by Carrot Quinn
We watch the trainyard come alive in fits and starts as the afternoon lengthens, and then the activity dies down again and everything is still. Honeysuckle bushes and boughs of half-naked box elder shield us from the tracks. Surely, if we wait long enough, our train will come. We overturn a couple of four-gallon buckets as chairs and play cards in the leaves.
At night while we sleep under the moon, there is a crunch, crunch, crunch. A groundhog on his rounds. “Bob,” I whisper. “This is the enchanted groundhog forest.” In the morning we explore the land: A chain-link fence shapes the northern terminus, and a tall brick wall defines the back. And here, where the forest meets the wall, there are two old cisterns—deep holes lined in brick, filled with dark, leafy water. I follow the wall, kicking up the surface of the leaves, and there I find a steady trail of glass bottles. Old, dirt-caked glass bottles. Brown beer bottles, pale green Pepsi bottles. Bottles engraved with peacocks, bottles with stamped tin caps. Bottles half buried in mud, bottles stuck in the bases of the trees. I fill my arms with the unbroken ones. They were here, I think. They waited for trains. In the thirties, in the forties, in the fifties. Headed to California, to pick peaches. Headed south to work in the coal mines. West for logging work. They were here, waiting, and they left these bottles.
I carry the bottles back to our camp, to our white buckets upended in the leaves. I show them to Bob and he goes to the wall, fills his shirt with bottles too. There’s an old fueling station of sorts next to our camp, a pump and some rusted pipes grown into the forest itself, shackled in box elder. Here, we arrange the bottles along a wide flaking pipe that runs horizontal through the branches of cottonwood trees. The sun is dipping on the other end of the trainyard and the light shoots through the forest, setting our bottles of green and brown and amber on fire. Bob retrieves his white paint pen, and on the face of the rusted pipe, in bright cursive, he gives our installation a name: The Cincinnati Union Terminal Hobo Museum.
On a mission for water, we climb a fence to a wing of the massive, sprawling train terminal, and there we find a sort of secret garden, a row of cabbages and a brittle tomato plant. And through the glass, a history exhibit: plaster businessmen at broad oak desks. We unscrew the garden hose and fill up our water jugs, pick a few yellow fruits from the wilted tomato plant.
After dark we grow bored, so we play cat and mouse with the yard workers. Walking in and out of the trainyard, climbing ladders on strings of cars, ducking yellow lights. Bob teaches me the things he learned as a boy, from a children’s book about sleuthing given to him by an aunt. Duck low when you look around a corner; no one expects to see your head way down there. We pet stray cats, we count the groundhog holes. I’m not sure what time it is when I finally fall asleep, in my bed in the leaves, with the rumble of trains so close to my head. Are we ever going to get out of this yard? Maybe, maybe not.
In the morning we leave the patch of woods for a few hours, a sort of field trip. We walk out of the hobo jungle and find ourselves suddenly in Cincinnati—hungry, humid Cincinnati. We find a cluttered brick grocery store and buy ridiculous things: sugar beans, beef stew that smells like cat food. Bob finds a root beer float for two dollars.
All day we wait again, and the trains that come through our yard, that rattle our jungle with their bright lights, are but the dregs of trains; slow, junky trains, trains that crawl through without stopping. Still we wait; surely our train will come. The day passes, each hour laid out plain in the warm October light.
And then, at dusk, a compromise. We have come to accept, at this point, that there is no way for us to know which way our train will go. We have also come to accept that we’ll have to ride something other than an intermodal, that fast and trusty beast that goes anywhere you would want to go except, apparently, away from Cincinnati. We let these truths into our hearts, and then climb aboard the next junk train that stops. The train is carrying empty coil cars. “Hot” is written on the sides of the cars. Neither of us has ever seen a coil car before. What is a coil, and from where does it come? And why do the cars say “Hot” when they are, in fact, cool to the touch?
We drop our packs on the floor of the car and lie back against its rusted, sloping floor. The sides are very low, and so we’ll only be completely hidden while lying down. Because of this, the views, we know, will be incredible. The train stirs and begins to drag itself forward. It picks up speed. “Goodbye, enchanted groundhog forest!” I scream into the wind.
There is, incredibly, an elevated track in Cincinnati that stretches over the city. And we are being pulled onto this track, now, as though onto a roller coaster. We rattle past the great downtown buildings and over the Ohio River into Kentucky. We trundle slowly through people’s backyards, into the forest and finally east, along the river. Night has fallen and the warm wind rushes around us, flinging metal flakes into our hair. Pillars of light rise from the darkness, as though from cities on the river’s banks. Steel mills. Coke plants. Coal power plants. Thrumming with life and spewing great mushrooms of exhaust. Hulking. Dystopic. Smooth.
Our train sides in the middle hours of the night, on a residential street in a small Kentucky town. Twenty feet away from us a woman sits on her porch, talking on the phone. Loud music plays from behind her screen door. Neighbors on either side come in and out of their houses, slamming porch doors, the cherries of their cigarettes glowing red in the dark.
In the cool, damp hour before dawn, our train pulls into a massive complex of steel mills. The train starts, stops, jerks. I have been half sleeping, my head bouncing on the cold metal, the wind rushing over my face. Bob has been sitting up, alert to the rolling night. A train passes us, rattling west, coil cars like our own, but these ones are full; long, gleaming cylinders are stacked inside. And they actually are hot. We can feel the warmth radiating from them.
Oh shit. Is our train headed to a place where hot cylinders will be loaded onto our car? We pack up fast and jump down, onto the ballast. “I’m exhausted,” I say. Castles of industry are clustered all around us. We walk out of this sprawling place, feeling small and slow, like ants. There are towering concrete mounds. Plumes of dust. Lights.
There isn’t a town to be found at this early, empty hour, but there is an intersection with a few fast-food restaurants, and beyond these—what luck!—a sprawling field of wet grass, a bluff of rock, a dirt path. Mist hangs in the air, heavy like cobwebs, as though you could claw it down with your fingers. We spread out our bedrolls behind the bluff, me with my foam pad and Bob with his cardboard, side by side in the grass. A bit of day is weakening the night sky, revealing a creek on one side of us, and trees with yellow leaves. It begins to rain. Softly at first, and then harder. Bob unrolls his camo-print waterproof bivy sack, bought secondhand for cheap on the internet, and scoots down inside. I toss open my tarp and drag it over my bag, then curl into a ball underneath. As the rain falls, I drift in and out of sleep. Puddles form on the tarp, and the seams begin to drip. I wake a few hours later, soaked and angry.
We pack up camp, stuff our sodden things away, all our gear heavy with rainwater. Rubbing our eyes in the gray light, we study our maps and have a realization: There are no trains that go south from here. Trains here only go east or west, along the Ohio River. To and from steel plants. We can wait here until we turn blue in the face, but no train will take us to North Carolina.
We’ll have to hitchhike.
1998
April convinces me to go swing dancing with her, at a small church in the part of town where all the sweet corn is grown.
“You’ll love it!” she says, smiling wider than any other teenage girl would dare to smile. We’re in first period, whispering over the announcements, which are broadcast on a black-and-white television bolted to the wall. I haven’t eaten any breakfast, and the Clorox smell of my desk is making me dizzy. I’ve decided to mostly stop eating, which is turning out to be harder than I thought. At lunch I’ll allow myself
one Taco Bell bean burrito, and whether or not I can eat dinner depends on how big that burrito makes me feel. I’ve been getting dELiA*s catalogs in the mail, and although I don’t have any money for the clothing therein, I like to use the models as a yardstick for how I myself should look. So far I haven’t measured up. As far as I can tell, the dELiA*s models make no shapes inside their clothing at all; it is as though someone laid the clothing on the ground, smoothed it flat, and then photoshopped in the models’ heads, hands, and feet. At home I take off my shirt, stand in front of the mirror in my bedroom, and suck in my stomach as hard as I can, but my body still makes a shape. This is unacceptable. I am grotesque. I am the most disgusting person who has ever existed. A failure in the most basic sense of the word.
The blackness tugs at me, and I lay my head down on my desk.
“Did you study for the history test?” whispers April.
“No,” I say. I try to remember what we’ve been studying in history, but I can’t.
I’ve also recently started counting. I count on my fingers, tapping them against my leg. I count lines in the linoleum, panes in the windows, streetlamps that pass the car when Grandma and I drive to Costco. I count seconds. I count calories. I’ve memorized the calorie content of every single food that I like to eat. I count each food item again and again throughout the day, like beads on a rosary.
Besides counting, I also touch my hair. I have a deep feeling, like an itch, that my hair should be a certain way at all times. The problem with hair, though, is that it shifts constantly, so I have to touch it a lot to make sure it’s how I want it to be. I surreptitiously touch my hair several times a minute. It annoys me that touching my hair so much makes it greasy faster, which is ultimately counterproductive to my goal, but still I can’t stop. Recently I’ve begun to grow pubic hair, just a handful of individual hairs, and this itches at my brain as well. Each night I lock the bathroom door, sit on the sink, and dutifully pluck out these hairs. Sometimes they’re ingrown, which makes them even more satisfying to remove. I also pluck out my lower eyelashes. This is painful but feels incredibly relieving, as though each eyelash is a foreign object embedded wrongly in my body. I have mild acne on my upper arms, and I pick at this until my arms are covered in scars and I can no longer wear tank tops. This picking is the most euphoric release of all—removing literal wastes from my body, manually, in small white spurts.
April and I are not like the other kids at our school. The other kids drive their pickups off-road into the desert for keg parties. They shoot prairie dogs with high-powered rifles, hoping to see the elusive “red mist.” They smoke meth. The girls iron their hair and tan at the mall. April and I wear thrift store clothes and we don’t do our makeup very well. We listen to Rob Zombie and we don’t play a single sport. We read a lot of books and write poetry in our journals. We don’t smoke weed, but we hang out with the kids who do. The kids who wear Korn shirts and know all the words to Rammstein’s “Du Hast.” The kids who see Insane Clown Posse every time they tour through Grand Junction, which is a lot. The kids with wallet chains and JNCOs. I want a pair of JNCOs so badly, but I don’t have the money. After school we hike into the hills behind April’s house and cast spells, pretending to be witches. April shows me her collection of corsets and elaborate dresses that she wears to Renaissance festivals. Although she is only fifteen, April has a boyfriend, Jared, who is twenty-five. She met him at one of these festivals, where he was playing the part of a knight. Jared has a mullet and wears a T-shirt with a howling wolf on it.
I keep not caring about my classes, because not caring at all is less embarrassing than caring a little bit and failing. I’m bright, so I do well on tests, and because of this I pass most, if not all, of my classes. I skip class often to sit with the stoners in the field behind the school. I let a boy finger me in the ditch there, among the wild asparagus. It feels terrible. We walk to the apartment where he lives with his mom and try to have sex, but he can’t get hard. We’re bored and disinterested in each other, but I guess we’re not virgins anymore? Afterward we watch a Doors documentary and his mother microwaves us corn dogs. I carefully eat one single corn dog. That painful feeling of hunger in my stomach is the only thing that I own.
I feel as though I don’t know how to be a person. I watch the other kids at school, taking note of their easy way of speaking to each other, their warm smiles. I can copy their mannerisms, and this seems like a useful skill to have. But mostly I keep to myself. Humans are wildly unpredictable, I’ve decided. I’m not sure when this idea that people can’t be trusted became an integral part of my core self. I probe it, following the threads of my thoughts down toward my heart, and find that the idea is so interwoven with my bones, tissues, and organs that the two can’t be separated. I grew in a certain soil, and the contents of that soil became a part of me. Barbara’s fear became my fear.
At night I lie in the bed that once was my mother’s and watch the white curtains move in the moonlight, wondering how I can kill myself so that I don’t have to go to school. So that I don’t have to hear my grandpa ranting at the dinner table, telling me I’m a fuckup. So that I am no longer pulled, at inopportune moments, into the infinite aloneness that lives inside me. It is a parallel universe to Barbara’s universe, in which she is also alone, and I want to be free from it.
Laura’s not doing so well in Alaska, either. That skater boy who looked like Kurt Cobain who we thought was so hot in junior high, with his long, greasy bleach-blond hair parted down the middle and his baggy jeans with the wallet chain and his piercing blue eyes? He broke her heart. She’d even taken up smoking.
I miss Laura so much. I should be with her. I should be watching the way her blunt dark bob swings across her pale face. I should be holding her hand. We could have eating disorders together. We could become cutters! I would do that, for her.
* * *
—
“You’ve got to take the sacrament.” The bedroom feels small and close and yet too large, too bright. I’m under a hundred blankets but I can’t get warm. Am I dreaming? Time has ceased to be linear, the hours of the day irreparably tangled. The curtains over the window billow, and the sun dances on the bed in bright patches. “You’ve got to take the sacrament.” It’s Grandma, standing over the bed, holding something in a paper napkin. The Communion wafer, from church. It must be Sunday.
“I can’t really eat anything right now.” My voice is hoarse. All I’ve kept down in the last few days is some chicken broth and a few chunks of sugar-free green Jell-O.
“You have to eat this, though,” says Grandma. I can smell her breath mint.
“No.”
“Yes.” Her lips are a tight pink line.
“Fuck off, Grandma!” I roll onto my side and pull the pillow over my head. The bed shifts as she stands, and I hear the door of my bedroom shut. How did she get that Communion wafer? Did she let the priest put it on her tongue, and then take it out and save it for me? Grandma tries every week to get me to go to mass with her, but I hate mass. The boring sermons, the sitting and the standing. Riding in Grandma’s Oldsmobile with the Freon smell of the air conditioner. Donuts in the church basement afterward, which I can’t even eat.
I know that Grandma is sitting in the kitchen now, at the Formica table, staring at the damp Communion wafer on its white paper napkin. Clutching her hands together. Wondering what to do about the matter of my soul. I don’t care, though. I just don’t fucking care. Last week she found my birth control, which I’d gotten from Planned Parenthood. I’ve been sleeping with Tristan, the stoner who lives in the trailer with his hoarder mom, every room full of old magazines and the carpet reeking of cat piss. Tristan smells like socks, and I don’t enjoy the sex, but it feels good to be worth something to someone. I’m not stupid, though, and no matter how many times Grandpa tells me that I’m going to end up like my mother, a single mom on welfare, I know that isn’t true. I’m not ever
fucking getting pregnant. Ever. And if I do by accident, I’ll have an abortion stat. Because fuck that shit, I think. And then Grandma found my birth control—she went through all my things, actually, and found my birth control and my journals of dark poetry about wanting to die—and was more upset about the birth control than any of it, including the fact that I was having sex. Because birth control is abortion, according to the Catholic Church. So now I have the flu and she’s sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the Communion wafer, clutching her hands together and trying to figure out how to get me to swallow it. Because of the birth control.
Last week I saw my aunt Pat, the one who was wild as a teenager—her boyfriend had a motorcycle—and who is now a mild-mannered special education teacher and married to a sullen, absent man. Pat told me that growing up, Grandma and Grandpa’s policy was to never say anything positive or encouraging to a child’s face.
“They figured that would give the kid a big head.” She smiled down at me as she cracked open a can of Diet Coke.
“Oh,” I said, not knowing what else to say. Was that supposed to make me feel better?
* * *
—
She has the biggest, thickest mane of brown hair I’ve ever seen (like a Disney princess, I think), long gangly limbs, and feet that seem too big for her body. We’re standing at the edge of a cornfield in the cool night, the muffled sounds of swing music coming from the small church nearby. My face is flushed and my skin is damp from how hard and clumsily I’ve been dancing in that warm, crowded room. Her name is Nicole and she smooths her dress, her hands bright against the dark. She pulls a pack of cigarettes from a pocket and shakes one out, offers it to me.
“You smoke?” I say.
“Just a few a day. It’s a terrible habit. Nobody knows.”