Patrick Strickland
SCREAMING EAST ON I-10
I just want to get home, but home’s never quite where I left it. After work tonight, I glide along the streets of Simi Valley, nearly nodding off a time or two, in search of the complex where I stay. I almost crashed once before, at the tail end of the twenty-hour trek from Texas, when Hank appeared in my passenger seat. I left home to get away from him, but there he glimmered, the same guy who taught me exactly how much to water down Ma’s wine bottle when we snuck a glass. He’s next to me again now, in my periphery, smog hovering above the seat, but when I glance over, there’s only emptiness. I yank the wheel straight just in time to miss a Pinto parked on the shoulder.
I hook a left on Royal. My bones ache something awful. Eight hours of hauling pallets off Mack trucks behind the TJ Maxx. Lugging boxes back and forth, crates of jeans with mismatched pockets, shirts with sleeves of different lengths, lampshades with small tears in the material, beauty products suspiciously near the expiration date. Sneaking off to suck down Parliaments in the chute of the industrial trash compactor at the back corner of the warehouse. The manager hollering at us to shape up or ship out. Demanding to know if he pays us drag ass all shift long. But it’s my lucky night: I chewed up a couple pills some poor bastard dropped near the conveyor belt and itched my nose all the way back to the breakroom to clock out.
I moved west to get away from Ma. She became difficult after Hank, talked about death all the time, washed and folded Hank’s old clothes like he was going to stumble out of his bedroom one day searching for clean socks. For three years, everything was a mother’s grief this, a lost soul that. You’d think she forgot she still had a living, breathing kid. I didn’t want to think about death, about Hank. I didn’t want to waste away taking care of someone who wouldn’t take care of me back. I drove half the country looking for somewhere I didn’t have to consider whether death is the end. But Hank trailed me like a shadow. It didn’t help that I landed here in a townhome with roommates who couldn’t help but remind me of the day I found him. He had stone limbs, a stiff face. A phone charger choked around the crook of his arm, foam filling the cracks between his teeth.
It’s like our complex moves a couple streets every time I go to work or step out to buy smokes. The management company named it Creekside, but if you do a lap or two around the clusters of townhomes, see what kind of people rot away on plastic lawn chairs next to their front doors, you won’t bother asking why everyone calls it Tweakside. After a half hour of wrong turns, I cruise through the front gates—they’ve been broken since I moved here, maybe never worked—and feel the brief satisfaction of a small victory.
Our townhome isn’t much, a two-bedroom unit with hardly enough space to fit the four of us. The place makes everything feel temporary—the thick green shag carpet with loose seams and inexplicable bumps, no photos or posters on the wall. At any moment, someone could come along and strip the place bare, and no one would know anyone had ever been there. We’ve tacked up old, stained T-shirts as curtains, and the towels we bunched up in a mound to catch water leaking off the AC unit have lately started to breathe a sharp rot. We’re all around eighteen or nineteen, but life’s decay has left us thin-limbed and miserable.
I’ve got my mind set on some shuteye, but just as I shoulder through the front door, a meat cleaver hums across the living room like a gigantic gnat, drilling into the wall. Drywall shoots all over the carpet, little white flecks in the shag, and the spot around where the cleaver’s stuck in the wall is all wounds. Holes where poorly tossed knives have gnashed it up. My roommates can’t help it—they are drawn to small acts of destruction like a moth to a bulb. When they tie one on, they can keep it up all night.
Face nods at me, smiles a mouthful of teeth like crumbling headstones. When he grins, his eyes and nose twist up tight, and you get the feeling he can hardly handle whatever goes on between his ears without making a joke out of it.
“Hey, Tex.” His voice’s a housefire. A year has passed since I watched dust blot out Dallas in my rearview, but he still hasn’t thought up a better nickname.
P.A. sits up on the couch, claps for the performance. “Great toss, Face.” When he speaks, you can see the empty slot where he lost a tooth in a brawl with a bartender he shorted or a woman he did wrong, I can’t remember which.
Face’s girlfriend is on the other side of the couch, pale and hollow, rocking either way with her knees hugged hard against her chest. She was probably normal once, or whatever passed for normal, but life’s done a real number on her. Face says she looks like someone left her outside too long.
“Hey, Face.” I survey the room, the chunks of wall on the carpet, the small pile of knives. “What are y’all doing?”
“Well.” Face clasps his hands like he’s making it all simple for a child. “We’re just throwing knives at the wall.”
“I can see that much.” We pawned all the landlord’s cutlery weeks ago. “But where’d you get the money for new knives?”
Face ignores me, lobs another one that sticks in the wall. P.A. grunts some kind of guttural approval. “What a throw.”
His real name is Justin, but he got his nickname because he comes from Pennsylvania. After he got caught pushing pills at an N.A. meeting, his old man sent him packing. To hear P.A. recount it, his father’s decision was deeply unfair because, after all, the pills were actually just diuretics he’d pocketed at the Walgreens. P.A. points a slim finger, yellow as nausea, at the cleaver lodged in the wall. “Let another one rip. That was pure luck.”
Face’s girlfriend snags a crumpled pack of Parliaments from inside her bra, fires one up. She works the register at a Wendy’s and has a real name, but I never have learned it. I only know her by the nickname Face cooked up for her: Minimum Wage Mama.
*
Face winds up again, steak knife in hand. The lights flicker, lash us. I’m still counting holes in the wall when the next knife hits handle first and ricochets across the carpet. Face licks his finger, holds it up, and laughs. “Must be the wind.”
Face got his own nickname a long time ago, years before I wandered west. The way he tells it, his friends gave it to him in middle school because looking at him made them want to hack up their last meal. I’ve never heard a guy shit on himself like that, but nothing much seems to bother Face. He wears his shame snug as skin, laughs if unsettled kids stare at him when we go out. This is a nice town, health food stores and strip-mall churches, gentle, green mountains fencing it all in. Still, something’s off about the place.
P.A. tosses up his arms, howls. “You shit the bed on that one, Face.”
Face makes a fist, shakes it. “Let’s see you do any better.”
But P.A.’s had enough. He lays his head on the armrest and drops into a deep sleep, snoring from the start.
Face grabs a light bulb from the kitchen counter, pitches it hard at P.A. It shatters against the windowsill behind the couch, sending a spray of shards everywhere, but P.A. doesn’t flinch. Minimum Wage Mama springs to her feet, shouts. “We need that, you moron.”
“We’ve got plenty.” His voice is full of indignation, shock that she can’t see a plain fact. He climbs on the counter, unscrews the kitchen light bulb, and the room goes a shade darker. He makes a big show of it, guts the bulb, and crushes little crystals into it. He’ll do anything for crank—I’ve seen him chug curdled milk on a bet, choke down rotten eggs, eat a bug plucked from the carpet. He once housed a six-pack of energy drinks because we promised him a hit, but we had already finished off the sack. He spent the rest of the night knotted up on his naked mattress, now and then vomiting into a plastic grocery sack.
Right now, he sucks in a lungful, holds it until his face hardens. He exhales a small smog and offers me a beer, an Old English. “Because you’re a good guy, I don’t mind giving this to you free of charge.”
“Thanks.” I swat away smoke. I bought the case and stocked the fridge last night—neither Face nor P.A. have jobs or money—but what use is pointing that out?
Before I packed up and left Texas, Ma warned me to stay safe in California, but she said it as if reciting a prompt. “There are riots out there.”
I told her all that finished years ago. I had no idea whether that was true. I just wanted her to tell me to stay, that she’d get a grip on herself. “I’m more likely to die in a wildfire.”
“You’ll be fine.”
Then, she stood barefoot in the gravel driveway in front of our trailer, coughing her way down a cigarette, and shriveled in my rearview mirror.
P.A. glimmers as his chest rises and falls. Minimum Wage Mama flicks away tiny fragments of glass from her bare thighs. She can’t get comfortable. She keeps squirming, and something’s buzzing beneath her.
I point her way. “Your phone. It’s vibrating.”
She doesn’t hear me, or if she does, she doesn’t show it. Face passes her the bulb, and she sucks a small wraith of smoke through the straw. After a while, she stares at me. “I ever tell you about my kid?”
“No.” I already know the whole story, sure, how her kid, a little boy, has a deadbeat for a dad. “I don’t think you have.”
Sob story or not, Minimum Wage Mama can’t hold my attention. The more she talks, the less I hear. I think of Ma, of Hank. I down half my Old English in a few big slugs that ache my chest. When I look back, I notice Minimum Wage Mama’s clothes. I raise my hand, stop her mid-sentence. “Is that my shirt?”
But when I glance around, they are all wearing my clothes, Minimum Wage Mama and Face and P.A.
“How should I know?” She shrugs like I asked her whether God exists. “I got it from your room.”
Someone passes me the bulb. I shake my head no but take it anyway, and after a hard hit, hand it off again. I push aside a T-shirt curtain, finger a gap in the blinds. Night bruises the sky purple. An ambulance cries out somewhere far off. For a flash, my head fills with images of bodies busted into pieces, people begging for help, bystanders phoning 911. Truth be told, Minimum Wage Mama’s nickname doesn’t sit right with me. Back in Texas, Ma makes minimum wage at the bar she tends.
The crank sets in. Something smashes into the wall. Someone lights a cigarette, and just as I turn to ask for one, Face gifts me a lit Marlboro Red. The smoke sears my lungs, but I can’t enjoy it. The buzzing’s started up again, and my nerves are razors.
Last time I talked to Ma, she spoke with the loose drawl she took on whenever she got around half a bottle deep. I was on break at work, sipping a Keystone Light at the payphone and watching wildfires shave the mountaintops bald. I knew she was hurting, but why couldn’t she just ask me to come back?
“Bet you’re doing well for yourself out there.”
“It’s not like they make it out on TV.”
“Bet you’re glad to forget about us.”
“What are you even saying?”
Face falls into the spot on the couch between me and Minimum Wage Mama, gives me a soft punch in the ribs. “You good, Tex?”
“My Ma wants me to come home.” The words taste empty.
“No one ever asks me to come home.” Face laughs something sad and forced, but resentment’s in there too. He claims he was raised by foster parents and has real bad stories, stuff you see on the news. He’s also the best bullshit artist I’ve ever met. Still, I’m never quite sure, so whenever he sometimes wakes me up riffling through my pockets, I only say something if he snatches a big bill off me. Who knows? Maybe his foster dad really did rip out Face’s toenails for sneaking out, like he says, maybe not. Either way, it’s hard to get all that mad at a guy like that, someone who’s never had a home at all.
Face gets back to his feet, points at the blades all in a pile on the carpet. He grabs a potato peeler off the kitchen island and hurls it at the ceiling.
The couch cushions shiver. “What is that buzzing?”
Minimum Wage Mama shoots me a face full of hate, red and crumpled. She says no one has a single clue what I’m talking about. She says why don’t I get a doctor to check my ears. She says why don’t I just shut my fucking trap already.
*
A few dozen throws later, the landlord blasts through the door, a shock to all of us because he normally stays shacked up at his old lady’s.
Minimum Wage Mama leans toward me. “Listen: my kid just needs a good father figure.”
“Like Face?” I ask, but it’s hard to hear over the landlord’s shouting.
I swivel his direction. “John, man. Long time.”
“That’s not my name.”
“Well. What was it again?”
“You’re fucking hopeless.”
I’m not so arrogant I can’t admit when someone’s got a good point. “Right, right.”
P.A. snores through the whole thing, occasionally twitching.
Minimum Wage Mama taps my shoulder. “Like Face, yeah. You think he’d maybe make a good dad?”
I look Face’s way, see him taking another draw off the bulb. I shrug. How can you blame her for wondering? I know desperate when I see it. Besides, my old man must have seemed like a fine father until he hauled off with a woman my Ma called “his new slice of ass,” her voice vaulting each time she brought it up.
“Sure.” I turn to Minimum Wage Mama. Then, something P.A. told me comes to mind, how he once went out to the desert with Face and witnessed him gutting a baby fox with a stick, stirring its innards.
The buzzing’s at it again. It gets me thinking of the way the TV hummed when I found Hank. Since he died, it’s felt like I’m facing down a brutal wind with no skin on my body at all. He was my big brother. Now, he’s just a boxful of bones a few feet beneath the topsoil. I don’t mean to, but I huff. “Can’t you just turn your phone off?”
Minimum Wage Mama launches to her feet, stalks straight back to the bedroom.
Face shakes his head. “It’s her kid, Tex.”
I scan the room, peek out the blinds. “Where?”
“The buzzing. Her kid’s calling. I think she forgot to leave him grub. But you’re right. Don’t know why she doesn’t just turn the fucking phone off.”
“I guessed as much.” Sadness twists my intestines. Truth is, I’d have never expected a thing like that in a thousand years.
John smacks his hands together, a loud, angry clap. “You guys hear me?”
Regret falls on Face like a shawl. “John, I’m sorry, man. What were you saying again?”
“Get the hell out.” He swings the front door open, lets it slam against the wall. “You’re evicted, all of you.”
“Says you and what army?” But when he steps my way, fists balled, I shirk deep into the couch cushions.
P.A.’s head pops up. “Y’all hear someone taking a leak upstairs?”
I kick him in the ass. “Keep it down, man. Minimum Wage Mama’s trying to nap back there.”
Face snatches from the floor a cockroach, slips it between his lip and teeth like chaw.
“I mean it.” John squeezes the telephone in his hand. His knuckles go white. I rub my eyes hard, and by the time the room takes shape around me, he’s already dialing the cops.
I look back from the door, see the landlord on his knees in front of the knife pile, swaying as if he can pray away what happened to his place. I can’t find any words, not a goddamn one of them. When I head out in the parking lot, a hot breeze running over my body, I hear P.A. dragging his heels behind me.
*
Not long before sunrise, P.A. sits up in the passenger next to me in my pickup. The first morning light glows his veins bright blue. He left his window cracked, and gnats buzz all around us. He’s thinner than last night. A strong enough wind could shred him to pieces. He digs a finger deep in his nose, yawns. “Still roommates.”
I look at the Cinemark parking lot where we slept parked. Wind tosses wrappers here and there. A rat runs past, a shadow chasing it. “Still roommates. Say, did we ask John about the security deposits?”
P.A. slaps me on the shoulder. “That’s good shit, Tex.”
I get out, pad over to a payphone. Ma doesn’t pick up.
Back in the truck, I drowse away. Time passes—ten minutes, two hours, I can’t say. A hard-nosed cop jolts me awake, tapping the window. “You can’t sleep here.”
I see right through him all of a sudden. “You’re not a real cop.” He’s just a security guard, a cheap, plastic badge tagged to his shirt. Still, his eyes burn me alive. He lifts a baton, whirls it.
The pickup starts on the second try. Out of the parking lot, a few minutes down the street, the cab shakes as we rattle over train tracks. We push on to wherever we’re headed. A mountain rises over the valley ahead. Wildfires claw all about its face.
I pull over at a gas station, hit another payphone. No luck.
We drive for an hour, circling town as the sun soldiers its way higher into the sky, until P.A. wants some real rest. “I know a place. Called the Goat Farm.”
“Goat Farm? What’s that?” I know he’s got strange friends, people I’ve never met, but farmers?
He points west, or what I guess is west. I mash down the gas and the engine coughs. A man’s standing next to an intersection, hands in his pockets, shouting at the sun. We miss the turn a couple times. Finally, we pull in front of a place P.A. figures is the one. “Here.”
I run my eyes across the yard, the splintering shack.
P.A. cuts me off before I can ask. “Lady who owns the place used to raise goats.”
“But she’s got space to spare?”
“There’s only one bed, Tex.” His face hangs slack and blue. His future spreads out in front of me—his limbs rigid, froth between his teeth. “Sorry.”
I let him out, drive off. He really was sorry. You could tell.
*
I pull off the highway and sleep for hours, days maybe. I dream of joining a group of drifters, big-hearted people who take me in and share what little they have, going from city to city together, each of us making sure the next is fed. When I wake up, night soaks everything. Streetlights flick nearby. A crow sits perched on the pickup’s hood. It takes four tries to turn the engine over and send the bird flapping away.
Interstate traffic pumps me down to North Hollywood, and to escape, I slide into the nearly empty lot outside a McDonald’s. There’s a group of junkies sitting cross-legged, leaning against a dumpster. One sits up as I get nearer, and I ask how he’s doing. He has on ripped-up jean shorts, his legs shedding layers of skin.
“If you had to guess?” He scratches dead skin off his sideburn.
“Probably seen better days, I’d say.”
“Damn.”
“What?”
“What kind of awards they give you for all that genius you got between your ears?”
“Why don’t y’all just go to a mission?”
“Mission’s for the weak.”
A sedan inches along the drive-thru. I think of the little tricks Hank taught me: how to lift an order off the counter inside a fast-food joint before someone has a chance to claim it, and how to skip the pay window altogether, act rushed and aggravated at the second so you can blast out of the lot before anyone realizes you didn’t pay the bill. “You’ll be hungry and alone one day,” he told me.
I plop on my ass, cross my legs, the dumpster against my back. We, the junkies and I, don’t speak for a while. It’s the kind of quiet camaraderie I could get used to. The other two eventually sprawl out on the pavement, and I picture Hank again, his body not at all looking like he was just asleep when I found him. That was a trick too, one that went wrong. He showed me how to crush the pill like bone into powder, to use the Bic lighter to make liquid in the bowl of the spoon.
I fade off like the others, crossing into the black with the warm sense of security that stray dogs must feel when they travel in packs. I awake to the press of cold steel against my neck. A piece of scrap metal, sharp-edged and rusted. The dreamers are gone, and when I ask what’s going on, the junkie with the ripped jean shorts jams part of his fist damn near all the way into my throat. “I need to go somewhere. I need to get out of this fucking town. You understand?”
I gag.
“Nod.”
I nod. He yanks his fist from between my teeth.
“Who’s stopping you?”
“Not you.” He presses the mangle of steel to my neck, pats my pockets with his free hand. He finds my keys and strolls off to the pickup, climbs in. The engine sputters, then groans, and on the fourth try, the junkie gives up and drops out of the pickup, his face red.
He points a bone-thin finger at me, accusatory. “I need to get the fuck out of this town.”
I keep quiet.
“You understand?” He fastballs the keys into my face, walks off. “You understand?”
Blood leaks warm from my right eye. I do understand. Really, I do.
The McDonald’s lights flip off. A lady in a uniform walks out into the lot, stops when she spots me toweling blood from my face with my T-shirt, then turns the opposite way. I stand, make to leave. The pickup starts first try. A throb in my throat makes me think I might never see P.A. or Face or Minimum Wage Mama again. My mattress’s still back at the townhome, but no way am I phoning the landlord. It first hits me, that I can still go home and help Ma get right, like a shiv in the neck. My foot kicks down on the gas.
*
The pickup screams to the freeway, but the getaway isn’t as dramatic as I hoped. Traffic clogs the lanes after a few minutes. I sit behind Mack trucks and minivans for two hours, dig in the cup holders for a cigarette butt P.A. might have left, but it’s all ash. After a couple miles, I exit and skid to a stop at a 7-Eleven. I drop fifty cents in the payphone, but the landlord doesn’t answer. I try my boss at TJ Maxx, to let him know I’m going home, but it’s no use.
Morning blinks the world bright. I never look in the rearview. Los Angeles never shrivels in the rearview behind me. The traffic breaks apart like phlegm. I floor it through exhaust clouds and barrel east on I-10, a straight shot to El Paso. Slanting saguaros and Waffle House parking lots whoosh past. Flames chew away a crashed car. An eighteen-wheeler’s tipped on its side. Every now and then, Hank appears in the passenger seat, but he fizzles off before I can get a word in. If I make it home, I tell myself, I’ll see him clearly, the wild smile that revealed streaks of cigarette stains on his front teeth.
The junction for I-20 appears out of nowhere. I swing left just in time. I drive through the day, then through the night, honking at semis and blinking at empty fields all the way home. The Dallas skyline reaches its fingers into the sky. North Texas isn’t much to look at, but if you don’t keep your wits about you, it’ll leave you for dead.
The tires kick up gravel in the driveway. The sun struggles up over the silhouettes of trailers and shacks lining the road. I pound the front door until my knuckles ache something awful. Ma opens, sleeves the sleep from her eyes, tugs at a knot in her hair. “You made it home, honey.”
“I called.” I pluck a bouquet of plastic flowers off the mantel. “I’m going out.”
I don’t expect her to fight me on it, but she looks like she could cry. “Already?”
Then, she thumbs her lighter, lights a smoke, lies flat-backed on the couch and lets out a little laugh. “Already?” She laughs harder. “Already, already, already.”
The walk takes twenty minutes, past the middle school I attended, along the sidewalks in front of the old, abandoned homes where Hank and I used to kick in the backdoors and pound Keystone Ice. Where we used to inhale crushed-up painkillers. Where we’d talk all night about how far we’d crawl on raw knees to get out of this town.
I unlatch the cemetery gate. Gnats, a swarm of them, buzz all around me. I stomp up and down every row. People who lost someone, I guess, have leaned fresh flowers against the headstones. They must be real torn up, I know, but so what?
My footsteps echo loudly in the morning quiet. I consider life, the way it tosses you from one place to the next until you slam face-first into the wall. The way some hand you can’t see takes a fistful of your guts and forces you back to your feet. I make up my mind to say goodbye to Hank one last time, then tear ass back west. I picture P.A. asleep at the Goat Ranch, the fires chewing through the mountains. I imagine the landlord plastering the holes in the wall, Face and Minimum Wage Mama doing whatever they’re doing, wherever they ended up.
The clouds grow grey as cadavers and sag so low they damn near touch the headstones. I search and search, but there’s no telling where we buried Hank. I wind up, hurl the bouquet at a random grave. It slaps the stone. Those plastic petals look ridiculous—and I laugh, I really do—next to all those living, breathing flowers.
Patrick Strickland is a Greece-based writer and journalist from Texas. His short stories have appeared at Porter House Review, Pithead Chapel, Five South, and The Broadkill Review, among others. He’s the author of three nonfiction books, including the forthcoming You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave (Melville House 2024).
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #46.
