Strays

by Ron Koertge

  I don’t know where I am. The social worker said she doesn’t like to drive the freeways, so it’s just one twist and turn after another. There was somebody else in the van when she picked me up, but he’s huddled all the way in the back. I’m in the middle seat.

  When Ms. Ervin finally pulls over, she says, “This is where Mr. and Mrs. Rafter live, boys. Get your stuff.”

  I’ve only got a suitcase and a duffel. The other kid tosses two green trash bags out the back.

  That’s got to be Mr. Rafter peering at us from the porch. My parents owned a pet shop, so I’ve seen that look before. It’s the one that means, Are you going to pee on the rug and keep me up at night?

  Right behind him is a set of plastic chairs, the kind with slats and arms. Ms. Ervin just points. She’s big and frazzled-looking. Gold shoes, jangly jewelry, a chopstick stuck in a lot of red/gold/gray hair. A briefcase with somebody else’s initials on it. A purse like a bird’s nest with handles.

  “Why don’t you guys have a seat,” she says. “I’ve got some paperwork to do inside.” Then she turns her back to the house and whispers, “I had to beg to get this placement. Don’t make me look bad, okay?”

  The kid with the trash bags twists the tops tighter. He doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t look at me.

  I like to figure things out: The porch sags, the picnic table needs two shims to keep it even, paint is peeling off the overhang, and that’s a five-year-old truck in the driveway. So — money is tight. And it’s either take in a couple of strangers or dip into the savings.

  That’s where we come in.

  The other foster kid glances at the screen door and whispers, “That one looks like a hard-ass. What’s his name again?”

  “Rafter, I think.”

  He points up. “Like in the ceiling?”

  “Or on a river maybe. A long time ago you kind of were what you did. So there was a Mr. Shoemaker and a Mr. Baker and a Mr. Fletcher and —”

  “What’s a fletcher?”

  “Guy who makes arrows.”

  “No way.”

  I nod.

  “So you think back in the day this guy made rafts?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  He asks, “What’s your last name?”

  “O’Connor.”

  “Does that mean anything?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Mine’s Porter. Sounds like all my people did was carry shit to white folks.”

  When animals get to know each other, they dance around and sniff and yip a little and just generally see what’s up. That’s what Porter and I are doing. Pretty soon it’ll either be okay or he’ll growl and show his teeth.

  He takes out a cell phone and checks for messages. “Where were you before this?”

  I point toward the San Gabriel Mountains. “Santa Mira. You?”

  “El Serreno. They fed three of us one can of chicken noodle soup a day and spent the rest on malt liquor. Social Services drops by, and the next thing you know I’m in the van again.” He squints and looks at me hard. Harder. “Charles William,” he says, “but nobody calls me that. I go by C.W.” Then he holds out one fist.

  I know what he wants to do, but what if I put mine out there, then he pulls his back and laughs? It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened to me.

  I say, “Ted,” and offer to shake hands instead.

  He shrugs and does it. “You’re cold,” he says. When I look at him, he adds, “Temperature-wise, I mean.”

  “My whole family is cold.” It gives me the creeps when I say that because it’s a lot truer than he knows. And I didn’t mean it that way. It just slipped out.

  He pushes past me and heads for one of the chairs. He’s a big kid wearing owlish-looking glasses. He sits down and sighs. He leans forward with both elbows on his knees. He stares at the floor.

  I wonder if he’s scared, too. There’s no way I can flat out ask him, though, so I go back to figuring things out: a purple plastic bucket with one stiff brush, some newspaper, and a rag mean that Mr. Rafter’s wife is fussy. Wipe your feet. Clean up after yourself. Pack out what you brought in. Don’t even leave footprints.

  My mother’s porch was a mess, not that she could have stayed ahead of the animals, anyway. They were everywhere. Dogs, sure, but cats, too. Wall-to-wall cats sometimes. When they were all up and around, the whole floor looked restless.

  They rubbed against everybody (and by everybody, all I mean is my parents and me, because we didn’t exactly entertain), but they couldn’t keep their paws off yours truly. My mother has a picture of me with what must be fifteen of them. All you can see is my head because I am buried in cats.

  Mostly people dumped them on our lawn or left them in cardboard boxes at the front door of my parents’ pet shop — Doggie Dog World. None of them would end up at the pound or in some creepy lab on an island. My mother would find homes for them. Or they’d live at our house. Is that why my father had a girlfriend, that skinny woman in San Dimas who bred Chihuahuas?

  C.W. looks toward the screen door. “I was in this place once where the lady would tie off and shoot up while her old man made us paint the house. And all the other guys did was beat on me.”

  I look toward the big white front door. “What other guys?”

  “This lady is not cooking for two when she can cook for three or four and make more money. That’s how it works, man. Where you been? There’s always other guys.”

  “Are they ever okay?” I ask.

  “This is foster care. Nobody’s okay.” He reaches under his sweatshirt and rubs his stomach. It’s not a yum-yum rub, either. Something hurts in there.

  A couple of minutes later, we’re all in the foyer. Ms. Ervin says good-bye and shakes C.W.’s hand, then mine. Her blue eyes are big and moist. When her cell phone rings, she turns it off so we’ll think we’re more important than any phone call.

  She pats Mr. Rafter on the arm, then hugs his wife, who’s got big, moist eyes, too. From the look of her, she doesn’t jog much or work out, but she’s still Nike from her sweatshirt to her shoes. She’s got a ton of hair that hangs down to her waist in a long braid.

  Ms. Ervin hugs C.W., who eats it up, but when she gets to me, I step back.

  “I know, sweetheart,” she murmurs. “It’s hard.”

  Both the Rafters lead us up the stairs and right into the first bedroom. C.W. opens the closet and looks in, then gets down on his hands and knees and checks under the single bunk bed like he’s about to spend five days and six nights in Transylvania. I wonder if he knows something I don’t.

  He stands up and kicks at his garbage bags with the toe of one worn-out sneaker. “Is Ted in here with me?” he asks.

  Mr. Rafter shakes his head. “Ted’s upstairs.”

  “Been a long time since I had a room by myself.”

  “The toilet’s right across the hall.”

  “I’ll come with you guys, okay? See where Teddy’s gonna be.”

  Mr. Rafter shakes his head. “Give us a minute. Barbara will stay here and show you where to stow your gear.”

  I follow him. His big Red Wing work shoes make every stair step groan. His boot-cut jeans are new. His white Western shirt with snaps is so starched it’s like armor.

  He opens a door to the attic, and the hinges creak. One bed is out in the open, covered with a big blue comforter. But I’ll bet it’s not mine. The other one is shoved back where the ceiling meets the floor — just the kind of place somebody might’ve chained up a crazy aunt.

  Mr. Rafter says, “We gave the single room to the other boy because I don’t like to mix black and white. Astin’s going to age out just about the time he graduates, so then the whole place will be yours.”

  “All right.”

  “Let’s get so
me things straight right now. My wife’s a pushover, but I’m not. Your Ms. Ervin thinks mistakes are things to learn from and a way for boys to mature faster. I think they’re a one-way ticket out of here.”

  “I understand.” I try to smile up at him.

  He cocks his head, narrows his milky blue eyes, and delivers his line. “For what you’ve been through, you’re a little too together. You’re not going to go off the rails on me, are you?”

  For what you’ve been through. He means my parents. I’m not getting into that with somebody I just met. So I say, “I don’t think so.”

  Mr. Rafter studies me some more. He’s got big, rough hands. My dad slapped me around a couple of times when he was really mad, but if this guy hit me, I’ll bet he’d knock me out. Or down, anyway.

  “All right. I’ll let you get to it.” Then he leaves me alone on the set of The House That Tough Love Built.

  I put my suitcase on the bed and start to unpack. It’s a good thing I don’t have much, since all I get are two shelves and a cubbyhole instead of a dresser. As far as light goes, my roommate has a brass reading lamp. Mine’s a beat-up gooseneck. I try lying down on top of the wool bedspread, which turns out to be as scratchy as it looks.

  The roof is almost right in my face. I take a couple of deep breaths.

  When I hate where I am, I picture myself in Africa speaking Swahili or Chokwe or Edo to someone who knows where there’s a western lowlands gorilla that’s hurt or sick. The more exotic the animal, the more remote or dangerous the terrain, the more likely it is that I’ll be there. I don’t own a house. I don’t even have a car. I live where chance and necessity take me.

  I travel on foot like my native guides. I eat what they eat, and I’m never ill. And once we reach the animal in distress, I sleep beside it. I instinctively know what is wrong and how to make it right. My guides, who are by that time my friends, squat by the fire and watch. They know they are witnessing something extraordinary. The stories they have heard about me are true.

  I’m back on my feet in this world hanging things in the closet when I hear somebody go into the bathroom across the hall, then the shower comes on. Pretty soon, my roommate wanders in.

  With his shirt off like that, he’s a walking geometry problem: kite-shaped on top with skinny legs. Wide forehead and pointed chin. Long, crimped hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. He’s lean and wolfish. He’s got the only dresser, and the top of it is covered with stuff for his hair and his skin. More stuff than my mom ever had.

  He drops his gym bag, holds up an electric toothbrush, and says, “Not just clean teeth, but a higher plane of dental awareness.” Then he grins like a lottery winner. “How long you guys been here?”

  “Just a little while.”

  “I was working on somebody’s piece-of-crap Pontiac. And then I went to the gym.”

  He sees me glance at the weights on the floor beside his bed.

  “Those are for the in-betweens. You can use ’em if you want, but ask, okay? You can pretty much use anything of mine if you ask.” The grin morphs into a leer. “Anything except Megan.” He grabs a V-neck sweater out of his dresser and pulls it over his head. “You okay? This all a little too much?”

  “I guess I’m all right.”

  “That bow tie with the camo pants is a nice look.”

  I don’t pay much attention to clothes. I could wear a tux to school and I’d still get called Litter Box O’Connor. “It’s my dad’s.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “He thought it made him look approachable.”

  “Your dad did?”

  I nod. “He said a shirt with an open collar doesn’t inspire confidence, while a regular tie is too corporate.”

  “Could be true. What’d he sell?”

  “Pets. We had a pet store in Santa Mira.”

  “Seriously? Like PetSmart?”

  Astin squeezes a dab of something onto one hand, then rubs it on his face. My mother didn’t even like to take baths. I’d pass the bathroom, and there she was in slacks and an old bra just washing under her arms.

  “Smaller. A whole lot smaller.”

  “Could you compete with those corporate guys?” he asks.

  “We do okay.”

  “And it’s did.”

  I just look at him.

  “You did okay. Your folks passed, right? It’s Teddy, isn’t it?”

  “Or Ted.”

  “Teddy, your folks died, right?”

  Is this Astin pretending to get things straight, or is he really rubbing it in?

  “Ted?”

  “Technically, yes.”

  He laughs sharp and hard. He says, “We just might get along. The guy before you bored me to death.”

  I guess this is more of the Getting to Know You game. Well, it’s a whole lot better than Beat Up the New Kid. So I play along. “What was he like?”

  “Mexican kid. In the system forever. And a total queer. He split for New York the minute he turned eighteen. What was he waiting for — the lousy yard and a half from the state? I’d have fronted him that to get his homo ass out of here.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want the cops after him.”

  Astin shakes his head. “That never happens to older kids. Little ones, yeah, because of the pervs and all that. But older kids, no. They don’t much care, and even if they did, they don’t have the manpower.”

  I want to keep him talking. I didn’t like that other conversation. The less I think about my parents the better.

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The cops. The system. Social Services. Foster care. Try and imagine Ms. Ervin in her van stopping at every gay bar between here and the East Coast and showing Enrique’s picture around.” He shakes his head. “No way.”

  “So I could walk out of here with no problem?”

  “Probably. But where are you gonna go? All Ricky talked about was hooking up with some older guy. That’s not your scene. At least not in that outfit.”

  “No, I’m not like that.”

  “What you got here is three hots and a cot. Medical and dental when you need it. My advice is hang in there and graduate.” He points west. “It’s cold out there, man, and when you age out, all you get is a handshake and a kick in the ass.”

  I look out the little window. “Do I have to ask if I want to go out for a walk or run an errand?”

  “Nah. You’re not in jail. Just be back by sixteen hundred. Major Rafter goes nuts if you’re late.”

  The light rail system in Pasadena is called the Gold Line mostly to make it different from the Red and Blue Lines, which go off in other directions.

  The Lake Avenue station is six blocks north of the Rafters’; my old home is six miles east. Santa Mira is closer to the foothills. It’s arty but funky enough to be zoned for horses. The city council voted against a Starbucks. There’s a shoemaker and a butcher. And there used to be a pet shop.

  Some rich people (who are also green) ride the Gold Line and then talk about the “urban experience.” All that means is a homeless guy talking to his hand puppet and a posse of wannabe rappers who huff and puff and call each other “dawg” and “playuh.”

  The car I’m in is almost deserted except for a blind man and his dog — a big, cream-colored Lab. She’s lying with her face on her paws, but sits up when I settle across from her.

  She looks pretty good. My mother used to organize intervention and rescue because some blind people take out all their troubles on their dogs. But this one doesn’t have a mark on her.

  I say to her owner, “Since she’s not really working right now, do you mind if I pet your dog?”

  The blind man turns toward my voice. “I’m sure Brandy wouldn’t mind. What do you think, girl?”

  Brandy stands up and smiles. I mean that. Her mouth curves up in a grin and her eyes sparkle. I take her head between my hands and lean until my forehead touches hers.

  “You’re doing okay,” she says. “Keep it up.”

  Now I put my arm
s around her. I can feel her wide chest against mine, her long face against my ear.

  She adds, “I have a toothache.”

  I pat her, kiss the space between her eyes, then press on her back end so she’ll sit.

  I tell the blind man thanks.

  “Not a problem. She warmed right up to you. Usually she doesn’t.”

  “If you take her to the vet, there’s an abscessed tooth in the back on the right. Her right.”

  The mechanical conductor calls the Santa Mira station and I stand up.

  Brandy’s owner asks, “How in the world would you know that?”

  “I’ve been around animals all my life.”

  When I disembark (I like that word. It doesn’t sound like forever. I’ll pretend I’ve just disembarked at the Rafters’.), four girls from my old high school pour out of one of the other cars, so I go and hide behind the big square route map. Only my feet show, and I guess they might know me by my old desert boots except they’re not really interested in anybody but themselves. Their sweatshirts say SANTA MIRA. All they need is a zip code, and they could be mailed home from anywhere in the world. And if somebody stuffed them all in a very small mailbox, it’d be okay with me.

  I watch them take the switchback stairs all the way to Foothill Boulevard, then head for the outdoor mall and probably the Old Navy store. They’ve got bags of clothes from the Gap and Banana Republic. But they always want more. Like a boy with spiky hair and a tattoo who’ll pull up in a Dodge Magnum, buy them lunch, and text-message a couple of friends. They’ll go clubbing and end up making out (some tongue but not much). Then the girls will call each other and squeal.

  It all just makes me want to puke. I know one of those girls is Sally Denfield, the same Sally Denfield who stopped me in the hall last year and said, “So, Ted. Do you like to do it doggy style?”

  Everyone acted like it was the funniest thing they ever heard. Then they closed in. Usually they just kind of pecked at me until I ran away. But this time Scott McIntyre hit me from behind and I went down. My books, and there were a lot of them, slid for what seemed like forever.

  A lot of people saw it and nobody said anything. As usual. Even Mr. White, a teacher who was right there when it happened. I told my father (my mother would have just said, “No animals were hurt, were they?”), he called the school, and a secretary told him the office was aware that a good-natured stunt had backfired and it was being looked into.