The Orange Houses (2 page)

“Don't be afraid,” the ship's mate said from the hatchway above. “Come.”

The women tiptoed onto the deck as if they were treading landmined sands. For nine days they had been hiding in the backup engine room of this oil tanker fit for hauling two million barrels of light sweet crude and, this time around, thirty-four refugees. Each woman's passage cost twenty-five hundred dollars. This blind faith cash had been raised a coin at a time, person by displaced person, family by fractured African family. Those who had endured were sending their best shots at survival, if not by bloodline then heritage, west.

Of the thirty-four, most were going to Camden, where the Immigration police did not go. Camden was written off as a city lost to drugs, prostitution and the nation's highest teen mortality rate. The rest of these travelers were going to a city somewhat safer yet no less rife with illegal employment, Atlantic City. The rest save Fatima Espérer.

Her mother had given the young woman her first name, but for her new life Fatima chose the last, a French word meaning to hope. She taught herself the language from schoolbooks that somehow escaped burning—English too. At sixteen she was headed where all told her not to go: New York. She had to visit the Statue of Liberty.

“A silly tourist trap,” one of her sister travelers said.

Fatima smiled. Trap or not, she was going to see Liberty up close.

The refugees huddled at the bow, their shawls drawn tight around their heads and shoulders. The ship's mate ordered the deck lights turned off. He pointed overhead.

Fatima looked up. The night sky swung as the freighter wrestled a broken wave. The stars were nearly the same ones she saw back home before the raids, the fires, the smoke. On the horizon were the lights of Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan and somewhere in the glow the Great Lady. Fatima leaned on a somewhat friend's shoulder. “If we see only this, the trip was worth it.”

The other woman furled her lips and eyes as she relit a half cigarette she'd earned by way of a grabby kiss with a mechanic. “If I see only this, I want my goddamned money back.”

The Orange Houses were not orange. They were beaten brick the color of the sky this drizzly dusk. Some long-dead architect Casper Orange slapped together the nine jail-like towers way back when. Small, deep-set windows grayed cinderblock hallways noisy with need.

Mik hustled her grocery bags into tower #4 to beat the rain. The elevator was grounded again. After a ten-flight hike up the fire stairs she found NaNa passed out on the couch. Tostitos Natural Blue crumbs buckshot the old woman's chest. Nosebleed channel TV teased with an info mercial for an exercise machine nobody could afford. The floor vibrated with the TV's fake enthusiasm jacked all the way up. NaNa was not Deaf, but old-lady deaf.
Wha
jou say?
Wha
jou call me?

The woman had no folks, but everybody called her NaNa because she would sit your kid for a free meal. If you left a beer or two in the fridge for her, that was fine too. Going on three years now Mik and Mom didn't have the heart to tell the old gal she wasn't needed anymore.

Mik clicked to MTV to taunt herself. Some cutie was getting down with a guitar.

She put her hand on the TV speaker. Slow-strummed chords buzzed her fingertips and triggered a memory of Mom working that big body acoustic gathering closet dust the last ten years.

She clicked on her hearing aids. The music was ruined in them, the notes crackly edges and angles. Outside her window the city thumped with the coming night crowd: sellers, buyers, screamers, liars. In the background NaNa snored to cure comas.

Mik clicked off her aids.

This was what it was all about—the sadness muted. She could live and die without hearing another people-made noise. Except that guitar.

She changed the channel to the news. Closed captions flashed. HOUSE OVERRIDES PREZ'S VETO. CONTROVERSIAL IMMIGRATION BILL MOVES TO SENATE. BILL OFFERS REWARD $ TO ENCOURAGE REPORTING OF ILLEGALS.

Mik had enough problems without worrying about Mexicans stealing Americans' delivery bike jobs. She aimed the clicker, killed the TV and tucked a blanket around NaNa. Sure the old gal was asleep, Mik pecked a kiss onto that brow lined with seventy-some years of disappointment. She went to her room and pulled a throwaway briefcase from her closet. Inside were sketchbooks, pens and inks of all colors.

She kept the briefcase hidden behind her off-season threads. In her mind she heard Mom:
Why you spending all that time drawing instead of studying? You make all A's, you get yourself a free ride to college. You wanna end up like me, double shifting Target and Dunkin's? My daughter gonna end up slinging Hennessey cocktails at Applebee's for thug pimps, blah, blah, blah . . .

Moms, Moms, Moms . . . How I want to love you.

Who wanted to go to college? After X463, aka Bronx-Orange high school, yo, Mik was
out
.

What then?

Whatever.

She studied her sketches. Cityscapes to the last one, they were remarkable, odd, the world a century after the plague. Buildings miraculously defied decay beneath gorgeous skies, no one around to enjoy them. Her streets were empty.

She checked her ink bottles. She was out of the most important color, the bones of every drawing, black. She tucked the briefcase into its hiding spot and crashed facedown into sheets that needed washing.

Jimmi Sixes the street poet eyed the bathroom mirror. He picked up the glitter lipstick the cross dresser down the hall left on the sink ledge. Over his cracked reflection he wrote:

Jimmi's story: no Pops, his Moms a slave to the pipe. She put Jimmi in and out of foster care. With no prospects he signed on for what seemed a fair wage and adventure: the army. He left Bronx West for Basic without knowing he'd knocked up his girlfriend, the love of his life. He didn't find out she was getting heavy till he was overseas. He set the wedding for his next three-day leave. It never happened.

One morning a five-year-old with an IED strapped to her stomach skipped past Jimmi into the heart of a city market. The bomb malfunctioned. The half explosion tore the girl apart but didn't kill her instantly. Jimmi got to her on her third to last breath. As she died she asked him something in a language he didn't understand. The wounded man next to her coughed up, “She said, ‘I know I am going into a coffin, but where will my face live?'”

PFC James Semprevivo sat in the smoking rubble and closed his eyes. He opened them nineteen days later to find out he was going home. He was eager to get back to the Bronx. His girl hadn't written him since a month before the suicide bomber. He left messages on her machine and her mother's, but neither woman called him back. Thirty feet into Bronx West he got the story. His gal lost the baby late term, then slit her wrists.

The VA set him up with a spot at the halfway house, a part-time sweep job at the hospital, benefit checks he forgot to cash and all the happy drugs he could stand. To those he added the occasional hit of crack cocaine. But now, eight months later, he was tired of being either jazzed or numb. He wrote on the mirror:

He dumped his many antipsychotic meds into the toilet, grabbed his oversized skateboard and poetry slam notebooks and did a swan dive out the second-story window. A forward flip later he landed in a Dumpster soupy with wet cardboard and kitchen garbage. He was filthy but all right. He hopped his board and slalomed the back alley trash into the street and the thickening gray of the afternoon rain. “Hallelujah,” he said, opening himself to the thunderstorm.

Jimmi Sixes was on a mission. He had to know: Was life worth living?

In Mexico they call the one who smuggles you into Texas the coyote, but the one who takes you from the refugee camps in Africa, across the ocean to New York, is the shark.

Fatima's shark sent her to a man who sold newspapers. He worked from a cluttered old house in what most considered a rough patch of Bronx. “You think this is rough?” Fatima said.

The man smiled. He had escaped a horrendous refugee situation a few years before. He was known to help illegals with connections to work and housing—for a price. “Do you have the money?”

Fatima gave the man half of what she had left after the boat ride: five hundred dollars.

The man counted the money. “Good. Be here by four a.m. to pick up your papers. After that I sell them to someone else.” He scratched an address onto a paper scrap. “This woman will rent you a room for fifty dollars a week. Now sit, I have advice for you.” All of it began with
Never,
ending with: “Never let the police see you. The laws are changing. In this neighborhood you are all right. The police do not come here much. They would have to arrest everyone if they did. Where I am sending you to sell your papers is also safe. You will work by the highway, just east of the Orange Houses. Many people shortcut to the subway there. If you work hard, you will save two hundred dollars each week. What will you do with all this cash?”

“In six months I will have enough to bring my sister here. Six months after that, we will bring two more.”

“I believe you will. You are strong. Your English is excellent. You will make a good life here—if you keep your wits about you. Focus on but one thing: money. Keep to yourself.” He gave her a newspaper. “Here. Learn about this crazy wonderful country. Do you have any questions?”

“How do I get to the Statue of Liberty?”

“Do not go there. It is a tourist trap.”

 

Fatima paid four weeks rent to the old woman who showed her the small basement apartment. “I am sorry it is so bare and dark,” the woman said.

“It is wonderful.” Fatima meant what she said, always.

“On garbage days people on the nicer block just uphill leave out treasures. Perhaps you will find some furniture. Where are your suitcases?”

Fatima tapped her backpack.

 

Her newspaper tucked under her arm, she explored her new neighborhood. She found a small park facing the veterans' hospital, whose buildings occupied much of the district's acreage. She sat at a concrete checkers table with a cup of cart coffee, the most wonderful she'd tasted, loaded with sugar. In the crisp clear afternoon air she wept.

A little girl approached. “Why are you crying?”

“Because I am happy.”

“Then you got to be smiling. What happened to your face?” The girl pointed to a slash scar crossing Fatima's cheek.

Fatima smiled. “Sit. I must show you something.” She waved to the girl's mother, watching from a distance. The mother waved back, gabbing into her phone. “Do you like angels?” Fatima asked the girl.

“Angels aren't real.”

“Until you make one.” Fatima pulled two sheets of newspaper from her daily and put one in front of the girl. “Do as I do.” She folded the paper longwise, then in a series of crimps and tucks leading toward an angel.

The girl followed along. She eyed Fatima's left hand. “What happened to your fingers?”

Fatima smiled. Her pinky and ring finger were gone. If she held up the hand, say to block a machete blade, the angle of the slash through her palm would match that of the slash crossing her cheek. “You are a great angel maker.” Fatima gave her own paper angel to the girl. “For your mother.”

The girl ran off. “Ma, check it out.”

Fatima started in on another angel.

“I saw what you did.” Behind her was a tall, handsome young man, his skateboard tucked under his arm, his face a battered god's.

“Why are you crying?” Fatima said.

“Just mad happy is all,” the man said.

“You are mad and happy at the same time?”

“Who's the third angel for?”

“I like always to have one in my pocket.”

“For good luck.”

“To give away.” Fatima finished the angel with fast hands. She pulled a tab, and the angel collapsed. Another tab righted the angel, its wings a starburst. She gave it to the young man.

He studied it. He gently pressed it to his heart. “Yo, I'm Jimmi. Want you to meet a friend of mine. C'mon, just across the way there, the hoop courts.”

Fatima studied the man, his smile, and knew he was a good man. She followed cautiously as this Jimmi led her across the street to the hospital yard.

“What's y'all's tag?” Jimmi said.

Fatima checked the side seam of her ratty sweatshirt. “Champion.”

Jimmi's laugh was quiet and true. “Your name?”

“Fatima.”

Veterans in wheelchairs played a ferocious game of basketball. Jimmi waved to the referee, a dour man.

Seeing Jimmi, the referee blew his whistle and barked, “Take five.” He jogged to the chain-link fence. “Got a call from the halfway, James. Went AWOL, huh? I called your supe, dude said you missed work last two days.”

“Been sick.”

“Brother, are you jonesing?”

“Job brings me down, man. Was forcing myself over there when I met this young lady here.”

“Where y'all holing up, James?”