Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  After a time, the young man got up and gave Imani a sideways hug. “You be good now, don’t you be gettin’ into any trouble!” she yelled after him when he turned away. He afforded her a sideways smile and a wave before bounding across the street. He held the belt of his pants up as he jogged.

  Aria watched him check and recheck his watch on the side of the street until an iridescent black low-rider car drove up behind him. She watched him get into the car and drive away without ever knowing whether they had anything in common with each other. Without ever saying hello or waving goodbye.

  She poked at Taylor’s side and said, “What do you want to do?”

  Taylor pulled the coat down from his face, squinting against the sunlight. “I don’t know,” he said, realizing that neither of them had thought past trying to seek out a meal. “There’s a temp office like ten blocks away. They might have gotten something new in for me.” He said it like a question more than a statement.

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Aria said. “I can stay here and wait for you to get back if you’d like.”

  Taylor was taken aback, having assumed that she would go with him and wait outside the office instead. “Don’t you want to come with?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t want to just stand around outside. Besides, I can talk to her about whatever she was talking about before,” she said, pointing to Imani.

  Taylor suddenly seemed insecure about the idea of wandering the city alone. But he didn’t want to risk being pushed away by pressing her to accompany him. “OK,” he said. “It’ll only take me like two hours. I’ll meet you back here and we can go back home.”

  He pulled his backpack up onto his back and, before navigating his way to the sidewalk, he said, “Cross your fingers for me.” She smiled and gave him a thumbs up. The way he walked was so obviously gay that she caught herself worrying about his safety, strutting down the road in this part of town unaccompanied. She felt compelled to join him to avoid the guilt she would feel if anything happened to him because she wasn’t there. But Aria wanted to talk to Imani away from Taylor’s tendency to blindly trust people and accept their assistance, no matter the hidden consequence. She wanted to see if Imani’s offer was legitimate or truly full of shit.

  Aria watched Imani, waiting for what looked like a good time to cut in. That time never came. By the time she was about to make a move to go over and talk to her, the woman had disappeared inside the building, leaving a younger girl in charge of the table, and didn’t come back out for so long that Aria decided the opportunity had closed. She walked briskly in the same direction as Taylor had gone, hoping that if she walked fast enough, she would be able to catch up with him. Soon she found herself standing at an intersection two blocks away from the church, not knowing which way he had gone. She stopped to lean against an inhospitable brick wall for long enough to decide whether to continue looking for him or to go back and idle at the church, waiting for him to come back.

  In front of Aria, there was the Super Sun Market, or so it said in red 3D lettering affixed to a yellow stripe of paint above the door. It was a corner store on an unpeopled street. Despite the new year having come and gone, Happy New Year was still written across the front windows, surrounded by doodles of poorly drawn fireworks. Its door was propped open as if begging for customers to come in. For some reason unknown to her, instead of immediately walking back to the church, Aria decided to heed its invitation. As she stepped through the door, the smell of the place gave away that it was a store that belonged to immigrants. In addition to the usual things that can be found in any small general market – candy bars, medicines and overpriced refrigerated goods – there were items that Aria had never seen before. She paused in front of a stack of bags containing what looked like little orange beads. The packages said Masoor Dal, beneath the icon of a flaming genie’s bottle.

  Aria peered around hesitantly, trying to locate whoever was tending the store. There were a few closed doors that clearly led to other rooms or closets and a staircase that led to a second floor, which didn’t look like it was intended for customers. Aria took advantage of the absence immediately, attempting to trick any potential security cameras by pretending to look at one item with one hand, while using the other to steal things away in her jacket pocket. She had taken a candy bar, a packet of gum and a packet of peanuts before she heard the heavy, hurried footsteps of someone coming down the stairs.

  “Hello, welcome.” The man’s voice preceded his entry into the room. He nearly fell through the doorway to the stairs in his eagerness to greet her. For the briefest of seconds, Aria thought that she had been caught red handed. But instead, the man looked ashamed that he had not been there to tend to her needs when she had first entered the store. He had been raised with a strict sense of customer service, which he had clearly fallen short of by leaving the store untended for a few minutes. He must have mistakenly assumed that no one would show up in the time he had given himself to use the bathroom.

  The man who stood before her did not appear to be much older than herself. He was thin and tall. She could not tell if he was Middle Eastern or Indian. Bushy eyebrows framed his almond-shaped eyes. They were the color of melted chocolate. They peered down at her from an almost uncomfortably close distance. They were as trusting as they were curious. His face was almost childlike, only a hint of stubble gracing his chin and upper lip. Even though his long nose, prominent ears and thin upper lip made it so that he would not be what most people would consider handsome, there was something that Aria found stately and tempting about him.

  “Do you need help finding anything?” he asked.

  “Nah, I’m just looking around,” she said.

  “OK. I am Omkar,” he said, putting his hand against his chest. “Tell me if you need anything.” His accent stressed the syllables rhythmically, the words almost entirely spoken in the front of his mouth. She liked the way he put emphasis on the wrong syllables. It made him all the more endearing.

  He looked almost disappointed at her rejection. She couldn’t work out whether the let-down she felt was due to the fact that he had worked out that “just looking around” meant “probably not going to buy anything.” Or whether it was because he was lonely and desperate for the discourse implied in showing her around the store.

  Aria felt bad for having stolen anything from a man who was so obviously nice. But it was too late to change her mind now. She wandered through the aisles to deceive him into thinking she had looked around without finding anything interesting to buy. She was fully aware of Omkar restlessly waiting behind the checkout stand in case she was to indicate the need for his assistance. Aria was impressed that so much of his personal energy filled up the room. His essence was so thick it nearly sucked the breath out of the room. This was not the kind of place that a man with such obvious charisma would normally be found.

  After a few minutes, she made her way to the door and said “thanks” before stepping outside of it. She heard his voice yell out behind her, “Thank you, come back again.” Aria felt strange leaving, as if by stepping into the store, she had exited her own life and entered his. She hadn’t realized how her own story had faded into the background of the thick smell of Punjab spices when she was walking around the shop. Suddenly, the street outside felt colder and her loneliness more bleak. As she walked back to the church, she used the momentum of her body to emotionally push through and past the way the feel of him haunted her.

  Taylor arrived long before he had promised. The temp office had told him that they had no new listings and so he had turned back as quickly as he’d come. Aria felt like they were occupying two different worlds despite their physical proximity. Taylor, who didn’t mind the surface chitchat that took place between them on their way back to the car lot, was oblivious to the distance between them.

  When they arrived back at the lot, there was a commotion taking place. Aria and Taylor watched at a distance, sensing the tension in the air. Ciarra was screaming, “Get the fuck o
utta here you sick fuck,” as she threw a handful of dirt in the direction of a man who had parked his Chevy Beretta on the street just outside the lot. The man wore an ill-fitting flat-brimmed hat over a mullet. The top of his too-tight jeans was hidden beneath the bottom of a loose-fitting gym tank that he obviously wore to show off his muscles. He stalked toward his car in a rage. His cowboy boots kicked up dust under his angry footsteps.

  Ciarra continued to cry and scream at him and throw rocks long after he was out of range. When he drove away, she got into the purple van, slammed the door and sobbed against the steering wheel.

  Taylor and Aria walked with trepidation through the gate toward the white Land Cruiser. Luke called out to them before they reached it. Palin came bounding up toward them, her tail wagging and her ears pinned with elation, curling her body like a fish under their hands.

  Aria coddled Palin with endearments, ecstatic to see her again and feeling the heaven of being so obviously wanted by someone. They went over to sit with Luke in the doorway of his tent, leaving their legs just outside the door instead of taking their shoes off. Luke smelled of campfire smoke and sweat. He had obviously not taken a shower in a long time but was oblivious to his own stench. “Dude, that was off the hook,” he said referring to his recent travels. “There were so many people there, dude. There were bonfires every night and dancing and chanting and just magic people, you know?”

  Taylor took the bait and started asking him questions. Even though Aria was barely listening, Luke spilled the details of his journey that he so obviously wanted to tell the both of them as if they were listening equally.

  Aria let his voice fade into the background. She was petting Palin when a sound near Ciarra’s purple van caught her attention. It was Aston indignantly digging holes in the dirt with his stick like he so often did, there being nothing else to preoccupy himself with. Aria’s stomach sank when she saw him. She was close enough to see that the brow on the left side of his face bore a cleaned-up cut. A bruise that covered half his face had swollen his left eye shut.

  She knew that marks like that on a child so young could never have come from a school fight or an accidental fall. She knew that Aston had been beaten. She wondered if that was the reason Ciarra had ended up in the fight they had just walked in on.

  Aria was consumed by fury that she could do nothing about. She watched Aston sit alone in the dirt, his mother having closed the door on him, drowning in her own self-pity. It reminded her of her own childhood. The many times she watched her own mother cry her eyes out over the very person who was ruining their lives. Her body went numb with the memory of it.

  But she didn’t approach Aston because she knew the kind of mother that Ciarra was. She would abandon her son but consider any person who tried to take her place an enemy. And Aria couldn’t afford that. At least not right now. She was terrified of Ciarra. In fact, she hated her. But her safety depended upon Ciarra never knowing it.

  Aria knew that the man who had stormed off in a rage was Aston’s father. A deadbeat who showed up like a hero to take his son somewhere only rarely, whenever his band was in town. He lived in Las Vegas. One of two electric guitarists in a heavy metal band that got few gigs, he had a day job doing assembly at a manufacturing plant. It was not enough to pay child support. Or, more to the point, he said it wasn’t, and Ciarra was so afraid of him stealing Aston as retribution for taking him to court that she never forced the issue. But on more than one occasion, today being one of those occasions, Aston’s failure to please him during one of their outings had resulted in a beating under the disguise of discipline.

  Ciarra couldn’t find it in herself to be a mother. The agony of being left to fend for the both of them and the deprivation of having no support made it impossible for her to comfort Aston, who she knew was sitting on his own just outside the door. She knew it wasn’t fair to him. She also knew he hated her for it. But she couldn’t blame him because no matter what she said, she knew that she deserved it. She hated herself for it, too. There was nothing more painful than knowing she had to be a mother, but not feeling capable of being one. It was always the same. She hated herself for thinking that today would be any different. How many times had they been through this? He would stroll into their lives unpredictably, promising that this time would be different. But it never was. They would never be a family again, not that they ever were. But Ciarra couldn’t stop herself from hoping that, by some miracle, their dysfunctional liaisons would transform into the picture she had in her head of a white picket fence and meals together at the dinner table.

  Ciarra dreaded the aftermath. She knew that she couldn’t take Aston to school that week. She had made the excuse that he had fallen or gotten into some kind of accident one too many times. She also dreaded how her father would react. Mike would come back to find Aston bruised and battered, and he’d lecture her, like he always did, about her poor choices in life and how unfit she was to be a mother. She couldn’t face it. So instead, she decided to take Aston away.

  Aria watched Ciarra get out of the van and grab his arm to come with her as if he were in trouble. She watched her pick him up and walk straight out of the car lot and disappear down the adjacent street. Ciarra wouldn’t return for over a week, staying with one of the other girls who worked for the same pimp until she ran out of money and had to rely on Mike to watch Aston again. It had happened before. It would happen again.

  Aria felt the all-too-familiar seduction of her usual way of coping with emotions at times like this. She tried for a while to defy it until she couldn’t do so any longer. She needed the release. The release of pain.

  She told Taylor and Luke she was going to pee and went out into the woods to a place outside of their visual range. She found the sullied shards of a broken beer bottle and, buzzing with adrenaline, drew the edges that were sharpest across her arms. The electric sting that sliced through her forearms as she cut them again and again was more powerful than her overwhelming feelings. The glass, now coated with her blood, became slippery as she used it. She started crying. But the multitude of splits in her arms were still weeping more than she was. The sharp sting had climaxed to an overall burning sensation that induced her body to start shaking. She watched her body forming clots to stop the flow of blood. She could feel the disunity in part of her wanting to be punished and another part, whatever part was forming those clots, wanting her to thrive. She watched her blood fall into the dust and laminate the grass blades.

  Aria could see herself in the bruises that hugged Aston’s face. It was a tragedy to be hidden. A cycle of perpetual let-down that neither of them could find a way to escape. It was not even the pain of yesterday that mattered. It was that the pain was back again today.

  She wanted there to be a sunrise on the darkness of his life. But she couldn’t make one for him any more than she could make one for herself.

  CHAPTER 18

  Aria had developed a cold again. Her body ached and her throat was sore. The pressure in her head made her feel disconnected from the world and it seemed like her voice had risen up into her sinuses. Taylor had gone out looking for work and had promised to try to bring something back for her to eat.

  In predictable fashion, Ciarra had returned to the camp with Aston a few days earlier and Mike was watching him again. The bruises on his face had diminished and turned yellow-green. Aria didn’t want him to get sick, but she was playing with him anyway because of how sad she felt for him. Aston had spied a way out of his boredom when Aria had exited the Land Cruiser and sat down beside it, looking to get some sun. He had brought his little collection of Hot Wheels cars over to her and asked her if she wanted to play.

  “Not like that, like this,” he said, dissatisfied with the method she was using to scoot one of the cars across the dirt.

  “Vroom!” Aria sounded, trying to make an engine noise to bring life to their game of pretend. But Aston cut her attempt short.

  “They don’t make that sound. That’s the wrong kind of en
gine. They sound like this … zzzzzz.”

  He repeated the sound for a couple of minutes, taking breaths in between his buzzing. He drove the car up onto Aria’s legs and back down again into the dirt.

  It was sad to Aria how in his own world his play was, even when he had someone to play with. She began copying him. A bright smile lit up his face and he stared at Aria with a playful, innocent look, which was uncommon to him. She showed him how to drive the car up and over the actual cars in the lot, pretending that they were huge mountains to climb, until Ciarra showed up, having been gone all night, and called him over.

  Ciarra ushered him into the purple van and Aston continued the game that they had been playing across the inside of the car, while Ciarra climbed into the bed of the van and fell asleep. It was enough to break Aria’s heart.

  She sat down again beside the Land Cruiser. Luke waved at her on his way out of the lot with Palin. She smiled and waved back. Aria had come to find that just like Taylor, Luke had a tendency to imagine a rapport that didn’t actually exist between himself and others, including the people who were currently inhabiting the car lot with them. In fact, Aria and Taylor were now more generally accepted than he was.

  Despite Luke’s friendliness, Mike, Robert, Darren and Anthony barely tolerated him. To be voluntarily homeless was an insult to those who had no other choice. Aria read between the lines of their obvious annoyance when he was around. They saw him as both irresponsible and pathetic. Though tolerance was a long way away from friendship, it seemed to be enough for Luke to set up camp and imagine himself to be welcome there.

  Still, she couldn’t help but like him. Her original dislike of him had been replaced by fondness. She felt that fondness when she watched him and Palin leave the lot to walk together toward the heart of the city.