Lay of the Land

 

". . . the gods of the heathen are stone and brass, and any
attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly condemned."
--Rudyard Kipling

　

　

　

　

　From where you stand, all that's visible of Lefty are two grungy corduroy leggings and a pair of red Chuck Taylors worn so loose the tongues bob out like on thirsty dogs.
The rest of him, from the waist up, is cramped underneath the dashboard of an old Buick LeSabre you've stumbled on back here in this empty (plus the Buick) lot circumscribed by long stark buildings with no signage and, much to your advantage, few windows. Its blacktop is pockmarked, sprawling with weedy fissures of sand and white gravel, so the car makes fitting ornamentation: A real showroom model. Badged with brown splotches of rust on its diarrhea green paint job. Lefty says probably a '96 or '97, but with every minute that ticks by you lose more and more faith in his prowess with cars.
Your role is to play lookout, getting more bored every second, quickly forgetting the point if there ever was one beyond Lefty's ego. It's the same old s**t as Sequoia. Him bragging to the cafeteria about past scores: Caddies, Porsches, and BMWs from Toronto to Brooklyn to SantaFe. And now this junker joins the hall of fame.
Hurry it up, you say.
"Is someone coming?" Yes. "For real?" No.
"Then hold your horses, I almost got the b***h . . ."
He leaves you no room to doubt. Synchronized with the above italics is a grating, impotent cough of resurrection as the car shakes to life. Lefty yee-ha's--forgetting, maybe, his roots in Ohio--and slithers out into the open air, red and white trucker hat worn askew. Lefty fell in love with the hat at a gas station outside Petaluma. It reads, in the typical uninspired jest one associates with truckers, Inner Beauty Won't Get You Laid. "Ain't that the damndest truth?" he smiled, elbowing you compulsively, doubled right over in hysterics even as he stole it. Besides that, he's got on a camouflage vest with lots of fatigue pockets and no shirt underneath so he can flaunt all his squid tattoos.
Lefty's obsession with squids has warranted no less than nine of them be sutured onto various parts of his body, and you're sorry to say by this point you've seen them all. He likes to tell a recurrent story about being anywhere from three to five years old and playing on the floor of his thoroughbred Hungarian grandmother's Cleveland townhouse some holiday (specifically which one alters from telling to telling) when along comes "good old Uncle Clem", who bends over on his haunches and asks young Lefty with a yeasty gust: "What has three hearts, eyes as round as basketballs, and can kill a shark?"
"What, Uncle Clem?"
A squid, if you hadn't guessed. That's what. And from that day forward, Lefty was enamored with naive conceptualizations of what this deep sea dynamo must look like. Until, of course, he was old enough to go look one up in a f*****g book.
"Gee," Lefty couldn't ever help but conclude with, "that must've been the same year they found the petting zoo in Clem's basement." (A herd of amateurishly-taxidermied goats with marble eyes and rubber stents wedged in their sphincters. Upon further investigation, every goat turned out to match the description of one reportedly dragged off by coyotes sometime in the past four years.) If this digressive characterization serves any purpose, it's to cement your opinion that Lefty was born into that hat.
"Now what?" you ask.
"Don't know. Wanna tear up 101 a bit?"
"Not really." You're staring off towards Main St., or the approximate direction thereof, where parked at the curb is a perfectly operative, full-size Chevy van that incidentally renders the conquest of this old Buick moot. But try explaining that to Lefty.
"I mean honestly," you say, "I'd rather be seen in the Astro."
"Yeah, it's a pile alright." He nods as one nods at the simple facts of life. His legs are spread puppet-like on the ground as though bearing an excess of kneecaps, and he plucks absentmindedly at some raw tar. "But you see any other rigs parked back here?"
No, you don't. It's what you've been pondering a long time.
Well, not a long time, but ever since you wandered into this strange tributary off the street via the sole entrance; barely wide enough for a vehicle to access (the Astro probably wouldn't make it), in part due to an obtrusive dumpster. Thin alleys bisect the buildings like foxholes, out which you catch glimpses of the world outside. In a bigger city, this whole cracked plain would have been nationalized long ago by homeless caravans into a tarp-strewn refugee camp. But Port Angeles isn't a big city. You found it by accident, beholden to coastal highway 101 and squeamish of the desolate sideroads spidering out into northern Washington and its vital Redwood congeries. The crossing of the Columbia River had been a milestone which deadlocked you thereafter into an oppressive alien screenery of green, more green . . . "All f*****g green!" Lefty raved at one point. "This state is supposed to be f*****g beautiful, isn't that what everyone says? I can hardly breathe--No, no, when I open the window it's only worse. Gotta keep going. This is some freaky Jurassic bullshit! In this day and age, can you believe it? I tell you: man is not welcome here." Signs were posted every other mile or so for towns that never came. Lefty's green eyes quivered; his fingers rapped a nervous, incessant beat on the wheel. On the pretense of fetching a lighter, you inspected a tube of Stelazine stowed in the armrest and found it empty.
Someone's gum is stuck to your shoe and that's the last straw. The words "let's split" are on the tip of your tongue when gradually, out of the blue, like the onset of a rainstorm, a consortium of young voices defiles the air, echoing untraceably from brick to brick. Lefty hears it too. You exchange worried looks and deign to yank him on his feet before fleeing the apparent source of the chatter.
Keeping one ear trained backwards, you can catch segments of the not-so-distant exchange: "Dude, why is your car running?"
"Who are those guys?"
"Dude, why'd you leave your door open?"
"Who are those guys . . ?"
You duck into an alley, Lefty a few steps ahead, and it's so tight you're forced to shuffle sideways or else risk having your shoulders ground off. While your own tedious footsteps rake the gravel below, the flip-flap-flip-flap of sprinting sneakers gets louder. Where did they come from? You'd been watching the entrance with an almost hypnotic vigilance out of sheer, immovable ennui, thus they must have snuck in the same way you're sneaking out: through one of the numerous foxholes. Craning back your head, the narrowing red walls ensconce a stripe of overcast sky . . . You and Lefty don't look like locals. Not here, not anywhere. Any redblooded yokel who caught you stealing cars in his town wouldn't waste a forethought on the contingency of loved ones demanding investigation into your disappearance. No way. 'Tramp' may as well be stenciled on both your foreheads, doomed to be all the more demeaning once you're strung by your vitals as the new communal scarecrows.
Unannounced, Lefty jerks to a halt and interrupts these very thoughts, causing you to shove and swear with abandon.
"Shut-up!" he fumes.
That's when you notice there's a brown metal service door before you that has probably been soldered shut since the tenement next door was built. But when you chance the knob (Lefty seeming content to just stare the thing down), it opens. Pathetically short on options, you hop the ledge and are inside at the foot of a dank, linoleum staircase. Lefty forces the sluggish door shut. The right-hand banister is falling off its prongs and a stench of diapers is unmistakable. Not soiled diapers, but like sticking your nose in a fresh pack of Huggees, that sort of talcumy odor. Next to your head, a purple-painted cardboard sign duct taped to the wall reads "Costume Shop" in sloppy block lettering. All very sordid and meaningless.
A dome light hovers over the top landing, switched on and basking the staircase in raw visibility. As you climb, the diaper smell ferments. You don't even know why you're climbing in the first place, or who initiated the act, but a mutual curiosity bars either of you from regressing. None of the angles in here seem flush. Flaky plaster explodes with cracks mirroring the parking lot outside. Mirroring the whole damn town probably. All of it inching down the blade of some Atlantic prophecy. Jesus, take a breath. The stairs creak and moan under your feet, too narrow to ascend side by side. Nothing obstructs your way but a collection of glass milk bottles about midway up, dusty with lost relevance. The further you climb, the quieter you tread, listening for sounds ahead or behind.
Lefty leads the way.
At the summit, once his legs move aside, you find you're staring eye-to-eye with a cast of crudely drawn pencil characters gawking at you from the obverse wall. The bulb's wavering glow seems to animate them and make them waver as well. Disproportionate, ugly characters donning scarves and hats and capes, like Tim Burton renderings of the Dickensian bourgeoisie; bent over on meek spines with strongly expressive faces; some smiling, some weeping, none passive. The wall corners off on your right. Lefty's body fills the doorway.
"What do you see?"
"Nothing much," he replies, after a pause, and steps aside to corroborate.
More accurately, the room is packed, in much the way a storage unit is packed. Packed with nothing. Dust-broiled clothes stew on the floor, crawling in vermiform from beneath one lonesome lump of furniture: a plaid-stitched loveseat oozing yellow foam out its copious wounds. The humidified wallpaper has limped off, leaving behind sawtooth patches of clammy wood. For a moment, you think your ears are ringing, then realize it’s just the fervid buzzchoir of a billion microscopic tenants. A bare ceiling bulb is the only material light source; presently, it's switched off and dirty illumination filters in from two conjunct rooms. Maroon threadbare carpet ramps to a gluey end at the open doorway to your right--replaced by age-stained tile flooring a bright, hectic kitchen--and continues on to your left, filling yet another indistinct wing.
In short, Lefty puts it best. "What a dump. Let's rack it for liquor and smokes."
These people can't even afford a lamp, you think skeptically (in the plural tense, because no one inhabitant could account for so much shed laundry) but acknowledge you've known plenty of chainsmoking alcoholics without lamps. Lefty toes through the mottled carpet. There are clothes belonging to every age, gender, and style. Either a family calls this dump home or an indiscriminate hoarder. He looks up at you somewhat nauseated and says, "I'll check the fridge."
Consequently, you're left with little option but to search the west wing or else wait ankle-deep in a pestilence that outweighs the Seattle subway terminal or even Skid Row by its unexpected quality alone. One delves into certain a******s of the world with realized prospects of seeing a mother tend her baby and a hypo with the same hand, but when the local boy scout troop is hosting a spaghetti supper at Blessed Trinity just three blocks away--well f**k, you guess what you're trying to say is context becomes the issue . . .
Doubtful that startling an inevitable hideaway of cockroaches is worth a quick snoop under the couch cushions for loose change, you move on. The next room is filthier but what's worse is it has potential. Even you can see that. There's a bay window overlooking Main Street and the stooped gravel rooftops of more buildings and alleyways that constitute the postcard marketplace. The harbor lay beyond that, jutting like a comb into the Strait of Juan da Fuca, which recycles its water with the Pacific Ocean about 70 miles west of here. An endemic, silveryblue fog pervades the whole distance. You're pretty sure, from where you stand, that if you pressed your head against the glass, you could spot your Chevy's front bumper still loitering outside the Dutch bakery--god willing; though in a town of this caliber you can't put it past some punctilious vigilante to call the eyesore in for a tow. That would mean letting Lefty putter fruitlessly under another dashboard for 10-20 minutes. Best just to split now before you contract syphilis or something worse . . . Jaunty Venetian blinds permit unequal slices of light to capture the dust blizzards orbiting languidly within their compact universe of weak plaster, termite-nibbled baseboards, and gaping moldy chasms in the ceiling ribbed by rafters. There are other more 'humane' relics of squalor too. A collapsible cot, for one, with iron springs exploding vengefully from its striped husk of a mattress, which has been impressed over time with the shape of its most common user, like a giant peanut-shaped crater. Spangling the wall beside that is a pinup array of Playboy bunnies wearing buoyant '80s style hairdos, all of them torn at the edges and wrinkled with age, even in print.
You're not going near the bed. You're not touching the laundry, not even to skim through pockets. There's nothing for you here.
"Stubs! Hey Stubs, you gotta--where the f**k are you?"
Grateful for the diversion, plus piqued by an uncharacteristic catch in Lefty's voice, you evacuate through the living room (calling it that only with a crush of irony) and into the kitchen where the strangely prominent diaper smell is now coupled with that of dirty dishrag and cooked meat. It's brighter in here than in the bedroom because there's nothing on the windows, no curtains or blinds. One of the panes is broken and mended up slipshod with a scrap of blue garbage bag. Strangely transfixed, you watch it breathe in and out with the wind like an obese plastic lung. "Stubs, check it out!" Lefty is gawking into a pink playpen thats primary function now is that of a bra drying rack. It's upholstered in pink zoo animals, with squares of white mesh caging the hypothetical resident.
You decide henceforth you'll do anything but "check it out". In fact, you'll lick six solid inches of buttery grime off one of the warped aluminum frying pans stacked ten-high in the sink or on the stove before you go near that thing! But you do. And Lefty's taut features, his bewilderment, don't lie. There's a kid inside.
The most bizarre detail being it's alive.
Not only alive, but relatively well looking in a pair of fleece Snoopy pajamas faded to an unwashed gray, crusty the way old fleece gets and chewed up inside one thigh as if by a rat. You check the playpen's corners for rats, but all the kid has for company is one blanket and a couple crushed beer cans.
"The thing's getting fed, no question about it." Lefty infers, gaining back his composure. "Plus look over there, did you see? Somebody's cell on the charger. We should probably split, huh?"
You're staring hard at the baby. It's staring back, less hard. Neither of you seem capable of settling on an appropriate countenance, so what transpires instead is mutual apathy. One thing's for sure, you're not a total monster. You bend over and toss out the beer cans. Pabst, no surprise. Had this pegged as a Pabst joint from the getgo . . . F****n kid could cut himself on one . . . Probably a hat lying around here too matches Lefty's. "Is there anymore beer in the fridge?" You ask, thirsting all at once, even for Pabst.
"A couple." Lefty pats his bulky vest pockets.
The fridge, a monstrous '60s relic, barrelbodied in cream shellac with space-age silver trimmings, is tucked away behind you in the front-right corner. You hadn't even noticed it upon entering, so trained was your momentum on the window lung. Now, right on cue, its cooling system shakes to life like a Model T, vibrating hard enough against the floor and sidewalls to shake loose every rancid bolt holding it together.
You verify Lefty's comment about a cellphone. Resting on the kitchen counter, it's plugged by a long black cable to an outlet hidden away somewhere in the dust and shadows of a low cupboard comprised of cheap oak and rusty hinges; concealed among the disarray of coffee mugs, stacked plates, steak knives, a blender imbued with some jam-like resin, sundry books on gourmet meat preparation, and a lidless tube of Quick Oats. A green signal light denotes the device fully charged. Maybe he, she, they, have been out for a while. What does it matter? The phone is one of those chunky gray pay-per-minute capsules, probably on welfare's tab like this whole moldering loft, like everything but the Pabst.
The baby doesn't do a thing. It's different than the way you've always thought of their type. It doesn't cry, it doesn't even babble or fuss. Of course, chances are it's a crack baby. Its eyes, a glacial amalgamate of every blue known to nature, are unblinkingly dark and oblique. Yeah, that's probably got a lot to do with it.
You head for the living room and don't look at the infant again but assure it telepathically on your way out not to fret: "Uncle Sam's got a soft spot for poverty. He'll keep your pink a*s afloat."
The beer cans rattle in Lefty's vest as you descend the stairs. He must be spooked or distracted or something because he accidentally kicks over all those milk bottles, thereby paving the lower landing in a glaze of sharp splinters. Besides an inadequate asskicking, what else is there to do--find a dustpan? Play house? Scrub all those dishes while you're at it? Crunching onward over the vandalism, you peek very cautiously out the same metal door at fault for this surreal detour; it doesn't even have enough leeway to open all the way before butting the opposite wall. No more voices lace the wind that whistles down the alley and that's all that matters.
You each hop down, squeeze around the door, and shimmy north, away from the parking lot.