the years, she memorized the contours of his face, the scars that divoted his cheeks. She’d ask him why his path had been braided with her own. Granny Zip claimed her old eyes couldn’t see him but wasn’t one for doubt. Early on, Granny Zip did see that Summer would be some kind of schoolteacher. The old woman made Summer promise to be the first one of them to graduate.

Summer preferred the occupation of librarian, but since the creek said it was so, a teacher she would be. Summer never really felt like an orphan until Granny Zip passed away. They came for Summer at dawn and dumped her in the same crowded foster home as Ricky.

***

Summer was told her daddy never recovered from her mother’s shooting. Granny Zip said it settled true meanness in him that he struggled to shake. Summer’s daddy ran with Ricky’s pop since they were boys—taking out and putting in the fears around eastern Tennessee. When their muscle work dried up, they angled for a change to the straight and took off to wildcat in the Dakotas. It didn’t stick long before they chased off their ragged highs by horse whispering in Cheyenne, only to let the sting of need catch them when they journeyed back home with stories of rodeos and Frontier Days. Ricky’s pop was buried at twenty-three but Summer’s daddy made it a year longer—found open-eyed and slumped in his pickup, alongside the ruins of their shot-up house.

***

Summer was trailing Ricky who fled their foster home and lit out for a dude ranch that footed the crags of Wyoming. Someplace called the Magic Wheel Ranch from a ghostly Polaroid Ricky’s pop had sent. Summer told Ricky she’d be in Cheyenne for Frontier Days like they’d promised the year before when he had to flee or face his own charge for vengeance. Summer needed the time to graduate—to keep her word to Granny Zip—and let the law’s search for Ricky fade away. She ticked off the days until she could join him. Had to endure the tempered speed of her westward travel.

***

At the St. Louis station stop, the teacher brought two sodas back to the bus. Summer hesitated at the offered drink but was parched and hadn’t wanted to dip into her last ten. She thanked the woman and drained the cold soda. Summer watched the grasslands whisk by and the sky slow-motion smeared with the faces of Ricky—little, bigger, then man-sized, like when she last saw him.

***

Summer woke up swimmy-headed and nauseous. The bus warped into focus as they accelerated away from the Topeka stop. Her backpack nowhere—the teacher’s seat vacant. Her red bandana was still in her pocket, but only the bullets remained. The ten-dollar bill was replaced by the drawing of the wine-red horse with the gold star. She locked herself in the bus restroom and strained to recognize the person in the mirror. Lines scored her leathery face. Liver-colored splotches spackled her hands. Her steely bun teetered like a stone, tilting her head downward and curving her shoulders forward into a stoop. Freeing a pocketknife from her boot, she ripped apart the bandana to construct a cat o’ nine tails, or to be accurate, a cat o’ three tails, with the red cloth and the trio of smashed bullets. She lashed herself once to make sure she was real. Her stomach flipped when she sensed the sweet-sour tang of decay, swelling her with dread.

Like how now, returning to her seat, a man glided in beside her, lanky thin with the stink of sex riding him as he flipped open a dog-eared Bible. He rambled about strange-sighted prophets, like himself, roving the cross-country bus lines. She leaned away from him and traced circles against her cold, damp breath on the window. A copper sunset blazed across the expanse until the horizon was consumed by violet thunderheads. The threatening sky blotted out the rising slice of moon and darkness fell late across the Kansas flatlands.

***

Kansas. Summer’s mother used to hold her feet, paint her toes ruby. Called her Dorothy or Toto sometimes for fun. But after Summer’s mother and father and Granny Zip were gone, the flying monkeys swarmed her nightmares until Ricky held her hand and whisper-sang Somewhere.

***

Summer jerked awake when they crossed over the Colorado state line. Her knifepoint blocked the fingered intrusion of the so-called prophet. It was different when she wasn’t prepared. She had to learn that lesson the hardest way. So-called prophet quiet-drawled, “I fear me an old lady. But I bet you’re wearing some flowery bloomers.” She knew transactions were in order.

***

Last spring, they took Summer’s womb—perforated by an object, the sterile report said. She wept until they moved her to a safer family, if there’s ever such a thing. Ricky would steal into her new room and pet her head. Whispered she was beautiful. Said they’d just have to adopt. Told her they’d have kids like themselves someday that they’d already named Tommy and Kim. They’d all ride horses into the shaded mountains. The foster daddy ran, skated free of a charge, until Ricky tracked him down and then on to Wyoming.

***

The bus stopped in Denver after a mauve sunrise washed the sky. Summer followed the so-called prophet to a weed-choked spot near a flat river. Hands not mouth. Hands not mouth. A twenty and the promise of a smoke. Summer crammed the twenty in her bra and her pocketknife dropped from her sleeve. Before she could react, the so-called prophet gripped her knife and unhinged the blade. “Little darling, if you weren’t so olden, I’d keep you and trick you out like my pretty penny.” Just as the so-called prophet was pawing back his twenty, they were startled by a muck-slicked man who slid in from a thicket. The muddy man had one eye patched, and his cheeks were dented with scars. The so-called prophet stepped away from Summer and asked if the man wanted to get in on this old broad. “Damn you man, she’s just a tow-headed slip of a girl,” scar-faced man said, his good eye haloing with an invocation of brilliant light. The so-called prophet shielded his eyes from the blinding sight. Summer unleashed her cat o’ three tails and lashed her tormentor’s eyes until he dropped. The muddy man enveloped the so-called prophet, soaking up his flesh and bone. When nothing of the so-called prophet remained, the scarred man wiped away Summer’s tears with his dewy hands and then bolted. She pursued him but couldn’t match his speed. When she caught up at the riverbank, he grinned and the flaxen grasses that fringed the water absorbed him. All around she noticed the morning shadows flux between gradients of gray and black, dissolving between darkness and light with ease. At the river’s edge, she kneeled and unpinned her hair. In the water’s reflection, she palmed her face, now smooth and tender-skinned. She stroked her hair that draped her shoulders in a blue-black hue.

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L.A. Harris grew up in the Appalachian mountains of Southwest Virginia and currently lives in Denver, Colorado. Her fiction has been selected as a finalist for the Lamar York Prize for Fiction, awarded by The Chattahoochee Review, a finalist for the American Fiction Short Story Award, appearing in the American Fiction Volume 17 anthology (New Rivers Press), and an honorable mention for the 2025 Barthelme Prize, awarded by the Gulf Coast Journal. You can find her at LAHarrisauthor.com