Dig, page 2
I light a cigarette. I think about my summer clothes. I think about Texas and Arizona and Nebraska, my last three summers. Sometimes I try to remember the names of my friends in the places I remember living, but their names are as inaccessible as Mr. ________son’s. I remember such little things. I remember the name of a lizard in a third-grade classroom. Pollo—pronounced the Spanish way with the two ls as a y. Dumb name for a lizard. Pollo is Spanish for “chicken”—the kind you eat, not the animal. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe lizard tastes like chicken. I can’t remember the teacher’s name or else I’d write to him and ask about why he named his lizard chicken. He had a reptile tie for every day of the week.
I remember one best friend per location, if I had one. My other friends all blend into one another. JoshSethJaiquanRayRayBillSumo. Before this apartment, we lived in a smaller one with brick walls; and next door lived Barry, the Texan boy who taught me how to smoke. I would always remember Barry. A kid doesn’t forget the boy who taught him to smoke.
Barry thought it was weird for me and Mom to share a bed, but we only had one bed and one room and I got sick of sleeping on the floor and she didn’t mind and it wasn’t like we did anything inappropriate because that’s not how we do things. We just survive. Potatoes and corn bread. Potatoes and pork chops. Potatoes and sweet corn. Potatoes and roast chicken. Who cares where we dream?
* * *
The weather forecast says we’re about to get a real blizzard—maybe three feet. I walk back up the stairs to the apartment—a two-story, two-bedroom with thin windows—and I hand the potato pot to Mom and she looks like I just gave her a Cadillac with a million dollars inside. Then her face changes direction.
“Don’t think I don’t smell that on you,” she says. “How are you even affording those things?”
“I had a pack I brought with me,” I say.
She starts the hot water so she can wash the potato pot. “We need jobs,” she says. She points to the newspaper, open on the breakfast bar.
“We do.”
“Tomorrow morning I’m going to the temp agency and see what they can find for me.”
“You probably won’t get there until Tuesday or even Wednesday. Blizzard.”
She doesn’t say anything because we both know the last thing Mom wants is a job.
I open the newspaper to the help-wanted section. Truck drivers, a battery plant, and third shift at the factory a block down the road. The neighbor guy, Mike, who loaned me his snow shovel yesterday, told me the factory makes mousetraps. I made a joke about how there’s probably no mice on 3rd Street, which is good because our last two apartments had mice who ate the junk food I used to hide. When he laughed, I felt like life could be okay here.
At my age I’m supposed to be chasing girls, doing homework, hanging out at McDonald’s on Friday and Saturday night goofing around with other high school sophomores. But Mike is more my style, even though he’s in his thirties. He has a good job and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and in winter he drives a small pickup truck. I think he’s a happy guy even though he lives with his mother. I’m a happy guy and I live with my mother.
“If you see anything part-time, let me know,” I say. “Only jobs in here are full-time.”
“Will do,” Mom says. She’s done peeling potatoes now. “I have to walk over to the grocery in a minute. Will you keep an eye on these? I don’t want ’em to boil over.”
“No problem.”
She thinks I don’t know that she’s going to be gone for more than an hour. She thinks I don’t know that she shoplifts pork loins and chicken breasts. She thinks I don’t know that she’s choosing to walk to the grocery before a snowstorm because it’ll be packed with people buying milk and toilet paper so her bulging pockets will go unnoticed. She thinks I don’t know she flirts with Mike next door, even though we’ve only been here three days. She thinks I don’t know about the calls from the last landlord who took her to court. She thinks I don’t know about how she has bad credit. She thinks I don’t know about her using other people’s details to get the electric hooked up—stealing people’s trash bags and digging through them for anything she can find. She thinks I don’t know that she steals a single cigarette from me every Saturday night and smokes it on the front porch.
I can’t stop the variables.
She can’t stop the variables.
Every night, we eat potatoes.
The Shoveler: Old Business
When it snows, it snows fast. Under the streetlight, it moves sideways and sometimes defies gravity and moves straight up. I watch it from the living room window. This is the most space we’ve had since Arizona. Mom told me it was because she had more money to put down, but Mike next door told me that it’s because the roof leaks.
Mom checks her phone. “You don’t have school tomorrow.”
I nod. “How much do they say we’re getting?”
“Another foot or foot and a half.”
“Maybe we should’ve gone to California.”
“I have business here,” Mom says. She’s looking out the window and it’s not her usual business face.
“What do you mean?”
“Just some old business.”
As always, variables. As always, the first variable is my father. As always, I can’t say a word about it. As always, Mom doesn’t extrapolate. So I just sit and watch the snow. I get bored after an hour.
“I’m going out to start on the car,” I say. “Less for me to do tomorrow.”
“Stay in,” Mom says. “Mike will help you in the morning.”
Mike. Okay. Sure.
I go out anyway. When I stand on our porch, there isn’t a footprint anywhere around me. It’s like landing on the moon. Quiet. Muffled. Cold. I start with Mike’s borrowed shovel in the most logical place—where I’m standing. I cut a path down our walkway to the sidewalk. The snow comes down so hard, I have to brush off my shoulders every five minutes.
Once I start on the sidewalk, I can’t stop. I do the run in front of our building and then I do Mike’s building, then I do the old lady’s building next to Mike. He told me he usually does her shoveling for her, so this feels helpful.
A snowplow turns down the street. It pushes the snow from the middle of the road to the edge of the parked cars. The drifts are so high already the cars look like space pods on the moon. I look up at the streetlight, and the snow’s still coming down fast.
“Hey!”
It’s Mike. I wave. By the time he gets to me, his goatee is caked with snow.
“Your mom said you were out here. You should wait for me, man. We can do it in the morning. I got my brother’s old snowblower in the garage.”
“You told me it was a piece of shit,” I say.
“It is. But it’s better than doing it by hand,” he says. “Come in for a beer or something.”
“I’m sixteen.”
“Whatever. Come in. I have the stove going.”
Mike has a wood-pellet stove. And his brother’s old snowblower and an impressive collection of snow shovels and the biggest flat-screen TV I ever saw. He records baseball games all season and then watches them in winter. He says it makes him feel warmer.
I think this is why I like Mike.
He doesn’t seem to be the type of guy who shoplifts or digs through anyone’s trash for their Social Security numbers. Just baseball and beer. And his mother upstairs, who I’ve never seen.
I stop on his back stoop—where a flight of snow-covered steps leads up to his back door—and pull out my pack of Camel Lights. I offer him one and he takes it.
“Come around this side,” he says. “Your mom can’t see us here.”
We smoke and blow out huge clouds. Smoking in a snowstorm is something special. It’s not like smoking in Texas. It’s hard to explain.
“How are you settling in?” he asks.
“Good.” I shrug. I’m not sure if I’ve ever settled into anything, anywhere.
“Your mom says you’re a good kid.”
“Sure,” I say.
“Sorry. You’re not really a kid,” he says.
“I don’t know. Can’t tell.” I think for a second and add, “It’s a gray area, really, isn’t it?”
“True,” Mike says.
When we go inside, Mike presses a button on his remote to make the frozen baseball batter on the screen come to life again. He says, “Watch this!” and the guy hits a home run. I don’t really watch baseball, but the home run is impressive. Right over the stadium. Out of the park.
I sit next to the wood stove and warm my hands. Mike goes into the fridge and gets a can of beer for each of us, but I say, “No thanks, man.”
He nods and sits down and I get up and put the beer back in the fridge. In the kitchen, I take inventory of kitchen appliances. Mike has a blender, a toaster, a coffeemaker, a bread maker, a dehydrator, a food processor, a juicer, and something called a seed starter that looks like the cage Pollo the lizard lived in.
Mike has a lot of kitchen appliances for a guy who lives with a mother who never comes downstairs.
And yet, in the fridge it’s just beer and the usual condiments.
I want to ask him what he eats, but it seems stupid. I go in and sit on his couch and watch baseball by the wood stove. I say, “You’re right. Baseball makes me feel warmer.”
He points to his brain with his index finger. “It’s all in the head, man. Control the brain, and the rest is easy.”
The Shoveler: Tunnels on the Surface of the Moon
Control the brain and the rest is easy. I think about this as I walk home from Mike’s.
He probably wasn’t talking to me, directly. He probably doesn’t know about my brain. Mom doesn’t even know about my brain. How would I tell her? When would I tell her? Is there a certain time of day that she can actually stop thinking about herself?
My brain is none of her business.
Even if it’s trying to drive me crazy.
Every hour since that 5:33 a.m. phone call, my brain has a new distraction. Stephenson, Richardson, Davidson, Hutchinson, Robinson, Johnson, Jefferson. Every day since I could wonder, it wonders where half of me is. Ever since I could tally myself, I am half here.
Family tree project. Second grade. I’d have preferred to dissect my own foot. While it was still attached to my ankle. Florida. The teacher drew a tree on the whiteboard. Drew lines around it. Filled in the lines. Her mother. Her father. Her sister. Her two brothers. Her husband. Her children. Her nieces and nephews. Her pets. Just for fun, she said. I drew my tree. I drew my tree big on the paper, and she said, Sweetheart, you haven’t left space for your family! I had one of those fat crayons in my hand. I wrote MOM across the top of the tree. I wrote ME in the middle of the trunk of the tree. Mrs. Second Grade stood for a minute and I heard it. I heard it click in her head and I heard her heart break for poor little me. Never had a chance. No limbs. No leaves. No twigs. No pets just for fun.
I got an A. This kid in my class did his tree on a piece of paper so big he had to unroll it. Went back four generations. Four generations. The handwriting wasn’t even his. He called me out for getting an A. He said he should be the only one with an A. Mrs. Second Grade said, Your grades are not based on your family size.
Recess. Same day. Kid calls me a bastard and says my mom is a slut. I tell him he should eat a giant dick. He tries to punch me, but Florida kids are slower than me. I punch him instead. He bleeds.
Find myself in the office. Tell the principal the kid called my mom a slut. Get sent home anyway. Walk in on Mom and her boyfriend doing things I don’t want to hear.
I never brought my family tree home. Shoved it into the classroom trash can. Spat on it for good measure.
* * *
My brain makes tunnels. The tunnels get smaller. They eventually close. Usually. The family tree tunnel never closes all the way. Stephenson, Richardson, Davidson, Hutchinson, Robinson, Johnson, Jefferson. I am somebody’s son.
* * *
I’m still warm from Mike’s baseball game and decide to clear a path to the car so I can start clearing it off. When I shovel, I feel like I was born to shovel things. I consider shoveling things for the rest of my life. Shovel snow, shovel dirt, shovel Mom, shovel myself. Eventually I might get to the answer. Sounds stupid, right? A sixteen-year-old kid looking for the answer when he doesn’t even know the question.
But we all know the question.
The question is: What am I even doing here?
* * *
I watch the plows and the salt trucks go up the main road and pass through the intersection with the traffic lights. Then the plow goes past and pushes the road snow back to where I shoveled, and I think maybe the answer is to constantly do things and never get anywhere.
There’s something about being out in a snowstorm, though. The answer is a snowflake. It’s a blizzard. It’s the way I feel hot on the inside and my nose is numb at the same time. Sweat is running down my back. My fingers are frozen because my gloves are wet. Maybe these are the answers.
* * *
Another foot of snow has fallen. I don’t know how long I’ve been out here. Mike’s lights are still on, so I’m guessing it’s still early enough for watching baseball and controlling the mind to think it’s summer. The roads are frozen. There is no way anyone is getting anywhere tomorrow. I look at the church across the street and the snow has weighed down the branches of the fir trees around it so much they look like they could snap.
I turn around and look at our house. It’s pretty in the snow. Downstairs lives a woman named Penny who’s a music teacher. We have the next two floors in the front. A guy named Doug or Dirk or Don or something lives in the back apartment. Mike says he works third shift, so we never see him. Penny keeps the front porch nice and it looks like she has flower beds and stuff. I mean, before the snow. Now it just looks like she grows the surface of the moon.
Only a week ago I was sweating my ass off in jeans in the South Texas sun. I just moved into a blizzard. I’m sixteen years old and the only constant in my life other than my mother is our potato pot.
The answer has something to do with potatoes. It has to.
MAKE THE FREAK VANISH!
It was a Saturday night about two years ago, and The Freak decided to drive to the mall cinema and see a movie. Something animated. Childish.
Kelly Pointer and her best friend, Mika, walked toward The Freak when she was at the concession stand, buying popcorn. They stopped a few feet from her and talked low, then Mika walked away and toward the arcade. Kelly stepped in with a panicked look on her face. The Freak could tell it didn’t seem right. The Freak moved here only a few weeks before, and Kelly Pointer had been nothing but territorial.
Kelly said, “I have to talk to you about something.”
The Freak said, “Okay.”
“You can’t tell anybody, okay?”
The Freak said, “Okay.”
“I’m pregnant.”
The Freak asked a few questions. The Are you okays and the Are you going to keep its. Kelly Pointer went on her way and The Freak knew she just got set up. And if it had anything to do with the best friend, Mika, good freakin’ luck because the girl couldn’t think her way out of an open shoebox.
An hour later, mid-movie.
Mika leaned over to The Freak and said, “. . .”
The Freak had a freeze frame right there.
The Freak couldn’t figure out the game, but she knew she was in one. The Freak thought Mika was going to say What’s up with Kelly tonight? She won’t tell me anything! The Freak knows the bitches. All the bitches. The Freak is in tune with the bitch playbook.
So Mika leaned over to The Freak and said, “Did you hear Kelly’s pregnant?”
The Freak had no idea what to say. This was not in the playbook. So she said, “Is she okay?”
Mika nodded and turned her attention back to the movie.
An hour later, the movie was over, Kelly Pointer marched up to The Freak at the soda machine and said, “You told Mika I was pregnant!” Now, thanks to Kelly’s own lack of volume control, everyone in the cinema lobby knew Kelly Pointer was pregnant, so The Freak guessed it wasn’t a problem.
The Freak said, “Mika told me you were pregnant.”
Kelly said, “No, she didn’t.”
The Freak said, “Yes, she did.”
Kelly said, “You told her and you know it.”
The Freak looked over at Mika, who was completely clueless about what was going on and was staring at a boy across the lobby.
The Freak said, “She told me during the movie. I just asked if you were okay.”
Kelly launched her allegedly pregnant body at The Freak with her right hand cocked and ready to punch. The Freak ran.
* * *
The Freak has been running ever since. Nearly two years.
Running on every continent, through every climate. She just closes her eyes and flickers from one place to the next. She is permanently out of danger. Whether she’s in some war-torn country at gunpoint or in a random town about to get beat up by a girl like Kelly Pointer, all she has to do is close her eyes and she flickers to the next place.
She spent most of yesterday learning how to belly dance in Berlin.
She spent most of today in the desert poking a poisonous snake.
