by Joshua Furst
Through a slit in the cardboard, she spied on the alley outside. A chain-link fence was secured to a concrete barrier, about two feet high, and beyond that was a wide expanse of blacktop. A few scattered poles arched up in the distance, each ending in a bulb projecting a cone of light, each light illuminating nothing; they reminded her of those deep-sea creatures that dangled flashlights in front of their faces as they swam. Everything alive had been bulldozed away, and off in the distance, a swath of sky—not all of it, just one large localized section—radiated with a weathered cast of red; this was the Twin Cities, reflected in the clouds. A desolate, spooky view, but it thrilled her somehow.
When morning came, she tumbled out of her fort into the bleached daylight. She pulled her socks back on—they were stiff and scratchy now—and positioned the bills in the other ankle. Then she laced up her boots and continued to dig toward the city center. The yards got smaller. The grass faded to a pale yellow-brown and leafy creepers strangled rotting fences and rusted, sinking swing sets. Ranch homes and split-levels were replaced by duplexes with shingled siding, and eventually these disappeared as well. Housing complexes eight, twelve stories high with heavy metal doors and doomed atmospheres clustered together under names like Grover Cleveland and Chester Arthur, and Cheryl stopped seeing white people on sidewalks.
I spent the day sitting in her bedroom. Every once in a while— okay, more than that, every ten, fifteen minutes—I tried calling her. I left messages.
She'd haphazardly mounted posters of rock bands across the walls of the room. The musicians didn't look much different from those I had worshipped when I was around her age. They had the same anti-hairstyles, the same rotting clothes, but hers all looked haggard in a calculated way. The lifestyle they were peddling had been codified years before they were born; it stood for things our culture no longer believed in.
I couldn't stop calling her. It was a compulsion. I wished she had at least let me pack a lunch.
Finally, around three that afternoon, she returned my calls.
“Mom?”
“Cheryl!”
“Quit calling me!”
“I—”
“Leave me alone!”
She hung up on me.
I've never been good at recognizing the boundaries between myself and the people I love. My body responds viscerally to her emotions. My cells break apart. I turn into something liquid and throbbing. For the rest of the day, though, I stayed away from the phone. We had other ways of keeping in touch.
Robert came home late like he had the day before. He found me on Cheryl's bed, wide awake, Gremlin curled in behind my knees. Inspecting the room with deliberate, evidence-collecting eyes, he said, “Where is she?”
Though I knew the answer I refused to speak.
Since calling me, she'd traced the northwestern slums and followed Hennepin south, hoping to avoid the dangers of downtown. She was lodged now on a concrete ledge under Highway 52, burrowed in, cold, wishing she'd brought along a coat or cadged a bottle of something or other from the liquor cabinet Robert and I never opened. Her roof shook with each car that passed overhead and below her on Highway 12 semis rolled past like searchlights.
“She didn't go to Jessie whatever's house last night, did she?” Robert said.
He'd pulled the stiff kitchen chair Cheryl used at her desk into the center of the room and straddled it, leaning over it, pressing toward me. I was looking past him, watching the shadows under that highway.
“Where is she?”
Sometime earlier, Cheryl had grabbed a paper clip out of a gutter. She'd toyed with it all afternoon, bending it back and forth, wrapping it around her fingers, twisting it into the shapes of barking dogs. Since installing herself on the ledge in the underpass, she'd been grinding one end of it against the concrete, not really thinking about what she was doing, just doing something for something to do.
“Julia, I need you to communicate with me.” Suddenly, Robert was standing. “Answer my question.” He whipped the chair out from under himself and slammed it against the floor. “Now!”
Gremlin leapt from the bed and dashed out of the room.
Recoiling, clutching a pillow to my chest, I watched Cheryl scrape her name in the concrete, adding it to the names already there— Sal P. and Kilroy and Fuckhead and Tralala and so many others too worn away to read. Some were ornate, scrawled in marker-paint, and some had been gouged out with bonded-steel blades. Some were lightly etched surface scratches. Cheryl carved hers with care in capital letters; she went over them time and time and time again, thickening the lines, deepening the grooves, smoothing out the flaws, wearing her paper clip to a fine sharp point.
Wondering what Robert and I were up to, she tested it on her fingertip. She hoped, in a vague way, that we were crying, finally thinking about her for a change—not that she wanted us to search for her. Leaving hadn't been a cry for attention or any of that sappy TV movie shit. It was more of a mandate, a decree: I'm Mine! Now, for the first time since she'd left, she felt lonely. Shivering under a bridge had turned out to be much less romantic than she'd been prepared for. She longed for a group to attach herself to, a scene that would think for her and keep her warm.
Robert stomped off, down the hall, to the kitchen, slamming cupboard doors like a petulant child. When I heard him pound into the garage and start his car, I scrambled after him, but I was too late. He roared away before I could intercept him.
Cheryl flicked the paper clip across her forearm, quick, thoughtless slashes, then, because it was interesting the way her skin turned white, more-considered cuts. She carved a straight line, then went over it again. And again. And again, until she drew blood. She examined the wound. It hurt less than her blister, which had been stinging since she'd weakened and popped it that afternoon. An SUV sped past below her on the highway, and she realized how thin the ledge really was. What would happen if she rolled off while she slept? She might break a leg, two. Then she'd be stuck there in the middle of the road. A semi would hit her. She'd be pulverized. She didn't particularly want to die, but thinking this way gave her a weird feeling of satisfaction. Back at her arm, she started flicking again, moving the paper clip up and down this time instead of back and forth. She began a third line, which, along with the others, created the letter F. Then she carved a V, and next to this, she made what looked like a diamond, except that the diagonals on the right side didn't quite intersect. She'd discovered that her skin caught under the point of her paper clip, making it impossible for her to draw curves, so the diamond was a C and the V was a U. She added a K and she followed this up with a Y and an O and a final second U.
I wondered why she was so hell-bent on hurting me.
Three hours later, when Robert got home, I asked him what he'd discovered.
“What do you think?” he said, plopping down next to me on the front stoop—I had to scoot over so we wouldn't touch. He pushed at his eyes like there was smoke in them. “Jesus, I'm exhausted.”
“Where'd you go?”
“Just … around. I got on 698 for a while, but then … So I went to the station and filed a missing persons report.”
“I wish you hadn't done that. She's gonna come back.”
“That's what the guy said, the officer. I gave him her school picture from my wallet. He's gonna stop by the house tomor—”
I suddenly snapped at him. “No, Robert, no, I won't. I'm not going to talk to any police.”
For a moment, he stared at me in frustration. Then he relented. “I'm taking the day off. It's just pro forma anyway. He made it pretty clear, they never find these kids. I'll keep him away from you. Okay?” I knew what I was doing to him wasn't fair, but I had to protect my daughter. “Okay?” he said again. He took my hand and squeezed it to reinforce his words.
I nodded sheepishly.
“You know,” I said, “she called me this afternoon.”
He shook his head like he didn't want to hear. “This is just hopeless.” Then he looked at me.
“And?”
“And she didn't really say much of anything.”
“She must have said something.”
“When she's figured things out—”
“What things?” His voice cracked. “What happened between you two?” With a jerk of his body, he propelled himself to a standing position and paced out toward the Japanese maple. He tapped his lip in time to his thoughts, a rapid nervous drumming. By the time he turned back to me, he was calm enough to hold his voice steady. “What the hell's wrong with you, Julia?” he said. Then he raced toward the stoop in a panic and wrapped his arms around me. “No. I'm sorry. Julia, I'm sorry. I know what's wrong, I know.” His chest quaked for a moment before the sobs came. “It just … there's …” He pressed his forehead to mine and let me go, walking out blearily into the street.
“She knows where we live,” I called. “You'll see. She'll come back.”
But if she did, it wouldn't be soon. Tomorrow would take her into the city, where it was harder to stay hidden but easier to disappear.
ROBERT TOOK LONG DETOURS to and from work, peering into ditches and shadowy doorways, trolling through neighborhoods that made him nervous, searching in all the wrong places for her. I didn't tell him he should try Dinkytown, and the thought never occurred to him on his own.
That's where she was, though. The people there fascinated her. This was, she knew, where the radical fringe of our culture hung out—the politically minded, the social and sexual deviants, the art students and the wannabe rock stars, all those people who'd broken their minds open and somehow freed themselves from the machine.
She sat on a ratty sofa at a coffee shop and watched the crowd. One guy was barefoot, dressed like a Buddhist monk, with a long braided beard that he flipped over his shoulder like a scarf and milky blue eyes containing a hard intensity. Another guy had a tattooed head and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes as he hunkered over his MacBook. A girl not much older than Cheryl, with hair done up in childish pigtails, handed her a flyer for a show at the Boom Boom Tick Club. “You should check it out,” she said. “They're the best band in town. I know. I'm the bassist. Just looking at you, I can tell you'll like it.” These people were intimidating. She wanted what they had, even if she wasn't quite sure what that was.
Propped against the whitewashed wall outside Ron's Tiny Diner, she saw a forlorn-looking boy with a pale moon-shaped face. Next to him was a sign: SPARE CHANGE—HELP ME FEED MY DOG. A scrawny puppy hunkered between his raised knees; it couldn't have been more than a few months old and it kept trying to get at the single crumpled bill in the shoebox at the boy's feet.
Something about this boy and his dog, maybe it was the dog itself, pulled Cheryl in. She watched him for a while from across the street, wishing she had the courage to speak to him, working her way closer a few steps at a time until, before she was ready, she was standing right next to him.
The greeting she gave the boy was hardly a whisper. He glanced up sleepily, then went back to doing nothing.
The puppy, though, perked its ears as she knelt next to it. A mutt with coarse mottled fur and a thin foxlike nose, its eyes had that sparkle, and when she sadly cooed, “Hey, puppy, hey-ya, pooch,” it pounded its tail on the sidewalk and inched toward her. When it rolled over and splayed its legs, she scratched its emaciated tummy. She cupped her hands around its ears and shook its head back and forth. The gunk in its eyes, thick and crusty with deep canals running through it, looked like something you'd see on a barnyard animal.
“Is he sick?” Cheryl asked.
The boy mumbled something she couldn't catch.
“What?”
“She's a she. She's a fucking girl.” Talking to Cheryl seemed to piss the boy off, and she nearly scurried away, mortified, but a slow second later he tipped over and laid himself down on the sidewalk, scratching the dog behind the ear. “Aren'tcha, pup?” he said. “You're my little bitch.” The puppy licked his face. “Fuck yeah, you are.”
“What's her name?”
“Dog.” He broke out a sheepish smile, which faded immediately back into blankness.
“How old is she?”
The boy shrugged. “I found her.”
His name was Jarod and he didn't talk much, but he didn't seem to mind Cheryl hanging around, either. They sat there, watching the people with someplace to go walk past. Sometimes these people dropped a few coins in the box, and though Jarod never broke his trance, Cheryl couldn't help nodding up at them to mouth a quiet thanks. She was surprised at how easily this game was played; even if most people averted their gaze and shook their heads in disgust, the dog was a helpful prop and when it wagged its tail and panted a little, it earned them not just coins but dollar bills too. Jarod hid these away in his pants pocket as soon as the donor was off down the street—he never let more than one bill linger in the box.
As the afternoon crept forward and the air turned thick and sticky, the dog's energy flagged. Eventually, it gave up on movement completely, flopped down with a sigh, its muzzle in Jarod's lap. Its tongue dangled out of its open mouth, quivering a little.
“I bet she's thirsty,” Cheryl said.
Jarod shrugged. This was his response to everything.
She begged a cup of water from the Nix Bar down the block and the two of them watched as the dog dug its snout into the tiny plastic cylinder and flicked its tongue across the surface of the water.
“I should have gone and left you here with Dog,” Jarod said. “People give more when they see you're a girl.”
Tucking this information away for later, Cheryl twisted up the edge of her shirt and sucked on the node she'd made until it was soaked through. She braced the puppy still between her legs and daubed at its eyes, wiping the gunk away. When she could see what was going on underneath, the dog didn't look so bad off after all.
“You know, you let this stuff build up and pretty soon its eyes'll seal shut.”
She and Jarod were sort of like dogs themselves, sniffing each other out, circling, hanging back, only gradually allowing small parts of themselves to show. By the time the light began to fall and bounce off second-story windows, they'd become a tiny bit less skittish with each other.
Reaching out toward the scratches on Cheryl's arm, Jarod asked, “What happened there?” His hand hovered for a second, charged, like he was afraid to touch her.
“I was bored,” she said, reaching up to cover the wounds. Under her fingers, the dots of dried blood felt like words written in Braille, a secret message hidden on the surface of the K and the Y and the O, encouraging her toward strength.
The people walking by repeated themselves. The boy with the brown leather satchel and the sloppy part in his dense hair must have gone back and forth at least fifteen times. The anorexic girl with the fringe of pale blue beneath her black bangs and the green knee socks dangling around her ankles was crying the second time Cheryl saw her. And then there were the worker bees—carbon casts of each other, they blurred together, there were too many of them to keep track of. All these people—all these good Midwestern people. Their movements were organized around particular rhythms. It was only Jarod and her who stayed in one place.
“I thought there'd be more …” She didn't know quite how to put it. “You know, like a scene or something.”
Jarod shrugged.
“Like other kids or whatever.”
“Trent and them are all around here somewhere,” he said.
What she'd wanted to ask was where the good places to sleep were. She'd been on the street for four days now and last night it had rained and she was freaked out and sick of being alone. But she didn't want to come off as a poseur. She didn't want to look like a hanger-on. He could probably tell from what she'd already said that she didn't have any idea what she was doing.
“Last night I got stuck up on this fire escape. It like broke or whatever. I climbed up there and pulled the thingy up, the ladder, and then when it started to rain, I couldn't get it down again. It was like jammed or whateve
r and I had to sit there getting all wet and shit. My Discman got ruined.”
As she babbled, Jarod watched her. She couldn't tell if she was annoying him or not. His face had a wet, wounded look, like he was two throbs away from crying.
“Man, that sucked,” she said. “You think it's gonna rain tonight?”
Jarod tugged one of the dog's paws. He looked up at the sky and scratched at a glossy canker sore on his lip. Turning to her, his thin eyebrows arching high up on his forehead, he said, “You can stay with me if you want, but you'll have to put up with my ho-bag mother.”
He spat a thick gob of saliva onto the sidewalk and she realized he was blushing, hiding his face. He had a little crush, and in his awkward and furtive way, he was trying to let her know about it.
Then, suddenly, he turned cranky and officious, pulling the wadded bills out of his pocket and dumping them into the shoebox. One by one, he rubbed them flat and stacked them against the corner. They'd made more than Cheryl had thought, close to thirty-eight dollars all told, including change.
Shoving the money back into his pocket, he stood up. “Can you hang out with the dog for a minute?”
“Where you going?”
He shrugged. “I gotta go do this thing.”
He was taller than she'd thought, somehow lanky and doughy at the same time, and the odd little stutter step in his walk made him bounce down the sidewalk like an extremely slow-moving windup toy. He'd come back, she was sure, and then she'd have to decide what to do. She plucked a dandelion out of a crack in the sidewalk and, using her fingernail as a wedge, split the hollow cylinder down to the flower. The puppy sighed in its sleep. When she tickled just the right spot behind its ear, she could get it to twitch and that was amusing, at least for a while.