Grace Krilanovich - The Orange Eats Creeps

“My mind is a machine gun, my body is the bullets, and the audience is the target!” —

“My lifestyle pretty much consists of what you see: I got a pair of pants, one jacket, a shirt; whatever can fit into a paper bag. I’m the type of person who has to be able to get out of town quick,” one said.

“I got a wild soul that’s too confined in this life,” another said. The fat motherfucker lay down and sang the next three songs in a semi-conscious state.

Seth and I left and went to a nearby convenience store. “What would happen if a girl tried to cut herself onstage?”

“The crowd would go crazy — they would try to stop her.”

We walk outside to where it had started to rain. What if she killed herself on stage?

We can no longer pass over bridges, only under them. The clerk behind the register was obviously wearing a wig and a large fake beard. I guess if you’re on the run you still have to make a paycheck.

We tried to rob him. He grew frustrated and threw down his disguise. “We’re not your enemies — we’re just like you! I don’t give a shit about this place. I’m just as predisposed to pulling some kind of crap like this on my own. And I do! I don’t give a fuck. I tell my friends to pull up to the back and say ‘Load it up with whatever the fuck you want.’ Just the other day I stole from the 7-Eleven up on Lancaster. Don’t give a fuck!”

“Fuck you, man. Just keep talking. You hate me and I hate you.”

Poised, coffee in hand. The world at large can go fuck itself … coffee fills my mind with thoughts of escape. A scattering of dead leaves loosened their way to the ground with the memory of one day last fall as I sat out in front of a flattened patch of ivy and hay where our trailer used to be hitched on the outskirts of Eugene, deep in the forest. I had already lived there with Seth for a few months, surviving off crumpled tins of white noodles, doggy bags he brought me from the restaurant. It seemed like whenever I came back home I would find him fucking around with the trailer — trying to patch holes or hook up some hose or other — until that one day when I walked up and the trailer was just gone. All I came upon was some vaguely reminiscent place in the woods. Some dude several yards up the gravel road approaching me with a huge sleepy hound dog on a chain, yelling at me to get away and then starting to chase me. I ran away with one last noodle in my mouth like a bird. The next thing I recalled was waking up in a strange man’s bed, maybe in the morning, with that smell that had taken over my life, like coffee burning on the stove. A sudden realization from far away shook me even more. From the window I watched a small, sharp-jointed day laborer pick a spot in front of Big Creek Lumber. I heard a man stirring and waking up next to me, nightmares causing his jerky fitfulness. I could dream his dream too, if I chose, complete with his perspective on the kids he knew who were fed up with the county system, kids in tight, smelly jeans and monkey boots who were delivered to his house on a weekly basis. One kid came back early in the morning with bruises from this killing. To our surprise there would be an article on him in the newspaper, a story about some guy who picked him up for work but actually took him up to live with the old dude’s secret family, a bunch of children fending for themselves up in the hills. But before the cops knew the whole story they had found a body at a storage facility next to the freeway. The trucker, who had lay there without help for so long he died of his wounds. Later the kids stupidly tried to beat their way through a room of caseworkers. They had got a pretty fucked idea of what they were up against so all anyone would admit to was the story about one kid throwing a handful of gravel in a guy’s face and the rest of them running for it.

It was as if Angel Father had visited me in the night with a reminder of my role that left me feeling hot, swollen with the crawling nausea of an all-over mosquito bite. I feared I would soon begin to rot. That spurred me on, all right.

Early one morning I sat at the edge of a truck bed in a maintenance yard in some green camo sunglasses I got at a Halloween store. Seth said stop clomping your feet against the bumper, “It’s making me crazy.” Instead we walked on the train tracks leaving a trail of beer cans and sweaty footprints. I sat outside and smoked while Seth bought a car for fifty dollars at a police auction. We drove back to the camp in this piece of shit Chevy Celebrity. He kept saying 50 bucks, 50 bucks, and all this bullshit about it only having 48,000 miles on it despite it being 18 years old. Nobody’s fuckin buying it but at the same time most were slowly crawling inside to go to sleep.

Rummaging around in the trunk Seth clicked into his Bird Mind. This whole car thing has made him more Bird than usual. He could be overwhelmed but also fuckin ruffled like an uptight parakeet. It starts when he gets a crazy gleam in his eye, they half-close like he’s going to sleep but instead he goes into a neurotic trance. That night while sitting on the hood of the car Seth pointed to his chest, “You can get away with anything if you’re wearing an apron.” He was very convincing because “it’s a proven fact,” people wearing aprons of regulation colors like red, blue, or green are beyond suspicion when walking up to a store, for example, and taking off with a couple plants or a case of water bottles. “Think about it: go to an elementary school, hang around the hallways in your apron. Did anybody care? Go to a motel, take all the brochures from the front desk, nod to the office person and leave. If there’s trouble, point to the apron and bail. See a golf cart? Jump in cuz you’re wearing an apron. Go to a busy intersection, put black bags over the parking meters, paint the curb white — no one will stop you cuz you’re wearing an apron.” He ran up to the Safeway entrance and came back with armfuls of flowering plants. He put some in the back seat of the Celebrity, others he just left on the hood. It was a repossessed car, in police storage for 16 years. The only residue of humanity was a heavy metal tape I found in the glove box. We drove it for three days then the alternator went. We left it in the Safeway parking lot after it wouldn’t start again and I use it to crash in when I’m tired.

Our town is doomed. We’re just hanging out waiting till it turns into the next thing, then we’ll go to sleep. Just build your shit around us, we’ll only go out at night anyway… The town slipped in and out of consciousness, depending on where you went. All the little twigs scraped at the ground like lace fans spread at the sun.

I was down wading around in the creek washing my dishes when a lady ghost walked around the corner of some musky foliage, a kind of rough police sketch version of Kim, effervescent and fibrous, like the most exquisite Christmas tinsel. She appeared to walk down to the creek to meet me but then she fell into a hole, or fissure, into some kind of unexplained absence in front of me. It could have been that she stooped down into this hiding place on purpose — to be looked for, discovered — but she never emerged, striking the coyness of that kind of gesture. By the time I got back to the trailer a neighbor cat had stationed itself on a rough-hewn piece of scrap wood next to the door, sitting upright in that wedge-like way on a section of beam the size of a suitcase, waiting for me, staring straight ahead like a sentry. I picked it up and put it on the ground in front of me because something about the tidiness of that stance bothered me. With low broken squeaks the kitty cat passed itself back and forth across my bare legs, its tail sticking to the cold, wet skin. I had a feeling that Kim once had occupied my trailer, hanging thick and low like propane hemmed in by the bowed enamel walls. It’s a small town, so there’s the coincidental inevitability of that, but then again I just always knew she had lived there before me. I felt her resting her tired bones here, in my bed, a toxic plume of smoke that comforted me a great deal. The air swirling around above me while I slept spoke to the dreadful circumstances surrounding her disappearance. I read her all over that small space as there had been one night months ago when her man hoisted her out of the tiny shower stall and, in one sweeping motion that spoke to the concentrated size and locus of energy of their trailer, carried her to the converted bed. He set her down still damp on the sheets and she immediately fused with every drop that remained. Here every pore was sealed, her body swollen with moisture, but he found one at the center of her being and began working it with his cock until it defined a furrow, then sank into an ecstatic inroad and he too fused with the girl, being satisfied to simply hold himself suspended in this pore — afraid he might dissolve at once completely into her, her force was so great. Her spell… how sticky and elusive at times like these, when she was neither awake nor asleep but in some otherworldly place of toxic splendor he’d never know, being left to deduce its mystery from the slight, forceful sounds she made as he prodded at her site of controversy… I was told that while I was passed out, Seth, Knowles, and Josh carried me over to a trough in the ground at the edge of a junkyard and placed me next to a bloodied bus driver who was also passed out. I unfolded myself from the mazelike dream, waking with a shallow pulse crossing my forehead, eclipsing my view. The rest were several feet off drinking and screwing around. They turned and each knelt down to where the bus driver was lying unconscious and sucked a hole in his neck; but instead of blood, Robitussin came out. After they had their fill Seth waltzed over to me in the fog and kissed me but instead of love, Robitussin came out. Knowles, Murph, and Josh laced their hands together and hoisted the bus driver up onto an awning, out of sight, but the force of his lame twitching caused his body to fall down and roll off into an embankment by the freeway. The rain, coming down even harder now, begins to eat away at these remains, sealing the ports where they had sucked, filling and widening into gaping craters of fluid. I stood up some hours later and found Josh lolling around on the sidewalk, but when I went to help him stand up my foot went into a patch of mud and matted hair and I couldn’t wrest it free. I bent low to scoop away the obstacle but I fell in the process and soon discovered I was under a series of beams, in a basement perhaps, stacked with sacks of flour. I tried to stand but had worked my way only deeper and deeper into the pile. I pushed through the cardboard wall and then crawled from a door at the end of the hallway out into a lot behind the shopping center where the others had reconvened. I couldn’t tell if I was screaming it or miming it but I recall asking if they had bothered to look for me while I was gone before picking a fight with one of them — Was it Knowles? — for “trying to unbutton my shirt without my say-so,” but instead I only clawed lamely at his face. I noticed a half-eaten bag of chips on the ground and when I stooped down to pick it up it appeared to emit a low hushed tone like a shell. I gradually became aware of blood and flecks of skin under my fingernails Knowles, damn it, I’m sorry but when I turned around he was cowered over in a fit of sobbing and screaming. Suddenly, one by one, tiny bloody scratches popped up on my skin all over, as if carved out from the inside. I clasped a hand to each in turn, but more crept up in shiny black beads in its wake. Devour him back Kim sobs, and I’m wrenched awake. I open my eyes in the afternoon. It’s hot, which gives me the grey brain of a hangover. I see that the cat’s been sneaking around under the stairs because it came back with dust balls on its eyebrow whiskers. All these boys with their handmade clothes! Why they insisted on sewing their own pants I’d never know. They zipped everything up so tight — everything was sutured to their bodies, collars and cuffs sealed against the cold night. They locked everything up, packed themselves away, buckled up their cocks where only they could unlock. They mended their boots with tape, as boys like them had always done. They sealed the seam between their boots and the hem of their pants. Nothing’s going to hang over and snag on some piece of razor-wire or chain link fence. No guard dog is going to hook his claw in there… Mysterious pants-making guys, these forest soldiers — male and a couple of female ones too — with shanks hidden all up and down their bodies. Always sitting low and close to the ground, always crouching down below the windows of supermarkets or 7-Elevens or diners. Their freckles and clear eyelashes made them even more exotic, like red warriors — fetish objects who breathed and stole. Their utility bodies hid blades that came out of nowhere. They could fold their bodies into impossible shapes to fit up into the crevices they’d staked out in a squat, where they lived on bags of chips they’d stapled to the wall, on soup made of pond water and lily pads. Others slept all folded around each other in a nest of ground-scored clothes and dreamed one collective dream. Morning came and I found them once again perching on low items of refuse, on a towel or a pizza box. Their hands in paper bags or dipping into a cupped palm a few sunflower seeds; sitting on their boots staring at the sun through a crack in the clouds — wondering if it was going to come out today. Sniffing at the air. Sweat smearing like a dark logo down the fronts of their shirts — the only logos in the camp… I surfaced at a senior center pancake breakfast where the server-to-guest ratio was wildly in my favor. It was basically five grandmas waiting on me, all poking at my plate, pressuring me into finishing the first pile of grilled dough so they could heap it on all over again. Meanwhile one played the piano in the corner and others circulated around with trays of Dixie cups filled with colorful old-people juices: tomato, grapefruit, pineapple… Looking outside chemical-smeared glass I peered out into the street at some vagrants. They didn’t see me watching them the whole time. The opposite is looking at old photographs. I always thought old pictures of pets are some of the strangest things. Long dead animals appear oddly tainted by time, maybe because they’re so set aside from it. It’s the unspeakable pull of those glassy eyes, that jolt between two worlds so familiar with the pin-prick of only half recognition. I wondered about old pets and their manners, how their dispositions had been shaped by the sensibilities of the day. My mind wrestled with the image of pioneers flogging their animals but I knew this couldn’t really be all there was to it, and tried to shake it clear.