"Shh!" I said and pushed his face back though the screen door. He whimpered and licked my hand. "Gro-oss!" I wiped the slobber on my lucky red pants.
"I'll bring you somethin' nice," I told him to make him feel better, but I knew I wasn't never comin' back here. No sir.
It was cold and by the time I reached Jeremiah's farm I was darn sorry I only had one pair of socks.
"Silly girl," my mother would have said. "Stupid bitch," my father would have said.
No lights were on at Jeremiah's farm. Even though me and Jeremiah played ball toss together at school, I was afraid of that big white farmhouse. And Jeremiah's big white daddy.
Over the next hill the woods got thick on the south side of the road and I knew that somewhere through them trees was the train tracks and on the tracks was the trains and the trains went to New Orleans and to New York City and to California.
Jeremiah told me his daddy been everywhere and in New Orleans they got crawfish they call "prawns" big as your arm. In New York City everybody shouts all day and night, and they have a rule that you can never turn out the lights at night, and all the cars are painted yellow. And in California it's so sunny and hot all the time that everybody walks around butt-naked, and even still they have to go in the ocean to cool off 'cause I guess they don't got no shade or iceboxes or nothin'. That sounded scary to me, but Jeremiah thought it was fantastic.
I jumped onto a moving boxcar that night, no idea where I was goin'. I prayed for New Orleans and baby, I been doing nothin' but runnin' and prayin' ever since.
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