by Jan Carson
Twenty-four hours later, the idea having germinated thickly under his baseball cap, Jimmy Orange slipped out the door of their motel room, filled the Volvo’s tank with gas and left town with Mexican intentions.
In a fit of never-before-witnessed generosity, he stopped to pay the week’s motel bill in advance.
This, Martha Orange would later recount to her only remaining relative – a Boston-based stepsister – was the nicest thing her husband had ever done for her.
– Chapter Three –
Jesus God
There are worse places to be abandoned than Portland, Oregon: Oklahoma City, for one, Arkansas for another.
Later, when the guilt finally caught up with him, creeping up the neck of his fifteenth Corona, Jimmy Orange turned to the Mexican barman who had lately become his sole confidant and muttered self-righteously, ‘There’s worse places to leave your woman than Oregon: Oklahoma City for one. I thought long and hard about leaving Martha in Portland. She should thank her lucky stars I didn’t dump her in Idaho.’
And the Mexican barman, blessed as he was with little more than game show American, caught only the barest hint of sentiment and slid the white man a sixteenth Corona, transferring the lime slice from one bottle to the next. Jimmy Orange was long past appreciating aesthetics.
‘Sí, sir,’ he nodded, all the time noting the sixteenth drink on the tab, and automatically adding a seventeenth bottle for himself.
‘Portland, Oregon … Very rainy. Much, much rains.’ In the year nineteen hundred and ninety five the rain in Portland fell mostly in the winter months, occasionally beginning on the first day of fall and stretching willfully into spring. The seasons split the city in half. For eight calendar months, seven on a leap year, the rain rained incessantly, stirring the Willamette to a seething mass of piss and mud and sin. The streets were streams and aspiring rivers, nursing impossible ambitions of Venice, of Oxford and Egyptian canals.
All infants born during the rainy season swam long before they found their standing feet. The older residents grew flippers, plundering thickly through the sweaty streets. They congregated on the buses, emanating the deep stench of damp wool and just-drowned dog. The smell was their own local peculiarity, deeply comforting to the homegrown and offensive to the few tourists who visited Portland during monsoon season. These peculiar locals stalwartly refused the comfort of an umbrella, choosing to wear their hair short and frizzy, long in the summer months. They hid their smiles behind enormous beards, all their fickle joys hibernating through the watery season. They ran on tar, dark coffee and good intentions. Their pant legs decayed slowly, turning moist and mushy; moldering from the ankle up. They relished the growing potential of damp living. Most Portlanders believed themselves capable of sprouting an extra inch every winter and consequently spent the summer months receding into their own skin. They did their sinning in secret, hiding behind the daily shower curtain.
All the city’s darker elements – the cross-dressing kids on the late-night bus, the crusty bums beneath the Burnside bridge, the meth labs flaming and strip bars belching elderly men into the early evening fog, the churches crumbling into cocktail bars and under-age punk clubs – all were ritually drenched, baptized beneath a sheath of never-ending sky sulk. Terrible things took place in the rain and blurred, as beneath a sheaf of greaseproof paper, no one seemed to notice.
When the summer months finally freckled their way up the Willamette, peaking wistfully over the Steel Bridge, it was a future city they found already blooming in anticipation. Every second street boasted a green grass park. The squirrels, recently released from their storm drains, oscillated up and down the telephone wires, humping and fuzzing like greased electricity. The trees shook their spindly fingers – once, twice, for miracle luck – and gave birth to wild, broccoli babies until all the streets ran thick with cloudy greens. The local children sped bare-chested through the downtown sprinklers. The crusty bums emerged from beneath the Burnside Bridge, peeling back their plaid shirts to reveal chests, backs and lumberjack necks already tanned the sweet-talking color of beef jerky. The entire city sprouted wheels and cycled madly up and down Hawthorne Boulevard, running stop lights until all the little last drops of winter dew drained from their heels. No serious Portlander spent a single ounce of summer time indoors.
The best and most blessed thing about Portland, Oregon – twin, spliced city of the Pacific Northwest – was the taste; the taste of youth and hope and bottled water, which lingered long into the summer, eclipsing the thought of October showers and those dank, beery days ahead. And this taste was tart, sharp and toothpaste-clean; the freshly scent of an entire city just laundered.
There were worse places to leave your woman than Portland, Oregon in late summer. It would be many, many years before Malcolm’s mother came to appreciate this fact.
On the morning after the grand departure, Martha Orange woke early, turned her underwear inside-out – for it had been almost a week since she’d last had the opportunity to launder – and prepared to face the weekend alone. Whilst Malcolm dozed on the other side of the queen-size, his mother rescued Ross from the trouser drawer where she’d managed to wedge him for the evening and fed him half a lukewarm bottle, briefly heated beneath the bathroom faucet. Once finished, she burped the baby over the crook of her elbow, returned him to his sports bag and set about fixing breakfast for Malcolm and herself. First she split a fresh bottle of Mountain Dew evenly between two Dixie Cups. Then she opened a pack of miniature Oreos, arranged six cookies each on two squares of toilet paper and, for nutritional value, emptied a box of raisins on top of each makeshift plate. Breakfast preparations complete, Martha Orange switched the bedroom’s grainy television set to the Mexican channel, pumped up the volume and waited for her son to rouse.
Malcolm Orange, who had been wrenched from yet another dinosaur dream, took almost two minutes to work out where he was. It was a relatively exotic experience to find himself sleeping in an actual bed. To wake as sole occupant of a bed too large by far, both forwards and sideways, was a luxury beyond Malcolm’s wildest imagination. For a brief and beautiful moment he imagined himself finally adopted into a normal family. The reality hit him like a midlife crisis.
‘Your dad’s not coming back, Malcolm,’ his mother announced, sliding his toilet paper breakfast across the bedspread. ‘Better enjoy these Oreos. They might be the last cookies we can afford for a good long while.’
Worse things had happened in Texas.
Malcolm Orange chose to ignore the disappearance of his long-loathed father, an occurrence he’d been petitioning the Almighty for, for the better part of three years (occasionally turning to Allah when the Jesus God fell silent). Instead of rising to meet his mother’s mounting panic, he yawned deeply, lay back on two fat blue pillows and relished the sensation of eating breakfast cookies in a giant bed.
Martha Orange perched her backside on the edge of the bed, naked feet wedged against the radiator, and fed herself Oreos absentmindedly, all the time staring at the Mexican couple arguing on the television screen.
From his vantage point at the stern of their bed, Malcolm Orange scrutinized the back of his mother’s head. Five feet removed, with her neck obscured by a generous sheath of auburn hair, his mother could easily pass for any age or race. In the right shirt or the wrong pants she might even be mistaken for a girlish boy. Only her shoulder blades, straining beneath the faded soccer shirt she wore at night, revealed anything concrete about the stranger sharing Malcolm’s bed. Martha Orange was struggling to climb out of her own skin.
Malcolm’s mother had not always been this strained. He remembered her enormously in his preschool days. During those early years when the road had seemed golden, temporary and paved with twenty-five different Oklahoma exits, Martha Orange had lived loud and footloose from one state to the next. She was young and beautiful and paraded her youth in catalogue dresses and six-inch shorts, slashed from the remnants of old Levis. Malcolm Orange knew his mother was b
eautiful beyond ordinary mothers. Strange men offered her cigarettes and soda pop on the gas station forecourt. Upon noticing Martha, even from behind, other mothers automatically paused to fix their hair, settling their skirt tails self-consciously. Elderly gentlemen slobbered into their summer vests when she walked past. And in Arkansas, once on a cloudy afternoon, two older boys had arrested Malcolm atop the play structure outside McDonald’s, eager to discuss his mother. The larger of the two was wearing a Mötley Crüe T-shirt. Malcolm Orange did not know what Mötley Crüe was but was nonetheless awed.
‘Is that your mama, kid?’ the second boy asked. (He was larger and wearing a white shirt with the sleeves pulled off at the shoulder. Tiny shards of cotton thread and shirt fabric were beginning to unravel around his upper arms.)
Malcolm Orange nodded. He was barely five years old and not yet wary of teenage boys.
‘She’s smokin’ hot,’ the Mötley Crüe boy said, accompanying his observation with a long, low whistle, reminiscent of a just-boiled kettle.
‘I’d give her one,’ the second boy added and though Malcolm Orange wasn’t entirely sure what the boy wanted to give her, he knew it wasn’t something worth discussing with his mother and took the opportunity to shove the boy, elbow first, off the play structure. The resulting injury and subsequent howling forced the Oranges to make yet another of their infamous speedy getaways. Five-year-old Malcolm was thrust violently into the backseat of the Volvo, landing unceremoniously in his grandmother’s lap with both feet wedged under his Step Nana’s enormous thighs. He had barely enough time to turn himself right side up before the interrogation began.
‘What the hell was that about Malcolm?’ his father yelled, face fuming in the rearview mirror.
‘You can’t go pushing older kids around, Malcolm!’ his mother continued. ‘You’ll get your ass kicked if you do.’
‘They said mean things,’ whispered Malcolm.
‘You’ve got to rise above it, Malcolm,’ said his father, ‘you can’t go punching every no-good Johnny who calls you names.’
‘What sort of mean things?’ his mother asked, already beginning to display a righteous tendency towards ignoring her husband.
‘Don’t want to say …’ replied Malcolm, remaining tight-lipped in the backseat.
‘Malcolm, you can tell me. I’m your mama, you can tell me anything.’
‘I can’t tell you this, mama. You’ll just get mad with me.’
‘We’re already mad with you, Malcolm. Tell us now,’ his father fumed, ‘or so help me, I will leave you at the next Greyhound station.’
And, because he could not bring himself to hurt his mother, who was beautiful in his eyes, like a Christmas tree angel, or Jesus’ own mama, Malcolm decided to crucify his father instead, ‘They said you were ugly Papa, like a gorilla, and that you smelled like fried onions.’ (Malcolm Orange, not yet officially schooled, awarded himself two proud points for ingenuity. Both these insults were for the most part true, though the onion thing was seasonal and seemed markedly worse during summer months.)
In the rearview mirror, with his sunglasses shoved, Miami Vice style, high on his forehead, Malcolm’s father turned the color of pickled beetroot and thumped the inside section of his steering wheel so it emitted a tiny, strangled parp.
‘Punk ass kids!’ he yelled. ‘I’m going to turn this car around and teach them a thing or two about respect.’
‘Rise above it, Jimmy,’ his wife replied, sharp as polished piss. She turned to stare out the passenger window. In the wing mirror Malcolm could see a bent back reflection of his mother’s naked face. She was grinning wildly with one hand covering her jaw. Aged just five years old, with only five states to compare, Malcolm Orange suddenly realized that his was the most beautiful and best mother in the whole of the United States.
As the years rolled the Oranges all across America with an ever-depleting cargo of elderly relatives, Malcolm began to better understand the fragile wonder of the woman who had given birth to him in the dugout of a Detroit baseball field. Her highs were loud and cloudless, her lows parchment thin and each year more frequent than the last. As he progressed from childhood towards the possibility of something equating to puberty Malcolm Orange kept a tally of his mother’s ups and downs. These findings were recorded, collated and eventually analyzed in the same dime store notepad which held his ‘Lamp Posts of America’ and ‘Miles between Dairy Queens’ research projects; two important pieces of scientific investigative research he one day hoped to present to the President of the United States.
Observing his mother now on this, the first morning of her enforced widowhood, Malcolm Orange struggled to recall a single skyscraper day in the last eighteen months of road raging. (He made a mental note to check his research notes later when his mother wasn’t in the room.) Terrified that he might, for the first time in two years, cry without the believable excuse of chicken pox or funerals, Malcolm dug his heels further into the folded sheets and forced his head to remember the way his mother had once been, many years ago when she was oftentimes hilarious and ill-inclined to daytime television.
He remembered her twirling down the aisles of Walmart dancing arm in arm with her own elderly – but not yet crazy – mother whilst the overhead speakers pumped Kenny Rogers into the shampoo section. He remembered her rhinestone heels, stolen from the shoe department of the Goodwill; left foot stuffed down the back of his pushchair, right foot concealed inside his sweater vest. Malcolm, who was young enough to escape jail and old enough to know better, had held his tongue, relishing the thrill of illegal, complicit adventuring. He remembered her ordering ice cream for breakfast on at least fifteen separate occasions, most often going for pistachio over any of the more obvious flavors.
Malcolm Orange remembered her singing; holy smokes, there had also been fabulous singing.
Malcolm’s mother kept a shoebox of country and western cassettes under the Volvo’s passenger seat, insisting upon their ongoing presence, even as perfectly good toaster ovens and umbrellas fell victim to the packing whims of Jimmy Orange. With the windows fully recoiled she liked to pass the miles singing lustily along with Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette while the mid-western winds whipped her hair into a wild nest of earthy tendrils. Approaching this diner or that interstate motel she’d quit her singing to roll the windows up and, with a single, fluid motion, well-rehearsed, whisk her hair north, south, east and west, securing the nestled mountain neatly with an old shoelace. Seated directly behind his mother, Malcolm Orange soon learnt to draw breath and close his eyes when the hairspray emerged from the glove compartment, ready to coat his mother’s hair – and, by proxy, the occupants of the Volvo’s cramped back-seat – in a sticky layer of breath-quenching hair glue.
Finally, there was the knitting; yards and yards of blue and white striped scarf which filled the front seat of the Volvo and threatened to spill into the backseat, strangling the occupants in a mile or more of wool mix yarn. This same scarf had been knitting for longer than Malcolm had existed and ran like a constant, stripy seam through all his childhood memories. Having reached saturation point in the year nineteen hundred and eighty eight, Martha Orange had simply begun to unravel the earliest sections of the scarf and proceeded to knit on, using the raveled thread; a stroke of knitting genius which had eventually formed a colossal, nautical-themed Möbius strip.
Malcolm was not to know the origin of this never-ending scarf but he soon became familiar with the aura of deep, tantric peace which came over his mother each time she picked up her needles. Watching her fingers flying from the backseat, Malcolm thought of the ancient Mexican ladies who populated the doorways of most every city he’d ever lived in, knotty fingers feeding rosary beads left to right in an endless parody of activity.
(Martha Orange’s knitting was conceived in youthful hope and yet had, over the years, slowly pickled to become a form of quiet, costless therapy; an adult attempt at thumb sucking. The scarf had begun on the first morning of Martha Orange’s
honeymoon. Having loved her long into the night in a fashion rarely seen or sampled in rural Oklahoma, having offered up his grandma’s antique ring for a wedding band, and ponyed up for a proper hotel – one of the cheaper rooms in one of the cheaper hotels advertised on the Vegas strip – Jimmy Orange had been slowly rising in the estimation of the freshly-baked Mrs Orange.
Rolling over to meet his eye, she’d smiled silently, bit her lip to avoid inhaling last night’s whiskey breath and audibly wondered what the future might hold for the Oranges.
‘Baby,’ he’d whispered, as he ran his fingers up and down her perfect legs, rubbing the stench of stale sex and motor oil deep into her shins, ‘one year from now I’ll have you knocked up and rocking in a little cabin somewhere in Alaska, just you and me and a hound dog. I’ll keep you fat and naked and you can knit me scarves and sweaters to keep the frostbite out.’
Thereafter, Malcolm’s mother had crept out of bed, grinning ear to ear with the bed sheets wrapped modestly round her chest and silently thanked the Lord for a man who did not smell like manure, who was more than moderately handsome and, most importantly, going places fast. She’d showered quickly with the bathroom door open, still scared her new husband might slip off without her and, whilst Malcolm’s father completed his bathroom ablutions, cast off and commenced the scarf which would keep her fingers in constant anticipation of Alaska for the next thirteen years.)
Malcolm Orange loved his mother. She was beautiful to him like a TV chef or a first grade teacher, but he no longer knew what to say to her. She was unraveling before his eyes, a forty-foot scarf left one decade too long in the damp.
‘Now your dad’s gone,’ she muttered, raising her voice in competition with the angry Hispanic sentiments now flooding the bedroom, ‘I should get some kind of skill. I’m only good for cooking and cleaning. Maybe I could learn computers or Spanish. A bit of Spanish would come in handy round here. There’s Mexicans everywhere.’
