by Jo Barney
“Orange?”
“You’ve seen some around here.”
“Crossed-out smiley faces. Just today. First time I’ve seen orange. I Graffiti X’d them. Sorry, Sergeant Trommald. I wiped away the evidence.” Sarah’s safe.
“Matt,” he says. “And it’s okay. We have a theory. Not about the orange graffiti, exactly, but about the murders. Three transients—your friend Rick excepted, maybe, because he actually had a closet to sleep in—three transients are murdered, left to be found in or near the neighborhood park down the street. The only connection between them, other than their homelessness, is the murder weapons, a rounded instrument. Maybe a baseball bat. And a knife, a hunting knife, we believe.”
I’m imagining as he sits back and takes a swallow of his lukewarm coffee that he’s wondering where I’ve hidden these weapons. I am so relieved about Sarah that I’m cracking jokes to myself. I hold my lips straight, serious.
“We’re looking for these items,” he says. “All over the neighborhood, including the shrubbery around the apartment buildings, the park’s bushes, the edge of the county forest. We think that a transient, probably a mental case, is taking out his anger on folks who can’t fight back, storing his equipment somewhere near. And we’re wondering what message this kid was sending with his orange paint.” He takes out his pad, writes something down. “Seems ominous, doesn’t it, a crossed-out smile?”
I think of a girl whose street name is Smiley. She’s gone from my apartment, from the sick little park. I’m thinking of the other kids out there under the trees, not safe and not innocent. I can’t put them in more danger than they are in from all sides. I shrug, pick up our cups.
“Good luck,” I say. “I wish I could help.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jeff
2006-2008
At first, he thought he’d probably been out of his mind to join the army. He hated the torture of the unceasing physical training. He dreamed of slashing the brutish red face and simian lips of his sergeant with the butt of the weapon he was supposed to be learning to use. He made no effort to talk to the one-syllable-word ignoramuses who slept and ate next to him. He’d made a terrible mistake.
Then, a month later, he sees himself in a mirror as he shaves, admires his rounding pecs and his tanned skin, and realizes he’s never been in such good shape. Except for the haircut. He’s changing physically, and maybe in other ways. This military experience may be not only a means of getting out of a tent in a forest, but, even more important, a chance to take back some control of himself, of his life. He’s the smartest guy in the platoon. He can do this. Jeff forces himself to listen, obey, and volunteer, and even smile once in a while. He manages to get himself chosen as platoon leader before the end of two months, a model soldier.
When he is asked which career he wants to train for, he lists the administrative string of jobs that his test scores, especially the verbal ones, are good enough for. Journalist, broadcast journalist, intelligence analyst, counterintelligence agent. Any one of these will be okay. He has learned he can follow someone else’s rules when necessary, especially when he considers the paid tuition to the college he’ll choose when he walks away into his next life. He is pleased when he is sent to a communication school in Arlington.
However, the nighttime anxiety that has rattled his sleep since he was a little kid still visits him as he buries his head under a pillow to still the groans and mutterings of his fellow bunkmates. Unbidden fragments pass across his closed eyes. Danny’s laugh, an old man’s fingers, the back of a father’s hand, a mother’s red lips, the flick of a knife, Kitten’s soft brown boobs…the shards come together, dissipate, a constantly moving kaleidoscope until the Ambien takes hold. In the morning, Jeff cannot remember the patterns, only the vague sense of loss that accompanies them.
* * *
The broadcast journalism classes are a perfect fit. He likes himself on camera. The army has chiseled his cheekbones, hardened his body. His hair, grown out a little now, is cut in the precise way he wore it when he hustled. He has the voice and the words, and after a few months, he has appeared on the military television channel enough to make a small name for himself.
After a particularly successful interview of a female colonel on sexual harassment in the service, he is asked to lead a committee of fellow students working to partner with PBS. At their first meeting, as they sit and drink coffee, Jeff looks around the table and sees the others nod at him with respect, admiration, even, and knows he is on his way. In the end, their efforts don’t amount to much, but Jeff revels in the role of leader, as he always has.
And he makes a friend, the first real friend he’s had since Danny. Xavier is younger by a couple of years, street-smart, and like Jeff, ready to change the direction his life has been taking, which has included getting mixed up for a while in an L.A. gang war and watching a brother get shot down in front of the neighborhood mercado.
The two of them share where they have come from, and they share their dreams of where they are going. Jeff can imagine himself reading the news on television. Xavier is a writer and wants to report from the midst of the action. “Maybe in Iraq,” he says, his brown eyes wide, excited. “Or Somalia. Somewhere far away.” They spend free time on weekends drinking beer, laughing, and sometimes talking about the grit of their pasts, especially when they have had a beer or two too many.
“Do you have a girlfriend? You never talk of one,” Xavier asks one night between mouthfuls of a burger. Up to this moment, for almost two years of friendship, Jeff has managed to derail this subject with a raunchy joke or a yell at the game on the TV above the bar.
“Not really.”
Jeff looks over Xavier’s head at the college basketball game. “Did you see that? Foul, I guess! Terrible ref.”
In this new life, he’s packed away thoughts of sex like a box of old photos he doesn’t want to look at for a long time: his past profession; his dalliances in the woods; his grandfather; and, at the bottom of the box, his disinterest in women, a disinterest, almost a revulsion, in fact, that he can’t deny anymore as he listens to the moans of men jacking off to Playboy pin-ups behind the doors of the toilet cubicles. His own self-pleasuring is silent, drowned in the midst of a sea of midnight snores, his fantasy sometimes involving an amorphous young boy. Himself, maybe, he thinks more than once, as he stirs and then falls asleep. He finds this kind of relief as necessary for sleep as Ambien.
“Haven’t found the right girl,” he says, when he sees that Xavier is not distracted by the game. He swirls the beer in its paper cup, waiting for whatever will come next.
“Me neither.” Xavier keeps chewing, wipes his mouth with a wadded napkin and tosses it across the table. “No right girl.”
A door opens and Jeff steps through it. “Or the right boy, maybe?”
Xavier shakes his head. “When I was about thirteen, I had a crush on a kid and I thought I was gay. Scared the hell out of me. Beat him up.” He laughs. “Felt good, and I kept beating up people for the fun of it.”
“What was he like, this kid?”
“Tall, smart, popular. Didn’t know I existed until I shoved him into a locker after PE and almost broke his jaw. He said I was crazy, and I guess I was. Dale Whitman. Still remember his name.”
Jeff raises his cup, remembering. “Yeah. Like Danny. Long time ago. Except I knew what I was scared of.” He swallows the last of his beer and wills himself to continue, a test. “My grandfather introduced me to that kind of sex—buggery, he used to call it, joking. He’s dead, but not before he’d trained me to be his baby ho.” A panicky heartbeat propels his alcohol-loosened words. He closes his eyes, leans back. Waits.
Xavier shifts, takes a French fry from Jeff’s basket, doesn’t get up as Jeff expects him to. “I heard of stuff like that,” he says. “How’d you come out so normal?”
Jeff breathes, is able to laugh. “They say marijuana is medicinal,” he answers. “I took a lot of medicine.” He almost touche
s Xavier’s hand as it reaches for another French fry. “Here. They’re all yours,” he says instead, pushing the basket toward his friend.
A month later they finish the final phase of their course, and rumors indicate that the graduates might be sent to any one of the American Forces Network locations outside the United States. Jeff and Xavier join a few other classmates in a celebratory tour of pubs and watering holes, and when the others go on to seek whatever other entertainment they can find, the two friends start walking back to the base. The possibility of being separated is sad, they both admit. The two street kids have come this far, and who knows when they’ll get back together.
“Facebook,” Xavier says woozily. He leans against a wall, his eyes closed under a palm. “Waiting for a moment of clarity,” he adds. “Hang on for a second. Might vomit. Lotsa beer tonight.”
Jeff eases the hand away from the closed eyes, holds it. Another hand held his like this long ago. He cannot stop what is about to happen. “Before all this is over,” he whispers, his words slurred, warm, “you need to know that I want you, Xavier.” He moves closer, presses his erect penis against Xavier’s thigh and for a moment, neither of them moves. Then Jeff feels the sting of the slap, hears the word, sees Xavier plunging away from him.
“Faggot!” his friend yells. The word sounds like a sob.
An orderly delivers the commander’s letter three days later. It confirms that a general discharge is mandatory when homosexual behavior is reported. A witness, a fellow soldier on his way back to base, corroborated Xavier’s report. Jeff signs the receipt of the notification and chooses not to seek counsel. He does not see Xavier before he packs his bags and walks away from his army career.
* * *
He works his way back toward the West Coast, hitchhiking, and by bus when the rides are hard to come by. His less-than-honorable-discharge papers mean that he is ineligible for the GI Bill, so he won’t be going to school when he arrives in Green River. Somewhere in Wyoming he decides to use his small savings to buy another tent. He’ll go back to the woods and plan his next move. One thing for sure: there will be no more Dannies and no more Xaviers in his life. Friendship, like love, is a figment of a 3:00 A.M. imagination.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sarah
September 2009
I’m not going to Transitions, of course, or to the social-services office a few blocks away. I’m heading into the forest.
But first I have to have a plan. I head to the homeless youth shelter I hate. I can stand one or two nights there while I figure out what I’m going to do and get a couple of meals.
Except for the screaming nightmare one of my roommates has, the center turns out to be a good place to think. The counselor says, “No pressure,” when I say I need a little time to get myself together before I talk to her, and I spend most of the time pretending to read magazines in the lounge.
All I need to do, I decide, is get close to the camp and when the kids come trailing in for dinner, stop a couple of them and tell them they need to leave, that the police are looking for them. Pass the word, I’ll say. I won’t need to get near Starkey.
First, though, I have to find the camp. At breakfast the second morning, I sneak a couple of rolls and an orange into my duffel. I’m ready.
To reach the family, I have to go around the playground, cross the soccer field, and push into the bushes that separate the city park from the paths of the county forest that lies like a green blanket over the hills overlooking the city. I’ve never done this alone. Peter and the others knew where the camp was, and I always followed them.
The county forest is crisscrossed with marked trails, signs pointing one way or another, mileage noted ever so often. If you look closely, though, other paths lead away from the groomed trails and cut through underbrush and over rocky mounds. All kinds of people use these unofficial trails to get into secret parts of the forest.
A year ago a family was discovered living in tents and growing vegetables and storing hazelnuts for the winter in a secluded but sunny spot tucked against a hillside. A dog off-leash followed his nose and interrupted their berry-soup meal. The parents and two kids had been there a year, had gone down for library books every week, panhandled for stuff they couldn’t grow or make, saved rainwater in an abandoned water tower. No one had stumbled across their camp in the whole time they lived there—the woods are that dense.
And sometimes hikers heading off-trail get lost a half-mile from the three-story houses at the edge of the forest and make the headlines. At least, that’s what Starkey warned as he taught us to live off the land and the Dumpsters below us.
An hour later, I leave the marked trail and am stumbling through the undergrowth when I see a path nearly invisible under ferns and low-lying bushes. I follow it to a beaten-down patch of grass covered with beer cans and cigarette butts. A few condoms wilt in the debris. I turn around, leaving the love nest to the people who created it.
I keep heading up, zigzagging between rocks and mounds of bushes and tree trunks that are handy to grab when I slip in the soft mush of the forest floor. The sun is edging against the tree line, shadows beginning to narrow the path, when I spot a couple of birch trees that look familiar, see an ax cut on one, a marker of some kind. I am scratched and itchy, probably covered with poison oak since some of those bushes look familiar. Maybe Starkey warned us about them, too.
I drop my duffel under a tree root and sit down on a rock. I take off my jacket. Not poison oak, I discover. A couple of spiders have had dinner on my arms. For a minute I wonder if I’m some kind of magnet for bad things, from poisonous spiders to everyone I love dying. Not everyone. Not yet. I stop scratching, take out the orange, and look around.
From my low angle, I can see, through the ferns, a foot-wide trail heading straight up, cutting a track in the underbrush. I think I remember this path. I toss the orange peels and get up, stoop low, try to step quietly despite the ankle-twisting rocks hidden under moss and debris. In minutes, my hair drips sweat on my neck and my hands sting from scratches. I don’t remember getting to the camp being so hard. I haven’t found another mark on a tree. Then I spot a couple of deer hoof prints in front of me.
Shit. I’m following an animal trail. And I’ve left my duffel more than an hour behind me. I’m about to turn around when I feel as if someone is close by, watching. I stop and moving only my eyes, glance through the tree trunks. Nothing. Then I look up and laugh. A wooden water tower, most of its boards broken and hanging, leans like an old drunk against a couple of firs at the top of the hill I’ve been climbing. Probably the one that family used. No danger here, unless I get too close to it and get bopped by a falling board. I keep going.
The sun’s disappearing behind the hill when I see a wisp of smoke floating like a gray ghost above the trees. I follow it and come to the edge of the camp. It’s almost time to eat. The kids will be trailing in with their Dumpster offerings and icy thirty-two-ounce tubs of drinks bought with panhandled coins downtown. I’ll wait for them out under the trees. But where is Starkey?
Sounds lead me toward a patch of grass still bright with sunlight where I see him lying naked, working his penis. His back is arched, and his chest heaves with moans that come out of his stretched mouth like curses, his fingers frantic. His heels have dug into bare dirt, the grass under them beaten down. I watch for a minute, but then I remember why I’m here.
I slip back into the woods and sit down next to a tree trunk. I’m tired; my whole body aches. I wake up to Leaky leaning over me, shaking my shoulder.
“Hey, Smiley! You’re here!” Before I can answer, Jimmy and a couple of new kids I don’t know wander up, and I don’t have time to tell them to shut up. Jimmy pulls me up and drags me to the fire ring. “Look who we found,” he calls.
Starkey is sitting in his throne chair. He has his clothes on. His cheeks above his trimmed beard are no longer wet with sweat.
“Welcome back,” he says.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
>
Jeff
2008
Things have not changed much in Green River. Homeless kids still sit around with their dogs and packs in doorways and on corners, telling stories, asking for money, using, getting kicked out of shelters when they won’t quit and learn to do something productive. They need more than a shelter. They need a family, a realization that Jeff came to on a bus somewhere in Idaho as he stared out the window and considered his future, as hazy as the mountains on the other side of the steamy glass.
It won’t be difficult to bring another family together, to lay down the rules, instruct, and protect a few of them from the dangers of the street. He’ll offer safety, like a good father should.
Seven street kids accept his offer.
After the first few weeks, Jeff understands that his talent for parenting, the discipline coming so naturally, is enhanced by a thread of cruelty that weaves through his relationship with his children. His willingness to hurt when the hurt brings obedience no longer surprises him, a trait maybe learned face down on a carpet from his father or in a breeze of uplifted blankets. Or, more likely, he thinks, in boot camp, where grown men wept. Whatever—it works.
Like the evening his knife slashes a boy’s face when he laughs at something Jeff has said during a lesson on trust. Just one slice, a permanent lesson etched on a smooth cheek. A week later a twist of Cherry’s red hair encourages a screech and a confession to holding back a couple packs of cigarettes from the family. As a reward for her truthfulness, he hands her a hank of her hair and she takes it, whimpering, “I’m sorry.” A tip of a forefinger lands on the last piece of pizza as its hand reaches out for it, bloodying but not spoiling the cheesy triangle.
