My Abandonment (21 page)

Across from where I'm sitting is a sewing store and in the window fabric is all unrolled and hanging. One long piece is dark blue with yellow and orange birds swooping across it and squirrels down along the bottom. I almost forget my pack when I stand up to look closer.

The smallest piece of fabric I can buy is a yard which costs ten dollars. The lady who tells me this has thick eyeglasses and a measuring tape over the shoulders of her brown cardigan sweater.

"What are you making?" she says.

"I don't know," I say. The truth is I saw it and it made me happy.

"All right," she says. "Will there be anything else?"

"No," I say.

Once I watch her cutting the fabric and the silver scissors going through it I have another idea.

With the fabric folded in tissue paper inside my pack I go down the long back hallway until I find the women's restroom. I wash my face and in the stall I hang my coat. The stall door is made of steel and has initials and curse words scratched into it.

I wet the bottom of my T-shirt and back in the stall wipe it over myself and put on a clean shirt. The one I was wearing smells like smoke. Later I will change my underwear but first I take off my cap and wet my hair down. It smells like smoke too and the water brings out the smell. In my pack I find my broken off half of a comb and comb my hair straight down past my shoulders. The faucet is automatic when I put my hand there which is hard to learn and keeps starting and stopping.

There's mirrors on two walls at the corner of the sinks so I can see the front and side of my head at the same time. With my coat off Father's bracelets clink around my wrists so I take them off and stack them on the counter. I take his long sharp scissors from the oilskin case and it's easier to cut the left side of my hair than the right where I have to turn my hand upside down and can't exactly see the blades cutting. The bleached part of my hair goes from my ears down and my regular black hair is above. The line between them is uneven and a little blurry and that's what I follow. My hair will be all black again, just like it always was back in the forest park.

First I hear the door and then in the mirror I see the two girls coming in and standing behind me. One has red hair and freckles and is tall and the other shorter girl has blond hair. The first thing I do is take Father's bracelets off the counter and put them back on my wrist. These girls are about my age and they both wear headphones whose cords come out of a Walkman in the short girl's hand. They take off the headphones so they're not attached together but don't move apart or go into the stalls. They just stand there watching.

"What?" I say. "What is your problem?"

They step back a little without leaving.

"We saw you out in the mall," the tall girl says. "We followed you. At first because we thought you were a cute boy but then you went into the women's room so we wondered."

"I wanted you to think that," I say. "I knew you were following me."

We're talking to each other in the mirror. I haven't turned around. Our voices are loud with all that tile.

"She means," the short blond girl says, "that you could be a cute girl, too."

"I don't care what you think," I say.

"I was only trying to say something nice," she says.

"That's fake," I say.

For a while I keep cutting my hair and the girls keep watching me without saying anything. Then in the reflection I see the tall girl point at the floor:

"Look," she says. "This is bad. You're hurt."

"I'm fine," I say and I don't look down since it might be a trick and I don't want them to think I'll look where they say. Also I'm right at the tricky back part of my hair. I snip around to connect the lines of the right and left sides and then with my hand I sweep the cut hair off the counter and into the sink. I scoop it up to throw in the trash can.

When I look to pick up the hair on the floor I see what they were saying. There's smeared red on the yellow and tan tiles, blood tracked all around in the tread of my sneakers. It's red footprints walking over each other. The front of my left sneaker is red and wet.

I try not to let my face show anything. The girls just stand there still watching. "You're hurt."

"So what?" I say.

"Go get Mom," the short one says. "Right away."

The tall girl is gone, the door slapping.

"I'm fine by myself," I say even if now I don't feel fine. I pick up my pack and set it back down since it feels so heavy. I close my eyes for a moment and open them. The girl has stepped closer without me noticing.

"You're sisters?" I say.

"Yeah," she says. "Don't worry, we're going to help you."

"I could go if I wanted," I say. "I could get right by you."

"Are you crying?" she says. "Don't cry."

"I'm not crying," I say.

"Don't," she says, but she doesn't touch me and I'm past her, out the door.

I turn right and not left, not back to the mall but out the emergency exit so an alarm starts ringing. The scissors are still in my hand and the sun is bright. I slip away slow between all the cars in the parking lot, my footsteps silent and holding my breath. When I carefully look up across and over the cars no one is following. I am already thinking what to do next.

These days I have a mountain bicycle with nubbed rubber tires that can make it up and down the muddy gravel road. It's all downhill from where I live on Wildwing Road to the library so it only takes about half an hour. Under the tall trees, in and out of the ruts. I have neighbors up here who raise llamas and others who raise dogs that are half wolf. This means there must be at least one wolf with them who teaches all the dogs to howl like that. When they start in at night I think of Lala and wonder if I really saw her back in the snow and how far a dog can run and how old a dog can get. Late at night I also think of Nameless and the decisions he made and wonder if he's still trying and he's gotten further or has given up or has been caught or maybe has become a different kind of animal who can't communicate at all. I wonder where he came from that made him become like that and whether he remembers it, if he had parents or a family, whether he is trying to forget it or whether he has truly forgotten it.

All I want to tell is about Father and me but how I came out of it and how I put it together starts to become part of the story too.

That day after the mall in Boise I am afraid people will follow me, that those girls know I was there, so I catch the bus back and downtown I find a bank with an ATM on an outside wall. I take the card Father gave me and I close my eyes and remember the right numbers and where they are on Randy's body. I withdraw forty dollars and can see the balance of what Father left me which is plenty and surprising. But when I withdraw the money I see that the balance counts down and I'm thinking and thinking.

I go to the Greyhound station and buy another ticket, round trip so people will expect me to come back. Then I ride, back the way I came.

As soon as I'm in Sisters I go to the post office and I can see through the little glass window that there are two checks in our box. I write Father's name and the account number on the back of them and walk over to an ATM and deposit them right into the account. That's how I still do it, every month.

In those early days I make plenty of acquaintances. I never ask or answer too many questions. I rent a room one week at a time and I check the bulletin boards in the post office and the coffee shop to find other possibilities.

I spend a lot of time in the Sisters library which is a nice new building with even a gas fireplace at one end by the magazines with soft chairs around it. The library has a whole section of computers where people come in to use the Internet. There's a special room for children with the little chairs and tables and a few toys. A quilt of the Cat in the Hat. A mural that shows Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
and some camels and a bearded father reading a book to a girl.

The head librarian is named Peg. She becomes an acquaintance of mine, and then a kind of friend. She never asks questions about where I came from but only about what I want to do and where I want to go. She's the one who finds the books and explains to me how to get my GED. This takes me one year of studying and tests. Now I am enrolled in library science classes at the community college, riding the bus to Bend twice a week. It's a school where the students are all sorts of ages, so no one worries about me. People thought I was eighteen back when I was fifteen and now almost two more years have passed.

I know the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress, both. I like all the colored spines of the books pressed in their shelves, thick with words. The whispering, the silence, the sound of a page being turned. I started out volunteering, shelving and reading story time for the children, and then Peg hired me as an assistant. I work three or four days a week.

At the end of my shift I take my jacket and backpack out of the office. I check out a few books to myself. I unlock my bicycle from the rack outside.

Riding through town, I pass Bronco Billy's and I pass Ray's IGA and they remind me of the times before. When I am inside them, whenever I shop for groceries I expect Father to still be there walking down the aisle smiling with a jar of peanut butter in his hand, pointing me toward the apples.

Past Ray's I turn along the McKenzie Highway where it passes all the churches: Catholic, LDS, the Community Church, whatever that means. I've never been inside them, never plan to. There's the high school, home of the Outlaws with these kids revving the engines of their pickup trucks who are my age I know even if that feels impossible. A boy yells after me and I don't look back. Even closer to my house is the middle school with its bright metal roof and its octagonal front, its sports fields out back.

I cross over and go left onto Edgington, past where elk graze in someone's field with the metal wheels of the irrigation line. The asphalt beneath me turns to gravel, to mud. I pass the llamas with their woolly necks, hear the wolf dogs start to bark and howl.

Out here there's hardly any houses, just huge white satellite dishes hidden in the trees that tell you there's someone back there. The long snakes my bicycle's tires make are the only marks in the snow for days. It can get too deep over the last half mile and I have to get off and push the rest of the way.

Mr. Hoffman's place on Wildwood Road is a big old log barn turned into a fancy house with a swooping red roof. Deer and elk antlers hang above the doorways, along the walls outside. Mr. Hoffman has never shot anything. He buys the antlers just like he bought the shiny taxidermied salmon that hangs over the fireplace inside.

He is a fat old rich man from Salem who has no wife and two grown children who never come around, which is about as often as he does. The rooms in his house are crowded with puffy leather furniture and dusty bronze statues of cougars and horses. In every room there's a television and I switch them on and walk around with all the voices going in a kind of conversation. I collect his mail which is mostly catalogs. I open the empty drawers and the mothballs roll hard, bouncing inside. I switch on his CB radio and hear distant voices talking in numbers and lost in static. I never push the button to say anything back. Instead I check the water lines, the light switches, I spring his mousetraps with a straightened wire hanger.

I am the caretaker and what I do is up to me. If I wanted to turn on all the electric heaters and live here, he would never notice. I could sleep on one of the soft beds in the guest room, I could cook on his shining stove.

Standing in his kitchen I look out to where the land slopes and fifty yards away in the trees I can just see the roof of my l little yurt, its round window in the top like an eye staring up. Lying flat in bed I can see the stars and sometimes the moon or an airplane, a black bird zipping by. In windstorms the sharp tips of pine trees lean in.

The trees grow thick since it's the Deschutes National Forest all around us. I can run straight from my door, lose hours out there by myself in alone time. In winter I wear white clothes, in summer brown and tan. In hunting season you're supposed to wear orange so the hunters won't mistake you but I never wear orange. I blend in. I can still walk without leaving a trace. I can hold perfectly motionless and I can sway slightly, keeping pace with the trees and bushes in the wind.

The dirt is black, volcanic, sharp underfoot. Still I go barefoot when I can, when the weather allows. I wander now more than I truly run since in the week after Boise my left foot, my toes got worse. Frostbite. I read about it, how it works, ice crystals between the cells as my skin went white and waxy and then red and itchy. Frostbite can turn to gangrene, where your tissue dies away and you can lose your body piece by piece. My little toe was black and loosened already, snagged in my sock. I iced that toe down but still it hardly hurt when I took Father's sharp knife and cut it straight through. The bone made the smallest sound. This changed my balance and it's tricky to run so sometimes I wonder if I cut off the little toe on my right foot I'd get my balance back and be able to run straight again.

Just over a mile from my yurt I've dug down into the edge of a ridge and I've built a roof that hangs over further, just like in the forest park with dirt on top and a mattress inside, a cooking stove, a pine branch that leans against the front door so no one would know it's here. I hardly ever sleep here but I can with my sleeping bag and in the night I wake up and pretend that Father is next to me, that in the morning we'll walk down through the trees and across the St. Johns Bridge to the Safeway.

Lying on the mattress in the afternoon I watch eagles circle in, and red tail hawks and peregrine falcons, the egrets with their legs bent back. I've seen helicopters glide across the treetops with their noses pointing down, spilling great bags of water to put out forest fires.

Wandering and ranging I cross in and out of the burnt sections where the fires have been. Even where the fires have not been the trees here are not as good for climbing. I am heavier now but still I'll spend an afternoon thirty feet off the ground stretched out on a branch watching everything that passes below. I see deer and rabbits and elk. I hear marmots whistle to each other, see them disappear into rock piles. I've never seen another person out here. I sit in the branches without moving and animals pass right beneath me without sensing a thing so I could drop down on them like a wolverine, which is the largest weasel, a mammal that will fall from above to break a deer's spine. There are no wolverines here since now they hardly live anyplace except Canada.