Given (34 page)

You never understand the nature of the drug, you only understand the sorrow. Somewhere deep in my old brain there must have been a memory stored from the first time I ever did a line and cocaine had become my fate, my sweet annihilating angel.

I didn't get to bed that night because after we had cooked up and smoked what was left in the flap, I-5 went to his stash in the basement and came back with more.

Vernal had always said I had a sensible streak, but there is nothing sensible about cocaine. I only used what I needed which was, of course, an immeasurable amount. That is to say, if there was any in the room I couldn't let it go unused, but the minute I'd done a line I wanted to be straight again, and then I'd do another line, and another, until it was all gone and I found some sort of peace in coming down. Meanwhile every line I snorted, every base toke I took, helped obliterate my life.

When I opened my eyes late the next day, got out of bed and stumbled up to Vernal's office, full of remorse, I found Frenchy where I could count on finding her, at the computer. Rainy sat on the floor with Say Muh's head in her lap, going through her hair with the fine-toothed flea comb I-5 used on the Bomb, looking for lice. Ever since the twins had removed their veils they'd been scratching at themselves, she said. I told her it might help if she tried washing their hair once in a while.

Frenchy said
shhhhhh
because she couldn't concentrate with us distracting her, conversationally. Frenchy had reached the Twelfth Step: “Having reached a state of spiritual exhaustion as the result of all the other steps we've taken, we were ready to carry our message to others who were newly dead and looking for a way to live well in the afterlife.”

So many steps, only two feet,
Rainy said, sulkily.
What you gon do now, you finish settin your wreckful life right?

Frenchy looked up at her, and shook her head.
Shoot bullets through me, why don't you?

Rainy shrieked — she knew this always got Frenchy's attention — hitting a pitch that caused the computer screen to crack, from one side to the other. Rainy took hold of the twins by their hair and went back downstairs.

She be high as a nigga pie,
Frenchy said, confirming my worst fears.

I went down to join Rainy who was watching the noon news. I had missed the beginning of the story but caught, “ . . . believed the child's mother, who may have had outside help, kidnapped the premature baby who was being kept in a Natal Intensive Care Unit and left the hospital early this morning. A hospital spokesperson said, ‘We have checked the area thoroughly and there is nothing to indicate that the child is actually lost, other than the fact that he is missing.'” The reporter said the baby had been under the protection of Human Resources and was in the process of being adopted, that the infant's birth mother was an intravenous drug user who was being held under observation at Mercy, and that the missing baby was now the centre of a city-wide hunt.

Rainy sniffed, pressing her nose flat with her forefinger the way she used to do in the Facility to show she was not pleased with the world.
You jack what belong to you, they still call it stealin?

I said most people would see it that way. Grace was one of those about whom others say, “she should never have been a mother.”

I heard the phone ring, got up and went into the kitchen, just as I-5 was hanging up. “We got a situation,” he said. “Let's go. Right now. Fast.”

The twins wanted to watch TV, so Rainy said they could stay behind again. The HE had changed into a clean, white robe, covered his head with his black and white checkered scarf, and put on the green bandana with the Arabic lettering. His eyes, for once, looked beatific, as though his soul resided, already, in another place.

As we piled into the hearse, Toop came around the corner of the house, the dirt-encrusted body of the headless Baby-Think-It-Over in his mouth. Rainy wrenched it from him, and clutched it to her own damaged body.

I-5 kept giving me directions, even though I knew where to go. Frenchy tried to restrain the HE as he flew from one side of the hearse to the other, gulping down the fast-paced downtown air, as if he had been starved for chaos.

When we reached the centre of the city nearly every parking lot had been cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape in the aftermath of the Marilyn Manson concert. I no longer recognized where I was. The neighbourhood had changed since the days the legal crowd had frequented the restaurants and I had joined Vernal at the Hung Jury Inn, with prosecutors and other defence lawyers, for long boozy lunches. Now the local businesses had more bars on their windows than your average Death Row facility.

I-5 pointed to a vacant spot in front of the Salvation Army. I parked, and he went to open the passenger door, but a woman on crutches, wearing fire-engine red boots up to her crotch blocked his way, and made a sign for him to roll down his window. Her skin was a urinous yellow, her nose brimming with doper's drip. She asked if he had a cigarette, or five dollars for bus fare, and he shook his head. “Not for you I don't, sweetheart.”

“What about crutches, you need crutches?” she asked, ignoring him and turning her attention to me. “I can get a good pair, cheap. I give you a deal.”

“Does she look like she needs crutches, she's driving, ain't she?” I-5 opened his door and the woman stepped backwards, mumbling “fuck you very much,” then crumpled to the sidewalk as if her bones had been pulled out from inside her legs.

I put the “On Appointment” sign on display in the window, got out and locked the doors. I glanced at a plaque: Salvation Army was invented to save souls, to grow saints, and to serve suffering humanity. It was hard to imagine any kind of saint growing or thriving in a neighbourhood such as this one.
Look like everyone fall out of an ugly tree and get broke by branches on they way to the ground,
Rainy said.

The smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air. We had to run the half block to keep up with I-5, who disappeared inside a McDonald's whose golden arches had long ago fallen. A sign on the temporary plywood door read, “Sorry For Our Appearance. We are Undergoing a Face Lift”.

A girl, presumably a server, leaned on the counter, twitching. A man with the top of his head wrapped in bleeding newspaper sat at a corner table collecting his spit in a wide-mouthed Mason jar. A woman stood over him, pulling his ear, saying, “Dave, I thought you loved me? Dave?”

At that moment the HE, who had come in after Frenchy, twisting at a piece of shrapnel under his skin, started going
glock-glock-glock
clutching at his throat. He made the same coughing-up-a-massive-hairball sound I was accustomed to hearing, accompanied now by an even more heroic clearing of lungs, a gurgling sound, like the death rattle issuing from the throat of a dying man. But this time, as he blew his nose over and over again into his
kaffiyeh
, a projectile that had struck him between his eyes and lodged itself above his nose all those years ago, flew out and landed at Frenchy's feet. The HE slapped his head hard, only once, with his open hand, and then stopped, opened his eyes, and stared at his mother as if seeing her for the first time.

Frenchy fell to her knees on the floor before her son, telling him she had never given up hope that he would find his way back to her. Even though the HE had regained his sight, he couldn't hear her. He just went on smiling down at Frenchy with that half-embarrassed smile the dead get, as if they're sorry to be a burden on you, for the grief you're going to get.

You go ahead, girl
, Frenchy said to Rainy.
I catch up widju later.

I-5 headed straight through the building to the door leading into the alley behind the restaurant. Rainy hustled me outside in time to see I-5 reach into a dumpster and pull out a green garbage bag. He opened it, looked inside, then told me to have a peep: I saw a baby, wrapped in crime-scene tape like a tiny mummy, with his head poking out, sucking a pacifier that had been fixed in place with duct tape so he couldn't cry and draw attention to himself.

The baby looked up at me. He had Angel's caramel eyes — eyes that at first just looked warm, but which, like little windows in furnace doors, only gave a glimpse of the heat inside.

I-5 made kissing noises as he lifted the baby out of the bag. I unzipped my jacket, tore open my shirt, and loosened the yellow tape from around his body. When his arms were free, he balled his hands into fists and began pummelling the air, like Angel used to do.

I removed the duct tape and took the pacifier from his mouth, then tucked him inside my shirt, and held him against my bare chest like a piece of my mother's bone china, one with a hairline crack that might break all the way if you looked at it too long, or too hard. I felt peaceful, suddenly, and whole again, having him there, as though a part of me that had gone missing had been temporarily restored.

“Youngster could have starved to death,” I-5 said, giving the baby a proprietary look. He turned the bag upside down and a plastic baby-bottle, a jar of Coffee-Mate, and a note saying, “Feed me, pleas,” fell out. I recognized the scrawl.

This be Son Jesus come back early for his birthday,
Rainy cried, as she danced around me, swinging Baby-Think-It-Over high over her head, reciting snippets of nursery rhymes because she was too excited to remember any of them all the way through:
Rock-a-bye Jesus, Be hip-hoppin up da hill, Son he felt down, An busted he ass, the whole muhfo crib rock on.

The baby fixed Rainy with an open-mouthed stare. When his eyes shifted their focus onto the headless doll, his face, for a moment, became pinched — he seemed to be trying to make up his mind whether he should be afraid or amused — his eyes darting from the doll's severed neck to the centre of its gutted body. His decision made, a frown pulled down the corners of his mouth, his bottom lip began to quiver, and he began to wail. There was no consoling him. He continued to scream until Rainy stuffed Baby-Think-It-Over in the garbage bag, and tossed it in the dumpster. It was as if he had sensed, in that headless, emptied out body, what could have been his fate.

Rainy asked if it was safe to touch him, and when I said “go ahead” she reached inside my jacket to rub his shiny head. She said he looked hungry, that we should stop and pick up a pizza on our way back to the house.

“Babies don't eat pizza,” I said. “You have to have teeth.”

Even the ghost of a dog got teeth. Babies don't eat pizza, what they do eat?
Rainy stared at me as if the baby might be better off scavenging in a dumpster than having me as a mother. I thought of my own son, how I had watched him sicken, grow thin, his eyes as big as mouths, his heart all hunger. I didn't know anything about taking care of babies, then. I could hardly take care of myself, let alone a hapless child who needed me.

“Milk,” I said. “Babies need milk.”