Mission of Hope (4 page)

“I
t's hopeless.” Quinn's ma stood at the opening of their shack and rewound her graying red hair up into the ever-present knot at the base of her neck. “You can't expect children to run around such filth all day long without shoes and not cut their feet to ribbons.” She looked up and saw Uncle Mike coming up the path. “Did you find any, Michael?”

“It's just as I thought, Mary. Only the sisters in the other camp have any iodine left.”

His mother blew out a breath. “The sisters. Well, that's all well and good for them, but we're on the wrong side of the street to get much of that, aren't we?”

“And they don't come over here 'til Thursday.”

Quinn watched his ma look at poor Sam. He'd cut his foot yesterday morning on a nail, and it was an angry red this afternoon—a bad sign. “It hurts you, don't it, boy?”

Sam, smart enough to see the bad news in Ma's eyes, put on a brave face. “Not so much.”

Quinn sat down next to the boy. “Your limp says different, Sam. If it hurts a lot, my ma should know. Ma's
are smart that way, besides. No use fooling them about things like this.”

Sam swallowed hard. “It hurts a lot,” he admitted.

“I reckon it does,” Ma said, her smile softening. “You've got a man-sized wound in your foot, and you're just a tiny one, you are.” She put Sam's foot back into the bucket, which was really just a large tin Uncle Mike had found and washed, and motioned for Quinn to stand.

“I'll take it you'd know where to find a shot or two of whiskey,” she asked.

Quinn raised an eyebrow at his mother. Given the damage alcohol had done in this household, he knew his mother's disapproval of drinking. “For the
wound,
” she clarified in an exasperated tone. “Iodine would be better, but we can hardly get persnickety now, can we?”

Uncle Mike put his hands into his pockets while Ma reached for the small pine box she kept under her trunk. Quinn knew they were searching for a coin or two—the man at the far corner of Dolores Park, who'd opened an undercover tavern, brooked no charity whatsoever. Even if he carried Sam bleeding and screaming in pain to the man, Quinn doubted the profiteer would spare a tablespoon for medicinal purposes. “I've got one,” Quinn said, producing the silver coin he'd found under a beam two days ago. He'd had his eye on a pair of hose for his mother—her fifty-first birthday was next week—but Sam seemed a more pressing cause.

Ma sighed. “That'd buy a whole bottle of iodine before.”

“Before.”
Quinn echoed her sigh, tucking the coin back in his pocket and tussling Sam's hair. “Before” didn't even need words around it anymore. It had become an expression unto itself. Everybody knew what
you meant when you said “before,” especially when you said it that way. As he walked out of the tent toward the rowdier edge of the camp, Quinn wondered if the time would come when someone said “before” like it was a bad thing. Like things were so much better now.
That day will come, won't it, Lord?

As he picked his way through the moonlit alleys—lamps or any other open flames were scarce and outlawed after sundown besides—Quinn was almost sorry he'd said that prayer. It kept ricocheting back to him somehow, as if the answer to it lay within his own reach. He was one man, barely able to scrape up enough whiskey to treat a boy's wound, much less make things better than before. Right now, with the wind rousting up an uncomfortable chill, San Francisco was a problem that felt even too big for God, and Reverend Bauers would surely scold him for thinking that way.

Reverend Bauers.

Quinn thought of the boxes they'd discovered in the Grace House cellar. Did he even dare think one man could make things better?

Bauers would undoubtedly argue that Quinn did know one man who had made things better than before. Quinn shrugged and pulled his thin coat tighter around him. Had he really? Or was he just remembering the daring Black Bandit exploits with the easily impressionable eyes of youth? He'd thought the Bandit's weapons giant-sized, but they weren't when he held them yesterday. Matthew Covington was clever, yet hadn't Nora Longstreet called him clever to realize the children needed playthings?

Am I clever enough, Lord?
The question seemed to shoot right through him, like an electric current. Donated medical supplies were supposedly pouring into the
city. They had to be going somewhere. Perhaps a clever man need only help get such things from one place to another. And these days, with as few people watching as possible. That, Quinn surmised with a low churning in his chest, was most definitely the job for one clever man.

Quinn Freeman couldn't really be the Black Bandit. That was fine, however, because San Francisco didn't need a Bandit. It needed a messenger. An invisible transporter, getting things from those who sent them to those who needed them. He could do that.

I can do that. Quinn had to stop for a moment, reeling from the weight of the idea. Actually, he reeled from the
lightness
of the idea. Quinn had just answered the question burning in the corner of his heart since the fires. The question everyone asked but no one dared to voice. The thing niggling at him, keeping him up nights, making him stare off into space for hours instead of sleeping:
Why am I still here?

“That's why I'm still here?” His chest began to lift as he said the words aloud to himself. It made perfect, ridiculous sense. He knew the streets in a way a wealthier man never could. He had size and speed and the kind of wit that can get a man from one point to another without being seen. He had weapons to defend himself and the unfaltering faith of Reverend Bauers at his back.

And he'd been chosen. Decades ago. By the one man most qualified to choose.

That's why I'm still here. That's why I survived. That's why the chest survived and why we found it again yesterday. Quinn could almost feel God's eyes looking
down on him, waiting with a stare twenty years long. Poised to launch him into an unimaginable adventure.

Quinn looked quickly around, somehow sure he'd changed physically, that those around could see the earth-shattering moment that just took place.

The world shuffled by dark and unawares. There seemed no other words to use. Quinn squeezed his eyes tight and prayed.
Here I am, Lord, send me.

 

Nora examined Sam's injured foot as he poked it toward her. An angry red gash ran down the soft pink flesh; far too large a cut for such a fidgety, innocent foot. And to call it clean was a bit of a stretch, given the grime on the rest of the boy. She had no doubt Mrs. Freeman struggled to get the boy as clean as he was. “They make me sit here all the time,” he pouted. With youth's astounding flexibility, Sam pulled the foot up practically to his nose and squinted at it. Nora's hip joints hurt just watching the contortion.

Comically, Sam sniffed at his foot and wiggled his toes. “Smells fine,” he pronounced, giving the tiny jar of whiskey on Mrs. Freeman's trunk a suspicious glare. “I'm okay now.” He put the foot down, stuffing it back into the single enormous sock—one of Quinn's, Nora supposed. Mrs. Freeman had tried to make Sam wear it in a last-ditch effort to keep out the constant dust.

He made to stand up, until Quinn's hand came down on his shoulder. “I thought you said you wanted a visit from Miss Longstreet here. It took a fair amount of promises and convincing to get her to come over here.” Quinn pulled the huge sock back off Sam's foot. “You can't just up and leave now that she's been nice enough to come and call, now can you?”

Sam's wiggles suggested that he intended to do just that, and Nora wondered if her visit had been meant to distract Quinn, not Sam himself. “Oh, no, Sam, I came to see you.” Nora paid careful attention not to catch Quinn's eyes as she spoke that last bit. “I wanted to make sure you were all right. After all, you've entrusted your mail into my care, and that means we're friends now.”

“It was fine of your father to let you come.” Mrs. Freeman nodded toward Sam, who didn't relax until she put the jar of alcohol away back inside the trunk. She handed Nora a roll of makeshift bandages, much like the strips of sheets and cloth Nora had made with her mother and Aunt Julia nearly every week since the earthquake. Nora's family—and most of San Francisco's female population—was down to one petticoat in the name of bandage making. “He was just a bit less wild with the promise of a visit from you.” She shook her head and motioned for Nora to begin wrapping Sam's foot. “'Tis a crime to be treating lads with whiskey.” She spoke sharply as she slammed the trunk shut. “But I suppose we should say a prayer of thanks that we've got anything at all.” Mama might have taken Mrs. Freeman's sharp tone as an accusation, but Nora could see it was just frustration at how slow relief seemed to be moving. Everyone—Nora included—had thought things would be so much more settled by now. Mrs. Freeman turned to Sam with a mother's piercing glare. “You say a prayer of thanks, young Sam, that Miss Longstreet brought you those fine sweets to suck on while we tended your foot.”

“I did,” Sam replied quickly. Under Mrs. Freeman's suspiciously raised eyebrow, he added, “Sort of.”

Quinn hunkered down to Sam's height as Nora tied
off the end of Sam's new bandage. “I'd change that ‘sort of' into a ‘thank You, Father God' tonight, if I were you. My ma talks to God all the time, so she'll know if you don't.”

Sam nodded.

“You've still no real bandages?” Nora asked, straightening up. She'd caught sight of Quinn staring at her hands as she wrapped Sam's foot. Even though it was a quick glance out of the corner of her eye, she found it unnerving. That man watched things far too intensely. “No things to treat wounds? My father said supplies like that are coming in from the army all the time.” She handed back the bandage roll while Quinn tied the enormous sock in place with a piece of string. The makeshift footwear looked absurd, the toe of the sock flopping about as Sam jiggled his foot.

“Your father would know that more than I, miss, and it may be true.” Mrs. Freeman opened the trunk once more, tucking the roll of cloth strips inside. “The nuns and the official camps have supplies, surely, but they only come over here once a week. You can't very well ask people to only cut themselves on Wednesdays, now can you?”

“It's just iodine,” Nora said, amazed. “There must be bottles and bottles of it at the other camps by now. Papa says crates of supplies come through his office every day.”

“And you can see how much of it makes its way to us out here.” She softened her hard stare. “We can't all fit into the official camps, no matter what those men in suits say. But that's none of your doing, Miss Longstreet. I've not meant to grouse at you. I don't know where they
expect us to go or how they expect us to get by. So much making do and doing without wears on a soul.”

Obviously cued by Quinn, Sam stood up straight and extended a chubby hand. “Thanks for my licorice, Miss Longstreet. And for coming.”

Nora shook Sam's hand with grand formality. “You're welcome, young master Sam. And thank you for the invitation. I do hope you're feeling better soon.”

Sam was evidently feeling better now, for he tumbled through the door as soon as Quinn's hand released his shoulder. A limping tumble, but an energetic one just the same. Nora watched him go. “What else do you need? I have to think there is something I or my family can do.”

Mrs. Freeman planted her hands on her hips. “What
don't
folks need? We need everything. Bandages, iodine, wood, water, socks, pins, string…I could rattle on for days.”

“Wait a minute.” Nora fished into her pockets for the bits of paper and the stub of a pencil she'd begun keeping in there during her mail cart visits. “Let me write this down.” Mrs. Freeman rattled off the surprisingly long list of basic items needed in the makeshift camps. Many of these things showed up regularly in the official camps. How had things become so segregated?—everyone suffered. It made no sense. Two or three of the items she could provide from her own household. Surely in the name of Christian mercy Mama and Aunt Julia—with a little help from Mrs. Hastings, perhaps—might scour up the rest.

“Could you make another copy of that list?” Quinn asked, holding out his hand. “Reverend Bauers could put one to good use, I'd guess.”

“Of course.” Nora found another scrap of paper—this one a page torn out of a cookery book—and copied down the list.

Quinn folded it carefully and tucked it into a pocket of his shirt. He had the most peculiar smile on his face, as if he'd just learned a great secret. “I should get you back, Miss Longstreet, before your father worries.”

 

Quinn stared at the list. Miss Longstreet did a funny, curvy thing with the dots on her
i
's. A delicate little backward slant. He ran his fingers across the writing again, careful not to smudge it.

He had his first challenge. A list of basic supplies.

It was in her handwriting. That shouldn't have mattered much, but it did. There was a generosity about her that stuck in the back of his mind. She was kind to Sam, but not out of pity—the sort that he had seen far too much of lately. That version—a superior, ingratiating sort of assistance—bred the hopelessness that was already running rampant in the camp. Nora's kind of help was respectful. She grasped the truth that made so many people uncomfortable in this disaster: fire was no respecter of privilege. Those now without homes had done nothing but live on the wrong street corner at the wrong time. The firestorm and the earthquake destroyed nice homes as eagerly as they consumed shanties. Bricks fell just as hard on good men as they did on criminals. Certain people had begun to sort victims into worthy and unworthy categories. Official camp refugees and squatters. Implying reasons why the refugees were in the positions they were. It was, Quinn supposed, a perfectly human reaction to death and destruction's random natures. A desire to seek order amidst chaos.