Even if you went inside to escape it, the smell was still there on everyone’s mind and, even worse, their tongues—acrid and rotting—in their clothes, sweating out of their pores. The adults debated amongst themselves how to properly describe it as if this would make it dissipate. Moldy gym clothes, the crust that collects at the top of a gallon of milk, festering meat, and a decapitated decomposing mouse stuck in a trap were offered up as possibilities. Someone would always interject. Ruin the reverie.
“It’s shit,” they would say, “pure grade-A shit, goddamnit.”
And that would be that. One by one they’d go back to silently contemplating their beer or push their grocery buggy away from the knot of people that had formed at the end of the aisle. Game over until next time when too many of them paused in the confines of an air-conditioned haven to contemplate how their lives had been taken over by poop trains that summer.
Since 1998, the trains had been coming from New York full of treated sewage that they were too environmentally conscious to dump themselves. The South had no such qualms. How much? We’ll take it. But then two years later, a town farther down the tracks—one with more money, more people, more everything—threw a fit about having it zoom past their well-tended lawns and golf courses. A hazard, they said. Their children couldn’t breathe in those fumes. Parrish, Alabama got stuck holding the proverbial shit bag.
Shit cans? Hildegarde didn’t know what to call it. There’s not much to consider when ten million pounds of it are parked fifty feet from your house. There you are and there they are and there’s not a thing you can do about it. At only fourteen, what the hell did she care?
“Don’t forget your vanilla,” her mother called. Hildegarde kept her face still while her mom pressed a wet thumb into the groove between her upper lip and the tip of her nose. The sweet syrupy warmth of cake filled her nostrils. Her mom was full of quick fixes from the how-to articles. Her latest—one thumb full of vanilla extract so all you smell is baked goods when you walked outside—had a flaw. Hilde didn’t have it in her to tell her mother that it just made everything smell like someone tried to cover up a massive shit with air freshener. Or even worse that they had learned in biology class beavers make this musty goo that smells just like vanilla, but it comes out their butts. It was used in foods and flavorings just like the kind her mother put under Hilde’s nose. She bet her mom hadn’t read that little bit of info in her magazines.
Those magazines were what was forcing her outside in the first place. That and her dad. He had been laid off or quit again, though the tight voices she heard when they thought she was asleep suggested the latter. He sat in front of the TV all day, sound too loud. Lately, she felt like Alice in Wonderland when she devoured those “Eat Me” cookies.
The smell hit her as soon as she stepped outside. It was already late in the day so the train had fully heated. Flies would start buzzing soon. Their unfenced backyard gave a clear shot to the train and the sturdy elms and pines beyond.
She turned and headed toward Main Street, cutting behind low-slung brick ranches and edging along the ditch that bisected the backyards. Some stood empty. Others had the occasional inflatable pool. A random charcoal grill. All open to voyeurs as even the occasional metal fence only rose waist high. Hilde moved back into the street before she hit the Bennett family’s backyard. They kept their dog on one of those moving clotheslines and the ground beneath him bare save for a little dirt. If Hilde passed too close, he would run back and forth, howling something fierce. Maybe if he escaped, he would have just licked her face or maybe he would bite it off.
She made the two lefts needed to get to Main Street, where there was nothing but shuttered storefronts. That wasn’t entirely true. Exactly two stores were currently open, the result of the town council’s efforts to revitalize—an utterly useless stationary store and a hardware store. Out front of the hardware store two old men rocked. They had clothespins over their noses like they were in a Pepe LePew cartoon.
Hilde wanted everything to be gray and dull. It’s what the town deserved. But the late afternoon sun made the colors on the fading storefronts pop like an Andy Warhol exhibit, all bright splashes against the blue of the sky. Just a week before she had seen some of the other girls using them as backdrops for impromptu photo shoots with those yellow disposable Kodak cameras. She stopped at the boarded-up grocery store. Its jaunty pig still looked sharp. Hilde had applied for a job to bag groceries in May. One day they were hiring and the next, without ever letting anyone know, gone. The workers showed up to locked doors. The nearest chain grocery store was now the next town over, as was Hilde’s new high school. Theirs had shut down a year ago due to budget constraints. A drive to the mall took two hours round trip.
Hide slipped fifty cents into the machine that still hummed outside the grocery store for a Dr Pepper. When she bent down to fish it out, someone whistled.
“Well, lookee, here. Heya, there, Hilde.”
He was the only person who called her Hilde with a long e. She turned and squinted up at him, one hand over her eyes in a salute against the sun and the other curled around the sweaty can.
“Hey, Colt.”
Two grades above her, Colt came from one of those families where all their names started with the same letter. His mother had just given birth to number seven, Cy. All the more reason for Colt to take too-long afternoon runs even though the hot shit smell was at its zenith. He ran cross-country for the high school. Colt that runs cross-country like a pony, Hilde told herself the first time she saw him. He even tossed his hair around like one, dashing through lawn sprinklers.
His wet, sweat soaked shirt clung to his chest and those long legs loped easy and free. So what if up close he had pustules, angry and red along his chin, and his cupid’s bow ran a little flat? Hilde had been slowly moving toward the idea that crushes on celebrities and musicians she would never see was stupid. Here in front of her stood this tall boy with doe brown eyes talking only to her. He wasn’t a what if or a when but now. She made it a point from that day on to run into him by accident on purpose.
Colt wanted to go to college and come back, fix everything up. Reopen the schools and the mine that had closed in the Eighties. Living here, Hilde had always felt as if she had just missed the party, arrived two minutes too late when all the guests had just left and the booze had run dry. Colt wanted to restart it. Hilde almost vibrated with the need for another party somewhere else away from here, bigger, better.
They never kissed. Hilde guessed it was her fault. In a fit of blind optimism, she had gotten her hair cut into a pixie to look like that girl from the catalogue—the one with the pouty lips, pointy chin, and impossibly long legs. Hilde looked like Peter Pan. No amount of bobby pins could fix it. Worse, she was technically still an eighth grader until August.
They had developed a routine, running into each other in front of the store, walking back down along Main Street, overshooting Hilde’s house, past the shit train, and on to the woods. When they reached the clearing, Colt pulled her forward to press against her. Sometimes they did it against a tree. Other times she dragged him down atop her. She liked the weight.
Today, she told him, “You first.”
He knelt on the grass then stretched out fully, arms behind his head. She sat on his lap, her legs over his. Unsure at first but more confident as his breath turned ragged, Hilde rolled her hips forward. She was embarrassed at how wet she got. Felt it through her shorts and wondered if he thought the same thing. His eyes were closed.
“Can I?” he asked. And before she could answer, he flipped them around so he was on top. He pushed a hand under her shirt, squeezing her breast like a stress ball.
As he thrust against her, Hilde realized her vanilla had completely faded and she smelled shit. She thought about those girls in front of the pharmacy, posing for pictures. Did they put them on their walls? Share them amongst themselves? Look how pretty we are? Hilde would never take those pictures herself.
“Oh,” she said out loud, and he took it as encouragement, moving faster. They had never done this for so long before. She began to feel warm and more. She wanted more. Hilde buried her face in his wet shirt and hairless chest, pressed harder. Her hips lifted off the ground.
He cried out and stopped. She felt wetness along the inside of her thigh.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?” she asked, even though she knew. He looked down at her. And that was when he kissed her. Full tongue. Eyes closed. Hildegarde Adam’s first official kiss.
By fall, Colt will decide to go by his middle name, Jensen. He nods to her in the halls. They do not speak except for that one time his senior year when he asks her if she plans to have the last slice of pepperoni pizza in the caf since she is standing in front of him. Her response? No. It will take Hilde until college to tell people she prefers Hildegarde as if naming means knowing.
When she tells the story to her freshman roommate, who she wants to shock and impress, Hildegarde will say that this is where she gave her first blow job. Dropped to her knees right there in the grass. Made him cum in less than a minute. In this scenario, he will be taller, the oozing pustules of his face airbrushed smooth. No shit train.
Two years after that, when she tells the story to her first real boyfriend, the one whose leaving makes her curl up in an empty tub, she’ll say that Colt chased her all summer long, desperate for her attention, only to receive a polite no thank you and a conciliatory kiss.
To her own teenage daughter, Hildegard will say it was sweet and innocent. No age gap. They were equals. His thumb rubbing the inside of her wrist drove her wild.
Even later still, when memory starts to leave her and she grasps at what little is left, Hildegarde will replace the scent of shit that summer with lilacs and honeysuckle, pulled from the distant recesses of her mind, mixing a summer spent at her Gram’s with this one. She’ll remember the smell of his sweat and the pressure of it all, rubbing, pushing closer, angling for something that remained just out of reach.
