“Why are you crying, Mom?”
She puts her elbow on the ledge of the window and leans her head into her hand. A big green sign on the side of the highway says, “Welcome to Oregon.”
“Are you sad?”
“No, honey, I’m happy we’re moving to a new place where we can be together and it’ll be clean and we can breathe.”
“I’m sad,” I say. “I miss the School and Bonnie and Dmitri and macaroni and cheese.”
She says, “No you don’t.” She tells me I’m happy we’re moving. It wasn’t safe there so we left and we’re all together now and I’m happy I can be somewhere safe and clean where a person can breathe. She says I’ll make friends and they’ll be good plus I get to be with my mom now.
I remember that a “Mom” is supposed to be a special thing, that’s what I was told one time she came to visit us in the School: “This is your mom. She would’ve been your parent if you weren’t a child of the universe. You belong to her.” She tells me I’m her son and she wanted kids so she wouldn’t be alone anymore and now she has us and it is a son’s job to take care of his mother.
“I’m so glad we’re all together,” she says from the front seat. She reaches a hand back toward me with a palm open for me to hold. I put my hand in hers and she closes her fingers around it. The hand feels bigger than I am, bigger than the car, the road, the mountains and the sky.
* * *
AFTER DRIVING ALL day, stopping only at a diner where Tony and I got our own hamburgers even though I didn’t finish mine, just as the sky is turning a dark blue, we see a sign on the side of the highway that reads, “Salem, Oregon, Population 89,233.”
It’s been raining since we left the mountains. It rains as we drive through town. The heater in the Vega puts out a lukewarm, gassy air that smells like stale oil and burned rubber as we listen to the steady thwup thwup of the wipers on the windshield. The gray streets are filled with old cars and overgrown bushes, leaning fences, collapsing porches, mobile homes, gravel alleys overrun with weeds and blackberry bushes twisting between the power lines, storefronts, donut shops, hunting supplies, churches, wooded parks and a strange smell that stings the nostrils we later find out comes from a mushroom cannery on the edge of town.
Every few blocks there is a house with boarded-up windows and overgrown lawns, some covered in black streaks from fires that burned the houses which were left to rot. Everywhere are trees, pine trees with pointy green needles, some taller than buildings with branches fanning out in all directions. It looks like a place that was built by trees and conquered by people.
We pass a white marble building with a giant golden man on top holding a big golden ax, a cape slung over his shoulder. The man stands legs apart, looking off into the distance. I wonder if this man saved the people from the trees or the trees from the people. I wonder if the giant golden lumberjack will protect us from the bad men. If they’ll see him and be scared of the giant ax so they’ll leave us alone.
I picture him stepping down from his marble perch and picking up our car in his big hands, carrying us on his back across the rivers and lakes, over the mountains and valleys and highways, back to Tomales Bay where we can sing songs and play games with the other kids while he stands guard if the bad men come with their masks and clubs.
The houses are farther apart on the edge of town so it feels more like we’re driving through a forest. Fields of green grass and bushes run right up against the black rain-slicked street as we cross a small bridge over a stream and come to a sign that says, “Battle Creek Lodges,” our new home.
The building looks like a big green gingerbread house with a curved roof. There’s a crisp quiet even in the light rain when we get out of the car, the feeling of being hidden among mountains.
Tony yells, “Deer!” pointing toward the field. We see it, hunched and cautious, taller than we are with its antlers bobbing over the tall weeds. Mom takes a deep breath, closing her eyes as if to savor the air while Tony and I carry the cardboard boxes of Goodwill dishes and hand-me-down clothes into the apartment. It’s got an electric wall heater, an actual kitchen with a stove, and a stained mattress turned sideways on the floor of the bedroom where we fall facedown to sleep. It seems as good a place as any to hide.
In the morning, the sun is out and there is steam rising from all the puddles in the parking lot. We see squirrels, chipmunks, even a prairie dog in his hole as Tony and I walk through the tall grass field next to the gingerbread building looking for sticks and rocks to throw. It reminds me of the fields next to the compound in Tomales Bay, except wetter and colder. The Battle Creek runs beneath the road and every now and then a car breaks the silence as we watch it speed away, wondering when the world got so quiet.
“I bet we could go fishing in there if we wanted to,” Tony says. We’ve never fished, only seen the flow of water as it disappeared into a two-foot concrete pipe in Oakland, a dirty river of paper trash and cigarette butts. “I think all we need are earthworms and maybe a string or something.”
We walk back to the apartment to hunt for supplies as the sun falls behind a cloud and the air gets thick with mist. It starts to rain. It rains all morning. First in a cloud that springs up like fog, then in sheets that pound the concrete as we watch from the front window. Finally it settles into a steady rhythm, the sound of water falling off the roof, flowing in the gutters, the drip drip drip around the windows, raining all afternoon as we wait for it to stop in the front room with our Legos and crayons. We hear it falling outside the bedroom window when we go to sleep, wondering when it will break so we can explore the field, to get lost in the grove of trees like the golden pioneer on the marble building downtown.
Mom gets us raincoats and rubber galoshes from Goodwill and we promise her we’ll stay dry when we go outside in the dark afternoon. The water runs along the highway in a stream, muddy with whitecaps. We see the shadow of a river rat the size of a small cat in the creek below our feet where we hoped to fish. The water gets in our socks, our shoes, our skin, our pores and we soon realize that the sun was a dirty trick and we are destined to be wet.
“Maybe it’ll just rain forever,” Tony says.
CHAPTER 6
THE COWBOYS WHO LEFT
Tony starts school and Mom starts her job at the state mental hospital. I go to day care at an apartment two buildings over run by a mean woman with black hair pulled back on her head and a hairy mole on her top lip. Tony joins me there after school. We sit with the other kids and watch The Electric Company. We’re not used to the TV or the other kids who scream at it when the letters come on: “E! F!” We already know our letters because all the kids at the School knew their letters. At the end of the day we watch Bonanza which is the best show because of all the outlaws and heroes and cowboys, all those men on their horses.
We don’t like the mean woman who runs the day care because she lets her kids make fun of us for the holes in our shoes and jeans. Her daughter, who is about my age, says, “Your sneakers are talking to me,” because the rubber on the front comes apart when I walk. When we play hide-and-seek, she says, “You two should hide in the trash. No one would even notice.” The other kids laugh at us or they keep their distance.