Color Words

In front of Kelly, sat a cardboard box that once housed an old Kenmore microwave, filled with pistols, revolvers, handguns of all sorts. Her job was to take the guns from the owners, write their last name on a hunter-orange tag, then rubber band it to the trigger guard. The system was sloppy, yes, and it was terrifying. Caroline didn’t come from a family of gun folk. She didn’t know how to handle the weapons, the jingoism that came along with ownership. The first time she handled a gun, she was surprised by its heft, how much more there seemed to be beneath the sheen, the scuffed-black finish. It was a cannonball in the palm of her hand, she thought. A rocket. She always excused herself when the races were over, didn’t want to be by the table then, when the owners—usually men—would come back drunk and red-faced, flinging salacious propositions at the girls. “We’re underage, dickweed,” Kelly would say, defiantly pushing their gun toward them across the plastic tabletop. “Get lost.”

Caroline hated it—hated confrontation. She hated, too, when her dad would prank call her here, asking her directions from Florida or England or Hawai‘i. “Please stop calling,” she’d say, hanging up the receiver slowly. But she learned to love the fold-out table where she worked. She knew what was expected—to answer the belled-ringing phone and give directions to the speedway—and it was easy enough work. Plus, she could sit in the hot afternoon sun and get a tan, darkening her skin like she thought the boys liked. Before them, the sprawling parking lot sat pockmarked with the glare of sedans and pick-up trucks and older-model SUVs. The table was positioned in the center of a wide-paved path that narrowed as it entered into the speedway. When it was quiet, especially after the race had begun, especially when Kelly would sneak off, Caroline would often scooch her chair out from under the tent, roll up her shorts, put her hair up, sit back. All those cars and yet she felt like she was the only person alive.