BLACK MARKET LIT
About Konner Knudsen.
Darkness on the Edge of Town
KONNER KNUDSEN is an Oregonian born and raised and watches Portlandia because it is mostly based on fact. He has a BA in English-Writing from Western Oregon University. Loves dogs and doesn't trust cats. Loves videogames, mythology, and discussions involving the possibility that we are in fact all in "The Matrix". One day he hopes to be one of those awesome writing professors that really knows how to drop the creative holy-hand-grenade in a classroom. He is a firm believer that telling stories is by far the most important thing we do besides breathing.
Stories/ more about him/ rambling
Konner thinks each of these stories are connected to the theme of change. They are each realistic fiction pieces dealing with life, death, loss, transition and growth. Writing is therapeutic and sometimes escapism, but often times it is a way to reorganize our experiences and tell our stories. At the end of the day, if he has even a single line that someone else was able to connect with and gain something from he will be happy.
His fingers fumbled with the lighter in his pocket, too chilled by the cold mountain air. She was on her way he was sure, but he was slowly pacing back and forth. Gas stations make for good meeting places, lighting midnight with their neon light. She had to show up tonight.
He stared down the hill to the dim street lights of their town, and pondered the emptiness of its one main street. He hummed to himself a tune he couldn't name. A song his dad used to play, before the plant closed and whiskey bottles replaced guitar.
Everyone was tired in his town, like they all suffered from constant hangovers, except for her. To him she was exciting, like a carnival passing through town. Full of mystery, beauty and wonder. The week before they had decided to finally leave. It was what all the kids in the town had talked about but very few did.
Nervously chewing on his bottom lip, he checked his watch and reassured himself she would arrive any minute in her dad's car. The plan was simple, the old bastard usually passed out by eleven. She probably was just packing and writing a note. He had on his favorite pair of jeans, the shirt she liked best and a photograph of his mom. He had snagged the lighter from the open palm of his blacked-out father.
He walked around back and puffed a new cigarette to life, gazing out into the forest. That late the town was always hushed by the swaying trees and he was sure it was all he would miss. He lost himself watching their shadows sway to and fro.
When he was too small to fight back the drunken blows he would flee to the woods. That was where they met years ago, each showing off bruises and scars. She showed him her favorite spot high up in one tree, overlooking all of town. Together they would laugh and pretend the people below were just ants.
Suddenly He heard sirens. Never before had fear hit his heart with such a heavy hammer. cigarette dropping from his lips he bolted down hill. When he reached the main drag red and blue ebbed at the far end. It was her dad's truck. The wind couldn't keep pace with his feet.
Mom never understood my silence. When she gave me the news I just froze up and stared at the light on our porch and watched moths flutter around it. She was sobbing and going through the details and trying to explain what part failed and why. She talked in doctor’s terms which always made people sound like machines. My dad wasn’t a robot. She needed that disassociation, that verbal denial. She was having a hard time with it all and I wasn’t there. Other family members crowded, hugged, and sobbed. I stood off to the side.
All I could imagine was my dad's body, stretched out on a cold metal slab in a coroner's office. Examined and dissected like a frog in high school biology. I wanted to throw up. I thought about how organic we are, biodegradable. How we always end up in a casket like a human jack-o-lantern, so much less than we were. I didn’t want to see my dad like that. Mom kept asking me if I was okay and I just kept nodding. I really wasn’t, but she didn’t need to know, no one did.
My older brother had left after hugging Mom and with sad sunken eyes asking me, " Are you going to be alright?" to which I could only nod slightly, watching a fat brown moth bump into a fatter white moth on accident. As my brother drove off with his girlfriend to escape not the sadness of the house but its emptiness, I noticed Mom's trembling hands, her cigarette burning itself away, ashes dropping down onto one of her gold rings.
It's the emptiness left behind that kept Mom and I sitting on the porch for hours. How could we go inside without Dad's clicking keyboard in the office, without his booming voice in the kitchen, without his witty critiques and commentary of the evening news? I didn’t want to be in that hollow house. I wanted to leave. I had no car –dad's was still in the drive way, but it just wouldn’t have felt right taking it. Mom was talking about the things we would need to do in his memory, tributes we had to make.
"Let's go to Montana every summer and buy ridiculously expensive fireworks. He loved doing that." She took a drag off the dying cigarette and lit a new one from its embers. "Or we can buy a motor home and take it cross country, looking at every stupid landmark on the way, Worlds Biggest Frying Pan here we come. Oh God, he would have loved to see that," she said staring into the dark street and taking another drag.
We sat like that in silence a while, her chain smoking and rambling and me watching the moths. Finally mom pressed me for some kind of response beyond a nod, “Don’t you have anything to say? You have always been such a quiet kid I hate that because I never know what's going on, but I can tell well enough when you are sad, and you should be sad. What are you thinking?"
I didn’t bother lying or hesitating I just told her the truth, “I have been thinking about moths for a long time now. How they seem so god damn interested in that light."
"You are thinking about moths? Your father died today and you are thinking about moths? I don’t understand." She was upset, and crying a little and grinding her teeth like she wanted to slap me.
“I am thinking about what the moths do when the light goes out. Do they still flutter around the bulbs fading warmth? Do they land and rest for a while or do they zoom off in search of a new sun to orbit? What do they do when the light goes out Mom?" She admitted she didn’t have the slightest clue.
I haven't been able to get the image out of my mind, I still dream about it sometimes, moths fluttering around the light and panicking when it is suddenly gone.
* * *
The day my family put my father into the earth I was a hundred miles away with my phone turned off. I sat at home with my roommate, Derek, taking hits off of his Gandalf pipe and hammering shots of whiskey, rum, and something that tasted like Big Red gum. I didn’t forget what day it was, I just didn’t go. I never have liked funerals, but who does? That wasn't really it. It was maybe that I didn’t want to see him so absent. When I was cross-faded enough that I began rambling about how pissed off I was that Pluto was no longer a planet, Derek stopped me.
"Did you . . . not love your dad or. . . I mean," He coughed out a cloud of smoke, "what's the deal bro?" I tried to ignore him, the room spinning, the darkness that seemed to gather in the corners where the light from our kitchenette didn’t quite touch in the living room. Shadows I can still picture growing like thickening cobwebs. He jostled me out of my stupor. "Really man. I want to know."
"Know about Pluto?” I looked up at the ceiling as if I could see the stars.
"No" Derek said in a serious tone. “How you feel about your dad?" He handed me a shot of rum, "How do you really feel?"
I lowered my head like an automaton, slowly, and with a jerking motion I turned my head, looked at him. "I loved my dad, but . . . It's hard to think of him being gone," I sipped a bit of orange juice, swished, swallowed, stared into the orange pools thinking of the summer I turned eleven. How just me and my dad went fishing, out where grandpa grew up. I thought about how the town where grandpa lived had been consumed by the forest. I remembered how my dad taught me how to bait a worm on a treble hook, and how to gut a fish the right way. I pictured my father disemboweled like a pharaoh before mummification, with all his organs placed in jars. I wanted to throw up.
"I did love my father, he wasn’t perfect, but I loved him. I guess it's just like that one British dude said ‘They fuck you up, your mom and dad. They may not mean to but they do' or something like that." My stomach was flipping sideways, "what about Saturn?" I slumped to one side and felt cold.
Suddenly Derek's spindly arm draped over my shoulders and I felt safe, and he said "it's okay man. Don’t worry about the planets."
I said, “I never felt good enough to be his son. I was always short of his expectations. Never came home with big enough medals. I never quite made his cut." And I dropped my head into my hot palms and rambled. Derek's hand drummed circles on my back until I felt strong enough to speak. "Now he's dead, and I can't prove myself to him. I didn’t get to say goodbye, what else is there to say?” I glugged more orange juice, and felt my mistake instantly.
"It's okay man, it's okay." Derek whispered as he partially dragged me to the bathroom where I threw up several times. On the edge of blacking out I watched the murky and chunky orange spiral into crystal clean bubbles. Derek gently patted some life back into me while making sure I didn’t let my head completely drop into the stinking bowl.
"Now I only have his empty shoes," I said, collapsing back into the toilet for an encore upheaval. Derek said, "At least you have those", and I remembered how on a different night, weeks earlier, our roles were reversed. I had learned the vague details of his unworthy father. A man who wore down everyone who belonged to him until they were brittle as beach wood and left them to rot. That man beat a tune into Derek's head hard enough that five years after the asshole put a bullet through his own skull I could still catch it in his son’s teardrops. Derek handed me a glass of water and asked “Did your father love you?" and I nodded, and I nodded, and I nodded.
We collapsed back onto our worn down couch and I tried not to cry. Alcohol and weed clouding my mind I blurted out, "What about Saturn?"
Derek chuckled and draped his arm back over my shoulder, leaned back mimicking my pose, stared at the ceiling and said, "What a gigantic ugly planet, and what's with all those damn moons? Why would anyone need so many damn moons?"
I felt a little more sober with my stomach cleared out. I lit a cigarette and watched it glow like a miniature sun, "Saturn is what the Romans renamed the Greek titan, Kronos, father of Zeus. He had killed his father and tried to eat his own children. "
Derek laughed and stole my cigarette. "Now that guy sounds like a real asshole." He took a large drag, and exhaled a thin nimbus into our fictional sky, "You're going to be okay man." I felt my eyes grow heavy; Derek's repetitive reassurance was beginning to work.
"I wonder if my father made it to Styx, I wonder if he's made it across." I mumbled, my head dropping to his shoulder.
"I don’t know what you're trying to say, but that band is awesome."
I said, "Maybe when I die we can go fishing, maybe he will be there waiting, cutting up fish, stalling the boatman, waiting to see his sons. Waiting to see me."
Derek told me again, "You're going to be just fine man." And that time I truly believed him.
I thought of my father's grave, a hundred miles away, tucked in a cemetery next to a forest. Of the flowers left on the mounded dirt, the rain that fell softer there out of respect. I imagined the constellations and planets poured across the sky and always looking down on his tombstone. I felt sleep carry me off in its arms slowly into darkness, consuming me as the forest did the town, as it will my father's grave.
* * *
Derek always made fun of my job. How I sit all day watching people travel north or south and I am always stuck in the same spot selling gas, cheap beer, poisonous food, expired condoms and cassette tapes. I tell him that at least I get to meet a wide variety of tweakers and stoners and old retired couples in RV's headed nowhere. I make fun of Derek for working in the cafeteria, I tell him it makes him smell like a deep fryer. He tells me it is there he meets over half of the girls he fucks. He tells me that he keeps a stack of napkins with his number written on them in his pocket. We laugh. I explain why my job really is complete shit and he listens.
I tell Derek how my truck stop bathroom is one of those places, which if blindfolded I could still identify by its specific stench of industrial cleaner and crap. The cleaner smell fails to mask the layers of piss that have missed the pot and the particles of shit that cling in microscopic ways I try not to think about. Scrape your shoes on the floor and you can hear the granules of sand grate against the grimy tiles littered with cigarette butts. The lights are always flickering and humming fluorescent. The porcelain you wish you didn’t have to touch is always unsettlingly warm.
You avoid touching anything around you, especially the moldy walls decorated by untalented graffiti artists. A part of me wishes to join the endless dialogue between strangers who never meet, mark walls covered with disjointed messages often rude but sometimes honest. Next to me somebody who hasn't lost hope wrote, "You are better than this." And next to that someone drew a surprisingly detailed sketch of a fork-tailed demon wearing a Nixon mask screwing what I interpret to be Jesus, but could just be a generic hippy in a tie-dye T-shirt.
The toilet paper is always the same brand that they only sell to truck stops, motels that charge by hour, and public schools. It is impossible to get it out of the consistently broken dispensary in anything but torn half-sheets. Derek says that “in matters of shit one must always remain calm." I laugh and nod.
We trade hits off of a bong longer than my arm and we laugh about our jobs and the people we see. He tells me about how a girl texted him right away after she sat down and found one of his napkins on her tray. He told me she had him fuck her in the handicap stall on his lunch break. How later that week he sold a hamburger to that girl’s boyfriend. I asked him if he felt bad and he shook his head and said, "I gave him extra bacon, that’s the best way to indirectly apologize isn't it?" I tell him how I once wrote a poem to some girl in an art class I had freshmen year. He asked what her name was. He had fucked her too.
I don’t tell Derek that I actually was the one who wrote, "You're better than this" on the wall of the truck stop bathroom, or that I have rewritten it ten times, and that some asshole keeps crossing them out. I also don't tell him that once a month or so I slip my number into his napkins before he takes them to work just for fun. How once or twice I had gotten a text from a girl he handed out a napkin with my number written on it but didn’t know how to respond.
Sometimes I wonder what sort of things Derek didn't tell me.
* * *
The first time I saw Derek working on one of his sculptures was when I went into Derek's room to tell him I was going to be an uncle. I found what appeared to be a crudely glued together pile of recycling. There were splayed open milk jugs and bisected juice cartons tied together with zip ties and duct tape creating nothing recognizable. The room smelled like red spray paint and Derek was clearly rocking out in the corner with a bong, his speakers blasting Green Day from 1995. According to Derek most of the bands new stuff was shit.
"What the fuck is this thing dude?" I shouted over the music just loud enough he turned.
"Huh?" he said, spinning down the volume on his speaker.
I pointed directly at the recyclables, “This? What the fuck is it?"
Derek coughed out a lungful of heavy smoke, “Therapy I guess" he shrugged and began trying to cut a tin can.
"Wait, so your therapist is having you make strange garbage statues?"
"Sculptures," he corrected me, "and I guess so, I am not supposed to think about it too much just make whatever comes to mind."
"Why out of garbage?" I asked, trying to figure out what "thing" came to his mind.
"Oh, that was my idea, pretty cool huh?" He proudly placed a used baseball on top covered in super adhesive. I began to notice how the sculpture was starting to look like a leg.
I shrugged, "Yeah I guess. Sorry if I broke your concentration." I started turning to leave.
"Wait! Did you need anything? What's up?" Derek asked looking at me while he snapped an old glow stick into its place.“Well. . . I guess I am going to be an uncle. "
"Wow. Really? That’s great right?" He stopped working on the sculpture to talk to me.
"I guess so"
"Your older brother right? Not the younger?"
"Yes the older, the other one just turned 12"
"Oh . . . well whatever, kids are crazy these days." We laugh a moment then Derek put on his serious face, "It doesn’t seem like you are excited."
“It’s just . . . my brother hasn't kept a steady job in over a year. Him and his girlfriend can't even seem to take care of their dog. My parents, I mean, my mom takes care of it for them." I nervously twitted my thumbs together.
"I am sure they will get their shit together for this." Derek wrapped more duct tape around the ankle of the sculpture.
"Hopefully."
"Well how do you feel about it?"
"I don’t know. . . I am excited to be an uncle, I guess."
"Well you seem kind of down about it."
"Well, they have had three abortions in the past. I guess they finally decided to keep one. It isn't even just them though, half my friends are either getting married or having kids, and I don’t even have a girlfriend."
I think maybe it is because of my dad, but I don't say it.
"It's more exciting than anything though right?”
"It is. I just am dealing with stuff still you know?"
Derek silently nodded and went back to work piecing the leg together. I sat in watching him work, taking long hits off of the bong and listening to Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana. He made it all the way up to the thigh before he asked me, "What are you thinking? You are totally zoned out bro." he was spray painting red toenails on to the foot.
I felt foggy and overwhelmed by life all of the sudden. I said, "Did I tell you about visiting Ripley's Believe It or Not? I stood next to the wax life replica of Walton Ladlow, the guy who was almost 9 feet tall. I feel like that."
"Too big?"
"No."
"Too small?"
"No. Stuck."
"Stuck how?"
"Like I am trapped in wax."
"Even now?"
"All the time."
He stared at me intently for a moment then smiled, "sounds like you should make a sculpture."
* * *
One time I walked down the highway with Derek watching him pick up the miscellaneous garbage tossed from the windows of truck drivers and eco-inconsiderate commuters. He talks about the failure of Oregonians to legalize weed the way Grandpa talks about Vietnam, as if it's continued illegitimacy is the end of the world. I think about how some people just like to do stuff because they aren't supposed to.
A single dirty pickup truck whines past us in a small cloud of dark grey smoke. Twenty yards ahead the driver tosses a small black disc out the window, a can of chew. Derek stopped ranting long enough to sigh. I smelled the dry thick smell of wheat dust from the field nearby, its edges tangled by plastic wrappers and indescribable junk. I remember the image of a noble Indian chief crying by the roadside. The tune of a Jim Morrison song, popped into my head and everything seemed more desolate.
Derek said, "THC can cure cancer"
I offered a skeptical grunt.
Angrily snatching up a soda can he says, “It can." Picking up an empty condom wrapper he says, “There have been studies".
I don’t bother arguing.
I watch as Derek picks up an empty Big Gulp with a latex glove like the doctor wears and shoves it into a black garbage bag. Sometimes I felt like he was doing community service and other times I felt he was just shoveling garbage to fuel his self indulgent eco-art, the gorilla Glued sculptures which had began to clutter our apartment. The strange figures that sometimes felt like unwanted guests. He tells me about how Marijuana cured his claustrophobia. I smiled and nodded as a minivan drove by, the driver tossing something out of the window and Derek was only half upset.
* * *
When I sat down in the living room uncluttered by Derek's sculptures I felt lonely. Despite the cigarette smell that we couldn’t get rid of with two bottles of Febreze and a scented candle-light Vigil, our townhouse wasn't too bad. Of course, before the townhouse I had lived in a decrepit hundred year old upstairs apartment that was clearly built for a midget and had lead paint hidden under a thin flakey veil of yellowing egg-shell white. When we looked at this apartment I was sold on a shower I wouldn’t have to hunchback underneath just to wash my hair. I guess I am easy that way. Derek was sold on the space of the downstairs, and the size of the closets in our rooms. I never knew why the large closets specifically excited him, he never had that much clothes. But I didn’t need to know the details to understand a general need for space, at some point we all hate being boxed in. It wasn't until later his rubber and plastic shrapnel sculptures began to fill our space, his space, the front lawn.
Derek told me how his sculptures, "reflect his pain", as we loaded a pop-can starfish into the truck.
I asked ,"what kind of pain does the Pot leaf reflect? "
His quick reply was, "Oppression".
To which I playfully added, "by the Munchies?" but instead of laughing Derek just glared. I thought about elbowing playfully but instead I pulled two cigarettes out of my packet and handed him one. We lit up.
I planned smoking my last nug later and listening to "Dark Side of the Moon" in sync to The Wizard of OZ.
We loaded Marilyn Monroe held together by rubber bands and dressed in plastic bags into the rental truck without talking about how her smile was a little too crooked, and I wondered what she looked like when they found her lying there lifeless. I wonder if they tried to fondle her awake or stood back in heavy sadness like the dwarves who couldn’t wake Snow White. I knew that the pain reflected there was his suicidal mom, and we didn’t need to talk about it again.
Derek was in one of his moods where he thinks nothing is funny and everything said about him is a criticism of some kind. He was probably just nervous about his big fancy art show and a little pissed off that I wasn’t coming. As we loaded the T-Rex with spark plug eyes and shattered headlight teeth I asked "what pain does Reptar here reflect?"
He smiled slightly and said, "My fears."
I paused, looking at the pink and green spray painted 6 foot trash dinosaur and said, "You are afraid of pink dinosaurs?"
He stifled a smile, "No. Not at all, just don’t worry about it, you wouldn’t get it".
I acted offended, I was good at getting things, especially his things, my attempts at brevity didn’t seem to be working but I wasn’t in a mood to give up. I crossed my arms, "Oh I see, you think I don’t get your art? I am not some wine sniffing Portlander that is about to talk about how abstract and creative your work is," finally cracking through part of his shell and making him smile again. I took on a fancy accent and said, “I think the dinosaur represents the artist’s fears of growing up, it is indeed a powerful and superb piece of art." He finally busted out some real laughter and dropped the bad attitude.
The funny thing is I do know what fear it represents to Derek, it represents love. Yeah, he is afraid of it. The clothesline of one-night-stands and two week relationships stretched back two years to when he got dumped by some girl he rarely mentions anymore. But I'm not an art critic, and I like it for what it is, the most beautiful pink spotted T-Rex I had ever seen.
With a devilish grin Derek prodded me in the ribs, "Come on, last chance, what are you going to do here? Jerk off all day and play videogames?"
I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Maybe, but I will probably just end up smoking hookah and watching bad movies on Netflix while pretending to read smarty-pants books."
He let out a belly laugh and said, "It's funny because it's true."
I grinned and loaded the last sculpture into the truck , a crab made out of an old tire with ragged looking claws made out of a dropped muffler chopped up and welded back together. "What pain does this thing represent?" I rapped a knuckle on its harsh metal top and flicked its big round eye that was an empty can of chew, "Your wide array of STD's".
We both busted out in laughter and he climbed into the cab of the truck still laughing, "See you next week," he said, leaving his hand out the window in a peace sign as he drove off.
I never thought I would miss those damn sculptures cluttering my house, but I felt so fucking alone. It may have been the paranoia generated by the weed I had smoked and Pink Floyd ringing in my ears, it may have been Dorothy saying "there's no place like home", but I felt like I needed to check on Derek. I texted him [Are you there yet?]
He didn’t reply.
* * *
It was strange seeing Derek's recycled art scattered across the road like wounded soldiers. The truck flipped on its side reminding me of the whales that wash up on the beach and don’t make it back to sea. I found Marilyn first, or rather I found her foot, the original shoddy piece Derek had thrown together months before. The therapeutic vision of his mother. I tried not to notice how much broken glass there was on the road, or the blood on the asphalt next to the cab of the truck.
Derek sounding delirious from pain meds or loss of blood demanded that I collect his sculptures from the highway before coming to see him. This was his way of keeping me busy. This was his diversion tactic. His sad attempt to hide the truth. I agreed to try but worked fast and left most of the sculpture carcasses in a heap next to the highway.
I could only think about if Derek was in one piece or not. I tried not to picture the broken bones, or the gurney he was on. Damn his voice was faint but in his short phone call he tried to make me laugh, " It's Just a flesh wound," he managed to cough into the phone before one of the nurses made him hang up.
My mind was a hive of nasty scenarios, but I tried to just focus on fitting the pink dinosaur I had found intact into the back seat of Derek’s car. Marilyn was sitting on top the dinged up crab, her leg and both of her arms curl next to each other on the floor. I hoped Derek was in a lot better shape than his sculptures.
I Remember driving to the hospital and praying with every fiber in my body that my best friend would be okay. I glanced up at the darkening sky, thinking of what kind of a deal I would need to make with Pluto to Derek out of Hades. I just wasn’t ready for more death. Passing an old barn that was getting pulled to the ground by overgrowth and rot I couldn’t help thinking that is what it must feel like to decay. I concentrated on the white lines on the road that blurred as I sped towards the hospital. I couldn’t stop asking myself the question: Where do we go when our light goes out?
The wind shield was shattered into a foggy spider web. His lungs burned desperately as he shouted her name. The paramedics blocked his view of the door and he was suddenly jerked back from the scene by the sheriff.
"It's okay" a choked up voice said from behind them, "I am gonna be okay." He turned to see her shaking and crying, clutching a backpack to her chest like a stuffed animal. An empty bottle of Wild Turkey rolled out of the broken cab and cracked on the asphalt.
They walked away from the lights and shouting to the other end of the boulevard. It was cold so he gave her his coat to wear over her sweatshirt. They found a seat at the all-night diner that was empty except for a broken down truck driver and a burnt out waitress.
She stared out the window at the bus stop outside, thinking of tomorrow, trying to forget broken things. He hummed, staring over the bus stop, over the houses, uphill, to the safe shadows of the whispering trees. The fingers of his right hand entwined with hers.
Where Do We Go?
Sometimes, still, the thing I long for the most is to remove my shoes and socks and plant my feet into freshly tilled soil. Even as a small child, I am told, I would tug and stretch at those tight toddler socks with puppy print or Power Ranger logos and run rampantly toward the nearest garden or potted plant. "No, no!" Mom would shout, "Don't get your feet dirty again!" But I was never one for listening. I would jam my feet in-between blades of grass or directly into the exposed earth and wriggle my toes until they disappeared into the dirt. My brothers called me crazy, my sister said it was gross, my father would talk about how "boys would be boys" and tell the same story about how he once ate a fifteen inch earthworm for only four dollars.
My grandpa was different, the one who lost a leg in "The War." A war that was only ever explained to me years later in textbooks and History Channel documentaries. Once, when I was nine, with feet buried to the ankles next to my grandma's rose bush, instead of yelling at me to "stop playing in the garden," or to "quit getting so gosh-darn dirty," he just plopped down right next to me.
He didn’t say anything right away, just took his time getting comfortable. He removed his shoes and rolled up the cuffs of his jeans. The foot that I always thought he might have stolen from a mannequin rested sockless next to the lawn gnome. The other sock he took his time removing, rolling it down and popping it off with a sigh leaded with both arthritis and relief. He wiggled his toes in the air and plunged his callused old foot into the dark damp earth inches away from mine.
"You know, this ain't so bad," Grandpa said with a chuckle, "It's sort of like burying your feet in sand at the beach, huh?" I nodded and smiled. "Yeah, I was quiet too at your age, and that’s okay." We sat for a while just like that, in total silence, our toes creating tiny earthquakes on the mounds that enveloped our feet. Later, as he refused my help, and struggled to stand up on his own, he looked at me with kind but intense eyes and said, "Never let anyone convince you to be normal," and slowly he walked back into the house.
* * *
I first met Em at the community garden. I was watching her over-water tomatoes from behind a row of thickening corn. She was like a piece of art that you can't pull yourself away from because there is some intangible thing that causes you to run your eyes along all its lines and search for hidden patterns in the brushstrokes. Three piercings in one ear, two in the other, a stud in her nose, maroon lipstick, unnaturally faded jeans and a zombie Captain America t-shirt. She was some form of punk and I looked like a bad REI ad that spent too much time in the garden.
Suddenly she turned to me, put a hand over her brow to block out the sun and said, "Hey Scarecrow, are you just going to stand there and scare off the birds or can you help a girl out?"
I was stunned at first, and embarrassed thinking that she knew I had been standing there for probably what was a creepy amount of time, but I managed a smile. Stepping around a cornstalk, I stuttered, “What… What exactly do you…need help with?”
"Watering the tomatoes. Next I am going to move on to the strawberries, although. . . I have never watered them before, figured you could show me the right amount." She talked while still raining water from the green plastic watering can on the already soaked tomatoes.
"Have you watered tomatoes before?" I asked, failing at not sounding like a jerk.
"Umm, no not really," she nervously smiled, "Am I drowning them?"
"Just a little bit," I lied.
"Oh. . . My bad," she said, handing me the watering can and holding out her other hand. I awkwardly shook it and she said, "I'm Em."
"Danny," I said, moving toward the strawberries trying not to think how if it rained that night all of the tomatoes would be done for.
"Yeah, you live in number twelve right?" Out of the corner of my eye she was gently pulling down a leaf on a corn stalk.
"Yup, how'd you know?" I tried to focus on the plants, feeling the leaves with tiny holes in them, hoping I wouldn’t find too many more the next day.
"Oh, ha! That sort of sounded stalkerish huh? I just moved in with my friend Alex who lives in seven."
"Alex . . . Alex . . . is that the dude with the beard who always wears a black Peacoat?" I knew it wasn’t, that guy lived in number six. I just wanted to contribute more to the conversation.
"No, My friend Alexis. She is blond. Usually seen in nursing scrubs or pajamas with pink bunny slippers. Still listens to the Spice Girls. Says you are always barefoot like you are right now." She kicked at some dirt underneath her Vans, the dust hit my heels.
"Oh her. At least she doesn’t blare Justin Bieber all day like the sixteen year old that lives next door to me." I tried to avoid the comment about my feet, even though I only really went barefoot in the garden. She laughed and walking through the corn loudly hummed the tune of the pop stars famous song "Baby". I was never a fan and judging from the way she laughed I guessed that she wasn’t either. I set down the empty water can and followed her into the corn.
"Holy shit!" Em called out, "I didn’t know there was this much space up here, it's a whole freaking cornfield." I caught up with her at the railing where she slumped against the bars to watch the people on the streets below. "When I came to the city," she turned to look at me, "the last thing I thought I would see is a bunch of corn growing on top of some old apartments like this. I mean this entire roof is just covered with plants."
"Yeah, I sort of helped out. Before I moved in here this roof was just boring grey concrete, there wasn’t any railing either. This took a whole lot of soil." I didn’t tell her how I had convinced the other tenants to petition the owner, and moved bag after bag of dirt up to the roof by myself.
"I'm not surprised, you seem to have a real green thumb." "I guess," somewhere inside of me a brave and foolish Danny thought he would take a chance and ask, "Would you want to get coffee sometime, I know a good place. Well this is Portland and here everyone knows a good place for coffee, but I promise my place is really good," I felt like I was rambling. I rubbed the back of my head and stared at the ground.
"No. I can't. Sorry," she said, looking back to the busy streets below, "I have a boyfriend."
It was sudden, it was unexpected , and I had no idea how to properly backpedal over the desperate jump I had taken. "Just-friend coffee then?" I said, instantly wanting to bury my palm into my stupid face. I thought of climbing over the railing just to escape the embarrassment.
Em laughed and pushed away from the ledge, "Sure, maybe some time we will have Just- Friend Coffee." Walking back through the corn she waved without looking back, "See ya around Scarecrow."
I finished watering the strawberries and sat down by the tomatoes not caring If I got wet at all. I wanted a ridiculously large anvil or grand piano to materialize out of nowhere and come crashing down on my head.
* * *
Grandpa's casket was carried by five guys who fought the war with him. One of them only had one arm but I remember him carrying his share of the weight. During his eulogy he told the mourning crowd the story of how they met in a military hospital, how they would joke about being willing to give an arm or a leg just to see home again.
Before the Cancer progressed too far Grandpa told me that after he was gone, I should consider heading north. He told me, "Maybe Seattle. I think you might like that town, good earth, soft grass." But I never made it past Vancouver. He would tell me to move around like he did, like a tumbleweed. In his life he had moved from South-East to North-East to South-West. I never asked why. His last words to me were, "Head North, try the soil, plant something for me."
I left the night after his funeral, packed a bag and hopped on Highway 1, took it all the way to Newport before heading inland. It was my first great road trip and in Oregon it seemed all roads led to Portland. As if the city itself was one big strange heart that all the States life flowed from and came back to. It was the right place for me to lose myself for a while.
* * *
My roommate Johnny didn’t need to ask what had happened when I started moping around the apartment and watching the street from the window. Instead of asking anything at all he waited until he could sneak up and peek over my shoulder to ask, "Which one are you in love with, Nurse Barbie or the chick who looks like she is trying to be Tank-Girl?" He didn’t give me a chance to answer, "Ha, who am I kidding we both know it isn't the Barbie."
"Doesn’t matter," I shrugged, "She has a boyfriend."
Jamming what must have been half a maple bar into his mouth he said, "So what?"dropping crumbs from his mouth onto my shoulder.
I brushed them off and nudged him away, " I'm not like that."
"Eh whatever, at some point we are all like that. Do you need a ride to work?"
I nodded while I watched a leather jacketed, spiked collar, green-mohawked anarchist toss Em over his shoulder and carry her into the building.
"Let's go man, quit staring out the damn window, plenty of other weird chicks in Portland. Hell, Comic Con is coming up if you really want a Tank-Girl you can probably find one there."
* * *
Johnny had gotten us jobs as Groundskeepers at the Oregon Zoo. It was peaceful there before the crowds arrived and the babies started wailing and bored teenagers snuffed out cigarettes on my grass. The Zoo was so much better without people.
At first I was afraid to go inside most of the enclosures, even if the animals were in other areas or distracted by their trainers. But I guess someone had to clean up the lions shit, literally. It turned out it was the un-caged animals I needed to be careful of.
One day we witnessed one of the rabid peacocks attack a little boy and knock his snow cone out of his hands. The worst part was that the little boy, scratched-up and crying, kept on trying to pick up the snow cone but his mom just kept slapping his hand away shouting, "No don’t eat that! It's dirty!" and was beginning to drag the kid away from the scene by the arm. A park official trapped the peacock in a tree where it made that awful cawing sound while opening and closing its plumage as if to show it would attack or shit on anyone.
As we watched this crazy lady yell at her child I whispered to Johnny that the mother, "belongs in a cage more than any of these animals." And unfortunately for me this lady had librarian-level hearing and almost got me fired just for saying that. Luckily for me I had worked wonders for the green spaces around and inside the enclosures and was deemed "too valuable" to get rid of. This gave us a good laugh for a month or so because the week before one of the Bird guys got fired just because he couldn’t get the damn owls to do anything during the day. They would just sit there on their perches and mechanically turn their heads slowly to examine nothing. They wouldn’t even chase after the feeding mice with vigor. They were really quite boring. The messed up part was, the new guy they hired after him couldn’t get them to do anything either. And they were talking about firing that dude too. Yet they were dying to keep me, a glorified landscaper, even though this lady bluffed at a lawsuit before storming away when other bystanders threatened to call Child Protective Services on her.
Really we spent most of the time at work pretending to clean wherever a feeding was taking place. Sometimes we would get into debates about whether or not it was humane to keep certain animals in captivity, and some of the customers passing by would join in. Johnny and me disagreed on everything except Polar bears. They were probably better off in the zoo, but that was only because he had shown me a documentary about the ice caps melting and Polar bears drowning because of it. Apparently a polar bear can swim forty miles. . . forty miles and their habitat has shrunken so much they still drown.
* * *
Months blew by and I felt myself slipping into an Arctic depression watching Em leave with that guy almost every night and coming back wasted and banged up. I was just glad her roommate was a nurse. Sometimes I would see her at the rooftop garden and avoid asking about the bumps bruises and bandages that she claimed to get from "Mosh-pitting". I couldn’t shake the feeling that he did it, and that made me want to destroy him.
She would ramble about some crazy band's music inciting a violent clash, or some "Bitch" that tied razorblades into the shoulders of her leather jacket, and I would daydream about what I would do to her boyfriend if I had proof he was the one who was hurting her. I'd envision his destruction animalistically. Remembering how I had seen chimps tear apart heads of lettuce, or tigers play with their already macerated prey, or how even the gentle elephants enjoyed crushing the giant pumpkins they were given to entertain crowds near Halloween.
I wanted to be with Em. She knew I liked her and she had been avoiding me because either she felt bad or liked me a little bit too. Every day that I went to work and watched the animals sit in their lonely cages I felt a little less free myself. I was sure I could never be with her the same way that they could never be back in the wild.
I thought of a zoo lion rejoining a Pride in Africa and lazily waiting for some dude to show up with two raw steaks, that guy never would show up and the lion would waste away. I thought that even if I had a chance with Em I would probably fuck it up. Some nights I would find myself staying up till two or three AM just to go to the Garden and lay down under the cornstalks, barefooted and press the bottoms of my feet and my palms into the earth. I wanted the soil to take me in, to be of some use to someone or something. To be a part of something else. I would return to bed just before dawn with dirty feet and just enough willpower to rise and go to work.
* * *
I was half asleep on the roof when I heard sirens race toward my building. I prayed that they would zoom past us to somewhere else. That Em would be okay, that she would be safe. It was her, and it was his fault. He did it, well, he tried to do it. Later I found out that Alexis had gotten back from her late shift at the hospital just before she would have been too late.
In a way, I soon decided, it was everyone's fault for living with and accepting the denial. Pretending we didn’t see that the kind of wear and tear Em was getting had to be more than just extracurricular activities in underground night clubs. Alexis came to my apartment that night and told me everything that happened. Maybe because she knew I had seen it coming, or maybe because she knew I would care more than anyone else.
Mohawk guy was dead. I didn’t get to be the hero but he got what he deserved if you ask me. Judging by the details Alexis was too shocked to tell me I figured the little blond nurse knew exactly how to stop an abusive boyfriend. Medical training turned deadly force. Which arteries to slice, what organ to puncture and how. In my mind the whole struggle played out like a fight scene from Sherlock Holmes, except a larger part of me understood that Hollywood could never capture the real brutality the world was filled with. Every action movie we ever watch is only really a grown-up version of Cowboys and Indians.
The horror of reality was written all over Alexis' face that night. She had cold eyes, not because her flame was out but because she snuffed someone else's flame and didn’t feel bad about it. When Em came back the next week the two friends embraced as survivors of the same battle. They didn’t need to discuss their nightmares. Time would bury them.
* * *
A month later Em came to find me in the garden. I was picking a ripe tomato off one of the plants that she had drowned the day we met. Our small talk was awkward but funny and I tried not to stare at the thick bandages on her arms, or the bruises on her neck and face. When I finally made eye contact I was a little shocked.
"Em, you took your piercings out? All of them?" She smiled, and I noticed her lips were a slightly lighter shade of red. Something in her eyes was different too, but I couldn’t place it yet.
"Yeah. . . Old lifestyle wasn’t exactly working for me," she rubbed the bare part of her upper arm and stared down at her shoes, the ground, then back up at me, "Sometimes you just need to make some changes about yourself right?" She asked licking at a cut on her lower lip.
"Only if you want to," I said, subconsciously digging my toes into the dirt wet from morning rain.
"I think I want to go by Emma now," she said, reaching down and undoing one of her shoelaces, then the other. She put a hand on my shoulder to support her balance and kicked both off. Balancing on top of her shoes one foot at a time she removed her short socks and tucked them away together. She wiggled her toes down just like I do, as if she had watched me do it a thousand times. She took a deep breath and exhaled, "I have wanted to know what this feels like for so long, you have no idea. It actually feels nice," she said closing her eyes and tilting her face towards the sun. I did the same. We sat in a serene silence for a comfortably drawn out moment. I dropped my eyes and looked out over the city.
"So," she said, recapturing my gaze, "Do you still think you know where the best coffee place is?" And I finally recognized her look.
"I actually remember hearing about a pretty good one." I thought back to the night I drove North, how my eyes reflected in the rearview mirror.
"Oh yeah? Where at?" Emma grinned at me. It was the look of someone who needed to move on, to relocate.
"Seattle" I said grinning back, feeling a breeze pick up and whistle through the corn. I shook the dirt off my feet.
"Okay" she said playfully nodding, "But I need to let you know something. . ."
"What?" I played along, holding out a hand to pull her out of the dirt with.
She accepted, swooping her socks and shoes off the ground before standing slowly to let my curiosity build, "I definitely do not go all the way to Seattle for Just-Friend coffee."
As we laughed I thought about how I finally felt like I was a part of something human, something beautiful and real. And I realized that some people, like Emma and me, are just meant to migrate now and then. Destined to be pulled in whichever direction the road takes us. Brave enough to pack a bag and leave everything else to fire and mulch and strong enough to plant our roots wherever we land.