VAN WINDOWS

From Woman with Dark Horses (Starcherone, 2004). Appeared originally in Quarterly West.

The boy was a miracle to me when I found him while passing crowded streets three years ago this winter. Only fifteen, he was two years older than I was when I left my parents for another home, starving. He had soft skin like a girl’s, a hairless face, and fiery eyes above deep shadows. His cheekbones protruded as if his skull was beginning to rise through his face. His stomach rumbled. When I bent down to kiss his forehead, I saw lice jumping in his tangled auburn hair. Every night for two weeks, I washed his scalp with medicated green shampoo. His tangles turned to curls, and I picked the dead nits out with a fine-toothed comb before the lice were gone for good.
   He had been living on expired vitamin pills thrown out in a drugstore Dumpster. The pills had stained his lips and fingers reddish orange. The first time I drove by his corner, I felt him watching me, begging with only his eyes. As I slowed down, he held out his tiny gray-spotted dog. The dog was shivering and so small I thought it might have been a gutter rat. After parking the van, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and approached the boy. He smelled like his dog, a mixture of cocktails, sea salt, and stagnant water.
  I loved him when I laid eyes on him. I didn’t have a son or a daughter, and I knew I never would. He stayed on the sidewalk, crouching down, the dog whimpering in his long pale hands. He was slouching back against a brick wall. Hunched over, he looked down at his dog for a long time before he finally raised his head to look up at me.
  The dusty denim cap he wore shaded his eyes. His lashes were heavy with rain. A gray trench coat was wrapped around his shoulders. He wore three T-shirts under the trench coat. His boots were too big for his feet, and I could tell he was wearing several pairs of socks to keep them from slipping off his ankles. His jeans were full of holes, and I saw an insect weaving in and out of the holes. The dog was biting its paw as if it had fleas, and the boy’s face was covered with dirt and tears. I didn’t care how filthy he was. I wanted him to be my son.
  I beckoned to him with a flick of my wrist and walked back to my black van. He picked up his little dog and followed me without a word. His hands glowed in the streetlights like a photograph exposed too soon – only blinding light, no color.
  For months on end, I mothered him, feeding him all he would eat, driving him from one all-night buffet to another until the fried steaks began to stick to his bones. When he grew stronger than me, I no longer felt responsible for what happened to us in the van or on the grasses or in the stale motel rooms during the long nights.

Leaving San Francisco, wrapped up in a blue sheet in the back of my van, I’m home. The boy drives too fast. Who could blame him? No matter where we go, it’s always away. Leaning on my elbows, I look at his scraggly hair, dark and long and tangled, in need of a good washing. We have no shampoo, I’m thinking. Then I see his green eyes in the rearview mirror, squinting as he studies me. I cover myself to my chin in the faded blanket that he has netted and unnetted with his nervous fingers during the nights we slept in the grasses on the edge of the highway, watching the red-tailed hawk soar through the morning.
  Even after all this traveling, I’m still not certain who he is or where he came from. One night he said his name was Jeremy. The next night it was George. Over the years, I’ve lost track of some of his names, and I miss the way they felt, whispering as I spoke them, knowing I was giving a voice to his lie. Tonight he’s Abe again, maybe because he knows I like that name best. Of all the others, it somehow rings true. Perhaps so I couldn’t trace his roots by the sound of his voice, his slow southern accent gradually became Jersey, then British, French, and Italian before he let the Spanish come through on the edge of his whisper. The edge defined itself and deepened in his words until I felt it lingering. Taking hold in a natural progression as he spoke to me, it never went away.
  Tonight the van jerks and sputters as it picks up speed so that I have to brace myself against the singed red carpets, my fingernails digging into the synthetic fibers. The boy slams down the brakes, and I fall against the wall, hitting my head on the window.
  “Fuck,” he says. “Did you feel that? That was a close one. You better be glad I’m driving tonight and not you.”
  I hold my head in my hands as he pulls over onto the shoulder and drives through the weeds outside of a gated field. The horses walk so slowly I can barely see them for all the darkness. He crawls through our scattered belongings to lie next to me.
  Running my hands over his face, I linger near his lips so he can kiss my wrists. His kisses are still a surprise to me, his tenderness like nothing I’ve experienced before knowing him. His skin is so smooth above the shadow of his new beard, he seems too perfect to be loved by someone like me. I feel his breath on my ear and know I don’t deserve to touch him. Maybe no matter how long he stays with me, I will always feel guilty for holding him, even when he’s holding me so tight I fear my ribs will crack against his chest.
  In Los Angeles, years before I started living in the van, I killed a man. He had been good to me in his own way, I suppose.
  The van was red and white then, with silver trim, not black like it is now. I have painted it several times and changed the plates whenever I could. Whenever I have to paint the van, I’m sorry for what I’ve done. But I know why I did it.
  The man was at least twice as heavy as I am. I am a little woman, thin but not as fragile as I appear. He smothered me. Sometimes I couldn’t breathe while he was on top of me, my face mashed against the soft flesh of his chest.
  When I wanted to break away, I set the house on fire with him locked inside. Sleeping like the baby we never had, he inhaled the black smoke before the flames ever touched his body.
Later, I saw my photograph in the newspaper reports of the fire – the caption under my name that read ARSONIST/LOVER.
  “Why did you kill that man?” the boy asks, holding the old newspaper clippings to the interior light.
  “Because I had to.”
  “Would you do it again?”
  “If I had to.”
  “Will you ever have to?”
  “I don’t know.”
  “What if you had to kill me?”
  “I would rather kill myself,” I tell him. “I would go through a burning building if you were somewhere inside and I thought I could carry you away.”
  “You couldn’t carry me.”
  “Yes, I could.”
  That’s when I tell him to get out of the van. We walk though a patch of dry hot sand into desert. I motion for him to lie down on the parched ground. Leaning over him, I loop one arm under his knees and one under his neck. Then I begin to lift with all my might, straining muscles in my back, neck, legs, and arms. Gritting my teeth so that my skull begins to ache, I feel his body gradually rising. As I lift him off the ground, he’s laughing. I feel a sharp pain in my chest where I think my heart might be.

During our first months together, the boy and I drove a winding path. I kept forgetting my troubles every time I looked out the van windows. We passed by cattle and horses ranging in Texas. We drove away from cornfields to rocky inclines before reaching houses in St. Louis and bridges over industrial rivers. We kept coming back to ocean motels in Galveston, then leaving for tall buildings in dingy cities where houses were stacked close together on hills, old and divided. In Phoenix, skyscrapers rose to smoggy air. In Missouri, we memorized billboards with photos of women smoking, painted angels, and quotations from God bitching about what He had seen on the highway. Large windows reflected the sun and the closer factories that bottled soda and packaged dog food.
  Now the boy sits in the front seat next to me. His dog yawns in his lap, then stands on the boy’s knees to look out the rainy window. His jeans are coming apart again, ripped at the seams through the red and yellow patches I have sewn across the tatters. The windshield wipers work fast across the glass, but the rain makes trails directed by wind as the drops come together and fly off the windows.
  In the rain’s distortion, my reflection reminds me of the last time I looked into two-way mirrors. I was ready for the pain to begin. I felt I had to leave Los Angeles before I died there. The man was alive then. He kept pointing out the faint crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes and the laugh lines he said made me look sad or cruel, like I was constantly frowning. In the mornings, he told me the pillow lines on my face didn’t fade away. He made me afraid I was losing my hair.
  “It grows thinner,” he said, stroking his chin while he looked at me, “and I find long strands on the bathroom floor.”
  In the nighttime, he made me wear a wig of dark curls. But he said the wig made me look more attractive than I really was, especially from far away. Occasionally, he let me wander away from the house so he could follow me and spy on strangers I passed by, to prove that my fake hair attracted the wrong type of men. He claimed a large man with coarse hands and a loud voice followed me out of the bar and through the streets to my room. But I was never followed by anyone but him.
  He made love to me as if he despised me, throwing me down on the mattress so hard my body bounced under his weight and my head whipped back, injuring my neck. Even now, he’s in my memory like bad movies playing in the dark theaters of my childhood, the bone fragments the LAPD found in the house’s ashes to trace the fire back to me.
  And maybe I don’t blame the man for what he did to me, at least not anymore. When he met me, he was a producer at Babie Blu Films Inc. and I was the new star, barely sixteen years old, my fragile light burning away as I undressed on screen. Although I knew what money was mine, I had no idea what would remain private and what the cameras captured when I entered the dim motels. I wasn’t like most women I’d known in the business. I escaped it. But even after I left, every building I entered felt like an old brothel newly remodeled and open for business.
  Even after he said he wanted to marry me, he still watched the old films of me as a teenager, shivering in the green room night after night where the men stood smoking outside the door.
I wore a lot of blue and purple eyeshadow to make myself look surprised. With the right makeup, I gave myself huge eyes. I wore glittering coffee-colored lipstick to make my mouth look softer. I had to hide the bruises or else I’d go broke.

The boy sits on the bed in the back of the van. The dog rolls out of his coat, slobbering, its sleepy eyes squinting in the lamplight. The boy unwraps his cigarettes, his yellowed fingers rattling the glossy paper. Striking a match on the wall, I light the cigarette he holds in his thin lips.
  “Thank you,” he says.
  “You’re welcome.” I pick up the dog. It licks my hands.
  “Now what can I do for you?”
  “What?”
  “What do you want from me?”
  “Nothing.”
  He shakes his head and looks at me with mock sadness.
  “You’re lying,” he whispers, his lips pressed to mine.

As for who I was before I became his mother, this is all I know for sure: When I was a young girl, I dreamed of taking over the family business. My father owned a traveling puppet show. I slept with him and my mother in motels or in the back of the van. At night, I could hear my parents making love beside me. The three of us slept so close together there was no way for them to hide what they were doing. I just pretended I didn’t hear them.
  During the day, we drove from town to town, stopping for whatever churches or daycare centers or elementary schools were in need of an assembly. My father taught lessons with the marionettes, demonstrating how little girls could escape strangers. He also set up a replica of the Milky Way on the stage and started all the major planets turning on strings and wires. Making sure the galaxy stayed in proper position and the strings didn’t tangle or break, he helped the children learn where the planets were located as the puppets’ spaceship traveled from one planet to the next.
  For religious schools, he had a Jesus puppet and a Mary puppet and a Joseph puppet, as well as puppets to represent Samson and Delilah and Adam and Eve. He also had a Satan puppet and puppets of Abraham Lincoln, Einstein, and Hitler. All the puppets had three basic body types – male, female, and child. Their small wigs and clothing were interchangeable, so that the same puppet that represented Joseph could also represent Jesus, Samson, Adam, Lincoln, Einstein, and Hitler. The women were also interchangeable. My father could speak in many different voices, male and female, and he had a voice to fit each character in the puppet show.
  When I tried to learn his trade, I failed. It would have taken years and years to learn how to operate the marionettes like my father. When I touched the controls, the strings got tangled around the puppets’ bodies, and their arms wouldn’t move. My father cursed me because I was no good at changing voices. I was no actress then and no puppet master. It was hardest for me to find a voice for Jesus. I never wanted to make him speak like a man. For some reason, I wanted him to speak to the children in the voice of a young girl.
  By the time I turned thirteen, whenever newspapers advertised for figure models, my parents drove me to men who took photographs of me. The white lights of the cameras flashing burned my eyes until I could see only shadowy forms. When I told my mother I was running away to live with the photographers, she said their house was lovely and she wished she could live there with me. But she had to stay with my father, even though she said Babie Blu should send my checks to her P.O. box in Tennessee.
  I knew why she wanted me to leave. The van was more cramped than ever, and I was getting too old to sleep so close to my father. Sometimes at night, he reached out for her hair and touched mine by accident, but I don’t think she knew what was happening.
A year after I left, the van was found abandoned on an Alabama highway, and my parents were gone. I never heard from them or saw them again. Now their van is all I have to remind me of the life I led with them. I think of my parents whenever I drive through the midnight traffic and wonder where they got lost. When I close my eyes, I see their faces in all this static darkness of newspaper photos fading and think maybe they’re dead now or maybe they’re searching for me while I search for them. Maybe they’ve seen me in my films, or maybe we’ll never see each other again, never know who we were.

The boy touches my hair. I don’t want to hurt him, but I’m afraid to keep him for too long. I’m also reluctant to turn him loose. He has nowhere to go. He has seen me in my saddest moments and is proud of who I am. “Mother,” he sometimes whispers, and I can almost believe he is my child. He has already begun to sprout dark hairs on his chest and chin, but he tries to hide the hairs, shaving them off at night with my razor.
  I smile at him when he leaves the gas-station bathroom, as if I don’t know what he’s doing. Perhaps he is already a man and has hidden his age from me all along. Perhaps because he was starving when I found him he appeared younger than he really was, or perhaps I am a bad judge of people’s ages. I don’t know.
  Tonight we sleep on the highway shoulder in the back of the van. In the passing headlights, the boy’s eyes remind me of my father’s eyes. On the old stage, a long flare of blue turns green and gold as the light turns, winking off and on. There’s no way for me to say what the shows were really like unless I close my eyes as I did then and lie still for a long time, my face on a pile of pillows, my hands grasping the soles of my feet. Every time the boy penetrates me, I try to help him reach the dark space behind my eyelids where the others still live. I see my mother and father waiting for me in condemned motels. I see rags on fire and my face burned into the foggy windows.
  My father calls to me. He opens his arms as if he expects me to run to him. Somewhere far away I hear my mother crying. A soft sound like muffled laughter goes on too long. The old house is in my eyes. The studio is dark, but when I come inside to look at the old photos, searching the stores for images of my childhood I may have forgotten, the boy turns on the overhead lights inside the van. I see him there, smiling as if he has finally caught me. He has been waiting for me in the dark for so long that his pupils constrict into two black dots like mine.

Whenever I tell the boy that traveling with me is no life for a grown man, he begins to groan and then to whimper, falling at my feet, begging me not to leave him behind. I think he believes there is no better life than the one we lead together, but I don’t want him to miss better opportunities. He’s a smart boy and will be a handsome man. He could get a good job in a grocery store and have a wife and children.
  At night in my dreams, I see the faces of his unborn children watching me through the van windows. When I wake, I tell him what they told me, that he should go to school. But he says no. I am his family. He says there is no woman like me, no woman who can do what I do. No woman knows what I know. I can’t argue with him when he says this because it’s true: no one in this world understands sex like I do. Moving like a dancer and speaking like a child, I call to the boy in hushed voices I have never spoken before and will never speak again.
  Every time I touch him, our arms in the black windows look like oak limbs. My legs open to the stale air. Our faces are pale like the moon at sundown. My makeup is painted like a portrait in an old gallery. In the right light, our bodies are no longer flesh but made of wood and leaves. We gesture to each other like marionettes in delicate motions.

When I was a little girl, I sometimes looked at myself in three mirrors at the same time. There was a round mirror in front of my face, a small square mirror in my hands, and a long mirror on the wall behind me. My image ricocheted countless times. I could see my face, my eyes, my hair, and my backside pale and exposed. I was frightened as if I had found other girls naked in my room. But when I turned, my reflections also turned. When I opened my mouth to scream, the other girls opened their mouths. “Who are you?” I kept saying to myself.
  Tonight, I am completely nude and standing in front of the bathroom mirror inside an Oakland motel. My makeup mirror is in my hand. I cry until the boy finds me, turning his head away as he wraps me in a white robe.
  He leads me back to the bed and covers me in musty blankets. “Baby,” he whispers, “baby,” as he pulls his black guitar from its case. He strums the silvered strings. I lie down. He sits on the bed beside me and begins to sing a lonely song about a girl who walks on rooftops on rainy nights. He sings about bullfrogs and narrow streets that wind like rivers. He sings me into his songs.
  Raccoons and blue wasps travel to houses beside the woods. He sings of waterfalls and old trees, making up the words as he goes along. He can never remember his lyrics from one night to the next, and he plays guitar by ear alone. He can’t read music, and he can’t read words, so he never writes his songs down. I know every song he sings is a song I’ll never hear again.

The guitar was the first gift I gave him. When I offered it to him, we were both sitting in the back of my van, and he was afraid to touch the case. Maybe he thought I was playing a trick on him. I don’t know. When he finally took the guitar from my arms, he strummed it gently, weaving odd chords into the strangest song I have ever heard. He didn’t know how to play it, but that didn’t stop him. He just kept strumming along.
  “You keep that,” I said. “I never could play it. My fingers are too weak.”
  He looked at me like he didn’t understand my words.
  “Keep it. It’s yours,” I said.
  He smiled at me, then looked at the guitar and held it tighter to his chest. Then he put the guitar down behind him, near a mound of quilts where his dog was sleeping. He glanced out the van windows at the night and began to take off his clothes.
  “No,” I whispered, “not yet.”
  I drove him to a motel where the highway ended and the ocean began. The van rattled along, the puppets’ heads crashing together in their cases every time I made a wrong turn. Because I liked to look at the land as I passed by, I didn’t keep my eyes on the road. I was the worst type of driver, constantly chasing the moon from one coast to the other.
  “Do you have a cigarette?” the boy asked.
  “No.” I adjusted the van lights. “But I’ll buy you some. I’ll buy you lots and lots of cigarettes at the next motel, and I’ll steal you all the matches I can find.”
  He kept quiet for the rest of the way, but he seemed pleased by what I had said. His lips turned up, forming a slight smile that didn’t fade away, even when I pulled the van into the empty lot.
  In the motel room, sharing a cigarette with him later that night, I was ashamed of myself for the first time in my life – not because of what I had done to him, but because of what he had done to me.

In Hollywood again, after days of driving in circles, taking the same exits on this highway, we finally stop for the night. The motel is claustrophobic with a view of the dark hills. The outside walls are painted yellow, blue, and tan. The lobby has gold wallpaper with green seahorses and orange shells. The carpet is pink with white rows marked by old shoe prints. The boy follows me inside where he immediately finds a cigarette machine. Just like the old days when cigarettes were all he lived for, I empty my purse, my pockets, and wallet to give him all the coins I can find. I have a lot on me. He begins to shove the coins into the slots, his hands trembling in the pale lobby light.
  I pay the clerk at the counter. She gives us room number seventeen, and I ask her for matches. I notice she is much older than I am and has pockets of wrinkled flesh hanging from her eyelids and neck. I begin to touch my face slowly, feeling under my eyes. I ask her for more matches, and she empties the entire basket into my purse. The matchbooks are orange and blue with silver marlins etched on their backs. I ask her for twenty dollars in quarters, and I give the quarters to the boy, dumping them onto the table beside the cigarette machine.
  I suddenly realize he is much taller than I am, almost six feet tall. He looks down at me and smiles while slipping the quarters into the slots. He puts the cigarette packs and matches into his trench coat pockets and follows me to our room.
  Roaches crawl on the white and yellow and pale-blue striped wallpaper and gold tiles in the bathroom. Under the faucets and behind the toilet, a puddle of clear water stands. I have seen worse rooms, and the boy doesn’t seem disappointed. But I am. I want to take him to a nicer place, but it’s too late.
  My makeup kit is already set out on the TV table. In the mirror that faces the bed, we watch ourselves undress. There are pink and yellow perfume bottles, powder in oval boxes, and tubes of red gloss. I reapply my mask, redoing my foundation to even out my skin tone after my evening makeup has been melted by the rain. I put on yellowish concealer to hide the purplish circles under my eyes. I watch my eyes in the mirror as I layer on the blue mascara. Then I watch the boy in the mirror as he watches my eyes. I smile at him and brush on the crimson lip gloss.
  “I want to . . .” I whisper.
  He looks at me as if I’m not telling the truth. I don’t know what the truth is to someone like him. I don’t want to know, at least not tonight.
  When I put my arms around his neck, he tells a joke I can’t understand, something about a vaudeville theater in winter. Even as we hold each other, there’s a chasm between us, a brook in a deep valley I don’t want to transgress. In silence, he’s lost in his own dreams. Every time he looks at me with such forgiveness in his eyes, I feel that I’m becoming a part of those dreams. But I have no idea what he’s really thinking. I only know he possesses a calm I’ve never known.

In the morning, the sky changes colors as I wake in his arms. He pulls me closer, and I trust him more than anyone in the world, more than I’ve trusted anyone before or since. Now there’s nothing I won’t let him do to me.
  At checkout time, he carries me to the van and lets me sleep in the back while he drives out of the parking lot and onto the highway. I pull the blankets over my face. Even the dim sunlight filtered through the tinted window stings my eyes.
  After we’ve been traveling for less than an hour, he pulls the van off the highway and parks at a rest stop. He settles into the back, sitting next to me. I pull the blankets away from my face to look at him as he runs his hand over the stubble on his chin.
  I lie back, opening my legs as I put my hands behind my head. The boy closes his hand and I close my eyes. I feel his knuckles burning against my thigh as he puts his fingers inside me.
When I open my eyes, I look at him as if for the first time. I am confused and feel like he is the adult and I am the child. He keeps pushing until his fingers are gone.
  Years go by. I forgive myself but am not forgiven. Although my crime is not forgotten, I am never found. The boy is still a boy. Even though he should have become a man long ago, he never changes. The van breaks down. We repair it night after night, leaving a trail of rusted metal on the dark highway that stretches behind us.
  This is not the way our lives were supposed to be, but we go on. There is no future for us. I know that now. He opens his fingers and his hand hurts me. I tell him to go on.
  “I’m alive now,” I whisper. “I’m alive.”