by Rene Denfeld
“Hey! Catch the—”
He could hear them gaining behind him, their voices mad with joy and the excitement of pursuit. Rich felt his feet pick up, his legs churn in terror. His mouth was open, gulping air that could not reach his lungs, already burning.
“Fucking fag!”
Rich wished he could close his eyes, melt to the ground in sorrow. The footbridge was ahead of him, but he wasn’t going to make it. He could hear them right behind him.
He whipped around before they could tackle him. There were six of them, all in new clothes, windbreakers, sneakers that probably cost hundreds of dollars. Their hair was cut short, their faces strangely plastic, honed to sharpness by razors and cruelty.
“What do you want?” he asked, backing up. He immediately wished he hadn’t said anything. His voice cracked with fear.
“Whatcha running for?” the leader asked. He was a muscular boy with bright yellow hair, dyed. He had a diamond in one ear. Rich remembered some old bum telling him that once upon a time that meant you were gay, only now it didn’t, but that didn’t change anything, did it?
“I’m talking to you. You fucking loser.”
The leader was puffing up, his arms turning into deadly triangles. His eyes were like dead fish. He reminded Rich of the body they had seen in the river. Maybe the boy had come from the river, too. Maybe they all had. Maybe they were all already dead, and that was why they played this game.
Rich felt the fear widen, encompass him. Please, he wanted to tell the world. Don’t do this to me. Again.
“Fucking street trash.”
The leader was winding up, relishing. A light dancing, athletic. One of the other boys held up his phone, recording. Another video, Rich thought, as the first fist swung. Taking out the trash, as they called it. By the next night it might hit a million views, and everyone would be laughing at him, too.
Rich felt the first blow against the side of his head. It was like the stars, and the moon, yes, exploding into pain, and he could feel himself dropping, trying to catch his hands on the pavement, thinking dimly maybe they wouldn’t want to bloody their new shoes by kicking him. But that didn’t work either.
Chapter 26
This time Naomi asked Jerome to come with her. It was a bit like the past year of travel: increasingly long silences broken by spontaneous laughter and warmth. Jerome recognized his people’s home country as they crossed the valley: long-neglected oak savannas, fertile farmland crested with dark fir mountains.
elk crossing, the bullet-punched sign outside of town said, leaning over a ditch frenzied with spring growth. population: 740.
Naomi felt her body tense driving into the empty town. A spider was in the back of her skull, hissing danger. This was strawberry country. This was terror.
Naomi and Jerome had come through here before, after finding the bunker nearby. But they had come up empty. Now they had a name. They had a story to follow.
The town of Elk Crossing looked abandoned, the shop windows soaped. They drove past the funeral home, low and squat and pink, with dried shrubs outside the walls like freckles, and a boarded-up high school. The fields were still planted. But the family farms had been eaten up by the corporations that now combed the fields. Few people lived here anymore. It was a place managed, not occupied.
The solitary bar was still open. Naomi watched a man with a face like burlap stagger down the street to his truck.
She parked at one of the forgotten meters.
“What are we looking for?” Jerome asked. Their efforts to find anything online about how Naomi and her sister went missing from the orphanage had been fruitless.
“I don’t know yet,” she answered.
Naomi was surprised to find the small courthouse was still open. Inside the front entry was a solitary clerk. She looked up, lines of surprise in her face.
“I need to see your records,” Naomi said, showing her license. Jerome, next to her, stood, wearing his Purple Heart pin on a white shirt with the sleeve neatly pinned up over the cap of scar tissue from his missing arm. That’s all it took. Glancing reverentially at Jerome while completely ignoring Naomi, the clerk hustled. “Right this way,” she said, leading them down a hallway floor lined with mop streaks. Naomi rolled her eyes. “Hero,” she whispered to Jerome.
Naomi looked around as they walked, at the crumbling walls, the circles of water damage on the ceiling. They passed the solitary courtroom, the heavy doors now latched. The bench outside was polished down by generations of bottoms. Above the bench was a painting of an older man labeled with a brass plaque.
The clerk unlocked a door to a long narrow room lined with shelves. In the middle was an oak table. Naomi walked down the row of brown file boxes, checking dates. All the town records were here: police, court, and land.
“Here,” she said, pulling down a box for the months that she and her sister had gone missing. She carried it to the table, surprised at how light it was.
The clerk, her face curious, hung in the doorway. Behind her the pure light of farm-valley Oregon poured into the room. “We’re okay,” Naomi said so the woman would go away. Naomi shut the door behind her.
The box, as it turned out, was almost empty. They found traffic tickets and divorce decrees, a few deeds. No missing child reports. Jerome and Naomi went through box after box and found the same paucity. There was no sign that the kidnapping had ever been reported, let alone investigated. It was as if she and her sister had never existed.
Jerome set down a land deed. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said, frowning. “There’s no such thing as a town without crime.” Naomi leaned over, looked at the signature at the bottom. Judge Thurman, it said. She looked at the other records. They all had the same name.
Naomi stood below the painting down the hall. the honorable ralph thurman, the plaque said. The judge had been a heavy-jowled man with crinkled grandfatherly eyes. She checked out the dates below. He had died not long after she went missing.
“The migrants who found me nearby didn’t want to come here,” Naomi said under her breath. The clerk was hovering nearby, inquisitive. “They drove me all the way to Opal. There was a reason why.”
Jerome stood behind her, waiting.
Naomi turned to the clerk. “Where’s the local graveyard?”
The Elk Crossing graveyard had the shy, quiet look of all abandoned places. Naomi and Jerome walked the rows of headstones, passing under tall firs. A mossy statue of Mary reached out her consoling hand, a sparrow nest in her pitted palm. Jerome looked over the grassy oak savannas that were once populated by his people, only to be stolen and now neglected.
In the back, crowded against a falling-down stone wall, they found the baby nursery. Baby nurseries, also called baby graveyards, were a Northwest tradition that went back to pioneer times. Naomi didn’t know if other places had the same practice of burying children in a separate graveyard, or if it was just an Oregon peculiarity.
The baby nursery was surrounded with a row of overgrown hedges, almost swallowing an arching cast-iron entryway. Inside was a maze of tiny headstones sunken into the grassy soil. The dates went back to the 1800s. Many, she could tell, were stillbirths. Naomi stopped to read one. Baby Agnes, Nov. 2, 1901, born already with our Lord.
Other graves were of children well into their teens. You could almost track epidemics and flus, Naomi thought, walking past the clusters of graves. “This is sad,” Jerome said, pointing to a row of five children, all from the same family. Their names told the story, starting with Hope and moving on to Faith and finally the last one, Perseverance. “I wonder if they kept trying,” he said.
Naomi didn’t respond. She told herself she was used to death, used to being buried alive.
The sun, passing through the trees, caught on Jerome’s black hair.
“What do the Kalapuya believe about death, again?” Naomi asked, curious.
Jerome knelt and swept dirt off an ancient headstone with his one hand. “My people believe that no one
really dies. When it is time for us to leave this world, one of our loved ones comes to walk us on. They take us to the other country.”
“Where is this other country?”
“No one knows. You have to die to find out.”
“Well, no thanks.”
He rose, brushing dirt off his jeans. “Remember how we used to hunt for their belongings in the trees, Naomi?”
“I do.” It sounded like a promise. Naomi gazed in adoration at Jerome.
Her shoe had hit a line of newer graves. This section of the child graveyard was crowded, and Naomi instantly recognized another graveyard tradition: the pauper graves. She was looking down at a cheap metal plate from decades past. She followed down a line of graves. There were over a dozen of them, ending around the time she had gone missing. Each contained a child with an estimated age of five to ten.
Jerome stood next to her. The wind sloughed through the trees. Each of the plates said the same thing: Child Doe.
“Something terrible happened here,” Naomi said.
“Stop here.”
Unaccustomed to Jerome speaking so abruptly, Naomi pulled over. They had just left the town and were passing by another set of strawberry fields. The green crowns were just now budding with white flowers. An old farmhouse stood on a hill, as empty as the sky. A torn scrap of fabric flew out a dormer window. In the pasture was a single majestic white oak tree, its tightly budded arms reaching for the sky.
Jerome got out. Naomi followed.
Finding the rusted pasture gate, Jerome walked into the field. The unruly grass came to his waist. The air was heavy with the rich scent of cottonwoods, the fences draped with the long white blooms. Jerome walked until he came to the spreading, majestic oak.
He stood underneath the tree and lifted his one hand and squinted. Naomi, curious, looked up, too.
Tied high up in one of the branches was what appeared to be an old blanket, wrapped tightly around bulky objects. The bundle was securely tied to the tree with ancient rope. The rope was so old the tree limb had overgrown part of it, swallowing it. The blanket was tufted from birds and rotten in places, dried hard by the sun in others.
“Well, after all this time, I think we found one of the relics we were looking for as kids,” Jerome said, smiling at Naomi.
“Do we climb up there, take it down?” Naomi asked.
Jerome shook his head. “I should get an elder from the tribe. If it is an ancestor’s belongings, I don’t want to be disrespectful. It’s been there for years. It can wait a few days.”
In the distance the farmhouse, empty windows for eyes, seemed to smile. The breeze lifted Jerome’s hair, and the skin of his arm looked dark under the tree. All around the cottonwoods bloomed, the soft down catching on the wind.
On the way back to the city it began raining.
Chapter 27
Heading back downtown from the overpass was miserable when it was raining.
Celia and the boys had waited for what felt like hours hoping the cloudburst would stop, crouched in their overpass cave. The heavy rains soaked under the bushes, running in wet muddy fingers up to their feet.
Finally, too hungry to bear it any longer, they slid down the hill, getting covered in mud, and ran, squelching in sopping-wet shoes, to the freeway, where the cars, wipers on full tilt, didn’t even slow down for them. Celia could see the faces of the drivers huddled over the wheels. She wondered if she would ever learn to drive. Her mother had lost her license for driving while high. Celia understood that was punishment, but she didn’t think the judge understood that meant her mom couldn’t work anymore and that meant Teddy owned them and Celia was trapped forever.
Finally a break in the traffic came, and the street kids ran, their jeans black with water. Rich kept his head down, his swollen lids almost closed with bruises. They crossed the footbridge, the river below them a wild torrent. Celia could see the back of Stoner’s neck where the rain had parted his hair, the twin tendons as delicate as musical instruments.
The street kids went to the deli at the top of downtown. The booths were made of a sticky fake leather that made squishing noises when they sat down. The waitress put the water glasses down, stared at Rich and his swollen, bruised face. “Someone beat you up, honey?” she asked with concern.
No, he shook his head, miserable.
“Let me guess,” she addressed them. “Biscuits and gravy.”
“I want pie. Pecan, à la mode,” Stoner said, and a rivulet of water poured down his neck. Celia stared at him. That was a stupid thing to buy. Pie was more expensive and didn’t last as long. Biscuits and gravy was big and cheap.
The plates came, heavy and white. On the plate in front of Celia, thick white goo was ladled over two stale biscuits with dry crumbs on the sides. Celia stuck a fork in one, twanged it. She pulled the fork out. Most of the gluey biscuit came with it, tiny pieces of gray mystery meat in the pasty white gravy. She put the chunk on her tongue. It tasted like salt and nothing else. She was hungry. She ate it.
Rich had come back late the night before, crawling into their cave, whimpering. Celia had woken just enough to smell the blood. She had lain against him until he stopped shivering, putting her arms around his cold middle. Waking, she had seen he had been beaten. With the others she had counted his teeth, made him lift his shirt so they could see that his ribs, though bruised, were not broken. His breath had whistled in and out okay, and his eyes, though bloodied, could see. A beating was ordinary and deeply sad. But ordinary. Or so she told herself, once again.
Celia thought about the apartments and trailer courts they had lived in when she was little, with names like Pine Top Estates and Chantilly Arms. The grosser the place, the nicer the name. It almost felt like a personal insult.
Stoner ate his pie in three bites. Then he waited to see if anyone wasn’t going to finish their food, his lowered eyes checking, then coming back again.
Rich ate, head down, fork moving rapidly from plate to mouth. You could tell it hurt Rich to eat, but he did it all the same. They all kept their arms cocked around their plates, like someone might steal them.
Celia looked out the window. Sometimes she wanted bad things to happen just to relieve the moments like this. Like the way her feet itched in her wet socks, or the way her soaked jeans clung to her icy thighs, getting colder by the second. The feeling of needing to go to the bathroom.
The food was gone. They pulled out wet pennies and linty nickels, counting their change onto the wet table. Stoner licked his plate. The waitress watched from behind the counter, then went into the kitchen.
In a moment the waitress came back, bearing another white plate. Biscuits and gravy for Stoner. She put down the plate with a smile. “Manners,” she reminded him.
“Thank you,” he mumbled.
“You looked hungry,” she said, looking relieved.
When they left, she waved at them, and Celia turned around, waving back.
There was one good thing about a heavy rain:
It got rid of the creeps. The pimps, the freaks, and the johns.
The only people on skid row when it was raining were the street people and the nuns and the volunteers trying to help. Those people were real. They didn’t tell lies like go to the police if anyone touches you or it will all be okay.
One of the nuns came down the wet sidewalk now as the homeless huddled under the gusts of rain and wind. Families protected their children under their coats. The nun handed out clear white plastic rain ponchos, knowing the street people liked these best—you could see through them to make sure another was not holding a weapon—and they kept the water off better than any jacket.
Grateful, the street people donned the ponchos, and Celia and her friends became one in a line of white plastic gleaming objects. “Like a row of condoms,” Stoner joked, his mouth wet with rain, but Celia thought more like pictures she had seen of jellyfish, bobbing along in a gray pavement sea.
In the late afternoon the sky cleared and became a har
d metallic blue. The sun shone, and the mist evaporated off all the buildings, twining like snakes off the turrets. It got so hot that the metal trash cans were warm under their touch as Celia and Rich dug into them, looking for returnable bottles others had missed. It was then that Celia noticed the ponchos littering the street. The families had returned to holding their kids in front of their jackets, and it was like everyone had forgotten the rain.
With the heat came danger.
Stoner, living up to his name, got into something wicked. Only instead of smoothing him out, relaxing his always tense face, it turned his mouth into a black cavern full of teeth, and Celia, like the others, ducked and ran from his swinging-wide fists.
“Slow down, Stoner, slow down,” Rich kept saying, getting chased in a circle in the hot street, the sun pounding down. The bums, lying on their sides in the heat, panted and watched the show. Stoner spun and spun, and Celia and the other street kids stood under the aspire sign and watched, heads cocked for—
There. The sound of sirens. The cops only came when there were fights. Or bodies on the streets. No one ever knew who called the cops since skid row was all street people. Maybe it was the recovering alkies sulking in the dirty rooms above, sent there by the agencies to test the dry among their friends.
The cops came to a halt, sirens muted by the day, the sun striking off the domed lights. They got out of the car. One walked towards Stoner, talking to him. Another stood to the side, watching, hand on his gun. Celia was watching, too, her head tilted. She became cautious, times like this. She became an eye in the sky.
Were the cops going to kill Stoner? That was the worry in her mouth, and the cynical fear in the eyes of the bums. But the cop talking to Stoner soon had him cornered, and he had his hands up. Profanity was pouring out of his mouth. “Fucking cocksuckers,” Celia heard. “Clit fuckers.” My friend is high, she wanted to tell the cops.