Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [69]
“What’s your fucking story? Why you sleeping at Burnside with some crackhead?” I ask, doing the concerned-citizen thing, even though I’m still considering her offer, wondering if she swallows.
And then I hear a shout from the upper parking lot, up where the mattress is, and I know who it is and that he’s looking for his girl, and I imagine going out and beating the living shit out of him, but I’m tired and it’s raining and I’m honestly not all that excited about going bodies with a dirty addict sleeping on a mattress at Burnside. The girl hears the shout too. She reaches out and takes my hand, pries my fingers open one by one. She buries her thumb into my palm, just enough that it feels good, and looks up at me with those eyes. Then she takes a Sharpie out of her pocket and writes in my hand.
Please don’t help me, it says.
9) A text message from Manny wakes me up a few hours later, around 4 a.m. I think I might be an angel, it says.
10) It’s hard being back in Portland, back here where it all happened. I drive past where Amber and I used to live before she got sick, our little green bungalow in Southeast, over by St. Francis Park. Some other family is living in the house now, some people with a Subaru and a swingset. They put a garden in the side yard where my mini-ramp used to be.
I park the van and walk up into the yard and peer through the front window. I can’t see anyone but it looks like someone’s home. I hate them, whoever they are, but at the same time I wouldn’t mind if they invited me in for a sandwich.
I walk over into the garden, where everything is mostly dead, this being wintertime, except for a few onions. They have rust-colored skins with green shoots coming out the tops. They feel firm and ripe so I pick a couple. Then I turn around and there’s a little blond kid standing there looking up at me. He’s wearing rollerblades.
“This your garden?” I ask.
He doesn’t say anything.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I used to live here.”
But by the look on his face I can see that this only makes it worse. He turns around and tries to skate off toward the porch, as fast as he can, but he falls down and skins his knee and starts crying, and then there’s a woman’s face looking at us from out the window, and here I am, this big bearded fucker standing over her crying kid, with a couple of her onions in my hand, and her face disappears fast, and I want to do the same, so I make my way toward the van, and from behind me I hear someone shouting, Hey, a man’s voice, the voice of a not particularly tough man trying to sound a little bit tough.
I start up the engine and drive off.
11) I’ve been on this program, eating fruit and making the sign of the cross and skating Burnside every morning early, and not too much drinking, and my head was feeling cleared out a little, but then stuff kind of started going downhill after the thing with that family and their garden. Or maybe it was the thing with the girl, I don’t know.
Manny and me start drinking early at the skatepark, getting all sloppy. I take a bad slam on my elbow. I lie there for a while, looking at the underside of the bridge, all black and sooty and painted with pigeon shit, like an old cathedral. My elbow turns into a swellbow, the size of a baseball, the way it always does. And then these art school girls who Manny knows show up with some bottles of champagne, and we decide to celebrate my swellbow, and we’re all drinking out of the bottle at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, and it’s good, you know, the way freedom can be good.
Then these art school girls want to hit the strip clubs, which is just fine with Manny and me, and we end up at Magic Gardens, where the ceilings are low, and one of the strippers swings her hair around all crazy and gets it stuck in the heating vent above the stage. I’m embarrassed for her a little, all