“Police! Thieves! Back you devils! Police! Thieves!”

I recognized the quavering shouts in the hall as belonging to the tenant in apartment #8, the only other apartment in my hall. I didn’t even flinch. This tenant, John Moses (who everyone just referred to by his last name), seemed as old as the apartment building himself, but was actually about ninety, a tiny old man smelled like dust and cigarette ash, like musty stacks of newspaper. His hair looked like handfuls of cobwebs, and he always wore the same ancient Reed College sweatshirt, and old dirty Levi’s with a black fine tooth comb peeking out of the back pocket.

Half-awake on a Wednesday morning, in the middle of a lackluster March, I slid my back down the porcelain edge of the clawfoot tub in my apartment until half my face was submersed in the now tepid bathwater, lilac and geranium scented soap floating at the other end of the tub, causing a layer of filmy suds to slide over the surface of the water, my ears submerged to muffle the noise. Staring out the bathroom window, I could only see the shabby branches of the cottonwood tree after sliding down so far – I could no longer see the tops of the apartment buildings, the baseball field, the grocery stores, the music venues, or the Fremont Bridge which leads travelers north across the river. I still woke at eight thirty every morning, even though I quit setting my alarm. I wondered how many people had stared at that tree from this exact spot, in this apartment building that was once a boarding house. I wondered if boarders would stare through that window with its crooked windowsill, and dark wood starting to splinter and bubble. I imagined, as I had so many times before, that I didn’t live in this apartment, but that I was just staying a night in the boarding house, some other winter, in some other year, maybe 1897, right after the building was built. I closed my eyes, and my pockets were full of blueberries and tobacco, I played banjo in a band for a circus, I was waiting for the next train south, and I would soon be gone, eating cherry pie, wearing handmade poplin dresses and a pair of old lace up boots, borrowed from my brother who had outgrown them.

“Commie bastards, eh all of you…pinkos!” I heard Moses muttering over the sounds of doors slamming. I hear my doorknob being rattled, but was in the habit of locking the door always, just for occasions like this, when Moses forgot whose apartment was whose.

I didn’t think about my full voicemail box as I lay in the tub; I didn’t think about all the messages from my friends, wondering why I was missing our weekly routine outings, I didn’t think about messages from my dad, wondering why I hadn’t answered his emails, I didn’t think about the calls from my boss, the messages he would leave that were full of words that would render concern, but were spoken in a tone that sounded accusatory – “I hope you feel well enough to return to work soon…We really need you back.”

With my eyes closed, I couldn’t even see the tiny green tendrils sprouting on the branches of the cottonwood tree, the tender buds forming on the branches – the first sign that warm weather would soon burn away the winter, dissolve the clouds that bore rain on the city, that bore rain on the shoulders of my coat, on the top of my hat for the last six months. The apartment I moved in to in the winter, felt less cozy by early spring. The friendships I formed with my neighbors and people in the neighborhood felt less delightful but more confining, like responsibilities. Weekly events, nights out, movie and Thai food nights, craft nights, I began to dread them all; I would wince whenever someone sarcastically asked if I couldn’t come because I had a headache – not because I felt bad or because I had a headache, but because it meant that my excuse had been figured out, thus it wouldn’t work anymore. I began calling in sick to work, mostly because I hated the work but was too scared to actually quit. In some way, I knew that this excuse would be exhausted, and maybe I really wanted to quit, but didn’t know how. Even the walls in my apartment, once sea green-blue looked gray, and as I lay in bed at night, the sounds of the heater, the city train sliding down its tracks, the water dripping in the bathroom, all these noises seemed horrendously loud and jarring, filling the tiny space of my studio apartment even more, as I shivered in my tangerine sheets, listening to the rain on the roof, as if I could hear every drop.

Climbing out of the tub, reaching for my scratchy yellow towel, I looked at the imprints my wet feet left on the cream mat outside my tub, perfect outlines of tiny feet. I heard a loud rattling of keys and a tenuous guffaw from the hall, so I knew that Moses had found his way into his apartment. All those days, in that winter, where I called in sick and couldn’t even motivate myself to read a book, I would just float in my apartment, laying in one place to another – from the bath to the couch, still in a towel, or back into bed, to look through some old magazine or journal I’d written. Usually, I would make a cup of black tea, sweeten it with sugar, and sit on the front stoop, a little shelter outside from the rain, and smoke a cigarette. I don’t know how long Moses had been smoking cigarettes, but when I think about it, I wonder if it was more than fifty years. Our cigarette breaks often coordinated. My interactions with Moses were varied at first: when I first moved in, if I asked him a question, he would crane his neck towards me, the white prickly hairs on the back of his neck looking like the gruff of an old hound; his eyes were a dull blue, and I knew that he was only pretending to listen, that I wasn’t speaking loud enough for him to hear. He did this with other people too, at the coffee shop around the corner, where they usually let him eat for free. I wished I could ignore people like he did, sometimes, just let their words pass by my ears, nod, and then be done. Once I became more familiar to Moses, he would speak to me more often. When he saw my septum piercing, he squinted his eyes, pursed his lips and said, “You look like a prize bull.” Other times he would say, “I feel bad for you. You’ve got a crush on me and I’m too old for you.” Another time, I opened a door for him and he said, “You’re just like every other woman I know, taking charge! I won’t have it!” Occasionally I would just pass him in the coffee shop or on the apartment stairs and ask how he was. Sometimes he would tell me to “mind my own damn business,” another time he said something like, “Oh, just thinking back on my past affairs. Some lovely, some I’d care to forget. You know how that goes, you’ve been around the block a few times, I’m sure.” My landlord told me once that Moses was a friend of her father’s from college, and that they had fought in World War Two together, and Moses later had fought in Korea. I never knew for sure, but I’d heard that they didn’t charge him rent to live in that apartment anymore.

I sighed and looked around my apartment, #7 – jars half full of water, chipped mugs, mismatched saucers cluttering my desk and table; knitting projects, tangles of yarn, needles and fabric; piles of clothes – clean, dirty, needing to be hung up, needing to be folded, needing to be washed; crumbs on the counter, stacks of pans in the dishes with dried on food that would never come off. I sat and leaned my head back against the wall, regarding all these things with the same apathy as everything else.

*

“There aren’t any fruit trees in this city,” I had said, looking over at Moses, whose small figure made the weather battered plastic lawn chair look large, months earlier, sometime in January. As I took a sip of tea, much too hot, I watched his reaction to this – he wrinkled his nose, furrowed his brows and looked to the side, as if it took more time for my words to find meaning as they passed from his ears into his mind. I exhaled a slow, smoky breath wishing my mouth was full of the taste of oranges not cigarettes. I remembered when I lived with my mother in the Florida Keys, in a small blue house. I hardly remember the house, I was seven when we moved away, but I remember my mother lifting me up and walking around with me on her shoulders, her curly black hair tickling my thick legs as we would walk under the two blood orange and one lemon and one lime tree that grew under the webs of power lines, between the telephone poles, the only trees in our tiny yard. I stretched to reach the oranges, then handed them to my mother, who would stuff them into any pockets she had on her dress or sweatshirt. Then I would sit on the concrete patio and peel orange after orange, lime after lime while my mother read Ramona Quimby books to me. My fingers would be stained from the scent and color of the rinds of the fruit, punky fragrant pieces shoved under my fingernails, pieces of dark blood orange slices scattered around.

As I sat on the porch stairs, Moses in his plastic throne, I eyed my cigarette, and felt how acrid it made my inhale, how much tighter my chest was, and I wished I were seven and covered with sticky citrus juice. I wished I were anywhere that wasn’t my apartment, my neighborhood, the coffee shop, the bar, or a friend’s house. I wished I was pulling apart a blood orange, warm from the sun; I wished that my mom laying in the grass next to me, wearing her favorite green blouse, asleep with her book covering her face from the light and the sky. I remember the afternoon I tried to climb the tree by myself, but tumbled out of the tree, unable to capture any of the pulpy treasures hanging from the end of the branches. I sat with my legs straight out in front of me, puffing with tears, rubbing the scratches on my face and arms. “Oh, you have a thicker skin than that, you’re okay,” my mother had said, both comforting and scolding, as she knelt to wipe my arm with a dishtowel in our dark kitchen. I still wonder how thick my skin is supposed to be.

“Ah, fruit trees!” Moses exclaimed, finally realizing what I had said.

“Those bastards. When I was…” he paused to tilt his head away from me, looking at me with one quavering eye, that seemed to be hiding a wink, “…a much younger, more attractive man, if you can imagine that, I was chasing this girl who’s father had a plum orchard. This was years ago, when I lived in Minnesota. A plum orchard. Christ. I worked there a summer, thinking I could woo this girl. Well, those trees were more trouble than it was worth – trimming, picking, raking. It was a hassle,” he particularly emphasized the word hassle, nearly shouting the word.

“A storm came through that summer, a wind storm, you know like sometimes happen here. Well those trees have shallow roots, but wide. One got blown over, then a whole bunch of others when with them. The thing about those fruit trees is that their tiniest roots held on the hardest. Once the big roots broke loose, well they were done for. But I could hear the tiny crackles of the..the little roots…the littlest ones…holding on to the earth as long as they could. Ah well. That storm ended my summer work. I probably spend the rest of August drinking whiskey or some other rascaly business. But you know nothing about that do you?” he turned his face towards me, mustache bristling with a smile, saying “do you” less as a question, but a statement. Whenever he spoke, his voice would get quiet and then loud, oddly emphasizing words in some way I could never quite decipher. Phrases of words would be spoken simply, phrases of words would be stuttered, fumbled with, and then one word shouted. Maybe it wasn’t intended to be meaningful. I asked him what happened to the girl he was trying to woo.

“Well, being the cantankerous hooligan I was…” Moses chuckled, “well, being the cantankerous hooligan I am, I found something or someone else to chase. She got married or something, had a slew of kids. I can’t remember,” and he took another shaky drag of his cigarette.

Running my tongue around on the insides of my cheek, trying to wash out the taste of my cigarette, I looked down the stairs at the street, at the empty city train curving up the hill, at the scraggly trees planted by the city on the sidewalk, their trunks so thing I could fit both hands around them. “Well, I wish we could have some plum trees around here. Or oranges. Or anything other than this weather.”

“Fruit trees, eh. Well, I don’t know about that. Won’t grow up here. But this weather…well I’ve been here for quite a few winters, and the thing about the weather here, in eh…the weather here in…” Moses looked down into his cup of coffee for a moment, his face cloudy with irritation, “Portland. The thing about the weather here in the winters in Portland, is that it doesn’t keep any secrets from us. Not one,” he said, pushing himself slowly up and out of the chair. I stood, seeing tiny splashes on the thin white paper of my cigarette, feeling drops my eyelashes and pulled the door open for Moses, who shuffled inside, dwarfed by puffy blue jacket. I wondered what sort of secrets wintery Portland had, what sort of secrets the rainy weather wasn’t keeping. I wondered if this too, like Moses’s emphasized words, had meaning or not.

*

Maybe I was tired of staring at the mess of my apartment, or I realized I hadn’t left the tiny place in three days. When I looked out the window in my bedroom, the one that was only three feet wide, but six feet tall, white paint chipping of the frame, I saw that it wasn’t raining – or at least wasn’t raining yet. The sidewalk was wet, the trees were dark and wet, the sky bright, not in a sunny way, but only because of the thick, gray clouds, which somehow reflected light. I got dressed and pulled on some boots, my old gray wool coat, a thin blue scarf my best friend sent me from Colorado after she moved there, and decided to go outside, on a walk, to get air, any of those things people say are good to do - not even taking a bag, or my wallet, or any cash, just a cigarette I’d rolled dangling from my lips.

I stopped on the front porch, cupping my hand to light my cigarette. It still wasn’t raining, but drops of water were splashing down from the eaves. Moses was sitting in his usual perch, same puffy blue coat, and a gray stocking cap, folded over twice. I glanced over to see what the paper was that he was holding to read – I think it was #4’s electric bill. If Moses wasn’t re-reading Nietzsche essays or War and Peace, he would read our mail. Moses had gotten better about taking mail that wasn’t his, but usually I would find my letters and bills opened, re-folded, then tucked under my door. He nodded at me, smiling with his old teeth under his bristly mustache. I folded my lips upward into a return smile, and noticed his eyes seemed sharper, less dull, like shards of old blue glass bottles. As I padded down the twelve dirty cement stairs, under the brick arch, landing on the sidewalk and turning to the north, a small fuzzy object was caught in my periphery, nesting in one of the scraggly sidewalk trees. Pausing, then walking closer, I saw a tiny Clementine orange, peeled, fragrant and spicy, wet from the earlier rain shower tucked between two twiggy branches. Looking at the two other trees on the block, I saw tiny citrus gems placed between the other branches. I turned, stood under the arch which had our apartment building’s name painted across it in scrolling hand painted letters, cupping the tiny fruit in the palm of my hand, wondering if Moses’s fingers were stained from the color and scent of the orange peel. Moses snuffed out his cigarette. As he stood I saw how hunched he was, how his sitting posture and standing posture were not so different. He hunched down slightly and pointed his finger at me. I thought I saw his mustache twitch, like it did when he smiled or winked, and then he turned and began fumbling with his keys. Pulling the main door open, I saw the back of his hat tilt upward as he surveyed the steep stairs ahead of him. Grabbing onto the handrail, I heard him grumble to himself, as I had heard him say so many times before as he fought his way up those stairs, “Dammit, Moses! Get a hold of yourself. Keep it together