Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  When they got back to the car lot, the sun was almost setting. A few of Luke’s “roommates” eyed them suspiciously as Luke led them around the lot, looking for a place for them to set up camp. Seeing as neither of them had a tent, the obvious option was to see if one of the broken-down cars could serve as a temporary shelter. They settled on an abandoned white Land Cruiser because it had the most room, all of its doors were still mounted and its windows were intact. The metal on its front end was still crinkled from the accident it had never recovered from. And it was missing both of its front wheels. Still, later that night, when Luke said goodnight and left them to their own devices, climbing onto the gray fabric of its interior felt like luxury.

  Aria got into her sleeping bag and lay flat across the back seat. Taylor reclined the front passenger seat as far as it would go over her legs. “I like it here,” he said, watching the other inhabitants of the abandoned car lot go about their business before turning in for the night, and Aria agreed with him. “Luke told me some places I could find a job tomorrow. I think I’m gonna try and get a bus ticket or somethin’ and maybe go see if I can get into that acting program.” She realized that meant she would be alone for the day but Taylor quickly added, “You can come with me if you want to, I just don’t know how much fun it’s gonna be.”

  They were both aware that since she was still under 18, she had to lie lower than any of the rest of them, and Aria guessed he didn’t like the risk that her being underage posed to him. It would be safer for her to stay there. “That’s OK,” she reassured him. “I can stay here tomorrow. Maybe Luke can show me around some more.”

  She wasn’t really excited to spend more time with Luke, especially one-on-one, but the idea of not walking anywhere for a day was enticing. She wanted Taylor to go chase his dreams, no matter how unrealistic they were. Watching his zeal for the future, which once had been so irritating to her, now felt like watching a flower grow among the weeds. His fervor for life was a scarce form of beauty that life on the streets tried to strip from him every day. And Aria wanted him to keep it. She wished that she could have some of it herself.

  She patted Taylor’s arm before she fell asleep, to soothe away his worry about whether she felt hurt by his intention to leave her behind the next day. She remembered the terrible posters with empowerment quotes at the group home. One of them said, “You can learn something from everyone you meet.” She smiled to herself because regardless of how obnoxious it was, she was finding it to be true. Taylor had taught her something. He was teaching her how to cut her losses without cutting loose her hope.

  The last thought that went through her head that night before falling asleep with her blankie was, “You never know, something could get worse. And you never know, something could get better.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Past the anemic pallor of discarded surgical gloves, the cigarette boxes and the beer cans torn and crushed, a shallow stream cleaved the woodland by the car lot. Luke led Aria upstream, past where the people in camp who cared less drank, did laundry and occasionally urinated. He said next to nothing. The careful progress of his footsteps was occasionally impeded by whatever lawless path Palin’s nose took her down, her tail curled up over her loin. Occasionally, she would lie flat on her belly and hold her head low in the grass, staring straight ahead as if stalking a phantasm neither Luke nor Aria could see.

  When they stopped, Aria stuck her fingers deep into the cold air hovering inches above the flowing water, deep into the mellow of the earth’s own breath. The green of better days was brighter than the green that flavored the landscape. The sun’s hands ran over everything, the wet wings of a moth as they opened and closed, the crown of oak leaves and the water that was older than the flow of human blood.

  They quickly and silently confirmed their mutual comfort level with nudity. They washed their clothes with a mint green bar of pumice lava soap that Luke carried with him in a ziplock bag. Almost no discourse floated between them. Aria mimicked Luke, draping her clean clothes over the branches of one of the nearby oak trees. The heat of the sun censored the chill of the air.

  Aria sat on a rocky outcropping near the stream, waiting for her clothes to dry. She watched Luke run the bar of soap across the scope of his body forcibly. The water below him was tainted with a streak of powdery white from the soap. He used his hands to cup the water and saturate himself. Aria felt warmed by the primal image of him. Luke was a traveler. His body and dreadlocks had been chiseled by the necessity of migration. In many ways, when he was naked, he looked how she imagined a primitive man might have looked thousands of years ago. She smiled, picturing him hunting through the woodland with a loincloth and a spear.

  When Luke came to sit down next to her, the river spray still shedding from his skin sparkled against the right side of her body and caused her to flinch. They sat in the awkward but pleasurable silence of unresolved sexual tension until Aria couldn’t sustain it any longer. “So what’s your story?” she asked. Though she was convinced she could most likely write the story of his life without him even telling her, the fact that they were sitting there naked had softened her judgmental attitude.

  “What do you mean – like, what was my childhood like, or …?” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, people don’t just end up out here for nothing,” Aria replied.

  Luke paused for a moment, looking down at his feet. “Well, I was born out here in LA. My dad was a surfer. He met my mom on a scuba-diving trip. He was the instructor. According to him, she was the one that came after him. Who knows.” He paused as if trying to sort through something in his mind and picked up where he left off. “According to my dad, my mom didn’t even want us. But he wouldn’t marry her unless she agreed to have kids. She told him that if they got a divorce, he was the one taking the kids. But that wasn’t at all how it turned out. My dad said that on the delivery table, my mom grabbed me and said ‘mine.’ And then she wouldn’t let him touch me until she was ready to let go of me. After they got married, my mom wanted to move away from here. So they took us to Park City, Utah. I would have been a surfer too, but I learned to ski instead. But that’s where everything went to shit.”

  Again, Luke paused as if trying to untangle a knot in his head. It was clear that whatever had happened had cast him into a state of confusion.

  “Did you have any brothers or sisters?” Aria asked.

  “Yes. I had a younger brother. His name was Alex. He died. He ran his bike into the back of a parked van and died,” Luke replied. He fell silent again.

  “Did your parents get divorced?” Aria asked, trying to help him start back up with his story.

  “Yes. My dad started drinking. They hired us au pairs and pretty soon, my mom started making all the money. She didn’t respect him anymore. She fought him for custody of us, which made him drink even harder. And then it was kind of like we were dropped into thin air. My mom got married like five or six times, each time to a richer and richer man, and my dad developed this habit of driving drunk. He ended up in jail.

  “When I was eleven and my brother was ten, my mom was off on safari and my dad put us both in the car when he was drunk. Thank God he was arrested. But we sat there at the police office for hours while they tried to find someone to come pick us up. Finally a family friend came and got us.

  “Needless to say, my brother started having drug problems and so my mom sent him away to a boys’ camp in Sedona. When he came back, he was different. And one day, he just decided to ram his bike into the back of a van.”

  Luke stopped as if that was the end of his story but Aria wanted to know it all now.

  “How did you end up out here, though?” she asked.

  Luke started speaking again, but this time, he told his story as if recounting it were a chore. “Well, I could never do anything right by my mother. And yet, I was her favorite. So it was really confusing … I fucking hate my mother. Um, I went to college for a little bit, but I didn’t know
what I was interested in, so I just signed up for a bunch of music classes. I was playing trombone. I was interning for the local legislature. And one day, I met this girl and totally fell in love with her so we moved in together. But my mom didn’t like her. She treated her like shit. And she said that if I kept living with her, she’d stop paying for my college. Obviously I refused. So she called the IRS to report me. Basically she had been claiming the money she spent on my college tuition as salary for an employee that didn’t exist. So they came after me for all the money. She expected me to just cave in. But I was so sick of her bullshit that I told the IRS what she’d really been doing. Even the IRS agent thought my mother was a bitch. Anyway, I stopped talking to her. I haven’t talked to her since.”

  “What happened to the girl?” Aria asked, suddenly terrified for the answer.

  “She died,” Luke said flatly. “I was driving across an intersection and a huge black Suburban hit the wheel well and she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. My lung popped. They told me in the emergency room that she had died. I wanted to die too. It was me that killed her.

  “I was hysterical. By the time they let me out of the hospital, I had eighty thousand dollars’ worth of medical debt and nothing to go home to, so I just put everything I needed in my camping backpack and paid for a flight out here.”

  “That’s so fucked,” Aria said when Luke finished. It was all she could say. She was unable to break through the rough persona that she had manufactured over the years. But inside, she was speechless. She knew the contours of grief well enough to know that saying “I’m sorry” would have been a slap in his face. She felt guilty for having judged him so wrongly to begin with. She felt like holding him. Instead, she held the heaviness with him just sitting in the quiet, sharing his burden for a few minutes.

  Luke didn’t ask Aria anything about her life that day. He was the kind of man who hated to ask anything of anyone for fear of their rejection, even details about themselves. Instead he filled the space with his political theories.

  Once their clothes were reasonably dry, they put them back on. Having clean clothes again felt like heaven to Aria. Another simple pleasure that she had taken for granted before now. They sat down again to take in a few more minutes of the peace being offered by the nature around them. Luke got out his bag of trail mix and rolled down the sides of the plastic far enough for it to resemble a flimsy dish. He offered Palin part of a sandwich he hadn’t finished. The dog devoured it and then sprawled herself across their legs, exposing her belly to the sky as a solicitation for affection. The glee with which she did it made them both laugh. Together, they fussed over her as if she were a maharaja.

  It struck Aria how strange life can be. One second, your life can fall apart to the degree that you don’t want to go on living. And the next, a pleasure as simple as a dog can bring the breath back to your life again. Aria could see that Palin had picked up where the woman of Luke’s life had left off when she died. Palin had brought him back to life again. She had given him a reason to live and she had loved him like his mother had not. She wondered if maybe the reason Palin felt so human was because she wasn’t really a dog, but an angel in a dog’s body come to save this man.

  Taylor didn’t return to the car lot until Aria was already asleep. Despite his less-than-graceful movements, he tried to get into the car quietly, so that she wouldn’t wake up. Unbeknownst to him, his attempt failed. However, instead of saying something, Aria surveyed him through a hole in her sleeping bag until he had fallen asleep.

  Taylor was noticeably distraught. He had slipped out before first light and bummed change off of people at the closest bus station until he had enough to buy a fare. He had taken several buses to the studio whose flyer he had been carrying around in his backpack, thinking it would be his promised land. But when he got there, he had been told that all the work/study positions were currently filled. They asked for his number so they could call him if one opened up, but he didn’t have a cell phone. Instead of admitting to his current situation, he simply told them he would check back every week.

  The studio was nowhere near the offices that Luke had referred him to for temp work. On top of that, he made the mistake of taking a wrong transfer on the bus system and found his efforts opposed by the masses of people visiting Universal Studios. So he only had time to visit one temp office before they had all shut down for the day, and that office had nothing for him. He was too proud to mow lawns for a landscaper. He felt humiliated at the idea of being a janitor at a manufacturing plant. He couldn’t lifeguard because he couldn’t swim.

  Taylor could not accept the reality of where he was in life. He had imagined himself being instantaneously scouted once he came to LA. He had come here to be an actor. Compared to that, every job that was available felt beneath him. The day had been just one more exercise in disappointment in his life. His stomach throbbed with emptiness, both emotionally and physically. So much so that it was hard to fall asleep. But eventually, he did.

  CHAPTER 14

  In the morning, their sleep was shattered by the sound of tapping on the window. At first, they quailed, expecting to see a police officer or some other person who posed an equal amount of threat standing above them. Instead, two blue eyes peered over the lip of the car door.

  “Aston, get away from there!” Mike yelled at the boy who was staring through the window. The boy took the stick he was holding and ran back toward him as if the trouble he had created for himself had not fazed him. The kid was stocky, oversized for the five years he had accumulated on earth. Though the tragedy of his life was obvious by virtue of him being there, his demeanor defied it. Instead of collapsing, he had turned into a brave little warrior, already at war with life. But, that warrior nature made him either a little hero or a bully, depending on the day.

  When Aria and Taylor emerged from the vehicle they now called home, Mike motioned to them to join him by his army-green ridge tent. They made their way across the lot apprehensively.

  “Hey, I’m sorry about that, I didn’t mean for him to wake you. He’s a little rambunctious sometimes.”

  Aston had found a place in the dirt and was digging at it with his stick aggressively. “I heard you playing guitar the other day; you’re good,” Aria said.

  “Oh thanks, it’s just something I picked up along the way. I’m not really very good, but I enjoy it. Would you like some coffee?” he asked.

  “Um, OK,” Aria said, not because she actually drank coffee, but because the way he asked implied it would be a rejection of him instead of the coffee if she were to refuse.

  Mike was a man of few words. He talked the way that Aria imagined the cowboys of Wyoming would talk. She liked it. She found herself asking him questions just so she could hear the way his voice sounded. He warmed up the coffee on a little Coleman gas camping stove and poured them each a cup in a pair of blue metal mugs. “Have you met Ciarra yet? She lives just over there,” he said, pointing to the purple van.

  “Yes,” Aria said.

  “She’s my daughter. We named her Cameron, but she changed it to Ciarra for whatever reason,” Mike said with a smile. Just peering out from underneath his trucker hat, he seemed simultaneously embarrassed and proud to claim her as his own. “I watch Aston for her when she’s on a night shift. She doesn’t stay here that often. Only when she breaks up with one of her boyfriends,” he said, making light of a situation that he obviously disapproved of.

  Mike didn’t feel like he had the right to exert much authority over Ciarra. Aria gathered that this was because she had spent the majority of her childhood with her mother and had only reconnected with Mike after she dropped out of high school to live with him.

  A large rectangle of cardboard was leaned up against the mouth of his tent. There were three lines written on it that read: No job. Willing to work. God bless. Mike noticed Aria looking at it.

  “I’m not a beggar,” he said. “I only use it if I can’t find a job.” Aria smiled back at him to lessen his o
bvious shame about it.

  Mike explained that he did not see himself as homeless any more than he saw himself as a beggar. As far as he was concerned, he was just a man without a job looking to get back on his feet. He took any work that was offered to him. The only problem was that not many people wanted to hire a man his age, especially for the manual labor jobs that were most widely available to people in his particular situation. For Mike, asking for favors was only a back-up when temporary work, pawning off possessions or collecting plastic bottles had failed. He was a proud sort of man. It was a trait that his daughter, Ciarra, had inherited. And part of that pride was evident in his decision to help raise his grandson Aston, despite having next to no experience in childcare himself.

  Taylor was uncharacteristically silent that morning. Aria could tell by how slowly he was sipping his coffee that he, too, was drinking it out of courtesy.

  Two men approached the tent. Mike greeted them submissively and, obviously wanting to make them feel welcome, motioned to them to sit down on two foldable camping stools. They said hello and waved at Taylor and Aria without introducing themselves, and began to talk as if the young people weren’t there.

  “You wouldn’t believe the line down at JWC yesterday,” one of them told Mike. He was an older man, whose toothless mouth was drawn into a smile that paled in comparison to the smile of his eyes. They gleamed with pleasure under the gray whiskers serving as eyebrows. His nose was bulbous and far too big for his face. But it made him all the more endearing to look at. Silver stubble covered his chin and what was left of his hair was wafted into Einstein-like tufts on top of his head. Even though she had only just met him and had not yet even been introduced, Aria knew she could love this man. She had an image in her head of a grandpa bouncing his two grandkids on his knee with a Christmas tree glittering in the background. This man looked like he had come straight out of that vision and into real life. The instant affection that she felt for him made her all the more shy toward him.