by Carrot Quinn
* * *
—
Winter loses its hold on the land. The ice crumbles, becomes chaos, and then is gone. One day I walk to Burger King for a sack of fries and hear wolves howling in the Chugach Mountains, their cries drifting over the city. The birch trees leaf out, heralding spring. Later, at home, the phone rings in our empty apartment. I put down the fries I bought with my last two dollars and pick it up.
“Hello? Jenni?” The line crackles. It’s my grandfather. I press the plastic receiver, which smells like my mother’s stale breath, closer to my ear. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine, I guess,” I say. I look at the paper Burger King bag. I can feel the fries getting cold.
“That’s good,” says Grandpa. He tells me that he and Grandma are adopting my brother. Barbara gave up her parental rights. Jordan will go to Colorado, to live with them. He won’t have to be in juvie anymore.
Jordan will finally be free from juvie. My tears wet the receiver.
* * *
—
“We’re being evicted,” Barbara says. She’s stuffing dirty laundry into a black trash bag.
“What?” I ask. It’s summer and I’ve just come home from the woods, where I passed the day reading Flowers in the Attic in a grove of spruce trees and eating shoplifted cookies.
“We failed our inspection. We’re being evicted.”
I look at the broken blinds, the white paint gone yellow from cigarette smoke. The spilled food ground into the carpet. The overflowing trash can. Had we ever cleaned the fridge?
“Where will we live?” I say. Barbara doesn’t respond. She’s stuffing the laundry blindly, grabbing whatever is in front of her. The pile that’s been accumulating in the hallway for years comes up to my waist. Lots of these clothes are too small for me now. Some of them are Jordan’s.
We move into a women’s shelter. The weather is mild and the world is a tangle of green and the days never really end, just bleed, gently, into each other. I’m not allowed to leave the shelter on my own, so I wander the quiet halls, open doors into rooms of supplies, folded linens, a well-stocked kitchen. I look in the fridge—vegetables, bags of shredded cheese, a chocolate cake. I pull a fork from a drawer and eat a piece of this cake. When we arrived, I was presented with travel-size toiletries and new, clean socks. The dorm where we sleep has bunk beds with stiff woven blankets that smell strongly of detergent. Each day, we make our beds, pulling the bedclothes tight and folding down the white top sheet. At night I lie in this perfect bed, the tucked-in sheet holding me fast, and watch the ceiling fan turn languidly. The midnight sun bleeds in around the edges of the blinds. Often I can hear a woman in the stairwell, crying softly into the payphone.
Barbara hates the shelter. She hisses at me about the other women there, about the staff who make the rules. Ignoring her, I return to the kitchen, where I eat another slice of chocolate cake. In the yard with its high chain-link fence there is a set of swings and I rest here, feeling the sun on my face. I can smell the loam of the forest and hear the seagulls crying and I know that the sea is just a few blocks away. I lie on the wood chips and stare up at the clean blue sky and think about whales, about my brother’s blue whale, carved into a hunk of wood. The whale he never got to finish. We can stay in this shelter, but for how long? We have nothing, we are homeless. But I don’t need anything when I have the sun. I can live in the forest. I can sleep on a bed of moss, I tell myself. The trees will be my family.
* * *
—
The apartment building sits alone, squat and with peeling white paint, on a busy industrial boulevard in an especially desolate part of town. Barbara unlocks the door to the stairwell and we drag in the two trash bags that hold our most important belongings—everything else is piled in a storage unit across the street. In the warm basement the dryer thumps companionably. The stairwell smells like miso and the neighbors’ shoes are lined up neatly on the mat outside their door. I look at the neighbors’ closed door and wonder about their food, their laundry, their lives. What is it like to live behind that door? Do they have matching sets of bath towels? Are there adults who become concerned if a child disappears?
Barbara pushes open the door to our apartment and flicks on the light. A bare living room, the carpet striped with lines from the rug shampooer. White paint, mini blinds, wall registers for heat. There is a couch, which is neat, since we no longer own any furniture, and there are three bedrooms: One for Barbara, where she can kneel in the dark and drink Mountain Dew while writing her manifestos about the Virgin Mary on paper grocery bags. One for me, where I will sleep on the floor curled against the wall, wrapped in an old comforter with the batting spilling out. If I leave the blinds on the window up at night, I can see the stars. The third bedroom is for Jordan. Barbara still sees Jordan, coming and going throughout the day. She speaks to this Jordan as if he is still with us. But Jordan is in Colorado. He’s never coming back.
* * *
—
I wake at four a.m. in the dark apartment and pull on my Walmart winter coat and my boots; no hat or gloves, even though it’s twenty degrees below zero outside. It’ll take me an hour and a half on the city bus to reach East High School, where Laura and I are freshmen. Outside, I cross the wide frozen street, empty of traffic in this early hour, to the bus stop on the other side. The bus costs eighty cents, and today I have it. Last week I didn’t have the change. Last week the bus pulled to a stop with a great diesel wheeze and the doors swung open with their sigh of stale, warm air and I told the bus driver I didn’t have eighty cents, could I still come aboard. Just a fourteen-year-old in the bitter cold of early morning, standing on the side of the road.
“No,” he said. The doors creaked shut and the bus lumbered away, leaving me alone.
Behind me at the bus stop is a shuttered restaurant, its neon sign promising hot soup. I have never eaten soup there, I’ve never had the four dollars for a small bowl of soup, but I think about that soup each day when I wait for the bus. Is the soup good? Does it come with crackers? How many crackers? What would it be like to walk into a restaurant whenever you wanted, and order soup?
Today, though, I have eighty cents—two quarters, two nickels, and two dimes—and when the bus jostles to a stop and the doors wheeze open, I climb on, accept my thin paper bus transfer, and take my place in comfort, sitting on my numb hands to warm them. Not having the money a few days ago felt like a rejection. Today, though, I have been accepted. I watch the driver nervously as we lurch along the icy street. My status seems tenuous. At any moment the bus could stop, and I could be asked to leave. I will my body to relax. I am safe here. Twenty minutes later we reach the intersection of Arctic and Northern Lights Boulevards and I hop out the back door into the dark and crunch across the street to McDonald’s. I have a half-hour wait until my next bus and I like to pass it here, enveloped in the smell of cooking food. I usually don’t have money for breakfast and my first meal of the day is the free school lunch at noon, which means fighting dizziness to stay awake in my classes, but today is a good day, an incredible day, because I have two dollars to buy two hash brown patties. I stole twenty dollars from Barbara when she got the small bit of cash that was left over after welfare paid our rent this month, and this is the last of it. I carry my hash browns on their plastic tray with four white paper ramekins of ketchup to an empty booth where I can watch the falling snow. The salt of the potatoes crackles like electricity in my mouth.
Laura is waiting for me when I get to school this morning, on the couch in the lounge area outside of our first class. We have a lounge area with a couch because we attend a smaller, alternative school that exists within East High School. The alternative school is for the weirdos, the gays and the poets and the cutters, people like me who are good at math and test well but can’t really focus. Laura is wearing her blood-colored velour dress with the lace-up bodice and the bell sleeves, an
d her perfectly smooth bob is dyed a fresh shade of black. I sit next to her, close enough to smell her floral conditioner, and hold her hand. We take out our journals and swap them, open to a clean white page and uncap our colored pens and write stories for each other in the rune alphabet we like to use. When class starts, English, I’ll sit at my desk but keep writing stories in my journal, and after a while I’ll leave and return to this couch. Our alternative school has an open-door policy and we are allowed to leave class when we want to. I’m still barely passing, though, even by alternative-school standards. What is the point of homework? What is the point of paying attention?
“Do you want to come over to my house for dinner tonight?” asks Laura, as she closes my journal and hands it back to me.
“I think so?” I say. I run my fingers over the purple velvet of the journal, smoothing it. Fear rises in my throat. Fear tastes like McDonald’s hash browns.
A split-level home on a quiet residential street. A tidy warm living room, a Christmas tree, piles of gifts wrapped in shining foil. The smell of onions sautéing. One of Laura’s moms chops garlic in the kitchen. Her other mom tosses carrots into a colander and runs them under water in the sink. The swing of a cupboard door, a glimpse of shelves of packaged foodstuffs. An empty carton, dropped into the recycling bin. Laughter.
I am perched stiffly on a stool in the kitchen, trying to remember how to breathe. At home in my filthy apartment, I fit. I make sense. But here, I am suddenly aware of how bad I smell: like the ubiquitous secondhand smoke, plus mildew and unwashed armpits. There are stains on my sweatshirt, and I haven’t changed my underwear in four days. I am aware of how hungry I am, not just for calories but for nutrients, for fresh living things and flavors other than fast food and ramen noodles. Watching one of Laura’s moms slice open a carton of tofu, I feel like a feral cat that’s been captured in an alleyway and brought home. My fur is matted with burrs and my face is disfigured from fighting. I have a limp from an injury that never healed right. My teeth are mossy when I run my tongue across them. When was the last time I brushed them?
One of Laura’s moms, Sharon, is a social worker, and this makes things even scarier. At a very young age, I learned to fear social workers. I am sure that Sharon, more than the others, can see right through me, into my heart. She can see how full of shame I am, how undeserving of love. Any minute now she’s going to drop the colander in revulsion and cast me out into the snowy street, where I won’t have any money for the bus home. There’s an urge to run out of Laura’s house and flounder through the deep snow into the forest, then crawl into the hollow beneath a spruce tree, the one place I know to be safe. But instead I grip the stool, willing myself to stay put.
Laura is kneeling under the Christmas tree, lifting the presents one by one and shaking them. The scent of wrapping paper is thick in the air. I wonder if I’ll get a package of socks and a kitten calendar from my grandparents this year, now that Jordan is gone and I’m fourteen. How will they know where to send the gifts, since we moved?
At dinner I fork sautéed green beans into my mouth, trying not to seem too hungry. Laura’s mom Brenda, who works for the phone company, smiles at me and I flinch. When will I have to run, or protect myself somehow? The food is very good. Maybe if I say as little as possible, I’ll be able to finish my plate before things take a dark turn.
After dinner Laura and I retreat to her room and shut the door and I collapse on the bed like a starfish, relieved. It’s a small room, the walls hung with tapestries and blacklight posters. Laura lights a stick of sandalwood incense, stolen from the mall, and places it in the small clay incense holder, made by me, that sits on top of her dresser. I reach my arm out and touch the clothes in her closet—flannel, crushed velvet, thrift store polyester. Laura flicks on the blacklight and we lie on the bed. I take her hand in mine. I can see the lint stuck on her dark shirt, the white glow of her teeth. Her eyes are closed.
“What’s going to happen in the future, do you think?” she says.
“I don’t know. Maybe we’ll live on another planet. Instead of people, there will just be cats. The cats can talk, but only in sign language. We’ll all speak in sign language.”
“And we’ll wear medieval clothing,” says Laura. “It’ll be on an island. The rest of the planet is water.”
“We’ll travel everywhere by boat,” I say. “Except for when we’re riding horses. There will be fruit growing all around us. The rain will always be warm.”
“We’ll live in a castle,” says Laura.
I trace the lines in her palm, touch her bitten nails. Laura and I have made up so many worlds together—I have journals full of them. We’ve created alphabets. Languages. Galaxies. Since I was old enough to comprehend, I’d known the real world. Not the world that is shown on television but what exists under that, the bedrock of everything. And all I can think about is how badly I want to leave it behind.
2006
I crouch in the alley with my pack against my legs and stare at the string of railcars, willing it to move. The string sits motionless, but I know that it is bluffing. In a moment, when the engines affix themselves to the front of the string, the trainyard will burst into life. Everything that was still will become noisy; everything silent will begin to lurch. I have only a few minutes in which to make my move.
I hoist my pack, heavy with cans of beans and several days’ worth of water, and jog clumsily into the yard. The overhead spotlights hack the night into chunks of brightness and shadow, and I dart quickly from patch of black to patch of black. This string consists of UPS truck trailers on flatcars—piggybacks, as they’re called. Mail trains are the second-fastest thing to Amtrak, and this one will cover the distance from Portland to Chicago in just three days.
Things with Finch didn’t work out. Finch is like me, wild, and she would disappear for days at a time, or I would. I was never sure where she went. After reuniting, we’d curl on the futon in a friend’s basement, where I was staying, and we’d fuck, and then we’d cry. Her heart beat to a rhythm that my heart recognized, but in the end, the mirror was too much. Finch started spending more and more time in Seattle, where she had another lover. She enrolled in trade school. She wanted to learn carpentry.
My intention is to make my way to North Carolina, on the train, by myself. I’m not so much heartbroken as I am running from the idea of being heartbroken. I’m running from Portland, from the rain, from a loneliness that feels like anemia; so deep inside that nothing can touch it, like a constant ache in my bone marrow. A month ago Willow wrote me from North Carolina, telling me about the sunshine. I’m hoping I can find something tangible there, something solid enough to hold in my hands. I’m not sure yet what that thing will be.
I’ve never ridden a train solo. The idea of it overwhelms me. I know that I have the understanding, the directions to lonely crew changes, the photocopied rail maps—what I don’t know is whether I have the emotional strength to endure the challenges of the train alone. But what is my life if not an experiment in enduring challenges alone? I will be the sagebrush plateau, the glacial river. The open landscapes of the American West will be my mirror now.
I find a car that might be rideable at the back of the string and heave myself up onto the filthy steel, shoving my pack under the axle of the truck trailer that sits on the flatcar and then wriggling onto my belly after it. There is no graceful way to ride a piggyback, this truck trailer on a flatcar. Once under the axle, I can crouch on my heels, my back hunched; hoses and metal contraptions, thick with road grime, hang around my face. There is not enough room on the flatcar, under the axle of the truck trailer, to lie down or stretch out completely, but I need to be here until the train clears the yard; under this axle is the only place to hide. Once I’m north of Portland, I can move out from under the truck trailer and spread my bedroll in the open on the flatcar. For now, I touch the hoses around me—to be curled in the innards of a sem
i-truck’s axle is something I imagine few people have a chance to experience. I press the button that lights up my watch and see that it’s three-thirty in the morning. Beyond my car the yard is yet unmoving; blinking lights are distant and slow, tracks gleam dully in the spotlights.
I close my eyes, aching for sleep. It’s October, and the nights are getting colder. I want to pull out my sleeping bag and wrap it around me, but the bag is fluorescent orange, and besides, there isn’t any room. I think of the dusty futon I slept on in Portland, in the basement of my friend’s house, with the kitchen that smelled of cumin and tea. I think of Finch, curled in my arms, quietly weeping.
I don’t know if I know how to properly give and receive love. I understand the first bit, the early part when I feel euphoric and unaffected by anything, but I don’t know how to do the part that comes after that. I wish I had a script, a template, some idea in my head of how things should work. But I don’t. The initial dazzle wears off and then there aren’t any instructions, only the hot nakedness of vulnerability, like a bad dream where you’re in a crowded room but you’ve lost your clothes. It’s a sort of exposure that feels insane to me, like someone could just hack me up with a sword. I need armor to live in this sharp world; shining, heavy, glinting armor. Anything else feels pathetic. Like a worm on the sidewalk after the rain. Like a slug about to be salted.
At four a.m. the train jerks and I startle; I didn’t even notice the engines approaching the string. There are usually three or four engines, more if you’re going over mountains, so that the train has more power; they hiss and click and make a thundering sound. I must be at the back, they must have added more cars to make the train even longer; that would make the engines far enough ahead that I wouldn’t hear them. My mouth is dry, so I swallow some of the water in my gallon jug. And then my car begins to move.