She spit out the pieces, her lips buzzing like a horse's.
"Don't touch my stuff," I said.
She nodded.
I let her up.
She went back to her bed and started poking herself with the safety pin. I put the knife in my pocket and picked up the crumpled page, the torn pieces.
In the kitchen, the niece and her boyfriend were sitting at the table, drinking Colt 45, listening to the radio. Having an argument. "You're never going to see that money, fool," she said. They didn't see me. They didn't see any of us. I got the tape and went back to my room.
I taped the torn page together, taped them both back into the book. It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moon-flower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves. It was her reading copy, soft pencil notes in the margins. PAUSE. Upward Inflect. I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.
The picture on the back. My mother in a short dress with long graceful sleeves, her hair cut in long bangs, eyes peeking out underneath. Like a cat peering out from under a bed. That beautiful girl, she was a universe, bearer of these words that rang like gongs, that tumbled like flutes made of human bones. In the picture, none of this had ever happened. I was safe then, a tiny pin-head egg buried in her right-side ovary, and we never were apart.
WHEN I STARTED talking, they sent me to school. My name was White Girl. I was an albino, a freak. I had no skin at all. I was transparent, you could see the circulation of the blood. I drew pictures in every class. I drew pictures on the computer cards, connecting the dots into new constellations.
5
CASEWORKERS CHANGED but were always the same. They took me to McDonald's, opened their files, asked their questions. McDonald's scared me. There were too many children, screaming and crying and sliding into pits filled with colored balls. I had nothing to say. This one was a man, white, with a clipped beard like the jack of spades. His hands square as a shovel, he wore a signet on his pinkie finger.
He found me a permanent placement. When I left the group home on Crenshaw Boulevard, nobody said good-bye. But the girl with the scar tattoos stood on the front porch and watched me drive away. Clusters of lavender jacarandas emerged from the ranks of trees as we stitched along the gray-and-white streets.
It took four freeways to get to my new home. We exited onto a street that sloped upward like a ramp. Tujunga, the signs said. I watched the low ranch houses get larger, then smaller, the yards chaotic. The sidewalks disappeared. Furniture grew on the porches like toadstools. A washing machine, scrap lumber, a white hen, a goat. Finally we were no longer in town. We came over a rise and we could see the wash, half a mile across, kids on dirt bikes cutting trails in the open land, kicking up pale plumes of dust. In contrast, the air seemed listless, defeated. We stopped in the dirt yard of a house, part trailer, but so many parts added on, you had to call it a house. A plastic garden pinwheel stood motionless in a patch of geraniums. Spider plants hung from pots on the wide trailer porch. Three little boys sat, watching. One held a jar with some kind of animal. The biggest one pushed his glasses up on his nose, called back over his shoulder, through the screen door. The woman who came through it was busty and leggy, with a big smile, her teeth white and shallow, all in the front. Her nose was flat at the bridge, like a boxer's.
Her name was Starr and it was dark inside her trailer. She gave us sugary Cokes we drank out of the can as the caseworker talked. When she spoke, Starr moved her whole body, throwing her head back to laugh. A small gold cross glittered between her breasts, and the caseworker couldn't keep his eyes off that deep secret place. She and the caseworker didn't even notice when I went outside.
There were no fringy jacarandas here, only oleanders and palms, pear cactus and a big weeping pepper. The dust that covered everything was the pinkish beige of sandstone, but the sky was broad as an untroubled forehead, the pure leaded blue of stained glass. It was the first time the ceiling wasn't pressing on my head.
The biggest boy, the one with the glasses, stood up. "We're catching lizards, you want to?"
They trapped the lizards with shoebox snares down in the wash. The patience of such small boys as they waited, silent, still, for a green li/aiu <.u enter the trap. They pulled the string and the box fell down. The biggest boy slid a sheet of cardboard under the box and turned it over, and the middle one grabbed the tiny living thing and put it in the glass jar.
"What do you do with them?" I asked.
The boy with the glasses looked at me in surprise. "We study them, of course." The lizard in the jar did push-ups, then grew very still. Isolated, you could see how perfect it was, every small scale, its row of etched toenails. Made special by virtue of its imprisonment. Above us the mountain loomed, a solemn presence. I found if I looked at it a certain way, I could feel its huge-shouldered mass moving toward me, green polka dots of sage clinging to its flanks. A puff of breeze came up. A bird screamed. The chaparral gave off a hot fresh smell.
I walked down the wash, wandering between boulders warmed in the sun. I leaned my cheek against one, imagining becoming so still, so quiet as this, indifferent to where the river dumped me after the last storm. The biggest boy was suddenly beside me. "Careful of the rattlesnakes. They like those rocks."
I moved away from the rock.
"The western diamondback is the largest of the American vipers," he said. "But they rarely strike above the ankle. Just watch where you're going, and don't climb on the rocks, or if you do, watch where you put your hands. Do like this." He took a small rock and knocked it on the nearest boulder, as if knocking on a door. "They'll avoid you if they can. Also look out for scorpions. Shake your shoes before you put them on, especially outside."
I looked at him closely, this skinny freckled boy, a bit younger than me, trying to decide if he wanted to scare me. But he seemed more interested in impressing me with how smart he was. I kept walking along, looking at the shapes the boulders made, the blue of their shadows. I had the sense that they were inhabited, like people in hiding. The boy followed me.
"Rabbit," he said, pointing down at the dust.
I could barely make out the blurred markings, two larger prints followed by a smaller one and then another. He smiled, his teeth slightly pushed back, vaguely rabbitlike himself. He was a boy who should have been in front of a TV or in a library, but he could read the pale dust the way another kid would read a comic book, the way my mother read cards. I wished he could read my fortune in the dust.
"You see a lot," I said.
He smiled. He was a boy who wanted to be seen. He told me his name was Davey, he was Starr's real son. There was a daughter too, Carolee. The other two, Owen and Peter, were foster like me. But even her natural children had been in foster care, when Starr was in rehab.
How many children had this happened to? How many children were like me, floating like plankton in the wide ocean? I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children, between friends, family, things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost, more easily than anyone could imagine.
We walked on. Davey pulled at a bush with bright yellow flowers. "Deerweed. Pea family." The breeze came up the canyon, making the trees flicker green and gray. "Paloverde's got the green bark. The other's ironwood."
The quiet, the solidness of the mountain, the white butterflies. Green scent of laurel sumac, which Davey informed me the local Indians had used to sweeten the air in their wickiups. Clumps of giant ryegrass, still green, but already crackling like fire. Two hawks circled the seamless blue sky, screaming.
THAT NIGHT, motifs of cowboys on broncos, lariats, and spurs decorated my sleeping bag bed, where I lay zipper open to the coolness watching Carolee, sixteen years old and tall as her mother, a sullen girl with pouty lips, zipping her top. "Thinks she's going to ground me," Carolee said to her reflection. "That's what she thinks."
On the other side of our thin wall, the mother and her hippie boyfriend were making love, the headboard knocking against the partition. It was not the night magic, my mother and her young men, murmuring to strains of imperial koto in the scented dusk.
"Lord almighty!" Starr wailed.
Carolee's mouth twisted into something not quite a smile, her boot on her bed, she was doing the laces. "Christians don't say, 'Fuck me baby.' Actually they're not supposed to do it at all, but she's got the sin virus in her blood." She posed in front of the mirror, lowered the zipper of her top an inch, so it showed the well between her breasts. She bared her teeth and wiped them with her finger.
A dirt bike whined, and she pushed the screen out, climbed onto the dresser, narrowly missing her basket of makeup. "See you in the morning. Don't close the window."
I got up and watched her on the dirt bike disappearing up the road. It was wide and white in the moonlight, the darkness of mountains darker than the sky, a perfect vanishing point of the road and the telephone poles. I imagined you could follow that road through the vanishing point, come out somewhere else entirely.
"WITHOUT JESUS, I'd be dead today," Starr was saying as she cut in front of a semi, which punished us with its air horn. "That's the God's honest truth. They'd taken my kids, I was ready for roadkill."
I sat in the passenger seat of Starr's Ford Torino while Carolee slouched in the back, ankle bracelet glittering, a present from her boyfriend, Derrick. Starr drove too fast, bumping up the road, and chain-smoked Benson and Hedges loos from a gold pack, listening to Christian radio. She was talking about how she used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead and topless waitress at a club called the Trop.
She wasn't beautiful like my mother, but you couldn't help looking at her. I'd never seen anyone with a figure like that. Only in the back pages of the L.A. Weekly, chewing on a phone cord. But her energy was overwhelming. She never stopped talking, laughing, lecturing, smoking. I wondered what she was like on cocaine.
"I can't wait for you to meet Reverend Thomas. Have you accepted Christ as your personal savior?"
I considered telling her that we hung our gods from trees, but thought better of it.
"Well, you will. Lord, once you hear that man, you'll be saved on the spot."
Carolee lit a Marlboro, lowered the back window. "That phony-ass con. How can you swallow such shit."
"He who believeth in me, though he was dead, yet he will live, and don't you forget it, missy," Starr said. She never called us by our names, not even her own children, only "mister" or "missy."
She was taking us to the Clothestime in the next town, Sunland, she wanted to get me a few things for my new life. I'd never been into a store like that. My mother and I got our clothes on the boardwalk in Venice. Inside the Clothestime, colors assaulted us from every side. Magenta! they screamed. Turquoise! Battery acid! under the nicker of fluorescent lighting. Starr filled my arms with clothes to try on, herded me into a dressing room with her, so we could continue our chat.
In the cubicle, she wriggled into a tiny striped minidress and smoothed it over her ribs, turning to the side to see what it looked like in profile. The stripes widened and tapered over her breasts and bottom like op art. I tried not to stare, but how could you not be astounded. I wondered what Reverend Thomas would think of her in a dress like that.
She frowned, pulled the dress over her head, and hung it back up. It still was stretched to fit her figure. Her body in the small dressing room was almost too much to bear. I could only look at her in the mirror, her breasts falling out of the top of her under-wired brassiere, the cross hiding between them like a snake in a rock.
"Sin's a virus, that's what Reverend Thomas says. Infecting the whole country, like the clap," she told me. "They've got clap now you can't get rid of. Sin's just exactly the same. We've got every excuse in the book. Like what difference does it make if I shovel coke up my nose or not? What's wrong with wanting to feel good all the time? Who does it hurt?"
She opened her eyes wide, I could see the glue on her false eyelashes. "It hurts us and it hurts Jesus. Because it's wrong." She said it soft and sweet, like a nursery school teacher. I tried to imagine what it was like working in a gentleman's club. Walking naked into a room full of men.