Finn (19 page)

“So what if she is?” James said.

“So what if she’s
what?”
I said.

“Police. She works for the Man.” He said this with pride, although it sounded like something from a TV show.

I didn’t want to think about this. I was so tired of thinking about consequences! I had been leading Silvia around like a mule. I pulled her to a halt. “James,” I said, “you’re taking us to the police?”

“To my aunt house,” he said.

“Who happens to be a cop.”

“So what?” said James.

Silvia knew what it meant, too. She sank down to the sticky linoleum floor, put her hands over her ears, and started to cry.

“We can’t stay there,” I said.

“You
can’t. Don’t mean
I
can’t,” James said.

“No, no, no, you should,” I said. “Of course you should. It’s just we can’t.”

“Let’s just stay, Chica,” Silvia said. “Please. I’m too tired.”

“You want to stay?” I said. “Fine. Have a nice life in Mexico.”

James shushed me. “People live here,” he said.

Silvia was crying harder now, cradling her belly as if she were comforting a child. “I’m allowed to rest,” she said. “I’m not a guilty person. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

We were stuck that way for a while. I didn’t want to say anything because I knew it wouldn’t come out right. I was pissed off, but I didn’t really blame Silvia for being illegal. We just stood there in the hallway, frozen.

James was the one who finally got us unstuck. “I know a place you can sleep,” he said. “I’ll take you. But I’m coming back.”

I thanked him and went to help Silvia up. She refused my hand. She took James’s instead.

T
hen it was down the massive elevator and back out into the night. Silvia refused my help, even when we went through the heavy front door. She preferred to let it hit her belly rather than have me hold it open for her. I couldn’t really blame her for being mad. I felt like a coach who had refused to let one of her athletes quit a race. Part of me hoped she’d stay angry. I thought it might give her some extra strength.

The place James knew about was a park. He told us it wasn’t too far away. Once we got out of the foul lobby and into the night air, which was heavy but still pretty fresh, I found I was less scared. Exhaustion wrapped itself around me like a blanket, weighing down my shoulders and tripping up my legs. Nothing could hurt me because nothing seemed real: not the scraggly bearded drunks asleep on the ground in their filthy stiff clothes; not the defiant sewer rats with their slicked-back hair; not the sidewalks shimmering with broken glass. I felt like a car with the windows rolled up.

We heard gunshots, but no sirens.

It was like walking through a bombed-out city, where the bombs had been dropped by stealthy American jets. There were gaping holes in the streets with weeds growing in them. The sidewalks were all broken and heaved up, but there were no tree roots to blame, no trees. I imagined furious men pounding the sidewalks with sledgehammers. Charcoal from old cooking fires moldered in the gutters. James saw me looking and said: People live here.

James waited for us at a mutilated stop sign. You could tell it was a stop sign from its shape, but the word “STOP” had been erased. All the paint had been blistered off, as if someone had tortured it with fire to shut it up. “Almost there,” James said. I could tell he was looking forward to getting rid of us. He pointed down the street to a decrepit park lined with derelict townhouses. Silvia planted her feet when she saw it, as if she wanted to take root in the broken sidewalk.

“At least there are trees. Which is good,” I said, but somewhere in the night I had lost my gift for lying.

“This was so stupid,” Silvia said, but I couldn’t tell which “this” she meant.

James took us into the park. It was as ruined, in its way, as the worst part of the river. The park was built on uneven ground. There were lots of rock outcroppings, perfect for climbing on if you were a kid, but from the adult look of the trash, this wasn’t a playground, at least not for kids. “Quick. In here,” James said. I didn’t know what he was talking about until he was practically pushing me down in the dirt.

“Hey, take it easy,” I said, but then I saw the hole, which was basically a shallow scooped-out cave under one of the biggest outcroppings.

“I’m not getting in there,” said Silvia. “There could be animals.”

Which meant that I had to get in first. I backed my way into the cave, kicking spastically every few inches, just in case. I felt around with my feet. “See,” I said. “Piece of cake.”

Silvia didn’t fit at first, so James and I had to scoop out some more dirt. I couldn’t do much. My wrist was starting to hurt again. I remembered what Dr. Locke had said at the hospital about losing my hand. After everything my wrist had been through, I was suddenly afraid of getting it dirty.

“You got a quarter?” James asked. At first I thought he wanted a tip, on account of his having to work so hard digging, but that turned out to be an insulting thing to think. I gave him one. He came back a few minutes later, his arms stacked to the chin with newspapers. “Make it a little nicer in there,” he said, setting them down. The paper was still warm from the presses. The ink gave off a sharp smell, but a clean one, like shoe polish. It was better than the hole’s general wet clay smell, which I associated with open graves. We spread out the newspapers and then Silvia and I settled in on top of them.

The newspapers helped, but the cave still felt like a roomy coffin. I lay back and tried not to look at the cobwebby slab, which was only a foot or so above our noses.

The last thing James did before he left was to pile up some junk in front of our cave, so that we could still see out, but other people couldn’t see in. “Don’t talk to nobody,” James said, as if we were toddlers. I was really grateful to him, for everything, especially for talking with me back at the mill. “Can I give you some money?” I said. “Just to say thanks?” I tried to say it in the least insulting way possible, but money talk always ruins everything. James rose above it. He shook his head, and then, as a final salute, he did a handstand and walked away like that, balanced on his fingertips. “Be careful!” I said, thinking of all the glass on the ground. It was the last I saw of him.

You’d think that Silvia and I would have fallen asleep instantly, but we didn’t. We didn’t talk, either. We just slithered around like snakes for a while, trying to avoid lying on rocks. We were extra polite to each other, saying, “Excuse me,” when our knees bumped. I wanted to apologize to Silvia a thousand times, but instead I was pulling away when my fingers brushed up against her cheek.

Then she was snoring, and I was left to face the night alone. I squirmed over to the edge of the cave and watched some rats forage, trying to imagine they were crabs. There was definitely an underwater feel to this place, as if the city was an ocean, and its whole crushing weight was resting on this park. A few homeless men drifted through the park like seahorses, stopping here or there to dig around in a wire trash can or laze on a bench for a while before drifting away. A gentle tide seemed to be moving them. I understood how it felt to try to set your own course but then to be pushed wherever by the invisible hand of the night.

I would have been happy to rest in my cave and think my gloomy thoughts, but I was distracted by the arrival of a small group of black people at the far end of the park. They were mostly men, but a few women, too, which surprised me. They were all dressed up, and talking and laughing politely, as if they had just come from church.

Two of the men stuck out—one because of his incredible height, the other because he was so handsome. Everybody treated the handsome one like a king. His head was shaved bald and he was wearing one of those fuzzy Kangol caps, which gave him an attractive exotic look. He was wearing a purple exercise suit, the kind that looks like it was made from a parachute, and spit-polished leather loafers. There was a huge gold ring on his left pinkie. He walked with a girl on each arm. I found the girls annoying. They were fawning all over him in their miniskirts and deep cleavage. I wondered why he put up with it.

The incredibly tall man was always by his side like a Secret Service man. It was the middle of the night and he was wearing sunglasses! His head scanned the park like a security camera. He was tall enough to be a basketball player, maybe seven feet, but that was judging from where I was, so low to the ground. He was wearing a pin-striped suit and an old-time hat, which made him look like an alien trying to blend in among earthlings.

The handsome one sat on the bench nearest to me, about twenty feet away. He was close enough for me to see that his ring was in the shape of a human skull, with rubies in the eye sockets. No one else sat down. They just kind of crowded around him. I heard someone call him “King D,” and then, later, I heard him refer to himself that way. He talked about himself in the third person, like a politician. He kept saying “King D”
this
and “King D”
that
. It was like me walking around saying, “Chlo”
this,
“Chlo”
that.
But somehow it wasn’t so strange coming from him. It made him sound more official.

It would go like this: King D would ask the tall man, “Who we got next, dog?” He said “dog” with affection, but I could tell it bothered his sidekick. Everyone else called the tall man “Lieutenant,” or just “Tenant.” Tenant would make a sign, waving his long elegant fingers, which, for some reason, made me think of a giraffe. Then a man or a woman would appear. The man’s hat, if he had one, would be crumpled in his hands in front of his crotch. The woman would curtsy, or, if her skirt was too tight, maybe just bow. I finally figured it out: King D was a judge.

I couldn’t hear most of what they were saying, but it was obvious that King D was settling complaints. He would listen, relaxing on the bench. His exercise suit made a high “wisp, wisp” sound when he shifted his legs. He looked like an old man feeding pigeons. At times, he would lean forward, nodding gravely, and say, “I hear you, player.” He let the people speak until they were finished, even if what they were saying annoyed him, which it often did. At that point, he would raise his arms in the air, as if to say, “Enough!” and give his decision. Almost everyone kneeled down and kissed his ring afterwards, even if the decision went against them.

Justice at his hands was so swift, the opposite of what I had seen in the courtroom with my grandparents. Everything there took forever. Most of the time, the judge couldn’t do what he obviously wanted to because of some stupid technicality. Even if the judge did what he wanted, a lot of things fell through the cracks—the restraining order against my mother, for instance. I liked the way King D just listened, thought about the case for a minute, and decided.