Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  Aria shifted her attention back to the negotiation taking place between Ciarra and the man in the BMW. Ciarra’s flirtations ended. She pushed herself back from the ledge of the car window and turned in her tall boots toward Aria. For a minute, Aria expected the man to drive off. But instead, the car stayed parked by the curb. “Come on, bitch, hurry,” Ciarra yelled affectionately at Aria. She opened the car door, ushering Aria inside as fast as she could.

  “Hey,” the man said. Aria said hi in response and smiled at him, trying to mimic Ciarra’s sexual flair, albeit unsuccessfully. He drove away from the curb, attempting to draw as little attention to himself as possible. Through the side mirror, Aria watched Ciarra strut toward Larry’s car and get into it before her own car turned the corner.

  The car pulled into a parking spot just in front of the outermost motel room on the bottom level of a cheap, two-story, U-shaped motel. Inside, the carpet, left over from the 1970s, was stained, as if its putrid orange color weren’t off-putting enough already. Two beds took up the room. They were arranged against a wood-plank wall and covered with floor-length orange bedding. Above them were two cheap-looking reproduction paintings of a group of sailboats. The sharp fetor of chain-smoking hung so thick in the air you could taste it.

  Aria didn’t want to know anything about this man. She didn’t even want to remember his face, so she didn’t focus on it. She intentionally tried to ignore everything about him. He put $150 in small bills on the bed stand, then sat on the bed as a ploy to get past the awkwardness between them. Ciarra had warned her to make sure he had the cash as well as the cock, and now the end was in sight, Aria took control of the situation, hoping that by doing so her feeling of susceptibility would subside. She got down on her knees in front of him and started unbuckling the belt holding up his pants.

  She stroked the insides of his thighs, occasionally kissing them and letting her breath graze the bottom side of his erect penis, which smelled like fish and urine. He hadn’t even bothered to wash his cock first. He watched her unwrap and roll a condom to the base of his dick, not touching her at all at first, as a method of increasing the grip of his sexual tension. It took only moments for the tension to get so high that it eroded his calm. He grabbed Aria’s forearms and used them to twist her face-first onto the floor. The aggression with which he pulled her skirt up and pulled her underwear to the side left red marks on her skin. After struggling for a moment for lack of wetness, he impaled himself inside her and began hammering.

  Eventually, he was not satisfied with doing it doggy style and pushed her face-down flat against the floor. He tucked her hands underneath her hips to aggrandize her submission. The weight of him made it so Aria had to sneak in breaths between his penetrations. The thought about what people had tracked across the floor that her cheek was now pressed up against crossed her mind as a distraction from the trespass of his dick inside her. It took her back to Mr Johnson. She had become an expert at this point of dissociating from the burn. Aria could feel the icy sensation of liquid exposed to air on the side of her face that was turned to him, instead of to the carpet. She assumed it was spit, but it was blood. “Oh shit,” he said, realizing that the force of the intercourse had given him a nosebleed. But he didn’t stop. He let it trickle down his lip and onto her face, occasionally sniffing to reduce the flow.

  “You’re a fine fuck … yeah, you’re a fine fuck, aren’t you?” he whispered forcefully, less to her than to himself, trying to turn himself on even further. Eventually, his body went stiff. Gripping her thighs to hold himself inside her, he exhaled the almost painful-sounding moan that Aria had come to expect when men came. Breathing heavily, he went limp, not caring that the weight of his body was given over as a burden to Aria’s. She managed to shift out from underneath him, the rash of carpet burn now on her face and the front side of her hands. “That was good,” she said, breathing heavily and smiling, hoping to give him the impression that she’d actually liked it. He petted her while he caught his breath. She focused on the pores of his face, instead of the features of it. She still didn’t want to remember this man or take note of anything about him.

  Despite having just fucked her, he closed the door when he went to use the bathroom. She yelled through the door, “I’m gonna go catch a bus.”

  “Nah, I can take you back,” he responded.

  “No, it’s fine, really. I need to get to a place that’s closer to here anyway.”

  “OK,” was all he said.

  Aria paused to see if he was going to say anything further. But there was only silence. So she folded the $150 and put it in the right cup of her bra before stepping out into the parking lot of the motel, closing the door behind her.

  She started jogging. The impact of her feet against the pavement made it impossible to quell her tears and so she started crying, using the tears to wipe his blood off of her face until there were only smears left. She sat down on the first patch of grass she could find until she had collected herself well enough to walk back to a bus stop on the Orange line, where she was able to get change for a bus fare.

  She didn’t tell Taylor where she had been or what she had done that day. When she got back to their car, before he and Luke showed up for the night, she used one of the water bottles from her backpack to wash the crime off of her face so there wouldn’t be any evidence.

  When Ciarra returned to the car lot, she greeted Aria with ardor. “How’d it go?” she asked.

  Aria handed over the money that she had made. Ciarra took half of it to give her pimp and gave the rest back to Aria. “It was OK. It’s not really my thing,” Aria replied. She had prepared to defend herself against a fall from grace, but no defense was necessary.

  Ciarra seemed infinitely more satisfied with Aria’s failure to do what she herself did so well. She laughed at Aria with a hair flick and said, “I get it. Not everyone’s got it,” then winked at her as Aston fussed for her to pick him up and onto her hip. Ciarra left their short meeting feeling self-satisfied. And that self-satisfaction bought Aria some time outside the scrutiny of her focus.

  Aria tied Taylor’s little flashlight to one of the grab handles in the back of the car and wrote in her journal.

  “I fucked a man today. I am forever poisoned by it. No … imprisoned by it. To be loved instead of fucked must taste like so much freedom that the lack of bars and chains alone would make you bleed. I’m not doing it again … At least I hope not. I guess you never know what might happen. I have seventy-five dollars now, which I can’t let anyone know about. It seems strange that homeless people steal from each other but whatever. There isn’t anyone around to hear me cry about it. There is nothing special about fucking. I don’t get why men like it so much. I want love. But I got stuck in the intestines of misfortune too young. The acid has become my home.”

  She closed her journal and put it back into her backpack before turning off the flashlight. She was glad of the $75. It would buy her a full stomach long enough for her to find another way of making money.

  CHAPTER 16

  Aria closed her eyes and listened to the harp, whose fairy-like plucking stood out against the melody of the classical orchestra. She imagined the musician’s hands and fingers stroking across the strings. Her body knew every note of the song. Then again, everybody’s did. The song was “Silent Night.” The speakers in the mall had been playing an endless rotation of Christmas songs for a month now.

  She had come to the mall to use the public restroom and dig through the dumpsters behind the stores, which promised to be full because it was Christmas Eve. She found herself sitting in the common area of the mall, between the rows of kiosks, watching children pose for pictures on Santa’s lap.

  Aria felt ambivalent about Christmas. For her, and so many of the other people in her position, there were two sides to the story of Christmas in their lives. In one way, Aria could feel what might have been. She could see herself as a child in a different kind of home. It was as if she were looking through a wi
ndow onto that life she never had. The glass was partially frosted. Inside she could see her younger self with her mother, Lucy, looking healthy, with a responsible and gentle man who took care of them by her side. She could see a younger sister or brother there too. The family dog was wearing a Christmas sweater. They were reading The Night Before Christmas on the couch in front of a giant Christmas tree. Every ornament on the tree was glamorized by the creamy glow of the Christmas lights. She had memorized every one of them. She had felt the nostalgia of taking each ornament out of its wrapping with this imaginary family each year. She could taste the thickness of hot cocoa against the roof of her mouth.

  Every smell associated with Christmas contained a story of its own, a thousand years of festivity. Aria loved those smells. She loved the idea that the notes of each Christmas carol had the potential to restore those positive memories and those feelings of love and belonging to full bloom. She loved the look on the children’s faces, overwhelmed with the magic of presents appearing in their stockings. She loved the way that people seemed to be stricken with a sudden sense of kindness during Christmas. Instead of fighting their way through the crowd, people were smiling and making way for each other. They were wishing each other a happy holiday. Aria imagined she would love the tradition of Christmas if that tradition had been anything good.

  But the other side of the story of Christmas in Aria’s life was the reality: that Christmas wasn’t good. It was watching her mother draw a Christmas tree on a paper with crayons because it was all she could afford to do. It was the time of the year that Lucy was most aware she couldn’t give her daughter the life she wanted to give her. It was watching her mother struggle to buy or steal her one toy each year. It was playing with that toy by herself, watching Lucy drown away that feeling of shortcoming with a needle. It was the fuckedup way the foster parents or staff at the group homes tried to make them enjoy a holiday designed specifically to celebrate the very thing that all of them had lost.

  Aria knew that the man who was pretending to be Santa most likely had the stain of alcohol on his breath. She knew that the shops were just looking to Christmas for one more way to tease the money out of people’s purses. She knew she had no home to go home to. And because of all this, Aria wished that Christmas didn’t exist. The interminable build-up to Christmas was like never-ending foreplay leading up to an experience that she could never have. The outward hatred she showed for Christmas was her way of hiding the painful fact that, like everyone, she wanted to love Christmas, but couldn’t because of the reality of her unlucky life.

  It had been nearly five months since Aria had come to Los Angeles. Though she had found a sort of base camp in the car lot and with the people who lived there, it had been a breadth of hardship. In that time, Aria had learned the true value of a dollar. She had learned how to disappear into the tapestry of the city. She had learned so much the hard way, like where not to walk at night and where not to walk during the day. Her life had been a surfeit of near misses. Finding programs for people in her position that posed too much of a risk for her to try to join.

  Taylor hadn’t had it much better. He had taken a handful of temp jobs and lived off of the dollars he made until he had none left, but it was never enough to rent a place. He had attended a few publicly advertised cattle calls for actors, but had never gotten a part. He had slept with more than a few men, but it never amounted to anything more than a booty call. Some days he went out on behalf of both of them with a cardboard sign to solicit charity. It made Aria feel guilty when he did it, but she was still 17. She couldn’t take the risk of getting caught.

  Luke and Palin, forever nomadic, had been off to a dozen festivals. Occasionally he brought back a gutter punk or two that he had met there. They would park themselves at the car lot for a day or two before leaving on the boxcar of some train, headed to whatever places anarchists go. Though her almost patriotic devotion was to Luke, Palin had grown close to Aria. Scratches now scuffed up the side of the broken-down Land Cruiser from Palin trying to coerce her to come out and play.

  Aria’s hair had grown longer. She had bitten her nails down as far as she could chew them. As far as food went, some days she was luckier than others. The unpredictability of sustenance made it difficult for her to concentrate sometimes. She welcomed the mental fogginess because it made her stop thinking about her life. Her gums were sore. With the lifeblood stripped from her immune system, it seemed like she had fallen sick at least seven times in the past months. She was so skinny that people might have been expected to guess the truth about her situation. But because her youth would not give her body the permission to decay, people simply assumed that she was anorexic.

  No matter how many times she managed to find a place to wash them, her clothes seemed to be eternally soused by the fumes of sports cars that passed her by. Aria had never cared about fashion. But she found herself missing the feeling of wearing something just because it looked good. It was asking for trouble to be on the streets and wear something for any reason other than that it was practical.

  With no phone or calendar, and LA having no real seasons to demonstrate the passing of time, the days blurred into one another. If society was a rat race, most of its members were stuck in the wheel. The people on the street believed themselves to be free from that rat cage, but the stasis in which they lived was just another kind of rat cage. Their marginal existence was the wheel of surviving day to day. Never getting ahead, every day starting over at zero. Aria had the feeling that if she got off the street and came back to these same places, she would see the same people doing the same things in one year, five years, 20 years … assuming that they hadn’t died first. If you weren’t insane before living out here, the living here would make you insane. It would kill you, but not quickly and not painlessly. It would wear you down at the edges before scooping out your core.

  Last-minute shoppers swarmed through the corridors of the mall: frenzied people quickly bouncing from store to store with bags in their hands. The buttery smell of toasted almonds, coated in cinnamon sugar, was laced through the air. Aria wove her way through the crowd to get outside the building behind the food court. She waited until no one was passing by and grabbed the first thing that her hands could reach out of the dumpster. It was a styrofoam takeaway box with a divvy of partially eaten lo mein noodles. Instead of standing there, she took them to a corner of the bustling parking lot and ate them with her hands. Whoever had finished the first portion of the noodles had drowned them in soy and sriracha hot sauce. It made her mouth and stomach burn, but she ate them anyway before heading back to the car lot.

  Luke woke them up in the morning by knocking his elbow against the glass. In his hands, he was precariously holding two paper cups full of instant hot cocoa. He had taken the packets and cups from a bank office three days before with Christmas morning in mind. Like almost everyone else, Luke had nowhere to go this Christmas. But in typical fashion, he had taken it upon himself to prevent them all from sinking into sorrow.

  Taylor opened the door and took the cups from him. “Merry Christmas. It’s cocoa,” Luke announced. “I’ll be back in a second.”

  Taylor handed one of the cups to Aria. It was so hot that the film of wax on the outside of the cup began to come loose on her hands. They watched Luke go back into his tent and carry little cups to every person in the car lot, except for Ciarra, Aston and Mike, who had been gone for two days to visit a relative somewhere in Hemet, California. When he got around to Anthony’s tarp, Anthony refused to respond. He was not asleep; he simply didn’t move. He stayed where he was, lying on his stomach, staring off into a chasm of depression that only he could see. Luke placed the cup of cocoa in front of his face, where it stood the least chance of being knocked over but where he would be forced to see it.

  Luke came back to the Land Cruiser with his own cup of cocoa and Palin in tow. They both got into the back seat with Aria, forcing her to slide over to one side. “Mmmm, a subtle note of cherry, maybe some oa
k and definitely some chocolate undertones,” he said, jokingly sipping his cocoa as if impersonating a wine sommelier.

  They laughed out loud. The joke was all the more funny because the cocoa he had managed to make them on his little camping stove was anything but gourmet. The saccharin sweetness of synthetic chocolate was enough to give them all a headache. But it lifted their spirits anyway. “So, what the fuck should we do today?” Taylor asked them with a tone that denoted defeat.

  “Ah, dude, today’s the best day to go downtown. People give out mad loot, man,” Luke responded.

  “What do you mean?” Taylor asked.

  “It’s Christmas, the only day people actually give a shit,” Luke responded with a pandering smile.

  As it turned out, Luke was right. He, Taylor, Aria and Palin sat under the façade of a building on a street close to the three biggest missions in the city. Aria was glad that being in California meant there would be no snow for Christmas this year. It wasn’t that she hated snow; quite the opposite. But it didn’t feel quite like Christmas without snow, and so the holiday didn’t hurt as much as it might have otherwise. Christmas lights didn’t look or feel the same without the backdrop of powdery white.

  The streets were crowded with people like themselves, looking to take advantage of the habitual alms that they could expect to receive on Christmas Day. In a slow and virtuous swarm, families and couples passed by in their brand new Range Rovers, Ford Fusions, Porsches, Teslas and Toyota Priuses. Every so often, one of the cars would stop and open the trunk to gather an allotment of whatever they had decided to hand out to the homeless that year. They would walk the items over to whichever recipients they had singled out and hand them down to them with righteous smiles on their faces.