The One We Feed (32 page)

“If we do
this,” she said quietly, and my spine resonated with the sound of it, “how will
you get out? My brothers and sisters are strong, especially as a chorus.” Perfect
in every way, her voice carried with it the full force of a psychic mind only
just holding back.

“Oh….” I waved
a hand as Devlin might have, my smile growing a little. “I imagine I’ll have ample
opportunity to eat at least one of you before I’ll have to worry about that.”

She swallowed
and her gum disappeared.

“You know what
I want most.”

Large hoop
earrings dangled as she nodded uncomfortably.

“Then make it
happen.”

The harsh
scream of sirens woke me. The Doppler shift pulled me upright. Flashing red
lights stung my eyes but forbade sleep. I cradled my head in my hands as it
threatened to split open.

“Hey!” a
gravel-tumbled voice shouted at me. There was a hacking cough near my back. “Hey!
Are you okay? Did something happen to you?”

I looked
around blankly. I was in an empty lot. Dirt and weeds were fertilized and
tilled with jagged bottles and empty cans. Nearby, a chain link fence lay half
on its side, trampled into the dirt. An ambulance turned the corner, still
shrieking at the other evening traffic, and sped away. An amber streetlight
flickered like a guttering candle .

“Hey!” the
voice shouted again. It was thick and slurred. “You gonna answer me?”

I turned,
though my body felt as if it had been churned in a cement truck. An elderly
woman stood behind me, draped in layers and layers of dirty clothes. Her face
was filthy, and she gripped the shopping cart behind her protectively. In her
free hand was a suspicious-looking paper bag.

“I ain’t
callin’ no po-lice.”

I shook my
head. Something inside it rattled loose and triggered my gag reflex. I coughed
and spluttered and felt the vomit come out before I could stop myself. It was
bloody. I wiped my mouth, and my hand came away tinted red. To my shock, the
woman let go of her cart and inched closer to me. She looked down at my puddle
of sick and shook her head. Her face had changed from streetwise to wise.

“That ain’t
good, Sweetie.”

I looked at
the blood. “Yeah.”

“Someone beat
you up?” She dropped down and touched my shoulder timidly. “You need to go to
the hospital if that’s what happened.”

I shook my
head.

“You don’t
belong out here.”

I looked
myself over. I was wearing clothes I didn’t recognize, filthy with the dust of
the lot. I looked at my hands, touched my face, felt for bruises.

“What’s your
name, Sweetie?” she asked, and as if it were some kind of signal, my mind
stirred and spit out a chain of events. With a sudden sob, I hid my face in my
hands again.

“Eva’s dead,”
I whispered, and a pain that had been lying dormant with me thrashed and
throbbed within my chest. Suddenly nothing meant anything anymore. “Oh my god. My
sister’s dead!”

The lady
smoothed my hair. “Did something happen?”

“She…”—but it seemed
too horrible to believe—“she killed herself. I was supposed to take care of her
and I didn’t! I yelled at her! The last time we spoke, I was angry with her! Why
did I do that? Why didn’t I help her?”

The woman held
me up and took a deep breath for me. “Ah. Don’t you have somewhere to go?”

“No.” I
shivered. I had fallen asleep in the field without a coat on. “My husband left
me. My parents are dead. I lost my house. My whole life is a failure.” Tears
made little crusted circles in my thin covering of dust. “I don’t have
anywhere.”

“How’d you get
here?”

“I don’t know.”
I shuddered. “I can’t remember.”

Another siren
blared a few blocks away as a police car sped to meet the ambulance on its
horrible errand.

“Come on,” she
murmured and propped me up with an arm. “There’s a shelter in this
neighborhood. We can go together.”

“Who are you?”
 

She smiled. “Name’s
Camille, call me Cammy. Everyone does. What’s your name?”

“Lilith.”

She pulled me
to my feet. I was grateful for her help. There was no way I could have made it by
myself. She put her arm around my waist and walked me unsteadily to her
shopping cart. We rolled along slowly as I limped beside her through the throng
of nightlife.

It was some
city, somewhere, with the distinctive Californian crispness of smog, sea air,
and cows. People ducked around us but refused to look at us. Out of sight, out
of mind, I supposed. It was what I deserved, after how I had treated Eva.

A nondescript
building appeared between a clinic and an abandoned storefront. A line trailed
out of the door and around the corner. The air smelled of tomato soup, trash,
and stale beer.

“Here we are,”
Cammy said with a cackle, “I guess you could say this is home.”

Chapter
25

Lost and Found

I stood up in the dumpster and
tossed over the half loaf of bread in its sealed bag. Only the top piece was
moldy. Cammy untwisted the tie with stilted coordination and discarded the odd
piece. The loaf found a place in her cart.

“You’re always
so good at this!” She cheered as I hopped out. The sack of malt liquor was
passed to me. I took a swig and grinned. “Glad I found you. Can’t be jumpin’ in
and out no more, with my leg.”

“Wanna hit
that one over behind the Starbucks?”

I pushed the cart
along while she braced herself on it, limping a bit worse than usual. “Naw,
they don’t toss until after closing.”

I nodded. It
wasn’t so bad, really. The houses and soft beds, the good food and hot water,
they were all lies. They were comfortable, but they couldn’t stop Eva from
taking her own life, from leaving me. They hadn’t kept Howard in my arms. They
hadn’t saved my parents. In many ways, they were the cause of all those
hardships. When people lost the struggle, they got bored. Boredom led to trouble.
At least that’s what Cammy said when she’d had too much to drink.

After the
first couple days I had asked her why she had given up on life. She told me she
hadn’t; she just couldn’t bear the life she’d had, the fake life, she called
it. The reality where her husband had died was too much for her. This was the
reality that took training and armor, filled her thoughts up with survival, dug
a huge moat between her and the past. I could certainly understand that. In
many ways, I felt that her story was exactly why we had gotten on so well. We
knew each other at first sight.

“How about the
park? Or the boulevard?” I flicked her bottle and took another swig when she
handed it to me. “We’re almost out and you know I’m good at looking destitute.”

“You were born
to be a panhandler, sweetie pie!” she cackled. “Sure we can. If you want, but I
gotta sit a bit.”

She grimaced. I
could tell her leg was bothering her. It often did when the temperature
dropped. Something about the cold made the tissues seize, then the infection
would flare up. I stopped the cart beside a bus stop and pointed at it.

“Sit you down,
woman! Let’s see it.”

“One hell of a
way to catch a bus,” she tried to laugh. A cough cut in and shook her so hard I
thought she’d fall over. I braced her with a hand on her back until she could
catch her breath.

A man walked
by, giving us a wide berth.

“What the fuck
are you staring at?” I growled.

He shook his
head in shock and looked away almost instantly.

“Hey now,”
Cammy said, “don’t bother them. They don’t know no better. Wait till the wheel
rolls around.”

I put the
wooden crate from the cart down and propped her leg up on it. I hadn’t looked
at it for a few days, but I could tell by the stretching of her pant leg that
it was swollen. I lifted it slowly, halting carefully at each wince. She was
wearing a pair of old men’s boots, but the edema had increased to such a degree
that the roughened leather edge was slicing into her ankle.

“Jesus fuck,”
I gasped. I tried to loosen the laces, but each tug sent her into agony. The
skin above it was purple and a strange shade of bluish green. My heart skipped.
“Cam, I gotta get this off you.”

She glanced
down and shook her head forlornly. Shoe laces were currency, but they couldn’t
purchase a life. “Knife’s in the sack. Give me the strong stuff, will you?”

I jumped up
and dug through the old vinyl purse filled with our collected valuables. Not
really so valuable, but when you were trying to forget everything and trying
hard not to die while doing so, a bottle opener, a knife, a book of matches,
and some duct tape were pretty important. There was also the ring, Cammy’s one
treasure. It was nestled inside a bottle cap, wrapped in tape. No matter what
happened, she never sold it.

I came back
around and handed her the flask of Popov. I flicked open the knife and hooked
it beneath the bow. “Hold still. It’s gonna smart.”

She smiled in
agony and took hold of the bench. “Can’t hurt that bad. Nothing can hurt that
bad.” She tipped up the bottle and guzzled down a quarter of it one good
swallow. I slit the laces. The boot popped open and the bottle fell. When I
looked up, she was crying.

“You okay?” I
whispered.

She shook her
head. “Whole thing feels like fire, just burnin’ in my bones!”

“When’s the
last time you cleaned it up, Cam?”  The cut around her ankle was black. I
pushed the pant leg up past her knee. It was an angry red mass. Her entire calf
had broken out in a kind of hives, little boils that made it seem as if her leg
was about to burst.

“Dunno,” she said,
slurring. “Can’t touch it anymore. Hurts too much.”

I lifted the
boot gently and tried to remove it. Her shriek surprised me. “I’m sorry! Oh
Cam, this is horrible!”

She put her
hand on my shoulder. “Says the girl who throws up blood!”

Her fingers
were digging into me, her whole body shaking with pain.

“Why didn’t
you say something sooner?”

She shook her
head. The answer was plain. No point in worrying me when the Popov could solve
the problem. I bent back over her calf and palpated it gently, stunned she had
walked so long on it.

We’d only been
together for a few weeks, but our friendship had been as fast and strong as
super glue. She had never been unkind to me, even though I was a newbie. She
had shared her cart and its contents with me as a Duchess would her home, and
all she’d asked in return was a little dumpster hop and a few dollars a day. I
had done it willingly; anything to not be alone. Caring for her better than she
could care for herself was the only thing I’d ever done well. Maybe in some
ways it was an attempt to make up for the mistakes I’d made with Eva, but so
what? Things like that were easily justified.

“This is bad,”
I whispered. I had been pre-med, and, even though it was years ago, I knew
diabetic neuropathy and gangrenous infection when I saw it. When I looked up at
her, I saw my grave expression reflected in her eyes. “You should’ve said
something sooner!”

Her breathing
was ragged. She searched my face as if the answer to the problem was written
there. “Well...I’ll just have to take some aspirin….”

I stood up and
put my hands on her shoulders. “This is way past aspirin, Cam. You’ve got to go
to a hospital.”

A terrified
glow filled her eyes. Her husband had died in a hospital many decades ago. She
had been pathologically afraid of them ever since. “No! I can go to the clinic!”

I shook my
head insistently. “No, Honey this is really bad. You’ve gotta get checked in!”

She reached up
and pushed my arms away. “No! I can’t, Lily. Can’t do it.” The vodka tipped up
again.

I sighed. She
outweighed me by almost a hundred and fifty pounds. I couldn’t force her, nor
could an ambulance if I called them. I flapped my arms helplessly. “What do you
want me to do, Honey?”

The cough
struck a second time and rattled around in her chest like a thunderstorm. When
it finally subsided, she was exhausted. “Go get me some more of this.” She
shook the bottle. “It’s all I need.”

My insides
eroded into an immense hollowness that made my quickening heart sound like a
Taiko drum. “Cammy…,” I began, but when she looked at me with unholy wrath in
her eye, I held up my hands in defeat. “Okay, okay. I’ll go. You stay here,
okay? I’ll be back soon.”

I walked
quickly toward the boulevard, a busy street of shopping complexes and foot
traffic, the perfect place to find charity if any existed. I put the paper cup
on the ground in our usual corner and sat behind it.

Sometimes it
could take moments, sometime hours. When it was the two of us together, we made
a killing, two women, one old and sickly, one young and not too terrible on the
eyes. When Cammy was alone, she said it sometimes took days to scrape up a few
bucks. Since I’d come along, she’d been eating a lot better.

“Spare some
change, please,” I said to a passing couple. The man stopped and tossed some nickels
in. The girl on his arm smiled at his generosity.

Depending on
what I wore, we did better or worse when I was alone. If I looked too cheap, I
was mistaken for a hooker; too covered, and I looked as if I would do just fine
against the elements. It was a balancing act, but I had found that loose men’s
jeans, a thin t-shirt, and an ancient flannel button up were the perfect props.
One hop in a dumpster, and I was the homeless girl they wanted to help.

“Spare
anything,” I said plaintively to an older woman with a few too many shopping
bags. She ignored me.

Wrong target
, I thought. As
a rule, I’d found it helpful not to address anyone talking on a phone, carrying
a heavy load, in a hurry, or with a group of friends. If someone saw you as an
annoyance, they didn’t bother to feel sympathy.

It was the
middle of Christmas shopping. There should have been more good cheer in the
air, but it was several hours before I had enough spare change to get another
flask and a hot dog, Cammy’s favorite food, smothered in sauerkraut and
mustard.

The man at the
stand saw me coming and greeted me with a huge smile. “Miss you when you’re not
around, Lily Bird.”

He was a nice
enough man, older, with no spouse and grabby hands. I tolerated it. Sometimes
he gave me a few dogs that had been out a little long.

“Yeah, Tommy
Cat, like a bad headache.”

He handed me
the dog and a paper sack with a couple more. I leaned forward and kissed his
cheek.

“What’re the
feminazis gonna say about you repaying kindness with favors?”  

I shrugged. “Who
the fuck cares what they think? Can’t eat integrity. Besides, you’re a cutie.” I
walked away and blew a kiss over my shoulder while he grinned.

There was a
line at the store, and they were out of Popov. I was short ten cents on a
different brand, but luckily the man behind the counter cut me a break. By the
time I got back to the bus stop, the sun had gone down. We hadn’t been in line
for the shelter; it was the park again, or the poorly laid tile of one of the
store fronts.

Cammy was
asleep when I came up and waved the hot dog under her nose. “Come on, my gal! Dog
and sauce, at the ready.”

She didn’t
stir. I set the food aside and reached out timidly, my soul feeling as if it
had frosted over. Her face was boiling hot.

“Cammy?” I
shook her slightly. Nothing happened. “Camille?”

She gurgled
but remained unconscious, barely propped against the bench.

I jumped back
and pressed my hands to either side of my forehead. Before long, I was crying. Pacing
back and forth made it easier, but it did not supply me with a strategy. If I
called the hospital, she would be furious. If I didn’t she would surely die. I
tried to wake her several more times, but she was past that point. I tried not
to think it, but my mind kept insisting she was past
any
point.

Footsteps approached.
I turned. A man had come to catch the bus, but he didn’t look like any man I’d
ever seen waiting for public transit. He had a severe face with a pointy nose,
cold eyes, and a crown of wavy auburn hair. He wore a fantastically expensive
suit, designer shoes, and a very,
very
nice watch.

Quickly, I
realized he wasn’t walking toward the bench. He was coming toward me from a
nice car parked down a side street, strolling as if the misery on my face was
unimportant. I made a decision then, that if he wanted to help me, I’d pay anything.

“Are you all
right, my dear?”  His voice was softer than I had expected, with a kind of
refinement to it and superb elocution.

I used my
sleeve to mop my face of tears and snot. “My….” I sniffled. “My friend is sick.
She has diabetes. I can’t wake her up.”

He stepped
forward and examined Camille’s ashen face, and, while I was glad for his time,
I could have done without the slightly upturned nose.

“Oh, dear,” he
whispered.

“She won’t go
to the hospital. She hates them.”

He shook his
head sadly. “Terrible. I saw a clinic around the corner.”

“It’s closed.”

“Ah.” He
leaned over her again and seemed to be smelling her. “Very tragic,” he said,
but something about his tone was dispassionate, as if every evening he walked
around keeping a tally of the homeless dead.

“I….” I rushed
to the purse and dug out the ring, peeling it open like a piece of fruit. He
was rich. Maybe he had a personal doctor who had a wife that liked jewelry. “This
is all we have. Do you know anyone who’ll look after her?”

I held it out.
It was a stunning piece, a thin platinum band with a light sprinkling of tiny
diamonds twisted around a large emerald. He reached out and slowly plucked it
from my fingers. The eyes slanted shrewdly and looked for occlusions, then he
tucked it away in his pocket.