Authors: Brandon Shire
But it didn’t happen that way.
I was on the floor when I came to, but I could still feel her throat in my hands. Jarrel was standing over me with his fists clenched tight, his body coiled for another blow. He scowled at me. “What are you, fucking stupid?” he bellowed. “The bitch is dying. Let her die!”
“Fuck you,” I answered rubbing at the blood on my mouth. “That cunt deserves to …”, but the words froze in my mouth as I stared at the door to her room.
Charlotte, who was swatting Penny’s hands away, went still as Penny took a step back with a gasp.
Only Jarrel seemed to know this was coming and he turned, passed all patience, and looked his brother in the eye.
Charlotte cackled. “Well, look at this. Now the whole troupe of rejects has come back to roost.”
“Hello, Charlotte,” Breece said from the doorway, taking in the scene with sad resignation.
It was one of my first nights on the streets of Potsham and I was not faring well. All the well thought out plans and schemes I had devised to shame my family had fallen short with the one small detail I had overlooked; my need to eat.
For some reason, I had assumed that, like any bum, I could simply pop open a trash can and consume what had been laid out for me. It was not quite that easy. Though people didn’t recognize or know me, they did have certain phobia about strange men picking through their trash. Business establishments were no less wary than residents, though they were more concerned about scaring off potential customers and creating a street-wise precedent than they were about the security of their trash.
And there was a certain system to dumpster diving which made the pickings better on some days at some locations better than on other days at other locations. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that system.
I needed a teacher. Or maybe a larger city. Potsham wasn’t New York, and it hardly seemed logical that it could support an army of vagrants. I remembered a few derelicts in my childhood but there was no mass of homelessness in Potsham. The town elders wouldn’t have allowed it.
But then I met Cleat, a wickedly thin black man with weathered hands, a starch-dried face, and an Adam’s apple that would have rivaled a cartoonist version of Ichabod Crane. He was standing in an alley off of River Street, his hands on his hips and a look of irritation scratched into his face. From my short distance it seemed he was a little pissed at the disarray of the alley, as if he had cleaned and ordered it before he left and came back to chaos.
“The fuck you want, cracker?” he demanded when he saw me watching him.
“Food.” I answered
“This is my fucking turf. Go find your own place.”
“Where?”
He looked at me. “Where? I don’t give a fuck! Anywhere but here. Now get the fuck lost.”
I stared at him, suddenly aware of the traffic whirring by on River Street, the babble of the Tonight Show on someone’s TV set, and the absolute isolation of this alley.
Cleat, reading my silent defiance as a sign of aggression, lit his posture with menace and turned to face me fully. I watched his hands as they slipped to his side, an old survival technique I learned from Sanctuary. The simple fact was that a crazy person’s eyes were not always the true window into the soul. You could easily be beaten to death by someone who has absolute placidity in their eyes. In the nuthouse you watched the hands; were they scarred and violent, thick fingered and clenching with inner rage, or were they thin fingered and languid, a quiet flow of fingers over keys? They said a lot without saying anything at all.
Cleat’s fingers were strumming his palms; irritated, assessing a potential threat but somewhat dismissive. I decided to leave the alley to him anyway. There was no sense getting myself stabbed over garbage.
I turned to go, but as I did a baby faced teen stumbled out of the back door of a nearby restaurant with his hands full of trash bags. He didn’t see either of us until Cleat whirled on him and coiled his body for a fight. The boy froze, a scream just barely clenched in the tight muscles of his throat.
I took one small step forward and the kid flinched. “He won’t hurt you; we’re just looking for something to eat. You got anything good in there?” I asked, my eyes motioning toward the garbage bags.
“Some, I guess,” he answered; just enough trepidation in his voice to tell me that he would cut and run at the merest hint of hostility.
“You mind?” I asked, holding my hands out for the bags without moving.
He shifted his eyes from me to Cleat and back again. He shrugged and put the bags down. “Yeah. Sure. But don’t leave no mess ‘cause Tony gets pissed and I gotta clean it up.”
“Gotcha, no mess,” I assured him.
He backed off, took a long look at both of us, and then scrambled off when someone yelled his name, Tony presumably.
Cleat hadn’t moved during the entire exchange, not one finger. He knew, as I would later learn, that a scream of fear, especially from a child, would bring someone like Tony running with a meat clever in hand. Or worse, the police, and then the incident would have extrapolated itself out to the equivalent of a near massacre in the alley. Goddamn bums.
I walked over, picked up the bags, deposited them at Cleat’s well worn shoes and stepped back to sit on the steps the kids had just vacated. Cleat glared at me suspiciously and crouched down to paw through the bags, his eyes slowly looking me over as he stuffed his mouth with whatever came into his hands.
“What you doing here, cracker? You ain’t never been on no street before.”
I shrugged, pulling out one of my last cigarettes. “No place else to go.”
“Got another one?” Cleat asked immediately.
There were three left in the pack which I tossed to him along with my lighter. He quickly pocketed both and looked me over again. “I ain’t no babysitter.”
“I need a teacher, not a babysitter.”
He spat out some gob of food that had soured and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Same difference.”
I shrugged half-heartedly, I couldn’t really argue with him. I needed someone to teach me the ropes, so I guess there was some amount of babysitting involved .
“Go talk to Breece,” Cleat said after silently stuffing a few more handfuls into his mouth.
“Who’s Breece?” I asked.
“White guy.” A sudden half toothed smile burst onto his face. “Dressed like me,” he added with a throaty chuckle. “Stationary store on Main.”
He turned his full attention back to his meal and fell silent, dismissing me with the pressures of necessity.
A vagrant at a stationary store, I couldn’t picture it.
“What’s your name?” I asked
Cleat looked up sharply. “You writing a fucking book?”
I cocked my head at him and cinched my eyes, trying to figure out what made him tick. “What keeps you going? What’s the use?”
That half crooked smile of his crept up again. “Take their space, use their air. Fuck ‘em. They want me gone, let ‘em kill me. Fuck ‘em.”
I stared at him a moment, not doubting that they had tried at least once. I nodded and turned to go find this bum at the stationary store.
“Cleat,” I heard him say behind me.
“Huh?”
“Name’s Cleat.”
I nodded again and left without giving him my name. At once understanding that he didn’t care what it was. As far as Cleat was concerned it was just another tag society could lay claim to. One he easily did without.
It took me a few frustrating and hungry days, but I finally caught up with this Breece character outside the stationary store.
I was sleeping in the shadows against a telephone pole on the sidewalk opposite the store, having, the day before, decided that I would camp there until I came across him. Hunger, weakness and the ire at the refusal of the old lady behind the counter to give me any information, had driven me to it.
It was a warm, dry very early morning when a beam of light fell across my eyes and woke me. My first thought, of course, was that I was being roused by the police, but the light wasn’t strong enough for that. I put hand up and squinted against the brightness until my eyes adjusted.
The door to the stationary store was wide open. I came to my feet quickly and looked up and down the street, nervous about this oddity at so early an hour of the morning. But the light was like a magnet, and I found myself gliding silently across the street to the muffled voices inside.
I was too late. They were coming back toward the door, forcing me to duck behind a car as the interior light was extinguished and the door closed and relocked.
He stood on the street by himself; his veiled conversation having given me an accent of Harvard or Yale; something I
vy with just enough street patoi
s that it hinted at dereliction and mendacity. A slight breeze carried the bad smell of muddled genius to me; a troubled sour odor of a body abandoned by the mind. He had the familiar smell of the Birch Building.
He was tall and weathered by many a long year, but at the same time graceful in his poise. Like a bedraggled wizard, I thought with some amusement. His hair and his beard were long, gray and styled by the wind. His clothes were a menagerie of layers and fabrics, and I could only guess at how he tolerated them in the heat. The shoes he wore were as leathered as his face, and just as wrinkled, scuffed and worn. But it was his eyes that held me in the shadows.
They were old, and I mean old. But they were radiant too; sparkling in the darkness with a wisdom and despair that were in sharp contradiction to the cataracted film I’d seen over Cleat’s eyes. They scared me, especially when they penetrated the darkness and locked me into place.
“What is this guy, a fucking vampire?” I whispered to myself.
His gaze lingered for a moment, then lifted and lured me into their wake as he turned and strode down the darkened sidewalk.
When I finally moved I stopped and stood where he had stood, looking back at my hiding spot. He couldn’t have seen me, it was too dark. Yet he had. I had felt his eyes on me like a physical touch. He had seen and penetrated my façade in a single glance, confessing all my frailties and weaknesses without amusement, condemnation or pity. He respected the frailty he saw and would change nothing, unlike all the well meaning people before him.
This was my teacher.
I think he knew I was following him. He led me from the stationary store down several narrow streets, through the unlocked tarred-over school yard and finally past the old St. Mary’s rectory.
We were on the edge of town, the moon still strong in the sky, when my steps finally faltered in front of the cemetery gates. Weren’t they still locked at night like they were when I was a kid?
Intrigued and slightly disturbed at his disappearance inside, I pushed myself forward until I realized that they were as derelict and rusted as the bum who had just passed through them. How sad, I thought. Either the diocese was broke or people had simply stopped caring.
I stepped through the broken gates and halted with a shudder. Dark bars of shadow fell from each headstone giving the appearance open graves as far as the eye could see. In the distance Breece was hovering over one of these shadows like a ghoul digging for flesh. I took a deep breath and took one silent step forward, praying that Cleat had not been playing me for a fool and driven me to a person who would help me find my own shadow on this night.
Breece looked up as soon as I moved. It was a long look filled with uncomfortable silence. I heard him mumble something indistinguishable in the distance and then he looked down and returned to whatever he was doing.