He pretends to pretend to browse the travel guides while looking around for a client who isn’t there. The cops might see right through this performance, but they’ll let it play out for a few minutes before their patience finally gives out. Jacob weighing his options, hoping a few minutes is enough time … but for what?
Across the room, he catches sight of a memory.
The young female employee with the tattooed arms slouching at the info desk reminds Jacob of the woman he dated. She could be her, frozen in time. He wonders how many twenty-something kids wander into this job with temporary expectations and stagger out years later, trying to recall where they’d misplaced their youth.
Celeste. That was her name—the one she gave Jacob, at any rate.
And now he remembers the way things ended. When she’d told him she was seeing someone else now. Jacob thinking, That’s fine, it’s just casual sex. Surprised to find himself lying awake in a bed that felt too big. Picturing some other guy touching Celeste’s tattoos in ways Jacob never would again. His hand stroking the roses twined around her calf. Lips caressing the blackbirds fluttering above the swell of her breasts. The Celtic knot on her upper arm expanding, contracting, expanding, shiny in her sweat, contracting again as she clings to his shoulders.
A lanky young man with limp black hair, who’s wearing eye makeup and tight jeans that proudly display his androgyny, leans on the info desk and the employee puts her hand gently on his forearm. She beams with an unguarded warmth that no one has directed at Jacob since he was their age. In return, Lanky affects a bored expression, acting like everything else in the room is more interesting than she is.
Jacob catches the cops’ eyes. Nods his head to the info desk.
Shoulders knits his brow with confusion.
Jacob nods emphatically, mimes “jacket” in his best attempt at charades, then indicates the inside pocket. Mustache eyes the studded jacket folded over Lanky’s arm, and starts toward him. Shoulders hesitates another beat, clearly thinking this doesn’t add up, but knowing better than to abandon his partner.
Jacob would love to stick around and see that asshole’s expression as these giants hook his arms in theirs, but schaden-freude is a luxury he can’t afford just now. He dashes back to the Purple Room, bounds down the stairs to the Mezzanine, runs across to the Gold Room—never move in a straight line when you don’t want to be followed—and hurries up the aisles.
He finds the kid standing at the endcaps, right out in the open.
Jacob grabs the kid by his elbow, steers him through the Blue Room as fast as they can hustle without looking too suspicious. He shoves the paper bag into the kid’s hands, talking right over his meek protests: “Get out of here. Get on your bike and ride your scrawny ass off. Keep off major streets, ride the wrong way down one-ways. Don’t go home till you know you weren’t followed.”
“Wait, I don’t—”
“Tomorrow you and your girl move to another city. Don’t tell your friends, don’t leave a forwarding address, and don’t come back.”
“Can’t we just—”
Jacob yanks the kid’s arm, hard. “You got all that?”
The kid nods, and as they proceed into the Green Room, he glances past Jacob and his eyes widen with alarm. Jacob doesn’t have to look, but he does, looks as he keeps moving toward the front entrance, sees the cops descend the steps from the Purple Room to the Mezzanine.
They spot him at the same instant. Both men start as if to run, but think better of it, fast-walking past postcards and books about Oregon. Huge legs clearing the short distance quickly.
Jacob shoves the kid toward the front doors, putting himself between the kid and the cops who are fast approaching. He flings himself at the info desk and the two managers chatting behind it. He doesn’t have to fake the urgency in his voice: “My son’s missing! He’s only six!”
One of the managers darts for the doors—just as the kid disappears into the night air. The other manager picks up the phone and her voice crackles over the PA system: “White Rabbit. We have a White Rabbit.”
“White Rabbit,” Celeste had explained to him once. “Y’know, like Alice chasing the rabbit down the hole and getting lost.”
Employees spring into action. Cashiers rush over from behind the counter to stand guard by the door, where the first manager has stopped a middle-aged woman and her son on their way out. “I’m sorry, ma’am, no one can leave just now. This should only take a few minutes.”
The cops stop short. Shoulders goes for his wallet, starts to say something, but Mustache grasps him with a firm hand. Shakes his head. Wrong place, wrong time to flash a badge.
Shoulders paces a small circle, seething, utilizing every ounce of self-control to keep from punching something, someone, anything.
Mustache turns to Jacob, that sadistic gleam back in his eyes.
Jacob is too busy describing his nonexistent son—and the balding, fussy old man he’d last seen talking to the boy near the Rare Book Room—to say anything to Mustache that would get him killed.
When the manager dashes off to share the description, Jacob leans toward Mustache. “Purple Room. On the far right after you get up the stairs. Up on the top shelf, you’ll find what you’re looking for. And maybe a sleeping homeless guy too.”
Mustache unfolds his arms, easing off his scowl a bit. “Think that’s it? You just walk away scot-free?”
“The kid’s gone—you’ll never catch him,” Jacob says, surprised to find he hopes it’s true. “And I’m not worth risking your badges. Just a bag man.”
Mustache scans Jacob’s face like he’s committing the details to memory. “Don’t be too sure,” he says. Then nods at his partner and they stalk away, Shoulders brushing past Jacob hard enough to knock him off balance. Jacob rights himself against the info desk, watches them take the steps to the Purple Room two at a time.
Jacob looks out the front doors and tells the manager standing guard, “Oh, there they are!” He points at the crowd of tourists milling outside—could be any of a half-dozen kids with their mothers. “Thank you so much,” he says, then calls, “Honey, over here!” as he blows past the manager and out the doors.
Thinking as he goes out: This really is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.
PART III
DESOLATION CITY
BURNSIDE FOREVER
BY JUSTIN HOCKING
Burnside Skatepark
1) Fuck Hawaii.
2) First time I see her: she’s lying on a dirty-ass mattress, up in the parking lot above Burnside Skatepark, right in the place everyone goes to piss or shoot up or toss their empties or die. It’s the middle of the day, 2 p.m. And she’s on this mattress, sleeping with this sketchy-looking young black guy, which honestly you don’t see too often down here under the bridge, and her pink g-string’s hanging way out of her Dickies, which strikes me as weird too, because most homeless girls don’t wear g-strings. Or not pink ones, at least. She’s sleeping but I can tell she’s pretty. And young. And then me and this sketchy black guy, we’re staring at each other, his stare all full of emptiness and craziness and malice—all shit I stare back with in fucking spades. We’re staring at each other hard, and I think to myself, This is how wars start.
3) Things went okay over on the islands, for the first few months at least. I did what I do: drink, surf, skate, fight. It was the first and the last things that got me in trouble. And I guess the surfing too. They called me the Lumberjack over there, and at first I think they got a kick out of me, this big haole lumberjack motherfucker out in the lineup, fighting for waves with all the locals. What you hear about Hawaii is true: they’ll punch you in the face for stealing waves; they’ll do it right out in the water. But not me, not at first. They could see that I’d just been through some shit and I was over there to get away from it, just like half the other fucking Haoles on the island, but the kind of shit I’d been through was different and deeper and they could read it in my eyes and my beard and the way I’d
take waves no one else would take, drop in high and late and still make it and generally just not give a fuck. Spiritual fuckers, the Hawaiians, from years of living between oceans and volcanoes. But still fuckers, nonetheless, from years of Haole lumberjack interlopers like me pissing them off, stealing their land and their waves, and the grudging respect they showed me at first wore off once I dropped in on the wrong people. Blood in the water: there was a lot of it.
4) This girl on the mattress, I don’t know what it was about her. She was too pretty and dressed too well to be homeless. She had dark black hair and pale skin and turquoise eyes.
5) Awhile back I worked at a summer camp, as a cook, and the kids liked me, more than they liked some of their counselors, because I was cool to them I guess, and I skated with them and shit. And told them dirty jokes. There was this one kid, redheaded and kind of round. Some of the other kids fucked with him, called him a fag and a kook. I spent my whole day off teaching him kickflips, and after that things got easier for him.
6) So after Hawaii and I were done with each other, I came back to Portland, picked up my van—the one Amber and I bought together for surf trips—and having no immediate place to live I parked it under the Burnside Bridge and ate beef jerky and blood oranges and grapefruits that I stole from the fruit wholesaler across the street. In the mornings I got up early to skate the park. I saw this kid do this thing in Hawaii once, before he went out into big surf. He dipped his hand in the ocean and then made the sign of the cross over his chest, all Jesus-style. So I took to doing that before paddling out, not because I believed in anything, but because it seemed right and good, and also because I’d seen Amber’s uncle do it at her funeral. I do it now before I skate too, and then I skate with a clear head, the whole park to myself, the city still damp and sleeping, and it’s like in Hawaii in the warm ocean water, the way it cleans you out, flushes out all the shit. Burnside can do that, but in a dirtier way.
That’s the thing about me: I’m trying. I am.
7) Manny got fucked up while I was gone.
“What the fuck happened to you?” I ask. We’re up in the crow’s nest at Burnside, drinking beers, heckling some Californian skater in full pads and a helmet, telling him to beat it. Manny’s face looks bad, real bad, with stitches around his eye and a burly dent in his forehead.
“We were downtown partying one night and we had some words with some hicks in a big lifted truck,” Manny says. “Guys from Gresham, for sure. Fucking hicks, you know? So we pulled up next to them at a stoplight, and I jumped up in the bed of their truck and started bouncing that shit up and down. Startled the shit out of them! And then they just fuck-ing took off, blew right through the red light, almost got fuck-ing bashed by an oncoming. They drove around like maniacs, taking hard turns, just to fuck with me. I thought for sure we were going to flip over and die, man. Scariest shit ever. So finally I just jumped out and rolled about fifteen times across the asphalt. Rolled myself right into the hospital,” he says, trying to laugh, but it makes me feel bad, because he’s fucked up bad and there’s something not right about him now, and it’s not like he’d ever been totally right, but still.
8) I wake up in the middle of the night because someone’s knocking on the van door. I look out and it’s the girl, the one from the mattress, and she’s out there shivering in the rain, and I can tell she needs something. The light is misty, chemical orange from the streetlamps up on the bridge.
“You need a blanket?” I ask, sliding the van door open.
“No,” she says. “A blanket’s not what I need.” She looks hungry, but not for food. She takes two fingers and smacks the inside of her elbow.
“I don’t have anything like that,” I say.
“Please?” There’s something in her eyes, something pure behind all the makeup and crust.
I invite her in out of the rain and pull a couple beers out of the cooler, even though I know that’s not what she needs. Her skin’s pale and strung with little beads of rain; she smells like sweat and like the sky. She shakes her hair out like a dog and I can feel the rain from her hair on my face.
“Why don’t you ask your boyfriend?” I say. “Where’s he?”
“I don’t know.”
“He leaves you here alone in the middle of the night?”
“He takes care of me,” she says. “You don’t know him.”
I crack a beer. She sits down on the edge of the bench where I’d been sleeping, runs her hand across my pillow. She looks around my van, at my stacks of clothes and dishes and skate decks and fruit. “You live in here?” she asks.
“Right now,” I say. “Just while I find a place.”
“It’s nice,” she says.
“It’s a van,” I say.
“You seen where I sleep? Believe me, this is nice.”
No argument there. I take a sip of beer.
“I watch you skate sometimes,” she says, looking me in the eye now. “It’s like you’re on fire, or you want to die or something. Everyone watches out for you.”
I look out the window, at the park’s darkened curves and lips. I take some pride in the way I skate, in the fact that I scare people. At a place like Burnside, this says a lot.
She stands up and reaches for the beaded necklace hanging off my rearview mirror. It was something I made for Amber back when I worked at the summer camp, during arts-and-crafts time with the kids. Amber liked it for some reason, wore it all the time. It’s one of the few things of hers I have left. The girl takes it off the rearview and starts to put it around her own neck. Before she can do that I grab it out of her hand.
“I think you better go now,” I say.
“I’m sorry, I just wanted to try it on. It’s pretty.”
I open the van door for her.
“Wait,” she says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. Was it your ex-girlfriend’s or something?”
I don’t say anything.
“I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll make you feel better. I’ll suck your dick if you want me to. Seriously.”
Blood rushes to my head. The same way it does every time. I’d stayed up all night drinking and fucking so many times in Hawaii, but still the blood rushes to my head, because temptation does that to you, even when you remember all the mornings you woke up feeling empty and sick and regretful, so many mornings, but still, this girl’s mouth is so young and full.
“What’s your fucking story? Why you sleeping at Burnside with some crackhead?” I ask, doing the concerned-citizen thing, even though I’m still considering her offer, wondering if she swallows.
And then I hear a shout from the upper parking lot, up where the mattress is, and I know who it is and that he’s looking for his girl, and I imagine going out and beating the living shit out of him, but I’m tired and it’s raining and I’m honestly not all that excited about going bodies with a dirty addict sleeping on a mattress at Burnside. The girl hears the shout too. She reaches out and takes my hand, pries my fingers open one by one. She buries her thumb into my palm, just enough that it feels good, and looks up at me with those eyes. Then she takes a Sharpie out of her pocket and writes in my hand.
Please don’t help me, it says.
9) A text message from Manny wakes me up a few hours later, around 4 a.m. I think I might be an angel, it says.
10) It’s hard being back in Portland, back here where it all happened. I drive past where Amber and I used to live before she got sick, our little green bungalow in Southeast, over by St. Francis Park. Some other family is living in the house now, some people with a Subaru and a swingset. They put a garden in the side yard where my mini-ramp used to be.
I park the van and walk up into the yard and peer through the front window. I can’t see anyone but it looks like someone’s home. I hate them, whoever they are, but at the same time I wouldn’t mind if they invited me in for a sandwich.
I walk over into the garden, where everything is mostly dead, this being wintertime, except for a few onions. They
have rust-colored skins with green shoots coming out the tops. They feel firm and ripe so I pick a couple. Then I turn around and there’s a little blond kid standing there looking up at me. He’s wearing rollerblades.
“This your garden?” I ask.
He doesn’t say anything.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I used to live here.”
But by the look on his face I can see that this only makes it worse. He turns around and tries to skate off toward the porch, as fast as he can, but he falls down and skins his knee and starts crying, and then there’s a woman’s face looking at us from out the window, and here I am, this big bearded fucker standing over her crying kid, with a couple of her onions in my hand, and her face disappears fast, and I want to do the same, so I make my way toward the van, and from behind me I hear someone shouting, Hey, a man’s voice, the voice of a not particularly tough man trying to sound a little bit tough.
I start up the engine and drive off.
11) I’ve been on this program, eating fruit and making the sign of the cross and skating Burnside every morning early, and not too much drinking, and my head was feeling cleared out a little, but then stuff kind of started going downhill after the thing with that family and their garden. Or maybe it was the thing with the girl, I don’t know.
Manny and me start drinking early at the skatepark, getting all sloppy. I take a bad slam on my elbow. I lie there for a while, looking at the underside of the bridge, all black and sooty and painted with pigeon shit, like an old cathedral. My elbow turns into a swellbow, the size of a baseball, the way it always does. And then these art school girls who Manny knows show up with some bottles of champagne, and we decide to celebrate my swellbow, and we’re all drinking out of the bottle at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, and it’s good, you know, the way freedom can be good.
Then these art school girls want to hit the strip clubs, which is just fine with Manny and me, and we end up at Magic Gardens, where the ceilings are low, and one of the strippers swings her hair around all crazy and gets it stuck in the heating vent above the stage. I’m embarrassed for her a little, all naked and hanging there by the hair, but that doesn’t keep me and Manny from looking and laughing. Then the bartender, this fat Asian, comes out with a pair of scissors.
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