by Carrot Quinn
Nicole and I are both sixteen, but she doesn’t go to my high school.
“I’m homeschooled,” she says, as I swat at the smoke from her cigarette. “You ever just drive around in the desert for hours, for fun?” She tilts her head back toward the church. “I’ve got a car.”
The desert is warm, open, full of strangeness and yet familiar. The night is a balm for my sadness. Nicole’s Subaru has a CD player, and she owns two CDs—Bloodhound Gang’s One Fierce Beer Coaster and Cake’s Fashion Nugget. She slips Fashion Nugget into the stereo and rolls all the windows down, letting in the smell of earth and freshly irrigated fields. Nicole tells me that her father was killed when she was four years old; he was shot during a mass shooting at an Albertson’s where he was manager. The life insurance money from her father’s death allowed her to buy a house, where she now lives with her mother, Beverly. Beverly dresses like a teenager and drinks too much, and sometimes she loses touch with reality.
Nicole becomes my best friend. We drive in the desert almost every day, letting the open space carry our worries away, singing aloud until we’ve memorized all the lyrics to Bloodhound Gang’s “Fire Water Burn.” We travel in either her car or mine, the 1984 Honda Prelude my grandparents are letting me buy in installments. It’s 1998, and gas in western Colorado costs eighty-seven cents a gallon. We follow the straight smooth country roads past the stubble of cornfields, soothed by the smell of sun-warped vinyl, Melissa Etheridge songs on the radio. Since finding my birth control, my grandparents have forbidden me from going out in the evenings, so after the house quiets I pop the screen from my bedroom window, climb down onto the grass, and reverse my little car out of the drive, headlights off. When I return after midnight, I shut the car door as quietly as I can and stand looking up at the cold stars, stretched wild and abundant across the desert sky. I listen to the crickets and smell the new alfalfa growth and feel held by the sky, the stars, the earth. Sometimes, when I gently open the kitchen door, I find Grandma and Grandpa sitting at the table in the dark drinking decaffeinated instant coffee. They’ve waited up for me. I walk past them, through the thick fog of their disappointment, none of us saying a word.
One weekend, Nicole and I drive through the night to Las Vegas, arriving just as the sun is rising. Another day, we go onto the mesa and jump off cliffs into deep red-rock pools of cold, churning water. We take mushrooms and strip off our clothes and draw flowers on each other with colored markers. I bury my face in Nicole’s heavy brown hair. April is busy with school—with her AP classes, with the yearbook committee, with all the important things that are setting her up for the rest of her life. She decided years ago that she would study to be a doctor. When I actually attend my classes, I mostly sleep at my desk, and I see April less and less. I stop returning her phone calls asking me to come swim in the pool. I remember how alien I felt, standing in her beautiful kitchen while her loving mother butchered a head of romaine lettuce and they discussed April’s future together.
I have two jobs. One of them is bussing tables at a buffet for $5.15 an hour. The buffet serves canned corn, spaghetti, and popcorn shrimp, and teenage girls vomit in the bathroom. It isn’t a great job, but my four-hour shifts fly by pretty fast and it’s the only place that would hire me when I was fifteen. My other job is running documents to the courthouse for a lawyer whose name is—I kid you not—Dick Gurly. I like driving the documents to and fro for minimum wage, but sometimes I am tasked with making huge stacks of photocopies and the sound of the photocopier going through its machinations for hours on end makes me want to die, so I eat the paralegals’ stashes of Dove chocolates and lie on the carpet, staring up at the fluorescent lights.
I think about Barbara often. I still haven’t heard from her—no one in the family has. When I left Alaska, Barbara couldn’t speak, or hear, or read, or write, or eat, or sleep. What happens to a person like that? Did the police come and force her out of the apartment? Was she taken to an institution? How did she stay alive, in Anchorage, in the winter, when she couldn’t even talk? When I’m rolling silverware at the end of my shift, when I’m driving home from work, when I’m in the shower, I think of her. I wipe the tears from my face and make myself focus on the traffic lights. The water stains on the soup spoons. The smell of my strawberry shampoo.
One Saturday afternoon I’m helping Grandma unload the car after a trip to Costco while she scolds me for not cleaning out the garage and dusting the living room like she asked. It’s hot outside and I’m hungry and cranky—I haven’t let myself eat anything yet today.
“Don’t be such a bitch,” I snap at her.
Grandma slaps me.
I punch her in the face.
Just like that. There aren’t any thoughts, only instinct, the same one that overtook me that day with Barbara in the hallway. The right lens pops out of Grandma’s glasses. She pulls them off, and I can see a small cut on her nose. She looks away, out the window at the stubbly fields. I watch her shrink into someone small, weak, and elderly. My skin crawls in horror. Dear God.
I decide to move out of my grandparents’ house. I have a boyfriend, a cook in his twenties named Kyle, who works at Outback Steakhouse. I don’t love him but he’s kind to me and has his own apartment, and since I’m only seventeen and unable to get a place on my own, this feels like an important alliance. My grandparents forbid me to go; shacking up before marriage is a major sin. Since when have they given a fuck about me, though? They don’t love me, they just love their stupid rules. I miss the hallucinatory, mystical Catholicism of my mother; it’s far preferable to this dry, soulless one. I pack my things, my journals and CDs and flared jeans and cardigans, and I go. The next morning, my car is missing from Kyle’s apartment; they sent Jordan in the night to take it back. I lived with my grandparents for three years, in their warm quiet house with the smooth wood floors and well-stocked pantry. In this time, I learned that hunger for food was not the only kind of hunger. Hunger for love will starve you in its own time, no matter how much you have to eat.
I still have the job running documents for the lawyer, but now it seems like I’ll lose it, on account of not having a vehicle. One of the paralegals, who is kind and pretends not to notice when I eat her stashes of candy, offers me the 1980 Mazda hatchback she had been saving for her teenage son but that he has summarily rejected, and I am so grateful for this act of kindness that I cry. The car, which smells pleasantly of dust and old plastic, has a hole rusted in the floor and the driver’s-side door is stuck shut. It billows blue smoke when it starts, and if I take my foot off the gas, the engine dies—so at stoplights I have to put the car in neutral and rev it, with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas, until the light turns green again. But it goes. It goes! The car is manual transmission, which I don’t know how to drive, so Kyle teaches me in a parking lot dusted with snow. Within a day I am lurching my way through intersections and stalling in awkward places.
I move on from the second job at the buffet to Denny’s, where I work graveyard shifts, pouring milkshakes and serving Moons Over My Hammy sandwiches to the drunks, goths, and gays as fast as I can until four a.m., at which time the restaurant empties and there is a pause in the bustle of human life. Then, for an hour, it’s only me in my apron restocking the ranch dressing and scouring the coffeepots and the cook banging around in the kitchen, and then the elderly folks in their perfectly neat clothing and coifed white hair climb onto the stools at the counter for their toast and single egg. My shift ends at seven a.m., when the desert is a soft pink. I throw my mustard-stained apron that stinks of fryer grease into the backseat of the Mazda and smoke my way out of the parking lot, into a world that has made itself new again, somehow.
By midwinter of my senior year of high school, I’ve missed so many classes that, the school counselor warns me, I might not graduate. I’d been flirting with failure but the knowledge that it might actually happen lights a fire under me, and I manage
to pull my shit together for the last few months, dragging myself daily to the hell place that I hate, and after all is said and done I do graduate—with a 2.8 GPA. No one in my family comes to the graduation ceremony, although April’s mom is there, cheering for both of us. April graduates at the top of her class; she got into the college of her choice. I tested in the ninetieth percentile on my SATs, so in spite of my bad grades, I am awarded a partial scholarship to the local state college. I don’t really want to go to college—I hate school, I always have, and I’m not sure what I would even study if I did go—but I take the packet of financial aid information home to my boyfriend’s one-bedroom apartment and look it over on the couch, trying to understand it, with a bag of Doritos open on the coffee table in front of me. A familiar wave of shame washes over me as I attempt to navigate another grown-up thing without an adult to help. As far as I can tell from the packet, I can apply for financial aid for the half of college tuition that my scholarship doesn’t cover, but I’ll need my grandparents’ tax information to do so, as they are still my legal guardians.
I could be the first person in my family to go to college. Why not?
“No,” says Grandma. We’re standing in her kitchen with its spotless linoleum and shining Formica, its cracked vinyl chairs and wooden bread box, its dish towel folded neatly over the faucet. She’s scrubbing a spot on the stove.
“College ruins women,” says Grandpa. He’s sitting at the table with the funnies section of the Sunday paper on his lap, drinking instant coffee.
“You won’t fill out these forms?” I hold up the packet.
“No!” spits Grandma. Her face is red from the effort of scrubbing.
I look at the yellow ceramic cookie jar on top of the fridge. I try to remember when I was too short to reach that jar. I try to remember those months I lived here as a little kid, when Grandma bought me ruffled white socks and taught me to brush my teeth. She’d stand me on a stool and wash my hair in the kitchen sink. I try to remember the careful feeling of her hands in my hair, working the suds around, dodging tangles.
There are other memories too—eating a ripe peach for the first time in my life the summer after they adopted me, off the tree in the yard. Tearing the fruit open—bigger than my fist and warm from the sun—picking out the live earwigs, juice running down my arm as I swallowed what tasted like the sun, only sweeter. Grandma teaching me to make my bed. “You should make it every day!” she said, snapping the sheets taut—a movement I at first resented but later learned to appreciate—smoothing the starburst quilt just so, making a place for the sun to gather. The crickets at night through my open bedroom window, hollering in the fields. The slate cat, Ms. Kitty, who Grandma and Grandpa had fed since she appeared one day from nowhere, but who wasn’t allowed to come in the house. I’d sit on the back stoop in the sun with Ms. Kitty, listening to her raspy meow and watching the sheets on the clothesline move in the still afternoon. Canning tomatoes from the garden with Grandma, dozens and dozens of quarts of tomatoes. Lifting the mason jars from their steaming water bath and arranging them on clean dish towels, hearing the lids ping shut as they cooled. Grandma teaching me to peel a clove of garlic—“You smash it first, under the flat part of a knife, and then the skin comes off easy.”
I wait for Grandma to speak again but she’s turned away from me, working the stovetop with a piece of steel wool. I can’t see the spot she’s scrubbing; the stove looks clean to me. Grandpa shakes the paper and grunts, flips to the next page in the funnies section. I shut the kitchen door softly as I leave.
2006
Bob and I are huddled in a plastic booth in McDonald’s. Tiny elderly people file past us, clutching red trays of breakfast sandwiches. A smell of hash browns and acidic coffee fills the air. I am stiff and cold inside my wet clothes, and I hunch over my hand of gin rummy, the cards damp in my fingers. We want to hitchhike but we can’t, not until the rain stops. So for now we’re stuck in this McDonald’s in eastern Kentucky.
The rain does stop, though. We walk the broad pavement, which hardly seems to move for us. The rushing car-wind hurts my eyes. It takes us a hundred years to summit a low hill, another hundred years to extract a bit of cardboard from the sterile landscape. How, I wonder, will we ever get anywhere significant without our good friend, Train? Train is a steadfast, forward-moving, down-the-tracks sort of friend. What else is there?
A man in a little red sedan picks us up. He’s headed five miles down the road. He pronounces “Ironton” “Arnton,” which sounds like music. “Let me take you to Huntington,” he says. “There are free bus tickets there. Just tell ’em I sent you.”
He drops us in the crumbling downtown of Huntington, Kentucky, where the only people around are strange, with empty eyes. We say, “Free bus tickets?” but no one has any idea what we’re talking about. We plod the streets. Our packs, it seems, have grown at least twenty-five pounds heavier.
A bus circles the town, and eventually leaves us at a laundromat. We dry our wet, stinking sleeping bags. I buy a candy bar from a vending machine, but it gets stuck. I shake the machine while staring at the sticker that says, Don’t Shake the Machine. I keep an eye on the proprietor, who is pacing the front-loading washers, nodding his head.
* * *
—
An angel appears a few blocks from the laundromat. A man across the road, screaming at us. “Do you guys need a ride to the highway?”
The man has clear blue eyes and crooked teeth. As we speed away from the curb, he tells us that he’s a drug addiction and mental health counselor.
“Where do y’all sleep at night?” he asks us.
“We camp,” says Bob. “In the trees.”
“Ah,” he says, nodding.
He ferries us to the highway in his flaking ship of cat hair, the heater turned to maximum. The distance to the highway is several unfathomable miles. An ocean of concrete. We never would’ve made it. Gone, is what we would’ve been. A tarp, blowing in the wind. Caught on a thorny bush. A crushed paper bag.
Our next ride, Thomas, is a giant man in blue coveralls driving a faded pickup truck. He’s just gotten off work at the steel mill. He stayed late today, until six o’clock. Usually he’s up at four a.m., drives an hour to work, is out at four p.m., and home by five.
“It’s good I worked late today,” he says, nodding. “I was helping this guy out. I’m the one to help somebody out, if they need it. God meant me to work late also so I could give you two a ride.” Thomas talks slow, his voice low, big fingers rubbing together, making a sound like paper rustling.
“You got any kids?” asks Bob.
“Got ten kids. Oldest one thirty-four, youngest fifteen. Got ten grandkids too.” He tells us he’s been shot, stabbed, and nearly decapitated. He “fried his brains” with drugs and alcohol. Then, fresh out of prison, he found Christ. He was saved. Now he’s married to his second wife. He works six days a week at the steel mill. His wife is in grad school, studying to be an addictions and domestic abuse counselor.
“It was God meant for me to pick you two up,” he says again. “God, he take care of you. The birds, they don’t think, ‘How we gonna make it? How we gonna live tomorrow?’ The birds, they know God will take care of them. And me picking you up, that’s God, taking care of you. Every time a sparrow touches the ground, God know. Ain’t anything on this earth that he don’t know.”
Thomas pulls off into a bright gas station parking lot on the edge of his town, somewhere in Virginia. He has us bow our heads while he says a prayer for us.
“Take care of these two. Watch over them. I don’t know how well they already know you, but whatever problems they have, and I know we all have them, right now, you take care of all those problems, whatever they might be. Watch out for these two, they’re your image, we’re all your image, I know everything on this earth is yours. It’s your property, you control it. Send your angels to watch over thes
e two.”
Thomas laughs a weary laugh and hugs us goodbye. He’ll have to be up at four a.m. tomorrow for work, and it’s eight p.m. now. Bob and I stand under the lights of the gas station, watching his truck disappear into the night. Thomas wished for angels to protect us. He prayed over us. But he was that angel, I think. He was that good luck. The God that he prays to, who takes care of the sparrow—Thomas is that God. He is what makes that God real.
Inside the gas station, Bob buys a slice of pizza and I fill up my water bottle, browse the shelves of food. A man is mopping, and he smiles at us. It feels good to be here in this nowhere town, where everyone will smile at you, no matter how dirty you look. Even late-night gas station clerks. Angels. Bruce Springsteen is playing on the stereo in the back.
Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just coverin’ up
Across the highway is an old, leaning board fence and beyond that a patch of woods. In the woods we find a graveyard, tombstones peaceful in the low-hanging mist. We spread our bedrolls under a flaming orange sassafras tree and drift off under the clear night sky. I wake up once to pee and hear a coyote howling in the hills. Am I ever going to have a home? I wonder, staring up at the boughs of the tree. Have I ever had a home? Does home even exist? Or is the concept a construct, a thing to aspire to but never reach? Do we search our whole lives but never arrive? I imagine myself living here forever, under this sassafras tree. How long until the ghosts catch up to me? Until they crowd around me, shouting away anything wonderful in my world. Until they grab my ankles and attempt to drag me underground, back into the darkness. I think of Barbara, and then stop myself. Don’t think of Barbara. But the thoughts return, I cannot fight them. Where is she? Is she still alive? Does she suffer alone, endlessly, in some dark room thick with cigarette smoke?