by Carrot Quinn
You’re safe, the tree whispers. You’re safe.
1992
When Barbara was a teenager, she was pretty and popular, and she was determined not just to be good, but to be the very best at everything she did. She played basketball and could do flips in the air on the trampoline and she brushed her black hair a hundred times with her wooden paddle brush and rationed her cottage cheese so that her waist was at least an inch narrower than her three sisters’, who were also very thin. Her knees were knobby and there was too much gum when she smiled, but there was nothing to be done about that.
When Barbara was given the challenge of sewing a dress for her high school Home Economics class, she became determined to sew the best dress that had ever been made in her school. She spent weeks obsessing over it, sewing and then tearing out the seams in frustration, then sewing again. Her sewing machine was in a corner of the living room, and while her five siblings played freely in the sun outside, she remained bent over the table, focused. She wanted the pleats just so and the poufs on the sleeves were difficult, and then there was the issue of the bust. Dinner came and went, and still Barbara sat. In the end, the dress was perfect. Her Home Ec teacher, who had never paid her any mind at all, absolutely beamed at Barbara, and then used the dress as an example in class. Barbara was elated for the rest of the week. There was nothing she liked better than being the best at something.
“I hated math, though,” she says. We’re in the living room of our apartment and I am listening, rapt, as she tells me about her life in high school, about the person she was before I was born. She is showing me how to assemble bits of fabric and then run them through the sewing machine to make a simple doll. I take the small cloth leg she just finished and work it with my fingers, turning it inside out so that the seams are hidden. Barbara hands me a bit of fiberfill from a cellophane bag, and I push this stuffing inside the leg. She pinches together the white fabric for the other leg and feeds it through the machine. Whrrrrr goes the small metal foot. Black thread flies from the spindle. The thread snarls and Barbara stills the metal foot and pulls the thread loose, and then works it through the spindle again. Her Pall Mall smolders and she pauses to lift it with her long fingers and take a drag.
“I was never good at math,” she says again, as she clips the thread with a pair of shears and passes the second finished leg to me. “I tried so hard, but I still did poorly. I even had a tutor. The teacher told me I was stupid.”
“I’m good at math,” I say.
“I know you are,” says Barbara. She hands me a rectangle of synthetic black fur. “Cut a square of this, for the hair.” I do as I am told, and Barbara pipes glue from the hot glue gun onto the doll’s head, which we’ve already sewn and stuffed. I love the hot glue gun. I love the way it smells, and the way the glue changes form, from solid to liquid and back again.
Recently I’ve been spending the evenings after school at the public library down the road, curled in a wooden booth in my stained winter coat, reading. It’s quiet there and smells comfortingly of musty books and bleach. I can get lost in what I’m reading for hours, and there is toilet paper in the bathroom. Often I stay until the library closes. Last week, in the nonfiction section, I found a book—a huge tome covered in crinkling plastic—titled Schizophrenia. I hid the book under the magazines in my arm and rushed back to my wooden booth, coat rustling. Lately I had started to understand that Barbara’s world was not real. That there was something going on with her brain. That she was ill. As I read the book, my loyalty to Barbara, to her burning convictions, did battle in my heart with this nascent understanding of mental illness. I flipped through the chapters in the heavy book, reading bulleted lists of signs, symptoms, treatments. Waves of terror and embarrassment washed over me. Was there anything more awful than schizophrenia? It seemed worse than all the other mental illnesses combined. Why did Barbara have to be like this? Why couldn’t she get it together? Why couldn’t she snap out of it? “SNAP OUT OF IT!” I often screamed at her, when I was hungry, when I was afraid. Was she even trying to not be sick? There was a chapter of case studies in the book, and I read these carefully. Other people who were like Barbara. Whose brains created monsters from the things they feared most and sent these monsters to torment them endlessly, day and night, for the rest of their lives. People who were sent plummeting down a dark well into a parallel reality of endless suffering, and even though their loved ones could see them, they couldn’t reach them to comfort them. Nobody could. It was like some sort of medieval torture situation you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, or even on the worst person who had ever lived.
I started to cry in my wooden booth, in the quiet corner of the library, under the soft fluorescent lights. My tears spread onto the pages of the book, onto the stories of the other people like Barbara. I closed the book and wrapped my arms around it and rested my head on its cover. I felt as though my guts were turning inside out. As though my tears would become an ocean, and that ocean would drown me. Then I remembered that I was in the library and wiped at the snot coming out of my nose with the sleeve of my coat. I wept quietly on the book until I felt empty and then I returned it to its shelf, pushing it into the spot where I had found it, tidying the books around it. I left the library and reentered the cold winter, the dark of evening. My kid boots crunched on the frozen crust of the snow. Streetlights cast circles of yellow light on the black road. I was alone except for my hunger. My hunger was my constant companion. The wind moaned, knocking itself against the boughs of the trees, wailing against every solid object. Unlike me, I realized, the wind was free. It could cut loose its sorrow against the wide, empty night.
I press the square of black fur onto the doll’s cloth scalp while Barbara threads a sewing needle with green embroidery thread. The doll will have green eyes and black hair, like Barbara. Barbara’s fingers are nimble, and the tiny sewing needle darts in and out of the white cloth. She shows me how to space the stitches closely and precisely, so that no single stitch stands out but instead joins with the others to make a filled-in shape. Like painting with thread. Soon the doll has long black embroidered eyelashes and a red embroidered mouth. Barbara shows me how to whipstitch the legs and arms to the torso, and the head to the neck. I hold the naked doll in my hands, ecstatic at what we have created.
Barbara’s hands are beginning to shake. She lights a new cigarette.
“We’ll make her clothes another day,” she says. She stands up from the table, with its detritus of fabric scraps, and rubs her hands over her face. The apartment is clean—Barbara has been up and about all week. She’s scrubbed the crusted food off the stove and counters, washed all the dishes, cleaned the windows, and wiped down the bathroom until everything smells of Windex and Bon Ami. She wrote a bad check at the grocery store and brought home a gallon of milk, two loaves of bread, a jumbo carton of eggs, and a sack of potatoes. She’s kept us home from school this week to help her fold laundry, clean our rooms, and make pans of burnt scrambled eggs. At night her bedroom light spills, liquid yellow, into the hallway. I don’t know when she last slept.
That night I boil potatoes and Jordan and I eat them with the last of the margarine while watching TV. We’ve finished the eggs, and the milk and the bread are gone. I leave our dirty dishes in the sink and stand in front of Barbara’s bedroom door, the naked doll clutched in my arms. Maybe Barbara can write another bad check and buy us more food. Maybe she will show me how to make clothes for my doll. Maybe I can sleep in her bed tonight with a fistful of her black hair clutched in my hand, the way she sometimes let me when I was small. I knock on the bedroom door but there is no answer, although I can hear the low muttering of the radio. I open the door and thick cigarette smoke spills out, stinging my eyes. Barbara is kneeling on the carpet, in front of the radio, and she is speaking to it.
“Mom,” I say. “Mom!” She rocks back and forth while she talks to the radio. “Mom!” I shout, louder. “Mom!�
�� Soon I am screaming her name as loud as I can. Suddenly she leaps to her feet, eyes aflame, and lunges at me. I lurch away but she grabs my arm and drags me into her room. She is hitting me across the back, again and again, as hard as she can. Her eyes have gone dark and blank. She is somewhere else. She is gone. I curl into a protective ball, but she keeps hitting me. She shoves me out the doorway and slams her bedroom door. I curl against the cool wall, making myself as small as possible. The world is a monster, poised to attack. I have to make myself invisible. I cry until I am blank. No feelings. The hallway is silent, the apartment is silent.
Eventually, I make the doll a dress from an old sock so that it won’t be naked anymore.
2003
We hurtle east out of L.A., the wind warm on our restless bodies, the desert opening before us like a great sea. It’s a thrill, to be this free. This time, we’re in a train car that has a floor, and we unroll our bedrolls without fear of falling onto the tracks to our deaths. This train hadn’t been hard to catch—it had stopped, the units with their watchful eyes far ahead and us way in back near the rear of the train, hiding in a culvert full of weeds. We had run along the string as it sat silent in the warm dark, recognized this rideable car, and climbed inside, our boots ringing out against the steel.
We make it as far as Yuma, Arizona, before we are pulled off in the dead of night. There’s a tower above the tracks where the rail cop hangs out, and from there he can see straight down into our car, where we’re sprawled out, asleep. The rail cop is a large, friendly man.
“You don’t see too many people riding trains these days,” he says to us, grinning. We’re standing on the ballast with our packs, half asleep, while our hard-won ride to Texas pulls slowly away until all we can see is the blinking red light on the end of the final car, and then nothing. The rail cop takes a yellow pad from his pocket. “I’m gonna write y’all a citation. You’re going to have to come back and appear in court. I want to tell you, though, that once I give this to you, I’m going to go back in that tower, and if you should happen to get another train out of here, I didn’t see it.”
“Thank you,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “Are you so bored up in that tower?”
“You betcha,” he says. I have a feeling that we are a welcome interruption in the monotony of his shift. I stuff the ticket absentmindedly into my pack, where I plan on losing it completely. Stay in Arizona long enough for a court date? Yeah, right.
We hide in the desert at the west end of the yard, where the sprawl of industry fades into a lonely stretch of double track, because this is where the back end of our train will be when the front end pulls up to the station. This, says Sami, is the way it usually is in small-town trainyards. You find the wee train station and then walk backward along the tracks for about a mile. There will usually be signs, here, that this is the place to wait—flattened cardboard, a clearing in the trees. Beer cans. The yards in small towns are much simpler than the jungles of big-city railyards, and easier to puzzle out.
An hour later we are lying on our foam pads under the warmth of the glowing stars when there are lights in the distance, a deep rumbling, and then the units of another eastbound intermodal pound past our hiding place, flooding the world with light, followed by the rattling cars. Our hearts are racing—is the train slowing? It is! We stuff our things away with trembling hands and crunch along the ballast until we find our ride, five cars from the back.
We rattle our way through Arizona, our train vibrating with speed, earplugs stuffed into our ears to protect us from the noise. We sit on the grated metal porch of our car and watch the desert go by as our hair tangles in the wind. The Mexico border is just south of us and it’s mostly open country here, not a soul in sight. When we do pass through a town, we sit down in our car, where we’re hidden by the four-foot walls, and wait there until the dinging of the last road crossing recedes. Cold cans of beans become meals, and games of cards and Hot Dice pass the time. We pee in a gallon jug with the top chopped off and empty it over the side—when we have to shit, we climb into the car behind ours and do it on a piece of cardboard, fling that over the side into the empty desert.
In New Mexico the train really picks up speed and the cinderblock shacks and wild horses blur past, as if there isn’t anything worth stopping for in this part of the world. I nap and wake, nap and wake, the blue sky and then the stars whirling above me. I raise my hand in the air and trace the cup of the Big Dipper to the shining North Star. My earplugs fall out while I’m sleeping and the screaming and rocking of the train becomes the soundtrack of my dreams.
* * *
—
Sami and I came up with the idea to go to Texas just two weeks before we caught the train out of Portland. We were curled on the couch in the kitchen of the Wych Elm house, a wool blanket over our laps, drinking dandelion root tea while outside the world was drenched in cold rain. Two friends who’d just come back from Austin were sitting on the kitchen floor, sorting a box of dumpstered flowers from Trader Joe’s. Their eyes sparkled and their arms were tanned from the sun. They plucked the good flowers from the wilted bouquets and rearranged them in mason jars.
“There’s this punk house in Austin that’s so amazing,” they said. “It’s called Entropy. There are like fifteen people living there. You should go visit, and get out of the rain.”
I had never been to Texas. I had hardly been anywhere. South-central Alaska, with its glaciated mountains next to the ocean; the desert mesas of western Colorado; Portland. That was it. What would it be like to ride my first freight train? To go where it was warm in the winter?
Sami had ridden a train twice, from Portland to Eugene, but I had no experience at all. That afternoon, when Andrew gusted in the back door, carrying his banjo case and dripping from the rain, we cornered him.
“We want to ride a train to Texas,” we said to him. “How do we do that?”
* * *
—
We cross, at last, into Texas. In the morning the train stops and I sit blinking in the sun on the porch of our car, my ears ringing in the silence. At the front of the train, where the units are, there must be a tiny town, people, movement. But our car sits pinging on a yellow plain, nothing to mark space but a length of wooden fence on the horizon, partly fallen over. I unfold my rail map and compare it with our surroundings. I have no idea where we are. Our gallons of water are lined up at the end of the car. One gallon is still full. I should’ve gotten up in the night every time we blew through some small road crossing in the middle of nowhere and looked for street signs that could orient us. But I was lazy, hypnotized by the movement, and I slept. The lines on our rail map are like a spider’s web—we were hoping to get to Austin but our train, at any point, could’ve turned north, at which point we should’ve gotten off at the soonest crew change and caught another train, if possible.
“Where are we?” asks Sami. She’s sitting up in her sleeping bag, rubbing the crust from her eyes. Her hands, black from diesel grime, leave streaks across her face. Our train lurches and begins to move again.
“I don’t know,” I say. I knife open a can of refried beans and sit on the metal floor of the car, eating the beans with a spoon. I can hear the dinging of the road crossing now, in the distance. Then the train slows again and settles to a stop.
There is a sound that no train rider ever wants to hear—the crunch of boots on gravel and the static hiss of a CB radio. My spoon freezes en route to the bean can, and I lock eyes with Sami.
Pong. Pong. Pong. The sound of someone mounting the three rungs of the ladder on the outside of our car. And then he’s standing above us, casting us in the shadow of his ten-gallon Stetson hat.
“Y’all need to get off this train,” he says. He’s wearing cowboy boots and has a mustache. His belt buckle winks in the sunlight. Why is this yard worker pulling us off the train? Couldn’t he have just looked the other way, as they often do, as long a
s they won’t get in trouble for it? Now we’ll have to get another train, and we’re not even sure where we are. I sigh audibly, and root around in my pack for my sleeping bag stuff sack.
“Y’all better hurry it up,” says the man. “Y’all are under arrest.”
“Oh shit!” says Sami. “You’re a rail cop?”
“I saw you, up on the hill.” He points to his unmarked SUV parked near an overpass, where he can look down at passing trains and see any riders in the cars.
“Fuck!” says Sami.
* * *
—
“You’re in Sweetwater, Texas,” says the warden at the jail, which looks, from the outside, like a small-town post office. The warden has big blond Dolly Parton hair and she frowns at me as she presses my fingers into the ink pad to take my fingerprints. “Why do y’all smell so bad?”
“There aren’t any showers on the train,” I say.
The warden shakes her head. “You’re a little gamey.”
“You stink,” says another warden, who is rifling through our packs, looking for exciting things like drugs. It’s been just over a year since 9/11, and when we first arrived at the jail, the Dolly Parton warden gripped the laminate counter and hissed at us:
“You know who rides these freight trains? Terrorists! Terrorists ride these freight trains!”
The second warden is looking in our wallets. She pulls out a stack of traveler’s checks.