“White Rabbit,” Celeste had explained to him once. “Y’know, like Alice chasing the rabbit down the hole and getting lost.”
Employees spring into action. Cashiers rush over from behind the counter to stand guard by the door, where the first manager has stopped a middle-aged woman and her son on their way out. “I’m sorry, ma’am, no one can leave just now. This should only take a few minutes.”
The cops stop short. Shoulders goes for his wallet, starts to say something, but Mustache grasps him with a firm hand. Shakes his head. Wrong place, wrong time to flash a badge.
Shoulders paces a small circle, seething, utilizing every ounce of self-control to keep from punching something, someone, anything.
Mustache turns to Jacob, that sadistic gleam back in his eyes.
Jacob is too busy describing his nonexistent son-and the balding, fussy old man he’d last seen talking to the boy near the Rare Book Room-to say anything to Mustache that would get him killed.
When the manager dashes off to share the description, Jacob leans toward Mustache. “Purple Room. On the far right after you get up the stairs. Up on the top shelf, you’ll find what you’re looking for. And maybe a sleeping homeless guy too.”
Mustache unfolds his arms, easing off his scowl a bit. “Think that’s it? You just walk away scot-free?”
“The kid’s gone-you’ll never catch him,” Jacob says, surprised to find he hopes it’s true. “And I’m not worth risking your badges. Just a bag man.”
Mustache scans Jacob’s face like he’s committing the details to memory. “Don’t be too sure,” he says. Then nods at his partner and they stalk away, Shoulders brushing past Jacob hard enough to knock him off balance. Jacob rights himself against the info desk, watches them take the steps to the Purple Room two at a time.
Jacob looks out the front doors and tells the manager standing guard, “Oh, there they are!” He points at the crowd of tourists milling outside-could be any of a half-dozen kids with their mothers. “Thank you so much,” he says, then calls, “Honey, over here!” as he blows past the manager and out the doors.
Thinking as he goes out: This really is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.
PART III. DESOLATION CITY
BURNSIDE FOREVER BY JUSTIN HOCKING
Burnside Skatepark
1) Fuck Hawaii.
2) First time I see her: she’s lying on a dirty-ass mattress, up in the parking lot above Burnside Skatepark, right in the place everyone goes to piss or shoot up or toss their empties or die. It’s the middle of the day, 2 p.m. And she’s on this mattress, sleeping with this sketchy-looking young black guy, which honestly you don’t see too often down here under the bridge, and her pink g-string’s hanging way out of her Dickies, which strikes me as weird too, because most homeless girls don’t wear g-strings. Or not pink ones, at least. She’s sleeping but I can tell she’s pretty. And young. And then me and this sketchy black guy, we’re staring at each other, his stare all full of emptiness and craziness and malice-all shit I stare back with in fucking spades. We’re staring at each other hard, and I think to myself, This is how wars start.
3) Things went okay over on the islands, for the first few months at least. I did what I do: drink, surf, skate, fight. It was the first and the last things that got me in trouble. And I guess the surfing too. They called me the Lumberjack over there, and at first I think they got a kick out of me, this big haole lumberjack motherfucker out in the lineup, fighting for waves with all the locals. What you hear about Hawaii is true: they’ll punch you in the face for stealing waves; they’ll do it right out in the water. But not me, not at first. They could see that I’d just been through some shit and I was over there to get away from it, just like half the other fucking Haoles on the island, but the kind of shit I’d been through was different and deeper and they could read it in my eyes and my beard and the way I’d take waves no one else would take, drop in high and late and still make it and generally just not give a fuck. Spiritual fuckers, the Hawaiians, from years of living between oceans and volcanoes. But still fuckers, nonetheless, from years of Haole lumberjack interlopers like me pissing them off, stealing their land and their waves, and the grudging respect they showed me at first wore off once I dropped in on the wrong people. Blood in the water: there was a lot of it.
4) This girl on the mattress, I don’t know what it was about her. She was too pretty and dressed too well to be homeless. She had dark black hair and pale skin and turquoise eyes.
5) Awhile back I worked at a summer camp, as a cook, and the kids liked me, more than they liked some of their counselors, because I was cool to them I guess, and I skated with them and shit. And told them dirty jokes. There was this one kid, redheaded and kind of round. Some of the other kids fucked with him, called him a fag and a kook. I spent my whole day off teaching him kickflips, and after that things got easier for him.
6) So after Hawaii and I were done with each other, I came back to Portland, picked up my van-the one Amber and I bought together for surf trips-and having no immediate place to live I parked it under the Burnside Bridge and ate beef jerky and blood oranges and grapefruits that I stole from the fruit wholesaler across the street. In the mornings I got up early to skate the park. I saw this kid do this thing in Hawaii once, before he went out into big surf. He dipped his hand in the ocean and then made the sign of the cross over his chest, all Jesus-style. So I took to doing that before paddling out, not because I believed in anything, but because it seemed right and good, and also because I’d seen Amber’s uncle do it at her funeral. I do it now before I skate too, and then I skate with a clear head, the whole park to myself, the city still damp and sleeping, and it’s like in Hawaii in the warm ocean water, the way it cleans you out, flushes out all the shit. Burnside can do that, but in a dirtier way.
That’s the thing about me: I’m trying. I am.
7) Manny got fucked up while I was gone.
“What the fuck happened to you?” I ask. We’re up in the crow’s nest at Burnside, drinking beers, heckling some Californian skater in full pads and a helmet, telling him to beat it. Manny’s face looks bad, real bad, with stitches around his eye and a burly dent in his forehead.
“We were downtown partying one night and we had some words with some hicks in a big lifted truck,” Manny says. “Guys from Gresham, for sure. Fucking hicks, you know? So we pulled up next to them at a stoplight, and I jumped up in the bed of their truck and started bouncing that shit up and down. Startled the shit out of them! And then they just fuck-ing took off, blew right through the red light, almost got fuck-ing bashed by an oncoming. They drove around like maniacs, taking hard turns, just to fuck with me. I thought for sure we were going to flip over and die, man. Scariest shit ever. So finally I just jumped out and rolled about fifteen times across the asphalt. Rolled myself right into the hospital,” he says, trying to laugh, but it makes me feel bad, because he’s fucked up bad and there’s something not right about him now, and it’s not like he’d ever been totally right, but still.
8) I wake up in the middle of the night because someone’s knocking on the van door. I look out and it’s the girl, the one from the mattress, and she’s out there shivering in the rain, and I can tell she needs something. The light is misty, chemical orange from the streetlamps up on the bridge.