Eye Contact
Bob Daniels
The opening of the
culvert running under the railroad tracks was protected by a skinny pine tree
that had gone crazy. Twisted roots anchoring a scraggly trunk showed above the
rocks and dirt sloping down to the Puget Sound.
The trunk bent this way and that, struggling toward the sun. Half bald, holding
onto useless, dead needles, the tree reminded Clark
of a picture his art teacher had showed the class called The Scream.
Clark scrambled down the slope sending stones rolling in front of his sneakers to the edge of the salty water. He had his notebook, a pen, scissors, a flashlight and the advertisement flyers from the Sunday Daily Olympian in his backpack. Squatting next to the tree, he started cutting pictures out of the Sunday ads, choosing healthy looking people with giant grins, posing and having fun. Gulls shuffled awake on the roof of the warehouse behind him. Calling to each other, they rose in the air and flapped over to the water. Clark made a very shallow impression around the crazy pine tree and laid the pictures in it face up. They helped Clark feel warm inside and good.
After a moment admiring his moat of happy people around the crazy tree Clark found a wide board beside the road and carried it, duck walking, board dragging, inside the culvert to lay over the slimy stream stuck on the bottom. He sat down on the board, put the flashlight in his mouth and opened his notebook against his knees. A train went over the tracks above him and the culvert vibrated slowly. It sang. Clark hummed along a moment then took the flashlight out of his mouth and sang harmony with the train in a hidden language. He sang a song about darkness.
“The secret to training fleas is eye contact,” Clark wrote in his notebook after the song was gone.
“Snot Wooley didn’t know what was in store when he saw the first flea crawling up his leg,” Clark wrote. “But he had a sense of destiny. He pinched the flea between his fingers and held it up to his face, staring hard into the shallow soul of the blood sucking bug. ‘You will obey me,’ Snot told the flea. That was when he had the inspiration for a flea circus.”
Clark paused. He decided that Snot would be his own age, seventeen, but Snot wouldn’t be living with his grandparents. Snot would be different from him, Clark thought. Instead of living with his grandparents, Snot would move into the old-growth forest at Priest Point Park. He’d live in a hollow tree and eat oatmeal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
A shadow passed by the opening of the culvert. Clark turned off his flashlight. The shadow mixed up with the shadow of the crazy pine tree. Suddenly, a body covered the light at the opening and a girl’s voice echoed in the ribbed culvert.
“Who’s in there?”
Clark stayed quiet, pretending he wasn’t there, wondering if the voice would go away.
“I seen you go in,” the voice said. The body in the opening, black against the outside light, turned around. Gulls called to each other looking for food over the inlet; a spooky noise, coming out of a nightmare. Clark thought the gulls had probably helped drive the sentinel pine tree crazy.
“I know you’re in there,” the girl said, turning her face back into the culvert. “It smells bad in there. It smells like rotten fish guts. Don’t it bother you?” Her voice felt sharp and sticky to Clark. But it wasn’t sticky like spilled soda pop attracting bees, it was sticky like a memory of a song that wouldn’t go away.
The girl’s silhouette took up most of the circle of light at the entrance of the culvert. Clark had squatted there too, for a moment, the day before. He could picture what the girl was seeing: the rocks and the gray water and the thick evergreens along the bank farther up the inlet. He could imagine the fresher air, still briny but fresher.
“That train that just went by?” the voice said. “Was full of dead trees. Cut down in the prime of life. Piles and piles of them.”
“I’ve seen the trains,” Clark said. He flushed with embarrassment then, from being caught. Then he let out the breath he had been holding. “And it doesn’t smell any worse one place than any other. Just if there’s more smell of it, that’s not any worse. I like strong smells.”
Clark switched on his flashlight over the notebook again.
“Snot Wooley found a big aquarium for his flea circus,” he wrote. “Snot made a circus out of sticks, string and cloth. He found strong man fleas. Acrobat fleas. He even found a geek flea. They all jumped around like crazy in the aquarium. Snot set it up in the picnic table part of the park and sold tickets. He sold tickets for a nickel if people wanted to watch a few minutes and tickets for a dollar if people wanted to watch all day.”
“I can see you scribbling,” the girl said. “Why’d you put these pictures under the tree?”
Clark pointed the flashlight at her. She twisted to let the faint beam fall on her back.
“It’s cool,” she said.
She moved into the thin flashlight beam then. Her hair was wild. Even in the dim light Clark could tell she was very pale. He thought she was older than him from the experience in her body language, in her voice.
“It’s just something I did,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m Jennifer. I used to live in Portland before I ran away. You ever go to Oregon? You know Portland? King’s Hill?”
She duck-walked three steps further into the culvert.
The closer Jennifer got the more the flashlight revealed. She wore a dark overcoat dragging in the fish gut stink. She had thick eyebrows, chubby cheeks, a wide mouth, and her forehead erupted with acne. She had a disarming smile. She was more or less like him, a loner, he thought.
“I’m Clark,” he said. “I never been to Portland. I live here in Olympia with my grandparents. But I lived with my mom in Eugene for awhile. That’s around Portland isn’t it?”
“Why Eugene?” she asked.
Clark shrugged. “We lived different places, you know, when my mom picked me up at my grandpa’s and took me with her. We lived over in Yakima too, and the last time we lived on the ocean in Westport.”
“I know Westport,” she said.
“I was little.”
“How long ago?” she asked.
“Oh,” Clark thought about it. He could remember living in the Sea Breeze motel and eating lots of salt water taffy. He loved taffy and felt like he chewed it all the time in Westport. “I guess seven or eight years or so.”
“I wasn’t there then. I was there one summer, two or three years ago. I knew this guy and he let me crash in his garage. Wouldn’t that be freaky if we were there at the same time and saw each other but didn’t know it? Like I saw you somewhere. But we’d never know it.”
“That would be freaky.” Clark pictured that. He imagined himself, ten years old, walking into the battle charged lights and sounds of the Beachside Video Arcade. Older kids leaning and squeezing and tapping in a cavern of video games that sang staccato, glassy eyed hymns. Maybe somebody noticed him, a girl in a parked car noticed him going into the Beachside. Later, they wouldn’t recognize each other but really if they ever met again they’d know something about each other. “Pretend you did see me. I used to play video games in the arcade. You saw me and you thought, you thought...” he realized he didn’t want to say it.
“I thought you were cool,” she finished for him.
“Yeah, but...”
“But nothing pretend. I came with you. We played video games that afternoon.”
“OK,” Clark imagined it. “Wow. Then we meet again, now.”
Jennifer had duck-walked almost to Clark. That close, Clark thought maybe she was his age but she’d obviously been around more than him. He had never run away from home or gotten into any serious trouble. Thinking about Westport, or any of the times he spent with his mom made him feel funny.
“I got to write something,” he said.
“OK,” she said. “Can I watch?”
“I guess,” he said. “The fleas got better and better at their tricks the more eye contact Snot Wooley made with them. Pretty soon he gave them names. One day he met a girl in the park who was very cool and pretty. ‘Don’t your fleas get tired of doing tricks in a cage?’ she asked him. ‘I guess so,’ he said. Then Snot let all the fleas go free.”
He felt better. He didn’t like ending his stories completely because he thought he might want to keep writing about the characters later. But he felt that setting the fleas free was a good place to stop.
“Can I read it?” Jennifer asked him, reaching for the notebook and the flashlight. She flipped through the notebook too quickly to read at first but then she went back and read it slowly.
“This is dope,” Jennifer said. They just sat without talking a moment. Then Jennifer said, “Let’s get out of here. I want to show you something.”
Westport was on the Pacific Ocean two hours west of Olympia. Clark found out that his mom didn’t even tell his grandpa she was picking him up the time she took him there. She got him at school and his grandpa didn’t know.
Clark’s mom had a job as a waitress in a seafood restaurant in Westport. Her boyfriend owned the restaurant, but her boyfriend was married and he lived with his wife. Clark and his mom lived in the Sea Breeze Motel in a run down part of town as far from the ocean and its tangy, refreshing breeze as you could get. He wasn’t sure how long it lasted there, but that was the last time he’d seen her.
“You live in the crack whore motel,” a kid had told Clark during his second week at the elementary school in Westport. It must have been fourth or fifth grade. The kid looked mean and his arms were covered with rub-on tattoos that came out of the quarter machines at grocery stores; cartoon tattoos, like the Tasmanian Devil, chopped motorcycles and drag racers. The kid was in Clark’s class, a screw up but funny sometimes. Clark’s teacher was a pudgy, soft spoken man who was very strict and made the kids write sentences over and over as punishment. Clark didn’t remember much, but he remembered that the cafeteria smelled like puke.
“Your mom must be a crack whore,” another kid said.
That night, after the mean kids talked to him, Clark had noticed that the only other kids around the motel were Mexican kids.
“Are we Mexican?” he had asked his mom.
She was at the mirror putting on make-up. That was really the only time he could talk to her when she’d answer him. If they were watching TV, she might listen but she’d only grunt a response. She had freckles on her hands that he liked to stare at, especially when her hands were around her face and eyes. She never looked like the other moms he saw and never, ever, much like his grandmother. Clark knew, because his grandpa said so, that it was because of drugs.
“No honey,” she said watching her face in the mirror.
The bed took up most of the room. The mirror was over the scratched up dresser at the foot of the bed. The TV was bolted to a metal platform up in the corner. Reruns of the TV show F Troop were on it. The color kept going out, so it would be Corporal Agarn getting kicked in the butt in color, black and white, then color, then black and white.
“Mexicans have black hair and brown skins. Why would you ask something so fucking stupid?” his mom said.
“Because we’re living in the worst fucking dive in town,” Clark said. Dive was a word he’d heard his grandpa use after the last time his mom picked him up and they lived in the duplex in Eugene for awhile.
“That doesn’t make us Mexicans for god’s sakes,” she answered. She didn’t get upset. It took a lot to get Clark’s mom upset when she was putting on her make up. “It makes us white trash. Which we aren’t either. My boyfriend who I’m seeing tonight? He has a boat and a house and we’ll move in there as soon as he leaves his wife.”
Clark had gotten up on the bed behind his mom so she could see his face behind hers in the mirror. She smiled at him. That was his most vivid memory of her, smiling at him in the mirror.
One time, a kid at his regular elementary school in Olympia had asked him why he lived with his grandparents instead of his real parents and Clark told the kid it was because his mom couldn’t get out of her mirror.
“My mom can only talk to people in a mirror,” Clark said, but he couldn’t remember if that was before they went to Westport or after that.
Jennifer led Clark along the railroad tracks beside the inlet. She started chucking loose stones from the track bed at the gulls perched on the big rocks along the water. The gulls lifted up and settled again while the stones clattered harmlessly over the barnacles. Clark liked the sound of the stones. Jennifer imitated the noise the gulls made when they flew away from the stones. She made him laugh.
“What if there was another me, somewhere?” Clark asked her after they’d walked a little ways. “Who always lived with his mom? I mean, I live with my grandparents, just like parents, they take care of me, buy me clothes, feed me, give me rides... but what if the other me still lived with Mom and that me’s having all kinds of other crap going on? Running around with her? That me is with her, but this me here doesn’t know? Except, somehow I feel the experiences deep down, you know?”
Jennifer shook her head. She turned and headed off the train tracks away from the inlet. They jumped over the ditch beside the tracks and landed in high grass.
“Where is your mom?” Jennifer asked when Clark had jumped over with her.
“After Westport they won’t tell me,” he said.
“What happened?” she asked, and then started wading through the grass toward a big gravel parking lot with a bunch of semi tractor trailers in it. Clark watched her a moment before he moved. Her body was a series of echoes and mirrors he thought: the curve of her butt echoed in the curve of her upper lip, the swell of her breasts echoed in her lower lip, the line of her cheek bones echoed in her attitude and style.
“I was at this motel room by myself for a long time and then the woman at night found me. She gave me half of her ham sandwich. I think she called the cops too. Anyway my grandpa came and took me back to his house.”
“No, asshole, I mean what happened to your mom? She dead?”
“Oh. No. They won’t tell me but I think she’s in New Mexico. There’s a city down there, like Santa Claus or something.”
“Santa Claus?” Jennifer laughed, dimples echoing. “What kind of place is that?”
“No, not Santa Claus, but like that, like Santa something,” Clark smiled too. “I saw it on a letter.”
Across the parking lot were two long, tall, brick buildings. They looked empty with boarded windows. Jennifer headed for a gap in between them.
“Well, you probably do live part of your life with her still. I’d say. I don’t know how you’ll ever get that part of you back though.” Jennifer stopped walking when they got to the old warehouses. Jennifer glanced around to see if anybody was watching, then she took Clark’s hand and led him down the narrow alley between the buildings. It smelled like brick and mud and the sharp, high stink of pee. “Santa Claus,” she chuckled.
The passage was so narrow they had to twist sideways some places, picking their way over rocks, fallen brick and mud puddles. “Watch this so you can do it,” she told him when they had gone about fifty feet.
Jennifer pushed her back against one wall and her feet against the other and shoved, walking up the brick wall ten feet or so until she got to a ledge that she scrambled onto. She looked down at Clark. “Come on,” she said. Clark followed her feeling excited because he rose up like magic over the ground. The ledge seemed higher when he got there than it had looking up but they didn’t stay on it long. Jennifer pried the plywood away from the window there and they squeezed through into the darkness.
“I thought you were older than me,” Clark told Jennifer inside the warehouse when their eyes adjusted to the light. “I thought you were like, twenty.”
“I thought you were like, fifteen,” she said. “I’ve had my eye on you,” she cracked up when she said that. “I’ve had my eye on you,” she said in a lower, official voice, like a principal. “I’ve had my eye on you,” she said in a fake southern accent.
They could hear rain start up and patter on the roof, harder and harder. Light squeaked through cracks around the windows so they could see broken glass and thick dust over the floor clearly, then the light spread out to create a murk that Jennifer walked into fearlessly.
“What do you mean you’ve had your eye on me?” Clark asked her, whispering in the big, empty space.
“You’re cute, acting all mysterious and solitary,” her voice was still tough and sure but Clark felt clouds sliding in it. “Come on, up this ladder.”
The ladder led to another loft and then another ladder.
“I watched you from here,” Jennifer said. “You think that’s sick and wrong?”
The second ladder ended in a cupola about six feet square and five feet high. It had slatted windows on all four sides and Jennifer pointed to the one across from the top of the ladder. That window looked out over everything: the trucks in the gravel lot, the railroad tracks, the inlet, the evergreens and even the hillside crowded with houses past the evergreens.
“You could see me?” Clark asked.
“I noticed you walking down the railroad tracks. Then I noticed you put some stuff around the tree and go into into the tunnel. I couldn’t tell what you were doing, but it made me curious about you. When I came down, I saw you had put pictures of people around the tree. That’s pretty fucking weird Clark,” she said. “Tell me why’d you put the pictures around the tree?”
Clark slid right up against the slatted window and stared out. He focused on the sentinel tree and then imagined himself down there, hunched over by the tree, like he was planting something. He thought about telling her he’d been planting smiles. Or he could say that he thought the tree was lonely and needed company. Or he could say something creepy, he thought, like each picture represented a soul or something. But he liked her and anyway, he wondered why he’d put the pictures around the tree too.
“What usually happened,” he said. “With my mother I mean...”
“Your mother?”
“Yeah,” he turned his head. “You asked what happened with my mother.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Clark turned back to the slats. He watched the raindrops fall outside, trying to pick out a single individual one and watch it as far as he could. The raindrops disappeared when he looked at the landscape, then they reappeared when he focused five feet in front of the cupola.
“What usually happened after Mom and me lived somewhere together,” he told Jennifer, feeling himself entranced by the rain drops, “Was that we’d both go back to my grandpa’s house and she’d leave me there after awhile. The time at the Sea Breeze though, in Westport, she called my grandpa, and he told her not to come home. Not to come home ever again. I could hear him yelling through the phone. Yelling: ‘No! Stay away!’ She was sitting in front of the mirror. I was on the bed. The bed took up the whole fucking room so I spent all my time on the bed. The only chair in the room was in front of the mirror. She rested her feet on the dresser drawer. I was cutting pictures out of magazines for some stupid reason. I think I was cutting pictures for homework for school but I don’t know for sure. I remember cutting out pictures though, sitting on the bed, watching her in the mirror.”
“What about the kid?” Clark’s mother had yelled into the phone. “What about your grandson, Dad? Don’t you want to see him? Don’t you want me to bring him? What’ll happen to him?”
His mother had put her feet on the floor and leaned forward to hear the answer. His grandpa had stopped yelling. His mom stood up and dropped the phone into its cradle. Clark had cut out a picture of a lake with a boat on it and two pictures of dogs. He cut out a picture of a smiling woman bending down with a plate of brownies in her hand. He put the pictures in a circle around himself on the bed.
“Well that’s it,” his mother said. She was dry eyed and matter of fact. She didn’t touch Clark. She didn’t go near him. “Your grandpa doesn’t want to see me anymore. Fuck.”
Her suitcase was packed by the door with her jacket laying over it. She stood by the dresser. “I can’t stay here,” she said to Clark as if he had begged her to stay and make a permanent home in the Sea Breeze. “I won’t take you with me,” she said, finally, and turned to go, glancing at Clark in the mirror when she took her purse off the dresser, lifting her eyebrows in a tiny shrug.
Clark felt Jennifer’s hand on his shoulder. It jogged him out of the trance. “Hey,” she said softly. “You don’t have to tell me why you put those pictures around that tree.”
Clark had sat on the motel bed but part of him chased his mom and grabbed her legs and wouldn’t let go. Most of him just sat there and watched the TV go from color to black and white and waited, but part of him went along with her.
Jennifer dissolved out his consciousness then and Clark went back to imagining himself, except he started imagining himself down there by the sentinel tree, carefully placing the pictures in the little moat. He could see it like it was someone else doing it, in the rain, the pictures getting wet, the rocks getting slippery.
Suddenly, the pictures began to glow and slowly they came to life. The happy people in the pictures became three dimensional, like holograms, like princess Lea in Star Wars when she got projected by R2D2. The picture people grew up to life size, in their poses, looking ready to start moving, to start living their perfect lives. The Clark in the cupola stared, wondering what he’d created now.
The other Clark, the boy in the rain, looked surprised by the pictures coming to life. He jumped up in the middle of the circle of happy and attractive people: a mother holding a child, a young man and woman wearing tennis outfits, a father with a collie and another man with a fishing rod. The boy reached out both arms, he reached out but the holograms retreated in front of him. Watching, Clark prayed that the boy could leave the circle, just get out of there.
“Let him go!” Clark yelled from up in the cupola. “You monsters! Let him out of there!”
The circle of attractive, happy newspaper pictures ignored the yelling. Their healthy, perfect smiles always turned toward the lens of the cameras that had captured them, frozen in their moments of completion, encircled the boy. Clark felt guilty for having laid them in the sandy loam. The part of himself he’d left in the circle couldn’t see outside of it he realized, or couldn’t function outside of it. That part of himself sank down in the rain and huddled next to the trunk of the sentinel tree.
“Pretend you liked me,” Jennifer’s voice came through the trance from behind him in the cupola. “OK? Pretend I knew you and you liked me. Pretend I liked you.”
The rain fell over the rocks. Clark thought about it. Why not pretend that? He stared at individual drops of rain again for a moment and when he looked back down toward the culvert the happy people had shrunk back into their pictures. The boy looked relieved, Clark thought, standing in the rain. The boy turned and looked up at the cupola where Jennifer and Clark were watching him and waved.
Clark scrambled down the slope sending stones rolling in front of his sneakers to the edge of the salty water. He had his notebook, a pen, scissors, a flashlight and the advertisement flyers from the Sunday Daily Olympian in his backpack. Squatting next to the tree, he started cutting pictures out of the Sunday ads, choosing healthy looking people with giant grins, posing and having fun. Gulls shuffled awake on the roof of the warehouse behind him. Calling to each other, they rose in the air and flapped over to the water. Clark made a very shallow impression around the crazy pine tree and laid the pictures in it face up. They helped Clark feel warm inside and good.
After a moment admiring his moat of happy people around the crazy tree Clark found a wide board beside the road and carried it, duck walking, board dragging, inside the culvert to lay over the slimy stream stuck on the bottom. He sat down on the board, put the flashlight in his mouth and opened his notebook against his knees. A train went over the tracks above him and the culvert vibrated slowly. It sang. Clark hummed along a moment then took the flashlight out of his mouth and sang harmony with the train in a hidden language. He sang a song about darkness.
“The secret to training fleas is eye contact,” Clark wrote in his notebook after the song was gone.
“Snot Wooley didn’t know what was in store when he saw the first flea crawling up his leg,” Clark wrote. “But he had a sense of destiny. He pinched the flea between his fingers and held it up to his face, staring hard into the shallow soul of the blood sucking bug. ‘You will obey me,’ Snot told the flea. That was when he had the inspiration for a flea circus.”
Clark paused. He decided that Snot would be his own age, seventeen, but Snot wouldn’t be living with his grandparents. Snot would be different from him, Clark thought. Instead of living with his grandparents, Snot would move into the old-growth forest at Priest Point Park. He’d live in a hollow tree and eat oatmeal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
A shadow passed by the opening of the culvert. Clark turned off his flashlight. The shadow mixed up with the shadow of the crazy pine tree. Suddenly, a body covered the light at the opening and a girl’s voice echoed in the ribbed culvert.
“Who’s in there?”
Clark stayed quiet, pretending he wasn’t there, wondering if the voice would go away.
“I seen you go in,” the voice said. The body in the opening, black against the outside light, turned around. Gulls called to each other looking for food over the inlet; a spooky noise, coming out of a nightmare. Clark thought the gulls had probably helped drive the sentinel pine tree crazy.
“I know you’re in there,” the girl said, turning her face back into the culvert. “It smells bad in there. It smells like rotten fish guts. Don’t it bother you?” Her voice felt sharp and sticky to Clark. But it wasn’t sticky like spilled soda pop attracting bees, it was sticky like a memory of a song that wouldn’t go away.
The girl’s silhouette took up most of the circle of light at the entrance of the culvert. Clark had squatted there too, for a moment, the day before. He could picture what the girl was seeing: the rocks and the gray water and the thick evergreens along the bank farther up the inlet. He could imagine the fresher air, still briny but fresher.
“That train that just went by?” the voice said. “Was full of dead trees. Cut down in the prime of life. Piles and piles of them.”
“I’ve seen the trains,” Clark said. He flushed with embarrassment then, from being caught. Then he let out the breath he had been holding. “And it doesn’t smell any worse one place than any other. Just if there’s more smell of it, that’s not any worse. I like strong smells.”
Clark switched on his flashlight over the notebook again.
“Snot Wooley found a big aquarium for his flea circus,” he wrote. “Snot made a circus out of sticks, string and cloth. He found strong man fleas. Acrobat fleas. He even found a geek flea. They all jumped around like crazy in the aquarium. Snot set it up in the picnic table part of the park and sold tickets. He sold tickets for a nickel if people wanted to watch a few minutes and tickets for a dollar if people wanted to watch all day.”
“I can see you scribbling,” the girl said. “Why’d you put these pictures under the tree?”
Clark pointed the flashlight at her. She twisted to let the faint beam fall on her back.
“It’s cool,” she said.
She moved into the thin flashlight beam then. Her hair was wild. Even in the dim light Clark could tell she was very pale. He thought she was older than him from the experience in her body language, in her voice.
“It’s just something I did,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m Jennifer. I used to live in Portland before I ran away. You ever go to Oregon? You know Portland? King’s Hill?”
She duck-walked three steps further into the culvert.
The closer Jennifer got the more the flashlight revealed. She wore a dark overcoat dragging in the fish gut stink. She had thick eyebrows, chubby cheeks, a wide mouth, and her forehead erupted with acne. She had a disarming smile. She was more or less like him, a loner, he thought.
“I’m Clark,” he said. “I never been to Portland. I live here in Olympia with my grandparents. But I lived with my mom in Eugene for awhile. That’s around Portland isn’t it?”
“Why Eugene?” she asked.
Clark shrugged. “We lived different places, you know, when my mom picked me up at my grandpa’s and took me with her. We lived over in Yakima too, and the last time we lived on the ocean in Westport.”
“I know Westport,” she said.
“I was little.”
“How long ago?” she asked.
“Oh,” Clark thought about it. He could remember living in the Sea Breeze motel and eating lots of salt water taffy. He loved taffy and felt like he chewed it all the time in Westport. “I guess seven or eight years or so.”
“I wasn’t there then. I was there one summer, two or three years ago. I knew this guy and he let me crash in his garage. Wouldn’t that be freaky if we were there at the same time and saw each other but didn’t know it? Like I saw you somewhere. But we’d never know it.”
“That would be freaky.” Clark pictured that. He imagined himself, ten years old, walking into the battle charged lights and sounds of the Beachside Video Arcade. Older kids leaning and squeezing and tapping in a cavern of video games that sang staccato, glassy eyed hymns. Maybe somebody noticed him, a girl in a parked car noticed him going into the Beachside. Later, they wouldn’t recognize each other but really if they ever met again they’d know something about each other. “Pretend you did see me. I used to play video games in the arcade. You saw me and you thought, you thought...” he realized he didn’t want to say it.
“I thought you were cool,” she finished for him.
“Yeah, but...”
“But nothing pretend. I came with you. We played video games that afternoon.”
“OK,” Clark imagined it. “Wow. Then we meet again, now.”
Jennifer had duck-walked almost to Clark. That close, Clark thought maybe she was his age but she’d obviously been around more than him. He had never run away from home or gotten into any serious trouble. Thinking about Westport, or any of the times he spent with his mom made him feel funny.
“I got to write something,” he said.
“OK,” she said. “Can I watch?”
“I guess,” he said. “The fleas got better and better at their tricks the more eye contact Snot Wooley made with them. Pretty soon he gave them names. One day he met a girl in the park who was very cool and pretty. ‘Don’t your fleas get tired of doing tricks in a cage?’ she asked him. ‘I guess so,’ he said. Then Snot let all the fleas go free.”
He felt better. He didn’t like ending his stories completely because he thought he might want to keep writing about the characters later. But he felt that setting the fleas free was a good place to stop.
“Can I read it?” Jennifer asked him, reaching for the notebook and the flashlight. She flipped through the notebook too quickly to read at first but then she went back and read it slowly.
“This is dope,” Jennifer said. They just sat without talking a moment. Then Jennifer said, “Let’s get out of here. I want to show you something.”
Westport was on the Pacific Ocean two hours west of Olympia. Clark found out that his mom didn’t even tell his grandpa she was picking him up the time she took him there. She got him at school and his grandpa didn’t know.
Clark’s mom had a job as a waitress in a seafood restaurant in Westport. Her boyfriend owned the restaurant, but her boyfriend was married and he lived with his wife. Clark and his mom lived in the Sea Breeze Motel in a run down part of town as far from the ocean and its tangy, refreshing breeze as you could get. He wasn’t sure how long it lasted there, but that was the last time he’d seen her.
“You live in the crack whore motel,” a kid had told Clark during his second week at the elementary school in Westport. It must have been fourth or fifth grade. The kid looked mean and his arms were covered with rub-on tattoos that came out of the quarter machines at grocery stores; cartoon tattoos, like the Tasmanian Devil, chopped motorcycles and drag racers. The kid was in Clark’s class, a screw up but funny sometimes. Clark’s teacher was a pudgy, soft spoken man who was very strict and made the kids write sentences over and over as punishment. Clark didn’t remember much, but he remembered that the cafeteria smelled like puke.
“Your mom must be a crack whore,” another kid said.
That night, after the mean kids talked to him, Clark had noticed that the only other kids around the motel were Mexican kids.
“Are we Mexican?” he had asked his mom.
She was at the mirror putting on make-up. That was really the only time he could talk to her when she’d answer him. If they were watching TV, she might listen but she’d only grunt a response. She had freckles on her hands that he liked to stare at, especially when her hands were around her face and eyes. She never looked like the other moms he saw and never, ever, much like his grandmother. Clark knew, because his grandpa said so, that it was because of drugs.
“No honey,” she said watching her face in the mirror.
The bed took up most of the room. The mirror was over the scratched up dresser at the foot of the bed. The TV was bolted to a metal platform up in the corner. Reruns of the TV show F Troop were on it. The color kept going out, so it would be Corporal Agarn getting kicked in the butt in color, black and white, then color, then black and white.
“Mexicans have black hair and brown skins. Why would you ask something so fucking stupid?” his mom said.
“Because we’re living in the worst fucking dive in town,” Clark said. Dive was a word he’d heard his grandpa use after the last time his mom picked him up and they lived in the duplex in Eugene for awhile.
“That doesn’t make us Mexicans for god’s sakes,” she answered. She didn’t get upset. It took a lot to get Clark’s mom upset when she was putting on her make up. “It makes us white trash. Which we aren’t either. My boyfriend who I’m seeing tonight? He has a boat and a house and we’ll move in there as soon as he leaves his wife.”
Clark had gotten up on the bed behind his mom so she could see his face behind hers in the mirror. She smiled at him. That was his most vivid memory of her, smiling at him in the mirror.
One time, a kid at his regular elementary school in Olympia had asked him why he lived with his grandparents instead of his real parents and Clark told the kid it was because his mom couldn’t get out of her mirror.
“My mom can only talk to people in a mirror,” Clark said, but he couldn’t remember if that was before they went to Westport or after that.
Jennifer led Clark along the railroad tracks beside the inlet. She started chucking loose stones from the track bed at the gulls perched on the big rocks along the water. The gulls lifted up and settled again while the stones clattered harmlessly over the barnacles. Clark liked the sound of the stones. Jennifer imitated the noise the gulls made when they flew away from the stones. She made him laugh.
“What if there was another me, somewhere?” Clark asked her after they’d walked a little ways. “Who always lived with his mom? I mean, I live with my grandparents, just like parents, they take care of me, buy me clothes, feed me, give me rides... but what if the other me still lived with Mom and that me’s having all kinds of other crap going on? Running around with her? That me is with her, but this me here doesn’t know? Except, somehow I feel the experiences deep down, you know?”
Jennifer shook her head. She turned and headed off the train tracks away from the inlet. They jumped over the ditch beside the tracks and landed in high grass.
“Where is your mom?” Jennifer asked when Clark had jumped over with her.
“After Westport they won’t tell me,” he said.
“What happened?” she asked, and then started wading through the grass toward a big gravel parking lot with a bunch of semi tractor trailers in it. Clark watched her a moment before he moved. Her body was a series of echoes and mirrors he thought: the curve of her butt echoed in the curve of her upper lip, the swell of her breasts echoed in her lower lip, the line of her cheek bones echoed in her attitude and style.
“I was at this motel room by myself for a long time and then the woman at night found me. She gave me half of her ham sandwich. I think she called the cops too. Anyway my grandpa came and took me back to his house.”
“No, asshole, I mean what happened to your mom? She dead?”
“Oh. No. They won’t tell me but I think she’s in New Mexico. There’s a city down there, like Santa Claus or something.”
“Santa Claus?” Jennifer laughed, dimples echoing. “What kind of place is that?”
“No, not Santa Claus, but like that, like Santa something,” Clark smiled too. “I saw it on a letter.”
Across the parking lot were two long, tall, brick buildings. They looked empty with boarded windows. Jennifer headed for a gap in between them.
“Well, you probably do live part of your life with her still. I’d say. I don’t know how you’ll ever get that part of you back though.” Jennifer stopped walking when they got to the old warehouses. Jennifer glanced around to see if anybody was watching, then she took Clark’s hand and led him down the narrow alley between the buildings. It smelled like brick and mud and the sharp, high stink of pee. “Santa Claus,” she chuckled.
The passage was so narrow they had to twist sideways some places, picking their way over rocks, fallen brick and mud puddles. “Watch this so you can do it,” she told him when they had gone about fifty feet.
Jennifer pushed her back against one wall and her feet against the other and shoved, walking up the brick wall ten feet or so until she got to a ledge that she scrambled onto. She looked down at Clark. “Come on,” she said. Clark followed her feeling excited because he rose up like magic over the ground. The ledge seemed higher when he got there than it had looking up but they didn’t stay on it long. Jennifer pried the plywood away from the window there and they squeezed through into the darkness.
“I thought you were older than me,” Clark told Jennifer inside the warehouse when their eyes adjusted to the light. “I thought you were like, twenty.”
“I thought you were like, fifteen,” she said. “I’ve had my eye on you,” she cracked up when she said that. “I’ve had my eye on you,” she said in a lower, official voice, like a principal. “I’ve had my eye on you,” she said in a fake southern accent.
They could hear rain start up and patter on the roof, harder and harder. Light squeaked through cracks around the windows so they could see broken glass and thick dust over the floor clearly, then the light spread out to create a murk that Jennifer walked into fearlessly.
“What do you mean you’ve had your eye on me?” Clark asked her, whispering in the big, empty space.
“You’re cute, acting all mysterious and solitary,” her voice was still tough and sure but Clark felt clouds sliding in it. “Come on, up this ladder.”
The ladder led to another loft and then another ladder.
“I watched you from here,” Jennifer said. “You think that’s sick and wrong?”
The second ladder ended in a cupola about six feet square and five feet high. It had slatted windows on all four sides and Jennifer pointed to the one across from the top of the ladder. That window looked out over everything: the trucks in the gravel lot, the railroad tracks, the inlet, the evergreens and even the hillside crowded with houses past the evergreens.
“You could see me?” Clark asked.
“I noticed you walking down the railroad tracks. Then I noticed you put some stuff around the tree and go into into the tunnel. I couldn’t tell what you were doing, but it made me curious about you. When I came down, I saw you had put pictures of people around the tree. That’s pretty fucking weird Clark,” she said. “Tell me why’d you put the pictures around the tree?”
Clark slid right up against the slatted window and stared out. He focused on the sentinel tree and then imagined himself down there, hunched over by the tree, like he was planting something. He thought about telling her he’d been planting smiles. Or he could say that he thought the tree was lonely and needed company. Or he could say something creepy, he thought, like each picture represented a soul or something. But he liked her and anyway, he wondered why he’d put the pictures around the tree too.
“What usually happened,” he said. “With my mother I mean...”
“Your mother?”
“Yeah,” he turned his head. “You asked what happened with my mother.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Clark turned back to the slats. He watched the raindrops fall outside, trying to pick out a single individual one and watch it as far as he could. The raindrops disappeared when he looked at the landscape, then they reappeared when he focused five feet in front of the cupola.
“What usually happened after Mom and me lived somewhere together,” he told Jennifer, feeling himself entranced by the rain drops, “Was that we’d both go back to my grandpa’s house and she’d leave me there after awhile. The time at the Sea Breeze though, in Westport, she called my grandpa, and he told her not to come home. Not to come home ever again. I could hear him yelling through the phone. Yelling: ‘No! Stay away!’ She was sitting in front of the mirror. I was on the bed. The bed took up the whole fucking room so I spent all my time on the bed. The only chair in the room was in front of the mirror. She rested her feet on the dresser drawer. I was cutting pictures out of magazines for some stupid reason. I think I was cutting pictures for homework for school but I don’t know for sure. I remember cutting out pictures though, sitting on the bed, watching her in the mirror.”
“What about the kid?” Clark’s mother had yelled into the phone. “What about your grandson, Dad? Don’t you want to see him? Don’t you want me to bring him? What’ll happen to him?”
His mother had put her feet on the floor and leaned forward to hear the answer. His grandpa had stopped yelling. His mom stood up and dropped the phone into its cradle. Clark had cut out a picture of a lake with a boat on it and two pictures of dogs. He cut out a picture of a smiling woman bending down with a plate of brownies in her hand. He put the pictures in a circle around himself on the bed.
“Well that’s it,” his mother said. She was dry eyed and matter of fact. She didn’t touch Clark. She didn’t go near him. “Your grandpa doesn’t want to see me anymore. Fuck.”
Her suitcase was packed by the door with her jacket laying over it. She stood by the dresser. “I can’t stay here,” she said to Clark as if he had begged her to stay and make a permanent home in the Sea Breeze. “I won’t take you with me,” she said, finally, and turned to go, glancing at Clark in the mirror when she took her purse off the dresser, lifting her eyebrows in a tiny shrug.
Clark felt Jennifer’s hand on his shoulder. It jogged him out of the trance. “Hey,” she said softly. “You don’t have to tell me why you put those pictures around that tree.”
Clark had sat on the motel bed but part of him chased his mom and grabbed her legs and wouldn’t let go. Most of him just sat there and watched the TV go from color to black and white and waited, but part of him went along with her.
Jennifer dissolved out his consciousness then and Clark went back to imagining himself, except he started imagining himself down there by the sentinel tree, carefully placing the pictures in the little moat. He could see it like it was someone else doing it, in the rain, the pictures getting wet, the rocks getting slippery.
Suddenly, the pictures began to glow and slowly they came to life. The happy people in the pictures became three dimensional, like holograms, like princess Lea in Star Wars when she got projected by R2D2. The picture people grew up to life size, in their poses, looking ready to start moving, to start living their perfect lives. The Clark in the cupola stared, wondering what he’d created now.
The other Clark, the boy in the rain, looked surprised by the pictures coming to life. He jumped up in the middle of the circle of happy and attractive people: a mother holding a child, a young man and woman wearing tennis outfits, a father with a collie and another man with a fishing rod. The boy reached out both arms, he reached out but the holograms retreated in front of him. Watching, Clark prayed that the boy could leave the circle, just get out of there.
“Let him go!” Clark yelled from up in the cupola. “You monsters! Let him out of there!”
The circle of attractive, happy newspaper pictures ignored the yelling. Their healthy, perfect smiles always turned toward the lens of the cameras that had captured them, frozen in their moments of completion, encircled the boy. Clark felt guilty for having laid them in the sandy loam. The part of himself he’d left in the circle couldn’t see outside of it he realized, or couldn’t function outside of it. That part of himself sank down in the rain and huddled next to the trunk of the sentinel tree.
“Pretend you liked me,” Jennifer’s voice came through the trance from behind him in the cupola. “OK? Pretend I knew you and you liked me. Pretend I liked you.”
The rain fell over the rocks. Clark thought about it. Why not pretend that? He stared at individual drops of rain again for a moment and when he looked back down toward the culvert the happy people had shrunk back into their pictures. The boy looked relieved, Clark thought, standing in the rain. The boy turned and looked up at the cupola where Jennifer and Clark were watching him and waved.
