Finn (17 page)

I danced with him, close, right up next to the wound. When he saw me looking at it, he thrust his cheek at me, saying, “You like?” The gash smelled like fishy newspaper. He wiped his cheek with his fingertips and touched my forehead with them, blooding me, as if we were celebrating my first kill.

I was pretty dizzy after all that spinning around. Clark’s hands were all over me, pinching and squeezing. My main thought was:
not in front of James,
even though he had betrayed me. I couldn’t really see James. I couldn’t see much of anything. The boxcar was almost dark. The bonfire was only in my imagination. Clark leaned in. His face stank. “You’re gonna be my special lady,” he whispered. I felt his breath in my ear. Then his toothless gums were pinching my earlobe.

Silvia screamed “No!” from behind Clark’s back. Suddenly, he was doubled over, and then he was on the ground, his hands jammed between his thighs. Silvia had kicked him right in the nads. She did it again when he was on the ground. His butt was up in the air. She just took aim and kicked him from behind. She must have hit home, because Clark started to throw up.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. I stood over Clark, shaking. I still wanted to do something to him. The next thing I knew, I was crumpling up a twenty dollar bill and shoving it in his pukey mouth. I hoped he’d choke on it.

When Silvia and I were safely outside, I jammed the door with the crowbar. Silvia had second thoughts about that. “What if there’s a fire?” she said. I said I hoped there would be, but then I remembered James, so I loosened the crowbar and told Silvia that they could get out in an emergency, even though I secretly doubted it. I could still hear Clark moaning and throwing up. It was sweet.

As it turns out, we didn’t have to worry about James at all. We hadn’t gone fifty feet when he suddenly appeared.

“Where’d you come from?” I said.

“The hatch,” he said. “I fit right through.”

I didn’t say anything else to James. I was still mad at him for switching sides, but I didn’t shoo him off, either. He followed Silvia and me out of the railroad yard, keeping a respectful distance. He understood he wasn’t completely welcome.

We found a hole in the fence by the elevated highway. Before we climbed through, I stopped and took one last look at the train yard. From here, it was obvious that the California Pacific boxcars weren’t going anywhere. They were set apart from the active tracks, all by themselves on a weed-choked stretch of rail.

We stopped for Silvia to catch her breath. She asked me why I had given Clark the money.

“Because my mouth was too dry to spit,” I said.

S
ylvia was breathing in shallow gulps like a goldfish, pressing her fingers to her chest, as if her weak lungs needed some outside help. I gave her some extra time to catch her breath. “Men are pigs,” I said.

Silvia shook her head. “Not all of them. You’ll see.”

“Shh. Don’t talk. Just breathe,” were the words I said, but what I was really doing was apologizing for what I had put her through. After everything that had happened,
she
was comforting
me!
She could be so exasperating.

I pulled away from her when James walked up. He didn’t have any right to see Silvia and me being so close.

“What do
you
want?” I said.

“I know a place to crash,” he said.

“I thought you lived on the trains.”

“I was born here,” he said. “This my city.”

Silvia looked ready to collapse. I didn’t have any better ideas, so we fell in behind James. He made us wait while he found himself a walking stick, a long piece of iron rod. He did a little pole vault with it as a test. “Come on,” he said. “It’s a ways away.”

James led us deep into the shadows under the elevated highway as night fell. Silvia and I trudged behind him, trying to cheer each other up, but the conversation always seemed to come back to men.

Even if it was an illusion, I felt safer under the highway. It was like walking under the belly of a long white beast asleep on its feet. The traffic overhead made a constant rough song, which I found soothing. Our path was as wide as a runway, with angled banks like a river. James called it a gutter. He said it was full of water after a big rain. A gutter was as good a name for it as any.

James looked so small and solemn with his walking stick, like a pygmy Moses. The iron stick rang out when it hit the ground. I stayed behind with Silvia, helping her along, letting her rest her cheek on my shoulder whenever she needed to. James was always ahead. He slowed down when we fell too far behind, but he was always pushing us to move on—not with words, but with impatient taps of his rod.

After—what, a mile? Who could tell when the concrete scenery was always identical?—but after a long time, we started passing cavernous metal pipes aimed downward at us from the banks like a firing squad. The first pipes were dry, but then we came across some that gave out a trickle of black water. Soon the puddles started. The farther we went, the larger they got, until there was so much water that we had to start walking on the angled banks. I learned how hard it is to walk at an angle. I could barely imagine what Silvia must have felt like, with the gravity working against her big belly.

We finally hit a flat stretch, which made it easier on the ankles but slowed us down on account of all the bunched-up rusted fences, the abandoned cars, and the rest of the dangerous junk we had to climb around. The water flowing under the highway had become a real stream, with rocks and eddies and a nice gurgle.

At a certain point, the stream became a full-blown river—sluggish, swollen with garbage, dotted with tires and dead fish, but a river, nonetheless. And all of it under the highway, matching it curve for curve. I’d been on that highway a million times and never known about the river below.

I asked James how much farther—more for Silvia’s sake than mine. She was stopping every twenty yards to bend forward and rest her hands on her thighs. Her shoulders were drooping. She had a sour expression on her face, as if she’d been drinking from the brackish puddles. James didn’t have anything to say. I started to worry that he had lied about being a native of this city. What if he was lost?

But he didn’t walk like a lost person. He went in a more or less straight line, climbing on top of anything in the way, banging the roofs of torched cars with his staff, as if to drive out the ghosts of burnt drivers. Or he’d run along with a wheel-stuck grocery cart, coast a few feet before the cart tumbled, and jump clear of the wreck with a whoop, always landing on his feet.

Silvia was reaching her limit. James looked at her with disgust. He said there was a place up ahead to rest and get some water. Then he marched off at full speed and we lost sight of him for almost half an hour.

We would have walked right past him if he hadn’t hissed at us— “Psst!”—and banged his staff. We were under an unlit section of highway, which meant that none of the usual foggy yellow light slanted down through the guardrails. It was almost pitch black. The river was high here. We were working our way along the busted-up foundation of some old brick building. I knew that because I kept bashing my toes into loose bricks. I walked ahead of Silvia, clearing the path like a soldier in a minefield.

James kept tapping, guiding us across the old foundation. There were tall weeds everywhere. Silvia found a tick on the back of my neck. She pinched it with her fingernails and flicked it away.

The air was fresher here. We were finally on higher ground than the expressway with its red and white streaming cars. There was a lovely splashing sound, but I was immediately skeptical, on account of all the filthy water we had seen that night. James was standing waist deep in a pool of frothy water, splashing around under—a
waterfall?

“Come on in,” he said. “Water’s nice.” I didn’t go in just yet. First I helped Silvia lie down on an old stone wall next to the water, easing her through her long series of positions, from sitting to leaning sideways, to lowering herself on her side, to rolling on her back. Her eyes fell shut along the way, like a sleeping doll’s. She made an involuntary grunt when her legs stretched out.

“That’s good,” she said, and in seconds she was snoring. I wasn’t ready to get in the water yet, so I fussed with Silvia for a while, propping her head up off the stone with my shirt, her knees with my bunched-up pants. I dipped my hand in the water and brushed her forehead and cheeks with my fingers, as if I was painting sleep on her face. I did it more for me than for her, I suppose. It made a nice quiet moment.

Then I was ready. I took off everything else.

“Hey. You’re naked,” James said, but he didn’t put much energy into teasing me, and I was certainly beyond caring.

“So call the President,” I said, and got in the water. James moved out from under the waterfall so I could stand there for a while under its cleansing fists and just let it pound me. I didn’t even care if the water was dirty, it felt so good.

When I was done, I moved off to the shallows, and sat there on a waterworn rock, enjoying the feeling of resting my palms on the wavy surface, as if my hands were waterbugs, the kind with the long skinny legs that never sink. It reminded me of a pool my father took me to one summer, when we lived in an oven of an apartment in the South. The pool itself was nothing—the usual bright blue hole—but I loved walking into the water on shallow rounded steps. There was a nice chrome handrail you could slide down, starting out above the water in the hot summer air and then slipping downwards, bit by bit, under the agitated surface. I used to play on those steps for hours. My father thought I was afraid of the deeper water. I let him think that, because it made him more attentive, but I actually liked playing on the steps much more than just swimming with the other kids.

Even here, with my butt on this bare rock, with the cold city water splashing down from above, so unlike that Southern pool, I liked the shallows, that nice feeling of half in, half out. Sitting there gave me a chance to look around. The crumbly walls of the ruin were all different stones, all irregular. They looked really old, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know anything about buildings, except what Miss Bellows had explained about the ancient Romans at the beginning of the year— how they knew how to cut stones and build everything with them. But the Romans never made it to America. I think the Americans just used whatever stones were lying around.

“What is this place?” I said.

“Meadow mill,” James said. “It’s old.” He was sitting in the shallows, too, but keeping a distance. He didn’t look at me, I guess out of respect for my being naked. I liked that. I felt clean and powerful again, and I wanted to talk to someone, even if it was James.

“How’d you find it?” I said.

“Aunt used to take me.”

Silvia sighed and shifted on the wall. For a second, I thought she was going to roll off, but even sleeping people have a sense of limits. Her arm dangled over the edge, but that was it.

“Did you grow up around here?” I said. James pursed his lips. I could tell he didn’t want to talk, but I didn’t care.

“Aunt had me summers,” he said.

“My father died when I was your age,” I said. James suddenly got all tense.

“My father ain’t dead. He just don’t want me. Mother neither,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said. I had assumed his parents were dead.

“Ain’t your fault,” James said, dipping his head under the water. He came up with his cheeks full. He made a tiny “o” with his lips and spat an arched stream. “Pooty good,” he said, when he was all out of water.

“Do you still have your tonsils?” I asked.

“Yeah. I got ’em.”

“My Dad had his, too. He got a sore throat one time. His fever came and went, but it got too high at night. He wanted to go to the doctor. My Mom wouldn’t let him. She said it cost too much.”

“Sore throat? No big deal,” James said.

“Yeah. By the time they took him to the hospital, the bacteria in his throat had got to his heart. He was in the hospital for a while. Then he died,” I said. I hadn’t said those words to anyone, ever, but they came easy here.