Almost Home

by Jessica Blank

  I pretend not to know what she’s talking about and chew my thumbnail. “What?” is what I muster.

  “I saw you watching me. When I came in with Critter.”

  “Critter?”

  “Yeah, the guy I was with? Whatever. It’s rude to stare.”

  It’s funny: there she is, squatted down, grimy-nailed, sucking ash through a filterless cigarette, patches on her black chained pants full of foul language—and she’s telling me about manners. “You don’t look like you care much about rude,” I say, and as soon as it’s out of my mouth I start thinking what I’d do if she gets mad. Really she’s not that different from all the dirtball bully boys in Ludlow, I tell myself, and I stand up for myself with them all right.

  But she just grins at me. “Yeah,” she says. She looks like a wet rat when she smiles. “That’s true.” I just stand there, half smirking, not sure if it’s cool or not to smile back. “Got a buck twenty-nine? I could use a taco,” she says, and offers me a cigarette. I ask her for a light.

  After that Tracy’s my de facto best friend in Los Angeles. I say de facto because there aren’t any others, which makes her automatically the best, but secretly even if there were she’d be my favorite. She’s not like anybody on TV or back in Ludlow. She doesn’t give a shit about my straight A’s either, but she cares even less about pretty, and she wants to know about the words that buzz around inside my head. She’s real, the first real thing I’ve ever met, and she scares me just a little. Nobody’s ever scared me before.

  Tracy knows lots of people besides me, but they’re all guys with names like Critter and Squid who hang out on the sidewalk with a pit bull and spend their money on 40s. I’m pretty sure they all want to get in her pants, so none of them is really her friend.

  Right away they start in asking who’s the goody-goody, meaning me. Tracy always keeps us out on the edge of the group, only talking to Critter, but I can still hear them. I don’t dress like them in black jeans and once-white-now-brown wifebeaters, rags and patches, spikes and bleach. My clothes come from Wal-Mart in Ludlow; it’s not like I’ve got money to spend looking punk. My hair is brown, not green or dreadlocked orange, and I don’t hustle or shoot up. They call me Country Girl and holler things at Tracy. She never says much to them except fuck off, and they always just keep talking.

  But she goes back to Critter every couple days around sunset, finds him by the 7-Eleven or the alley, stands just in eyeshot till he leaves the pack and comes to her. I stick to her side till he pulls her over by the Dumpsters and I’m left there, shuffling, while Scabius yells shit at me from twenty feet away. When she comes back I breathe relief and take her to Benito’s Taco Shop, home of the famous rolled taco. She likes red beans or sometimes chicken.

  Besides Benito’s, we spend a lot of time at the donut shops around Santa Monica and Vine. Twin Donut, Fancy Donut, Tang’s Donut, Winchell’s. Twin has the best coffee but they kick us out faster than the others; they have a one-hour limit. Sometimes when the cops come in and check her out Tracy gets antsy and tells me “Let’s get out of here,” and I follow her even though I don’t have any reason to be scared of cops. Nobody’s looking for me.

  The day Tracy tells me about her dad, we’ve been kicked out of Twin Donut and cops have shown up at Tang’s to try and talk to her; we didn’t stick around long enough to find out what they wanted. So we’re reduced to hanging out at Winchell’s, the lowest rung on the donut ladder. They’ve got a special: two donuts and a jumbo coffee, and I eat the donuts while she drinks. I almost never see her hungry.

  The thing that gets me is how matter-of-fact she is. I mean, it’s not like I expect her to cry or something; she never does and besides I know enough to know that after a while you dry up. But it’s more than not crying: she sounds like a news anchor, the way her voice loses its edges and she reports the facts. No details, just facts, like she’s telling the story of someone else and doesn’t know their insides, the way things smell and feel.

  It started when she was ten. She never told her mom. First he just came in sometimes past bedtime; by six months later he split her open every other night. After five years she snuck out and didn’t leave a note. She had a sister, who’d be ten about now. Sometimes at night around bedtime she thought of hitching home, breaking a window and stealing her back.

  I want to ask her why didn’t she do it. I’d go with her if she wanted, we could cut the screens together. I had a knife. I look at her looking down at the Formica table and I can see it, us up on Cahuenga by the on-ramp, thumbs out, headed east into too-bright sunrise, squinting it out till we hit the desert and dust got in our mouths. We’d plot out our plan of action like a couple of spies, get in and out of the house without even leaving handprints. I’d help her; I’d know how once we were there.

  It’s quiet at our table for a minute, inside the sound of donut orders and where’s the sugar for the coffee and a drunk guy muttering in the back about new shoes and socks. Nobody’s ever told me something like that before. Something real. I watch Tracy pick at her fingernails, scrape dirt from under them like she knows they’ll never really be clean. I want to ask her why doesn’t she do it, go home, get her sister, and I try to think of how to say it without sounding like I think I know something, because I don’t. The quiet swells while I try to think of ways to say things till finally she drains her coffee and stands up. “I gotta go,” she says. “Critter’s waiting for me at Benito’s.” I want to tell her to wait, give me one more minute and I’ll have something to say, but I don’t. I just trail her out the door and back onto the street.

  Somehow we never wind up at that Winchell’s again, and I never can bring up her dad. It makes that day a bubble, contained in itself and fragile. Sometimes I look at her and I can feel it: the Formica of the table, sick-sweet of coconut donuts, the bitter black of sludgy coffee and the glare of buzzing light, all tucked in a pocket inside me. In that bubble she’s still saying things nobody knows and I’m still wordless, not knowing how to fill the space she opened up, but wanting to and watching her and staying with her after, following her so she’ll know that I won’t leave. The bubble edge around that day makes it not just a memory but a secret, and I hold on to it like I could keep it safe. When the boys show up and Tracy switches seats to sit with Critter I roll it over in my mouth, rub it in my fingers like a stone and think: You guys will never touch this.

  Critter isn’t Tracy’s boyfriend. I don’t know how I found that out really; I just know after a while, the way you know a place, the way it smells, the angles and the corners. Sometimes she goes and meets him or talks to him off on the edges where I can’t hear, but that’s all. She never talks about him when he isn’t there.

  Still it makes me mad when she leaves me to meet him.

  She always comes back quiet, neck stiff from slouching, and won’t look me in the eye. It takes me an hour of sitting there not asking questions before she’ll start talking again.

  Once I tried to ask her where they’d gone and her eyes went slitty. Right then she reminded me of a coyote I’d seen in a petting zoo when I was nine. Everything else was baby goats and sheep and cows, and there was this coyote in a chicken-wire cage, trying to find a place to hide. But there was nowhere to go so it just stood there, backed into the corner of the cage it was trapped in, and watched the people point at it. Tracy was like that right then, and I felt like a kid with my fists full of petting-zoo food.

  After that I never ask her where they’ve been or where she came from. It kind of makes it magic: she disappears and then shows up again like someone waved a wand. I still feel something knot up underneath my chest when she leaves, though. I guess it’s what people call jealous. I’ve never cared about anyone enough to be jealous before, and even though the inside of my chest is crawling, I also kind of love her more that she could make me feel that way.

  To make the time she’s gone pass quicker, I start walking. I never get farther than Alameda on the north end or Olympic on the south, and othe
r than Burbank I never leave Hollywood. I know there’s way more of the city spread out beyond those edges, enough to wear out three pairs of shoes if I tried to walk it all. But I kind of don’t want to. I like the feeling of knowing it goes beyond what I could see or touch or travel, always more out there somewhere. There are all these names I’ve heard but still can’t picture: Brentwood, Inglewood, Glendale, Echo Park. I want to keep the words inside my head and the places unfamiliar. It leaves open the possibility that one of the places inside the names is magic. Even if I know it isn’t true, at least then I can’t prove it isn’t.

  Inside that cross-street box, though, I go everywhere: down Sunset, up Highland, on La Brea toward the fenced-off tar pits. I spend a lot of time on the tourist strip of Hollywood Boulevard, by the shops that sell pictures of celebrities left over from the ’80s. The falafel is cheap there and it’s one of two stretches of street I’ve found where people actually walk around. Tracy taught me to panhandle so I wouldn’t use up all my savings, and most places it’s pretty hopeless, with the strangers closed inside their air-conditioned cars. But that part of Hollywood is full of people, and Wisconsin Kansas Utah tourists all feel guilty when they see the TV-movie runaway out on the street begging for change. They think if they flip me a quarter they’ll stave off my descent into the naked grainy-video underbelly of the city, so they always drop their change and keep on walking.

  Lots of people keep on walking in L.A. Or driving, but either way it’s the same: they look forward and keep moving past. The strip-mall signs draw your eye up and out, away from what’s happening at street level, near your own skin, and you just thread through it all, keep the blinders on, wind in your ears. Sitting on the sidewalks I see it over and over. One time I’m coming out of the 7-Eleven when a little girl falls on the concrete. She must be about six, just trips and falls like six-year-olds do, scrapes her grubby knees and starts crying. Her junkie-skinny dad just keeps on walking. But she won’t follow. She’s still little enough to know when something hurts you don’t get up and walk away from it, so she sits there till he comes back.

  When he does he still won’t touch her, though, or talk. Just slouches over her scraped-knee sobs and lets her cry, staring at the sidewalk or I don’t know what. Finally I get in front of him, squat down and ask her “Are you okay?” She skitters behind his skeleton legs and clings to his acid-washed jeans, staring out at me through dirt and snot and tears. He doesn’t move. His eyes are like the wax museum. “Man, give your kid a hug,” I say. “She’s crying. Just hug her. It’ll fix it.” He looks through me like I’m only a voice, but bends down and puts his hand on the edge of her shoulder. He doesn’t even really touch her, just the air around her, like he thinks her skin will hurt him. It doesn’t make her stop crying at all.

  He’s so skinny and his eyes are dead; it’d be so easy to shove him out of the way so I could grab that girl and hold her. But she cowers behind him like I’m a thing she needs to be protected from. Like he’ll protect her. After a while he pulls her up by the armpit and keeps on walking again. She stumbles to catch up to him, says “Daddy, Daddy,” still thinking he might hear her.

  All day after I watch them walk away I hold that girl inside my head.

  When Tracy comes back later I tell her about them. “Motherfucker,” she says. “We should go find that fucking guy and take his daughter and raise her ourselves.” And I know if we could find them that she’d do it. That’s why I love Tracy. I could never tell her but I know she’s just like that little girl, with her ratty hair and grimy weasel face and skittery eyes. But she quit clinging to the skeleton legs of the daddy that didn’t touch her right, wiped the snot off her cheeks and learned to look strangers straight in the face. That’s why I love her.

  I want to say Well come on then, let’s go get a flashlight and troll through the streets till we find them, smoke out every house in L.A. so they’re forced into the outside where we can see them, take that girl and grab her in our arms and run. But I know that it can’t happen so I don’t. Instead I say “Let’s get a taco.”

  When we’re a block from Benito’s I see that Critter and the guys are there. I want to tell her that I changed my mind, I want donuts instead. But they already saw us. As we walk the last few yards I hold my breath, hoping Tracy won’t get sucked into Critter-world and leave me waiting for our food. But when we get there Tracy just marches to the counter, orders red beans and rice, and asks me for two dollars. It’s only a dollar thirty-seven but I let her pocket the change.

  We’re about to take off when Scabius asks me for a blowjob. Actually he doesn’t ask; he tells me to give him one or get off their piece of sidewalk. It rolls out of his mouth easy, like he’s asking for spare change, but then he lets it hang there, won’t let me pass it by. Critter laughs and no one else says anything and Scabius goes “Well, how about it, Country Girl?” I can feel the corner I’m backed into even in the open air of sidewalk and the seconds stretch out like they do when you’re stuck in fight-or-flight and can’t do either one. My face gets hot. I can’t look at Tracy. She could go either way, I think: leave me to fend for myself like her sister or search me out and save me like the scraped-knee sidewalk stranger girl. These guys have been there longer than me.

  After just about forever Tracy says “Fuck you.” It comes out like ice, or glass, or steel. When I turn around her eyes aim past me like I’m not even there. “Don’t pull that shit, you fucking coward,” she says, and spits on the sidewalk at his feet. A little of it flies off and hits him. It looks like she’s not quite finished, like she wants to say something else; her jaw clenches and she’s pointing something at him sharper than any knife I’ve ever seen. His face turns pink through the orange of his freckles. She’s skinnier and stragglier than all those guys, a little dried-out weed against the wind of them, but there is something in her fierce enough to change her size. It whittles her down till she’s skeleton-small, swells her up till she fills the whole street, all at the same time like Alice, and her edge turns sharp and scary. Scabius stares at her and she stares back, so hard it seems like it could hurt him, her eyes bigger than themselves and drilling through the air. I’ve never seen Tracy talk to Scabius before, and I’ve never seen her look like this. Squid keeps his gaze on them but doesn’t say anything; Rusty can’t watch. The air’s thick and the silence is loud; it seems like someone might get hurt even though no one’s doing anything but talking. It’s enough to make Critter say “Yeah, come on, man, let it go,” and then the rest of them fall like dominoes and the air thins.

  Nobody’s ever sworn for me before, let alone changed size. I want to say thank you, but she won’t look at me.

  The rest of that day Tracy’s as silent as she is about her dad since that day that we talked, and I know not to ask if she’s going to still hang around with Critter and those guys or what. But part of me wonders if maybe that was it, if she took sides and now she’ll stick to her story. I want it to be true too much to ask.

  But that night up on Hollywood her eyes start moving around again. She goes and gets me a falafel, looks at the sidewalk, and tells me she’s got an errand to run. I know what that means: Critter. It makes my stomach this weird yellow sort of sick, and I don’t know whose side it puts me on, but I breathe in and say “Okay,” and wait for her outside the Wax Museum.

  An hour later, as sunset turns the sky orange and the buildings black, I spot Tracy headed up the block toward me, fast: head thrust up, eyes forced open. When she gets close to me I can see the blood. When she gets closer I can see her cheek is turning purple. He did that to her. “Oh shit,” I say, and run the rest of the way, and when I get to her I pull her into my chest without thinking, hard, a scraped-knee girl with nobody to hide behind. She stumbles, surprised, and for a second I get scared I’ve backed her in a corner and she’s about to bolt. I don’t want her to run, so I don’t ask her anything. I shut my mouth and close my eyes and she lets me hold her there, like that, as the sun sinks down behind us.

/>   The next morning she says she’ll be right back and looks me straight in the face, no shifty eyes. I don’t ask where she’s going, but the way she looks at me I can tell she’ll come right back. She walks off south and half an hour later comes back grinning, grabs me by the arm, and says “I’m finished with that motherfucker. No more Critter. Take me someplace else.”

  We walk north, away from Benito’s and the hostel, the donut shops on Santa Monica, to places she hasn’t been before: the Church of Scientology with its polished halls full of drones with weirdo glassy eyes, La Brea Tar Pits set up like Prehistoric Land with plastic mammoths, the L.A. River up in Burbank where you can scale the railings, drop down and walk the asphalt banks for miles. Two nights in a row we hike to the observatory and sleep where the hills open up, skyline blends into stars, and it glitters till the light lulls you to sleep. All the places I went while she was off with Critter I take her to, and all of them are better with her there.

  The third morning she gets antsy, though, and calls it homesick. She starts smoking lots of cigarettes and says the city feels too big, like it could swallow her. She promises that she won’t talk to him, won’t leave again, but could we head back down there, just for a day or two, where the sidewalks are familiar? I’ve never figured her to be a small-town type like that, nervous when the world reminds you that it’s bigger than you’ll ever know, but I know what she means. Some nights I miss the strip of road outside my house in Ludlow, and I feel it too. I swallow the hot doubt clumped in my throat and say okay.

  Over the next few days the antsy gets worse. She’s out of money, that’s part of it; but there’s something else too, an edge that keeps her broke because nobody will stop to give her anything. Even the trannie prostitutes turn their backs to her when she tries to go and talk to them. I start buying cigarettes so I’ll have some the second she runs out; when I don’t have any she starts pacing parking lots, looking to bum them from strangers. They get scared of the size-shifting glint in her eyes and she barks at them, swears at their backs as they walk away. It embarrasses me. She bites her nails till her fingers are bloody, and sometimes when she thinks I’m asleep I can hear her cry. She doesn’t want to leave our stretch of Sunset but she can’t sit still, won’t stay in one place; she seems like she’s looking for something but she’ll never say what.