Whidbey Island Continued

2.


Her dad found the car about 7 in the morning after he’d gone out looking. He found it parked quietly along the road just up the way from Bailey’s Corner store. All the windows of her Mazda were smashed out. She was in the drivers seat. “She’s dead.” But she wasn’t. Only passed out. And with no idea how the windows got smashed. There was glass all over her.


3.

I’ve been working with this kid who is twenty and he’s strapping as hell and comes to work in shitty blue jeans, a big cap, and a black tank top. He works hard and has been around. On days when you collect him at this guy Carl’s whose shack he’s living at sometimes his girlfriend comes to the door first. She opens the door to the shack and most often has a pacifier in her mouth. She’s nineteen and says she has bad teeth – that it runs in the family – she calls to her boy how most often is still crashed out on the couch, and then he gets his space together and comes out the door and then you drive him back out to the job site.

I spent yesterday working and talking with him. He’s twenty. He’s been around. He’s been to nearly all 50 states and wants to see the rest. He has a dream to row a boat from Alaska to Siberia. “What’s your girl do?” you ask, “She lives up in Burlington with her Grandfather. She takes care of him. He’s got cancer.” “I go up and get her and when she’s down here she does this, I guess it’s construction. This guy got her a job drywalling.”

He tells you that he lived out in Nebraska. “Really? What was there?” you ask. “Nothing.” “Nothing at all.” And he’s looking at you right in the eye as he says so, and you know he’s being honest – there was actually nothing there. “Why did you go?” you ask.

He’s got a younger brother you see who somehow ended up in Nebraska. The younger fell on hard times “He lost his job, his girlfriend, and all of his bearings. So I went out there to help him.” “I was working demolition trailer parks, you can make some money doing that.” “Then,” he tells you, “I had a job at Applebee’s after I changed towns for us on account of my brothers stupidity.”
“You changed towns?”
“Ya, after I got thrown through a window.”
“Really? Some guys came after you?”
“No, they came after my brother and I protected him.”
“So he was being a fuckup even after you went there to help him out of a jam.”
“Oh, ya. He was stealing – he’d take my cell phone and not give it back, he say he didn’t even take it, and I was the one who paid for it. He’d take my charger like every single day.”

At the end of the work day you find a half-opened soup can next to the kids knapsack. The can has been cut half open with a knife and the jaggedy edge is sticking up. “Ya” he tells you, “My father caught me that. To eat it right out of the can. He said that if you need to you can always find a can of soup, and that if you have a can of soup and you know how to open it that you will always have something to eat. I’ve been all over, but if I need to, I can do something like just go to a soup kitchen or something and get a can of soup and I’ll always have something to eat.” He rolls Top cigarettes and eats soup straight out of a can. Just the way his father taught him. His younger brother finally put it back together and left Nebraska with the circus. He took a job with Carnies. They travel around, living in tents and trucks, and traveling for the season going everywhere. “I’m looking forward to getting him back” he told me, “Ya, I told him, just try and make it as far as Idaho and I can get you from there.” Just try and make it as far as Idaho? THAT is some old school shit. But really it’s not. It just was told to me yesterday.