1990.
◈
“C’mon, just give me a drink,” he said while readjusting his John Deere cap—notching a shadow to fall low over his flickering eyes: roving from her face, to his friend, and then back to mine. “Just a quick one!”
“I don’t even have much left to quench my own thirst,” she responded. “Much less for the four of us. Unless you take small, deliberate sips…which I know nobody here is willing to do.”
“I promise! I promise I’ll only take a small one…a small one, and that’s it!”
“He ain’t gonna take a little bit,” his friend finally said, “hand George that canteen, and he’s gonna drain it.”
“So you don’t trust us?” he stammered out, “so you…you’re…you’re a trustie.”
The word, rolling off his tongue into the dust drifting in the still Oregon heat, was designed to sting, to wound, to pierce through flesh, to shoot down, and puncture whatever reservoir of pride the recipient had.
It implied everything around us—the pines, lining the tracks, stretching their crowns skywards but not sparing a bit of growth for temporary shade, the packs, slung on our backs, with mis-matched leather and synthetic straps holding down blankets cut from discarded drapes and sleeping pads fished out from cardboard boxes on the curb waiting for the Sunday pickers, and the ties, set firmly in the bed of crunching ballast, leeching the scent of creosote and god-knows-what-else-preservatives directly in our nostrils, was ill-gotten. Unearned, like a stack of ten dollar bills, drawn from an ATM on the corner and handed over to a shopkeeper across a cool, air-conditioned counter sprinkled with ivy neatly kept within planter boxes and plastic social media signs, illuminated with strings of twinkling fairy lights. Call it a farce, even, if you were like my old English teacher and liked to turn words upside down.
I coughed, spitting those two resuscitated words, torn away from the dictionary and strung together in a mockery of itself, onto those ties. They landed smack dab atop a knothole. I watched as it drained away from the surface, into the crevices. Trust. And rastafarian, whatever that word entailed anymore, evaporating into the chemical-jacked wood baking under the harsh sun.
The first round escaped my chapped, flaking lips as more of a whisper.
“Shut…shut up.”
Then, somehow emboldened by it all—the heat, the weight of my pack, straps pressing against my chest, like the tangerine crates had been when the boxcar door was thrown wide open and the bull’s1 revolver barrel extended, like God’s thumb, from the blinding sunlight, and the thirst, tapping away at the lining of my gullet, I somehow found the traction.
“Shut up.”
“Huh? What did you say?”
“Shut…shut the hell up…”
“What’s wrong with you-”
“Shut your goddamn mouth! You’re making things more complicated than it needs to be, if you…” My lips pursed tight, unsure whether to drop it. Might as well say it, damn it.
“You were the guy who made us all get kicked out of Dunsmuir! You’re lucky you weren’t nabbed by them and thrown into the slammer!”
“Let him finish, George…”
“And you’re asking for a drink from her, when she doesn’t have enough for all of us!” That one rose in pitch, turning into almost a shriek. “You see us asking her for a drink, huh? Our throats are all a-hurtin and yet we have the guts to keep them inside. Keep jabbering like that, I’m…I’m…gonna slug you!”
Girls on the road didn’t need anyone to shield them away from danger, from ridicule, especially someone like Navi. If she wanted to, she could have whipped out her switchblade from her pocket and decked him in an instant. Deep down, I knew that my voice was being fed on stacks of pride. Pride, and vanity.
“So shut the hell…you know what? Screw it. Shut the fuck up!”
The last one felt strange, alien, as was much of the day leading up to this moment, leaving my mouth. A twenty year old should have known how much that word hurt, should know how much that word punched and stripped deep into flesh, like a brass knuckle to a gut, and shouldn’t have used it. I should have known better…we all should have known better, when the heat snuck up on us from behind and the rails bore sunspots into our eyes.
He winced at that. Internally. I could tell, when he kept a straight, blank face, when a finger slipped under his backpack strap and his discolored polo to keep it from stripping away more of the skin on his shoulders. He didn’t smirk. He didn’t sneer. He didn’t shoot back with some witty response meant to capture, pin my rant against me. But from those two eyes, the color of a green plastic bag kicked halfway into the dirt, darkened by the cap, fixated directly at mine, I knew.
He’ll get me back.
Navi was the first to break the long pause.
“Quick to call me a trustie, huh, because I won’t give you a drink?” she said quietly, letting out a small laugh as she did so, “the river’s not too far from here.”
She started off down the tracks, and the sight of her titanium-oxide hair, split—half buzzed, half long, draped over her bobbing pack—somehow compelled all three of us to start moving again.
-
The railroad tracks crossed the river.
The name long escapes me, but the sight for sure didn’t wriggle away.
From the foot of the trestle, ballast crunching under our sneakers and boots, it was a small ribbon, rippling slow and deep under creaking timber stays bolted together with aging worm screws: blue, black, and then brown, when the depths dropped and shored away at the little sandbars downstream, just like the crusted points of pen nibs littering the gutter outside of a bus station when rain hit.
When we tentatively made our way down, however, winding our way around bushes and rotting ties, the ribbon seemed to slip and it became something else—wide, still in all its colors, showing degrees and depth and clarity as the bed dropped away: brown, the same old brown, from the mud and sand lining, transitioning to blue, a shimmering, iridescent sort of blue that whisked, mingled with black—not a straight, flat black, but a light gray, which grew from graphite shavings to straight marker ink and then doubled back on itself to resemble a sort of oiled bronze, except it was polished enough to reflect the sky, before the heat, the rains, and hands touched it so much that the coating wore away.
Back to brown.
Back to sand.
Back to the same old packed dirt.
Beyond the bowing limbs of pine trees, Mt. Shasta rose, its pale ridges encroaching on what sway the peeling trunks still had, shimmering in the late heat. And it smelled, smelled of everything good in the world—creosote and leftover diesel locomotive exhaust from a long-gone prime mover, no longer suppressed by the dust—the water had seemingly matted all the earth, coupled with the tang of sweat, and the aftershave of fallen pine needles.
Our packs thudded down, wedging themselves in between boulders, stuck halfway in sand and hard-packed earth held in by rebars of roots, snaking back and forth up, around, and back again against stone.
While George and Christopher went straight down to the river, Navi paused, lingering back to shuck off her boots. I did the same.
Creased leather and frayed nylon fell away to reveal plain feet. Toes, callused and smeared from tramping across pebbled ground in the dead of night, the sharp ends digging into soft flesh, and running, running over ashy earth when the horn breaks the still jungle2 morning, leaping over the bodies of passed-out geezers sprawled out on newspaper sheets, basking, in bourbon-fueled dreams urged on by the last of the heat radiating from an extinguished fire—stretched themselves into the afternoon sunlight.
The wet sand didn’t agree easily with my feet.
They relented, too quickly and without much as a sound of protest, sinking under half of my weight, leaving indents, one after another, in a trail as I staggered forward. My legs, out of step, seemed to knock, pendulums shooting down muscle, twisting tendon—screaming, as they did so, in confusion. My calves had screamed too, at the beginning of the day, from sheer pain alone, when our boots pounded the ballast against the distant howls of everyone else, locked up by the bulls and given the slip of twin sets of silver bracelets cinched tight around their wrists.
I don’t know why I started running, then, when the bull with the revolver stumbled back as a rivulet of blood dripped onto his starched white shirt and the hand holding the gun flailed in all directions, and it seemed like his crony was gonna nail us all cold to the ground with his shotgun muzzle, but I knew for certain that it was her who started booking it first for the yard fence, making an straight beeline for that hole peeled back in the rustling chain-link, and then George, and his friend followed, and that’s when I decided to tag along, too, mostly because I didn’t want to make a fool of myself just standing there, getting shoved up against the boxcar wall with guys with lame, busted legs, and lungs, blackened by endless daisy chains of Camels, strip searched down to boxers and my pack rifled through, the mooncake container safeguarding my only picture of Grandpa and money stashed in little red envelopes snatched away by some beer-bellied bull and offered as a present, slick with cathode tube hues and chicken grease, to his wife at sundown.
She was still hanging back, where our packs were. Watching me, a hand placed on her hip where the canteen was, the crook of a finger curled around the plastic cap while the others hung loose, like a spaghetti western gunfighter surveying their opponents. All fools. Goddamnit. I did look a lot like a fool, once again, staggering across that little strip of sand to the water, driven by unsteady legs and overclocked thoughts.
But nobody else besides her was looking on. George was gone, for whatever reason, possibly to go downstream to fool around—I didn’t think much of his absence at that moment. His friend had waded in, to where the brown started to part to blue, having rolled up his jeans just a bit above the knee. He was washing his face, taking quick scoops out of the water, sending ripples my way as he did so, the ripples overextending themselves to lap the edge of my toes, which were attached, in batteries that flexed, digging into this strange new surface in defiance against feet that stopped short.
I dropped to my knees, molded my palms into the shapes of misfired cups, and dunked them in.
The water came out clear, the glistening surface swishing, so loose, so fluid, upon my grubby hands. I had expected sediment to taint it all—my first handful of that river water, because Christopher was still moving around, now assuming a crane position as he splashed all over, kicking up the stuff of the riverbed, but there was nothing, no single grain of sand or misplaced pebble, hell, even a thin strand of a pine needle. Nothing. Clear as day, so much so that I could see my splotched face peering back.
I brought it to my lips.
It didn’t taste like anything.
Not initially, at least.
It tasted like what it was—just water, the same water that came packaged in sterile plastic bottles neatly lined up in the cooler that you grabbed for a buck when all the iced tea and undercounter beers were already taken and the same water that came out of the rusty yard-tap, warm because the lead pipes that diverted it here from the dented tankers parked on the nearby siding weren’t insulated—not that it mattered anyway because of the cylindrical bodies tacked onto rusting frames were painted flat black to hide the old reporting marks—all the flaking stencils: for petroleum service and non-potable water.
Just water, when that first handful trickled down my tongue. My taste buds, like exhausted mules, were only concerned with the thirst.
That’s when I brought my hands up for a second round. My lips quivered, and stretched back as I gulped it down, taking a moment to turn some of it over in my mouth as my mind slumped back.
-
Was it just water, then, when the ticking of thirst stopped?
No.
This time, it was different.
My buds were soothed.
The back of my throat was primed.
Ready to click.
Oh, how they did click.
And jab their hind legs…
Straight into my system.
Because it wasn’t just any ol’ water.
It was north country river water.
-
It's hard to keep an sure sense of taste on the road.
Especially for water. The buds had been dulled. They needed to be stimulated, and I had done so by way of so many hard slaps on the wrist and quick, forceful swallows. Because you couldn’t choose much, on the road—on what sort of thing you’ll need to stomach, when the good, clean water from the city runs dry and you’re left to face the rushing hot wind sapping all the moisture from your skin.
If I had to choose between drinking the stuff coming out of galvanized vats last used for refueling steam locomotives in the middle of the desert when Kennedy was president, some thick concoction chock full of minerals and residue that collected over several decades or trying to tough it out until we came upon the next withered hamlet with a good chance of dropping dead in a moving sand-service gondola, I’d pick the first, because, even though it would make my throat prickle up like a saguaro and my stomach turn over when I chugged it down in one fell swoop, it would at least satisfy me.
Keep me alive.
How it spoke of being alive.
The first thing I noticed was the crisp. The crisp of brewing clouds dumping their burden down onto shimmering dewdrops waiting, just for them, upon piles of yellowed oak leaves, before running off together, down spring rock onto the bed. Then came the high notes, all of them high and euphoric, yet to be joined by the low tones downstream. The sickly sweet chords of aquifers and buckling logjams coalescing with leftover snowmelt, turning up its vintage, of long-shuttered backwoods Christmas tree farms and maple snowboard wax busted out under my tongue, mingling with something else entirely that I could have sworn I recognized—something akin to the smell of cracking chestnuts dotting the banks of the American River, fifty or more so miles south, except that it wasn’t that, because chestnuts didn’t come around easily in the Shastas. But that hardly mattered, at all.
Because it was water.
North country river water.
Damn good, it was.
Besides setting my tongue afire, it made my head buzz, just like a beer. But unlike a beer, which we carried paracord-strapped onto the outside frame of our packs, the stuff growing lukewarm under the blazing sun—it felt cool, rejuvenating, even. I felt myself reaching for more, bringing to my lips, for perhaps the first time in months, yearning to quench my thirst…yearning to relish it.
My hands scarcely scooped it up, the second—or was it third, now that I knew the taste? In any case, I was craning my neck, cracking a strange sort of smile, while stray drops streamed down my chin—wasting water be damned! This was coming from, after all, a river, getting itself all good and ready to take another round of drinking. My head buzzed, skipped a beat, and buzzed some more, and I was about to lift it to my lips…
-
“Who’s saying ‘shut the fuck up' now, huh?!”
Something hard and fast came crashing into the right side of my head.
The buzzing screamed.
Buckled.
And then, after what seemed like a long hesitation, it imploded.
Imploded on itself.
Sheer pain. Razor blades heeling their edge deep into flesh, from the stem of my ear to the corners of my eyes, leaping over moles and barreling through mosquito bites on my scalp.
And I felt myself fall face forward into the river.
Water splashed wholesale over my skin, thrashing out and pricking both of my arms, which were clawing at the sediment—the brown parts of the river were so shallow, there, that even a squirrel would find it hard to drown. Somehow, I flipped right side up. Fingers jerked and started toeing up from the base of my neck.
Where I had been hit?
How hard? The pain answered the question for itself.
Was there blood…seeping into the river, at all?
Too late.
Gumsole and leather exploded in my open palm.
-
It’s one thing to see your body go to war against someone else. Your lip clenches tight, and hairs start to tingle and bristle up and down all your arms, forcing your heart to work overtime, which in turn gives you that rare, satisfying luxury to quickly ball your fist into a meat-and-bone lump and send it out before the other guy sends out his.
I’ve felt those sensations before. Just days ago, but it might as well have been years. It went down in the far corner of the Roseville jungle, butting up against the main yard where the blacktop ran thin and melted away completely into packed dirt and golden grass crawling up around bending wrought iron fence, unfazed by weed killer.
He was wearing that same cap, with that embroidered dirty yellow stag perched, mid-leap, over a field of faded snapback green. I struck first, then, and when it slammed into his face, I was surprised at how strange it felt. A charge seemed to jolt down from his bashed cheek into mine, passing through my wrist and only stopping short in the bend of my shoulder. He let out a half-felt gasp, swaying, ever so slightly—I didn’t think he ever got punched in the face before in his entire life, and I didn’t, either, but I couldn’t help but feel, as he staggered back, into the wreath of a dozen or so weathered faces looking on, clinging to his sunken back and my eyes like pitted peach fuzz—some misspent boost of confidence, watching him fumble around on his return as everybody just stood there.
-
“Whaddya think those kids are doing, Rob?”
“Duking it out, that’s what’s going down.”
“Gee, they’re fighting like two peacocks on LSD.”
“You get the show you pay for. All copper and not an lick of tarnish. Kid with the green cap started it, methinks. He’s been slinging around that word a lot…trustie, I think it is? Yeah…because of that tin.”
“That tin? Trustie? Pshaw…Rob. You got a flair for spicing up white lies. But I don’t think that’s quite it. I mean…if it was because of that word and whatever that red tin was, it would have been over in five seconds.”
“Then I dunno what else the score could be…for that girl’s attention, maybe? But that’s not the right answer, either, ‘cause I think she got the brains to take them for fools…look at her, Ernest, she’s running back from the stream! Goddamn, she got that switch drawn.”
-
But it’s another thing entirely when your body is pressed, no, whipped and beaten along, tumbling a path, winding and long. You rattle down gullies, trenches, glens, and irrigation ditches, carved straight through the unyielding land that your own two feet once walked. My mind caught a glimpse of sunlight catching on stainless steel extending from her right fist. You can thrash all you want against the current. But it’s not much help. Nobody’s watching you as you sweep by. I knew those two figures, Navi and Christopher, still knee-deep in the water, hidden behind shapes of the sun and the trestle above burning disfigured blobs into my eyes with the river, damn weren’t rolling up their sleeves to take the plunge, for one. God, why didn’t she rush in with the switchblade, when she saw him take that first swing with his boot, before I hurtled down the sluice and into the estuary, where brackish waters collided against the fresh, tingeing the world in darker shades of red, brown, black and gray?
-
Hell, I never really needed their help.
They’re stuck on the banks.
I’m drowning. No doubt about that.
The pain’s so far deep, now, that I could barely feel anything else.
God, I’m gulping for air.
He might shove my head under.
The water will mask my face.
So he couldn’t see me glaring back.
They’ll force themselves down my lungs.
So I couldn’t speak.
Or cry.
And I’ll drown.
They’re stuck on the banks.
While he’s wading himself…
deeper
and
deeper
into the river.
I’m drowning.
I just need to suck him down with me.
-
I stuck my arm out as he went for another blow to my side. It caught square in the ankle. He sprawled backwards on his ass into the river.
Bracing my burning legs against the motion of the slow current, I stood up. He was still lying there, seemingly dazed, shocked that the guy he was beating up would have the guts and coordination to block his beatdown. But his eyes, still masked behind what shadow that John Deere cap pinned—caged, with acne and grease, down to bridge of his nose—were alert. Tracking me.
What are you gonna do? They seemed to say. Look at you. While everyone is standing around, wasting away, growing old, doing jack shit like all the geezers around us, you’re gonna stumble. Stumble and fall…
I gritted my teeth together, feeling the blood…my own blood, trickle with the river water down the back of my throat…
And surged three steps forward.
My wrist batted away the cap. It dropped into the water, the sweat and rust-stained fabric crumpling as water latched on.
His eyes went wide like a fish about to meet the gaff.
“You could have gotten me back when I was finished drinking,” I croaked. My right fingers twitched and bent inwards. Bent into a fist. A shaking fist. But a fist, nonetheless.
When I finally finished, I turned, on those unsteady legs ablaze, to face the two. Navi. Her switchblade still flicked out, quivering in her hand. And Christopher. Looking too old and beaten down in the dying shadows cast by the thin needles of the pines. That was when the realizations finally set in. Oh…how we were all sure in ourselves, in our young, fitful bodies when we first made our escape, after the bulls threw open the boxcar door, sending all of us crashing headfirst into the Oregon heat and the crushing grip that thirst had on all our throats. We came upon that river, then, to drink, quench our thirst, only to be retributed, in a whirlwind of fist and boot blows that pulled us all under…downstream.
As I just stood there, soaking wet, while he let out moans, trying in vain to stop his nosebleed in the river, the blood mixing with mine, as it went ever on downstream toward the sea, my stomach dropped knowing how hard the world was going to come down on me from thereon after.