Crack-Up (20 page)

I managed another inch.
 
Another.
 
The pottie tilted back more.
 
More, more, more . . .
 
Finally, it tipped over!

The brick wall directly behind the portable outhouse caught the top of it, so that the structure came to rest at a forty-five degree slant.
 
I heard sloshing inside and a muffled human groan.
 
Outside, I heard shouting from the other inmates, followed by the piercing mechanical whistle of a guard.

I took a few steps back, then raced up the front of the portable pottie and jumped.
 
My outstretched hands buried fingers into the base of the chain link fencing above the brick wall.
 
I swung a leg up, hauled myself to the top of the brick wall, and then climbed the chain link, digging the tips of my paper shoes into air holes, swinging my arms up high in orangutan motions.

I halted where my eyes were level with the strands of barbed and razor wire that jutted away from the top of the chain link fencing at a sharp angle.
 
This point in my climb I’d anticipated would be the most problematic.
 
More problematic still was the warning shot the guard in the watch tower now fired into the air.

With one hand, I untied the pajamas around my waist and flung the garment flat across the flesh-hungry wires.
 
Then I took my own paper shoes and slipped them inside the pair I’d tucked into my waistband, then slipped both pairs over my hands.

Slowly, I crawled atop the overalls, the shoes acting like poorly protective mittens.
 
Yet my hands, I realized immediately, were still being cut up with every motion.
 
I could feel my wrists being cut up too, along with my knees.

And despite all the codeine in my system, I screamed.
 
I screamed until I found myself bawling.

I swung my feet over the wire’s edge first, followed by the rest of my body, ending up dangling by my shoe-covered hands.

I tried to swing myself, hand over hand, back to the chain link fencing and climb down, but my paper mittens weren’t too dexterous, and the shots fired from the guard tower weren’t at all ignorable.
 
I lost concentration, then my grip, and fell.

Twenty feet or so.
 
Landing on pavement.
 
Rolling.
 
Stopping.
 
Standing.
 
Running.
 
I rounded the corner, escaping the aim of the guard in the tower as soon as possible.
 
Pain radiated from my left ankle.
 
I’d twisted it upon landing.

Thirty yards ahead I saw the bulldozer I’d been hearing since breakfast.
 
It was busy flattening mounds of earth near the housing facility under construction.
 
I limped toward it.

A siren peeled from loudspeakers on buildings and telephone poles.
 
The driver of the bulldozer slowed his vehicle to an idling stop and craned his neck in every direction until he saw me coming at him from ten yards away.
 
I jerked my thumb at him like a baseball umpire calling a runner out.

The bulldozer driver obliged me by climbing down off the bulldozer, but not fast enough, not nearly, for the man was a small planet.
 
I gripped the back of his shirt collar and yanked, throwing him into the dirt, plunging his micro cosmos into chaos.

I climbed into the driver’s seat.
 
It took almost half a minute of experimentation before I mastered the gear shift well enough to drive off.
 
I headed straight for the perimeter fence.

The fence was brick, topped with barbed and razor wire.
 
I had my seatbelt on and my head down and my arms hugging the steering wheel when the plow punched into it.

The jolt knocked my breath away.
 
My neck strained from whiplash.
 
The machine came to a halt, still idling.
 
I caught my breath again and looked up.
 
Maybe two tenths of the brick wall had toppled in front of my plow.

There was plenty of loose brick, though.
 
I climbed down.
 
My bleeding hands found the loosest rectangles, and I flung them away from the wall, one after another.

I could hear the whistle of a guard growing louder and louder in my ears—and running footsteps approaching—but I kept digging.
 
I soon dug myself a ragged hole in the wall, beneath the barbed wire, and I scraped and slithered my way through it, falling onto a paved sidewalk, where the free people roamed.

Mainly free African-Americans.
 
White, bleeding, barefoot, and jammied, I could hardly be more conspicuous.
 
I raced across the street, slicing my toe on a broken bottle, testing the brakes and shocks of an old Honda Civic trying not to run me down.

I limped down a slender, granite-paved alleyway between rows of dilapidated old row houses.
 
My lungs were soon pounding as fast as my heart.
 
I stopped to rest along an oak-shrouded side street near the Washington Navy Yard.

Stooped over, bleeding hands braced on bleeding knees, and gasping for air, I heard sirens wailing from all directions, or so it seemed.
 
I raised my head and found a homeless Black man with a great gray beard sitting on the sidewalk, his back propped against the wall of a row house.

He was far too overdressed for such humid weather.
 
I approached thinking he must be too drunk, or strung out, to notice the heat.
 
But he noticed me right away.

I stopped short when I smelled his stench and saw his bloodshot look of fear and the pus rimming the jaundiced whites of his hopeless, haggard eyes.

He wore a floppy denim hat, a long, dusty coat, a red scarf, dark slacks with holes visible at the knees, and military boots that might’ve been worn in
Viet Nam
.
 
I coveted them all.

“Trade you,” I said to him, slipping off my 18-carat gold wedding ring, streaked now with my own blood.
 
I tossed it to him.
 
He caught it, but didn’t seem to understand.

“That ring for what you’re wearing,” I said.
 
“Shirt, pants, shoes, coat, scarf, hat.
 
Agreed?”

Graybeard bit into the ring’s soft metal, not without difficulty, having to line up a rare remaining top tooth with a rare remaining bottom tooth.
 
Then he shook his head and tossed the ring back into my palm.
 
The nearing sirens bothered him as much as myself.

“C’mon,” I said.
 
“Please.
 
Those sirens are for me.
 
I paid four grand for this ring.”

Graybeard said, “Forget it, Cracker.
 
I got da bed-bugs anyways.
 
Go on now.”

So I roughed up a homeless man for his clothes—hardly my finest hour.
 
I did leave the ring behind, along with my own bloodied and torn hospital pajamas.
 
He had to wear something.

Chapter 21

I limped down a busy sidewalk by a car-crowded street.
 
All eyes averted me or swept by me rapidly, unseeing.
 
I was invisible now, it seemed, though dressed for December on a muggy June day, dripping with sweat, leaking blood, missing a boot heel.

The stink from my new rags assaulted me in waves, like nausea, fifteen or twenty seconds apart.
 
But the stiffness of the fabric irritated me constantly.
 
A raunchy veneer of filth and sweat in the lining scraped at my wounds, and I often shuddered imagining colonies of germs plunging into my body, water slide fast, through every nick and cut and scrape and gash.

Skirting a small park, I stopped to sip at a water fountain and to rinse my hand wounds.
 
Nearby, a Y-Generation rollerblader in black neoprene bike shorts occupied a shady bench.
 
When I sat down on one end for a short rest, the rollerblader quickly stood and wheeled away.
 
I’m not simply invisible
, I thought,
I repel objects too, like some gravitational force
.

I felt no resentment, though.
 
Instead, I wondered if this was how it had been, or how it was, for my long-lost father.
 
I wondered if my old man had ever felt the same odd attraction that I now felt toward my newfound powers.

Worse could happen, it seemed to me, than to live on the streets.
 
I could disappear.
 
Simply disappear.
 
Stay in my filthy new rags and live on hand-outs.
 
Or learn to dumpster dive.
 
Repel people who reminded me of my old world.
 
Spare my family anymore shame.
 
Oh, yes
, I thought,
worse could happen
.

By late afternoon I’d trudged all the way to
Dupont Circle
.
 
My feet ached with blisters, unaccustomed to six mile hikes or to Graybeard’s worn, ill-fitting boots.
 
My injured left ankle had slowed me down a lot.
 
By now, the swelling joint felt like it had the size and heft of a cannonball.

I came to a five-foot tall brick fence encircling the grounds of a small, gated community I knew.
 
Keisha Fallon’s community.
 
There weren’t many people in the world I cared to trust under the circumstances.
 
Keisha was one of the few and lived closest to where I’d escaped from.
 
I scaled the wall by climbing a nearby oak tree and dropping down from a thick branch.
 
I stood facing a complex of three-story brick condominiums.

Keisha would still be at work, I reasoned, as I’d just arranged a temporary position for her out at Helms Technology.
 
I circled around to the rear of the complex.

The garden was empty.
 
The entire complex, for all I knew, was empty, Washingtonians being such double-income workaholics.

Standing behind some tall fern hedges, I punched my fist through one of Keisha’s ground floor window panes, reached inside and unlocked the window, and then threw the sash up.
 
Gripping the window sill with both hands, I jumped up and down on my one good leg half a dozen times before finally managing to scramble through the opening.

The first thing I did inside—after ditching my filthy overcoat and cranking the A/C—was to rip the side panel off a small, cardboard box stuffed with hip-hop music—Keisha’s CDs—and duct tape it over the hole I’d punched in the window.
 
That way any residents using the white gravel walkway outside would assume it was an old hole they’d spotted, one being attended to by the occupants, and not evidence of a fresh burglary.

Then I searched room to room for a firearm.
 
If I knew Keisha—and I certainly did—then I knew she’d have at least a couple pieces hidden in the house somewhere, and I didn’t want any arguments from her later about lending me one.

I found a carton of nine millimeter hollow point ammunition in a kitchen drawer, along with gun cleaning material—oil, bore brushes, cotton patches—but no weapon.
 
I searched through the front hall closet and all the cubbyholes in the dining and living rooms without any luck, then tried the master bedroom.

I found Keisha’s underwear drawer a distraction.
 
Searching for cold steel, I ran my hand through a pile of silk panties—some of them Frederick’s of Hollywood-worthy—which unleashed a torrent of images from that long ago night in a Miami hotel room.