Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  Aria and Taylor felt the tension build and the insecurity start to pull their perfect plan apart at the seams. Aria was terrified that the police might have given her name to the bus station and that at any moment, she would have to make a run for it.

  “At least one parent or guardian is supposed to be here at the counter to sign for an unaccompanied child,” the woman eventually said. “But your sister is seventeen. Children seventeen years of age and older can travel unaccompanied with no restrictions, so she doesn’t need this.”

  She placed the unnecessary document to the side of her desk and began to type on the computer in front of her. Her words let them off the hook. Taylor gave Aria a quick smile that expected acknowledgment back for his incredible talent at getting away with things – even if they hadn’t needed the documents.

  “I hope your father gets better,” the woman said, as the printer beside her elbow spat out documents. “You two have a good trip. The bus departs at 6.30pm and it boards twenty minutes before departure, right out those doors,” she said. She slipped two tickets and the IDs under the tiny opening in the bulletproof glass.

  Taylor took them, saying, “Thank you, ma’am … come on, sis,” and strolled away in a manner that would give the impression they were in fact brother and sister.

  Guarding the tickets like treasure, Aria and Taylor spent the day waiting in the area near the Greyhound bus station to board the bus that would take them from Chicago to LA. They had entertained the idea of spending the day seeing the places in the city that they might miss and perhaps would never see again, but decided against it. They couldn’t afford to miss the bus, even if that meant waiting the entire day for it to come.

  First, they walked to the shade of a bridge by a river four streets away from the bus station. Motivated by their triumph, they took two rocks and laughed as they tediously scratched a message into the bridge’s surface. The powder-white words “Goodbye Cruel World” began to emerge from the now-blemished grunge cement. They were conscious that if anyone saw the message, they would think that someone had committed suicide. They found it funny. But the words’ true meaning was a goodbye to the life they had lived there in that city. They were bound for an entirely different life. A life that was no longer a dead end, but one full of possibility and promise.

  They spent the rest of the day sitting outside a gas station, under the overhang of the roof, trying to nap and escape the bite of the sun. Aria surprised Taylor with a jug of peanut butter and crackers purchased with some of the extra $314 that remained from the money she’d stolen. They ate it together like it was a celebration meal.

  By the time Taylor’s twelfth check-in on what time it was with the gas station attendant resulted in the answer of “six o’clock,” Taylor had worn out the man’s patience. They lined up early with their tickets to board the bus. When the driver stepped down from the open door, wearing a fluorescent yellow vest, they felt the same tension that they had experienced earlier that day begin to revisit them. But all he did was check their tickets and motion them inside.

  CHAPTER 9

  The valleys and plains they passed along Highway 40, though dry, gave more of a lonely impression of open ocean than of land. The sun seemed to be fixed on life, sucking the water from everything. The main streets of the old western towns were littered now with impermanent chain stores. Absent of a building code, it looked as if the businesses that came there had all snagged themselves on the destitution, unprepared for the kind of customers who leave their Christmas lights on all year long. Since the beginning people had been coming to the West, mistaking the impression of endlessness for opportunity.

  In her naivety, Aria had expected to see cowboys herding cattle on the plains, but the people who would be driving those cattle, growing gardens or canning their own food seemed to have been swallowed up by the wave of modern society and left behind by it. Now the cowboy, who once conquered the Native American, found himself conquered, his life made obsolete. To Aria’s dismay, they lived in trailer parks or houses that were falling apart on the outskirts of what could hardly be called cities, living on cigarettes and chew and easy-access television. Instead of working the land, they worked on oil rigs or metal shops or corporate dairy farms because it was all they could afford to do.

  The West was conquered barely over a hundred years ago and still, Aria could see it was already full of a hard-won, gunshot, broken history and the kind of wounds that never heal. But beyond the hot crackle of the grasshoppers, she found there to be a slow, heartbreaking beauty; a vastness that could never be possessed.

  They traversed an unpeopled wilderness where the night sky was so dark, the stars were a bright, white dust instead of interspersed lights, not just those which could outshine the nebulous glow of the city. There were sunsets and wildflowers. Animals outside cages, people outside metal and glass. A violent dance of nature, where life itself was distilled to its raw, original self.

  The bus had driven through the night. Aria was staring at a man in an army uniform sitting three rows up from her. She caught herself wondering about his life, creating possible scenarios about where he was going and why. Scanning the rest of the occupants of the bus, she felt out of place amidst the rows and rows of blacks and Mexicans in front of her. Not that the bus felt like a safe place to be in the first place, but when the racial coin was flipped, she always felt as if one wrong move would bring centuries’ worth of resentment for what her forefathers had done crashing down on her head. She felt outnumbered. Even so, Aria loved the way that so many people with so many different stories, most of whom would never cross paths in a lifetime, could all end up as if by fate in one place and on a temporary odyssey together.

  Aria felt the bus slow and diverge from the highway when it pulled in for a morning meal stop on the day they were due to arrive in LA. It was one of 19 stops they made along the way. The turbulence it created woke up most of the passengers, including Taylor, who had been sleeping for nearly the entire two-day ride. His eyes opened, as if he were coming out of a daze. He sat straight up and looked around with a childlike movement that said “are we there yet?”

  They had pulled over at a gas station that was conjoined to a Burger King. The driver announced that they would have 30 minutes before they were expected to be back on the bus. Promising Taylor to meet him back on the bus when she was done in the bathroom, Aria rounded the corner into one of the aisles, hoping to be hidden from view by the conflux of passengers perusing the shelves. She picked up items, assessing them one by one, hoping to appear normal, like every other customer. When she was sure that the people manning the counter were sufficiently overwhelmed with customer purchases and she was out of view of all of the security cameras in the room, she disguised her action as best as she could and picked up two honey-flavored granola bars, concealing them in her jacket pocket.

  She felt disgusting. Disgusting for stealing and disgusting because she had not found a way to shower in too many days to count. At first she wandered into the bathroom to see if there was any way to wash herself there, but the constant influx of passengers made her decide against it. She stood in the hallway where the bathrooms were located, trying the few different doors that were there in the short spaces of solitude between customers entering the bathrooms. The first door turned up nothing but a storeroom full of boxes of unopened products. But the second turned out to be a utility closet. In the brief moment it took to glance inside, she saw that there was a sink there. Aria closed the door to pretend again that she was up to nothing long enough for a man who was headed for the bathroom to disappear inside. Then she opened the door again, snuck inside and locked the door behind her.

  The cement floor was stained brown from years of heavy use. All around her, in some form of organized chaos, were cleaning products and tools, a collection of brooms, two ladders, a rolled-up hose and empty buckets thrown on top of one another. The yellow handle of a mop projected from the deep porcelain washbasin affixed to the wall. Rust stain
s had tainted its original color. Aria had collected three empty water bottles in her time since running away from the Johnsons. She had been using them for everything from gathering water in drinking fountains to filling them with hot tap water to keep her warm at night, to placing them on the ledges of windowsills to catch the light in a way that comforted her. She found it almost farcical that something she’d never thought twice about would be one of the things she now treasured the most.

  Looking down to confirm that there was a drain in the center of the floor, she pulled the bottles from her backpack and began to fill each with water from the faucet. Still afraid to be discovered, she rushed to strip naked and place her clothes up on a high shelf, out of reach of any potential water spray. The water, not intended for the human skin, was freezing. As fast as she could, refilling the bottles again and again, she soaked herself with it. Tiny goosebumps began to rise up to meet the water.

  Aria briefly looked for soap with which to clean herself, but only discovered a jug of solvent cleaner, intended for cleaning floors. She considered whether or not it would be dangerous for her skin, but decided to take the risk. She soaped herself vigorously, including the length of her hair, which she stuck under the faucet of the sink. She hoped that the force of the water would do a better job of washing the suds out than the trickle from the water bottles would.

  When she was done, she patted herself off as fast as she could with sheets of paper towels she found on a roll sitting on the shelf beside her and squeezed the water from the ends of her hair with them. After pulling her clothes and shoes back on, she put the damp bottles back into her backpack. Aria stood there, holding on to the straps of her backpack and listening to what was happening on the other side of the door for a time, before deciding to exit. When she did, no one noticed. Aria didn’t know whether that was a relief or whether she wanted them to notice. On the one hand, she did not want to get in trouble. She hadn’t wanted them to catch her there. On the other hand, the ease with which she was going unnoticed made her nervous. She was beginning to feel invisible, as if she were a ghost. She was beginning to slip through the cracks in between people’s caring.

  Aria went outside to sit in the sun. Her wet hair made parts of the fabric of her coat look darker. Even though the air was cold that morning, the luxury of the sunlight wasn’t lost on her. She let it caress the contours of her face. She opened the top of her coat to let it touch the edges of the ever-present ache in her heart, but was interrupted after a brief time by the sound of the bus driver giving everyone a five-minute warning.

  She was the first person back on the bus. Taylor was the last. He had made a nuisance of himself during their meal break, failing to establish a rapport with any of the passengers, with whom he had tried to establish several connections. They seemed irritated by his chummy demeanor. As he walked down the aisle, the few people with an empty seat beside them seemed to tense up for fear that he would sit down next to them. “Hey,” he said, all but crawling over Aria to claim the seat next to the window. “That felt great to stretch my legs for a while.”

  Aria afforded him a customary smile. She extracted from her pocket the granola bars that she had stolen and handed one to him. For a half a second, he seemed taken aback, then said “Ah, thanks” and immediately ripped open the packaging. The homey oat-and-honey flavor mollified the both of them. As the bus made its way back onto the highway, they ate without talking, feeling lucky for the snack, which for both of them felt like pure indulgence.

  Taylor was in heaven. Out on the open road, he felt like life was finally moving forward. When he was getting what he really wanted, his body had a way of responding by letting go of the pain of years of not getting it. It did so with memories and it did so with tears. Instead of sleeping, he listened to Aria begin to write in her journal and stared out the window at the blur of sagebrush and other cars passing by. His eyes were burning, having welled up in response to memories that his body was exhaling up and into his awareness.

  He remembered when he was five years old and had wanted a bike so badly. He wanted it so that he could feel just the way he felt now. He had woken up on his birthday to see a bike poorly wrapped in wrapping paper in the center of the living room, waiting for him. Later that day, he and his older brother had gotten into a fight over it and, as a punishment, his mother had forced all of the kids into the car. She drove to the Salvation Army store where she had purchased the bike and then proceeded to force him to re-donate it. He remembered the divine weight of the bike when the man at the store took it from him. He had gained his freedom and, in the same day, had lost it.

  He remembered the incarceration of the group homes. When he was 12 years old, two other boys at his group home had placed two of their CDs inside his room and then reported them missing. When the staff had resorted to a room check and had found the “missing” CDs in his room, they immediately called the police. If Taylor had been a kid in a normal family home, the consequence for stealing would be a scolding or losing TV time or being grounded. In the group home, the consequences were the cops being called. No matter what he said, they would not believe that he hadn’t taken them. And so, he became hysterical. Eventually, in response to the escalation, the staff made the decision to drug him with antipsychotic medication. He was arrested and taken to the juvenile detention center. He remembered thinking that except for the fact that he was completely alone in the detention room, jail was not much different than the group home.

  He remembered sitting in front of the judge, who scowled at him with displeasure, passing judgment for something he had never done. Judgment from an ignorant position of never having lived through any of the conditions that he had been forced to live through. Taylor wished the judge would suffer the same way that he had suffered, but knew that day would never come.

  When Taylor had tried to explain himself, the judge had barked, “I’m not buying it today,” and had sentenced him to both probation and counseling. When he was released from the detention center, he was driven to an entirely different group home. He had been transferred. This was what it had felt like when he was young, an endless routine of hopping, of never belonging to one place, of never staying long enough to grow roots.

  As he watched the country passing by, Taylor felt like he was leaving the prison of it all behind. He felt defiant and victorious. He saw his father’s face in his mind. Taylor couldn’t decide if his father had been sad to lose him or if he was glad to see him go. He wondered why he was not enough. Not enough to value, not enough to want. Not enough to make his father stay, instead of leaving them all behind when he did. The cool of his father’s indifference could not calm Taylor’s fury at not being loved enough. He felt the agonized sea of parting ways crack and heave against his heart. The sound of his heartbreak rang like a bell underwater. But he did not break under the blow of it. The hope he held for the life he was headed toward wouldn’t let it happen. He was done wanting, done waiting for a life he would never have there. He was done wanting things from people who would never give those things to him. As they were driven across that open country, the promise he made himself – not to return to where he had come from, unless he came home a big success – amounted to little more than a whisper. But that whisper was still a vow.

  The austerity of the desert eventually converted itself to palm trees and freshly watered lawns. They had arrived in Los Angeles before dinnertime. It felt strange to Aria to watch the people she had spent the last couple of days with scatter and disappear, knowing she would most likely never see any of them again.

  The quality of the air was completely different. The city buzzed with enterprise and it excited her. She could tell immediately that the law of that land of opportunity was “every man for himself,” but there seemed absolutely no one to try to get in your way. Every person they passed walking out of the bus station seemed to be striving for something and to be so busy in the striving for it that they had no time for anything or anyone. They were observing that
fast current toward success, knowing that soon, they too would be in it … but not today.

  It was so crowded at the station that Taylor took her hand to lead her through the crowd toward a row of silver and black pay phones. He shuffled around in various pockets to produce a phone number written on a piece of napkin. Holding the phone between his shoulder and face, he dialed the number. He was still, listening to the dial tone for what seemed like forever. Despite the crowd, Aria could hear him leave a message. “Hey, it’s Taylor. I’m in LA! I brought a friend with me. I’m gonna call you back in a little bit because you didn’t pick up. We could really use some help around the city. Do you know anywhere that we could stay the night? OK, call you back soon.”

  Taylor repositioned the telephone receiver in its holster and looked at her with a slightly embarrassed look, as if disappointed with himself that she was now in the position of waiting with him and not knowing exactly what to do. Aria pretended to just barely come up with enough money to go half in with Taylor on a packet of corn nuts and strawberry Pop Tarts from the vending machine. They sat down to eat in the waiting area of the station and exchanged observations about the other people and their initial impressions of the city.

  Taylor tried six more times over the next five hours to reach his friend. He left upbeat, eager messages each time. Aria began to wonder whether this friend of his was truly a friend or whether, like everyone else in his life, she was just someone with whom he had conjured an imaginary sense of closeness. The sun had now set on the infant hours of their time in this new life, so, having resolved to try calling again in the morning, they set out walking.