Sometimes the sound of it would get tangled up into a dream. I would hear it whistling through my sleep for what seemed like days while I tried to lift a heavy teakettle off a stove or, once, chased a runaway horse that was carrying off Turtle while she hollered bloody murder (something I had yet to hear her do in real life). Finally the sound would push out through my eyes and there was the daylight. There were the maroon paisley curtains made from an Indian bedspread, there was the orange-brown stain on the porcelain sink where the faucet dripped, there was the army cot where Turtle was asleep, safe and sound in the Republic Hotel. Some mornings it was like that.
On other days I would wake up before the whistle ever sounded and just lie there waiting, feeling that my day couldn’t begin without it. Lately it had been mostly this second way.
We were in trouble. I lasted six days at the Burger Derby before I got in a fight with the manager and threw my red so-called jockey cap in the trash compactor and walked out. I would have thrown the whole uniform in there, but I didn’t feel like giving him a free show.
I won’t say that working there didn’t have its moments. When Sandi and I worked the morning shift together we’d have a ball. I would tell her all kinds of stories I’d heard about horse farms, such as the fact that the really high-strung horses had TVs in their stalls. It was supposed to lower their blood pressure.
“Their favorite show is old reruns of Mr. Ed,” I would tell her with a poker face.
“No! You’re kidding. Are you kidding me?”
“And they hate the commercials for Knox gelatin.”
She was easy to tease, but I had to give her credit, considering that life had delivered Sandi a truckload of manure with no return address. The father of her baby had told everyone that Sandi was an admitted schizophrenic and had picked his name out of the high school yearbook when she found out she was pregnant. Soon afterward the boy’s father got transferred from Tucson and the whole family moved to Oakland, California. Sandi’s mother had made her move out, and she lived with her older sister Aimee, who was born again and made her pay rent. In Aimee’s opinion it would have been condoning sin to let Sandi and her illegitimate son stay there for free.
But nothing really seemed to throw Sandi. She knew all about things like how to rub an ice cube on kids’ gums when they were teething, and where to get secondhand baby clothes for practically nothing. We would take turns checking on Turtle and Seattle, and at the end of our shift we’d go over to the mall together to pick them up. “I don’t know,” she’d say real loud, hamming it up while we waited in line at Kid Central Station. “I can’t decide if I want that La-Z-Boy recliner in the genuine leather or the green plaid with the stain-proof finish.” “Take your time deciding,” I’d say. “Sleep on it and come back tomorrow.”
Turtle would be sitting wherever I had set her down that morning, with each hand locked onto some ratty, punked-out stuffed dog or a torn book or another kid’s jacket and her eyes fixed on some empty point in the air, just the way a cat will do. It’s as though they live in a separate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of fascinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can’t see.
Kid Central Station was not doing Turtle any good. I knew that.
After six days the Burger Derby manager Jerry Speller, this little twerp who believed that the responsibility of running a burger joint put you a heartbeat away from Emperor of the Universe, said I didn’t have the right attitude, and I told him he was exactly right. I said I had to confess I didn’t have the proper reverence for the Burger Derby institution, and to prove it I threw my hat into the Mighty Miser and turned it on. Sandi was so impressed she burned the trench fries twice in a row.
The fight had been about the Burger Derby uniform. The shorts weren’t actually plastic, it turned out, but cotton-polyester with some kind of shiny finish that had to be dry-cleaned. Three twenty-five an hour plus celery and you’re supposed to pay for dry-cleaning your own shorts.
My one regret was that I didn’t see much of Sandi anymore. Naturally I had to find a new place to eat breakfast. There were half a dozen coffee-shops in the area, and although I didn’t really feel at home in any of them I discovered a new resource: newspapers. On the tables, along with their gritty coffee cups and orange rinds and croissant crumbs, people often left behind the same day’s paper.
There was a lady named Jessie with wild white hair and floppy rainboots who would dash into the restaurants and scrounge the leftover fruit and melon rinds. “It’s not to eat,” she would explain to any- and everybody as she clumped along the sidewalk pushing an interesting-smelling shopping cart that had at some point in history belonged to Safeway. “It’s for still-lifes.” She told me she painted nothing but madonnas: Orange-peel madonna. Madonna and child with strawberries. Together we made a sort of mop-up team. I nabbed the newspapers, and she took the rest.
Looking through
