by Brian Hart
And in the middle of DEK8D falling apart, because everything was so awesome already, Roy had gotten blackout drunk and center-punched his stepdad’s Beemer into a palm tree. After the hospital and the police were done with him, he’d gotten a firm get-out-of-the-nest shove from Stepdad Steve and his mom and had officially quit high school with his senior year half finished and bailed on California altogether—left town on a 2:00 a.m. Greyhound with a backpack full of clothes and his skateboard. On the road, freeway rumble, bus murmur, he’d chewed a vike and chased it down with a shoplifted beer. He’d felt good leaving home, ready for whatever. Just don’t overthink it.
From the Portland bus station downtown he’d called up a DEK8D guy, Pablo, who had moved to the Northwest a few years back. Pablo was having a party at his house while his mom was out of town. Roy had jotted the directions on the inside of his wrist with a black Bic and skated from the bus depot over the Broadway Bridge in a misting rain. He stopped in the middle of the bridge to scope the muddy river and the murky lights of the city. He wasn’t in California anymore. This was something else entirely.
Over the next few weeks, skating with Pablo and his pals, Roy had fallen hard for Portland, skater heaven, his people, his town. He’d settled right in, and with his newly minted fake ID, he got a cash nightly job as a barback, and moved into a ramp house in Southeast with Pablo’s cousin, Esky. He’d bought a mattress for twelve dollars at the pawnshop on the corner and skated it home and Esky had helped him haul it upstairs to his room. He could see Mount Tabor from his cracked single-pane window. The six-foot ramp in the backyard was sheltered by a metal roof so they could skate even when it was raining.
Bastille Day—he didn’t know shit about that, something about storming a prison—and it was a party with a few bands and everybody was skating and swilling and later, when he met Karen Oronski, he knew that he was at the right place at the right time doing the right thing. He didn’t feel lucky. He felt the lead-heavy hands of fate guiding him forward.
When he looked back, the van was gone, swallowed by storm and topography. Carl, same as Roy, had rolled off the line in 1980. He was an ex–California Parks Department vehicle. Roy and Karen had altered the stencil on the side to say Carl by scraping off the twenty extra letters and the legs from the K. It still had the orange gumdrop light on the roof and the ghosts of door badges, fleet numbers on the back. You cross the country in the van you can afford, not the van you would prefer.
“We’re fine, you know,” Karen said. “Now it’s memorable, it might even be a little romantic.”
Roy couldn’t help but smile. “I didn’t break the van,” he said. “The van broke.”
“I wasn’t saying that you broke the van.” She touched Roy’s arm and he thought she might hold his hand and was glad when she did. “Babe,” she said, “these things happen. They seem to happen to us all the time, but they happen to other people too.”
“You paid out the ass for the brakes. And the fuckin’ snow tires? We should’ve waited for summer.”
“It’s not the brakes or the tires that let us down,” Karen said. “We weren’t waiting. We’re done waiting, remember?”
“We should’ve stuck to the main road, is what we should’ve done.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” She smiled at him. “We’ve talked about this. We’ve always been waiting for the next show to go to or the next party or meal to eat or the next trip to take, but now we’re really doing something. Even with Carl calling it quits, I feel like we’re actually starting now.”
“Starting what?”
“Our lives.”
His stomach tightened at her dopey optimism. “What’re you talking about? We weren’t waiting. That’s how people live. That’s how everybody lives. If they’re lucky. If they aren’t, if they’re truly fucked, they live in the moment. Child soldiers and refugees, they live in the moment. Them and people with cancer. Sick people. Victims. I’m not a victim. Not even as fucked as we are right now, I’m not.”
“Be that as it may,” she said, trying to calm him. “All I’m saying is now we have a purpose.”
He moaned at the pain she was causing him.
“Don’t act like it hurts you to hear me talk,” she said.
“The purpose is that there is no purpose,” Roy said. “The road is empty and the road is long.” He held out his hand and presented the road in front of them.
She was silent for a dozen steps or more. “I feel old,” she said finally. “You make me feel old.”
Roy flicked his cigarette away with the wind. Karen knocked the cherry off of hers and put it in her pocket because she didn’t litter. Her non-littering made him angry. She leaned into Roy’s shoulder and fished his hand out of his warm pocket and held on to it.
“Carl isn’t your fault,” she said eventually. “This is fine. I’m glad we’re here and we’re together. This is our moment.”
“Stop the cheese, please.”
“I think you’re afraid of me when I speak honestly.”
“I’m afraid of drowning in a flood of purpose-driven new-age bullshit, not honesty.”
She took a deep breath and shook her head, showing her disappointment as surely as if she’d said it out loud. “Listen to me, days like this are what give us form.”
Make it stop, he thought. Her earnestness stared back at him as pathetic as a handmade birthday card. He couldn’t handle Metaphysical Karen right now. To change the subject he said: “I don’t know what else I could’ve done, you know, about Carl.” Thinking: wires, plugs, cap and rotor—the alternator that’s as old as I am. The alternator, that’s what got them; there was his final carlike word. Alternator. He wasn’t a complete whamby. He spoke man-talk.
“I’m glad we’re together,” Karen said. “I’m always glad we’re together. Even when you’re being an ass.”
He took his arm back and shoved his frozen hand into his pocket. He could feel a fight or a moment of kindness coming on. The next few seconds would determine how it went, the clock was running.
“Know-how,” Karen said, frankly. “We have no know-how.”
“We’re American made,” Roy replied. “Red, white, and frozen blue.”
She hip checked him and he veered off and almost went into the snowbank. “Look at you,” she said, with a pitiful head shake. “Out here in the elements in your pretty pink hat and no gloves, your little skate shoes. All you need are some sweatpants that say juicy on the ass.”
“Watch yourself,” he said, half-joking. “Cuba’s under nuclear threat.”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “More like, castration unnecessary, nominal testosterone.”
“Celtics upset Nuggets today?”
“Adding a sports reference to insult?” she said.
“That’s life on the gridiron.”
“Or the back nine,” she said, shaking her head. “OK, I counter with: Corporations understand national trade.” A presidential pronouncement, complete with wooden hand gestures. Then she shoved him in the chest hard and ran. He chased her and when he caught her, he lifted her off of her feet and acted like he was going to throw her in the snowbank but he gave her a kiss instead. Right then, he made a pledge to himself—a new way of living—but he could feel it crumbling before he even put her down.
[7]
M>35
CA 96118
They stand in their underwear and watch the lights from their bedroom window. In tactical terms, maybe a flying wedge or vee, or was that only for aircrafts? He’s been trying to read up on the things they’ve been seeing, modern warfare and weaponry, paramilitary action. Mostly it was dudes with pre-ban ARs in trucks, or riding in side-by-side ATVs, dudes on foot with backpacks, running dudes. Running and gunning dudes. Still weird. Still abnormal. Almost a joke but they’re serious.
He turns to her and her swollen belly looks hard and shiny as a melon. He puts his hand on it and she places her hand on his.
“Red Dawn but with peckerwoods,” sh
e says, lifts his hand and kisses it. She pulls on her pants and a sweatshirt. “Who am I kidding? Red Dawn was with peckerwoods. The Swaze.”
“They’ll keep going,” he says. “They’ll respect the property line at least.”
“We don’t know that,” she says.
“No lights,” he says. “Stay goth.”
“I know. Total fucking darkness.”
They’ve stopped going to town because of the roadblocks and the reporters, never mind the protesters. Porch lights were so last year, don’t draw attention. Their nearest remaining neighbor has turned into a Jeffersonian militia honcho and these gun-happy orchestrations—night moves, she calls them—always make a stop at his place. But they’ve developed a plan for this and they’re sticking to it.
He gets dressed and picks up the child from her bed and wraps her in her blanket. If she wakes, he’ll say burrito because she likes to be wrapped up after her bath. It’s their thing, swaddled, bundled in his arms, as he wipes the steam from the mirror. Who is it? Burrito. Who’s my burrito? I am.
When he steps through the back door the woman is there waiting and she takes the child and the man picks up his backpack and slings his new rifle over his shoulder. He hefts the other pack for the woman and she slips under it. She passes the sleeping child back to him. They’re already sweating. They lock the house.
No lights and no moon, but they know the way. Beyond the barn the land rolls into an old drainage. When the highway was built they diverted the drainage into a culvert to keep the water in the ditch beside the road. When there was water. Now it’s a dry wash, an arroyo. One day when the man and the child were walking the gravel path of it they found a hole in the bank like a dog had dug there but exploring it further found a stone house, a root cellar, from the days of the settlers.
The child sleeps on the small bed the man built for her, while he and the woman huddle in the dark on pallets surrounded by winter squash and burlap sacks of potatoes, crates of apples, to wait for morning. He keeps his rifle on his lap and watches the door. He imagines shooting someone. The woman rests her head on his shoulder. He hopes she isn’t thinking of killing but she probably is. When the shooting starts outside, he pulls the blanket up around the child’s chin.
“They’re just target shooting,” he says. “This is all for show, training.”
“How long do you think they’ll keep that up?”
“Not long.”
“I mean, how long will they just be shooting targets?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m trying not to be scared.”
“It’ll be OK. I’ll go and see what’s happening in a little while.”
“Can you feel that?” she says, guiding his hand to her stomach.
The baby moves like a knuckle beneath his palm, a sharp bump, maybe a heel or an elbow. They’re quietly astonished, laughing to each other, and even though the shooting continues outside, it no longer registers, or not as much.
[8]
M<55
CA 94203
The vet is on her porch with her bare feet resting on a blue plastic beer cooler. She’s wearing loose-fitting linen pants and a black sleeveless sweatshirt. She has the hood pulled forward so that it shades her face. Her arms are tan and sinewy as a marathoner’s. As he approaches, she lifts her pants beyond her knees and picks up the bottle of lotion from the ground beside her. The scars on her legs look like something left by burrowing rodents. She squirts the greenish lotion onto her legs and rubs it in.
The man helps the dog out of the trailer and onto the porch.
“You’re cleaner,” the vet says, sliding her hood from her head. “Not clean but cleaner. Less dirty.”
“Went swimming.”
She wipes her hands on her pants and puts her feet on the splintery porch boards and slides her pants down. “Anybody bother you?”
“No. Saw some of those kelpers though. Other side of the river.”
“You kept the dog out of the water?”
“He stayed in the trailer.”
She picks up the bottle of lotion, offers it. “This stuff is amazing. Does wonders for aches and pains. Black market special. It may or may not contain opioids. Want some?”
“I already ate all of your ice cream and drank your whiskey.”
“Suit yourself.” She stands up and touches his arm. “I left something for you inside. And I don’t want you to argue about it. I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t want to.”
“I’m not taking your truck.”
“I’m not offering it.”
He opens the sagging screen door and enters the cool dark inside. A stack of bills thick as a paperback novel on the counter. He returns to the porch.
“I can’t take that,” he says.
“Go buy a car. Drive to your girls. I don’t need that money. I’m strictly barter now. I have everything I need. I have friends that look out for me.”
“I could pay you back.”
“I’m not talking about it anymore.” She slides a hair tie from her wrist and pulls her hair into a ponytail. “Are you staying for dinner?”
“If you want me to.”
She walks by him shaking her head.
Three days later he maneuvers his bike and trailer through the unmanned blockade and heads south, enters the thick clouds of dust stirred up by the traffic on Folsom Boulevard, sidles into the stream of dust-mask walkers and cyclists at the margin of the stalled traffic. Many of the cars are wrapped in what looks to be landscaping cloth with holes cut out for the windshield. Taking the hint, choking on the dust, the man stops and ties a ripped T-shirt around his face and makes sure the fasteners are done up on the dog’s trailer and he’s sealed in tight. He shouldn’t have brought the dog, but the dog wanted to come. So now he’s doing what the dog wants.
He meanders through a burned-out business park and down a small dirt hill into the expansive, former-Walmart parking lot, now an open-air market, an ocean of green and blue tarps, tents, campers, junk cars, and pallet wood shanties, not joyless but desperate still. He is instantly a part of something here, as a wildebeest crossing a flooding river with the herd is part of something and also something else.
It is called the Buzzard, pronounced, for some unknown reason, in the French manner, same as bizarre. Before the floods it was the last surviving Walmart in Sacramento. They used to shop here. Not that long ago. After it closed, someone spray-painted a massive purple-headed turkey vulture on the western wall and it was renamed, retooled, reclaimed. The vet said that this was where business was done now, where he might find a legal, titled vehicle for sale.
Through the spud and beet vendors, solar and cycle power charging stations, and HAM operators that charge by the minute, he keeps moving. He stops and observes a rotisserie rack of what looks to be blackened meat thrumming with blue flies inside a gutted Airstream but the placard says it’s only kelp. Nobody has tried to sell him anything, which is strange. Out of everyone, he’s the only one in a suit.
A camo tent with a sign that reads: luggages, lingeries, and leather. Smiley face. The proprietor is a teenager with an afro, naked to the waist with camo joggers and logging boots, tattoos of automatic pistols on his dusty chest. He sits leisurely among a jumbled stack of haggard roller bags.
“Where can I get a car?” the man inquires.
“Inside.” The boy points at the cage doors at the front of the former superstore.
When he looks back the boy is standing in the lane watching him.
One of the three guards at the door comes out of his hockey-glass-and-hog-wire cage and circles the man’s rig and gives him a hateful up and down.
“Doesn’t look like you got much to offer, brother,” the guard says. “But if I let you in, business is gonna be done. Hear me? You might not like what’s on the bill if you don’t come up with—let’s call it currency—of some sort.”
“Tell him to fuck off, Jeremy,” one of the other guards calls from his cage. “Give it to the Lord.�
��
The man reaches in his pocket and fans a few large bills.
“He’s showing three or four hun, looks like he has more,” Jeremy says.
“Well, fuckin’ let ’im in then, but pat him down. And no bike and no trailer. He probably has a bomb.”
Jeremy frisks him, feels his pockets, says he’s OK, then opens the trailer flap and is startled by the dog.
“I’m not leaving my dog out here,” the man says.
“You heard him,” Jeremy says. “Just you.” To his associates, “He has a dog. All fucked up. Lampshade.” He holds his hands up to illustrate.
The man grabs his handlebars and turns to leave.
“Let him in,” the one doing the talking in the guardhouse yells.
“Want me to search the trailer and the bike then?” Jeremy says.
“Don’t bother.” The talker peeks his head out so he doesn’t have to yell—high and tight with product, mirrored shades, handlebar mustache. “Never in the history of suicide bombers has anyone been willing to blow up their dog too.”
Jeremy opens the gate and motions him inside. “You aren’t gonna blow us up, are you?” he says.
The man doesn’t bother to answer.
The store is dark and cavernous and it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust and see that the aisles have been removed and the whole structure is being used as a parking garage, mostly for off-road and military-style vehicles. They walk to where the women’s section used to be, and another guard calls him over and leads him down a wide hallway. The bike trailer squeaks noisily in the quiet. The heavily armed guard has a long beard and a ponytail and stands not much over five feet tall. They don’t speak. Lights come on as they walk and turn off again as they pass.