Raising Wrecker

CHAPTER ELEVEN





The bus squealed to a stop, opened its gassy maw, and belched its passengers onto the pavement.

Lisa Fay stumbled down the steps and took a long, deep breath. Was that what freedom smelled like? The diesel-tinged, soot-soaked air of San Francisco reeked of catastrophe. She swallowed hard. Behind her, passengers jostled for position by the Greyhound’s luggage hatch and clambered about for their bags. They swarmed as one body and moved off in a mass and left her standing there, hardly able to breathe at all.

“This yours?”

The driver offered her a tattered suitcase belted with duct tape. He gripped the bag firmly and avoided her eyes.

She shook her head. Lisa Fay carried everything she owned in a paper shopping bag. They’d issued her a tote on discharge but she’d left that behind at a rest stop on the highway in Coalinga. As soon as she found a place to buy new clothes she’d get rid of the ones they’d provided, too. She wanted nothing of theirs.

“Terminal’s that way.” The driver flopped the suitcase on a cart alongside cardboard boxes and stepped briskly from the bus.

Lisa Fay watched his back recede. It was dusky in the parking garage. Motes of dirt rode the stale air and the buses huffed and whined as they eased into their slots and discharged their cargo. They were a clan of dull-witted creatures, and Lisa Fay was seized with the wish to live there among them, lumbering and dispirited, each day’s demands mapped out in advance. The idea of stepping into the light of the city morning paralyzed her. But the bus driver paused with his luggage scow and fixed her with a suspicious squint. She understood. She was not a bus. She was a free woman, and this was no way for a free woman to act. She tightened her grip on the paper handles of her bag and aimed herself toward the door. It opened for her. She stepped into the Transbay Terminal and felt the air whoosh behind her as it shut.

Inside the terminal everyone moved swiftly. Lisa Fay let the energy propel her toward the ticket windows. She had planned it carefully: buy a bus ticket north, finagle a ride west, follow the map Willow had drawn to Meg’s house. There were no buses into the Mattole Valley. They stopped at Garberville and then passed on to Fortuna, Eureka, up into Oregon—as far north as you wanted to go, but if you were headed west then good luck to you. She had a map of the state that showed the area as a hazy green blur. Lisa Fay knew there were roads where Meg lived. Willow had drawn them in, labeled them in her confident hand. But they were too small to show up on the map of the state; they weren’t real enough, she suspected, to show up. That area, that whole knob of land, seemed like a new growth on the body of California, some untendered, nonnegotiable figment of the imagination, risky for visitors and subject to change without notice. She pictured it a Shangri-La that disappeared behind the mists once the rains started and only reemerged when the sun came back and baked it dry. Which is why she should go now, in October, in the dry time.

Or risk losing him for good. That land was so wild, her friend Alma had told her, a person could get lost in those mountains and never get found. Lisa Fay glanced down at the crumpled map she held. The creases were worn white from the hours she’d spent studying it. Her rib cage ached, her bones, those muscles, her heart—Wrecker couldn’t be lost. There were big trees, weren’t there? She calmed herself with that thought. Enormous trees. You can drive a car through one, Alma had told her. If the land could support giant trees surely it could hold on to one small boy. She screwed her courage and approached the ticket window.

“How much to Garberville?” Her voice was a whisper.

The clerk turned to face her. He had kind eyes, loose and watery, behind thick lenses, and a neck that rested in accommodating folds over a tight collar. “Speak up, dear.” He tapped a bulbous device that wormed into his ear canal. “I can barely hear you.”

“Garberville,” she said, louder this time.

He nodded. His eyelids flickered rapidly, almost imperceptibly, but his gaze remained steady on her face. “Twice a day,” he said. “You missed the first one. Next bus leaves at one fifty. Check back for the platform number. How many in your party?”

Her voice was so soft it barely puffed past her lips. “Only me.”

“Three?” He tilted his head to thrust the listening device closer to her.

Lisa Fay shrank back from the window. His eyes were too friendly. The plastic aid was disturbing, and the next bus would not leave until one fifty. It was 1983, she was forty-one years old, and she’d been waiting fifteen long years to see her son. She could make her own decisions, now; wasn’t that true? She could determine for herself who to smile at, how to move in the world, where to rest and when to move again. And still she would have to wait. Fifteen years. One fifty. Five hours. Five hours? Fifteen long years and for the moment she could remember none of it. Her mind was flooded with the image of his face as he had been, and she could barely stand. A small cry escaped her lips.

“Miss?” The clerk’s eyes glistened with concern.

She turned her back on him and fled into the city.

Lisa Fay stood on the sidewalk and let the sunshine strike her eyelids and warm her cheeks. The city noises filled her ears. The city smells traveled in through her nose to reach that part of the brain that forgets nothing.

She’d meant to write a letter. She had started it a thousand times in her head; a dozen times she put pen to paper. Dear Son. And had gotten no further.

She’d written a letter to Meg, a long one, and heartfelt.

Dear Son.

There was so much to tell him.

A paper cup lay overturned in the gutter; a pigeon lit beside it and gave it an idle, exploratory peck. A bus rumbled by and the draft lifted the edge of Lisa Fay’s untucked blouse. The air smelled better out here. There was salt from the bay and a sweet burnt odor from a coffee cart down the block. It was terrifying to be free and terrifying to be alive and look how that pigeon went on pecking, nonchalant, nearly indifferent to the traffic that sped past. Lisa Fay hoisted the weight of her life onto her shoulders and trudged toward the smell of the water. Remove that yoke and she would blow like a piece of trash in the wind.

The bay was still there, dirty and uplifting. The Ferry Building squatted beside the water and suffered its slosh against the dark timbers of its dock. Lisa Fay set her bag onto a concrete bench and eased herself down beside it. There was bustle but no real rush, and she could sit there in the shadow of the elevated freeway and sink into her thoughts. A young cop lounged like a hoodlum against the building’s weathered marble face. He cupped his hands to light a cigarette and caught her eye, and she quickly looked away.

She wanted her son to know his father. But what could she offer him, to make that true? What, to weigh against the absence? Arlyn was big, and strong, and never once in all the time she’d known him had she seen him put his strength to anything but good. Well, or whimsy. He could lift her in one arm, he could hoist her to his shoulder like a circus girl—and they’d laughed, they’d laughed. He had not meant to leave. She was sure of it. Dear Son, she thought. She despaired. Words were small and Arlyn had been a large man, large hearted, and there was no way she could think to tell him that. Lisa Fay unwrapped the remains of a muffin she had purchased at a rest stop. It tasted grainy and dry, peppered with tiny blueberries that lent texture but no taste. She ate a few bites and then carefully rewrapped it for later.

Arlyn loved food. Cabbage and cauliflower mostly, but The Hook had a sweet tooth, and one time he had bought her a steak dinner, enormous, more than she could eat, and for the first time in her life she got up from the table and left something on her plate. Wrecker loved food, too. Did he still? Dear Son, she thought. And then she wrenched her thoughts back to the privacy of her grief. She didn’t know why he left, or where he went. The concrete bench stored the sun’s warmth. It felt good to her when clouds grayed the sky for moments before scudding on.

She glanced around at the solitaries and small groups moving along the waterfront. Ghosts peopled her life. She could be going along with her business and find herself hijacked by memories forcing themselves onto the shapes of strangers. There were too many who ought to have been there but no longer were. Lisa Fay’s parents were dead. Arlyn had disappeared. That hazy shape of a woman waiting a block away for the bus—that was not Belle.

Lisa Fay closed her eyes; felt the sun return from behind the clouds. When she opened her eyes again, the young cop had moved on. The clock by the Ferry Building read 10:15. She had slept a bit and woke anxious and confused. Everything was different, now. Fifteen years since she’d been in San Francisco, and the city she’d known inside and out, up and down, forward and back, had developed yawning chasms between neighborhoods that wouldn’t allow her to traverse them in her mind. She could walk along the Embarcadero and eventually she would arrive at the ocean; but if she walked in the other direction, would she know where to turn to reach the Greek grocery? The apartment they’d lived in, was it still up that ratty flight of stairs, sunny in the mornings and ripe with the smell of olives floating in their brine beneath? She pictured the park, the sprawling reach of green, the duck pond where Wrecker loved to play. Which streets should she take to reach it? Her mind preserved memories as sharp as shards floating in a damaged geography. Was heaven like this? Was hell?

Belle would know. But Belle was gone.

Lisa Fay stood. She could get to Belle’s flat. She could picture the way. Belle was gone, but if her building was still there it was one part of Wrecker’s history that wouldn’t be lost. Dear Son, she thought, her legs carrying her urgently across the wide boulevard that hugged the waterfront. Do you remember Belle? Lisa Fay’s eyes watered as she recalled Belle’s mottled hands, her sharp wit and the strength of her love. She brushed away her tears and strode on. The ground inclined up and away from the Embarcadero; the streets narrowed, and the people who traveled them kept their heads tucked with the resolve of someplace to go. The shop signs crowded together and shouted their messages in Chinese. On that corner, there—twenty years ago, an old crone had needed help setting up her produce stand and offered a corner of a storeroom for Lisa Fay to sleep in in exchange. Not just the room but the spoils, too, and sometimes a sweaty, crumpled dollar bill pressed into her palm; and when the old lady’s grandson took over her position Lisa Fay faded into the foliage, slept a few nights tucked unseen among tree roots and tall stands of pampas grass. Later, she’d traded those trafficked spots for her cozy camp behind the DeYoung. Lisa Fay sighed and walked on, slower now, and the sun rose higher. She detoured up Vallejo in search of stairs she knew were there and felt the old familiar pull in her calves as her muscles strained to climb the hill. Back then she’d bounded up these slopes; later, with Wrecker tied like a twenty-pound barnacle to her back, she climbed them more cautiously. It winded her, now. She paused at its crest to gaze at the water.

It was exhausting, being there. All of her senses were on high alert, navigating, watching for danger, noting changes, grasping at all of the faces, hundreds and hundreds of them. At Leavenworth the number 27 bus pulled up beside her and she climbed aboard. People pushed past her to board the bus; they parted on the sidewalks to flow around her. At Chino they were packed like rats in the hold of a ship, but they were familiar rats. The fear tightened her scalp and lifted the roots of her hair. The sounds assaulted her. Chino had been loud with ugly noise, but it was predictable, regular. Everyone here moved with a head start past her. The enormity of the city confronted her. She could enter that door and sit at a table and look at a menu and someone would bring her food from a country she’d never heard of before. She could enter that door and it would be cupcakes, thirty different kinds in a pert lineup. Everyone was going somewhere, meeting someone, checking their watches or daydreaming at a bus stop. Lisa Fay had no watch to consult. Her daydreams were memories, too full to escape from. They felt like floodwater she strained to hold back.

But it was clear, now: she had created an imaginary city in her head, a city composed of only those places that had meaning for her and none of the rest, and the city she crossed now was a brand-new city, shiny and charged and rife with land mines, memories that exploded in her as she turned a corner, blank spaces that overwhelmed her as she peered into neighborhoods she’d once known. She had to choose where to go. That side street? That alley? Toward the ocean, or away from it? To Belle’s flat? To the park that last day?

Not there. Lisa Fay gripped the rail and turned to look out the window of the bus. The woman it mirrored back was obvious, exposed, an open book anyone could read. Her hair capped her head in a short pale helmet that made the lines on her face stand out more starkly. They were deep lines, marks a clawed animal will leave in fear and frantic effort. The bus paused at a stop and Lisa Fay hurried down the steps. She held her bag close to her chest and tucked her chin to hide her face. The blocks disappeared underfoot. Through the Tenderloin—she looked up to see a pair of lovers, their torsos entwined, wave to her from a window high above the street. She looked around, and then she raised one arm in a cautious salute.

There was more than what had been lost. What she had gained, what the city had brought to her, was written on her body as well. She moved on with an animal frenzy now, barely registering street names, crossing against the light, her feet pounding the concrete as though only motion could keep her from blowing apart. Dear Son. Lisa Fay looked up, startled by the sound of her voice as she spoke aloud. This city brought me heartbreak, but it brought me you.

The day Wrecker had been born, the pains had caught her by surprise. She was homeless once more. The building’s owner had discovered the basement squat and booted them onto the street. Lisa Fay had shared the space with others—a blond bearded man, a girl who covered her mouth when she spoke, couples who came and went—and they scattered like raindrops when the man padlocked the door. Sadly she made her way off. Without her friends, life alone would be lonely. But then she felt the baby stir inside her and corrected her thoughts: life would never again be lonely. She had a little crocheted hat pushed down in the bottom of her bag for when her baby was born. She felt another kick, and then a flutter, and then lower down … she stumbled to her knees as the first contraction seized her like a field mouse caught in the tines of the thresher. Lisa Fay forced herself to standing. The sun fell bright over her like the raiments of a saint. She gripped the handles of her bag with all the ferociousness of fear and suddenly had to pee and just as suddenly felt the gush of warm water slide down the skin of her leg, bare beneath her skirt, and drench her rolled sock and pool in her canvas sneaker and turn the light gray of the sidewalk a deep, polished color and she stood there a minute, stunned.

She had planned to have her baby at home. That’s what she told them all, proudly: “I’ll be birthing him here,” there in the basement squat with the long-haired girl to boil water and, after, the blond bearded man to score joints and pass them around like cigars, slapping the others on the back. But now this. And another set of contractions like a wrecking ball knocking down a row of buildings, each one crashing into the next with the force of the one behind. Lisa Fay waited until the pain slid back and stood again to get her bearings. She was closer to General Hospital than to the jaunty newness of St. Luke’s. She plotted her route and started to walk.

It was early evening, then. It was late June. It was the middle of 1965, and all across the rest of the city the fog rolled in to temper the effects of the sun and chart a path for the night to follow. Downtown men in office buildings snapped shut their briefcases and loosened their ties, reached for their suitjackets. Jackhammers quieted, and the song of saws crying their way through pitchy lumber; men came down off their scaffolds, hung up their toolbelts, lowered the hoods of the cars they toiled on; they wiped the grease and numbers and latest marketing plan from their hands; they handed on the shift key at the great Cargill plant out at the piers; they quit the soft ruffle of paper money counted into the drawer; they stood with their faces averted from the wind to snap their Zippos and taste that first welcome Lucky of the evening. And after a bus ride, a loose lope up the hill, pit stop at the corner bar, after a quick wink at the bay and a wistful recollection of the sailboat they had hoped to have by now and a shrug to say so what, maybe later, they went in to their women.

Lisa Fay saw the welcome green of the Rolph Playground just ahead and knew she’d need to rest. It was still sunny in the Mission, but the children had all gone home and the courts weren’t livened yet by the slap of the ball and the flash of bright-clad bodies colliding midair. She had the square of grass to herself, and she settled down onto the gentle slope and waited.

When the contractions came they ran through her fast and hard and she felt whipped like a rag doll, shaken and limp. But in between? All of the city came to comfort Lisa Fay, a crazy quilt that covered her, an old dog that lay down beside her. She closed her eyes and there stood Arlyn and the other longshoremen, their muscles bulging, offloading the freighters that docked and dropped their cargo from the Orient, from Russia, enormous holds of coconut coming in from the Philippines. She saw ducks hanging in the windows of the Chinese butcher shops, whole pigs and beef sides slid from the back of trucks to the shoulders of workmen who carried them through rear doors and out of sight. She turned and moaned and caught the wail of an ambulance rushing through the streets and the crash of waves at the Lands End strand and the train whistle sliding into the station and the clang of the cable car atop the California hill and there, softly, high heels muted by stained carpet. Lisa Fay struggled to listen but the contractions took over and what she heard was her own whimper and cry and ragged breath—and the chatter, somewhere close by, of a squirrel—and then rousing, in there, not timid at all, those first awkward efforts at bellow.

Amazed, she lifted her head to look.

And then dark closed in.

The sun had climbed as high as it could and had begun to roll toward the Pacific. Lisa Fay had missed the afternoon bus to Garberville. She was huddled in the corner of a bench facing a vast expanse of green. She had brought herself back to the park, as though there were no other place in this city her legs could think to deliver her. She had no place to go but the address of a shelter folded into her wallet. Nothing to do but start over.

Lisa Fay took a long, slow look around.

Or not.

She had not opened her mouth to speak, but the words echoed as loudly in her head as if she had.

Drugs smuggled in. A homemade shank. There were women in Chino who had chosen that road. They threw themselves under the wheels of whatever train would bury them fastest. The sad girl had cried herself close to death and finished the job with a bed sheet tied over the rail. And Lisa Fay had wanted desperately to follow her, to escape on her heels and flee that place. Alone in her cell, ten years into her term, she had made up her mind. She had secured the means. And it was almost more than she could do, to pry open her own fingers and drop those small red pills into the swirl of the sink.

One by one.

Until they were all gone.

Dear Son, she thought. For you I stayed.

Throughout the city there were weathered people worse off than she was—missing teeth, missing that part of the brain that defends against fracture and theft. In spite of everything she had dragged herself along. She had protected her right to exist.

I wanted to go to sleep. I wanted it strongly. I’d been kept awake for so long my brain wouldn’t think.

For you, she thought. Then, because of you.

That wasn’t quite right.

Thanks to you.

If she’d eaten those pills they would surely have killed her.

Son.

Thank you.

A raven with a velvet ruff speechified from its perch on a nearby trashcan. Across the street, a cat streaked along the top of a garden wall and disappeared into an alley. She was free. She had imagined this day for a long time. In her fantasy she had sent a letter and they had said: Come. You must come. We welcome you. Your son is eager to know you. She would take the bus as far as it would go, find someone to drive her. She would arrive on their doorstep.

The raven cawed and turned his shiny eyes on her.

They could as easily say: You have no place here.

They could say: Do not set foot near him.

They would not recognize her. They would have no reason to believe her when she told them Wrecker was her son.

He would have no reason—

Forfeited. Abandoned. Betrayed. She leveled the charges against herself.

A bitter taste on her tongue.

She hadn’t mailed the letter to Meg. Why would she?

Lisa Fay sat for a long time while the sun sank lower and the shadows lengthened. Her stomach was a tight fist of pain. She needed to feed herself, but the thought of eating anything made the pain worse. The thought of rising, of walking to a store or a café to purchase food—that seemed impossible. There was still the muffin stub wrapped in her bag. She reached for it and pulled it out.

A skinny dog peered warily at her from behind a shrub. She hadn’t noticed him before, and she was startled at first to see him so close. But there was nothing aggressive in his manner. He had a sharp snout and black liquid eyes and medium-length hair that switched abruptly from brown to a dirty white in a line down the middle of his face, and his ribs heaved—all of them visible—as he watched her nibble at the muffin.

Lisa Fay ate what she could and then carefully wrapped the paper around the remainder to save for later.

He was the first dog she’d been close to in fifteen years.

He blinked and looked away and she studied his profile. His chin was slightly lifted and the skin beneath it made a smooth line until it ruffled with longer hair at his neck. His chest was narrow but proportionate and he sat on his haunches nobly, like a statue. Then he yawned and rolled his weight backward as his hind leg lifted and he scratched furiously at the base of his right ear.

Lisa Fay’s mouth lifted in a tentative grin.

The dog caught that. He must have. Because he trained his liquid gaze on her and opened his mouth and gave a short, soft pant that resembled a smile before he looked away again.

Lisa Fay felt it like a knife to her heart. And in return, she opened the muffin shroud and carefully left the food on the bench for him as she stood to walk away.

“Nice of you,” a voice said. “But he probably won’t eat it. Doesn’t eat much.”

Lisa Fay’s gaze jerked back to the dog. She was startled to see a human shape behind him, a young man lying flat on the ground. He propped himself up on one elbow to face her and flung the other arm about the dog’s shoulders.

“I’ve tried to fatten him up, but he likes what he likes. He’s healthy, I guess.”

Go, Lisa Fay’s inner voices told her. Go now. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t ask for trouble.

“What does he like?” Her voice had a faint quaver.

The young man sat up. He was as slender as the dog and he was dressed in a white cotton tunic and white pants. His dark hair was loose and bushy and he wore a scraggly dark beard that covered haphazard patches of his face. He wasn’t old enough to grow a man’s beard. He was a boy approaching manhood, and his eyes, dark and liquid like his dog’s, looked trustworthy to her.

“Weird stuff. Bell peppers. Boiled potatoes.” He scratched the dog’s neck and gazed at him. “My parents feed him dog food, but he doesn’t like it. So I try to sneak away sometimes and take him out for a run.” He reached into his pocket and offered the dog a carrot chunk. He took it daintily and then lay down and held it between his paws and licked it. She heard the crunch as he broke off smaller chunks and swallowed.

The dog was Jasper. The boy was Garth. The dog still lived with the parents, where the boy had lived until he’d left home the year before. He’d meant to see the world but had only gotten as far as Oakland. There was an ashram there, and he found he liked meditating. He could see the world later.

“They don’t take dogs?”

“He meditates,” Garth said, and smiled, “but not in a conventional way.”

“I just got out of prison, Garth.”

It is never quiet in the city. So the car horns went on honking and the buses whooshed by on the street and over on the trashcan the raven gave a short, bored caw.

The boy’s eyes never stopped being trustworthy. He said, “That might account for the clothes.”

Lisa Fay glanced down.

“Not that they aren’t becoming,” he said, blushing slightly, “but you don’t look all that comfortable in them.”

She looked at him, surprised.

He put his hands to the sides of his head. “I can’t believe I said that.” He stood up. He was very tall. “I have to take Jasper back.”

“You take care, Garth.”

The dog and the boy looked at her intently. Garth hesitated. “After that, I’m going back to the ashram. You could come.” He watched her face. “It’s open to everybody. There’s a women’s dorm. You could spend the night there, if you want.” When she said nothing, he reached down and patted the dog. “I’ll take him home. Maybe you’ll be here when I come back. Maybe not.” He shrugged, and grinned. “The nature of impermanence, and all.”

She didn’t expect him to return. When he did, he carried a plate covered in aluminum foil. It was a full dinner, and still hot. She ate it slowly and carefully. It was the first home-cooked meal she’d had in a very long time. He waited for her to finish, and then they stood and walked down Sixteenth Street and took the subway to cross the bay to Oakland.

Dear Son, she thought. Just one night.

The next night arrived.

Just one more.

And then another. And another. And another after that.

Just until she got onto her feet.