Finn (12 page)

E
veryone knows that the news on TV is phony. Try flipping from channel to channel at five thirty or six o’clock. Or eleven. All the different channels show exactly the same news stories, in exactly the same order, night after night. Talk about a conspiracy. Not to mention those hypnotized anchors with their robotic banter.

If I had any doubts that the so-called “news” was completely made up, the story they told about me and Silvia convinced me. I remember it almost word for word, because it was all so outrageous and false. The black anchorman with the buck teeth—the one my grandfather always called “Mr. Beaver”—read it, in that fumbling anchorman way, like a five year old:

“In a bizarre twist on a story we brought you several days ago, the alleged kidnapper of local school girl Chloe Wilder has been positively identified as illegal alien Silvia Morales. The suspect was seen by firefighters early this morning fleeing the scene of an explosion at the girl’s foster home. The girl’s grandparents, whose house was rocked by a huge fireball, claim that Ms. Morales is mentally unbalanced, and angry at being forced from the home, where she worked as a domestic until she was recently fired. No one was injured in the blast. The resulting fire was quickly brought under control. Police are asking anyone who has seen either Silvia Morales or Chloe Wilder to please call the number on your screen. Ms. Morales should be considered extremely dangerous. The two were last seen in a stolen white Dodge Aries K. . .”

They showed the license number of my grandparents’ Dodge. Then they showed a picture of me, the one from the Field School that was on the milk cartons. It looked even less like me on TV than on a sweaty milk carton, which was something at least. They didn’t have a photograph of Silvia, which goes to show how temporary her life was at my grandparents’. Instead of a photograph, they had a police sketch. The eyebrows were thick and angry. The lips were huge. The expression on the face was more like a terrorist than a maid. The sketch had my grandfather written all over it.

The other channels were showing our story, too. I didn’t even have to check to know that, but I checked anyway.

The rest of what they said about us on the news was unimportant, but I do remember that right after Mr. Beaver finished reading his lies, he and the other anchorman joked about how badly some sports team was doing, comparing their bad season to the explosion at my grandparents’ house. That’s when I turned off the TV.

Silvia and I sat there in the room, which was quiet now, except for the regular chirp of Silvia’s heartbeat from one of the monitors. We tried to kid each other about the police sketch. It might have been funny, in different circumstances.

Silvia hadn’t understood the story word for word, so I went over it with her, which was much more painful than just watching it on TV.

“Your grandparents think I kidnapped you? And exploded their house?” she said. I nodded and said that they could be pretty stupid at times. Silvia started to cry. She said, “I thought they
liked
me.” It amazed me that her feelings could be so hurt after all my grandparents had done to her.

Silvia sat quietly for a while trying to calm her mind. Finally she asked, “What does this mean for us?” I told her it meant that we couldn’t use the car any more, because now the police would be looking for it.

“And we have to leave the hospital?” I’m not the easiest person to move emotionally, but I leaned over and gave her a hug when she asked that. I even cried a little. Hearing the baby’s heartbeat had obviously made her want to stay.

“Now more than ever,” I said.

Silvia sat at the edge of the bed for a long time. Her lips were trembling. I helped pull the rubber suckers off her belly. The monitor squealed. “Then let’s go,” she said. “Roberto says the California hospitals are good, too.”

After that, there wasn’t time to be sappy. I helped Silvia out of her hospital gown and back into her street clothes. The fizzy water had dried in one big faded blotch. Silvia noticed it, although I was hoping she wouldn’t. She started experimenting with the hospital gown, pinching it in back, examining the hems. I could tell she was considering wearing it, even though it was made out of paper. She told me it was quite nice. That’s the exact expression she used: “This is quite nice.” I told her to forget about the paper gown. My exact expression was: “You’re wasting our time with that piece of trash.” I didn’t mean to be nasty, but my words hung in the air afterwards like a bad smell.

The scotch tape had come off my fingers, and I couldn’t feel them very well any more, which worried me, but at least there was less pain. I went though all the drawers in the room, hoping to find something for my wrist. One drawer was full of neatly rolled Ace bandages. Each roll was clamped with a pair of little toothy clips. I grabbed a few rolls. Then I hit the jackpot: a drawer with slings and arm braces. I tried some on. The only one that came close to fitting was covered with pictures of lacrosse sticks and helmets and the words “Go Team!” It screamed “stupid jock,” but it fit, so I strapped it on. I also picked up some Band-Aids, and a few tongue depressors. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the tongue depressors, but I just couldn’t resist. They were so clean and smooth and practical-looking.

Then we left, sneaking through the halls like the thieves we were. Silvia insisted we go to the car and try to get the bag of food from the Mini-Mart. She said she wasn’t going on any more trips without real food, and since I had basically just evicted her from her hospital room, I didn’t argue. It turned out I was right about losing the car, though. When we got to the level of the parking garage where the trooper had parked our car for us, the elevator doors opened on a major crime scene, complete with tons of flashing police lights and news cameras. I shoved Silvia over to the side of the elevator and pressed the “Close Door” button about fifty times before we were on our way back up to the lobby.

The only way out of the hospital that didn’t have a policeman stationed at it was the loading dock. It took us almost an hour to find it. By then, I practically had to carry Silvia. She was beginning to look defeated. I couldn’t admit that at the time. I remember telling myself it was probably all her hormones.

O
urs is a city of poor neighborhoods. Most of them aren’t so bad, unless you happen to be talking to my grandparents. If you listened to them, you’d think that everything inside the Beltway—except for two or three blocks right around their house— was practically Sodom. My grandparents are the kind of people who lock their doors as soon as they see a black person. They’ll be riding along in the car, and suddenly, “Thunk!”, the automatic locks go down. My grandfather won’t announce it, but you just know he’s mentally reporting the sighting: “Danger. Black man, nine o’clock!” What he’ll say out loud is: “This used to be a nice neighborhood.”

Locking your doors like that could be a silly, totally racist thing to do. Around City General, though, it made some sense. This was a truly bad neighborhood. Most of the shootings you heard about on the news happened near City General. The hospital was famous for its emergency room. The TV news people loved to say the words, “Shock Trauma,” which is what the emergency room was called. You couldn’t stand on the sidewalk here and not think of those words. You couldn’t walk down the street and not wish you were in a car with locked doors.

It was cool out. There was a foul breeze. A police cruiser crawled down the street like a well fed beetle, shining its spotlight into the peeling doorways and the filthy crevasses between buildings. Silvia and I kept ahead of it, trying every door, except where we had to climb over a sleeping person. The whole neighborhood seemed locked up tight and abandoned, as if an invasion was coming, or already had come. There were padlocked iron fences in front of all the stores, and I began to feel that the street was a kind of jail, only instead of being locked
in,
Silvia and I were locked
out,
which amounted to the same thing. The police cruiser was still rolling along. It was slowly catching up with us.

We finally found an unlocked door. It was a barbershop, with an old fashioned red, white, and blue sign outside. The sign wasn’t lit or spinning, so I thought the place might be closed, but then I saw a barber inside, an old guy with a spiky flattop and a shriveled red nose. A loud buzzer sounded when I opened the door, which surprised me. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe jangling bells.

The barber stood between the two red barbershop chairs, the nice old kind with leather and pretty metal, with one hand resting on each, as if the chairs were his kneeling servants, ready to attack at a single quiet word. A ceiling fan squealed crookedly above his head, its blades black with grime. I smelled pomade and cigars and cooking grease.

The barber growled at Silvia.

“Men only,” he said. Then he unfolded a big rubbery apron, shook some hair off it, and held it up as if he was a bullfighter. “Well?” he said to me. I wanted to get out of there, but the cruiser was still lurking outside, its flashing blue lights reflecting endlessly in the barbershop mirrors. The barber balanced his sodden cigar on the edge of an ashtray. “You want a cut or what?”

He thought I was a boy!

“Okay,” I said. “Yeah, whatever,” I added, in case the “okay” sounded too girlish.

“Your girlfriend’ll have to wait over there,” the barber said, jabbing at Silvia with his fingers, which still looked like they were holding an invisible cigar. Silvia obviously wanted to leave, but I said, “She won’t mind. You’ve got magazines.”

“The ladies do like their magazines,” said the barber. “What’ll it be?”

I didn’t know what to say. I had never had a boy’s haircut before.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something different.” Apparently, that was exactly the wrong thing to say, because a look of disgust spread over the barber’s pug face. He wrapped a paper towel around my neck and then buttoned the apron around it—much tighter than he had to.

“Okay pretty boy,” he said, snorting. “Just tell me. You want a Zero, a One, or a Two Point Five?”

I thought about that for a while. It seemed like a big decision. The barber got impatient. “Don’t tell me you want a Four,” he said. A Four seemed like a bad thing, so I shook my head and said “How about a One?” A One sounded better than a Zero, which I figured was the opposite of a Two Point Five and possibly as undesirable as a Four.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” the barber said. “A One it is.” He plugged in a big electric tool that looked like a hedge clipper. Then he stood behind me and looked at me in the mirror as if my head were a lump of clay. He tugged at my hair disapprovingly and said, “Who did this, a lawnmower?” He was being needlessly rude, and I felt like telling him off, but he looked like the kind of person you’d have to explain your sarcasm to, which takes all the fun out of it, so I just said, “No, I was in a play.”

“A play, huh? Interesting,” the barber said. “Velly intelesting.” He put on a smudged pair of reading glasses, leaned over to a round wire rack on his counter, and spun it slowly, as if he was roasting a suckling pig. “Let’s see. A Zero. A Two Point Five. A Triple Zero. A Four. Hello. What have we here?” he said. He turned and gave me a significant look. “A One.” It was a tiny black plastic comb, just like all the other tiny black plastic combs on the rack. He took off his glasses, set them back down, and then dipped the One into a glass dish full of blue liquid. He dipped in the One several times, studying the blue film which formed momentarily across the plastic teeth, then dunking it completely and stirring it around the bottom of the dish with his hairy pinkie. When he was finished with that, he dried the One on a stained washcloth tucked in his belt. “That’ll git it,” he said, clipping the One to the electric tool. “Now, let’s cut some hair.”

I’m not saying that I go to fancy hair salons like my grandmother, but in the past, the person cutting my hair had always used scissors. It was strange to feel the hedge clippers going through my hair. The vibrations tickled my teeth. The barber hummed a song while he was cutting, but he had an awful voice, full of cigar phlegm.

I watched long strips of hair peel over my forehead and fall into the apron. It reminded me of a TV show I had seen once about the wool harvest. Sheep cowboys squeezed the trembling sheep between their legs and ran electric shears all over their bodies. I had been amazed by the sheep’s enormous black eyes, which followed the path of the shears, as if they understood what was being done to them but couldn’t fathom why anyone would do it.

My head was a lot smaller than a whole sheep. It only took a few strokes with the shears to take off all my hair. It was even a pleasant feeling, a kind of lightening, which I might have been able to enjoy if I hadn’t been so fixated on the word “baldy.” After my hair was gone, the barber slathered the back of my neck with hot shaving cream, which he got from a crusty electric dispenser on the counter. He took up a straight razor—the horror movie kind that swings open and has absolutely no safety features—and flicked it back and forth for a while against a leather strap.