Free Sentimental Journey by Jill Barnett Page A

way he’d seen a young fellow from Fort Worth do; then he held it up and shook a few of them onto his dry tongue. They tasted like a mix of licorice and his mama’s Camay soap, the kind she’d used to wash his mouth out when he repeated one of her curse words.
    He’d first tried Sen-Sen to cover up the smell of the two Chesterfield cigarettes he’d smoked behind the old wooden water tower when he was eight. But now, four years later, he’d grown to like the way they made his mouth feel. They were cheaper than one of those blue packages of Clove gum and lasted longer. You got your few pennies’ worth out of a Sen-Sen pack.
    He closed his eyes, figuring he’d sleep a bit. But he opened his eyes and cocked his head when he heard a distinct and distant hum in the air. He propped up on his bare elbows and looked eastward.
    There, in that blue sky, was an airplane, flying right toward him.
    He’d seen planes a couple of times, once up real close, when a barnstormer buzzed into Quannah on a Saturday in May a few years back and gave rides to whoever could afford to pay a dollar for one. His daddy took Nettie and him over so’s they could see that biplane in person. It wasn’t hard to figure out that his daddy had wanted to get his nose into the engine as badly as Red wanted to ride in the thing.
    But they didn’t have dollars to waste on plane rides, so Red had just walked around it over and over again, spinning the propeller, sliding his hand along the bi-wings and the tail, trying to imagine what it would be like to get into that bucket of a seat, to put goggles over his eyes and fly right out of Acme, Texas, away from the bootlegged beer bottles that filled the kitchen trash can every day, away from the chipped supper plates that weren’t good enough to give away with a gasoline fill-up and the jelly-jar glasses they used for meals, away from the hollering that echoed in their lopsided old house out back of the gas station, hollering that came from his mama’s restlessness and his daddy’s confusion.
    Red stood up, shaded a hand over his eyes, and watched.
    The biplane flew overhead; it rocked its wings at him and circled once. He waved back at the pilot, then ran through the field after that plane, still waving, ran and ran and ran, until his arms were spread out like wings and his face was turned up toward the sun and the sky and tomorrow.
    “Billy Joe!”
    Red stumbled and fell on his knees, his palms skidding into a warm furrow of dirt. He knelt there in that rust-colored Texas farm field while the plane kept on flying away, until it was only an arrow in the distant sky that was as unreachable as a dream.
    He stood, dusted himself off, then shoved his hands in the deep pockets of his overalls, where a hunk of smooth turquoise slipped right into his fingers as if it were meant to be there. He looked toward the house and the female voice that called him.
    The sun caught his mama’s bright red hair, a burst of shining color against the weathered wood of their scrappy gray house, which was really little more than a three-room shack that leaned like a Saturday night drunk and sat under an old wooden water tower with a narrow platform that was a favorite spot of his. That water tower was branded with cigarette burns along the back rail, and he could sit there on that puffy platform for hours, wishing, dreaming, and looking out to the west where there was nothing but the flat Texas horizon for as far as his eyes could see.
    “Billy Joe!”
    It must be after
four o’clock
. She never got up before
four o’clock
, and that was just because she had to get ready for work. Six nights a week she played honky-tonk piano at a club just across the Oklahoma border called The Afterthought, where the Harmon County law enforcement turned a blind eye to the drinking and gambling because the governor’s brother owned half the place.
    Red’s older sister, Onetta, said she heard the church ladies laughing about Mama’s job.