by Carrot Quinn
Once Sandra feels confident that we know what we’re doing, she ducks out to catch a few hours of sleep before the school day begins. I’ll join her, at noon, for the second half of the day. Until then I’ll be here, in this garage, covered in warm blood. No sleep for me.
The sun rises and we grow bleary with exhaustion as we do the slow, steady work of dismantling this giant beast. As Tara and I wearily work side by side, our clothes and arms covered in blood and our hair matted, our exhaustion turns to something else, a sort of strange, transcendental deliriousness.
“Don’t tell anyone about the caribou,” says Tara. Her voice is hoarse with fatigue. She’s cutting meat off one of the leg bones and dropping it into the stew pot. Her face is smeared with blood. “Taking roadkill home is illegal. My mom could get in trouble.”
“By who?” I snap, as I maneuver a hindquarter in the sink, trying to rinse off the last of the hair. “The roadkill police? Literally who would care?” Her fear irks me. In this strange worn-out hour Tara’s fear feels, in my body, like my mother’s fear, a tide against which I struggled for years.
“Just don’t tell anyone about it, okay?” says Tara.
“You’re being paranoid,” I say. “No one cares.”
Tara looks at me, and I see the dark parts of her eyes close up, and suddenly she’s far away.
We don’t speak for the rest of the morning as we continue processing the caribou. At noon I shower, put on a clean shirt, and walk the two blocks to the small village school, feeling shaky and strange. When I am off at four, I return to the house and take over for Tara, who leaves to drive back to her cabin, where she will sleep at last. By evening I am pulling the jars of stew from their steaming water bath and lining them up on dish towels to cool. Jerky is drying in the dehydrator, and steaks are frozen in Ziploc bags in Sandra’s chest freezer. We have mopped up all the blood. We’re finished.
On Friday, when I email Tara to ask if I can come to the cabin for the weekend, she doesn’t respond. Something has shifted between us, something has flipped. I don’t know if it’s her, or me, or both of us. I stay in Andrews for the weekend, spend my time wandering the forests there, discovering what lies beneath the melting snow—ancient moose skeletons, hunks of rusted metal, antique liquor bottles.
Weeks pass and one day winter is gone completely, and it’s summer, and the school year has ended. The sun hangs stubbornly in the sky, and hordes of mosquitoes rise up from the bogs. I have just enough money—twelve hundred dollars—to buy an old van in which I can live. I feel heavy with loneliness. I email Tara again, and again she doesn’t respond. I have a nagging feeling that I’ve done something wrong, but I don’t know what it is. Or has Tara done something wrong? Or is it my clumsy attempts at relationships that have always been, and will always be, wrong? Either way I need to find another job, so I drive to Fairbanks. Fairbanks is where the people are.
In Fairbanks I find Meadow, my companion from my Craigslist ride north. She’s living in an abandoned cabin in the woods, on a rough jeep road beyond the edge of town. The windows of the cabin have no glass, and the insulation of one wall has been eaten out by squirrels. There’s a loft with a stained futon and a single, tattered blanket. The woodstove doesn’t draw, and the cabin is thick with smoke. Dark mildew flowers on the plaster. A small low table is cluttered with empty wine bottles. Meadow and Barry have arranged knickknacks on the windowsill. A wall calendar hanging next to the door reads June 1996.
“How did you find this cabin?” I ask.
“Just wandering around in the woods, I guess,” Meadow says. She’s wearing a stained satin slip and smoking a Marlboro, sitting on the decomposing porch, looking out at the dark forest. She doesn’t seem to notice the mosquitoes at all. “After we moved in, a woman came by. She said her son built this place, but that he’d died more than ten years ago, before he had a chance to finish it. She said we could stay, as long as we swept up the broken glass.”
Meadow lends me an old mountain bike that she bought on the street for twenty-five dollars. Sandra’s husband has a mechanic shop in town that he rarely uses, and he lets me park my van in the fenced-in lot out back. The lot is full of fireweed, and willows grow from the rusted carcasses of old vehicles. I pull one of the captain’s chairs from my van and set it on a wooden flatbed trailer where it can catch the light. Now I have a living room. In the endless evenings I sit in this captain’s chair and read books set in the Far North. I have a case of caribou stew in a cardboard box under my bed, and a small cooler in which I keep carrots and other sturdy vegetables. I eat my dinner while the sun sinks into peachy-orange milk in the dusty sky, feeling the mosquitoes land on the tops of my feet.
* * *
—
I find a job as a gardener for a sprawling estate twenty minutes outside of town. The estate hosts weddings, and the grounds are dotted with hundreds of flower beds: pansies and marigolds and petunias. The estate sits on a hillside far above Fairbanks, and from the grounds I can see the Tanana Valley, wide and green and glittering with lakes, stretching all the way to the Alaska Range. The flowers are dewy and fragrant in the warm, still afternoons, and I haul the hose or the watering can from flower bed to flower bed, no sound but the twittering of the birds. My boss is a drunk; she tools around the property on her ATV, gripping a tumbler of booze. She yells at me, tells me I’m fucking up, then disappears for the rest of the day. Bumblebees dip in and out of the flowers. I throw dog food to the koi in the koi pond, I clean the algae from the filters. My heart feels empty.
At the library in town, I email Tara. How are you? I say. How is the dog? She doesn’t respond.
I find a lake, ringed in gravel, that sits on the outskirts of town. After work I park my van next to the lake and roll down all the windows. The water smells of soaked leaves and phosphorus, and above it the sky is empty and blue. The light comes in the open doors of the van, a big rectangle of sun, and warms the beige carpet, the bed, the wooden cabinet that holds my dry goods. On top of the cabinet is a cast-iron skillet I found at the dump. I use it to poach my eggs in canned soup on my little two-burner propane stove.
I lie in the rectangle of sun, feeling my muscles creak and pop. My work is hard, and at the end of the day I’m tired. It’s full-fledged summer now, and the sun doesn’t set. I haven’t been sleeping much.
I pull myself up and walk through the trees to the edge of the lake, take off all my clothes, and wade into the cool, broth-colored water. Leafy underwater plants brush my legs. I drop all the way in, rise up, and wave my arms and legs around. When I lie back in the water, I am weightless. The lake smell is on my face. The water is all around me, holding me up with its million tiny hands. The weariness has left me. There are barn swallows flying over. I can see their soft white underbellies. On the elastic surface of the water there are spiders, small beetles, the parasols of dandelion seeds.
Climbing out of the water, I feel my heaviness return. But I am cooler now, cleansed by the lake. The tannins of decomposing leaves. Duck shit. Fish. Now that I’m heavy again, the small shore rocks hurt the soles of my feet. It is hard being a land mammal. A tired land mammal. I feel old. Ancient. Close to death.
The sun is lower now and the shadows are long, the way they’ll stay for the rest of the night. I climb into the front passenger seat and put my feet up on the dash, check my cellphone. It’s a flip phone, prepaid, ten cents a minute. No one has called me. I could go to the library, I think, and check my email. I could read magazines there. Bits of plant matter float in my open window, carried on the air.
* * *
—
Meadow tells me about a show at the Sea Otter Saloon—Girl Haggard, an all-woman Merle Haggard cover band. There’s a wedding on the grounds at work tonight, and I have to set up the big canvas tents, lug a hundred plastic chairs across the grass, hand out mushrooms stuffed with breadcrumbs and tiny glass flutes of champagne. The
bride is beautiful. At the end of the night I carry the demolished cake into the kitchen and set it on the stainless steel counter. Only the rich chocolate edges are left, the buttercream fluting. The heel of a slice. Each crumb glistens. I eat a few handfuls. It tastes incredible. The cake-stained paper doilies go in the trash; the crystal champagne glasses get soaped clean. There is a muslin bag of jelly beans, knotted with a ribbon that says Happily Forever. I put these in my pocket for later.
Outside, the sunlight is long and filled with dust from the road. My van edges between the parked cars of the guests, with my Happily Forever jelly beans sitting on the dash. It feels good to reach the open road that leads back to town. There are three country music stations on the radio, and I switch between them as I drive. The good wind comes in through the rolled-down window and stirs the dust that coats everything.
Cake is the only thing in my stomach, so I buy a package of sushi from the deli at the grocery store and park next to the Sea Otter Saloon, in the huge lot for a sporting goods store, to eat it. The show has already started and there are folks milling around outside, smoking cigarettes. There’s a man selling hot dogs from a metal cart. The crowd is mostly young men with beards and they watch me, in my van. I’ve never been to this bar before. I don’t like to drink, but I am trying to make some friends tonight. Why are the men pointing at me, though? I ignore them and focus on my sushi. I squeeze out too much wasabi. Tamari is everywhere.
There is a loud clang, and my van shakes. I put down my sushi, confused. Then my van lurches backward.
I open the door and jump out. There is a tow truck behind the van, the kind with the big flatbed that lowers to make a ramp. My van is being winched, slowly, onto the ramp.
“Hey!” I shout, above the rumbling of the truck. “Hey!”
The man standing next to the truck looks at me. He motions with his arm, and the winching motion stops. But there is a winching feeling in my gut.
“I was in there!” I shout. “I had just parked!” My laughter is loud and ridiculous.
“You’re on private property,” the man shouts back. He’s my age, wearing a crass T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His upper arms are soft, and covered in tattoos. The side of the truck says Fairbanks I Tow. “You want your van back, it’s a hundred dollars.”
“I just parked!” I say. “There aren’t any signs! I hadn’t even gone into the bar!” I think of my flip phone, inside the van. I think of my paycheck, all of my worldly belongings.
The man shrugs, blank faced, and points to a concrete barrier, two feet high, that sits at the end of the row of parking spaces. In stencil spray paint it says: Lot Closed 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Unauthorized Vehicles Will Be Towed at Awner’s Expense.
My watch says it’s 10:30 p.m. The men outside the bar are laughing loudly, slapping their pant legs. Raising their glasses of beer in the air. Shouting. They’re laughing at the tow truck driver. They’re laughing at me.
“I don’t have a hundred dollars!” I shout. “Why can’t you put my van back down?”
“Hundred dollars,” says the man. His partner steps down from the cab and stands next to him. The truck rumbles. “More if we have to wait.”
There is no strength left inside me. I do not understand why everyone is laughing at me.
“You’re not taking my van! What is this, some sort of scam?” Against my will, water comes out of my eyeballs and fucks up my vision, ruins my voice. Now I can hardly speak.
“A hundred dollars or we take the van.” The tow truck drivers look at each other. “You want us to call the trooper?”
“Yes! Call the fucking trooper!” I am shameless now, screaming through my snot, pacing along the concrete. The second man gets on his cellphone. He is bearded and wearing dirty Carhartts. They could be brothers. I imagine them in their house in the woods. It is cluttered and has no siding, only Tyvek.
A few minutes later the trooper appears. He greets the tow truck drivers by name and nods at each of them in turn. My cheeks are flushed, and I can’t stop crying.
“I had just parked and was eating sushi in my van and had only been here four minutes—”
“ID,” he says.
I hand him my ID. He looks it over and hands it back.
“This is private property,” he says. “You got an issue, you take it up with the sporting goods store.”
He tips his hat at the drivers, gets in his car, and leaves. The men stand sideways, watching him go. They do not look at me.
“It’s a hundred fifty now, for the wait,” they say.
The thing winches tighter in my gut. It is a taut rope, pulling my insides too close together. I walk away, and then I turn and screech at them, through my snot:
“Is this fun for you? Is this what you do? Wait for the lot to close at ten, then circle around, looking for people still parked here, who have no idea they can’t park here? I have never even been to this bar before!”
They say nothing. They are being strong. It is good money for them, predatory towing. This sporting goods store allows it. Some businesses will not allow it.
“You can pick up your van from the impound lot tomorrow,” says the one with the crass T-shirt. He looks down at the black pavement. “It’ll cost three-fifty. You want a receipt?”
“No!” I shriek. My voice warbles. I am frantic, inconsolable. I want to kill them. I want to take out a knife and gouge their eyes out. I want to steal their tow truck. The chain clinks, the truck rumbles, and my van begins to move onto the bed again. I do not have my cellphone. I do not have my money, hidden under the cutting board in the cabinet in my van. I do not have a blanket. I do not have a place to stay or a way to get to work tomorrow.
“Okay! I’ll pay you the hundred and fifty dollars!” The van stops moving. I jump onto the truck bed and climb inside, find the money, a small stack of twenties. It is my first paycheck. So my car insurance payment will be late again this month.
The man hands me a receipt on yellow paper. He still cannot look at me. Hostility wafts off him like cologne. Things are spelled wrong on the receipt. My van comes back down slowly on the chain.
“You’re a fucking douchebag,” I say as he lowers my van.
He looks straight ahead. “I don’t care what you think of me,” he says. “I don’t care what you think of me.” I want to shoot him with a paintball gun. I want to chase him through the woods. It doesn’t do any good. He is already unhappy, I can tell. The whole world is unhappy. Nothing does any good.
Shaking, I get in my van, circle the lot, and, laughing hysterically, park on the opposite side. The drivers look at me and jump into their truck, which comes rumbling to life and peels out across the lot, toward me. I scream and pull into traffic. I am insane. I am insane.
I drive east out of town. The sun is low, the sky and dust glow golden, like fire. This week I am house-sitting for my boss’s next-door neighbor. They are leaving on a fishing trip in the morning. “Park in our driveway tonight,” they had said. “We’ll be gone when you get up in the morning. You can let the dogs out then.” I am headed to their house, driving fast. It is a nice two-story place in the woods. They have a big garden, a greenhouse. Three dogs.
The sun is in my rearview mirror, the clear blue of the sky. I grip my steering wheel and scream as loudly as I possibly can. My body shudders. I have no tears left. I open my mouth and scream again. It is a perfect summer night. I scream again, and the noise terrorizes the empty space around me, bounces off the wind from my open window. I keep screaming, all the way to the house. There’s a spot for me in the trees next to their driveway. It is around midnight. I step out and pee in the grass. Outside, the air has gone gray. A gentle dusk has settled.
Pulling the van’s mini blinds down against the light, I crawl carefully under the mosquito netting and curl up on the bed in back. I lie on my side, my knees tight against my chest, making myse
lf as small as possible. Instead of breathing, I shake. The screen of my flip phone glows gently. I count forward. In Oregon it is three a.m. There is no one I can call. My body shudders. I am hyperventilating now. There is an ache inside me. It eats my bone marrow. The entire world hates me. And the hate is attacking me. There is no one who wants me to live, and so I am dying. Hyperventilating. My bones are hollow gourds, my stomach is bottomless, my lungs are echo chambers. There is no one in the world to talk to, so I am dying. My only friends are the petunias and the bumblebees, so I am dying. My boss is a grumpy drunk and I have spoken aloud to no one but her and the bank teller in the last two weeks, so I am dying. It makes perfect sense. I have ceased to exist. I am dying.
I die until five a.m. At five a.m. I turn on my phone and dial 1-800-SUICIDE. I do not know if it’s a real phone number, but “suicide” has seven letters, which seems serendipitous.
“I need to talk to someone and I don’t have anyone to talk to,” I say to the man who answers the phone. His voice is quiet and flat, like the voice of someone watching television. “Uh-huh,” he says.
“I live in my van and I don’t have any money,” I say. “I am small,” I say. “I am helpless. I am barely alive.”
Uh-huh.
I tell him everything that happened and everything I am afraid of, my voice squeaking higher and higher like a cartoon mouse. When I am finished talking, I don’t know what to say, so I thank him and hang up the phone. The man doesn’t offer any solutions. There aren’t any solutions. There was only the pressure of my own existence, cracking my heart in two. Now this man has it. He has grown special pockets to carry it. He carries pieces of many people, in his special pockets. The pieces are heavy, but he carries them just so, and maybe they won’t hurt him.