Mercy Train (4 page)

“What do you got there?” He took it and looked it over, opening and closing the hinged lid.

He didn't say anything, but she knew he was pleased.

He walked away, and Violet ran to catch up, stepping over the putrescent frothy blood running in a crooked stream from the slaughterhouse. The drainage line to the river was always getting clogged.

She was struck by how Nino looked older, his shoulders broad, his arms long and muscled. Gangs didn't bother with the boys until they were old enough to be valuable, but Nino had already been approached by the Batavia Boys on account of his size. He didn't want to be a gang runner, but he didn't have any illusions that he wouldn't be one. Newsboys graduated to be criminals. Violet knew what her options were. She could be a sewing girl, a paper-flower seller, or a prostitute. She didn't like to think about the future; none of the kids did. They feared growing up because, when they became adults, they would no longer be invisible. They would live in flophouses or sagging tenements and drink and gamble away what little they had. They would fight. They would be picked over by kids as they slept off their hangovers on the sidewalk. Or they would be dead.

“What'd I miss?” Violet asked.

“Same old garbage,” Nino said. “Some lady jumped off the bridge. Filled her stockings with sand. But she lived, I guess.”

Nino couldn't read, but Ollie, the newsboy captain, read them the headlines before they headed out with their papers.

“Your grandma'am still sick?” she asked.

“Coughs and rattles the whole place. She'll be dead by fall, my papa says. Not soon enough, he says.”

“My mother's gone again.”

“So?”

“I can't go up there alone.”

Nino shook his head. “Ollie's giving me Cherry Street. Evening edition.”

“You'll be back in time,” she said.

Nino crossed his arms and clamped his hands into his armpits.

“I got to do something on the way,” he said.

They walked. Nino kicked a stone along the sidewalk until Violet intercepted it and sent it skidding out into the street.

“There he is,” he said. “Wait here.”

Violet leaned against the wall of the post office on watch as Nino tussled in the adjoining alley with a boy who owed him money. She wanted to jump in and help, but she knew better. A policeman rounded Oak Street and she hopped up, whistling three times through her fingers.

Nino stormed back out into the street, wiping blood from his nose with his palm.

“Little bastard,” he said, over his shoulder.

Violet turned away from her friend's battered face, secure in knowing that the other boy surely looked worse.

She carried the cigar box as they walked.

“You get it from him?” she asked.

“Nah. It don't matter, though. He won't try it again.”

He held one nostril shut with his fingers and shot bloody snot out onto the sidewalk at the feet of an old woman cradling her market basket.

“Che schifo!”
she yelled at him.

“Lo scorfano!”
Nino hurled back, startling her with his Italian.

The woman scooted away, looking back once to make sure Nino wasn't following her. Violet laughed. She had stopped caring about disgusted looks and diminishing comments long ago.

“What'd you call her?” she asked, handing him the box.

“Ugly. It's a real ugly fish.”

As they reached Chinatown, Violet thought this was what a foreign country must be like, the faces unfamiliar, the words indecipherable. She and Nino found the building and looked up at its crooked façade, a worn Star of David over the rusty front door left over from the old days. She had been here before in search of her mother, but it didn't make her feel any more comfortable. Inside it was hot and close and, despite the hour, too dark to move about. They waited until their eyes adjusted before trying to find the stairs. The building's residents were indentured to various brokers and smugglers, packed ten to an apartment, their narrow windows lined from the inside with newspaper in a cursory attempt to curtail Board of Health raids. From under the doors seeped smells of frying food and urine, of smoke and men. The building's communal cat dragged a fish skeleton from floor to floor, his black fur bare in spots from hot grease.

Violet reached down to rub the cat's head, but it hissed at her and skulked away down the rank hallway. She and Nino climbed another flight of stairs.

“It stinks in here,” he said.

“So do you,” she said.

He shoved her shoulder roughly and she knocked into a wall, something sticky against her sleeve.

Madam Tang's was on the fourth floor. For the initiated, a separate entrance with a chutelike staircase led straight from the street to another door. Violet knew better than to attempt access that way. She and Nino had to wait until Li emerged to set out milk for the cat. They sat and watched the door.

A skinny Chinese boy slipped through the door and squatted with a saucer.

“Li,” Nino whispered.

Li squinted into the grim light and scrunched his nose, waving them away. They knew him from the docks. When the boy wasn't at Madam Tang's, he hawked the scraped-out tar from opium pipes to foreign sailors.

“Let me in,” Violet said.

“No way,” Li said. “Scram.”

“Leave the door unlatched or I'll beat your face in,” Nino said.

Li twitched in resignation and disappeared, leaving the door open a crack.

Nino stood and clapped the cigar box at Violet like it was a mouth.

“I got to get my papers,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “Go on.”

“We're celebrating tonight. Jimmy's back.”

“Where'd he go?”

“Jail. He got nicked trying to rob a police.”

She knocked her head with her knuckle.

“We're meeting up behind the tavern,” he said.

Nino tucked his cigar box under his arm and saluted her with his free hand before bounding down the stairs, jumping two-footed onto each landing with an echoing boom, all the way down.

When she could no longer hear him, Violet knelt on the grimy floor and pulled the door open with her finger. She had never been inside. The last time she had come looking for her mother, an old man had chased her away, swinging a walking stick at her and screaming in Chinese. The ceiling was high, and bands of sunlight stole through fabric nailed across the windows. Patrons lay on their sides on straw mats or on flat mismatched cushions, their heads on their arms like napping children.

Madam Tang was a middle-aged Chinese woman with parchment skin and corncob teeth, a layer of flesh between her chin and her neck. She reclined on a frayed divan. Peeking out from beneath the hem of her long silk smock, her small feet were fat and bare, her toes contracted and gnarled.

The smokers were all men except for Lilibeth, who curved her body gracefully around her tapped opium pipe. Her eyes were at half mast, but they seemed to smile in spite of her slack, slightly parted lips.

“Mama,” Violet said.

Madam Tang whipped her head to the door, a snarl slashed across her face, but she knew better than to disturb her customers by raising a fuss.

Lilibeth lifted her eyes slowly to her daughter. “Vi,” she said, in a low, throaty voice. “Vi, Vi, Vi, Vi, Vi. What am I going to do with you?”

She patted the mat. Violet lay down under the crook of her mother's arm and breathed in the smell of stale, sweet smoke from her sleeve, the faint hint of lilac from her perfume. Violet took hold of Lilibeth's delicate fingers, and then closed her eyes.

 

IRIS

Iris decided that her birthday would be a good day to die. That gave her three more weeks. She would have liked to see the end of the millennium, out of some desire for the tidiness of reaching a milestone year, she supposed, but this was not an option in even the most hopeful of scenarios. She had always thought cancer would be a banal way to go, but in fact it felt personal, almost intimate, an insidious march beneath the surface of her skin. Seventy-two years didn't seem like an unfair sentence. She had lived plenty. She had tried to express this to her children in an attempt to curb their need to find a solution, some other specialist, treatment, or drug to prolong the inevitable, but her passivity—her equanimity, really—frustrated them more than it comforted.

Morning was the least painful part of the day. Iris sat up in bed and placed her feet on the floor, waiting for the stars to recede from her vision and her blood pressure to stabilize. Even as her body had gone to hell from age and sickness, her feet still looked girlish, her toes painted petunia pink. She had been barefoot every summer of her Minnesota childhood, her soles tough and dirty, the tops of her feet tanned deep. The older she got the more recent those years seemed, while the decades she spent as a suburban housewife grew flat and faded. That wasn't completely true, she thought, rubbing her feet lightly against the white Berber rug. There were her children, and sometimes memories of when Theo and Samantha were little would strike her with vivid wallops. Motherhood was its own universe with its own nonlinear time line, its own indefinable pain and reward.

The overhead fan spun lazily above her head, the air cool through the open window. Iris wondered if she would ever need to turn on the air-conditioning again. This was a game she played with herself: would this be the last manicure, shampoo purchase, mu shu pork, thunderstorm, visit to the post office, Saturday crossword puzzle? This musing imparted ceremony to the mundane, which she appreciated. There weren't many things she longed to do again, though she would have liked to revisit her childhood home near the south fork of the Root River. She was sorry she had not made that trip north in the thirty years since her mother had died. Her father had been so fiercely, silently, proud of the farm, even as he sold off the land toward the end, with no one to pass it on to, Iris having long ago stepped away from rural life.

The early morning was overcast, the clouds above the ocean slate-gray and pink, spongy, the light in the room soft and flat. Her father. He'd been a gentle and quiet man, with thinning blond hair and a weedy frame that belied his strength and tirelessness. He'd spoken with the Scandinavian-Minnesotan cadence and accent, the
yah
s and
eh
s and flat vowels. Iris remembered her father's voice raised only once, a sorrowful yell, when he'd learned that his brother Peter had been killed, the lower half of his body sucked into the combine teeth before his boy could cut the engine. Her father was from the old world, her mother had often said, in explanation for his taciturn nature and his almost spiritual devotion to land and work.

Her mother had been tough and capable, a woman who'd done man's work readily and never complained. She didn't talk about herself and seemed to have no needs of her own. “How is it you are my daughter?” she said sometimes to Iris, who'd been lazy at chores, a girl given to daydreams and wandering. Her mother was not prim and did not like to dress up, wearing a dress only to church, and she had a surprisingly quick and boyish laugh. Much to Iris's dismay, she was the only mother around who wore pants. She loved to knit, her hands never still, churning out blankets, scarves, and mittens, sometimes late into the night. On rare afternoons, she and Iris would go to the river and fish, squishing their toes into the cold, slippery clay along the bank, and pass a bottle of milk between them. Iris wondered if her mother had been lonely after her father died, or if she had been, as an old woman, happy finally to be alone. Why did I never bother to ask? Iris thought.

She picked up the splayed book on her bedside table and slipped in a bookmark. She knew it would be her last book, and she was savoring it all the more, reading slowly, feeling the words tumble through her sleepy mind, getting lost in the interminable sentences. The bespectacled boy at the library—visiting his grandparents on fall break, he'd told her—had recommended it as she'd perused the new arrivals cart next to him.

“Any good ideas?” she'd asked.

“It's tough to choose, isn't it? So many books to read. I'm on a postmodern kick myself, but that might not be your style.”

Iris smiled. “I'm not sure I have a style.”

“How about Virginia Woolf? Do you like her?” he asked.

“I couldn't say,” Iris said. “I don't think I've ever read anything of hers.”

She felt, ridiculously, the heat of a blush in her cheeks. He was a handsome boy, tall, his brown eyes slightly magnified by his small round glasses, and he was unknowingly earnest. He reminded her of Henry, or what Henry must have been like long ago. Their affair had lasted for less than a year, but she still thought of him every day.

“Follow me,” the boy said.

He jogged over to the literature section, scanned the shelves, and finally pulled out a book.

“I read this one last semester in my Western Civilization class. It's, like, amazing.” With both hands, he'd held out
To the Lighthouse
to her. “It's going to rock your world.”

“That's quite an endorsement,” she had said. “I'll take it.”

Iris used to frown at literature—who had the time or attention for it?—preferring the zip and ease of thrillers or the colorful, mind-numbing predictability of magazines. And yet here she was, having discovered at the last minute that she had been wrong. Something else to regret, she thought. Add it to the list.

Her mind was cottony from painkillers, but she felt okay to stand, to begin the day. She pulled on the apple-green robe she had draped over the back of the rocking chair the night before. She didn't like to see herself in her nightgown in the bathroom mirror. It wasn't the slack fabric where her breasts used to be or even the smooth red edges of the scars that peeked from the neckline that bothered her as much as her concavity, her diminishing physical form. As if she needed reminding of her wasting body. Since her divorce, Iris had cherished her independence, her solitude, her lack of need—she had chosen to move to Florida after all—but she knew her run was coming to an end.