by Carrot Quinn
Every Sunday, Willow, Helena, and I meet our other friends at a concrete loading dock to play in an anarchist marching band together. Someone has acquired drums; someone else thought up a new beat for us to play in their dreams. A few of us are brilliant with rhythm, and the rest of us, myself included, struggle to stay on the beat. But the effect is transcendent—for an hour time slips away, and the looping rhythm transforms us. We are not individuals. We have always been, and we will always be, parts of a whole. We call ourselves Cakalak Thunder.
At night I lie in bed and look at the way the glitter in the green paint of my room sparkles in the Christmas lights. I pull my sheets up to my chin. They’re 1500 thread count, shoplifted from the mall, the softest sheets I’ve ever owned. I wait for that loosening of reality that comes before sleep, the tug that pulls me under, but it doesn’t come. I’ve been thinking about Barbara again lately; terrible, invasive thoughts, images I can’t drive from my brain. Barbara, alone in a room somewhere. Hungry, cold, scared of everything. Barbara in this room day and night, irrespective of what is happening in the rest of the world. In my mind there are floods, famines, earthquakes, and Barbara is still in this room. I’m eating cold fried chicken in a dumpster or sewing a cycling cap from thrifted fabric while outside a rare snow dusts the dogwood trees, and Barbara is still in this room. The planets spin around the sun, and Barbara is still in this room. Barbara is inside this room that is inside me. The room is in my heart.
One morning I open my computer to find an email from Jordan; he’s finished his stint in military prison. He’s working as a diesel mechanic, and doing well. His letter reminds me of the one he wrote from basic training, when he said he’d talked to Barbara. He wrote her number in that letter. I jump up from my desk and pull out my stack of journals, flipping through them. The letter falls out, onto the floor. As I unfold the worn notebook paper, my skin prickles and I feel cold. There’s the television static, creeping at the corners of my vision. I stumble down the narrow attic steps and lift the receiver of the landline in the front room. I mash the numbers and wait, the pealing of the phone far away, reverberating too loudly into another, parallel world. There are so many ways to die, when you’re homeless and schizophrenic in Alaska in winter. You could set your tent on fire in an attempt to drive out Satan, or you could run full speed at the police. You could die of exposure on the street after drinking too much rum and curling up in a doorway wearing just a trench coat as protection from the cold. If Barbara is still alive, it means that she must’ve gotten help somehow, at least at one point. She must have been given something, even if it was just enough to keep her head above water. Keep her alive for a little while longer.
And if she is alive, shouldn’t I be taking care of her? Aren’t I the able-bodied daughter, frittering my life away in a brick house filled with sunlight, eating shoplifted goat cheese and writing stories about riding trains? A wave of shame overwhelms me, eclipsing the static at the corners of my vision. Who am I, anyway? I should be studying nursing, learning to code, taking welding classes—anything practical that would afford me a good, steady income. I should be saving up so that I can fly to Alaska and rescue her, take her home to a peaceful bit of land I’ve acquired in the countryside. Hook her up with the very best doctors that can work out the very best medication cocktail so that she can have the very best quality of life possible.
Barbara answers the phone on the third ring.
“This is your daughter,” I say.
“Jenni?” she says.
Bile rises in my stomach. I’m sitting on the floor in the front room, the plastic receiver pressed against my cheek. It’s warm in the house but I’m shaking with cold.
“Jenni?” she repeats. I realize, then, that I changed my name to Carrot so that I would never have to hear that word again.
“How are you?” I ask, keeping my voice level.
“I’m fine,” she says. Her voice is high, nasal, childlike.
“Where are you living?” I ask.
“Oh, Jenni,” she says again. “You should’ve called. You know you can always call me.”
I wrap my free arm around my knees, try to stop the shaking.
“Okay,” I say.
“Oh, Jenni,” she says. “You’ve got the devil inside of you. Satan, he lives inside of you. I can see all the monkey demons, above your head. Can you see them there? Oh, Jenni, I should’ve let you die when you were a baby. I should’ve let you go with Jesus.”
The walls in the living room are starting to breathe. They warp softly in and then out again. I’m eight years old, and Barbara is beating me with a wooden kitchen spoon. Her eyes are empty and dark, her mouth in a grimace. Her black hair is coming loose; wisps of it stick to her sweaty forehead. I’m in bed, and she’s whaling on me as hard as she can. Because I had begged her for food again.
“You should’ve died when you were a baby,” she repeats.
I’m wandering the playground at recess, looking for something to eat. I find a Doritos bag and there are chip crumbs in the bottom. The other kids are playing four square and tetherball, swinging on the monkey bars. The crushed Doritos don’t quiet the burning in my stomach. Every muscle in my body is tensed toward survival. I crawl into the space under the jungle gym and crouch in the wood chips there, surveying the other children like a feral animal. Where is food, and how do I get it?
I hang up the phone. It rings. I pick it up.
“I should’ve let you die when you were a baby,” she repeats again. “I should’ve let you go with Jesus….”
I hang up again.
The phone rings again.
“DO NOT CALL THIS NUMBER ANYMORE!” I scream into the phone. I smash the landline into its cradle. I grab my bike and push it out of the house, let the screen door slam. Behind me the phone rings, and rings, and rings.
* * *
—
Winter in Greensboro is gentle and mild, like a dream that never comes. Pussy willows grow along the trash-choked creek. The sky is nothing but sun. Florence arrives one day, in a Dodge Neon that trails plumes of burning oil. She’s wearing tights and pineapple earrings and she’s cut her hair into a mullet with a razor blade. She’s running from her red farmhouse banked in new snow and the memory of a man—he’d been handsome but mean and she’d wanted to make a life together, but then everything had ended.
“This town seems like a nice place,” she says. “Is that true?”
We’re sitting around a fire in the backyard, wearing corsages made of dumpstered roses. I look at Florence and I remember her in Winona, squatting in the fields in her bathing suit, her freckled hands caked with dirt.
Willow is in New York for the holidays and Florence moves into Willow’s room, with its glossy red floor and smell of clove cigarettes. In the mornings, I make us eggs and rice and greens and we play cards while we eat and then go dumpstering in Florence’s car. We turn the radio way up, and fight over the stations. We steal from the scrapbook aisle at a huge crafts store and then make crafts in Willow’s room while eating sugar cookies. Finally, I collapse from the sugar and lie in a heap on the futon, watching Florence make bracelets from old bicycle tubes.
“Where did you come from?” I ask Florence. She crawls into bed and wraps her freckled arms around me and tells me stories about her cats, her bike, her friends and how they like to drink. Her dad was a truck driver and she inherited her grandfather’s farm in Minnesota. The winters are too cold in Winona. The summers burn her skin. When she was a teenager, she was into meth; when she was a kid, she huffed propane. Her friends robbed liquor stores. She and her ex-partner had wanted to get goats.
We hold each other on the hard futon, waiting to fall asleep. And then sleep comes and I forget that Florence is there at all.
* * *
—
After talking to my mother on the phone, I’d decided to try to contact my g
randmother on my father’s side, the one he told me wasn’t interested in knowing me. Because what if he was lying? What if she was waiting for my call, sitting in her dusty parlor in San Francisco? Looking out the window at the pigeons in the street, wishing she had a granddaughter. My father had told me that she had been a writer and an editor during her career. I was a writer too. What if I got these genes from her? Maybe my father didn’t want her to know me because he was ashamed of how he hadn’t paid child support. In the scorched forest of my heart was a small clearing full of lupine and wild paintbrush that was reserved just for her, this grandmother I had never met.
I found her phone number the same way I found my father’s address—on the internet. It was listed publicly. One warm afternoon, I called the number and she answered on the second ring.
“My name is Jennifer Quinn,” I said. “I think I’m related to you?”
“We’re no longer related,” she said, her voice clipped. “Never call this number again.”
That night I lay in bed and wondered how much rejection was too much to bear. How much rejection could a single person stand? How much pain could a single person stand? When did the pain end and the healing begin? How long did it take to heal? Was one lifetime long enough to even start, much less complete, the process of healing? Or was the certainty of breaking the only thing in life that we could count on for sure? Were we destined to break, and break, and break, until we died?
Florence and I go to a New Year’s Eve party. I don’t usually drink, but tonight I make an exception, and by midnight I’m moody from wine.
“Kiss me?” I ask Florence, on the deck. I have to shout above the noise. A light rain is falling. Florence pulls the foil from a bottle of champagne and then kisses me. Her eye shadow is the colors of a sunset.
I ask what her plans are.
“I have no plans,” she says. “Not right now.”
The ghosts have found me by this time, here in Greensboro; they’ve been drifting like snow in through the open windows, settling into the corners of my living space. Creeping under the blankets at night, sitting on my chest, getting caught behind my eyelids. They’re everywhere, on every surface. No one else can see these ghosts; not even I can see them. I can feel them, though. Everything’s off about Greensboro now; nothing is right. I feel spooked, wary, certain that something terrible is about to happen. If I stay here, the ghosts will crush me with their weight. They’ll kill me.
I ask Florence if she’ll ride trains with me, from Georgia to Alabama to the Mississippi bayou. Hot yards in Texas; New Mexico like the future and the past, like the surface of the moon. Southern Arizona where there is no winter (and there are oranges on the trees!). All the way to California. The Sunset Route, the same train I rode with Sami to escape the Portland rain. Where we went to jail in Sweetwater and I had pinworms in L.A. The train that carries truck trailers of orange juice from Florida to Los Angeles.
Florence says yes.
We start planning our trip together. We have a huge road atlas and we cover it in pencil marks. We’re jumping off into the great wide anything; we’ll claw our way across the Southwest on the Tropicana train. We collect the gear we need bit by bit, make lists, stress about this and that. Will it be cold? Probably. How many days will it take? How many gallons of water will we need to haul with us?
Florence has never ridden a freight train before. I draw rectangles along the edge of our atlas.
“See? That,” I say, “is a stack train.”
We talk about the Rockies in Canada, where the train goes through a spiral tunnel built into the mountain itself. How you can ride down the West Coast with winds like ice, and the great middle part of the country with yellow prairies and weather that hits without a cloud in the sky. It’s January, and the world feels electric. I feel electric. It feels like movement is the only thing that can soothe me, like I must burn through space and time as though I’ve been born with more than I can possibly use.
Why not? I figure. There’s no place I’d rather be than inside a freight car. We’ll eat up the poetry of the passing desert and know that we’ve got water and a tarp in case it rains. We’ll end up west just in time for crocuses and cherry blossoms and the bright wet end of the rainy season, people’s hearts exploding like they’ve just been brought up from the sea floor.
February comes with a clear winter wind and we’re off—heavy packs stuffed with woolen things and a cardboard sign that says Georgia, hitchhiking thumbs bright red in the cold, going south to find the Juice Train.
That night we’re on a dark road in Georgia, tired and windburned. We don’t know where we are. We lean against a pine tree on the shoulder of the blacktop and watch the silhouette of an old man against the warm yellow windows of his small house. It gets colder and our sweat chills, and ice chunks slosh in the gallons of water that we carry. We walk circles in the fifteen-degree night, kick rocks on the train trestle over I-85.
The next morning, we wake in the frozen dawn and stir, brush the frost from our sleeping bags and knock it from the tarp we’d strung low in the trees. The frustration from last night is gone with our dreams. We stumble, again, under twenty pounds of canned beans, and sleep next to the trainyard in a ditch full of brambles. We find our train, at last, and spend a cold day and black night rumbling toward Louisiana. On the train it’s too noisy to talk, so we make faces at each other and stick our filthy fingers into cans of corn, throw liters of bright red piss over the side (we’re both on our periods) and laugh, together, until we feel as though we’ll throw up. New Orleans is the warm red glow of a city overhead and voices all around us, boots crunching on gravel and the two of us hidden deep in our sleeping bags, holding our breath as the train jumps and startles through the crossings. Finally we are out of it and asleep and in the morning our train is a ship crossing the Mississippi bayou, trees rising out of the still water of a swamp on either side as far as we can see.
Suddenly we’re halfway through Texas and the long train slows, then stops. We run our grubby fingers along the atlas and see that we’re pretty close to Alpine, although we’re not exactly sure what that is. It feels good to stand in the full sun with our backs against the orange freight container, looking at the blue sky and letting the light drive away the stale, dull cold. My mouth tastes like dust. The only sound is the rush of the soundless desert. I pick up a gallon jug and drink for a long time, and Florence shuffles a deck of cards and deals two hands on the floor of the car. So far our train has stopped often and for long periods of time in Texas, pulling off onto stretches of double track in the lonesome desert to wait for other, higher-priority trains to pass. The train will sit silently for hours, with only the whoosh whoosh of the winter wind and the ping of settling steel. And then, when we’ve just about forgotten that the train can move at all, when we’ve accepted it as an immovable thing, a monument to the impermanence of industry, our train will begin to creep—so smoothly at first that we don’t notice it until a tree or pole passes above us in the sky.
This morning, we play our card game in the stopped car, and our stomachs growl in the sun-drenched quiet. I reach for my jar of peanut butter but cannot make myself eat one more bite of it. My heavy cold cans of beans aren’t appetizing either, nor is the single can of pale green peas, wet and salty and soft, that I packed to break up the monotony of beans.
After eight hours Florence says, “I want to get the fuck out of this metal box.” We gather our gallon jugs and blue tarp and throw ourselves over the side, landing squarely on the ballast and walking through brittle sagebrush toward where we imagine the road will be. We turn and look back at our train; it’s so long you wouldn’t guess that it even had a beginning or an end. I feel a pang of longing looking at it, the train we worked so hard to locate and stow away on, the distance that it took us.
Our legs pump happily on the walk to the road. Blood flows through us; after days of sitting, our m
etabolisms kick in like flocks of birds.
We find the road and cross, stick out our thumbs toward the west and then put them down again. There is no traffic. Leaning our packs against our legs, we stand upright, our joints loosening like soft butter in the sun. A few cars pass, and then a pickup pulls over for us and we sprint after it, water jugs banging against our sides.
The man driving the pickup has long legs like calipers for squeezing horses and a bright handsome Texas face. His eyes are clear blue glass and he says, “I can take you into Alpine, where you need to go.”
“See that train, we just got off that train,” we say, to explain why we’re standing on the bright empty shoulder, here of all places, our faces smeared in diesel grime, and why we smell like hot dusty sweat gone clammy and then warmed over again.
He drops us at the laundromat and we stuff our filthy things into a washer, scrub our faces with soap in the bathroom, and wipe at ourselves with coarse brown paper towels. In the dumpster behind the grocery store, we find a pecan pie. Fruit and sardines purchased from the store complete our shopping trip, and sometime in the evening the train we left behind rattles through town with a clatter of two tracks joining and a long whistle. We’re walking to the catch-out spot; the sun is getting low and the cold is creeping in.
“We’ll get the next one,” says Florence. “We can find a faster train than that.”
There is a wooden shed across a dirt road from the tracks and we poke around in the deep shadow there, use our headlamps to check for hobo loaf (the unburied poops of other train riders) and then set our things in the weeds. Dinner is pecan pie, and then the cold comes in like a flood, so we cover ourselves in our sleeping bags and curl awkwardly on the ground, trying not to fall asleep. Around two a.m. the front of an intermodal train pulls up loudly, headlights sweeping, and then it stops. The train sits quiet while we stuff our sleeping bags away and shake the stiffness from our bodies. We spring down the ballast in the dark, stumbling awkwardly on the sharp, black rocks, until we find a rideable car, just three from the back. Our boots ring out on the metal rungs of the ladder and then we’re inside the car, rolling out our bedrolls on the cold steel floor. Stuffing ourselves into our warm bags, we shut our eyes. The train crouches like a cat and then hisses, finally pulling west into the great open desert as the first gray washes the bleary bowl of the sky.