by Summer Wood
It was exhausting, being there. All of her senses were on high alert, navigating, watching for danger, noting changes, grasping at all of the faces, hundreds and hundreds of them. At Leavenworth the number 27 bus pulled up beside her and she climbed aboard. People pushed past her to board the bus; they parted on the sidewalks to flow around her. At Chino they were packed like rats in the hold of a ship, but they were familiar rats. The fear tightened her scalp and lifted the roots of her hair. The sounds assaulted her. Chino had been loud with ugly noise, but it was predictable, regular. Everyone here moved with a head start past her. The enormity of the city confronted her. She could enter that door and sit at a table and look at a menu and someone would bring her food from a country she’d never heard of before. She could enter that door and it would be cupcakes, thirty different kinds in a pert lineup. Everyone was going somewhere, meeting someone, checking their watches or daydreaming at a bus stop. Lisa Fay had no watch to consult. Her daydreams were memories, too full to escape from. They felt like floodwater she strained to hold back.
But it was clear, now: she had created an imaginary city in her head, a city composed of only those places that had meaning for her and none of the rest, and the city she crossed now was a brand-new city, shiny and charged and rife with land mines, memories that exploded in her as she turned a corner, blank spaces that overwhelmed her as she peered into neighborhoods she’d once known. She had to choose where to go. That side street? That alley? Toward the ocean, or away from it? To Belle’s flat? To the park that last day?
Not there. Lisa Fay gripped the rail and turned to look out the window of the bus. The woman it mirrored back was obvious, exposed, an open book anyone could read. Her hair capped her head in a short pale helmet that made the lines on her face stand out more starkly. They were deep lines, marks a clawed animal will leave in fear and frantic effort. The bus paused at a stop and Lisa Fay hurried down the steps. She held her bag close to her chest and tucked her chin to hide her face. The blocks disappeared underfoot. Through the Tenderloin—she looked up to see a pair of lovers, their torsos entwined, wave to her from a window high above the street. She looked around, and then she raised one arm in a cautious salute.
There was more than what had been lost. What she had gained, what the city had brought to her, was written on her body as well. She moved on with an animal frenzy now, barely registering street names, crossing against the light, her feet pounding the concrete as though only motion could keep her from blowing apart. Dear Son. Lisa Fay looked up, startled by the sound of her voice as she spoke aloud. This city brought me heartbreak, but it brought me you.
The day Wrecker had been born, the pains had caught her by surprise. She was homeless once more. The building’s owner had discovered the basement squat and booted them onto the street. Lisa Fay had shared the space with others—a blond bearded man, a girl who covered her mouth when she spoke, couples who came and went—and they scattered like raindrops when the man padlocked the door. Sadly she made her way off. Without her friends, life alone would be lonely. But then she felt the baby stir inside her and corrected her thoughts: life would never again be lonely. She had a little crocheted hat pushed down in the bottom of her bag for when her baby was born. She felt another kick, and then a flutter, and then lower down … she stumbled to her knees as the first contraction seized her like a field mouse caught in the tines of the thresher. Lisa Fay forced herself to standing. The sun fell bright over her like the raiments of a saint. She gripped the handles of her bag with all the ferociousness of fear and suddenly had to pee and just as suddenly felt the gush of warm water slide down the skin of her leg, bare beneath her skirt, and drench her rolled sock and pool in her canvas sneaker and turn the light gray of the sidewalk a deep, polished color and she stood there a minute, stunned.
She had planned to have her baby at home. That’s what she told them all, proudly: “I’ll be birthing him here,” there in the basement squat with the long-haired girl to boil water and, after, the blond bearded man to score joints and pass them around like cigars, slapping the others on the back. But now this. And another set of contractions like a wrecking ball knocking down a row of buildings, each one crashing into the next with the force of the one behind. Lisa Fay waited until the pain slid back and stood again to get her bearings. She was closer to General Hospital than to the jaunty newness of St. Luke’s. She plotted her route and started to walk.
It was early evening, then. It was late June. It was the middle of 1965, and all across the rest of the city the fog rolled in to temper the effects of the sun and chart a path for the night to follow. Downtown men in office buildings snapped shut their briefcases and loosened their ties, reached for their suitjackets. Jackhammers quieted, and the song of saws crying their way through pitchy lumber; men came down off their scaffolds, hung up their toolbelts, lowered the hoods of the cars they toiled on; they wiped the grease and numbers and latest marketing plan from their hands; they handed on the shift key at the great Cargill plant out at the piers; they quit the soft ruffle of paper money counted into the drawer; they stood with their faces averted from the wind to snap their Zippos and taste that first welcome Lucky of the evening. And after a bus ride, a loose lope up the hill, pit stop at the corner bar, after a quick wink at the bay and a wistful recollection of the sailboat they had hoped to have by now and a shrug to say so what, maybe later, they went in to their women.
Lisa Fay saw the welcome green of the Rolph Playground just ahead and knew she’d need to rest. It was still sunny in the Mission, but the children had all gone home and the courts weren’t livened yet by the slap of the ball and the flash of bright-clad bodies colliding midair. She had the square of grass to herself, and she settled down onto the gentle slope and waited.
When the contractions came they ran through her fast and hard and she felt whipped like a rag doll, shaken and limp. But in between? All of the city came to comfort Lisa Fay, a crazy quilt that covered her, an old dog that lay down beside her. She closed her eyes and there stood Arlyn and the other longshoremen, their muscles bulging, offloading the freighters that docked and dropped their cargo from the Orient, from Russia, enormous holds of coconut coming in from the Philippines. She saw ducks hanging in the windows of the Chinese butcher shops, whole pigs and beef sides slid from the back of trucks to the shoulders of workmen who carried them through rear doors and out of sight. She turned and moaned and caught the wail of an ambulance rushing through the streets and the crash of waves at the Lands End strand and the train whistle sliding into the station and the clang of the cable car atop the California hill and there, softly, high heels muted by stained carpet. Lisa Fay struggled to listen but the contractions took over and what she heard was her own whimper and cry and ragged breath—and the chatter, somewhere close by, of a squirrel—and then rousing, in there, not timid at all, those first awkward efforts at bellow.
Amazed, she lifted her head to look.
And then dark closed in.
The sun had climbed as high as it could and had begun to roll toward the Pacific. Lisa Fay had missed the afternoon bus to Garberville. She was huddled in the corner of a bench facing a vast expanse of green. She had brought herself back to the park, as though there were no other place in this city her legs could think to deliver her. She had no place to go but the address of a shelter folded into her wallet. Nothing to do but start over.
Lisa Fay took a long, slow look around.
Or not.
She had not opened her mouth to speak, but the words echoed as loudly in her head as if she had.
Drugs smuggled in. A homemade shank. There were women in Chino who had chosen that road. They threw themselves under the wheels of whatever train would bury them fastest. The sad girl had cried herself close to death and finished the job with a bed sheet tied over the rail. And Lisa Fay had wanted desperately to follow her, to escape on her heels and flee that place. Alone in her cell, ten years into her term, she had made up her mind. She had secured the means
. And it was almost more than she could do, to pry open her own fingers and drop those small red pills into the swirl of the sink.
One by one.
Until they were all gone.
Dear Son, she thought. For you I stayed.
Throughout the city there were weathered people worse off than she was—missing teeth, missing that part of the brain that defends against fracture and theft. In spite of everything she had dragged herself along. She had protected her right to exist.
I wanted to go to sleep. I wanted it strongly. I’d been kept awake for so long my brain wouldn’t think.
For you, she thought. Then, because of you.
That wasn’t quite right.
Thanks to you.
If she’d eaten those pills they would surely have killed her.
Son.
Thank you.
A raven with a velvet ruff speechified from its perch on a nearby trashcan. Across the street, a cat streaked along the top of a garden wall and disappeared into an alley. She was free. She had imagined this day for a long time. In her fantasy she had sent a letter and they had said: Come. You must come. We welcome you. Your son is eager to know you. She would take the bus as far as it would go, find someone to drive her. She would arrive on their doorstep.
The raven cawed and turned his shiny eyes on her.
They could as easily say: You have no place here.
They could say: Do not set foot near him.
They would not recognize her. They would have no reason to believe her when she told them Wrecker was her son.
He would have no reason—
Forfeited. Abandoned. Betrayed. She leveled the charges against herself.
A bitter taste on her tongue.
She hadn’t mailed the letter to Meg. Why would she?
Lisa Fay sat for a long time while the sun sank lower and the shadows lengthened. Her stomach was a tight fist of pain. She needed to feed herself, but the thought of eating anything made the pain worse. The thought of rising, of walking to a store or a café to purchase food—that seemed impossible. There was still the muffin stub wrapped in her bag. She reached for it and pulled it out.
A skinny dog peered warily at her from behind a shrub. She hadn’t noticed him before, and she was startled at first to see him so close. But there was nothing aggressive in his manner. He had a sharp snout and black liquid eyes and medium-length hair that switched abruptly from brown to a dirty white in a line down the middle of his face, and his ribs heaved—all of them visible—as he watched her nibble at the muffin.
Lisa Fay ate what she could and then carefully wrapped the paper around the remainder to save for later.
He was the first dog she’d been close to in fifteen years.
He blinked and looked away and she studied his profile. His chin was slightly lifted and the skin beneath it made a smooth line until it ruffled with longer hair at his neck. His chest was narrow but proportionate and he sat on his haunches nobly, like a statue. Then he yawned and rolled his weight backward as his hind leg lifted and he scratched furiously at the base of his right ear.
Lisa Fay’s mouth lifted in a tentative grin.
The dog caught that. He must have. Because he trained his liquid gaze on her and opened his mouth and gave a short, soft pant that resembled a smile before he looked away again.
Lisa Fay felt it like a knife to her heart. And in return, she opened the muffin shroud and carefully left the food on the bench for him as she stood to walk away.
“Nice of you,” a voice said. “But he probably won’t eat it. Doesn’t eat much.”
Lisa Fay’s gaze jerked back to the dog. She was startled to see a human shape behind him, a young man lying flat on the ground. He propped himself up on one elbow to face her and flung the other arm about the dog’s shoulders.
“I’ve tried to fatten him up, but he likes what he likes. He’s healthy, I guess.”
Go, Lisa Fay’s inner voices told her. Go now. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t ask for trouble.
“What does he like?” Her voice had a faint quaver.
The young man sat up. He was as slender as the dog and he was dressed in a white cotton tunic and white pants. His dark hair was loose and bushy and he wore a scraggly dark beard that covered haphazard patches of his face. He wasn’t old enough to grow a man’s beard. He was a boy approaching manhood, and his eyes, dark and liquid like his dog’s, looked trustworthy to her.
“Weird stuff. Bell peppers. Boiled potatoes.” He scratched the dog’s neck and gazed at him. “My parents feed him dog food, but he doesn’t like it. So I try to sneak away sometimes and take him out for a run.” He reached into his pocket and offered the dog a carrot chunk. He took it daintily and then lay down and held it between his paws and licked it. She heard the crunch as he broke off smaller chunks and swallowed.
The dog was Jasper. The boy was Garth. The dog still lived with the parents, where the boy had lived until he’d left home the year before. He’d meant to see the world but had only gotten as far as Oakland. There was an ashram there, and he found he liked meditating. He could see the world later.
“They don’t take dogs?”
“He meditates,” Garth said, and smiled, “but not in a conventional way.”
“I just got out of prison, Garth.”
It is never quiet in the city. So the car horns went on honking and the buses whooshed by on the street and over on the trashcan the raven gave a short, bored caw.
The boy’s eyes never stopped being trustworthy. He said, “That might account for the clothes.”
Lisa Fay glanced down.
“Not that they aren’t becoming,” he said, blushing slightly, “but you don’t look all that comfortable in them.”
She looked at him, surprised.
He put his hands to the sides of his head. “I can’t believe I said that.” He stood up. He was very tall. “I have to take Jasper back.”
“You take care, Garth.”
The dog and the boy looked at her intently. Garth hesitated. “After that, I’m going back to the ashram. You could come.” He watched her face. “It’s open to everybody. There’s a women’s dorm. You could spend the night there, if you want.” When she said nothing, he reached down and patted the dog. “I’ll take him home. Maybe you’ll be here when I come back. Maybe not.” He shrugged, and grinned. “The nature of impermanence, and all.”
She didn’t expect him to return. When he did, he carried a plate covered in aluminum foil. It was a full dinner, and still hot. She ate it slowly and carefully. It was the first home-cooked meal she’d had in a very long time. He waited for her to finish, and then they stood and walked down Sixteenth Street and took the subway to cross the bay to Oakland.
Dear Son, she thought. Just one night.
The next night arrived.
Just one more.
And then another. And another. And another after that.
Just until she got onto her feet.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Wrecker planted his feet in the center of the small clearing and surveyed his domain.
He was pushing eighteen. Six feet tall, solid and unstoppable, he had a tender heart, muscles on him like a Russian bodybuilder, a crown of thick blond hair, and a diploma from the home-school company so fresh the ink had barely dried. Deedee’d been jonesing for that. Payback for him was this prime little patch of land upslope and out of sight. Dig a foundation, lay up some log walls—he was building himself a house, working so far off a flat spot and a vision, trying to make up for his late start.
Wrecker glanced around and took stock of what he had. There was so much new growth it was hard to tell he’d scraped this little stretch of level ground down to dirt the autumn before. Gorse and cheat grass, yellow broom and blooming lupine, everything gone rampant, growing too fast for even the deer and the rabbits to get a handle on. Just east of him the steep side of a hill had peeled off and slid to its base in the worst of the rains. This whole place was in a hurry
, same as him. He breathed in deep, caught hints of sea salt and pine sap and something sweet. All he had to do was hike a little higher up the hill, ease himself out on the cantilevered trunk of the old maple, and peer through its branches to catch a glimpse of the ocean. There’d been some wild surf out there this winter; it beat the crap out of that kid who came up from the city to try to ride it at Big Flat. Fucking crazy. Crazy like insane. Though he’d thought about it, himself. Was tempted by it. Those monster waves. He hated the thought of passing up a chance that might not come around again for a while.
Wrecker crossed to the northwest corner of the plot. He had a picture window sitting in Len’s lumber shed that would go here. It wouldn’t be hard to score some smaller windows for the rest of the views. He had laid things out so he could keep an eye on the farmhouse and the barn down below, and there was Ruthie trudging up the hill right now, the last of Sitka’s pups following stiffly behind. Ruth was clutching something to her that Wrecker guessed was food. His mouth watered. There was never a time that he was not hungry. But the hill was steep and Ruth and the pup were old and they’d be wheezing already. Wrecker waved his arm in a wide arc. “I’ll come down,” he shouted, and he closed the distance between them like a bull elk on his way to water.
“Made you something,” Ruth said. She had to sit down. Asthma, she told them. Emphysema, more likely, Melody muttered. All those damn cigarettes. Should have cut her off, and Willow had lifted an eyebrow and said, How, exactly? and Wrecker had hid a grin. They were a stubborn bunch. Not that he was any more tractable. Willow had taught him that word. “Tuna fish sandwiches.”
Wrecker flopped beside her and took what she handed him. She idly scratched the pup behind the ear. “You’re a beautiful boy,” she crooned.