Almost Home (8 page)

“I’m gonna catch the bus back in to Hollywood,” I tell her. “You want anything before I go?”

She sits up and looks a way I’ve never seen her look: sad. “You’re leaving?”

“Yeah, I gotta, uh—” and I don’t know how to finish that sentence so I just scratch my head and look at the sand.

“Okay,” she goes, louder, in her normal voice: sharp like broken glass, rough like cigarettes. “That’s cool, man.”

“Okay,” I go.

“Okay,” she goes again. I keep expecting her to say something more, but she doesn’t; she just puts on her boots and starts lacing them up.

I stand up. “So I’ll see ya.” I don’t want to say when, because I’m hoping to not have to come back.

“Okay,” she goes. I walk over the hill of sand.

Staring out the gray-streaked bus window as the city rolls by, I realize I’ve been awake for two hours and haven’t thought about Jim once. It’s weird: I’ve been with Jim the whole time I’ve been a person; before that I was just a kid. And it’s always been like in order to keep being myself I have to be with him, or wait for him, or imagine him at least. And now I’m not. Instead I’m thinking about Tracy’s face, and how it changes back and forth from hard to laughing, like she’s going someplace else and coming back, and how I kind of recognize that back and forth even though I don’t know why. I’m thinking that I have to find another way of making money, even though I’m not sure I really can. And I’m thinking about Squid. Inside my head I can see the exact shape of his cheek and where his freckles are, and there’s something that folds up inside me, curled round and warm and right, when I think about Squid’s face.

When I get off the 217 bus by Benito’s, the three of them are right there, where they always are. It makes me feel like there’s something I can count on. Germ sees me first and barks. Squid looks up and gets a big grin on his face and something twists inside me, in a good way even though it makes my legs feel wobbly. When I walk up Eeyore gives me a hug and Critter goes “Hey, man,” and nods.

“Where’d you go, man?” Squid asks me, his face wide open.

I hadn’t thought about having to explain. I freeze for a second, hold my breath and watch the traffic like I’m actually looking at something. “Uh—I went over to the beach,” I say, and kick the sidewalk.

“Needed a little vacation, huh?” Critter says, and cracks a smile.

“Yeah,” I breathe out. I meet his eyes: he can tell it’s not the truth, but he isn’t fucking with me either. “Yeah,” I say again, relieved. And that’s all anyone says about it.

That night when it gets dark, Critter and Eeyore go off to Dumpster for tomorrow. They’re gone for a while, long enough for me and Squid to eat some tacos and for Squid to drink a 40 and get tired. When his eyes start to droop, we lie down in the alley by Benito’s, heads on our backpacks. Some nightclub’s got a searchlight and they’re sweeping it against the sky, throwing up big beams that crisscross the black and drown out the stars. It makes me dizzy to look at it and I turn onto my side, away from Squid.

Even though I was up all last night with Tracy, I’m not tired. My whole body’s awake, perked up like I’m nervous, except I’m not, not really. I watch the wall of the building beside us, count the bricks, try to stay quiet so Squid can fall asleep.

I’ve been lying there for fifteen minutes when I hear rustling behind me. I stay on my side, breathing, and listen to Squid move. There’s more rustling and then I feel him near me, but not touching. He’s close enough that I can feel his breath on my neck, just a little warmer than the hot night air. My heart starts pounding like a drum against the inside of my chest, so hard I’m sure he can hear it. I time my breaths so they’re exactly even, faking sleep as perfectly as I can.

He doesn’t move for about a minute. Eight breaths exactly. Then he’s up against me and I almost jump out of my skin, like when you’re concentrating hard and someone suddenly talks. But I keep myself from moving and my eyes stay closed. My heartbeat’s up in my head now, fluttering. Squid puts his arm around my waist and just stays there, pressed against me like spoons. His face brushes up against the back of my neck and I can feel his lips. I keep waiting for him to do something else, to want something from me, but he doesn’t. We stay like that all night.

I sleep harder than I have since I came here. By the time I wake up the sun is high over our heads, spreading out in the sky, and Squid’s a few feet away giving Germ water from a squeezy bottle. I wait a minute before I move too much or speak, so I’ll have a chance to watch without him knowing. His shoulders are as wide and strong as two of me put together. His freckles are like a map across his cheeks.

After a minute I get nervous he’ll see me looking, so I yawn loud, like I just woke up, and stretch my arms. He looks over at me. “Hey,” he goes. “What’s up.”

“Morning,” I go, and then wait. My heart starts thumping in my chest again. I guess I’m expecting him to say something about last night, or at least act different, but he just keeps giving water to Germ.

I guess I must be staring because after a minute he looks over and goes “What?” My whole body is hot and prickly but I say “Nothing.”

He finishes with the dog and goes “I bet Critter and Eeyore are at Winchell’s. Let’s get some donuts,” and gets up. Just like that. The whole way to Winchell’s he doesn’t say anything, and I feel like I’m keeping a big secret from him even though we both know the same things.

Since that night it’s been different and almost exactly the same. Eeyore hangs on Critter’s neck, and we four sleep back in the alleys and eat two-day-old donuts, and Squid sits with me to spange, and grins and buys me food when he’s got cash. But he doesn’t touch me again, and he never says anything about that night. I guess I feel like I can’t either. Every day I spend beside Squid on the sidewalk I can feel my insides lock more into place with his, fitting up perfect like a brand-new puzzle, and so my secrets stretch out past my skin, out there unarmored in the hot air of Hollywood, and I don’t want to point them out to him if he can’t already see. I’m pretty sure it’s not the same for him. Which means that there are lots of things I’ll always have to never say.

But I still don’t get how you can touch someone and act afterward like it didn’t ever happen, like you’re still just two separate people, the same safe pocket of air swelled up between you. When Squid and I are waiting for our food to come up at Benito’s I watch him watch it cook and I think: I know what your breath feels like. I wonder if he ever thinks that about me.

i
don’t know how the fuck it got so noisy around
here. The last few weeks it seemed so quiet: with Critter here, plus Eeyore and Rusty, I finally was sleeping every night. Critter’d mumble stoned and drunk, Eeyore’d babble through her dreams, Rusty breathed out through his skinny chest and all of it was like a lullaby. But Critter and Eeyore left two days ago to unload junk, and when I came back today with breakfast Rusty wasn’t there.

So tonight they’re gone and I’m alone again and the less people there are around me the louder it all seems to get. Trucks drag by sounding like whole factories, creeping up then peaking and fading away, and I try to imagine they’re waves crashing but the metal grinds against itself too hard for me to believe it’s water. The hookers scream at each other half in Spanish, voices screechy like a girl’s but loud and deep like guys. You can never tell if they’re laughing or about to stab each other.

The sounds don’t come and go; they add up, and closing my eyes just makes it worse. In the inside of my head they turn into a million-petaled metal flower, or a herd of butterflies beating at the inside of my skull. I can feel every single cell of skin and hair on me, crawling. After a while the noise from outside doesn’t even matter anymore: it’s all inside. I count the stars to calm down, but they double up, start multiplying too. There’s too many of everything everywhere and I can’t keep track.

I get this feeling when I’m by myself too much.

Ever since I was a kid I had it. As far back as I can remember once my mom got too tweaked out to keep on running from my dad, and I started getting passed around to strangers. The feeling’s like a rash. Right at the edge of my skin, except inside my mind.

Annabelle made it go away for a while, in Arizona and all the way out here. The quiet came from a place I didn’t even know I remembered. I met her when we were both fifteen. I’d been floating around in foster homes for seven years and dropped out of school for two. She was reading fucking
Beowulf
for English. I fell right in love with her chopped-up hair and inky hands and faded bruises and made her skip class every day. It took ten months to get her to realize that if she ran away from her asshole dad and the leaky roof he kept above her head the world wouldn’t end, it might even get better, but finally I did, and we took off on the trains. It was me and her and Germ in the open air, finding our own food and surviving. We even had plans.

But within a week of landing in L.A. Annabelle was headed up to Berkeley, following some stupid band she heard was there, and my head started roaring again.

Those first two weeks were pretty goddamn loud. When I met Critter underneath the 101 I stopped noticing the noise so much. First of all, just having another person’s voice there drowned it out. And Critter always makes sure you eat, when he’s around. He strolls down the Hollywood sidewalks like he’s lived on them forever, and everybody knows him. It was nice having someone look out for me a little bit; I’d forgot what it felt like.

But Critter’s just too fucking good-looking to be considered reliable, so things never really quieted down for real. Those four months that it was me and him it used to make me nervous: he’s the kind of guy you might sometimes love but you don’t really want to need, because he’ll never ever need you back.

A month or so ago we found Eeyore back by the Dumpsters. Three days after that Rusty came along. Since then I was happier, and for the first time I could sleep: there’s enough of us now that it’s almost like a little family. Eeyore mostly only talks to Critter, but Rusty and me are perfect. He fits with what I’m missing somehow: our sentences match when we talk to each other. That never happened to me with anyone except Annabelle. I thought you only got it once per life until I bought Rusty some burritos and we started talking. I mean, he’s not a girl, so I guess it’s different that way. But he needs me and that part’s the same.

But now Rusty’s gone and he didn’t say where he was going. I know he’s not used to being out here, and I didn’t think he was the type to just leave. I’ve been wondering what he’s gonna eat since this morning. How he’ll find his way back here, no bread crumbs. And I keep trying to keep track of everything I did and said, in case I made him go away by accident. I can’t stop. I lean over into Germ and listen to him snore, hoping it’ll drown out all the other noise. At least Germ’s not going anywhere. Nobody’s gonna feed him but me.

Of course right when I finally get to sleep, the sun comes up. I roll over into my backpack to stretch out the dark, but one sound gets in, and then another and another, and I’m up. I keep my eyes shut anyway. Against the black-eyelid backdrop my mind picks up where it stopped last night, keeping track. I’m not worried about Critter: he’s always leaving to buy shit or sell it, and he always comes back. I know Eeyore went with Critter because that’s what she does, and she’ll be back when he’s back for the same exact reason. But that still leaves Rusty.

The light gets brighter and brighter through my eyelids while I lie there till everything looks blank and red. Halfway into rush hour Germ hears something near us. He picks up his head. His collars clink together before the leash tugs on my hand; then he’s up and jumping, happy; shitty watchdog. I open my eyes and he pulls me with him: slobbers his face into the bag Eeyore’s holding, rustling the grease-stained white till Critter grabs it away from both of them, takes a glazed donut and gives it to Germ. Critter slaps my hand hi. Eeyore copies his smile. They’re back.

Their voices take the edge off my alone—at least I’ve got something else to listen to—but after hello they mostly talk to each other, as usual. Nobody needs anything from me. I could turn invisible and they probably wouldn’t notice. I pick at the sole of my boot and talk to Germ. Rusty’s still gone. I spend the next two hours wondering if he’s coming back.

At ten the 217 bus pulls up and I get my answer. He’s the fourth one out the door, after two Mexican guys and an old white lady who looks like she’s made out of dust. He seems nervous in a happy way, the way I guess you’re supposed to be before the first day of school, or prom, or whatever shit you’re supposed to do if your mom’s not a tweaker and your dad didn’t beat her up and you live in a house instead of on the sidewalk. When I see his face my insides finally start to settle and the wings in my head slow down. It’s still loud in there but his face helps, his nose and eyes. He stutters up to us like he wants to run and he’s making his feet slow down. I wish he’d hurry up.

That night in the alley I get up close enough to him that the breathing sounds drown out the hookers and the trucks. I wrap my arms around him so he can’t leave again. My head is just one thing, quiet now, and I can get to sleep.

I think something happened with Critter and Eeyore while they were off selling that shit. All last night and today he’s been keeping her really close but distant at the same time. You can tell that he’s preoccupied, like a dad on TV who’s got something on his mind. He doesn’t say what, though. They never do on TV either.

Critter never says what’s on his mind, but usually he at least says other things instead. Usually he says “Come here” to everyone and smokes us up, or buys us dinner. Always making sure that no one’s hungry. He smiles with those movie-star eyes and laughs about something and makes you feel like out here’s the best and freest place to be, even if you’re only here to run away from somewhere else. Eeyore went right to it like a moth to a lightbulb, the hot glass of him the only bright space in the dark. She hasn’t left him since.

But now Critter won’t talk, and I can tell Eeyore’s lonely. I wish I could take care of her. I like taking care of things that are smaller than me. They remind me of myself a long time ago, I guess. There’s nothing I can do, though; Eeyore won’t let me. She’d rather hide under piles of bravado or else nestle under Critter’s arm like a baby bird. Even when he hardly moves to let her in. I want to tell her to quit it: he could pull out from under any time. That’s what guys like him do, guys like dads on TV who feed everyone and give you drugs and never admit that they need anything. But they always seem like the strongest of all if you don’t know better. And she doesn’t.

Now Critter comes up to us from the Goodwill parking lot, holding on to Eeyore like her arm’s a leash, and plops her down. She scowls.

“Would you take care of her for a while, guys? I gotta go pick up some shit,” Critter goes. I’m glad to but Eeyore looks pissed: this is obviously the middle of something that started already.

“What the fuck, Critter?” Eeyore says. “I
told
you I want to come.” She lets it hang there for a second, but he doesn’t bite. “C’mon, I won’t fuck anything up, I promise, you can say I’m your little sister—” she’s begging now. But Critter’s got his mind made up, he’s not hearing any arguments.

“I told you, Juan-Carlo’s got his eye on you, he thinks you’re worth money and I’m not taking you back there.”

Eeyore rolls her eyes. “I don’t even know what you’re
talking
about. You are so paranoid. All he said is I was cute. That’s a
compliment
.”

Critter just looks at us like we all understand what Eeyore doesn’t, which we do. “Sure,” I go, “she can hang out with us,” and she scowls again. This time at me.

“Thanks,” Critter says, then throws a half-empty bag of Doritos down at us. “That’s for her,” he goes. Germ scuttles over to sniff it.

Eeyore is pissy for the next seven hours. It’s obvious she’s mad because of Critter. He’s trying to protect her, but there’s no way I can say that: I’d rather have her mad at him than me. It gets to where I want to get her drunk just to take the edge off, and I don’t usually feel that way. I’m getting nervous she’ll blow up and leave, or Rusty will, or someone. Finally I have to do something, so I buy us a 40, most of which Eeyore downs almost immediately. We go walking. If I take us somewhere better maybe it’ll help.

On Formosa there’s this huge construction site. I don’t know what they’re building there, a high-rise or a minimall, but they’ve been digging for three months and nothing’s come up but dust and piles of steel. We pass by it sometimes on the way to Whole Foods, the wood walls with the “warning” signs and construction trucks like dinosaurs grumbling around inside. Fluorescents shine down on it like helicopter searchlights but I don’t care. I hand Eeyore Germ’s leash, tell Rusty to give me a boost and slide up the wall, flip over the edge and scrape my stomach on the other side.

Once I’m over, the two of them don’t really have any choice but to follow. Rusty lifts Germ all the way up. I can tell Rusty’s on his tiptoes because all you can see is Germ teetering from side to side, scrambling like a little pig. I hold my arms up to Germ. He trusts me like always, and I catch him. Then there’s a pause for a second before Eeyore’s pink face peeks past the edge. I wave at her:
Come on
. For a second she looks scared, like the weak kid in dodgeball who’s about to get hit. Then Rusty hoists her up and over and she lands in the red dirt next to me.

When Rusty gets stuck at the top, I reach up and pull him the rest of the way. He lands on his knees, stands quick to brush them off. I ask if he’s all right. He doesn’t say anything, just looks up like he’s glad to be on the same side of the wall as us.

Eeyore is officially almost drunk. Plus she’s excited I think, so she forgets her bad mood and turns cute like a kid. She runs around the edge of the enormous crater pit that the construction dinosaurs dug. It goes down a hundred feet, like the top of a volcano, except there’s no fire at the bottom, just more dirt. Around the edges of the pit, piles of steel beams and wood planks make mountains on the ground, and the yellow and orange creature machines sleep standing up. The wood walls shut out the light from the street. It’s black, except where the work lights shine down like a stadium, and then it’s so bright you can hardly look at it. It’s beautiful. I look at Eeyore and Rusty, both grinning. It worked. I brought them someplace better.

Eeyore stumbles us across the site like we’re astronauts, climbing over hills of lumber, darting in and out of light. For a minute we can’t see her. Then her little voice yells “Guys!” We run up. She’s standing in front of a shack, three-quarters built. It’s dark-green painted wood and flimsy metal. The floor is dust. There are little windows with no glass in them and a door frame with no door. Eeyore shrieks like she found a gingerbread house in the woods; runs into it and sits right down. Rusty and I go in after.

Inside the light filters through the little window holes. None of us are used to being inside anywhere that’s ours. It’s usually either out in open air or in some store that someone owns. And I guess somebody owns this too, but it doesn’t feel like it. The sounds from the sidewalks barely even get in here. Rusty and I grin at each other, trying to hear the quiet.

Eeyore’s drunk, though, so she starts jabbering. It stirs up the air, but nobody minds. She’s happy talking. Mostly we just listen: Critter the asshole should’ve let her go with him, don’t we think so, come on guys (we nod). Man. He always lets her come, she’s never messed it up; Juan-Carlo’d give Critter a deal if she was there. She really thinks Juan-Carlo likes her.

Rusty and I just look at each other when she says that. It’s not funny, but for some reason the look in Rusty’s eyes makes me laugh sudden like a sneeze, too fast for me to stop it coming out. Rusty laughs back, like a reflex. Then it wears off and he looks away from me. I stop laughing too. I look at Eeyore for a second. I see her eyes fill up.

“Shit, man,” I say to her. “I didn’t mean anything—”

“What the fuck are you laughing about?” she goes, in that choky way you talk when you’re trying to get words out past tears. I can’t really answer. I guess we were laughing because Juan-Carlo likes her in a different way from how she thinks, but that’s not funny, it’s more scary if you think about it. Plus I don’t think she’d believe me if I told her that; I think she’d just get mad. So I just say “Nothing.” Which only makes her madder.