by Teal Swan
Mike became uncomfortable with Aria and Taylor’s exclusion from the conversation. “Hey, let me introduce you to these guys.” He pointed first at the less vocal of the two of them. “This is Darren, and this is Bob.”
“Robert, but you can call me Bob,” the older man corrected him with a humble wave in Aria’s general direction. Darren just nodded his head, obviously leery of the youngsters’ sudden presence in a spot that was clearly a ritual meeting place for them. Despite the introduction, Darren and Bob resumed the conversation purely with Mike.
Darren was dressed in a green camouflage coat over long blue jean shorts. On his head was a brown camouflage baseball cap that said “US Army Veteran” under a seal of a bald eagle that looked to Aria like it had been flattened like a pancake. His now graying hair had been strawberry blond once. It came down to his collarbones. His mustache met his beard in a perfect open-ended frown of a triangle, making his already dispirited poise seem all the more somber. His right leg was lacerated with a network of purple scars and his left leg was missing. In its place was a dirty prosthetic. The stump of his leg was capped with a gray sock and suctioned into the socket. A steel pole the size of a shinbone fed into a black tennis shoe.
Aria guessed that the three men were friends and that they had probably relocated here together. Contrary to Aria’s assumptions, as she later found out, they hadn’t known each other at the start. Robert had come to the abandoned car lot first, and nobody knew how he found it. He had invited Darren to stay here with him after the two met at a holiday meal program just over three years ago. Robert was 68 years old. He had worked all his life as a mechanic to retire. Like so many seniors on the street, he relied on social security checks, but they put him in a position where he had to choose between eating or paying rent. He did everything he could to keep his apartment in Santa Monica until the relative who was living with him, and who he depended upon to keep the place, died five and a half years ago. He had been living out of a backpack, with his bicycle and one-man tent, ever since.
Darren had invited Mike to the camp one year later. Mike had served four years in the army, which granted him immediate rapport with Darren, who, unlike Mike, had made a career of the army. That is, until the last time he was deployed to Iraq, where he crossed paths with an IED that made mincemeat out of his legs. He had been referred to a mental health program as part of his recovery but had ended up on the street when their attempts to alleviate his paranoia, flashbacks, night terrors and chronic pain had failed when compared to alcohol. Still trying to make it through the day with PTSD, and now alcoholic, Darren had turned the inside of the abandoned RV he now occupied into a vault of trash. Darren had become a hoarder.
Aria felt wrong for having arrived in a place where such established connections already existed. She imagined herself to be an imposition there, even though they never indicated that they minded it. So she made the effort to engage with them, with an air of exaggerated friendliness. When the conversation died down between them, Darren and Robert started asking Taylor and Aria their stories. Except for the occasional interruption by Aston coming into the tent to announce and re-announce his boredom, Taylor and Aria took turns telling their tales and answering questions until there were no more questions to be asked.
Taylor and Aria learned a lesson the hard way that day, too: never drink coffee if it is the only thing you get to eat on a given day. After they left the three men, their efforts to find discarded food in a dumpster behind a grocery store produced nothing. Both feeling jittery and sick to their stomachs, they lay down against the door of the loading dock until they felt good enough to make the trip back to the car lot. Aria threw up, which made her feel better, and drank enough from one of her plastic water bottles to feel full.
Aria couldn’t get the meeting with Mike and Darren and Robert out of her head. She recycled it in her mind. They had parted ways that day feeling the nearness brought about by hardship, which, like superglue, closes up the cracks that would normally separate people from such different walks of life. She could not work out why, no matter where some people seem to turn, their lives have no door leading anywhere … Dead end after dead end after dead end of pain. The inevitable rain of loss had soaked them all. It had left them all destitute.
There was so much uncertainty in life. Aria wanted some certainty. But so far, any certainty that people seemed to establish seemed to be ornamental anyway. Despite her youth, Aria already knew that all ornament would be lost in death, just as Luke had lost his brother and girlfriend. It would disappear like shadows into light.
It was a thought that usually made her feel uneasy. But tonight, it made her feel glad that she currently had so little to lose.
CHAPTER 15
The air smelled of gasoline. Two streets away, a couple of men sat on the curbside, sipping their deaths through a bottle hidden in a paper bag. The unlit street lamps stood over their heads like pallbearers. The day was so hot; it seemed like the sun looked to cremate everything in sight. Ciarra, who already had a cigarette in her mouth, handed one to Aria and lit it. At the very least, it took the edge off the adversity that no amount of nicotine could fully drown out. Every time a car passed, Ciarra would lean forward to look inside the windows to ascertain whether the driver was a prospective client or just some passerby who wasn’t worth her notice.
She had lied to her father, for obvious reasons. Ciarra wasn’t working night shifts at a bar. Ciarra was a nightwalker. She slept with men for money or for blow.
Almost two weeks had passed since Luke had brought Taylor and Aria to the abandoned car lot. Luke had taken Palin up the coast of California to attend a festival of some sort. Without him as a go-between, Taylor and Aria had been forced to converse with the other inhabitants of the lot. Though they all lived very separate lives, the connection formed by common circumstances had already garnered them a certain level of acceptance in the group.
One night, before the sun went down, Aria noticed someone flailing and moaning in the old broken-down Camaro. When she approached the car, she found EJ in withdrawal. His bone-thin body was writhing in pain. Sweat stuck the loose strands of his black hair to his forehead. His eyes were rolling behind his eyelids and he was breathing as if he was having a seizure. Aria sat in the driver’s seat and tried to soothe him. Under her touch, he quieted and tears started to roll down the side of his face toward his ear, which was pierced with a hoop earring.
Even though he was 23 years old, he reminded her of a small child stricken with the flu. EJ, who was an acquaintance of Ciarra’s, was addicted to fentanyl. He was used to injecting every five hours, but hadn’t managed to get his hands on a dose. EJ never spent the day at the car lot. He came and left, so absorbed in the cycle of his addiction that he was a mystery to everyone, more like a ghost that slept among them. The day after Aria had been with him through such a vulnerable moment, he went back to acting as if he didn’t know her at all, or perhaps didn’t remember.
Aria had also met Wolf. In truth, they had been introduced to one another by Robert and had only shaken hands. He didn’t sleep in a car or in a tent or beneath a tarp like everyone else at the lot. Except for when it rained, he would sleep out underneath the open sky, preferring to have nothing between him and the world. His real name was James, but everyone called him Wolf and it was the only title that was fitting. Out of everyone at the lot, Wolf intrigued Aria the most. He seemed to hang around the lot less because it was a home base and more because it offered a poor substitute for a missing sense of tribe. Aria watched him disappear into the woodland for hours and even days, as if on some sort of solitary vision quest. When he returned, he would sit with Robert and talk for hours, or throw a stick for Palin until she was too tired to fetch it anymore. And more than a few times, she saw him sitting with EJ in his car.
On one of those days, Aria had thought they were smoking weed. But, after watching them long enough, she realized that Wolf had gathered a tiny bundle of sage and was smudging EJ with
it. Whether EJ was open to Wolf’s guidance or not didn’t seem to matter to Wolf. He appeared to be heavily invested in EJ’s recovery. He had imposed himself as a mentor to usher EJ out of his lost-ness.
Aria loved the feel of Wolf. He had a distrustful way of being. But his poverty and his ill-fitting clothes could not conceal what was truly magical about him. Aria could hear the pulse of the earth itself in his footsteps. She could hear its rivers in his veins. He seemed to carry both the earth and sky within him. His skin was the color of coffee. His 40 years upon this earth had only just begun to trace chicken-foot wrinkles from his eyes to his temples. He wore his long black hair in a ponytail that was tied just above the back collar of his shirt. His hands and arms were covered in tattoos, most of them representing some part of his life that he considered to be a rite of passage. Some of them, spiritual messages to himself, were etched into his skin so he couldn’t forget them. There was no way of telling where the black of his pupil ended and his iris began. The whites of his eyes were yellowed. Palin’s eyes looked more human than his did; and the consciousness behind them, more familiar.
Wolf was N’pooh-le, a tribe commonly known as Sanpoil. He had been raised on the Colville Indian Reservation in Okanagan County, Washington. His father had gotten into his beaten-up pick-up truck and disappeared when Wolf was eight. Most of his memories before then were of his father beating him and his mother. He remembered the days spent by himself, trying to fill up the vacuum of boredom with both his mother and father passed out cold in whatever part of the house their chronic drunkenness had left them. He never knew where his father went. And his mother never quit drinking.
In most ways, Wolf took up the place in his mother’s life where his father was supposed to be until he was 16 and she died of liver disease. His childhood had birthed a dream within him of reuniting the tribes. He saw the loss of their way of life as the reason for all their suffering. For a couple of years after his mother died, he dedicated himself to this vision, thinking that everyone would be quick to commit to the old way of life of their people if only he led them back into it. But he was wrong. They had given up. They had given in to the fissures that existed between each other and between themselves and that old way of life. So he left, bitter. He lived his life up and down the Pacific coast, looking for some tonic for the anger he felt toward himself, toward the white man and also toward his own people.
It was not uncommon to see Native Americans on the streets. Most of them had thrown their traditions away in favor of alcohol and chew. Equally, they seemed less ruined by life out on the streets. Perhaps because, having been stripped of their culture, they had lost everything already. Or perhaps it was because living nomadically, relying on whatever bounty could be hunted or found, was in their blood already. Their lives did not seem as devastated by lack of possessions. And the sun did not seem to wear them down the same way. The tragedy was in their extraction from the land. It was in the annihilation of their culture. It was in the loss of their tribe. Wolf did not find it as easy as others to accept what had happened to his people. The tragedy of it was heavy upon his back. He felt eaten alive by it. Wolf would vacillate between a modern embodiment of a medicine man and dissolving into suicidal crisis. When Aria watched him, she felt like maybe he helped people so that one day they might just turn around and rescue him from this torment that he seemed to carry with him everywhere he went.
Apart from Robert and EJ, the person Wolf spent the most time with was Anthony. He was a scrawny man, who lived beneath the blue tarp affixed to the chain-link fence on the far end of the lot. He had attended one of Mike’s morning coffee socials, which Aria had yet again been motioned over to attend. The seam just between the brim and cap of his olive-green baseball hat was stained with sweat. He had small, dirty-green eyes with so much sclera that they reminded Aria of shark eyes. His sandy blond hair was cut short, his beard and mustache trimmed. After years of harsh treatment, his body was stiff and weathered. His skin bore the corrupt color of a permanent sunburn. His hands, graceless in their movements, were covered in cracks and callouses.
Anthony had killed a man. When he was young, he had been a bucker at a logging company in Idaho. When he found out that his wife had been cheating on him with a man who worked beside him every day as a faller, he drove over to the man’s house in a rage to confront him. The screaming match escalated until the other man threatened to call the police on him for trespassing. When Anthony didn’t leave, the man pointed a rifle at his face. This made Anthony so angry that he grabbed the gun and wrestled him for it. When he ended up with the gun, as if overtaken by something other than himself, he pointed it back at him and shot twice. Anthony tried to skip town, but was arrested two days later. He was charged with voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
His parole papers had been signed off years ago. But to get a job, or buy a car, or qualify to rent an apartment, as a convicted felon had proved to be impossible. So, he turned to robbery and had spent his time since then in and out of jails. On occasion, he would intentionally get himself arrested to escape the cold of the winters before deciding to come out west to California.
Anthony found life outside prison unmanageable. He no longer felt wanted in society. There was no way to transition from life behind bars to life outside them. Perhaps Wolf offered him a sense of tribal belonging that society would not afford him. Perhaps Wolf was on a mission to save the part of himself that lacked a tribe externally through Anthony. But unless Wolf had sunk into the intentional isolation of one of his downward spirals, the two were inseparable. Anthony followed Wolf around like a beta member of a two-man wolf pack.
Ciarra had tried to bum a smoke off of Aria one day the previous week. When Aria told her that she didn’t have any, Ciarra had put two and two together and realized that Aria didn’t have any money. Suddenly the tables flipped from “you help me” to “I’ll help you.” She promised Aria that she could find work for her and that it didn’t matter how old she was or wasn’t.
Without Ciarra needing to say what the work was, Aria knew. There was no other reason to beat around the bush about it. Before she accepted, Aria weighed the burden of her circumstance against her conscience. She felt the malaise of the stigma that came along with prostitution. She didn’t want to wear the scarlet letter of it. But at the same time, she wasn’t particularly identified with her body. It had been used on multiple occasions by men already. She found herself unable to care about something that never felt like it was hers. Besides, it wasn’t like she would be spoiling something that was pure to begin with. In fact, part of her liked the modest kick of empowerment that she felt in response to the idea that as opposed to giving it away for free, she would be getting something in return for it. If they didn’t care about her at all, at least she’d be able to use them mutually in order to buy food and clothes and eventually get a place.
What made Aria hesitate was not her conscience; it was knowing that Ciarra was no philanthropist. Ciarra’s “love,” like so much of the “love” Aria had been given throughout her life, was more like a spider’s web, designed to ensnare. She could feel the sense of forced allegiance in the pretense of caring that Ciarra had fashioned to disguise her own need for power and control. Aria did not want to give in to it. But she was also in a lose–lose situation. To turn Ciarra’s help down was to establish herself as a foe from the get-go and to suffer the consequences. Aria eventually accepted Ciarra’s offer, hoping not only to get a leg up on life, but also to stay safe from the covert fascism of Ciarra’s social game.
Now, here she stood, in a nylon pink miniskirt and a cut-off tee that Ciarra had coerced her into wearing. They had been standing there for less than half an hour before a man in a BMW pulled over to the side of the street. He had stopped for Ciarra, whose attempt at a plaid naughty-schoolgirl uniform had been attracting men like moths to a flame. Ciarra seductively leaned her arms on the frame of the lowered passenger window. Aria couldn’t hear what she w
as saying, but she knew that Ciarra was trying to sell the man on the idea of sleeping with her instead. Ciarra had promised to get her hooked up with a “john,” the depersonalizing word they used for a client, before leaving with one of her regular clients that her pimp had arranged for her that afternoon.
Ciarra’s regular john was sitting in his parked car a block further on from where they were standing. His engine was turned off. Aria could see him watching through the rear-view mirror. His name was Larry. He was a gentle ogre of a man who was missing most of his hair. He wore a “God Bless America” t-shirt over the bulk of his severely obese body. The way he was smiling while he waited for Ciarra made Aria pity him. He was so clearly unaware of the level of Ciarra’s deception.
Ciarra had been complaining about this regular of hers while they were on their way there. “I don’t know, he’s sweet but sometimes it’s like, what the fuck do you want to pay me for?” she said, laughing at how ridiculous it was to her that most of the time he just wanted to talk and take her out to dinner instead of to fuck. “I don’t know whether he’s lonely or what the fuck is goin’ on. Maybe he’s in love with me.” She winked at Aria when she said it.
As she explained to Aria, Larry was the kind of man who had so little sense of real wealth within the world that his stable salary and bonuses made him feel like a king, especially when compared to these women of the night. And, desperate for affection, he was committed to spoiling them with it. Really, he was buying the way they looked at him when instead of telling them to suck his cock, he took them on a shopping spree, or at the very least focused on trying to get them to orgasm instead. They would fake it every time, but he was too naive to know it. Instead, he deluded himself that they loved spending time with him and that he was the only man who had ever cared about them. It was a hero fantasy that Ciarra played straight into. “You gotta love the guy,” she said. And maybe some part of her did. Not in the way a woman loves a man, but in the way a girl loves a puppy or a kitten. His blatant naivety made her feel safe. And safety was a hard commodity to come by.