Rhonda (Everyone calls me "Half-Pint")

In the middle of the night
her car is stopped dead
in the middle of the 2-lane highway.
She reeks of booze
and abuse.
(Those bastards, she says--
all of them.)
Clutching her white straw cowboy hat,
somehow glad to meet another woman
in the middle of this, yet another calamity.
I've lived here all my life, she says bitterly.
These woods are just a prison.
That's what they are.
I push her car with my car
up and down the highway.
She weaves slightly.
I signal her to pull off
into a safe place.
We have a cigarette
on the dark roadside.
Those are foxes, she says
of the four bright lights
which run across the road.
I drive her home.
She chatters quietly,
admires my car.
I turn off into a short dirt road,
pull up to the dark trailer.
She asks me to come in,
offers me some killer hashish.
I say no thanks.
She asks me to wait.
I see the bathroom light go on.
She returns and grabs her small
purse and her overnite bag.
I give her some smokes.
On the curving drive home,
high on the Cruise-On Grade,
I see the lights of Sacramento,
80 miles below.
At midnite, I reach the wood cabin
and think of women, like her,
living in the woods.
I liked her--unfazed inside, battered outside.
Thinking about how I want to live here, but don't;
about how she says she doesn't want to live here, but does.
And I wonder if I had stayed in the woods, all those years,
would I be like her; or maybe we are all just the same
anyway, no matter where we live.


© Eskimo Pie Girl