by Carrot Quinn
All there is to do today is nap and watch the world go by, wait for the day to pass and for night to come again. But surely, we think, by the time it’s dark, we will be safe in the warm California desert! And yet night arrives, with its stars and bitter cold and whipping wind, and we are still in the dark mountains of Northern California, stopping in the eerie black forest and then hurtling forward at a speed that feels like it will shake the fillings from our mouths. So there is another night of misery, of trembling in the cold wind; of wishing I had twenty times as many tarps, a sleeping bag fifteen feet thick, an entire gallon of spring water.
Dawn comes again and we emerge from our bedrolls into a delicate world of pink and gold light, a warmth that softens our stiff bodies, a wind turned gentle and kind. The California desert! We’ve reached the desert! We sit on the metal porch at the front of our car, chewing dried mango, watching the land go by. Finally our layers come off; finally the balmy air caresses our skin. At last our train breaches the dusty outskirts of early-morning Los Angeles. The train slows a great deal, from a shaking rumble to a gentle creep, and stops and starts often as it moves through industrial neighborhoods and road crossings, where commuters are backed up behind the dinging metal crossing arm, watching our train, oblivious to the two riders on sleeping pads, just hidden by the lip of the car.
We’d like to get off before our train reaches the huge labyrinthine trainyard, if possible, with its endless expanse of glimmering, parallel tracks and tangles of strings of cars bound for nowhere, and so when the train stops again we stuff our things into our packs and hop over the side, eardrums vibrating as we stand on the ballast, gathering our bearings.
We are hungry and dehydrated, and we have no idea where we are. My tongue feels like a balled-up sock in my mouth. We walk a few blocks along a wide, empty boulevard, past teenagers selling heart-shaped balloons and baskets of candy. It’s Valentine’s Day, we realize. We round a corner, and in front of us is a faded strip mall with a taqueria, shimmering like a mirage.
In the taqueria I suck down a huge Styrofoam cup of ice water and feel my cells expanding like a million tiny sponges. I eat a massive burrito, and in the bathroom I scrub the grime from my hands and face with paper towels. Sami and I slump, bleary and contented, in the red plastic booth, nibbling on paper cups of pickled carrots, the wreckage of our meal before us. The proprietors watch us from the back of the restaurant, twisting dishcloths in their hands. At last it’s time to ship out and we heave our packs up, newfound energy pumping through our bodies. Outside, we stand in the sunlight, unsure of our next move. We’ve got to catch the train to Texas, but I also need to acquire a sleeping bag somehow.
“Maybe I’ll call my dad?” says Sami. We both laugh. Neither of us grew up knowing our fathers, and we’re not sure what a father even is, or what they’re supposed to do. The whole concept is absurd to us. But Sami reconnected with her father for the first time a year ago—they even met in person—and they’ve been talking on the phone once a month, albeit awkwardly, ever since. He lives a thirty-minute drive away.
The bus drops us in Burbank and we walk a few blocks to Sami’s dad’s house—white, with a tidy lawn and a palm tree, and a red sports car parked in the drive. His wife, who is a costume maker in Hollywood, opens the door and frowns at us. We are filthy with diesel grime and smell of unwashed clothes.
“Leave your packs on the porch,” she says. We step inside, to thick beige carpet and glass-fronted china cabinets.
“Can you take us to Trader Joe’s?” Sami asks her dad, after we’ve both showered, leaving gray streaks in the tub and muddying a pile of white towels, which we’ve left crumpled on the bathroom floor. “We need to dumpster some food for the rest of our trip.”
“This is crazy,” Sami whispers to me as we pull up behind Trader Joe’s in her dad’s shiny red sports car. We root around in the dumpster in the warm afternoon sun, the wealthy patrons in the parking lot too oblivious to really understand what we’re doing. We load up the trunk of the car with expired sushi, flour tortillas, baby greens, bags of tangerines. I lift a bright bunch of cut flowers in the air, twirl it around in the blue sky, and then toss it behind me, back into the dumpster. I think about my own father—my whole life I’ve made up stories about how he’s dead, or in prison, and that’s why he never was there for us when Jordan and I were kids, why he never appeared like a magical Santa Claus when we were starving or had no place to go. I wonder for the millionth time if I should try to find him, now that I’m an adult. Maybe he and I could be friends, the way Sami and her dad are friends now. What would it be like to have a father? I drop the thought in the dumpster with the flowers, and keep digging.
Sami and I climb back into her dad’s car, the tread of our shoes caked in coffee grounds and mashed plums, and he ferries us to a large chain outdoor store, where I return my rain gear, which I shoplifted in Portland for this trip but figure I will no longer need, and use the store credit to buy the warmest sleeping bag on the shelf. The salesperson tries to talk me out of selecting such a warm sleeping bag.
“Where are you going camping?” he keeps asking me. “The Arctic? You don’t need that.” I wave him away. I’ve decided that I’m never going to be cold again.
That evening, Sami’s dad and stepmom take us out for Thai food. As we inhale our noodles, Sami’s stepmom tells us about her job working in Hollywood, the long days and the way the work consumes her life.
“Are you happy?” I ask.
She fiddles with the snow peas on her plate.
“No,” she says. “Not really. I wish, at this point, that I could do something else.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I mumble, suddenly awkward. Who are Sami and I to be free like this, I think, doing whatever we want?
Sami’s dad pays the bill and we walk out into the faded night, warm air rising off the concrete. I know I won’t be able to ride trains and live off dumpstered bread forever. But what else is there? I’m not sure.
* * *
—
At a railroad junction outside of L.A., we wait for two days for the train that will take us to Texas. The Union Pacific route that heads east from L.A. through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and then continues on through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama before terminating in Georgia is called the Sunset Route, and I’ve heard stories about it from others—it hurtles across the open desert of the Southwest, changes crews in El Paso, the highest-security railyard in the country, and it’s the only long train route in North America that won’t freeze you in the wintertime. The junction where we wait for our train is open yellow grass and a warm blue sky and we build a three-sided shelter out of tumbleweeds in which to hide. At night, we lie in our tumbleweed house and watch the stars, drifting in and out of sleep as trains that aren’t ours blow past. During the day, birds wheel overhead and I finish a February issue of The New Yorker, open it at the beginning and start again. Time pools into a great sea with waves lapping all around us and we forget where we are, or how we ever got to this place.
The second morning, I walk across the tracks into the tall weeds to take a shit and, after relieving myself, I glance down and see that my poop is writhing with small white worms. I stand there for a moment, wordless, and then I shriek.
“We need the internet,” says Sami, when I give her my report. She’s stuffing away her sleeping bag. “The internet will tell us what to do.”
We hike along the sun-washed roadsides, asking strangers for directions until we find a small, squat public library, where Google tells me that I have pinworms. I look up holistic remedies. Eat raw garlic every day, says the internet. And not any sugar. In two weeks they’ll be gone. I buy a half dozen heads of garlic at a small tienda, peel a clove, and chop it with my pocket knife, using the double knee of my Carhartts as a cutting board. I sprinkle this onto a cold corn tortilla spread with almond butter. It tastes pretty good. I call the Wych Elm,
the punk house in Portland where Sami and I live, on a payphone outside the tienda. Does anyone there have pinworms? Children, I have learned, are the ones most likely to get them, and they are spread by poor hygiene—adults in the U.S. usually bathe too much for it to really be a thing. I think of the narrow bathroom at the Wych Elm house. A pungent yellow toilet bowl, a single filthy towel. As far as I know, that bathroom has never been cleaned. And in spite of the cramped nature of the house, the shower is never occupied…because no one wants to shower. People boast about how they don’t bathe except for the occasional swim in a natural body of water, or how they never wash their clothes. White clothes age with sweat and dirt and black clothes fade from the sun, until everything is the same transcendent shade of brown. People smell strong, but not in a bad way. Not like my mother’s stress sweat, from weeks of cowering in her room, chain-smoking in terror while she hallucinated. This is the smell of fresh air and warm bodies and good, clean sweat that’s been baked by the sun. It’s like how horses have a smell.
“I’ll be right back,” says Ryan. I hear a knock as the phone’s receiver is set on the kitchen table. There is laughter, and a rustling as he picks up the phone again. “Yeah, I have pinworms,” he says. “I just had Lisa look at my asshole. I got ’em.”
“Oh my God,” I say. I think of the time I was dumpstering with Ryan in the rain. We were in the dumpster behind a grocery store, up to our knees in wilted produce. At the bottom was four inches of standing trash-water. Ryan picked a floating carrot out of this water and ate it.
That night, after I eat all that garlic, the itching in my butthole goes away—an itching that I had noticed and been annoyed by, but hadn’t known was from the worms. Sami and I sit up playing cards by the light of the nearby streetlamp, and grow antsy with each passing train that still, somehow, does not stop for us. At last, around midnight, I take Andrew’s directions from my journal and smooth them, and we reexamine the cryptic words and drawings, wondering if we could’ve misinterpreted them somehow.
“Wait wait wait,” I say, tracing my finger over the scrawls on the paper. “Maybe instead of taking the number five bus to Fourth Street, that four is actually a nine, and we were supposed to get off at Ninth Street? And that’s why we never saw the abandoned Pizza Hut, and the hole in the fence wasn’t where it was supposed to be?”
“My God,” says Sami.
An hour later we’re at a stretch of double track in another part of this brightly lit industrial neighborhood, and by dawn, we’re in our sleeping bags headed east, on a train to Texas.
1992
We are driving. I have no idea what time it is. Outside the windows of our little blue Ford, the world is dark, save for the bare snow illuminated in the streetlamps. We are circling Anchorage in great, aimless loops as Barbara burns one cigarette after another and switches the radio dial, never settling on a song. The volume on the radio is turned up as far as it can go, and the thundering of oldies, then country, then pop music, rattles my skull. The cigarette smoke is thick enough to choke on, and my eyes itch and burn. I am carsick and I have to pee.
I know that Barbara drives for hours like this because it calms her. And I know that she likes the radio up this loud because it helps drown out the voices in her head. At home, the TV stays on 24/7, although the volume is lower so as not to bother the neighbors. At home, the effect is subtler—a dull background noise, inane chatter. Cheery bright commercials and the dumb banter of sitcoms follow me around the apartment as I search for food, wash my hair with dish detergent, or dig through the pile of dirty laundry in the hallway, looking for a shirt or pair of socks that don’t reek of mildew.
I press my face against the cold window of the car and soften my gaze, letting the yellow streetlights hypnotize me as they pass. I scratch shapes into the frost with my fingernails. It’s so cold out there, so clean. The city this late at night is empty, and the fresh snow is unbroken. I search the dark shapes of the forest beyond the streetlights, let my eyes travel into the hollows there. I am no longer in the car—I am in the woods, I am rising up into the sky. I am in the stars.
We pull into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven and Barbara shuts the engine off. The noise of the radio dies and the silence is deafening, a loudness that flutters in my ears.
“Here,” says Barbara. She twists in the seat and hands us each a one-dollar food stamp bill. The slug of dead ashes from the end of her cigarette lands on the leg of my sweatpants. “Buy a piece of candy. Nothing more than twenty-five cents, okay?”
The neat racks of candies sorted by color and shape at the front of a convenience store are incredibly pleasing to me. They are low to the ground, where I can reach them, and I touch a candy in each bin, lifting it and turning it in the light, considering. Do I want the watermelon Jolly Rancher, or the Bit-O-Honey that sticks to my molars? The Tootsie Roll isn’t as good as the others, but you get the most candy for your money. Jordan is already paying for his Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, and I pick a couple of Jolly Ranchers and stand behind him in line. The clerk hands Jordan three quarters in change, and then she hands the same to me. The weight of the quarters in my palm is its own sort of food, and I savor it as I exit the warm store and step into the bitter cold.
“Give me that,” says Barbara. She scrapes the coins out of our palms with her fingernails. She wrenches the car into reverse and we resume our looping drive of the city. Now I have the bright taste of a watermelon Jolly Rancher in my mouth, though, to cut through the sensations of noise and smoke. A few minutes later we park at another convenience store and she hands us each another food stamp dollar.
This time I buy the Tootsie Roll. I’m hungry, and that candy will fill me up better. I’m nodding off in the car, the thundering radio part of my dreams, when we stop at the third convenience store. After our mission inside is complete, Barbara counts the quarters, her fingers shaking, and then she leaves us in the car and returns a moment later with a fresh pack of Pall Malls. She slaps the pack against her palm and pulls off the cellophane, then drops the trash to the floor of the car, where it mingles with the Taco Bell wrappers and empty drink cups. I fish out the cellophane and play with it as we drive, my heart skipping from the sugar. Jordan is asleep, curled against the door of the car.
A few days later Jordan and I come home from school and the car is gone.
“The brakes went out on a hill on the ice,” says Barbara. “Some boys helped me push it off the road, and I gave the car to them. The boys were angels, and God told me to give them the car.”
“You gave our car away?” shouts Jordan. “Because God told you to?” He slams the door of his room and it bounces off the doorframe, rattling bits of plaster from the wall. I follow him into his room and sit on the carpet, in front of the television he found on the side of the road. The TV is tuned to a station called “The Box,” where you can call a 1-800 number and pay four dollars to have them broadcast the music video of your choice. Right now no one is calling and the screen is static. Jordan and I often watch The Box for hours after school, waiting for a music video. Jordan’s favorite is the Green Jellÿ video for “Three Little Pigs.”
“She probably doesn’t even have a license,” Jordan is saying. “We’re better off without the car. She shouldn’t even be driving. Crazy bitch!” He’s removing his schoolwork from his backpack and filling the backpack with comic books. He lifts the mattress and pulls out his stash of Hustler magazines and puts those in the backpack as well.
“Where are you going?” I ask, nervous.
“I’ll be back,” he says to me. “Don’t worry about me. Find something to eat, okay? The hot bar at the grocery store is good to steal from. You can fill a container with food and just walk out with it. Everyone will think you’ve paid.”
“Don’t leave!” I’m crying now, my face thick with snot.
“Shh,” says Jordan, a finger to his lips. He lifts his bedroom window open a
nd cold fresh air rushes in. The broken blinds snag on his backpack as he climbs out. I hear the crunch of his boots as he lands in the snow. He turns and pulls the window almost, but not quite, shut.
The hallway is dark and silent save for the low mumbling of the radio in Barbara’s room. I likely won’t see her again for a few days. It’s just me, now, in this world. Just me—hardly strong enough to carry a gallon of milk on my own, not yet strong enough to open a jar of pickles. Short enough that I still have to climb onto the kitchen counter to reach the top cabinets. At night I stay up as late as I want reading library books, and I sleep with all the lights on. I walk to school myself, in the dark under the cold stars, the strong Chinook winds pushing me across the ice that’s like a skating rink. No one tells me to wash behind my ears. Brushing my teeth is tedious, so I don’t do it.
I pull on my snow pants and step into my snow boots. Behind our apartment is a forested hill and I work my way up it, plunging to my hips in the snow with each step. The snow is fresh, replenished each day by the generous gods of winter. Snow is a free and limitless sculpture medium and building material, and having this much of it makes me feel rich. I like to make caves and tunnels, to burrow into it like an animal. I throw snow into the air and at the other neighborhood children, knock it off tree branches, stamp it down, jump off the back porch railing into it. I let it gather on my eyelashes. I sled downhill on a flattened cardboard box. I eat fistfuls of it, and it tastes like the sky.
There is a spruce tree on this hill whose lowest boughs make a small cave, and now I crawl into this hole and lie on my back, breathing in the crisp air and the clean smell of the spruce tree. The cave is warm and I watch the snow fall, flakes pirouetting from the heavy, leaden sky. I will stay as long as I can, until my eyelashes freeze together and my toes go numb. I can feel the tree’s quiet sentience, the way that it holds me. Home is chaos, but this tree is solid. There is no love for me at home but here is the love of nature in its entirety, channeled via this one still, snowy tree.