moving day

I’m moving this month and it seems that many others are moving as well. Changing houses. Packing, driving, unpacking again. It’s a hateful business. I’m lucky, my place is cool (if I can afford it in the winter). The new place has windows with a view to the water. I will have a new housemate in a month, and there is room for guests. Some people though when they move on Whidbey Island aren’t so lucky. Sometimes when people move on Whidbey Island they wind up moving up north of Freeland.

Up north of Freeland. You know the kind of places; the rent is a little high for what it is but you justify ‘cos it’s closer to the roofer guy who you work for and you might save on gas driving to meet him in the morning. Even though you mostly meet him on the job sites. Really, you can’t justify it. You just don’t want to admit that you’re desperate. You just need a new place after the landlord of the old place you were in decided to come up to the island and spend the summer. So you packed it up, not that it was that much, and drove up north of Freeland to the new place. It’s a little place. A cabin really. It’s more like a shack. It’s been a rental since the 70’s and still has the original tar paper on the walls outside from where the siding never went up. The place sits under mossy maple trees and one cedar, and the whole yard feels cold on hot days. It’s got a deck but it’s dodgy, it’s mossy and half rotten, and next to the front door are some things that the previous tenants left behind when they left Whidbey Island and went back to Idaho where she has a brother. There’s a broken baby stroller, a blanket sitting on top of a box that has been rained on, and a few other bits of trash, and a flip flop. It’s depressing and lifeless and you know it, but it’s yours. Plus you’ve got a buddy going to stay on the couch for a month or two - just ‘till he finds his own – you shook on it so your kindof committed.

Inside the new pad has got a wood stove with gold trimmed, smoked up, glass doors, a blue carpet on the floor – wall to wall, and like you knew it’s been a rental for years and feels like it in there. One dark little room for a bed (it’s got glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling), a kitchen with a microwave that some who moved out left behind, some Febreeze under the sink down where it smells like mold, and a bathroom big enough to just turn around in. There’s a shower stall with no curtain. The place has a TV antenna on the roof if that’s any indication. Out in the yard is an old lawn chair that someone left, along with bits of trash and overgrown firewood. There’s dead Mazda too. A little red hatchback just ‘round back. The landlord of the place said it wasn’t his. That it was over the property line. You didn’t believe him and it doesn’t matter anyway – this is only temporary. Something better will come along and you will ditch this shithole.

There are two houses on either side that you can see through the scrubby trees from your new place. Over on the one side is the house that looks more like a compound. There are a few out-buildings and the main house all painted white. A fellow lives there who people don’t see ‘round too much. He’s got a brown and yellow billygoat. He’s got a shortwave radio antenna on his roof. A refrigerator that runs on propane, and in the evenings the house is lit by Colman lanterns. His is also the place where the Mormon girls come to stay when they are away from home on their 16 month Missions. After knocking on doors all day, the girls sit in the evenings at a big round lamp-lit table with their scripture books, underlying passages in soft blue crayon. He sits with them looking on proudly and drinking bourbon on ice. When he gets just drunk enough that his lips are a little wet and his vision is fuzzy, he starts in. The girls know it when it’s coming. He starts in almost talking to himself about Jewish conspiracy theories, 911, the take over of the national Parks by the U.N., and the Mormon girls look sideways at each other with their heads down and stay on with their work. After a time the man is good and drunk and adjitatated and he’s up ranting about the room. He recites passages out loud from Leviticus and Deuteronomy. “…the land that he hath trodden upon, and to his children, because he hath wholly followed the LORD….” He doesn’t hurt the girls. He drinks until blackout and passes out on the couch most often. He has a room but no one has seen the inside of it. In the summer when it’s muggy out he twitches and moans in his sleep. He talks softly too when there is the chance of a lightning storm, and if you were to listen you would realize that the man is talking in his dreams to the Confederate Lutenants in various battles of the Civil War correcting them on their follies and blunders before they make them; “Make your line at the picket fence and wait, don’t cross the field and try setting your line at the creek you bastard. That’s where they are. How many? ALL of them you jackass, they’re ALL are in there. There’s two hundred and fifty yards of riprap on the other side of that God-damn creek, and their all through it. Stop! Don’t cross the field, you’ll get the boys killed. You’ll get all the boys killed…Don’t cross the field, you’ll get all the boys killed…You’ll get all the boys killed…You’ll get all the boys killed…..” And his voice trails away and his cheeks are wet, and he quiets down.

He’s always up first in the morning. Kindly and smiling, and he makes the Mormon girls an egg on toast, then while the girls eat he packs them a lunch of the same thing every day; a green apple, string cheese, a fruit wrap, some crackers, a bottle of water and sends them off for their day of door knocking and Mormonizing. He waves from the porch, “See you when you get home girls”.


On the other side of the new digs is another kind of place, darker, and it has more trash in the yard. Cars come here. They come and go. A lot. They never stay too long, and they come and go at all hours. You know exactly what the score is. You hear a baby crying sometimes but you can’t work out if it lives there or not. They have parties and bonfires and these go on for two or three days. When the people are frying they get real loud and swear at each other and start fights, and every now and then someone looses it completely and goes crashing into the blackberry bushes behind that house, and they are yelling “I just got to get the fuck out of here!!” And people are yelling and freaking out, and you kindof think that you should do something, but mostly don’t want to, and you couldn’t anyway. Best not to get involved and hope no one sees you looking from the window of your shitty place.

And then there was the night when you were sleeping and suddenly woke up when something crashed down on your bed. It’s dark and there’s something just landed on your bed. And it’s a girl and she’s laughing, and you can tell by the laugh that she’s way out there, and she’s squirming on the lower side of your bed with her back kidndof leaned on the wall, and there is this green glowing shit all over her lips and teeth and chin and fingers, and she’s got a little plastic tube that she’s chewing on and you realize that she’s chewed through a glow stick and it’s gotten all over her, and she’s frying so hard that it makes the air in the room feel goopy. It all only takes a second, but now she’s holding on to your leg under the covers, and for a second you even think about it, ‘cos you could probably totally get away with it. There’s probably nothing on under her tee shirt, and she’s holding on to your leg. She would probably hardly even notice if you did, and she’d certainly never remember. But wait, what the fuck are you thinking, you’d never, she’s frying and has got glow tube shit all over her and she probably came from the house next door, and then you’re spooked, and then it dawns on you that you have to get her the fuck out of your house. She’s laughing and talking gibberish, and squirming on your bed and you start telling her “Look you gotta get the hell out of here – no, no YOU gotta go – NOW!” And then she squirms away and runs into the kitchen saying something that you can’t make out. And then you open the front door and start yelling “Get the fuck out of my house!” And finally she’s out the door and disappears into the dark running up the driveway up to the road, and then you’re worried. You think “Fuck, she’s up on the road now and anything could happen up there.” You wander out there a little to see if you can make out where she’s at but she’s gone. You wonder if you should call the cops, but you don’t. They would just show up and ask loads of questions about how a girl ended up on your bed in the middle of the night. And if someone from the tweeker house saw the cops at yours they might get paranoid and there’s no telling then. So you don’t call the cops, you go back to bed. And then at about ten-past-five in the morning when your buddy who is couching it at yours shows up from some party or other you tell him what happened, and he says “Do you know who that was? That was freeking…” And then he tells you who the girl was, and then you bum ‘cos you know, or knew the girl. You used to ride the bus with her in Elementary School. You always liked her. And in high school you would hang out at parties together sometimes and smoke cigarettes. She was pretty, and arty, and would go to all the parties, but then at this one party you remember in a clear cut off Deer Lake road she was hanging with some older dudes who stand off-ish and real slimy and druggy. She left in one of their cars. That was in the summer and you didn’t see her again until September when school went back and it was senior year and she just seemed different. She was real removed and said she didn’t go to parties anymore but she looked like shit. She seemed haggard, like she didn’t get enough sleep. She didn’t go to graduation in the spring. You saw her mom later that summer in line at the check stand at the Red Apple store and she said that it devastated her daughter not to make it to graduation but that she’d been sick. “A bad flu.” Then her mom asked if you had seen her recently, and you said no, and then her mom got real quiet and far away and you wanted to get past the fucking check stand as quick as possible.


That was then, but then all day at work with the fuck-up roofer crew it dogs you. You can’t get it out of your head all day. The girl on the bus. The girl with the day-glow shit on her teeth in the dark room. You can’t get the vision of her teeth glowing day-glow in the dark out of your head.

Then later when you’re drunk your mind trips out on a spin, and you think that maybe it would work out between the girl and you. You think that yes, maybe it would, it would be fucking cool if it did, and you could run away together and get the fuck off of Whidbey Island, ‘cos it’s all a fuck-up here anyway. Maybe then the two of you would run away together and buy one of those little boarded up seaside motels somewhere on the Oregon coast. You could paint the outside, and she could paint the inside of the rooms, and each one could have a different theme. Yes, that’s it – and you remember that back before that one summer in High School that she was always a pretty crafty girl. She would be handy with a brush. And you could be happy doing something simple like that. Something small. Something that seemed like it was just big enough to make sense again. And you would open this little place, maybe it would have five or six rooms plus the little place that the two of you would live in, and people would come and stay, and you could sell postcards and Myrtlewood and salt water taffy to the families who are up from California. And then maybe you would have a little kid and later when the kid was maybe three or four mom would take the tot down to the beach with a little pale and shovel. And maybe you would be working outside on the place, painting the fence or something, when they came back, and before they crossed the Highway she would laugh and you would watch, and then she would see you and give you that look, and then pick the kid up and cross the road, and you would be the happiest and proudest papa and husband in the world. ‘Cos Whidbey is just a fuck-up anymore. There is an outbreak of kids cutting themselves in the Middle School. You know someone who is on the team that has to call the parents and ask them to come in and has to tell them that their kids are taking knives and cutting their skin open. More people are desperate and lost. The economy is tanking. Jobs are fewer and farther between. The jackasses that you work with roofing are a fuck-up too. You really can’t take it anymore. Their drinking way too much and one of them is gonna slip and get himself fucking killed.

What’s the fucking option though? And besides, it’s going to be winter soon so you should probably just get some wood in. OK, do that. Stay in the new place and get some wood in. Stick it out in the shithole and get the fuck out in the spring. April. Leave in April. Deal? OK. Where? It’s brutal out there. People are having it hard all over the place, and at least here you have a place to live, and the rent is too high, but what the hell are you going to do? Stick it out here, get some wood in, and something else will come along and you can get the fuck out.

The vision though of the girl just about to cross the highway with the kid kills you. Almost every night. You can see it. You want it. Bad. Your buddy out on the couch snores and keeps you awake. It’s all just such a fuck-up. How did it get like this? It wasn’t always like this was it? No, it wasn’t. You remember. Remember. You got to.