Where Night Stops, Page 2

  It’d been my plan to start college in the fall at the University of Iowa. I had my dorm room, my class schedule, and an oversized black-and-gold Hawkeyes hoodie. Forty-five hundred freshman would swarm the campus. New friends and interests, experimentation and exploration, learning and change awaited me. Or that was the hope.

  I’d applied to five schools total, each for reasons other than their programs. My love of the whole grunge era drove my desire to go to the University of Washington in Seattle. I’d applied to Columbia University after reading that Kerouac had studied there. The University of Cincinnati? Because the Bengals were my favorite football team. And Tulane because, well, it was in New Orleans. I was accepted to all of them, but cost and proximity won out. University of Iowa it was.

  But plans change. College, it now seemed, was the avoidance of the inevitable. Life was looming, waiting to take hold. Better to face it head on, I thought. Better to start it now.

  Word got around that I was out of the hospital. Heavy casseroles made with Campbell’s soups and topped with fried onions arrived on my doorstep. Food to satiate my grief. I threw them out.

  Small, somber cards from my uncles and aunts, from the Hendersons, Joneses, Dices, Wagners, Nees, Reeves, Critlens, Peters, Franks, Lynchs, and Smiths arrived in the mail. I threw them out.

  People who had never taken an interest in my parents when they were alive called to offer their condolences, their advice. Everyone knew what I should do. Close out accounts, sign documents, decide on the font for my parent’s tombstones. They called to instruct me on decisions I wasn’t prepared to make.

  Life went on, at least for everyone else.

  At first, the money my parents had in the bank seemed like a lot. Then it didn’t seem like enough. Mortgage, utilities, taxes, insurance, and the cost of simple upkeep. Why did anyone want to own a house? What kind of dream was that? My dream was to be free of it all, out from under all the things my folks had gathered over time, the debris that defined them. I wanted to shed the load that had been heaped on me and walk away.

  I rang a real estate broker. My mind tangled with all the tasks of selling the house: the prepping, the showings, the strangers wandering from room to room, examining my life on display. If an offer actually came in, there’d be haggling, the back-and-forth, and the struggle of closing the deal.

  I hung up the phone. There had to be a quicker, simpler way to cash out.

  The answer was in the pile of bills—homeowner’s insurance.

  It seemed an easy way out. But the moment the flames took the kitchen, a crushing sadness gripped me. I’d made a mistake. I was destroying the last bit of my parents, the remnants of what I once was.

  By the time the fire department rolled up their hoses, there was little left of the house. A flooded, charred frame surrounded by a dark halo of burnt grass. Filled with regret, I held to my story: the lawn mower had somehow set off the blaze.

  Insurance investigators don’t so much sniff out lies as not believe anything. Cops, though, know a lie. They’re fed them daily. They cultivate a palate for what’s true and what’s not.

  Windstop’s sheriff visited me at my motel room, my temporary residency. “Shit, really?” he said. “The lawnmower?” It was the ninth time in two days I’d told my story, each time exactly as before. I’d learned that the words inflammable and flammable meant the same thing. It was astounding how many household products were just that.

  The sheriff sat next to me on the bed. “Listen, I never much liked your father. Me and him never got along. So seeing his house—your house—get burnt down doesn’t get me misty in the least. But that doesn’t mean you can—” He broke off, stared at me hard.

  I couldn’t hold his gaze; I had to look away. The only thing worse than fucking up is getting caught fucking up. Needing something to do, I pulled out the pack of cigarettes I’d bought at the hospital. They were still unopened. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Yeah. I do.” He stood, hovered over me. “Get up.”

  Out at his cruiser, I asked, “Want me in the back?”

  “I want you to shut up.”

  He drove me to the next town over. Parking at the bus stop, he said, “You know anything about quantum mechanics?”

  I didn’t.

  “Well, me neither. But I saw this thing on TV about it. Don’t know why, but they talked about putting a cat in a bunker with a grenade or bomb or something that had a fifty-fifty chance of blowing up in the next minute. Then they closed the lid tight and waited for the minute to pass.” He bit at a hangnail. “Thing is, no one knows if the cat is dead or alive until the lid is opened. So the cat is both dead and alive, as long as no one opens the lid.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “Right now,” he said, “you both did and didn’t burn your house down.” He pulled out his wallet, tossed seventy dollars on my lap.

  I picked up the bills. “What’s this?”

  “Opportunity.” He opened his door and climbed out. “I’m getting a coffee. When I get back, I’m going to have to crack open that lid.” He drilled me with a hard stare. “You understand what I’m saying?”

  I did.

  I bought a bus ticket.

  Wedged tight into a window seat, I watched the sheriff slowly make his way back to his cruiser, coffee in hand. He kept his back turned as the bus started up and then lurched westward, kicking off a gray cloud of diesel exhaust.

  As the day slipped to night and Iowa disappeared behind me, I tried to sleep, but the woman beside me kept elbowing me awake with her knitting. It was only when dawn found us nearing Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that the worrying thought took hold of me: Why sell cigarettes at a hospital?

  Chapter 4

  Often, I think of Clement and how he and I ended up best friends by chance in first grade. Assigned seats next to each other, we’d stuck together ever since. If I wanted to try out for the basketball team, Clement did too. If Clement wanted to ride dirt bikes, so did I. We both wore blue Chuck Taylors, both had a crush on Trish Rineholt, and both wanted to get fire-red convertible Corvettes and drive down to Mexico. It was our mutual dream to escape Windstop once we were old enough.

  At age eight, we were into collecting baseball cards. At eleven, starting fires. When we were twelve, we took to blowing things up. With money stolen from our folks, we’d head to Larry Cockran’s house, a classmate of ours. It wasn’t Larry we wanted to see; it was his older brother, Chris.

  Chris had a footlocker filled with wonders: Rambo knifes, Chinese throwing stars, and fireworks. We passed on blades and the kung fu stuff and instead bought some Black Cats, Thunder Bombs, and all the sparklers he had. First, we started small, blowing up soup cans, milk cartons, and bottles of Clement’s mother’s perfumes. Then we stepped it up and made sparkler bombs—duct-taped two to three hundred sticks together and stuffed a fuse in the core. No mailbox was safe.

  Mr. Preston’s mailbox was our downfall. He’d driven up just as we lit the fuse. The sheriff was called, then our folks. But we got off easy, only had to pay restitution for the mailboxes and serve ten community service hours, which meant a lot of riding around in the back of a pickup truck and picking up trash.

  Bows and arrows became our passion the summer before high school. We were out to live off the land, survive in the wild. Pricking our thumbs then pressing them together, Clement and I swore a blood oath to protect each other from the dangers of the two acres of woods behind my house. If one of us was killed by a wild boar or a cougar while we were out hunting, the other was to create a funeral pyre, burn the body, and avenge the death by tracking down and killing the guilty beast, then eating it’s heart. The warm days lazed by while we traipsed about the woods with our shirts off and headbands on, firing at squirrels and birds, always missing.

  Clement came up with the idea of creating a twelve-foot-long headband crafted from torn T-shirts. We’d each
tie an end around our foreheads, the length connecting us. Soon, we found ourselves bolting through the trees, firing off arrows while we screamed war cries. When a tree came between us, the headband tethering us together stopped us dead in our tracks. Our necks snapped back. Our feet flew from under us.

  The more hurt we were, the harder we laughed. We were blood brothers, joined together forever.

  On quiet nights, even now, I find myself wondering: If Clement had never sat next me in first grade, would he have been my best friend?

  Would he be alive now?

  Chapter 5

  The moment the bus crossed into South Dakota, the trip turned into a tiny taste of hell. The toilet overflowed, a fight broke out, and someone set into a meal that reeked of fried baloney. The woman next to me came alive with questions. She wanted to know everything about me: my family, my dreams, my faith. “I love talking to anyone. Muslims, Jews, Christians, even Buddhists. Everyone but Mormons.” She forced a laugh.

  I told her I was a Mormon, which shut her down. She knitted furiously, elbowing harder until she finally got off in Billings, Montana.

  Seattle was my goal. My money had a different idea. Nearly broke, I landed just outside of Spokane, Washington, where I signed on as a day laborer picking pole beans. My wages covered my daily existence and little else. When the harvesting season ended, I hitched a ride with a group of Phish phans on their way to a Vancouver show. They dropped me off in Seattle. It’d been five months since I’d graduated from high school, since I’d left Iowa altogether. I was in a chilled, strange town with no money, no friends, and no prospects. After a couple days wandering aimlessly and sleeping on the street, I ended up at the homeless shelter.

  My education was just beginning.

  Chapter 6

  The Salvation Army’s Lighthouse Shelter for Men. Two stories, in Pioneer Square. No drugs, no alcohol, and prayers before every meal. No one was allowed to remain in the shelter during the day; we had to be working or looking for work, though the truth was that most of the men spent the hours in an aimless limbo, wandering the sidewalks, camped out in the park, or napping in the library when it was too cold out. Because we had to blow on a Breathalyzer to prove we hadn’t been drinking before being allowed in for the night, the smart guys smuggled in pints of vodka and drank it in the privacy of the showers.

  Dinner was served at 6:00 p.m. The front door locked at 7:00 p.m. If you weren’t in by then, you weren’t coming in. Eight thirty, lights out.

  The shame of being homeless was nothing next to the humiliation of being processed into the shelter.

  Under the watchful eye of a shelter employee, I squeezed out a urine sample for drug testing. My fingers were inked for prints. Multiple photos were snapped for my file. The rules and regulations were repeated three times to me, in case I was slow.

  After being inspected, prodded, and recorded like livestock at a 4-H fair, I was finally handed a wool blanket that stank of night sweats and mildewed wet dreams, and was assigned a cot positioned just in front of the restrooms. At night, a bright beam crossed me each time the restroom door opened, like a searchlight cutting across a prison yard.

  We slept on the second floor in an open space that held ninety-eight men at varying degrees of destitute. Half were tapping the system, exploiting it for all it was worth just to avoid the responsibilities of being an adult—of working, paying bills, feeding and taking care of themselves or a family. No point working for something when you could get it for free. The other half were broken men, crippled by the full press of life. Being able to work, to get back on their feet, was their dream.

  Ray-Ray had the cot next to mine. My first night there, he eased himself onto the edge of my cot. His hair looked like something straight out of a men’s magazine, perfectly styled in salt-and-pepper waves. “Raymond’s my name, but friends call me Ray-Ray.” He asked if I wanted to be his friend.

  “What’s that entail?”

  He smiled and said my birth name aloud: first, middle, and last.

  I hadn’t told him, hadn’t even spoken to him.

  Ray-Ray held up a wallet—my wallet. “Nice driver’s license photo. Very handsome. Do you have a photo I could keep?”

  I grabbed the wallet from him. “How’d you get this?”

  “I reached into your back pocket and took it,” he said. “Listen, if you’re going to be my friend, you have to be more cautious. I’ll watch out for you as much as I can, but I can’t protect you every minute of the day.” Ray-Ray’s thin fingers found my chest, touched me gently. “I hope you’ll keep an eye out for me in return.”

  “What am I watching for?”

  Ray-Ray studied the room, the men lulling about, talking, listening to music. He scooted even closer to me on the cot. “I want you to know something about me. I hate disloyalty. So if you’re going to be my friend, don’t fuck me over.” He stood, motioned to my soap dish. “Hide your soap.”

  My soap, a bar of Dove I’d poached from the Korean store, sat in a plastic container in my footlocker, still damp from that evening’s shower. “Why?”

  “Someone will steal it.”

  “Who, you?”

  His face flashed with hurt. “Why would I steal a friend’s bar of soap?”

  I ignored Ray-Ray’s advice. When I woke the next morning, I found the soap box where I’d left it.

  The soap, however, was gone.

  Chapter 7

  Ray-Ray and I became friends. Of sorts. Proximity drew us together, not fondness. We shared meals and idle talk, games of dominos. We only discussed the immediate and near future. Our pasts, our histories, had stopped at the shelter doors. Whoever we were before, those men weren’t here now.

  The only payout for being poor is an abundance of time. No work to fill the hours, no money to help make time pass. My days were long. I spent most of them at the Seattle Central Public Library, reading magazines and newspapers and halfheartedly looking for jobs online in that broken birdhouse of a building.

  One day I found Ray-Ray there, studying world atlases.

  “Planning a vacation?” I asked.

  He didn’t acknowledge me. In unison, he turned the pages of each atlas, studying one, then the other, in silence.

  Just as I was turning to leave, he spoke, “Who do you think decides the colors and names of the countries?” He motioned to the two different atlases resting side by side before him. Rhodesia, filled in light green on one page; Zimbabwe, a muted blue on the other. Congo, a muddy ocher on one, transformed to Zaire and a cold gray on the other. Names and history. “Do you think it signifies anything, the different colors, the different names?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “I was a different person before now,” he said, flipping the page. He pointed out an area in Iran near the border with Russia. “This is where I’m from.”

  He told me he’d been a child soldier in the Iraq-Iran War; after the war, when he was seventeen years old, he flew to Canada on a fake passport. Eventually, he entered America illegally. He spent a year traveling about, then ended up in a small town in Florida and married a woman there. “Not much of a marriage,” he said. “She expected certain things I wasn’t able to provide, things like sex.” He smiled. “But I got my green card.” Though husband and wife, they had separate rooms, separate lives. The union was all for show. Eventually, she dumped him. “I was crushed when she left.”

  “But you just said it wasn’t even a real marriage.”

  “I’m Iranian,” he said, “but people here in America say I’m Persian. Did I change? No. But people’s perception of me did. Same with my marriage. It wasn’t much of a marriage but it was still my marriage. It was who I was,” he said.

  After the divorce, he packed up and moved to the Northwest, got his beautician’s license, and went to work at a hair salon. Eventually, he saved up enough money to open his own shop. “Beauty b
y Ray-Ray,” he said. “I had five girls working for me. We were booked two months out. I was a success.”

  He closed the atlases and shelved them. “You want to know what happened, right? You want to know how I ended up in a homeless shelter.”

  I said I did.

  He reached out, tugged on a lock of my hair. He offered me a haircut. He offered me a blowjob.

  I took the haircut.

  Back at the shelter, he broke out his scissors, draped a towel over my shoulders, and meticulously trimmed my hair. He did a great job. “You’re really good. Why don’t you cut hair again? You could make lots of money.”

  He brushed the hair trimmings into the trash, snapped out the towel. “Living in a homeless shelter doesn’t mean I don’t have money.”

  “A prince among paupers,” I said. “So you just enjoy living with all the misfortunate?”

  “Unfortunate, not misfortunate,” he said. “Most everyone here is unfortunate.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  He packed away his scissors. “There’s a difference.”

  Chapter 8

  Haven, Florida

  The bartender sets a new drink before her. She hits the fresh drink hard, taking most of it down in a single swallow.

  Then she gets up, ambles off to the bathroom.

  I check the time. The meeting’s set for noon, three-plus hours off.

  The Germans have a chess term. Zugzwang. It’s when neither player can move without landing in grave danger. It’s when both players find themselves in a fucked situation.

  Is it possible that an event becomes inevitable only after the fact, only after the disaster has struck and the damage is done? It’s obvious to me now that something awful had been building for the last four years. The road behind me is littered with signs I couldn’t see as I passed them. Stop before it ends badly, they warned. Stop before you get killed.