“But it’s not a loss if I’m bringing back something I paid for.”
“Sir, I have to help this next person in line. If you have more questions, I could get a manager…” The customer behind him nudged her purchases forward. The clerk reached for the phone.
Isaac’s second call for a manager today! Why did people call the manager instead of thinking for themselves? Why did he need their permission to leave their packaging?
The greeter edged over to Isaac. “Hi, do you mind if we look in your backpack, sir?”
“I do mind. I didn’t take anything. You watched me go through the check out.”
“Nothing personal.” The attendant smiled. “Have a nice day then and thank you for shopping.”
Isaac slapped the door as he went out. Shelly thrust the package to him. “Why must you make everything so difficult?” she said.
“Because everything is difficult. You just don’t see it. That guy’s job is to welcome people like you and profile people like me. You get the red carpet. I get the stop sign.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Did he ask to check your receipt?”
“No, but so what if he did? It’s nothing.”
“For you it’s nothing.” He removed the computer and slipped it in his backpack, then stomped the cardboard flat. “For you, it’s one speck, a grain of sand. What’s wrong with a little grit? Try rubbing your nose against sandpaper all day.”
Inside the vestibule were receptacles for recycling batteries, toner cartridges, plastic bags and cables. Nothing for cardboard. He thrust the packaging at the greeter.
“Recycling.”
“Ah, we only recycle products and components.” His have-a-nice-dayness seemed about to expire.
Isaac dropped the bundle at the greeter’s feet. “All right, call it trash. You do have trash cans, right?”
He’d expected Shelly to be gone when he came out, but she stood where he’d left her.
“Okay, are you happy now that you’ve antagonized everyone?”
She didn’t understand he’d burn out the brakes if he applied them every time he met an obstacle. Still, he knew he’d been a jerk to her. He told her he was sorry.
She said, “I know where you can rent a place for three-ninety-five.”
“So do I. But I don’t want to be around people who pay three-ninety-five.”
“Are you working?”
“I’m fine. I’ll look for work after I finish my research. Maybe I can get a job mistreating shoplifters. At least I could do it without insulting innocent people. But first I need an ID. Tell Mom I need my birth certificate.”
“Why don’t you tell her?” she said. “What’s wrong with this picture? You don’t have a place to live but you’re paying rent for a storage unit full of crap. You’ve got a copy of Thomas Edison’s proposal to move off the gold standard and you don’t even have a copy of your own birth certificate.”
He was impressed that Shelly remembered about Edison’s currency plan. “Pardon my insufficient planning. I didn’t think to grab my birth certificate before Mom kicked me out of the house.”
“You ran out. You left it in shambles.”
“One room was all.”
“Like our kitchen.”
“I’m sorry. I thought there were transmitters.”
“Isaac, that’s not even what I’m talking about. Of course you need your ID. But you can’t be fighting this imaginary system all the time.”
Shelly was a good person but she didn’t understand the essence of a system was its invisibility. Her life was seamless. When she woke up, her wallet was still in her purse. It never occurred to her that Isaac didn’t need an ID for the reasons she did. He needed it to show the cops.
The police labeled the yellow workman’s cottage the Anarchist House. Everyone else knew it as Zack’s house. Street people found it by word of mouth and the front porch with a couch too broken down even for an anarchist’s living room. The entry was a gantlet of warning and welcome: a long, fist-shaking manifesto signed by the Whitman Collective railed against oligarchs, oppressors and their informants; flowerpots sprouted with cigarette butts; a lending library spilled ’zines and remnants from college reading lists. The papered-over glass in the front door declared:
Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself.
—Walt Whitman
How could people like Zack Nicolai be anarchists? They had too strong an urge to fix things. Isaac had looked up anarchist and discovered it didn’t mean bomb-thrower. It meant they wanted voluntary, self-governed communities. Anarchists were more like Wesley than anything. They didn’t want the world to fall into chaos; they just wanted an end to the GE version of the world.
The front room was set up as an office and lounge area. Its lone occupant was reading a comic book. He lived in a back room and spent his days reading, sniffing for narcs and keeping unauthorized visitors from wandering through the rest of the house. His right eye trailed off to the side while the left sized up Isaac. Yes, the house of anarchy had a bouncer—Steve, like the bowling ball launched into the canyon. Steve had been the town’s most literate electrician until a fall from a ladder put him on disability. Now he read mostly comics and graphic novels because they were easier on his vision.
Isaac usually went to the Day Center, because he felt less comfortable among the wanderpunks, anti-war vets, queer power activists, runaways, buskers, artists, taggers and dopers that hung out at Zack’s house. Walk-ins at both places could read a newspaper, grab a book, find a ride on a bulletin board, learn where to get a meal or score a voucher, pick over free stuff or leave things they didn’t need. The main difference: fewer people at Zack’s house likely to snatch his laptop if he turned his back.
“What’s your password?” Isaac asked.
“It’s yawp420, all lower case, all one word.” Steve watched Isaac type and then raised a thumb when he saw him connect. “A lotta guys can’t spell yawp,” he said.
Isaac submitted his keystrokes to be searched by bots and algorithms and whatever agency monitored the Whitman Collective. His fingers darted like minnows high in a mountain stream. How amazing he could stir the ocean from here.
For hours he wandered a pandemonium of false leads and irrelevancies—taxidermy and doll parts, vintage fishing lures and decoys, crafts and jewelry. A press release about unclaimed glass eyes in the Disney World lost and found had inspired local writers around the country to turn up detached eyes in local airports, buses, police stations, amusement parks, beer halls, rental cars and hotels. Newspaper accounts through the ages named one-eyed loggers, sailors, adventurers, football players and children. He liked the story about Prince Metternich, who had hidden his artificial eye until a portrait painter noticed that the prince’s gaze was unaffected by bright sunlight on that side. Blue-eyed animals were glass-eyed, according to cowboys and dog breeders. He found glass eyes for sale on eBay, demonstration videos on YouTube, references in films, pulp fiction, children’s books and TV shows. He studied how ocular prostheses were made and fitted. He located a national directory of oculists and discovered the process for getting a replacement at a VA hospital. A clinic’s gallery of faces challenged him to identify which eye was artificial.
Steve looked up from his reading. “No porno, right? You seem pretty intense there.”
Isaac told him what he’d found.
“Some people think I have one but my eye’s just lazy—like Ronald Reagan’s. Of course, they covered it up like Roosevelt’s polio.”
Ronald Reagan had a lazy eye? He could start a new research file on his laptop. Lazy Eye Mafia. The thought of moving to this new subject excited and terrified him.
“You got it on you?” Steve asked.
Isaac dug it out. “People assume they’re like marbles. They’re not glass, either.”
“You ever heard that song, ‘Glass Eye’? The band, I forget. They started out in Colorado.”
In ten seconds, Isaac found it. The song barely made sense. The lyrics didn’t even mention a glass eye but some of the words seemed to be about him:
Surrounded by clutter you call a collection
A forest that’s nothing but trees
Searching the earth for some long-lost connection
You won’t find it down on your knees
A one-eyed man is not half-blind
Don’t need tongue to speak his mind
Don’t need hands to feel unkind
Don’t need eyes to cry
Don’t need eyes to cry
“Do you believe in connection or coincidence?” Isaac asked Steve.
“Neither. I believe in we don’t know shit.”
“Exactly. Most of the world operates beyond our awareness. We only get these little glimpses of what’s really going on.”
“Like quantum mechanics.”
“More like, are you a bowler?”
“I used to be—before my accident.”
“What happened to your balls?”
Steve glared at Isaac. A Jack Elam bad cowboy face.
“I mean, I might’ve found one of your bowling balls.”
“Why do you think it’s mine?” Steve said.
“It has Steve engraved on it.”
“Dude, my name’s Scott.”
When your life is in flux, renting may be a better option than buying.
—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style
Sister Rose invited Meg to meet with Wesley Chambers at Grand Valley By-Products. She asked if Meg needed the address. After a moment to recollect the name, she knew immediately where it was.
For Meg and many locals, the glue factory represented more than a metaphor for the end. The local animal rendering plant represented an indelible place. A century ago it had situated next to the old sugar beet mill, where feedlot cattle fattened on the factory waste. After the mill and the stockyards closed, it held on for another seventy-five years, processing animal carcasses and spoiled meat into lard, tallow and other byproducts, the most prominent of which was stench. The miasma loomed over the river, where rafters and tubers had to pass. Parents warned children if they didn’t study, they’d end up working in the glue factory for the rest of their lives. Meg and generations of city high school students, insulated from the blunt realities of farm life, had been sent there by a biology teacher to obtain bacteria samples from the intestines of dead livestock. Whether this constituted science or sadism was a perennial subject of debate.
As a transplant, Wesley Chambers bore none of those memories, and if he knew anything of the abandoned property’s dismal history he likely considered it a plus for his tent city. Meg imagined him waiting there, a horror movie’s optimistic out-of-towner who’d just bought the haunted house. If that were all, Wesley might manage it. But there were political realities surrounding this place, newly intensified.
Scarcely seeming to ask, Sister Rose had managed to move a community on behalf of the poor, aligning Catholics and Mormons, Baptists and atheists, power brokers and anarchists, Democrats and Republicans. Though her selfless spirit and clear sense of justice were rooted in her faith, her authority magnified when she emerged from behind the veil of her church. She projected integrity rather than saintliness, which inspired a like response. The word no vaporized in Sister’s presence.
So Meg was stuck. There was no point resisting Sister Rose’s expectation. Yet there was no way she could imagine Wesley succeeding. Not with Betterment Health in the wings. And certainly not at the edge of Las Colonias Park.
Sister Rose, in a blue business suit and white Reeboks, waited with Wesley outside a barbed-wire-topped cyclone fence. Behind it sat a concrete block warehouse, its blank walls blotted with flesh-colored rectangles overpainted with new graffiti. The front door bowed from periodic break-ins. Weeds sprouted from crumbling pavement and trash trees had taken root in foundation cracks. Closer to the river, storage tanks and a few less substantial structures remained. Most of the parcel had been graded to bare dirt. The warehouse itself appeared solid. The air carried the sweet perfume of flowering Russian olives.
“Wesley really wanted you to see this. I told him we can’t go in without permission, so the tour will be rather brief,” said Sister Rose.
“Sister, nobody’d dare arrest us with you along,” Wesley said.
He produced a map from the County Assessor’s website showing the area surrounding the warehouse and factory lots. In the empty east quarter south of the warehouse, he had penciled neat rows of rectangles.
“This shows what fits. But you need to see the whole thing to get an idea how perfect this place would be.”
Perfect. Wesley had to be the first person since the Utes to see it that way.
The property was isolated on all four sides. Across the road was Sandstrom Trucking, which, as Wesley could tell from the Assessor information, had acquired the land for a bargain price and then idled its depot with the downturn in the natural gas market. A mere fifty yards east of the warehouse, the DNR owned a triangle of woods that ran to the river, which bounded the south edge. An overgrowth of Russian olive trees shielded the western view toward the park a quarter mile away.
“We can start small on this end without buying the other lot. The neighbors are either light industrial or small farms beyond the woods. All anybody will see of the camp is a few patches of color. The one drawback is we’re about two miles from a bus stop, but that’s nothing for someone to walk—at least for us.”
Meg looked from the map back to the barren ground and tried to picture the cheerful tent city Wesley had in mind. It was no less real than Hungerman’s enterprise and far less intrusive. Yet Wesley’s modest vision was the one that seemed unachievable.
He turned his attention to the warehouse. “I’ve been inside there. It’s nasty right now, but the building’s solid. We’ve got men experienced in the trades who could do renovation. Nothing fancy at first—running water and sewer for showers and restrooms, a secure room for storage, an office for admissions and security.” His animation grew. “Later, we could heat the whole building, add a laundry, a coffee room and kitchen, a workshop, a place to kennel animals.”
While Meg couldn’t disclose the conflict with the Betterment proposal, she could at least offer some market realism.
“Even if Sandstrom’s not using the property now, they’ll want it back when the drilling slump ends. And why would they lease it out if the camp brings all this pedestrian traffic around their truck terminal across the street? Best case, suppose Sandstrom agrees to sell. They’ve invested a lot in clean up. It won’t be the bargain it was before. And nobody I know is writing that mortgage, so you’ll have to come up with the cash somehow.”
Wesley pointed north toward the rail yard. “What do they care about being on the river? The City does land swaps, right? There’s plenty of flat land around here to park trucks. Nobody’s done squat with this place except pollute it. Thistletown will get people off the streets, and it’ll be an improvement over what’s here. The City should want to kick in.”
The City had passed on acquiring this land when it was cheap and expanding the park was uncontroversial. Why provoke controversy now by prying it away from a well-connected business owner? Some would accuse Sandstrom of making a killing at public expense and others would object to government intervention in the marketplace. Eve on her best day would be reluctant to carry it forward.
“Those swaps are to expand parkland or keep businesses in town,” she said. “Even in a perfect world, the City isn’t going to hand over land without conditions. You’ll have to abide by a lease and health regulations. Even rent-free, you’d have utilities and trash hauling.”
Wesley waved away her point. “You think people without money don’t know what things cost? I figure it’s sixty thousand a year to operate. That’s fifty occupants paying a little over three dollars a day, less than to stay at the Mission.”
The shelters also se
rved food for their four dollars, but she let it go. “All right, you’ve got the money side covered. What about the politics? Not just with the City; within your community. Self-governance is a beautiful concept, but I deal with homeowners’ associations. The disputes and drama can be brutal.”
Wesley rolled his eyes. “You ever lived in a shelter, lady? Been in jail? How about an army barracks? Girl Scout camp doesn’t count.”
Meg stiffened and drew back half a step. She had dealt with plenty of male condescension, but no man had ever spoken to her with such scorn.
Sister Rose cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. “Meg’s on your side, Wesley,” she said softly.
He snatched his pack from the ground and spun away. “Then she should know I don’t need a lecture on how to live with assholes.”
He stalked toward the park, slamming the fence with a series of hard forearms. Chang-chang-chang. The chain link resounded his frustration.
Sister Rose sighed. “Understand, Wesley’s a warrior. He sees the barriers just fine. He needs someone to tell him he’s not crazy, his objective’s worthwhile, and that if he takes charge of this, he’ll find support.”
“Some support, yes, but he’ll never sell it to the City. The shelter’s already struggling to stay open because it can’t get funding. A tent city’s even more controversial.”
“But there may still be a place for it. A shelter doesn’t work for all.”
Yes, shelters worked for people trying to recover their former life or move on to a new one. And some were born and raised in them, so shelters felt familiar. Working the welfare system was like going into the family business. Wesley’s objection was that shelters were neither a home nor a temporary stop. They were another form of incarceration. But even if society bore some blame for the condition of homelessness, and camping was simply a rejection of conventional life, it was the wrong message to send. To have any chance, Wesley had to sell his vision as a redemption story. He had a higher nature, a free will and a sense of responsibility like everyone else. He was a veteran who’d never accept being treated as other than a full human being. Enough local citizens might get behind this version of Thistletown. Otherwise, they’d only see tents and a bunch of vagrants getting a free ride.
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