Almost Home (11 page)
One time she’s gone all afternoon, and comes back with her backpack stuffed like she went grocery shopping. Cheetos and salad and shit that must’ve been cooked in a kitchen; leftovers crammed into Tupperware, meat wrapped in tinfoil. She strolls right up into the middle of Critter and me and starts unpacking on the sidewalk. Germ smells it from five feet away and comes sniffing, ignoring Squid and Rusty when they call him. I snatch the roast beef before he drools on it, dig in and we keep talking about what we’re talking about, which at the moment is girls we’d like to fuck; since no one’s exactly getting any out here, it’s not a conversation you want to be distracted from.
Eeyore’s got some bullshit story about how she stole the food, and she’s dead set on telling it to Critter. She butts in after Lindsay Lohan and then again after Carmen Electra with some invented adventure of how she almost got chased. Critter keeps saying “Mm-hm” and nodding at her, but I can tell he just wants her to go away. Finally I yell over to Squid to take her off our hands, and then I tell her to get lost. She turns to Critter like she wants him to tell her different, but Squid calls her over and she gets out of our hair. Once she walks off Critter asks me why I did that, but I know he’s glad I did.
The day after that it starts raining. That only happens once or twice a year in L.A. but when it does, it comes down hard, like someone dumped it from a bucket. It floods the gutters and drowns out the fast-food breeze so you can’t smell the rancid French-fry grease and the air’s just soot and water. It starts pouring down when it’s dark and the mosquitos get fierce; they come out like zombies awakened by the rain and keep you from sleeping the rest of the night.
You don’t get downpours in Utah, almost never. It’ll go years without rain and the dust gets in your teeth, dries you out till you can hardly swallow, and the dry mixes with hot mixes with whatever bruise you’ve got that day. But when it finally comes down it’s all at once. Rain’s about the only thing that happens out of nowhere in the desert; everything else you see coming for miles.
One time a storm hit when I was walking back from school; the first rain I ever saw. I showed up at home with my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt wet and my stupid little mullet all stuck to my ten-year-old face. I was cold as shit but grinning ’cause it was like running through the sprinkler; I watched the dust on my knees and elbows turn to dark brown streaks and then wash all the way off, clean without a shower, and it was magic in a weird kind of way the way the sky just opened up and I was under it. I think what I did was track mud in the house and that’s why I got hit that time. Or because my clothes were soaking. Every time my dad got the belt out after that I made sure I was good and dry; it stings like shit when your skin’s wet.
Now it’s raining for real and we’re all trying to huddle under the little strip of awning over 7-Eleven. There’s not many places you can go in a thunderstorm here; the city’s more braced for earthquakes than rain, so we’re stuck till it dries up. We stink like wet dirty jeans and dog, all crammed together, shivering.
Eeyore must’ve woken up at four a.m. to go for breakfast because practically as soon as it’s light she shows up with coffee and oatmeal cookies in a plastic bag. She hands her extra dry hoodie to Critter. Everything is gray and blue and flooded, like the sky is washing out the city, and we just stand there watching it.
Eeyore’s huddled in with Critter, keeping warm, I guess. She won’t look at me. The rain must make her feel romantic or maybe just entitled from bringing the cookies, ’cause when Critter looks down she turns her face up at him and kisses him right on the mouth. Tongue and all.
The rest of us stare at the two of them like what the fuck: this shit never happened before. Rusty laughs and Squid looks sort of worried. Germ just pants and keeps on stinking like wet dog. Critter pulls away, stands there for a minute with his arms around Eeyore and his head cocked at her, squinting like she just turned into a green space alien. She opens up those big asking-to-get-hit eyes at him like some kind of puppy. He keeps on watching her, waiting for her to say something, but she just blinks up at him and kind of smiles, just a kid, not an alien, and after a second Critter stops squinting.
He shakes her little body off him like a bug, then shuffles sideways toward the three of us, leaving Eeyore just past the edge of the awning in the rain. She gets this look on her face like someone took her teddy bear away; her hair’s glued to her head as drops drip down her neck into her hoodie and she shivers.
It looks like she’s about to cry but then she glazes it over fast, tells Critter “Fuck off,” and heads right for me with this look in her eye like she’s gonna kick somebody’s ass. I see her little flared nostrils and think, What the fuck, but she just comes up and puts her arms around my waist. She presses up on me different from the way she did with Critter, kind of from the front, and I can feel her tits on my stomach through her hoodie. She only comes up to my chin so she doesn’t notice when I look over her head at Critter. He’s smoking a cigarette she’d given him and looking west, away from us. I can’t see his eyes.
Eeyore reaches up, grabs my chin and pulls my face around to her. She gives me that weird I’m-gonna-kick-your-ass look again and lowers her eyelids. I think she’s trying to look hot but she winds up just looking kind of tired.
Critter’s still looking away so I figure he’s got no objection, and when Eeyore cranes her face up to kiss me I let her. She’s so short I have to slouch way over and it hurts my neck, like sitting in the front row at the movies except the opposite; but she’s pretty good for such a kid, enough to make me wonder where she learned it. And it’s not the kind of shit you want to talk about, but the last time I had a girl around was Reno, which was going on a year ago, so her lips feel pretty okay. “Come on, let’s go out in the rain,” Eeyore says and looks at me all sleepy-eyed again. I check back with Critter one more time, but he just exhales toward West Hollywood and flicks his ash toward me.
The rush-hour yuppies sipping their Starbucks stare out at me and Eeyore from their warm SUVs like we’re the TV in their miniature hotel rooms. We’re a big show to them: they can’t possibly imagine being unwarm and undry and not inside a cozy compartment, headed to a cubicle, headed to a little box of home. We run toward the alley, water gluing our shirts to our skin; they crane their necks at us like we’re an accident they’re passing by.
Eeyore pulls me behind a Dumpster and right away goes for my jeans. The rain turns trash into spitballs around us, food and paper gone soft on the asphalt, rattling off the plastic piled on top of the Dumpster. Somebody once told me it’ll take three million years for Coke bottles to break down, a thousand for tin cans. All that useless shit that hangs around forever, and people just make more and more and more of it. Someday it’s gonna shove us all aside. Already if you don’t have a safe little house tucked away from the landfills you can see the garbage start to pile up. I look around at it while Eeyore gets down in front of me. For a second I think her knees must be hurting, gravel digging through her wet jeans, but then I forget.
When I’m done she looks up at me like she’s waiting for a grade or gold star, this half-smile, half-question on her face. I hate it when girls do that shit. Everything’s fine and then they have to push it, try to get some kind of answer or discussion or big moony moment. I’m not about to ruin it for myself by letting her get inside my head, so I just look at her like “What?” and zip up. She stays down on the pavement, looking up at me like I owe her an answer, getting rained on. Finally I grab her skinny elbow and pull her to her feet. She doesn’t get up right away so I have to yank hard. “Come on,” I say, and we head back to where it’s dry.
“Fuck you, Scabius,” she says under her breath like a little kid swearing at their dad, the loud of wanting him to hear it drowned out by the quiet of needing not to piss him off and get your ass kicked. She doesn’t think I can hear her, but I do.
When we get back to 7-Eleven Critter’s gone. I was hoping him and me could go up on Hollywood and spange for a falafel, bum some smokes. I’ve got this weird dirtyish feeling, like I want to wash my hands and can’t as long as Eeyore’s there to keep them sticky. Taking off with Critter’d clean me off.
But he’s not around. When I ask Squid and Rusty what happened to him they just shrug like a couple of stoners. Squid shoots me a fucked-up look. I stare at them a minute like they must know something, but they won’t talk to me. I don’t know why. Finally Rusty looks up from petting Germ and tells me Critter walked off west, in the rain. Maybe he wanted Koo Koo Roo.
Eeyore’s standing there with a Tootsie Pop in her mouth, her chest all puffed out like she’s a guy. She followed me back but now she’s looking past me. I watch her strut around, pretending brave and looking stupid, trying to protect herself from me but not knowing how to do it right, and all of a sudden I can see what she is.
It’s like when you wake up sudden from a dream, blink once and the whole world around you changes. Just like that, I can see her: the whole time she’s been out here, she was only faking that she’s one of us.
I knew where that fucking food came from. I knew she had a house, I knew the fact of it. But I never really
thought
about it; all I cared about was getting fed. Now I realize what it means. She’s one of them. She’s never had her teeth knocked out, her cheek split open; nobody twisted her arm till her wrist broke, burned her skin with a cigarette down to the filter. She’s never had to survive. All of a sudden I can see the mom and dad at home, waiting for her with safe wide arms to take her back whenever she slouches through their big front door. Her clothes are soaked like mine, the knees of her jeans all dirty, but she can go home, throw them in the dryer, and they’ll come out soft and warm. Mine are wet till they dry stiff and itchy on my back.
The feeling of it pulls me two different ways inside, like my guts are getting yanked in opposite directions. One direction hates her for all the shit she has that the rest of us don’t, using us for her street-kid fantasy when she could ditch us for some soft warm bed whenever, knowing that she will. People are loyal when they have to be, when they’re the same as each other and there’s no escape. When there’s a hatch, they’ll always take it.
But the other direction is this feeling I don’t know the name of. It’s got something to do with knowing she’s got that soft warm bed because she’s still a kid—and that Critter and me and Rusty and Squid could squash that in two seconds if we wanted to. And that maybe I just did squash a part of it back there in that alley. There’s something about her that’s still the way it’s supposed to be, some little-kid part that could still get what it needs. And it’s got about another month before it’s gone. It makes me feel dirty and old and like my muscles are too strong, and I want to get her wide-open face away before she makes me hate myself more.
I go around behind, grab her waist and pull her backward, around the corner of the building. Squid looks like he’s about to try and talk, but I look at him hard and he shuts his mouth before anything comes out. Eeyore gets all riled up and kicks her heels and goes “Fuck you, I’m not coming with you, Scabius,” but I’m stronger, and after a second of wiggling like a freaked-out rabbit she gives up and lets me hold on to her wrist. I bring her between a Dumpster and a big red truck, to a patch of sidewalk that’s still dry, and I tell her, Go home. I tell her, “We all know you have a mommy and a daddy and a house, we know you rub your T-shirts in the dirt to make them crusty, patch your jeans where they’re not ripped.”
Her eyes flash but I keep going, push her hard enough to shove her backward. “You’re not like us; nobody really fuckin’ likes you. We just eat your food. Critter too: he told me. He wishes you’d quit bugging us. Why do you think he left?”
She tries to answer but I cut her off. “Look, we know you’ll take off anyway when it’s time for school in September, so why not do it now instead of waste those months pretending you’re not one of them? Go home and watch TV.”
Her eyes get all big; they fill up and spill over, but I don’t care. I want to say something different to her, something like: You have something we all wish we did; stay away from us or we’ll take it away; hard things are stronger than soft, and sooner or later your smooth skin will get cut through and you’ll never not have scars again. But I don’t know how to say that. So I just say “Go.”
And she’s gone.
That night the sky dries out and by morning the pavement dries out too. Critter’s not back, though. I try heading west to look for him but I can’t handle West Hollywood, the jocko guys in wifebeaters checking out my ass but hating me for being dirty, and all the stores have signs in front of them that say “The Area in Front of This Business Is Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.” I wonder if they arrest all the rich fucks who walk on that sidewalk, or just the people who need to be there. The parking lot by Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf even has rent-a-cops to swat away the flies like me.
When it gets dark I know I’m about to get stuck without a place to sleep so I head back east. I figure Critter’ll come back to where he knows we are: like when you’re five and get lost in a store, you’re supposed to just wait where you started, let your mom come back to find you instead of running all around. She didn’t always come back, sometimes even when the store closed and it started to get dark, but Critter’ll be different.
He doesn’t come back that night, though, or the next or the next. Rusty still won’t open his stupid mute mouth except to Squid, and Squid keeps glaring at me, asking me where Eeyore went. I tell him I don’t fucking know, but he keeps asking.
By the fifth day I’m considering heading to the highway with my thumb out, back to Reno or over to Albuquerque, maybe San Diego. It must be just laziness that keeps me from getting on the 101, either that or L.A.’s worn me down too much to deal with the freeway and the fumes and the almost getting hit. Either way, though, it’s good, because Critter shows up in front of Winchell’s the exact day after I decide that I can’t take it anymore. Or at least it’s good at first, when all I see is him getting out of some rich fuck’s Escalade.