Inhabited

by Charlie Quimby

  They stepped outside to a meadowlark’s trill. Chee-chee-chittalo Chittalo-chow. And an answer: Chee-chee-chittalitta-chee. All yesterday’s dust was scrubbed from the air. The sage burst forth with the turpentine aroma of a painter’s studio. Ruts in the road coddled precious water. They picked their way around mudslicks that already had started to dry and climbed a hogback that split into fingers pointed toward the far mesas. The view seemed featureless, worn shapes and muted colors, the same dull landscape she’d driven through the day before. Brian reached for her and found the tips of her fingers.

  “We caused a man’s death,” he said quietly. “I did. You did. He did. However you slice it, however you choose to remember it, we were part of his end. The more time passes, you’d think it would be easier to erase, but I feel worse. I’m not talking about guilt, exactly—more a gathering awareness of something too complicated to tackle all at once. You may drill away at what a life means, but the fluency comes with time, the way a first language seeps in. You hear before you speak. You see before you read. Keep at it and you someday arrive at wisdom.

  “We killed a man. I stopped him in his tracks and then his time ended. Call it manslaughter or reckless endangerment if you don’t want to say murder. A man younger than me never got a chance to change, to repent, to face punishment, whatever was waiting for him. You say he was a monster. Okay, that night was the only time I saw him, but I spend a year with a new bunch of faces in my classroom and can still be wrong about them. When they leave at the end of the year, I think I can tell who’ll be a star, who’ll be trouble, who’ll muddle through, who’ll die drinking on the rocks. But I’m wrong sometimes. Somebody else gets through to the kid I didn’t. Something I never saw coming deflects a girl from a bad path to a better one. It reminds me how long a life can be and how many chances it contains.

  “So—every sunrise I think, here’s one more day where we’re all heading out for a new shot at life. We deserve a chance to make something better of it. Yeah, maybe Neulan would have done something bad with that chance. But I’m not God. I teach third and fourth graders. I’m supposed to hope. It’s the only way I can do my job.”

  Poor Brian. Poor, poor Brian. By now he should have completed his atonement.

  He clasped her hand in both of his. “My advice, Meg: if you were able to forget everything before the eye showed up, go back to forgetting. And if you can’t, the source of this random object is not the problem you need to solve.”

  For all his great sensitivity and urging her toward her better self, Brian had never been able to see things from her side. She had tried and failed more than once and finally she had a decent life and a secure future. She was on the inside now, with a town counting on her to make a difference. Unaccepted and wasting his talents, he had nothing left to give up in his end-of-a-dirt-road life. He didn’t appreciate what she still had to risk. He was the one who needed the advice.

  “You should just follow Alex to grad school next year. Move on to something different. You deserve it.”

  “And you don’t?”

  It was not quite an embrace. He might have been a tree holding her aloft in his boughs. Suspended, she allowed herself to sway. The meadowlarks were calling out in the brush, locating each other, saying whatever birds say when there is no danger in view. Over his shoulder, the panorama reduced to earth and sky, like a great pair of hands cupping something small and precious. If Brian meant her to feel comforted, it was working, even though Meg knew she was being enveloped in a goodbye.

  She waved her car’s remote key fob under his nose. “I almost beeped you last night.”

  “Whoa, not another missed booty call.”

  He snatched it playfully and began pressing the buttons like a mad concertina player. The locks thunked and parking lights flashed. A kitchen timer chime came from the liftgate. The panic alarm flushed three quail.

  “Now you see why I didn’t.”

  “Definitely a mixed message,” he said. “This button doesn’t do anything.” A circular arrow with the point coming back almost to the tail.

  “Oh, that’s the remote start. You have to hit the lock first and then hold it down.”

  “Seriously?” Brian weighed the device in his palm as if considering how far he could hurl it. “Since when are you too delicate to get in a cold car?”

  She had never used it. The remote came with the car. She was tired of defending herself to him. Not everything in life came down to the choices he would make.

  She drove all the way to the Lukachukai turnoff where the first stop sign suggested a different route home. She checked the GPS. The way east toward Shiprock looked paved all the way but the earth view images rendered the road in disconcerting fragments. Instead, she bore north, back the way she’d come, until the highway intersected with the road to Four Corners. She took it, then angled north at Teec Nos Pos, where two bleak trading posts stood apart from each other, as if to avoid catching what had killed the neighboring Chevron.

  Long, dull vistas. Barely enough traffic for her to mind the stripes on the road. Ahead, a branch in her lane. A FedEx truck bearing from the other direction. Imperfect timing. The shoulder appeared dodgy. Oh, well, it’s an SUV. Run over the stick. Not a stick! A thick bullsnake basking on the asphalt. Too late. Her mirror showed the snake flinging itself impossibly upright, tall as a man, an essing jump rope of outrage. When its strikes at the heavens lost height, it still flailed its body upward in quavering sideways loops. The writhing did not end until she returned her eyes to the road ahead.

  As she drove, the image looped. Long ago tribes had followed this deer trail. White men made it a road. The state paved it. The sun warmed the earth and the reptile found the radiant comfort of the asphalt. A truck traveled this route in response to random orders. Meg chose a different way home. Her father, the insurance man, had taught her the danger of a sudden swerve. On this day these accidental influences produced something unexpected: a serpent discovers it can stand erect. What a revelation! Perhaps it looks across the desert and remembers the Garden.

  As a girl, she had memorized the Golden Rule before she grasped its meaning. The words first sounded in her child’s brain as a nonsense string of syllables, like the ella-meno-pee middle of the alphabet: Undo unto others as you would have them undo unto you. Eventually she untangled the language and understood that a good-for-good exchange reversed the compounded wrongs of the Old Testament tooth-for-tooth. But the Golden Rule failed to account for neighbors who were incapable of good or for men who believed everything should come unto them. Evil done to others demanded undoing.

  We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.

  —The Promises, The Big Book

  Glen Leary’s first painting job turned out all right. Vaughn fronted the money to get Leary’s truck out of impoundment with the idea he’d continue to work off the loan. Back to living in his truck, Leary became more difficult to pin down. He picked up some work with a trailer flipper and claimed he was too busy to take on Vaughn’s odd jobs. To Vaughn, the promises, excuses and evasions sounded familiar, and so did Leary’s failure to keep up on his IOU. Bad times or good times, a drinking man could always find the reason he wanted to get high or slide downhill.

  Leary had complained to Vaughn about a summons for a bullshit public urination charge. The municipal court docket was online now, much easier to look up court dates than in the old days. Vaughn had already kissed the money goodbye. He wanted to set eyes on the kids. He figured Leary would drag them to court, looking for sympathy. It had certainly worked on him.

  Vaughn asked his friend Leonard to provide backup with his Old Testament scowl if Leary tried to weasel away. Leonard had eased out of ranching and now volunteered with a therapeutic riding program. Retarded, blind kids, crippled. Soldiers back with wounds and PTSD. The cop hurt in the summer was there now.

  “Never loan money to a man who tried to pitchfork you,” said Leonard.

  “You’ve neve
r loaned money to anyone.”

  “Guess I have it pretty much covered then.”

  At first glance Vaughn thought the Farmer’s Market had moved to City Hall and filled all the parking spaces with tents, folding tables and banners. Then he noticed the lawn chairs and a portable basketball hoop. Rugs, blankets, wooden pallets and bedrolls covered the pavement. Each metered slot occupied and not one contained a car. People waved signs: No Home is No Crime, Parks for All People and Homeless–not Worthless! A cop tweeted and windmilled his arm to urge traffic past the barricaded spectacle. Car horns responded in short taps and long blares.

  A woman pushed a baby stroller loaded with oranges, bagels and bottles of water. A man with a bloodhound face slashed at a dead-strung guitar, singing “This Land is Your Land” in a nasal imitation of Bob Dylan imitating Woody Guthrie. A fellow in a knit hat and vegetable-patch-colored scarf sat under a potted tree. He wore a Che Guevara t-shirt under a tweed sport coat. Vaughn scanned the crowd in case Leary was somewhere in the confusion.

  Che stepped up onto two milk crates pulled from the foliage. He squeezed two siren whoops from a battery-powered megaphone, then looked to make sure the camera from Channel Eleven was recording.

  “Welcome to our new people’s park!” His amplified voice, flat and metallic, slapped the music store wall across the street. He put down the bullhorn and shouted in a hoarse voice, “Now, you might think this is a street...” he crooked his neck back and forth in an exaggerated manner “…but it looks like a park to me. How so? Because it’s being taken over by homeless people!”

  His expression of mock horror brought forth laughter, applause and whistles. “That’s right, the City thinks you’re taking over this whole valley! Taking over the parks, the downtown and the freeway exits. Hanging around ATMs, traffic lights and sidewalk cafes. Now here you are, stealing the good parking spaces—and most of us don’t even have cars!”

  He waited for the laugh. “Pavement makes a crappy park, so why are we here? Because for all the attention we get from the cops and City Council, we’re invisible when it comes to housing. Because for all the laws they want us to follow, the City won’t follow its own Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness. Instead, they send the police to chase you out of the shelter you have. They’ve made The Point and Las Colonias uninhabitable. Fifty camps gone, at least, without adding one new unit of affordable housing or one new shelter bed. So today we’re claiming this street to replace the ground that’s been lost. We’re not squatting. We’re paying for these spaces—plugging the meters at ten cents an hour—and there’s no law to say we can’t sit here peacefully. So…” He signalled two men standing in a brick planter behind him. “We’re calling this encampment Winslowville because the street is what passes for shelter in Mayor Eve Winslow’s city.”

  The men unfurled a bed sheet declaring Winslowville in rainbow letters. A cheer went up and another man with the shoulders of a bouncer joined Che on the milk crates. His face was half forehead. The other half reminded Vaughn of his days hauling around a fifty-pound headache.

  “We gotta get inside,” he said.

  At the court entrance, they emptied their pockets, raised their arms for the wand and regrouped in the back row of seats. Vaughn didn’t recognize anyone but the place was as familiar as the offenses about to unfold: shoplifting, terroristic threats, driving under the influence and public urination. It was probably the old straight-arrow Len’s first time in a courtroom.

  He and Leonard had coincided at passing intervals, none that seemed momentous at the time. Two boys: one orphaned, the other unparented. Later, young men at odds: one looking to land where the other was barely hanging on. A litany of minor grievance ensued: selfishness earned an eviction, an offering became trouble, a condolence went unnoticed and a small favor turned into a lecture. Leonard aired his thoughts with the frequency and duration of a lunar eclipse, but Vaughn believed his friend finally accepted how deeply they were twinned. Certain kinds of hurt were unreachable, no matter how much talk or drink you sent stumbling after it.

  They sat together in silence on the hard seats. Leary didn’t show.

  The speeches outside were over. The occupiers lounged in their spaces. At the end of the block, a meter monitor pulled up in his three-wheeler and opened the back.

  “You’ll never see that money,” Leonard said.

  “I know it,” said Vaughn.

  “But that ain’t all you were here about.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Them kids’re gone,” Leonard said. “Maybe it’ll work out for ’em. Look at us.”

  So says a failed cowboy who walks in circles with horses that have retards on their backs to a disowned drunk who’d managed to get semi-lucky. They were not what you’d call a scientific sample.

  The meter monitor placed red hoods over the meters despite the arm-waving appeal of Che and the blockheaded bouncer man.

  “Things’re different now. Kids are, too,” said Vaughn, although he hardly had any experience in that regard. His siblings were strangers, long scattered under different last names: Frank, Gerald, Vernon, Connie and the stillborn Lucinda.

  Leonard had had a foster boy at the ranch for a while, which made him an authority in comparison. He said, “It’s hard to sort out a mess you didn’t make. You tend to spruce up the easy parts. With kids you can’t just jump in and out.”

  Hanging with the program had not been Vaughn’s strong suit, and some things could be neglected only for so long until they became too stuck to fix. His back might’ve straightened out if he’d done his rehab like he was supposed to. Now he’d been crooked longer than he’d been straight.

  “I pity that lady cop, trapped on a saddle and listening to you point out her shortcomings,” Vaughn said.

  “Come out and watch sometime. It might change your opinion of my recuperative influence.”

  “So she’s coming around?”

  “Working on it. Amy’s invited to throw the first pitch at a Rockies game next spring. She’d like to make the leather pop.”

  “People’ll be happy just to see her out there.”

  “I guess throwing a ball’s a balance deal. Right now she’s still trying not to fall on her face.”

  “Like the rest of us,” Vaughn said.

  What’s the least-used space in your house? For many, it’s the guest room.

  —“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style

  Soon after she bought her house, Meg learned the limits of her tolerance for yard work. Gravel, cactus, clumps of native grasses and drought-resistant shrubs replaced the thirsty lawn, labor-intensive annuals and fussy beds of perennials. The only remaining evidence of the prior Eden was a rank of unruly snowberry and a grape arbor that framed her backyard view.

  From the kitchen the Book Cliffs were just now surrendering their dusty rose to a bluing that foreshadowed nightfall. Her patio chairs had been pushed against the hedge. Perhaps the previous night’s storm front had rolled through here. She glimpsed a figure standing in shadow beyond the jumble, now moving from the murk toward the house. A woman, clutching a lumpy white plastic bag between fists ready to fend off attack, her head bowed, cropped hair plastered as if she’d just emerged from underwater. Meg checked the lock on the sliding door and flicked on the outside spotlight. A sunburned face squinted toward the window.

  Pandora!

  Pandora shuffled forward with the weary step of someone queuing in a long, slow line. Her skin looked rubbed raw, her greenish blouse and grey shorts smudged and crumpled like well-traveled dollar bills.

  “All the way I practiced what I’d say to you,” Pandora said, her voice husky. “Now all I can think of is, may I have some water, please?”

  “Of course.” Meg looked for the boyfriend—what was his name? Maybe Pandora never left for North Dakota. No explanation for her appearance seemed promising.

  “Are you all right?” Meg said.

  “I’m not sure about the all.”

  Pandora
closed her eyes and threw her head back in the cool kitchen air. She dropped her sack and unslung a small gym bag from her shoulder. In two long gulps she drained the water down to the ice cubes and then held the glass against her forehead.

  How long had she been in the sun without a hat?

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Maybe later.” Pandora extended the glass for a refill. This time she took measured swallows. Satisfied for the moment, she set down the glass. “You were right.”

  A thin, bright pink line where the ring had been. Of course.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Meg said.

  Pandora’s eyes flicked in appreciation. “Nothing was working, almost from the day I last saw you. I left him four days ago, got here yesterday and slept in your yard last night. I’m sorry to dump my problems on you, but do you have any lotion?”

  As she applied the skin cream, Pandora’s story began to ease out of her.

  “Cody failed his drug screen for the first job and we had to chill until he could test with a different company. Williston State said I’d applied too late for fall quarter and the dorms were full. Cody said it was my fault we both had to live in the camper, as if going there in the first place was my idea.”

  Pandora’s face turned from red to white to rose. She put a drop on her fingertip and painted the scarlet rim of one ear.

  “He got hired to drive a truck hauling sewage from the man camps to Dickinson. I didn’t know anybody but him. It was crazy there, like you said it would be. Everything overpriced. An hour and a half just to get through checkout at Walmart. Men walking around day and night with too much money, drinking, fighting, acting stupid. Not all of them—the normal family guys would work their fourteen days and fly home for two weeks—but the town was not normal.”

  She drizzled a wavy line of lotion from wrist to elbow, wincing as she worked it up to her shoulder.

  “I found a housekeeping job just so I’d have something to do. Seventeen dollars an hour—crazy! More like zookeeping, cleaning cages. That’s where I found out the honeywagon drivers worked fourteen-and-fourteen. Cody was coming back at night like he’d been driving every day, but half the time he wasn’t.”