Rikki hears the familiar crunch of gravel beneath tires. He opens the flap of his tent to the smell of exhaust fumes and burning garbage from Rusty’s campfire. Mission truck, they call. Water. Sandwiches. Hot Chocolate. He makes his way to the van. The moon casts angles of light on the encampment. The sky is full of stars. He recognizes constellations; Pegasus, Aquila, Aquarius. Finally, the clouds have cleared, but Rikki still has to dodge puddles left by yesterday’s rain. For the last four years, on and off, he’s lived under the bridge, falling asleep to the sound of trucks and cars overhead, stretched out on his cardboard mattress with an army/navy surplus blanket for a wrap, a small tent for shelter. There is a slight tear on the right side causing it to drip in the open air in a heavy rain, but under the bridge he stays dry. He never quite warms up, though. His hands are always cold. They don’t turn blue like Marjorie’s, but his fingers remain a constant shade of bright pink. He blows on them as he walks. He lost his gloves a few weeks back. Or were they stolen? He can’t remember. Maybe they’ll give him a new pair.
Jasmine greets him. She is tiny, barely up to Rikki’s armpit, with short curly black hair that sticks out of her stocking cap. She smiles with her entire face. “Mr. Rikki,” she says, “we have hot chocolate tonight.” She hands him a peanut butter sandwich and a small bag of chips. “Need socks?” She turns and roots through a bag, hands Rikki two pairs of socks. Dry socks. Socks with red bands at the tops. Rikki holds them to his face, inhaling the clean scent of newness.
Matthew comes from behind the van, claps his hand on Rikki’s shoulder, then moves on. Twenty or so of them have come from their pieced together dwellings to mill about the van, holding paper cupped hot chocolates like chalices. Joey tells a joke, everyone laughs. The scene is like a macabre dinner party, a gathering of lost folks in torn and tattered items of clothing, some missing teeth, some with sores, all with the same look of longing in their eyes. Rikki stuffs his sandwich in one coat pocket, the chips and socks in another and takes a cup of the chocolate. He closes his eyes, feeling the sweet liquid warm his mouth, his throat, his chest. He exhales, and he is skating again, holding his wife, Laura’s hand. She laughs, her ponytail bouncing as she leaves him and skates ahead, the sound of her blades cutting the ice as she turns sideways, arms graceful, then spins on one leg. She glides to a stop, holding her arms outstretched. Come on, she shouts. Catch up.
“Rikki,” Matthew is beside him. “I have a bed open at the mission.”
“No. I’ll take my chances out here.”
“I’m not giving up on you, Rikki. I’m going to keep asking.”
“Do you have any gloves?” Rikki asks.
They come and do a sweep four days later. Police officers and city park workers in orange vests, their breath steaming in the chilly morning air. They throw anything left behind into the large blue dumpster on the truck bed. They don’t look the dwellers in the eye. Mayor’s orders, the long-faced cop keeps saying. Rikki watches as Melissa sticks the handle of a saucepan in her pants. She has two backpacks, one over-stuffed on her shoulders, the other she drags through the mud. Rusty carries nothing. He wears a torn ski coat and oversized boots. He plods by the officers with his head bowed, stopping to spit on the ground when he gets close to the cop posted at the edge of the road. Rikki rolls his belongings in his tent and carries it like an oversized rucksack. He leaves the cardboard behind; he’ll search for another piece later. There’s no sun today, only a constant grey drizzle. He takes one last look over his shoulder when his feet hit the pavement.
Rikki ends up on the waterfront, taking big breaths of the salt air. The air of the Puget Sound is cleansing, fresh, full of negative ions — he remembers this from the geography textbook he rescued from the trash pile on 55th Street, reading it by streetlight. When he could carry it no longer, he left it on an outdoor table of a café for someone else. He stakes out a spot on the old loading dock, now turned antique warehouse. The store is only open to the public on weekends, the other days it’s a free space. It’s dry here under the awning and the sun’s come out. He spreads his tent on the ground like a tarp, unwrapping his possessions. His wool blanket, a few changes of clothes, a buck knife, a toothbrush, a small soap bar in a worn box, and a small leather pouch that holds two match books, his dog tags from Iraq, and a tiny picture of his wife, Laura. The photo is faded with a small tear on the corner and a fold down the center. She is at the fair, a Ferris wheel in the background, wearing the yellow sundress with the mother-of-pearl buttons. He always liked that dress. Her skin is tan, her eyes looking upward.
“Mona Lisa,” a shout from the side alley. It’s Jeffie. He calls Rikki Mona Lisa, “Because you got that serene look. Like you gotta secret.” Jeffie was under the bridge too, just further in, in the Jungle they call it. He tells Rikki he got the sweep too, gonna stay on the dock with him for a few. “I got some stuff,” he says. He points to a bulging pocket. “Pills. Want some?”
“No. I only do the drink. There’s stuff in that shit now.”
“I don’t care. I’m dying out here every minute, so what the hell? Take a chance. It’s like a poker game. Bet I’m gonna feel real good for a while.” They watch the sun fade in the sky over the pier across the street. The advantage to being homeless in Seattle; it’s cold, but the views are like paintings in a museum. He watches over Jeffie as he fades into a delirious sleep. Rikki rarely sleeps at night. It’s too cold and too dangerous to let your guard down and night time war memories are the worst. He likes to nap in the park in the middle of the day. It’s safer that way.
They have to be gone by 5 a.m. on the dock. Coiffed folks don’t want to see them, they don’t want to know they exist, or smell, or urinate in the streets. Disappear. He shakes Jeffie awake. Rikki wraps his stuff up and heads to the market park so he can doze in the grass under the willow tree. The mission truck didn’t come last night, and he’s hungry. He might have to panhandle, which he hates. Folks look at him like he should get a job, but begging is the hardest job he’s ever had. He goes to the parking lot at the big box store sometimes, stands by the curb with thirty other guys to see if he can catch a bit of work doing carpentry or fix-it jobs. Folks swing by in their trucks or compacts and take a worker away for the day, pay them cash, sometimes give them food. He once had a lady pick him up in a sleek white Cadillac. “Need help with plumbing,”she said sweetly. When they got to her house, she told him to relax, gave him a glass of wine — good wine, not the cheap shit on the streets — then invited him into her bedroom. She patted the soft white comforter, asked him to lie beside her. After they made love, she let him use the shower, gave him some of her husband’s clothes. She paid him, even though he didn’t do a bit of work, then escorted him out of the house, passing art in gilded frames and photos of herself with a man. He figured she was married and living a clean life, so clean, she wanted to brush up with something that was raw around the edges.
Rikki is shaken awake. Kneeling beside him is a woman, thirty, maybe, long flowing skirt, three layers of shirts on, her blonde hair loosely braided and hanging over one shoulder. “You got a smoke?” she asks. She has a pile of things beside her, a cloth pack, a plastic grocery bag full of clothing, a rolled up sleeping bag.
“Don’t smoke,” he says.
“Pity.” She leans against the tree, takes out a book of poetry and recites a poem aloud.
“Mary Oliver,” she says when she is done. “I love nature.”
Rikki has never seen her before. The street people know each other. Not the histories; those are personal. Most don’t share why they’re there, they just are, they all are. “What’s your name?”
“Sabrina,” she says, twirling her braid with one finger.
“Rikki.”
She tilts her head to the clouds. “It sure rains a lot here. I’m from Arizona. We don’t get the kind of rain that goes on forever.”
Rikki laughs. “It is hard to stay dry around here.”
“You’ve got a tent,” she points to his improvised satchel.
“Yep.”
“Mind if I stay with you in the tent? I’ve been cold since I got here.” She touches the scar on his cheek.
“Iraq,” he says.
Rikki tells her he can’t set the tent up on the dock where he’s been sleeping; no dirt there for the stakes. They’ll have to go back to the underpass. “They won’t sweep for another six months. It’s dry under there. I’ll let you stay a night.”
One night turned into months of nights. They barely fit in the tent together, but curled up in the sleeping bag, their bodies touching. They stayed warm and Rikki slept through the night with her beside him. Having her next to him took the war dreams away. She made him laugh, and she was resourceful. Before he knew it, she had found a small table and a chair. They made a makeshift patio outside their tent. One of them had to be there at all times though, lest they lose their few possessions to another dweller or a random druggie passing by, but sometimes they could get Rusty or Franklin to watch their stuff while they went on escapades together in the city, holding hands and giggling like kids in school. She was good at foraging for food, rooting through the trash of the best bakeries and eateries in the area. I have expensive taste; she said. They picnicked on their patio under the soft clouds. Winter was clearing, the scotch broom was in bloom, and new weed patches were sprouting up in the cracks of the city sidewalks.
“I think I love you, Miss Sabrina,” he tells her one night.
“Ah, that’s nice Rikki. I love life, even when it’s real hard, so therefore, I love you.”
At night Rikki strokes her hair, running the blond waves through his fingertips, feeling the lightness of the strands, like woven magic. His daughter’s hair was soft. She was barely six months old when his wife left his clothes on the front porch. His daughter, Justina. He closes his eyes and tries to picture her. He remembers the feel of her hair beneath his lips, but he can’t remember the color. Was it dark? Light, maybe? He remembers the first time he held her. His entire body felt lighter, ethereal somehow with the thought that he had created something, had helped form a perfect little being. After Iraq, after seeing so much destruction, Rikki longed to create instead of destroy. That is why he worked in construction. He loved the act of sculpting shape and form from wood, never minding the long working hours, returning home with sawdust in his hair and smelling of milled lumber. The day he fell off the scaffolding on a job site, though, everything moved off center. Lying on his back, he watched the summer’s light clouds as he waited for an ambulance. Laura sat by his hospital bedside for hours with their baby. When he got out, he went to therapy. Three times a week. Three times a week, he saw Melissa, the physical therapist. Then he began seeing her in the evenings. And then the weekend getaway. And then his wife found out and threw every plate and bowl she could find at him, sending them shattering against the wall behind him. He grabbed her wrists, holding her tight. She called the police. Domestic violence, they said. They threw him in jail. Upon his release, he came home to find that Laura had packed his bags and left them on the front porch. She sold his tools the next day. A man broken, unable to make a living, a man unable to convince his wife to forgive him, a man forbidden to see his baby, a man with few friends and little money, becomes a man on the streets. He caught a bus out of the state and kept riding until he ended up in Seattle, determined to find work with the carpenters’ union, start over. But he had no transportation, a bad back, and the jobs offered were not on the bus lines. He ended up living on the streets with little but three changes of clothes. And once you’re on the streets, it’s hard to get off the streets.
Sabrina rolls over and looks at him. “Your back hurting Rikki?”
“Yea. Don’t worry. It always hurts.”
“Tomorrow, I’ll get you something.”
“No,” he says. “No street drugs.”
Sabrina leaves early in the morning to go out scavenging. She comes back giddy, with two croissants and a pack of expired prosciutto. “Man, that French grocery throws out good shit!”
“All we need is coffee and we’ll be living like the royals,” Rikki says, holding his croissant, admiring the fluffiness.
“Rusty has got some cowboy coffee going. I’ll go get us some.”
Sabrina comes back with two paper cups of coffee, the cups they had swiped from the fish’ n’ chip joint on the waterfront. “No cream,” she says, “but I’ve got this.” She holds up a clear baggie with three white pills.
“No,” Rikki reaches for the bag. “No street drugs. They’re laced with all kinds of shit.”
“Too late. I just took one with my coffee,” she laughs, sits cross-legged in the tent and starts to tell him a story about a dog, a grey dog with spots about his eyes, but her words begin to slur, her hands making wild gesticulating movements. Her lips turn pale blue along the edges. She slumps to one side.
Rikki opens the tent flap. “Narcan! I need Narcan!” He shouts again and again until he sees Big Mike run from the camper across the street.
Big Mike crawls into the tent, jabs a needle into Sabrina’s thigh. “She’ll need two,” he says. “I’ve got another in the rig.”
Rikki picks Sabrina up, cradling her, stroking her arms. “Come on, baby.”
Big Mike returns, gives Sabrina another dose. Her breathing steadies and her eyes flutter open.
“Lucky I was here,” Big Mike shakes his head. “Gotta get me some more, gotta re-stock.”
“Thank you Mike.” He pulls Sabrina close; his tears fall upon her cheeks.
When Rikki was seven, his dad left. Said he was going to work and never came home. When his mom realized his dad wasn’t coming back, she had a breakdown. The kind that made her cut up her clothes, stay awake until dawn searching the cupboards for the devil, and disconnect the phone to stop the voices she heard day and night. She went away to a hospital, the sort of hospital you don’t come back from. His grandmother raised him, meaning well, but too old to care for him. He learned early to do his own laundry, to shop and cook for the both of them and to get himself to school. He dropped out in the tenth grade and started cleaning up construction sites. When he turned 18, he signed up for the war.
The next week Sabrina says she’s leaving. “I’m hitching back home,” she says. “I’ve got to go back and face my life. Like, I gotta look at it. Square on Rikki. I almost died.” She hadn’t told him much about her life, only that her dad had molested her, that her mom had backed him, and that she had split on the 540 bus out of Tucson at age 17. “I’m a different person now, you know. I can handle it. I can tell him to fuck it now and I can take care of myself. Heck, he might even be dead. I can stay with my aunt and get a job and… Oh, Rikki, come with me.” She takes his hands in hers. He shakes his head no. He almost lost her to death. He couldn’t stand to lose her to life. And he knows he would lose her. She would outgrow him. He wouldn’t be able to keep up. She would leave him in a strange city with nothing but the clothes on his back and maybe his tent if he still had it.
He kisses her long and hard at the Greyhound station after bumming the money for a one-way ticket to Tucson. Her cheeks shine pink in the morning light. The sun is out; the dampness beginning to lift.
That night, the mission truck rolls into the encampment. Rikki hears their call, their cheerful voices making the night open. Maybe, he thinks, maybe.
“Whatcha up to Rikki? Word is you all almost lost one down here.” Matthew puts that
reassuring hand on Rikki’s shoulder again.
“Yea. Almost.”
“You okay? Can I pray for you?”
Rikki takes a full breath. “Matthew, I don’t think I’m savable, but what the hell?”
Rikki cries himself to sleep for weeks. He feels Sabrina beside him, smells her scent of musk and patchouli oil on his blanket. He talks to her, to the shadow that was her form. His loneliness wraps around him, making it hard to breathe.
When he came back from the war, he took care of his grandma. When she died, he rented a camper trailer on the edge of town from one of the guys on a job site. And then he met Laura, in the fall, when the leaves were dropping and the air smelled sweet well into the night. Laura was smart, outgoing, and witty. She was everything he wanted to be. He did his best to live up to her, to be something for her, and he was. Things just got away from him. He just had bad luck. He’d always had bad luck. The day he met Laura and the day his baby girl was born were the luckiest days of his life. He felt lucky again when he met Sabrina. She filled him with a lightness, a buoyancy, like maybe, just maybe, anything was possible.
Rikki leaves the encampment to look for work. He asks Jeffie to watch his tent, his stuff. Two guys pick him up in the big box parking lot. They take him to do a siding job. He works all day in a light drizzle and gets his money. They short him forty bucks. When he gets back to the camp, everyone and everything is gone, save for a few scattered piles of garbage, a five-gallon bucket, a few remnants of clothing, and the remains of Rusty’s campfire. They’d come and done a sweep while he was gone. Everything he owns is gone, save for his small leather pouch that he keeps with him. Rikki turns over the bucket and sits with his head in his hands as the night folds in around him. He searches the sky for the beginnings of stars, but finds nothing but impending blackness.
He walks the city for hours searching for cardboard, for something to lie on, but the alleys hold nothing promising. He tucks his body in between two rhododendron bushes on fourth street, in front of the posh bank building, the tallest building in Seattle, and prays. God, okay, you don’t know me; he says in a raspy whisper, but I wish you did. You haven’t known my name my whole life, I don’t think you even know I exist and… maybe I don’t. But maybe, maybe you can hear me. He falls asleep with his head nestled in the roots of the bush and the smell of the earth in his dreams.
When morning comes Rikki doesn’t know where to go. He walks to the Gospel Mission building, hoping to get a cup of coffee. He has a little money from the job he did, but it’s all he’s got. He’s gonna need clothes, a blanket, a shelter. Shit. He needs everything. The front door’s locked, so he goes around the back, sees a girl through the doorway making peanut butter sandwiches. He asks if he can use the bathroom.
“Of course,” she says, “you’re always welcome.”
The light from the doorway casts a glow about her face. Her strawberry blonde hair is tied up in a loose bun, strands brush the freckles on her cheeks. Rikki stands motionless, as if his feet are glued to the cement stoop. Tears slide down his cheeks. He tastes the salt on his lips. He remembers now. His girl, his baby girl. His baby’s hair was the same color as the girl standing before him. Blonde with precious tints of red strawberries. It brushed against her tiny cheeks and her eyes; he can see them now. Her eyes were blue, the color of the purest ocean.
“Are you okay?” the girl asks.
Yes, yes, I am, he thinks. “Is Matthew here?”