Chapter 4: The Other Path
Skeetz sat with her legs tucked under her chair and both arms on the desk in front of her, slouched over the pages of the open book, unable to feel the world around her for the magic the story was producing inside her. The words of Cervantes echoed inside her head, painting the walls of her mind with a tapestry of the foreign world, of a fool drawn on a wild adventure because of madness induced by poor quality story telling and false premises. The towns could be her town, and Dulcinea del Toboso could be one of the woman who live down the road. It could even be her, exactly her.
Skeetz wore a ragged t-shirt and jeans that had holes in them. Her hands were rough with callus and scabs and she was thin and wiry from long hours of hard work. At thirteen, she knew how to drive a semi-truck into the woods to collect logs, and she had a mind sharp enough to stay in school and do well even though she only got to come in a few dozen days out of the year. The teacher stood at the front of the classroom in a clean, ironed dress and watched Skeetz read with eyes that softened around the edges when a student did a good thing in the direction of learning. The woman held a ruler in her left hand and made ready to use it if any of the students did a bad thing for the direction of their learning. Normally, the way Skeetz was sitting would be a problem requiring application of the ruler, and it twitched slightly in the woman’s hand as she had this thought, but she knew what situation Skeetz was in and she saw the child’s mind.
A man’s voice echoed down the hall, loud and violent even from the other side of the building, and Skeetz’s bright blue eyes jumped from the page to the door and then to the teacher’s face. The eyes didn’t contract or change shape, and Skeetz’s body didn’t give any outward sign of an inward struggle. It was the teacher’s eyes that contracted, and her body that stood up straighter, stiffening in the direction of the door. “...don’t give a fuck what you...”, Bill’s voice rose to a crescendo and then fall back a note. He was on his way to this room, fighting with the principal. Footsteps joined the sound of shouting, and Skeetz closed the ragged cover of the book.
“...not a proper thing, to take a girl out of her education,”, the principal said, getting cut off by Bill as he responded, “‘not a proper thing’! I’ve got work to do and she can’t be wasting time reading your damn books. That ain’t going to help her get anywhere in life; she’s not fucking going to college - you hear me?”
The two men reached the door, and Skeetz stood up and looked at her father. He wasn’t a tall man, standing a few inches short of six feet, looking small next to the principal. Bill wore faded blue overalls and work boots and he smelled like pine pitch and motor oil. The principal wasn’t from around here, came from some city family, and had soft hands that had never known the heat of a scythe swung from right to left a hundred times in a row. The man wasn’t afraid of Bill, viewed him as an uneducated lout, and stood at exactly the proper distance with exactly the right posture. He had a single stain on his entire suit of clothing; a drop of coffee which had fallen errant from a careless sip he took a few hours earlier. Bill was a few sentences away from striking the man in the face with a thick meaty fist, the consequences be damned. Who was this city fellow to tell a man that his daughter needed learning, that she was better placed here in school than in the woods where Bill needed her.
“Daughter, get in the truck”, Bill said without breaking eye contact with the principal. Skeetz closed Don Quixote, gently flipping the cover to rest on top of all the middle pages, and walked out of the room. As she was moving down the hallway, Bill leaned forward an inch and snarled at the principal, “She doesn’t need to read your damn books, she needs to work, you hear me”? The man didn’t lean away from Bill, and in fact may have even tilted forward, just a smidge, not farther than propriety would recommend of course, and quietly changed his accent and dropped his manner of speaking. The principal’s eyes sparkled with malevolence and a scar that Bill had not noticed before came to prominence beneath the man’s left eye. “You ain’t better than me, Bill, because you work with your hands like you do, and my damn books are the difference between your daughter ending up just like you and her having a better life out of this town”. The principal’s words were meant to push Bill to swing at him, designed to be over the line that a man like Bill rings around his heart, and the principal knew that Bill wouldn’t do it. Bill wasn’t the only man in town who had a father that couldn’t tell the difference between a child and an object that would produce value when worked, and this was the principal’s way of telling him so. “It doesn’t have to go this way Bill”, the principal continued, “you can give her a way out of it”.
Bill finally responded, in a rage because no other emotion was available to him, “There isn’t a fucking thing wrong with our way of things, and she don’t need a way out of it”, leaning forward even further, closer to the principal’s face. The taller man said nothing, and met Bill’s eyes with a level gaze that gave nothing away and delivered the most humiliating response possible: un- derstanding. After a longer pause, the principal responded, “It’ll be here if she ever wants to come back Bill”. A way out.
Skeetz sat in the passenger seat of Bill’s truck with her hands laying lightly on top of her thighs, waiting for what she knew must be coming. But Bill just drove with both hands on top of the steering wheel and a madness in his eyes. He remembered being a child and wanting to understand how the world worked, to learn about everything that was out there, and right now that little boy inside himself sat next to him on the bench seat between Bill and Skeetz. Bill’s inner child was asking him why he didn’t live his life the way he wanted to now that he was grown up and free. Why he wouldn’t let his daughter have what he couldn’t have when he was young. Why he wouldn’t treat her better than he did.
The father that woke Bill up every morning in the pre-dawn darkness, who drove him to work like a machine, who beat him when he made mistakes or slowed down or got sick, wasn’t here anymore. But Bill couldn’t stand the thought that all of what his father did to him didn’t have meaning and purpose. It had shaped him and defined his life; he gave up his own dreams to live the way his father forced him too. Changing now meant seeing that it was years wasted, based on false premises; time and life that he couldn’t get back. It meant knowing that there was a choice in there, one his father made in the wrong direction and that he himself had been making in the wrong direction also. Tears welled up around the blood red veins sticking out of Bill’s eyes. Rage, watered by agony.
Skeetz knew better than to speak and so she sat with her hands in her lap and looked out the window of the truck. She should be afraid, but she wasn’t and didn’t know why. After a few minutes of motion her mind wandered into the forest spinning past the window in a blur of color and texture. She envisioned an old man riding a horse through the countryside, and she painted a tapestry out of all the threads Cervantes handed her, from hundreds of years in the past. She started her own story, having Quixote ramble through this forest, in these mountains. She had him and Sancho Panza happen upon a logger and his daughter who needed rescuing. She made Quixote tall, taller than the principal, and gave him the strength of ten men.
In Skeetz’s story, Quixote came upon this man and his daughter as they were chopping down an old oak tree, but the man was mad with some sickness of the mind and had told his daughter to stand beneath the tree and catch it as it fell. The girl’s eyes, wild with fear, locked on this strange looking foreign man on his giant horse as the tree began to tumble, and Quixote shouted to Sancho Panza that he must take the reins of his noble horse. Quixote flew in Skeetz’s mind from his place on the edge of the clearing to the path of the falling tree and stood with two wide legs in front of the girl as the trunk tumbled towards them. A thunderous crack broke as the tree was caught in Quixote’s hands, falling still and quivering in the air above the girl’s head.
The sound of Bill’s door slamming shut woke Skeetz from the story, and his words brought her back to this reality and these woods. As she followed him into the forest, she tucked away the tapestry she had started weaving into the back of her mind, determining to finish it someday.