Brown Girl In the Ring (20 page)

He pulled himself upright. His right shoulder was torn and bleeding, but his feet were moving. Supporting him as best she could, Ti-Jeanne staggered down the stairs to the subway.

They got only halfway down. The duppy was blocking their way. It sizzled and hissed, threatening her.

“Mummy,” Ti-Jeanne said. “Try to let we pass.” She took another few steps. Ravening eyes appeared in the fiery mass. Claws reached out to grab them.

“Duppy!” The deep voice was Rudy’s. “Where you? Come and give we some light.”

And the fireball went flying past them to its master. Ti-Jeanne hissed at the heat of it. She and Tony stumbled the rest of the way down the stairs.

It was dark. And it smelled of stale urine and rotting garbage. “Oh, God,” Tony muttered, “I feel weak.”

“Keep your feet moving. Just concentrate on that.” Ti-Jeanne felt her way along the cool tiled wall, trying to remember how Dundas station had been laid out when there had been a functioning subway system. Ti-Jeanne could hear Rudy and Crack making their way down the stairs.

“Look fresh blood there so,” came Rudy’s voice. Tony’s wound was leaving a trail. Baby stopped his crying almost instantly, as though he were aware that his bawling could lead their pursuers to them.

The heavy, even tread of Rudy’s footsteps got closer, punctuated with the tricky triple thump of Crack navigating the steps with his cane. Ti-Jeanne prayed that Crack’s injury would slow them down. She moved a little faster, kicking what felt like sheets of newspaper and old tin cans out of her way. Her foot connected with something fleshy that scrabbled at her running shoe and then fled, squeaking. Her hands touched plexiglass. The ticket collector’s booth. She felt her way around it, palms hitching on rubberiness that she hoped was only old wads of gum. Her hands found the turnstiles that led to the platform. She reached to push through the first turnstile. It was chained shut. The rusty chain flaked in her palms. Desperately she groped from turnstile to turnstile.

“Shit. Tony, all of them lock off.”

“Oh, God, they’re gonna get us.”

“Climb,” Ti-Jeanne said. She clambered clumsily over the obstruction, taking care not to drop Baby. The turnstile was wet and sticky. No matter. She helped Tony over. He whimpered with the pain. She could see the glow of the duppy now, filling the vestibule. Biting her lips in terror, she started a lumbering run down the length of the platform, groping along the wall in the near darkness, pulling Tony after her. He was breathing hard through his mouth. There was a chittering noise coming from the black furrow that was the subway tracks. Ti-Jeanne imagined the tunnel filled with squirming, toothy rats. There must be millions of them living in these old tunnels. The three of them had to stay away from the edge; Ti-Jeanne couldn’t bear the thought of falling into a swarming mass of rodents. Feeling along the tile wall, she kept moving. The cracks between the tiles were slimy. It smelled mouldy.

Rudy and Crack must have investigated the vestibule. They were now at the turnstile. Hovering about them, the duppy flared fire red. “I could hear them moving, boss,” came Crack’s thin, sharp voice. Ti-Jeanne brought them to a halt. She pressed herself against the wall, using one hand to push Tony back, too.

Rudy sucked his teeth in disgust. “Rasscloth. Enough of this. Duppy, go find them and do your job, then come back and bring we to them.” Ti-Jeanne could hear Rudy and Crack climbing over the turnstiles.

The duppy flew toward them like a flaming rock from a slingshot. In a corona of fire, Ti-Jeanne could see her mother’s anguished face. She stared full into the duppy’s eyes while Tony whispered, “Oh God oh God.”

Suddenly a sea of screaming children’s bodies boiled up from the tunnel below them and fell on Rudy and Crack. The duppy pulled back, a look of surprise on its unearthly face. Ti-Jeanne felt small hands pulling at her and Tony, taking them to the end of the platform. No time to protest; she just went along.

Crack’s pistol went off twice, three times. Ti-Jeanne looked back. Agile as snakes, a knot of squirming children had borne Rudy and Crack to the ground. The children were attacking them with what looked like rocks and torn tin cans. Two or three little bodies lay bleeding, but the rest kept at it, screaming with a fierce glee. Rudy shouted, “Duppy! Take we home!”

Crackling, the duppy rushed the swarm of children, growing in size as it did so. Battered and bleeding, Rudy and Crack fought their way clear, leapt into the heart of the duppy’s flame, but were not burned. They hung suspended in the glow.

…And the illusion of a battalion of feral children winked out, leaving only a small, grimy band of eight or ten surrounding Rudy and Crack. Rudy gaped, then narrowed his eyes in fury at Ti-Jeanne. His stare washed over her like cold ice. He gestured toward her, opened his mouth to speak, but the duppy fled, taking him and Crack. In a blink it was gone.

“C’mon, lady,” said Josée, the young woman who’d brought Susie to the balm-yard to have her broken leg set. “We gotta hide in case Rudy comes back.”

Carrying their injured, Josée and her troupe led Ti-Jeanne and Tony down the short flight of stairs into the tunnel.

• • • •

Gal, show me your motion, tra-la-la-la-la,
For you look like a little sugar plum (plum, plum).

—Ring game

The little children carried flashlights, the older ones flares. Ti-Jeanne could see mice and rats—and a raccoon?—scurrying away from the noise and light. With every step, Ti-Jeanne’s shoes stuck in degenerating gum wads, fluorescent pink and green. She had to kick at squashed pop cans that rolled tinnily away. Torn subway posters flapped at them as they passed, thin men and women posturing in outmoded clothes, gesturing at obsolete appliances.
NOW
, they said, and
TOWER
, and
TROJAN
. Baby’s eyes were wide, his head turning from side to side as he tried to take it all in.

The raggle-taggle children ranged in age from about seven to fifteen. One little girl was holding a bleeding wrist and whining from the pain. A tall young man half carried, half dragged another along, saying, “Come on, Chu, come on, buddy, you can make it.” Chu held a hand to his stomach. In the reddish light of the flares, it looked like molasses was leaking through his fingers.

“He need help,” Ti-Jeanne told Josée, jerking her chin toward Chu.

“Yeah, so does the guy you’re carrying, and Alyson. Can’t stop. We’ll be home soon.”

“At least wrap something snug around he waist to slow the bleeding little bit.”

Josée called out for what she needed. Somebody brought forth an oversize hockey sweater and tied it around Chu’s middle the way Ti-Jeanne had described.

“Alyson,” Ti-Jeanne called out to the little girl, “close your hand tight around your wrist, but
above
the cut, you understand? The side closest to your elbow… Yes, like so. Now, hold your hand high up against your body.”

“Like this?” Alyson sounded scared.

“Little bit higher, doux-doux, higher than your heart. Yes, just like that. That go slow the bleeding down. Good girl.”

Then Ti-Jeanne had a look at Tony’s wound. He knew what to do, was pinching the torn edges of the hole in his shoulder closed with one hand. He didn’t look good. His breathing was shallow, his eyes unfocused. His body felt cool against her side. He was going into shock. “Tony,” Ti-Jeanne said, “you still with me?”

“I’m here, but I’m feeling faint.”

“Hold on. Them say we nearly reach.” They kept walking.

“Josée,” Ti-Jeanne asked, “is what allyou do? To fool Rudy, I mean?”

Josée’s grin was feral. “That was Mumtaz,” she replied.

A girl of about twelve returned the grin, flicking a hank of black hair out of her eyes. Her brown face was difficult to see in the dark of the tunnel. Her teeth gleamed. Mumtaz was carrying some kind of jury-rigged electronic box, about the size of a loaf of bread, held together with patchy layers of masking and electric tape. Ti-Jeanne could just make out toggle switches bristling from the top of it.

“Listen,” said Mumtaz. She flicked a switch, and Ti-Jeanne jumped as the tunnel filled with the din of hundreds of children screaming. She could discern the words “Die!” “Fuckers!” “Kill you!”

Mumtaz shut off the noise. “I layered all our voices. That way, it sounds like there’s more of us than there are.”

“And the visuals?” Ti-Jeanne could have sworn there’d been a good forty kids.

“Deeplight projector hooked up on the subway tracks. I rigged it myself a long time ago. Keeps people out of our space. It’s a tape I made of all of us, dubbed on six waves so it looks like a lot more. You tripped my beam when you came down the stairs, so we knew someone was there. We came to scare them off, in case the projection didn’t do it. Smart, huh? Then we realised it was you.”

Ti-Jeanne had to smile. “Smart, yes. But why allyou save we? You coulda get away safe.”

Hatred twisted Josée’s face. “Because of Rudy. Wish we’d killed the bastard. He’s killed enough of us.” Josée and Mumtaz told Ti-Jeanne about the street children that the posse had kidnapped. They never came back.

“What they do with them?”

“We’ve followed them as far as Rudy’s, but we don’t know what happens to them in there.” Her tone got sad. “But we found a body once.”

“Emily,” said Mumtaz in a frightened voice. “Her throat was cut. She was really, really pale.”

Ti-Jeanne thought she might be sick. Rudy bled the children to feed the duppy—her mother. She remembered Mi-Jeanne’s anguish and shame when she talked of the things Rudy had forced her to do. She understood why her mother was begging for death.

They had reached College Station. The double weight of Tony on Ti-Jeanne’s shoulder and Baby in his Snugli was exhausting. Ti-Jeanne hauled them both up the narrow dirty stairs that led to the subway platform. They went through another creaky turnstile and up the stairs for the College Park Mall exit. Ti-Jeanne hadn’t been into a mall since the Riots. Mami had told her they were too dangerous, that the squatters would attack her. Right now she’d have rather faced starved street people than spend another minute in the subway tunnel.

The swinging glass doors had been broken a long time ago. They crunched their way through little squares of shatterglass and came out into what had been the food court for the mall, with its bolted-down Formica tables and plastic chairs of institutional orange. Like everything else in the city, the food court showed the marks of the Riots. Many of the chairs had been broken, their plastic burned, melted, and blackened. A few of the tables had nearly been pulled out of the floor. They sat at crazy angles, bent bolts sticking up out of the ground like mushrooms. The stalls that boxed in the eating area used to sell fast food:
GENERAL GEORGE FRIED CHICKEN
, proclaimed one sign;
BURGER DIVINE
, another. Now, almost all of them had ash-blackened walls. Refrigerators lay crashed and broken on their sides, robbed long ago of the pop and fruit juice that had been in them. From where Ti-Jeanne stood, drooping under her charges, she could make out debris piled chin high in many of the stalls. The mounds seemed to consist of heat racks, aluminum chafing dishes, and orange plastic trays.

Something was odd. The lights were on! “It have electricity in here!” Ti-Jeanne exclaimed.

Tony said groggily, “’S a mall. They all have power.”

“Yeah,” Josée said. “Malls were built with their own generators in case of power failures. We can cook in here, and everything. C’mon. Let’s lie these two down over here.”

Not a moment too soon. Tony was almost incoherent, and Chu had gone completely unconscious at some point during the trek. He’d lost a lot of blood; the front of his body was soaked with it. His friend was now carrying him in his arms. He tenderly laid Chu down and cradled his head in his lap. Chu moaned slightly but didn’t rouse. The young man stroked Chu’s hair away from his face, leaned forward, and kissed his forehead. His tenderness was that of a lover. He asked Ti-Jeanne tearfully, “Is he gonna be all right?”

“I ain’t know. He need medical attention.”

“Hospital won’t come. We can’t pay. You’re a healer, can’t you do something?”

Panicked, she stared down at Chu. “If the bullet rupture a organ, or bust into he intestines,” she told the young man, “I might not be able to help he.”

The young man reached for Chu’s hand, stared down at his face as though trying to imprint its features on his memory. “Josée,” Ti-Jeanne called out, “I need some blankets to keep them warm with.”

Josée brought two heavy, lined drapes. They’d do. To her surprise, Mumtaz handed Ti-Jeanne a battered first-aid kit, too.

“’S not much,” said the girl.

It wasn’t. It contained only some cotton swabs and an aged bottle of alcohol. Ti-Jeanne sniffed at the alcohol. Not completely denatured. That would be of some use. There was also a rusted pair of tweezers in the kit. At least she could use that for fishing out the bullets.

“I need plenty of cloth,” she said. “Tear it into strips. Clean cloth, mind.” She unbuckled the Snugli and put Baby on the ground beside her.

“Ti-Jeanne,” Tony said faintly, “they’re going to come after you again. Rudy and them, I mean.”

“He don’t know is where we gone.”

“He found us at the Parkway,” he reminded her.

Ti-Jeanne’s heart shrank within her. He was right. She looked over at Chu. His face, where it wasn’t smeared with his own blood, was pale. “I can’t leave just yet, Tony.”

The next half hour went by in a blur. The bullet had fragmented as it entered Chu’s body. The rusted tweezers were absurdly inadequate to the job of trying to find and fish out the bullet fragments. Chu bled and bled. “I need sterile tools, and seven pair of hands, and whole blood,” she muttered angrily. And now she could detect the smell of feces from the wound, which told her that what she was doing was useless. His intestine had indeed been punctured. If the damage from the bullet didn’t kill him directly, peritonitis would.

Eventually she didn’t know whether it was the blood loss or the rupture of a vital organ that caused Chu’s death first. The other young man was still holding Chu’s hand tightly. She put her hand over both of theirs. “I too sorry.”