Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [68]
That’s the thing about me: I’m trying. I am.
7) Manny got fucked up while I was gone.
“What the fuck happened to you?” I ask. We’re up in the crow’s nest at Burnside, drinking beers, heckling some Californian skater in full pads and a helmet, telling him to beat it. Manny’s face looks bad, real bad, with stitches around his eye and a burly dent in his forehead.
“We were downtown partying one night and we had some words with some hicks in a big lifted truck,” Manny says. “Guys from Gresham, for sure. Fucking hicks, you know? So we pulled up next to them at a stoplight, and I jumped up in the bed of their truck and started bouncing that shit up and down. Startled the shit out of them! And then they just fuck-ing took off, blew right through the red light, almost got fuck-ing bashed by an oncoming. They drove around like maniacs, taking hard turns, just to fuck with me. I thought for sure we were going to flip over and die, man. Scariest shit ever. So finally I just jumped out and rolled about fifteen times across the asphalt. Rolled myself right into the hospital,” he says, trying to laugh, but it makes me feel bad, because he’s fucked up bad and there’s something not right about him now, and it’s not like he’d ever been totally right, but still.
8) I wake up in the middle of the night because someone’s knocking on the van door. I look out and it’s the girl, the one from the mattress, and she’s out there shivering in the rain, and I can tell she needs something. The light is misty, chemical orange from the streetlamps up on the bridge.
“You need a blanket?” I ask, sliding the van door open.
“No,” she says. “A blanket’s not what I need.” She looks hungry, but not for food. She takes two fingers and smacks the inside of her elbow.
“I don’t have anything like that,” I say.
“Please?” There’s something in her eyes, something pure behind all the makeup and crust.
I invite her in out of the rain and pull a couple beers out of the cooler, even though I know that’s not what she needs. Her skin’s pale and strung with little beads of rain; she smells like sweat and like the sky. She shakes her hair out like a dog and I can feel the rain from her hair on my face.
“Why don’t you ask your boyfriend?” I say. “Where’s he?”
“I don’t know.”
“He leaves you here alone in the middle of the night?”
“He takes care of me,” she says. “You don’t know him.”
I crack a beer. She sits down on the edge of the bench where I’d been sleeping, runs her hand across my pillow. She looks around my van, at my stacks of clothes and dishes and skate decks and fruit. “You live in here?” she asks.
“Right now,” I say. “Just while I find a place.”
“It’s nice,” she says.
“It’s a van,” I say.
“You seen where I sleep? Believe me, this is nice.”
No argument there. I take a sip of beer.
“I watch you skate sometimes,” she says, looking me in the eye now. “It’s like you’re on fire, or you want to die or something. Everyone watches out for you.”
I look out the window, at the park’s darkened curves and lips. I take some pride in the way I skate, in the fact that I scare people. At a place like Burnside, this says a lot.
She stands up and reaches for the beaded necklace hanging off my rearview mirror. It was something I made for Amber back when I worked at the summer camp, during arts-and-crafts time with the kids. Amber liked it for some reason, wore it all the time. It’s one of the few things of hers I have left. The girl takes it off the rearview and starts to put it around her own neck. Before she can do that I grab it out of her hand.
“I think you better go now,” I say.
“I’m sorry, I just wanted to try it on. It’s pretty.”
I open the van door for her.
“Wait,” she says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. Was it your ex-girlfriend’s or something?”
I don’t say anything.
“I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll make you feel better. I’ll suck your dick if you want me to. Seriously.”
Blood rushes to my head. The same way it does every time. I’d stayed up all night drinking and fucking so many