Working alone was so much harder than with a crew, as I was used to. With no one to talk to, my mind gnawed through the hard question of where to sleep tonight.
By eight o’clock, as I raked the empty lot smooth by streetlight, my legs shook under me and my lungs burned, as if I’d run a marathon.
When Maggie came out to see the finished job, she shook her head in admiration. “I never thought a patch of dirt would look beautiful to me! You’ve saved us so much time and money—it means a lot, Travis.”
“You took my mom in. It worked out for both of us.”
She beamed at me. “It did, didn’t it?” Her face clouded then. “I wish I had more to tell you about your mother’s health. She’ll have a doctor’s appointment next week; that’s the soonest we could schedule it.”
“It’s okay.” I’d been to see Mom and found her chatting a little with her roommates and getting out of bed occasionally for one or two hours.
“It’s so nice here, Travis,” she’d said. “Tell me about your place.”
“It’s really good, Mom,” I’d said, grateful that she wasn’t well enough to suggest a trip over to see my fictional home.
I loaded up the chain saw and took off for the shower at the Community Center. Every part of me hurt. I was filthier than I’d ever been, like an avalanche with eyes. Dirt caked my hair all the way down to the roots and made gritty sounds between my teeth. It had gotten inside all my clothes. Even my socks and briefs had dirt in them.
All I could think of right now was a shower, almost feeling the hot water pounding my body, washing away dirt and pain.
The door was locked. A sign that I’d never noticed before said the facilities closed at eight.
I pulled on the door handle, hard, more out of anger and frustration than anything else. I had to have a shower. Now. As I pulled, loose dirt fell from my arms and clothes, powdering the concrete under my feet.
I wanted to beat down the door, but forced myself to think. I walked around the small building which housed the bathroom and shower facility, looking for a way in. The building had no alarm system, from what I saw.
It was wrong, what I was doing—I knew it. Breaking and entering. But I was going to get in there. Period.
A small window caught my eye. It was open an inch. When I couldn’t remove the screen, I pulled a little jack knife from my pocket and carefully cut it from its frame, then slid the glass open. It screeched a bit, making me stop a couple of times and wait, scared someone had heard me.
I was lucky to get my shoulders through the window. The rest of me followed easily.
Inside, I shut the window I’d come through, wedged the front door shut with a trash can, and stripped by flashlight. I planted myself under the hot water, letting it pound my tired muscles, soaping up and scrubbing every inch of my body.
A few times I jumped at a small sound, thinking someone was trying to come in or imagining the police outside, ready to burst in and arrest me. But I managed to wash, dry myself, brush my teeth and dress without a problem. Then I went back and re-opened the window an inch. I might need to get in that way again.
Quietly, I let myself out and drove away. My fingerprints were everywhere, but five people could testify that I showered there every morning. And now I had a bigger problem: where to sleep.
I found a quiet residential street close to the Center where two streetlights were burned out, making it darker than usual. Normally, streets in rich areas were better maintained, but I figured Josh had been too busy counting toilet paper rolls to keep up with the light bulb situation.
My weekend of hard labor was taking its toll. Every muscle in my body ached. My eyes kept closing on their own, as I struggled to keep them open. I climbed into the back seat with the pillow and blankets I’d brought from what I’d once thought of as home, curled up, and fell asleep.
##
Tap, tap, tap.
The sound skated on the surface of my consciousness. Then, louder.
Tap, tap, tap.
“Open up! Now!”
I shot up from the car’s back seat, my body awake even as my mind struggled to regain consciousness. “Who’s there?” I croaked.
“Police.”
Moving as if I were in molasses, I got myself over the window and rolled it down. I didn’t know the time, but it was still dark.
“Out of the car.” He was an older cop whose sad eyes made me think of Perkins a little. His hair was all gray, though, and his face heavily lined.
I got out, standing barefoot in the road, shivering in my sweats.
“ID?”
“It’s in my jeans.” Without thinking, I yanked open the door to the back seat and leaned in to grab my wallet.
The next thing I knew, he had pulled me back roughly, throwing me against my car. “Hands in front of you! Spread your legs!”
Heart pounding, I obeyed. I could have taken this guy out easily except that his gun pretty much evened the playing field. He ran his hands over me, finding nothing, then cuffed me and dragged me into the back seat of his police cruiser. “Sit here while I search your car.”
I shook with cold and fear, thinking please God don’t arrest me. I tried to stay calm. What could I say to him?
After a few minutes, he trudged back, my wallet in his hand. Instead of weapons or drugs, he’d found my valid driver’s license, fire department ID for the Discoverers group, and a card that said “I gave blood at Santa Alicia Hospital.”
“Don’t you know it’s illegal to sleep in your car in the city of Santa Alicia?”
“No. Sorry. I just… didn’t know where else to go. I lost my home a few days ago.” Maybe this dude would cut me some slack, even though he didn’t give a rat’s ass about me.
He looked me over for a minute or two. “You go to school? Or work?”
“I work for a brush clearance company. And I’m in the Discoverers program at Santa Alicia fire station.”
“Yeah, I saw that.” He held up my ID card. “Look, ya can’t sleep here, okay? I’m going to have to ask you to move on.”
“No problem. Thanks.”
He uncuffed me. “A word of advice. No sudden moves around a police officer. I thought you were going for a gun. That’s why I searched you.”
“I’ll remember.” I practically ran back to my car, jumped in and locked the door. Muggers and perverts I could handle, but a cop who might give me a criminal record scared the living crap out of me.
My cell phone showed the time as two o’clock in the morning. My feet were freezing. I didn’t know where to go. I drove around for half an hour until I finally just pulled over in a strip mall parking lot and crawled into my back seat, thinking the worst part was the loneliness. I’d never felt so alone in my life.
I dozed, waking up every hour or so, then drifting back to sleep, until the grinding and clashing of metal woke me up five. The garbage trucks had arrived.
Work started in two hours, meaning I would have to see Benny. I hadn’t heard a word from him since I took the chainsaw. I headed for the Community Center, where I could at least wash my face and brush my teeth before I faced the firing squad.
On the Street
Benny had no hello for me this morning. He checked over the chainsaw, then settled it into the back of his truck. Tightening his jaw, he studied me from under his usual backward baseball cap. I’d never realized before that a pair of shoulders could emanate rage.
“Good thing, Travis, this chain saw still work fine. And good thing you leave me that message. Otherwise, you be in jail right now.”
“It was for charity. I thought you wouldn’t mind helping out homeless women.” It sounded lame, even to me, and even though I knew it was true.
Benny’s mouth twisted. “Don’t bullshit me. You think you can take another job and use
my
equipment? Without even asking?” He went off in a torrent of Spanish.
I studied my scuffed, worn boots and waited for Benny to hand out my sentence.
“I’m letting you go,” he said. “The season— it’s more slow now anyway, and I must decide who goes when. You make it easy for me.”
“But Ms. Val recommended me…”
“So that you will stay in school. Which you do not. But I keep you anyway. I tell Maria, that boy knows how to work! But, now…..” His fingers moved in the air, as if to flick away an imaginary piece of lint or scum.
“Okay.” I focused on a door handle of Benny’s truck, taking in its curving lines and the highlights of white and silver. He kept his truck clean. “I’m sorry, Benny.”
“Me, too.”
I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other to return to my car. A way up the hillside, Tiny and Rammer looked on. Those two derelicts were staying, while I got kicked out.
Just keep moving your feet
.
An hour later, I was at Jake’s Burgers, getting it up the ass from Jake. “Travis, man, I got nothing for you. Between the rib joints and the vegans, I can’t move burgers the way I used to.”
Before my shift at the Community Center, I also put in applications at two gas stations, a hardware store, and a Home Warehouse. I’d get something else. I always did.
But this had hurt. I’d gotten fired because I did something wrong. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.
It was starting. I was turning into my dad.
##
I wasn’t homeless, I told myself. I still had a place in the world.
The old Chevy was now my home.
While in my mind the driver’s seat was still my car, the front passenger seat had morphed into my office. I kept my GED prep materials in my file cabinet, a bag on the floor. My glove compartment was my desk drawer, while a clipboard became my desk top. I spent part of my crummy little stock of cash on a car cell phone charger, since I needed a functioning phone to get a job.
The back seat was my bedroom, where I kept a pillow, flashlight, and a couple of neatly folded blankets. My closet was two plastic garbage bags on the floor of the back seat.
A cooler in the trunk served as my refrigerator. The rest of the trunk was my storage room. I decided I would keep as much as I could in the trunk, so the car didn’t look so obviously lived in.
I would shower and shave every day at the Community Center, clean and trim my nails, and invest in more cologne, no matter how much it cost. I couldn’t afford to smell bad or get that weathered, desperate look that instantly read
homeless
.
And, as usual, I would tell no one.
It turned out Perkins was taking a week off, which I reported to Brandon. He scowled, while I tried to keep any expression off my face. It enraged me to see him enjoy this.
“Alright, well, just so long as you tell him the minute he gets back!”
“I will! Jeez, Brandon, gimme a break.”
The self-righteous little turd. He should try living my life for even a day. Then I told myself,
suck it up, Travis.
Brandon was an asshole, but he was right. I had to tell Perkins, give up the fire service dream, and focus on getting some form of legal paid employment. If I never did anything more in life than support myself, I’d be a better man than my father.
Evasion
Zoey and I saw each other whenever we could outside of work, meeting at her house and always ending up in bed. “Let’s go out,” one of us would say, but then I would start exploring her collarbone with my lips. Or she would do some tiny thing like slide a fingertip inside the waistband of my jeans, inviting me to pin her down on the bed and take advantage of her. It was easy to be swept away by the hot, delicious awesomeness of staying home.
On one of those nights, I lay beside her, drifting, spent, unable to even lift my head. I somehow managed to pull a drowsy Zoey toward me, wondering what time it was.
I wanted her again, but couldn’t move. Was it Friday night? Or Saturday morning? These days, time went by in dollars. The time was forty-eight dollars. That’s what was left of Benny’s last pay check.
I still didn’t have a job.
I’d hoped to get Perdido Lumber. I was perfect for them, and they knew it. I could cut and carry boards, handle a cash register, charm the few women customers, and relate to men customers.
“Thing is, we already made another offer,” the manager had said. His name was Scotty and he had giant hairy eyebrows that moved like two caterpillars across his forehead. “The asshole has to think about it!” His voice went into a growl as if he couldn’t imagine anything more outrageous. Behind him, a table saw screamed through a four by four, while the smell of cedar filled the air.
I wondered why the “Help Wanted” sign was still up in the window. “When will you know?”
Scotty shrugged as if I’d asked an impossibly difficult question. “It’s the owner’s nephew. He does things on his own time, while the rest of us wait, thank you very much!”
“I’ll check back with you.”
A rustling beside me as Zoey stirred and turned over. “I dozed off for a minute.”
“Yeah.” I couldn’t stop myself from heaving a big sigh.
She put her hand on my face. “You look so serious.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Travis, I know something’s been on your mind! Why won’t you tell me?”
It was scary how fast my moods changed these days. I felt myself turn inward, sullen, uncooperative. “I’m fine, okay?” I hated being like this around Zoey. But I’d rather be an asshole than pathetic.
“All right, well. Maybe some time when you’re ready.”
Seeing the worry in her eyes, I hugged her, and she wiggled herself closer to me.
“Do you want to go to the park with me and my brothers on Saturday? After Discoverers?”
“Uh…” Brandon expected me to tell Perkins on Saturday morning. I was tied to a railroad track, and the train was coming. I had no way to stop it.
“Or, maybe…,” she backtracked, “it’s not a good idea?” It was the first time she’d offered to introduce me to any members of her family.
“No, it’s cool. I’d like to meet them.” I would live the next few days as if the upcoming catastrophe didn’t exist.