Wait for Me

Abstract

Wait for Me Katey Schultz (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Jeff Turner Every day, I stepped off the school bus on Flat Run Road, and every day, on the other side of the fence, Judy Puckett sat astride a four-wheeler, gunning the engine. “Sarvis Morton, you’re dumber than a dummy!” she’d shout, then tear into the pasture, over the hill, and through the coal chute. We lived in Pentress, [End Page 91] seventeen miles from Morgantown, and even with the sock factory and a post office with Wi-Fi, Pentress was easy to miss. But Judy never missed the sad exhalation of the school bus, or me, abandoned along the roadside after it wheeled away. I had about fifteen seconds between insults while Judy took the four-wheeler through obstacles. I learned to walk fast. On a good day, I could be out of earshot after just four or five of her assaults. But sometimes the wind slowed me down. Or mud. The ditch along Flat Run Road was steep, and I’d fallen in once. “Sarvis Morton, your brother’s a retard, and so’re you!” “Sarvis Morton, if you had another brain, it’d be lonely!” I’d have settled for giving her a nasty look, but she already had one— pug nose that flared when she yelled, voice pitched like a pack of coyotes. Dirty brown hair like bitterroot vines slapping across her face and a neon tube top paired with whatever jeans her older sisters had worn the year before. I couldn’t cross the road because Old Man Mooney’s pit bull lived on the other side. It doesn’t take being on honor roll to know a chain only puts the inevitable on hold. When a pit wants something, it’ll get it. If that means breaking a chain or breaking skin, that’s what it means. “I didn’t ask for your opinion,” I’d shout back. “Earth is full. Go home!” But rain, scalding sunshine, sideways wind—Judy came at me. She never could have gotten to me—not with that ten-foot pole fence between us, barbed wire rimming the top. Still, I felt more intimidated by her than by the punks at school. The way her biceps flexed when she steered, rounded and limber arms framing her rib-thin torso. The neon tube top unnerved me. Like she couldn’t be bothered to get dressed all the way, or like nobody she lived with cared. I guess that’s what it came down to. Nobody did care. Not as far as I could tell. “Sarvis Morton . . .” “Sarvis Morton . . .” ________ As the crow flies, my house wasn’t far from a wildlife management area. We just called it “the lake,” because that was the only reason anyone would ever go. The foothills boasted hundreds of acres of mixed hard-wood, but all I’d ever seen of West Virginia was trees or the tops of mountains where trees used to live. More trees didn’t particularly excite me. A lake, however, was something special. Flush or poor—Morgantown [End Page 92] or Pentress—everybody loved a good swim in summertime. Even Judy Puckett. Judy had been giving me hell ever since I’d seen her at the lake, her older sisters ripping her tube top off and laughing. They had her outnumbered at the end of a dock that jutted into a deep, narrow finger of the water. I watched from the opposite shore just twenty feet away. The tube top came off fast—the tallest sister holding Judy in a full nelson while another pulled it down her waist and past her knees, throwing it into the water like a piece of trash. If that had been me, I’d have jumped into the water as soon as I got free. But when the tall one released her, Judy turned around and knuckle-punched her in the throat. The other sister got worked up then, and two more sisters came dashing down the dock, strutting in their bikinis and raising their fists, and it was only then—outnumbered by her own...