Short Ride to Nowhere (6 page)

“So this is how you get by?” Jenks asked.
 
“Cleaning out people who have even less than you do?”

“Nobody’s got less than me.”

“Don’t be so certain, you prick.”
 
The rage suddenly prodding him like a branding iron.
 
“You see kids out there?
 
You see mothers who can’t feed their children?”

“Fuck them.”

Jenks backhanded Baldy, hard.
 
The loud crack of bone on bone echoed across the high corners of the shelter but didn’t seem to disturb or rouse anyone.
 
Not even the mustache, which seemed content to watch the proceedings.
 

Baldy let out a soft grunt of pain and his eyes wobbled around in their sockets for a moment before focusing again.
 

Jenks released him and stood there staring.
 
“Get out of here.
 
Go sleep in the park.”

“And what if I said no?”

Might be fun.
 
“Do you really want to find out?”

“Sure.”

Jenks nodded.
 
He wanted to know as well.
 
He cocked his head and felt the rage reaching through him like timid fingers, moving backwards and forwards through time.
 
It connected everything he’d been to everything he was now and was about to become.
 
Other men had money and fine memories and lessons learned from their lovers and fathers and mentors.
 
Jenks figured, Okay, so this is what I’ve been given.
 
It had been accumulating for more than a year, since his wife’s whispering laughter while she hid in another room, giggling on a cell phone that sometimes racked up a monthly bill that topped $250.
 
All these fucking plans in the world and she had to fuck around with a chatterbox, couldn’t even change her calling plan or just meet the guy at Penn Station and let him splurge.

A dog began to mewl.
 
Or maybe it was coming from inside his chest.
 
The blackness took over and he could feel his teeth drying.
 
He realized he was smiling and had been for a while.
 
He couldn’t feel the butterfly blade in his hand but he could hear it spinning and snapping closed.
 
It sounded as resolute as the word of God.
 
The dogs wanted blood.
 
Warring angels barked orders with that same sound.
 
The children needed milk.
 

He moved on Baldy and Baldy said, “Wait, you crazy bastard, don’t kill me, I’m going.”
 

Baldy spun and ran for the front door and Jenks took two steps after him, his heart dropping with sudden intense disappointment.
 
He was still curious about exactly what might have happened, what should have happened, what the proper order of things was supposed to be now.
  
If the ages of civilization had been peeled away far enough inside his DNA to get back to the basics of one man’s teeth in another man’s throat.
 
Baldy was right.
 
Murder was in the air.
 
Jenks turned and a poodle was pissing in terror.

The whining of pets, children, and addicts grew louder with the dawn.
 
Jenks listened to the din as if it were elevator music, something you had to put up with until you reached where you were going.
 

Breakfast was being served in the dining hall of the shelter.
 
Dishes banged together, grease fires occasionally roared.
 
He could smell ham and eggs, powdered milk, fresh bitter coffee brewing, and, beneath it all, blood.
 
The dying AIDS patients, the crackheads’ wounds, the sores of the unwashed.
 
The usual stirring morning sounds reminded him of home when he was a kid.
 
His father hacking, his mother sighing, his brothers grousing and arguing.
 
It was all here.
 

He checked his watch.
 
Somehow it had survived through everything.
 
Losing the suburban world, time on the street, working the boat, sleeping on the beach, the cheap-ass watch had made it.
 
There was probably a moral there, or a metaphor, but he didn’t have time to work through it.
 
It was 8am and Angela was at the front desk.

She ran the show, all right, you could sense it the second you saw her.
 
A bullwhip of a woman, tall and lean without an ounce of fat.
 
All muscle and tendon and hard edges.
 
But with a blunt face, as if her features had been worn down by a thousand years of hurricanes.
 
Graying blonde hair pulled back into a sloppy ponytail, loose frizzy curls going all over.
 
Low maintenance and high-strung.
 
She had never been an Angie.

The purse of her brittle lips said she hadn’t had a man in ten years, and the last one had been the worst of her life.
 
Angela had probably had some looks before her wary and harried expression had set like stone.
 
The crows’ feet seared in.
 
The rigid mouth uncompromising.
 
The jut of a nose ready to sniff out your secrets and sins.
 

There was a lot of action around the front counter this morning.
 
Homeless checking in and checking out, whatever you called it.
 
Paperwork, computer files, lots of typing, stapling, stamping.
 
Meds being handed out.
 
There was some laughter back in the dining room.
 
People could believe in hope if they weren’t quite so hungry.
 
Scraps were fed to the dogs.
 
Old men told stories.
 
Kids ran around.
 

None of it would have touched Hale much.
 
Jenks knew because none of it touched him much.
 

Tomorrow it would be even busier in here because winter was coming and it would be colder.
 
The ranks would swell.
 
The shelter would overflow.
 
The tax breaks were farther off.
 
Baldy would push his way through the weak.
 
More emotionally unstable losers would try to go out reinforced windows.
 
More docs with plaid socks would send you to the madhouse to burn.

Jenks stepped up and tried to give a disarming, amiable smile.
 
He knew he wasn’t going to make it.
 
Angela had seen it all, experienced it all, and survived with that chin growing softer through it all.
 
Jenks wondered where that kind of strength came from.
 
It couldn’t just be pain.
 
Jenks knew he’d never have it, never manage to be as efficient with his loss.

“Hello,” he said.

Angela didn’t look up.
 
She didn’t gesture for him to wait while she finished her paperwork, didn’t do or say anything.
 
Jenks waited.
 
She flipped through pages so fast he thought she couldn’t possibly be reading them.
 
Her eyes didn’t seem to be moving across the sentences.
 
He figured she’d get around to him in the next minute or two.
 
So he stood silently and Angela stood silently and the action continued going on around and around them as the people shuffled out of the shelter and hit the skids in the sun.

“Hello,” he said.

Angela’s eyes flashed towards him.
 
There was no anger or impatience in them.
 
There was nothing in them, not even death.
 
He thought, My Christ, so that’s what’s going to happen to me next.
 
He tried to imagine sitting on the beach with eyes like that.
 
They’d cordon him off on the sand like a beached killer whale.
 
Erect a fence around him; try to get him back in the water at high tide so he could drift the rest of the way to the bottom of the abyss.

He wasn’t sure she was seeing him.
 
She still said nothing.
 
He thought saying Hello for a third time would be ignorant, so he didn’t bother.
 
He wondered if she’d gone insane, or if he had, or if this was just some kind of a miscommunication, two different species unable to understand each other despite their best efforts.
 
Maybe she was speaking in an unknown language; maybe he was so tired and tense that he was missing a series of subtle signs.
 

“My friend, Ben Hale, stayed here a few months back.
 
I wanted to ask if you remembered him.
 
It’s important.
 
To me anyway.”

The tip of Angela’s tongue jutted and slowly rimmed her lips.
 
They parted.
 
He watched her take a breath.
 
It was as if she was emerging from a long sleep.
 
Maybe Hale’s name had some kind of quality to it.
 
Jenks tried it again.
 
“Ben Hale.
 
He’s dead.”

The shelter had mostly cleared out.
 
A colicky baby was still somewhere groaning and spitting up.
 
The smell overpowered everything, even the blood.
 
The sound of the butterfly blade snapping open and shut tugged his attention away.
 
His vision came unfocused.
 
He checked his hands and they were balled into fists clamped to the side of his legs.

Angela said, “You’re Jenks.”

She moved down the corridor with a clipped efficiency as well, like a machine doing its primary function and nothing else.
 
Her arms didn’t swing; her hips didn’t sway with sexuality or life.
 
He was struck with an overwhelming depth of sympathy for her.
 
Whatever had happened, it would have been kinder to have killed her.

“He told me about you,” Angela said.

“What did he tell you?”

“That you would be along eventually.”

“I wouldn’t have if he hadn’t killed himself.”

She stopped short and he nearly ran into her.
 
She turned on him, the empty eyes full of something uncoiling now, trying to awaken, but Jenks had no idea what.

“He committed suicide,” Jenks said.
 
“After someone tried to murder him.”

She shook her head slightly, like she had an earache.
 
Jenks explained what he’d learned, and what the cops and the shrink had told him.
 
Angela listened but kept creeping up the hallway step by step, forcing Jenks to stagger-step along as they progressed.
 
Finally they were in her private office and she shut the door.

On the desk was a small plaque with the name ANGELA PINCHOT.

She sat in an uncomfortable-looking chair.
 
The office was sparsely decorated.
 
There were no photos anywhere. No paintings, no signs of personality.
 
A computer hummed, the screen active with animated pipes.
 
There was another chair in the small room but it had been tipped forward to lean against the far side of the desk as if it was out of commission.
 
Jenks squinted and reached out with his thoughts trying to feel Hale here in the air.
 
Hale must’ve stood here noticing all the same things, acknowledging the woman in the same way, talking to her.
 
He had mentioned Jenks.

“How long was he here?” Jenks asked.

“Three days.”

He nodded and waited.
 
Angela said and did nothing.
 
She could outwait the ocean and the mountains.
 
She had more patience and permanence than the throne of God.

“So why do you remember him?” Jenks asked.
 
“What happened?
 
Did it have to do with a young girl?”