"Do you think people are born happy?" Asked Heighleigh, her voice low and stubborn, rough around the edges as usual.
"Why? Do you?" I always answered her questions with questions. It gave her the opportunity to talk more, which she always appreciated, and very seldom did I actually know the answers she sought.
"I don't think they are." She said, her voice rising as if she was still thinking about it. She began the ever-recognizable departure into a socially analytical monologue. "If they were, I think it'd be a hell of a lot easier to get yourself back to." She concluded, her satisfied expression souring into a frown. I knew it. The silence needed only to be broken for a moment before her stone features would falter. Suddenly she lifted her face again as she had been doing, listening for sirens, unheard to me. By the way she collected herself into partial relaxation again, I supposed she didn't hear any.
She was speaking nonsense again, of things that made sense only to her. Anything to keep her mind off of why she was currently sitting in the swampy dirt in the woods by the river, why she was keeping her voice down.
Heighleigh leaned forward and plucked a burning stick from the fire, holding it delicately between her thumb and first finger. A tiny flame flickered on its end, which she held to her face to ignite the cigarette she held pressed between her lips. Her freckled face was aglow with eerie light for a moment as the camel started to burning.
"You know, Heighleigh," I began timidly. "We might have to run, very soon. Maybe you don't want to smoke right now..." I was nervous; I knew my voice betrayed me.
"You're nuts." She accused. "We're fugitives from the law. It's either smoke or chew off one of my arms, North." She chuckled gruffly, then raised a suggestive brow my way. "Or maybe one of yours." Her all too playful words were punctuated by a sudden bite to my shoulder.
"Ow! Damn it, Heighleigh... you're not..." I stopped. It was no use reprimanding her. Of course she wasn't going to take anything seriously, she never did. She wouldn't have heard my argument anyway; her laughter had started to spill from her generously now.
"We can work this out... it'll be..." I started, intending fully to elaborate. The boiling silver of her laugh had ceased as quickly as it had started, and she stared blankly into the fire again. Her face looked almost dead with stillness. I didn't finish my sentence, but let my mouth just close, banishing the thought back to where it belonged.
The night had not been pleasant, or comfortable, or even normal. My mind was spinning, and I wasn't even the one in the direct line of danger. She was. After a pause that could have cut glass in its awkwardness, I spoke to her gently again, as if I could hurt her with mere words.
"Heighleigh?" I articulated her name, all the ridiculous puns we've incorporated with it flooding back into recollection. We had called her "Heighleigh intelligent" when she did something stupid, or "Heighleigh skilled" when she would make a mistake. We never meant anything by them, but it killed me to see her so upset, her usually rambunctious self, muffled now like putting a blanket in a bass drum. She was a different Heighleigh now, regardless of how her jokes still ran. She knew what was happening as much as I did, and so I was being consciously gentle with her. I pronounced the syllables of it now with as much levity and beauty as I could muster, and it was a beautiful name.
She looked over at me, her arms folding and settling on her bent knees as she rested one mottled side of her face on her palm.
"Yeah?" She asked quietly.
"You'll live through this." I told her tentatively. "You're tough." I wasn't sure if this was the right thing to say, in fact I braced myself, planting my booted feet into the dark ground before me. I was preparing to be either screamed at or cried on, it could go either way.
She bit her lip. I tried to decipher this action. It wasn't quite pensive, but neither was it laden with grief. I put a hand on her shoulder, in case it was the latter. There ensued another deep silence, throughout which my hand remained on the scratchy fibers of her seagull gray sweater. At any moment she might shrug it off, and I was prepared to take no offense.
Seagulls. I thought of these seafaring, garbage picking, bait stealing nuisances as I studied the hue of her sweater.
In the time I had spent on the east coast, they had become very familiar. I remember sitting on the dock down the beach from a friend's house, looking out over the receding waves as an old Otis Redding song played through my mind. I don't remember why.
A seagull of ordinary variety alighted carefully a few feet before me, on a low piling. I paid no heed at first; I had known these birds to be audacious in their endless pursuit of food. I returned my gaze to the water, but after a minute or two, I felt the weight of two finch-yellow eyes on my skin as the seagull stared at me from his perch. I looked to it slowly, as not to scare it away, but it didn't so much as flinch. I was curious of its interest. I stared into the lemon peel bird eyes for some time, admiring every perfect fleck of muted gold. The seagull remained remarkably still. Had I not seen it land there I would have thought it a smartly convincing work of taxidermy.
I studied its feathers; the soft whiskered edges of the gray and white freckled down.
This bird became then something more miraculous than an everyday harbor pest. It was very near regal, like a perfect hawk statue set on a stone pedestal. I had never taken the time to appreciate the simple and lackluster manner of a seagull such as this. At the same time, I was taken aback by my susceptibility to the unassuming stare of a wild creature. I thought it might even allow me to touch its feathers, which I now respected as if they belonged to a dove, or a bald eagle.
In my haste, I raised a steady hand to pet its feathers. It threw me a startled glance and took at once to the sky. The state of awe and reverence had snapped, recoiling back into the reality of a screeching, windshield soiling avian that, for a fleeting moment, thought a human being to be worth closer examination. It glided up on still wings into the hazy late afternoon sky to join a group of others, exactly the same.
"North?" Heighleigh's blonde brows furrowed, she had been looking at my hand on her shoulder. My wandering gaze flickered and settled on her wolf eyes, pale blue, with a ring of dark cobalt binding them. They called your attention like a police car's flashing lights. And then I saw those lights, dim and tiny in the corner of my concentrated vision. The reality again interrupting the dream.
The lights were far enough away for comfort, so we didn't need to move. The closest road was more than a mile through the woods. Flashlights were to come next, but we would walk again before we saw them, or we would be finished.
Heighleigh reached a hand up to push mine from where it rested, rather roughly.
"What was that for?" I inquired defensively.
"You were fadin' out on me again." She stared me down like the prey of the wolf she resembled.
"I'm sorry..." Now was the time to save myself. "Did you say something?"
"No." She spat. "But I was about to. You weren't quite... here." She raised a skeptical brow at me, a wispy section of her red blonde hair falling into her face, obscuring her freckles, but leaving her eyes to glare at me.
"I'm sorry." She was circling, she was gauging her attack.
"Don't apologize so damn much." Not what I expected. She stood up from the ground and brushed off her old jeans.
"Well I'm sorry for that too, then." I said, letting my guard down, perhaps just to see what would happen. She seemed to have left the trigger alone, although the barrel was still aimed at me.
"North?" She said, her face difficult to read in the distortion of flickering firelight. I thought it somewhere between childlike pleading and the calm before a tirade that would devastate our little campsite.
"Hmm?"
"Freak." She said and grinned, letting escape a low, grainy chuckle. With an air of victory, she flicked the spent cigarette into the fire before her. She was an imp, her snub nose and crooked teeth a mockery of perfection, and I could imagine her dancing about the fire then like some crafty horned god. I let myself laugh a little with her. She meandered around the campfire, pulling her stringy hair into a ponytail.
"You know you're the only person who calls me that?" I mused.
"What, freak? I'm surprised." She continued with her hoarse laughing, delivering this charming line in perfect deadpan.
"No, North. No one calls me that." I clarified. She knelt by the fire on the side opposite me and stuffed more dry leaves into the flames. She looked up, dragging a small stick in the dirt for no apparent reason.
"Plenty of people call you that. I'm sure." She said, still dragging the stick in little circles through the dully offensive-smelling mud.
"No, not really. Only when you're around. No one calls me that." I stood my ground.
"You're wrong." Heighleigh said flatly.
"No, you're wrong." I answered back, without the venom that she had sent with the same words. She frowned at me regardless.
"So I'm no one to you?" One side of her mouth curled up in a half snarl and she threw the stick at me. It hit me lightly in the arm.
"You know what I meant." I said quietly, more involved in my own thoughts than in reckoning with her constant emotional instability.
"Christ, North. Lighten up." She threw another twig in my direction, this one missed entirely. She frowned at her poor aim.
"I don't understand you." I responded, with little more emotion than a typed word.
"You're not supposed to." Heighleigh teased, winking one eye slowly shut in a suggestive manner.
I just blinked at her, and looked away, wondering if grade school arguments felt the same way as the ones we always had. It seemed an appropriate comparison, although I honestly wouldn't know.
"Fucking seriously, North!" She barked abruptly. I thought she had set her sleeve on fire or something. I looked up, startling, looking around. We�d been speaking no louder than a stage whisper since we�d set up camp, and I hoped to whatever god there might be that we weren�t about to be on the receiving end of a police ambush.
"See?" She said, her harsh voice calm. "You need to lighten up."
"Don't try me, Heighleigh." She turned to me, meeting my warning glance with lupine eyes. They shone with the reflection of the dwindling fire.
"What are you talking about, North?" Her face was much less anger than confusion. "Something wrong, kid?" Her tone had changed in an instant to concern.
"Nothing." Bullshit, and we both knew it.
"You're lying." She spoke simply.
"You're right." I answered shortly, looking up at her from where I sat on the half rotted tree stump that served as our only chair.
"What's going on, North." Her voice was all edges, without the softness of caring, although I knew she did.
"Crow." I needed only to speak one word. She understood. I had told her the story even before I left Massachusetts. I was only in Louisiana until I had the means to go home and see my brother. The little fiasco we were now engaged in had not been part of the original plan. I had been trying to work out a plan B for some time now, ever since plan A had been completely annihilated. After a moment of revered silence as she watched me and I watched the ground, she spoke again.
"North... I hear sirens." She said in a child's voice.
"Ambulance again?" I asked, looking up at her. I heard no sirens, but her ears were far keener than mine.
"Police cruisers. More of them. A lot of them..." She bit her lip violently, as if it was at fault. She stood, and without another word I kicked dirt onto the fire to extinguish it and picked up my filthy green backpack. Heighleigh hoisted her own, slinging it onto one shoulder and snaking the other arm through. We began to walk, Heighleigh's little red sneakers picking through the rough mucky terrain expertly, as if they hid cloven hooves instead of human feet. She struck a match and lit another smoke, offering me one, which I gladly accepted.
There was another ground stilling pause. I could nearly hear wisteria vines strangling the cypresses as we passed them. Heighleigh chewed on her lower lip in concentration, mulling things over. Most of the time she was content with not knowing, with being oblivious. When she did want to figure something out, it took a little work. I walked the still night, awaiting her next epiphany amidst an overture of cicadas. I closed my eyes, feeling my eyelashes brush my face bitterly as the silence of night threatened to swallow us both. At least then we wouldn't be found.
"Stop that." Heighleigh murmured finally. I looked up, hoping my eyes weren't as serious as hers. "You're making the air heavy."
"Sorry." I said, disregarding accidentally her earlier crusade against apologies. I dodged a dirty look that never came. Her eyes remained trained on the dark ground before her. Heighleigh twitched a little, shrugging off some dreaded notion or another. She sighed, a futile attempt at releasing her tension into the cool autumn air. I saw her breath billow from her mouth in a vaporous white plume.
"So are we talking tonight, or what?" Heighleigh gave up on the heavy silence.
"There's really not a lot to talk about, Heighleigh." I huffed in a visible sigh. "We've got a lot to take care of... a lot to worry about. But for now..." I paused to look over at her. "For now all we have to do is get out of the woods, back onto the road unnoticed. All we can do right now... is walk." I stuttered generously, and I knew she noticed. I just didn't care. I probably had re-adopted my old accent, as I often do in the face of stress. I didn't care about that either.
"I can't ever go home." Her voice rose, as did her gaze to meet mine. We both knew that already, but the shock had worn off and she felt the need to remind herself.
"We could always live in the trees..." I tried to lighten the air that I had made heavy. She didn't respond. "I know that's not what you meant." That went without saying, but I said it anyway.
Heighleigh produced from her pocket a small plastic bag of candy corn. I have no idea to this day where she got them, but that's hardly important. She popped a couple into her mouth, throwing her half smoked cigarette away.
"I don't want to go home. I never did." She concluded. I looked over at her as she stared at the light of a moon that struggled to find us in the woods as well. Her coppery hair was dirty and tangled.
"You don't have to." I brushed a wayward dusty tendril of her hair away from her face. "Not ever." She thought for a moment, chewing on her lower lip again. She avoided my face, pocketing the bag of candy.
"Why not?" She said. I gave her a puzzled look, an expression I had mastered in her presence. "I mean, why not live in the trees?" She seemed uncomfortable with her need to clarify, although it was meant to be a joke.
"Would you want to?" I studied the lines of her face, half shadowed, half set aglow with the struggling moonlight. "You could..." I thought about what I was about to say, and decided that it passed inspection. "You could come with me to Arizona instead. We don't have many trees where I live, but you could stay with my family for a little while. If you would want to."
"I think I might." Heighleigh answered me, a little more passively than she should have when considering a trip as long and arduous as the one she was prospectively facing. "North?" She asked, her timid tone unexpected like a whine from the mouth of a timber wolf.
"Hmm?" I said, barely disturbing the orchestration of a million singing insects in the forest. We had stumbled upon a small clearing, awash with the moon's pale yellow. I found a relatively dry place on the floor of the forest's stage and sat down, Heighleigh following suit and leaning against me.
"I don't want to think." It was a surrender.
"I think we're out of pot." I broke it to her in a quiet manner, looking at my boots, hoping she wouldn't kill the proverbial messenger.
"No, I don't want any more." Heighleigh mumbled dismissively.
"I don't understand." I ditched the subtleties, the weight of exhaustion wearing down my wit.
"Tell a story." It was more a command than a request. She drew her knees up, red sneakers ruddy with dirt and campfire ashes. I looked down at her, seeing than dingy gray sweater turned splendid in the nighttime theatre's light.
"Have you ever seen at a seagull? I mean, really looked at one. They're actually kind of..." I began, pausing to look for a suitably expressive word. Such a word was lost to me. "Pretty."
