The Runaway

by Jo Barney

  Matt needs to do some grocery shopping.

  “I’m not here,” he calls to Shelly.

  “Gotcha,” she answers. “And congratulations, Dad.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Jeff

  2004-2006

  Two days after the visit from Fred’s wife, Jeff sells his furniture to the guy who will take over the lease on the apartment. With a little money in his pocket, Jeff and his backpack head out to the streets. It has become clear to him that a hustling lifestyle isn’t going anywhere. Without Fred and Danny dragging him down, he is free to look around, see what’s out there. He is only twenty-two, with lots of time ahead of him.

  He sleeps outside that first night, under sweet-smelling Doug fir boughs, combs his hair in the washroom of the park, slides the Northwest Acting School brochures in his pocket, and goes by bus to the school. He’s on his way, he tells himself as he smiles at his reflection in the glass doors of the building.

  The visit is disappointing. The receptionist—a student at the school, he guesses because of her perfect diction—informs him that he’s missed the beginning of the term. She opens a folder and shows him the papers inside. “We have a waiting list of people who have auditioned and interviewed. Most of these won’t be able to attend until next fall.”

  He doesn’t want to give up that easily. He leans over her desk, reaches a hand toward her. “Perhaps you can give me an application and information on the kinds of classes I might expect. And the tuition?” His Grandpa Jack diction matches hers, and she gives him a slight smile as she opens a drawer and finds a folder.

  “Good luck,” she says as he walks away.

  On the sidewalk outside, he searches the sheets of paper for the cost: $3,000 per term. That is that. He needs to earn a lot of money if he is to follow that dream, and hustling will not cover both the tuition and his need to eat and sleep somewhere. He is hungry. His shirt itches from last night’s fir needles. Fuck. He hides his backpack in an alley and goes out to the corner to wait for a slowing car, a meeting of eyes. After a half hour of no action, a thought interrupts his attempt to keep an inviting eyebrow lifted. A wave of nausea moves through him. He recognizes the feeling, the same as he felt when he accused Grandpa Jack of using him, ruining him. And here he is, waiting once again for someone to choose him. No, not him, his body, a body that no longer is an enticing sixteen, even when offered like a dessert on a tray in a skintight designer shirt. He stays on the corner another half hour, being eyed and passed over. Then he decides.

  The next day Jeff goes to the public library and enrolls in an online GED course. After three weeks and $250, the last of his cash, he takes the four tests and passes three of them. A week later, he takes the fourth, mathematics, again, and passes it too. The piece of paper he holds in his hand will be his ticket to a new life.

  During his weeks of creating his future, Jeff has been camping in a park high on a hill overlooking the city. The day after receiving his GED certificate, he heads down to the street to look at the classifieds, find out what looks good, job-wise. He doesn’t find it among the ads for auto mechanics and wastewater plant trainees. Back in the park, trying to figure out where else to go, the computer in the library, perhaps, he almost misses the kid rolled up in a ball under a bush. At first he thinks he is dead, but a jab with his foot brings a “Don’t,” and Jeff sees that the boy is crying, the tears smudging his dirty cheeks like bruises.

  “What’s up, buddy?” he asks, mostly out of curiosity. The kid looks about thirteen, but he says he is a little older. He wants to talk and Jeff listens. His story is familiar. He was kicked out of his house by a father who socked him in the stomach after he walked in on a scene in the TV room involving his son, another boy, and a hastily zipped pair of jeans. The other boy escaped, leaving his jacket behind, which is probably still under the couch. His father isn’t much of a housekeeper, he adds.

  “Your mom?”

  “I don’t know. She’s probably glad I’m gone so she and Dad won’t fight so much.” By now, the two of them are behind a local restaurant, poking through day-old bakery stuff left out for anyone who wants it. The way Richard eats, ripping apart the bag of dinner rolls, Jeff can see it has been a while.

  “Where are you staying?”

  Richard chews, his eyes darting here and there, looking for more. “I don’t know. Got kicked out of the doorway. They even took my blanket.” He gets up, bent over like an old man, scuffles away without looking back. Something about the kid. The eyes. Reminds him of someone. Without thinking why, Jeff catches up with him.

  “Camp out with me,” he says. “I got a good spot in the woods. Safe. And I got this,” he adds as he pulls up his jacket and shows the knife hanging in its holder from his belt. “No problems.”

  The kid slides in next to him on the path, glances at the ivory handle, says, “Okay.”

  By the end of that week, three boys and two girls have joined them, and Jeff is teaching them how to live off the land. A gaggle of street kids is not in his plan, and no GED is required for this job, but he finds it strangely satisfying. Serendipity, Grandpa Jack would have said.

  Jeff has never been looked at the way they look at him when he is talking. They listen, accept his rules. They go out and bring back food and a little panhandled money every day. They talk in the evening. Running the camp comes easy, like he’s always known how, and Jeff begins to see himself as a kind of parent. He refers to the motley collection of orphans as his family. At first they laugh when he suggests he will be their father. But when one of the boys breaks the rule about burying his shit to keep the camp clean, Jeff takes a belt to him. That ends any question about who is in charge.

  Jeff sets up a tent and a camp chair from Goodwill to emphasize his role. The others sleep wrapped in blankets from rescue missions that they fold and stack neatly when the mornings lighten their tree-shadowed camp. The group holds together for a month or so. Then Ronnie, the newest family member, doesn’t come back one night after foraging for food.

  “I said I wouldn’t tell,” Arrow says when Jeff asks him where Ronnie is. Jeff grabs his arm and yanks. Then he twists the thin arm a bit more, and the boy screeches. “I think he went with someone, like, in a car,” he whispers.

  One of his grandfather’s teaching moments, Jeff realizes. He calls his family together. “Prostituting is dangerous. Not only for you, but for all of us, your family. Kids on the streets selling themselves attract the police. If they find out where our camp is, we’re done for. We need to stay safe.” Safety is the goal of his fatherhood, Jeff tells them. And safety includes, he adds, the rule that sex among the family members must be consensual and protected, so no one gets hurt.

  “That’s one of the reasons I use these,” he says to the gay kid that night in his tent as he unrolls a condom. “So no one gets hurt.” This is okay with Richard.

  The family makes it through the winter. They sleep under tarp-tents held up by nylon ropes tied to trunks and bushes at the edge of the camp. They learn to dig trenches around these tents to drain the water away from their sleeping bags and to keep scavenged wood dry beside their blankets. Local agencies hand out gloves and coats, and most of the family, including Jeff, eat at the mission dining halls whenever they can get in.

  As the days lengthen and warm, and the trees and bushes in the park at the center of the town pop buds and a few blossoms, everyone leaves camp early, coming back to share food and stories around the fire in the evening.

  Sitting on sunny park benches on the good days makes Jeff glad to be alive. He has an acquaintance or two he has a beer with once in a while, but mostly he likes watching the tourists walk by, discovering the mountains hiding in the clouds on the other side of the river, observing the buses full of commuters twice a day. He can’t imagine working in these moments, except as something he might try when he is tired of playing father to six wigged-out teenagers. Not for a while, he thinks. The GED will always be there.

  He has been read
ing an old newspaper left on his favorite bench long enough for two other loungers to come and go, and is about to head back to the camp when he notices a man, hands in pockets, sauntering along the sidewalk at the edge of the park, half a block away. The man pauses, looks back in the direction of the shop-lined street, waiting for someone, and soon a young woman in an open parka and a toothy smile runs toward him, her arms open. “I thought I’d lost you!” she calls as she wraps herself around him and they both laugh. He kisses her on the forehead, and it is his voice that Jeff recognizes. Danny, Danny saying, “Never ever. Best friends forever.”

  Danny, clear-eyed and happy, in love, living somewhere here in Green River. With a new best friend.

  “Fuck you,” Jeff says, getting up, feeling for the lump of weed he has been saving for an important occasion.

  * * *

  It is probably the good weather, unusual for this area in April. Jeff’s little family has begun to get feisty about the rules, disrespectful, edging away. The belt isn’t a threat for a couple of them who’ve done belts their entire lives. Chores, the digging of the latrine, especially, get lost in the busyness of the languid days of early summer. “Heading out for San Francisco,” Richard says, his backpack stuffed with the bread he’s gathered this morning. “You’ve been great,” he adds which makes Jeff angry enough to mutter, “Up yours,” to which Richard answers, “That was okay, too.”

  One night only two strays, not really family members, join Jeff at the campfire. Alone later in his chair in front his tent, he drinks a warm beer and understands it is time to take out that GED and get on with his life.

  Time to test your mettle, Grandpa Jack whispers.

  “I’m ready,” Jeff answers out loud as he throws the empty bottle into the dying fire. The next morning he packs up his clothes and heads to the day center where he takes a shower, cuts his hair and shaves with the razor he’s discovered in the inside pocket of his backpack.

  After spending a day in the library looking over first the jobs online and then the ASVAB for Dummies, he walks into the army recruiting office and takes the test. He does okay, good enough to get the recruiting sergeant’s eyes blinking. In a month or so, he is in boot camp, in a camo uniform with a shaved head.

  He knows the decision to join the army has something to do with the day he watched Danny being hugged in Pioneer Square by a woman carrying a bag of vegetables. Jeff has never been hugged like that, and he hasn’t shopped for a head of lettuce or anything else for a long time. Not that the Army will offer either of these moments. It will, though, bring a future that doesn’t involve a camp in a forest.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Ellie

  September 2009

  I like the quiet. I’ve got nothing to agitate me except maybe the Stephanie Plum mystery lying open on my bed. After I make my morning coffee, I sit in the fake-leather chair and check the calendar. Wednesday, graffiti day. Why not? I’ve been inside for two days. Time to get back on track.

  My bag of supplies is waiting in the coat closet. My apron, too, and I see when I walk down the stairs to the first floor that Rick’s grocery cart is still tucked under the steps. Efficient as he is, even having managed the cleaning out of Rick’s room, the super has missed the cart and its bags of cans and bottles. One of these days someone will be happy to discover the estate of a good, crazy, dead man.

  Gray day. I’m moving slow, spraying without enthusiasm, rubbing with a weak wrist. I catch myself looking over my shoulder for a girl with raccoon eyes. But it’s good she’s gone, safe somewhere, I say, probably out loud. A home, maybe, a new life.

  Who am I kidding? It’s not that good for me that she’s gone. I was getting used to her and her wet towels on the bathroom floor. If things had gone differently, if she had just stayed with me and maybe gone back to school and had let her hair go brown or back to black, but not both, if…Stop, I tell myself, pressing hard on that silver paint that never comes off easy. Thinking of ifs doesn’t do anyone any good. Time to begin forgetting, like I told Sarah.

  The first blue mailbox is covered with scribbles that look like ancient alphabets. Can any of these taggers actually read this stuff? Maybe they’ve come up with a language no one can decipher except other delinquents.

  I am thinking about this as I come up to the next box. Something new here: not hearts or organs or scribbles, just an orange smiley face inside a circle, a diagonal line crossing it out, like a NO PARKING sign. A NO SMILING sign? The orange is different, too, a pen line like the silver I hate, narrow, hard to get off. I take out my scratch pad, push against the metal, mutter a curse word or two until I’ve dislodged most of it.

  Someone is standing behind me, watching. Another old man. This time a long white beard waggles at me. “You get paid for doing this?” I don’t bother to answer, just pick up my bag and move on. I find another crossed-out smiley face on the next box and get rid of most of it before I head back to my apartment. I’ve got some turkey soup in the freezer. It’s probably still good.

  * * *

  At the knock, I open the door. I don’t know who I’m expecting, but it isn’t a policeman, the same one from a few days ago.

  “I don’t think you remember me,” he says.

  “Of course I do. Sergeant Trouble, wasn’t it?” What now?

  “Trommald.” He steps in, like he did before, notebook in hand. “We also met a few years ago. You called the graffiti office, complained that except for you, no one was doing anything about it around here. You said that it was driving you nuts, the vandalism in your neighborhood. Could someone help?”

  It’s coming back to me. I was using some dumb-shit stuff I bought at the paint store to clean up, and because I didn’t know what I was doing, I removed a little paint from a couple of apartment building walls. Some of the old buildings in my neighborhood are maroon underneath their modern gray coats, and my efforts left ugly bruises. The manager of one of them came out and told me to stop making his building look even worse than the graffiti jerks.

  I realized I could get in trouble for the same kind of crime that I was trying to do something about, and I needed to find out the rules of cleaning up. The cop who came by told me that the office would supply the Graffiti X. Public objects, okay, but not the red STOP signs because they lose their reflectiveness; private buildings have to take care of the mess themselves, or the city will for a price, usually leaving behind a patch that has nothing to do with the color of the building’s paint.

  I learned all this from the policeman who is standing in front of me at this very moment.

  “How’s your son doing?” he asks out of nowhere.

  “None of your business,” I answer.

  “Sorry. I was also remembering the problem you two had about ten years ago. I came by your old apartment after your call to the station. I was a patrolman; probably you don’t remember me. I felt sorry for you and for him, especially you. But you seem to be doing okay,” he adds, looking around my brown living room.

  “And all I remember about you is your Graffiti Hurts Us All button. Is bothering old ladies a come-down or a promotion?” But he’s right. We’ve had conversations three times. The first time when Danny left me twitching against the doorjamb. I moved from that place to this one, and then it was Rick dead in the lobby. And once, sometime in between, he’s reminding me now, I called the graffiti office for advice.

  He smiles a toothy smile, then relaxes it when I don’t respond. “The truth,” he says, “is that I had a kind of bad spell for awhile. I was reprimanded for doing something stupid and ended up working the graffiti squad for a few months.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  He raises a hand to his forehead and rubs a frown away. “I was drinking,” he says, “a lot,” and he looks at me like he knows I’ll understand. Probably because he’s seen me drunk, sunk against a wall. “I asked a fellow officer to show me her thong. My then-wife didn’t wear one, never would. I was curious, in an innocent way.”

  �
�Sure. And?”

  “I got demoted to graffiti, for one thing.” He gives me a better smile, meets my eyes, his hazel, honest. “I’m in homicide now. Not drinking, only mildly interested in women’s underwear.”

  “And you’re back to talking to me.”

  “And I’m back to investigating graffiti, and you’re the neighborhood expert.” He looks toward the davenport, and I lead him to it.

  “Instant?” I ask, and when he nods, I go set the pot on the burner.

  Sergeant Trommald is forty-five-ish, good-looking in a pouches-under-the-eyes way, a look that makes you think he’s gone through a lot and has come out the other side scarred but maybe wiser. The hand he takes his mug with doesn’t have a ring on it. I imagine he’s seen a few other undergarments since then. He’s capable of getting the juices running even in an old lady. “So?” I say in order to interrupt this futile line of thinking.

  “What I’m going to tell you is restricted information, Mrs. Miller.”

  “Ellie,” I say. A girl can dream, can’t she?

  “Another body has shown up. On the play equipment in the park, a teenager, no identification except for an ID card that turned out to be fake. He was beaten and stabbed to death, like the other two victims.”

  I try to keep my face still, but inside my guts are turning upside down. Which kid I almost know from Sarah’s stories has gotten it this time? I hope not Jimmy. Sweet Jimmy, she called him. “Shit. What’s going on?” My next thought is how glad I am that Sarah is safe someplace far away from the forest. Maybe she’ll never hear about this kid on the playground equipment.

  “We managed to identify him from a tattoo and a birthmark as a runaway from Snohomish. He apparently had been in town only about a week or so. Where you come in is what he had in his backpack. Two paint pens, the kind that go on in thin lines. Artists use them, and kids who tag. Like on mailboxes, traffic signs. Orange.”