City Boy (15 page)

The cop was writing in a notebook. “Who else is upstairs, anybody?”

“This old lady. I don’t think she speaks English.”

“Nobody’s home,” said the cop, still scribbling. Jack debated sending him up to pound harder on Mrs. Lacagnina’s door, make sure she was accounted for, then decided against it. She was probably better off oblivious and deaf.

“Who’d want to get in here anyway,” said Raggedy Ann, disdainfully. “I mean, what’s the big deal? What’s there to steal from this bunch?” She seemed to be smirking at Jack as she said it, or maybe he was imagining it.

“Act of vandalism,” said the cop. “You see it all the time. Punks don’t need a reason to act like punks.”

“I wouldn’t break in here even for grins. This place is so nothing.”

Rich Brezak said, “Yeah, right. You’re made for better things. We through here?”

“Unless you got some other damage or theft, sure, you’re through.”

“I guess we should go make sure. Hey.” Brezak got Raggedy Ann’s attention and herded her toward the stairs. The girl gave Brezak one of
her pouting, let’s-have-instant-sex looks, and started up ahead of him. Brezak raised his eyebrows at Jack, in invitation to witness that he was about to get himself some, then followed the girl’s lolling ass, step by step. A little bop in his step, a jaunty, stoned, soft shoe.

Jack stood for a moment, listening to Chloe’s voice trilling behind the closed apartment door. “Excuse me,” he said to the cop, who wasn’t paying attention to him anyway, and walked quickly down the back hallway.

The yard was empty. That was only what he expected. There was a gate that led to the alley, and this was supposed to be kept latched. One more thing Brezak was sloppy about; when he did manage to get his garbage out, he was just as likely to leave the gate open. It was unlatched now. Jack listened, testing the silence. He felt stupid, self-consciously stupid, but he whispered, “Ivory?”

Small sound from the other side of the wall. Something shifting or scraping. He pushed the gate open and stepped into the alley’s moonscape of gravel and garbage and power lines. The girl was pressed flat against the fence. A security light from across the way turned her hair and skin so white they were nearly blue. Her eyes glittered, hard as marbles. He realized he had never seen her in daylight.

“What are you—” He stopped. “What did you do to your arm?”

She was holding it close to her chest and it was leaking black blood. “Nothing.”

“Nothing hell.”

“Leam me alone.”

“I’m not going to bust you,” he said to reassure her, and then was forced to wonder why he was not.

She said nothing. Although the night was warm and calm, there was a tremor in her shoulders and tight-clenched jaw. Her eyes were still pointed at him but the seeing had gone out of them. He had the sense that she was dangerous, that she might shriek or strike him out of pure reflex. But she was also a shivering child.

He began talking to her in a matter-of-fact, calming voice, about nothing at all, about the kids in the class he was teaching this week, how funny they were, how he actually did like teaching, or wanted to
like it, and on good days you did, but on bad days you thought about how little they paid you to have a really bad day, and that’s when the sourness began, although you could always lift yourself up with some bit of good feeling. Sometimes the kids were sweet almost in spite of themselves. When she’d finally stopped that high-voltage-wire shaking, he said, “Come on, this way,” and started off down the alley. He saw that she wasn’t moving from her spot against the fence. “The police are still out front, you want to wait until they get around to checking back here?”

She followed, but slowly. Jack was about to say something impatient when he remembered her bad leg. It was half a block to the end of the alley, another slow passage around the corner to where he hoped like hell nobody’d made off with his car. They hadn’t. The taillights glowed and the engine chugged in the middle of the quiet street. The one squad car was still angled in front of the building’s door, but even its flasher had been turned off. Party over.

“Get in,” he told the girl, holding the passenger door, and she ducked under his arm and got herself inside double quick.

Once he’d gotten behind the wheel and put the car in gear and eased it past the apartment building—lights on, upstairs and down—Jack glanced over at her. It was a confusion to his eyes to see her there, in the space that was always Chloe’s. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had another woman in his car. “How bad is your arm?”

“It’s no big deal.” She was wearing another of her long, hobbling skirts; she’d pulled it down as far as she could over her drawn-up knees, as if she might indeed be cold. He couldn’t see her injured arm; she had it tucked away inside her denim shirt. When they reached the corner of Clark she said, “You can let me out here.”

“Why here?”

“Because I don’t want to bleed all over your car.”

“If that arm was about to fall off, you’d still say it was no big deal, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s not falling off, okay?” She made a show of being exasperated, of sighing. It made her seem even younger, a kid acting uppity with a parent, but at least she was back to her usual smart-mouth self.

With one hand Jack rummaged behind him and came up with an old towel.“Wrap this around it, apply some pressure.” Because he didn’t want her to jump out of the car, he kept moving, turning south on Clark. “How about I take you to an emergency room.”

“I don’t like hospitals.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It quit bleeding, see? Or it almost quit. If you want to take me anyplace, you can take me home. Turn here.”

She directed him south on Western Avenue, then on toward Hum-boldt Park, through neighborhoods where there was less and less good news, more and more beaten-down blocks of four flats and houses that might have been said to have seen better days, if those earlier days had been more hopeful in the first place. It wasn’t one of the worst parts of the city, those were reserved for people like his students, but it was a good three or four notches down from where he lived. It was the kind of neighborhood Chloe wanted people to envision when she complained. He tried to think about Chloe but his mind veered away from her. There was a space of emptiness where she’d been, like the broken emptiness of the door.

He said, “What were you trying to do with that stunt anyway, were you drunk or high, what?”

“I bet you think that explains stuff. Being fucked up.”

It unnerved him to realize that Chloe had said almost the same thing, that he seemed unable to escape her, or the rest of the bastard night. Everything had followed him here.

He hadn’t answered back before, but he did now: “Yeah, I do. It makes people do things they’re sorry for later.”

“Well I’m not sorry.”

He kept speaking in the same heavy, censorious tone, as if it was the only voice left to him. “I hope you enjoyed your little tantrum. I just want to point out, once more for the record, that the guy’s really not worth it.”

“Thanks.”

“You don’t have to do this to yourself. There are other guys out there. Ones who won’t treat you like absolute shit.”

She turned to look at him then. Streetlights slid over her face in a series of rapid white bars. She was going to say something about Chloe, he was sure of it, but no, she couldn’t possibly know what had happened …

“Fuck you.”

“Nice.” It was a relief to him to be talking to her in this way, he was accustomed to it.

“Why do you care, huh? What do you know about me, nothing, there’s all different ways of being fucked up. I wanted to break something, I wanted to pick up a rock and throw it, so I did. Maybe you’re not that way but I am. Here. Turn here. I feel things I don’t want to feel, so what, just leave me alone.”

She had burst out with this string of words and now she came to the end of them, or maybe she didn’t trust herself to keep speaking without losing control. There was a small fabric bag around her neck, a kind of homemade purse, and with her good hand she began to rummage around for her keys. Jack thought they were not really angry with each other. He might be only another sort of rock she wanted to throw. She was right, he didn’t know her, as he no longer knew Chloe, or his own heart, or what miserable confusion had led him to this place. The street Ivory directed him to was occupied on one side by some sort of industrial concern, Lownes and Co., a nondescript name that told you nothing, a long, windowless sheet-metal building surrounded by cyclone fencing topped off with four canted rows of barbed wire, as if something precious was inside. There were a couple of tanker trucks parked in a lot behind the gates, and some vents and ductwork that might have held compressor or exhaust fans. Who knew what they made there, paint or industrial adhesives or ball bearings, some aspect of human enterprise with its own structures and economies and history that he would know nothing of, as he knew nothing of the world itself.

Ivory was leaning forward. “See that light? You can let me off there.”

Jack pulled over. There was a narrow two-story building of some oddly painted brick, the paint the exact color of dried mud in a hot climate, a slit of a window or two in the expanse of ugly wall, so that it gave the impression of a fortress or a jail.

“You want your towel back? Because I can leave it here, or I can wash it and get it back to you.”

“Let me see that arm.”

She said no, but she didn’t make any move to leave the car. Some exhaustion she’d been too stubborn to give in to until now. Jack cut the engine, got out, went around to her side and opened her door. He expected some further back talk or protest from her but she was quiet. When he peeled the towel away from her arm, when he got himself to look past the shock of the gaudy blood staining the towel and her shirt and even the skirt where she’d held the arm, he saw some long scratches, already beginning to mound up with welts, and one deeper, oozing wound where the glass had gouged her. Blood was still leaking from it in a slow, puddling stream.

“I think there might be some glass in it still.” She sounded matter-of-fact, or maybe that too was fatigue.

Jack pressed the towel back into place. “Hold this,” he directed. “Hold your arm up.” He was genuinely alarmed now that he’d seen the extent of the bleeding. She should get to a doctor, but he doubted his ability to manage her to such an extent. He said, “I want to look at that in better light.”

“Why? It’s gross.” But she got out of the car and hitched along ahead of him, to one side of the building and down a half flight of cement stairs, where she unlocked a door that opened into darkness.

Jack hung back until she’d turned on the light. “So this is where I live,” Ivory said, stepping aside to let him in. “So it sucks.”

They stood in a kitchen, a lamp dangling low over a small table. The lightbulb was covered with a Japanese paper globe, pale green with a pattern of painted bamboo. The rest of the room or rooms beyond were in deep shadow. Jack deliberately kept his eyes from them. He didn’t want to know anything else sad about her.

“Do you have bandages, antiseptic? Anything like that?”

He waited while she stepped out of the circle of light. He heard her footsteps, then rummaging noises, then she was back, dumping things in a heap on the table. Jack told her to sit. He found paper towels, ran water in the sink, and began swabbing away at the dried blood. The cut
was meaty and inflamed, perhaps three inches long. One end was deeply incised. With the paper towel he prodded, then extracted a kernel of glass and two fine slivers. There was still a great deal of blood. The blood smell carved a path through his nostrils and into his brain, making him languid. There was another scent beneath that, her musky hair and skin. He had to remind himself that she was a child, she was angry and damaged and it was only through a long series of accidents that he was here at all.

The air in the room was warm and heavy, but the girl’s skin was cool to his touch. She was quiet and let him work. The forked vein at her wrist was hardly perceptible, as if everything had already drained from it. Her upturned hand was slight and dangling. He looked down on the crown of her head and the haphazard tangle of her hair, which the light turned to pale green straw. He was having trouble catching his breath. The blood, the closeness of the room, the growing wound of his own life, the green, underwater light—he thought he might faint, or embarrass himself in some even worse fashion.

He washed the cut with liquid soap, then swabbed it with hydrogen peroxide and squeezed out a line of antiseptic cream. He was relieved to be able to do a workmanlike job of it. The girl watched him. He saw her eyes and their sparse, childlike lashes following his hands. He pressed a gauze pad in place and was glad to see that the bleeding had slowed. But it was difficult to tape it down and keep the pressure on. The tape was of the cheapest, paper kind, and it turned sweaty and useless as he fumbled with it. “Here,” the girl said, her voice just a breath above the silence. “Let me …”

She wrapped a layer of tape, then pulled a thin scarf from around her neck and laid it over that, indicating that he should use it as a bandage. He was clumsy here too, he was afraid of hurting her, getting the scarf too tight. Finally he managed it. They both stared down at the flimsy pink silk, waiting to see if it would hold the blood. She said, in the same low breath of a voice, “I think …”

She trailed off without finishing. “What?” Jack said, or tried to say. He had to clear his throat to get the rust and spit out of it, but before he could come up with words she was out of her chair, she was kneeling
on the floor before him, her hands on his thighs, shoving him backward until he collided with the sink. Then she was reaching for his belt, unzipping him, his shock and alarm not keeping up with what was already
Jesus Christ
happening. He couldn’t speak. His hands tried to dislodge her but he was still afraid of hurting her, still thinking that way, and she already had him out of his clothes, her mouth was around him and in spite of himself he was growing big, he was letting it happen.