Girls Love Travis Walker (9 page)

“I like to bake,” she told me. “It makes the house smell good.”

Instant longing shot through me, bad enough to make my throat hurt—just at the thought of a comfortable home that smelled like cupcakes.

“Do you still live in Perdido?”

She nodded. “My family too. My mom and stepdad live there with my three brothers.”

 “Younger brothers?”

“A lot younger. They’re six, eight, and nine. They’re my half-brothers, really. Growing up, all I ever did was take care of them. So when I turned eighteen, I got my own place.”

“Wow. That must be great.” Zoey really had her act together. Goals, a job, a place of her own. And a long-term boyfriend.

“It’s just a room over a garage,” she said. “But it’s mine!”

 “What about your boyfriend?”

“He’s from Santa Alicia,” she said. “We dated all through high school.”

“So, pretty serious, huh?”

“I guess.” A banner of blond hair hid her face as she looked down. “I met him freshman year through Kat. They both went to Santa Alicia High.”

Kat. I hadn’t thought of her in a while. I hoped Zoey would fork out some details about the boyfriend, but it didn’t happen. “What things do you like to do?” I asked.

“Oh, lots. Swim, run track, read. In high school I really liked being on the school newspaper and yearbook staff.” She took a bite of cupcake, managing to look pretty while she wiped frosting from her upper lip with a napkin. “What about you?”

I didn’t have much of an answer for her. At least, not one I wanted to give, since historically most of my spare time had been devoted to getting laid. “It’s weird. I’ve mainly worked a lot the last few years. To make extra money.” I tried to ignore the feeling of shame that curled through me, for being poor and unentitled, a mongrel fighting for scraps. Especially when I thought of her boyfriend from Santa Alicia, who was probably Mr. Moneybags.

She cocked her head, like she was gearing up to ask another question. The door to the dining hall opened, and some guests came out, including Hilda. She marched over to us.

“Cupcakes are missing. Travis needs a cupcake.”

“I had a cupcake, Hilda. Thanks, though.”

“Travis needs a cupcake,” she said more loudly, presenting me with a much-handled specimen.

“Thank you, Hilda.” I accepted it.

She wandered off.

“Hilda really likes you,” Zoey said.

There was no denying it. Most days, Hilda found a reason to talk to me and brought me smashed little pieces of food, which I accepted and secretly threw away later.

I wondered which had come first, the homelessness or the mental illness. It seemed to me that being homeless would make you crazy. How could it not? The fear, the uncertainty, the difficulty of getting anything accomplished when you had no place to be. How could I look for a better job without a mailing address or a way to clean my clothes?

“I can hardly wait to get her into The Haven. It’ll be soon now.” Brightening at the thought, Zoey gave me a smile that was pure sunshine. It warmed me, even that little core part of me that seemed to be cold all the time these days.

“Hey,” I found myself saying, “you know what I’ve started doing?”

“What?”

 I began by describing the accident on the Ridge. I hadn’t meant to talk long, but I ended up running on at the mouth, telling Zoey everything about the fire department.

“When I saw that guy, the motorcyclist, just lying there on that ledge – it’s weird because it was scary, but I also felt excited, you know?  Like, hey, we’re gonna totally save this guy, and it’s gonna rock. You know what I mean?”

She nodded, her face lighting up.

I told her how Perkins had invited me to attend the Open House and how I’d broken Garret’s record.

Zoey listened the way she always did, with every cell of her body. This girl did things flat-out, with a thousand percent of her energy and attention.

Now, she was focused on firefighter turn-out drills, interrogating me about exactly how they went.

 “They lay the gear out on the floor in the order it goes on,” I told her. “So they can practice getting dressed in less than sixty seconds.”

“I wish I’d known that back when I lived at home with my clothes all over the floor,” Zoey said, with an impish expression. “I could have told Mom I was preparing for an emergency!” 

I felt lighter than I had in a while, like I could even relax a little. The After School program people were passing us, entering the center, and soon the kids would be arriving. I told Zoey all about Saturday and being invited to join the Discoverers—all,
that is, except for the tiny detail about not meeting the entrance qualifications. She didn’t need to know that—or that I was a dropout, for that matter.

“Travis, that’s amazing! You’re going to do it, right? The Discoverers program?”

“I dunno. I want to. But I shouldn’t.”

“Why?”  Zoey gave me this deep, searching look.

 “I need money, Zoey. I’m not kidding.” I couldn’t believe I was telling her my private stuff like this. “I should be working a paying job on the weekend. Not some volunteer thing.”

“That volunteer thing is the pathway to a career! Think of your future!”

“My future!” The words spilled out. “Do you really think I have one?” For so long, I’d seen no way out of the quicksand that was my life.

Her light gray eyes turned dark, and her glance was almost fierce. “You have a great future, Travis. And it’s not in brush clearance.” 

Well, when she put it that way. I didn’t know where her faith in me came from, but I hoped she was right.

##

That night I brought home a dreary dinner of tuna casserole, lifeless mixed vegetables, and scary-orange jello. In the dim gloom of our apartment, Mom’s shoulders drooped when she saw it. As usual, she’d spent the day by herself, dozing or sitting by a window, flipping through one of the magazines she borrowed from the neighbors.

“It’s all they had today,” I said. “Zoey keeps talking to them about improving the menu, but for now, this is it.”

We choked down the dinner by the light of a single candle, one of three we owned. I couldn’t believe Mom was here all day, every day, with no light, TV, or radio. She couldn’t run a hair dryer or heat a cup of water. Couldn’t take a hot shower, and if my nose was right, she wasn’t taking any showers at all. A sour smell hung over her and the apartment. When I found an overflowing bag of garbage in the kitchen, all food containers from the Community Center, I carried it down the hall to the garbage chute.

I sat at the table, swallowing guilt with my tuna casserole, hoping to take Perkins up on his invitation and slip out to the fire station for the evening, but not wanting to leave Mom alone in the dark apartment.

“Tired?” I asked hopefully as dinner ended.

“Not so much. I slept all afternoon,” was the discouraging reply, but she was asleep again within an hour anyway. If Mom slept any more, she’d be officially comatose.

I let myself out, worrying about her. It felt like Mom was getting weaker and paler until it seemed like she was almost transparent, and you could see right through her to the wall outlets. Which of course didn’t work.

I had to do something. Soon. I would take her to the Free Clinic on Thursday night, when they stayed open til ten. The doctors there would help her. And maybe that would help me.

Hoops

At the station, two fire trucks were returning from a call and just pulling into the Truck Bay. Garret stepped down from the fire truck and drew off his helmet. Day-glow yellow stripes ran across his firefighter’s jacket and pants. If you were doing a search and rescue mission with him in a dark building, working by flashlight, the stripes would be the only part of him you could see.

 “Overturned SUV on the 110 freeway,” Garret was saying as I walked up. “We had to cut the passengers out of the car.” Then, noticing me, “Hey, Walker.” He shook his head, scowling. “What’re you doing here?”

 “I just dropped by. Perkins said I could.” I bit the side of my mouth, feeling stupid and in the way. I didn’t see Perkins anywhere.

“You up for some basketball?” Jason said. He was in his mid-twenties, not as big as some of the others, but solid muscle and sinew. He wore his hair longish, compared to the other guys on the crew, and wore a patterned band tattooed on his left bicep.

I’d noticed a couple of hoops mounted on posts in the training yard, but I’d never seen anyone use them. “Great!” I tried to put enthusiasm into my voice. After eight hours of dragging heavy tree limbs down a hill and wrestling them into a wood chipper, my arms, legs, and back wanted no part of a basketball game.

We gathered outside and formed two teams of three. “We get Walker!” Garret yelled. He smirked at me. “Hope you’re as good at basketball as you are at firefighting.”

“All right!” Jason slapped me on the shoulder.

I sighed. The guys on the other team were huge—on average three inches taller than me, and I was the tallest on our team.

When had I last played hoops? I never really saw the point of most sports anyway. It was just about getting a ball from here to there, which never interested me much. I’d gone to one football game last year, which was memorable only for the cheerleaders, bouncing up and down, their skirts flipping to reveal those little panties underneath. I watched them for the first half of the game, then ended up making a touchdown of my own under the bleachers with that sexy exchange student, Carolina, from Brazil.

 I knew the rules of basketball, though. Block the other guy from shooting and be sure to dribble when you move with the ball. That seemed to be about all that was worth knowing.

We played. I focused, just like I did during training, dribbling, blocking a few shots, taking a few, making one. Still, me and Garret and Jason were getting pounded by the Tall Guys.

“Time out!” Garret called finally. “We suck,” he said, firing a ball at me from three feet away. Hard.

I just caught it before it sank into my gut
. Jeez, mellow out, dude.
I wondered how long he planned to make me pay for accidentally breaking his famous record and embarrassing him.

“Let’s change these teams up,” Garret called out to the others. “Drew, you wanna trade with Walker?” So now, I would play for the other side, while Garret and Jason took Drew, who was 6’5” and really good.

We started in again, with Garret guarding me this time. He was only 5’10,” but tenacious as a bulldog and armed with his status as my superior at the fire station.

I had possession of the ball. Within a second, Garret had plowed into me and stepped on my feet. It was totally illegal. Against anyone else, I would have put a sharp elbow in his ribs or pushed back. But we both knew it wasn’t smart to piss him off.

A few minutes later, as I tried to make a shot, he outright grabbed my arm, pulling it down and sending the ball bouncing away. “Hey!
Rules
, Garret!” one of my teammates complained. You would have thought someone obsessed with rules would follow them.

After a while, my teammates stopped passing me the ball, since it would set off a mauling from Garret. That didn’t stop his fun, though. He still managed to trip me once, for no reason, and charged into me at top speed, almost knocking me over.

“Didn’t know you were so accident prone, Walker.” Garret snorted, as if he’d just said the funniest thing ever.

My team lost, of course.

That was a good time, I thought grimly, as we hoofed it into the kitchen to break out the sodas and waters. For a second I had expected beer, then remembered they were on duty. There would be no alcohol intake tonight, or any night at the fire station.

Garret and two of the other guys took off, leaving me with Drew and Jason. We threw ourselves onto the big sofas in the Day Room. I lay there, examining a nasty scrape on my elbow.

I couldn’t believe this place was inhabited by a bunch of guys. It was super clean. The upholstery had no stains, amazingly, and the floors looked like you could walk on them barefoot without getting crumbs and threads stuck to your feet, like at my place. A big chart on the wall showed a schedule for all chores around the station. They clearly followed it.

“Garret’s a fun guy, huh?” Jason looked at me sideways.

“He’s fine.” I knew better than to complain. “What’s with him and the rulebook, by the way?”

“Just his own personal form of OCD. He claims to be memorizing the whole Procedural Guide on his rise to the top.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Seems as if he doesn’t like me.”

Jason took a pull off his can of Sprite, looking at it with distaste. “Aw, he likes you, Walker! He just would like you better at another station!” He laughed, then saw I wasn’t. “He wants to make Battalion Chief by age forty. Perkins is really hard on him, but that’s only because Garret’s so good. So Garret does the same thing to you.” He guzzled the rest of the can and tossed it in a high arcing throw that just missed the trash basket by the kitchen door.

Drew threw a wad of paper at him. “Good thing you didn’t shoot like that earlier. We’d have lost for sure.”

Well, that blew, I thought as I drove home. But I knew the drill. Garret would dish out the punishment, and I would take it, until one of us wore himself out. The game was called Last Man Standing, and I was as good at it as anyone.

##

After work the next evening, I pulled into the parking lot at the The Free Clinic. Neither Mom nor I had spoken the whole way over. She seemed to hardly know where she was. I brooded, hoping they could help, but worrying they’d just prescribe us a bunch of useless pills that I would have to find a way to pay for.

The Free Clinic waiting room offered all the style and comfort of hard plastic chairs and chipped vinyl flooring, along with dusty window blinds and a giant fake fern in a pot. If the medical advice was on par with the design of the place, we were in big trouble.

“Mrs. Walker?” The woman’s name tag said “Bridgette, Nurse Practitioner.”

Mom got to her feet, looking around vaguely. Her face was puffy, and a cold sore had sprouted on her mouth, the second one this week. I felt like I should go with her to the examining room. It seemed like a weird thing to do, but I didn’t think she could manage on her own.