Marian Palaia - Given World

“While I make coffee,” he says.

“Of course.” She looks into Slim’s eyes. She sees they are changing color. She thinks they may be turning green. Or maybe it is a reflection, a trick of the light. He holds a tiny hand up for her hair. She leans her head down so he can reach it. So he can hold on.

I truly believed I was flying under the radar — figured I was inconspicuous or at least camouflaged — but Primo told me that was ridiculous: I was impossible to miss. It was the car, he said, beat up in its massively original way. He said he dug the duct-taped slashes in the rag top, the dope Bondo work around the wheel wells, and what was probably the most fucked-up paint job he had ever seen on a vehicle a person could actually drive. He said it looked like something some Mission cholo might be commandeering. A Mission cholo like him.

“Yeah, okay, so what.” His response when I pointed that small detail out, later, when I knew what the word meant. Even so, he said, even he would not have thought that many different shades of black were possible.

“I knew it ran though,” he said, “because you kept moving it.”

It’s true. I did, but I always stayed within a few blocks of the ocean, because the ocean was why I had gone to California in the first place. Primo said he noticed the Montana plates right away, but not me, the girl sleeping in the backseat.

“If I had, I would have checked on you sooner, to see if you was okay.”

“I was okay,” I said.

He said, “Sure you was.”

Once he found me, it didn’t take too long for me to start imagining how we’d tell the story later on, together, to whoever asked how we’d met, as surely people would want to know. I knew, even before anything like that happened, what I would say: I’d say everything was just peachy in my world; that it was Primo who was the lucky one, the one who needed finding.

I was awake, still wearing my pajamas, when he rolled up in his navy-blue San Francisco Chronicle truck, got out, and tapped on my window. It was about four, and I was in my sleeping bag in the back, reading The Old Man and the Sea by flashlight. I turned it off, but with the streetlamps we could still, if just, see each other. I didn’t think he looked at all dangerous or deranged, and was obviously working, unless he had stolen the truck, which seemed unlikely. I trusted, at any rate, that he wasn’t skulking around at that hour in search of young girls to prey on, because other than me, I figured no one else was out. After he tapped on the window, he stood waiting, as if he had all day and nowhere in particular to be. I saw him checking out the peeling duct tape that more or less held the top of the car together and, also more or less, kept the rain out, which was good, since there had been quite a lot of it since I’d gotten to town.

It was September, and I was about to turn nineteen. I was almost a grown-up. A nearly broke one. Also really hungry, alone, and beginning to wonder how long I could live in my car. And if the sun was ever going to come up or out again. Because even when it wasn’t raining, the fog made it feel like it was. I had thought California was supposed to be a sunny place. Seemed like that’s what all the fuss was about. Come visit. Come see the ocean and the palm trees and the Sun . Ha.

I leaned forward and rolled down the back window a few inches. Primo crouched slightly to peer in, filling the window and then some. He was not very tall, but he was plenty wide, like he was wearing shoulder pads, and not just on his shoulders. He didn’t appear to be fat, though, just solid, like a wall of Mexican. His dark hair was a little long, and messy, as if he’d brushed it with his pillow. Of course mine looked pretty much the same, though it was brown and not black, and there was a lot more of it.

“Hey there,” he said, awfully chipper for four in the morning. “How’s tricks?”

“Pardon?”

“How’s life? You okay in there?”

I glanced around the car, thinking what was obvious to some might not be so obvious to some others. “Could be worse,” I said.

“That’s good.” He nodded approvingly, as if that was the answer he’d been expecting. “I’m Primo,” he said. “Usually.” He brought his hand up, but the window was in the way, so he dropped it back down to his side again, reluctantly, or so it seemed.

“Hi,” I said. I didn’t know what sort of etiquette was called for, or what he meant by “usually,” or whether Primo was a name or a condition or what. He rescued me, for a minute, from having to work it out.

“What do they call you?” he asked.

“What does who call me?”

“Whoever. Friends? Family? I mean what’s your name?”

“Tinker Bell.” I didn’t know why. It just appeared, like all the other names I’d been given or had made up, Tinker Bell not among them. Mick had called me Cupcake, or Smartass, or Punk, and Darrell had called me Ginger, after Ginger Rogers, but that was different. That was the past.

I could see him thinking hard, squinching up his forehead. “Peter Pan,” he said, as if someone had asked him a really hard question and he had, against all odds, come up with the answer. “Right? Never-never land?”

“Right.”

He was clearly relieved. “Well, hey there, then, Tinker Bell. Me, I’m still Primo. Almost always.”

“Nice to meet you.” I was intrigued, at the very least, to meet someone else whose identity might not be carved in stone.

He looked about thirty, maybe thirty-five; it was hard to tell. He asked if anyone ever called me T.B. Because sometimes people called him T.C. Because his given name was Tony, and his last name was Castaneda.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “T.B. stands for tuberculosis.”

A baffled expression came and went. “Oh, right. That wouldn’t be so good. Would it?”

“No. Not really.”

“Do they even have that anymore?”

“Tuberculosis?”

“Yeah. That.”

“I’m pretty sure they do. In some places, anyway.” I thought about the rez; thought I remembered hearing something about TB there. But it was hazy, just a flicker. Something Darrell had said? Something from a history book? Maybe cholera or yellow fever. The plague. Whatever it was, I was sure it was something special. Some lovely keepsake to remember white people by. Darrell hadn’t held any of it against me, though, not like some. He’d actually loved me, in a way; I could see that, from this distance, even though he’d never said it in so many words. Maybe because I wouldn’t let him.

One of Primo’s eyes looked strange, and it didn’t follow the other one as he took in the arrangement of my living quarters. What little there was to take in. A small cooler in the front passenger seat. Six or seven books stacked on the floor in back. My day clothes — jeans and a red sweatshirt with a wolf design — folded on top of the cooler. A jug of water and a thermos. Remnants of last night’s dinner: cheese and peanut butter crackers. An open Buck knife on top of the books. The rest of my life, what there was of it, was in the trunk.

I’d been dining on 7-Eleven fare, bathing in gas station restrooms, couldn’t remember the last time I’d properly washed my hair, but there was a dim memory of a shower at a truck stop in Nevada. I hoped I didn’t appear as animal-like as I was starting to feel.

“Home sweet home?” Primo asked.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Nice,” he said. I didn’t think he was being sarcastic. He sounded, truly, as if he liked what he saw, as if he could see living there, or in a place just like it.

He glanced again at the cooler. “You got plenty of food in there?” My stomach growled, and I wondered if he heard.