Side Road by Lisa Lynn Biggar

Gloria stands up on her bike, using all her 125 pounds to propel her up the hill, past the fire hall— the pride of this small town, with its breakfast buffets and bingo nights. Before she and Matt moved to Galena, several months ago, her experience on the eastern shore of Maryland was mainly limited to the drive from the western shore, over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to the beach and back—the main drag, route 50, mostly bordered by fields of corn and soy bean with irrigation sprayers that looked like large prehistoric creatures. Her parents would stop at a chicken barbecue stand, get corn, baked beans, chicken wrapped in aluminum foil that had a smoky, charred taste they would wash down with Kool-Aid her mother would bring in the big round, plastic thermos. And then there were the road-side stands with copious fresh produce and plants and cut flowers, the peaches so big and juicy there was no eating them in the car.

            She and Matt like the slower pace of the eastern shore; they found Galena to their liking with its one short main street, a few little restaurants, antique stores, a small grocery store. There’s a big white boarding house at the corner of downtown where Mexican workers stay during the growing season, but from what they saw the town is made-up of mostly white middle-class families, the houses in the several developments modest and well-manicured. Basketball hoops in driveways. Trampolines in back yards. She and Matt are trying in a hit-and-miss-way to have kids, a soft ticking in the back of her mind now that she’s turned thirty-five.

            She turns right onto a side road—an area she has yet to explore—bikes past a small Baptist church then down into a marshy area that has a noxious smell, like rotten eggs; she pedals fast, back up another hill. It’s the middle of August, the heat stifling, the air thick with gnats. She’s wearing only shorts and a halter top, a sun hat in place of  her helmet.

            She stands up again, making it to the top, coming into a housing development like none she’s ever seen before: some houses left to rot, cinderblock and stucco falling in on itself; others look barely habitable—windows covered over with  particle board or plastic—but are clearly lived in, with laundry hung on lines, and shiny big cars parked in yards of dirt and sand, the flimsy barbed wire fences clearly unable to keep anything in or out. She hears dogs barking, pedals down what seems to be a circular road, but then comes to a dead-end—a gnarly woods of grapevine and prickers, like places depicted in fairy tales where only rabbits wish to be flung—an old stick frame house far back in the entanglement now reclaimed by the forest.

            She turns around to head back, but is fast apprehended by a group of kids on bikes—kids of all sizes, all ages, all boys, all black, staring her down as if she were from another world, as if they had never seen the likes of her before. One of the older boys circles her bike, asks where she came from, his tone suggesting that she’d clearly gone out of bounds. “Where you live?” he asks, meaning where do you belong.

            Gloria tries to think quickly; she has no intention of telling these boys where she lives, but before she can make something up one of the smaller ones pipes up:  “I know where she lives. You live in that white house down the hill, right?”

            She remembers a white house just past the fire hall, a two-story colonial. “Yeah,” she says, her heart beating fast. “That’s the one.”

            “I knew it,” the boy says, his head shaved in a geometric design. “I seen you there.”

            They’re all circling her bike now; she tries to count them, ten, twelve, fifteen.

             “Where was you going?” Another boy asks, his hair in a wild afro.

            “Yeah, where was you going?” another boy asks. Some of the boys have stopped in front of her now, blocking her way.

            Not long after she and Matt moved here, there was an incident. Two white guys in their twenties, brothers, pulled up alongside a Lincoln in their pick-up truck; one of the guys shot and killed the driver, an elderly black lady, with a sawed off shut gun. There were vigils held in local churches, editorials in the local newspaper—

            “I’m going home,” she says.

            “You like living there?” geo-head asks.

            “Yeah,” she  says. “It’s nice.”

            “What you got in there?”

            “You got a flat screen?”

            “You got Nintendo?”

            “You got PlayStation?”

            “You got Xbox?”

            They start circling her again in a faster, more frenzied pace. She thinks of squeezing her bike horn and then realizes the absurdity of this, knowing how defenseless she truly is—no phone, no pepper spray. In Arizona she carried Mace on her key chain for walking around the campus at night. But, here, in this small town, in the middle of the day—

            A medium-sized dog comes trotting up, scrawny-looking, hungry; it starts barking when it sees her. “That’s Izzy,” one of the younger boys says, the circle slowing down a bit.

            “Hey Izzy,” Gloria says, putting out her hand, trying to part the churning sea.

            Izzy backs up, growling.

            “Who does he belong to?” she asks.

            “All of us,” geo-head says.

            Gloria wonders if all these boys are related, brothers, cousins—this whole neighborhood one big family that she’s imposed upon. They stop circling, waiting to see what Izzy will do. Gloria gets off her bike, stoops down, extending her hand closer to Izzy, looking into his dark, soulful eyes; he inches towards her slowly, his tail wagging, no longer growling. “Good dog,” she says gently, patting his head. She’s always had a way with animals. And children. She looks back up at the boys. They’re just kids.  

            “I know a song,” she says.

            “What song you know?”

            She keeps petting Izzy, his coat mangled by fleas. Before she and Matt moved to Arizona they traveled around the country in a van, playing folk music at fairs, festivals, coffee houses. “Every time I go to town,” she sings now.“The boys keep kickin’ my dog around. Makes no difference if he’s a hound, they gotta quit kickin’ my dog around. Once Me an’ Lem Briggs an’ ol’ Del Brown, took us a little walk to town. My ol’ Jim Dog, an ornery ol’ cuss, well he just naturally followed us. As we went by the ol’ Johnson store, a passel of yaps come out the door, yelling and a scheming and a throwin’ rocks, they run my Jim Dog under a box. . .

            The boys are clapping along now, some laughing. Gloria stands up, keeps singing, loud with spirit, as if singing for her life. They tied a can to old Jim’s tail, an’ run him a-past the county jail; that just naturally made us swore, Lem, he cussed an’ Bill he swore. Me an’ Lem Briggs an’ old Del Brown lost no time a’gittin’ down; we wiped them fellers on the ground for kickin’ my ol’ Jim dog around. Well, Jim seen his duty there and then and he lit into them gentlemen. Sure messed up that court house square with the rags and the meat and the hind and the hair. Well, everytime I go to town, the boys keep kickin’ my dog around.  Makes no difference if he’s a hound, they gotta quit kickin’ my dog around. . .

            She gets back on her bike, and they let her ride, the boys forming an arc around her now, as if to protect. “Where you learn that song?” geo asks.

            “It’s been around a long time,” Gloria says. “People keep it going.”

            “Ain’t nobody gonna kick our dog ‘round,” geo says.

            “Ain’t nobody gonna keep us down,” afro says.

Lisa Lynn Biggar received her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College and is completing a short story cycle set on the eastern shore of Maryland. Her fiction has been widely published, including in The Minnesota Review, The Delmarva Review and Superstition Review. She’s the fiction editor for Little Patuxent Review and co-owns and operates a cut flower farm on the eastern shore of Maryland with her husband and three cats.