Faster than a walk but slower than a canter, trotting
is the equivalent of jogging, which she hadn't done in many years.
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She couldn't think about it too hard or she would be like the centipede who, when asked how he knew which leg to move when, promptly fell into a ditch. Some things, you just had to know without thinking. When a horse trots, the hooves move in diagonal pairs. Say, the front left and right rear leg both move forward and back at the same. Two hooves hit the ground at once, so you call the trot a two-beat gait. Western riders move their hips with the horse to avoid bouncing against the saddle.
DeLorean DeWitt wasn't trotting. She was galloping, full speed ahead, not on hooves but on wheels in the now-burgundy Chrysler minivan. She kept to the speed limit to avoid getting pulled over. She slept by day and drove by night until the dirt of the Great Plains was stuck to her strategically mud-coated plates, but her bootsoles were shed of the dust of a so-called life with Dwayne.
She'd left her cell phone behind and picked up one of those "throwaway" phones and found her way to Mayer with a last-century road map. Mayer. Population 1,584. Elevation: 4,415 feet above sea level. What woman on the run, "rewriting the narrative of her life" as Sandy put it, would pause in this place?
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She hadn't heard from Lenna since Mom died.
Cancer, all the women from that line were riddled with cancer, and it was surely the result of marrying bad men, if Sandy wasn't blowing smoke. That woman. That New-Age Catholic, that feminist. If Dwayne found out she'd put DeLorean up to running off like this, nobody would ever find Sandy's body. Not that Dwayne was homicidal. He had never killed a human. (Yet.) Anything else that panted and ran was fair game. He clubbed oppossums and shot raccoons and shot strays without even checking for dog tags first. It was legal, after all, to shoot a dog on his own property, even if it was tagged and loved by some hapless human who didn't keep a tight leash.
The last photo Lenna ever sent was taken during the wildfires,
the one where twenty or more of the "hotshot" firefighters were killed. Lenna just watched the smoke heading her way and made no move to vacate the premises.
"See you later on down the road," Lenna signed her letters back when she and Mom were still young, and newly married, and crossing off the first milestones of a lifetime. Over the years it turned to "See you later on down that long, dusty road." Then it was just the annual Christmas card. When Mom died, everyone cleaned house and filled two Dumpsters with stuff, but DeLorean pawed through the letters from Yavapai County, Arizona, because there was history in those cardboard shoe boxes filled with envelopes postmarked with five-cent stamps, then ten, then twenty, and the latest horror, the Forever stamp, because there was no end in sight for postal increases. Snail mail was as last-century now as Lenna, whose parents went back to the tail end of yet another century.
Mom and Lenna shared the same grandma and grandpa, the same way Rory and DeLorean had the same set of grandparents in common. It was kinda like thinking about how a horse can trot. The connections, the beats, the timing, the steps that led one at a time up to the predicament she was in now.
The dusty road was just one right turn ahead,
and Lenna took it, and kept on driving. "Take a left at the big red barn"--well, she had the sense to reckon that the derelict old barn with no paint or shingles left was the landmark she once knew.
The narrow road to the Runyan place was about as desolate as ever. The little trailer house was no uglier than before. She hadn't seen Rory since 1985.
There was no telling what he might look like now.
She pulled up to a stop outside the door to the rusty old trailer house, but before she could even get out, a window cracked open, a rifle barrel jutted out, and a man's voice said
"Get the hell out."
Day 595: 5 Minute Freewrite: Friday - Prompt: trot
This is an ongoing freewrite,
inspired in part by @Felt.buzz and his clever series using the daily prompts. This began with a woman on the run ("Danny's mom, Laura Jensen," she lied).
Part One: She Came in through the Kitchen Window - Day 577: 5 Minute Freewrite: Monday - Prompt: window
Part Two: "You Little Tart" - Day 585: 5 Minute Freewrite: Tuesday - Prompt: tart
Part Three: Day 588: 5 Minute Freewrite: Friday - Prompt: rodeo
https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-588-5-minute-freewrite-friday-prompt-rodeo
Part Four: Mom's Cousin Lenna the Tart - Part 3 or 4 -Day 591: 5 Minute Freewrite: Monday - Prompt: Rule
Part Five: Mom's Cousin Lenna the Lunatic