Velva Jean Learns to Fly Read Online Free Page A

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    And that was how I found myself walking in the late-summer rain, down a gravel road, just a few miles east of Nashville, somewhere near a place called Watertown, chin up, mountains fading in the distance, wheeling a tire I’d bought with some of the money I’d earned and saved myself so that I could keep on going.
     
    The truck manual didn’t say anything about where the jack and the lug wrench were kept. I went over every inch of that truck until I pushed the seat forward and found them behind it, slid underneath. The jack looked like an enormous black bird. It was heavy and shaped like a strange, flattened S . The lug wrench was a steel lever bent at each end—one going up, the other going down. There was a funny-shaped, six-sided hole the size of a quarter at one of the ends.
    It’s like a puzzle, I told myself. I was good at puzzles. Didn’t I almost beat Johnny Clay at putting together a puzzle once, back when I was eight and he was ten and Mama was still alive? I came so close to beating him that afterward he didn’t speak to me for a week.
    I lay the jack and the lug wrench down on the ground by the tire, and then I dug through my hatbox until I found How to Drive and Man and the Motor Car , the books I learned to drive by. I read through, page after page, until I figured out that the jack needed to be placed under the front axle. I put it just where I thought that was, and just where it needed to be, but it didn’t look right compared to the picture in How to Drive . I got down on my knees and moved it forward an inch and then back an inch and then right back to where I’d had it in the first place. Then I stuck the jack handle into the “rotary mechanism” at the bottom of the jack. All that time the rain came down, down, down.
    Next I studied the tire—the wheels were wire, the yellow paint chipped, the hubcaps scuffed and dented. My poor old truck. It looked like I felt—banged up here and there, scraped and scarred, but still running strong.
    The book said something about removable hubcaps. I pulled, gentle as my mama’s touch, at the hubcap, afraid to break it. When it wouldn’t come off, I sat down and yanked at it with all my might. It flew off and sent me backward into the dirt, which was now turning into mud.
    There were five lug nuts underneath where the hubcap had been. I picked up the lug wrench and fit the hole over one of the nuts. I turned it hard as I could until I felt it give a little. Then a little more, a little more, a little more—until I had all five off.
    The old tire practically fell in on itself then. I pulled it off and threw it aside, and then I rolled the new one over and lifted it into place. One by one, I screwed in the lug nuts, and then I popped the hubcap back on and cranked the jack until the truck was all the way on the ground again.
    I sat back—hands and face muddy, hair wild and wet from the breeze and the rain, fingers aching, arms scratched—admiring my new front tire, which was now, thanks to me, attached to the truck. An automobile drove by and honked its horn. I thought, What a sight I must be. I wished Berletta Snow or Oderay Swan—who Harley called “good Christian women, close in touch with the Lord”—could see me right this minute, sitting in the mud like a wild mountain heathen, just like one of the Lowes, who were always filthy and ridden with mites.
    I stood up then, brushing myself off, and picked up the old tire and dropped it into the bed of the truck with a thud. Then I swung back up behind the wheel and looked at myself in the mirror. There was dirt on my cheeks and a leaf in my hair, which dripped water like I’d just gone swimming in Three Gum River. My face and dress were wet. My lips were their own dull pink color again. I threw the leaf out the window and rubbed at the smudges on my face and patted some of the rain off as best I could. Then I opened my hatbox and pulled out a shiny gold tube, shaped just like a bullet. I