“This is going to take forever,” she said, closing her eyes.
Sometimes it seems like she was wrecked by the smallest things. I couldn’t tell her that I’d been at the library, about to look up Ash’s camp and that a guy next to me almost died. He was probably being dumped back on the street already. I wondered if he had a family that ever went looking for him or if all he had was the woman at the library.
“Maybe you should teach reading, since you do it all the time,” I said. Fleet sighed, eyes still shut. I put my head against her shoulder.
Root growled and Fleet and I sat up, but not fast enough. Two guys from ES EF ran in circles around us, grabbing the money. Root chased them and barked. He thought it was a game. One of them threw a dollar bill at Root, like that would stop him.
“Root get back here,” I called, and he sat down next to me. I knew what they could do, so I put on his leash and held on to his neck. The guy straightened the bills into a neat package and tipped it at us, thank you very fucking much, before walking off. He was so sure he had us he didn’t have to run. Fleet looked like she might jump on him. She had tears at the corner of her eyes. Now I couldn’t tell her what happened in the library. I was going to, but I couldn’t come up with the words when all she wanted was for me to take care of her. Of course, I couldn’t do that.
chapter 15
Ash stood in the shelter door, backlit by the hazy morning sky. He had been gone two weeks and he was tanner and his dreads were covered in back with a red beanie. We had finished breakfast and I was feeding Root bread that someone left on the table. I had imagined Ash with a shaved head, wearing military clothes. I had told myself stories about where he was, at a camp with a big fire pit in the middle. He would make breakfast with the other kids and then they would go hiking, a different trail every day. Maybe they went in a sweat lodge and talked about everything they had done wrong. I felt better after I imagined these scenes, like he was not lost to me, even though part of me wanted that. He had gone off and I wanted him to know I didn’t care.
He opened his arms when he saw us and then he was down on his knees, hugging Root and me. Root licked his hands and Ash held me tight around the waist. He smelled of patchouli and sweat. I pounded a hand on his back, harder than I needed to.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said into my ear.
We sat down at the end of Haight, outside the music store. Root settled between my knees and I held onto Ash. He knew I was going to ask him why he went to Wyoming, because he started telling me about the day his mother had come to get him.
“I had my own kidnapping,” I reminded him and pushed him in the ribs. He’d acted like I was lucky to go with Dave and Marva.
“My mother showed up here,” he said. “No warning.”
She had walked down Haight in her khakis and button-up sweater, followed by a man in cowboy boots. His mother didn’t even greet him. She left that to the guy she was with, who grabbed Ash by the shoulders so he couldn’t move.
“He called me son and said something about how things were going to get worse and then much better.”
Ash didn’t look him in the eyes, but the guy kept talking. Maybe the guy was planning to hypnotize him. Ash had heard about that. It was like being awake and asleep at the same time. You couldn’t move or resist. He told Ash they were going, that it was not negotiable if he wanted to have any relationship with his mother, and Ash, who usually didn’t take shit from anyone, got his pack and followed him even though he was twenty-two and no one could make him do anything. He refused to talk to his mother, though, who sat in the front seat of the car, a black pick-up with giant wheels, while they drove to the airport. On the drive, she turned around and handed him a folder from a place in the mountains that said it was a therapeutic wilderness camp.
“It had these stories of kids who sat on the couch getting stoned and playing video games or cutting school and being so drugged out of their minds they ended up at the camp, where they all learned their lessons and came out perfect,” said Ash, sitting wedged up next to me, but looking straight ahead, a hand on Root’s head. “I opened the window on the freeway and threw out the folder.”
The rest of the drive he’d thought about how the guy driving the truck would have to put him in restraints or knock him out to get him on the plane. But when they got to the airport, his mother said she loved him but didn’t much like him. She knew he didn’t want to be in Arizona, but he had to be in a place where he could be productive. He could not stay on the street.
Then the guy opened Ash’s door and Ash went with him, because what was he supposed to do? He couldn’t stay there with his mother. She drove off, leaving him on the sidewalk with the guy. He said Ash could consider the trip a vacation, with rest, food, righteous people. And restorative nature. He could always come back to San Francisco. Ash thought again about bolting, but also how he had never been to Wyoming. It would be a mind trip. Maybe he would hike all the way back, have that to talk about. He might walk through the mountains, fish and hunt and eat wild berries, until he got back to the coast. Or he could get on a train and see every state on the way.
“Life is not endless, despite what you think,” the guy said on the plane. “There’s a limit. The next time you’re picked up, the cops will keep you in jail.”
“What did he mean?” said Ash. “Was he talking about how I was wasting my life and that smoking weed was making it harder for me to think straight? That’s what my mother said. Or maybe he was saying my mother wasn’t always going to be around, that next time no one would be there for me. He had me confused, which is probably what he wanted.”
Ash said they landed at what looked like a toy airport. I’d only flown one time when my mom took me to Las Vegas. “At least you’ll get a taste of the world,” she said. When the plane lifted, I’d seen houses set in rows that stretched forever in a neat pattern, even though from the ground Los Angeles seemed like a place where you could get trampled or separated from everything you knew.
Ash climbed down from the plane onto a blacktop surrounded by nothing. It wasn’t Arizona, where the desert was like a city. Everything he could see, including the mountains, was in the distance. The air was full of dust. He said he never realized how much he considered the mist that poured over San Francisco as the juice of life. I snorted.
“I know it sounds stupid,” he said. “But when you go away you see it differently. I thought I was going to dry up and turn into dust.”
“Then maybe some of you would have ended up back here and you’d be there every time someone breathed. You would get in our lungs.” He put his hand over my mouth and his fingers tasted slightly sweet and salty.
“I was trying not to let the guy totally freak me out,” said Ash. “He had me trapped.”
Ash gripped me tighter and I let him stay like that. He said the guy drove and they didn’t talk. By that time it had been so long since Ash spoke that he didn’t know if he could. He wanted to ask questions, but he didn’t want to make it look like he was okay with being swiped off the street by his own mother. He thought about opening the door and jumping out, but what was that going to do? He would tumble into the dirt by the road. He’d have broken arms and legs but he’d still be in Wyoming.
After an hour, they got to the camp. It didn’t have horses or cows or most other animals he’d expected. There were only chickens and a big orange rooster, all walking around wherever they wanted. The kids stayed in round blue tents. Ash was assigned to one with two other guys. He put his stuff down on the only empty cot, next to folded sheets and a blanket with strings hanging off the end. Someone had combed the dirt floor into a neat swirled pattern. He lay down and looked up at the tent ceiling. The sound of his roommates’ boots crunching outside woke him up. They didn’t look happy to see that someone was occupying the free cot and he was not thrilled to see them either.
“So you’re a hippie,” said the first one to walk in. He had a slow southern accent. “I’m John Robert. The
other kid nodded. “Sebastian,” he said.
John Robert was from Tennessee, which is why he had two first names. Sebastian was from Connecticut. The only thing they had in common was getting kicked out of the house. John Robert was high every day, but his parents were more freaked that he always wore black clothes and thick black eyeliner. He couldn’t figure out why they cared so much. In the end, he’d been happy to get away from them, even if it meant living in a tent and looking like everyone else in the world. Sebastian had stolen his grandmother’s car when she was in the hospital and crashed it into a street pole. His parents didn’t know that he’d been smoking A-bombs. It wasn’t like he was addicted, he said. He could stop when he needed to.
Ash told them about Golden Gate Park. They’d never heard of it, but they both said they’d come when they left Wyoming. The three of them were like freaks from different worlds, but he sort of liked them, he said. He even lied and said he had a middle name when John Robert had said, “Yeah, Ash. And what else?”
“Ash Ralph?” I said. “Really?”
“I knew I shouldn’t tell you,” he said. “It was really my grandfather’s name. He died five years ago of a lung disease he got from his construction job and he was the only half decent person in my family. He used to carry around an oxygen tank to breathe. Everyone else, they breathed normal, and acted like shit. I wish I had his name.”
His new roommates showed him around the camp, which took about five minutes. Learning the rules took longer. They gave him a heavy coat, jeans, and work boots. He had to be in morning meeting at six every day, held in the only building, to go over the day’s events. He had to help build the fire, cook, feed the chickens, and clean, which included the pointless task of raking the dirt in the tent. The only freedom he had was deciding which pattern to carve, a circle, tight square lines, zigzags. It all got ruined the second someone walked in so he didn’t see why they bothered. The rooster was the worst, he said. It looked peaceful until he tried to gather eggs from the hens and then it tried to attack him. It charged at his knees and squawked. He’d gotten peck marks all over his legs.
After a few days Ash couldn’t follow the rules, which reminded him of being in school. They were constantly on him for that. Even his eighth grade teacher had said he was hopeless with directions. He tried staying up all night so he wouldn’t miss morning meeting, but then he fell asleep during the day and got written up for that. Then he had to bring it up in group therapy, where the twelve guys at the camp talked about taking responsibility and making amends. He had a personal goal of never talking during the group, which he usually messed up. He couldn’t help that he liked to talk.
Most days they hiked for hours, climbed straight uphill and then had a view of the valley full of ponds and grass in every tint of green. He’d closed his eyes and tried to remember being in the park, or even back in Arizona. Each time it was harder. For a few seconds, everything from his life before seemed to fall away.
“I almost wished I could be the kind of person who lives in a place like that. But surprise,” he said, and he pinched my waist, “I’m not.”
The idea, the counselor said, was that when they were in nature, sober, they would be open to beauty, that much closer to finding purpose in the world. Ash didn’t bother to tell him that he was already sober. He wasn’t an addict and the weed and Wild Turkey were long out of his body. Sorry if he lived in the park and was not going to school, but those weren’t crimes. His only crime was not being what his mother wanted.
It was growing colder every night, the snow on the mountains inching its way down to the valley. In the morning, the dirt outside was crusted with ice. Ash didn’t want to stay around to find out what would happen when the canvas on the tent froze solid. And he wasn’t sure how staying in Wyoming was putting him closer to his purpose, if he had one. John Robert and Sebastian talked about how they were making what the camp called future contracts. Sebastian was thinking about studying behavioral psychology in college. John Robert said he might learn car repair or astronomy. Maybe he would get shot into space, see Mars.
At the end of the week, Ash told his counselor he wanted to go back to San Francisco. The counselor tried to talk him into staying for the solo journey, a night alone on the mountain, but Ash said he was already on a solo journey.
“Most of the reason,” Ash said, pressed closer to me, “was you.”
“I want to see Mars,” I said. I gathered his dreads into a single tail.
“I’d go to Mars with you, but then you’d want to leave and we’d be fucked,” he said.
He stood and offered an arm to hoist me up, pack on one arm, Root’s leash on the other. There was a new awkwardness as we walked to the corner store. Nothing had changed and everything had changed. I hadn’t told him about going with the cops to identify the guy who killed Shane.
“I’ve got funds,” Ash said, pulling out some bills from his front pocket. “They gave these to me when I left, like they were paying for the time I spent there. At least I can buy.”
He disappeared into the store. I stayed outside with Root because they didn’t allow animals. Except cockroaches and mice, which you could usually see if you stayed there long enough. They had posted signs on all their windows, clean up caca, with a little picture of a dog squatting, a red line through its butt. no loitering. I stood in the doorway and watched Ash at the counter, across from a guy named Sammy who sometimes came outside and smoked with us. He had been a bodybuilder and had bulging arms that hung away from his body when he walked.
“Missed you,” he said, slapping Ash’s shoulder. “Where you been? Behind bars?”
“Away with my family, which was worse,” said Ash. “But you can relax. I’m back.”
“Nice to know you have people,” said Sammy. “Because you know what, buddy? I wondered.”
He rang up a bottle of Hennessey and a large bag of potato chips. In between slugs of whiskey and handfuls of chips, I told Ash about Dave and Marva’s cabin and the police line-up. I was hoping the guy I’d picked out was in jail, but I wasn’t sure. No one had told me. He could be on the street, waiting. I’d thought about asking one of the beat cops on the street, but why would I want to start talking to them?
“I could have stayed in Wyoming and you could have gone off and lived in a cabin in Marin?” he said. “That’s crazy.”
Ash took out a joint, twisted up the end and lit it. He inhaled hard, a screwball smile breaking out as he passed it to me. I told him no, I couldn’t take it right then, not with the Hennessey. I had to be conscious.
“More for me,” he said, holding the joint between his thumb and first finger, his pinky out straight. Fleet and Hope showed up, along with a group of guys from Santa Cruz. Three small dogs, tied together with rope, toggled behind them. One guy leaned down and took the joint from Ash and then started pumping an accordion that was tied around his neck. The others sat next to us along the wall and the dogs settled in a pile, as far from Root as they could. It didn’t take long for a small crowd to gather. The accordion wailed on until Sammy came out with a push broom under his arm.
“How am I supposed to do business with you out here?” he yelled.
The crowd ignored him. People were watching and some danced around to the music. Sammy started sweeping with his broom like he was going to wipe us all off the sidewalk. We knew how he could act so I pulled Ash up and motioned to Fleet and Hope to get moving. When I looked back the guy was still playing his accordion. One of his buddies had set out CDs for sale. Sammy was still yelling.
“You see, nothing changes,” said Ash.
But something was different. For starters, Ash had his arm around me and I let him. He was half blasted, but I was comfortable holding onto him on the way toward the park. Fleet and Hope tagged behind. We all stopped at the lake to talk to some kids who had just come from Colorado for a concert, which was not for two weeks. Hope, the tour guide, told them when to show up for dinner at the shelter, and how early they had to
be there if they wanted to stay overnight. She went on about how to get on the waiting list if they didn’t have space. I stared at her in an accusing way. They were band groupies, hauling army backpacks, long blades hooked to their belts. You couldn’t tell what was up with them. They were twitchy, then mellow. And we’d have to listen to them argue about which songs they wanted to hear at the concert, like they were going to kill one another over that.
“Fuck it,” I whispered to Ash. “Let’s go.”
We left Fleet and Hope, who had settled into the Colorado circle, passing a tall bottle of beer and a pipe. They didn’t notice we’d gone. We threaded past two other groups on the lawn near the pond and one guy passed out on his back. His face was red from sleeping in the sun and whatever else he’d been doing. He half smiled, deep in a dream that probably was better than the littered grass where he was sprawled. I looked at his chest to see if it was moving. How else would I know if he was dead? He didn’t look that different from Shane, except his eyes were closed. Maybe people died with their eyes open, a last second when they knew what was happening.
“You think he’s breathing?” I said to Ash.
Ash tapped the guy’s foot. He shifted his legs and stopped smiling but didn’t open his eyes. “He’s fine. Are you worrying about everyone now? How about giving me some of that?”
“I keep thinking about Shane,” I said. “What did he do that was so different from that guy, who you’re right, is obviously not dead? Let’s get out of here.”
The shopping cart was parked at our sleeping spot, half full of recycled bottles, so Ash rattled it off outside the ring of trees. He asked if I wanted anything and opened his hand, which held the end of a joint and a small white pill. I shook my head.
At the Edge of the Haight Page 12