Ben Kujawski

On the hook… They used to always be on the hook under the steps… They weren’t… She felt around in the dirt, maybe they’d fallen off… Nothing… Every time she reached under those sun damaged wooden steps she thought there would be a snake or a spider waiting there to bite her and that her hand would need to be amputated as a result. Then she’d be a loser with one hand. She rolled backwards off her knees and onto her ass, sitting in the dirt and looking up at the grey aluminum door to the trailer with its dirty circular window. The stars were bright and clear, the only interference coming from the glow of Indio toward the horizon. A warm wind wafted in a familiar smell reminiscent of old soup and death.

The dirt bike was leaned against the aluminum sided trailer softly illuminated by the orange glow of a distant porch light. The kickstand had broken off years ago. It was a green Kawasaki KX250 with a bluish-purplish seat. The logo on the seat was partially worn away so that it now read “wasaki”. A brown piece of foam bulged out of one of the ripped corners. She walked over, unscrewed the cap and looked into the gas tank. Unable to see anything she rocked it and could hear the gasoline sloshing around.

Randy O’ Conley lived here. A former Marine. A lot of veterans lived around here. Well, not a lot because realistically nobody lived around here. Her Dad was a veteran too, Army. Randy had a head that looked like a red water balloon with a salt and pepper mustache taped on it but a body that was very fit and young looking. All the older women used to joke about who was gonna screw Randy because he had the body of a 20 year old. All Randy did was work out and watch cop shows like NYPD Blue, he was never married and you never saw him with a woman. He always went away during the summer. Nobody knew where to. But a lot of people left during the summer. It was more of a mystery to her why some people actually stayed, with the temperature constantly hovering around 100 degrees day and night. Not to mention the disgusting salty humidity and the smell. She hated it and she hated the dirty, disgusting, polluted lake it came from. As a child she used to swim in it, but not anymore. She often wondered what kind of cancers that it would cause her later in life. The old people still swam in it, but they were stupid and didn’t know any better.

One of the windows at the end of the trailer had been left cracked open. She had enough Steel Reserve in her to decide to break in, thinking for certain the keys were inside. Using the dirt bike as a step, she elevated herself up to the window. There was a small hole in the screen which she stuck her fingers through and ripped open, nearly losing her balance in the process. She scraped her body uncomfortably across the harsh aluminum window sill and slid onto the kitchen table which was just inside. As she caught her breath she looked around, her feet still protruding from the ripped screen. Randy’s trailer was always very tidy even if it was a bit run down. Grabbing the edge of the table she pulled herself all the way in, elbowing a few neatly piled hang gliding magazines off the table. A large Marine Corps flag was stretched across the wall next to the table. There was an enormous flat screen probably 40 years newer than anything else in the trailer mounted across from Randy’s single bed which he always made like he was still in the Corps.

She’d slept in that bed many times. Randy had a nephew, Jacky. He was five years older than her and she thought he was gorgeous. She loved his thighs. He was a high school soccer player and he used to come out during the summer when Randy would leave town to watch the cabin. Him and his friend Ty. Ty was an annoying fat kid with red hair and an obnoxious hoarse-throated laugh. When Jacky and her would fuck they would make Ty sleep outside in this shitty old army tent that Randy kept in the closet. They always left the trailer a mess and Randy would chew out Jacky when he got back. He’d tell Jacky he was lucky he was smart enough to go to college because if he had to join the Corps. they’d rip him a new asshole. Jacky didn’t come around here anymore. Not because of his Uncle, they actually got along most of the time. She thought Jacky probably just got old enough to where he realized that the Salton sea was a toxic shit hole and it wasn’t cool to spend your summers there.

When he stopped coming she tried to call him. She’d call multiple times a day. He usually never came to the phone or he would speak very briefly and unaffectionately. She began to make excuses for him as to why he wouldn’t come to see her, telling herself that he was busy with school, he was just stressed out, or after he graduated he’d come back for her. She dreamed of getting on the dirt bike and riding to Riverside where he lived to. So far she’d never had the guts to do it and her dream was beginning to fade. Except for the times when she got really drunk by herself late at night.

He was her first boyfriend and her first fuck. After he stopped coming around she’d hooked up with a few losers that hung out at Slab City. That’s where Jacky and her would ride the dirt bike. No one gave a shit out there. One of those losers almost got her addicted to heroin, she didn’t go there anymore. Sometimes she went and hung around Indio while Coachella was going on if she was feeling horny or lonely or to run up some bro’s bar tab.

Lying prone on top of the table for a moment, her arms dangling off the edge,  she stared down the length of the trailer. She half expected to see someone look back at her. But the trailer was dark, hanging in time until its proprietor returned. That was except from everything she was fucking up in her immediate vicinity. She started to prop herself up. There was a loud crack from somewhere below the table. She briefly tried to look at the underside for what it was that had broken until she decided that ultimately she didn’t give a shit.

Lowering herself off the table in some sort of crumpled push up manuever she bashed her knee into the checkerboard linoleum floor and screamed, “motherfucker!” Despite the pain she quickly jumped upwards, steadying herself on the counter. The room spun for a moment.  She flicked on a small antique lamp which sat on the countertop, nearly swatting it from its perch. The amber colored light it cast wasn’t enough to illuminate the trailer. It faded toward the opposite ending giving the trailer the feeling of a very evil tunnel.

She went for the drawers in the kitchen first. Dark brown heavily lacquered wooden drawers underneath a green formica countertop with aluminum trim. The salt in the air attacked everything here, inside and out. Everything you touched had a stickiness to it. On top of that, everything in the trailer was coated in decades of cigarette smoke. But that smell was nostalgic to her, it reminded her of Jacky and of good things. Salt and sweat and cigarette smoke. It also helped mask the smell of a million dead Tilapia which permeated everything within twenty miles of the Salton Sea.

She pulled the first drawer open too quickly, expecting it to be longer, and removed it entirely from its sheath. It dropped away from the counter and its contents fell all over the floor. The drawer had contained a lot of rubber bands, paper clips, coupons and other accoutrement that was of no use to her. She briefly kicked through it before removing the next drawer. This time she placed it on top of the counter to sort through. It was full of yellow legal pads, phone numbers carefully imprinted in Randy’s neatly laser-like handwriting. She wished she could write like that but she felt she wrote more like a kindergartener who was holding the pen with their mouth. Flipping the drawer over she dumped all it into the sink, a procedure she followed for every remaining drawer in the kitchen.

The final drawer contained several identical photo albums, bound in textured maroon vinyl embossed with a gold border. The first two were contained photos of Randy on vacation; hangliding, riding in hot air balloons, and tanning his robust torso next to a million different resort swimming pools. She scanned them quickly and dropped them into the sink. As she opened the next one she slowed, carefully inspecting the photos. These were from around the Salton Sea, her parents were in some. One set of pictures was taken with a flash inside of a bar called Pat’s. Everyone in the pictures looked like some sort of shocked, underground, Hawaiian shirt wearing vampire, caught off guard by the flash. She basically grew up in that place. Her parents would go there every night, she ate there almost every night. Once she decided she was going to be vegetarian when she was thirteen. She ate peanut butter and jelly for lunch and onion rings with ketchup from Pat’s for dinner almost every day for three months until she decided that her constant stomach aches and intermittent diarrhea weren’t worth saving a few animal lives. There were photos of other things too. Her parents and their friends outside by the water, barbecuing, other stuff like that.

Pulling the photos from their sleeves she began to look at them closer. Her parents looked young in the pictures, younger than they do now anyway, probably in their 40s. She saw herself in a picture when she was about 5. In the picture she was standing outside in a dirt lot in the blaring sun with a tutu on and no shirt. Her hair was almost blonde then -it was blonde now too but the roots were growing back in. This was a year after they moved there. Right after her Dad got his big government check for having been sprayed with agent orange in Vietnam. She tried not to think about what the little girl in the photo would think of her now.

With the extracted photos now layering the entire counter top, she discovered one last photo album at the bottom. It was bound in a black velvety material with black velvety string to hold it closed. She couldn’t untie the string so she just ripped it off. Inside was a number of pictures of Randy in a purple robe with a metallic purple cylinder shaped hat on his head. She was too confused to laugh. Around him were other middle aged men wearing similar outfits in different colors. They were standing around a campfire, all sharing a very serious wide eyed look like they were trying really hard to shoot lasers out of their eyeballs. She shuffled through the pictures until she got to some more pictures where the men no longer had the robes on but instead had just the hats, their naked bodies covered in body paint and foreign looking symbols. She thought she was going to throw up for a moment and she did. Everything in the sink was soon covered in vomit comprised of her mother’s half digested “cheeseburger macaroni” dinner and Spitz sunflower seeds. When her stomach had finished purging itself she turned the sink on and left it running.

She sat down on a yellow vinyl cushioned chair which stuck out awkwardly into the walkway of the trailer.  The vinyl groaned while she slid into it, extending her legs straight out in front and contorting her neck to rest in the crook of its cushions.  The chair directed her attention to a glass cabinet containing a half empty bottle of Evan Williams and and an unopened bottle of Jose Cuervo. She went for the Jose Cuervo straight from the bottle. Her brother used to get that shit when he was still living out there. Then he moved to LA like the rest of her siblings. Allie and John, the two oldest lived in LA and Mickey had joined them. They were all half siblings but Mickey was the youngest of the group and the most fun. Their mother was a junkie and none of them talked to her. The older of the half siblings she hardly knew. They were always nice to her and offered to let her stay with them in LA but her mom told her that those were empty promises.

She didn’t really want to go to LA anyway. Maybe she’d go to Riverside. That’s where Jacky lived. She could be like some sort of reverse knight in shining armor arriving to pick him up on the Kawasaki. She drank half the bottle and passed out.

*****

It was now 3am and she woke up. She had to piss. She opened the front door to the trailer and shakily walked down the steps, pulled her pants down and squatting against the edge of the bottom step. As she was relieving herself she said, “fuck,” because for some reason she didn’t think to use the bathroom in the trailer. Again she said, “fuck,” because when she realized this she stood up a little and accidentally pissed a little on the back of her jeans. The dirtbike stared at her mockingly as she urinated. She hated it. She hated Jacky too. If she had the keys right now she’d go there and smack him in the face for abandoning her. She’d run his ass over with it. She pictured herself doing a burnout on his gorgeous head of thick black hair and spraying his brains all over the place. He didn’t give a fuck what happened to her. He probably just talked about her like she was just some chick he used to fuck that lived next to a stinking rotten puddle of pollution full of dead fish and pelicans.

There was a rock on the ground, she threw it at the dirtbike, missing and hitting the side of the trailer. That’s when she saw the brass colored keys dangling from the killswitch on the side of the bike. Pulling her pants up she shuffled over to the dirtbike. Randy had wired the switch on himself when his Oldsmobile was on the fritz. He had decided to make the bike street-legal and therefore his primary mode of transportation. But Randy got a new car when the government finally paid him out for also being sprayed with agent orange while he was in the Vientam. She stumbled over to the bike, stood it upright, and straddled it. She folded her torso downward toward the killswitch. It was connected to the bike now only by the wires, levitating away from the chassis. She grabbed the switch in one hand to steady it and she grabbed the key with the other. It wouldn’t budge. She put her strength behind it. The key snapped. The fucking salt. It broke down everything. The key was frozen in there.

She let out a guttural drunken yell as she tried to frantically turn the broken piece still lodged in the switch with her finger tips. She tore them up. Blood got all over her hand and all over the killswitch. Sitting up she lost her balance. The bike tipped over, tossing her to the ground and landing on top of her left ankle. It hurt bad.  She began to sob, resting the side of her face on the sand. Her frustration rose again and she pulled her ankle out from under the bike and lay down on her back. Her chest heaved as she panted with exhaustion and emotion. Letting out another yell, she awkwardly kicked the bike from her supine position. The sand was warm and the night air was cool, she looked up at the stars through the water in her eyes. Eventually she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

*****

Harsh white light beamed against her eyelids. The morning sun was cooking her skin, she could smell it.  Opening her eyes she saw a cormorant sitting above her in a gnarled dead tree, preening itself. It stopped every now and then to let out a call which sounded more like the dusty cough of an old man. As she sat up, the bird stopped to look at her. The ugly seabird thought to itself that she looked too pathetic to be a threat and continued its process, almost feeling bad for her. A throbbing headache quickly erupted in her skull. She rolled over onto her knees, trying to stand up, her ankle was fucked. Managing to crawl over to Randy’s outdoor workout bench she stiffly lifted herself onto it and sat there for a moment.

A menagerie of pains coursed through her body and mind. She thought she would die right there. After fifteen minutes of sitting there she stuck her hurt leg out straight like a crutch and hoisted her weight onto it. Limping around in a circle she eventually made her way back to the trailer and to look inside. She didn’t have the energy to react, so she just closed the door and decided to deal with it later. The dirt bike lay on its side. Piece of shit. She began to limp off toward her parent’s house. Not knowing what time it was, she looked at the sun and was fairly certain she was late for work. When she thought of the date shakes she’d be serving all day, she wanted to throw up again, but she didn’t. Instead she limped back toward her parent’s manufactured home, remembering through her splitting headache that today was payday.