The Sunset Route

by Carrot Quinn

  “School was fine, I guess,” I answer for both of us.

  Grandpa finishes his drink and pours himself another.

  “You didn’t pick up your tools in the drive like I asked you,” he says to Jordan. “And where in the hell do you go at night?” Grandpa’s hands are red around his drink glass, permanently irritated from a lifetime handling caustic chemicals. Jordan quietly cuts his meat into chunks, his face inscrutable. Grandpa turns to me. “What’s this crying in your room this afternoon? Is there something wrong with you? Are you on the pot?”

  I laugh, and spit the food back onto my plate.

  “On the pot?” I repeat.

  Grandpa bangs his fist on the table. The silverware jumps.

  “George!” says Grandma.

  “There’s something wrong with her,” shouts Grandpa, louder now. He stabs a finger in the air in my direction. “She’s gonna end up on welfare, just like her mother.”

  I put down my fork and focus on the Formica of the table. The lights seem to dim.

  Far away, like a radio station turned down low, I can hear Grandpa yelling at Grandma. Something about the place she took the car in for repairs. Grandpa is retired but Grandma will never retire, really; she still works to make their home, the same way she always has; each day she fixes his meals, cleans up after him, runs the household errands, does his laundry. And yet she’s fucked it all up, somehow. Like she always does.

  Grandpa’s face is flushed, his lips wet with spit. His anger becomes expansive, and reaches out to include the larger world. The wetbacks are stealing all the jobs. There’s a goddang subdivision being built across the street, where pumpkin fields used to be. I focus my gaze on the thick hair of his forearms, the backs of his hands. I suddenly realize how lucky I am to have never had a father.

  Jordan pushes back his chair. I hear the slam of the kitchen door. The roar of a truck engine starting. Flying gravel.

  After dinner I lie in my bed in the dark, waiting to hear the television click off, Grandma’s slippers in the hall, water running in their bathroom. Moonlight from the window illuminates the far wall, where my mother’s childhood things are stacked in the closet. On the chair next to the dresser is my school backpack, with my homework inside, which I haven’t done. I don’t care, though. When have I ever cared? What did Barbara think about, when she was my age, lying in this same bed? When she was young and healthy and strong? When this was all that she knew? I wonder where she is now. I haven’t heard from her since I arrived in Colorado. Is she homeless, in Anchorage in the wintertime? Is she dead? My head has gone hot and fuzzy. Oh God. The blackness is going to return and swallow me. I am going to float in the universe alone again, untethered. The floorboards in the hallway creak, and then the house is silent. I switch on the reading lamp on my headboard and extract my journal from its hiding place behind the other books on the bookshelf. I page through the notebook to a blank page, and uncap my pen.

  I want to die, I want to die, I want to die, I want to die

  * * *

  —

  I jog north, along the dirt track that follows the fields. Once, I pause to look back at the small brick house and then I keep running, pushing through the stitch in my side. Away. I need to get farther away. I run until I am surrounded by open space, the sky, the sun. The smell of sagebrush in the warm afternoon. At the end of the field is a ditch, choked with tamarisk and wild asparagus, and I crouch in the shadows there. I am still getting used to this sun, this light brighter than anything I have ever known. Like a noise I can’t turn down. I am from the land of black-dark winters and cool overcast summers with frigid lakes. The place where the sea washes up against the high mountains. I am damp moss, I am delicate lichen, I am the loamy forest floor.

  I draw myself up and keep running, out of the ditch and across the neighbors’ fields, to the road. The road carries me past the faded corner store and I turn left and climb into the dirt-colored hills. The houses are larger now, gated. Estates. I reach the horse pasture and lope up the snaking drive, out of breath by the time I pound on the huge wooden door.

  It opens. A woman in a turquoise terrycloth robe stands holding a glass of white wine.

  “Is April here?” I ask. The woman hollers into the yawning cavern of the house and then April appears, six feet tall with long red hair, and gathers me up into a hug.

  “Is this your new friend you were telling me about?” says the older woman, in a Louisiana drawl. “I’m Frankie.” She extends her hand. “April’s mother. I was just headed out to the pool. Do y’all want some food? There’s snacks in the kitchen.”

  I met April a week ago, in first period—she rushed into class late, flustered, her hair in sheets around her face, her arms full of books, wearing a patchwork skirt that swept the ground. “Do you know there’s an article in the school paper about me?” she said, after sitting in the seat next to mine, at the back of the class. “They say I’m the oddest kid in school.” I checked, and it was true—the school paper had written about April—about her cheesy jokes, her propensity for talking too loudly and laughing at the wrong moment, her extremely good grades, her strange flowing clothing. I decided then that we would be friends, a suggestion that April agreed to enthusiastically since she didn’t have a friend at school, either, and we ate our cold pizza and paper boat of french fries together at lunch, at a table all by ourselves, while April listed off to me, loudly, the things that she liked—Star Trek, her cat, swing dancing, and Renaissance festivals.

  “I live near you!” she said, after I told her where my grandparents’ house was. “You should come over! We have a pool!”

  I’d felt happy that afternoon, in the passenger seat of Jordan’s truck, on our way home from school. I had a friend! Jordan was silent, watching the road, his gold chain glinting in the light. Nas was playing on the stereo, from a mixtape that Jordan made. We listened to this same cassette each morning—me bleary with sleep, my coat zipped up because the truck didn’t have a heater, trying to remember if I’d done my homework, or what my homework even was, a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket to buy lunch for the week (“There’s no Santa Claus,” Grandpa always said, before pulling the bill from his wallet)—and again on the way home, when I was spent from disappointment and the exertion of maintaining my invisibility (some of my teachers still hadn’t even realized I was in their classes).

  That day I was smiling, though. A friend! I held on to the bench seat as we jostled over the train tracks in town. I cranked the window down, letting in the fresh spring air. Jordan turned up the stereo.

  If I ruled the world…

  I’d free all my sons…

  Black diamonds and pearls…

  If I ruled the world

  I accept some carrots and hummus from April in her huge kitchen. The appliances are stainless steel, like in a restaurant kitchen. There’s an island in the middle with a rack above it from which hang gleaming pots and pans. On the island is a bowl of pomegranates, a bottle of balsamic vinegar, a large wooden pepper grinder. This is my first time eating hummus—it’s good.

  Grandma was fixing dinner when I left the house—meatloaf, the top shiny with ketchup. When I walked through the kitchen, Grandpa grabbed my wrist and squeezed, hard.

  “You look like a slut!” His breath stank of vodka. I was wearing a tank top with no bra. It was spring in the high desert, and the days were warm. And I didn’t really have boobs yet, anyway.

  I wrenched myself free and ran out the kitchen door. Grandpa hollered.

  “Let her go,” I heard Grandma say, through the open window.

  “Let me lend you my extra bathing suit,” says April, returning the hummus to the fridge. “We can swim!”

  April leads me through the dining room with its long oak table, the library with its walls of leather-bound books, to a set of French doors beyond which is the pool, clear blue in a concrete
patio. Frankie is in a bikini on one of the lounge chairs, smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine. April drops her shorts and hands me a small bundle, her other suit.

  “What’s your house like?” asks April. “Where you live with your grandparents?”

  “It’s small,” I say. “Not like this. But it’s really nice.” I try to find words. “Do you think I can stay here tonight?”

  “Of course you can, honey,” says Frankie. “But why? Do your grandparents know where you are?”

  Shame makes the deck recede. I talk around what feels like a sock in my mouth.

  “I don’t know. It’s…complicated. I just moved in with them a few months ago. Before that I lived in Alaska with my mother. She’s schizophrenic. She used to beat the shit out of me. We didn’t have any food. Anyway, I told myself that no one would ever hit me again. My grandpa got pissed at me today after school, called me a slut and grabbed my arm. I freaked out and ran up here. I don’t think my grandparents even like me. I mean I’m pretty sure they don’t like me. I don’t know.” The world is rushing white noise. Everything is too much. I sit on a pool lounger and close my eyes against the sun.

  “What’s your grandparents’ number, honey?” says Frankie. She disappears inside the house, closing the French doors behind her.

  “Fuck your grandparents,” says April.

  The pool is incredible. We do cannonballs, stand on our hands under the water, run off the end of the diving board. We drop quarters to the bottom and dive for them, holding our breath as long as we can. Is that the sound of Frankie shouting in the kitchen? I can’t tell. Our hands and feet are prune-y and we reek of chlorine by the time we pull ourselves out and lie like seals on the warm concrete in the sun.

  “Dinner!” Frankie calls from the doorway. “Don’t worry about your grandparents,” she says, as she spoons spaghetti onto scalloped white china.

  April hands me a fluffy towel to wrap around my dripping suit. “I’m glad you’re staying with us tonight.”

  I’m not sure what to do with all the pillows on the guest room bed—what are they for? Do people really sleep with this many pillows? I shove them off, onto the floor, and climb into the tall bed, burying myself in the blankets. On the walls are framed portraits of April over the years—April with big hair and heavy eye makeup as a young child, April wearing a leather jacket, a caricature of April bought from a street vendor while on vacation, maybe. The house is silent except for a clock in the hallway that ticks softly and persistently. I wish I could call Laura and tell her about this house, about the stainless-steel kitchen and the hummus and the pool. I close my eyes before the blackness can come and carry me away.

  2006

  I hitch thirty miles from Winona to the next town, where the train I want will stop to change crews. I set up in the trash-strewn weeds along the tracks and eat Florence’s tomatoes. When a train arrives, the rail cop materializes as well; parked in his SUV, lights off, on the access road. He’s probably napping in there and not really keeping a lookout, but there’s no way to be certain, and I am directly in his line of sight. My maps show another catch-out spot, where the train stops; I can probably walk there. It’s six in the evening and creeping toward dark.

  I traverse the sprawling outskirts of the town, across a vast industrial sea. There are no sidewalks and the starry sky expands above me, the occasional bright lights of a grumbling semi-truck pin me to the road. Four hours later I still have not found my spot. I’m standing at the edge of a field, facing a dark intersection. There’s a merry little house with a jack-o’-lantern in the window. I’m tired and lonely, and everything seems impossible.

  Down the road a bit is a gas station. The doorbells jangle and I am enveloped in the warm, cloying air. The clerk lets me study a map. I turn it upside down and right side up again. My head is hot and there’s a rattling in my lungs; maybe I’m a little delirious. And, of course, I find that I am impossibly far from where I need to be. Of course I have, in my attempt to go one direction, walked in a great circle instead. I rotate the map again. There are highway overpasses between me and my catch-out spot, and gray chunks of map that represent unknown lands. I fold the map carefully and hand it back to the clerk. I buy a banana. I’ll go back to my original spot, then. The rail cop has probably moved.

  This is train riding. There is the bit on the train, and before that there are days and days of this.

  An hour later I heave my pack over a tall fence, climb over after it, and wade through a field of dry grass beneath a power line. It’s dark but I’m near the trainyard, so I don’t want to use my headlamp. I flick the light on now and then, shading it against my palm, to reassure myself that I’m going the right direction.

  A forest of hardwoods edges the trainyard. This forest is dark and open, the leaf litter heavy and soft underfoot. Through the trees, I can see the tracks glinting in the moonlight. I’m in the spot I was in earlier but on the other side of the yard, away from the access road, so if a train comes it will obscure me from the rail cop.

  My bedroll is comfortable but I toss and turn, warm enough but too keyed up to really rest. In my imagination are Florence’s hands, her strong palms, the crow’s-feet around her eyes that soften her smile. I picture her in her sleeping loft, wrapped in a tangled white sheet, the heat of the woodstove gathered around her. I wish I’d told Florence that I like her. I wonder if she likes me back.

  In the morning I’m on a train, but it has not yet left the yard. When this train arrived, I thought it was headed to Chicago, and so I’d climbed aboard. But instead of leaving the yard, it had split, while I was asleep, into two neat pieces, and my piece had been left behind. I lie on my bedroll, dawn breaking over my face, while flocks of pigeons beat the grainers with their wings. The sky is a cold, autumnal blue.

  Another train rumbles up and stops on the other side of the trees. I throw my things together and sprint through the tall grass down into a mucky ditch, scramble up the ballast and over an unrideable car and down the ballast on the other side, to where I am once again hidden on the edge of the forest and can walk along the train, looking for something rideable.

  But I find nothing. The train leaves.

  I’m thirsty. I have to take a shit. In the forest I rest on the ground, quiet. The leaves on the trees are just beginning to fall. My pack stashes neatly in the lee of a tree and I leave the forest for an old residential neighborhood, blank houses steeling themselves against the coming Wisconsin winter. At a fast-food restaurant I order chili cheese fries and then find the public library and use the bathroom, after which I stand in front of the mirror for a long time, staring at my face.

  I pass the rest of the day and another night in the hardwood forest next to the trainyard, sleeping and reading and lying on the ground, watching the sky. It’s cold, and I think of the roar of the woodstove in Florence’s red farmhouse. The way I’d wake in the night and feed it split wood. What would it be like to have a home like that? With someone like Florence? The clouds roll over and away again, stack up like houses of playing cards and then tumble apart. At night a creature makes its bed in the thistles around me, and spiders crawl over my sleeping bag. When I’m hungry, I eat salted kidney beans rolled up in the leaves of a red cabbage from Florence’s farm; when I’m thirsty, I have water in my plastic gallon jug.

  Trains come and go, slow pounding power with their lights reaching into my nest. The engineers lean out the windows of the units. Do they see me? I can’t tell.

  On the third day, I abandon the hardwood forest and hitchhike. After a period of waiting, I am on my way east. A dude in a pickup truck stops for me, and then an aging hippie in a crumbling Subaru. And then, in Illinois, a man named Mark picks me up and says he will take me all the way to Ohio.

  Mark makes his living buying and selling things on Craigslist, which he tells me about as we drive through the night, stopping once for gas station nachos and Di
et 7Up. At five in the morning we are finally in Ohio. Bob meets me in the darkened driveway when I arrive.

  “Last night was my little brother’s birthday,” he says. “We played cards and drank Old Crow until late. I fell asleep on the couch.”

  After saying goodbye to Mark, I stumble into Bob’s parents’ huge house, with hot and cold running water, soft beds, lace curtains, and all sorts of other things. I drift off under smooth pink blankets in the guest room and sleep until noon, waking to find the house empty and warm sunshine coming in through the curtains. My dreams were full of death and heterosexual sex, weeping, and men.

  * * *

  —

  Sixty years ago, in the woods behind Cincinnati Union Terminal, hobos waited in the cottonwood trees on nests of rain-soaked cardboard boxes for their trains. They drank liquor from green glass bottles, trampled paths in the weeds, and built fires to cook their stew. The woods were busy with comings and goings and the sounds of shouting. Now, Bob and I are in this same jungle, under the trees that shake in the wind and catch the last of the light, and it’s quiet. The air is fresh and clean, and October leaves drop over last year’s flattened beer cartons. These days the jungles are mostly abandoned. The cold trains blow through unridden. We’d pored over our maps at Bob’s mom’s house and decided that this would be the spot to catch a train. Trains come through here headed to Chattanooga, Atlanta, Louisville, East St. Louis. They do not go to North Carolina, which is where we want to go, but we figure that the first step in getting to our destination is just getting out of Ohio. After that, we’ll figure it out.