by Carrot Quinn
“What is this?” she says, flapping the paper notes at us. “Canada money?”
I’m trying not to laugh. Sami shoots me a withering look.
It’s Sunday, so we’ll have to stay overnight, and the judge will see us in the morning. We trade our filthy Carhartts for clean black-and-white-striped uniforms, shower in a cold steel room, and are taken to our cell, which has three bunks and a TV bolted into the corner of the wall. Our cellmate, Leanne, tells us that she’s in for check fraud.
“You were riding a freight train?” she says. “Wow, that’s cool! Here, lemme show you a card trick.” She shuffles a deck, spreads it facedown on the little table in our cell, and when she picks it back up the cards are in order. Dinner is chicken-fried steak and microwaved corn. The movie Save the Last Dance comes on the TV and I watch it curled on the top bunk. Then, after the lights go out, I cry. We’ve traded the wide-open desert and good moving air for this stale cell with no natural light—it might as well be underground. And we can’t leave until they say so. Claustrophobia comes and sits on my chest. I feel as though I’ve been entombed.
Breakfast is gelatinous oatmeal and a small carton of milk, and then we are handed back our clothes, neatly folded and warm from the dryer. The judge meets us in the hallway—he is a huge, friendly man wearing jeans and a button-down shirt.
“I know y’all think this is Bill and Ted’s big adventure,” he says, “and you’re waitin’ to see George Carlin in a phone booth.” He tells us we’ve served our time, a night in jail, and now we’re free to go.
Outside, the air is fresh and warm and wild, and we laugh with delight as we wander through the tiny town of Sweetwater, Texas, which looks like the set of an old western film, toward the outskirts in hopes of hitching a ride. Our packs are heavy on our backs but our clothes are clean and we’re drunk with joy. Cars slow as they pass us, the drivers’ expressions flickering with curiosity, or maybe it’s disgust. We don’t care, though. We’re free. Free!
In Austin we follow our crumpled, handwritten directions to the Entropy house. The house is a huge, old Victorian-style structure with a sinking roof and creaking wooden floors. Narrow stairways lead to oddly shaped rooms where residents have built dens of salvaged furniture, lace, and old velvet. The yard is a jungle of overgrown medicinal herbs and sculptures made from welded bike parts. A young man shows us the kitchen pantry, with hundreds of kinds of tea and trash bags of bagels on the floor. “Stay as long as you like,” he says. We gather our strength in the yard among the plants, reading Assata Shakur’s autobiography aloud and watching the many visitors come and go. I continue to eat peanut butter for most of my meals. After a week, Sami and I put down our books and look at each other.
“Where to next?” we say.
1993
I unhinge the stapler and press it into the wooden top of my desk. Pop. A little folded staple appears; my first link of chain. Pop. There is the second link. I make a few more of these and connect them; now I have a length of miniature chain. My gray elephant eraser wanders over, curious, and next thing he knows the chain is around his leg. Now the elephant is trapped forever, attached to the edge of my desk. I pick up my horse eraser and sniff it. The horse will be next.
“Jennifer,” the teacher is saying.
“What?” I look up. The other kids in my row are staring at me.
“We’re passing forward our homework. Do you have your homework?”
I open my backpack and shuffle through the papers there. What homework? I don’t remember any homework. History? Math? I can’t remember what we’ve been studying. I pull out my Trapper Keeper with the Lisa Frank neon kitten on the cover, open it, and pick a few papers at random. I pass these papers forward. There are words on the blackboard but the spots in the corners of my vision are bad today, and I can’t read what’s written there. The teacher is talking about long division. Math! We’re studying math. I sniff my horse eraser again. Pop. Another link for my chain.
School lunch. A corn dog, some canned green beans, a wet square of cobbler. Carton of milk. Bright yellow mustard. The first things I’ve eaten all day. I finish my meal and eye the other kids’ lunches. I’m still hungry. The other kids have bologna sandwiches and foil packets of fruit snacks. Those kids don’t even notice if they have food or not, they’re so well-fed.
I like playing four square, but the spots in my vision just won’t quit today, so at recess I sit under the wooden playground equipment and play by myself. I have two sticks. One of them is for digging in the dirt, making neat straight lines and then crosshatching these lines. The other stick walks in the dug dirt after the first, leaving perfect little tracks. I am counting the lines as I make them. When I finish a square of dirt, I erase it, move a foot to the right, and start again. My stomach rumbles and I drop the sticks and walk away from the playground, into the big open field that edges the woods. It’s spring, and the field is soft and wet. A girl bumps into me as the four-square ball bounces past.
“Hey,” she says, after she fetches the ball. “Don’t you want to play?”
“Nah,” I say.
“Why do you smell like an ashtray?” she asks. “You smoke? You got cigarettes?”
“I don’t smoke.” The girl stares at me and then runs away, her arms around the ball. A flash of white in the grass. I drop to my knees. It’s an Oreo, gone soggy from the rain. Likely dropped by someone rich, someone who walks around with dollars falling from their pockets. Someone who owns every packaged product in the world, every expensive kind of boxed cereal, every forty-nine-cent fruit pie. I carefully pick the Oreo from the field and eat it.
* * *
—
The explosion comes in the still of the afternoon. I’m in the living room, watching TV. I find Jordan in his bedroom, kneeling on the floor next to a length of PVC pipe. He’s gripping one hand in the other, and blood is running down his arm.
“I followed the instructions,” he says. “The potato gun was supposed to work.” He is crying, freckled cheeks wet, his lips pulled back in rage.
“No, no, no,” says Barbara. She kneels next to Jordan and yanks his hands apart. He screams in pain. I can smell her, like a dumpster on a hot day.
“I need to go to the hospital!” cries Jordan.
“No,” snaps Barbara. She lifts his arm, dragging him to his feet. “They ask too many questions at the hospital. We can’t trust the hospital!” She pulls him, struggling, to the bathroom, and sits him on the edge of the tub while she fills an enamel turkey pan with tap water and a few glugs of hydrogen peroxide.
“Soak your hand in this,” she says to Jordan, and pushes his hand into the pot. He is still crying, snot running into his mouth. “Shut up!” she screams at him. I stand in the hall, keeping myself small. Barbara returns to her room and quietly shuts the door. I find some Scotch tape and pull handfuls of toilet paper from the single precious roll in the bathroom. As I fold the toilet paper, I think about how rare it is to have something unsullied, like a fresh roll of toilet paper. That’s what wealth is—clean toilet paper. Unused notebook paper. Clothing that doesn’t stink. As much as you want, to dirty up however you like. After this roll of toilet paper is gone, I’m not sure where we’ll get more. Usually, all we have to wipe with is newspaper. The newspaper is terrible to use dry. But if you hold it under the faucet and get it a little wet, it works okay. Jordan lifts his fist from the water and uncurls his fingers—the skin on his palm is blown wide open.
“I think I need stitches,” he says. He pats his hand with his shirt, trying to dry it. He’s shaking and breathing through his teeth.
“I know,” I say. “But Mom won’t go to the hospital.”
“I fucking hate her,” he says. “I wish she’d die. Then they’d come and take us away.”
I hand him the toilet paper and the Scotch tape and he clumsily bandages his hand, wincing when he touches his palm.
“The potato gun was supposed to work,” he repeats. “It wasn’t supposed to blow up like that.”
In the kitchen I drop a brick of ramen into a plastic bowl of warm tap water. Our single saucepan is in the sink, crusted with old macaroni and cheese, along with most of our other dishes. We haven’t had dish soap in weeks. There isn’t a sponge, either, just an old washcloth that hangs stiff over the faucet. I dig a plastic tumbler from the pile in the sink and look inside it. The bottom is a sludge of wet cigarette ashes. I rinse the ashes out and drink some tap water. The water tastes like cigarettes. The ramen in the bowl is beginning to soften and I try to hurry the process along with a spoon, poking the layers of noodles until they separate and an oily film rises to the surface of the water. The noodles never come out quite right, soaking them this way. Sometimes I eat the ramen dry, broken up like chips. I dip each hunk in the flavor packet to season it.
I pick up the flavor packet. It’s shiny foil, neat, with Chicken Chicken Chicken printed diagonally across it. Sometimes a whole flavor packet is too much salt, and half a packet is just right. The noodles are good without the flavor packet too. When there is not a single thing in the apartment to eat, somehow I can always still find these flavor packets, littered across the bottom of every kitchen drawer. Flavor packets and rubber bands and the plastic ties from bread bags.
Ramen is twenty-five cents, fifty cents, a dollar, depending on how much I can buy at once. It’s a pyramid, and the more money I have to spend, the less the ramen costs. The whole world is set up like this and I am at the bottom. If I am poor enough, ramen will always cost too much. If I am poor enough, I’ll feel like a trespasser even going through the automatic sliding doors of the grocery store. I don’t have any money and my hunger pulls negative ions from the food and even that feels like stealing. I walk through the doors anyway and take free heat and free light and free non-violence and non-shouting and it is freeing to be around people who aren’t hallucinating, at least for a little while.
Ramen is a good friend when I have a quarter, but it doesn’t fill me up. My hunger is deeper than the salt mines in an ancient seabed. My insides are catacombs. My muscles are steel cables and my bones are Swiss cheese. My head is a bird’s nest made from spiderwebs and my own saliva. I can’t think.
I knock on Jordan’s door. There is no answer, and I push it open. The room smells of WD-40 and dirty socks. His bed is empty, his window open, the blinds askew. I feel my pulse quicken. This isn’t the first time Jordan has run away. Although he’s only two years older than me, he seems to grow wilder each year, while I stay the same. He runs away in summer and lives for days in forts that he and his friend build in the woods from plywood stolen from construction sites, while I stay in my room with a book, hiding from the other kids. He eats dumpstered candy bars, their chocolate gone waxy, and sleeps on the forest floor. He runs away in winter, in the snow, without any shoes. Back when we had a car, he would run away when we were stopped at stoplights, hurling open the car door and darting out into oncoming traffic. Now, seeing his open window and his empty room, I sit on his bed and start to cry. I often feel as though I am as alone as it is possible for a person to be, and then something like this will happen. I am learning that there is no bottom to how alone a person can feel. The comforter on the bed smells like Jordan, and I pull his pillow to me. I feel myself rising from the bed and drifting, untethered, up through the clouds and into the blackness of space, where I slowly spin like an astronaut come loose from the space station. Here in space I am connected to nothing and no one. Here in space it is always dark and always cold, and not a single soul knows that I exist. This is the safest place to be. It is also the worst.
I walk west along the busy road that runs in front of our apartment complex, past the forest to the strip mall where there is a bakery thrift store. There’s a good blustery wind and I can smell the earth, raw and wet, free from the heavy hush of winter. In a few months the sun won’t set anymore and I’ll stay outside until eleven at night, collecting leaves and sticks, stringing sunshine dandelions into necklaces and making small dens in the mossy riot of the forest. When summer comes, I’ll live on light alone. But for now, I have to eat.
Heaving myself up, I bend at the waist and dip into the dumpster behind the bakery thrift store. Just like the girls on the parallel bars on the school playground, with their jackets draped over the metal bar, going round and round. There are boxes of donuts inside the dumpster and I feel my heart race as I paw through them. White powder donuts, waxy chocolate donuts. Dropping back onto the ground, I cradle these treasures in my arms. I tear one package open as I walk and quickly eat a donut. I eat another as I make my way through the forest, on the narrow dirt paths that lead to the flat, tea-colored lake. I can smell the lake today, the earthy water, the salty ducks. I eat a third donut, biting carefully into its shiny chocolate exterior. The inside is dry yellow cake. It backs up in my esophagus, coats my mouth in chalk. By the time I get home, my head is thumping and I feel dizzy. My thoughts are going in quick circles, knocking into each other, manic and frightening like a Donald Duck cartoon. I lie on my bed, still, and will my stomach to digest the donuts. I drink a cup of lukewarm tap water. The water tastes like metal.
In the summer there won’t be free school lunches, but it won’t matter. There will be sunshine and warm dirt and bare skin and green, good-smelling plants along the burbling forest streams and wolves howling in the mountains. I’ll make necklaces out of chips of wood and small treasures from leaves and grass and bits of spruce pitch. I’ll lie belly-down in the moss and stare for hours at the millipedes and the iridescent beetles. I’ll climb every single tree within a quarter mile of my house, give them names and stories and remember their smells—sweet and green or sharp and dusty—and peel off thin whorls of their bark to wear on my wrists. I’ll avoid going home as much as possible, and at night I’ll sleep with all the windows open and the bad air will go out, and drift away into the wind, and dissipate into a million tiny particles and be eaten up by the good light and the green growing things.
As I lie in my bed and wait for my heart to stop racing, I think, as I sometimes do, about my father. What does he look like? Where is he? I remember a photograph of him where he has a beard and wears thick, square glasses. But that could be anyone, any living man. Doesn’t he care about us? I imagine him in prison or long dead. He’s definitely in prison, I decide, but he’ll be out soon, and then he’ll come for Jordan and me. He’ll drive us to Taco Bell and buy us bean burritos and we’ll wade in the creek. The salmon will be running. He’ll look at our dirty clothes and shake his head. He’ll buy us new clothes that smell like the store. When we talk to him, he’ll understand the words that come out of our mouths and respond in complete sentences. No more word salad. Our life will finally take shape, become regular, with edges and borders that contain it. The dark world of Barbara’s demons will stop leaking in, ruining everything. We’ll be safe. We’ll finally be safe.
“You came home,” I say. Jordan is on the couch in the living room, watching The Simpsons.
“Yeah,” he says, not looking up from the television. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
2003
The air smells like roses, and the sidewalks are wet from last night’s rain. Bigleaf maples cast the street in warm, dappled shadow. I’m headed to the public library on Killingsworth Street, to use the internet. It’s been a few months since my train trip to Texas with Sami, and I’ve been back in Portland working part-time gigs—nannying, house painting, dog walking. Last night, lying awake on my futon at the Wych Elm house, I decided that I would try to find my father. I’m twenty years old, an adult. I’ve lived long enough with the fantasy of who and where he might be. I want to know for real.
On the library’s computer I pull up a people-finder website and enter my father’s full name. A wheel spins on the screen as the website dredges its archives for information. My father has a unique na
me, and suddenly it’s there—an exact match. I pull out my debit card and enter my payment information; it costs just three American dollars for the secret this oracle holds. I am rewarded with an address. No phone number or other information. Just an address. I look around at the other patrons in the library, wondering if they realize what an epic moment this is. They don’t. I focus again at the screen. The address is in Anchorage. My father lives in Anchorage. He is neither dead nor in prison. He exists on the very same plane of existence that I do.
Google Maps tells me that his residence is only a mile from the low-income apartment complex where we lived for several years. Has he been in this spot for a long time? Was he there, just down the street, when we were starving? When we subsisted on one free school lunch a day and occasionally I’d find five dollars and brave the winter winds to walk to the Burger King on the corner for a sack of things off the dollar menu? When we didn’t even have money for soap? I know he gave up his parental rights before he disappeared, but how could he live so close by and never reach out or find some other way to help us?
I feel strange for the rest of the day, like I’m in a fog. I boil quinoa on the stove and eat it with olive oil and salt, sitting on a wooden chair in the sun next to the herb garden in the backyard. Others come and go—there’s an old-time music jam on the roof of the warehouse that makes up one wall of the yard. Patrick comes over from the Greasy Spoon, another punk house, looking for canning jars. Some folks arrive with a bunch of green potatoes they’ve dumpstered, and there’s a loud debate in the kitchen over whether or not green potatoes will make you sick. I let my gaze go soft on the rosemary and culinary sage and wait for the fog to leave my body. My father has been in Anchorage? Possibly this whole time?
I sketch a father-shaped fantasy in my mind. This fantasy fits neatly into the parent-shaped hole in my heart. I tell myself that my father will be excited to know I’m alive. He’ll want to be friends. He’ll ask me questions about my life. My father will think I’m interesting. He’ll say things like I wish I’d found you sooner and Here’s a thing or two I’ve learned in my long life and If you’re ever in an emergency and need some cash, give me a call. My father will smile warmly at me. His entire being will radiate nonjudgmental, unconditional love. He’ll have a great excuse for his absence. I was in prison for a while and I’m embarrassed about that. I figured you’d find me when you were ready.