Portland Noir

BURNSIDE FOREVER BY JUSTIN HOCKING

Burnside Skatepark

1) Fuck Hawaii.

2) First time I see her: she’s lying on a dirty-ass mattress, up in the parking lot above Burnside Skatepark, right in the place everyone goes to piss or shoot up or toss their empties or die. It’s the middle of the day, 2 p.m. And she’s on this mattress, sleeping with this sketchy-looking young black guy, which honestly you don’t see too often down here under the bridge, and her pink g-string’s hanging way out of her Dickies, which strikes me as weird too, because most homeless girls don’t wear g-strings. Or not pink ones, at least. She’s sleeping but I can tell she’s pretty. And young. And then me and this sketchy black guy, we’re staring at each other, his stare all full of emptiness and craziness and malice-all shit I stare back with in fucking spades. We’re staring at each other hard, and I think to myself, This is how wars start.

3) Things went okay over on the islands, for the first few months at least. I did what I do: drink, surf, skate, fight. It was the first and the last things that got me in trouble. And I guess the surfing too. They called me the Lumberjack over there, and at first I think they got a kick out of me, this big haole lumberjack motherfucker out in the lineup, fighting for waves with all the locals. What you hear about Hawaii is true: they’ll punch you in the face for stealing waves; they’ll do it right out in the water. But not me, not at first. They could see that I’d just been through some shit and I was over there to get away from it, just like half the other fucking Haoles on the island, but the kind of shit I’d been through was different and deeper and they could read it in my eyes and my beard and the way I’d take waves no one else would take, drop in high and late and still make it and generally just not give a fuck. Spiritual fuckers, the Hawaiians, from years of living between oceans and volcanoes. But still fuckers, nonetheless, from years of Haole lumberjack interlopers like me pissing them off, stealing their land and their waves, and the grudging respect they showed me at first wore off once I dropped in on the wrong people. Blood in the water: there was a lot of it.

4) This girl on the mattress, I don’t know what it was about her. She was too pretty and dressed too well to be homeless. She had dark black hair and pale skin and turquoise eyes.

5) Awhile back I worked at a summer camp, as a cook, and the kids liked me, more than they liked some of their counselors, because I was cool to them I guess, and I skated with them and shit. And told them dirty jokes. There was this one kid, redheaded and kind of round. Some of the other kids fucked with him, called him a fag and a kook. I spent my whole day off teaching him kickflips, and after that things got easier for him.

6) So after Hawaii and I were done with each other, I came back to Portland, picked up my van-the one Amber and I bought together for surf trips-and having no immediate place to live I parked it under the Burnside Bridge and ate beef jerky and blood oranges and grapefruits that I stole from the fruit wholesaler across the street. In the mornings I got up early to skate the park. I saw this kid do this thing in Hawaii once, before he went out into big surf. He dipped his hand in the ocean and then made the sign of the cross over his chest, all Jesus-style. So I took to doing that before paddling out, not because I believed in anything, but because it seemed right and good, and also because I’d seen Amber’s uncle do it at her funeral. I do it now before I skate too, and then I skate with a clear head, the whole park to myself, the city still damp and sleeping, and it’s like in Hawaii in the warm ocean water, the way it cleans you out, flushes out all the shit. Burnside can do that, but in a dirtier way.

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 times in Hawaii, but still the blood rushes to my head, because temptation does that to you, even when you remember all the mornings you woke up feeling empty and sick and regretful, so many mornings, but still, this girl’s mouth is so young and full.

“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 naked and hanging there by the hair, but that doesn’t keep me and Manny from looking and laughing. Then the bartender, this fat Asian, comes out with a pair of scissors.

“You cut that girl’s hair and I’ll fucking knock your teeth out,” I say. “Bring me a screwdriver and I’ll get it done right.”

But the bartender isn’t having that, so I slap the scissors out of his fat hand, and then I’m in a headlock and the bouncer and the bartender are dragging me out. They’re sorry they let me go out on the sidewalk, though, because now the bartender needs some dental work, as promised.

So then we hit Mary’s, where I wash my bloody knuckles in the sink while Manny looks at his crushed face in the mirror. The bathrooms at Mary’s are tiny and filthy, post-lap dance come stains on the wall next to the urinal.

“Sometimes I think I should’ve gone ahead and died,” Manny says, tracing the scar line up around his eye.

“You know what the smell of blood does to me,” I say. “Right now I could kill you with one punch.”

He turns away from the mirror and looks at me. “You’d do that for me?” I’m surprised to see that he’s serious.

“Come on, man,” I say. “You don’t really want to die.”

His face turns disappointed. “I’m supposed to die so I can come back as an angel.” Then he walks out. Like I said, something’s not right with him.

What happens next is better than Christmas morning, or winning the lottery, or the resurrection of Jesus, or any of that miraculous shit. I finish washing my knuckles, and in through the swinging door comes that sketchy fucker from Burnside, carrying a bent spoon, eyes all red.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I say, grinning. This isn’t something I usually say, but using the word “fancy” here in this bathroom strikes me as fucking hilarious.

It takes a few seconds for him to recognize me, and then I can see the fear in his eyes. I smack the spoon out of his hand. He goes down on the piss-sticky floor, crawling around like a dog, looking for it.

“Just give me a couple minutes,” he says. “Just let me take care of something and then we can-”

I kick him straight in the mouth.

I thought that would do the trick, but then he’s up and on me, and stronger than I thought, or not stronger but more desperate maybe. I’m fighting for fun, for the girl; he’s fighting for his life, for his next fix. But still, I’m not the right person to fuck with, not ever. I bear hug him, crack his forehead open with a head butt, then break the bathroom door open with his body and we spill out into the bar, me on top the entire time. Blood: there’s a lot of it. I think Manny even got a few shots in, or maybe it was Manny who pulled me off him, it’s hard to remember.

12) Manny figures it might not be the best idea for me to sleep at Burnside, but I don’t give a fuck. Right now this place belongs to me.

Sketchy and the girl are nowhere to be found. My best guess is the hospital. I sleep sound, until there’s another knock on my van.

The girl again.

She looks scared. A fresh purple bruise under her left eye.

“Is he okay?” I ask, yawning.

“No, he’s not fucking okay,” she says, climbing into the van. She smells like sweat again, and like something burning. Incense, maybe. Or charcoal.

“I just gave him a friendly beat down. He got what he deserved.”

“It’s not what you did,” she says. “It’s something else.”

“What, the bouncers rough him up after I finished?”

She looks around nervously. “You have any more beers?”

I reach back into the cooler and grab a couple. When I turn around she kisses me hard, and I can feel that she already has her shirt half off. The way she smells does something to me, like the smell of blood does something to me. But this is different. She smells like the ocean and like fire, and the way she’s all over me and hungry is like being out on a big day in Hawaii, when you bail hard and get tumbled all over the fuck-ing place, held under a thousand gallons of seawater, churned around like a dirty sock in a washing machine. Then you finally come up for air and you know you’re probably not going to drown and it feels so good to breathe that you thank God, whether or not you’ve ever set foot in church, and this girl all over me with her hot mouth and her soft tits is like that but better. And then it’s my turn to be on top, and I keep asking to make sure I’m not hurting her, because I’m big-I make girls cry in a good way, most of the time-and the girl promises me it’s in a good way, her crying, and then she begs me to come in her mouth so that I know for sure.

When it’s over she lies totally still, almost like she’s dead. Or catatonic. But she’s breathing, and she’s soft, and I kind of like her all quiet like this. I fall asleep with my hand on her stomach.

She shakes me awake. Half an hour later? Three hours? I have no fucking clue.

She has that strung-out look again, like the first time she got in my van. I ask her what’s the matter, and she just sits there shivering until I touch her cheek.

“It’s okay,” I say. “You don’t have to worry about him anymore. I’ll take care of you.”

She shakes her head. “I know,” she says. “I trust you.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I killed him,” she says.

“You what?”

“I killed him. I really did. He came back here after you beat him up and he punched me in the face, so I took his knife and killed him.”

I rub my face and try to let this sink in, the fact that I just fucked a murderer.

“Okay, so you killed him. What the fuck did you do with his body?”

“That’s what I need your help with,” she says.

13) She leads me up the dirt path to the upper parking lot. She holds my hand the whole way. Sobbing. “He’s up here,” she says. “I pulled the mattress over him.”

We climb further up to the spot, and sure enough, there’s the mattress, all covered in bloodstains, and there’s a big long lump underneath that looks a lot like a body. The girl falls to her knees and starts sobbing again. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking up at me with pleading eyes. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. Fucker had it coming.”

And then from out of nowhere something bashes me on the back of the head, dropping me straight to my knees, my vision crackling with little white fireworks. Then a hard kick to my ribs that knocks the wind out of me.

I don’t even have to look up, I know who it is. But I do look up, and he’s got a gun and I can see that he’s pretty serious about wanting to use it. I laugh. “I know a guy who’ll pay you to shoot him,” I say.

“You stupid motherfucker,” he rasps, the gun trained right on my eye socket.

But then the girl is on his back, still crying, begging him not to.

He shoves her away and I make a move for him, but he stomps on my face. And again. And then again. Somewhere between the time I pounded on him at Mary’s and now he found a pair of heavy boots.

14) I wake up on the mattress, my pulse punching from inside my head. What looked like the shape of a body at first is actually a pile of rocks and broken concrete chunks, which I highly don’t recommend sleeping on. I feel around in my pockets; as expected, my van keys are gone.

15) I wake up again, maybe half an hour later, and Manny has me by the legs. His skateboard’s underneath me like a little hospital gurney, and he’s facing forward, pulling me by both my feet. One of my shoes is gone.

I try to open my mouth to thank him, but it hurts to talk.

He tows me from under the bridge, and out there it’s a bright sunny morning, the first I’ve seen in Portland for a while. I’m looking straight up into the sky, from my one good eye, at the clouds and the sun and lampposts and power cables. Manny pulls me across the street, through a crosswalk, and I can see a lady in a Volvo looking out at us like, What the fuck, this man pulling another man like a rickshaw, both our faces wrecked, mine with fresh blood. I know Manny’s taking me to the hospital, because everyone who skates Burnside knows where the nearest hospital is, and I don’t have to ask about my van because if it was still here he’d be driving me. I picture Sketchy and the girl-I never did learn her name-driving south to California, the way Amber and I used to drive down there in the winter, heading toward the sun. And it’s here, with Manny pulling me toward help and me picturing those two driving my van, that I start to feel how bad it hurts, everything I’ve been through, and I wonder if maybe the girl will wear the beaded necklace, the one I made for Amber at camp. It would look good on her, I think. It definitely would. And Manny’s humming now while he pulls me, like this is no big deal, like this is what he was born to do.

HUMMINGBIRD BY ZOE TROPE

S.E. Eighty-Second Avenue

Amy doesn’t want to go to Cathie’s. I don’t care. “You deserve orgasms!” I tell her.

She flushes and pushes her long, sideways bangs out of her eyes. “Shut up,” she says, and turns up the volume on the TV. We’re watching Ace of Cakes on the Food Network in my parents’ basement. Again.

“Luke doesn’t make you come, right?”

She doesn’t answer, which means yes.

I stand in front of the television. Amy crosses her thin arms and looks past me, focusing on Duff Goldman, the chef, who is up to his elbows in fondant. She can be pissy sometimes, but we’ve been friends since we were both straight. That was sixth grade. Then puberty hit and Amy fell in love with Samir Rajkumar, who, after two dates that involved making out at the movie theater, admitted to her, I think I like guys. Then the universe decided to donkey punch Amy because I told her that I was into chicks on the same day. She asked if gay was going around like the flu.

“Amy, come on. It’ll be fun. I’ll buy you a coffee.” She ignores me and changes the channel. There’s a lady on the news with pink lipstick and bad hair talking about a sexual predator on the loose.

“The suspect is a twenty-five-to-thirty-year-old white male…”

“Who is this guy?” Amy asks as an artist’s sketch lingers on the screen.

“Some meth head who’s been ‘harassing women outside a local nightclub.’” I wiggle my fingers in the air, putting quotes around the second part.

“What does that mean?”

I smirk. “He’s been harassing dykes outside E Room, asking if he can help them come. That’s what Julia told me, anyway.”

“How would she know?”

“Her friend Emma works there.”

“With our luck, we’ll run into some guy like that at the porn shop.” Amy gestures at the screen and wrinkles her tiny, cute nose.

“Cathie’s is very classy,” I assure her. “It’s women-owned. Minimal meth head exposure, I promise.” Her green eyes move from the screen to my pleading, grinning face. “Orgasms, Amy!” I do my Martha impression, which she loves: “It’s a good thing.”

Amy cracks a smile, turns off the TV, and picks up her tiny purse from under the coffee table. I see her pull out her phone as she gets into my car.

“Who are you texting?”

“Luke.”

“Gonna let him know that you’re going to buy his competition?”

She doesn’t say anything as we drive down Eighty-second, past Vietnamese restaurants and brothels with names like Honeysuckles Lingerie and The G Spot. I wonder what she’s writing. what r u doing tonight? I pull into a strip mall with a Russian deli, a teriyaki joint, a nail salon, and a bubble tea café.

There’s techno music playing in the café, which is mostly deserted except for a guy checking his e-mail and two teenage girls reading magazines in the back. Amy orders a latte. “I hate the way those bubbles feel in my mouth,” she says when I order a taro root smoothie with tapioca pearls. “They’re so slimy.”

“Nah, they’re kind of like candy,” I explain.

Amy argues, “I don’t think you should have to chew your drink,” and adds another packet of sugar to her cup. She grabs two swizzle straws and pushes them through the hole in the lid.

We drive further south, past the community college, the Taboo porn shop, and two enormous Chinese restaurants.

I ask Amy if she came with her last boyfriend, Del, who she dated her junior year. He was tall and tan like a Ken doll. I liked him, right up until he called Samir a faggot behind his back. I did the only thing a sensible lesbian would do-I gave him a black eye. Del snitched to his parents, telling them a crazy dyke tried to kill him, and I had to spend time with my mom and a juvie youth counselor talking about why I was such “an angry young woman.” I got probation. Amy broke up with Del and didn’t talk to me for a month.

Amy shakes her head about Del. I suck the bubbles up from the bottom of my cup. “That blows,” I say.

She stares at her phone, mid-text. “His dick was too big. It hurt.”

“Okay, well, moving forward. Top 10 best things about vibrators. I’ll start. They come in shapes like dolphins and beavers. Your turn.” Amy will play Top 10 anything. It’s my way of making her feel okay about things she doesn’t want to do. One time we played Top 10 best things about abortions.

“Uh,” she finishes her text and puts her phone away in her purse. “Some of them ejaculate, I’ve heard, which is absolutely hilarious.”

“Good call. Number three, some of them light up. I even had one once that had glitter in the middle.”

“Isn’t that a health hazard?” Amy asks.

“Not if you wash it properly. Your turn. Four.”

“They don’t forget your birthday,” she offers.

“Oh, bitter. I like it.”

She adds quietly with a smirk, “And they can’t get you pregnant, either.”

I nod. “Six. They never get jealous when you sleep with someone else.”

Amy rolls her eyes. “And they never choose to play Xbox over you.”

“You can easily twist the base to adjust the speed.”

“Number nine… When they get tired, you can just put in more batteries.”

“Excellent point. And number ten, of course-multiple orgasms. Thank God for the Hitachi magic wand.”

Amy puts down her cup mid-sip. “Wait,” she says. “I thought the Bunny was the best one.”

“You mean the Rabbit. And you watch too much Sex and the City.”

“So then which one do I buy?”

“Well, that depends,” I reply, “on whether you have clitoral or vaginal orgasms.”

Amy bites the tiny swizzle straw in her latte, opens her mouth, and then closes it again.

I try to translate. “Neither?” I ask as we pull into the strip mall parking lot. The windows are frosted white and the neon sign above the door is written in swirly red letters with a heart dotting the i: Cathie’s. Amy opens her door and jumps out of the car to avoid the question.

Inside, I help her decipher the wall of fake wieners. I explain the difference between jelly, cyberskin, and plastic, and the importance of noting battery sizes.

“See this one?” I pick up a slim white number from the wall. “This one takes double-As, so that means it’s kind of like a quiet hum.” I pick up a bigger one, an inch and a half in diameter, with a pink leopard pattern all over it. “This one takes C batteries. It’s like having a didgeridoo against your clit.” I smile and close my eyes. “Mmm. My favorite.”

Amy bites her lip. “How do I know which one to pick? Should I get that thing with the hook on the end?” She picks up one that looks like a dentist’s instrument-long and thin with a slight curve at the tip.

“Have you found your G spot? That’s what the hook is for.”

Amy cocks her head in response, her body now mirroring the shape of the vibrator in her hand. The way she holds it, it almost looks like an abstract self-portrait.

I smack myself in the forehead with the pink leopard wiener. “This is ridiculous,” I say. “Do you do anything down there besides piss and put in the occasional tampon?”

Amy smirks and puts it back. “I know you think I’m an idiot, Kate, but I’m not.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’m getting more head than you right now,” she says with a self-satisfied smile.

I roll my eyes. “Boy head, whatever. He doesn’t give you orgasms!”

“Sometimes orgasms aren’t everything,” Amy explains.

“Only people who can’t have orgasms say stuff like that.”

Amy picks up a slim silver vibrator with a body that slowly moves in and out. The base is cupped like a spoon. The box says, Hummingbird. “How about this one?”

I nod. “Sure, it looks good. I think that little spoony part is for your clit.”

Amy holds it firmly, decisively. “Okay. I think we’re done.” Her eyes dart around the store and she lowers her voice to a whisper. “See that lady over there?”

I turn to the display of butt plugs and pick up one like I’m interested. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot an older woman in her forties with bright yellow hair hanging in crispy, over-gelled waves down her back. She’s wearing white shorts and her skin is brown like a hot dog. She’s holding the largest bottle of lube I’ve ever seen. It looks like a Big Gulp cup.

I snort, Amy giggles, and then we cover our mouths with our hands. She whispers, “I hope our vags never become so sandy.”

“Amen.”

I notice a fat guy with a mustache reading a book in the corner. The cover says, Guide to the Female Orgasm. I poke Amy in the ribs and jerk my chin at him. “Do you think that’s the guy?”

Amy glances at him and shakes her head. “Nah. He looks like some married man with a sad wife.” She adds, “Can we please get out of here now?”

The girl at the cash register looks like she’s not much older than us, with a lip ring and short pink hair. She takes Amy’s vibrator out of the package, shoves batteries into it, and twists the base, which makes it hum. She disassembles it just as quickly, kind of like a soldier with a gun. The whole thing happens so fast that Amy just stands there with her mouth slightly open. Her wide eyes tell me that she’s going to thoroughly disinfect her purchase before it touches her body.

Amy pays with a debit card and the lady asks for her signature.

“Why do I have to sign if it’s a debit?” Amy asks.

The girl smacks her gum as she explains, “We have to track all the purchases. People like to get high on meth, steal people’s identities, and buy porn.”

Amy doesn’t know what to say to that. “Oh,” she replies.

“God, I can’t believe we’re doing this backwards,” I say to Amy. “I thought it was porn, identity theft, then meth.”

Amy sighs and shakes her head. “I guess we’ll get it right next time.” She hooks her arm through mine. “Let’s just skip the identity theft and go home to our meth.”

I pat her hand. “Okay, honey.”

The girl behind the counter starts to put the Hummingbird in a black plastic bag. Amy waves her hand, “I don’t need a bag.”

“You sure?” she asks.

“Yeah.” Amy grabs the vibe and tucks it into her purse. It fits snugly.

The girl shrugs. “Have fun, ladies,” she says.

We’re on the road again, driving fast but aimless, zipping north on the 205 to the 84 west, racing along next to the MAX train. I refuse to roll up the windows, so we yell to hear each other over the wind and the Pretty Girls Make Graves album. I smoke three cigarettes between Cathie’s and Lloyd Center, careful not to burn my long hair as it whips around in front of my face. Amy’s fingers are fast on her phone. omg i bought a vibrator!!

I pull the car into the mall parking lot so we can ride the train for free downtown. You’re not supposed to do this, but everyone does.

We get off the train in Chinatown and walk to Voodoo Doughnut so Amy can get the one with cocoa puffs on top. She says she needs some comfort after being traumatized by the wiener wall. I smile at her fake drama.

The line outside the tiny shop is understandably long and most of the people waiting for doughnuts are dressed to go out-punks in torn-up jeans and spikes, sorority girls with hard nipples pressing against their tube tops. I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but Amy, in her platform sandals and halter top, looks like she could go clubbing. She’s even got big sweeping strokes of purple eye shadow over each eye.

“Shit,” I whisper.

“What?” Amy looks up from her phone.

I point. “It’s Liz.”

“Oh crap,” Amy says. She knows Liz is my ex-girlfriend and that our break-up sucked, but she doesn’t know that Liz dumped me after she found out I was “humping that whore from Hillsboro”-her alliteration, not mine.

Liz is easy to spot in a crowd. She looks like a Latina pin-up with dark skin, big eyes, and pouty lips. She dresses like a vintage model in big black Mary Janes, fishnets, and bright red lipstick. She keeps her black hair cut short in this sexy Louise Brooks kind of way.

I still want to fuck her.

I suddenly wish I’d worn something cool. Liz loved my soft butch look. She said it was best when I wore my long auburn hair loose with pinstripe pants and a button-up shirt.

Amy watches me staring. “Do you want to go?”

“No,” I say. “There’s room for two lesbos in this doughnut shop.”

Liz doesn’t even notice me while she orders a McMin-nville cream-my favorite too, a custard-filled doughnut with maple frosting.

Some skinny dyke wearing tight jeans and Converse sneakers has her arm around Liz’s waist the whole time, but I realize when they turn to leave that the girl is remarkably flat-chested and her face is blunt and chiseled under her big black glasses.

Then I see his Adam’s apple.

I want to stop myself but I can’t. I follow them out the door and leave Amy standing at the counter.

I yell down the street, “I didn’t realize you were into dudes, Liz!”

Liz and her boyfriend turn around. She blinks once, slowly, her eyes weighed down by multiple layers of mascara, and says, “I’m not, Kate. I just like people who aren’t assholes.” She nods at the doughnut shop, where Amy is still inside. “Have fun with your puta nueva,” she adds. Liz knows that Amy is only a friend, but everybody is competition to her.

Her boyfriend flips me off. Liz sashays down the street and doesn’t look back.

Amy appears next to me, her mouth full of chocolate cereal and frosting. “You are a total failure at life, you know that, right?”

I shrug. Amy doesn’t get it. Amy didn’t make Liz come in a parked car. I still get off to the image of Liz in her tight black dress, leaning her head back with her red mouth open while I worked her clit with my fingers. And tonight I’ll probably fantasize about pushing her up against the wall of that doughnut shop and reaching my hand inside her fishnet stockings. I loved the way she held the back of my neck when I fucked her, forcing my lips against hers. She gave the dirtiest kisses.

Amy licks her fingers. “Let’s go to Backspace,” she offers. It’s one of the few late-night coffee shops downtown, which means it’s always full of high school kids. I don’t really want to go but, until we turn twenty-one we don’t have many other options.

Amy buys a second latte and grabs a deck of cards from another table. There’s a group of boys with laptops at a big table in the back and they’re all playing some computer game together. One of them leans back in his chair and sighs, “This is so fucking gay, dudes.”

Amy deals gin, which means she wants to talk. We’ve been playing gin since we were in the Girl Scouts. We used to play a quarter per point against other troops and clean them out. She spent all her money on makeup and I bought books. “How old is Liz, anyway?” she asks.

“Twenty-five,” I say.

“So does that mean it was, like, statutory rape when you were dating?”

“Nope. Just sodomy.”

“Oh.” Amy looks a little disappointed, like she was hoping for a felony, but her face brightens as she lays out her hand. “Gin.”

“You’re a cunt,” I tell her and slap my cards on the table.

She shrugs. “Homo.”

“Prude.”

“Dyke.”

“Breeder.”

Amy deals another hand and then leans across the table to whisper, “Don’t be mad that you can never have me.”

“Mad?” I point at her bug-bite titties. “There’s nothing there to motorboat. Forget it.”

Amy shakes her shoulders in an effort to make her nonexistent tits jiggle, which makes me snort. “Is that why you loved Liz?” Amy asks. “Because of her motorboat-ability?”

“And her apartment,” I answer. “It was nice to have a place where I could escape.”

Amy nods as she picks a discard. “I didn’t see you much then.”

“Yeah,” I say. I feel my cheeks tinge pink. It’s true. I dated Liz for nine months, right at the end of our senior year. I would live at her place on the weekends and never answer my cell phone. Amy sent me so many texts: where r u? call me. iron chef tonight? answer yr damn phone, plz!!

But I didn’t want to deal with anyone else. I just wanted to be in Liz’s apartment and see her looking disheveled in the morning. I loved the way she would roll over and smile at me with crusty raccoon eyes. “Morning, Glory,” she would say. Then she’d kiss me and I’d run my hands over her bare breasts, over her back, into her panties.

“Well, too bad she was a nut job,” Amy laments.

I nod and half-smile. “And now she’s straight too.”

Liz had moods sharp like knives. She said she was stressed with grad school and would apologize, but then she’d go into rages, break dishes, and yell at me to get out. One time she bit me so hard on my arm it left a scar. My mom asked if a dog did it.

“Some of it was good,” I say. Amy looks up from her cards. “I loved going to brunch with her on Sundays. And she wrote me letters, even when we saw each other every day. Sometimes we just sat together on her porch, reading books and smoking cigarettes.”

Amy nods thoughtfully. Then she gives me a big smile and I groan. “Gin,” she says.

By the time we head back across the river, the train is almost empty. We sit side by side, Amy texting a mini-novella while I stare out the window. so then i got a donut and kate was a total bitch to her ex and we played gin and i won every time and we’re heading home now so maybe i’ll come over later and you can meet my hummingbird?

A guy about our age in an Old Navy T-shirt is sitting across the aisle. He’s rocking his head back and forth singing “Brown Eyed Girl” to himself. “Sha la la la la la la la la la ti da,” he mumbles. He’s got short brown hair and a hooked nose. I look at his hands because he’s drumming his fingers on his leg and his hands are all fucked up and scarred and dirty. He looks familiar.

He catches me looking at him and lopes over to our seats. He goes, “Hey.” He’s got pale skin and he smells wet and sour, like a gutter that’s been pissed in too many times. I breathe through my mouth. I look at Amy and we don’t say anything.

The guy smiles like one half of his mouth is all shot up with Novocain. “Hey,” he says again, and leans closer to Amy. “You’re really pretty.” She tenses up but doesn’t move. He runs a finger along the edge of her hair, from the base of her neck down to her shoulder blade.

I swat his hand away. “Hey, man. Don’t fucking touch her!”

Amy is red and frozen, not looking at either of us.

The guy straightens up and laughs. “Whatever. I’m just giving her a compliment.” His Adam’s apple bobs in his neck and suddenly I want to wrap my hands around his throat. Make him shut up. Make him sorry. His eyes roll around, like he’s not sure where to look. He stares into Amy’s lap, at her purse. “Hey,” he says again, and points. “What’s what?”

The Hummingbird is sticking out of her bag. He can see the cupped tip and the edge of the package, where it says, Requires two AA batteries, in large print. “It’s a toothbrush,” Amy says, and tries to push it down into her purse.

“Nah,” he says. “That’s a dildo.” He stretches it out into two heavy syllables: Dill. Dough. He laughs again and I want to crush his windpipe. My fingernails are digging into my palms.

He touches Amy’s neck. “You need some help, honey? Need a man to help you, baby doll?”

Amy cringes and I leap over her, shoving him with force. There are three other people on the train and they are all working very hard to seem like they are not looking at us.

I warn him, “Keep your fucking hands and your compliments to yourself.”

“Don’t touch me, you fat fucking dyke,” he growls. His glassy eyes darken and he pushes me back, so I stumble into Amy, who, miraculously, is still texting. this is so crazy!!

I take a deep breath and feel my body hum. There’s a rush of blood that starts in my feet and burns straight up my legs to my pussy. It feels like an hour passes before the train stops and the doors slowly pull apart, and in one moment I do two things-I stomp on his foot, which distracts him enough to look down for a fraction of a second, then I jam the palm of my hand upward into his face and I hear his nose pop into my fingers. Suddenly there’s blood streaming down my forearm and I yell, “Run!” to Amy, who’s already jumped out and is racing to the parking lot.

I run as hard as I can, pausing only once to glance over my shoulder, and I see that he’s stepped off the train but he’s not going to catch us. He’s stumbling around with blood all over his shirt. The last thing I hear from him is a muffled cry like a broken animal.

Amy shouts for the keys and I toss them to her. She sprints ahead to the car and has the engine started before I even reach the passenger door.

We burn through signals regardless of their color and pull onto the freeway. The blood on my hand slowly dries and turns brown. Amy stares straight ahead, a death grip on the wheel, her chest heaving. Her right foot is planted to the floor. The album is still blasting from the stereo and we don’t turn it down.

Stand up so I can see you

Shout out so I can hear you

Reach out so I can touch you

This is our emergency

This is our emergency

A moment turns into half an hour. I make Amy turn around at Multnomah Falls, the scenic area thirty miles east of where we started.

“I don’t want to go to Idaho,” I say. I try to make it funny but she doesn’t respond.

Amy quietly, slowly pulls the car around. She looks left and right three times. Stops. She finally speaks: “Do you think we lost him?”

In the dark night, it’s so funny, all I can do is laugh, and finally Amy laughs too, and I say, “He never even had us.”

SHANGHAIED BY GIGI LITTLE

Old Town

Eight o’clock

So, I’m walking down this seedy street in Old Town with Kit and Rhonda, silently lamenting my sorrowful existence-how rent’s going up again, how I need some new clothes, how good cheese is so fucking expensive-and up ahead, on the next corner, here’s this old woman begging. How’s that for juxtaposition?

In other words, I’m a pathetic, whiny bitch.

She’s squat like a folding chair. Hunched, head straight out from the crossbar of her shoulders. Hand out at the people walking by. And this funny look on her face, this little twisted thing with her lips, almost a smile-and, damn, look at her eyes. She’s got crooked eyes. Like she’s wearing crooked glasses, but she’s not wearing glasses at all.

“Spare change?” she says. “Pretty jewelry?”

And that’s the thing that really has me reaching into my purse. Pretty jewelry. Because Jesus, I mean, just look at her.

All right, it’s not the dress-that’s just some old house-dress. Yellow faded to white. Some splattery stain covering it that, when I step close enough, turns out to be what was once a pattern of flowers. But her hat. That’s bright blue velvet. With one of those little feathers at the side and some torn net hanging from the brim. And her jewelry. Trying so hard to be pretty. She’s covered in junky plastic-big earrings, clinking bracelets-old and broken. And what looks like-step closer-clippings of wire circled around her fingers. Necklaces made of tied-together pieces of gutter-stained string and buttons and faded sequins. Step right in front of her now, and the brooch pinned to her chest is an arthritic metal claw with no rhinestones.

She looks her crooked eyes down my face to the pearls at my neck. “Pretty jewelry?”

I’ve got a fistful of coins and I step up and hang it over her open hand and let go.

Her other hand comes up fast. Takes a jabbing snatch at me.

Her rough, knobby fingers around the four of mine.

The top of my head does that scared thing where it feels like someone’s cracked a raw egg up there. I hang my mouth open but my brain forgets what screaming’s for, and then she lets go. And now we’re walking away, Kit glancing back. That touch still on my fingers. The way the squirm hangs around in your stomach after the scare’s over.

Rhonda’s good enough to wait until we’re one step away from being out of earshot. “My friend,” she says, “you are such a sap.”

Nine o’clock

After a couple hours walking through the dungeons and opium dens below the streets of Portland you need a drink. It was thick hot down there, and dark. They gave us flashlights and said, Now, direct your attention to this corner where, in eighteen-hundred- and-I-can’t-remember, men were held captive in foul prison cells.

Rhonda had the reaction I thought she’d have: “Shanghai Tunnels? Shit, that was more like the Shanghai Basement.”

But if you enjoy good lore and don’t mind close, dark spaces where the air is like breathing dirt and it’s so hot you could keel over but for being constantly revived by the exquisite reek of body odor coming off the tourist next to you, it’s quite a hoot.

Me, I love good lore. Lore is my favorite kind of story. Because it’s not only historical, it’s a lie everyone knows is a lie but tells anyway. I love that. Of course every story I tell is true. Completely true. Completely and utterly at least five-eighths of the way to being true, which is truer than any piece of lore and truer than most truths you’ll hear, including the one about George Washington and the cherry tree. Look it up.

But after the tunnels and then the old woman grabbing my hand, we had to get out of Old Town. I said we could walk to the Pearl District, but Rhonda always has to call a cab. She couldn’t have gotten very far anyway on those shoes of hers that are somewhere between fuck-me pumps and fuck-you pumps. She sat in the middle so she could lean in between the front seats and show her boobs to the cab driver.

And now we’re at the Everett Street Bistro, Rhonda’s favorite place-sitting at her favorite sidewalk table. I wanted to sit inside, and I’m trying to drown my frustrations in some sort of sugar-on-the-rim, house-infused, fruit-muddled, herb-atomized cocktail, and pommes frites with a side of béarnaise sauce.

Kit is big blue eyes over an even bluer drink. “No, seriously, Rhonda, there are tunnels running all under this city. From Old Town all the way to the Willamette River.”

Kit’s reciting word for word what the tour guide said. She smiles like the tour guide did. Her large, goaty teeth are a shade of blue.

“You want to know what I think?” Rhonda says, pointing a pomme frite at us. “I think they heard some old legend, found a basement, threw some old, broken shit down there, and started charging admission.”

“No, seriously,” says Kit and her blue teeth. “Back in the day, the bars were full of trap doors, and if you were an able-bodied man and you got yourself drunk, bang, down you’d go, to be chained up and shanghaied away on some pirate boat.”

Again: tour guide. Except that her two drinks-closing in on three-are making Kit both more emphatic and less articulate. And I’m pretty sure the tour guide didn’t say anything about pirates.

Rhonda rolls her eyes. It’s ticking me off. She’s rolling her eyes at the lore of our city. Which in my book is like you’re dissing my story. I mean, this evening’s entertainment was my idea. And first she’s making cracks under her breath the whole tour, then she’s acting like me giving some change to a woman on the street is the most obvious act of chumpdom she’s ever seen. I’m going inside to find a waiter and ask if this place has a trap door I can shove her down.

Dusk is dying, and the city’s washed blue to match Kit’s teeth. A car drags a curtain of bright white down the street in front of us.

“You want to know what I think?” Rhonda says, but then she glances out across the road. “Hey, look who’s come back for more.”

Right there on the far corner. Faded dress, velvet hat, hand out at people walking by.

“I’ll bet she works a circuit,” Rhonda says. “I’ll bet she knows exactly where to go at what time to milk the public of the most money.”

I push out a laugh and try not to sound pissy defensive. “There are people in need in this world, you know.”

“Her name’s Dorothy,” Rhonda says in that way she has when it’s less about her knowing more than it is about you knowing less. “As in, we’re not in Kansas anymore? I heard she lives at the Biltmore Apartments in Northwest.” Points her chin down so she can give us the just-under-the-eyebrows look. “I also heard from an equally reliable source that she lives in a loft here in the Pearl. And owns a car.”

Kit downs her drink. Her voice is just a step past not-quite-too-loud. “Well, I heard she lives in the Shanghai Tunnels.”

Which is all lore-of some lame sort-and normally this would at least somewhat intrigue me, but now I look down at my hand all naked on the white tablecloth, and what the hell?

My ring.

The garnet and the amethyst are on my left hand, but the right hand, the hand she grabbed-

All right, hold on, maybe I didn’t put it back on after I showered this morning. I try to remember having it on in the tunnels.

Rhonda’s still going at it: “I heard she has this son who lets her beg and then takes the money and buys collectible baseball cards.”

And Kit: “Well, I heard she has this son who corners people in alleys and clubs them to death with a baseball bat.”

Worms in my stomach.

My favorite ring.

My grandmother’s ring.

Rhonda sneering: “I heard those crooked eyes of hers can put you in a trance.”

Kit slurring: “Well, I heard in reality she’s the Pied Piper!”

I’m frantic eyes at the ground under my chair, at cracks in the sidewalk. The conversation moves on to how much Rhonda hates her mother, but I can’t listen, and I can’t stop watching that woman.

“Mother is always trying to control me,” Rhonda says. “All her fucking little guilt trips. You want to know what I think? It comes down to control. Everything we do, everything we feel. What’s marriage? Control. Rape? Control. A mother’s love? Control. Charity?” Rhonda looks at me. “Dorothy over there? What a fraud. She knows how to use guilt better than anyone I know. Yeah, the minute you locked eyes with her, you surrendered control to that old woman.”

I don’t answer. I’ve got my hand in my purse in some pathetic search all through the slink of coins at the bottom.

Dorothy swivels and sets her crooked eyes at me.

Nine-thirty

We toss crumpled-up bills out to settle the check. In my body is that perfect drone that says I’ve had just the right amount of too much to drink. The sun’s gone down past that place where it does any good in the sky, so now everything’s blue-going-to-black. It’s time to hug and say, Wow, is it really that late? We’ve got to do this more often. Rhonda and Kit set off down the sidewalk. Kit big, flappy waves and blue smiles, while I’m stalling by the table. Hand in my bag like looking for keys or lipstick. Wait until they’ve turned the corner. Sit back down. Old, dead drink glasses and the empty pommes frites paper cone all brown and greasy.

I sit and watch the old woman.

“I hear she lives in this big Craftsman off Belmont and breeds award-winning pugs.”

It’s the waiter with the shaved head and the tiny braid beard. He nods big at me as if now we share a special secret. Turns. Goes off, back inside.

And the corner is empty.

I’m on my feet fast. A glass topples. I see she’s not far. Walking in this slow shuffle like when you’re a kid pretending your socks are roller skates. Grab my purse and start down the sidewalk, but it’s the opposite sidewalk, and parallel means I’m not following, not really. I’m not even looking at her, just keeping her at the corner of my eye. Not-following-just-walking past the wine bar. Not-following-just-walking past the coffee house. Am I being crazy? Is my ring sitting in the dish by the bathtub? I open my hand. At the base of my finger the halo of skin is smooth and glossy.

Look up, and she’s passing right in front of me.

So close, the blur of her sparks into a moment of detail: cheek like a half-deflated balloon, velvety sag of a thousand wrinkles, white whiskers, and her eye, the droop of a red rim and a flash of watery blue right at me.

Takes me a moment to catch my breath. In that moment, I could point myself in the direction of home. Instead, I wait long enough to get about fifteen feet between us. Turn, and now we’re off on a little crazy-stalky tour of the city and I’m thinking she’s crazy and I’m stalky, although I suppose I could be both. We see the sights. Endless shop windows, mannequins sexy with no heads. Getting darker, but the Pearl District is upscale and therefore safe, and I’ve got just enough rum in me to make up for my total lack of personal strength.

Whoever we pass she holds her hand out, spare change, pretty jewelry. Finally some couple stops to give her something. I get closer. Blond hair and lipstick, black hair and mustache up over Dorothy’s head, smiling down. Both in a state of grace. They pass, glance at me as they go. I watch the hunch of her body as she shoves whatever they gave her down in some deep pocket of her dress. She starts up walking again, and now I’m right behind her. Trying to see around her arm to that pocket. She has my ring in that pocket.

And then I realize: I’m right on top of her as if I’m some mugger. I feel out of control. What’s that Rhonda was saying about control? Whatever, I’ve got to stop this now. Powell’s is right at the next block. I’ll stop off there. I’ll quit.

She steps into the street, and I step in after.

Sudden blaze at the side of my eyes.

A car. Right at me.

My muscles jam up, panic-stupid, and I can’t move. Eyes pinned on Dorothy’s back. The car jerks to a stop, bumper right at my calf, and there I am standing in the middle of the street, and in my chest is the steady pound of oh-what-the-fuck-just-happened.

Headlights flash and for a moment light up the back of Dorothy’s dress. The driver shaking his hands at me. Should go forward, but I’ll run right into her. Should fucking go back, but somehow I can’t.

The guy shouts something muffled through the windshield. My lungs are a tight fist around an inch and a half of air. Dorothy finally steps up onto the far curb.

And I can move.

The car pulls off behind me. This time his fuck-you is loud enough to make out.

I walk on in a strange daze of comprehension. Down past the bookstore where I was never actually going to stop off, now, was I? Past closed-up restaurants, empty parking lots. Dark folding in. It’s a Pied Piper dark, thick and rat black. And it’s pulling me right back into Old Town. And all along I’m still asking myself what just happened, but the thing is, I know what the fuck just happened. I was pinned in the middle of the fucking street because I was not going to let that old woman out of my sight.

Ten-fifteen

Stubby, hunched buildings lumped along the sidewalk, worn-out Victorians peeling paint. Bars and abandoned storefronts.

Some guy pissing on the side of a dumpster. Wine bottle in his hand-yes, this lovely, little pinot gris has a delicate bouquet with notes of urine and rotting burrito.

If I am to be a crazy stalker, I might as well get my method down. I set my distance at about fifteen feet, set my pace at old-lady slow. Most stalkers probably have some idea what their plan is, but I’m new to this so I just keep following. On and on through Old Town. Stalkers should wear better shoes. We walk past windows like oil-black mirrors. And I watch Dorothy’s head turn. First to her reflection, then back to mine, then she swivels and she’s looking right at me.

I get the egg-on-the-head thing, the kick to the gut, but my eyes grab hold of hers and don’t let go. Panic turns so easy into thrill. I stare her down until she turns away.

And we’re on into the part of Old Town that’s also Chinatown. Chinese restaurants, some abandoned. Cheesy gift shops. A pile of trash in the darkness of a doorway or maybe someone sleeping. As Dorothy cocks a look back, I step up closer.

Ten feet. The stiffness of her body, the folding-in along her back as she walks-she’s totally focused on me.

Nine feet. Stray strings of tinsel at the back of her neck.

Eight feet. The clink of her bracelets, the uneven huff of her breathing.

I let my footsteps go loud on the sidewalk to make sure she hears me.

Rhonda’s right, of course. It’s all about control. But now I’m the one who has the control. Dorothy can keep walking all night, but she can’t get away.

Five feet. If I reached out, my fingertips could slip right in there at the back of her collar.

Behind me is the sandpaper scuff of shoe on pavement. I glance over my shoulder. There’s some man back there, walking down the sidewalk after us. I turn back to Dorothy, steady myself. Move away from her-slowly-so it looks like I’m not following.

Just walk now.

I try to calm my breathing. No need to freak out. Just because he was a little too close. But I swear he was looking right at me.

A brick wall gives way to a bank of narrow warped-glass windows. Our reflections are smears of color bobbling across, no way to separate one from two from maybe three.

And here, some sound is coming from Dorothy: a droning, rolling sound under her breath. Great-he’s stalking me, I’m stalking her, she’s fucking humming.

Footstep scuff right behind me. My whole body tightens.

A hand on my shoulder.

I spin, recoiling, and a scream chokes off at the back of my throat.

“Want to know what I’ve heard?” he says.

The guy’s right over me. Shaggy black beard and stocking cap, a missing tooth as he smiles. His eyes go over my shoulder in Dorothy’s direction.

“Sometimes stories are true,” he says.

He reaches to his neck, pulls a set of headphones over his ears. Tinny buzz of music like the hover of a fly.

And now he’s bobbing his head at me.

Crazy-omen-man likes rock and roll.

I step back. Turn, and Dorothy’s gone.

I get a panic kick to my gut so hard it runs a tingle out along my fingers. I scan desperate. Graffitied-up mailbox. Overturned shopping cart. I pound shoes to the corner. Dark, empty streets left, right, straight-no idea which way to go.

I go right. My eyes everywhere-in doorways, behind dumpsters, between parked cars. Panic turns so easy into anger-goddamn psycho headset freak-sometimes stories are true, like the one where the crazy bitch hunts down the old woman over nothing more than a ring.

Movement in the dark recess of a doorway. I lurch toward it, and there’s a man crouched, shirt off. I jerk back, turn. My eyes go out across the street. To fall on the figure over there in front of that boarded-up building, pulling open that rusted metal door.

Dorothy.

My heart is going at it hard-that panic and anger thing-it’s a beautiful drunk. Filling my head up like too much wine. Dorothy looks over her shoulder, and even from all the way over there, those twisted-ass eyes are right on me. Along my spine, my shoulders, the muscles tighten. She steps through the door, pulls it shut, and she’s gone.

Eleven o’clock

I drag the door open.

All black in front of my face. The Old Town air is a hot breath on the back of my neck.

Don’t hesitate-just go. Into the black, and it swallows me up, and I’ve never felt such a goddamn thrill before. I inch toward an open doorway I barely see up ahead. Doing that whole hands-out-in-front-of-you thing. Don’t hear her humming or her bracelet clink. I step through this next doorway but something makes me stop. Something says don’t move.

For a moment I just stand here in the dark. Feel the panicanger drunk coursing lush through me. I start forward again.

My foot comes down onto nothing.

Hands out, thrashing. Clutch crazy at some metal rail. Foot finds the ledge. Stand crouched. Breathe. Hands gripping hard. The black, receding and finding shape again, settles on the smoke-thread edging of the handrail, which traces down and down.

A distant sound comes up. Dorothy’s voice. A tune. A taunt.

One foot out to find a step. Next foot out. A creak under my shoe. The lower I go, the warmer it gets. Like the devil forgot heat is supposed to rise. The smell is just this side of rot. Turn at the bottom, eyes scanning the dark for her. Then I hear a sound like air forced through a tiny hole, something breathy and shrill. And a strange scuttling. Oh shit, no.

But the humming. Flat and faraway. And so I walk.

The room just goes and goes, thin and long-what, am I about to get shanghaied, are Kit’s pirates lying in wait? The only light comes down from cracks between the wooden beams overhead. Corridors converge, and I listen, and I turn. Keep going deeper in. Hot sweat down my back. Ceiling just above my head. Walls close. What the hell is this place? Darker now. Nothing but fissures in the wood to let in something feeble and dim silver like moon going through water.

The whole black floor seems to crawl-oh Christ. Something brushes my heel-body jerks. I stumble forward. On and on under the streets of Portland. I’ve lost the way out. All I can do is hold onto Dorothy’s voice and follow. Her Pied Piper song in this Pied Piper black.

Can’t stop, can’t breathe.

Because sometimes panic just turns into more panic, and sometimes stories are true, and sometimes you’re an idiot.

My foot comes down onto something soft.

Sick squirm under my shoe.

I choke in a gasp, stagger back. For a second I’ve lost the floor.

Then, as my shoe comes down again-solid ground-there’s a click and suddenly, light.

I’m in a chamber at the end of the line. Walls full of white Christmas lights. Hanging in swags like the piping of sweet on a birthday cake.

And all up and down and ceiling to floor: pretty jewelry.

At first I can’t make it out, it’s just an enormous, blurred luster. But bring it into focus, and it’s gold and more gold, like an Egyptian tomb-gold all pressed into the walls-gold and silver and the crazy shimmer colors of thousands of jewels. Mosaics of rings, overlapped bracelets, winding chains, strings of pearls. I reach my hand out to touch. Stop.

Directly ahead, Dorothy in her faded housedress and blue velvet hat is hunched, face close to the wall, hands working. Her humming is so low I barely hear it. She has a little tube of glue. She presses something into the wall. Face smattered with beaded light and twinkle, and she turns and looks at me and smiles.

Crooked eyes dip down. To the diamonds in my ears, the drapes of pearls against my chest.

The glint in her hand is my ring.

I don’t hear a sound from behind.

I don’t hear the swift of the baseball bat before it comes down.

LILA BY MEGAN KRUSE

Powell Boulevard

When I saw Lila for the first time it was at the Tik Tok, at a quarter past 2 in the morning. I was there because I had this terrible loneliness in me and I couldn’t stand to be in my apartment, where the cars outside on Foster Road dragged their headlights over the thin walls. There was black mold on the shower curtain and the linoleum was peeling up and there was an ugly stain on the mattress. It didn’t matter; I slept on the sofa anyway.

I slept on the sofa and when I couldn’t sleep I sat in the Tik Tok near Powell Boulevard, watching the rows of clocks on the walls, and then Lila came in, late on a Friday night. She was tall, with rust-colored hair, and she looked like a girl I had known once, the daughter of someone who came to take care of my mother after her accident. The girl was my age and she had a puppy that she carried, with ragged, chewed-up fur, scratching its fleas and burying its head under her arm. I was eleven. I tied a red scarf around my head because I wanted to look like a soldier who had just returned from war. I dreamt the girl would hold a rag to my forehead and whisper carefully in my ear.

While her mother took care of my mother, the girl slept in the room next to mine. When she outgrew one of her dresses it was folded, washed, and put on my bed. It was blue, terry cloth, a summer dress. I wore it until I could hold it in my hands and see right through.

But then my mother was well enough and the woman left and took the girl with her. My mother sometimes stood and walked around, and changed her clothes, but her eyes were blank as marbles and her mouth was slack. Sometimes she sat and played the accordion but it was always the same wheezing note. She kept a fifth of whiskey in the top drawer of her dresser and when she slept on the recliner I would sip from it, lie in her bed, and imagine that girl. Her blue dress like water, like a calm and perfect sea.

Lila came into the Tik Tok that night and I watched her for a long time. She was beautiful. She folded and refolded her napkin, looked around as though she was waiting for someone. After ten minutes a tall man came in and sat at the table and I heard him call her by her name. It was a beautiful name, I thought. He sat there for a bit and they spoke quietly. Then he stood up and left.

I waited awhile and ordered a fried egg so that I could ask her if she wanted some food. Maybe she was hungry, I thought, and didn’t have enough money, or maybe she couldn’t decide what she wanted. I moved into her booth. She didn’t look up.

“Listen,” she said, “I’m not a dyke. I don’t lick pussy so probably you should just go back to your eggs.”

“I don’t have anywhere to go,” I replied. At that moment it seemed true. My apartment seemed like someplace I had resided in during a different lifetime. The job I had checking groceries was suddenly someone else’s, and I felt like I had been in the Tik Tok for days, weeks, the clocks turning their slow circles, the coffee growing cold until another waitress stretched her pale arm across the table toward my cup.

Lila shrugged. She pulled a cigarette from her pack and held it between her long fingers. Her nails were bitten. “Not my fucking problem,” she said. She put some money on the table, stood up, and walked out. I waited a few minutes and then I followed her, watched as she crossed the parking lot to the nearest motel, a ground-floor room marked 42, and let herself in.

From there it was easy. I didn’t have any savings, but the grocery store let me cash out my retirement plan, $470, minus the taxes. I kept the apartment. The motel was closer to my work, and I liked the way it looked.

“Room 43, please,” I said, and the man behind the counter took my money and handed me a key. There was a little table with cigarette burns ringing it like years of a tree, and heavy curtains that could shut out the light even in the middle of the day. The sheets were rough and when I turned against them, their scratching reminded me that I was there, that I was waiting for something. There was even a little refrigerator and I took the 72 bus to the store and bought things that I thought Lila might like-a tin of pink salmon, almonds in a pale candy shell. Above the bed was a painting of a ship tossing in a wild sea.

Every night at 7 the tall man from the Tik Tok drove up in a van and parked outside of the hotel. Lila would leave her room and climb inside. They would be gone until 3 or 4 in the morning, when I heard her unlock the door. She would set down her purse and sit on the bed; there was a click when she dropped her heels by their narrow leather straps to the floor. The water would run; I could imagine her as clearly as if the wall had fallen away-there she was in her slip, her bare feet toeing into the carpet. I slept when she slept.

It was a week before I knocked on the door. I had a fifth of whiskey and I held it out when she opened the door.

“What?” she asked.

“I was just sitting by my window,” I said, “and I saw you come in.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “I thought, I should go over there and see if she wants some whiskey.” My voice sounded shaky. “You shouldn’t have to be alone,” I added.

Lila looked from me to the bottle. “I like being alone,” she said, but she opened the door anyway and grabbed the whiskey and took a long drink. In the corner was an open suitcase and inside it I could see a jumble of nylons, the egg cup of a bra. The painting above her bed showed a field, flowers, and tall grass.

She held onto the bottle and sat down on the bed. She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt that went to her knees. Her feet were bare and she looked at me. “So what’s your story?” she asked. “You work out here? I’ve never seen you.” She didn’t remember me, I realized, and felt relieved. I wanted to start new. She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I’ve been working for three years now. It’s shit.” She went into the bathroom and came out with the plastic cup from the bathroom sink, filled it with whiskey, and passed it to me. “But what else are you supposed to do?”

I took a drink and my throat burned. It tasted to me like the house after the accident, my mother sleeping in the living room while the television faded in and out of static.

Up close Lila was even more beautiful than I remembered. “And Mark is an asshole,” she said. Mark-the tall man, I thought. “I can’t believe I used to think we’d get married.” She darkened a little, and turned on the television, drank half of the bottle of whiskey, then asked me to leave.

I stopped going to work at the grocery store because Lila needed me. She didn’t have to say it, but I knew it was true. I didn’t hand in a notice, just left my apron and name tag next to the till and went back to the motel. If the van was gone I would knock on her door, bring her whiskey or rice paper candy from the store up the street. She didn’t seem to wonder why I was there. I sat at the little table while she flipped through the channels on the television, or talked about the places she wanted to live-Paris and Greece and New York and Prague. I remembered a man I met once, someone lonely, nursing a drink in a booth at Holman’s. He’d told me he might go to Prague, and now I imagined us all colliding in some narrow street, so far from home.

“Anywhere but here,” she said. “Anywhere but this fuck-ing motel.”

Then one night when I knocked on the door Lila answered it right away, smiling. Her front tooth was crooked and I felt bothered that I hadn’t noticed it before.

“He’s gone,” she said. “He’ll be back at the end of the week. He’s bringing some girls up from Los Angeles. Get in here.” She held the door open.

I thought, I have never seen her so beautiful. Her eyes were bright and she leaned against me and grabbed my hand.

“Four days!” she said. “Four days of nothing to do. Fucking thank God.” She sat at the little table and leaned over something, then looked up at me. “Gators,” she said, and that’s what they started to look like to me, white rows of teeth. She cut them with the sharp edge of a driver’s license with a picture that didn’t look like her.

When she was done I leaned over and she showed me how to snort them, how to follow each line with a palmful of water that dripped bitter down the back of my throat, until the room felt frantic and bright and both of us right in the center of it; fireflies, I thought, burning hot in the cup of someone’s hand.

“Let’s look outside,” Lila suggested. She opened the curtain and the only thing I could see were our own wavering faces in the glass. I kissed her then; her mouth was dry. She pulled back. “I’m not a dyke,” she said. The smell of her cigarette; I thought of my mother, waking for a second from her slow fugue when I came home with my hair cut close to my skull-No daughter of mine is going to be a fucking dyke, she’d said, and turned back to the wall. “I’m not,” Lila said again, but then she put her mouth to mine.

We kissed for a long time and then Lila stood and went to the sink and pulled something out of the makeup bag she kept there. A knife. “Cut an X,” she said. She took her shirt off and her breasts were pale and I thought about reaching out very carefully to touch them but was afraid.

She sat on the edge of the bed and put the knife in my hand. It was heavy and cold. “Just a single X,” she said. “Just two crossing lines.” Her skin was so white. She touched her shoulder blade. “Here… Ten years ago,” she continued, “they say you could stand at one end of Eighty-second and watch the girls jumping in and out of cars in beautiful dresses.”

I traced an X in the air above her perfect skin. I couldn’t do it, I thought.

“Where did you live before here?” Lila asked. “What were you like? Did you have some beautiful life?”

The cluttered apartment; the recliner with its smell of smoke and age; my mother, in her chair, with her heavy silver accordion, pushing the bellows in and out, her eyes on the wall behind me. It was another five years before she died, and then there were eight people at the funeral, all dressed in black, like a circle of bats fluttering at each other. A necklace of them, I had thought, standing around the terrible throat of her grave.

“It was beautiful,” I said. “I had a house with a garden. And a puppy named Soldier.”

Lila sighed. “It sounds nice.” She pushed her hair out of her eyes. “I thought I was in love with Mark, but then-” She looked up at me. “We could make a thousand dollars in a day, him and I, when we started. I didn’t used to mind it. We were going to get a house too.” She touched my arm. “An X,” she said. “Do it.” I squeezed the handle of the knife in my hand and pulled, twice. There were two thick red lines that swelled and spilled.

Mark came back late that night. I lay on the bed in my room next door and I could hear him through the thin wall. “What the fuck are you thinking?” he was saying. “No one will want you with that on you. What the hell is wrong with you?”

My face felt hot. What had she said, one night while she sat on the bed and flipped through a magazine, talking in long circles-He left one girl with sixteen broken bones out by the gorge. He’s served six years in prison already.

When I heard the door slam I stood up, looked out the window until his van had pulled out of the parking lot. I counted to thirty and then knocked. There was no answer. “Lila,” I called out. I pounded on the door.

She finally opened up and her suitcase was upside down, the clothes everywhere. Her left eye was half-closed and starting to bruise. She looked at me. “He took the money,” she said. “And he won’t let me work until my back and my eye are healed.” She pulled the neckline of her T-shirt down over her shoulder and I could see what I had done, the X, red and raw.

I sat on the bed and pulled her down next to me. “So you don’t need him anymore,” I said. “We go somewhere else.” I thought of the two of us, months from now, lit up in the summer sun. We would take the bus into the city and dance drunk in a dark bar. It would be exactly as it should be. Her bottom lip between my careful teeth, far from the string of motels, the dented van that pulled up in the dark.

“You don’t get it,” Lila replied. She sounded angry, the way she had sounded that first night at the Tik Tok. “You don’t get it at all.”

I touched her hair. “We’ll be fine.”

She pushed my hand away. “No one walks out on Mark. Especially not me-he’d fucking kill me.”

“He can’t be that bad-”

“You haven’t worked for him,” she snapped. Her voice was cold and she didn’t look like the Lila I knew. “How would you know?”

I remembered a story my mother had told me about a woodcutter, clumsy, and his sharp axe. He kept missing the tree and his right arm went first, then the rest, left arm, right leg, left leg. Until a woman came by and looked at him, crippled and sad. I’m sorry, he said, I am only half a man. She laughed and answered, Look, and because she was so lovely and he was lucky, his legs grew right back to skin and bone. But his heart beat so fast it burnt right through his chest, and he died anyway, for love.

Lila stood up. “Just go,” she said.

In my own room in the dark I stared at the curve of the lampshade, the square of the doorframe, shadowy slips that floated and opened their angry mouths, and I thought, She has to love me again. Ten years ago the little girl and her mother had left with her puppy and I had never seen her again. Her blue dress at the foot of my bed like a broken promise. She has to, I thought.

Mark didn’t come back the next day, or the day after that. Lila knocked on my door and she didn’t seem angry anymore. I gave my key to the front desk and slept in her room, curled against her, listening to her slow breathing.

The next morning she shook me awake. “We need sixty-five dollars,” she said. “We need sixty-five dollars today.”

I thought about my apartment. There would be an eviction notice on the door by now. I couldn’t bring her there, not to that. The grocery store would have hired someone, and I couldn’t be that far away from Lila for eight hours, anyway. I had thirty-four dollars left. Not enough for another night. “Tell me what to do,” I said.

The man was neither more nor less handsome than I expected. He was wearing gray sweatpants and he pulled a white envelope from the stretched waistband. He coughed. “You have the greatest legs,” he said, “They’re truly great.”

I imagined his hands were Lila’s hands, running up over my breasts. His tongue became hers. It was all for her, I thought. The envelope was tucked under the little red handbag that she had loaned me.

“The gams of a movie star,” the man said. “The face of a dog, but the gams of a true old-time beauty.” His pink lips like two punctured balloons, dragging over my skin.

When I opened the door to Room 42 Lila was brushing her hair. We put the money inside the lining of her little suitcase. I lay beside her that night and she smelled like honey and when I couldn’t sleep I turned on the bedside lamp and the red of her hair lit up like a pyre.

Every day that week I saw someone different. After dark, I wandered through the parking lot of Area 69, stood inside by the racks of videos, the leather harnesses and handcuffs and dildos in plastic packaging, until someone asked me back to the booths. The time without Lila nagged at me, the socket left from a tooth pulled, the vague shape of what could be lost, but in an hour I could make $150, nearly three nights in Room 42. It was better this way, Lila said, than with Mark. Before she met him she would sit in the corner at Devil’s Point, the strip club on 53rd, and wait for someone to pick her up. The next day she’d be able to buy a new dress or go to the movies; she could make her rent in a day and a half. Now Mark took half the money and he wouldn’t let you go, she said, and he would know in a second if you’d been working on your own. He’d been locked up in Snake River after he pulled a fifteen-year-old onto the circuit, and the day after he was released he started running girls again. His probation officer was nowhere to be found. “This is better,” Lila kept saying. “We keep you a secret.” At night I stood in the shower until the water ran cold and then lay beside her until we both slept.

Mark came back four days later and I hid behind the shower curtain in the bathroom. “You start work again tomorrow,” he said. “And you never pull that shit again. I don’t ever want to see a fucking scratch on you that I didn’t give you myself.”

I could hear Lila, sweet and pleading. “Baby,” she said, and it was silent for a while. I closed my eyes, imagined a forest, my hands up in the trees, the cool of the leaves. I tried not to think of them kissing.

After a long time Mark cleared his throat. “We go back on the road tomorrow,” he said. “Have your shit packed.”

Lila’s voice was a murmur, something I couldn’t hear, and then she said, “I need you,” and panic welled up in me like a tide, a breathless gray.

She didn’t need Mark, I thought. That was how things would begin to go wrong, how they always began. My mother’s accident wasn’t really an accident. It was after my father had left her. For two weeks after he packed his things and took the car, she had laid on the sofa and watched daytime television, and spoke quietly, as though she was telling a secret. Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, we were walking on a busy street and she squeezed my arm. “Stay here,” she said, and smiled, and walked in front of a rattling bus, and I understood that the calm had been a deceptive one, the first freeze that leaves the lake solid and the fish still swimming, fast and alarmed, a foot below ice. What kept pounding at the back of my head was that I didn’t know when it had begun, that the first sign of ruin was something never recovered.

The door slammed but I stood in the shower until Lila came and pushed the curtain back. “He’s gone,” she said.

We had $300, slipped into the lining of Lila’s suitcase. The Greyhound station was a half hour away, just off the 20 bus.

Lila wanted to go somewhere warm. “New Mexico,” she said. “Or Arizona. Someplace dry as a fucking bone where we can get tan and gorgeous.” She kissed my cheek. “And never again here.” She gave me scissors and I cut her hair until it fell at her chin and she pulled a hat over it. “Do I look like me?” she asked. “Would you recognize me?”

I thought, I’ll always recognize you.

I slept deeper that night than I had in what felt like years. In the dark I reached out and felt the curve of Lila’s bare back, the raised scar on her shoulder blade, and then slipped into some dream that later I couldn’t remember.

There was a sound like footsteps, and then a quick cold, and then in the dark I was awake and the bed was empty. The door was open. Lila, I thought. A sound of tires squealing and I was up out of bed. I must have been a moment too late, because there was only the empty parking lot, and the city spread out around me like a bowl of lights, a thousand smoke-gray rooms and in each one a person, waiting.

It’s snowing now, but barely, gray sleet driven up over the shoulder by traffic headed toward the 205. I think of her feet, white, delicate as eggshell. I remember the first time I saw snow, how I built a snowman that looked at me with stone eyes and one fell onto the ground. I pushed rocks into his snow mouth and they disappeared. My mother said, Love goes like water, right through your hands. The snow closed up. I pushed a stick right through him.

I have a good route, down to Burnside and up to Johnson Creek. The gams of a true old-time beauty. Lila’s suitcase was still in the corner. Her clothes on me look only approximate, like a memory.

The city wants to plant roses, up and down Eighty-second, to make it peaceful.

Later, my mother’s accordion was sold for a song to a man who slivered the keys off and carried them away in a bag, clacking like teeth. When I dream of Lila there is a tattoo on her chest, a mask, and in the eyes of the mask I am faceup over her heart.

There are sirens outside of the Tik Tok every night and I wait. The waitress refills my coffee. Across the parking lot there is always a lit window with the curtains drawn tight across it. Inside the Tik Tok, the clocks move at once, slowly, like a song written all in the same sad note.

PEOPLE ARE STRANGE BY KIMBERLY WARNER-COHEN

Sandy Boulevard

Whoever said Portland was a friendly city stated it from the comfortable vantage of already knowing people. Aside from the middle-aged clerk at 7-Eleven, who smiled with yellow teeth and attempted broken conversation when she walked across the busy intersection at Eighty-second and Sandy to buy cigarettes and a Big Gulp, Kara had spoken to less than ten people since she arrived four days ago. That included the woman with an eye patch behind the desk at the Cameo (closest non-chain airport motel she could find), Kara already thinking when she paid for a week in advance that it was a mistake coming here. Shouldn’t have strayed from her habit of putting her finger randomly on an atlas and going.

Strangers didn’t start casual conversations with her in bars, usually moved a seat over. Wasn’t simply that Kara could be best described as plain, known since she could recognize her reflection that she would never be one of the blessed few who glided through life; it was the contempt in her eyes that drove them off. Being passed over was a relief, feigning interest in people’s lives irritated her. Happier to sit at the end of the row in some seamy tavern where light didn’t penetrate through grimy windows. Bartenders took pity and threw her an extra drink or two as the clock edged past 1:00 and other patrons sought someone other than her to share the night, or at least fifteen minutes, with.

Kara pulled the battered and stained white plastic fob with 17 printed on it in chipped gold paint from her back pocket, balancing her dinner: a fifth of Bushmills and a barely edible pizza from the dingy store across the street from the massive Safeway.

Would’ve eaten at the pancake house attached to the motel, where she had platter-sized portions for the past three mornings, but Kara couldn’t stand the sympathetic stares from the fat, bored waitresses anymore. Same with the bar down the block, where day workers stopped in after long hours working too hard for too little money; stared her up and down before turning back to their conversations, shaking their heads. Better to stay in the room tonight, as she jiggled the wood turquoise door open that, like all the others, looked as if it’d been kicked in during an episode of Cops.

She could have just as easily slept at one of the chic boutique hotels downtown, with what her parents left her. Car accident when she was thirteen, Father having too many Rob Roys during one of the many charity events they attended throughout the year. Her aunt and uncle took her in after the funeral, shuffled from one affluent suburb to another.

Aunt Suzanne was barren and they doted on Kara. Decorated her bedroom as if she was five years younger (always loathed cotton candy-pink but didn’t have the heart to say it when she saw their expectant smiles), sent her to the local prep school with the same Anglican pretentions as the last one, bought her gifts (clothes that were in fashion but never looked right on her, records for bands she didn’t like, books she’d never read). Nothing worked. Kara would smile and politely thank them, then go in her room and throw it on top of the growing pile in the back of her closet.

Suzanne’s eyebrows furrowed at Kara’s disinterest in others, especially after she read the books the shrink recommended when he diagnosed Kara with an attachment disorder. Blond sons and prim daughters were dragged over with their parents and sat in uncomfortable silence as Kara openly stared at them in the den while the adults had their digestifs. When they were called in from the parlor, none disguised their relief.

Uncle Phillip hid the coroner’s report between the pages of a treatise by Hobbes. Edge of the envelope stuck out, Kara found it the first time she was in the library alone. Detailed how Father’s broken rib punctured his heart as he slammed into the steering wheel. Mother was nearly decapitated when a piece of windshield glass cut through her trachea as the car smashed into the tree, only thing holding her head to trunk were neck vertebrae. When Phillip realized Kara took it, he explained that they hid the details because they thought she’d be traumatized; troubled when she wasn’t perturbed. Since she’d found out what her parents kept from her, Kara had no use for them.

When she was twelve, six months before they died, Kara had nightmares that woke her up every few hours. Always the same, being ripped apart by her mother and another woman whose face was shadowed. Once she was torn, her other half became a mirror image. For weeks her parents looked at each other and made sympathetic noises. Scared to dream, she would sit in the rocking chair, listening to silence until she nodded off. After one morning when she got three hours of sleep, Kara told them hysterically at breakfast she couldn’t take it anymore. Father looked at Mother, who brought out the locked box from their bedroom closet that Kara wasn’t supposed to know about.

Sat her in the formal living room (knew it was serious), box on the end table between them. Father tapped his foot and both began talking at the same time, tripping over each other’s words until Mother touched Father on the knee, her way of shutting him up. Didn’t say anything for what seemed like a long time. Why was she about to cry? Did someone die? What did that have to do with her dreams? “You had a sister.”

“A twin,” Father interjected.

In the time it took for her mother to pat him again, all became clear. No wonder she couldn’t make friends, why no one understood her. Someone did, once, more intimately than anyone ever could. Mother only carried her, Father donated the sperm. Kara rubbed the fingers of her left hand together. “Tell me everything. Start from the beginning. She’s identical, isn’t she? What’s her name? Where is she? You were holding back, all these years. I knew I couldn’t trust you.”

Mother nodded, swallowed hard, tears. “Kaya is, was, your identical twin; born first by six minutes.”

The part of Kara’s brain that had suppressed the memories cracked, flooded her temporal lobe. Snatches of playing with pastel wood blocks in their nursery, patty-cake, sleeping with limbs entwined. “What happened?”

“You were so adorable in your matching dresses, running through the house, always laughing. You’d only sleep in the same crib and we had to have a custom double-highchair made or you wouldn’t eat. Do you remember, Steven?”

Father nodded gravely, stared at the rug.

“What happened, Mother?”

“It was in the park. Your nanny-”

“I had a nanny?”

“Ursula, from Sweden, very nice girl. She never forgave herself.”

“How old was I… were we?”

“About to turn four. You were on the jungle gym and skinned your knee. Ursula was putting the bandage on; her attention was only away for a moment.”

“And?”

“And somebody took your sister.” Tears made tributaries through her foundation.

Kara concentrated on her breath to keep the red in her periphery from closing in. Hate (just as much at herself for being the distraction) surging through arteries and veins instead of blood, pure white light. “Did you look for her?”

Father, allowed to speak, “Of course we did. Police, FBI, private investigators. It all happened so quickly, none of the other nannies saw anything unusual.”

“Was there a note? A phone call?”

“There was never any communication. They said that it was probably a mother who’d lost her child and wanted another.”

“So Kaya could still be alive?” Her tongue knew the name, slid from her lips like she said it all the time.

“We’ve tried so many times over the years, and nothing.”

“What’s in the box?”

“We shouldn’t have taken it out.”

“Why did you?”

“I don’t know.” Mascara streaked her face. “In case you didn’t believe us.”

“Did you think you could keep this from me forever?”

“You took it so hard at first, we didn’t want you to get upset all over again.” That was their way, forced forgetfulness. Soak your tears on fine linen and it won’t sting as bad.

Kara wanted details, but her mother faked a crying fit and hurried (never ran) out of the room. Father doggedly followed, telling Kara they’d talk further, soon, and left her with the box. Waiting for the soon that never came, Kara would lock her bedroom door and pore over the yellowed news clippings, police and PI reports. Memorized and read again.

At the bottom, under Kaya’s birth certificate and Social Security card, was a thin envelope of photos. Like Mother said, always in matching onesies, pajamas, dresses; holding hands and smiling. Searched all the hiding places she could think of, looking for more the next time they went out, but nothing. Did they care enough to burn them, or were they just shredded and tossed? Late nights running her finger over pictures of her and her mirror image.

Strange looks from Phillip and Suzanne began during the first dinner, night before the funeral, when she brought Kaya up in the middle of their coq au vin. Suzanne spit out a little of her merlot, stammered the same flimsy lines her parents did. After that, Kara caught the sideways stares, pauses as they considered how to phrase conversation, guard up. She made them nervous, Kara liked the power.

Morning of her eighteenth birthday, before the sun or the servants were up, she packed a bag, placed a note in the drawing room thanking her aunt and uncle for taking care of her, and left. Took the bus to Richmond, then Amtrak to Tampa, flight to New Orleans, short stay in Lubbock. After that they melded. At first Kara called to let them know she was all right; that dwindled as she lost herself in a sea of roads, train stations, highways. Always on the lookout for Kaya.

Decided on Portland instead of leaving it to chance this time because of a small article she read in one of those “Spotlight” columns in a free travel magazine, mentioned how many young people had been flocking to the city in the last few years. It was as good of a lead as any of the few she found. The city was still small enough to search, big enough for there to be the chance that Kaya was there; if she’d been kidnapped, maybe her home life was bad enough for her to flee.

Kara stared at the crack in the ceiling by the bathroom and took another swig. Didn’t want to think anymore and lay on the polyester and particle board bed, finishing the bottle, and tumbled into a dreamless sleep, easily ignoring the fistfight in the room below.

Sky was a lesser shade of gray the next morning and Kara dressed in dirty jeans and a brown sweater long past stretched out. The lack of sun was getting to her, didn’t know how people could handle it for months at a time. Usually didn’t go outside during daylight, but it was nice to know that it was there.

She weaved through kids by the bus stop in front of the 7-Eleven, either dealing or really bored, and into the too brightly lit store to get her nicotine and corn syrup breakfast. Kara passed the motel, wandered further down until she reached the strip club shaped like a huge whiskey jug, Pirate’s Cove emblazoned on a red-and-white backlit sign, and under that, Wet Panty Party 2nite! Loved the anonymity of a cheap titty bar, but there were too many cars outside for the space; nowhere to hide.

Retraced her steps and turned on a side street across from Ed’s House of Gems, pine and concrete glorified shack fashioned to resemble a barn, complete with the Wild West white mural and dusty windows. Thought about going in, run her eyes over the Fool’s Gold or maybe some onyx and hematite, but a sour middle-aged man in a flannel shirt stretched over a belly made huge from years of cheap beer was standing by the door, glaring at nothing.

Instead turned left, down one of the residential side streets. Liked how nothing matched, everything shabby around the edges and thrown together, moss growing in between the sidewalk cracks and roof shingles. Even in the chill, front lawns were teeming with green.

Kara zigzagged around corners and up avenues, streets looked identical in their individuality, until she realized she was halfway to the airport; continued past houses progressively more run-down, a mini-mart that was filthy, cement lots.

Another strip club ahead, couldn’t miss the neon sign with letters burned out so it read, Th_ La_d_ng St_ _p; nothing beyond that but hotels and car rentals. Much bigger than the other place, though no less decrepit, parking lot half-full. Perfect.

Kara swung open the flimsy glass doors and into the dark, stopping on the carpeted ramp to adjust her eyes. Nose hit full force with the harsh odor of baby lotion, cheap powder makeup, and desperation; same as any other strip club she went into. Main illumination were strings of lights in plastic tubing that hung on the stage, bar, crisscrossed the walls; popular in the ’70s and hadn’t been updated since. Black plastic tables, indiscriminately placed violet plush seats.

Blue-collar guys and businessmen on layovers sat next to each other drinking Buds in front of the main stage, laying dollar bills at the edges; definitely not the A team performing at this time of the day. Lots of things jiggling where they shouldn’t.

Kara stood at the bar until a dim-looking guy in his early forties waddled over. “What can I getcha?”

“Stella.”

“We just ran out.”

“Red Stripe?”

“Don’t carry it.”

“Corona.”

“Waiting on the delivery. Should be here later.”

“What do you have?”

“Session, Bud, Bud Light, Coors Light.”

Other choices nauseated her. “Session.”

Surprise when she sipped it, the local beer wasn’t bad. Kara sat at one of the tables and drank, half-looking at the tired peroxide blonde who had surpassed the acceptable age limit of her profession when the place was in its heyday.

Her song was finished and so was Kara’s drink. She caught the eye of the waitress, who looked away, preferring to chat with the bartender. Only when she couldn’t ignore Kara’s waving bottle did she begrudgingly grab a fresh one.

Turned back from the small irritation and Kara’s heart stopped for one, two beats. It was her. Body a little more toned than Kara’s, hair stuffed hastily under the cheap pink wig that the lights made look cheaper. But it was her legs, her hands, her breasts, her face.

“Two-fifty.”

Didn’t hear the waitress until she impatiently repeated herself. Kara handed her a wrinkled bill from her pocket, palms so wet the paper was soft, no idea what denomination. The girl laid the change on the table, tapping her foot for the dollar tip Kara threw at her.

She watched herself half-heartedly twirl on the pole, backbend near the guy eating cheese fries. She’s alive. Kara bit her bottom lip until she tasted blood to keep emotion from boiling over, muscles tensed still. Of course it would be now, here, when she least expected it. Chain-smoked through the two songs, over too soon, watched Kaya grab her clothes and tips, disappear (still naked, ass extra white in the dark) into a room behind the stage.

Kara was too lightheaded to trip up to the bar until midway through the next act. “The last girl who was on, where is she?”

Bartender smirked as he shook one of the taps. “Why? You want a private dance?”

“No, I want to talk to her. What’s her name?”

“Tammi. I can go back there, but she ain’t comin’ out unless it’s for a private dance.”

“I want a dance.”

“It’ll be thirty.”

“Sure, fine. Just get her.”

The bartender heaved away from the bar, wishing he’d told her it cost more and split the difference with Tam. Intentionally talked to every person on his way there-anecdote to the bouncer, nudge and wink to the waitress serving chicken tenders to a guy wearing sunglasses on the other side of the stage.

Kara’s hands were shaking so badly it took three tries to light one cigarette off the other. Finally, Kaya strolled out and gave Kara a disinterested once-over, looked through her. “Follow me.”

She led Kara, who stared at the way Kaya’s green and yellow butterfly tattoo near her shoulder blade moved as she walked, to the furthest corner of the club. Did Kara’s skin sting thousands of miles away at the same moment the needle was put to Kaya’s flesh? So many questions and Kara couldn’t think of any that were important. Kaya peeled back a sheer black curtain with gold thread, revealing a small plastic and mirror booth with a black pleather bench.

She sat Kara down, adjusted the wig in the mirror behind the bench. “Thirty.”

Instead of grabbing Kaya and telling her who she was, Kara reached into her wallet and peeled off two fives and a twenty. She had to do this right, only as much information as Kaya’d be able to handle at once, couldn’t scare her off. Maybe when Kaya started to dance, she would give Kara more than a glance, and see.

Kaya shuffled as little as possible, chest hovering six or seven inches over Kara’s face as she swayed her hips and looked at herself in the mirror, yawning. Every movement was perfect and Kara was complete.

“I bet you don’t even know how beautiful you are.”

“Thanks.”

“Did you have chicken pox when you were seven too?”

“Huh?”

“Forget that.” Kara couldn’t restrain, put her hand on Kaya’s wrist. “Stop.”

Kaya broke her bored façade and glared. “No touching.”

“I’m sorry. Please, I need to talk to you.”

Kaya still didn’t recognize her (light in the booth was terrible), instead shrugged and sat down, picked at her cuticles. “Can I bum a smoke?”

“Yeah, sure.” Kara handed them over. She even lit her cigarette the same way, protecting the flame when it wasn’t necessary. “Don’t you see a resemblance?”

“To what?”

“To me.”

Kaya really looked at her then, but not with the expression Kara was hoping for. Instead, confusion with disgust at the edges. “You think we’re related, a cousin or something?”

So many years imagining the reunion, but never pictured this. Kara played different scenarios in her mind before she went to bed until it was the only thing that could lull her to sleep. In all, Kaya recognized her instantly. She was some executive who Kara found through a magazine feature on exceptional women in business. Or homeless… or possibly a suburban housewife settled into some homogenous berg that Kara passed through when she took a wrong turn on the highway.

“You’re my twin, don’t you see it? You were kidnapped when we were young, but now things are okay because we’re together now. We can leave, you never have to work here again.”

Kaya ground her cigarette into the burnt carpet with the heel of her stiletto. “I don’t know who you are, or what kind of sick fantasy you have, but we’re not twins and I was never kidnapped.”

No. Kara grabbed her sister’s forearm; Kaya pulled away with force.

“Just answer me this, what do you remember before you were four?”

“I fucking told you not to touch me. You’re nuts.” Kaya stormed out, wadding up the money and throwing it at Kara’s chest.

Stereotypical bouncer, big neck and small head, came tanking through the club, eyes on fire as he grabbed Kara roughly on the arm and pulled her up. “Time for you to go.”

She knew better than to argue and stood. His grip didn’t loosen when he realized Kara wasn’t going to fight back, shoved her to the double doors.

“Don’t come back.”

In the parking lot, everything was the same. How could it be, when her world was inside out? She checked her watch. Time had stopped inside, couldn’t have only been twenty minutes. On her way back to the motel, when it became so obvious, Kara wanted to slap her forehead. Stupid, did she think Kaya could let her guard down in that kind of place? She had to talk to her away from there.

Kara double-timed until she reached her rental car in the motel’s lot, straight back to the club. She parked in the back corner, eyes fixed on the entrance, scared to blink; slid down into the seat whenever the doors opened, so just the top of her head was visible. If the bouncer saw her, he’d kick her off the lot or worse, call the cops, and then Kara might never find Kaya again.

Kara knew that once she got a chance to sit Kaya down with no distraction, she’d see that they were twins (soul mates), and would be grateful for rescuing Kaya from this; never want to leave Kara’s side. Everything that was hers was her sister’s too. They could travel, or buy houses next to each other, a hallway built connecting the two.

Hours passed, sky evolved to a darker gray, then black. Her stomach rumbled and legs got numb, but she didn’t notice.

Finally, a shift change, and Kara didn’t care anymore if she was seen. Kaya was one of the last to leave, angelic in street clothes and no makeup to hide the rose in her cheeks. She fumbled with her keys, got into an old Charger. Out of the cars in the lot, Kara didn’t figure that one, guessed the economical Honda or the white and red T-Bird. There was a lot to catch up on.

Kara counted to thirty after Kaya pulled out before starting the ignition. It didn’t matter if cars got between, Kara could see her sister through them.

Kaya pulled into the driveway of a light green and yellow house on the dubiously named Failing Street. Not far from the motel, would’ve met anyway, it was meant to be. Kara parked across the street, under a wide willow, watching as her sister went in and lights turned on in succession.

Kara chain-smoked the rest of her pack before she worked up the nerve. Now or never, as she threw the last butt into the street, couldn’t sit here all night. Deep breath and she walked up the porch steps. Knocked and rang the bell, did it again to be sure.

When Kaya threw the door open, Kara saw how much more breathtaking she was up close, dyed bright auburn hair (must have had it straightened). Barefoot, wearing pink yoga pants and a tank top, smoking, Kaya was more elegant than any Renaissance painting or Greek statue. Split second before she recognized Kara. “You. How the fuck did you find out where I live?”

“I followed you.”

“You’re crazy. I’m calling the police.”

Combination of panic and the adrenaline, Kara put her hand on the door and leaned into it. “Please, hear me out.”

Kaya sucked on her cigarette. “You’re not going to leave me alone until I do.”

Kara shook her head.

“We talk on the porch.”

“Of course.”

Kaya stepped into the night chill, shivering. “What do you want to tell me? Make it quick.”

Kara wished for another smoke, rubbed the fingers of her left hand together. “You’re my sister, my twin. You were kidnapped when we were four.”

“We look nothing alike, and I wasn’t snatched. My parents never hurt nobody. I think I’d remember.”

“Look at my eyes, mouth, hands. Don’t you see that they’re the same as yours?”

Kaya shook her head, impatient. “No, they’re not. I heard you out. Now, leave me alone. If you come by the strip club or here again, the cops will arrest you before you know you’ve been spotted.” She turned to go inside.

Kara couldn’t lose her now, grabbed her by the shoulder and whipped her around to make her listen, using all the force she had to make Kaya know how important this was. Kaya slammed into the doorframe, absorbing the energy of both their weight. Corner caught Kaya on the perfect angle at the base of her skull. Crumpled like Kara had inside when Kaya rejected her.

She wasn’t breathing, and Kara stood over her, very still, as she watched Kaya shiver a death shake, half-lidded eyes dull.

Kara knew she should be upset, but instead there was an overwhelming sense of relief. She’d never convince Kaya, rejection of all rejections, after spending so many years searching for her. Glad it was now, before Kara hated her. Kaya must have been brainwashed to have no memory of the kidnapping, whoever they were must have been smart.

Kara looked around. No one out for an evening stroll or looking through their front windows this late, no sound at all; even the crows were sleeping. Could’ve been the only beings on the planet as she dragged Kaya inside, surprised at how heavy she was.

Kaya lived alone in the house, Kara gathered from a quick tour; surprised she liked basketball, a poster of some guy mid-dunk, Blazers in red and black against white. Rifled through the closets for a duffel bag, something to put Kaya in, found nothing bigger than a few overnight suitcases. She kept looking over, expecting Kaya to sit up and bum a smoke, telling Kara she believed her now.

Reminded herself that she did the right thing, there was no other choice; what would she do with herself if Kaya closed the door in her face, leaving her in the cold?

Found a box of black garbage bags. She could probably fit Kaya in one of those, if she folded her into the fetal position. Once she got Kaya in the car, what then? Didn’t know where to go, could be driving in circles until the sun came up looking for isolation. Her stomach tightened at the idea of getting caught. Think outside the box.

She flipped on the backyard light switch, all dirt with tall pine board planks for a fence. Kara tested the dirt, too hard; she’d never get more than a few feet down. Wished she had thought this through. Kara was about to leave the body in the living room and split town before they could figure out it was her, when the flood lamp shone a halo down on the answer to her problems: the huge compost heap, more than big enough to bury Kaya.

Kara found a small hand shovel under the sink, took longer than she thought it would digging a hole; manure covering her bottom half, filling her shoes so that her socks squished. Back in the house, grabbed Kaya’s waxy, cold wrists and pulled; cleaned the mess she tracked in later. Managed a few inches at a time, grunting as she angled Kaya through the house; bumped her into the table, corners, oven. Kara had a blissful smile on her face for the first time, as she knew what she was meant to do.

Sun rising when she got Kaya in and covered up. Back inside, she showered and put on a pair of yoga pants and tank top (snug). Before she went to bed, she switched Kaya’s license with hers. Knowing all she did about slipping in and out of personalities, this would be easy.