Where the Sun Never Shines
All that day, the mist had clung to his windshield like a stubborn ghost, and Arden, on the cusp of pissing himself, kept missing the exits on account of it. While he was still in Oregon, he could have pulled over and walked deep into the pines and relieved himself there, but he was superstitious about such places, and besides, the light blue Toyota pickup with its engine cut and lights off, seemed to vanish behind the crawling clouds like the pale sky above. There was the distinct possibility that he would get flattened by a passing truck.
He had spent the night in Springfield at a Motel 6, and instead of breakfast had opted to drink one too many cups of shitty drip coffee, mostly because it was free. The woman behind the front desk picked at her chipped French tips and glared at him suspiciously through lashes thick with clumps of purple eyeshadow. She was ten more minutes pretty- as in, if God had spent ten more minutes on the girl’s face she might have made the cut- the sharp upturned tip of her nose, which quivered when she spoke, gave her the appearance of a small rodent. She reminded him of the little Vietnamese girls, curling their toes inside their little shoes when they saw him approaching, their features delicate as calligraphy, wrinkled in distaste at the bubblegum he offered them. Ungrateful little bitches. His father had taught him that trick; offer the natives a piece of chewing gum. It supposedly worked on little girls and older women alike; you could get them to come sit by you while you smoked, and you could touch their bare legs, or lead them someplace, behind a barn maybe. Not the Vietnamese girls though; they’d look at him like he’d pissed on it or something, cross their arms over their nipples when they caught him looking at the space between the buttons on their thin, damp blouses. Women always wanted something different from what you were offering them, but they never told you what. At night, he would lay on his pack in the mud, looking up at the stars and pretending that they were bullets shot through their dark, silky heads.
He had spent a long time looking at the girl behind the counter, which was maybe why she was scowling at him in that way. He was particularly transfixed by her long, wrinkled neck, from which an inhumanly high-pitched voice emerged every so often, startling the three old men sitting in the lobby of the motel. His palms, hot and moist from holding the scalding coffee cup, itched to reach for it, to press the folds of skin back and pick her up by the nape of her neck, as one would hold a kitten perhaps. He imagined her dark, wet eyes, widened in innocent terror, the cracking sound of choking and the damp, animal smell of her hair. She rested her elbow on the concierge bell and yelped when it rang, looking around the room for permission to laugh. No one looked at her besides Arden, and she certainly did not look at him. She giggled softly and pretended to focus on something on the fuzzy blue screen of her old computer. And so he had sat there obstinately, for forty-five minutes longer than he had intended to, drinking cup after cup of burnt coffee, until the other men had left and the girl disappeared behind the counter partition.
And now because of it all, he was going to piss himself. He was almost to the California border, and figured that there must be a gas station there. He narrowed his eyes and peered out into the fog, as though by concentrating he could improve his failing vision. He lifted his foot from the gas pedal a bit- the roads were empty and he wasn’t pressed for time- and turned the radio down as one inexplicably does when trying to navigate difficult roads. Nothing but tall lonesome trees like winter shadows disappearing into the filmy sky. He could hear the dog panting and pacing in the cargo bed, agonizing over the passing smells he couldn’t pursue. He didn’t exactly love the dog, nor was he the type to kick it or anything. The dog had simply followed him around the streets of Portland long enough, where there were surprisingly few strays, and that type of thing was unusual. And then the dog had followed him to the parking lot where he had paid an old Black man the fifteen hundred dollars for the pickup truck. Just like the dogs, there were few enough Black men in Portland that one noted their presence with curiosity, or suspicion. For a moment, the man reminded Arden of Moose, the garbage man’s kid from around the corner where he’d lived in Sacramento as a child. His name was not really Moose, of course, but Arden couldn’t quite remember what it was, and that’s what he’d always called him. There had been many times with Moose that he’d wanted to ask about what it was like to be Black; when Moose slept over at his house, he always woke before him, checking the sheets for stains rubbing off from his friend’s body. Moose slept quietly, the length of his breath rippling down his smooth, brown body, and Arden liked to watch him sleeping sometimes, though he would never have told him so. When Moose got his driver’s license, they borrowed Arden’s father’s Buick and drove to Folsom Dam to go fishing. They had spent the day sitting on slippery, purple rocks, skipping stones and eating barbecue chips, laughing at the minnows nibbling on their ankles. That was before the war, before everything with Angelique and the drugs, and Moose, teaching him to whistle over the whispering sounds of the water, was his anchor to the wide and wondrous world.
“I reckon I should teach you a song that you can whistle when you fish alone,” Moose had said.
“I hope I’ll never fish alone,” Arden had answered in a moment of uncharacteristic tenderness. When the shadows came dancing over the boiling brown water, and the cicadas began to murmur their summer songs, Arden reached for his friend’s hand and they whistled together an Appalachian tune from long ago, something about the darkness of pine trees and shivering winds.
Although the man who sold him the car looked nothing like Moose, he had a scar like a long white worm that ran down the length of his shoulder, about where Moose’s would have been. When the boys pulled into Arden’s driveway, there was his father, a long pale switch running through his palm like a hypnotized snake. He had kept his eyes closed the entire time, though he could remember still the brassy, hot smell of blood and the hiss of the switch splitting the sweet sounds of the summer night.
A bellowing truck horn shook from him the last remnants of that memory. Fucking asshole, he growled to himself. He slowed the car to a crawling speed, relishing the sight of the balding man behind the wheel of the truck, gesticulating in his rearview mirror. That’ll show him. In the distance, he spotted at last a flickering panel advertising the latest gas prices. Just as he pulled the car into the gas station, the truck accelerated as though trying to prove that it could have crushed the little blue pickup if it had so desired. Arden rolled down his window.
“Fucking asshole,” he called out with a self-satisfied grin. The truck disappeared into the folds of the heavy mist with a low rumble like thunder. He pulled into the empty parking lot of the gas station and opened up the truck bed. The dog leapt into his arms and he stumbled backwards into the gas pump, digging into his ribcage. “Get down dog,” he mumbled, but he kept the dog held tight in his arms, and it licked the stubble on his face with enthusiasm. He put the dog down, gently, and motioned towards the brown patches of grass behind the gas station bathroom. “Go pee,” he said. The dog obliged. It seemed to him a sad animal, bound to him by its insatiable need for affection, so pitifully grateful for Arden’s touch. He had always preferred cats but wouldn’t have called himself a cat person, really. He liked animals in general, though he found the dog’s blind loyalty to be vaguely unsettling. This, he knew, was the quality that most people appreciated about dogs. He supposed this suggested something about him, though he knew not what. Or maybe it suggested something about everyone else.
Inside the store, he spent some time feigning interest in the candy bars and stale packs of gum before asking for the bathroom key. Not that it mattered to the girl behind the counter whether he bought anything or not; she looked to be about sixteen years old and disinterested in all but the little scabs that ran the length of her arms like beetles, which she picked off one by one and flicked onto the floor.
“Do you need something,” she said, more like a statement than a question. “Cigarettes here are about as cheap as you’ll get ‘em.”
He glanced at the price: $5.89. So he was back in California then. The girl, without looking up at him, seemed to read his mind.
“You’re about three hours from San Fran and then everything gets hella expensive. You won’t believe what they charge for a pack of smokes.” He shook his head but still she did not look up.
“No,” he murmured, “just the bathroom key please. I’ll pick something up on my way out.”
She looked at her fingers when she handed him the key; chewed raw at the tips and swollen. He thought of offering her a piece of chewing gum and chuckled to himself. She lifted her gaze then and stared at him blankly, her pale brown eyes moist and red-rimmed. She was most likely high, he thought to himself. Girls were like that when they took to drugs: existing someplace far outside of themselves where nothing but shadows could reach them, limp as laundry drying in the wind. He took the key and walked out and around the building, where the dog was digging a hole and panting profusely. In the dense fog, the silhouettes of the gas pumps loomed like motionless mechanical beasts. Scraps of dirty toilet paper and honey bun wrappers tumbled across the desolate landscape.
When he brought back the key, the girl was picking at a piercing in her nose. He bought a bottle of water, for the dog, and a tall boy and bag of sour gummy worms for himself. He wasn’t much for candy, but he figured that there was a chance the girl might want some. When he offered, she stretched her lip over the top of her teeth and looked at her reflection in the vacant security camera lens beside the register.
“No,” she said, “I’m on a diet.”
For a moment, he imagined cupping the back of her shaved head and slamming it into the security camera, shards of glass puncturing her blue powdered eyelids, filling her mouth like ice. “Have a nice day,” he said on his way out.
~
He had been driving again for awhile, listening to an old taping of Lenny Bruce saying something about Catholic statues and burlesque dancers, when he saw the boy with the sign. He was about as tall as Arden but fuller, healthier looking, with densely freckled cheeks and a smile that spoke of warmth and water and days spent in the sunshine. The sign said Need a ride to Los Angeles. Will pay. Arden had been a hitchhiker once, in the seventies when he’d returned from Vietnam, pretending to know peace and haunting festival grounds like a ghost caught in limbo. He’d been to a few concerts- the Bee Gees, Paul Simon- nothing special to him at all, but he was almost always accompanied by some girl who wanted to marry a soldier turned pacifist. They were all like that back then.
He drove slowly past the boy, who was now happily picking yellow flowers by the side of the road. Around the next bend he was surprised to find a girl, balancing her weight on a fallen log, holding a sign of her own. The sign read I need YOU to drive me to L.A. and was decorated with crooked hearts and misshapen stars. On the radio, Lenny Bruce was pretending to cry after an audience member had told him that she didn’t want to go home with him. The dog began to bark.
Arden slowed the car to a stop next to the girl and rolled down his window. “Say,” he said, “you’re going to L.A.?”
The girl pointed to the sign with a cruel smile and nodded. Right, he thought, it said so on the sign. He was always asking questions to which he already knew the answers.
“Is that your friend back there?” He looked into the pale blue moons of her eyes, the pupils shrinking visibly as the sunlight seeped over the distant hills.
“Yeah,” she answered tentatively, “we’re together.” There was dark defiance in her gaze, sharp and glinting like a knife. Her hair was long and wild, tied in a copper knot on top of her head, tangled with twigs and little leaves and flowers. Her high cheekbones shone like plums and gave her the appearance of a storybook villain, beautiful and cruel. She jumped down from the log and crouched next to her dirty yellow backpack. She seemed to be avoiding eye contact now, and began to pull at the loose threads on the worn straps of her bag.
“So you’ll take us,” she said, more like a tentative statement than a question.
“Sure, I’ll take you as far as San Francisco. Or maybe Sacramento even. Hop in.” The girl looked up at him, a strange sort of sadness carving out her features. She didn’t move. “Maybe she’s on drugs,” he thought to himself. It seemed likely; her eyes were those of a caged animal set free, frantically assessing its newfound position on the food chain. She was a pretty girl, beautiful even, but looked worn somehow, like she’d been dragged across the country by some irresistible urge. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen, maybe seventeen years old. He felt her face was indecent somehow, as though she’d been wearing a veil suddenly removed. She was waiting for the boy, probably. She didn’t want to climb into the truck without him.
Arden lit a cigarette and forced himself to look away. A deep vacuum stilled the honeyed summer air. One could hear the bees humming lazily in the wild mulberry bushes, the pattering of lizards across the shimmering hot cement. The fog had lifted now, replaced by the warbling haze of heat rising up from the dry, cracked soil. Everywhere else people were waking up and going to work, sending their children to school. Was it the month of May already? He wondered where the girl had gone to school, and if she was missed from the place she had left.
At last the boy came around the bend in the road, half running, his cheeks flushed a deep pink and streaming with sweat. His sandy hair and large brown eyes gave him the appearance of a stuffed animal, soft and complacent. He looked like a nice, simple boy- how had he ended up with such a girl in such a timeless, desolate place?
“We’ve been camping in the mountains for a week now,” he explained. “But we ran out of food and we’re trying to get to a music festival in Southern California.” The boy began to laugh; a warm, resonant sound that shook the bees from their reverie. “So we took a half a tab and hoped for the best.”
So they were on drugs. Arden had taken plenty of LSD in the years leading up to his departure for Southeast Asia. And he had done it once when he’d returned, with Chance Lerman and Billie Yardlow, who were cousins and lived across the street from him in Sacramento. They’d all met up in San Francisco and gone to the beach. Arden, caught in a timeless loop of memories- his own personal hell- had spent the day underneath a blanket. “You need to let go of your ego,” Billie had said. And Arden had tried, desperately, to let go of whatever it was keeping him tethered to that fateful day in March, had begged the pale, moonlit ghosts to leave him be, had squeezed his eyes shut against the low moaning sounds of the wind on the water, in which he heard whispers of that alien language, the soft sighs of those women from underneath him. He had never spoken to Billie and Chance again; they had nothing to talk about after that.
“How fun,” he managed to say at last. “Well I hope you won’t mind my old dog here. He’ll keep you company in the back of the truck. He keeps to his own business most of the time. Can’t seem to shake him so I keep him around.”
The girl raised a dark, thick eyebrow. “Not at all,” the boy said. “My name is Dash by the way- it’s short for Dashiell- and this is Carmen. We’ve been travelling awhile, we’re grateful for whatever. Does the dog have a name?”
For a fleeting moment, Arden felt the cool spread of rage draining the blood from his limbs. A name? Should the dog have a name? What was this kid implying? “No,” he answered simply, taking a sharp drag from the cigarette. “But my name is Arden. You can just call him ‘dog’. That’s what I've been doing.” The girl- Carmen- let out a small sound like laughter. She looked up at him then with her cool, pale eyes and a simmering smirk. He felt as though she could see the senseless rage bubbling up inside of him, and this made him all the more angry. Who did she think she was, looking at him like that? There would be plenty of time to figure it out. He bottled that moment someplace deep in his mind and held it tightly like a secret. “Hop in,” he said again, and this time the girl sat up slowly and climbed into the bed of the truck. The boy followed her quickly, holding his hands up as though he were a mountain climber spotting his partner. Arden could tell that this was their pattern; the girl led the way, all sparkle and shine, and the boy followed blindly, bathing in her wake. She hardly seemed to notice the way that he looked at her, the way he cupped his hands to hoist her more comfortably into the truck, his tacit acknowledgement of their mutual understanding that he could sit close to her, but not too close. For a moment, Arden felt pity for the boy. He understood what it was like to follow a girl around like that. Most likely, she’d been on the road, eluding him for years, and he’d finally caught up to her. And most likely he would lose her again, somewhere along the way to Southern California, and would return home with his pockets empty and a few bittersweet memories of the smell of her hair in the sunshine. There was a name for girls like that.
The boy settled into the bed of the pickup truck and began to untie his shoelaces. The dog had curled itself up into a question mark at Carmen’s feet, and began to fall asleep in the hot sun, whispers of steam rising from its thick, black coat. She touched it with the tips of her fingers only, as though the sleeping beast might wake at any moment and begin to bark again. He finished the last of his cigarette, looking back at the blue hazy peak of Mount Tamalpais from where the two hitchhikers had mostly likely come. He had been there only once, on a camping trip with a manicurist whose name and face he couldn’t remember- a truly miserable weekend spent getting lost in the rain. They had come across a bathtub deep in the forest, filled with thick, green water and silver insects, and a few weathered rubber ducks. He wondered if it was still there.
When he started the car again, his two passengers yelped with surprise and the dog began to bark again. There was laughter, clear and sharp as Easter bells, the only sound for miles and miles. He tried hard to remember the last time that someone had made him laugh. On the radio, the rushing sound of a live audience filled the air like a chorus of whispers. Women were shouting We love you Lenny! The special was over. He turned the radio off.
They drove past vast meadows of alpine lilies and groves of redwood trees like quiet sentinels, up and over the bare flanks of wind-swept hills and over little bridges, built long ago. They drove beneath ominous outcroppings of serpentine rock, little bits of gravel bouncing off of the windshield like bullets of hail. They drove up the hot and dry manzanita slopes, casting clouds of dust the color of dried blood, and down into cool and foggy ocean-facing valleys, where the tall redwoods and Douglas firs seemed to suck the sounds from the air. And all that time Arden kept the radio off, so that he might hear the sound of laughter if it should happen again.
But the boy and girl were quiet now, taking in the warm, comforting smells of oak and pine, of sage scrub and decaying leaves. And as they burst out from beneath the fog line, into the warmth of wide coastal prairies, they fell into a gentle stupor, lulled by the humming of the engine and the sounds of the sea below. Although Dash had been here before, he resisted the urge to point everything out to his companion. Carmen had closed her eyes against the white glare of the cloudy sky, and appeared to be thinking very deeply about something, or trying very hard not to think of anything at all. And because they usually ended up talking about such things, it wasn’t necessary to ask what was on her mind right then.
She must have been thinking about the man behind the wheel; where he must have come from, how long he’d been travelling. Through the dirty windshield she could see his lonesome, hunched figure, his raw, red hands trembling and tapping to the beat of some silent song. Perhaps this man reminded her of her father, whom she hadn’t heard from since his second wedding; the yellow moisture in his eyes, the pauses he took between words, as though weighing them first in his head, the way he gestured wildly here and there, as though carrying on a conversation with himself.
As it so happened, Arden was also peering at the girl from the rearview mirror, searching her cool, vacant expression for something: was she enjoying the crisp, sweet wind in her hair? Was she thinking about someone in particular, or someone she’d left behind? He remembered again the way that she had looked at him as she gathered up her things- like he had let something slip that could be used against him. “A girl like that isn’t stupid,” he thought with bitter rancor. “She’s probably used the same tricks for years.” Girls like her were dangerous, unforgiving. They took what they could get and ran away without ever looking back. He conjured up the image for a moment: the girl, running swiftly on long, white legs, hitting the ground with a dull, thumping sound, those pretty white teeth smashing like so many chips of ice, the smell of blood beating beneath her pale, blue skin. What if she had been alone, had a fight with her companion perhaps? He imagined her skinned knees knocking together, a rising tide of helplessness filling her eyes like cold, dark ocean water. His father had always told him that women were becoming too bold, too angry for their own good. Though he hadn’t been with a woman himself until after his return from the army, Moose had had many girlfriends, and he’d hated them all. They were Black girls mostly, with glossy, pillowed lips and figures that filled their clothing like warm dough, rising. He met them briefly and they always seemed ready to burst with rage and indignance. Sometimes there were Mexican girls, but Moose insisted that these were hardly girlfriends and mostly hung around “for the company.” Once, Moose had brought Tessie Hammond along on a short fishing trip. Tessie was a small, spindly girl who moved delicately like a spider, and rarely spoke. Arden had tried many times to dissuade her from coming- he’d known it was a bad idea from the start. But the girl had insisted, quite uncharacteristically, and had spent the entire day in the shade, sitting on a raw wool picnic blanket, eating strawberries and drinking milk and calling intermittently for Moose to come over and sit on her lap. All that day, Arden had remained quiet- he’d hardly spoken to the girl at all. But she told Moose later on that she’d felt Arden was “creepy” and had been looking up her skirt every so often when he thought she wasn’t looking. It hadn’t been long since his father had died, and when he returned home, Arden crept into the old man’s empty room, silent and still as a museum, and wept for the very first time.
At last they reached the mouth of the Golden Gate Bridge, and Arden slowed the car down to a stop, searching frantically for change, as though it were the transportation official who was anxious to get someplace and not Arden himself. He held his breath until he’d collected enough money to pay the toll, the rattling of the coins in his quivering hands giving him the unpleasant feeling of begging on a street corner. The woman in the tollbooth had a dark, waxy face that drooped as though she were melting in the late springtime heat, and she insisted on returning his change, which he didn’t want because it was just pennies.
They gathered speed and rode into the sharp Pacific winds. He looked into the rearview mirror again and watched the girl open her mouth and let out a scream sucked silent by the rushing air. The boy rested his hand on hers and she let it sit there for a moment. Her mouth was open and her sharp little teeth glinting in the light, suspended in an expression that was meant to be a smile, but revealed the distance between the girl herself and the experience she was having. She gently removed her hand from beneath the boy’s and crawled to the end of the truck closest to the water, peering shyly over the edge. Arden remembered something then about the bridge; how so many people had jumped there that they’d had to install telephone booths that dialed in directly to crisis hotlines, and nets to catch the falling bodies below. Some people survived the fall- something like five percent- with gruesome, disfiguring injuries and chilling anecdotes of what it was like to change one’s mind halfway down. The girl had taken her hiking boots off and was throwing pebbles into the water below. Her laughter seemed to harmonize with the howling wind.
Again, Arden had to pee. When they pulled over at a gas station on the very tip of the San Francisco peninsula, the boy and girl began to cheer. Their faces were raw and pink and their lips cracked at the corners. The girl seemed so young then, for a moment. Arden was reminded of Tessie Hammond drinking milk and blowing bubbles with her straw. And of Moose, reaching out a warm brown hand while they walked in silence, side by side.
When Arden returned to the truck, the boy and girl were gone. The dog whined pitifully and paced about the truck bed, seemingly in distress at their disappearance. But Arden had known that something in the girl had shifted once they’d crossed the bridge, and she’d begun to hatch a plan. He thought of her running with the boy in tow, back to the bridge, over to the very edge, her hair spreading like blood on the water. He started the car and began the long drive to Sacramento, where the mother he’d never known lay buried somewhere, and some old bank accounts needed closing.
~
It was a few months before Arden found the piece of paper tucked inside the spare tire in the truck bed. It had been ripped from a notebook and yellowed by the dust and rain. On it there was a picture of a dandelion blown bare, its little stems twisting out elegantly like bloodless veins, and a note that said here is my phone number and then a number after that. He put it in his pocket. A few weeks passed during which Arden hardly thought of the note at all. But then February rolled into March and he became restless with the changes of spring. In him there was a gnawing sense of timeless loss, as though he were homesick for a place he’d never been, and he sought to fill it with time and drink and California sunsets- to no avail. He remembered once more the note and the girl and the sun on her bony shoulders, and dialed the number on the first day of spring. And though he had expected nothing more, he listened for a long time to the corrosive, mechanical beeping on the other line, and wondered if her number had been disconnected, or if it was never really her number at all.
