Signs of life?

Bro stirs in the front seat, and I roll over under the thick down. My hair has become a cage of frost and it catches my hand as I reach out into cold air. I pull the hand back in quickly and shove it between my legs to warm up as I scrunch further down in bed.

There’s an explosion of barking Bro in the front seat. I hold my breath and listen, because it sounds serious. There are footsteps in the snow, and then Bro is quiet. I call him back to me and pull him up in the bed, under the covers. He brings cold air with him and we shiver together under the cover, me reaching around him to hold the blanket against air leaks.

There are more footsteps, and through the frosty windshield I see a man in a funny hat walk in front of the van.  I wonder if he works at the store whose parking lot I’m in. As usual, my first line of defense is to snug down and shut up. Bro shivers against me with the reverberations of his whispered growl.

Then he knocks on the door. I let go of Bro and he’s in the front going crazy in under a second. This gives me some time to evaluate the situation. From the back of the van I can see the van parked across from me, and it is the other van dweller that lives here!

I left him a note once.  You know, “Hey, you live in a van? Me too! Parked across from ya, write back.” When I went to put it under his wiper I was startled to find him sleeping in the drivers seat with a pile of junk and two pit bulls. His van is so much bigger than mine, and I’d had high hopes of seeing a cool conversion. Apparently not. He didn’t write back.

But there he is at my window, and it might be 1PM for normal people, but it’s prime REM time for me and I’m not happy about being awake. I’ve learned in life that there are certain little unspoken boundaries, and people who cross them never turn out well in my life. Waking me up in the middle of my sleep is one of them.

I open the door and climb out with Bro, who of course has to pee.

He’s got an apartment now, he says, an address for his vehicle registration. He lived in the van for three years, and he doesn’t have a bed because he has a lot of cleaning equipment in the back from when he had a cleaning business down south. He asks if I’m looking for a job, looking for a house. Of course I’m not.

He’s not much of a conversationalist. I ask what he does for fun and he says he target shoots and walks in the woods with his gun cause you never know when you might need to shoot an animal or something. He invites me to his house and I decline. You never know when he might need to shoot a woman or something.

When he goes in the store I leave, not wanting him to follow me. I drive across town to another store that I sleep at sometimes. There’s a different van that parks here at night, an old Caravan with sheets hung in the window. I’ve always pictured a cute happy family in this van, and now I shudder for all the nights I parked next to the other van, feeling some kind of solidarity.

Lesson learned: some people are creepy, even if they do live in vans.