The Bewildered. Peter Rock
the Burnside Bridge, closer to the shadows beneath it, past loading docks with their metal doors pulled down, red and blue squares against the lighter concrete. Abandoned streetcar tracks lined the asphalt; she stepped over them. A wheelchair was parked halfway under one dock, and someone slept on an old mattress under there, the dirty soles of his bare feet showing. She passed quietly, so as not to disturb him.
The lions overhead looked a little more like bears, high on the Towne Storage building. Natalie walked with, she carried Miss November, Patti McGuire, who stands in a fantasy Midwestern diner with all her dress’s buttons undone, leaning against the jukebox, her unbelievable supple flesh all there for you, her stare a challenge. Patti loves CB radios; she exudes heat. And rubbing against her, paper to paper, is peroxided Miss May, in high snakeskin boots, one zipper already slipping, her bare ass pressing against the cold metal coin dispenser of a pinball machine, her nipples another set of startled eyes. And Deborah Borkman, Miss July, wearing knee-high striped socks and nothing else as she sets up a tent. Her body is dark and taut and thin, her hair blown back; her hands hold a thick rope that mysteriously hangs from above, as if she might climb straight to Heaven, where she belongs. Bathrooms, game rooms and barns—these girls have bodies, they want to show them off, and there often seems to be a rope nearby. Looping, stretched taut, or in the background; incidental, yet a continual possibility; coiled, as if holding electricity.
Natalie eased a hand into the pocket, felt the pages, the photographs, the girls. All this was like setting a trapline, with bait that could be blown away, burned up, lost. Only she was not trying to catch anything, anyone—was she? She was only trying to stay connected to a thrill, to cast one forward, to provide for someone what she’d once had.
A few deliveries were already being made. It was fruit mostly, down here. She approached a row of parked semitrailers, Pacific Coast Fruit Company painted on their sides. Here, she slowed; she bent down. She reached into her jacket pocket and unfolded part of a centerfold, glimpsed only the red and black wool blanket, the canvas tent, and recognized it. The air smelled sweet, of rotten, fermenting fruit. She folded the already stiff paper, wedged it under the thick, black rubber of a tire, where the flash of skin would catch in the corner of someone’s eye, reel them in.
Natalie stepped into the shadow, out of the rain, the blackened underside of the Burnside Bridge above her. Beneath the echoing roar of the traffic, she heard a strange sound. A solid, whirring hiss. It came, and it went. She paused, and cocked her ear. It was on her right, where a low wall stretched, its concrete spray-painted with hundreds of white skulls, solid, as if piled atop one another. And then the sound returned, swooped closer.
Suddenly, a head, a young girl’s head slid along the top of the wall, her pale face intent, her long hair pulled back; the girl stared straight ahead, fiercely anticipating and yet calm, her head sliding from right to left, then gone, the sound fading.
Startled, Natalie stepped closer to the wall. She stretched and looked over: the girl was on a skateboard, rolling across smooth curves of concrete, carving up the walls, hands out, knees and elbows flexing, her wake almost visible in the morning shadows. The girl shot back up the steep slope of the near wall; the rails of the board slid along the top edge and she was gone again, her face hovering there for a split second between forward and backward, transfixed and looking into the next move, her bright eyes not even seeing Natalie.
Above, on the bridge’s dark stanchions, a sign said no alcohol was allowed at the skatepark. No camping, no vandalism, no abusive behavior. over all, BE A GOOD NEIGHBOR. While the sign said no graffiti, there were the skulls and, across where the tall wall rose—a hundred feet distant, where the bridge angled down—there were red and yellow flames, the silhouettes of the damned. A hooded Grim Reaper loomed in the foreground, his scythe twenty feet long.
The girl skated toward Natalie, then dropped into a tight, sunken, perfectly round bowl—its mouth twenty feet across—and circled quickly inside it, her feet as high as her head, her body parallel to the bottom; her face stared up, expressionless, her ponytail straight out, rigid, like the hand of a clock inside that round white space.
Natalie leaned in, wanting to be closer. Up near the Reaper, near the broken concrete atop the wall, she saw a space under the bridge, a path leading to it. A space where a person might stand and look down, and have a better view. The low walls at the corners had chain-link fence along the top, bent back here and there. She walked around, past dark scrawls where graffiti had been painted over, past more skulls, past the word FEAR in tall white letters. She scrabbled up the loose dirt and gravel, the broken-down concrete, and stood with her head near the bridge’s blackened underside.
The exhaust fumes were stronger, mixed with the ashes of campfires long gone out, and the traffic’s rattle and roar muted the sound of the girl’s wheels below. The gray of the concrete was smooth, as if burnished, the color of an elephant’s hide. The girl now balanced on one leg, pushed hard with the other for more speed, her shoe slapping. She wore headphones over her ears, and torn jeans, black sneakers, a long-sleeved white T-shirt, her body angular and small and never still, perfectly balanced, knees bending to pump the board higher up the wall and then gliding there, almost weightless. Natalie wanted to call out, to applaud, but she didn’t want to interrupt, to break the concentration, the reverie. She forced her hands into her pockets and listened to the wheels, the rasp of the board’s wooden tail against concrete.
The girl rose up the near wall, planted a hand down low and, wheels screeching, the board took her feet and legs up above her in a smooth arc, returning beneath her, beautiful.
Natalie heard a footstep behind her, then, a dragged scuffing sound, a low voice closer than it should be.
“Dope?” a young man asked. “Coke? Tweak?” His face was hooded, hands in the pockets of his huge jeans.
She shook her head, turned away, waved him off.
“I saw you earlier,” he said. “I followed you, a little. No offense. You’re looking for something—I can tell.”
“I’m very busy,” she said, her whispered voice strange to her. She turned to face him, and didn’t want to look away from the girl. “Do you know her?”
“I’m just asking,” he said. “Alls I’m saying is—”
“I have a knife,” she said. “Do you want me to scream?”
“Jesus. What is your problem?” He backed off, just blinking his eyes at her. Then he turned the corner and climbed out of view.
The cars above had grown louder, heading into rush hour, and now there was no sound of the skateboard’s wheels, no sign of the girl. Below, the concrete stretched gray, empty. Natalie looked to the right, across an abandoned parking lot. Three crows hopped along—black wings half out, tormenting each other, feathers shiny as if wet, lacquered. She hurried back down the slope, breathing hard, feet sliding in the scree, back around the walls of the skatepark.
The girl stood near the semi-trailers, faced away, not moving. Reading something she held in her hands, turning over the ragged page. The headphones were still on; Natalie crept closer, the sound of her footsteps covered. She tried to regain her breath, to slow down. She got within five feet, almost close enough to reach out and touch the girl’s shoulder.
The girl spun and simultaneously shoved the paper into her pocket, pulled the headphones from her ears, around her neck, and twisted her face into a warning scowl.
“Hey,” Natalie said. “Easy.”
She noticed that she was a head taller than the girl, and that the girl’s part was purposefully crooked, like a sharp lightning bolt in her dirty blond hair. Her thick eyebrows were almost grown together. Her face was so white, her lips pale and chapped. Her blue eyes didn’t blink. She bent down and picked up her skateboard with one hand;
in the other, she held a black case, long and narrow. “What’s in there?” Natalie said. “My flute.” The girl’s voice was surprisingly husky. “What were you reading, there?” “Nothing.” “You sure can skate. I watched.” The girl shrugged. There were illegible ballpoint scribbles, blue, on the rubber toes of her shoes. The bottom