by Teal Swan
She was awoken by a hand on her shoulder. “The library is closing,” a woman said in a tone that suggested she felt bad for having to wake her up and send her on her way. It didn’t matter if the woman seemed to be fine with the fact that she had fallen asleep. Aria’s body felt like it had been dropped out of thin air, consumed by the fiery flush of both embarrassment and adrenaline. She nodded in acknowledgment and jumped to her feet so fast that she didn’t notice the torn piece of paper upon which Taylor had written in undeniably poor handwriting: I’m going to a temp office, I’ll be back as fast as I can. Wait here for me. Love Taylor. The note fell to the floor and under the chair she had been sitting on. Taylor had found her sleeping and, having decided not to wake her, placed it on her lap.
The lights in the library had dimmed. The stores in the foyer had closed their doors for the night. Aria was confused, having been suddenly jarred into a reality where it seemed that she had missed so much. After exiting the building into the congregation of other homeless people who, along with her, had suddenly been ejected from their sanctuary, she looked back through the windows to see if she could find Taylor still inside. She felt her stomach sink. Not knowing what else to do, she sat down on the grass. Did he fucking abandon me here? she thought to herself.
Aria had been wrong about people before. But this just seemed so drastically out of character, especially given that they both seemed to be each other’s lifeline. She felt sick. Her world was spinning. Her mind was flailing to reach for ideas about what had happened and what to do now, as if those ideas were buoys in the middle of a deep ocean full of sharks. After about half an hour, that all-too-familiar feeling of bad luck got the better of Aria. She was doing her best to stay in the light from the street lamps and blend in with the crowd, which was largely ignoring her. Since she was a child, it had dawned on her that some people are lucky. They see themselves in the faces staring back at them. They are not strangers in the world. Some people feel the warmth of connection; they are not worn thin by wariness. But to Aria, her own voice sounded like a wolf’s cry in a chorus of bleating. She was a stranger in this world. She had no one and she had nothing to belong to.
Aria had resigned herself to accepting that as if things could not get any worse, now she was alone, when Taylor’s voice rattled across the distance from nearly a block away. “Aria!” he was yelling again and again. He walked toward her rapidly.
The relief of hearing his voice was ineffable. But the closer he got, the more that relief turned into resentment. She would have confronted him about simply leaving her there to think she had been abandoned without saying a word, but she saw that Taylor was walking toward her with someone else in tow. The rupture between them, known only to Aria, was left unmended because it was suddenly less important than the approach of a total stranger – and his dog.
“This is Luke,” Taylor said, before he had even reached her. And once he did, “This is Aria,” he said, waiting for the pair to shake hands. Luke took the initiative in a way that suggested that he respected the necessary distance that Aria’s body language implied she required from him.
Aria looked down at his dog, who was held close to him with a striped, dirt-stained bungee cord. “This is Palin,” Luke said, with a chuckle. Aria later learned he had named his dog after Sarah Palin, the politician who had run for vice-president. It made him laugh to have displayed his disdain for her as a person and for her policies by “keeping her on a leash like the politician’s pet that she was.” He also considered it to be a brilliant way of advertising his liberal political persuasions to anyone who he happened to meet on the road. It was a great way to sort out potential foes from potential friends.
It was obvious that Luke adored her. Unlike so many of the dogs Taylor and Aria had seen who lived with their owners out on the street, Palin was in perfect condition. She looked a bit like a border collie, simply taller. Most of the long hair on her body and ears was black. But the tip of her tail, her legs, underbelly, shoulders, neck and face were white with black freckles of all different sizes. White eyelashes accented amber brown eyes, which looked far too human to be dog eyes. In fact, everything about her seemed more human than dog, especially her facial expressions. Her intelligence was palpable, making for an equal personality mix of sweet and sassy. Aria reached down to pet her and she closed her eyes with pleasure under the touch.
“We met at the temp office, he has somewhere we can stay.” Taylor’s voice cut through the moment of connection.
“Yep,” said Luke. “Are you hungry?”
Aria nodded, still hesitant to fully let him in. Luke took off his tall, metal-framed camping backpack and rifled through the compartments. He shoveled her out a few handfuls of bulk trail mix from a plastic bag. Aria almost laughed out loud, but, afraid to be rude, she smiled instead and said, “Thank you.”
“No problem, man, don’t worry about it,” Luke responded, pleased with his capacity to help where help was needed. Everything about Luke seemed stereotypical to Aria – and the trail mix was the epitome of cliché.
Luke was a “Crusty.” That was the not-so-affectionate term given to people who were homeless not through circumstance, but by choice. He had abandoned the 9-to-5 lifestyle in favor of train-hopping, hitchhiking and panhandling. Luke’s homelessness was a statement against “the man.” He despised the government and he was not afraid to let everyone know it. His life on the streets was a form of passive activism. And his rebellion made him feel free. But Aria knew what he did not. She knew that a Crusty’s rebellion was not freedom. It was not choosing a life for what they wanted. It was choosing a life against what they did not want.
As they walked, Aria listened to Luke, and studied him carefully. Unshaven and unwashed, he hid his blatant irresponsibility beneath a head of sandy red dreadlocks that fell just below his shoulder blades. It was not that she disagreed with his opinion on things. In fact, she agreed with pretty much everything he said. It was just what he had decided to do with that opinion – that was where they parted company.
She could not work out whether she liked him or hated him because of the mixed message of his entire state of being. She felt guilty for the resistance that she felt toward him because he was being so incredibly friendly. In fact, when she thought about it, the friendliness he exhibited was advocacy. This made her feel simultaneously supported and looked down upon. It became clear to her that he saw people like her as the underdogs in society. And he had joined them with the same forced philanthropy and imposed-but-false equality as the whites who had joined the Black Panther movement in the 1960s.
She hated feeling pitied. She hated it when the surface of things did not match what was underneath. It was clear that Luke’s sense of equality with everyone else on the street was just a surface veneer and that under it, he saw himself as their hero – and maybe their savior.
Aria followed just behind Taylor and Luke, next to Palin. She watched them talk and agree with one another about the plethora of conspiracy theories that had caused Luke to abandon his mainstream life. She could feel the rapport building between them. Taylor was thrilled to have someone to talk to. It was obvious to Aria, watching them talk, that she had deprived him of his need for verbal stimulation with her tendency to be silent. In Luke he had found someone in the world even more apt to dominate a conversation than himself.
Though dirty and full of holes, every item he was wearing from top to bottom and every item in his possession, from his North Face backpack to his outdoor-enthusiast hiking boots, was of the highest quality. At one point, when they stopped to take a rest, he folded his legs in such a way as to perfectly expose the label on the waistband of his pants. Aria laughed out loud when she saw the capital letters Georgio Armani.
Taylor and Luke stopped to see why she had laughed but she passed it off by saying “It’s nothing” and let them resume their conversation. By now, Aria had him all figured out. Luke was a rich kid who couldn’t do right by his daddy. Their high standards and
workaholic tendencies had driven him to want to find some connection that couldn’t be found in his tennis matches or piano lessons. He obviously failed to conform to what his father wanted. So he got fed up with it one day and threw it all away. Aria felt no sympathy for him at all. To her, it was blasphemy for him to believe he even knew what suffering was. She could not shake the feeling of irritation she had toward him. She was glad that both he and Taylor seemed oblivious to it.
After a couple of hours, they had reached a part of the city that seemed to bleed into the arid nature that surrounded it. Luke showed them where to sneak through the chain-link fence and scrub trees surrounding what appeared to be an abandoned auto shop. Through the dark, Aria could just make out that the red and yellow stripes across its exterior had faded from neglect. Peering through the inky fog of night that had settled across the city, she could see that the large lot around the shop was cluttered with broken-down cars, many of which were missing wheels, hoods or other parts. Having not been washed in years, they looked like they had been salvaged from a natural disaster. Interspersed between the cars were a few tents and the occasional blue tarp, covering collections of clutter underneath them. There was no one to be seen apart from a boot belonging to one of the camp’s inhabitants that was sticking out from underneath a blanket.
Careful to be quiet, they followed Luke to his tent. Like everything else that he possessed, the tent looked like something only a rich kid would have. Aria asked Luke if there was anywhere to use the bathroom. He pointed to the left and told her, “We mostly just find a place in the woods.” She left the boys to walk to the perimeter of the property and climbed over the fence into the scrub sage and stunted oak trees surrounding the lot. Making sure that there was no one around to catch her, she peed in the tall grass before climbing back over the fence to find Luke and Taylor again.
Luke guaranteed them, even though they never asked, that tomorrow he would help them to find a place there to establish their own camp if they wanted. But that night he invited them to stay with him. Aria watched him hurry to push everything in his tent over to one side to make room for them. His lengthy conversation with Taylor had not ceased, it simply buzzed through exaggerated whispers. Even though Aria had slept almost the entire day, she was still so tired that when she lay down on the other side of Taylor, who was thrilled to be sandwiched between her and Luke and Palin, the airy sound of their voices quickly lulled her to sleep.
Aria was glad to be taken under someone’s wing, even if that someone was as obnoxious as Luke. She was glad that the deafening noise of the city could only be heard as a breath in the distance. She was glad to have the pressure of Taylor’s incessant need for conversation temporarily taken off her. She was even more glad that, contrary to what she had feared just hours earlier, she was not spending the night alone.
CHAPTER 12
The metallic twang of an old Martin guitar being poorly tuned pulled Aria from her slumber. The sun had been up long enough that it had made the condensation on the inside of the tent tepid. She listened to whoever was playing the guitar stop and start again and again, trying to master a song that she had never heard before.
Palin stood up and stretched out across them, waking up both Taylor and Luke. Luke pulled her on top of his body, smothering her in affectionate kisses and baby talk. Palin was snuggly in the morning. She seemed to bathe in the reestablishment of closeness that took place when people came back from the short parting of dreamtime to greet her. When Luke had moved his attention to changing his shirt and pants for the day, not thinking that anyone was watching him, Palin made her way over to repeat her snuggle routine with Aria. She flicked Aria’s face with her little black nose while being prevented from licking it. Aria held her muzzle still and planted a kiss on it, making the dog exhale a little sneeze. Aria was in heaven running her fingers through her cottony hair and feeling the weight of Palin’s perfect trust against her.
Luke unzipped the tent just in time for Taylor to sit up straight and stretch his arms across both of their faces. “Who lives here?” Aria asked Luke, wanting to get a feeling for what she was about to be met with before exiting the tent.
“Well, it’s just a group of us who decided to create a little community, I guess you could say,” Luke explained. “That over there is Mike.” He pointed to the man who was playing the guitar. His white hair was tied in a ponytail behind his head and shrouded by a black trucker’s hat. “That over there is EJ,” he said, indicating a thin man who was sitting half in and half out of a broken-down black Camaro. “That’s Ciarra,” he said, pointing to a woman who was watching herself brush her hair in the wing mirror of a giant purple van. Then he pointed to a tarp on the right. It was tied between the fence and two trees. “Anthony lives there. He’s on a trip so you’ll meet him later.”
By this point, Aria couldn’t take everything in. But Luke continued anyway, and she didn’t stop him. “That place belongs to Robert. He’s a great guy, you’ll like him,” he went on, pointing to a lime-colored one-man tent with a bike near the perimeter of the lot. “Oh, and that’s Wolf,” he said, pointing to a Native American-looking man walking across the lot. “And that place over there belongs to Darren.” He gestured to an abandoned RV.
Aria counted them and said, “So eight of you live here?”
“Well, nine because Ciarra has a son, and ten if you count Palin.” Luke petted her head as an affirmation of her importance.
“Do you all know each other?” she asked.
Luke answered her with an air of humor that said everything his words did not. “Some of us did before. We all know each other now. I wouldn’t say that all of us are friends. But we’re like roommates.” He switched topics despite Aria’s curiosity. “Are you guys hungry? I know a place if you are.”
“Hell, yes,” Taylor replied, looking at Aria like he had hit the jackpot by meeting Luke. He gathered his things as if he intended to take them along.
“Nah,” said Luke, “you don’t have to take your stuff. That’s the benefit of living here – we sorta watch out for each other, ya know? You can leave your stuff here, no one’s gonna take it.”
“Oh, cool,” Taylor said and dropped what he was doing. Aria wasn’t so quick to trust the other people in the camp. There was only so much you could trust desperate people with. She pulled her backpack on and scooted out of the tent, waiting for Luke to take the lead again.
“Hey!” She heard a voice cut across the car lot. “Who you got?”
The woman who had been brushing her hair in the wing mirror was walking toward them. Aria was caught off guard by her gregarious nature. She was wearing a pair of cut-off jean shorts and a purple tank top. Her stringy brown hair was streaked with highlights whose roots had grown out a long time ago. Her skin was mottled with purple acne scars.
“I’m Ciarra,” the woman said, extending a stiff hand directly at Aria, like a knife meant more to establish dominance than affinity.
She accepted the handshake as fast as she could. “I’m Aria.”
“I’m Taylor,” Taylor interjected enthusiastically, giving her his hand to shake.
Ciarra turned her focus back to Aira. “I like your hair,” she said, crossing all the usual boundaries of social etiquette to touch it. Aria was noticeably uncomfortable, but let Ciarra do whatever she wanted to establish that she was not to be considered a threat.
The dance of hierarchy that so often played out between women, which was playing out now between herself and Ciarra, was exhausting Aria. She could tell that Ciarra had no interest in her except as an opportunity to establish her superiority. Luke’s voice cut through the tension. “I met these guys yesterday. They’re good people. They’re gonna stay here for a while.”
Ciarra pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows, nodding up and down as if to say, “Just who do you think you are to make that sort of decision?” But she simply said “Ah, OK. Well, tell me if you want to go shopping, I know all the good places, and make sure to introduc
e them to everyone else so no one tries to shoot ’em.” She winked at them in a seductive manner, satisfied with having elicited fear.
Aria watched her walk back to the van. She was intimidated by Ciarra. But she was also envious of the way Ciarra seemed to tame the world around her. That was not something Aria felt able to do.
Taylor, Luke and Aria walked a long distance until they reached a church that Luke had promised contained a food pantry. Aria had expected to find a soiled storeroom with various canned goods, which she would then have to try to figure out how to open. But to her surprise, the line that they found themselves in led up to a plastic table where a woman was handing out sandwiches wrapped in plastic wrap. Luke and Taylor each accepted one. She paid no attention to them. But when Aria reached the end of the line to take the sandwich being held out to her, the woman said, “There you go, darlin’,” with an almost southern drawl that owed more to cultural upbringing than it did to geographical location.
This unexpected bit of intimacy confused Aria. It both comforted her and contradicted her sense of reality. Aria had come to expect cruelty or at least self-centered altruism from people. This sense of genuine kindness was like a shock to the system and she couldn’t quite decide whether she liked it or not. Given the strange nature of the interaction, Aria read the lettering on the woman’s name tag. Her name was Imani. On that cold June morning, Imani was simply someone who had been unexpectedly kind; Aria could not know then that she had met a friend.
That day Taylor and Aria followed Luke endlessly to different parts of the city. Aria was beginning to feel the same way Taylor did: that they had hit the jackpot by meeting him. After visiting shelters and locating a mission that allowed a 15-minute shower for each of them, by the time they were headed back to the car lot, Aria felt better than she had in a long time. She had found a sleeping bag in a donation pile at one of the shelters. She was holding it under her arm like a treasure. And, except for her clothes, which hadn’t been laundered for weeks, for the first time in weeks she felt clean.