Darren was dressed in a green camouflage coat over long blue jean shorts. On his head was a brown camouflage baseball cap that said “US Army Veteran” under a seal of a bald eagle that looked to Aria like it had been flattened like a pancake. His now graying hair had been strawberry blond once. It came down to his collarbones. His mustache met his beard in a perfect open-ended frown of a triangle, making his already dispirited poise seem all the more somber. His right leg was lacerated with a network of purple scars and his left leg was missing. In its place was a dirty prosthetic. The stump of his leg was capped with a gray sock and suctioned into the socket. A steel pole the size of a shinbone fed into a black tennis shoe.
Aria guessed that the three men were friends and that they had probably relocated here together. Contrary to Aria’s assumptions, as she later found out, they hadn’t known each other at the start. Robert had come to the abandoned car lot first, and nobody knew how he found it. He had invited Darren to stay here with him after the two met at a holiday meal program just over three years ago. Robert was 68 years old. He had worked all his life as a mechanic to retire. Like so many seniors on the street, he relied on social security checks, but they put him in a position where he had to choose between eating or paying rent. He did everything he could to keep his apartment in Santa Monica until the relative who was living with him, and who he depended upon to keep the place, died five and a half years ago. He had been living out of a backpack, with his bicycle and one-man tent, ever since.
Darren had invited Mike to the camp one year later. Mike had served four years in the army, which granted him immediate rapport with Darren, who, unlike Mike, had made a career of the army. That is, until the last time he was deployed to Iraq, where he crossed paths with an IED that made mincemeat out of his legs. He had been referred to a mental health program as part of his recovery but had ended up on the street when their attempts to alleviate his paranoia, flashbacks, night terrors and chronic pain had failed when compared to alcohol. Still trying to make it through the day with PTSD, and now alcoholic, Darren had turned the inside of the abandoned RV he now occupied into a vault of trash. Darren had become a hoarder.
Aria felt wrong for having arrived in a place where such established connections already existed. She imagined herself to be an imposition there, even though they never indicated that they minded it. So she made the effort to engage with them, with an air of exaggerated friendliness. When the conversation died down between them, Darren and Robert started asking Taylor and Aria their stories. Except for the occasional interruption by Aston coming into the tent to announce and re-announce his boredom, Taylor and Aria took turns telling their tales and answering questions until there were no more questions to be asked.
Taylor and Aria learned a lesson the hard way that day, too: never drink coffee if it is the only thing you get to eat on a given day. After they left the three men, their efforts to find discarded food in a dumpster behind a grocery store produced nothing. Both feeling jittery and sick to their stomachs, they lay down against the door of the loading dock until they felt good enough to make the trip back to the car lot. Aria threw up, which made her feel better, and drank enough from one of her plastic water bottles to feel full.
Aria couldn’t get the meeting with Mike and Darren and Robert out of her head. She recycled it in her mind. They had parted ways that day feeling the nearness brought about by hardship, which, like superglue, closes up the cracks that would normally separate people from such different walks of life. She could not work out why, no matter where some people seem to turn, their lives have no door leading anywhere … Dead end after dead end after dead end of pain. The inevitable rain of loss had soaked them all. It had left them all destitute.
There was so much uncertainty in life. Aria wanted some certainty. But so far, any certainty that people seemed to establish seemed to be ornamental anyway. Despite her youth, Aria already knew that all ornament would be lost in death, just as Luke had lost his brother and girlfriend. It would disappear like shadows into light.
It was a thought that usually made her feel uneasy. But tonight, it made her feel glad that she currently had so little to lose.
CHAPTER 15
The air smelled of gasoline. Two streets away, a couple of men sat on the curbside, sipping their deaths through a bottle hidden in a paper bag. The unlit street lamps stood over their heads like pallbearers. The day was so hot; it seemed like the sun looked to cremate everything in sight. Ciarra, who already had a cigarette in her mouth, handed one to Aria and lit it. At the very least, it took the edge off the adversity that no amount of nicotine could fully drown out. Every time a car passed, Ciarra would lean forward to look inside the windows to ascertain whether the driver was a prospective client or just some passerby who wasn’t worth her notice.
She had lied to her father, for obvious reasons. Ciarra wasn’t working night shifts at a bar. Ciarra was a nightwalker. She slept with men for money or for blow.
Almost two weeks had passed since Luke
