My Abandonment (12 page)

Outside the sky is darker than the clouds and inside the bus the lights flicker on and off. I see my face in the window's reflection, then the dark fields, then my face again. On my head I wear a stocking cap with all my hair pushed up inside it so maybe I look like a boy. I close my eyes to rest since Father told me at the bus stop that it might be a long night. I open my eyes and we come down through the curving streets, into the lights. I recognize some of the buildings' shapes and the names of the streets: Salmon, Jefferson, Oak.

Father walks to the front to get off and I go out the back door. We're downtown in the city of Portland and I'm excited and afraid and a little disappointed. We might sleep in a doorway or down along the river which we have done before a long time ago.

"What?" I say to Father, whispering without really facing him.

"Did you hold on to your transfer?" he says. "Good girl. Now we catch one more bus. Here goes."

We're not even downtown for ten minutes and we don't talk to anyone. We climb onto the next bus, careful that others get on between us so it looks like we are not together.

We're out again in fifteen minutes, past dark houses and parked cars. A dog barks. Father and I walk on opposite sides of the street, walking at the same speed. The rain barely starts and we are across the mowed park then on the little trail along Balch Creek, safe under the trees.

An owl calls hollow from one side then the other. We're not talking. We turn right at the stone house and it is harder to walk and find our way than I remember, like the trees have grown up in new places while we were gone and thickened the dark. I feel like I'm back where I belong and then something else sharp I'm not sure what.

Father is careful. His headlamp is around his head but he doesn't switch it on until we're close. Our feet find the old stepping stones.

The circle of light darts and settles. I am glad I can't see all this at once even if every sad thing adds up the way I see it so later I will remember them lit up and lost. Part of the roof has been torn off our old house so the plastic and tarps show. There's a hole where maybe someone's foot went through and I think how that would be, to be reading a book or playing chess or lying in bed when a foot comes punching through the ceiling.

There's a fire ring in the middle of our clearing, all wet and charred logs with blackened beer cans crushed up. Keystone is the name of the brand of beer. There's cigarette butts and shreds of plastic bags.

"Oh man, oh man," Father says. His hands are on his head and he's turning slow circles so the beam of light flashes against the tree trunks, up into the branches, there and gone, resting on a white sign that says sheriff but Father can read it faster than I can and the light flashes away, down into our house which is empty.

"Of course, of course of course this is how it is," Father says. "This is exactly the kind of thing they love to do, every single time. Oh man, Caroline."

Our green Coleman stove and our kettle and our pots and pans and everything is gone just like I said they would be taken. The only thing left really is my encyclopedias and they're all damp and pulled off the shelf and piled on the floor. There's black mold growing in the pages so they're thicker than they should be with the spines stretched open. I pick up the L and try but it smells bad and the pages are stuck together so I drop it.

"Do we have to sleep here?" I say.

"We could," Father says, "but I don't think I can."

Instead we sleep in the hollow beneath a fallen tree trunk. Father spreads a blue tarp beneath us, on top of ferns and moss. He's brought a blanket from our house on the farm to put over us. We're in all our clothes, holding hands. The trees scratch and creak.

"At least we're back," I say.

"Now, Caroline," Father says. "Try to sleep."

I turn over and over again. I listen. I am not asleep since I want to see it all again in the morning and since I am a little afraid and since I can tell that Father is also not asleep.

There is frost on the blanket in the morning, just barely. My ear that is outside of the blanket is cold. Father is already up slapping his legs and stretching his arms over his head trying to get warm.

"This is great," he says. "Just like old times." He keeps saying things like this and the more he says the less true it sounds.

"Caroline!" he says. He's pulling plastic bags out of his pack. "Breakfast," he says.

He's brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and while we eat them I think of our refrigerator and the full jar of jelly there and the orange juice, and the toaster on the counter.

"What do you want to do today?" he says.

"I don't know," I say. "Start building a new house, I guess."

"Let's walk around a little," he says. "Stay warm until the sun comes up."

We walk on paths and not on paths. Wet ferns stripe our legs. The sky is overcast and there's nothing to say. It's like every animal is hibernating or hiding. Father isn't even bothering to make a trail. He kicks sticks out of the way, cracks them. He tears leaves with his hands. And then he sees something and crashes sideways though the bushes. He stretches to reach up into the crook of a tree. Into a hollow.

His hand comes out with his special oilskin holder, folded and rolled up and tied tight. It is easy to find or make do to replace almost anything except a good knife or scissors and he has found his knives and his long scissors where they'd been hidden.

He hands me my red pocketknife and I cut my fingernails with the tiny scissors and scatter them around. Next I cut his beard with these, careful around his mouth. He pulls the skin tight and I snip along, just the long ones that stick out. He is sitting on a stump and next I stand straight.

"How would it be if we cut it all off this time?" he says. "If I cut it as short as mine?"

"Why?" I say.

"So you'll look different."

"The same," I say. "I don't want to look like anyone else."

Father cuts my black hair straight across my back at the bottom of the shoulder blades so I'll still be able to pull it back in a rubber band or he can French braid it. His hair is harder to cut. It is brown and gray and curls and he says he doesn't care how it looks because he'll be wearing a lot of hats during the winter. I take hold of his hair and cut it close, as thick as my finger, right above where I'm holding.

At the end he takes off his jacket and flaps it all around and we run laughing from all the loose hairs floating through the air like we always used to.

The sun has actually come out. We're laughing. Father runs ahead slapping his head, the last hairs falling down behind him and I'm chasing. He's ahead and when I catch up he's not laughing anymore. He's standing still. I can't tell what's happened and what's changed.

"Listen," he says. "I was thinking it might be good for us to have some alone time just to range around and remember. So we can get comfortable again."

"Are you going to stay in the forest park?" I say. "I can come with you."

"Let's just decide on our watches," he says, "and then we'll meet back where we slept. You can find that again, right?

Father does not check back. He disappears through the trees tall and uncertain, not in any kind of straight line. The maple leaves are bright red and yellow and orange against the green pines. After a while that is all I can see.

First I take off my shoes and socks then put them back on since the ground is cold and wet and hard. I run a little ways and then stop so I can think. No one can see me, I'm thinking. I'm thinking how Father says someone could always see us on the farm but now here in the forest park I'm not even sure no one is watching. With my short fingernail I scratch Hello in the green of a leaf.

I circle back to get Randy, just in case. His body is cold, stiffer than usual. When I take him out of my pack I put him back in and put the whole thing on my back since I just don't know.

I walk out along the edge of the forest park and there are no criminals in their orange outfits. I do not see or hear any dogs.

"What?" I yell in the loudest voice I have ever used in the forest park. "Lala!" I say. Nothing happens and no one answers except the birds are quiet for a moment before they start up talking again.

Father is already waiting when I come back and I am early. He stands up and swings his frame pack onto his back.

"We need to find the men's camp," he says.

"I thought we decided never to go back," I say.

"Caroline," he says. "So much has changed. Stay close to me."

We walk the old path that is not a real path but when we get to the men's camp it is abandoned. It is more overgrown even than our old house was. Someone probably the rangers has picked up the trash and other than the fire rings and broken glass and torn off tree branches a person might not even know.

It's easy enough even for me to see the direction the men went. How they dragged things and stepped all over the ferns and the little maples. Father and I follow all this for only another ten minutes and then I hear a voice call out low saying how we look and then another lookout who knows who we are calls out our names.

There's only one fire. Dirty wool blankets and stained, soggy sleeping bags hang from branches. There's only about twenty people. None of the Skeleton Family, no Nameless of course but I can't even see Richard and if he was here he would at least come talk to me, or try to talk to me. It's like every person has been replaced by another person even if they all look the same and wear the kind of clothes. If Richard was here I see that I would be kind of happy but he is not.

It is only Clarence coming over to talk to us. His red beard is longer and he wears a wool-blanket poncho and a bright orange hunter's cap that anyone could see a mile away. Instead of shoes he's got the inside felt liners from snowmobile boots and they're filthy and shredded up. Closer to us I can see he's frowning.

"What?" he says. "You know better. This is ridiculous."

"Hold on, now," Father says, and his deep voice slows Clarence. "I thought you might have some of our things, that were left behind when we went away."

"Since you went away!" Clarence says. "That's an excellent way to put it. Since you've been away. Well, since you've been away what you've done is rain down shit on everybody and brought cops through here like they never even cared before. You and your daughter! Do you even know? I can't believe you would come back here and lead them to us again not to mention that this is the exact first place they'll come looking for you. Stupid."

I wait for Father to say something and so does Clarence. I look up and I can't even see where the lookouts are, the men who called our approach. I think how last night I didn't even check the lookout over our old house, how someone could have been up there listening and waiting. But Father doesn't say anything right away and Clarence just kicks his legs back around and goes back to the fire and sits down and doesn't look back.

Over to the left then I see the shredded paper people. There's matchbooks all around on the ground and the silver plastic from sheets of pills. They're cooking something on our green Coleman stove.

"Look," I say. "Look."

"Come on, Caroline," Father says, turning me away. "That's poisoned now."

We cut across a slope, a different direction than the way we came. I feel that I might not know my way.

"Nature ever flows," Father says, "never stands still."

"They might come looking for us, here," I say, "but they'll never find us again. We'll make a new house. We know how."

"He's right it was stupid," Father says. "Even for one night. They won't find us here because it was never the plan to stay here. We only came back to get our things, what we could."

"What is the plan?" I say. "Where will we sleep?"

"The main thing is we found our knives," he says, the oilskin holder in his hand.

Father tightens the straps on his pack and we keep walking. A little while later we push through a stand of bushes, into a clearing and I stop since it seems like I've been here before.

"What?" he says.

"Isn't this the place," I say, "where the deer died?"

"What?" he says again.

"Where the dead deer was?" I say.

We start kicking the long grass with our shoes, then pull at it with our hands but don't find a single bone or tooth or even a tuft of hair. Either every last scrap has been taken or this is not the same place at all.

These are the worst days. The rules and the way things work in the city are different, sharper and dirtier than in the forest park but you can still be aware and stay out in the open enough not to get trapped and still not draw attention so people won't want to know who you are and what you're doing, a girl out alone in the city. If someone thinks they know me I am to tell them there's been a misunderstanding, that my name is Elaine and I live in Lake Oswego. If I see a police car or a policeman I am not to run away. I turn my face in another direction. I can look like I am on my way to school or catching the bus home or like I'm shopping for birthday presents or meeting my friends.

There is alone time in the city but that means really that we are apart from each other not that we are alone since there are people everywhere. Mostly they are not looking at you. They think you're looking at them.

I can only sleep decently in the forest park but Father says that's too dangerous, especially to stay in one place and maybe once every two weeks he'll let us sleep in some different part of the forest park but more often we just nap during the day and wander at night. Sometimes it's different parks, even across the river on Mount Tabor or Laurelhurst but there's always homeless people in that park. We've slept in a parking garage in unlocked cars and in the entryway under the metal mailboxes in an apartment building. When you're tired it makes everything in the day harder.

My head is bent over the sink in the Fred Meyer bathroom and it doesn't take long. It burns in my nose and throat. Someone knocks on the door and Father tells them to wait. The water is running and running and my back is sore and when I look up all my hair is bleached out to a yellow that doesn't look real. My eyes look different and the edges of my face are harder to see. Father smiles behind me, his beard makes a scratching noise against the collar of his jacket. I look fake and wet. I don't like it at all but would I like it better if my hair stayed black and we were caught and locked up again?