once in a while, or you’re not really alive. That’s one thing I know.”
Her eyebrows pulsed as she smiled, as if she was worried and amused at once.
“My great aunt must really be alive then,” she said. “She gets pushed around in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank in a home in San Diego.”
“I don’t mean old people,” he said. “They don’t count.”
“What, then? Russian roulette type stuff?”
“No, that’s sick. One thing I like to do is come up here and climb out to the other side of the rail. I hold onto the bar, then I let go and fall backward and catch myself at the last minute.”
“No you don’t! When?”
“All the time. Once a day.”
As he placed a foot up on the railing, she pulled him down. “Stop it! Why would you do that?”
“I like to hold onto the rail one-handed and swing, looking up at the sky.”
“Alone? That’s kind of weird.”
“Martin and I come up here sometimes. I brought him up here. It was my idea. We also jump trains a lot.”
“Promise me you won’t do it anymore. Jump trains, okay, if they’re going slow, but don’t step outside the railing.”
“Have you ever read anybody’s mind?” he said. “My sister and I used to read each other’s. She could do it better than me. Ask me a question about your thoughts.”
“What’s my favorite color?”
“No, something about your family.”
“What’s my dad’s job?”
“Okay, I have to concentrate.” He touched his head with both hands for a moment. “Not sure what he does, exactly. Is it stressful? Does he drink a lot?”
A dark line appeared between her eyes.
“Nope—wrong,” she said. “He’s really nice. He’s a pretty happy person.”
“Who said he wasn’t?”
She leaned against the rail and squinted. She seemed to be scrutinizing the cars passing on the parkway one block up. “He’s highly successful. He’s a lawyer.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.
“God, there’s so many trashy cars in this town. It seems like everybody’s favorite car is a twenty-year-old Subaru.”
“I like people whose parents drink a lot. I don’t know why or anything—I just do.”
“He doesn’t, okay? Besides, it’s a weird thing to say, you like people whose parents drink a lot. It doesn’t even mean anything.”
“You’re right.”
“What time is it? I guess we’d better go.”
She opened the door and they walked back to the elevator. In the lobby, they went out the front door and tacked across the road, to a gravel lot across the street. Lyle picked up a rock and sailed it past the high red H on the sign in front of the hotel. “You see that? I threw it clean over the Hilton. Hey are you still mad? I only said that about your dad as a guess. I don’t know anything about him.”
“No, I’m not mad. Wait. I forgot my bike. Which way is my house? I’m turned around.”
“You can’t stay out a while?”
She looked up at the red H. “What else do you do, besides hang off of hotel railings?”
“Everything, anything. Steal booze. Run at night. I like to go around, see what I can see. Hit me somewhere—hit me in the stomach. I’m in great shape!”
“See what you can see, huh? No, I think I’ll go home.”
Her eyes were narrowed, as though with understanding. She went sullen, a very touchy girl. She crossed the street and he followed her, where she unlocked her bike at the side of the hotel. After walking two silent blocks, they entered the square of statues from the opposite side, across from where he had arrived six hours before. In the iron bathtub where Martin had plugged the drain, water covered the children’s waists. He imagined the iron children a few days from now, hair swirling about their heads.
He considered staying out, running town, but sleepiness moved in him. Maybe it was disappointment with the girl’s silence. His mom was getting off at the cannery at two, and he might try to catch a ride with her instead of walking to the apartment. At the boulevard Rosa got on her bike, ready to go on alone.
“You’re the one who peeked in our house,” she said. “Where’s my sister’s bike?”
“I’m meeting my mom across the river. I’m late. Why does everybody always blame me?”
“Maybe it’s because you do things.”
“What things?”
“You were the one, right? Tell me the truth or I won’t talk to you again.”
A stain on the sidewalk held his gaze. “Okay it was me, but I liked you and wanted to see where you lived.”
“Thanks for snooping around like some pervert homeless.”
When she peddled off, he turned and walked through the square.
3
He crossed the bridge toward the retaining wall of the bright cannery parking lot and heard the cry of night birds. He hunted them in the river fog, but saw none. Fast water punched a wide rock below and smoothed out beyond it, pushing downriver in expanding circles and then into a black shadow of trees. The motion pulled at him, and he ran across the bridge, then climbed a short staircase to the parking lot. The front transoms of the cannery, running along each floor, looked like rows of glowing gun ports on a ship made of brick.
His mom’s truck was parked at the edge of the raised lot, facing a short concrete wall and the river below. He got in and held the wheel. His eyes clung to the water. Soon a train sounded and the gates lowered at the bridge—a calamity of horns and bells—and it pulsed invisibly below the lot, the pavement trembling. Red shapes of memory bloomed in his mind. He dismantled those pictures but they rushed to form again and he prayed his mom would come soon. Now and then when he was alone, memories jostled loose in him in a way he didn’t like.
It was after youth group one day in Marshal and he had walked the mile of highway toward Seven Devils Road where his family lived. Frost furrowed the canyon tops. The high crag that marked his turnoff came into view, and he saw Lila weaving toward him on the road, her arms swinging loosely and bouncing off of her body. She wore a white shirt gone gray. The wide collar displayed sores on the tops of her breasts, purple in the cold like those on her face and arms. As she passed him, she clenched her teeth, her head shaking as if with palsy. “You’re going to town looking like that?” he said. “Go home and get your hat
