The Orange Eats Creeps

by Grace Krilanovich

  “You see,” Josh settled into a bag of pumpkin seeds, “the East doesn’t really exist. Austin is almost already as far as it goes for us. San Luis is pushing it to the South. All those awkward jackassholes in New Jersey just seem so fuckin corny. I don’t know how else to put it. Theirs is the land of dorks.” The Other Washington was the only Eastern place they were willing to acknowledge. DC was okay. The scene there set off a firestorm of humorless, stageless hardcore acts that popped up across the country, where sometimes the stage was just the patch of floor where a band played, surrounded by all kinds of kids freaking politically. In these cases, instead of feeling like I was on their level, I always felt like I was looking down over the proceedings, watching the events unfold and therefore sanctifying it like witnessing a birth or a live sex act. Always overlooking. Always occurring underneath my gaze.

  Josh and Knowles sat and debated the proper direction of the lucky horseshoe. One said it went like a U so that all the good luck would collect inside.

  “But if it were the other way, luck would still collect in it,” the other one said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Luck could come from below…”

  He scoffed. “Good luck comes from Hell — ”

  At the Black Bear Evangele had set up shop in the corner booth. He parked his cart in the aisle and the restaurant went down eight notches on the classiness scale. He laughed wildly to punctuate every casual remark but nothing was actually funny. He opened the small nondescript paperback book he had with him to reveal intense numerological calculations filling the margins, often obscuring the very words his figures were meant to expound upon. I heaved a giant sigh of relief: he was just a crazy fucker, a manic jackass and it wasn’t just me… Across his table were arranged, painstakingly in neat piles: three rolls of masking tape, two lighters, various ripped-in-half cigarettes, empty cigarette packages both foreign and domestic, multiple piles of two quarters, a banana, two jackets, newspapers, and some leaves. Evangele mind you, was up at the counter spinning around in his chair to the tune of “Oh Sherrie,” which he had playing on his boom box. If only the other guests knew he had infiltrated their little private club… his eyes raced to all of the sets of keys sitting on their tables next to plates of breakfast. His eyes stared at the keys for so long he saw them in his hands. All these people sitting there eating and talking didn’t even realize: he would be sitting comfortably in their Jacuzzi tubs with two redheads by dawn — of that he could be sure. He scribbled some lyrics on a receipt paper and passed it to a woman seated next to him. She slapped his face and stared hotly out the window… Shop dust has formed a protective coating on an old bucket of coffee on the floor of a 7-Eleven. The coffee is getting thicker and thicker, leathery and rare. Seth didn’t see me watching him like a lech as he climbed down a handful of stairs to the parking lot, his legs buckling out of starvation as he lowered his way down. I looked upon this fragile display lustily, and with perverted curiosity. I was drunk enough to fuck some way no two people had ever fucked before. Problem was, we couldn’t even stay awake, being out of our minds in the reek of DM syrup fumes, falling all over each other. I decided to take a nap in the bathtub. Sitting in the middle of all this steam I noticed pieces of flesh sloughing off in great grey sheets, plunging into sticky bathwater, each dissolving into a layer of ash on the surface of the anonymous liquid. Spelling ominous secrets.

  Shortly before running away Kim brought home two puppies she bought out in front of the grocery store. They went nuts at our house and ate our stepdad’s slippers and peed on our paperwork from the county office. He sent them to a shelter where one was put to sleep and the other went to live with a woman in Eugene. The dead one was dying anyway, and had a series of shots to finish him up. Our stepdad was the head of our house mom like Jesus was the head of the church, “This is not a matter of dominance; it is a matter of love.” Kim danced in circles on the kitchen floor; she said, “I’ll play this song till I can’t take any more.” As for her friends Rick, Ronnie, Peetie — that whole other gang of slutty teenage hobo junkies — all those guys came from bad homes. They’d had enough and they ran away. They pissed off cops with their screw you attitude and fucked up bodies, got beat up too many times for being fuckup transient whores. They got holes in their throats from spewing bile in the general direction of city limits. Peetie had a patchy flat top and a tattoo that said JÅCKE OFF + DIE in block letters and wore the same brown t-shirt every day with the sleeves rolled all the way up. He used to look normal, his cheeks were filled out in well-fed youth, his teeth used to be straight, but several months on the road and all the drugs and stuff had made him totally skinny, leathery skinny. More like a cart horse that got whipped all day. At our foster house jars of half-formed houseplants sat along every horizontal surface. Some were just collections of sprigs of green threads — weeds really — in cups of water. How do they do that, grow a little plant in a cup of water? Orange roots twisted around in the murky glass. I thought I saw one twitch and send up a line of bubbles, but no… Other plants looking like paper mâché wings dipped in slime rested on pieces of cardboard on the floor. Those ones were actually rooted in dirt. Flat green flaps of shell on a stick. I’ll water it in a little bit and it will gurgle at me for more till all the mites living in its soil have scrambled up its stalk for safety. The safety of mites? Did I just care about that? Kim folded the cat’s ears back like felt-covered leaves. She was surprised how perfectly they seemed to fold into little compact darts. They look better this way, she said. She remembered folding her dog’s ears down and back so the skin side was showing. She used to say that it was his hairdo… “Wait a minute,” Kim said, sitting in her darkened bedroom with Rick in the afternoon, “Just cuz you bought me a video doesn’t mean I have to put out. Anyway, we’re friends.” She had just finished saying this when he snuck back up into her face and for a second she felt sure it was going to happen: First Contact. She bristled as he moved in for the kiss. Sharply she pulled away. “Fuck man, your breath smells like a taxidermist’s workbench — ”His face reminded her of many she had seen who came to Oregon to die. There was pathos in Rick. He was dark and squirrelly. Shy and eager to please, untrained and raw. Needful… Kim couldn’t get him to stop shifting around like a dog smoothing out a place to sleep. Problem was, sleep proved elusive those days. They would have to lessen their death-grip on speed/consciousness/life for that one…

  One summer I caught an evil little pet. I caged it but it ditched me. No problem. After it left me I made it do my bidding from afar. Now I have remote control over its doings, ties I hitched over endless indelible months of putrid wandering. Walking lost, my body boiling like water until all the thoughts in my head just evaporate. The swath of vapor in the sky infects your lungs and forces me into bubbles in your brain with every predictable breath. That summer I was a teenage carnivore. On hot nights I dug up little things here and there that I found buried in holes. Creeping around under steel overpasses downtown I lived with my eyes to the ground, struck by how many gutter punks, panhandlers, dumpster divers, gakkers, vagrants, and romantic tramps would never even fuckin get it: the fact that we have to dig for stuff we don’t understand cuz we live in a past we don’t understand. I found a videotape in among some other stuff. It was of some kids partying in an apartment. They were all high on speed, tattooing each other while the girl held her cat to her chest, drunk, lying down on her living room floor. She looked absently at what was going on around her, a bit bewildered perhaps but casually luxuriating in her drunken nonchalance. She flipped through religious pamphlets in the dark. I identified with that girl on the tape, her predicament leapt right out at me from her crooked mouth. She looked at me but her bangs hid it all.

  Passing by the Anarcho-squats between Salem and Eugene I couldn’t help but absorb the longing of all the people lodged in every conceivable corner, suctioned into seams in the rafters. Their overwhelming sense of self-satisfaction warming the whole cavernous space like a gre
at growling pot-bellied stove. They read to each other by the light of a bare bulb burning on the side of an adjacent building. The room glowed brown with the dim orange light. Their bodies were wrapped and bound like cheeses and, as it happened, their skins looked and felt like a salt-basted exquisite cheese because they never left the brown light. They had money — why didn’t they use it?… Thoughts of escape were suspiciously absent. They enmeshed themselves snakelike with others in proximity and groped long and poignantly, their minds jogging through the detailed process of making bombs out of ordinary household materials. Longing to be true fugitives, for true disaster to strike; they wanted to scrape crumbs off the floors of cops and judges and county supervisors’ homes, to gurgle their tap water after the inhabitants have torn themselves strangled and conflicted from this world. With great effort they pre-wrote suicide notes for each of the prominent robots they had scheduled to die. Cops had no clue, no intelligence on them. This was strictly a subliminal war, fought behind the eyes drowning in blood, scoring flesh with acid, sputtering out of a bubbling vat of gruel on the stove. They shared one giant body. It was hungry all the time because it was just a baby.

  In the diner a few of them sat there and distracted the server while others dove into the back and stuffed their pants with dinner bread. “You pieces of rat shit,” we said to them, “this isn’t Europe, you know!” Anarchists! Never a surprise there. “Look at them groping each other under the table. You’d think they were conducting a symphony down there — ”Josh stood and threw a cup of ice in their general direction, “Thatch my roof, asshole! Turn my bucolic windmill!” Now it was getting redundant, “Strangle me with your extra long eyelashes! With your high quality beer and cigarettes — !”

  Rising before dawn we went out to some yard sales in town and the people looked at us like we were friggin nuts, but it was all the other people who were drunk and falling all over their stupid shit piled in their front yard. I’m like, dude, stop spilling your beer on me and get away from me with your shitty beach-ball… It’s a little like shopping on another planet. The scene is populated with a whole subterranean world of people, most disproportionately single middle-aged men with grizzled beards, Hawaiian shirts, and windowless vans, who make a meager living buying repossessed storage units at auctions, then selling the wares at swap meets. They live fast and loose, existing parenthetically to mass society, usually buried in much of the crap they are trying to sell but haven’t been able to. They’re a dying breed. Their lives are full of shit and mystery and intrigue, with few redeeming qualities, personality-wise. We discovered evidence of human activity from a long time ago at a limekiln in the woods that had been abandoned 175 years ago. We sensed that horrible tragedies were inflicted at this site. Maybe a killer hid out. Maybe a guy was chained to a bed in the 1910s. Maybe a family of desperate teens in the Depression starved to death in the creek. We followed the tiny fossilized footprints of history’s small adults — the marks of a past race of dapper children, animal children with no decipherable language. We found a shoe, a man’s fossilized cigarette butt, a cat skeleton. Excavating, digging around I began to find objects both strange and familiar, telepathically guided by horrific artifacts projecting a tone from feet below. And I can’t help but think of all the other stuff that’s lying in wait in storage units all over the country. Panting, sweat beading up on their Mylar shells, waiting for the door of their enclosure to open up and let that strange light in. All over the country storage containers sat full and silent on the ground. Alone in the dark; issuing forth negative energy, the kind only stored objects can bring out. Throbbing in the dark.

  When we got to the check cashing place it was almost three a.m. and the place was empty. Then we noticed a pair of eyes peering over the counter. The guy who worked there, I guess, but it seemed strange, like he was doing something back there. We walked up and noticed that he was crouching but that he was only four feet tall anyway. He stared at us and made pained wincing noises, as if for him breathing was something both precious and jagged. He looked like Evangele, except his skin was grey with spots and his hair looked like it was on backward. When he started talking it was like someone had pressed his button. A voice came out of a crack in the check cashing counter. “The Aspirin Man: His Story,” he announced.

  “What?” Josh said.

  “I’ve been waiting, you know — ”

  “Can I have cigarettes?”

  “Come a little bit closer so you can hear better. Lend me your ears, children.”

  “Somebody turn him off, seriously.”

  “You kids on the run? I was too when I was your age.” We didn’t answer, and yet he continued, “It’s rough in the trenches. I won’t deny that, but it’s no bed of roses here either!… You boys have been wounded? That’s fine, but I’m absolutely destroyed. For two years I’ve been on night duty. Do you know what that means? Exhausted! Worn to a frazzle! Oh my God!” He spoke so loud, like he was shouting over a black river at us on the other side: “At night I nap lightly at the end of a drawbridge under a box of industrial-strength Anacin tablets. The situation behind supermarkets is desperate, with all sorts of desperate people, desperate animals, and desperate things sniffing around the other side of the drawbridge. The opening in the building is exactly the same size as the truck that comes to leave its food inside. It pulls up and all the goods can roll off into the giant storeroom. But before the truck can pull up there’s the drawbridge, and that’s where I come in. I’m the lever-puller, the switch-thrower.”

  After a silence where he even closed his eyes, he continued, “Industrial strength Anacin keeps me going. I have no use for the food that comes off of these trucks. No need for anything else to animate me — just that sour white ore pulverizing my limbs… My stomach hardened into a big white rock a long time ago. My eyes are two ping-pong balls filled up with sand, tap water runs through my veins — but my hand is still wrapped around that switch, ready to pull. I am the chiseled switch-throwing Anacin Man; pass by me and reach the warehouse of your dreams! My bed is made up in the destroyed cab of a Mack truck — that deadly incubator of mustachioed evil. Upholstered in lizard skin, sugared water glass, an enlarged growth where the steering wheel had been… I puff myself up and settle into a palette of cotton swabs in the back and watch a little TV set I have in there, licking my paws and wetting my ears as I watch my little TV set and dream Anacin dreams of white deer circled by moons as big as the sky itself.”

  Outside the convenience store, at a spot in the sky, blacker than a storm winding its way through heaven, was a crack in the clouds. My eyes filterless, I watched the ribbon that wound and curled inertly in the twilight. Late at night I got lost inside… I remember sitting in the kitchen with Kim and she turned to me slowly and said cryptically, I can feel the wind that’s starting at the center of this house!… it’s turning and turning and turning, kicking up a wild frenzy. It’s turning and whipping around, turning me into something that I always wanted to be — my organs are crystallizing into gems. She sat straight up, staring at the wall behind me. I said Kim, Do you feel the ESP? Is it coming for you? She answered Yes, I feel it —

  Do you feel the storm too?

  And I said No. I can’t.

  She always seemed kind of embryonic. Reverting back to some liminal state launched into motion when she left the house, as if the building itself was keeping her on an upward path, evolving into a real person. Running away she seemed to just start sliding back down. She fell and collapsed at the bottom of the food chain somewhere in the spring… In this secret room with no doors there is a golden wilderness, where everything is priceless and wild. I coveted a scrap of bone said to be from the Donner Party, incinerated with marks of butchery visible to the naked eye. Other pieces turned up in the dirt along the way. Pieces I couldn’t quite place: bits of china, a petrified crust of bread, dice, a wad of Scotch tape folded into a flattened ice cube. Other objects that weren’t recognizable but still clanked around in my pocket, bits of wood
, glass. Taken together they were my Locating Deck. I jiggled and threw it out onto the table and read it. The lost pieces led me like a ghost guide through the forest and through towns and through parts of towns that reeked of death and fresh, urgent things I couldn’t put my finger on.

  I knelt down to where a patch of clover stood against a moist retaining wall. Father son holy ghost I said as if I knew and tapped each nodule on the clover’s head. I grew feverish at the thought of tearing one of the leaves in half, making four leaves, as if sinking into a realization of what that meant for the first time. Connecting the four leaves with the stem, and the dreaded five-point cross — the pentagram — popped out. What did that mean? I drew sketches in my mind of each possibility and its number. I thought of the little bag of bones resting these long winter days and nights in my apron pocket. I counted them out and muttered the names and origins of each as I wound my way around the dirt paths this side of the Northwest Rainforest. I dreamed of wheat. Bushels of large well-kempt tubes of flaky stalks. Strange, because I had never felt or been in any proximity to wheat and wondered why I would dream about a grain of cosmic significance. I saw little brown birds shaking at the ends of long tufted heads of wheat. Were they one and the same? A rustle of feathers hewn by the scythe; a pulpy bushel of flaky stalks?… Please stand clear of the lady’s shadow I heard out of the corner of my sight, and awoke. So the wheat was a person then? A human mother? Angel lady come to save me? Late at night at my old family living room I woke up and sat in the middle of the couch. Plastic dust rose off the hairy blue carpet like a quiet and perilous vapor. The cat rooted around under a blanket until it found some lost remnants of old food on the floor, maybe nothing more than a salty patch from who knows what source. Against what I would have considered to be an animal’s best judgment he licked at that spot on the floor for a long time. I pulled him away with his tongue still stuck halfway out of his mouth. But cats don’t really have mouths; they have what’s more like a compact little salty bear trap. Outside it was brighter, orange street lamps banishing all life on the street below. The spotlights’ hard beams fastening down a deadness out of the dead of night. I found myself outside, towering over the worms that turned up this time of night on the street, unaware of their fate at the hands of a daylight world they didn’t own. I began to feel some measure of guilt for not cluing them in. They’ll just fry like the rest when the sun comes up, like all the worms of history; they shouldn’t be any different. And perhaps they would come to know this site intimately after all. By being sizzled into the surface the worms would become it, in a way, like nothing else could. I stared at nothing in particular and felt my eyeballs boring holes through their soft pale skin. Do they deserve this? I walked up to the rainwater barrel behind the neighbors’. I steeped an unrefined tea out of assorted blooms, sticks, and pebbles surrounding one of the gravesites on the hill. I walked back down; an air of predictability pervaded the driveway; juices ran down in among fissures and pooled in dark reservoirs at street level. Microbes living on the little pebbles are supposed to make you psychic — if they don’t lock you into the static scaffolding of your own goddamn skeleton first.