by Brian Hart
She laughed and he warmed to her again, her earthy and robust sexiness, her big sad eyes that were only a degree or so from being just right, or just smart enough, just quick enough to strike him down. But she wasn’t Karen. Never would be. Sometimes he wondered if it would be better to just go and find her and get it over with but he couldn’t. Pride was a problem but more than that he was afraid she wouldn’t be the person he remembered. She would’ve changed too. Who’re you again? What if that happened? Like if she’d forgotten who he was. He actually shuddered while thinking this.
They both needed sleep and Lacey probably shouldn’t have been driving. “It’s the root of a word, right?” Roy said. “Like where it came from.” He turned on her. “Like Lacey means you’re delicate and pretty much see-through. Particularly pleasing while employed in sexual acts.”
She smiled, but the hurt was in her eyes. “Have you ever had the feeling when somebody says something to you that it might be the meanest thing anybody has ever said to you?”
“Don’t take everything so hard.”
“It’s happened to me twice with you. In less than a week.” She sat up in her seat. “Think about that,” she said with a forced smile. The clouds parted although the rain continued and the wet streets flashed as brightly as a fish.
He thought, maybe there’s nothing wrong with her that a change of hairdo couldn’t cure. Her smile was enchanting. He shouldn’t be so cruel. This was a good thing they had going, but she had him feeling like a kept boy because he didn’t have any place to stay and was in fact dependent on this woman for shelter and transportation. “Let’s just go to your place and get some sleep, OK?”
“Are you gonna keep the asshole thing going,” she said. “Or can you act like a human?”
“I’ll be human from now on,” Roy said. “At least for the rest of the day.”
A month later, Roy was sitting in the middle-row seat of the Sprinter van, leaning against the window, picking at the spray-paint overspray on his hands, sweating beer. Westbound on I-70, headed toward some concrete skatepark in the pointless suburbs of Kansas or Missouri or somewhere. Lana del Rey was ironically on the radio but secretly they all loved her and would bitch if the music changed. Her song “Cola” had been repeated three times.
Derik, shirtless, sat beside him on the bench seat rolling a joint on a stolen red plastic McDonald’s tray. Rasheed was in the back reading Wired with his headphones on. Yano from Fresno was up front messing with his phone. Brandon the boy hesher was asleep next to him, drool on his baby-face chin. Tony was driving, sipping a grande Red Bull, resting the can on his tubby gut. Roy and the B-Team. Nessy didn’t mess with road tours much anymore, and for good reason. The van smelled like spilled beer, rotten fruit, balls, and hydroponic weed. Coast to coast in two weeks, more driving than skateboarding by a factor of ten. Five days in and Roy was ready to go home but he didn’t know where that would be.
Derik licked the paper on his joint and pulled it smooth, held it up for inspection, offered it to Roy, No, thanks, lit it and hit it and left it smoldering in his mouth while he stowed his weed, along with a small pair of pink-handled crafting scissors and rolling papers, in a Crown Royal bag. He exhaled big and bounced a fist off his chest, a chest nourished by Wendy’s, Budweiser, and marijuana, running lean on adolescent fumes.
“Roll your window down,” Rasheed said to his cousin.
Derik did as he was asked and the gust of wind woke Brandon up.
“This shit used to look like all affirmative action,” Derik said to Roy. “Real urban youth shit, right? City kids.” He blew the ash onto the floor and hit it again. He’d made it clear that if he provided the weed, not to mention held it if they got pulled over, that he got double taps on the rotation.
Roy dead-eyed Derik, not in the mood. He wanted out of the van. He wanted real food. Mostly he wanted privacy. The freeway thudded beneath the tires, almost in time with the hangover pounding in his ears. Derik exhaled in Roy’s face and passed the joint to Yano.
“See, we got amigos, Asians, a couple a hood niggas,” Derik continued, shaking out one-two-three, thumb-index-middle on his right hand at the other skateboarders in the van. “We even got a Jew from Brazil.” He took the joint back from Yano but waited to hit it. “And now we got Roy fucking Bingham. Team photo looks fucked up all over again. Like, who brought their dad to work? Grandpa and the Gang is what this shit should be called.”
Roy made the talk talk talk motion with his hand, like a duck quacking.
“You got gray hair, nigga,” Derik said. Yano started laughing and Brandon, too. Tony was focused on the road. Rasheed might as well have been in another vehicle altogether. Outside the window there were cows.
“I got some gray hairs,” Roy said to Derik. “I don’t have gray hair.”
“Old-ass nigga,” Derik said. “Look at you, all puffy and ill. It’s almost tomorrow night and you’re still hung the fuck over from last night. You white niggas don’t age well. You look sick, zombie sick. Undead nigga.” His smile cracked open and showed his sparkling grill. “But you can skate. I’ll give you that.” He offered a fist and Roy obliged. “Roy Bingham can throw the fuck down, boy.”
“Less talk,” Roy said. “More rock.”
“You straight, Roy,” Derik said. “You straight.” He hit the joint again and this time when he offered, Roy took it.
The show went like this: Roll up to a local spot in the van and the boys all pile out and mill and kick-wheel stopper pebbles and kind of check what the fuck and see where the fuck you could get speed for that shit or how to transfer from that to that so you can get to there, smoke some cigarettes and roll joints, have some beers and suddenly the crowd’s deep and cheering and Roy is six beers in going for lipslides on the over vert. King of finding the sketchiest, die if you bail, Valhalla if you ride away shit, and because of this he always got footage. Always. Something always went down when Roy was skating and it wasn’t as if it wasn’t desperate because it was. He skated like each kick would be his last, each stock ollie was—smack!—another nail in his coffin. It’d taken him twenty-five years on a skateboard to develop this kind of skate acuity, all mental, physically he was pretty much fucked, but not so fucked that a couple vikes and five beers wouldn’t cure him. He might not look like much but he knew every sweet fold and crease and bump and how to get from here to there with speed and fucking style. All style, all commitment. Not much flippy shit, even though he could still more or less hit the lighter tech stuff, he didn’t abuse it. Let Derik and the lads handle the triple sets and the handrails. Roy had to use his brain. His battered knees demanded it.
When he was young he thought slamming was the worst pain he could feel. He hadn’t worked jobs and been evicted and learned bus schedules and lost the one he loved and gone to court-ordered AA and NA and gotten VD and acronymed himself into a deep septic hole of undiagnosed adult sadness. Old man, take a look at my life. What life, man-cub? Of what soft-serve state of existence do you speak?
Then it was one too many mornings with Derik yelling, “White power!” while Roy emptied his stomach into a hotel bathroom or parking lot shrubbery. He’d always been a pop-top charger, he had a reputation—wake ’n’ bake, burn while you earn, beer for breakfast, six-pack for dessert—but he couldn’t bounce back as easily anymore, and if he wanted this cash cow to keep crapping dollars and size-ten skate shoes, he had to make a showing. Which meant that he had to put a choke chain on the hard shit. Beer was fine, and (no edibles) weed, but that was it. If he got tired, as often happened after six hours of skating and swilling beers, instead of scoring some powders, he had to go to bed. Not even a Red Bull, find a pillow, get some rest. He was a grown-up after all and grown-ups, like small children, need routine, regular sleep and meal times.
In Denver, filming at a handrail on Sixteenth Street, Derik got in a scuffle with a security guard. Catch a piggy. Fuck you. No, fuck you. Try and stop me. They kept skating, skated circles around the security guard.
The rent-a-cop reminded Roy of his stepdad. He cruised by and gave him a swat on the ass and an atta boy. The real cops showed up. Rasheed picked up his board and strolled down the street to a pizza place and had a slice and a ginger ale. Zack-O the filmer moved off and got footage from across the street. DPD wasted no time and in a few minutes Roy, Yano, Derik, and Brandon were cuffed and crammed into two separate cop cars and taken to someplace called Van-Cise Simonet. Tony was at Jiffy Lube having the transmission flushed in the van but two minutes after he got Rasheed’s text, he was on the phone with a swoosh lawyer and working on bail.
Being processed was a process. Derik got bragging rights with his assault charge. Roy was runner-up with resisting. Everyone got destruction of public property. Derik was of the opinion that waking up in jail was better than going to sleep there. Nobody slept. Derik got in a fight with some mullet-headed tweeker and ended up knocking him silly with a haymaker. Roy shoved one of the tweeker’s buddies but didn’t have to swing. Yano and Brandon jumped in too and it was understood that if they’d been in there alone things could’ve gone differently. Brotherhood. They were let out a few hours after dinner. Instant potatoes, white bread, and kidney beans.
Roy picked up a staph infection in jail, festered in his road-rashed shoulder, put him in the hospital for a few days. Broad-spectrum antibiotic, vancomycin, as if it were designed for skateboarders. Steven Seagal marathon on TV. Plenty of rest.
After the lawyers started pressing, everything was thrown out except for the destruction-of-public-property tickets. It was good news. They had more footage. More mayhem. And Tony had some Night of the Living Dead/flesh-eating bacteria/Roy Bingham Lives T-shirts printed up and they tossed them to the crowds at demos. Some of them ended up on eBay for two hundred a pop.
[20]
M>45
CA 96118
As a family they load into the truck. Dust in the road. Dust on the hillsides blurring the ridges, bleeding into the washed-out sky. A dozen sheep are in the field, paddocked in last year’s pasture. The layer hens are pecking around the base of the hop vines. The pigpen is empty, gate open, feeder tipped over, they’re feral now. Somewhere there are goats but their range is boundless. The man hunts them now as he does the pigs, spot and stalk. He has coyote and fox pelts nailed to the goat shed, as much warning as decoration.
They don’t bother with car seats for the kids. There’s been a general reduction in speed as well as traffic. As in none. Pulling onto the county road, they don’t fasten their seat belts, fuses have been removed to stop the beeping. On rare occasions it feels easygoing and countrified but more powerful than that is the need to get out of the vehicle quickly.
“I bought groceries there for over twenty years,” the woman says.
“Never mind the gouging,” the man says. He’s driving. His pistol is shoved into the slot above the stereo on the dashboard. The license plates for the truck are in the tray between the front seats along with the screws and a screwdriver if they needed to put them on. If, for some reason, they have to cross the border.
“Are we going to buy anything?” the older child says.
“I don’t know, honey,” the woman says. “Cheryl said they were giving whatever was left away.”
“Where’s Cheryl going to go?” the younger child asks. “Marnie and Oliver are supposed to come to my birthday.” She’s had a hard time making friends. Marnie and Oliver are younger and look up to her.
“They aren’t leaving right away,” the woman says. “I’ll ask and make sure they’re still coming to your birthday.”
“But she won’t work at the store?”
“There won’t be a store after today.”
“They’ll move away?”
“Probably.”
The little girl is near tears. “Are we going to move?”
“No,” the woman says. “We’re staying. We’re not going anywhere.”
The man glances at her and she looks out the window.
Signage advises them not to leave the pavement, to slow down and prepare to stop. The militiamen at the roadblock wave at them to slow down but they’re allowed through without stopping. The numbers written on their windshield with shoe polish proclaim their status as permanent residents. Updated codes appear in their mailbox every Tuesday, thanks to the neighbor.
A twisted and burned SUV is in the ditch where it’d attempted to drive around the roadblock and hit the land mines. Even the youngest child has stopped noticing it or asking what happened, why they don’t take it away. What happened to the people?
In silence, they pass the parking lot where the woman’s drive-thru coffee trailer used to be. The broken skirting and the tire chocks remain. The trailer had been stolen months ago, another one just like it on the other side of town disappeared the following week. A police report was filed in Truckee but they wouldn’t find it and they wouldn’t come here and look. Somewhere some militia guys were sipping espresso.
The contents of the store have been moved to the parking lot and strewn onto rolled-out sheets of clear Visqueen. A few people push shopping carts but mostly it’s just pick up a spatula or a package of disposable shish kebab skewers or a hotpad. Junk show. The man already wants to go home.
Then he spots the boy whose parents were killed in the SUV at the roadblock. Jerzy, is his name. Last they’d seen him was at the funeral, wearing the same getup as when he showed his steer at the county fair. War orphan. His dad had been the lead man on a road crew. His mom was a teller at First National Bank. Country people. Nobody knows for sure why they skirted the road block. Doesn’t matter. The results are the same. Jerzy’s with his guardian now, the well-driller, Sullivan. Both of them are filthy and their pants are crusted in dried mud. Been working. Smell the diesel from here. What child labor law? Everybody needs a well, now more than ever. Soon enough, we will too. Must be on their lunch break, stopped to see the hubbub. Sullivan leans down and says something to Jerzy and they turn to leave. The man watches them cross the street and climb into Sullivan’s pickup.
His eldest daughter smacks him in the leg. “Hey, there’s Jerzy!” She runs to the sidewalk and waves to the truck as it drives away. Jerzy turns around in his seat to wave out the back window. They had the same teacher last year. Might not even be a school come fall.
“K-I-S-S,” is all the younger girl gets out before her sister smacks her in the shoulder.
“Enough,” the man says.
The woman sees her friend, Cheryl, short hair and a sundress, near the chained doors at the entrance and goes to join her. The man stays with the children and watches the scavengers.
“Can we go see if there’s anything we want?” the older child asks.
“No,” the man says. “There’s nothing here for us.”
“Why did we come here, then?” the older child asks.
“So your mom could talk with Cheryl. It’s all just junk.”
They watch an old man attempt the tablecloth trick with the plastic, fail, and drag it to his sedan and wad it into his trunk and drive away.
“Guess he found something,” the man says.
“You haven’t even looked,” the younger child says. “You don’t know what you could be missing.” Things he’s said to her, redirected back at him.
“Fine, you guys go see if you can find anything that we need.”
The children leave him and fall in with a few other kids that are smashing bubble wrap and making forts out of cardboard boxes.
The woman leaves Cheryl and returns to the truck.
“Is she OK?” the man asks.
“No.”
“Where’s she going?”
“She says she’s going to stay as long as she can. She has the keys to the store and she wants to move in there after everyone leaves.”
“No water means no sewer. She can’t take her kids in there.”
“Should I ask her to come to our place?”
“We talked about this.”
“I know.”
<
br /> “I like Cheryl. I want to help.”
“I know.”
“Her husband.”
“Her ex-husband.”
“He’s Jefferson and if they find out she’s at our place—I don’t know what would happen, but it wouldn’t be good.”
“We could let them stay for a week or so,” the woman says. “Nobody would know.”
The man watches as the younger child puts a box on her head and runs full tilt into her older sister and falls on her ass. He expects her to be crying when she lifts the box from her head but she’s laughing. Cheryl’s kids are there too, the boy is a few years younger than the girl.
“A week,” he says.
“I told her two.”
“I figured a month,” he says. “Are they riding back with us?”
“We’ll pick them up at Pioneer Park.”
“I’ll get the girls.”
“Don’t tell them yet,” she says. “And don’t tell Oliver and Marnie either.”
“I won’t.”
The man crosses the parking lot. Cheryl catches his eye and nods to him. He smiles back at her and picks up a box and whacks the younger girl on the butt with it. “Time to go,” he says.
“We just got here,” the child says. Her face is flushed and he can tell she’s only a bump away from crying. Her sister enjoys being the bumper.
“Say goodbye to your friends.”
The girls say goodbye as adults would, as an actual last goodbye, and it’s hard for the man to watch. He’d like the world to be different.
Cheryl and her children step out from behind the settler’s cabin in the park. They have backpacks on and grocery bags clutched in their fists. The man gets out and loads their stuff into the bed, takes note of the coffee beans in one of the plastic bags.
“You’re going to have to lie down under the girl’s feet, OK?” the woman says. Cheryl nods and her kids leap into the open rear door and squirm beneath the older girl’s feet while their mother crams herself in behind them. The woman drapes a blanket over them.
