Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  Eventually, Pedro and Consuelo got up to leave. Aria didn’t know where they were headed to, maybe back to the Home Depot parking lot to see if they had missed their chance to land a job or not. Pedro paused after hugging Lolita, but before walking out of the door, he called out, “Hey Aria, you be careful eh?” as familiarly as if she were his sister.

  “Thank you, guys,” Aria called back at him, extending her hand toward him in thanks through the air. Consuelo tipped the brim of his baseball hat and the two of them ducked out the door.

  Lolita was uneasy. She looked over at Aria as if trying to decide what to do with her. The look made Aria feel like she had worn out her welcome. Not wanting to burden her any further, Aria took the lollipop that Lolita had also given her from the table and placed it in her coat pocket. She got up and asked, “Should I put these anywhere?” referring to the mess she had made at the table.

  “No, mija, it’s OK. It’s OK, I’ll take care of it,” Lolita said, coming over to usher away the mess herself.

  “Thank you, really, thank you so much for everything,” Aria said, not knowing how to repay the generosity that Lolita had shown her.

  “Just be safe and don’t get yourself into any more trouble.”

  Aria shrugged and nodded her head.

  “Let the Virgen María guide over you,” Lolita said, patting Aria on the sleeve of her coat.

  Aria walked through the aisles to the door of the store. “Thank you again,” she said, extending one last appreciative look in Lolita’s direction.

  She decided to walk a different way back toward the car lot, having to backtrack a few times because the route was unfamiliar. The idea of waiting to see Omkar in the boredom of the empty car lot was usually tedious, but after the intensity of the day so far, it felt soothing. She pulled out the Rebanaditas lollipop from her pocket and tore off the yellow wrapper. Aria was confounded to see that the lollipop was covered in a dust that looked like chili powder. She didn’t know whether to expect it to be sweet or savory. She stuck out the tip of her tongue to find out. It was salty. She could not find any sweetness beyond the taste of salt and the sting of the hot pepper. “How strange,” she thought to herself. But she put it in her mouth anyway. Overwhelmed by the off-putting taste of pure hot chili powder, she held it in her mouth for a few seconds before the faint flavor of watermelon candy peeked through. She smiled to herself because the experience was symbolic of the day so far, which had started off unsavory and turned out sweet.

  Up until that day, Aria had been afraid of Mexican men. She had thought them to be venal and barbaric. Never did she imagine that two of them would be the preventers instead of the perpetrators of a crime against her. It felt strange to know nothing about them aside from their names, even stranger to ponder the webbing of life. It never ceased to amaze Aria to imagine people’s separate lives and to see how the threads of their life paths were suddenly woven together in one place for one singular experience.

  Perhaps those life paths would stay woven for a while, like hers and Taylor’s had. Or perhaps they would never cross one another’s paths again. Either way, Aria could feel some cosmic orchestration at work in the world at times like this.

  CHAPTER 25

  A couple of hours had come and gone since Aria returned to the car lot. The afternoon sun was high and harsh. Only Robert and Anthony were milling around their camps.

  Aria was writing in her journal in the shade offered by the inside of the Land Cruiser when a commotion outside stole away her attention. It was Ciarra returning to the lot with Aston in tow. But she wasn’t alone; she was followed by a black man that Aria didn’t recognize. The man was tall. His shoulders were slightly hunched around a concave chest. The bones of his face were chiseled. A stifled mustache sat atop his thick lips. Even from where Aria was watching, the large diamond earrings that pierced both of his ears were clearly visible. His perfectly trimmed hair looked like a thick mat of black moss. He was wearing a neon lime sport jumpsuit and impractical black high-top Jimmy Choo sneakers that were an obvious status-driven fashion statement.

  Aria cracked the cruiser door open quietly so she could try to hear what they were saying. She could just make out a word here and there, enough to gather that the man was Ciarra’s pimp.

  Ciarra had met the man when Aston was still a baby. After Aston’s father had abandoned them for his flop of a music career, Ciarra had been suffocating under the financial and emotional weight of having become a single mother at 19. On one occasion, a friend offered to watch Aston for her so she could release all the pressure for a night. She could be irresponsible and be her own age again. So she went to a nightclub with a friend. It was there that she met DeShawn. He spent the night buying her drinks and dancing and exploiting her low self-esteem. They slept together for a week. During that week, DeShawn paid her bills and took her shopping. He promised to take care of her and said she would never be alone again. Though it was just his process of recruiting hoes, Ciarra imagined it to be the start of a relationship. She believed herself to be in love. During that week, he also introduced her to blow. The first time she snorted the powder with him off of the kitchen table, it was during Aston’s naptime. In the beginning, she complied in order to endear herself to DeShawn. But before long, she was addicted. Now, it was just one more hold that he had over her.

  The first day that DeShawn sold her for sex to another man for money, he convinced her that because she was having sex already, there could be no easier and better way to become financially successful than to make money doing what she was already doing for free. Slowly DeShawn changed the game. Ciarra had slipped into the trap and he began to season her. Cocaine wasn’t the only addiction that had a hold over her. His intermittent reinforcement did too. Compliments were replaced by insults. Now he was nice to her only if she did exactly what he wanted. He used violence to threaten her when she wouldn’t comply. He collected whatever money he could from what she made, to deprive her of it. He deprived her to create dependency and used the giving or withholding of her material needs to motivate or to punish her. Before she even knew what happened, she had slipped under the tyranny of rules, quotas and performance incentives. Now, if she wanted the bills to be paid or wanted to eat or if Aston needed anything, she would have to go out and make him more money.

  When he was working, DeShawn went by the name of Ghostbuster. But he required his women to call him Daddy. It was a tradition in the community he grew up in, which was saturated with prostitutes, including his mom and sister. Becoming a pimp was simply a normal and achievable way of making money. It was a road to glitz and glamor as opposed to the squalor of welfare.

  DeShawn preferred to recruit and manage white girls because he found them easier to manage. They could blend into a variety of environments, from rich to poor. And the younger they were, the easier they were to manipulate, the harder they worked to earn their money and the easier they were to sell.

  But now Ciarra had become a liability. In the years since he recruited her, he had rethought his stance on using drugs as a way to keep his dames dependent. His women who were addicted were unreliable and a danger to themselves. He worried that it could threaten earnings if a woman was willing to charge a lower rate behind his back in exchange for narcotics. It was this unreliability that had led him to the car lot, looking for Ciarra.

  “Look at this here. You’s supposed to be with a date.” DeShawn tried to impede her path toward the purple van. His “bottom girl” (the most experienced woman in his lot, who had been given the job of training new girls, keeping the peace and monitoring what he could not) had called DeShawn to report Ciarra’s recent lax behavior.

  “I just need to sleep. I’m sick, just let me sleep it off and I’ll go out tomorrow, I promise,” Ciarra said, trying to pull Aston past him. “Plus, I got no one to watch him right now. My dad’s supposed to be here, but he isn’t.” She kept her eyes averted just like he expected, but waited for him to grant her permission.

  �
��You know what I’m gon’ have to do? I’m gon’ trade you down,” DeShawn said bluntly. “I can’t have no bitches actin’ this unprofessional. Fuck you. I don’t need you, don’t no one need a low bitch like you.” He expected his threat to trade her to another pimp to motivate her to comply. But instead she managed to get by him.

  He yelled out after her. “You know dat money you need for the abortion? You ain’t gon’ get it now. Not from me and not from nobody. I’m gonna give it to another girl in the stable. I’m gonna give it to Carley. You out on your own now, you a renegade … You out of pocket. Watch and see how far ya get wit’out me! You wanna be a lot lizard or you gonna get the fuck back out on the track?”

  DeShawn was the only person Ciarra had told that she was pregnant. Though DeShawn made sure his “bottom” took all his girls to a clinic to get on birth control pills, he couldn’t be there to make sure each one of them remembered to take them every day. Even though he expected the men hiring his women to use a condom, he couldn’t take any chances. Sometimes, due to the irregular hours she worked, Ciarra had taken the pills randomly. With a few of her johns, she had allowed them to pay her more to fuck her without a condom.

  It was a decision that had come back to haunt her. She was just over two months’ pregnant, a reality that threatened her livelihood. Out of the money Ciarra made, DeShawn had allowed her a smaller share, with the understanding that he was saving up that money until she had earned enough for the bottom to take her to an abortion clinic and deal with her “little problem.” It was just another one of the little problems Ciarra had tried to forget by freebasing or shooting cocaine.

  Ciarra had shot cocaine several times that day before picking Aston up from school. All day, as always, she had been trying to chase the feeling she’d got from the first injection. Not able to get it from a reputable source, she had bought it from a stranger out of desperation and had only realized, when stirring it with water didn’t make it go clear, that it was cut with something else. She shot it anyway.

  Once, Ciarra had been afraid of needles. The first time she shot up instead of smoked it, she had to have someone else do it for her while she looked away. Now she was addicted to watching the blood draw back in the needle. It was the rush of knowing that once she saw it, she was guaranteed to get that amazing feeling that would wash every last scrap of her pain away.

  The second it hit her bloodstream, the taste of ether took over her mouth. The sound in her ears changed to a ringing and throbbing. Her heart started pounding like a piston, pumping a wave of energy through her being. For once, she felt like she could do anything and go anywhere. She felt like she had been lifted out of the prison of life and instead was on top of the world. But the sound in her ears scared her. She had been told that the sound in her ears was what you heard right before you were about to OD. Being unfamiliar with the blow she had procured, she had overestimated her tolerance. Ciarra was afraid that if she sat down, she would die, so she didn’t. She spent hours running around and doing things until she was sure the risk had passed. But now, in the low of the comedown, those hours had caught up to her and she felt even worse than usual.

  Aria watched Ciarra stumble toward the van as if fighting a vapor of exhaustion trying to suck the life from her veins. It was obvious that she was high. The shackles of the futility in her life, which the cocaine had freed her from, had been put back on and were heavier. Ciarra didn’t care to live anymore. She couldn’t care about anything. She felt like giving up. All she could do in a state like this was sleep.

  DeShawn jogged to catch up to Ciarra, slamming the driver’s side door that she had just opened, preventing her from getting inside it. She spun around to face him with her back against the side of the car. “You get the fuck back on the track,” he yelled, pointing a finger so close to her face it grazed her nose.

  In an attempt to defend her, Aston tried to get between their legs and push DeShawn away from her. “Don’t hurt my mommy!” he yelled. DeShawn immediately punched the side of Aston’s head, knocking him to the ground.

  Aria watched him turn his attention back to Ciarra, preventing her from getting between himself and Aston. The boy struggled to get back up off of the ground. When he did, again he tried to get back in between them. DeShawn yelled something Aria couldn’t hear at Aston and proceeded to beat him.

  “No, stop it! Oh my God, stop it! OK, I’ll go back out. Oh my God, stop!” Ciarra screamed at the top of her lungs, too afraid of him to take a step forward to physically stop him.

  DeShawn backed off of Aston, who was lying motionless in the dust. By this point both Anthony and Robert were watching the scene from within their tents, like frightened rabbits peeking out at a predator from their burrows.

  Ciarra ran up to DeShawn, desperate to make amends. She looked for him to cosset her. Her body language indicated compliance. “OK, where’s the date? I’ll go right now. Just as soon as I get him in the car,” she said.

  “A’ight. That’s my girl. You go out to the cathouse now by the kiddy stroll. You see what you can pick up. But that little trick you pulled is gonna cost ya. I ain’t losin’ no revenue.”

  Ciarra nodded in agreement, knowing she would have to work to pay off the money he would have made if she had shown up to whatever “date” she had been expected to service.

  Satisfied, he put his arm around her neck and planted a kiss on her forehead. Aria watched him walk over and kneel down next to Aston, who was dazed to the point of not being able to get up. DeShawn pulled Aston to his feet and brushed the dust off of his pants and shirt, stabilizing the boy’s drunken sway, which had been initiated by his dizziness. “You love your momma, don’tcha? Yeah, you’re a good boy, ain’tcha. But your momma gotta work. If you let her work, one day I might teach ya to be like me. You’d like that, wouldn’t ya? You’ll be good with the ladies, yeah, I can tell you gonna be good with the ladies.”

  He handed Aston’s hand over to Ciarra, who pulled the boy tight against her legs. “I’ll take you back out on the track,” he said as a final order, not bothering to wait for a reply. Mother and son stood motionless against the van, watching DeShawn walk back toward his customized black Lincoln Navigator.

  Ciarra got them both in the car and rushed, despite her stupor, to clean the blood off of Aston’s face with a wet wipe. Though she heard nothing, Aria could see him crying through the windshield as she did it. Then Ciarra stripped down to her push-up bra in the front seat, changing her clothes as fast as she could to put on something sexier. When she got out of the van, she grabbed Aston and put him on her hip. The heels she was wearing wobbled when she walked across the uneven ground. Aria watched them get into the back of DeShawn’s car and disappear behind the tinted windows.

  Ciarra hated herself for the wounds that yet again distorted Aston’s face. But her guilt wouldn’t allow her to extend herself so far as to coddle him. Instead she stared out the window at the city passing by. The humbling darkness of her existence, which was hardly an existence, tumbled her with its claws. The company she kept had proven itself to be a synagogue of hell. She would take to her grave the way she judged herself for it, the way she blamed herself for having been so stupid and desperate to have fallen for it all in the first place. But she was stuck now. As far as she could tell, she had not only sold her body to meet their basic needs, she had sold her soul, too. Now her life was a blasphemy against those who had wished for her to do well. And now, the only thing strong enough to drown the shame she felt was cocaine.

  One of the other girls at the cathouse would watch Aston while Ciarra worked in another room. She hated when circumstances forced her to do that. She could never relax when he was out of her sight at a place where the dangers of the game were always lurking.

  Aria couldn’t take it anymore. No one knew better than she did that the system was broken. She wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But a broken system seemed better than the neglect and violence of the hands currently in charge of raising Aston. She found he
rself between a rock and a hard place, but had to make a decision.

  She had been in the system herself long enough to know the protocol. The fire of being fed up with watching Aston being bruised and battered and left alone, on top of the fury of seeing Ciarra high, like her own mother had been so many times, launched Aria into motion. She crossed the city blocks swiftly, to the first place she knew of with a pay phone. It took her a few minutes to find enough willing people to give her the spare change to make a call.

  “Hi, I’m calling to make a report,” she said, waiting for the woman on the other end to indicate she was ready to take notes. “It’s a little boy, about five years old. His mother is an addict. She’s keeping him in an abandoned parking lot. He gets beaten pretty regularly and also left by himself when she goes out to prostitute. I don’t know if he’s being fed. He got beaten up pretty bad today and I think someone should go get him.”

  Hearing her own voice, Aria could hardly believe what she was doing. Some part inside her was bellowing that she was making a serious mistake. But the part of her that was louder was the part that had dialed the number to the Department of Children and Family Services. Though the woman on the phone pressured Aria to reveal her identity, Aria refused and insisted on reporting anonymously. She gave her Ciarra’s and Aston’s names and explained their whereabouts, only hanging up once she was certain that someone could find them.

  On top of the guilt that Aria felt for reporting them, she felt guilty that she had revealed the whereabouts of the car lot. Though fairly certain that the police would escort a social worker there – someone who would only be concerned with the welfare of the child – she had no way of knowing if she had just put herself and everyone else there out of the closest place any of them had to a home. But Aston was a child. It was a risk she had to take. Though Aria already knew all too well the agony that Aston was about to face, she knew she could not live with herself for standing by and watching.