Girls Love Travis Walker (7 page)

“Yeah,” I lied. I didn’t want to talk about it.

In a voice that said,
I don’t believe you for a minute,
Zoey said, “You wanna take a walk? Get some fresh air?”

“Okay.” I still hadn’t calmed down. All that tree-kicking had gotten me going. Right then, I would have taken on a grove of redwoods.

Zoey blinked a few times, slowly, as if she was thinking hard and trying to understand  exactly how I felt. But she didn’t bug me about it or ask questions, which I gave her major points for. She had long eyelashes and perfect curved eyebrows in a dark reddish-gold, a surprise with that platinum hair.

We strolled through the park, scuffing our feet through the few brown leaves that had fallen from the trees, then turned to walk down Main Street. The air was warm from the September heat wave we were still in, and I moved my face up toward the sun. After a minute, I found myself looking around me, catching sight of myself in a store window and thinking I looked just as normal and problem-free as did all the other people passing by. Strange how easy it was to hide your problems. Beside me, Zoey spoke up suddenly.

“The Santa Ana winds are supposed to start up tonight.”

“Oh, yeah?”

 “It’s funny,” she said. “I know they cause a lot of fires, but I love them anyway.”

“Me too,” I said.

We stopped for a moment to look in the window of a bookstore.

“They’re so... wild,” Zoey said. “When they really get going at night, and the shutters are banging and the palm trees are almost bent in half, sometimes I go outside and stand in it.”

“I’ve done that too!”

We started walking again, silent now. She took in a deep breath, then said, all in a rush, “Are you all right, Travis?”

Instantly, I withdrew into myself, like a turtle. “Sure. Yeah. What do you mean?”

 “You know. The tree.” She shot me a swift look. “You don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

No. Maybe. Probably not. “What do you mean?” Nothing like repeating myself over and over, like an idiot.

“Well, you just seemed upset back there…”

“I wasn’t upset!”

“No, of course not! You seemed …. Pissed off.”

We reached the end of the block and turned a corner. A few trees on this street had actual red leaves, as if we lived in a place with seasons. A little kid, followed by his mom, ran in front of us, forcing us to stop. When Zoey’s eyes met mine, it felt like I was reliving every warm, safe thing that had ever happened to me, every hug from Mom, every cup of hot chocolate.

I hesitated. “Those people in there take some getting used to, don’t they?”

“The guests? Yeah. They’re people who’ve caught every bad break possible, all at the same time. It could happen to a lot of us.”

It
was
happening to a lot of us. I fought down fear again, thinking of Mom sitting in that apartment with no light or power. Feeling like a world-class loser, I reached for a different subject—any subject other than poor, poor Travis and his shitty little life.

“So you think Kat’ll come by one day?” I blurted.

Zoey’s eyes instantly went flat and emotionless. “She only temps here, and when she does, it’s not usually the meal program. She likes the kids at the After School program better.”

From the little I’d seen of Kat, she didn’t strike me as the sort who would warm up to homeless people. Bad for me, I guessed.

“What about you? How come you transferred to the soup kitchen?”

“It’s great experience for me. I’m going to be a social worker. So I can help people like that.”

“Really? That’s cool. Do you have to go to school for that?” I was grateful to have the subject on safe ground again.

“Yeah. Right now I’m part-time at Perdido Community College. But eventually I’ll go to a four-year school and get my B.A. in social work. And then a master’s.”

“A master’s degree!” Zoey was clearly going places.

As a couple of skateboarders rumbled past so close that my hair blew back, I automatically put a hand on her ribcage and  moved her away from them, putting myself in between. They rolled off, two punks maybe fourteen years old, too clueless to have even noticed us.

“Such a gentleman,” she said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” I’d never been called a gentleman before. “I just figured they’d have a harder time taking me out. I’m bigger than you.”

We grinned at each other. I slowly took my hand off her waist.

“Where are you going to college?” she asked, but before I could answer, her cell rang. She jumped. “Oh, wow, that’s my boyfriend. I’m meeting him now.”

 “Okay. I gotta go to work, too.” I walked her back to the Community Center parking lot. “See you tomorrow.”

She had a boyfriend, I thought, as I watched her drive off.  I shouldn’t have cared, but it kinda bugged me for some reason. I didn’t know why.

Alligator Lady

That evening Mrs. M prowled the entryway of my building as I walked in. “You are liar!” she hissed at me. “You don’t pay what you promise!”

I stopped. I had finally paid the August rent, but the problem was that all of September was still past due, with October coming up fast. I was falling further and further behind.

Don’t tell me this was it, I thought. The three day notice. Not now, just when I’d finally gotten a second job.

“I have more for you,” I said. Grabbing into my pocket, I fished out the bills I’d saved to buy oil for the car, counted them, my hands shaking with rage, and thrust them at her. “Take this,” I snapped. “It’s everything I have. I’ll be back on Friday with more.”

She’d called me a liar. I could practically feel the steam coming from my nostrils. She knew damn well that I gave her every cent I could spare.

I pushed past her up the stairs to my apartment, thinking I had to get a job on the weekends. I should have done it already, but I was so tired every night, after eight hours of back-breaking labor. I needed time off to recharge.

But I needed a place for us to live more. When I walked into my apartment, Mom greeted me like a kid waiting for Santa Claus. She had one lit candle on the dining table. She’d spent the whole day at home with no lights, no radio or TV, and dead kitchen appliances. “Did you bring dinner?” She reached for the bag of food from the soup kitchen.

Inside was a meal of macaroni and cheese and cornbread. Starch on starch. Mom looked like she was about to cry with joy. “Travis, this is wonderful! It’s just like magic!”

Actually, no, it wasn’t magic. I’d worked for this food, I thought, feeling a hard line of anger run through me. But more and more, Mom was living in her own world.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked.

“I’m not hungry.”  Without another word, I launched myself into the bathroom and took an icy shower in the dark.

##

Zoey patrolled the soup kitchen with a roll of labels and a marker, making name tags for both guests and staff and handing them out. “Let’s all get to know one another,” she said.

T-r-a-v-i-s, she wrote on a name tag. As I walked by her with a tray of steaming turkey pot pie, she stepped in front of me. She had on a t-shirt that clung more than the usual ones she wore and shorts that showed her bare legs up to the top of her thighs.

“Stand still,” she ordered me, a dimple appearing in her cheek. “I’ll put this on you, since your hands aren’t free.” She went up on tiptoes to pat the label on, her fingers moving on my chest for a brief but memorable moment. Zoey’s fingers felt soft, like butterflies, causing an instantaneous below-the-belt response.

What was happening to me? Kat was the one I wanted. Zoey was really cute and interesting, but too grounded for me. And she had a boyfriend.

“Thanks,” I managed to say, slinking over to the serving table and taking my place between Charlotte and Terra. Charlotte was freckle-faced, bubbly, and way too friendly for being barely seventeen years old. I’d overheard her tell Zoey she’d just had her birthday. She liked to come up from behind me and slip her hands over my eyes, a level of creepiness that matched the time out on the hillside when I accidentally put my hand on a big garter snake.

Terra, I knew instantly, was not into men. She just had that low-estrogen vibe. “Greetings!” She waved a ladle at me, her smile showing a gap between her two front teeth. A scarf held back a mountain of curly black hair.

People started to pour in. Within a few minutes, Zoey had put away the marker and labels and focused on getting the lunch out, helping some of the more confused guests get into line and find tables, answering our questions, solving problems in the kitchen and on the serving line.

It was pretty obvious where the weak spots were, one of them being Charlotte, who stood next to me, ladling vegetables with glacial slowness. Before long, in addition to running trays and serving the mac ‘n cheese, I was doing half of her work, too, just to keep the line from bogging down.

“Thank you,” Zoey mouthed to me. I watched her move around the dining hall, her hair like a bright spot of light in a dim room.

As lunch ended, I noticed the creepy Alligator Lady with the ice blue eyes. She was headed for freedom, clutching a large grease-stained shopping bag to her chest. Zoey powered after her, a determined look on her face, but the lady had a big head start. In a couple of long  strides, I made it into the doorway, where I hung out, casually blocking the exit.

The lady ground to a stop, Zoey pulling up behind her. “Travis,” she said smoothly. “This is Hilda. Hilda, this is Travis.”

“Hi, Hilda.”  I tried not to look too hard at her, but I couldn’t help staring, trying to decide how old she was. Those young eyes in that old face. I couldn’t tell.

“Rhymes with Travis,” she said, then made a loud buzzer noise. “Bzzzt! There are no words that rhyme with Travis.” She pulled the bag closer to her chest.

“It’s all right, Hilda,” Zoey said, patting her arm.

“Bzzzt! There are no words that rhyme with Zoey.” 

“Hilda.” Zoey spoke in a low, gentle voice. “What’s in the shopping bag? May I take a look?”

Hilda clutched the bag closer for a second, then held it out to Zoey. It looked like she’d poured an entire tray of cookies into it and was preparing to take off with them.

“How about sharing these with the other guests?” Zoey said.

Hilda set her jaw and snatched the bag back into her arms.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Zoey said. “If you go around the room twice offering cookies to anyone who wants them, you can take home whatever’s left over. Does that seem fair?”

Hilda began to shuffle around to the other guests, holding out the open bag while we watched. For the first time, I noticed she was wearing puffy bedroom slippers.

I sat down at a table, and Zoey sat next to me. “Thank you,” she said. “Some of these people are a little hard to handle.”

“Glad to help.”

Charlotte passed by on her way to the exit, looking for a moment like she wanted to join us.

“Bye, Charlotte!” I waved at her. Her lower lip came out in a sulky way, and she stalked off.

“Does Hilda have any place to go at night?” I asked Zoey.

She shook her head. “I’m trying to get her into this wonderful shelter. It’s clean and comfortable and just over on Pinecrest Road. It’s called The Haven and they help homeless women put their lives back together—find jobs and apartments, things like that.”

“That sounds great.” Here Mom was begging me to keep her out of the shelters, when this place, from the way Zoey described it, was nicer than our apartment.

The Center was almost empty now, so Zoey and I went out and sat down on the bench outside the entrance. A hot wind blew, rustling the trees and rattling the dry leaves on the ground. I’d heard on the news this morning that the Fire Department had issued red flag warnings for L.A. County. I’d have to get back to my other job soon.

“I’m glad I get to spend my lunch hours here, instead of on the mountain.” I spoke without thinking.

“Why?”

“It’s these two guys I work with. They’re stoned half the time, and go around the hillsides spying on people with binoculars.”

“You’re kidding!” She looked sideways at me. “So, like, what have they seen?”

“A lot of women out by the pool. Sometimes one of them goes skinny-dipping, which for these two freaks is like the Fourth of July and Christmas put together.”

I liked hearing her laugh. It was nice to feel like I could still keep a girl entertained. A sudden image of Zoey skinny-dipping flashed through my mind.

She stood up, since the After School program crowd was arriving. Her soft, clingy top revealed breasts that were round and small—just the right size for her little body. Apple-sized. Cute, like her.

I left, thinking how good it felt to talk and joke around with a girl. It was something new for me, but it was kind of nice. Maybe Zoey and I were becoming friends.

Imposter

Saturday morning I couldn’t get the car to start at first. Almost panicking, I tried the ignition a second and a third time, until the engine finally turned over. That did it. I was going to have to spring for some auto servicing.

I knew the price tag would probably eat up that week’s contribution to Mrs. M. Fear made me almost stop breathing for a moment. But the car was as important as the apartment—even more so. I couldn’t get to work without it, and if all else failed, we could always live in it.

I couldn’t believe that I was starting to see living in my car as one of my better options.

No matter how awesome it was, I shouldn’t be doing the Discoverers program, I thought, as I pulled into the parking lot behind the fire station. I should be doing a paying job. I thought of those perfect, sparkling fire trucks. Somebody had to wash them. I would ask Perkins about that today.

“Good to see you, Walker!” Perkins boomed. “Let’s get you started.” He took me out to the training area, where the group was gathered and Garret was just about to begin.