My Abandonment(11)

To follow a bird is impossible. I can follow a banana slug or some ants for hours and that whole time my thoughts slip away and I have to keep bringing myself back to remind me what the insects are doing.

People are easy to follow, and it's amazing the things they do when they think no one can see them. I follow joggers or even Richard or men I don't know from the men's camp and no one ever knows I'm there.

This morning a boy and girl come walking up the gravel road in the middle of the forest park called Leif Ericksen Drive. At first I think they are two boys. In the trees alongside the road, fifteen feet away, I walk like they are, keeping up. The girl holds a piece of yellow candy in her teeth and the boy snatches it, puts it in his mouth and I wonder if I were there, their third friend, if he would pass the candy to me so I could try it since I am not allowed to eat candy. They are my age or barely older.

The boy and girl slip down a side trail and I stay higher on my own trail. They're down in a hollow where there's a clearing and a tall round blue water tank with a flat top and a ladder I can't reach. That's where they climb and start to dance around with their arms like they are pretending to swim. Then the girl takes off her shirt and the boy is in his white underwear and sits down. The girl keeps dancing so her dark hair comes loose and her white shirt leaps all the way down and is caught in some bushes below, her shoes kicked off and her bra but I can't see much. I can hear myself breathing as I watch. She sits down next to him, close like they are talking and then after a while she puts her bra back on and stands and goes back to the ladder and slides down a rope the last ten feet. She finds her shirt and her backpack where she left it. The boy comes down after and then I lose track even if I could still follow if I wanted.

Father and I are supposed to meet at home at eleven to go over my homework but I'm over an hour early so I take the E encyclopedia and climb into the lookout. It's impossible to climb with both the encyclopedia and Randy so I take two trips. No horse has ever been higher in trees. Then I lie on the narrow platform on my back, the book beneath my head and Randy on my chest and I think a while.

An airplane slides along, the white line behind it. Far away I can hear cars on the freeway, a sound I wouldn't recognize if Father hadn't told me.

It is already a hot day, the legs of my pants rolled up almost to my knees and I am thinking of standing and taking off my clothes and hanging them in the branches around since sometimes in my alone time I like to look carefully at my body to see how it's been changing. There is a way that bodies can look that mine is starting to look like. The white bra of the girl on the water tank, the shape of her makes me think, makes me want to check my own body.

I have my shirt pulled off down to my undershirt when I hear cracking sticks below, branches pulled back and whipping around and then coming closer I hear breathing. Huffing and puffing is the only way to say it. I turn over onto my stomach and peek over just as a man comes busting into the clearing.

He is running. He is a runner. He has on white shoes and red shorts and a gray tank top and a white band like a halo around his long brown hair that is bald on top. Around his waist he has a belt that has little plastic canteens on it. He looks like he's run a long way and when he hits our clearing he stops and puts his hands on his knees and spits on the ground. Looking down he sees something through the branch across our door and steps closer and tips it away. He bends down and looks in and steps back and spits again, right next to the door of our house.

I make a little noise in my throat when he spits like that. I don't mean to and somehow then he looks up and sees me. His face is shiny from sweating and he turns all the way around shielding his eyes and I slide back so he cannot see me. I try to see him through the slats in the platform, through the branches attached on underneath and I cannot. I hold my breath. Randy is half under me sharp in my ribs.

"Hello?" the man says. "Hi? Girl? Don't be afraid."

I'm afraid he might try to climb the tree and I turn a little so I can kick down on his hands if he tries it. I breathe silently and hold my breath again. I can hear the man breathing, below, his steps on the grass we try not to ever step on. Minutes pass. I can hear my watch tick, and after a long time I hear a branch snap down low and heavy steps and more silence.

When I look over he is gone and no one is below and I see how my shirt is still off, hanging on the branch above me and that's what the man's eye caught on and how he saw me at all which was a stupid mistake.

A breeze kicks up and shivering I put my shirt back on over my undershirt. The green leaves still slide thick above, the sky pale blue past that. Branches rub against each other, back and forth, a slow creak. Squirrels and birds rattle from tree to tree. The air up here does not smell like dirt. It's sharper, closer to the sun. People have seen me in the forest park before but never so close to our house. That is a rule that has not been broken before and I do not want to make another house. I stretch out, my head on the encyclopedia and my hand around Randy, my fingertips on the edges of his organs. I watch the green leaves above. I try to concentrate, to look for airplanes.