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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book “Reaching for the Stars” Down in the Dirt, v201 (11/22) Order the paperback book:

Order this writing that appears in the one-of-a-kind anthology The Paths Less Traveled the Down in the Dirt September-December 2022 issues collection book		get the 422 page September-December 2022 Down in the Dirt 6" x 9" ISBN# perfect-bound paperback book:

Canned Ass

Anna Cates

    The agony of new boots, muddy already! Candace ascended the ditch to the country highway, her backpack slumped across one shoulder. She’d planned to attend school that day, had been making her way to the bus stop, but on second thought opted to skip, darting into the wooded field. A click of boys on the bus had begun pronouncing her name “Canned Ass,” and she wasn’t in the mood to take it that Friday morning.
    Her parents were out of town on business related to her father’s newly acquired inheritance. They’d left Candace alone for the week, after a big lecture about maturity and responsibility. She was ready to play the game and welcomed the privacy. She didn’t care for country bumpkin Kentucky and missed Pittsburgh. After one week at the new high school, she’d come home crying and yelling at her parents, stomping up to her bedroom, with its pat, lace curtains and Pepto Bismol pink rug, thick enough to drown in. “Leave it alone, Charles,” she’d heard her stepmother say through the air duct. “She’s just going through a stage. She’ll grow out of it.” How could she tell her parents, especially her father, that she was known all over school as “Canned Ass”? He’d probably laugh at her, just like the lesbian P.E. teacher. Candace’s only new friend was Trudy, who’d already turned eighteen and dropped out of high school to live with her older biker boyfriend eight miles away in a log cabin up on the mountain. She and Candace had met at Ma and Pa’s country store as Candace was purchasing beer and cigarettes with a fake I.D.
    Candace scanned the forested hills around the meandering highway. Suddenly, the eight mile trek to Trudy’s seemed a tiresome distance, the cumbersome bag of textbooks weighing down her shoulder. Yet she began down the lonely highway, resolute.
    That late October morning, mist hovered above the changing foliage. Candace could tell where the sun should have been by an unusually bright cloud, slowly rising. She watched the sky, attempting to foretell is sun or rain would be her portion. By the look of the heavens, rain seemed the likely portent.
    The road had been dead all morning until the whorl of an approaching vehicle sounded from behind. Candace turned. The white SUV looked familiar, though she couldn’t remember where she’d seen it before. She moved to the edge of the road as the vehicle pulled up beside her.
    “Candace?” said a familiar voice.
    She peered into the passenger’s window the man was rolling down. “Mr. Bellview?” she asked, surprised to behold her band teacher.
    “I thought I recognized that school bag. What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?” He gazed at her inquisitively.
    “Just walking.” Candace shrugged, looking away, feeling awkward to be so obviously not at home in bed with a thermometer stuffed beneath her tongue.
    “You weren’t in school yesterday. You been sick?”
    “I’m fine. I mean, I was sick. I’m just ... ... ...”
    “Need a lift?”
    “I’m not going to school.”
    “Great, neither am I,” he said with a good-natured grin. “I took a personal. I needed a three-day weekend. Hop in.” Leaning over, he clicked open the door.
    Candace hesitated then stepped inside the vehicle, smelling of leather seat covers. She hoisted the bag across her lap. Soon they were gliding down the road, the evergreen air freshener wagging from the rearview mirror.
    Mr. Bellview, fortyish, had pink skin and platinum blond hair, cut conservatively. Pale brows hung over mercurial hazel eyes, producing a bleached effect. He snapped his bubble gum in a prim mouth, dispassionate yet friendly. From the first day of band class, Candace had noticed his peculiar accent. Bostonian, or maybe Canadian, she’d mused. Mr. Bellview played a silver trumpet, the piano, and the harp. He loved the blues and sang old Elvis songs as if he were some rock star, explaining that he was pining for his wife, finishing a university degree out of state. “I call her Cupcake,” he’d shared, his face tinting even pinker. “She’s finishing a master’s in piano so we can play beautiful music together.” Candace had laughed. Mr. Bellview, despite his teacherly goofiness, seemed a decent guy.
    “Just drop me off at Ma and Pa’s, Mr. Bellview. I’ll walk the rest of the way from there.”
    “Just call me Stan. Now tell me again; why weren’t you in school yesterday, or today for that matter?” Practiced, he kept his eyes ahead, both hands on the steering wheel.
    Candace shifted in her seat, scraping her foot against grit, Walmart receipts, and gum wrappers. “I just hate it.” She gazed out the window with melancholy, feeling wilted as a weed, waning with winter’s advent.
    “I see,” he said, unsurprised. “You want to talk about it?” He smoothed the buttons of his starched, white blazer.
    “I don’t have any friends at school.” Candace sulked against the window, watching the whirl of trees and grasses.
    “Rumor has it you’re a little shy.”
    “The boys call me Canned Ass.”
    Mr. Bellview’s head tilted back with laughter. “I’d forgotten all about that!”
    “It’s not funny!”
    “Sorry.” He cupped his mouth with one hand, his face like a beet. “Seriously, I know what you’re going through. I’m new here in ‘Hickville’ myself, remember? And I’m not getting along well with all the faculty. I’m one of the few teachers with a master’s, so I get paid a little more. Some people don’t like that.” He punched the steering wheel. “They’re jealous! Damn it! Excuse me. I shouldn’t use that kind of language. Ma and Pa’s you said?”
    “You just passed it!” Candace looked back as the country store disappeared from view. “Maybe you could take me all the way to my friend Trudy’s. She lives just past the dump.” She hated to inconvenience him, but he seemed like a good neighbor who’d go the extra mile. Besides, he should’ve been paying attention and not driven past the store.
    “Wherever. But we need to discuss your skipping school. What about your future?”
    “I’ve only skipped a few days. Look; don’t turn me in. Don’t tell anyone you found me on the road today and picked me up. You won’t, will you?” She peered over, noting a streak of golden white stubble his razor had missed.
    Momentarily, Mr. Bellview lifted both hands like a man under arrest. “Not a soul!”
    “Good, because we’re both in the same boat together. You’re skipping too.”
    “Cohorts in crime!” Mr. Bellview laughed, adjusting the rearview mirror. “No, seriously, you shouldn’t let those jerk offs bother you. You know, I overheard Brent Hall telling some of the other football players that he thinks you’re really cute. I think he likes girls with all one hair color.”
    Candace laughed, running her fingers through her dark brown layers. “Last year I dyed my bangs pink. This year I needed a change.”
    “Candace, your parents would be upset if they found out you’ve been hitching rides. Terrible things could happen to you around here with all the bootleggers and psychos.
    “And band teachers!” Candace laughed, adjusting the strings of the stylish tear at the knee of her jeans. “Actually, I’d never hitch a ride with a stranger.”
    He nodded. “That’s good to know.”
    From the corner of her eye, she watched him drive. The sun shone through the glass onto his face; he looked calm and competent.
    “You know, Candace. I kind of agree with Brent.”
    “What do you mean? You don’t like rainbow hair?”
    “No, I mean you’re kind of cute. I noticed the first time I saw you, at the assembly. You were sitting on the front row. Your eyes were on Mr. Small, but you weren’t looking at him. You were seeing beyond him, beyond everything. You seemed so dark, so mysterious.”
    Candace rolled with laughter. “Mr. Bellview, really!” She interpreted his words as an attempt to cheer her. “You’re just trying to bolster my fragile ego so I won’t become the next suicide statistic.” She pursed her lips.
    “That so?” He smiled, steering onward into oblivion beneath the faded leaves, veering for a moment to avoid a dead raccoon, pink intestines trailing outward.
    “It’s okay, Mr. Stan. I know what you’re up to. I promise I won’t lose the self esteem challenge and kill myself, and, starting next Monday, I’ll return to school.”
    “Smashing! I hoped you’d come around.” He pointed into the closing distance. “There’s a road up ahead, a short cut.”
    “Short cut?” Candace was surprised that he’d know his way around the county so well, so soon, but she didn’t question him.
    After a few more winds in the highway, Mr. Bellview slowed down beside a dirt road and turned the SUV right. The road was more like a barely worn trail through the forest that crept along the contours of a mountain. They clambered up the climb, the sun shifting down through the leaves, creating a patchwork of light and shadow on the pathway and hood.
    They ascended the mountain further, the trees growing denser as nature’s solitude enveloped them. They bounced over rocks and uneven ground, climbing higher. She felt a sense of déjà vu. It seemed forever fate had waited to drop her into that very moment. It left a taste, bitter and primeval, in her mouth.
    They rose even higher like pilgrims at Babel. The path was disappearing and the ride getting bumpier. Weeds scuffed the floor of the vehicle as they moved higher still, more laboriously, until they could go no further. Mr. Bellview stopped the car and turned off the engine, a white birch choking off the remains of the path. Beyond the birch, an abandoned house loomed, blackbirds brooding along a broken gutter.
    “Mr. Bellview, this isn’t a short cut! This is a dead end!” Candace turned to him in alarm.
    A tunnel of sunshine fell through a break in the leaves and buried Mr. Bellview in light. His pale hair sparkled into a thousand variations of gold, touched with silver at the temples. He looked angelic, more heavenly than God himself and all the hosts of glory. He blinked at the glow engulfing him. His teeth, perfectly straight and white, spread into a grin.
    “I know. I brought you here on purpose.”
    Candace gasp. In an instant, his tone of voice and his whole demeanor had changed to sleazy. He wasn’t the professional person he pretended to be. A thunderbolt of dread tore through her.
    “I just bought this fixer-upper.” He pointed at the derelict abode. “I plan to renovate it.” He reached down and pushed a lever. The passenger’s door locked shut.
    Candace tried the handle in vain. “So what? I don’t understand. Why have you brought me here?”
    Mr. Bellview looked down if he felt guilty. Yet the grin never left this face. “When I got up this morning, I never imagined what I’d be doing today. It’s been a while, my wife and I being separated. But now that the opportunity avails me, I just can’t resist!” He laughed.
    “What?” Candace, frozen with horror, gazed at the old house with its dark, haunted windows, broken like a smashed up face.
    “You thought I was such a nice guy. I’m sorry I deceived you.”
    “Mr. Bellview, how could you?”
    “No, Candace.” He clutched her arm. “Just call me Stan!”

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