Skate and Salvage

The fire started on a Tuesday, which felt about right, because nothing in my life had gone to plan since I moved to this city six months ago. I was thirty-four years old, I had a crate of records in the back seat of my hatchback, and I was standing in a converted roller rink on the edge of town with a couple hundred strangers while the hills burned orange in the dark. The air smelled like dry smoke even inside, and one lone disco ball still spun over the old wooden floor, throwing slow white flecks across everyone like the whole shelter was underwater.

I had gotten out with almost nothing. My apartment building was in the voluntary zone, then the mandatory zone, and by the time the alert buzzed my phone I was already stuffing my car. Records first, which tells you something about me. Then the one houseplant I had owned for three years, a pothos that had been dying slowly since the move, mostly out of neglect and mostly because I kept forgetting it existed. I grabbed it anyway. It looked ridiculous in my arms in the middle of an evacuation, this sad trailing thing with maybe six live leaves left.

There was a canteen table set up near where the snack bar used to be, back when this place was a rink for kids' birthday parties. Red folding tables, paper cups, a coffee urn hissing away. I found a folding chair against the wall and sat there holding the pot in my lap like it was a pet, and I watched the disco ball turn, and I thought about how I had lived here half a year without making a single friend who would let me sleep on their couch tonight. That is a specific kind of lonely. You only find out you have it when the sky turns brown.

And then, because my brain likes to kick me when I am down, I thought about the karaoke bar. This was four years ago now, in the city I used to live in. I was thirty. There was a big guy at the bar, maybe late thirties, broad shoulders, flannel shirt, who had clearly had the kind of week that ends at a karaoke bar alone on a Wednesday. He was trying to close his tab and his card kept declining and the bartender was getting that tight polite face she gets. So I paid it. It was not much, maybe eighty bucks. He turned around and looked at me like I had handed him a kidney, and he said his name was Marvin, and he wrote his number on a napkin and swore up and down he would pay me back by Friday.

I never called him, which I want to note was half on me. I lost the napkin inside a week. But I remembered his face, and I remembered that he shook my hand with both of his, and I remembered thinking, well, that was a nice thing I did once, and that was the end of it.

The reason my brain dragged that up tonight is obvious and stupid. Eighty dollars would buy a motel room right now. Eighty dollars would buy dinner for a week while I figured out if my apartment still existed. I sat there doing that math with the dead plant on my knees and feeling sorry for myself in a very organized way.

* * *

"Is that a pothos?"

I looked up. There was a coffee cup in front of me first, then a man attached to it. Big, broad, flannel, a little gray coming in at the temples. My stomach did something complicated. It took me a solid three seconds to place him, which is a long time when you have already told the story of a person to yourself a thousand times.

"Marvin," I said. "Marvin Jordon."

His eyebrows went up. "You got me on the first try."

"Marvin Jordon from the Pawn Palace," I said, because his shop was three blocks from my old apartment and the sign was burned into my memory from driving past it every day. "You owe me eighty dollars."

I meant it as a joke. It came out as a joke. But his face did this thing where the light just went out of it, and he set his own cup down on the table and stood there holding both hands together like he was about to apologize to a judge.

"God," he said. "You know, I have thought about that night maybe four hundred times. I came back the next Friday. I came back the Friday after that. I asked the bartender about you and she said she didn't know your name, and I felt like such a piece of garbage I stopped going."

"You didn't owe me Fridays," I said. "You owed me whenever."

"I know. That's not the point and you know it's not the point." He sat down in the chair across from me, and it creaked under him, and he looked at the plant again. "Can I ask about the pothos? I only recognized it because my mother grew them. That's a rough one."

"That's Duke," I said. "He was dying before the fire. He's just dying faster now, with more witnesses."

Marvin laughed, and the laugh broke whatever was stuck in his throat, and I was glad because I did not actually want an apology ceremony. I wanted coffee. I picked up the cup he had brought me and drank it, and it was terrible shelter coffee, burnt and thin, and it was the best thing that had happened to me all day.

We talked about the fire for a while, the way everyone in that building was talking about the fire. Which roads were closed. Whether the north side was gone. Whether the school on Delmore had held. Marvin had gotten out early with his truck and his dog and had been volunteering at the shelter since the afternoon, hauling cots, which was why he had a coffee urn's worth of access and a folding chair with a view of me. I told him I had gotten out with records and a plant, and he said that was the most DJ thing he had ever heard, and I said how did you know I was a DJ, and he said the crate was sitting next to your chair and has "NOLAN SWEENEY" written on it in paint pen.

"That's fair," I said. "Yeah. I DJ. Or I did. I moved here six months ago for a residency at a place downtown, and the residency folded last month, and now the place might be ash, so." I shrugged. "DJ without a gig. It's a very small category of person and I'm in it."

"Six months in this town and you end up in a roller rink with a dying houseplant," Marvin said. "That's a rough six months."

"You have no idea!"

"I might have some idea," he said, and he looked at me in a way that made me think he was doing his own math, adding up the same things I had been adding up. A man alone at a karaoke bar on a Wednesday. A man alone at a snack bar in a shelter holding a plant. Same guy, four years apart, different city.

Then he said, "Look, I've got cash on me. I always keep cash, it's a pawnshop thing. Let me settle this tonight, right now, with interest, and you can stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm going to vanish again."

I laughed, but he did not, and I realized he was serious, that this had genuinely been sitting on him for four years the way my napkin loss had never sat on me. "The money doesn't matter," I said. "It never mattered. You having a bad week and me having eighty bucks, that is everything. That's fine."

"It's not fine," Marvin said. "Here's what's fine. If this shelter clears out by midnight the way they're saying, there's a taco truck on Fairview that stays open till two. You look as though you have not eaten since the alert went off on your phone. Let me buy you dinner, pay you back the eighty at the table like a civilized person, and we'll call the whole thing even and start over."

"Start over doing what?"

"I don't know," he said, and he smiled for the first time since he'd walked over. "Talking. Finding out if the guy who covered my tab was a fluke or a person I should have known this whole time."

I looked at Duke the pothos, dead or close to it, and at the disco ball still turning over a few hundred sleeping strangers, and I said yes.

A volunteer in a red vest came around the snack bar around ten. She had a clipboard and the look of someone who had been herding frightened people since noon. She saw the crate before she saw me.