White Oleander

I WALKED ALONG the river in the last afternoon light, my hands in my pockets, Baldy all pink in the east with reflected sunset, Susan's money crumpled in my fist. I strolled north, past the contractor's lot and the bakery loading bays, the sculptor's yard at the end of Clearwater Street, painted trompe 1'oeil like a little French village. A dog rushed the fence and the wide planks jerked as the animal struck it, barking and growling. Over the fence through the razor wire, shapes in bronze, balanced inside big metal hoops like Shiva, turned slowly in the wind. I found a chunk of concrete broken loose from the embankment and threw it into the river. It fell among the willows, and a flurry of whistling wings rose from cover, brown wading birds. It was happening again. I was being drawn back into her world, into her shadow, just when I was starting to feel free.

 

I coughed the dry hacking cough I'd had all spring, from smoking pot and the perennial mold at Rena's. I dashed down the slope to the water, squatted and touched the current with my fingertips. Cold, real. Water from mountains. I put it between my eyes, the third eye spot. Help me, River.

 

And what if she did get out? If she came walking up to the house on Ripple Street, if she said, "I'm back. Pack up, Astrid, we're leaving." Could I resist her? I pictured her, in the white shirt and jeans they let her change into when they arrested her. "Let's go," she said. I saw us standing on the porch at Rena's, staring at each other, but nothing beyond that.

 

Was she still in my bones, in my every thought?

 

I squatted by the water as it flowed over the tumbled rocks, thought how far must they have come to have settled in this concrete channel, the stream clear and melodious, the smell of fresh water. I didn't want to think about my mother anymore. It made me tired. I'd rather think about the way the willows and the cottonwoods and palms broke their way through the concrete, growing right out of the flood control channel, how the river struggled to reestablish itself. A little silt was carried down, settled. A seed dropped into it, sprouted. Little roots shot downward. The next thing you had trees, shrubs, birds.

 

My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out .small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. Then they were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat and serviceable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally, they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamp that met the sea.

 

But this river was none of these things. It flowed serene and ignored past fences spray-painted 18th Street, Roscos, Frogtown, alive despite everything, guarding the secrets of survival. This river was a girl like me.

 

A makeshift tent sat on a small island in the middle of the miniature forest, its blue plastic tarp startling amid the grays and greens. The here-and-now Hiltons, Barry used to call them. I knew whose it was. A tall, thin Vietnam vet in khakis and camouflage, I'd seen him around early in the mornings, the thin thread of smoke from his small coffee-can stove. I'd seen him in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, the boarded-up side, playing poker with his friends in the long shadows of afternoon.

 

Wild mustard flowered on the cracked banks, and I picked a bouquet for Yvonne. What was a weed, anyway. A plant nobody planted? A seed escaped from a traveler's coat, something that didn't belong? Was it something that grew better than what should have been there? Wasn't it just a word, weed, trailing its judgments. Useless, without value. Unwanted.

 

Well, anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon's charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cezanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them.