Carly went to the pictures the very next morning. She trudged through the slush and cussed herself for wearing such ridiculous shoes; came to the conclusion that those two tennis rackets, spider-webbed deep in the closet, may have had a use after all; had even resented the one wolf-whistle she’d collected en route. A first time for everything… All through the film, an icy cold spread around her ankles, melted snow pooled by her feet, searching for a slope along which to trickle.

There had been a new idol on screen, all singing, all dancing, plucking on a three-string guitar, the rest having snapped during a wonderful motorbike crash at the start of the reel. The poor instrument – looking pretty battered already, it has to be said – plunged off a freeway bridge, closely pursued by its owner, slow motion and describing an elegant parabola, breaking both high and low Es, together with middle G, just feet above the concrete carriageway below. The descending sequence of notes, (and never, it may be said, has a sequence descended with more conviction), formed a searching minor chord, and seemed to pass comment on all that was animated in the scene: rider, Harley and six-string. The idol escaped injury, and spent the rest of the picture stroking his maimed guitar whenever possible, caressing the nylons as if the remaining triad were a lost love, this act – ironically enough – often taking the place of getting it on with real loves, who stared resentfully at him from across vibrating motel beds, unused to being second bested by a sound hole. A succession of beauties fought back the sobs. Very occasionally, they even tried to speak, only to be drowned out by more musical wailing…
When all said and done, there hadn’t been much of a plot. It didn’t matter. Carly, whose memory too – in addition to certain other attributes – must have been pretty hot, sang one of the laments on the way home.

Baby who’ll warm me (ooohh)
Baby who’ll call me (aaahh)
In penitentiary lane…

Crooned by the hero mere seconds after the crash, sat cross-legged on a busy intersection, waiting for a highway patrol, it was a remarkable composition. Wailing sirens drowned it a lingering death, but the sick guitar, especially, played her heart out.

Not that Ryan Montana had been altogether forgotten. Far from it, in fact. She’d even managed to chisel out a spare afternoon some weeks back so as to visit the crash site, high up in the foothills. Braving the messy bus station, and just about making it past a series of buskers - each more insistent, (and smellier, she thought), than the last, each strumming the same tune but in a progressively higher key, the effect being a hundred-or-so yard long harmonisation – Carly boarded a number 6. The route was to stop-start through downtown Salinas, before climbing the pass that eventually unwound into another state. Eager as ever to respond to public demand, the bus company had added a temporary stop in the lower foothills especially for mourning fans. Unable to resist a publicity coup, and since teary girls in heels proved to be rather restricted in range, the halt was sited directly on the fatal hairpin. One couldn’t but help feeling that more flesh mangling may follow before the month was up.

There had been one spare seat left on the bus. Unfortunately for Carly, it was next to a mad war veteran with vibrating trousers, hands mysteriously AWOL from the sleeves of his jacket. Otherwise, the air smelt reassuringly of bubblegum and hairspray. On the pale vinyl of her seat, somebody had knifed a question mark. Foam now spilled from the cut. For mile upon mile, freed flaps of covering pressed against the back of her blouse. By the time of Carly’s stop, a corner of the torn vinyl had even managed to get tangled with the catch on her bra, (although she was unsure how this was at all possible, especially whilst wearing an overcoat), almost whipping it off when she rose. Something spiritual was afoot…

Oh indeed. Carly herself only narrowly averted several intimate rendezvous with the afterlife that very afternoon. These were so tightly bunched, in fact, that she found herself curiously let down when the remainder of the day decided to drift tamely away. Only seconds across the gritted highway, a lumber truck passed with what could only be described as a hurtle, performing an interpretation of the term so perfectly that a new, improved word really ought to be coined. Then another, opposite direction, same top-notch portrayal. Impossible here, of course, to convey the force, the dynamism, the proximity to first Carly’s chest, then her buttocks, these being the standout points on either front.

As the bus pulled away, her attention was drawn to its rear window, behind which children were playing, drawing funny question marks in the steamed up glass. Of this she’d been sure. Only much later did Carly start to wonder if they’d simply been innocent lollipops. The remaining brushes with death, by the way, mostly involved large and extremely dangerous looking pinecones, falling in places they had no business being.

Eight days later, Carly would give first airing to a beatnik T-shirt, initially whilst warm ironing some denim pants that would later partner it in crime… A picture of Ryan Montana graced the front, hair windswept back to reveal his moony brow, speeding along open-top in his beloved roadster. Happier times. As if to emphasise crudity, the image was rimmed by little decorative pine trees, dusted with snow, design probably lifted from a Christmas card. By some fluke of coincidence, the span of Carly’s nipples exactly matched that of the roadsters chrome hubcaps, lending the picture more (and unnecessary) lift.

She’d bought the top from a souvenir stall at the crash site, a stall which – amongst other things – sold badges, 1:32 scale roadster model kits, ampoules of (supposedly) genuine salvaged gasoline, and rather artlessly christened Montana vodka. It had cost all of… well, best not to dwell on such things at that time of day.

Carly had wondered how the stall was doing any business at all. Mourners appeared to be quite capable of finding knick-knacks by themselves, scattered across a fair radius, forest side of the guilty tree. Although the wreck had long since been towed away for scrap, a wealth of bust up automobile bits remained. The smallest of fragments, mind you, but fragments none the less, hidden beneath a thin veil of snow. On the bus journey home, teenage handbags overflowed with precious micro-junk. Return springs, paper-thin gaskets, locknuts, washers and diaphragms all competed for attention with the more familiar paraphernalia of young love: contraceptives, make-up, tear-smudged mail. Back in Salinas, Carly gazed over her own finds for the hundred-and-first time. Chief among these was a spark plug – which she toyed with the idea of somehow transforming into a lipstick holder – and, best of all, a chassis plate with, as she would later boast at a thousand parties as yet unconsummated, three out of four original rivets.

Salinas simply happened to Carly. There had been no introductions; no relatives posted about the town with obligations to nonplus, curl onto cheap perfumed sofas, milk for twenty dollars when the going was tough. Her family didn’t stretch out very far. At its pivot was Madsonville, population wavy but growing, from which point the spread was somewhat limited. No, Salinas (meet) Carly was a wholly accidental collision. Never a girl to buck laws regarding the conservation of momentum, her arrival triggered a departure - opposite end of town – as an unfortunate resident squirrel met the front fender of a Mack thirty-toner whilst foraging for nuts. Wisconsin had flooded by as Carly, shielded behind sunglasses, roosted at the back of the greyhound. She’d no trajectory of her own, save the occasional soak of gin into heart, the movement of sweat across her face, (or was it tears?). Not for the first time, Carly – devoid of motive and impetus – surrendered to a larger system, mechanism, body. Not for the first time, she found herself motionless and exothermic, world scrolling by, date spent, cooling…

A snapped fan belt decided it. The greyhound slowed to a standstill. The projector which had given fifteen straight hours of rolling farmsteads and homesteads, an odd diaroma-like shanty town with corrugated roofs and baked bean tin chimneys, then greener lowlands, thick crops and distant hills – broke. It stuck on a non-descript frame. Carly could sense the scene blistering in the middle. Fearing a denouement of sorts, (what, pray, might be revealed behind the print…?), she hurried down the aisle and left the bus. “I’m getting off here”, she declared for the sake of closure, addressing the driver’s feet.
“As good a place as any”, replied a pair of boots and blue slacks.
Carly was still searching for a riposte when he slid out into the dying sunset to swap spanners. Flat on his back, small and insignificant in a vertically polarised set, (the girl in question a good five-six in heels…), his eyes wandered. Took in the tatty holdall; the red eyes; pale lips; then to the tights, maybe for a fraction too long.
“No”, acting all hurt, “you can’t have them, they’re my only pair”, turning away into what remained of the evening. On any other day perhaps. On any other day…

Nineteen straight years of trailer park life had taken their toll. Fourteen acres of dust and grass could grind a girl down, until she too became part of the soil. During long summers, the earth scorched red, blew over from the exposed eastern flanks, from the wide fields, from the highway. It hunted in angry clouds, burnishing metal, filling shallow footprints, rattling empty mailboxes. Even during periods of still, dust lurked in spirit, never more than a sudden brakepedal away; a sneaker U-turn; a basketball score on courts with homemade hoops. No different to loose earth the world over, Carly supposed, hers (she was prone to such sentimentality) slept, danced, and escaped. These were all too common aspirations. Dust was the great leveller of Rockefeller Park: of smouldering cigarette butts; of pretty blue and yellow window boxes; gradually, of souls.

There were forty or so trailers. She’d never really counted. They spread, evenly spaced, right to the highway, to a tall mesh fence that strained at its ties in the crosswind. An entrance of sorts stood by a lone aspen tree, gravel run to dirt track, roots exposed. Pink neon tubing curled out the address, (seductive in style, not so desirable in content, a mirror for much that could be associated with its residents), fizzed hour upon hour to nobody in particular. Rain and dew would collect on letters with accommodating loops, then mature to vapour in the fresh morning sun. No respecters of planned entrances, gophers and cottontails tunnelled under perimeters with POW devotion, then broke into boarded-up trailers and nested in refrigerator salad trays.
Carly, innocent almond eyed five-year-old, reckoned burrowing must be thirsty work, evidenced by the bottles piled next to trash cans, (too drunk to climb in and close the lid), or the screw caps she often kicked school ward. By the same token, those pesky gophers had obviously developed a taste for boogie music, judging by the hubbub that carried across from long empty number 16, late into the night. Carly rarely minded. She slept fitfully with thoughts of cottontails jiving by the record player, or squashed with many cousins into a steamed up music store listening booth, bopping to the latest releases....

Innocence, however, tended to hang around no longer than dust, day tripping. Tired of joyriding every tricycle around Rockerfeller, she soon pedalled on past the fizzing neon and took to larking by the grain silos, forbidden side of the highway. Next to golden cornfields, where the sweet scent of harvest mingled with diesel fumes, crickets competing with low key engine drone, Carly polished off her childhood. The highway ran on a raised bank, supporting grouchy grain tankers on the first stretch of a long haul south, then eager beaver pickups full of dates. Occasionally, a school bus passed crammed with logarithm homework. Gravity fed fifteen feet below, where the ridge segued into cropland: claimed lorry drivers taking long, hard pisses arcing into the corn; rusty old spin dryers rolled in the dead of night; kids dealing out smokes; itinerant tramps collapsed in balls, sleeping it off. All receding inexorably into the cool shadows, out of sight, into safety.

Away from the highway was a small patch of woodland where maples and birch had had grown contorted, suffocated by hawthorn. Sun bounced off the massive silver silos and perforated the darkness in places. Beyond, (as if directed by a single reflected beam, hope of treasure at the foot of the rainbow...?), was an old empty shack, overrun in a corn field, wheat taller than Carly nuzzling right up to its sides, the odd ear flaking away loose paint. Roots had taken in the moist roofing felt, cracks in the porch flooring, the rotting curtains that had fallen to the floor. Sometimes at dusk, a crop-spraying bi-plane would swoop low and cover the cabin with a mist of chemicals. Lime green insecticide pooled in the gutters, pondered a trek to the nearest down pipe.

At some point during the next ten years, a shot-up mattress arrived in what used to be the kitchen. The springs soon learnt the contouring and dimensions of Carly’s back, leant motherly support to her hips as a variety of collegiate types notched up the practice hours. Groups of limp-dicked wonders gathered at dusk, milled about smoking on the porch (or antechamber...), with the air of anxious fathers in a maternity ward, whilst used rubbers piled lifeless and spent on the draining board and in the sink, leaking away to find solace in the plug hole. For hours after they’d filed away back to town, to the burger bars and late night diners, Carly would stretch back on the mattress - full of residual warmth, scented somewhere between cologne and crop spray - legs still set rigid and akimbo, and count through dollar bills. Breasts and neck tender and pinkish from overwork, (these boys held onto the old established dignities of a preamble), she’s stroll back towards Rockerfeller, towards the hissing neon to sleep amid the gophers.

Somewhere along the line, Carly had obviously given a green light. And it had been more of a lurch into sexual abandon than smooth transfer, clutch control lacking. Yet she’d grown strangely fond of many of the boys, from those first tentative probings of barely mature Craven - second row prop forward, though in need of much stabilising beneath his red and gold strip, eager and sloppy as a puppy dog - to the more practiced elbow grease of, say, Art, exercising his grazing rights beneath the silk sheets of his parents’ double bed, always master of timing. There was none better at spotting windows of opportunity, grasping those moments when the house was his and his alone. It had become a precision art. Each and every Friday afternoon (summer months), two concrete routines collided: Kat’s tuba lessons and the oldies’ weekly golf round. Well, the term round would be doing a grave disservice to that most elegant of shapes. Quite how you’d describe their navigation of the course was open to debate; a jagged circuit with much back tracking, ostensibly irregular but possibly conforming to a grand scheme of uniformity, given maybe a hundred odd years of three-wooding. Crystalline might be the best word. What drove the pair to continue was rather a mystery.
In fact, their chance to indulge in such luxurious sex (and to Carly at that stage, anything outside of the janitor’s broom cupboard qualified thus...) was based entirely on such inexplicables. Not merely the parents’ persistent attempts to reduce an ugly over-par score that threatened three figures, but the baffling positioning of a golf course in Madsonville at all. The land harboured ambitions to go dustbowl, and had no desire to hold onto close-cropped greens. The town, on the other hand, ironed out their troubles in numerous bars, and liked football. It didn’t really add up. The silver irrigation creepers that spurted tirelessly from dawn far outnumbered the members. And would probably be more adept with a putter.

Then there were the peculiar circumstances of Kat’s tuba lessons. A thin sliver of a twelve-year-old sister, she barely had enough puff to trouble a piccolo. Yet she pursed her lips and blew. Time after time after time, struggling for pitch. “Katherine, more lungs, more lungs...!”
“But I’m blowing sir -” cheeks red and glossy, perched on the corner of a chair in an empty classroom, innuendo collecting in the corners to be swept up and giggled at later. It was just that sort of town.

At lonely times, Carly was inclined to think that Art had been as close to love as she’d ever got. It was a fairly frequent affectation. Over gin-laced coffee in a Salinas diner, for example, her eyes just catching the reflection of a passing greyhound, her passing greyhound, in the half wiped chrome of a sugar shaker. Or two cups later, gin a fading scent, when the juke box seemed to give up during a difficult tenor sax break, needle burping, waitress toying with her apron strings, preparing to do battle. Carly, near empty bottle concealed between her thighs, warming, coaxing the last little drops from the inner glass walls, had fallen from her orbit again. The highway blundered by: glimpses of movement in a button of spilt milk; a huge polished belt buckle depicting a cartoon moose; rows of strawberry ‘shake stained tumblers. Always in reflection; always through an intermediary agent. As if she didn’t feel cut off enough already....

Carly supposed life was always filtered through something external; life only took on proper, provocative dimensions when played and tested against a mouldable, tangible surround. Otherwise, there would be no meaning, no resolution; ultimately, words were mere vapour trails until a collision with flesh and emotion.
And if Carly were destined by design to live a life of second-degree exposure, surface feeding, she was hard pressed to think of a better intermediary than Art.

Perhaps she was right to hang onto a few pleasing memories, half-truths, distortions. Bottle of gin left empty between pepper pot and saltcellar on the diner counter (more rocket than phallus), she’d found mid-summer Salinas had precious little to offer. Except escape.

Carly was always nervous around new towns. She shivered as the wind picked up by a crossroads, the days heat fading, and drafted a few more buttons into service. The main street was deserted; junction lights flirted with imaginary traffic, hooded eyes red-greening with no obvious pattern. Convenience stores were plotting next morning’s bargains, pre-emptive, wonder strikes. Floors were mopped. Long handled brooms still missed that packet of burst potato chips under a shelf on the snacks aisle, merely swilled the contents around as countless no-hope employees had done for months. A hair salon had put out a trashcan jammed with a week’s trimmings. Salinas was in the grip of a crew-cut plague. Crows - high with the nest-building urge, in search of luxury, thinking of possible jokes they could play on the mountainside bald eagle population - milled about on telegraph wires, pondering how to remove the lid. From the sewers, rats were having similar thoughts, squinting longingly through drain gratings Carly nearly saved both sets of beasts the trouble of concocting a break-in plan to said trashcan by blundering full into it, the clumsiness of a newcomer. Teetering but no more, the rats below winced, crows above tutted. The street may have been empty, but Carly was far from alone.

She wandered and found a less threatening side street of a side street, further from the hub, being far too soon to throw herself at Salinas’s heart. Wherever that was. The evening disappeared whilst swaying on an old swing, back garden of an empty fuchsia-coloured pre-fab, smoking as if her death depended on it. Goods trains passed every hour, slowed to walking pace on perfectly straight track, as if cajoling any vagrants who might be in the area. And a fair few stumbled aboard, one smashing up his banjo in the process. He looked disconsolate under moonlight. Grey, even, the colour of far-off mountains that backed the tragedy. She began to whistle a tune and tried to forget…

A full ten days into motel life, Carly still expected her stepfather to break down the door at any moment. She kept it double locked, though quite why she carried on with this rigmarole was beyond her, since the thing seemed to be made of thick cardboard. Anyhow, he was bound to track her down in the end. Carly worried that she’d not put enough miles between them. Her reasoning, her fears, were peppered with such conflicts, contradictions: concerns which bore scrutiny when each treated in isolation, but stubbornly refused to balance whenever there was a confluence. During a particularly drab episode of Ectoparasite, a daily sci-fi show, and semi-inspired by ten minutes of brutal alien culling at a moon ranch (programme never more than a thin-disguised colonial v Red Indian allegory), Carly resolved to jettison her most weakly argued worries, leaving her with a more manageable clutch of woes and torments. The activity didn’t feel as satisfying as it should have done. Even more so at the climax of Ectoparasite when, in a rare twist ending, it turned out that the aliens hadn’t been dead at all but play-acting. Like a hundred Briar Rabbits, but pleading clemency from the horror of ‘poison’ gas, not bramble bushes, (this being the moon, after all), the cunning critters were reborn, yet more powerful and full of children. Indigotin exposure was very much to their liking. The murder squads of crater corps were about to reap the whirlwind. But it would have to wait until next week’s episode. The television hissed malevolently. Carly suspected analogy.

Sure enough, her culled worries came back to haunt her, twice the size of before; strange shadows that crept in beneath the shower curtain, anxiety no amount of soap could wash away and bully down the plug hole. Then, later, the odd clatter in the forecourt, surely the work of strays, raccoons in the trash…? Carly knew this well enough, but the night was a poor respecter of logic. She soon convinced herself he was outside, kicking around patiently in the dust, waiting upon an opportunity. Or in a bar nearby, scoping, contact collecting. Or even - Lord help her – shacked up in the room next door, drill in hand, boring more little peep holes, ever so gently, ever so out of character, back turning to tease out the dust, never leaving a trace. She scoured the bathroom but found nothing. Not even around the scuffed plasterboard into which the water pipes disappeared, a favourite location. Carly had learnt some of the tricks.

So she drew the mucky orange blinds down tight and spent day after day in thir spooky, sickly, tangerine glow. All life - crisp, white morning sun, red brake lights, blue sky - filtered through this lens. It was no way for a seventeen-year-old to live. Sneaking out for food at dusk, tummy rumbling as she’d never heard it before, then eating herself to sleep, television pumping out its tuneless melody. And the money was nearly out, stolen money, his bills scraped up from business (nature: shady). It had felt good to tear something away from him, retribution, if only symbolic. She’d never been any more to him than a ready source of friction; a made-up, dressed up, tousled, bleeding mannequin. Wet dream fodder during weekday nights, too tired to act, hers was the image he sculpted around whilst she was at school, hitching up her skirt in a desperate search for salvation. Made a considered circuit of the trailer, as if marking his own, stale scent, leaving calling cards in the sink, bed sheets, whisky tumblers. During summer evenings - when work tended to be at its shortest - not even high-pitched crickets could cut through an atmosphere heady with alcohol and abuse. Waves of happy chirrups stalled in mid-flight, sound muffled, and crashed to the floor, unmade beds, washing up. Carly could barely breath for the salty sweat that laced the air, spread film-like on the walls. How she had wished him dead, mangled, torn asunder. From those very first fingerings, she ceased to be anything more than a personal desire interface, pliable, silent but for the occasional moan, unable to suppress (as if her agony needed adding to...), lipstick smudging onto the pillow, kissing out rows of magenta SOS’s for anybody who may have been watching over her from afar, any knight in shiny armour, any distant saviour. Anybody. Bent over into the refrigerator on Saturday nights, teeth sliding against ice-smooth six-packs (scratching lines in the silvery condensation), with hair flopped forward, curtaining eyes if not sensations, her body itself began to lose identity. If only her mother had been able to last things out, it may have been different. But not even Carly, understanding on the windswept afternoon of Fay’s hurried, underpacked desertion, thin cotton dress billowing gently around bruised legs, that abuse was hereditary, implicating herself firmly (but trembling) in the line of receivership, could feel resentment. The pattern of entrapment and escape was there to be repeated. Patterns, after all, evil or good hearted, are incapable of anything else.

Now, all she had left of him was fifteen dollars, a fraction of the original amount, once a fat wad, that she’d been steadily breaking apart. Rolled tightly and held with a green rubber band, the money struggled to the thickness of a cigarette. Which, Carly thought with smile, half grin, was kind of appropriate, since this was by far her biggest drain. Always security minded, now so more than ever, she propped the notes in an ashtray, praying hypothetical intruders wouldn’t notice. When not in use, the ashtray lived on top of the television, jiving to the late night jazz shows Carly had curled to sleep before. This was fine until the cathode ray tube - overworked to point of collapse - licked into flames and ignited what remained of her capital.
She awoke to find money turned to ash, only a stub left. Unrolling a few truncated notes, absent minded, she regarded a singed Abe Lincoln. The word ‘dollar’ had been similarly pruned; ‘d’ and ‘o’ were the only surviving letters. ‘D O’, in green turned to brown, sang out to her.

So Carly did. Got out and began waitressing. Sad at first, partly for the mess she was in; partly for the realisation she wouldn’t be able to watch Ectoparasite for the foreseeable. But life evened out, and fear dissipated as summer faded. She found a cheap apartment and began barmaiding in the Fall. It was good money; cathartic in ways she’d never envisaged. Carly could feel her perspective on life realigning itself, its angles rationalising, vertices solidifying.

And then, by and by, it was Christmas.