Kent Dixon
She doesn’t know where she’s going. She doesn’t know where she’s been nor where she is now. She doesn’t really know she doesn’t know. She just drifts, like a boat without a paddle on a lazy, leafy river.
Which river, which city? Doesn’t matter, they’re all the same, however many of them there may have been. She does know to stay on the move, ahead of the police. No sleeping and camping in public places, she can read. She’s had to give up most of her possessions because of it, but she doesn’t miss them. The sedan, the tent . . . some other life, was it ever hers? A slight feeling of misplacing something now and then, like when she first wakes up. And there are some victories, though she doesn’t often know to celebrate them. She has learned to sleep sitting up, for instance. You pick out a clean page or two of a newspaper, find a bench with a good back, cross a leg, set the paper on your lap, and let it come.
Sleep is so gentle. Inconspicuous. Considerate. It connives to not even tip her head over too far. And its blanket of sound, or really a barrier against sound, that high-pitched distant chirr of crickets in her ears, humming like consciousness on hold.
She eats well—a little starchy, that much bread, but she makes do—even with the most difficult tasks, like where to go to pee or doo. ‘It was defecation, I know . . . Seeing me alone with the moonlight above . . ..’ Old songs and mnemonics of sorts offer some helping hands. Green is keen, red is dead. They float in on the shreds as needed, variants and repeats like stanzas. Red is stop, green is trot. The park in the dark: walk toward the talk.
She might have been a secretary once, as accustomed to these ribboned shreds as she is. A faint pentimento of herself with a serious paper shredder that cuts across instead of down. Hence full phrases twist and twiggle across her drift, often just when she needs one. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the videogame—you can stand there at the window all day watching those sneaky sharp-shooters and in-your-face monsters. And if the weather changes, just inside the store you find umbrellas offering themselves up in a tall can—like candy canes.
She can be bold because her body knows that confidence trumps violence in a mean street, and she walks like she means it. Proud, Harriet the Secretariat. She usually has insurance, too, when she can find a shopping cart. Or make a show of sorting through a wire litter basket. It works: people actually put money in her hand. ‘Here, darling…’ and ‘Sorry it isn’t more.’ It doesn’t grow on trees, money, but it does seem to fall from them—albeit beneath the robotic unbending ones of corner street lights and traffic signs.
The trouble with money is the choices it brings. Band aids would be better. One man gave her a Swiss Army knife: ‘I’ve been there,’ he said and closed her hand around it to make her keep it. It has a toothpick and tweezers, and tools she doesn’t even know what for, but it opens cans and bottles like a Swiss trooper.
She has spared one thumbnail for pulling open its blades—a saw, a corkscrew, one of those screwdrivers that comes to a point. Knife, file, that mean-looking can-opener. Tweezers, pliers, a little magnifying glass. A ruler. They thought of everything, almost. If they’d consulted her…. [At the office: Hello, Miss Funderburke, would Mr. Kekele be available? Silk stocking, its hiss when she uncrosses her legs as Mr. Kekele glides by shaking his head no at the phone she’s holding up . . . if they’d called her….]
What was she just now thinking? If they’d called her….
Mr. Kekele, his office had plants she watered. And dusted. The spiky one that always put her in mind of some tropics. A peaceful plant until he’d knocked it over when he pinned her to the floor so fast she thought the building was falling up around her. And when that was over, she’d been expected to pick it all up, shop for new pot even. She had, a $300 one, plus the four packets of salt from the diner up the street. She’d waited a week to resign just in order to make sure it suffered—and it had come quickly, its sleek sheen turning to brown streaks, the spine curling, the mushy rot at the base—the poor plant was screaming with its own demise while her own seemed close behind, until it faded into every day flush with forgotten memories. Me here, all the rest of it out there somewhere smothering her with deletions, though she had managed a coup de grâce: she’d written a note for under the Agave’s pot, so when the next girl was told to throw it out, she’d meet the truth: Dear one, Watch out for Mr. Kekele. It’s he who poisoned me.
And that’s what she’d tell them if the Swiss Army had consulted her about a crowning master function for their knife!
What?
Can’t remember. It’s gotten in line behind all the intentions of those 24 tools. 48? 15?
She can’t really count them because she loses her way, but it gives her a protective sense. Someone—in a surprise quite like discovering a new blade—could burst from the periphery and snatch her knife away.So she keeps it in an inside pocket of her pinafore apron, often with her hand around it. Her right hand because that is where it would show up if she ever really needed it, like the man who gave it to her, I’ve been there, he said. Or was that Mr. Kekele, who kept taking her there in memory helter-skelter whether she liked it or not, and she did not, the worst part of her days.
Where is the Swiss Army when you need them?
Didn’t they beat Caesar once—‘all of Gaul is divided into three parts,’ except for this little stretch of Avernian hills swarming with Helvetian varmints who are destroying our supply lines. Ah, Miss Funderburke, you knew your stuff once. Cast your gaze wider:
It’s a funky movie theater of long ago, with college roomies who were into film studies and illegal potions, and the hip feature was three movies on one screen at the same time, and whether you’d tucked that doped up postage stamp under your tongue or not, you were soon experiencing time browning on its edges and mushy at is base; memory like a new issue of a Vercingetorix stamp, resembling Pat Boone, singing in falsetto like your grandmother, who made you afraid to fall asleep. The people in those films didn’t know what they were doing, a nest of thick transparent worms in black-and-white, like the park today, the dog park, the kiddie grounds, couples strolling, can they really know up from down? Man with little girl superimposed on his shoulders. Maybe that’s sweet, looks burdensome to her.
An occasional down-on-his-luck type. She’d like to say hello, but that isn’t the right word. She closes her hand around her knife, closes her eyes, casts about for a tune, a ditty . . . Swing low, sweet Harriet, coming for to carry me roam . . ..
Even as she rises from the bench—she does this abruptly, needs the momentum to get all the way up—even so, she knows about the boy on the bicycle thrusting down the path toward her. In fact, part of her wants to meet up with him, an impulse possibly left over from the tramp she couldn’t find the right word for. But she also knows, as if from a former life, that they could collide. So she is suspended, halfway between bench and boy yanking his bike to avoid her.
His handlebars wang into an about face, the bike nearly flips, the boy is air-born and comes to a stop only at the next bench, his head plowing up against the concrete foundation of that wood-slatted bench.
Oh, dear. She looks around. Someone to help him. But they are alone. It’s curious: they are so alone it’s as if they’re on a stage with spotlights trying to find where to look next. One wheel of his bike is still turning. She scuttles herself over to him. He’s moving. He’s bleeding behind his ear. He’s moaning and bleeding. Quite a lot. She’s pulling her pinafore from her neck,muttering, there, there, I know, I’ve been there. Pressure, you need pressure on the wound.
“You are bleeding profusely,” she says aloud, a little surprised at this singular intruding voice. Hers?
How this much blood, with just a concrete bump? It should be a scrape, a goose egg forming. Then she sees the clamp anchoring the concrete bench’s leg to the sidewalk—it’s fake concrete—and she presses her wadded pinafore to his head and studies the clamp. Rusty, sharp, bent in a mean way, meaning to do harm. What is wrong with these park personnel?
“You have sliced him,” she says to the bench. The applied pinafore is heavy, oozing with blood now and she knows you should not even take the time to look under it at the slice on his head. Just keep smothering that profusion, keep the pressure on.
She does look up and down the path, someone will help, is there a doctor in the park? Her gaze lingers on her Swiss Army knife which fell from the inner pocket when she whipped off her pinafore. What the knife people might include would be a Swiss medic. A handsome young man with three or four languages.
She smiles at her use of ‘ok’ too. It’s not an expression she’s used lately, long past its shelf life. “You’re ok, we’re just stopping the bleeding, help is coming, what is your name?”
She doesn’t get it all, but she says it’s a nice name, and how old is he? And then, what in hell, Harriet, hold that pressure, put that knife away, someone will think you did it. Someone will come and officials will be called and they’ll be asking her how, what went down—,‘Look at that bench, would you!’ she’d say, clearing a narrow space in the commotion with her angry gesture.
“Oh, oh,” she says, for there’s a small keyhole-size rent in all this muddle which suddenly expands, ga-fwaap: she sees, behind and ahead, even sees the boy’s mother tonight at dinner, ferreting out the story from her child, wondering why she’d given him that much freedom on his bike, but not mentioning it for the time being. That’s the mother; for her part, Harriet just wishes they would hurry the hell up and get here.
She’s sorely tempted to peek under the blood-spongy pinafore, but doesn’t. Pressure, until somebody shuts off the spigot. The boy has a lot of blood. He’s conscious, anxious, one hand around her wrist as if helping staunch his wound.
She keeps murmuring ok ok in between his whines. No, no, it’s ok, going to be all ok, but is it? With each stock comfort she utters she feels herself twinge, twist—a quick flick of the wrist on the rheostat of clarity. The tremendous world is stirring, settling itself around her fore and aft while she can’t help herself from spreading out to meet it. She is suddenly a nurse, a secretary, a mother, a citizen. She knows what to do here and is damn well doing it.
Her rhymes are slipping behind. Her insurance . . . the trash cans, the invisible maze, is it all slipping away? This imposes a burden. She can no longer accept alms from the passers-by, for instance. That would be dishonest. Should she return the knife? Pass it on to someone more in need? Put it on a mantelpiece, in some new life, and never tell its story?
—That’s just Harriet’s Swiss Army knife. —Don’t know. —She won’t say.
God, there was a time when . . . And then there it goes, the Drift, bobbing off downstream almost merrily, dragging its misty leafy lazy river behind it.
For now, finally, she sees there are people gathering. Much chatter, questions, useless sighs. One man is holding his phone to his ear. She peeks, raises the wad of sopping pinafore just enough to see under it. The blood slowly pools but has stopped running. She lifts the rag to her ear—why not, she’s smeared in the boy’s blood anyway. She squeezes his hand and with her free hand lifts the bloody glop of pinafore up to the side of her own face, snuggles her ear into its oozy petals and says, You see? It’s all coming ok.
“Like it or not,” she jokes, as if to distract him. “Like it or not, you’ll be good as new,” she says, and though said aloud, and looking right at him, it isn’t him she’s talking to.
Craft Essay
“Mistress of the Drift” began with a writing prompt in a course on Settings I was taking with Black Lawrence Press: write a scene in which a character moves from a familiar setting to a disturbing, unfamiliar one and is changed therefor. I decided to flip the structure: character moves from an unfamiliar setting to a familiar one, but the change would be negative. There! Take that, you bossy writing prompt. The thing is, I almost always write autobiographically, and here I was starting out with a homeless person, suffering from a trauma leaving her wandering on the streets in a kind of oblivion.
But I didn’t know beans about the homeless, a ‘street person’ as we used to say, so I hit Google and found “10 Best Survival Tips from Homeless Persons”. I’d covered a few obvious ones, and barely resisted including What to do if a pit bull attacks you? Finger in the ass, of course. I also omitted the churches and libraries––food, shelter, free internet access, charging stations. Toilets! Crucial aids, but didn’t want her running in and out of buildings, so she became an outdoors girl.
My first dashed off notes in addressing the prompt pretty much outline the whole structure:
No surprise that
TobyBonnie looked lost. She was always lost, trolling the streets, they change each day––like a river?––always same, always different. Then something triggers a return of memory. Two traumas then– –one to lose her memory, another to bring it back, whether she wants it or not.I wrote my way to the second trauma where she inadvertently causes a boy to crash his bicycle, badly cutting his head, and as she instinctively administers to him, consciousness returns, riding high on his blood and her reawakened empathy. And, even there, just a sentence or two short of the ending, I was still going to make this a tragedy: she had been safe, even skilled, in her ‘unfamiliar setting’ of homelessness, but now she would have to face familiarity, full consciousness returned, making life many times more difficult.
An ok irony but not a happy ending. I mulled over it for a week, finally deciding a positive outcome could be just as meaningful. I do lose the double flip in this brighter ending, rejecting that she would get her memory back and that’s tragic, ���. But empathy, fully engaged, can take us into a Zen interconnectedness of all life, all meaning and that’s a much better feeling and far richer story. ������������
So the only basic change, from the tragic downer to the expansive satori-al fullness, was from: She holds his hand and presses the bloody glop to her face… But at this point, 4 lines from the end but with the negative ending in mind, I had only notes:
She understands where she is, who she is. She’s going to have to steer now, to know, make choices. But this will destroy her: she will no longer be able to depend on the drift, at which she has become a master, mistress of the drift (title?).
Final version: She squeezes his hand and with her free hand lifts the bloody glop of pinafore up to the side of her own face, snuggles her ear into its oozy petals and says You see? It’s all coming ok.
“Like it or not,” she jokes, as if to distract him. “Like it or not, you’ll be good as new,” she says, and though said aloud, and looking right at him, it isn’t him she’s talking to.
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