My Abandonment (13 page)

At Pioneer Courthouse Square there's punk rock kids playing hackysack and smoking cigarettes. The MAX train slides in and out. The food trailers here have stainless steel sides printed in triangles that cut up your reflected face. I order the largest vegetarian burrito, the size is called Honkin.

Sitting on the red brick steps I can't even eat half of it but then I leave it on the bricks and walk away. Father walks over from where he's standing by the Starbucks. This is how we do it, how we share so we're not seen together. If we tried it the other way with him eating first it would draw attention and someone might worry about a girl eating leftover food. We have to think all the time. The two of us together draw a kind of attention since they will look for us to be together.

When he finishes the burrito Father throws the wrapper into a trash can and walks away. I follow. Sometimes I'm across the street, sometimes on the same side trailing behind. If it's raining we have umbrellas and there are signals we have with opening or closing or twirling them but today it is not raining.

I think I know where he's going. My pack slaps my back, Randy's hard nose against my neck. We do all this and yet I'm the small one who people don't see and Father draws attention right away with his strong way of walking and his red frame pack that we have nowhere safe to keep so he carries it everywhere. And still he jerks his head to check behind him and he's drawing attention by trying not to.

I cross the opening of a parking garage, a car coming out and then a wide doorway. I shiver since it seems like maybe the building where we were locked up when we were caught. I walk faster and turn my face away as a police car drives past and turns under the building.

Father says the helicopters over the city are mostly for traffic, to tell people through their radios where there are a lot of cars but there are other people in the helicopters too who are looking down with binoculars for people like us. This is one reason Father wears the piece of mirror taped to the top of his engineer's cap, so it reflects back up whoever's face is trying to look down at him. As he walks the sun reflects in the mirror and slides shining lights all along the brick wall above his head. If he bends down to tie his shoes it can hit you sharp in the eyes.

I was right: He goes into the Mailboxes store. When we lived on the farm Father switched our address to a close post office and before we left the farm he rode his bicycle to town and switched it to this place. Smart. Only he is nervous when he comes out with the envelope in his hand so I can see that he got it, that everything's fine. Next, the Wells Fargo machine, to deposit the check.

He's ten feet in front of me on the same side of the street when a black man in a baseball cap comes out of a door and reaches out to touch Father's arm.

"Jerry!" he says to Father. "Haven't seen you in a long, long time. Missing a lot of meetings, my man. You staying healthy?"

"Been out of town," Father says like he's trying to get past.

"I keep getting caught up on the fourth step," the man says. "Moral inventory, you know. You coming back?"

"At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again," Father says. "I better get on my way."

"Way you talk," the man says. "Cracks my shit up."

We keep walking. I talk to Father's back and he does not turn around so if you saw us you'd think we were talking to ourselves and not having a conversation.

"Your name's not Jerry," I say.

"That's just what he knows me by," he says.

"Why?" I say. "How does he know you?"

Two more police cars drive by. I look at three mannequins wearing dresses in a shop window so the space between Father and me can grow wider. Then I catch up.

"How does he know you?" I say.

"Hardly," Father says. "I liked that burrito."

"And what's a sojourner?" I say.

"Look it up," he says.

He says this when he knows I don't have my dictionary with me and I'd have to go to the library to look up the word sojourner. The downtown library is very big and homeless people gather there both inside and outside so we are not allowed to go there. It's no place to be seen. I've hardly done any homework or read a thing since we left the farm. Father sometimes writes in his notebook but it's more like he's adding up numbers or checking off lists than writing and I haven't seen him reading his books like he used to. Reading in public draws attention.

It's almost getting dark and I come out of the mall and on the sidewalk a shepherd dog in a red vest is looking right at me. I know I'm caught. If I turn or run, it will chase me. I remember my hair and I try to not walk or move like me. I am already thinking what Father will do and whether I'll tell about the hotel and everything else.

The dog's leash is short though and it's held by a lady in square sunglasses and her brown hair back in a ponytail. She's not looking at me like the dog is and then I see how the writing on the red vest does not say
POLICE
but something else I cannot read. The dog is kind of pulling this woman along as they walk away and I see then that it is that the lady is blind. So I am not caught and I keep walking.

It's darker now, late enough that the workers have left the hotel. It stands all fenced in. They didn't knock it down today. The signs on the fence say
DEMOLITION
and every night I have to find a new way through. I count the floors up all the steps and around all the trash in the stairwells, the broken shopping cart and everything else.

In our room Father has taken everything out of my little pack and put it neatly on the mattress. He is taking things from his pack and putting it in mine. He kisses me but he's thinking of something else.

"I saw a blind lady," I say.

"I think I have to go out," he says. "For a while. I'm waiting to hear from someone."

"I bet I know who," I say.

Father knows plenty of people in the city. He has a lot of different names. I don't have to know these people and it's better if they don't know me. Some of them are from other times and some are helpful now. Vincent is one of these people, Vincent who is even taller than Father but much skinnier and probably weighs half as much. He always wears dark creased slacks and a white shirt. His shoes shine. I am not to talk to him. I am never to be alone with him not that I'd want to be. When he walks he hardly bends his knees.

There's a knock at the door then and Father looks up. Through the peephole I can see Vincent's face: His black beard is pointed and the hair on his head is exactly the same length as that beard so it's like a helmet where you can only see the skin of his face around his mouth and high on his cheeks and his white forehead and black eyes.

"Open the door," Father says. "Let's see what he wants."

Vincent is not winded from walking all those flights of stairs.

"Hello," he says. "I have come. I have come because there's something to do."

Vincent has a different way of talking with his voice hardly rising or falling and there are no commas in anything he says. I count for a full minute and Father's eyes blink eight times and
Vincent's only blink once. My eyes blink nine times in a minute which is hard to test when I'm paying attention. All I'm trying to get clear is that Vincent's eyes hardly blink.

"Does this interest you?" he says.

"Can you maybe give me a little more information?" Father says.

"It's a delivery," Vincent says.

"More wire?" Father says.

"A delivery and a pickup," Vincent says. "And then perhaps another delivery. That's what I know."

"All right," Father says, "same deal as last time. Caroline, you lock the door. I'll be back late, after you're asleep."

They leave the room and I lock the door and after a little while I can see out the window, them getting into Vincent's white Chrysler K-Car with the trunk that opens and closes as it drives away from the hotel which is all surrounded by fences and barbed wire.

There is not glass in all our windows so it's almost as good as sleeping outside, I can breathe halfway decently. We have a mattress that's queen-sized, bigger than we've ever had and than we need. There are only beds from the sixth floor up. Below that the rooms are empty since Father says the workmen probably got tired of emptying it when they're going to knock the whole building down anyway and gravity will do that work for them. He says this was a nice hotel, once, over a hundred years ago. Now there's no electricity and all the water's been turned off. All the toilets are full or there's just trash in them but that's all right since we use a chamber pot again and some of the drains still drain. Father carries buckets of water up all the stairs. It stretches out my arms and hurts my fingers to try. You have to stay away from the elevators even though the doors are closed. It is dangerous.

I do everything I can think of doing in our room. I straighten all my things and I write. I have no books to read and I am not to read Father's books or to look inside his pack. Here I am, a girl in this hotel and no one knows I'm inside here. The building that Miss Jean Bauer works in is not far away and I wonder if she still thinks about me and what she would say if she knew I was this close.

Days, weeks and maybe a month has gone. Mostly we stay here in the hotel at night. Father and I change the hands on our watches around so much that it confuses the numbers in the little window that would tell me the day. It is hard to keep the days straight.

Alone I am not to unlock the door or leave our room at night without Father but I do. I wander with the headlamp in my hand, my fingers around it so the light won't draw attention. I wear shoes because of the nails and dirt and dust. Other people sleep here but they are afraid of Father. He won't let anyone else sleep on the seventh floor or even above us. I do go above us to the eighth floor and even the ninth floor. I don't dare go below the sixth. The door to the rooftop is locked with a thick chain around all the handles.

I wonder about my bedroom that I never slept in, in our house at the farm. I think about all my clothes I never wore and if they're still in my wooden dresser, washed once and folded and waiting. I would wear those to school and by now I would be in school. Kids would maybe have called me names but there also would have been good parts. All the books and games and maybe someone would like me after they got used to me and I was used to everything. I would have had the same clothes as everyone but now they are far away.

Now my clothes are dirty and it's even hard to keep my skin and hair clean. Waiting for Father to come back I take out the buttons and thimbles and green plastic army men and I have a square sheet of cardboard I've lined into a chessboard. I have pennies for pawns and silver batteries for queens, sparkplugs for bishops. Kings and rooks and knights I haven't figured out yet for sure so I use quarters and dimes and nickels. I play against Randy, with him on his side on the mattress and I play both sides really against myself which doesn't work. I try two openings and then stop. I write some of this out and curl up on the mattress.

I wake up when Father comes home since he knocks his knock and I have to unlock the locks.

"Tired," he says, sitting on the mattress, kicking off his boots.

"Your checks are still coming," I say. "We don't need money so much you have to work for Vincent, do we?"

"I'm planning ahead," Father says. "Caroline, you know that. The checks, I'm not certain they'll follow us where we're going."

"Where are we going?"

"Trust me," he says.

"Still," I say. "What are you doing?"

"We can only do our best," Father says. "We can't do better than our best." He falls back and groans.

"That wire with Vincent," I say, "that wasn't stolen?"

"His name is Victor," Father says. "I don't know that I'll work with him again."

"This is not the way we used to be," I say. "This is not a way we were ever supposed to be."

Father sits up and begins to scrabble his hands along the floor until he finds the headlamp. Then he digs through his pack until he finds his notebook. He pages through it.

"The other terror," he says, "the other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall."

I listen. The shadows on our wall are only the crossed lines of the window frame and the square edge of another building.

"It would be better," I say, "if you talked to me instead of reading at me."

"They're the same thing, really," Father says. With the headlamp his face is so bright I can't see his expression.

"No," I say. "One comes out of you and the other comes out of someone else."

"Think about that, Caroline," he says. "Whether or not that's actually true."

He switches off the headlamp and turns over, then over again pulling the blanket away from me.

"Do you ever think about all our things?" I say. "Back at the farm? Like our bicycles?"

"Those were not really our things," Father says. "You know that."

I don't say anything else. I know we have to sleep so we'll get up in time since during the day all the workmen come with their yellow hardhats. Some night we'll come home and this room where I'm sleeping will be gone. There will only be air here in the sky and the bricks and walls and mattresses and everything will have collapsed into a pile to be taken away. If we're not too far away in the city on the day it happens we might hear it fall.

To sojourn is to reside temporarily, so a sojourner is temporarily residing. To reside is to live in a place permanently or for an extended period. To extend is to open or straighten or unbend.

Today on the esplanade a girl in a hooded sweatshirt and duct-taped shoes skateboards past. Pushing hard and suddenly leaping to scrape the bottom of her board along the next bench and then rolling backward past me, near where my feet are pointed.

"Nice," I say but she doesn't hear me and keeps going and I'm thinking that girl could be my friend. Already she's out of reach out across the walkway under the Steel Bridge and past her, way up the river I can see the pale green towers of the St. Johns Bridge and I look away since I don't want to think of all that back then.